In China, rangeland fragmentation leads to the problems of anticommons, in terms of livestock production and ecological conditions. As the countermeasure, rangeland use right transfer has been encouraged by the governments recently, which aims to integrate the fragmented rangelands by lease. Can transfer overcome the problems of anticommons? We addressed this question through a case study in Inner Mongolia, by comparing livelihoods and ecological conditions between the households with lease-in pastures and those without practicing transfer. We found that though transfer could make the livelihoods of lease-in households with larger rangeland better-off in weather good years, but worse-off in drought years; and the over grazing was intensified on the transferred pastures. We concluded that the transfer may not be able to fundamentally overcome the problems of anticommons. We argued that spatial anticommons and right anticommons are interrelated to each other, rather than two juxtaposed types as defined by anticommons scholars.
The massification of higher education has dramatically changed the association between credentials and jobs in advanced countries, while its impacts in transitional economies have received less academic attention. To address this research lacuna, the paper utilizes rich information from China’s national surveys of college graduates from 2003 to 2019 and multiple waves of census data to explore the temporal and spatial effects of tertiary education expansion on college graduates’ job sorting. Regression results from the fixed effects model and the two-stage least-squares model indicate that, on the temporal dimension, the higher education expansion has weakened ties between college credentials and quality jobs over the past 20 years. Recent graduates are more likely to work in informal, non-urban, and non-public sectors, and the college earnings premium has also declined. There is a persistent gap in employment outcomes between bachelor’s and associate degree holders. On the spatial dimension, the growing enrolment size leads to skill sorting towards low skilled regions. The study argues that the dynamic effects of college credentials may be explained by labour market flexibility and cohort crowding after higher education expansion. This paper calls for a critical reflection on the merit of further massification of higher education in developing economies, regarding its potential impacts on intergenerational inequality and regional inequality.
As the Buddhist community in China carried forth the Buddhist yogic traditions into the modern era, a new form of yoga was imported to China via the West as the intermediary in a global network of knowledge transmission with metropolitan port cities like Shanghai as its enclaves. By examining newspapers, archives, and books published in the first half of the twentieth century, this chapter recollects the largely forgotten early history of yoga in modern China. Buddhist scholar Liu Renhang, with his translation of Japanese scholar Kaiten Nukariya’s study of yoga in North America, was the first to introduce yoga as a remedy for the nation, then suffering from endless warfare. The theosophist Hari Prasad Shastri lectured on yoga and established a yoga study group called “Holy Yoga”. The first teacher to offer yoga classes regularly in China was Eugenia Peterson, later known as Indra Devi, and her assistant Michael Volin. They successfully enlisted hundreds of pupils, many of whom were Westerners living in Shanghai. However, with the demise of the Shanghai concessions, the spread of yoga in modern China halted abruptly before it was incorporated into the everyday life of ordinary Chinese people.
The newly discovered gubernatorial edict from Laodicea, in which the proconsul of Asia (likely Marcus Ostorius? Scapula) issued a series of orders, contains references to precedents from his predecessors, including edicts from the proconsul Cornelius Tacitus and his deputy Saenius Sabinus, and a letter from the proconsul Vicirius Martialis. Why did Martialis issue a letter instead of an edict? What was the function of Martialis' correspondence, and what did it achieve? In Oliver, Greek Constitutions, pp. 20-21, Augustus and later principates continued to use written proclamations in edict form as a way of communicating with provincials, a tradition practiced by Roman magistrates in the Republic. We also learn that edicts were essentially "open letters to whom it might concern," and were not unlike epistles in terms of preparation, at times not carefully distinguished by the secretaries that prepared them. If there were edict and epistolary forms, it is not immediately clear how they differed in function and perception, both from the perspective of the senders and their intended recipients. Gubernatorial communications have received treatment by Meyer-Zweiffelhoffer (2002), Kokkinia (2003, 2004) Lavan (2013). Kokkinia states that there are approximately 90 examples, and they point to the pattern in which most governors were acting upon local requests to interevene (Kokkinia 2004: 49). If the purpose was to intervene, at what point will an epistle be no longer enough, but an edict will? This paper will first use Paulus Fabius Maximus' letter-edict to discuss a classical case in which an attempt to write a letter took a sinister turn towards an edict. We will then examine a range of cases including those from the Opramoas dossier to consider the various epistolary approaches that the Roman governors took in responding to local situations. The paper will use this assembled corpus to interpret the Vicirius Martialis' letter from both its immediate communicative context and also the general tradition in official correspondence. This paper also touches on the broader question of why governors need to write letters, when they could have just issued edicts, and what letters can do that edicts could not.