This book analyzes the recent growth of Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Fuzhou, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Nanjing, and Hong Kong, seven major Chinese coastal cities. The authors detail theoretical mechanisms, spatial and non-spatial models of development, all while exploring possible directions to sustainability. They also look at how these cities have developed over the last 30 years, from the late 1970s to the 21st century. Each has its own unique background, regional and national positions, advantages, and functions. Using diversified approaches and measurements for each city, the authors argue that structural changes are necessary to achieve much needed sustainable development. The book covers developmental issues such as the regaining of central city and global city statuses, the role of governments in steering development, and achieving goals through mega projects, urban competitiveness, positioning, and branding. Including varied assessment and intense suggestions for structural changes, this book addresses core concerns for the sustainable growth of these metropolises. A valuable book for students, researchers and policy makers.
This book provides a comprehensive and in-depth description of the education system in Lao PDR. It covers pre-school, primary, secondary general, secondary technical and vocational, post-secondary non-higher education, and adult non-formal education and training. In addition to the main content, the book includes a glossary of terms and abbreviations used; and an appendix on the organizational structure of the Ministry of Education and Sports, including the linkages between the national, provincial and district level. The content covers public and private sector education provision alike.
Unplanned Development offers a fascinating and fresh view into the realities of development planning. While to the outsider most development projects present themselves as thoroughly planned endeavours informed by structure, direction and intent, Jonathan Rigg exposes the truth of development experience that chance, serendipity, turbulence and the unexpected define development around the world. Based on rich empirical sources from South-East Asia, Unplanned Development sustains a unique general argument in making the case for chance and turbulence in development. Identifying chance as a leading factor in all development planning, the book contributes to a better way of dealing with the unexpected and asks vital questions on the underlying paradoxes of development practice.
This book highlights rice and water resources security in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam – countries that share the international Mekong River, which is a source of both regional cooperation and conflict. It discusses the topography, population, economy, rice production and rice trade of these four riparian countries, and analyses the impacts of climate change, El Nino and La Nina, and the construction of Mekong mainstream dams on water resources and rice productivity. Further, this publication assesses the role of the Mekong River Commission, a river basin organization responsible for the sustainable development and water resource management of the Mekong, and examines regional cooperation frameworks such as the Lower Mekong Initiative, and the Mekong-Japan Summit. The book then explores the emerging role of China in promoting the Lancang-Mekong cooperation between China and Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam in developing the Mekong River Basin, which could determine the future water and rice security of the region.
Series: Studies in Modern Tibetan Culture, Lexington Books Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University Since the central government of China started major campaigns for western development in the mid-1990s, the economies of the Tibetan areas in Western China have grown rapidly and living standards have improved. However, grievances and protests have also intensified, as dramatically evidenced by the protests that spread across most Tibetan areas in spring 2008 and by the more recent wave of self-immolation protests that started in 2011. This book offers a detailed and careful exploration of this synergy between development and conflict in Tibet from the mid-1990s onwards, when rapid economic growth has occurred in tandem with a particularly assimilationist approach of integrating Tibet into China. Fischer argues that the intensified economic integration of Tibet into regional and national development strategies on these assimilationist terms, within a context of continued political disempowerment, and through the massive channeling of subsidies through Han Chinese dominated entities based outside the Tibetan areas, has accentuated various dynamics of subordination and marginalization faced by Tibetans of all social strata. Whether or not these dynamics are intended to be discriminatory, they effectively accentuate the discriminatory, assimilationist and disempowering characteristics of development, even while producing considerable improvements in the material consumption of local Tibetans. In particular, strong cultural, linguistic and political biases intensify ethnically-exclusionary dynamics among middle and upper strata of the Tibetan labor force, which is problematic considering the rapid shift of Tibetans out of agriculture and towards the highly subsidy-dependent sectors of the economy, especially in urban areas. The combination of these disempowering dynamics with the sheer speed of dislocating and disembedding social change provides important insights into recent tensions given that it has accentuated insecurity while restricting the ability of Tibetan communities to adapt in autonomous and self-determined ways. The study represents one of the only macro-level and systemic analyses of its kind in the scholarship on Tibet, based on accessible economic analysis and extensive interdisciplinary fieldwork. It also carries much interest for those interested in China and in the interactions between development, inequality, exclusion and conflict more generally.
Education systems and textbooks in selected countries of the Middle East are increasingly the subject of debate. This volume presents and analyzes the major trends as well as the scope and the limits of education reform initiatives undertaken in recent years. In curricula and teaching materials, representations of the “Self” and the “Other” offer insights into the contemporary dynamics of identity politics. By building on a network of scholars working in various countries in the Middle East itself, this book aims to contribute to the evolution of a field of comparative education studies in this region.
This book explores the complex package of mechanisms used to identify, record, manage and remediate contaminated land, including the system for allocating liabilities that has been set up by China’s contaminated land law and accompanying administrative decrees and environmental standards. Statutory control of soil or land contamination is a comparatively new phenomenon for Chinese lawmakers and researchers. After more than ten years of preparation, China recently adopted its first nationwide contaminated land law—the Law of the People’s Republic of China on the Prevention and Control of Soil Contamination, which entered into effect in the beginning of 2019. The law deals exclusively with risk management in connection with soil contamination, and the remediation of contaminated land. This book analyzes various facets of how China is managing the risks associated with soil contamination and remediating contaminated sites by means of legislation. Chapters 1 and 2 reveal the current extent of the soil contamination problem in China and the initial policy responses of the country’s central government. In turn, Chapters 3 and 4 address the regulatory frameworks and the latest contaminated land legislation at both the local and national level. Lastly, Chapters 5 through 9 offer concrete recommendations, based on lessons learned in the US and UK, for reforming contaminated land management in China. Overall, the book covers the past, present and future of contaminated land management in China, making it of interest to environmental policymakers, administrators, academics, lawyers and engineers engaged in soil or environmental protection. Further, it offers a source of reliable information for those who want to learn more about China’s environmental legislation and contaminated land management policy.
