Since being established in 1949 — and especially since the reform and opening up 30 years ago — China has experienced the most drastic changes ever in its 5000-year history. During this period, China has transformed from an agricultural society into an emerging, dynamic, and industrialized nation and has undergone rapid urbanization. The standard of living of the Chinese continues to rise and is taking rapid strides forward to a higher level of comprehensive well-being.China's development over the past 60 years has indicated that the livelihood of the people is a key factor in economic and social construction in contemporary China. Having sufficient food and clothing is the first step in improving the livelihood of the people. A higher level of well-being can be achieved only after the basic needs are met. This “higher level of well-being” comprises of employment as the foundation, education as the key point, income distribution as the source, social security as the support, and public safety as an assurance.This book offers fresh perspectives by prestigious scholars from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Based on a unique source of data which is available only to Chinese scholars, this book showcases key issues on people's livelihood and social construction in Contemporary China, including income disparity, social security system, employment situation, post-80s generation and so on.

Since the reform and opening up in 1978, the Chinese economy has grown rapidly. China has become the focus of the world due to its astonishing achievements in every aspect of its economical growth. The country's transformation process has witnessed unprecedented social and economic phenomena and the existing economic theories have not been able to explain this rapid growth. Therefore, there is a need to establish new theories. This book fills the gap by bringing forth new ideas and economic theories.The author, who is one of China's most prestigious economists, has a profound understanding of the country's social, economic and political structures. The book is a collection of his most representative works in the recent years. The chapters not only investigate problems and challenges faced by the Chinese economy, but also shed new light on the solutions and opportunities.

Administrative Monopoly in China: Causes, Behaviors, and Termination is a further work of our previous book, China's State-Owned Enterprises: Nature, Performance and Reform. This new book analyzes the SOEs with respect to monopoly, and focuses on six industries: telecommunication, petroleum, railway, salt, banking and football.The book tells the history of how administrative monopolies were formed in China, analyzes the factors responsible for this, describes the behaviors of administrative monopoly, enterprises, and individuals against the monopolistic background, and presents data on the losses brought about by the administrative monopolies.

This book focuses on rural-urban migrants in China. They are one of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged groups in the country but are essential to the country's industrialization and urbanization. Integration of these migrants into urban societies is an urgent issue facing Chinese policy makers. The book provides an updated, systematic, empirically rich, and multifaceted analysis of migrant integration, its determinants and consequences in China. It integrates insights from the perspective of sociology, population studies, social psychology, and public health to help us understand how and why migrants integrate, the role of migrant networks in social integration, and the relationship between integration of migrants and their mental health and settlement intentions.

This book examines the decade from 2004 to 2013 during which people in China witnessed both a skyrocketing number of food safety crises, and aggregating regulatory initiatives attempting to control these crises. Multiple cycles of “crisis – regulatory efforts” indicated the systemic failure of this food safety regime. The book explains this failure in the “social foundations” for the regulatory governance of food safety. It locates the proximate causes in the regulatory segmentation, which is supported by the differential impacts of the food regulatory regime on various consumer groups. The approach of regulatory segmentation does not only explain the failure of the food safety regime by digging out its social foundation, but is also crucial to the understanding of the regulatory state in China.

Extraction is a process that is growing in importance. It is generally more energy efficient than competitive processes such as expression-the pressing of biological feed materials to liberate fluids. The high cost of modern extraction techniques and the increasingly stringent environmental regulations together with the new requirements of the medical and food industries for ultra-pure and high value added products have pointed out the need for the development of new and clean technologies for the processing of food products. The food processing industry uses various techniques to transform food ingredients into different forms for consumers. Separation techniques may be used to remove skins from fruits, water from juices, or whey from cheese. Each separation technique is customized to the amount of waste that needs to be removed, and the resiliency of the food product being processed. This is the fundamental reason for writing this book at the present time, to indicate the wealth of knowledge becoming available on reactions in food processing, and the use of reaction technology to apply this knowledge in food processing.

This book offers a comprehensive review of the far-reaching social changes that have taken place since the start of the Chinese economic reform and opening up of Chinese society over 30 years ago. As such, it examines various aspects of the social transformation of China, from urbanization, population aging and social governance to family structure, youth society and social mentality. It identifies major issues and challenges emerging during the process of the great social change, and proposes solutions to aid in future strategic planning. The analysis is supported by a wealth of empirical data collected in the course of extended social survey research. The book also provides a systematic summary of the most important research findings from the past few years, helping readers to understand and interpret the ongoing and complex process of transformation in Chinese society.

Bioprocessing has been used for a long time in the production of food. In fact, as early as 3,500 B.C., Sumerian brewers were using bioprocessing to create a popular beverage many drinkers still enjoy today. Bioprocessing, as the name suggests, uses living organisms and their components in the creation of new products. Bioprocessing is often used to manufacture pharmaceuticals, sustainable materials, alternative fuels, and even many of the foods we enjoy. Biotechnology as applied to food processing in most developing countries makes use of microbial inoculants to enhance properties such as the taste, aroma, shelf-life, texture and nutritional value of foods. The process whereby micro-organisms and their enzymes bring about these desirable changes in food materials is known as fermentation. Fermentation processing is also widely applied in the production of microbial cultures, enzymes, flavours, fragrances, food additives and a range of other high value-added products. These high value products are increasingly produced in more technologically advanced developing countries for use in their food and non-food processing applications. Many of these high value products are also imported by developing countries for use in their food-processing applications. Food, food-biocatalists and bioprocessing industries face great challenges in order to develop and establish systems to develop high quality, safety foods, as well as feeds and other industrial goods, environmentally acceptable and in a sustainable way. The text is supported by numerous clear informative diagrams. The book would be highly useful to the postgraduate students and researchers of applied biology, biotechnology, microbiology and biochemical engineering.

As the Internet has reshaped the way we communicate, people’s reading has become more fragmented and attention has been directed to a more concise and general form of language that outlines the most important information. This language of the internet, a language system that concentrates on the content of events and public emotions, has emerged and received wide currency. This monograph is one of the first books to examine the language of the internet in the Chinese context. By analysing content and discourse, the author examines Chinese website buzzwords since 2010. She reveals the mechanisms of generation, the cultural nature and political characteristics of the network language, analyzes the causes of its emergence and popularity, and highlights its social and academic significance. Meanwhile, she argues that research in the area is essentially interdisciplinary, involving not only perspectives from Journalism and Communication Studies, but also Philosophy, Culture, Linguistics and Sociology. Students and scholars of Communication Studies and Journalism, as well as Culture Studies should be greatly interested in this title.

This book contributes to our understanding of linkages between carbon management and local livelihoods by taking stock of the existing evidence and drawing on field experiences in the Hindu Kush Himalayan (HKH) region, an area that provides fresh water to more than 2 billion people and supports the world’s largest population of pastoralists and millions of livestock. This edited volume addresses two main questions: 1. Does carbon management offer livelihood opportunities or present risks, and what are they? 2. Do the attributes of carbon financing alter the nature of livelihood opportunities and risks? Chapters analyze the most pressing deficiencies in understanding carbon storage in both soils and in above ground biomass, and the related social and economic challenges associated with carbon sequestration projects. Chapters deliver insights to both academics from diverse disciplines (natural sciences, social sciences and engineering) and to policy makers.