This book provides a novel theoretical framework to explain the real source of competitive advantage of Chinese manufacturing. More importantly, such a framework can be generalized to analyze the potential of catch-up for large emerging economies in the globalization era. The book also provides insights for policy makers to rethink their design of policies.The rise of Made-in-China products has been widely attributed to low labour cost advantage and imitation advantage. However, as these two advantages are nearly innate to all late-developing countries, they cannot be regarded as the key factors that drive the rapid growth of China's manufacturing industry, or China's economy, over the past few decades. In this book, the author proposed a theory — 'the catch-up ladders theory', to explain the rise of China's manufacturing industry. The manufacturing advancement of any country is in essence a process of catching-up in both market and technology, during which enterprises will form a ladder-like holistic structure due to their differences in capabilities, technology and market positioning. In light of this, the continuity of the catch-up ladder will greatly determine the catch-up efficiency of an industry and even a country at large. Such a perspective is more applicable to large emerging economies, especially those with over one hundred million population and thus huge potential domestic market demand.

"Artificial intelligence (AI) and big data promise to help reshape the global order. For decades, most political observers believed that liberal democracy offered the only plausible future pathways for big, industrially sophisticated countries to make their citizens rich. Now, by allowing governments to monitor, understand, and control their citizens far more effectively than ever before, AI offers a plausible way for big, economically advanced countries to make their citizens rich while maintaining control over them--the first since the end of the Cold War. That may help fuel and shape renewed international competition between types of political regimes that are all becoming more "digital." Just as competition between liberal democratic, fascist, and communist social systems defined much of the twentieth century, how may the struggle between digital liberal democracy and digital authoritarianism define and shape the twenty-first? This work highlights several key areas where AI-related technologies have clear implications for globally integrated strategic planning and requirements development"--

Life outside the mobile phone is unbearable.’ Lily, 19, factory worker. Described as the biggest migration in human history, an estimated 250 million Chinese people have left their villages in recent decades to live and work in urban areas. Xinyuan Wang spent 15 months living among a community of these migrants in a small factory town in southeast China to track their use of social media. It was here she witnessed a second migration taking place: a movement from offline to online. As Wang argues, this is not simply a convenient analogy but represents the convergence of two phenomena as profound and consequential as each other, where the online world now provides a home for the migrant workers who feel otherwise ‘homeless’. Wang’s fascinating study explores the full range of preconceptions commonly held about Chinese people – their relationship with education, with family, with politics, with ‘home’ – and argues why, for this vast population, it is time to reassess what we think we know about contemporary China and the evolving role of social media.

As a result of his visits to classrooms across the nation, Brown has compiled an engaging, thought-provoking collection of classroom vignettes which show the ways in which national, state, and local school politics translate into changed classroom practices. "Captures the breadth, depth, and urgency of education reform".--Bill Clinton.

The essays in this collection challenge conventional ideas about consumption and consumerism: they consider if the inundation of Western consumer goods have created identity confusions among the affluent in Asia, and if the expansion of consumer culture really does threaten the stability of politically anti-liberal states in Asia. This is the first book to analyse in detial consumerism in the region, and will be valuable reading for students and researchers in Asian studies, economics, politics and cultural studies.

This book uses surveys, statistics, and case studies to explain why and how cultural norms affect political attitudes and behavior.

This book examines the foundations of China’s grand strategy as it is critical to any assessment of current and future Chinese regional and global strategic behavior, especially Beijing’s policies toward the USA. This eclectic study aims to analyze the current Chinese and American flexible grand strategies, based on present complexity and disorder. It identifies the major building blocks of both strategies, their major material, and ideational drivers and assesses how they might evolve in the future. Additionally, the author looks at China’s relations with important international players such as Russia, ASEAN, UN, EU, and BRICS.