China now manufactures or assembles over 50% of the world's products. However, the world has been reeling from daily accounts of defective "Made in China" products. China has been at the forefront of growing concern, not only about its products and enterprises, but also about its business ethics. This article analyzes recent events connected with the Made in China label from the perspective of evolving Chinese business ethics. Part 1 analyzes three of these events. Part 2 details and analyzes the (...) state of business ethics in China today. Part 3 concludes by exploring the future of business ethics in China. The main conclusion is that business ethics in China faces two kinds of ethical challenges: how to restrict the lawless in as short a period of time as possible and how to protect and advance the interests of employees, investors, and the public through corporate management and public administration. (shrink)

“Responsibility” in Chinese consists of two words: “ze” and “ren” . In modern Chinese, although the two words “ze” and “ren” are mostly used as one word, people can still discern the close relationship between ze and right and between ren and the duty associated with a position or a power. In modern life, however, there is a serious problem with these historically close, key relationships. This paper raises the crucial question: how should we understand and deal with the separation (...) of freedom from responsibility, right from obligation, and duty from power, particularly within China? The first part of the paper investigates the understanding of responsibility and concepts of duty, obligation, right, and power in the Chinese context. The second part analyzes the key issues of responsibility associated with the expansion of rights and powers in today’s China. The concluding part explores agents’ responsibilities on different levels and offers suggestions on how to cultivate responsibility as part of a systematic moral education. (shrink)

This study empirically examines whether firms’ environmental capital expenditures impact institutional investors’ investment decisions in the Chinese market. We particularly examine the impact of ownership type on the relationship of environmental capital expenditures and the behavior of different types of institutional investors by classifying institutional investors into two categories, short-term and long-term investors. In addition, this study further investigates whether environmental capital expenditures related to ownership type increase firm value. We find that long-term institutional investors tend to invest in state-owned (...) firms making environmental capital expenditures. Results also indicate that, with governmental backing and encouragement, the market value of SOEs making more environmental capital expenditures is likely to increase. However, no similar results are found for non-SOEs. (shrink)

Xiaohe Lu is Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Executive Director of the Centre for Business Ethics, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. Georges Enderle is Arthur and Mary O’Neil Professor of International Business Ethics at the Mendoza College of Business, Univer­sity of Notre Dame.

Frequent pattern mining is an effective approach for spatiotemporal association analysis of mobile trajectory big data in data-driven intelligent transportation systems. While existing parallel algorithms have been successfully applied to frequent pattern mining of large-scale trajectory data, two major challenges are how to overcome the inherent defects of Hadoop to cope with taxi trajectory big data including massive small files and how to discover the implicitly spatiotemporal frequent patterns with MapReduce. To conquer these challenges, this paper presents a MapReduce-based Parallel (...) Frequent Pattern growth algorithm to analyze the spatiotemporal characteristics of taxi operating using large-scale taxi trajectories with massive small file processing strategies on a Hadoop platform. More specifically, we first implement three methods, that is, Hadoop Archives, CombineFileInputFormat, and Sequence Files, to overcome the existing defects of Hadoop and then propose two strategies based on their performance evaluations. Next, we incorporate SF into Frequent Pattern growth algorithm and then implement the optimized FP-growth algorithm on a MapReduce framework. Finally, we analyze the characteristics of taxi operating in both spatial and temporal dimensions by MR-PFP in parallel. The results demonstrate that MR-PFP is superior to existing Parallel FP-growth algorithm in efficiency and scalability. (shrink)

This study explored the relationship between social support and job satisfaction in kindergarten teachers, and the mediating role of coping styles in this relationship. A sample of 617 kindergarten teachers from kindergartens in mainland China completed questionnaires measuring social support, job satisfaction, and coping style. The results showed that social support was positively related to job satisfaction and positive coping style was positively associated with social support and job satisfaction. Furthermore, the results revealed that positive coping style, but not negative (...) coping style, had a mediating effect on the relationship between kindergarten teachers’ social support and job satisfaction. This study provides initial evidence that coping style mediates the link between social support and job satisfaction in kindergarten teachers, and suggests that increasing social support and encouraging positive coping style could improve kindergarten teachers’ job satisfaction. (shrink)

COVID-19 has made it difficult to adopt traditional face-to-face psychological intervention under this situation because of the blocked down and social distancing, which brings big psychological crisis to the public among the global. To explore the emotional change of the public in China at the outburst of the pandemic at different phases, to establish an online working platform and create a new model of an online intervention to hold public emotions under pandemic, and test its effectiveness, so to give advisement (...) for government emergency management system. We established an online organization to work for this program ad innovated a model of online group counseling with online emotional support accompany group right after the outburst of a pandemic. We analyzed 53 OESAGs from February 10 to April 9, including 555 application forms, 253 feedback from members, and 139 feedback from group leaders by using NVivo and SPSS to explore the evolution and characteristics of public emotion during COVID-19 and the effectiveness of OESAG. Our results showed that the emotional changes of members ranged from shock to depression to positive. The public's emotions swiftly changed from stress, anxiety, and isolation, to the hope of returning to work or finding a job during the pandemic with the help of OESAG. OESAG has effectively regulated the negative emotions of members by conducting psychological crisis intervention to provide members a space to communicate with each other, especially the female and frontline staff. Policy makers can set up an online systematic psychological crisis intervention system as soon as possible to make up for the lack of psychological assistance in the emergency management system. (shrink)

Impossible de considérer la promotion, l’essor et le développement des idées libérales en Chine au xx e siècle sans prendre en compte la figure de Hu Shi (1891-1962) et l’influence que son œuvre exerça. Pendant toute sa vie intellectuelle, Hu Shi se tint au premier rang des intellectuels chinois désireux de moderniser leur pays. Parti se former aux États-Unis très tôt, il concentra ses recherches sur les (r)évolutions littéraires et entreprit d’analyser l’histoire de la philosophie chinoise avec les méthodes scientifiques (...) occidentales. Il entendait non seulement changer les façons de parler et d’écrire dans le monde académique, mais encore les styles de pensée et de vie au sein de la population chinoise. Il devint l’un des plus prestigieux intellectuels de la Chine moderne, en s’engageant activement dans la vie politique. Il poursuivitl’idéal d’une « bonne gouvernance », même en régime de parti unique. L’invasion par le Japon interrompit ses efforts et la guerre civile le mit en difficulté, quoiqu’il ait aidé dans une certaine mesure à restaurer l’autorité d’une administration centrale indispensable à un pays en voie de développement au territoire immense et à la population énorme : les efforts à déployer pour le moderniser vite et fort sont à cette mesure. Hu Shi dut quitter la Chine continentale. Dans les dernières années de sa vie, il fut un symbole de la relation entre les États-Unis et le régime du Kuomintang à Taïwan, mais nombre de ceux qu’il avait formés et qui étaient restés en Chine continentale critiquaient sa position, au sein de la communauté académique. Or Hu Shi prit lui-même ses distances avec le Kuomintang (KMT dans cet article), en levant toujours haut la bannière du libéralisme et d’une « Chine libre ». Classification JEL : B13, B31, N25, P26. (shrink)

The theory of embodied semantics holds that verbal metaphors are strongly grounded in sensorimotor experience. Many studies have proven that besides sensorimotor simulation, the comprehension of verbal metaphors also requires semantic abstraction. But the interaction between simulation and abstraction, as well as the time course of metaphorical meaning integration, is not well understood. In the present study, we aimed to investigate whether embodiment or abstraction, or both, is employed in the processing of Chinese verbal metaphor. Participants were asked to read (...) subject-verb metaphorical, verb-object metaphorical, literal-concrete and literal-abstract sentences, and the target words were measured at the verb and the object of each sentence. The results revealed that a similar N400 effect was elicited by the target verbs in the verb-object metaphorical and the literal-concrete sentences, and a similar P600/LPC effect was induced by the target verbs in the subject-verb metaphorical and the literal-abstract sentences, reflecting that the verb-object metaphors trigger a simulation process, while the subject-verb metaphors trigger an abstraction process in the verb processing stage. Moreover, the subject-verb metaphors elicited a stronger P600/LPC effect by the target verbs than the verb-object metaphors, but there was no difference of the P600/LPC caused by the target objects between the two kinds of metaphors, revealing that the metaphorical meaning of a subject-verb metaphor is integrated in the verb processing stage, while that of a verb-object metaphor is reanalyzed in the object processing stage. These results suggest that a verbal metaphor is processed both by simulation and abstraction, and the metaphorical meaning is integrated immediately with the unfolding of the sentence meaning. The position where the semantic conflict lies in a sentence modulates the time course of metaphor sentence comprehension. (shrink)

Making use of capital to develop China’s socialist market economy requires China not only to fully recognize the tendency of capital civilization but also to realize its intrinsic limitations and to seek conditions and a path for overcoming contradictions in the mode of capitalist production. Karl Marx’s theory of capital provides us with a key to understanding and dealing properly with problems of capital. At the same time we should also pay heed to Western research on, experience with, and lessons (...) from capitalist economies developed over the past four centuries summarized in the field of “business ethics”. (shrink)

Making use of capital to develop China’s socialist market economy requires China not only to fully recognize the tendency of capital civilization but also to realize its intrinsic limitations and to seek conditions and a path for overcoming contradictions in the mode of capitalist production. Karl Marx’s theory of capital provides us with a key to understanding and dealing properly with problems of capital. At the same time we should also pay heed to Western research on, experience with, and lessons (...) from capitalist economies developed over the past four centuries summarized in the field of “business ethics”. (shrink)

This exploration aims to study the emotion recognition of speech and graphic visualization of expressions of learners under the intelligent learning environment of the Internet. After comparing the performance of several neural network algorithms related to deep learning, an improved convolution neural network-Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory algorithm is proposed, and a simulation experiment is conducted to verify the performance of this algorithm. The experimental results indicate that the Accuracy of CNN-BiLSTM algorithm reported here reaches 98.75%, which is at least 3.15% (...) higher than that of other algorithms. Besides, the Recall is at least 7.13% higher than that of other algorithms, and the recognition rate is not less than 90%. Evidently, the improved CNN-BiLSTM algorithm can achieve good recognition results, and provide significant experimental reference for research on learners’ emotion recognition and graphic visualization of expressions in an intelligent learning environment. (shrink)

More and more people in China are now realizing that the country has already become a globalizing economy, but some contend that China's economy is still far from being based on knowledge. However, as globalization necessarily brings with it a knowledge economy, China is of necessity involved in the new economy, and has in consequence encountered many new ethical issues. In the first part of the paper some of these issues are discussed – issues of intellectual property protection, issues related (...) to the exploitation of Chinese know‐how and knowledge products by foreign companies, and issues of cultural colonization. These issues are complicated, widespread and novel, and there is a need to develop ethical guidelines to deal with these issues. Although the perspective of the analysis is Chinese, these same problems are faced by countries the world over. (shrink)

Virtual reality has developed rapidly, drawing more businesses to such development. Based on the diffusion of innovations theory, the study combines the flow theory and the satisfaction perspective to explore purchase intention influencing customers’ adoption of the VR shopping platform system. This study found that satisfaction and flow experience enhance their purchase intention. In technological characteristics, relative advantage, service compatibility, spatial presence, and complexity are important in satisfaction. Among them, both relative advantage and spatial presence impact flow experience. Additionally, a (...) cluster analysis based on gender was conducted, and the study found a significant difference between relative advantages, service compatibility, and complexity in women and men users. The flow experience is an important factor affecting women users’ shopping intention, while insignificant for male users. The implications of these findings are discussed. (shrink)

If market transactions are optimal, why do so many transactions occur within firms themselves? Ronald H. Coase explains this phenomenon by arguing that market transaction costs differ from intra-company transaction costs and that clear intra-intra-firm property rights have the effect of reducing transaction costs. But what exactly are the relevant transaction costs, and what factors determine them? Oliver Hart argues that market contracts are incomplete, and that the key to improving efficiency is putting the power to deal with these unspecified (...) circumstances into the hands of owners within the same entity.In this paper, I argued that, the development of the theory and practice of business ethics as well as China’s innovative practice in recent decades provide a new perspective, one that is especially relevant to the issues raised by Case and Hart and that bear directly on the reform of China’s state-owned enterprises. (shrink)

As the sensitivity to corporate social responsibility continues to grow, the goal of enterprises has expanded beyond the sole pursuit of economic value. Corporate social goal orientation has therefore come to occupy a central position in entrepreneurs’ psychology and the transition away from a market-only economy. This study uses secondary data from 4,288 samples of 725 Chinese-listed companies from 2009 to 2020 to explore the driving factors in social goal orientation based on the characteristics of sample companies and their industry (...) groups from the perspective of stakeholder relationships. The results can be summarized as follows: there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between government stakeholder relationships and social goal orientation, and there is a significant positive relationship between financial stakeholder relationships, market stakeholder relationships, and corporate social goal orientation. The correlation between single-dual stakeholder relationships and social goal orientation is not consistent. In light of the nature of the roles of government and the market, the correlation between the government–market dual relationship and corporate social goal orientation is not significant. However, there is a significant correlation between the finance–government dual stakeholder relationship and social goal orientation; that is, the dual stakeholder relationship maintains the existence of non-institutional capital and corporate financial capital. Moreover, there is no significant correlation between the market–finance dual relationship and corporate social goal orientation, and there is substitutability between market and financial stakeholder relationships. With the deepening of our understanding of CSR, the core goal of enterprises is no longer confined to the pursuit of economic value, and their social goal orientation has come to be regarded as a major driving force in sustainable development. This study enriches the research on the relationship between stakeholder relationships and shows that stakeholder relationships also have important significance to both achieving corporate goals and shaping entrepreneurs’ psychology. (shrink)

The concepts of Minben 民本, Minbensixiang 民本思想, and Minbenzhuyi 民本主义 are rather popular in current Chinese discourse. However, “Minben” was hardly found in Chinese ancient literature as a noun. Around the year of 1916, “Minbenzhuyi” became widely accepted in Japanese intellectual circles, interpreted as one of the Japanese versions of democracy. In 1917, “Minbenzhuyi” was transferred to China as a loanword by Li Dazhao and developed into one of the Chinese definitions of democracy. Nevertheless, Chen Duxiu questioned the meaning of (...) the term in 1919. It was not until 1922 did Liang Qichao bring Minbenzhuyi back into Chinese context and conduct a systematic analysis, which had a lasting impact on Chinese intellectual community. In the following 20 years, Minbenzhuyi was largely accepted in two different senses : 1) interpreted as Chinese definition of democracy; 2) specifically refers to the Confucian idea of “Minshiminting and Minguijunqing”. Gradually, it became evident that Minbenzhuyi in China had grown distant from the meaning of democracy and returned to its traditional Confucian values. (shrink)

Previous studies of the lexical psycholinguistic properties in second language production have assessed the degree of an LPP dimension of an L2 corpus by computing the mean ratings of unique content words in the corpus for that dimension, without considering the possibility that learners at different proficiency levels may perceive the degree of that dimension of the same words differently. This study extended a dynamic semantic similarity algorithm to estimate the degree of five different LPP dimensions of several sub-corpora of (...) the Education First-Cambridge Open Language Database representing L2 English learners at different proficiency levels. Our findings provide initial evidence for the validity of the algorithm for assessing the LPPs in L2 production and contribute useful insights into between-proficiency relationships and cross-proficiency differences in the LPPs in L2 production as well as the relationships among different LPP dimensions. (shrink)

It is believed in many studies that the servitization of manufactures is driven by internal economy, but the situation in China may be somewhat different. In this study, we consider the influence of external institutional environment on manufacturers’ servitization and the final performance, and discuss the moderating effect of organizational identity orientation on firms’ response to external institutional pressures. We conduct a survey where we collect responses from 312 manufacturers in China. Regression analyses are performed to test whether institutional pressures (...) coming from the external institutional environment have a positive effect on the level of manufacturing servitization or not. Moreover, we study if this positive effect is moderated by the individualistic identity orientation and the relational identity orientation. We also examine the impact of servitization strategy on manufacture’s market performance and financial performances. Furthermore, we separate out the influences comes from institutional pressures by using a new estimated method and try to explain the cause of “servitization paradox.” Our study is innovative in that it bridges the servitization and institutional theory, and provides practical guidance for the adoption of manufacturing servitization strategy. (shrink)

Positioning accuracy of micropositioning stage in scanning ion conductance microscopy is the key to obtain high-precision scanning model. Most piezoelectric ceramic micromotion platforms are used for that, and hysteresis characteristics are the main reason for the nonlinear characteristics of piezoelectric ceramics and the influence on the control accuracy. In order to solve this problem, backpropagation algorithm based on whale optimization algorithm is used to model the hysteresis, which is directly used as a feedforward controller to compensate the hysteresis effect, and (...) the robust adaptive moving average control method is used for feedback control. The results show that the hysteresis model of backpropagation algorithm based on the whale optimization algorithm can fit the hysteresis curve well, and the maximum fitting error is 0.2050 μm, only 0.256%. By adopting feedforward and feedback, feedforward robust adaptive moving average control algorithm decreases the hysteresis from 17.64% to 2.51%, which enables the output of the piezoelectric ceramic controller to track the expected displacement well and makes it possible to improve the scanning accuracy. (shrink)

The issue of left-behind children has become a key focus in China. In this study, we investigate the mediating role of social support between social anxiety and the subjective quality of life among left-behind children in China. A total of 710 junior high school students were recruited using clustering random sampling from five middle schools in China and investigated using the Social Anxiety Scale for Children, Social Support Rating Scale for Adolescents, and Inventory of Subjective Life Quality. The results show (...) that social anxiety is negatively associated with social support and subjective quality of life, and social support is positively correlated with subjective quality of life. In addition, social support partially mediates the relationship between social anxiety and subjective quality of life. In conclusion, these findings provide new insights to improve the subjective quality of life of left-behind children. The focus should be on alleviating social anxiety and increasing social support in order to help left-behind children improve their subjective quality of life. (shrink)

To understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on postgraduate students’ internships in China, 911 students from different regions of China were surveyed through online questionnaires. Among the postgraduate students surveyed, 48.51% of which believed that the pandemic had its greatest impact on colleagues interaction, and 59.60% believed that the pandemic had a strong impact on practical skills. In total, 31.8% of postgraduate internship programs were impacted by COVID-19. The proportions of respondents having severe, moderate, and mild anxiety levels were (...) 1.42%, 4.72%, and 15.92%, respectively; and the rates of severe, moderate, and mild depression were 1.64%, 10.86%, and 21.84%, respectively. ANOVA found that major, degree type, and degree of impact of the pandemic on colleague interactions and improved practical abilities all affected postgraduate mental health. The findings suggest that the mental health of postgraduate students should be monitored during a pandemic, and targeted psychological counseling should be offered. Postgraduate internships should be emphasized as to ensure a smooth internship process during a pandemic period. Psychological counseling and assistance should be provided to those whose internships were affected by the pandemic, and programs should be set up to aid postgraduate students in adapting to the new internship and employment conditions brought on by the “new normal” of pandemic prevention and control. (shrink)

The purpose of the study was to solve the problem of the mismatching between the supply and demand of the talents that universities provide for society, whose major is communication design. The correlations between social post demand and university cultivation, as well as between social post demand and the demand indexes of enterprises for posts, are explored under the guidance of University-Industrial Research Collaboration. The backpropagation neural network is used, and the advantages of the Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average model (...) model are combined to design the SARIMA-BPNN model after the relevant parameters are adjusted. Through the experimental analysis, it is found that the error of the root mean square of the designed SARIMA-BP model in post prediction is 7.523 and that of the BPNN model is 16.122. The effect of the prediction model that was designed based on deep learning is smaller than that of the previous model based on the neural network, and it can predict future posts more accurately for colleges and universities. Guided by the “University-Industrial Research Collaboration,” students will have more practice in the teaching process in response to social needs. “University-Industrial Research Collaboration” guides the teaching direction for communication design majors and can help to cultivate communication design talents who are competent for the post provided. (shrink)

The global financial crisis, triggered by the subprime mortgage crisis in the USA, raises an important issue—namely, private production without the control of private property. The credit system has concentrated increasingly large social assets into the hands of financial institutions governed by a few people. This paper argues that the use of social capital for private production has played a key role in causing the subprime mortgage crisis. The credit and banking systems have abolished the private nature of capital and (...) have instead provided a basis for organizing and implementing social production. However, these systems have not “overcome the antithesis between the character of wealth as social and as private.” Therefore, it behooves us to explore what we can learn from the US financial crisis concerning how best to protect social interests, i.e., how to make the social capital produce for society. (shrink)