HSBC

Abstract Between 1979 and 1982, 20,000 troops from the People's Liberation Army Engineering Corps travelled from military-industrial sites in the interior to Shenzhen, China's first Special Economic Zone (SEZ). They were the first batch of state-sponsored migrants to the SEZ and the pioneer builders of the city's urban infrastructure. This article uses the case of military workers in the SEZ to examine state–market relations during the early phase of China's post-socialist transition. On one hand, the Deng administration strategically repurposed a disciplined labour force from Mao's command economy to jump-start marketization. On the other hand, the Mao-era power structure of the Engineering Corps not only persisted but became even more entrenched in the SEZ at the forefront of China's reform. The higher one's military rank was before demobilization, the more easily one could monetize socialist-era political credentials, particularly by taking advantage of the rising value of land in Shenzhen's urbanization process. Academic credentials served as a moderate booster of status within the public sector and a more powerful ingredient leading to success for private entrepreneurs. The lower the military rank before demobilization, the less meaningful the agency to obtain material rewards commensurate with past contributions.

The United States is an important place for Chinese companies to list overseas. In recent years, the US has continuously strengthened regulatory policies involving Chinese companies, leading to the delisting pressure of most Chinese companies. At the same time, increased volatility in Chinese equity prices has had a clear contagion effect on the Hong Kong and mainland markets. In this context, Chinese companies not only need to explore new financing channels, but also need to consolidate the corporate governance mechanism according to international rules, strengthen coordination and communication with cross-border financial regulation, and maintain the two-way opening of the capital market.

In recent years, Chinese private companies have improved a lot in corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance, especially in the philanthropic area. However, private companies’ awareness and performance of social responsibility still have a big disparity with SOEs. And private companies’ policy of social responsibility is subjective and preferential. To explain this contradiction, this paper tries to introduce political connection and, based on stakeholder salience theory, to test how political connection changes managers’ perception of stakeholders’ relative importance and cause changes in stakeholders’ satisfaction level of social responsibility requirement. The result shows that (1) political connection has positive influence on private companies’ CSR; (2) companies with political connection are significantly better than the ones without political connection in society-oriented and customers-oriented responsibility; (3) two kinds of companies have no significant difference in investors-oriented responsibility; (4) as for government-oriented and employee-oriented responsibility, companies with political connection are worse than ones without political connection. These findings are significant for China’s future construction of competition system and private companies’ choice of stakeholders and future investment.

Using data for 320 radio stations operating in the 50 largest Arbitron metro radio markets during 2004 that offered at least some programming in 1 or more of 19 different foreign languages, strongly positive statistical relations were found between the size of foreign language populations in the radio market and the amount, or variety, of radio programming in their respective language that is available. A preference externality effect was also found: consistently negative relations between the variety of foreign language programming available and size of the English language population. Similar results were found for a measure of programming quality: the percentage of news and talk programming that is locally produced. Conventional wisdom that minority populations tend to be “underserved” by media is generally supported.

This paper proposes an approach for prescribing the inter-related decisions that prescribe a process plan for a series of dual head placement machines. The goal is to provide a means of rapidly prescribing a process plan that seeks to minimize cycle time (equivalently, maximize throughput rate) by balancing workloads assigned to heads when assembling a given type of circuit card. Our approach decomposes process planning decisions into four related problems. This paper explores list-processing heuristics for the first of these problems and adapts an optimizing method for the fourth. It also integrates these two methods with others to optimize the second and third of these problems, reporting computational tests that evaluate the overall approach to all four problems and assessing the degree to which the decomposition approach is able to balance workloads assigned and the run time required to do so. Resulting cycle times are also analyzed. These test results demonstrate that the overall approach provides a means of prescribing effective process plans within a run time acceptable to process planners.