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Sonstige beteiligte Institutionen
This thesis investigates the impact of the country-of-origin effect on Chinese luxury brands which intend to enter the German luxury goods market. By means of a questionnaire and a quantitative analysis, possible threats to Chinese newcomers that derive from an unfavorable country image are illustrated. In fact, the Chinese origin of luxury goods has an impact on German consumers' perception.
With the launch of economic reforms and the opening up in 1978, China started to catch up with the industrial nations. During the 1980s and 90s great importance was attached to the development of the science and educational sector. Development of the first Chinese intranet and connection to the internet became a key to developing science and economy. In 1987 the China Academic Network (CAnet, Zhongguo xueshu wangluo) was established. In the same year the first e-mail was sent from China to the University of Karlsruhe. Full access to the internet was gained in 1994, and it took four more years until the internet business was booming. The growth rate of internet users is tremendous, and China soon will have the largest online community in the world. In January 2008 China had about 210 million internet users, being only second to the United States with 215 million users. Analysts often forget that Chinese internet users only constitute a small percentage of the population (about 16% in December 2007). The internet penetration rate compared to countries like the USA or Japan (both above 65% in July 2007) is still very low. The internet market will grow as a large part of the population still is not connected to the worldwide web, especially in the rural areas. But it should be kept in mind that today’s surfers still represent an elite. A large proportion of internet users (about 36.2% in 2007) hold academic degrees, while persons who enjoyed tertiary education only make up for 6,22% of the populace. Besides economic aspects, western analyses often stress the aspect of censorship. Involvement of Western companies in content control and imprisonment of ‘cyber dissidents’, like Shi Tao, have been topics of discussion for a long time. Reporters Without Borders and Amnesty International have recommended China to respect its citizens’ freedom of speech. The USA, Germany and France have criticised China for its censorship policies. According to a proposal passed in February 2007 the European Union might consider internet censorship a trade barrier. This could affect future negotiations with the PRC. Literature on internet censorship in the PRC still holds the view that the Chinese government has successfully build a solid firewall, which can only be circumvented by using special software. Others hold the opinion that a system as complex as the internet cannot be censored in an effective way. As Bill Clinton put it once, trying to control the internet would be like ‘trying to nail Jello to the wall’. Some are overly enthusiastic in regard to the possible impact which the internet might have on the process of democratisation, by stressing the importance of its ‘feedback functionality’ and the influx of foreign body of thought. Imperfect control would lead to a more open public discourse, which would eventually lead to the fall of China’s authoritarian regime.The first part of the thesis will examine the status quo of internet censorship in the PRC. Mechanisms which the Chinese authorities employ to censor the web will be examined, but the focus will rest on the non-technical aspects internet censorship. It will be explored how mechanisms of censorship are becoming increasingly indirect, alongside taking a look at regulations and codes and the news monopoly of the Chinese state and its agencies, like Xinhua. The second part of the thesis will examine user’s reactions to internet censorship, how they adapt to it, and if they circumvent technical barriers, or if they are aware of the existence of internet censorship. Special attention will be paid to self-censorship and self-seduction, by taking a look at online behaviour. To better put into perspective the topic of internet censorship I will use the concept of Panopticism, mediated by Michel Foucault, as well as media theories by Chomsky and Herman. The paper is based on articles and research papers, surveys, as well as online articles and papers. Online articles are used throughout the paper because of their timeliness and availability, as the latest changes in China’s internet censorship cannot be found in traditional papers and articles.
As a cradle of ancient Chinese civilization, the Yellow River Basin has a very long human-environment interrelationship, where early anthropogenic activities re- sulted in large scale landscape modifications. Today, the impact of this relationship
has intensified further as the basin plays a vital role for China’s continued economic
development. It is one of the most densely-populated, fastest growing, and most dynamic
regions of China with abundant natural and environmental resources providing a livelihood for almost 190 million people. Triggered by fundamental economic reforms, the
basin has witnessed a spectacular economic boom during the last decades and can be
considered as an exemplary blueprint region for contemporary dynamic Global Change
processes occurring throughout the country, which is currently transitioning from an
agrarian-dominated economy into a modern urbanized society. However, this resourcesdemanding growth has led to profound land use changes with adverse effects on the Yellow
River social-ecological systems, where complex challenges arise threatening a long-term
sustainable development.
Consistent and continuous remote sensing-based monitoring of recent and past land
cover and land use change is a fundamental requirement to mitigate the adverse impacts
of Global Change processes. Nowadays, technical advancement and the multitude of
available satellite sensors, in combination with the opening of data archives, allow the
creation of new research perspectives in regional land cover applications over heterogeneous landscapes at large spatial scales. Despite the urgent need to better understand the
prevailing dynamics and underlying factors influencing the current processes, detailed
regional specific land cover data and change information are surprisingly absent for this
region.
In view of the noted research gaps and contemporary developments, three major objectives are defined in this thesis. First (i), the current and most pressing social-ecological
challenges are elaborated and policy and management instruments towards more sustainability are discussed. Second (ii), this thesis provides new and improved insights on
the current land cover state and dynamics of the entire Yellow River Basin. Finally (iii),
the most dominant processes related to mining, agriculture, forest, and urban dynamics
are determined on finer spatial and temporal scales.
The complex and manifold problems and challenges that result from long-term abuse
of the water and land resources in the basin have been underpinned by policy choices,
cultural attitude, and institutions that have evolved over centuries in China. The tremendous economic growth that has been mainly achieved by extracting water and exploiting
land resources in a rigorous, but unsustainable manner, might not only offset the economic benefits, but could also foster social unrest. Since the early emergence of the first Chinese dynasties, flooding was considered historically as a primary issue in river management and major achievements have been made to tame the wild nature of the Yellow
River. Whereas flooding is therefore largely now under control, new environmental and
social problems have evolved, including soil and water pollution, ecological degradation,
biodiversity decline, and food security, all being further aggravated by anthropogenic
climate change. To resolve the contemporary and complex challenges, many individual
environmental laws and regulations have been enacted by various Chinese ministries.
However, these policies often pursue different, often contradictory goals, are too general
to tackle specific problems and are usually implemented by a strong top-down approach.
Recently, more flexible economic and market-based incentives (pricing, tradable permits,
investments) have been successfully adopted, which are specifically tailored to the respective needs, shifting now away from the pure command and regulating instruments.
One way towards a more holistic and integrated river basin management could be the
establishment of a common platform (e.g. a Geographical Information System) for data
handling and sharing, possibly operated by the Yellow River Basin Conservancy Commission (YRCC), where available spatial data, statistical information and in-situ measures
are coalesced, on which sustainable decision-making could be based. So far, the collected
data is hardly accessible, fragmented, inconsistent, or outdated.
The first step to address the absence and lack of consistent and spatially up-to-date
information for the entire basin capturing the heterogeneous landscape conditions was
taken up in this thesis. Land cover characteristics and dynamics were derived from
the last decade for the years 2003 and 2013, based on optical medium-resolution hightemporal MODIS Normalized Differenced Vegetation Index (NDVI) time series at 250 m.
To minimize the inherent influence of atmospheric and geometric interferences found in
raw high temporal data, the applied adaptive Savitzky-Golay filter successfully smoothed
the time series and substantially reduced noise. Based on the smoothed time series
data, a large variety of intra-annual phenology metrics as well as spectral and multispectral annual statistics were derived, which served as input variables for random
forest (RF) classifiers. High quality reference data sets were derived from very high
resolution imagery for each year independently of which 70 % trained the RF models. The
accuracy assessments for all regionally specific defined thematic classes were based on the
remaining 30 % reference data split and yielded overall accuracies of 87 % and 84 % for
2003 and 2013, respectively. The first regional adapted Yellow River Land Cover Products
(YRB LC) depict the detail spatial extent and distribution of the current land cover status
and dynamics. The novel products overall differentiate overall 18 land cover and use
classes, including classes of natural vegetation (terrestrial and aquatic), cultivated classes,
mosaic classes, non-vegetated, and artificial classes, which are not presented in previous
land cover studies so far.
Building on this, an extended multi-faceted land cover analysis on the most prominent
land cover change types at finer spatial and temporal scales provides a better and more
detailed picture of the Yellow River Basin dynamics. Precise spatio-temporal products
about mining, agriculture, forest, and urban areas were examined from long-trem Landsat
satellite time series monitored at annual scales to capture the rapid rate of change in four
selected focus regions. All archived Landsat images between 2000 and 2015 were used to
derive spatially continuous spectral-temporal, multi-spectral, and textural metrics. For
each thematic region and year RF models were built, trained and tested based on a stablepixels reference data set. The automated adaptive signature (AASG) algorithm identifies those pixels that did not change between the investigated time periods to generate a
mono-temporal reference stable-pixels data set to keep manual sampling requirements
to a minimum level. Derived results gained high accuracies ranging from 88 % to 98 %.
Throughout the basin, afforestation on the Central Loess Plateau and urban sprawl are
identified as most prominent drivers of land cover change, whereas agricultural land
remained stable, only showing local small-scale dynamics. Mining operations started in
2004 on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, which resulted in a substantial loss of pristine alpine
meadows and wetlands.
In this thesis, a novel and unique regional specific view of current and past land cover
characteristics in a complex and heterogeneous landscape was presented by using a
multi-source remote sensing approach. The delineated products hold great potential for
various model and management applications. They could serve as valuable components
for effective and sustainable land and water management to adapt and mitigate the
predicted consequences of Global Change processes.
“I tried to control my emotions”: nursing home care workers’ experiences of emotional labor in China
(2022)
Despite dramatic expansions in the Chinese nursing home sector in meeting the increasing care needs of a rapidly aging population, direct care work in China remains largely devalued and socially unrecognized. Consequently, scant attention has been given to the caregiving experiences of direct care workers (DCWs) in Chinese nursing homes. In particular, given the relational nature of care work, there is little knowledge as to how Chinese DCWs manage emotions and inner feelings through their emotional labor. This article examines the emotional labor of Chinese DCWs through ethnographic data collected with 20 DCWs in one nursing home located in an urban setting in central China. Data were analyzed using conventional content analysis and constant comparison. Participants’ accounts of sustaining a caring self, preserving professional identity, and hoping for reciprocity revealed implicit meanings about the often-conflicting nature of emotional labor and the nonreciprocal elements of care work under constrained working conditions. Importantly, the moral-cultural notion of bao (报 norm of reciprocity) was found to be central among DCWs in navigating strained resources and suggested their agency in meaning-construction. However, their constructed moral buffers may be insufficient if emotional labor continues to be made invisible by care organizations.