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While prevailing scholarship commonly asserts that information and communication technologies (ICTs) significantly facilitate mass mobilization, a growing body of literature questions the mobilization potential of technologies alone. This literature proposes that ICTs might redirect offline participation by promoting low-risk and low-cost online collective actions, especially in the absence of linkage between offline and online tactics. In the context of these debates, this article explores the nuanced synergies between the online and offline mobilization strategies of individual activists and their underlying motives. It does so through an in-depth ethnographic case study of popular protest mobilization in a Chinese locality. Through an integration of the traditional entrepreneurial mobilization model with the concept of mediatization, this study delves into the intricate mobilization strategies and underlying motives of activists. The findings reveal that through a strategic convergence of offline and online tactics, including extension, amalgamation, and substitution, activists adeptly choreographed and presented protest repertoires, thereby fostering the development of mass mobilization. The research posits that the efficacy of ICTs in mobilization is contingent upon activists' adeptness in leveraging the norms and practices of ICTs to pursue collective objectives suited to social contexts, thus circumventing the pitfalls of "clicktivism."

Whole genome analysis in large samples from a single population is needed to provide adequate power to assess relative strengths of natural selection across different functional components of the genome. In this study, we analyzed next-generation sequencing data from 962 European Americans, and found that as expected approximately 60% of the top 1% of positive selection signals lie in intergenic regions, 33% in intronic regions, and slightly over 1% in coding regions. Several detailed functional annotation categories in intergenic regions showed statistically significant enrichment in positively selected loci when compared to the null distribution of the genomic span of ENCODE categories. There was a significant enrichment of purifying selection signals detected in enhancers, transcription factor binding sites, microRNAs and target sites, but not on lincRNA or piRNAs, suggesting different evolutionary constraints for these domains. Loci in repressed or low activity regions? and loci near or overlapping the transcription start site were the most significantly over-represented annotations among the top 1% of signals for positive selection.

In July and August 2010, a series of spontaneous "defend-my-mother-tongue" protests took place in Guangzhou. At its climax, thousands of protestors took to the streets to oppose a government proposal to switch local television broadcasts from Cantonese to Mandarin. Unlike other recent mass incidents in China, the "Defend Cantonese" protests mainly involved a place-based identity politics through which participants purported to support maintenance of Cantonese culture without explicit political and material demands. Based on the testimonies of dozens of participants and witnesses, the authors identify three sets of schematic dichotomies that framed the protests: namely, south versus north, local differences versus national uniformity, and conserving traditional Guangzhou versus urban redevelopment. It is argued that underpinning the language movement's cultural outlook was the participants' discontent with current politics and distribution of resources. The cultural packaging constitutes a specific tactic through which the actors resisted the authoritarian regime without triggering violent suppression. (China J/GIGA)

In recent decades, China has been increasingly seen as a land of seemingly limitless opportunity for transnational corporations and economic growth. In the early 1990s, China's late leader, Deng Xiaoping, welcomed multinationals into many strategic industries. Since then, this country has grown to become the world's second largest economy, behind only the United States. This book uses the latest economic and business information to show how the business and economic environments of China and the United States are intertwined, and offers a detailed account of how multinationals from the United States have been incorporated into the Chinese economy.Bringing together contributions by a number of well-known scholars from both China and abroad, this volume, as part of the Transnational Corporations Council of Studies series, allows the reader to navigate multinationals' interactions with the Sino-American economy.

The increasingly large role of financial intermediaries in promoting firms' innovation and internationalization has led to great research interest. China has faced mounting pressure to take entrepreneurial finance and innovation seriously. Little is known about entrepreneurial financiers' activities and performance. Focusing on entrepreneurial financiers' activities in the Yangtze River Economic Belt, this study investigates how they select projects and how well they perform in China. Evidence shows that various financiers serve in the financial system to nurture innovative entrepreneurial activities; they tend to focus on technology, and the major financiers vary with stage of industrial technological development. With the support of entrepreneurial finance, the invested firms in general maintain a sound growth momentum, but the foreign trade of relevant industries has not significantly increased and has even declined. The implication for industrial and international development policy is discussed.

This study presents the case study of a collective action against a proposed industrial waste-water disposal project in the city of Qidong, Jiangsu province in 2012 to explore the role of collective identity in the formation and mobilisation of environmental protests in contemporary China. It is suggested that collective identity articulated through protest is not just a static property of a certain group of people based on their history, culture and locality. Collective identity also works as a flexible framing strategy that can be pragmatically constructed or reconstructed by the discontents, as it interacts with the specific political context in the process of mobilisation. (China/GIGA)