front cover of Allies of the State
Allies of the State
China's Private Entrepreneurs and Democratic Change
Jie Chen and Bruce J. Dickson
Harvard University Press, 2010
Jie Chen and Bruce J. Dickson draw on extensive fieldwork as they explore the extent to which China’s private sector supports democracy, surveying more than 2,000 entrepreneurs in five coastal provinces with over 70 percent of China’s private enterprises.The authors examine who the private entrepreneurs are, how the party-state shapes this group, and what their relationship to the state is. China’s entrepreneurs are closely tied to the state through political and financial relationships, and these ties shape their views toward democracy. While most entrepreneurs favor multi-candidate elections under the current one-party system, they do not support a system characterized by multi-party competition and political liberties, including the right to demonstrate. The key to regime support lies in the capitalists’ political beliefs and their assessment of the government’s policy performance. China’s capitalists tend to be conservative and status-quo oriented, not likely to serve as agents of democratization.This is a valuable contribution not only to the debates over the prospects for democracy in China but also to understanding the process of democratization around the globe.
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front cover of Developments in Control Theory Towards Glocal Control
Developments in Control Theory Towards Glocal Control
Li Qiu
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2012
Glocal control, a term coined by Professor Shinji Hara at The University of Tokyo, represents a new framework for studying behaviour of complex dynamical systems from a feedback control perspective. A large number of dynamical components can be interconnected and interact with each other to form an integrated system with certain functionalities. Such complex systems are found in nature and have been created by man, including gene regulatory networks, neuronal circuits for memory, decision making, and motor control, bird flocking, global climate dynamics, central processing units for computers, electrical power grids, the World Wide Web, and financial markets. A common feature of these systems is that a global property or function emerges as a result of local, distributed, dynamical interactions of components. The objective of 'glocal' (global + local) control is to understand the mechanisms underlying this feature, analyze existing complex systems, and to design and create innovative systems with new functionalities. This book is dedicated to Professor Shinji Hara on the occasion of his 60th birthday, collecting the latest results by leading experts in control theories to lay a solid foundation towards the establishment of glocal control theory in the coming decades.
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