This article investigates how leaders' reputations shape states' foreign policy choices under Sino-US strategic competition. Using panel data covering 184 countries from 2015 to 2022, it measures leader reputation through the emotional tone of events recorded in GDELT GKG 1.0, also known as Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone Global Knowledge Graph, and links this measure to voting positions in the United Nations General Assembly. The results show that leaders with stronger reputations are more likely to lead their states to adopt more neutral stances between China and the United States, while alliances and partnerships only weakly moderate issue-specific behaviour, notably in votes on nuclear proliferation and human rights.
Addressing boundary pollutant emissions remains a governance challenge. Traditional approaches include vertical intervention and network-based governance, but each offers distinct advantages and limitations. Some nations, in response, have established vertically managed environmental institutions to mitigate pollution in boundary areas. Using Chinas' 2019 regional environmental supervision reform as a quasi-natural experiment, this article analyses surface water quality data from January 2017 to December 2020 within a triple-difference approach to assess the policys' impact. The results show that vertical management institutions reduce boundary water pollution by weakening local governments' informational advantages, with stronger effects observed in regions facing greater economic development pressure. This article emphasises the crucial role of vertical regional supervision in managing transboundary pollution and enhances understanding of how local environmental governance can be strengthened within a centralised system.
While Macaos' electoral laws mandate transparent competition, its associational politics renders electoral processes largely symbolic. Such institutional incompatibility arises from the substantial continuity of Macaos' traditional authority structure, a structure persisting from the Portuguese colonial era to the present day. Four factors shape Macaos' associational politics and its embedded traditional authority: its pre-handover associational history, the Chinese central governments' vision for Macaos' democracy, residents' pragmatic political culture and Macaos' demographic and economic structure. These findings necessitate a re-examination of the institutional feasibility of democratic reforms in Macao and similar postcolonial regions, a revaluation of the clientelism perspective and greater recognition of institutions' pivotal role in explaining the delayed emergence of democracy.
This study examines the effect of green technological innovation on carbon dioxide (CO2) intensity across Chinese provinces from 2000 to 2020. It distinguishes between invention patents and utility model patents to identify heterogeneous mechanisms across regional, regulatory and spatial contexts. Employing spatial Durbin models based on 630 province-year observations, the study reports three principal findings. First, green innovation is associated with lower CO2 intensity nationally, with an estimated elasticity of -0.111. This relationship remains robust across one- to three-year lag structures and dynamic panel (system-GMM) specifications, reflecting differential absorptive capacity and industrial structure constraints. Second, environmental regulation exhibits a threshold effect at -5.618, corresponding to 0.37 per cent of gross domestic product. Above this threshold, the effectiveness of green innovation in reducing CO2 intensity declines by approximately nine per cent, suggesting that excessive regulation is associated with diminished innovation productivity. Third, utility model patents generate substantially stronger spatial spillovers, with an indirect effect of -0.399, compared with 0.014 for invention patents. Moreover, the spillover effect of utility model patents exceed their direct effects by nearly threefold, indicating that incremental innovations diffuse more readily across provincial boundaries than breakthrough technologies. These findings suggest that optimal carbon mitigation policy should environmental regulation near the identified thresholds, and prioritise utility model patent development within regional cooperation frameworks to maximise interprovincial technology diffusion and collective emissions reduction.
This article examines the sustainability of Chinas' economic growth by analysing the role of innovation activity, measured through resident patent applications. Drawing on Solows' growth theory, it employs a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) model to assess the dynamic relationship between annual resident patent applications and gross domestic product (GDP) per capita from 2001 to 2021. The results indicate that although the immediate impact of innovation is moderate, its effects accumulate over time, suggesting a meaningful long-term contribution to economic growth. Traditional growth drivers-urbanisation, infrastructure, human capital and foreign direct investment (FDI)-driven technology transfer-remain important in explaining Chinas' growth trajectory, while innovation activity increasingly contributes to productivity dynamics. This article provides a macroeconomic and time-sensitive analysis of the relationship between aggregate innovation and economic performance in China.
