This book enriches the evolving concept of soft power, and China’s approach to soft power, by considering how aspects of Chinese culture, notably the traditional martial art and health promoting exercise Tai Chi Quan, are being successfully promoted around the world by non-state actors, and how this fits alongside China’s state-sponsored soft power promotion. The book contrasts growing soft power promotion by China with the corresponding decline in such activities by Western states, outlin...

This book analyses the implications of eco-urbanism re-making for policy and practice under the transformational trends of economic decentralization and market reform in China. While the guiding themes are space, scale, and governance of cities, the book focuses on three interrelated prevailing processes of local green space reproduction, cross-scale mediation of eco-city planning ideology and mobilized social-economic-political intricacies among different countries.This book addre...

When they magically shrink down to the size of ants, Maisie and her brother Paul get creative and turn their small apartment into a giant playground.

When they magically shrink down to the size of ants, Maisie and her brother Paul get creative and turn their small apartment into a giant playground.

When they magically shrink down to the size of ants, Maisie and her brother Paul get creative and turn their small apartment into a giant playground.

Navigating Dialogue and Diplomacy: China's Heritage in Global Perspective brings together contributions from a highly qualified and diverse team of international scholars to examine how cultural heritage operates as a field of global engagement at the intersection of diplomacy, dialogue, and mediated cultural practice. It advances a conceptual shift from heritage as a state instrument of soft power to heritage as a relational and mobile process that travels across borders and is c...

This book examines the sustainability transition theory in the context of urbanization in China, tracing the development of eco and low-carbon cities. It examines how ideas on building eco-cities and low-carbon cities travel from nation to nation, how they are adopted in the Chinese administrative context and what role inter-scalar actors play in getting the ideas transferred, translated and operationalized on the ground.Offering an overarching theoretical framework that incorporat...

The recent rapid growth in China’s involvement in Africa is being promoted by both Chinese and African leaders as being conducted in a spirit of cooperation, friendship and equality. In the media and informally, however, a different, less harmonious picture emerges. This book explores how China and Africa really regard each other, how official images are manufactured, and how informal images are nevertheless shaped and put forward. The book covers a wide range of areas where China-Africa e...

This book enhances the reader’s understanding of the theoretical foundations, sociotechnical assemblage, and governance mechanisms of sustainable smart city transitions.Drawing on empirical evidence stemming from existing smart city research, the book begins by advancing a theory of sustainable smart city transitions, which forms bridges between smart city development studies and some of the key assumptions underpinning transition management and system innovation research, human ge...

Towards Neuromorphic Machine Intelligence: Spike-Based Representation, Learning, and Applications provides readers with in-depth understanding of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), which is a burgeoning research branch of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), AI, and Machine Learning that sits at the heart of the integration between Computer Science and Neural Engineering. In recent years, neural networks have re-emerged in relation to AI, representing a well-grounded paradigm rooted in discipli...

This book assesses the global significance of China’s decade-long campaign to reduce poverty. After showing how the country’s unique approach to poverty alleviation brought about unparalleled progress toward achieving both the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the authors shed light on how China’s experience can help other countries around the globe as they try to permanently rid humanity of the scourge of poverty under ever more challenging ...

The book presents findings of anthropological studies conducted by researchers from Agricultural Technology Demonstration Center in a number of African countries, including Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Mozambique. The aim of these ethnological studies is to understand the Center’s experience in these countries as well as the way it works in terms of institutional arrangement, interaction between Chinese and local staff and technology transfer. A basic contention of the book is that in...