Notes On Academic Research

China’s auto industry: regimes of production and industrial policy in the age of electric cars

Dan Wu and Wei Zhao 

International Journal of Automotive Technology and Management (2023)

This article discusses China’s industrial and labour policy for the automotive industry facing the transition to the era of new energy vehicles. A conceptual framework on the regimes of production is employed to analyse the present transformation of industry structures in production models and labour markets. The growth of private-capitalist regimes of high-performance, low wages, and high profit incentives for workers is identified, which can be described as the ‘Foxconnisation’ of the industry, and it is at the expense of the corporate-bureaucratic regimes prevalent among the leading Sino-foreign joint ventures. As production networks become vertically disintegrated, some non-traditional industrial players are highlighted in the discussion of some recent developments in the industry during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The profound transformation in the regimes of production brought about social contradictions related to the production process, and new challenges and implications for workplace policies. The empirical study of this article confirms the necessity of trade union strategies inside China from an international perspective in order to ensure social standards and a more sustainable green transformation of the industry. From the Abstract

Internationalization of higher education research in the Greater Bay Area of China: Building capacities, alleviating asymmetries

Anatoly V. Oleksiyenko, Jie Liu, Christy Ngan

Higher Education Quarterly (2024)

Internationalization is known to enhance university capacities in cross-border learning and encourage institutional transformations for improved quality of scholarship and education. Studies on internationalization of research and teaching are, however, under-problematized with regard to asymmetries that pervade different collaborating systems and cultures. This paper addresses this gap by elucidating asymmetries in the Greater Bay Area of China (GBA), which is dealing with differences in legacies and experiences of internationalization in university research and teaching. At a time when the governments in the three constituent jurisdictions of GBA—Guangdong Province, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR), and Macao SAR—encourage universities to collaborate across jurisdictional borders, this study applies a bibliographic analysis to shed light on asymmetries and mitigation strategies in internationalization of research and teaching. From the Abstract