This article summarizes relevant historical developments involving Taiwan and Okinawa in Asia-Pacific multilateral relations over the longue durée, and suggests future prospects.

1. Both Taiwan and the Ryukyus are within the Kuroshio (Black Tide) Current Civilization Zone (from approximately the beginning of the 3rd Century): At that time, crops such as cassava and yams traveled northbound with the Kuroshio Currents, which ran from the Philippines to Taiwan and the Ryukyus to Kyushu, while crops such as millet in northern parts of South East Asia traveled to Taiwan via the South Sea and further traveled to the Ryukyus and Kyushu. Together with the path of rice from south of China's Yangtze River via Korea to Kyushu, Japan these were two important sea-borne cultural exchange paths in the Asia-Pacific. However, by the 3rd Century, the direct route from south of the Yangzi to central Japan, as well as the Silk Road from Chang'an in Northwest China to Central Asia, and the shipping route from Guangzhou to India superseded the aforesaid routes. As a result, Taiwan and the Ryukyu Islands became isolated on the international stage for about one thousand years (Ts'ao, 1988).

The American people have become used to government trickery in foreign affairs—wars and interventions based on lies and falsified evidence, “national security” used to justify the whittling away of privacy, classification of documents to hide embarrassing disclosures, massaging of budget figures to mask outrageous spending on arms, and demands for new weapons when already in possession of an unmatched conventional and nuclear arsenal.

To add greater theoretical precision to a fundamental construct in social exchange theory - namely, Gouldner's ‘norm of reciprocity’, this study developed a measure of Sahlins' generalized, balanced, and negative reciprocity types and validated its psychometric quality in China. For a comprehensive construct validation of the new scale, we carried out three studies. After generating a pool of items, we used a panel of experts to classify items according to conceptual definitions of the three reciprocity types. Using factor analysis, the first study revealed a factor structure consistent with Sahlins' reciprocity typology. In the second study, confirmatory factor analysis replicated this factor structure as well as demonstrated that the reciprocity factors are distinct from each other and other social-exchange constructs. In line with extant theories, the third study corroborated a nomological network relating reciprocity types to external constructs. Given this broad array of evidence for its construct validity, future researchers can employ this validated scale to investigate various forms of social exchange in Chinese work settings.

Drawing on the threat-rigidity hypothesis, we examine how managerial opportunity and threat interpretations of external environments affect a technology venture's choice of external knowledge search strategies in an emerging market. Results from a sample of 141 technology ventures in China reveal that opportunity interpretation directly and positively influences both the breadth and depth of external search, whereas threat interpretation directly and negatively influences only external search depth. Furthermore, managerial ties strengthen the positive relationship between opportunity interpretation and external search breadth but weaken the positive relationship on external search depth. Managerial ties weaken the negative relationship between threat interpretation and external search breadth but strengthen the negative relationship on external search depth. Implications for both research and practice are offered.

Economic development of a remote, mountainous region poses a challenge anywhere. Based on field research and documentary evidence, this article examines how such a development challenge has been addressed in Daocheng county, Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan province. In doing so, it investigates the different forms of economic development, how such development comes about, and the role played by government in economic development. The article also probes the broader socioeconomic consequences of economic development. The fact that Daocheng is a predominantly Tibetan county adds a nationality dimension to the issue of economic development.

Economic growth over the past three decades has greatly improved the nutrition and living standards of people in China. However, increasingly, the Chinese are becoming heavier. As many as a quarter of Chinese school-age urban boys are overweight or obese, yet a third of Chinese children remain underweight. Drawing on six national surveys of children's health conducted since 1979, the article reports on trends in nutritional status and regional disparities. It shows that the drivers behind the increase in mean body mass and in nutritional inequality are associated with rising household incomes and associated inequalities between provinces.

The concept of a high commitment work system (HCWS) has mostly been used in the West to study the relationship between a firm's work systems and organizational performance. In this paper, we introduce a preliminary measure of HCWS in China based on the definition of Baron and Kreps (1999). In study 1, we tested the measure by surveying 442 employees in China's information technology (IT) industry. In study 2, we re-tested the same measure from the perspective of human resource (HR) executives in 126 foreign-invested companies. The analyses not only provided some evidence for the construct validity of this preliminary measure of a high commitment work system, but also produced some interesting results that can only be understood with regards to the history and institutional backgrounds of Chinese organizations.

Existing research examining the curvilinear relationship between network centrality and performance tends to focus on the information recipients’ perspective. Focusing on the information providers’ perspective, our study draws upon social exchange theory to demonstrate that the advice-giving centrality-performance relationship for information providers has an inverse U-shape due to decreasing benefits and increasing costs of maintaining more advice-giving ties. We further show that increasing advice-giving centrality increases the likelihood that individuals would become a hindrance to coworkers, as they become bottlenecks impeding efficient workflow. However, our study demonstrates that political skill enables them to overcome the interpersonal challenges associated with high advice-giving centrality. Specifically, individuals with high political skills can better convert advice-giving ties to resources that could assist their cooperation with coworkers, reducing the hindrance they impose. Overall, we provide insights into the trade-off between the benefits and costs of advice-giving ties from a social exchange perspective and examine political skill as an important mitigator of the downsides of large advice-giving networks – a key area that has been hitherto largely unexplored.

The Chinese government has placed workforce upskilling at the core of its reform agenda to sustain the Chinese “economic miracle.” As such, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security (MOHRSS) and Ministry of Education (MOE) have each launched separate apprenticeship reforms geared towards enhancing China's oft-criticized vocational education and training system. Using a self-constructed theoretical framework, this article examines the two reforms and ascribes their divergent outcomes to the two ministries’ distinct approaches to institutionalizing their central initiatives (i.e. the top-down model followed by the MOHRSS versus the collaborative model of the MOE). However, given the absence of industry-level civil society governance in China, neither of these models has delivered ideal training outcomes, although the collaborative model has satisfied more employers and apprentices. China's skills-development reforms have thus become trapped in an institutional dilemma which is likely to impede the long-term economic restructuring efforts of the central state.