Employment testing is a key tool for selection and placement in China’s public and private sectors. Rooted in a tradition of rigorous exams and shaped by modern workforce demands, such testing significantly influences access to job opportunities. Yet concerns about bias and fairness persist, driven by cultural norms, legal structures, and changes in the labor market. This chapter examines key issues related to bias and fairness in Chinese employment testing, exploring historical and cultural contexts, legal regulations, professional standards, and enforcement mechanisms. It also addresses measurement bias, challenges to diversity, and the growing influence of machine learning and advanced psychometrics in assessment design. By analyzing these dimensions, the chapter offers a comprehensive view of current challenges and highlights opportunities to improve equity in hiring practices. The discussion provides insights for employers, policymakers, and researchers navigating the complexities of employment testing in China.

During the era of détente, Soviet and US leaders pursued common interests in controlling the spread of nuclear weapons, limiting the cost of the arms race, and expanding trade. Summit meetings brought agreements on nuclear non-proliferation, arms limitation, and space exploration. Yet, after a high point of friendly negotiation in the early 1970s, friction and competition overshadowed cooperation. While the unraveling of détente has often been blamed on Soviet adventurism in the “Third World,” this chapter presents a more balanced explanation. It notes that the United States too intervened around the world, argues that geopolitical competition was not the sole cause of tension, and highlights how domestic political dynamics disrupted relations between the superpowers. After the divisive and destructive US war in Vietnam, many Americans yearned to recover faith in their moral superiority. Denunciations of Soviet human rights violations, including restrictions on Jewish emigration and repression of dissidents, contributed to a revival of confidence in American virtues while irritating Soviet leaders. Long before the USSR invaded Afghanistan in 1979, acrimony eclipsed partnership.

What is the status and practice of US foreign relations history in China? The author observes that scholars in the field have not experienced the kind of self-examination and self-criticism that American (and other) scholars undertook during the 1980s and 1990s. Although Chinese historians today participate in global historiographical trends, the field, in his view, remains too much in a neopositivist mode.

This chapter examines the evolution of China’s innovation system over the past thirty-five years, detailing how government policies, R&D investment, and strategic international engagement have spurred a remarkable surge in patent activity and technological advancement. It outlines the transition from a weak, planned economy to one where domestic enterprises dominate innovation, emphasizing the shift from quantity-focused utility model patents to an increasing quality of invention patents. The analysis highlights the role of FDI and regional dynamics in boosting local innovation while comparing domestic and foreign patenting trends. Key external challenges are discussed, including the impacts of the Belt and Road Initiative, the Sino-US trade war and technology decoupling, and the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Looking forward, the chapter proposes future directions in sectors such as electric vehicle batteries, semiconductors, and digital startups, stressing that achieving sustained independent innovation will require enhanced basic research, collaborative international efforts, and a move beyond reliance on government policy alone.

Chapter 5 delves into the ADR movement both globally and in China. Through an interdisciplinary methodology and fieldwork, it details how the policy of ‘persisting and developing the Fengqiao Experience’ is transmitted from the central government to the grassroots level. The chapter provides an in-depth analysis of how grassroots communities and judicial organisations in China implement central policies, innovate based on practical conditions and adapt pragmatically. It highlights the local characteristics of dispute resolution and the challenges faced by macro-level policies in addressing significant regional socioeconomic disparities in China.

Chapter 10 provides a comprehensive overview of the challenges posed by rapid urbanisation in China and its impact on urban stormwater management. The chapter introduces the “Sponge City” initiative, whose implementation started by the Chinese government in 2013, as a strategic response to address these challenges. Drawing inspiration from low impact development (LID) and best management practices (BMPs), the Sponge City concept represents a paradigm shift from conventional rapid draining to a more sustainable and flexible stormwater management approach. The authors discuss the key concepts, implementation strategies and technical guidelines for Sponge City construction, supported by case studies from pilot cities such as Shenzhen, Tianjin and Xi’an. The Sponge City initiative reflects a harmonious blend of ancient Chinese wisdom and modern Western stormwater management concepts, offering a promising solution for sustainable urban development in the face of rapid urbanisation in China.

This final chapter extends the discussion to the implications of China’s evolving international energy relations, in turn, on its domestic energy transition, the geopolitical landscape, and global sustainability, including international efforts to combat climate change. It also reflects on the ramifications of energy transitions on the international stage in other countries, specifically Japan and Germany. The chapter concludes with a synthesis of the main findings of the book, providing with an overview of how China’s ongoing transition from fossil fuels to renewables, along with geopolitical shifts, is reshaping its interactions with the global energy sector.

Women of the middle millennium were more mobile than we imagine, moving from one location to another for marriage, work, trade, worship, to visit family members, to take part in warfare, to settle in new lands, and—against their will—to be trafficked as slaves and sex workers. This picture of women on the move might contradict pervasive stereotypes of premodern women confined to the domestic sphere, or living out their whole lives within the context of one village or neighbourhood. Certainly, diverse religious and secular edicts ordered women to remain confined to domestic spaces and denigrated ‘wandering’ women as harlots of loose character. Many women of elite status were constrained to obey such orders and found themselves subject to strict control over movement. The majority of women who did travel probably did so less often and over shorter distances than their male peers. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to imagine half of humanity was absent from the roads, paths and ship-routes of the premodern world. It is not that women did not make journeys, but rather that travel was highly gendered in ideology and practice.

Chinese travel writing is a literary genre. All such works contain a coherent narrative of the physical experience of a journey through space towards an identifiable place, written in prose. In later Chinese literary history, however, most travel writing concerns real journeys. Unlike early European travel writing, with its focus on distant, alien, and exotic lands, Chinese travel writing most often describes places inside China. Almost always written in short essay or diary format, the journeys described therein often—but not always—describe trips undertaken for sightseeing purposes. As for content, it can vary considerably, depending on the geographical focus of the narrative and the author’s personal interests. For instance, we might find descriptions of famous landmarks, prominent mountains, local customs and products, and flora and fauna. The ‘literary’ component of these works refers to descriptive and/or commentarial language that is at once personal. ‘Personal’ means active engagement between the author and the place visited and described, which often inspires the traveller to employ an elevated style of language rich in lyrical content.

In 1237, having conquered much of the Central Asian steppes, a massive force of Mongols led by the third generation of Chinggis Khan’s descendants launched a campaign into eastern Europe, taking Kiev (1240) and sweeping westward into Poland and Hungary. News of this invasion quickly reached as far west as England. After more than 130 years of crusading, Latin Christians were passably familiar with the political and cultural complexities of the eastern Mediterranean; knowledge of the lands farther east, however, remained a hazy blend of ancient authors, Biblical lore, the Alexander Romance, and the legend of Prester John. Within short order, however, western European leaders took the initiative in their own hands, dispatching exploratory missions to the Mongols, like those of the Franciscans John of Plano Carpini in the mid−1240s and William of Rubruck in the early 1250s. Thanks to the detailed accounts of their travels they wrote on their return, the Mongols emerged from the fog of apocalyptic terror that had first surrounded them and, like a gradually-developing Polaroid, took on the contours of people with their own history, customs, and institutions

This chapter surveys heterogenous lived experiences of disability throughout medieval Afro-Eurasian travel networks, examining examples from approximately the 7th through 15th centuries CE. It uses a broadly comparative approach to ‘religiomedical’ modes of understanding disability, illness, and other conditions, which situate the analysis of lived experience within local sociocultural understandings of the body (namely religious frameworks or historical forms of medical knowledge). Surveying disparate medieval first-person accounts of temporary or lifelong disability across Asia, Africa, and Europe, this chapter attends to disability as an adaptive practice and a venue for world transformation: an opening up of possibility, and an intellectual and artistic resource for people in motion.

This chapter explores the growing economic influence of China and its implications for state development. It develops a measure of China’s economic hierarchy and finds that Chinese support increases state capacity through different mechanisms than American hierarchy, primarily by enabling leaders to remain in power longer. The chapter also examines the interaction between American and Chinese economic hierarchies, revealing that their coexistence can undermine state capacity. It discusses the future trajectory of Chinese influence and its potential impact on partner states.