PENG. WANG

Peng Wang

Utilising individual interviews and focus group discussions, primarily from two Chinese cities, The Chinese Mafia: Organized Crime, Corruption, and Extra-Legal Protection contributes to the understanding of organized crime and corruption in the Chinese context, filing a significant gap in criminological literature, by investigating how extra-legal protectors-corrupt public officials and street gangsters-emerge, evolve and operate in a rapidly changing society. China's economic reforms have been accompanied by a surge of social problems, such as ineffective legal institutions, booming black markets and rampant corruption. This has resulted in the rise of extra-legal means of protection and enforcement: such is the demand for protection that cannot be fulfilled by state-sponsored institutions. This book develops a new socio-economic theory of mafia emergence, incorporating Granovetter's argument on social embeddedness into Gambetta's economic theory of the mafia, to suggest that the rise of the Chinese mafia is primarily due to the negative influence of guanxi (a Chinese version of personal connections) on the effectiveness of the formal legal system. This interplay has two major consequences. First, the weakened ability of the formal legal system sees street gangsters (the 'Black Mafia') providing protection and quasi law enforcement. Second, it allows for escalating abuse of power by public officials; as a result, corrupt officials (the 'Red Mafia') sell public appointments, exchange illegal benefits with businesses and protect local gangs. Together, these outcomes have seen street gangs shift their operations away from traditional areas (e.g. gambling, prostitution and drug distribution), whilst corrupt public officials have moved to offer illegal services to the criminal underworld, including the safeguarding organized crime groups and protection of illegal entrepreneurs. A study of crime and deviance located within a fast growing economy, The Chinese Mafia offers a unique understanding of these activities within contemporary Chinese society and a new perspective for understanding the interaction between corruption and organized crime. It will be of interest to academics and students engaged in the fields of criminology and criminal justice, sociology, and political science, with particular interest for those researching China and Chinese politics and governance.

Organized Crime, Corruption, and Extra-Legal Protection

The Chinese Mafia

Huachao Dong

Jinglu Li

This book presents recent advances in data-driven global optimization methods, combining theoretical foundations with real-world applications to address complex engineering optimization challenges. The book begins with an overview of the state of the art, key technologies and standard benchmark problems in the field. It then delves into several innovative approaches: space reduction-based, hybrid surrogate model-based and multi-surrogate model-based global optimization, followed by surrogate-assisted constrained global optimization, discrete global optimization and high-dimensional global optimization. These methods represent a variety of optimization techniques that excel in both optimization capability and efficiency, making them ideal choices for complex engineering optimization problems. Through benchmark test problems and real-world engineering applications, the book illustrates the practical implementation of these methods, linking established theories with cutting-edge research in industrial and engineering optimization. Both a professional book and an academic reference, this title will provide valuable insights for researchers, students, engineers and practitioners in a variety of fields, including optimization methods and algorithms, engineering design and manufacturing and artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Data-Driven Global Optimization Methods and Applications

Xin Wang

Wenwu Zhu

Qi Wu

Xiaodong He

Visual Question Answering (VQA) usually combines visual inputs like image and video with a natural language question concerning the input and generates a natural language answer as the output. This is by nature a multi-disciplinary research problem, involving computer vision (CV), natural language processing (NLP), knowledge representation and reasoning (KR), etc. Further, VQA is an ambitious undertaking, as it must overcome the challenges of general image understanding and the question-answering task, as well as the difficulties entailed by using large-scale databases with mixed-quality inputs. However, with the advent of deep learning (DL) and driven by the existence of advanced techniques in both CV and NLP and the availability of relevant large-scale datasets, we have recently seen enormous strides in VQA, with more systems and promising results emerging. This book provides a comprehensive overview of VQA, covering fundamental theories, models, datasets, and promising future directions. Given its scope, it can be used as a textbook on computer vision and natural language processing, especially for researchers and students in the area of visual question answering. It also highlights the key models used in VQA.

From Theory to Application

Visual Question Answering

Vivian Ling

The highly anticipated next book in Tuttle's Stories for Language Learners series is here! This book presents 22 classic Chinese proverbs and the traditional tales behind them. The stories are bilingual, with the Chinese and English versions presented on facing pages. Each includes an explanation of how the proverb is used today, cultural notes, vocabulary and discussion questions. Online audio recordings of the tales by native speakers give students a chance to improve their pronunciation and comprehension. Some of the proverbs featured in this collection include: "Painting the Eyes on the Dragon" Based on the story of a famous court painter in 6th century China who painted dragons, this proverb refers to the finishing touches needed to bring a work of art or literature to life. In a discussion, it refers to the final statements used to clinch the argument. "Waiting for Rabbits by a Tree Stump" Based on an ancient folktale about a foolish farmer who sees a rabbit kill itself in front of him by running into a tree stump, then gives up tilling his field to wait for more rabbits by the stump. This saying is applied to people who wait passively for luck to strike again. It also refers to impractical people who stick to one way of doing things only because it has worked for them once in the past. "Pure Water Has No Fish; Perfect People Have No Friends" Many versions of this historical tale exist. The one told here is about a 2nd century AD official sent to govern a far-flung outpost on the Silk Road who is fastidious in applying strict rules and thereby causes the local people to rebel against him. In the professional world, it is used to refer to people who do not like to work with an overly strict supervisor or colleague. Whether being used in a classroom or for self-study, Chinese Stories for Language Learners provides an educational and entertaining way for intermediate Mandarin learners to expand their vocabulary and understanding of the language.

A Treasury of Proverbs and Folktales in Chinese and English

Chinese Stories for Language Learners

Jing Liu

Yingxin Zhu

Fang Wang

Zhaojun Wang

Chao Shen

This book presents selected papers from the 11th International Symposium on Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (ISHVAC 2019), with a focus on HVAC techniques for improving indoor environment quality and the energy efficiency of heating and cooling systems. Presenting inspiration for implementing more efficient and safer HVAC systems, the book is a valuable resource for academic researchers, engineers in industry, and government regulators.

Volume II: Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning and Refrigeration System

Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (ISHVAC 2019)

Volume III: Buildings and Energy

Peng Wang

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