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What does it mean for the future of the planet when one of the world’s most durable authoritarian governance systems pursues “ecological civilization”? Despite its staggering pollution and colossal appetite for resources, China exemplifies a model of state-led environmentalism which concentrates decisive political, economic, and epistemic power under centralized leadership. On the face of it, China seems to embody hope for a radical new approach to environmental governance. In this thought-provoking book, Yifei Li and Judith Shapiro probe the concrete mechanisms of China’s coercive environmentalism to show how ‘going green’ helps the state to further other agendas such as citizen surveillance and geopolitical influence. Through top-down initiatives, regulations, and campaigns to mitigate pollution and environmental degradation, the Chinese authorities also promote control over the behavior of individuals and enterprises, pacification of borderlands, and expansion of Chinese power and influence along the Belt and Road and even into the global commons. Given the limited time that remains to mitigate climate change and protect millions of species from extinction, we need to consider whether a green authoritarianism can show us the way. This book explores both its promises and risks.

The purpose of this grounded theory study was to develop a theory that explains the process of self-authorship development of college students in China. Little research exists that explicitly explores the integrated development of college students in China and influences on that development from the educational environment. Despite the extensive research in U.S. higher education settings on students' development from an integrated perspective, little comparable research has been done in the context of college students in China. I interviewed 13 junior or senior college students from three institutions in one province in China via synchronous video conferencing. I utilized convenience sampling to choose the province, purposive sampling to select the three institutions with different rankings, purposive sampling to choose the first six participants, and then theoretical sampling to select the subsequent seven participants, until theoretical saturation was reached. I used constant comparative analysis to facilitate theoretical sampling and the data analysis process. An initial conceptual model of self-authorship development emerged from this study. The trajectory of development in the epistemological domain is from depending on external sources' knowing to beginning to construct knowledge. The trajectory of development in the interpersonal domain is from being subordinate or dominant in relationships to striving for mutual relationships. In other words, participants were becoming less dependent in relationships. The intrapersonal domain is comprised of three dimensions: self-defined goals, self-efficacy, and self-knowledge. The trajectory of development in the intrapersonal domain is from unclear self-defined goals to clear self-defined goals, low self-efficacy to high self-efficacy, and little self-knowledge to robust self-knowledge. In addition, I found four factors promoting participants' self-authorship development: absence of externally defined goals, flexibility to explore, support from peers and students in higher grades, and engagement in extracurricular activities. This study suggests multiple directions for future research, which include exploration of Chinese college students' post-graduation experience to look at their further self-authorship development and their self-authorship development in different contexts to explore how their meaning-making structures associate with different contexts. The findings also provide insights for policy makers in the Chinese higher education system, colleges and universities in China, and professionals and practitioners in Chinese higher education about ways to promote students' holistic development.

Cloth simulation has wide applications in computer animation, garment design, and robot-assisted dressing. This work presents a differentiable cloth simulator whose additional gradient information facilitates cloth-related applications. Our differentiable simulator extends a state-of-the-art cloth simulator based on Projective Dynamics (PD) and with dry frictional contact. We draw inspiration from previous work to propose a fast and novel method for deriving gradients in PD-based cloth simulation with dry frictional contact. Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive analysis and evaluation of the usefulness of gradients in contact-rich cloth simulation. Finally, we demonstrate the efficacy of our simulator in a number of downstream applications, including system identification, trajectory optimization for assisted dressing, closed-loop control, inverse design, and real-to-sim transfer. We observe a substantial speedup obtained from using our gradient information in solving most of these applications.

We explore the potential of transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) as phase-change materials for photonics integrated circuits (PIC). We measure the near-infrared (NIR) optical properties of bulk crystal telluride TMDs and sulfide TMDs. We find that telluride TMDs have large optical density and large optical contrast, but the loss is too high. The sulfide TMDs have lower loss, but the phase change energy is much higher. We further propose designing sulfide TMD alloys that are thermodynamically adjacent to phase boundaries between competing crystal structures, to realize martensitic (i.e., displacive, order-order) switching. We report large-area thin film synthesis of 1T TiS[subscript 2] and high-Ti-content, single-phase 2H alloy Mo[subscript 1][subscript -][subscript x]Ti[subscript x]S[subscript 2] thin films at temperature as low as 500 °C using a scalable two-step method of metal film deposition, followed by sulfurization in an H[subscript 2]S gas furnace. We demonstrate different roughening processes for each case and optimize the morphology.

Environmental protection is a central problem in development. In recent decades, an increasingly diverse group of local, national, regional, and transnational actors have created a complex set of institutions to enable environmental governance. While the field of environmental governance is becoming more expansive, the national state still plays a central role in shaping environmental policy outcomes. This dissertation examines the bureaucratic process in China through which environmental policies are made. I bring together historical circumstances, domestic bureaucratic dynamics, and transnational political forces to explain the current state of environmental governance in the most populated nation on earth. Methodologically, this dissertation draws from archival and ethnographic research. During archival research, I delved into the collection of published articles by Chinese scholar-officials since 1949, when the People's Republic of China was founded. Additionally, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the Chinese Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development (MoHURD) from December of 2013 to December of 2014. I conclude that under the authoritarian political framework, the Chinese state depends on a narrow set of bureaucratic tools for environmental policy-making. Specifically, these tools enable Chinese state actors to transform complex ecological relationships into measurable and predictable quantitative indicators for policy-making. I demonstrate that this process of quantification, which may seem similar to policy processes elsewhere, is deeply entangled with the historical evolution of the Chinese party-state bureaucracy. Furthermore, the history of the party-state interacts with contemporary politics of international development to consolidate the use of quantitative instruments in Chinese environmental governance. This dissertation articulates the confluence of historical, domestic, and international forces that gives rise to authoritarian environmentalism. This discussion of authoritarian environmentalism furthers our understanding of the difficulties with which political institutions handle environmental affairs. It also contributes to an understanding of environmental state as a bureaucratic process, bridging the work of environmental and political sociologists.

We derive an equation that is analogous to a well-known symmetric function identity: ∑[superscript n over i = 0](–1)[superscript i]e[subscript i]h[subscript n–i] = 0. Here the elementary symmetric function e[subscript i] is the Frobenius characteristic of the representation of Si on the top homology of the subset lattice Bi, whereas our identity involves the representation of Sn x Sn on the top homology of Segre product of Bn with itself. We then obtain a q-analogue of a polynomial identity given by Carlitz, Scoville and Vaughan through examining the Segre product of the subspace lattice Bn(q) with itself. We recognize the connection between the Euler characteristic of the Segre product of Bn( q) with itself and the representation on the homology of Segre product of Bn with itself by recovering our polynomial identity from specializing the identity on the representation of Sn x Sn.