After several decades of unprecedented growth that turned China into the world's second largest economy, today China is facing major economic challenges, exacerbated by rising tariffs imposed by its most important export market, the United States. How can we explain the extraordinary rise and sudden faltering of China's economic miracle?

Kent Deng takes a long-term view, charting the development of China's economy from the nineteenth century to the present day. He shows that the policies implemented during Mao's rule from the 1950s to the 1970s led to a growth cul-de-sac with major economic disincentives and mass poverty. This forced Mao's successor, Deng Xiaoping, to reform and open up China's economy with a view to unleashing the economic power of the market. The new model developed by Deng Xiaoping combined state-led import dependency with exports in order to catch up with the West, and success in achieving exports depended on a unique combination of cheap labour, cheap land and low environmental protection which, taken together, gave China an absolute advantage in the global market, enabling it to produce goods very cheaply and export them to Western countries where the costs were much higher. But Deng's economic model is now facing increasing resistance from those countries on which China has relied for its export growth. Since 2010, two doors have been closing on China: the door for goods heading for China (vital for China's modernization) and the door for goods coming from China (vital for paying for China's imports). This is likely to end China's hitherto uninterrupted 'import-export combo' loop. The 2025 tariff war between United States and China is only the most recent manifestation of this new state of affairs in the global economy.

Given the headwinds China now faces, and given that many low-income countries have now modelled themselves on China and begun to supply the world market with low-priced goods, China would need an economic miracle to bounce back to its pre-2010 growth trajectory.

This book calls scholars to rethink health and well-being. Doing so, strikes as necessary for a number of aspects related to these topics have not yet been really addressed from a philosophical point of view. For example: can we really speak about facts related to health and well-being? If so, then are value judgments only evaluative tools and not quite inseparable from our descriptions of the world? If the answer to the first question is "no", then does the rejection of facts leads us necessarily to normative conclusions about health and well-being? In other words, is it possible to have a purely descriptive approach to health and well-being that appreciates the knowledge problems we face? While settling the above can partly refurbish the philosophical landscape, more questions are hovering and are waiting to be unpacked. Since some scholars agree that health and well-being are, one way or another, related at a normative level, then is it possible to be connected in a purely descriptive manner? If so, then what does a conceptual connection say (if anything) about the science of health and well-being? Can we arrive at a philosophical schema that entails a novel conceptualization and a theoretical approach that attempts to refine methodologies related to scientific tasks vis-a-vis health and well-being?

All these questions come to challenge one's mind while searching through the vast literature on health, well-being and on the interconnection between them and so this book is the attempt to discuss these issues and all the byproducts and the implications they carry in some detail. Upon attempting to do so, a new framework to approach health and well-being has been hopefully born. Long story short: Health and well-being are treated as conceptually indistinguishable and a model-theoretic view of health and well-being is presented and which aspires to account for the above questions and their ramifications. Drawing upon the model-theoretic view brings us in an epistemic position to better deal with pesky methodological issues such as establishing causal relations without being prone to selection bias and reversed causality problems, it fascilitates measurement of well-being and it helps improve the chances of successful diagnosis in psychiatry.

This book shows how societal and cultural features may manifest themselves through translation practice across English-Greek-Russian, verbally and multimodally. It is a collection of papers which tackles how messages shift in contexts with a gradually diminishing participation of image and sound to construct intended social identities. It sheds light on how remakes perform transfer, how messages are transferred in dubbed and fan-subbed TV series, and how covers, in print translated versions of novels, manifest a shifting societal context in their attempt to establish contact with a new audience. Transfer is examined both cross-culturally and intra-culturally through translation practice. This book is relevant to academics, translation practitioners and students who are interested in pragmatic meaning transfer, in varied language contexts. It will also enlighten foreign language teachers as to what pragmatic aspects of transfer they should draw learners' attention to, to improve communicative competence.

Contemporary Marketing Practices in Africa: Technological and Strategic Perspectives is the first volume in a series of two published to honor Professor Kofi Q. Dadzie's enduring contributions to African business and development scholarship and his leadership in advancing research capacity and elevating global visibility of African scholarship.

This first volume offers a context-rooted examination of how digital technologies, evolving consumer behaviour, and strategic decision-making are reshaping marketing practice and theories across African markets to create and deliver customer value. Departing from traditional Western-centric marketing approaches and drawing on contributions from leading African and international scholars, it presents multidisciplinary insights that address the continent's institutional complexity, cultural diversity, and uneven technological adoption, preparing readers for the ethical and sustainability debates addressed in Volume 2.

This volume will appeal to scholars, graduate students, practitioners, and policymakers seeking a grounded understanding of evolving consumer behaviour, shifting marketing strategies, and technology-driven marketing transformation in African contexts.

Beyond Ballot Boxes explores how social media has transformed electoral politics by influencing voter behavior, political communication, and democratic integrity. The book introduces Digital Democracy Disruption (D (3)) Theory to analyze how misinformation, algorithmic bias, and computational propaganda shape elections worldwide. By comparing case studies from the United States, Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, the authors examine the impact of digital media in both developed and emerging democracies. The book also discusses regulatory challenges, misinformation countermeasures, and policy recommendations for preserving democratic resilience in the digital era. Tracing the historical evolution of media from print to digital platforms, the book highlights the role of traditional media in shaping public opinion before examining how social media has democratized access to information while simultaneously fostering misinformation and ideological divides. It explores the mechanisms of digital propaganda, distinguishing between misinformation (false but unintentional content) and disinformation (deliberate manipulation). The authors discuss the rise of deepfakes, troll farms, and bot-driven campaigns, with case studies including the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the spread of WhatsApp-driven misinformation in South Asia.

Harking from Aotearoa New Zealand, this book provides an account of the postqualitative approaches employed to map the worlds of four trans secondary students and the possibilities for gender justice that these worlds offer. Reading these maps through an agential realist lens affords a sense of the material-discursive, multiplicitous, dis/continuous, and more-than-human becoming of these students, their genderings, and the worlds that co-constitute them. These dynamics are a hauntological matter: the im/possibilities of students' presents are never simply here-now, entangled with pasts that have (not) been and futures that will (never) be. This is manifestly evident in the way the colonial invention of gender haunts students' worlds, constraining response-abilities, but also in the wondrous potentialities that lie in wait at the edge of possibility, reminding us that more just worlds are always already present (even if only as exclusions). An agential realist ethics of response-ability requires tracing the entanglements that constitute the ongoing reconfiguration of relations that embody reality, or spacetimematterings, as a means of renegotiating im/possibilities.

Economic competition between the United States and China has been a defining issue of the twenty-first century. But after years of rapid growth, China's economy has faltered. How did its long-term economic outlook change so quickly? And can Beijing change course and preserve China's political ambition for global economic primacy?

In Broken China, Logan Wright offers an unflinching account of how China's economy hit the wall. Drawing on extensive experience analyzing the Chinese financial sector on the ground, he argues that China's economic slowdown is rooted in its financial system, and an unprecedented credit expansion finally coming to an end. Opposing the prevailing myth that its leaders think and plan many years ahead, this book posits that there was no long-term plan that included the credit boom and bust that now constrains Beijing's options. Rather than crisis or collapse, Wright argues, China is suffering from a decay of its economic policy tools. As its domestic and foreign sectors face increasing pressure, the last thing Beijing needs is global pushback against Chinese exports. With no clear path to recovery, China's economy is broken, the consequences of which will reverberate around the world.

The Cuban Revolution is on the brink. Hyperinflation, mass migration, and deepening tensions with the United States are recasting the nature-and future-of the political experiment that has transformed Cuba and the Americas since 1959. The crisis born from the Soviet collapse has since become endemic, and the Revolution is now being rewritten from within.

In the streets of Havana, money is fragmenting. And with it, the political grammar of Cuban socialism.

This book offers an ethnographic and theoretical account of how the pluralization of monetary regimes is reshaping that grammar. It approaches Cuba's expanding black market not merely as an economic phenomenon, but as a lived social space, an experimental site of governance, and a catalyst of emergent subjectivities. Tracing three interlocking lines of inquiry-the tension between state-sanctioned labor and informal income as competing moral and political economies; the symbiotic relationship between the expanding non-state sector and illicit exchange networks; and a new economic rationality that redefines socialism along pragmatic rather than paternalistic lines-the study illuminates a transformative moment in which the foundational meanings of money, nation, and revolution are being renegotiated under conditions of radical uncertainty.

This is not a story of decline or rupture. It is an account of the Revolution's ongoing, contested reinvention-one that speaks to broader questions about the fate of socialist projects in a world shaped by crisis, informality, and the schizoid creativity of everyday life.

Applying various disciplinary perspectives with overlapping themes, contributors to this volume analyze the intersections of Disney studies and animal studies, demonstrating how common themes and issues transcend the context of Disney culture.

Through detailed analyses, contributors examine the roles played by animals in Disney culture, identifying recurring themes - like animal rights advocacy, the animal as Other, and the bond between humans and their dogs - that speak to the complex saga of human-animal relationships across time and cultural contexts.

Ranging from Disney's early-career projects like Silly Symphonies and World War II propaganda to both animated and live-action features including Alice in Wonderland (1951), Luca (2021), and Home on the Range (2004), and even representations of animals found at the theme parks, this volume offers a comprehensive study of the menagerie from insects and mice all the way up to lions and elephants.

We often hear that all behaviour is communication, but how do we fully understand what children are telling us when they act in distressed and often challenging ways in our settings? And how do we respond? This book offers a practice-oriented look at current theory around early childhood adversity, attachment, trauma and brain development. Traumatic experiences such as abuse, neglect, domestic violence, bereavement, bullying and others can have long-lasting effects on children, making responding to their impact a complex task for education professionals. But it is precisely through their enlightened response that healing can begin.

Providing children with positive childhood experiences is dependent upon knowledgeable practitioners who can determine children's different needs and use this understanding to create flexible, responsive learning environments. This book draws on up-to-date research informing the conceptualisation of trauma and trauma-informed interventions and uses this to establish links to practice, highlighting relationship-based interventions. Real world vignettes of trauma-aware schools and professional dialogue with experts in the field allow for a strong focus on practice.

Each chapter begins with key ideas outlining the content of the chapter, and ends with a summary paragraph to link back to the key ideas. Each chapter also provides thinking points in the form of questions for reflection. Each of the four parts of the book ends with a chapter providing insights from experts in the field, schools utilising trauma-informed and attachment-aware approaches as well as several Local Authorities seeking to introduce systemic change.

This book is essential reading for all those interested in how theory, research and policy developments can help to enhance practice in developing trauma-informed and trauma-responsive educational environments.

This accessible, philosophically framed early childhood education text shows how to create and implement a civic-minded, anti-bias curriculum.

This accessible early childhood education text offers an in-depth look at the creation and implementation of a series of civic-minded, anti-bias curriculum maps in contrasting classroom settings: one residing in a state with a "divisive concepts" law and another residing in a state without one. Grounded in philosophically informed conceptualizations of flourishing and personal autonomy, Joy Dangora Erickson argues that anti-bias education is a crucial component of a larger civic education and that schools have a moral obligation to provide it. However, social biases can impede citizens' abilities to make and execute well-informed decisions supportive of their own and others' well-being. Given that the current sociopolitical landscape in the United States actively discourages many educators' efforts to cultivate anti-bias learning spaces, being able to navigate these outside pressures and do right by children at this time is imperative. This book supports preservice and in-service early childhood educators by thoughtfully considering the curriculum maps designed by the research team and how they were employed in classrooms in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.