What happens when a US cultural institution is imported to China, the purported chief rival of the United States in the twenty-first century? The first book-length account of university-based creative writing programs in China, this book reveals how Chinese intellectuals adapt American-style writing programs such as the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the International Writing Program at Chinese universities to seek agency and literary innovation in the last two decades. The rise of creative wr...

Preparing and consuming food is an integral part of identity formation, which in contemporary China embodies tension between fast-forward modernization and cultural nostalgia. Jin Feng’s wide-ranging exploration of cities in the Lower Yangzi Delta—or Jiangnan, a region known for its paradisiacal beauty and abundant resources—illustrates how people preserve culinary inheritance while also revamping it for the new millennium.Throughout Chinese history, food nostalgia has generated cu...

Advanced methodologies in machine learning, optimal control, and agricultural water management to address irrigation scheduling in large-scale agricultureThrough a multidisciplinary approach, Precision Irrigation for Agriculture presents rigorous and practical methods that integrate machine learning, optimal control, and agricultural water management to design irrigation schedulers tailored for large-scale agricultural fields. The book includes case studie...

The availability of spatial databases and widespread use of geographic information systems has stimulated increasing interest in the analysis and modelling of spatial data. Spatial data analysis focuses on detecting patterns, and on exploring and modelling relationships between them in order to understand the processes responsible for their emergence. In this way, the role of space is emphasised , and our understanding of the working and representation of space, spatial patterns, and proce...

In The New Woman in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction, Jin Feng proposes that representation of the "new woman" in Communist Chinese fiction of the earlier twentieth century was paradoxically one of the ways in which male writers of the era explored, negotiated, and laid claim to their own emerging identity as "modern" intellectuals. Specifically, Feng argues that male writers such as Lu Xun, Yu Dafu, Ba Jin, and Mao Dun created fictional women as mirror images of their own ...

The challenge of standardising social work education remains a much-discussed but under-documented issue, particularly in developing and less-developed countries. Existing literature often emphasises the need for student-centred learning but lacks a comprehensive examination of how students can shape curricula, lesson plans and teaching methods in cooperation with educators.This edited volume brings together leading scholars from across the Global North and South to explore the co-...

This book offers a long-overdue, balanced, and objective perspective on China’s transformation from a constrained economy in the late 1970s to a leading global power in 2024.It examines the political motivations behind China’s rise through a detailed contextualisation of the reforms and opening-up policies of Deng Xiaoping, its governing principles, and the implications of its ascent for the world.For readers interested in China’s evolution over the past 50 years, this book...

This book focuses on the basic common technologies of smart manufacturing system and smart workshop. The applications of artificial intelligence in manufacturing system have been addressed from different perspectives, for example, smart optimization of cutting parameters, smart process planning, smart workshop and scheduling, and smart integration of process planning and scheduling.In the process of writing, this book highlights the combination of basic theory and engineering pract...

Taking an innovative look at Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), this practical reference fully covers new developments in SAR and its various methodologies and enables readers to interpret SAR imageryAn essential reference on polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), this book uses scattering theory and radiative transfer theory as a basis for its treatment of topics. It is organized to include theoretical scattering models and SAR data analysis techniques...

This book’s purpose and characteristics are not only to introduce the fundamental theoretical knowledge of nuclear radiation detection principles, detector preparation, and detection signal generation, but also provides a comprehensive introduction of the design, optimization, and preparation of semiconductor nuclear radiation detection. Beginning with the current materials and device processes of wide band gap semiconductors, the book focuses on the challenges and essential technologies o...

The validity of certain critical reasoning steps carried out during or on the sidelines of the environmental science, public health survey, medical experiment, population risk assessment, or disease space-time mapping under conditions of in situ uncertainty and space-time heterogeneity, is often not given sufficient attention and may even be out of the investigator's line of thought. For example, the technical complexity of an environmental exposure experiment may overshadow the logical as...

This book presents general methods for the design of economic model predictive control (EMPC) systems for broad classes of nonlinear systems that address key theoretical and practical considerations including recursive feasibility, closed-loop stability, closed-loop performance, and computational efficiency. Specifically, the book proposes:Lyapunov-based EMPC methods for nonlinear systems;two-tier EMPC architectures that are highly computationally efficient; and