Ya Zhao

While decentralization can enhance governance efficiency, it also grants discretionary power and resources to local governments and weakens monitoring by central authorities, thereby creating opportunities for rent-seeking. In China, although the decentralized land ownership system has created incentives for local governments to stimulate economic development, weakened monitoring by the central government and the sizable rents associated with residential land leasing tend to increase the risk of manipulation in the land market. This study investigates manipulation in the residential land market by comparing how non-competitive and competitive residential land auctions are differently affected by an unprecedented anti-corruption campaign. Based on land auction records from 15 major cities, the results of the difference-in-differences analysis indicate that inspection visits by the Central Inspection Teams increase the price paid by local developers by 15.49% to 19.01% in non-competitive auctions. However, CCDI inspections do not affect competitive auctions. The differing effects suggest that local governments manipulate the competition in land auctions to allow local developers to obtain land at a discount. This study broadens the research on decentralization and rent-seeking by investigating how enhanced top-down monitoring can mitigate local governments' manipulation in a transition country where bottom-up mechanisms of bureaucratic monitoring are weak.

This study examines how political career incentives drive city leaders to strategically lease land to the service and industrial sectors within their terms of office and trigger political circles in land supply. Drawing on a comprehensive panel dataset covering 284 cities in China from 2006 to 2020, the results of panel regressions reveal a U-shaped correlation between mayors’ tenure in office and the quantity and proportion of land leased to the service sector for the 2006–2013 period, when economic growth was the overwhelming indicator of political performance. Newly appointed mayors are more motivated to stimulate long-term economic growth and supply more land to the industrial sector. As their tenure in office increases, mayors become less concerned with maximizing long-term economic growth and opt to lease more land to the service sector for immediate one-off proceeds. However, the U-shaped relationship has disappeared since 2013, when the cadre evaluation system was amended to prohibit using GDP growth as the primary criterion for evaluating local officials’ performance.

The connection between knowledge points in teaching resources cannot be represented accurately. A method based on word co-occurrence and cluster analysis is proposed. First, the subject word extraction algorithm is used to extract the subject words; then the word co-occurrence analysis method is used to analyze the association relationship of the subject word pairs and visualize; finally, cluster analysis is performed on the basis of the association statistical characteristics to find the hidden subject clusters. Taking high school mathematics test question resources as an example, applying the method can better reflect the relationship between knowledge points.

Topology potential theory is a new community detection theory on complex network, which divides a network into communities by spreading outward from each local maximum potential node. At present, almost all topology-potential-based community detection methods ignore node difference and assume that all nodes have the same mass. This hypothesis leads to inaccuracy of topology potential calculation and then decreases the precision of community detection. Inspired by the idea of PageRank algorithm, this paper puts forward a novel mass calculation method for complex network nodes. A node’s mass obtained by our method can effectively reflect its importance and influence in complex network. The more important the node is, the bigger its mass is. Simulation experiment results showed that, after taking node mass into consideration, the topology potential of node is more accurate, the distribution of topology potential is more reasonable, and the results of community detection are more precise.