Unlike stable formulas, the model of rule of law keeps changing along with science and technology development, economic transformation, as well as cultural blending. The rule of administrative law, to be more specific, presents its dynamics towards the functions of administration with the shift of national mission. The path of history reveals how the rule of administrative law internally responds to the national mission. With this clue, it helps to understand the emergence, development, and transformation of administrative law in China when chasing back the changing course of the rule of administrative law. The history of reform and development is also the transformation of the rule of administrative law in China in the past 40 years. With the method of policy tracking analysis, China’s administrative reform can be divided into four stages, which exactly corresponds to four transformations of administrative law.In the first stage, the reform of “simpler administration”, intended to simplify staff, abolish or merge institutions. In order to consolidate the effectiveness of the reform of this stage, the National People’s Congress and its standing committee passed a series of acts of organizations. Hence, the study of administrative law started to thrive. In this stage, the pursuit of clear departmental power and responsibility and higher administrative efficiency could be traced in academic works. For an instance, the expression of the division of work and efficiency in administrative management can be found in specific argumentations in administrative law research.In the second stage, the reform of “functional transformation”, both the clear concept of the socialist market system and the reform of administrative functions based on system transformation had put forward new challenges to the administrative law in China. Overseas basic theories and system design, dominated by the idea of power control, became a shared perception in the field of administrative law in China. The context of law-based administration presented a more obvious stance of right protection. The power control idea of administrative law has been deeply rooted and administrative law system based on administrative actions has been shaped.In the third stage, the reform of “public service” expanded the forms of administrative activities. Comprehensive and flexible administrative functions are required by the socialist market economy in China. Especially, the concept of service-oriented government, put forward in The Report on the Work of the Government 2005 by the State Council, set the tone for the later governmental innovative management which integrates management with service. The argument among management theory, power control theory and balance theory stimulated the first systematical discussion on the basic theory of administrative law in the circles in China. There from, the administration turned to “responsive model” from “repressive model”. The reform of administrative functions reconciled the differences on the true value of administrative law among scholars, whose works later focused on the new administrative activities in the context of service-oriented administration.The fourth stage is the reform of national governance. The reform of the administrative approval system has become the key point of promoting national governance and realizing positive interaction among government, market and society. In the situation of such a co-governance, the legal effectiveness based on traditional representative democracy, legalization model built by the public bodies, as well as the discretion and its regulation have been reviewed. The method of utilizing the substantial rule of law to strengthen the legitimacy is preferred, while the study of new administrative law becomes a fresh development trend. Though, the development of rule of law in China is just on the rise, facing the same trend in the context of globalization and domestic administrative approval reform. An increasing amount of works in the field of administrative law, expressing the concern whether the rule of law in pure formalism can be the protector for the reform, are trying to explore the rule of law in substance, beyond the one in formalism, in ways such as seeking substantive consensus or justifying authority by the procedure.The history of the development of administrative law since 1978 has witnessed the shift of the theory system of administrative law, the change of the value in the field and the move to substantial rule of law, which is not only a struggle history of how Chinese administrative law scholars built the basic theory and academic discipline system, but also an interaction history of how administrative law responded, interpreted and boosted the administrative reform. In the context of historical development, the study of public law must be rooted in the background of the country. Only by understanding and predicting the current and future government tasks can we develop the administrative rule of law in accordance with the national conditions through the method of legal dogmatic.

The establishment mode choice (M&A, merger and acquisitions, vs. greenfield investment) has always been one of the most prominent topics in the field of international research and practice. In the research on the antecedents of the decision-making of establishment mode, cultural distance has triggered much debate. The main theoretical frameworks used to explain the influence of cultural distance on the establishment mode choice like the transaction cost theory (TCE), the resource-based view (RBV), the institutional theory, the eclectic theory of international production (OLI paradigm), and the organizational learning theory have drawn conflicting conclusions on this issue. This phenomenon is called a “Cultural Distance Paradox”.In order to explain the inconclusive findings in previous studies, this article decomposes the influence of cultural distance on the choice between greenfield investments and M&A into a dual mechanism of internal and external risks, i.e.the upsurge in the cultural distance between the host country and the home country of a multinational company (MNC) will result in sharp increases of the risks of both external adaptation and internal integration faced by the MNC. Cross-border M&A’s are in the position to alleviate external risks because they help MNCs to acquire local knowledge and legitimacy in host countries. However, cross-cultural human resource management resulted from the diverse cultural backgrounds of the staff will make the integration of subsidiaries more difficult. On the contrary, MNCs which choose to make greenfield investments can easily replicate the organizational processes and management styles from a subsidiary to another, thus being able to manage subsidiaries in a more standardized manner and minimize the internal integration risks. However, they must put in more efforts to deal with the uncertainties outside the organization. Based on the above discussion, this paper proposes that from the perspective of attention the distribution of multinational companies’ attention to internal and external risks will determine their preference for greenfield investments and M&A’s when minimizing the overall uncertainties of cross-cultural investments.The attention-based view points out three principles of the distribution of executors’ attention.It affirms that the attention of an enterprise is determined by the internal and external environment of the organization, while how the firm interprets these contextual situations depends on its structural characteristics. Based on this framework, this paper establishes a corresponding theoretical model which proposesthat the distribution of the attention of the company’s decision-makers between internal and external risks depends on the internationalization strategy adopted by the company (the organization’s internal environment) and the dynamism of the host country (the organization’s external environment), which is further moderated by the type of organization (prospector or defender).Using the outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) data of Chinese MNCs in 2010-2012，we empirically verified the three-way interaction model and reached the following conclusions: (1) When the MNC implements a globalization strategy, the higher the cultural distance is, the more likely it will adopt the greenfield investment. (2) When the market environment in the host country is highly dynamic, the higher the cultural distance is, the more likely the MNC will adopt M&A. (3) When the MNC is a prospector, the moderation effect of internationalization strategy will diminish, (4)but the moderation effect of market dynamism in the host country will be enhanced.This study introduces the attention-based view to explain the mechanism of how cultural distance influences establishment mode choice, cracking the “cultural distance paradox” by deconstructing the decision-making process on a micro level. It shows that the influence of cultural distance on overseas investment establishment mode is moderated by the internal and external context of the firm. There also exists a moderated moderation of organization type on the relationship between cultural distance and the choice between greenfield investments vs. M&A. This study provides some implications for Chinese firms whichlack international experiences on how to make establishment mode choice when entering a culturally distant country.

In Mencius, “a man with lofty ideals never forgets that his death may be in a ditch, and a man of valor never forgets that he may lose his head” has long been paraphrased as “to sacrifice one’s life for the sake of righteousness” since the Eastern Han Dynasty. However, only when one “forgets about his death” can he “sacrifice his life for the sake of righteousness”. Instead, if he “never forgets about his death”, he would “prefer his life to righteousness”. According to the context, Mencius here speaks against Chen Dai’s viewpoint that “to bend one foot of something to straighten eight feet of it”, in other words, “to sacrifice minor principles for greater gains”. In a similar context, it is also stated by Confucius as “keeping to the Tao is not as good a thing as keeping to one’s official duties”. In Shuo Yuan, however, the same expression that “a man with lofty ideals never forgets that his death may be in a ditch” is strangely interpreted as the opposite words of the rule of “sacrificing one’s life for the sake of righteousness”. Moreover, Hanshi Waizhuan tells a story which has nothing to do with this rule. Here “a man of valor never forgets that he may lose his head” is used to describe those scholars who feel contented to live a simple and virtuous life and would not rush to pursue wealth with dishonor. In this sense, “忘” or “forget” in “a man with lofty ideals never forgets that his death may be in a ditch, and a man of valor never forgets that he may lose his head” is the interchangeable word of “妄”, thus transforming the sentence into “a man with lofty ideals never rushes to die unnecessarily in a ditch, and a man of valor never rushes to lose his head pointlessly”. In such case, the whole sentence highlights the significance of life and disvalues a death without a just cause. Therefore, from the standpoint of pre-Qin Confucian scholars, “attaching little importance to death” only embodies the courage of the man of meanness; rather, to value life and etiquette and to keep independent from gains, powers and popular opinions reveals the courage of the man of virtue.To judge that whether a man “sacrifices his life for the sake of righteousness” or he “attaches little importance to life and death” is to see whether he lives and dies in accordance with the ritual system. As the “righteousness” in the ritual era means a strict and highly fixed duty for social individuals, “the death for the sake of righteousness” could only be acknowledged when the official dies for “keeping to his duties”. Likewise, the death caused by wielding power beyond one’s official duty is regarded as the result of “the embezzlement of duty” or “the unnecessary death in the ditch”. Therefore, for those who die for their remonstrance, Bi Gan, both an imperial relative and a high-ranking official, is thought to sacrifice “for the sake of righteousness”, while Xie Ye, an official bearing a different surname and thus an outsider for the imperial clan, “dies unnecessarily”. As defined by early Confucians, the noble deaths of Xie Ye, Shi Yu and Zong Lu are nothing but the consequences of the meaningless and arrogant “embezzlement of duty”. More than that, their self-assumed loyalty and tragic ends cause greater damage to social rituals.The principle of “keeping to one’s official duties” allows retainers to safeguard the interests of their feudal lords but not to obey their monarch blindly, and thus serves as the foundation of the power balance and mutual respect between the monarch and subjects in the ritual system of the Zhou Dynasty. Therefore, the significance of Confucius’ sticking to the principle of “keeping to one’s official duties” far exceeds the value of subjects’ loyalty to the monarch or of their pursuit of Tao and righteousness. In the autocratic era after the Qin and Han dynasties, as individual duties stay no longer as closely differentiated as those in the ritual era, and as the connotations of “Tao” and “righteousness” become no longer subject to social rituals and consequently broadened with great uncertainty, and the standard of morality and ethics becomes different from that of the ritual era. As a result, the Confucians in the autocratic era deny that Confucius once said that “keeping to the Tao is not as good a thing as keeping to one’s official duties”; rather, they equate the principle of “keeping to one’s official duties” with the thought of being loyal to the monarch.The pre-Qin Confucianism achieves an excellent balance between the seemingly contradictory views that “to sacrifice one’s life for the sake of righteousness” and “to value one’s life so as to keep his official duties”. The idea of “a man with lofty ideals never rushes to die unnecessarily in a ditch” or “keeping to one’s official duties” serves to be a counterbalance to both Yang Zhu’s idea of “extreme egoism” and Mo Zi’s idea of “extreme altruism”. Without this mutual balance, denying “extreme altruism” would inevitably lead to a dominant “extreme egoism”. In consequence, the public would find it embarrassing to mention “egoism” and feel forced to advocate “altruism”. As far as the text is concerned, it is not difficult to perceive the interchangeability between “忘” and “妄”. The difficulty lies in the bold interpretation of “a man with lofty ideals never forgets that his death may be in a ditch” into “a man values his life and never rushes to die unnecessarily”, since such understanding would establish Mencius as a coward, which fails to meet the public expectation of Confucian morality or Confucian sages.

Compared with the cultural criticism initiated by Thomas Carlyle and other British men of letters in the 19th Century that embodies their “transitional anxiety”, revealing their doubt and critique on the “progressive discourses” of mechanical civilization, cultural criticism in the 20th Century reflects a new “transitional anxiety” with new characteristics. Though the two world wars finished up the myth of linear social progress, the optimistic discourses like “scientific advance” and “welfare first” were still prevailing, which provides new targets and new context for the British post-war cultural criticism. The “Two Cultures” Debate between F. R. Leavis and C. P. Snow tend to be simplified as a controversy over literature and science, as critics mostly attend to their initial talks and neglect their later reflections and revisions. If we explore the event throughout, however, and put it in the context of cultural criticism in the post-war transitional period, we will find that rather than just a division of “science vs. literature”, it reveals two different ideas of culture. Borrowing the concept of culture from anthropology with an instrumental and utilitarian understanding of concept, Snow evaluated the Two Cultures in terms of quantity. Leavis, on the contrary, inherited the Romantic idea of culture as a counter force to resist the “external civilization” and therefore, in his mind, there was only “one culture”, the cultural tradition, which was the best of human accomplishments and indivisible.The opposite ideas of Leavis and Snow originated from their different “anxiety” over the historical transition of the post-war English society. Snow’s anxiety arose from his political and utilitarian considerations as he advocated the centrality of science in school education in order to protect the British interest against the Americans and Germans in scientific competition and the ideological rivalry of the Soviet Union. Leavis suffered from the truly cultural anxiety as he was frustrated by the erosion of English cultural tradition by the American commercial and consumption culture. He was worried that the great English tradition would decline and become a “minority culture” while “mass civilization” would become a major culture. Though they had different sources of anxiety, both entrusted education, university education in particular, with the mission of relieving their anxiety and tackling the cultural challenges they were faced with. Likewise, owing to different ideas of culture, they had different expectations of education. Snow understood education as being instrumental in producing talents for the service of the society; Leavis, by contrast, believed in the humanist education.To sum up, the Leavis-Snow Controversy reflects the change of ideas of culture in post-war Britain affected by scientism and technologico-Benthamism. The event and its aftermath have found echoes in the literary creation of some post-war and contemporary British writers, including Snow himself, David Lodge, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ian McEwan, manifesting fruitful interactions between literature and culture. Moreover, the “Two Cultures” Debate originating in England has provoked people all over the world to reflect on the missions of culture and higher education ever since.