Innholdsfortegnelse for Vol.64/No.14 i Beijing Review

Bond Inclusion FTSE Russell, a global multi-asset index provider, confirmed on March 30 that Chinese government bonds are to be included in the FTSE World Government Bond Index (WGBI) at the end of October. According to a statement by the company, China’s WGBI inclusion will occur over a period of 36 months to ensure an orderly transition for markets and investors. “This confirmation is based on affirmation with members of the FTSE Russell advisory committees and other index users that ongoing reforms to the Chinese government bond market warrant inclusion in the WGBI,” the statement said. Chris Woods, head of policy and governance at FTSE Russell, said, “We commend China on the great progress it has made in market reforms and look forward to the phased addition of Chinese government…

Anni Guli, a Uygur video blogger from Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region didn’t expect a video she shared online over two years ago to suddenly go viral last month. Anni Guli filmed the video on a cotton farm in Xinjiang in October 2018, during the cotton harvesting season. In the video she showed how a cotton picker worked on the farm. “This cotton picker costs 5 million yuan ($761,000) and can pick around 300 tons of cotton a day. It is superb,” she said in the video. The video was “unearthed” by Chinese netizens as proof that allegations of “forced labor” in Xinjiang’s cotton industry are false. Recently, a number of major international apparel retailers have accused Xinjiang’s cotton industry of using “forced labor” to harvest cotton. However, Anni Guli’s video…

At 51Talk, an educational company that specializes in online classes, artificial intelligence (AI) plays a key role, especially for young students. According to Zhang Xingjian, a marketing staff, the company has introduced AI cartoons through which youngsters learning Chinese are given their preliminary instructions, making learning fun. Students interact through speech recognition and speech technology. Since classrooms switched online due to COVID-19 last year, technology has become an integral part of education and would continue to be so though offline schooling has resumed with containment measures. According to a plan issued by the National Development and Reform Commission and other government departments in March, efforts will be furthered to develop new types of consumption, including online education. The authorities will promote the use of intelligent technologies and encourage the participation…

China’s 500-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) Tianyan is under maintenance in Guizhou Province on March 28. The world’s most sensitive radio telescope will have its observation time partially available to global scientists from August 1 onward, with online reservations having started on March 31, according to the National Astronomical Observatories of China. After the collapse of the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico last December, FAST is now the leading radio telescope in the world. Located in a naturally deep and round karst depression in southwest China, it came into operation on January 11, 2020, and has since identified over 300 pulsars.…

EGYPT A ship sails through the Suez Canal on March 30. Traffic resumed in the crucial marine passage after a stranded cargo vessel blocking it was removed on March 29 SRI LANKA President Gotabaya Rajapaksa (fourth right) attends the handover ceremony of the COVID-19 vaccines donated by the Chinese Government at the Bandaranaike International Airport in Colombo on March 31 UNITED STATES A television screen broadcasts the first press conference of President Joe Biden since taking office in Washington, D.C. on March 25 INDONESIA Smoke and massive fire arise from an oil refinery in Indramayu, West Java, on March 29. Three people went missing and 19 others were wounded, with a further 1,000 residents evacuated NEW ZEALAND People watch a lion dance during the outdoor arts and music festival CubaDupa…

1 April 4, 1971 During the 31st World Table Tennis Championships, American player Glenn Cowan boarded the bus for the Chinese delegation by mistake. Chinese player Zhuang Zedong gave Cowan a silkscreen painting as a gift. Cowan asked if U.S. athletes could visit China. 2 April 7, 1971 The Chinese Government decided to invite the U.S. players. 3 April 10, 1971 The U.S. table tennis delegation arrived in Beijing. They were the first Americans to set foot in the Chinese mainland after the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949. 4 April 14, 1971 Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai met the delegation at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. 5 April 17, 1971 The delegation left China after exhibition matches with Chinese players. 6 July 9-11, 1971 U.S.…

Putting minuscule flakes of paint back on a painting more than 1,000 years ago. Inspecting a cave that has been around for a millennium for fungal and other infections. Restoring tiny fragments on a stone wall dating back to the Tang Dynasty (618-907). These are some of the tasks Su Bomin, a “doctor” of murals, does daily during his round of the famous Dunhuang murals, the Buddhist wall paintings on hundreds of grottoes in Dunhuang, Gansu Province, thought to have been created between the 4th and 14th centuries on the Gobi Desert. “The longer I work here, the stronger my connection to the cultural relics becomes. I now have a special feeling for them,” Su, Director of the Department of Conservation and Research, the Dunhuang Academy China, which oversees the…

TCM Center China plans to build a major center at the national level focusing on the use of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in epidemic prevention and treatment, sources with the top economic planner said on March 29. Sun Zhicheng, a senior official with the social development department of the National Development and Reform Commission, said at a press conference that the center will be tasked with building a talent pool, formulating technical protocols for epidemic prevention and treatment, conducting TCM therapy research and stockpiling relevant medical supplies. The center is expected to ramp up the country’s capacity for rapid response, prevention, control, and treatment in the face of new or emerging infectious diseases and other major public health events by applying TCM, Sun said. Dryland Research A global dryland research…

One spring day in 1994, an original work by Yuan Dynasty master painter Zhao Mengfu (1254-1322) was brought to the warehouse office of the Palace Museum in Beijing. Two museum staff wearing white silk gloves gingerly unrolled the 700-year-old piece of art on a long table in front of a group of visitors watching intently. They were Chinese and American scholars working on a book, Three Thousands Years of Chinese Painting, one of the volumes in an unprecedented publishing collaboration series called The Culture and Civilization of China. This was one of the very rare occasions that the delicate artwork was ever shown under bright light, and the first time ever to visitors from the United States. It marked a typical but at that time very rare activity in exchanges…

The top legislature adopted a package of legislative changes to improve Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR)’s electoral system on March 30. The amended Annex I and Annex II to the Basic Law of Hong Kong SAR were passed at a session of the National People’s Congress (NPC) Standing Committee with all 167 committee members in attendance unanimously voting for it. Annex I concerns the method to select the SAR’s chief executive while Annex II is about the method for forming Hong Kong’s Legislative Council (LegCo) and its voting procedures. President Xi Jinping signed presidential orders to promulgate the amended annexes, which went into effect on March 31. “A democratic electoral system suiting Hong Kong’s legal status and reality has taken shape as a result of the amendments,” Li Zhanshu,…

Humans have a fascination with the unknown and we know very little about outer space. When it comes to exploring our solar system, let alone the universe, mankind has barely managed to scrape the surface. Dreams of space exploration have long had a strong hold on the human imagination. An interactive exhibition featuring the development of China’s manned space program opened to the public at the China Science and Technology Museum in Beijing on March 18, taking visitors as close to space as possible without leaving Earth. Co-hosted by the China Association for Science and Technology (CAST) and the China Manned Space Engineering Office, the Fly Into Space exhibition celebrates the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China and gives visitors the excitement of space travel.…