Innholdsfortegnelse for Vol. 62/No.36 i Beijing Review

On the Rise The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said China’s private enterprises have been growing fast in the past seven decades, achieving a prominent role in the economy, official data showed on August 26. The country only had 443,000 private enterprises in 1996, which soared to 14.369 million in 2017 and registered an average annual growth rate of 18 percent, the NBS said in a report. Private enterprises now make up the lion’s share of the country’s companies, accounting for nearly 80 percent in 2017, up from only 16.9 percent in 1996. China was home to about 4.40 million legal entities in 1996, with the number surging to about 22 million in 2017, expanding about 8 percent per year on average. The growth pace accelerated during the 2012-17 period…

August 21, 2019, will remain a memorable date in Guo Wangang’s life. On that day, the 67-year-old farmer received a special guest at his “forest farm,” an ecological initiative to prevent desertification. President Xi Jinping came for a visit. “President Xi plowed the soil and built barriers with us to stabilize the sand,” Guo told Beijing Review. “He also asked us about the quality of the drinking water and our income.” The Six Old Men Guo’s Babusha Forest Farm lies near the Tengger Desert in northwest China’s Gansu Province, the fourth largest desert in China. “We are ordinary farmers doing an ordinary job,” he said. Guo is modest. He is actually part of an extraordinary group of dedicated green warriors. Three generations of farmers from six families began rallying in…

Beijing Review: How would you rate the China-Brazil relationship? Paulo Estivallet de Mesquita: It’s clearly a success story. Forty-five years ago, we started from a very small and distant relationship in which we had very little trade and very few contacts between the two governments and the two people. Today, the bilateral trade volume has risen from a few millions of dollars to more than $100 billion. China has become Brazil’s largest trading partner, and last year, Brazil was China’s seventh largest trade partner. China has also become a very big investor in Brazil. Chinese investment in Brazil, while not so large in cumulative terms, has become the largest in Brazil in the last two or three years. In terms of the relationship between the two governments, we established a…

As she watched the guard of honor of the People’s Liberation Army raise the national flag at Tiananmen Square at dawn, the last thing Luo Yanyun had wanted to see in Beijing was crossed off on her wish list and she was ready to say farewell to the city where she had lived for two years as a migrant worker. Luo had arrived in Beijing from a village in Yongzhou, Hunan Province in central China, to work in a real estate agency, showing and selling apartments to customers. But eventually, the 25-year-old decided to leave the capital and move closer to her family. Besides the family reunion, she also wanted to find a new job where she could utilize what she studied in college—logistics. China has more than 280 million…

Foreign direct investment (FDI), a key yardstick to measure an economy’s potential, rose in China in the first seven months of the year with improved quality, thanks to China’s dedication to further opening up. Despite the fierce trade war the United States is waging against China, FDI into China expanded 7.3 percent year on year to 533.14 billion yuan ($78.8 billion) in the January-July period, China’s Ministry of Commerce announced on August 13. Usually, when the U.S. imposes trade sanctions on a country, there is a flight of foreign investment from the country for fear of economic collapse or recession. However, this did not happen in the case of the China-U.S. trade war. In fact, the opposite is true, which is unprecedented and unique. Foreign investors maintained their investments in…

People wave flags during an event organized by the Hong Kong Chinese Enterprises Association to unite families in their call for order and harmony in the Ocean Park, south China’s Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, on August 24. The event took place amid two-month-long protests in Hong Kong. The demonstrations and violent protests have severely impacted Hong Kong’s rule of law, social order and economy, as well as the well-being of the people and Hong Kong’s international image, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang said at a press briefing on August 27.…

RUSSIA Tourists view a tanker aircraft during the International Aviation and Space Salon MAKS 2019 at the Zhukovsky International Airport on August 27 ANGOLA Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni (left) and his Rwandan counterpart Paul Kagame pose for a photo in Luanda on August 21 after signing a memorandum of understanding ceasing hostilities between the two Central African states ITALY Jury President Lucrecia Martel (third right) and other jury members pose for photos on the opening day of the 76th Venice International Film Festival on August 28 UNITED KINGDOM Protesters outside the Houses of Parliament in London on August 28 after Queen Elizabeth II announced she had consented to Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s request to suspend Parliament until October 14 INDONESIA President Joko Widodo holds a press conference on the government’s…

Every morning at about 7:20, Liu Jiahui opens Alipay, China’s leading mobile payment platform, on his phone. He waits for his “virtual green energy” to “mature” in order to collect points that will eventually lead to the planting of a real tree. All his user activity that is considered low-carbon is counted and converted into virtual green energy. When Liu has enough points in his personal carbon account to plant a virtual tree, a real one is planted in desert areas by local people with the support of Ant Financial, an affiliate of e-commerce giant Alibaba, the National Afforestation Committee and some nonprofit organizations. So far, he has successfully “planted” five real trees in desert areas in northwest China’s Gansu Province and Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in the north. Liu,…

As the conventional September-October “golden” season of property sales approaches, the People’s Bank of China (PBC) has again brought the performance of the property market into the spotlight with its latest measure. In a statement on August 25, the central bank announced that China will link the personal mortgage loan rate to a new lending rate reference starting on October 8 to make the rate more flexible and market-driven. The plan is part of reform measures unveiled by the PBC for improving the loan prime rate (LPR) mechanism on August 17, with an aim of promoting the liberalization of interest rates and cutting financing costs for the real economy. Introduced in 2013, the LPR, which is the price of loans banks offer to their best clients, provides a market-based reference…

The Chinese used to say they have two pairs of scissors: Wangmazi in the north and Zhang Xiao Quan in the south. These are two time-honored scissor brands that can trace their history back to the 17th century. Both are named after their founders. Wangmazi grew from a small shop near an ancient execution ground in Beijing, owned by a man surnamed Wang. Since he had a pockmarked face, mazi in Chinese, people called him Wang Mazi. Wang didn’t make the scissors himself but had them manufactured at local workshops, giving them strict standards to ensure their quality. Zhang Xiao Quan derives its name from a blacksmith who opened his shop in a busy business district in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province in east China, where his scissors became a household name…

($1=7 yuan) 2.14 tln yuan Combined profit of China’s state-owned enterprises during the January-July period, up 7.3 percent year on year 13.42 tln yuan Total value of private funds at the end of July 3.8% Year-on-year growth of China’s total fixed assets investment in highways and waterways from January to July 32,000 Number of new jobs created by tourism in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, northwest China, in the first half of 2019 22.6 bln tons Total road freight volume in January-July, up 5.8 percent year on year 555.9 bln yuan Total value of local government bonds issued in July, down from a monthly high of 899.6 billion yuan in June 0.05% Year-on-year growth in non-cash payments in the second quarter 17.17 tln yuan Total turnover of China’s foreign exchange market…

The United States has the largest number of privately owned guns in the world, and this number is increasing. It has already exceeded the number of residents. While concerns about the threat of violence leads many to buy guns for self-protection, the proliferation of firearms has increasingly become an important agent of violent crime with frequent shootings and an alarming number of casualties. Gun proliferation inevitably leads to violence. The U.S. has the most gun violence in the world. In 2018, there were over 57,000 incidents, killing more than 14,000 people and injuring over 28,000. According to statistics, shootings are the second leading cause of death in the U.S. after traffic accidents. The U.S. population accounts for only 5 percent of the world’s population, but is responsible for 31 percent…

Moving Images Visitors at the Tsingtao Film Museum during the 2019 Qingdao International Film and Television Expo held in the coastal city in east China’s Shandong Province from August 26-28. The museum offers audiences an immersive experience of China’s film history using digital technologies. New Pilot FTZs The State Council announced a master plan for six new pilot free trade zones (FTZs) on August 26, in a strategic move to press ahead with reform and opening up. The pilot FTZs will be located in Shandong, Jiangsu, Hebei, Yunnan and Heilongjiang provinces and Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. This will bring the total number of the country’s pilot FTZs to 18. The six FTZs will be tasked with differentiated reform experiments, according to the plan. For example, the development of the marine…

On August 3, Beijing Review reporters visited the Suwu Desert Scenic Area in Minqin County, northwest China’s Gansu Province, where sculptures of various shapes dot the sand dunes. The 2018 Minqin (China) Desert Sculpture International Creation Camp and the Land Art Festival was launched here in July 2018, marking the first desert art cluster in China and the world. The second edition, themed Humanity, Green and Development, with 46 works from 20 countries and regions including China, Italy and Germany on display, was held in July. Standing in the vast desert, the sculptures have become a new hot spot for desert tourism along with the existing 26 pieces. According to the staff, hundreds of works will be added in the near future. The establishment of the desert scenic area demonstrates…

Wei Siwen, a graduate student studying neural engineering at Tianjin University, won the championship of a typing contest, not with her dexterous fingers, but with her brain and eyes. She earned the honor at a brain-controlled typing contest by achieving an information transmission rate of 691.55 bits per minute during the World Robot Conference 2019, held in Beijing on August 21-25. The speed is equivalent to outputting 145 English letters per minute, which is on par with the typing speed of a human using fingers. To perform brain-controlled typing, Wei wore an electro-encephalography (EEG) cap, which captures brainwaves through electrodes attached to the scalp. As she gazed at a letter on a virtual keyboard displayed on a small screen in front of her, her brainwaves were analyzed by a computer…

What inspired you to make the film? Julia Reichert (Director): We didn’t think of any others when we started making this film, our hearts were with the blue-collar workers of Dayton, Ohio, because when the economy crashed, it was extremely frightening in our town. Thousands of workers lost their jobs, it was crushing and devastating. The bottom fell out of people’s whole sense of who they were and their future. So we kept following those people, people who learned to reinvent themselves. Dayton is our hometown. When the tectonic plates of the world were shifting economically, we had a piece of that right in our own hometown. So why did we need to go anywhere else to make a film? And why did we need to find other people? We…

China’s two major online music service providers recently disclosed their business performance in the second quarter of the year, showing a remarkable difference and a new trend. NetEase Cloud Music, a music streaming service with a database of more than 10 million songs, had 800 million users, up 50 percent over a year ago, according to NetEase, Inc.’s second quarter earnings conference call on August 7. The number of paying subscribers jumped by 135 percent year on year. NetEase is one of China’s largest Internet companies, offering online game, advertising and wireless value-added services. Its net revenue in the second quarter of the year exceeded 18 billion yuan ($2.73 billion), an increase of 15.3 percent compared to the same period in 2018. The net revenue from innovative businesses and others,…

If you didn’t know that you were in the David H. Koch Theater in New York, you would think you had been transported to a village in ancient China, thanks to the ambience. Gently undulating mountains, hazy as though they were seen through a mist, stood sentinel at the back while a giant branch, with flowers slowly dropping down to the accompaniment of melodious flute music formed the foreground. All the elements of stage décor spoke of China as did the performance that began to unfold, with the story of Hua Mulan, the girl who became a byword for her love for her family and her bravery, told by the Liaoning Ballet of China, based in Shenyang, capital of Liaoning Province in the northeast. The story of how Mulan, a…