Innholdsfortegnelse for Vol. 62/No.42 i Beijing Review

SWEDEN Goran Hansson (center), Secretary General of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, announces the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry in Stockholm on October 9. The prize has been awarded to John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino for the development of lithium-ion batteries INDONESIA President Joko Widodo reviews troops in Jakarta on October 5 during celebrations marking the 74th anniversary of the establishment of the Indonesian Armed Forces IRAQ Anti-government protesters gather in eastern Baghdad on October 5. The death toll during the protests in the capital and other Iraqi cities had risen to 104, with more than 6,000 people wounded, by that day UNITED ARAB EMIRATES People visit the Gulf Information Technology Exhibition in Dubai on October 6. It is the largest IT exhibition and conference…

The grand finale to the celebrations for the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square was a grand gala on the evening of October 1. The 90-minute tribute started at 8 p.m. with a magnificent spectacle of 70 columns of synchronized fireworks exploding in the night sky to mark the PRC’s 70th anniversary. People of different ages and ethnicities and from all walks of life joined in, cheering. The gala showcased performances by both professional artists and public talent. An orchestra offered an acoustic feast, combined with visual delights on mobile screens and fireworks.…

Investing in China still holds great appeal for foreign investors as their top choice since the country’s economic strength and business infrastructure offer opportunities not to be missed despite trade uncertainties. Over four decades of reform and opening up and its ascent to a global manufacturing powerhouse, China has accumulated several advantages as a destination of foreign investment. Denis Depoux, managing partner at consulting firm Roland Berger Greater China, sees an “incomparable investment environment” for foreign companies in China. An integrated industry system, efficient infrastructure, a huge domestic market, well-educated human resources, a considerable economic growth rate as well as the application of new technologies are all part of the allure of China, Depoux said. “We see many of our clients looking into new investments in China with a different…

Free classes for 30 days, with free meals and accommodation. Feng Yue could hardly believe her luck when she was chosen as one of the 25 students to learn hand embroidery from a master. A fresh high school graduate, 18-year-old Feng was the youngest in the group. She was looking for a way to spend the summer before studying architecture in college. At that time, all she knew about hand embroidery was from a pop song. The chosen 25 from eight provinces across the country gathered in August in Hangzhou, capital city of Zhejiang Province in east China, for the intensive course headed by Jin Jiahong, 50, winner of many national contests. Classes often extended to 10:30 p.m., when students stayed to practice and Jin stayed for support. They took…

Macao Heat Tourists visit the Ruins of St. Paul’s in Macao Special Administrative Region (SAR) on October 8. Visitors to Macao reached more than 980,000 during the National Day holiday from October 1 to 7, up 11.5 percent year on year, the SAR tourism office said. Caring for Seniors China is capable of dealing with an aging population by providing more affordable and high-quality elderly care services and products, an official said on October 8. As the outcome of economic and social advancement, population aging is an irreversible trend and a crucial issue facing many countries, said Ou Xiaoli from the National Development and Reform Commission. By the end of 2018, people aged 60 or above exceeded 249 million in China, accounting for 17.9 percent of the total population. Official…

President Xi Jinping took his place on Tiananmen Rostrum on October 1 at a grand celebration marking the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. It was there on October 1, 1949, that Mao Zedong announced the birth of New China. Over the seven decades, the socialist country has blazed an extraordinary trail, rising from a “poor and blank” state to a major country on the world stage. Xi, the first top Chinese leader born after 1949, is at the helm in a new era, steering the country through wind and waves to a brighter future. Into new era Xi was elected general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee on November 15, 2012. The world at that time was transforming. The impact…

The author is an op-ed contributor to Beijing Review and a researcher with the Pangoal Institution A common consensus in the world today is that China’s development is linked to the change in the international structure and will have a profound and far-reaching influence on the world order. In many people’s eyes, China has already become a superpower, second only to the U.S., and is having growing impact on the world. In this context, a white paper titled China and the World in the New Era, published by the State Council Information Office on September 27, ahead of the grand celebrations marking the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on October 1, elaborates on what role the country wants to play in the world…

As arcane physics theories buzz around the world after the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics winners were announced, physicists and physics majors continue to try to popularize the mysteries of the world. An inspiring example is a group of graduate and doctoral students from the Institute of Physics (IOP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), who have been making efforts to change the face of physics by dressing it up, reassembling its fun parts and putting it all online. Playtime In 2014, Cheng Meng, a doctoral graduate from the institute, had the idea to make physics more fun through IOP’s official public account on WeChat, a popular social media app in China. Li Zhilin, an IOP doctoral student and winner of a campus contest to write an interesting article…

($1=7 yuan) 782 mln Domestic tourist trips during the National Day holiday, up 7.81 percent from last year 8.5% Year-on-year increase in combined sales of retail and catering enterprises in China during the National Day holiday, reaching 1.52 trillion yuan $3.09 tln China’s foreign exchange reserves at the end of September, up 0.6 percent from the beginning of 2019 142.9 bln yuan Amount of loans issued by China Development Bank to support poverty relief efforts in the first eight months of the year 127 Special railway projects China will plan and construct by 2020 with a total length of 1,586 km $127.5 bln Chinese tourists’ overseas spending in the first half of 2019 2.83 tln yuan Amount of loans provided by China Development Bank since 2014 for coordinated development of…

New Natural Reserves China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), the country’s largest oil and gas producer and supplier, has explored new petroleum and gas reserves, the company said on September 29. It discovered an oilfield with over 1 billion tons of reserves in northwest China, with newly added proven oil reserves of 358 million tons and expected reserves of 693 million tons, said CNPC. A total of 640,000 tons of oil will be produced in the oilfield this year, and the annual output will reach 3 million tons in the near future, said Li Luguang, Vice President of PetroChina Company Limited, a subsidiary of CNPC. Some 740.97 billion cubic meters of newly added proven shale gas reserves have been explored in southwest China’s Sichuan Basin, bringing the verified reserves to 1,061…

‘My country and I are so intertwined that we can’t be separated for a moment.” This was a line from the song My Motherland and Me heard often during the celebrations of the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), expressing the prevailing national mood of pride and joy. When Mao Zedong declared the birth of the PRC to the world from Tiananmen Square on October 1, 1949, it was a signal that the Chinese people had stood up from the poverty, weakness and humiliation they had suffered for more than 100 years and the journey to national rejuvenation had begun. Seventy years later, when President Xi Jinping stood in the same place on the same day and emphasized that no force can undermine…

In a weather-beaten dormitory at Beijing Foreign Studies University resides a 104-year-old Canadian named Isabel Crook. Born in 1915 in Chengdu, southwest China’s Sichuan Province, to a Canadian missionary family, she has spent most of her life in China. This year, as the People’s Republic of China (PRC) celebrated its 70th anniversary, Crook received the highest honor of her life—the PRC’s Friendship Medal. Crook’s longest hiatus outside of China was six years at the University of Toronto, where she earned a master of art degree with a minor in anthropology, returning to China in 1939 and conducting anthropological research in Sichuan. She co-authored a book titled Prosperity’s Predicament: Identity, Reform, and Resistance in Rural Wartime China, describing rural life in the early 1940s in a small village in Sichuan called…

A head of the 13th round of bilateral trade talks between China and the U.S. in Washington, D.C., economists and entrepreneurs warned that U.S. President Donald Trump has set off a full-blown trade war by imposing several rounds of tariffs on Chinese goods, accusing China of “intellectual property theft” and sanctioning Chinese companies, thereby putting the global economy in danger. Chinese Vice Premier Liu He led a delegation for another round of high-level consultations with U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on October 10-11. “This is not only a trade war; this is more and more looking like a significant decoupling, across issues from trade, education, technology and now financial flows,” Tom Orlik, chief economist of Bloomberg Economics, said at the 2019 China and the World…

China has taken a new step to open up the domestic financial market and facilitate cross-border investment and financing by scrapping quota restrictions on two major inbound investment programs. The move will provide unrestricted access to the second largest capital market in the world. The State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE), China’s foreign exchange regulator, announced on September 10 that the U.S. dollar-denominated Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor (QFII) program, introduced in 2002 to allow specified licensed international investors to participate in the mainland’s stock trading, and the Renminbi Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor (RQFII) scheme will no longer have any investment quotas. The RQFII program, introduced in 2011, allows the subsidiaries of domestic fund management companies and securities companies in Hong Kong Special Administrative Region to use renminbi-denominated funds raised in…