Innholdsfortegnelse for Vol.63/No.50 i Beijing Review

Tariff-Free Hainan Weather radar transceivers worth more than 3.8 million yuan ($579,100) became the first batch of tariff-free raw and auxiliary materials to enter the newly established Hainan Free Trade Port (FTP) located on Hainan Island in south China. The transceivers were imported for use by Hainan Airlines and arrived at the Hainan FTP on December 1. According to authorities, the transceivers were exempt from 530,200 yuan ($80,847) of tariffs. The Ministry of Finance (MOF) announced in November that China would waive tariffs on imported raw and auxiliary materials in the Hainan FTP. A circular jointly issued by MOF, the General Administration of Customs of China (GACC) and the State Taxation Administration, stated the exemption would begin from December 1. According to the circular, import tariffs, value-added tax and consumption…

The author is an international studies expert and op-ed contributor to Beijing Review After thousands of years of evolution from individual struggles for existence, human civilization is at another historic crossroads today: whether to propel competition into confrontation, or establish a social ecology of cooperation. What distinguishes civilization from barbarism is not the capacity for material productivity but the capacity to build symbiotic societies. The future lies in people’s perceptions and the choices they make. The novel coronavirus disease pandemic is an example. While it has shown that joint efforts are needed to face the crisis, some politicians in certain Western countries have tried to use it as a handle to further divide the world. Against this backdrop, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s recent visit to Japan…

The novel coronavirus pandemic has cast a wide shadow upon the world economy. Nevertheless, trade between China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is seemingly bucking the downward pressure. Bilateral trade exceeded $481 billion in the first three quarters of the year. ASEAN rose to be China’s largest trading partner for the first time, overtaking the EU and the U.S., while China has remained ASEAN’s largest import-export market since 2010. On November 30, the 17th China-ASEAN Expo (CAEXPO) wrapped up in Nanning, capital of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in south China, adding impetus to the uptrend. Weeks before the expo, 15 Asia-Pacific countries, including China and ASEAN members, signed the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, or RCEP. Covering about one third of the world population and GDP, the pact…

Shenzhen has long been a staple in any discussion on China’s reform and opening up. Shenzhen speed, Shenzhen experience, Shenzhen model… Several Shenzhen-related catchwords have been attracting attention from home and abroad over the past four decades. Shenzhen, one of China’s most advanced metropolises in the southern province of Guangdong, recorded 2.69 trillion yuan ($408.81 billion) of GDP in 2019, more than double that of countries such as Venezuela and Algeria. If it were a country, it would be the 32nd largest economy in the world. How could Shenzhen, primarily an agricultural county in 1978, grow into a major economic powerhouse of China and an international hub of innovation and entrepreneurship within just 40 years? It is not just foreigners who experience a sense of wonder at such achievements,…

JD Health, the online healthcare platform of China’s e-commerce giant JD.com, released the prospectus for an initial public offering (IPO) on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on November 26, aiming to sell 381.9 million shares through the IPO to raise up to $3.4 billion. Operating as a subsidiary since 2019, it has become the third online healthcare platform going public in China, following Ali Health of e-commerce giant Alibaba and the platform Ping An Good Doctor under the financial firm Ping An Insurance Group. Online healthcare services mainly include telemedicine and online sales of drugs, which can enhance the efficiency of medical services, bring convenience to users and drive the progress of medical and information technologies, Lu Qingjun, Director of the National Telemedicine and Connected Health Center, told Beijing Review.…

Recently, Tamdrin, a 20-year-old Tibetan herdsman from Litang County, Garze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan Province in southwest China, has become a hit online thanks to a 10-second video. Tamdrin smiles sweetly in the video. The video has gone viral, garnering over 2.7 million likes and 135,000 comments within days, most of which show fondness for his rugged style. After shooting to fame overnight, Tamdrin was invited by his home county Litang to become a tourism ambassador, and made a commercial to promote local tourism. In the video, he is dressed in his traditional Tibetan costume, rides a white horse, and stands against a background of snow-capped mountains and yellow meadows, which triggered another round of following on the Internet. Soon, many other local areas claimed him as their own and…

The Chang’e-5 spacecraft gathers rock samples on Moon on December 2. The China National Space Administration announced a day later that the probe has completed the task of taking samples. Launched on November 24, Chang’e-5 landed on the near side of Moon a week later, tasked to collect China’s first samples from an extraterrestrial body. Ascender of Chang’e-5 took off from the lunar surface on December 3, and is expected to complete unmanned rendezvous and docking with the orbiter-returner in lunar orbit.…

UNITED NATIONS UN Secretary General António Guterres calls for global solidarity and a sense of urgency to confront the coronavirus pandemic at a special session of the UN General Assembly at the UN headquarters in New York City on December 3 ROMANIA President Klaus Iohannis attends National Day celebrations in Bucharest on December 1 THE PHILIPPINES Firefighters try to put out a fire engulfing a residential area in Manila on November 27. Nearly 200 families were left homeless JAPAN A mask-themed shop in Yokohama on November 30. The venture, called Mask Paradise, is expected to open for one month for Christmas REPUBLIC OF KOREA A worker sterilizes an area in a high school in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, on December 2 for the College Scholastic Ability Test the next day. Students…

Kang Jiaxin, 28, has been a freelance interpreter based in Beijing since graduating with a master’s degree in 2016. Failing to find an ideally stable job after graduation, she chose to work on her own, taking advice from some veterans in the translation and interpreting industry. Despite at times feeling anxious due to the unstable nature of the job, she has been enjoying its flexible schedule and the freedom to choose who she wants to work for. Additionally, she earns a decent living, making above average in Beijing. “Being a freelance interpreter enables me to get in contact with different people and travel to different places, enriching my experience,” Kang told Beijing Review. She said she is satisfied with her current work and life, although there are numerous possibilities for…

It was the annual gathering of top filmmakers in China. The masks that the participants wore and nucleic acid tests that people had to go through before joining the event served as a reminder that the event was still held in the shadows of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19). The Golden Rooster Awards, formerly staged once every two years, has become an annual event since this year. Different from being hosted across different cities around China in previous years, this event has chosen to settle down in Xiamen, a coastal city in Fujian Province in southeast China, for 10 continuous years starting this year. Established in 1981, the Year of the Rooster, this award has become one of the most prestigious national film awards in China. The organizing committee, though…

Game Changer Students of a primary school in Tangshan, a city in Hebei Province in north China, play floorball on December 2. Public Opinion An online initiative was launched on December 1 to solicit public feedback on government work, the seventh year in succession such an initiative has been rolled out to improve public policies. The initiative will run through to the annual sessions of the national legislature and the national political advisory body—a key event on the country’s political calendar known as the Two Sessions—in 2021. Members of the public are invited to weigh in on 22 topics, including macroeconomic management, technological innovation, epidemic prevention and control, employment, entrepreneurship, education, and healthcare. They can visit a number of websites and platforms to submit their opinions and suggestions. Dubbed A…

When Xu Zhiyu, President of Global Government Affairs at Huawei Technologies, spoke at the 16th Beijing-Tokyo Forum on December 1, he mentioned that Japanese companies provide more than 80 percent of the 1,800 components in Huawei’s P40 flagship smartphone series. It was a telling statement on the complementarity of the strengths of the Chinese and Japanese industries. At the forum, an annual event co-hosted by the China International Publishing Group and Japanese non-profit think tank the Genron NPO to enhance bilateral relations, officials and experts from both countries agreed that the two neighbors should strengthen cooperation more than ever, especially in the post-novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic era. Though differences do exist, China and Japan share broad common interests, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi said in a…

The immense crowd, the technicolor buildings, the labyrinthine markets. No, we are not in Tokyo, we are in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province in south China. This sprawling megalopolis is often touted as China’s Silicon Valley, but it offers far more than tech campuses and hipster joints. In 1980, Shenzhen was transformed from mere farming and fishing communities in the Pearl River Delta into a special economic zone, one of four cities chosen by central authorities to undergo a pilot economic experiment. Economic incentives allowed Shenzhen to boom at an unparalleled speed. Between 1979 and 2019, its GDP grew at an average annual rate of 28 percent to 2.69 trillion yuan ($409 billion). The city’s permanent population rose from 310,000 to more than 13 million, with migrants currently accounting for over 63…

Fortunately, November 1 was not a working day, meaning Yu Meng’en could attend the China Science Fiction Convention 2020 on its opening date. The convention, featuring both online and offline events, took place in Beijing. “As a super fan, how could I not be one of the first to get here?” she said. In the eyes of Yu, a government employee, it has not been the easiest of feats for China’s science fiction industry to have made it this far. A booming industry In 2019, China’s total box office for science fiction films came to more than 19.5 billion yuan ($2.94 billion), according to a report on China’s science fiction industry released at the convention. This achievement could not have been made without the support of fans like Yu, who…