Innholdsfortegnelse for Vol.65/No.29 i Beijing Review

A museum is an institution designed to hold a civilization’s most treasured possessions. China now has 6,183 registered museums, among the top in the world, of which 5,605 are free to visit, accounting for more than 90 percent of the total. In 2021, 779 million visits were made to museums across China. The National Museum of China (NMC), which celebrated its 110th anniversary on July 9, keeps alive the nation’s collective memory. It houses 1.42 million objects that illustrate the evolution of China’s history, culture and society. Notably, in recent years, it has introduced avant-garde technologies such as virtual reality to make its exhibits more accessible. The NMC is also an important platform for cultural exchange between China and other countries. In recent years, it has hosted forums for curators…

Inside a conservation laboratory, the different parts of a bronze statue, after being roughly 3,000 years apart, were brought together in June to once again form a whole body. The parts had been excavated from Sichuan Province’s Sanxingdui site, hailed as one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the 20th century. Earlier that month, a large bronze figurine had been unearthed from the No.8 sacrificial pit of the Sanxingdui Ruins. It perfectly matched a bird-footed statue excavated 36 years earlier from the No.2 sacrificial pit. Fully assembled, the 1-meter-tall Y-shaped figure standing on its hands, as if striking a yoga pose, was an astonishing sight to behold. “Looking like an acrobat, its posture is so complex; I find it simply beyond imagination,” said Ran Honglin, a leading archaeologist working on…

Over these recent years of rapid development, cross-border e-commerce (CBEC) has become a common form of digital international trade. The COVID-19 pandemic has further accentuated the advantages of CBEC as a trade model that features less exposure to the virus and low physical contact, and provides a cushion against the negative impacts of the pandemic in sectors such as transportation. According to the Universal Post Union, retail e-commerce sales worldwide were valued at $4.9 trillion in 2021, up 17 percent year on year. This growth rate was double the global average, and the increase is expected to reach as much as 9 percent per year from 2021 to 2023. In 2020, Asia-Pacific economies accounted for 53.6 percent of the global CBEC market, with their combined sales volume hitting $450 billion.…

The term “moonlight clan” refers to low-income earners in China who spend all of their income meeting their basic needs. In the past decade, this cohort has been growing steadily. According to China Central Television (CCTV) in 2021, 40 percent of singles in China’s first-tier cities belong to the “moonlight clan,” mostly young people who live paycheck to paycheck for a “quality life.” In lower-tiered cities with lower monthly incomes, the proportion of the “moonlight clan” has risen sharply. On the flip side, the Chinese household savings rate remains high. The average savings rate in China is over 45 percent—a figure above average measured by any global average. In other words, nearly half of a household’s income does not flow back into the economy but sits in a bank account…

BA.5, an Omicron variant which is better at evading the immune system, was confirmed on July 5 to have caused locally transmitted infections in Xi’an, capital of Shaanxi Province, making it the first Chinese city to detect the variant. From July 2 to 5, the city reported 11 confirmed and 18 asymptomatic domestic cases. According to the city’s center for disease prevention and control on July 5, gene sequencing showed that the case cluster was caused by the BA.5.2 subvariant. In addition to Xi’an, the BA.5 variant had also been identified in six other cities including Beijing and Shanghai as of July 13. From July 4 to 6, Beijing reported 12 domestic cases. According to Pang Xinghuo, Deputy Director of the Beijing Center for Disease Prevention and Control, at a…

‘My dream is to bring Chinese music to the world,” Ye Yunchuan, a well-known music producer and founder of Rhymoi Music, makes no secret of his ambition. “It’s not as unrealistic as it sounds. Actually, our music has already reached more than 200 countries and regions,” he told Beijing Review. “Cultures grown in different soils have differing attributes and, as a result, it takes a certain amount of time for people to fully appreciate other cultures. But I am confident that this dream will come true.” In his studio, Ye picked up a leather bulb pump and squeezed it constantly to blow away the fine dust on his vinyl records and record player. “I know I might seem fussy,” he laughed in embarrassment. “But the truth is, I am only…

China’s vast countryside has birthed a new generation of social media influencers, which is generating revenue for and promoting the development of villages. Outdoor cooking videos featuring wild ingredients and scant equipment are a genre of their own on Douyin, China’s TikTok. Sowing, harvesting, fishing, handcrafting, all these everyday countryside scenes are attracting tens of thousands of online viewers. In the past year alone, short videos showing snippets of country life have garnered a whopping 12.9 billion likes. In short, live-streaming is the newest agricultural tool. However… After 12 months of skyrocketing viewer numbers, their popularity now seems to be on the decline, with many rural influencers starting to lose fans. This roller-coaster experience has sparked concerns that the influencer economy may not be the hope of China’s rural revitalization…

CRYSTALLOGRAPHER DIES AT 88 Fan Haifu, physicist and academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the World Academy of Sciences (TWAS), passed away from illness on July 8 in Beijing at the age of 88. Fan was born in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province. He graduated from Peking University in 1956, where he majored in chemistry. He started his career at the Institute of Physics under CAS in Beijing and became a researcher in 1986. His professional achievements contributed to global X-ray crystallography, the experimental science determining the atomic and molecular structure of a crystal, and electron microscopy. Throughout his lifetime, he received multiple national and global honors, including the TWAS award in physics in 1996. Together with British physicist Michael Woolfson, he published a book titled Physical and Non-physical…

China’s development has been accelerating since 2012 and in the process is becoming more equitable, sustainable and secure. According to Zhao Chenxin, Vice Minister of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the nation’s economic, scientific and technological strength has increased, as has its global influence. At a press conference on June 28, Zhao attributed the progress over the last decade to the push for high-quality development. In 2021, China’s GDP increased to 114.4 trillion yuan ($17.05 trillion), 18 percent of the world’s total, from 53.9 trillion yuan ($8.03 trillion), 11.3 percent, in 2012. Per-capita GDP rose to more than $12,000 from $6,300 during this period. A more open economy Since 2012, China’s market economy has made new progress as reforms have been made to stimulate the vitality of market…

Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was gunned down during a campaign event in the city of Nara on July 8. He was later pronounced dead in hospital. Abe was the Japanese prime minister with the longest unbroken term in office after the end of World War II. Despite resigning in 2020 due to health reasons, he remained an influential figure in the country’s political landscape and continued to campaign for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). The ruling coalition of the LDP and Komeito scored a sweeping victory as expected in House of Councilors election on July 10, with the LDP alone securing a majority of contested seats in the parliament’s upper house. However, with Abe’s passing, should his colleagues carry on his legacy or should they change their…

‘The violence was no accident. It was [Donald] Trump’s last stand.” In a series of recent public hearings about the Capitol riots on January 6 last year, as lawmakers met to certify Joe Biden’s election victory, former U.S. President Trump and his inner circle were accused of conspiring to overturn the election results and inciting violence. Before the congressional hearing opened on June 9—the first of six hearings that month—Trump dismissed it as a “political hoax.” Though the hearings did not contain any bombshell revelations, they did see a shift in tone from Trump allies, moving from total denial of responsibility to casting blame on others. Either way, the former president cannot escape responsibility for the Capitol chaos. His actions greatly damaged the political foundation and international reputation of the…

The Group of 20 (G20) is the premier forum for international economic cooperation established in September 1999. At the height of the international financial crisis, the G20 acted in a spirit of unity and partnership, pulled the world economy back from the edge and pushed it onto the track of stability and recovery. Many experts believe that closer partnerships and joint actions by G20 members will boost confidence in, foster driving forces for and intensify cooperation on global economic growth, contributing to shared prosperity and the world’s overall wellbeing. Today, 23 years on, the world is ushering in a new phase of instability and transformation. With the combined impacts of these changes and the COVID-19 pandemic both unseen in a century and eroding decades of gains in global development, the…

Classical conceptions of the common good differ little between East and West, but modern interpretations are growing more distant. Would you rather be poor in a rich nation or rich in a poor nation? This question has inspired never-ending debate since the first century A.D., when Roman historian and moralist Valerius Maximus first said of the ancient Romans that “they would rather be poor in a rich empire than rich in a poor empire.” Sentiment in the U.S. currently differs from that of the ancient Romans in the opinion of Harvard Law School professor, Adrian Vermeule, who says the current American position on the subject is “seemingly clever” but ultimately “self-defeating.” As a polity becomes increasingly disordered, increasingly remote from a flourishing commonwealth promoting peace, justice and abundance, the claims…

After queuing for nearly an hour, Zhu Jie, a teacher in her 20s in Chongqing, tried her first cup of Sexy Tea in June. The milk tea brand based in Changsha, Hunan Province, opened its first store in Chongqing that month. “Although queuing is tiring, it was worthwhile! It’s delicious,” Zhu said on her Moments, a social networking function of the super-app WeChat. Founded in 2014, Sexy Tea’s packaging and stores are decorated with ancient patterns, and its products make use of indigenous ingredients such as oolong tea and Chinese orchid flowers, which are attracting many young people. In recent years, the tide of China chic, or the rise of China’s native fashion trends, has driven homegrown food and beverage brands to seek new ways to gain a following among…