Chindia Alert: You’ll be Living in their World Very Soon
aims to alert you to the threats and opportunities that China and India present. China and India require serious attention; case of ‘hidden dragon and crouching tiger’.
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Xie Haifeng’s story is one of luck and resilience and he has made it his mission to help others through adversity
Professional dancer owes part of his success to the city of Hong Kong and one of its doctors who helped survivors through recovery
Xie Haifeng was 15 when he lost his leg in one of modern China’s most devastating disasters. Photo: Handout
When the rumbling began, Xie Haifeng thought someone was shaking his bed. Perhaps one of the other 800 children in the school dormitory was being naughty. Or maybe it was a small quake. Then came the unmistakable sound of screams.
Xie, then a 15-year-old pupil at Muyi Town Middle School in the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan, started running. He fell as the dorm building collapsed around him. When he tried to stand up, he realised something was missing. His left leg was gone.
What Xie thought was a small quake turned out to be one of the most devastating disasters in modern Chinese history.
The Sichuan earthquake of May 2008 left at least 87,000 people dead and shook the country to its core. It was less than three month before Beijing would host its first Olympic Games, an opportunity to show the world its strength and ambition.
Instead, 7,444 schools had crumbled like tofu in an area known to be seismically active. Their rubble was a stark demonstration of the weak foundation of China’s progress and its tragic consequences. At Xie’s school, the shoddily built walls and ceilings crushed 600 children. Only 300 survived.
It still frightens me to recall the earthquake.Xie Haifeng, dancer
Xie considers himself lucky. “If I had run just one second more slowly, I would have been dead. If I had run one second faster, I would have been completely fine. But anyway, I am lucky to be alive,” he said. A dozen years later, his story is also one of resilience. Defying all the odds, Xie is now a professional dancer for a troupe in Sichuan and has made it his mission to help others through adversity.
The journey from his hospital bed to the stage was long and difficult and even though many years have passed, “it still frightens me to recall the earthquake”. But, he said: “I have forgiven fate and accepted the reality that I have only one leg.”
Xie’s trauma was a particularly difficult blow to his family. His older sister was already handicapped, after injuring her arm in an accident. When his mother, a migrant worker in the northwestern province of Gansu, arrived at the hospital a few days after the earthquake, she had no idea of the extent of Xie’s condition.
“When I woke up in the evening, I saw my mother weeping beside my bed. I told myself I should be strong,” Xie said, adding that his mother initially thought he had suffered only bruises. He was sent for treatment to a hospital in the prosperous southern city of Shenzhen, along with other survivors who had been left with disabilities by the earthquake.
Defying all the odds, Xie Haifeng is now a professional dancer. Photo: Handout
It was there that Xie was inspired to make the most of his life. A team of athletes visited the hospital and he was shocked to see one of them, a volleyball player, walking on a prosthetic leg.
Xie began to wear a prosthesis and after rehabilitation training returned to his hometown in 2009 where he was admitted to Qingchuan High School. At first, he was self-conscious and felt inferior to his peers. He did not dare to wear shorts in summer and said he seldom talked to the other students.
The following year he was introduced to members of the Chengdu Disabled People’s Art Troupe, where he found a new and welcoming home. Xie quit school and joined the troupe, despite his parents’ opposition. They were convinced study was the only way for rural students like their son to get out of poverty.
Xie learned Sichuan opera and was soon performing its art of bian lian, or
– a skill that requires rapid mask changes in a dazzling sleight of hand – on stage until the troupe was disbanded in 2011, leaving him unemployed for six months.
China marks 10-year anniversary of Sichuan earthquake
But the misfortune led to an improbable opportunity when he was hired by the Sichuan Provincial Disabled People’s Art Troupe and trained to dance. At 19, and with no experience, Xie found the training far more difficult than those who had started at the more usual age of five or six.
His body was too stiff, he said, and in the first months he spent 10 hours each day just stretching and building flexibility. It was just the beginning of a long and often arduous process.
“That agony is too much to be described,” Xie said about the pain of dancing on a prosthetic leg. “During the first six months’ training, I broke three artificial legs.”
More than once, he wondered whether he had chosen the right path. But, ultimately, his gruelling effort paid off and Xie has performed in Singapore, Hong Kong and Macau. In 2013, he won a gold medal at a national dancing competition for people with disabilities.
“My dances won me applause and recognition from the audience. I feel relieved and I think my heart belongs to the stage,” he said.
Xie broke three artificial legs during his first six months of dance training. Photo: Handout
Xie said he owed part of his success to Hong Kong which in 2008 donated HK$20 billion (US$2.5 billion) in aid to Sichuan and sent doctors to treat the injured. Among the volunteers was Poon Tak-lun, a Hong Kong orthopaedist who flew to Sichuan every two weeks from 2008 to 2013 to treat patients.
At a gala show in 2013 to express gratitude from the people of Sichuan to Hong Kong, Xie met Poon and the two became good friends, thanks to their common interest in the arts.
“Dr Poon promised to pay for all the costs of installing and repairing my artificial leg in the future. He told me to focus on dancing without worrying about the leg’s costs,” Xie said.
Xie Haifeng (pictured left with friend Poon Tak-lun) gives a speech to students in Hong Kong. Photo: Handout
Grateful for the help he received from Poon and Hong Kong, Xie has sought to return the favour by doing what he does best.
“I have no other skills except dancing and performing. So I thought of sharing my experience to encourage young students in Hong Kong,” he said.
Xie travels to Hong Kong about twice a year to perform and visit schools. In 2019, he visited the city four times, performing dances and Sichuan opera, and giving speeches at more than 10 primary and secondary schools.
“I encourage them to study hard. I said there are many people in this world who have more difficulties than them but still insist on pursuing their dreams, so they should not give up their dreams,” Xie said.
When he is not dancing and giving inspirational speeches, Xie said he lived a life like everyone else – climbing mountains, swimming and proudly walking on the leg he gained after almost losing everything in Sichuan’s deadly earthquake.
This marks the latest mobile network upgrade on Mount Everest, where Chinese carriers had previously installed 2G, 3G and 4G equipment
China Mobile plans to deploy Huawei 5G gear at an altitude of 6,500 metres, providing network coverage to the mountain’s summit
A team from China Mobile shows off the initial 5G base stations, supplied by Huawei Technologies, that the telecoms carrier deployed on Mount Everest this April. Photo: Weibo
Huawei Technologies has teamed up with wireless network operators China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom to roll out advanced 5G infrastructure on
The deployment of 5G base stations on the famous Himalayan mountain, with an elevation of 8,848 metres, has extended the reach of the next-generation mobile technology, which has been held up as “the connective tissue” for the Internet of Things, autonomous cars, smart cities and other new applications – providing the backbone for the industrial internet. The new 5G infrastructure roll-outs were announced by Huawei in a post on Chinese microblogging site Weibo on Monday and confirmed by its spokeswoman on Tuesday.
China Mobile, the world’s largest wireless network operator, said its 5G project on Mount Everest marked “not only another extreme challenge in a human life exclusion zone, but also laid a solid foundation for the later development of 5G smart tourism and 5G communications for scientific research”, according to the company’s post on Weibo on Monday.
The Hong Kong and New York-listed carrier set up three 5G base stations – radio access gear that connects mobile devices to the broader telecommunications network – on April 19 in two camps at altitudes of 5,300 metres and 5,800 metres, which provide online download speed of about 1 gigabit per second.
China Mobile plans to install two more 5G base stations, supplied by telecommunications gear maker Huawei Technologies, on Mount Everest before April 25. Photo: Weibo
Installation of two more base stations are expected to be completed by China Mobile before April 25 in another camp at an altitude of 6,500 metres, providing 5G network coverage to the summit of Mount Everest. The international border between China and Nepal is 1,414 kilometres in length and runs across that summit.
More than 150 China Mobile employees are taking part on the construction and maintenance of the new 5G base stations as well as upgrading existing infrastructure on the surrounding areas, according to the company. It said 25 kms of new optical cables have also been laid out to support this project.
China Telecom confirmed its Mount Everest project on Tuesday in a statement, which said its 5G base stations were installed on April 13 at an altitude of 5,145 metres. It partnered with state-run China Central Television to broadcast a 24-hour live-streamed programme on April 14 from Mount Everest, which had an audience of more than six million people.
China Mobile did not immediately respond to a request for comment. China Unicom did not immediately reply to a separate request for comment.
Mobile network operators in China launched initial commercial 5G services last year. The country has already deployed more than 160,000 5G base stations, covering more than 50 cities, according to a report published last month by the GSMA, the trade body which represents mobile operators worldwide.
While initial commercial 5G mobile services were launched in countries like South Korea, the US, and Australia, the scale of China’s market is likely to dwarf the combined size of those economies, negating any first-mover advantage.
The steady annual deployment of new 5G base stations is critical to meet future demand in the world’s second largest economy and biggest smartphone market. China is expected to have 600 million 5G mobile users by 2025, which would make up 40 per cent of total global 5G subscribers, according to the GSMA.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi told his country’s space scientists he was proud of a programme that had come so near to putting a probe on the Moon.
Contact with Chandrayaan-2 was lost moments before its Vikram module was due to touch down at the lunar south pole.
The fate of the craft is not yet known, but Mr Modi said there would be further opportunities.
India would have been the fourth nation to make a soft landing on the Moon.
“The best is yet to come in our space programme. India is with you,” said Mr Modi.
The Chandrayaan-2 approached the Moon as normal until an error occurred about 2.1km (1.3 miles) from the surface, officials said.
Image copyright ISROImage caption The mission’s lift-off was broadcast live to an audience of hundreds of millions
India’s Space Research Organization (Isro) said it lost contact seconds before the ship was expected to land.
The country’s first Moon mission – Chandrayaan-1, in 2008 – carried out the first and most detailed search for water on the lunar surface using radars.
What happened?
Chandrayaan-2 entered the Moon’s orbit on 20 August and was due to make a controlled descent to the surface early on Saturday, Indian time, over a month after it first took off.
Staff at mission control were glued to the screens at Isro’s Bangalore space centre as the spacecraft made its descent towards the surface.
The control room burst into applause during the so-called rough breaking phase of the descent, with Prime Minister Modi watching the action from behind a glass screen.
Isro chairman Kailasavadivoo Sivan announced to staff that the ship’s initial descent had been “normal,” and that the mission’s data would be analysed.
Mr Sivan had earlier described the final descent as “15 minutes of terror”.
The rover (called Pragyan – wisdom in Sanskrit) had the capacity to travel 500m from the lander in its 14-day life span, and would have sent data and images back to Earth for analysis.
The mission would have focused on the lunar surface, searching for water and minerals and measuring moonquakes, among other things.
Why would it have been significant?
A soft landing on another planetary body – a feat achieved by just three other countries so far – would have been a huge technological achievement for Isro and India’s space ambitions, writes science writer Pallava Bagla.
He adds that it would also have paved the way for future Indian missions to land on Mars, and opened up the possibility of India sending astronauts into space.
For the first time in India’s space history, the interplanetary expedition was led by two women – project director Muthaya Vanitha and mission director Ritu Karidhal.
Media caption Is India a space superpower?
It is also a matter of national pride – the satellite’s lift-off in July was broadcast live on TV and Isro’s official social media accounts.
The mission has also made global headlines because it’s so cheap – the budget for Avengers: Endgame, for instance, was more than double at an estimated $356m. But this isn’t the first time Isro has been hailed for its thrift. Its 2014 Mars mission cost $74m, a tenth of the budget for the American Maven orbiter.
Chinese President Xi Jinping attends the opening ceremony of the FIBA Basketball World Cup 2019 at the National Aquatics Center, also known as the Water Cube, in Beijing, capital of China, Aug. 30, 2019. (Xinhua/Huang Jingwen)
BEIJING, Aug. 30 (Xinhua) — Chinese President Xi Jinping attended the opening ceremony of the FIBA Basketball World Cup 2019 Friday at the National Aquatics Center (Water Cube) in Beijing.
When Xi stepped into the Olympic Hall of the Water Cube with FIBA President Horacio Muratore, FIBA Secretary General Andreas Zagklis and visiting Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, the audience gave a warm welcome with a standing applause.
After the national flag of the People’s Republic of China was raised and the national anthem being performed and sung, Muratore delivered a speech.
He said the 2019 edition will be the largest and most-watched Basketball World Cup in history, and will feature the greatest ever number of host cities.
He highly commended the preparation China has made for the competition and said he believed that this Basketball World Cup would be a tremendous success.
At Muratore’s invitation, Xi declared the opening of the FIBA Basketball World Cup 2019.
Artistic performances unveiled after the rising of the flags of the FIBA and the FIBA Basketball World Cup 2019.
Yao Ming, chairman of the China Basketball Association, escorted the trophy of the Basketball World Cup into the center.
The FIBA Basketball World Cup is the top national-level basketball competition held by FIBA every four years. This year’s competition will be held from Aug. 31 to Sept. 15.
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 