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’.
Without this attention, governments, businesses and, indeed, individuals may find themselves at a great disadvantage sooner rather than later.
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Image copyright JEN SMITHImage caption Jen Smith lives in Shenzhen, where it’s compulsory to wear a mask outside at all times
My Money is a series looking at how people spend their money – and the sometimes tough decisions they have to make. Here, Jen Smith, a children’s TV presenter from Shenzhen in southern China, takes us through a week in her life, as the country slowly emerges from the coronavirus pandemic.
Over to Jen…
Since being in lockdown I’ve been bingeing on Keeping Up With the Kardashians. It starts with one episode after dinner, blink, and suddenly it’s 3am. YouTube, Facebook, Google and Instagram are all banned here, so you’d think I’d be a binge-free socialite after a year and a half living in China. Well, those sites are banned unless you have a VPN – I pay $120 (£97) a year for mine, so Sunday was a late night, with a lie-in until 10.30 this morning.
I go for a run – mask and all, as it’s currently illegal to be outside without one. I make my coffee (bought in the UK), fruit smoothie (about 20 yuan, $2.82, £2.27) and cereal (80 yuan a packet) before cycling to work.
Today is a bit of a crazy day in the studio. I work as a children’s TV presenter. My company has profited from the lockdown as more children are watching the shows non-stop – meaning a rapid turnaround for us.
We shoot two shows from 2-6pm then “break” for a meeting. We discuss tomorrow’s shoot while I eat dinner – homemade aubergine curry. It is normal for the Chinese to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner at work. Normally the company gives all staff 25 yuan through a food-ordering app, and the whole company would eat together. However, because of the current social distancing, that social time is in the far distant past!
I make it home for 8pm, order some deep-fried cauliflower as a snack (45 yuan) and start the inevitable Kardashian binge.
Total spend: 65 yuan ($9.10, £7.37)
Image copyright JEN SMITHImage caption Workers often have a midday nap in the office
It’s a much earlier start (7.30am), but the same morning routine. On my cycle to work I notice that the traffic is almost back to normal – Shenzhen is inhabited by well over 12 million people, so as you can imagine rush hour is intense. This doesn’t change the fact that everywhere you go you have to scan a QR code – leaving my apartment, using the walkway by the river, and getting into the building I work in.
After a morning of shooting I eat homemade potato curry and settle down for a nap. Naptime is such a commonality in China that people store camp beds at the office. I order a coffee and banana chips (20 yuan) for a pick-me-up before the afternoon’s shooting.
It’s St Paddy’s Day so I head to the local pubs area, catch dinner at a French restaurant (222 yuan), then a few drinks (25 yuan – mainly bought by men at the bar for us) before a very tipsy cycle home.
Total spend: 242 yuan ($34, £25)
Image copyright JEN SMITHImage caption A disposable cover reduces the risk of transmitting the virus by touching lift buttons
The morning’s shoot (thankfully) was cancelled, so I nursed a hangover in bed until around 11am, at which point I had a phone meeting for a company that I do “plus-size” modelling for (for context I’m a UK size 12). I eat a bowl of cereal and order more cauliflower (45 yuan) while I watch a film.
At 2.30pm an intern picks me up, and we head to the government building to apply for a new work visa. Ironically, the image taken for my visa is Photoshopped to remove wrinkles, freckles and my frizzy hair. When I ask why this is being done for an identification document, the intern replies that the government wants it to be neat, and “the Chinese way” is to have altered photos.
I don’t argue, and have an interview before I hand in my passport. The whole process takes around two hours, so I order food to my house while on the way home (150 yuan for burger, salad and cake!) I take a taxi across town which ends up being 39.05 yuan.
The day starts at 8.30am with coffee and reading, before I get a manicure (280 yuan). My nail lady has been very worried about the state of my hands during the virus, so she spends a whopping two and a half hours treating them while I watch a film (0.99 yuan – bought by her). Because the manicure was so long I don’t have time to eat lunch before our fitness shoot, which runs from 2-5.30pm. I then have an appointment to sign into a building which I’ll shoot in tomorrow.
The building is near a supermarket called Ole (one of the only western supermarkets), and I pick up groceries for 183 yuan before heading home to cook, listen to podcasts and prep for the big day of shooting on Friday.
Total spend: 463 yuan ($64, £52.5)
Image copyright JEN SMITHImage caption Jen filming in front of a green screen – a more colourful digital background will be added later in post-production
Fridays are generally my busiest day. The way the Chinese seem to function, is a boss will say “I want this done now” and then employees rush to finish it. Generally, they will write scripts on Monday and Tuesday, discuss Wednesday, then we shoot later in the week. The poor editors, despite mandatory office hours during the week, then have to work tirelessly through the weekend to achieve a Sunday evening deadline.
I start with mashed avocado and a hard-boiled egg before work. The morning shoot runs from 9.30-11.40am, and I have an early lunch – homemade curry again, before my regular nap time. The afternoon shoot is three hours, so I have time to pop home and shower before a live stream at 6pm. I take a taxi to and from the live stream which ends up being 28 yuan.
Total spend: 28 yuan ($3.92, £3.18)
Image copyright JEN SMITHImage caption A taxi driver has improvised a screen to reduce the risk of picking up Covid-19 from a passenger
Finally the weekend! Although things are slowly getting better in China after the coronavirus outbreak, there’s still not too much to do. So I use this time to write, play my piano and generally chill inside. Around 3pm, I venture outside to the shops to pick up some snacks (159.60 yuan) before settling in to ring my family back in the UK with a homemade cocktail – a friend of mine in Canada is doing a daily live stream, “quarantinis” where he teaches you how to make cocktails!
What’s interesting is that a lot of people have started leaving their houses again, but it is still illegal to go outside without a mask on, and temperature checks are taken everywhere. I was even refused entry to a building due to being foreign. I imagine this is because recently the only new cases are being brought in by non-Chinese travelling back to China.
Total spend: 159.60 yuan ($22, £18)
Image copyright JEN SMITHImage caption Shenzhen’s Metro system is still very quiet
It’s another slow day for me as many foreigners have not yet returned to China, so most of my friends are out of the country. I start the day by reviewing potential scripts.
This takes me to 1.30pm without realising I haven’t eaten. I decide to go for a quick run and I return to eat mashed avocado and a hard-boiled egg.
I home-bleach my hair with products bought in the UK, then head back to editing again. About half way through the afternoon I take a little break to practice Chinese. I use an app which is fantastic and free! Definitely worth everyone downloading this during social distancing so you can learn new skills!
For dinner I order online again, a three-dish meal for 160 yuan.
LONDON (Reuters) – The British government has not talked to China about helping build High Speed 2, the major rail project given the green light last week despite being billions of pounds over budget, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said on Sunday.
A report in the Financial Times said China had offered to build the rail line, known as HS2, in five years and for less money.
“I’ve certainly had no advice on the subject, obviously I will be asking to see what the communication has been,” Shapps told the BBC’s Andrew Marr on Sunday.
“This has not been a discussion with the department, it’s been a discussion with HS2 as I understand it.”
Shapps said he wanted to push ahead with major projects more quickly.
“There are things we can do to speed this up and I want to learn from everyone but I also want to make sure the British ingenuity and skills and apprentices and all the rest of it come through on this massive project,” he said.
Shapps also told Marr the resignation of finance minister, or chancellor, Sajid Javid on Thursday could result in a delay to the budget planned for March 11.
“This is a matter for the new chancellor Rishi (Sunak),” he said.
“I don’t think we’ve said it will definitely go ahead on the same date that was mentioned before in March, that will be a matter for the chancellor.”
BEIJING (Reuters) – German chemical giant BASF (BASFn.DE) has begun construction of its $10-billion (£7.8 billion) integrated petrochemicals project in China’s southern province of Guangdong, the company said in a statement on Saturday.
The project based in the city of Zhanjiang will be China’s first wholly foreign-owned chemicals complex, for which a framework agreement was signed in January.
It will primarily produce engineering plastics and thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU), and some petrochemical products widely used in automotive, electronics and new energy vehicles industries.
The project’s first phase is expected to be launched in 2022, with production capacity of 60,000 tonnes per year (tpy), taking BASF’s total capacity of engineering plastics and TPU to 290,000 tpy in the Asia-Pacific region.
The entire project is planned to be completed by 2030, the company said, making it the third-largest BASF site worldwide, following Ludwigshafen in Germany and Antwerp in Belgium.
BASF plans to employ a comprehensive smart manufacturing concept at the project, deploying automated packaging, high-tech control systems and automated guided vehicles, it added.
“(The project) will form a solid foundation for a world-class industrial cluster in Zhanjiang and establish stronger business connections between South China and other Asian countries,” Stephan Kothrade, a BASF regional official in China, said in the statement.
The project is “a signal showing China’s efforts of further opening-up are taking effect,” Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said, according to a central government website.
China would treat enterprises with all types of ownership structures, as well as domestic and foreign firms, equally and without discrimination, he added.
BEIJING, Oct. 25 (Xinhua) — Chinese President Xi Jinping has underlined the important role of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in building “Healthy China.”
The country should carry on fine elements in TCM and innovate them, Xi said in a recent instruction, stressing that traditional medicine is a treasure of Chinese civilization embodying the wisdom of the nation and its people.
Xi’s instruction was delivered at a national conference of TCM held Friday in Beijing.
Xi said that equal importance should be placed on traditional Chinese and Western medicines and efforts be made to enable them to supplement each other and prosper together.
He also underlined the efforts to promote TCM internationally and fully develop its unique strength in preventing and treating diseases.
In an instruction also delivered at the conference, Premier Li Keqiang called TCM a great creation of the Chinese nation.
Li stressed promoting talent training, scientific and technological innovation, and research and development of medicines.
He required efforts to promote preservation, innovation and high-quality development of TCM so that it will contribute to the improvement of people’s health and wellbeing.
Addressing the event, Vice Premier Sun Chunlan pledged to thoroughly implement the leaders’ instructions.
People who made outstanding contribution to TCM development were awarded at the conference.
Video of staff washing tableware with laundry detergent goes viral
A primary school principal has been sacked after it emerged laundry detergent was used in the canteen to wash tableware. Photo: Thepaper.cn
The head of a primary school in northeastern China has been sacked and a government investigation is underway into the use of laundry washing powder to clean tableware in the school canteen.
The scandal came to light when a video of canteen staff washing up at Dongfeng Primary School in Zuanghe, Liaoning province, went viral on Chinese social media.
The video shows staff, wearing white uniforms and aprons, cleaning plates and bowls in basins containing water tainted with laundry detergent. It is unclear when the incident happened.
In a statement on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, on Tuesday, the municipal government said the head of the school had been dismissed and representatives had been assigned by the authorities to take charge of the school’s daily operation. Due diligence investigations of the relevant department would begin “immediately”, the statement said.
Chinese school heads told to eat with pupils after string of scandals
The local administration for market regulation had also been ordered to speed up an examination of the food samples, tableware and washing products at the school, and the results would be made public in a timely manner, the authorities said.
Until the investigation is concluded, meals at the school, which has about 400 pupils, will be the responsibility of the municipal education department.
As an added precaution, food safety inspections would be carried out at all elementary and middle schools in the region.
The prompt action by the authorities reflects the wide public attention in China to any food safety scandal which involves children.
The principal of an international school in Shanghai was dismissed in October after parents of students found mouldy tomatoes and onions in a kitchen where food was prepared for pupils. In May, video footage showing mouldy food in the canteen of a middle school in Chengdu, Sichuan province, triggered angry parents to stage protests outside the school and the local government building.
Residents evacuated from building in Shenzhen as it leans to one side
An investigation is launched and utilities in the area are cut off
The building leans to one side after apparently sinking into the ground. Photo: Weibo
Emergency workers sealed off a building in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen after it collapsed on Wednesday morning, local authorities said.
At around 11.20am, a block of flats in Luohu district suddenly sank into the ground and leaned to one side, the Shenzhen government said on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter.
“Before it happened, the local community office heard noises coming from underground, and evacuated residents. Right now there are no casualties,” the Weibo post said. “The case is being investigated.”
In a short video published by state broadcaster CCTV, a residential building appears to have sunk into the ground and leans on the neighbouring building, with bricks and concrete strewn on the ground.
The area was closed off as police, ambulance crews and firefighters attended the scene.
The authorities also evacuated residents from surrounding buildings, moving them into temporary housing. A panel of experts began to investigate the cause of the collapse, while water, gas and electricity supplies were cut off in the area and construction work was halted as a precaution.
Earlier this month, a stadium in Shenzhen collapsed while demolition work was being carried out, killing three workers and injuring three. The part of the venue that collapsed had previously been used as a basketball court but was being renovated, with most of the interior having been torn down apart from a few pillars supporting the roof.
BEIJING (Reuters) – China will exempt Tesla Inc’s (TSLA.O) electric vehicles (EV) from purchase tax, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said on its website.
China currently levies a 10% purchase tax on the sale of each vehicle. The move could reduce the cost of buying a Tesla car by up to 99,000 yuan ($13,957.82), according to a post on Tesla’s social media WeChat account.
Tesla’s pre-market share price jumped more than 5% after the announcement.
Sixteen variants – all the Tesla models sold in the country – are listed on the document issued by MIIT, including Model S, X and 3. No reason was given for the decision to exclude the cars from the tax.
The U.S. EV maker is building a plant in Shanghai, the firm’s first overseas factory.
It is due to start production by the end of the year and Tesla has said it should be able to build 3,000 Model 3 vehicles a week in its initial phases.
The plant is slated to have annual output capacity of 250,000 vehicles after production of the Model Y is added.
New facility is designed to help scientists study particles that help deflect cosmic rays in the high atmosphere
Despite scepticism among some scientists, those familiar with the project insist radar will have a range about 10 times greater than existing ones
When completed the new laser radar will be used to study the high atmosphere. Photo: Handout
China has started building the world’s most powerful laser radar designed to study the physics of the Earth’s high atmosphere, according to state media reports and scientists informed of the project.
It is described as having a detection range of 1,000km (600 miles) – 10 times that of existing lasers – and will be used to study atmospheric particles that form the planet’s first line of defence against hostile elements from outer space such as cosmic rays and solar winds.
The facility, to be built on a site that remains classified, is expected to be up and running within four years and will form part of an ambitious project to reduce the risk from abnormal solar activities.
The radar will use a high-energy laser beam that can pierce through clouds, bypass the International Space Station and reach the outskirts of the atmosphere, beyond the orbiting height of most Earth observation satellites.
Lasers help tell ghostly story of doomed Nazi submarine U-576 and its entombed crew
There, the air becomes so thin that scientists will be able to count the number of gas atoms found within a radius of several metres.
These high-altitude observations could greatly expand our knowledge of a part of the atmosphere that has been little studied because the distances involved mean no one has been able to make direct observations from the ground.
“The large-calibre laser radar array will achieve the first detection of atmospheric density of up to 1,000km in human history,” said a statement posted on the website of the Chinese Academy of Sciences on Tuesday, a day after the launch of the project.
But the claim has been greeted with some scepticism in the scientific world.
“I think the 1,000km is a misprint!” professor Geraint Vaughan, director of observations at the National Centre for Atmospheric Science in the UK, replied when asked about the project.
Vaughan, who is also a Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society, said that while he thought the Chinese announcement was “very interesting”, it did not seem possible with existing technology.
At present, the effective range of atmospheric lasers is about 100 kilometres.
Some other senior scientists in China and overseas also expressed doubt about the project, although they requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue.
US warns airmen to beware of laser attacks near China’s military base in Djibouti
“There are other approaches, such as launching a satellite. Building such a huge, expensive machine on the ground does not make sense,” said a Beijing-based laser scientist.
But several researchers told the South China Morning Post that the project did exist, and insisted that 1,000km range was not a mistake.
Hua Dengxin, a professor at Xian University of Technology and a lead scientist in China’s laser radar development programmes, said: “I have heard of the project, yes. But I cannot speak about it.”
Powerful telescopes will pick up the signals reflected back to earth. Photo: Handout
According to publicly available information, the facility will use several large optical telescopes to pick up the faint signals reflected by the high-altitude atoms when the laser is fired at them.
The project is part of the Meridian Space Weather Monitoring Project, an ambitious programme that started in 2008 to build one of the largest, most advanced observation networks on Earth to monitor and forecast solar activities.
By 2025 Meridian stations containing some of the world’s most powerful radar systems will be established across the world – with facilities in Arctic and Antarctic, South China Sea, the Gobi desert, the Middle East, Central Asia and South America.
China in race for counter-drone tech and laser weapons as it tries to catch up with US
The purpose of the Meridian project, according to the Chinese government, is to reduce the risk abnormal solar activities pose to a wide range of Chinese assets including super-high voltage power grids, wireless communication, satellite constellations, space stations or even a future base on the Moon.
Chinese laser scientists have developed some of the world’s most sophisticated systems in recent years, including ranging stations that can track the movement of satellites and space debris, which the Pentagon has claimed have temporarily blinded some American scientists.
Last year researchers based in Xian, the capital of Shaanxi province, announced that they had developed a “laser AK-47” that could set fire to target from a distance of 800 metres.
The use of such a powerful laser raises concerns that passing objects such as planes, satellites or spacecraft – to say nothing of birds – may be at risk from its beams.
But Professor Qiao Yanli, engineer in chief at the Anhui Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said there was an “extremely low” risk of this happening.
“The sky is enormous. Getting hit by a tiny beam is almost impossible,” he said.
Some much smaller laser radars, such as those installed in auto-driving test vehicles, have reportedly damaged digital cameras by burning a few pixels on sensor.
But spacecraft such as earth observation satellites, according to Qiao, usually have some protection mechanisms, such as a warning system, to avoid permanent damage caused by an accidental laser hit.
‘Laser AK-47’? Chinese developer answers sceptics with videos of gun being tested
Professor Li Yuqiang, a researcher at the Yunnan Observatories in Kunming, whose team has measured the distance between the Earth and the Moon by shooting lasers at a reflector placed on the lunar surface during the US Apollo 15 mission, said detecting atom-sized targets on the fringes of the atmosphere posed many technical challenges.
“The number of photons [particles of light] reflected by the sparse gas particles will be very small. Even if they can be picked up by large telescopes on the ground, the analysis will require some very good algorithms to separate the useful signals from the noise,” Li said.
“How that can be achieved is beyond the scope of my knowledge.”
Three years ago, many journeys through villages in India’s Sundarbans Delta were treacherous. Women suffered miscarriages and children’s education was suffering because it was hard for them to get to hospitals and schools.
But then, a group of women decided to take matters into their own hands, by building their own road.
Image copyright JEN SMITH
Image copyright JEN SMITH
Image copyright JEN SMITH
Image copyright JEN SMITH
Image copyright JEN SMITH
Image copyright JEN SMITH
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 