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 GETTY IMAGESImage caption International students are uncertain of the future in the wake of Covid-19
Two years ago, 29-year-old Raunaq Singh started working towards his dream of pursuing an MBA from one of the world’s top business schools.
In January 2020, he was waitlisted by UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business in California, and was asked to send more information to bolster his case for admission.
“So, I quit my stable job of five years and started working with a mental wellness start-up as a consultant,” Mr Singh says.
“I’m on a major pay cut because the purpose of joining this company wasn’t to earn money, but to add value to my application.”
Fortunately, he was accepted at Berkeley, and was due to start his course in September.
But then the world changed as Covid-19 spread, plunging the immediate future into uncertainty.
Mr Singh is one of hundreds of thousands of Indian students who were planning to study abroad. But now they are not quite sure what will happen given international travel restrictions, new social distancing norms and the sheer uncertainty of what the next few months will bring.
Image copyright MEEHIKA BARUAImage caption Ms Barua is one of the hundreds of thousands of Indians who wants to study abroad
Every year, in June and July, students flood visa centres and consulates to start the paperwork to travel and study abroad. But things look different this year.
“There’s a lot of stress and anxiety and tension at this time but not enough clarity,” says Meehika Barua, 23, who wants to study journalism in the UK.
“We don’t know when international travel restrictions will be lifted or whether we’d be able to get our visas in time. We may also have to take classes online.”
Some universities across the UK and the US are giving international students the option to defer their courses to the next semester or year, while others have mandated online classes until the situation improves.
The University of Cambridge recently announced that lectures will be online only until next year. Others, like Greenwich University, will have a mix of online and face-to-face approaches while its international students can defer to the next semester.
“It feels a little unfair, especially after spending a year-and-half to get admission in one of these schools,” Mr Singh says. “Now, a part of the experience is compromised.”
Like him, many others are disappointed at the prospect of virtual classes.
Image copyright PA MEDIAImage caption Cambridge University has announced that all lectures will be online
“The main reason we apply to these universities is to be able to get the experience of studying on campus or because we want to work in these countries. We want to absorb the culture there,” Ms Barua says.
Studying abroad is also expensive. Many US and UK universities charge international students a higher fee. And then there’s the additional cost of applications or standardised tests.
Virtual classes mean they don’t have to pay for a visa, air tickets or living expenses. But many students are hesitant about spending their savings or borrowing money to pay for attending college in their living room.
Even if, months later, the situation improves to some extent, and students could travel abroad and enrol on campus, they say that brings its own challenges.
For one, Mr Singh points out, there is the steep cost of healthcare, and questions over access to it, as countries like the US are experiencing a deluge of infections and deaths.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption Students are also unsure of finding jobs overseas after graduation
And then there are the dimming job prospects. The pandemic has squeezed the global economy, so employers are less likely to hire, or sponsor visas for foreign workers.
“For international students, the roller coaster has been more intense because there is increased uncertainty about their ability to get jobs in the US after graduation, and for some, in their ability to get to the US at all,” says Taya Carothers, who works in Northwestern University’s international student office.
The idea of returning to India with an expensive degree and the looming unemployment is scaring students – especially since for many of them, the decision to study abroad is tied to a desire to find a well-paying job there.
“The risk we take when we leave our home country and move to another country – that risk has increased manifold,” Mr Singh adds.
The current crisis – and its economic impact – has affected the decision of nearly half the Indians who wanted to study abroad, according to a recent report by the QS, a global education network.
And logistics will also pose a challenge – colleges have to enforce social distancing across campuses, including dormitories, and accommodate students from multiple time zones in virtual classes.
“Regardless of how good your technology is, you’re still going to face problems like internet issues,” says Sadiq Basha, who heads a study abroad consultancy.
He adds that there might be a knee-jerk reaction as a large number of international students consider deferring their admission to 2021. But he’s positive that “in the long term, the ambitions of Indian students are not going to go down.”
Mr Singh is still waiting to see how things will unfold in the next few months, but he’s almost certain he will enrol and start his first semester of the two-year program online.
“Since I’ve been preparing for over a year now, I think mentally I’m already there,” he says.
Virus may have jumped from animal to humans long before the first detection in Wuhan, according to research by an international team of scientists
Findings significantly reduce the possibility of the virus having a laboratory origin, director of the US National Institute of Health says
An international team of scientists say the coronavirus may have jumped from animal to humans long before the first detection in China. Photo: AP
The coronavirus that causes Covid-19 might have been quietly spreading among humans for years or even decades before the sudden outbreak that sparked a global health crisis, according to an investigation by some of the world’s top virus hunters.
Researchers from the United States, Britain and Australia looked at piles of data released by scientists around the world for clues about the virus’ evolutionary past, and found it might have made the jump from animal to humans long before the first detection in the central China city of Wuhan.
Though there could be other possibilities, the scientists said the coronavirus carried a unique mutation that was not found in suspected animal hosts, but was likely to occur during repeated, small-cluster infections in humans.
The study, conducted by Kristian Andersen from the Scripps Research Institute in California, Andrew Rambaut from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, Ian Lipkin from Columbia University in New York, Edward Holmes from the University of Sydney, and Robert Garry from Tulane University in New Orleans, was published in the scientific journal Nature Medicine on March 17.
Dr Francis Collins, director of the US National Institute of Health, who was not involved in the research, said the study suggested a possible scenario in which the coronavirus crossed from animals into humans before it became capable of causing disease in people.
“Then, as a result of gradual evolutionary changes over years or perhaps decades, the virus eventually gained the ability to spread from human to human and cause serious, often life-threatening disease,” he said in an article published on the institute’s website on Thursday.
In December, doctors in Wuhan began noticing a surge in the number of people suffering from a mysterious pneumonia. Tests for flu and other pathogens returned negative. An unknown strain was isolated, and a team from the Wuhan Institute of Virology led by Shi Zhengli traced its origin to a bat virus found in a mountain cave close to the China-Myanmar border.
The two viruses shared more than 96 per cent of their genes, but the bat virus could not infect humans. It lacked a spike protein to bind with receptors in human cells.
Coronaviruses with a similar spike protein were later discovered in Malayan pangolins
by separate teams from Guangzhou and Hong Kong, which led some researchers to believe that a recombination of genomes had occurred between the bat and pangolin viruses.
Doctors in Wuhan began noticing a surge in the number of people suffering from a mysterious pneumonia in December. Photo: Handout
But the new strain, or SARS-Cov-2, had a mutation in its genes known as a polybasic cleavage site that was unseen in any coronaviruses found in bats or pangolins, according to Andersen and his colleagues.
This mutation, according to separate studies by researchers from China, France and the US, could produce a unique structure in the virus’ spike protein to interact with furin, a widely distributed enzyme in the human body. That could then trigger a fusion of the viral envelope and human cell membrane when they came into contact with one another.
Some human viruses including HIV and Ebola have the same furin-like cleavage site, which makes them contagious.
It is possible that the mutation happened naturally to the virus on animal hosts. Sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome) and Mers (Middle East respiratory syndrome), for instance, were believed to have been direct descendants of species found in masked civets and camels, which had a 99 per cent genetic similarity.
There was, however, no such direct evidence for the novel coronavirus, according to the international team. The gap between human and animal types was too large, they said, so they proposed another alternative.
“It is possible that a progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 jumped into humans, acquiring the genomic features described above through adaptation during undetected human-to-human transmission,” they said in the paper.
“Once acquired, these adaptations would enable the pandemic to take off and produce a sufficiently large cluster of cases to trigger the surveillance system that detected it.”
They said also that the most powerful computer models based on current knowledge about the coronavirus could not generate such a strange but highly efficient spike protein structure to bind with host cells.
The study had significantly reduced, if not ruled out, the possibility of a laboratory origin, Collins said.
“In fact, any bioengineer trying to design a coronavirus that threatened human health probably would never have chosen this particular conformation for a spike protein,” he said.
The findings by Western scientists echoed the mainstream opinion among Chinese researchers.
Zhong Nanshan, who advises Beijing on outbreak containment policies, had said on numerous occasions that there was growing scientific evidence to suggest the origin of the virus might not have been in China.
“The occurrence of Covid-19 in Wuhan does not mean it originated in Wuhan,” he said last week.
A doctor working in a public hospital treating Covid-19 patients in Beijing said numerous cases of mysterious pneumonia outbreaks had been reported by health professionals in several countries last year.
Re-examining the records and samples of these patients could reveal more clues about the history of this worsening pandemic, said the doctor, who asked not to be named due to the political sensitivity of the issue.
“There will be a day when the whole thing comes to light.”
Media caption Americans are taken from the docked ship to Haneda airport in Tokyo
Two planes carrying hundreds of US citizens from a coronavirus-hit cruise ship have left Japan, officials say.
One plane has landed at a US Air Force air base in California, and its passengers will be isolated at military facilities for 14 days.
There were some 400 Americans on board the Diamond Princess. The ship with some 3,700 passengers and crew has been in quarantine since 3 February.
Meanwhile, China reported a total of 2,048 new cases on Monday.
Of those new cases, 1,933 were from Hubei province, the epicentre of the outbreak.
More than 70,500 people across China have been infected by the virus. In Hubei alone, the official number of cases stands at 58,182, with 1,692 deaths. Most new cases and deaths have been reported in Wuhan, Hubei’s largest city.
In other developments:
In Japan, a public gathering to celebrate the birthday of new Emperor Naruhito later this week has been cancelled, due to concerns over the spread of the virus while organisers of the Tokyo marathon due to take place on 1 March are considering whether to cancel the amateur part of the race, reports say
In China, the National People’s Congress standing committee said it would meet next week to discuss a delay of this year’s Congress – the Communist Party’s most important annual gathering – because of the outbreak
At the weekend, an American woman tested positive for the virus in Malaysia after leaving a cruise liner docked off the coast of Cambodia
A Russian court has ordered a woman who escaped from a quarantine facility to go back and stay there until she is confirmed to be disease-free, Fontanka news agency reports. Alla Ilyina has until Wednesday to return
What’s happening on the Diamond Princess?
The cruise ship was put in quarantine in Japan’s port of Yokohama after a man who disembarked in Hong Kong was found to have the virus.
On Monday, Japanese officials said there were 99 new cases of infections on board the ship, bringing the total to 454 confirmed cases. It is the largest cluster of cases outside China.
A Russian woman who was on board and tested positive is thought to be the first Russian national to contract the virus after the two previous cases found in Russia were Chinese nationals, Reuters news agency reports.
She will be taken to a hospital for treatment, the Russian embassy in Japan said.
At least 40 US citizens who were on board are infected and will be treated in Japan, Dr Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases told US broadcaster CBS.
Image copyright AFPImage caption Those bound for the US left from Tokyo’s Haneda Airport
The two aircraft chartered by the US government left Tokyo’s Haneda Airport in the early hours of Monday. The second flight was due to land at another base in Texas.
More than 300 passengers are being repatriated voluntarily, the US state department said. Fourteen of them were reported during transit to have tested positive for the virus and were being kept separate from the other passengers, it said.
we would like to just finish the quarantine on the ship as planned, decompress in a non-quarantine environment in Japan for a few days, then fly back to the U.S. pursuant to our own arrangements. What’s wrong with that?
The smartphones were distributed so people could use an app, created by Japan’s health ministry, which links users with doctors, pharmacists and mental health counsellors. Phones registered outside of Japan are unable to access the app.
Other evacuation flights have been arranged to repatriate residents of Israel, Hong Kong and Canada. On Monday, Australia announced that it would evacuate 200 of its citizens too.
What is happening in China?
According to official figures for 16 February, 100 people died from the virus in Hubei, down from 139 on Saturday.
The Chinese authorities are tightening curbs on movement to combat the outbreak. People in Hubei province, which has 60 million people, have been ordered to stay at home, though they will be allowed to leave in an emergency.
In addition, a single person from each household will be allowed to leave the building or compound they live in every three days to buy food and essential items.
On housing estates, one entrance will be kept open. It will be guarded to ensure that only residents can enter or leave.
All businesses will stay closed, except chemists, hotels, food shops and medical services.
“The effects of epidemic prevention and control in various parts of the country can already be seen.”
The proportion of infected patients considered to be in a “serious condition” has dropped nationwide from more than 15% to just over 7%, according to China’s State Council.
Taiwan has reported a death from the illness – a taxi driver, 61, who had not travelled abroad recently but had diabetes and hepatitis B, Health Minister Chen Shih-chung said.
The minister said many of his passengers had come from China.
Outside China, there have been more than 500 cases in nearly 30 countries. Four others have died outside mainland China – in France, Hong Kong, the Philippines and Japan.
Meanwhile, a plane carrying 175 evacuated Nepalis, mostly students, has arrived in Kathmandu from Wuhan.
US President Donald Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi exchanged warm words of friendship in Texas at a rare mass rally for a foreign leader.
Around 50,000 people gathered for what Mr Trump called a “profoundly historic event” on Sunday in Houston.
The “Howdy, Modi!” event was billed as one of the largest ever receptions of a foreign leader in the US.
Mr Modi, however, may face a frostier reception at the UN General Assembly.
He is likely to face criticism over tensions in Indian-administered Kashmir, which he stripped of its special status last month, promising to restore the region to its “past glory”.
The region has been in lockdown for more than a month with thousands of activists, politicians and business leaders detained.
Trade talks and the UN General Assembly are on the Indian prime minister’s agenda during his week-long visit to the United States.
Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, who has been the most vocal international leader to oppose India’s Kashmir move, is also in the US for the UN conference. Like Mr Modi, he will have a one-on-one meeting with Mr Trump on the sidelines of the summit.
A 90-minute show, featuring 400 performers, warmed up the crowd before Mr Modi and Mr Trump shared the stage.
“I’m so thrilled to be here in Texas with one of America’s greatest, most devoted and most loyal friends, Prime Minister Modi of India,” Mr Trump told the crowd.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption Narendra Modi and Donald Trump leave the stage holding hands at Houston’s NRG Stadium
In his speech, Mr Modi said India has a “true friend” in the White House, describing Mr Trump as “warm, friendly, accessible, energetic and full of wit”.
“From CEO to commander-in-chief, from boardrooms to the Oval Office, from studios to the global stage… he has left a lasting impact everywhere,” Mr Modi said.
Personal-touch diplomacy played to perfection
Brajesh Upadhyay, BBC News, Houston
This was exactly the kind of crowd size and energy President Trump loves at his rallies.
Only here the chants were for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Mr Trump was the superstar invited to the party. But the crowd did not disappoint him either and greeted him with chants of “USA!”, most heard at Trump rallies.
The personal-touch diplomacy with Mr Modi’s trademark bear hugs was played to perfection.
This rally has been called a win-win for both the leaders. For President Trump, it was a chance to court Indian-Americans for the 2020 presidential election race where Texas could emerge as a battleground state. For Mr Modi, a PR triumph and picture with the president of the United States may help him shrug off the criticism over his recent strong-arm policies at home.
Houston’s NRG Stadium, where the event was hosted, was the first stop for Mr Modi, whose Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won a landslide victory in this year’s Indian elections.
Greeted by a standing ovation, Mr Trump used his speech to heap praise on Mr Modi, who he said was doing a “truly exceptional job for India” and its people.
Mr Trump also paid tribute to the Indian-American community, telling them “we are truly proud to have you as Americans”.
The US has a population of about 4 million Indians who are seen as an increasingly important vote bank in the country.
Apart from Mr Trump, organisers also invited Democrats to the event – House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer was among those who spoke.
The 2010 US census shows that Texas is home to the fourth-largest Indian-American population in the country after California, New York and New Jersey.
Analysis of voting patterns shows the community tends overwhelmingly to support the Democrat party.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption The event, dubbed “Howdy, Modi!”, was attended by an estimated 50,000 people
No stranger to nationalist rhetoric himself, Mr Trump compared security at the US-Mexico border to the tensions between India and Pakistan in the tinderbox Kashmir region.
“Both India and US also understand that to keep our communities safe, we must protect our borders,” Trump said.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption Donald Trump described Narendra Modi as one of America’s most “loyal friends”
In India, the rally was closely watched, with most mainstream media outlets running live news updates of what was transpiring on stage.
The event had been making headlines for days before as well.
On Twitter, many people shared instant analysis and opinions of what was taking place on the stage with the sentiment being overwhelmingly positive. Many praised Mr Modi for what they saw as his statesmanship and diplomatic acumen with a lot of praise coming in for the US president as well.
BEIJING/HONG KONG (Reuters) – Segway-Ninebot Group, a Beijing-based electric scooter maker, on Friday unveiled a scooter that can return itself to charging stations without a driver, a potential boon for the burgeoning scooter-sharing industry.
Ninebot said Uber and Lyft, the ride-hailing giants that are expanding into scooter-sharing, would be among the customers for the new semi-autonomous vehicles that are expected to hit roads early next year.
Gao Lufeng, Ninebot chairman and chief executive, told Reuters in an interview that AI-driven scooters, controlled remotely from the cloud, could radically improve the economics of scooter-sharing.
“The pain point for scooter operators is to better maintain the scooters at a lower cost,” he said. Currently, operators of scooter sharing fleets have to collect the machines manually for re-charging.
Formed by the 2015 combination of China’s Ninebot and U.S. transportation pioneer Segway, the company has quietly become the largest supplier for scooter-sharing companies such as Bird and Lime.
“I believe scooters will replace bicycles as the prime solution for micro-mobility,” Gao said. “It’s human nature to save energy when commuting.”
The scooter-sharing fad was triggered two years ago with the launch of Bird in California. Venture-capital investors have since poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the sector, and fleets of electric-powered scooters now operate in cities across the U.S. and Europe.
Segway-Ninebot Group has applied to list its shares on the China’s new Nasdaq-style board for homegrown tech firms, the STAR Market. The company sold 1.6 million scooters in 2018, according to a prospectus filed in April.
Lyft and Uber did not immediately respond to emailed requests for comment.
The new scooters will be priced at close to 10,000 yuan ($1,420), more than the company’s traditional scooters, which it sells to scooter companies for $100-$300.
The new machines will start road testing next month and will be largely commercialized in the first quarter of 2020.
The company also launched two self-driving delivery robots — one for outdoor delivery, the other for indoor services.
Ninebot said the unmanned delivery robots will initially serve the food delivery industry in China.
The company is in talks with food delivery operators, including Meituan Dianping and Alibaba Group’s Ele.me, to begin service by the first half of next year.
Civil affairs ministry reaffirms plan to eradicate names that ‘violate the core values of socialism, damage national confidence’
One man says it reminds him of the dark days of the Cultural Revolution
Beijing wants to eradicate place and property names, like “East Rome’s Garden”, that are influenced by foreign or “weird” words. Photo: Weibo
Beijing has reiterated its commitment to rid Chinese cities of “big, foreign and weird” property and place names, sparking a backlash from the public.
The campaign began last year when six government departments introduced a joint policy requiring provincial and county authorities to identify all such properties within their jurisdictions and rename them by the end of March.
On Friday, the Ministry of Civil Affairs reaffirmed its support for the plan, but reminded local governments to implement it “prudently and appropriately”.
Many Chinese properties, especially hotels and apartment buildings, incorporate famous foreign places, like Manhattan, California or Paris, into their names, but under the new rule they all have to go. According to a report by local newspaper Sanqin Metropolis Daily, in one city in Xian, the capital of Shaanxi province, at least 98 apartment projects, hotels, townships, communities and office towers need to be rebranded.
Many Chinese properties, like the Vienna International Hotel, incorporate famous foreign places into their names. Photo: Weibo
But for some people, the plan is nothing more than a waste of time and money.
“If projects are forced to change their names, what about the name on the property certificate, the enterprise licence and tax registration? Do they have to be changed too?” asked Zhu Yun, a woman who lives in Guangzhou, the capital of south China’s Guangdong province.
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“And what’s the standard for the new names, and who’s going to do the renaming? It’s just a waste of people’s energy and money, and will do nothing for the national culture or confidence.”
Zhu Min, an octogenarian who also lives in Guangdong, said the scheme had echoes of a darker time in China’s history.
“It reminds me of the bad times of the Cultural Revolution,” he said. “At that time, a great number of streets, roads and stores were forced to rename, because they contained elements of old customs and old culture.”
The debate has also been raging online, with tens of thousands of people airing their views on social media.
“Cultural and national confidence is about respect for multiculturalism,” one person wrote on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform.
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Despite the outcry, the civil affairs ministry said the implementation of the scheme was “an important measure … to carry forward the national and local culture”, Xinhua reported.
“The relevant regulations and guidelines of the campaign should be strictly observed to prevent the campaign from being expanded in an arbitrary manner,” it said.
The plan announced last year stated that “big, foreign, weird” place names and those based on homonyms “violate the core values of socialism, damage national confidence, and affect the production and lives of the people, and must be rectified and cleaned up”.
The city’s ambitious waste and recycling rules took effect on Monday, aiming to emulate successes of comparable policies in Japan, Taiwan and California
President Xi Jinping has urged China – the world’s second-biggest waste producer after the United States – to sort rubbish better
Recyclables such as plastic must be separated from wet garbage, dry garbage and hazardous waste under the new rules in Shanghai. Photo: AFP
At 9pm, Li Zhigang was sitting in front of his fruit shop on a bustling street in central Shanghai’s Xujiahui area, peeling the thin layers of plastic from rotten pears and mangoes.
“This is so much trouble!” he mumbled to himself while throwing the plastic into one trash can and the fruit into another.
In the past, Li simply threw away what could not be sold with the packaging on, but from July 1 he could be fined up to 200 yuan (about US$30) for doing so.
Like Li, many of the tens of millions of residents in the eastern Chinese city have been complaining in recent weeks that the introduction of compulsory
is making life difficult, but at the same time have been having to learn to do it.
Calls for garbage sorting have brought little progress in China in the past decade, but Shanghai is leading a fresh start for the world’s second-largest waste producer with its new municipal solid waste (MSW) regime, observers have said.
China generated 210 million tonnes of MSW in 2017, 48 million tonnes less than the United States, according to the World Bank’s What a Waste database.
“If we say China is now classifying its waste, then it’s Shanghai that is really doing it,” said Chen Liwen, a veteran environmentalist who has worked for non-governmental organisations devoted to waste classification for the past decade.
“It’s starting late, comparing with the US, Japan or Taiwan, but if it’s successful in such a megacity with such a huge population, it will mean a lot for the world,” she said.
A cleaner re-sorts household waste left at a residential facility in Shanghai. Photo: Alice Yan
Household waste in the city is now required to be sorted into four categories: wet garbage (household food), dry garbage (residual waste), recyclable waste and hazardous waste.
General rubbish bins that had previously taken all types of household waste were removed from buildings. Instead, residents were told to visit designated trash collection stations to dispose of different types of waste during designated periods of the day.
Companies and organisations flouting the new rules could be fined 50,000-500,000 yuan (US$7,000-70,000), while individual offenders risked a fine of 50-200 yuan.
The city’s urban management officers will be mainly responsible for identifying those who breach the rules.
Huang Rong, the municipal government’s deputy secretary general, said on Friday that nearly 14,000 inspections had been carried out around the city and more than 13,000 people had been warned on the issue since the regulations were announced at the start of the year.
As July 1’s enforcement of the rules approached, it became a much-discussed topic among Shanghainese people. A hashtag meaning “Shanghai residents almost driven crazy by garbage classification” was one of the most popular on China’s Twitter-like Weibo platform.
“My daughter took a box of expired medicine from her workplace to the trash collection station near our home yesterday because she couldn’t find the local bin for hazardous waste,” Li said.
While the measures force a change of habits for most people, they bring opportunities for some.
Du Huanzheng, director of the Recycling Economy Institute at Tongji University, said waste sorting was crucial for China’s recycling industry.
“Without proper classification, a lot of garbage that can be recycled is burned, and that’s a pity,” he said. “After being classified, items suitable to be stored and transported can now be recycled.”
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Shanghai’s refuse treatment plants deal with 19,300 tonnes of residual waste and 5,050 tonnes of kitchen waste every day, according to the municipal government. By contrast, only 3,300 tonnes of recyclables per day are collected at present.
Nationwide, the parcel delivery industry used more than 13 billion polypropylene woven bags, plastic bags and paper boxes as well as 330 million rolls of tape in 2016, but less than 20 per cent of this was recycled, according to a report by the State Post Bureau.
Prices of small sortable rubbish bins for home use have surged on e-commerce platforms, while bin makers are also developing smart models in response to new needs.
Some communities are deploying bins that people are required to sign in with their house number to use, and are equipped with a “big data analysis system”. The system records households have “actively participated” and which have not, so that neighbourhood management can publicise their addresses and make house visits, according to a report by Thepaper.cn.
In a residential community in Songjiang district, grocery store owner Nie Chuanguo has found something new to sell: a rubbish throwing service.
He has offered to visit homes, collect waste and throw it into the right bin at a designated time. He charges 30 yuan a month for those living on the ground and first floors, 40 yuan for those on the second and third, and 50 yuan for the fourth and fifth.
“This service will start from July 1. Many people have come to inquire about it,” he said.
According to Du, waste classification is not only about environmental impact or business opportunities. “Garbage sorting is an important part of a country’s soft power,” he said.
For China, it was an opportunity to improve its international reputation, he said. “In the past, Chinese people were rich and travelled abroad, but they threw rubbish wilfully, making foreigners not admit we are a respected powerhouse.”
He added: “It’s also related to 1.3 billion people’s health, since the current waste treatment methods – burying and burning – are not friendly to the environment.”
Shanghai’s part in tackling waste comes amid President Xi Jinping’s repeated calls for the country to sort waste better.
“For local officials, it is a political task,” said Chen, who heads a waste management programme in rural China called Zero Waste Villages.
Huang said the president had asked Shanghai in particular to set a good example in waste classification.
In March 2017, the central government set out plans for a standardised system and regulations for
, with a target for 46 major cities, including Shanghai, to recycle 35 per cent of their waste by then.
In early June, Xi issued a long statement calling for more action from local governments.
However, it was a long process that required input from individuals, government and enterprises, Du said.
“Japan took one generation to move to doing its waste sorting effectively, so we shouldn’t have the expectation that our initiative will succeed in several years,” Du said.
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“The lessons we can learn from Japan include carrying out campaigns again and again, and paying close attention to educating young pupils about rubbish classification.”
Chen echoed that Shanghai’s waste sorting frenzy now was only a beginning.
“What we can see now is that people are being pushed to sort waste by regulators, but what’s next? How shall we keep up the enthusiasm?” she asked.
She suggested that how well officials worked on garbage sorting should be included in their job appraisal, and that ultimately people should pay for waste disposal.
“The key to waste classification, going by international experience, is making polluters pay,” Chen said.
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There is plenty of experience for Shanghai to learn from in California, where unrecyclable waste is charged for at twice the price of recyclables, and Taiwan, where people are charged only for disposal of residual waste, according to Chen.
Taiwan has one of the world’s most impressive recycling rates, with nearly 60 per cent of its waste between January and October last year having been recycled, according to the Taipei government.
The daily amount of garbage produced per person during that period was about 0.41kg – down substantially from 1.14kg in 1997 – the government said.
Hong Kong has tried to copy the Taipei model over the years but failed, with a recycling rate of MSW slightly above 30 per cent in recent years, according to official data.
until late 2020 at the earliest. Under its plan, 80 per cent of household waste will have to go into designated bags and will be priced at an average of 11 HK cents (1 US cent) per litre.
On Friday, Shanghai officials admitted that there were plenty of challenges involved in
sorting and transport.
Zhang Lixin, deputy chief of the municipal housing administration, said: “Many property management companies fear the difficulties brought by garbage sorting or are reluctant to implement the new rules.”
The administration trained the heads of more than 200 companies across the city in April, he said.
“We do find that some cleaners and rubbish trucks mix the waste, despite residents being asked to throw different types in different bins,” said Deng Jianping, head of the city’s landscaping and city appearance administration – the government department spearheading the initiative.
In the interests of curbing such practices, they could face fines of up to 50,000 yuan or even have their licences revoked, he said.
‘There’s no need for a confrontation in technology because science has no borders,’ says the founder of CloudMinds
Huang has watched from up close as the US gradually descended from its telecoms supremacy and China caught up
Bill Huang in 2018. Photo: YouTube
Bill Huang, a Chinese-American telecoms industry veteran, used to target China and its vast, untapped market with the technological know-how he had learned in the US.
But over the past few years, the tables have turned. In his latest business endeavour, the engineer turned entrepreneur is relying on China for a key technology that would transform mobile communication for the next decade – and it is a technology the US has fallen behind on.
As one of the first young mainland Chinese to attend graduate school in the US after diplomatic relations were resumed 40 years ago, and as one of the early participants in Beijing’s global recruitment programme to attract top talent in science and technology, Huang has a unique perspective on the current bilateral stand-off that centres on technology.
CloudMinds Technology, a privately held robotics sector company he founded in 2015, needs the superfast 5G network to support its cloud-based platforms for operating intelligent robots. The next-generation wireless technology has become a flash point in the escalating US-China tech rivalry, and Huang is at the forefront of it all.
“It’s kind of like a one-sided rivalry. Because the US doesn’t have the [5G] technology,” Huang said on the sidelines of a recent conference on China in Philadelphia.
For months, the US government has waged a campaign to block the Chinese telecoms giant Huawei from dominating global 5G networks, lobbying allies to shun the company for what it says are risks of espionage or sabotage by Beijing.
Huawei is already ahead of its European rivals in market share thanks in part to its lower prices. But so far no companies in the US – which has long led the telecoms industry – can make the equipment needed to build the next generation of networks.
Huang, 57, who spent three decades in the mobile communication sector, has watched from up close as the US gradually descended from its telecoms supremacy and China quietly caught up.
Technology is not like martial arts, or Shakespeare’s book, it’s not like everything is copyrighted Bill Huang, CEO of CloudMinds Technology
In its heyday, US giants like AT&T sold network equipment to countries around the world. Huang himself once worked at AT&T’s research hub Bell Labs, a dominant leader in telecoms innovation known as “the idea factory” and arguably the most innovative scientific institution for a long stretch of the 20th century.
“In the last 20 years, the US went from [being] No 1 in the telecommunications industry to now almost exiting telecommunications equipment manufacturing,” Huang said, citing the acquisition of Lucent and Motorola by European counterparts.
It was a decline Huang witnessed with an initial sense of sadness. As a veteran of Bell Labs, he said, he had felt extremely proud of the company’s contribution not only to America, but to telecoms technology worldwide.
“But secondly I also felt a level of pride for China,” he said, “because it went from nothing in telecommunications to lead the world in telecommunications in less than 30 years.”
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Glenn O’Donnell, an analyst at Forrester Research, said the decline of major US telecoms providers had little to do with politics, but was a function of inadequate interest in innovatation because of their dominance in the field.
“The long lease cycles and until recently the relative maturity of the market really didn’t lend itself well for real innovation,” he said.
“And that’s now changing, and all of those players that decided not to play in telecommunications are now wishing they had a stake because there’s a lucrative new market.”
Also drastically different today is the state of relations between China and the US. As they fight their costly trade war, tensions and acrimony have spilled into other aspects of bilateral relations, from technology, defence and geopolitics to ideology. There are even warnings of “decoupling” – something almost unimaginable to Huang, whose personal trajectory has been shaped by the intertwined ties between his homeland and his adopted country.
Fifth-generation mobile telecommunications technology, or 5G, enables data to be transferred at a speed that is 20 times faster than current standards. Photo: Reuters
He calls himself “a product of China-US relations”. Such was his proud conviction that he gave his son the middle name “Nixon”, after the president who put relations with China back on track in 1972 with a historic trip to Beijing that ended over two decades of antagonism and isolation since the Chinese Communist Party took power.
The visit by Richard Nixon – who died in 1994, the same year Huang’s son was born – not only mended bilateral relations, but created an opportunity for Huang and many others like him: to learn the most advanced science and technology from the world’s leading innovation powerhouse.
Born in 1962 into an intellectual family in southwestern China, Huang spent most of his childhood in the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution.
“As professors, my parents had a very difficult time during the Cultural Revolution. But they insisted that we spend time to study,” he said.
Huang recalled being a “wild kid”, going to school to “have fun”. But when the time came to study, he was able to pick up the pace, which he attributed to the academic minds that run in his family.
Hailed as a “child prodigy”, he passed the country’s first university entrance exam in a decade at the age of 15. A year later, in 1978, he was in the first batch of students to enter university after the disruptions of the decade-long upheaval. He chose to major in electrical engineering, following in his father’s footsteps.
In his sophomore year at the Huazhong Institute of Technology, his parents told him to apply for graduate programmes in the US.
“They think the US has the best technology in the world, and they wanted me to come here to study,” he said. “I read everything about the US … and I was very eager to come.”
Arriving at the University of Illinois’ Chicago campus in 1982, at age 20, Huang was one of the first new Chinese graduates to further their studies in the US after the re-establishment of diplomatic relations in 1979. He did not speak English (although he could read it), and had to enrol in a three-month language training program before he could attend lectures.
He studied computer science in addition to electrical engineering, working day and night on projects in the lab – a time he looks back on with fondness.
“It was some of the most intense time in my life, I suppose,” Huang said. “But I was young and relentless, and I could go on for three days without sleep. … I thoroughly enjoyed it.”
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Despite their vastly different cultural backgrounds, Huang made friends with his American classmates and fellow foreign students, some of whom were from India and what was then the Soviet Union.
“I experienced zero racial prejudice,” he said. “That was Chicago in the 1980s. I don’t know what happened today, [but back then] it was thoroughly what I thought was the ‘melting pot’.”
In his computer science classes, Huang learned Unix – a state-of-the-art operating system developed by Bell Labs – from adjunct professors who had helped create the program.
Little did he know he would later become a researcher at Bell Labs. “That was the holy ground of telecommunications,” he said, still beaming with pride when speaking of his former employer, which invented, among other things, the communications satellite and the cellular telephone system.
Bill Huang as a graduate student in Chicago in the early 1980s. Photo: CCTV
In 1994, Huang joined 10 other former Bell Labs engineers at a California-based telecoms infrastructure provider that targeted the vast and underserved Chinese market. A year later, the company merged with a telecoms software company to become UTStarcom, with Huang as its co-founder and chief technology officer.
UTStarcom tapped into the fast-growing Chinese telecoms market with a low-cost, limited-range wireless service known as the Personal Access System (PAS). It went public on the Nasdaq exchange five years later. In 2001, China passed the US as having the most mobile phone customers. The rapidly expanding market propelled UTStarcom’s growth; its revenues increased tenfold between its IPO and 2003, when it controlled 60 per cent of China’s PAS market.
In 2007, having lived in the US for longer than he did in China and having become an American citizen, Huang moved from Silicon Valley to Beijing with his wife and son. China Mobile, the country’s largest telecoms operator, had asked him to help build a “Bell Labs for China” – a request he readily accepted.
“It was not only a simple job, but a responsibility, a challenge I thought I should accept no matter what,” he told Chinese state broadcaster CCTV in 2017.
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As the head of the China Mobile Research Institute, Huang led the carrier’s leap from 3G to 4G, and he was also at the centre of 5G research. “We put a lot of effort into researching what standards are required for the future network,” he said.
His return to China preceded the “Thousand Talents Plan”, a state-backed recruitment drive to lure the world’s brightest scientists and experts – especially those with roots in China – with lavish grants. But when the plan was set up in 2008, Huang was among the first batch of researchers to be enlisted.
“I express my heartfelt thanks to the state and the people for giving me such a good opportunity and condition to return home and serve the country,” Huang was quoted as saying at a forum for recipients of Thousand Talents awards hosted by People’s Daily in 2010.
“I worked for over 20 years abroad, and all my work was in the field of technology. I hope to bring the whole set of things I know back to China,” he added.
The recruitment scheme, much celebrated at the time, has become a sensitive subject today as tensions between the US and China escalate. It has drawn growing scrutiny and suspicion from the US, where investigators are looking for any connection to theft of American intellectual property. In response, China hushed up or deleted references to the programme in universities, companies and cyberspace.
A robot made by CloudMinds Technology showcased at the Mobile World Congress Barcelona in February. Photo: Handout
When asked about US complaints regarding China’s alleged technology theft, Huang gave a vehement defence of China.
“I think these are just basically blatant accusations with no ground,” he said. “Ninety-nine per cent [of the technologies] are not stolen. There are industrial espionage cases … but they’re not systematic cases, and they’re not [the result of the] rivalry between China and the US – they’re the result of competition.”
Huang also dismissed accusations that Chinese scientists and experts have “stolen” US technology.
“Technology is not like martial arts, or Shakespeare’s book, it’s not like everything is copyrighted,” he said.
“Everyone in Silicon Valley in the last 50 years started from somewhere, and then they become an entrepreneur and they move [on] to start their own companies. So in the early days, everyone took a little bit from what they have worked on.”
“It was customary, and then it became very litigious. Then people started saying: wait a minute, you can do that? So there were many exemplary cases, then it became more and more refined in what you can take and what you cannot take; what is protected and what is not protected. All of these things are happening industry-wide, it’s not a single US and China issue.”
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But intellectual property theft is not the only American grievance. Many US companies have accused China of forced technology transfers, with foreign businesses required to hand over technology to their Chinese partners in exchange for access to the market.
Huang said that complaint “has been there since day one”.
“Chinese companies will always complain about American companies. American companies will always complain about Chinese companies. The reason is very simple: every company would want to use regulations and law to their advantage,” he said.
A trained engineer, Huang holds a “globalist” view of technology – at odds with the national security perspective that has become prevalent in Washington.
“There’s no need for a confrontation in technology because science has no borders,” he said.
“In Huawei labs, there are many American engineers. In Intel and Qualcomm’s labs, I can assure you there are many Chinese engineers, and there are many German, French, Swedish engineers in all of these organisations. The fact they’re sold by a Chinese company or they’re sold by an American company has no meaning because behind the technologies is an international effort.”
To make his point, Huang calls the technology created by CloudMinds a “US and China technology”.
“I mean, how do you categorise it? Is it created by China or the US? It’s created by both. Because we have engineers in Silicon Valley, and we have engineers in Beijing.”
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The company has dual headquarters, with its global operation based in Santa Clara, California, and its China operation based in Beijing – a structure Huang says now “makes perfect sense”.
“That was by design, by our lawyers. They kind of foresaw, if there [are] going to be trade tensions, this would be the right way to do it.”
But Huang questions if these tensions – a large part of which he said had been “politicised” – are so deeply embedded in every corner of society.
“I come to the United States very often, and I talk to the industry. I still feel it is the same America.”
“I encountered no scrutiny, no warning, and everyone is encouraging us, both from the US and from China, to continue our practice,” he said, adding that he only felt the tension when speaking to lawyers and government officials.
“But I am worried by all these stories. I think that’s why I said earlier: in the media it all looks very scary, but in practice, it’s all business as usual.”
US paper mills are expanding capacity to take advantage of a glut of cheap waste materials
Some facilities that previously exported plastic or metal to China have retooled so they can process it themselves
China phased in import restrictions on scrap paper and plastics in January last year. Photo: AP
The halt on China’s imports of waste paper and plastic that has disrupted US recycling programmes has also spurred investment in American plants that process recyclables.
US paper mills are expanding capacity to take advantage of a glut of cheap scrap. Some facilities that previously exported plastic or metal to China have retooled so they can process it themselves.
And in a twist, the investors include Chinese companies that are still interested in having access to waste paper or flattened bottles as raw material for manufacturing.
“It’s a very good moment for recycling in the United States,” said Neil Seldman, co-founder of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a Washington-based organisation that helps cities improve recycling programmes.
Global scrap prices plummeted in the wake of China’s ban. Photo: AP
China, which had long been the world’s largest destination for paper, plastic and other recyclables, phased in import restrictions in January last year.
Global scrap prices plummeted, prompting waste-hauling companies to pass the cost of sorting and baling recyclables on to municipalities. With no market for the waste paper and plastic in their blue bins, some communities scaled back or suspended kerbside recycling programmes. But new domestic markets offer a glimmer of hope.
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About US$1 billion in investment in US paper processing plants has been announced in the past six months, according to Dylan de Thomas, a vice-president at The Recycling Partnership, a non-profit organisation that tracks and works with the industry.
Hong Kong-based Nine Dragons, one of the world’s largest producers of cardboard boxes, has invested US$500 million over the past year to buy and expand or restart production at paper mills in Maine, Wisconsin and West Virginia.
Brian Boland, vice-president of government affairs and corporate initiatives for ND Paper, Nine Dragons’ US affiliate, said that as well as making paper from wood fibre, the mills would add production lines turning more than a million tonnes of scrap into pulp to make boxes.
“The paper industry has been in contraction since the early 2000s,” he said. “To see this kind of change is frankly amazing. Even though it’s a Chinese-owned company, it’s creating US jobs and revitalising communities like Old Town, Maine, where the old mill was shuttered.”
Hong Kong-based Nine Dragons has invested US$500 million in paper mills in Maine, Wisconsin and West Virginia. Photo: Handout
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The Northeast Recycling Council said in a report last autumn that 17 North American paper mills had announced increased capacity to handle recyclable paper since the Chinese cut-off.
Another Chinese company, Global Win Wickliffe, is reopening a closed paper mill in Kentucky. Georgia-based Pratt Industries is constructing a mill in Wapakoneta, Ohio that will turn 425,000 tonnes of recycled paper per year into shipping boxes.
Plastics also had a lot of capacity coming online, de Thomas said, noting new or expanded plants in Texas, Pennsylvania, California and North Carolina that turned recycled plastic bottles into new bottles.
Chinese companies were investing in plastic and scrap metal recycling plants in Georgia, Indiana and North Carolina to make feedstocks for manufacturers in China, he said.
GDB International processes bales of scrap plastic film into pellets to make garbage bags and plastic pipe. Photo: AP
In New Brunswick, New Jersey, the recycling company GDB International exported bales of scrap plastic film such as pallet wrap and grocery bags for years. But when China started restricting imports, company president Sunil Bagaria installed new machinery to process it into pellets he sells profitably to manufacturers of garbage bags and plastic pipe.
The imports cut-off that China called “National Sword” was a much-needed wake-up call to his industry, he said.
“The export of plastic scrap played a big role in easing recycling in our country,” Bagaria said. “The downside is that infrastructure to do our own domestic recycling didn’t develop.”
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That was now changing, but he said far more domestic processing capacity would be needed as a growing number of countries restricted scrap imports.
“Ultimately, sooner or later, the society that produces plastic scrap will become responsible for recycling it,” he said.
It has also yet to be seen whether the new plants coming on line can quickly fix the problems for municipal recycling programmes that relied heavily on sales to China to get rid of piles of scrap.
About US$1 billion in investment in US paper processing plants has been announced in the past six months, according to a non-profit group that tracks the industry. Photo: AP
“Chinese companies are investing in mills, but until we see what the demand is going to be at those mills, we’re stuck in this rut,” said Ben Harvey, whose company in Westborough, Massachusetts, collects trash and recyclables for about 30 communities.
He had a car park filled with stockpiled paper a year ago after China closed its doors, but eventually found buyers in India, Korea and Indonesia.
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Keith Ristau, chief executive of Far West Recycling in Portland, Oregon, said most of the recyclable plastic his company collected used to go to China but now most of it went to processors in Canada or California.
To meet their standards, Far West invested in better equipment and more workers at its material recovery facility to reduce contamination.
In Sarepta, Louisiana, IntegriCo Composites is turning bales of hard-to-recycle mixed plastics into railroad ties. It expanded operations in 2017 with funding from New York-based Closed Loop Partners.
“As investors in domestic recycling and circular economy infrastructure in the US, we see what China has decided to do as very positive,” said Closed Loop founder Ron Gonen.
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