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.
The POSTs (front webpages) are mainly 'cuttings' from reliable sources, updated continuously.
The PAGEs (see Tabs, above) attempt to make the information more meaningful by putting some structure to the information we have researched and assembled since 2006.
BEIJING, Feb. 6 (Xinhua) — A slew of preventive measures have been taken to contain the novel coronavirus as a growing number of Chinese people hit the road and return to work after the Spring Festival holiday, the Ministry of Transport (MOT) said Thursday.
According to big data analysis, passenger flow is expected to pick up around this weekend, said Cai Tuanjie, an official with the MOT, at a press conference.
To contain virus infections during the trips, railways, airports and other public transportation operators have intensified disinfection, ventilation and sanitation of vehicles and stations, Cai said.
Passengers will go through body temperature screening at both entrances and exits of operating public transportation stations across the country. People found to have caught a fever above 37.3 degrees Celsius will be transferred to health departments.
Meanwhile, steps have been taken to make sure vehicles are not fully booked to allow a safe distance between passengers, Cai said, adding that temporary isolation areas had been set in the vehicles to avoid cross-infections in case of emergency during the journey.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption A model displays a car at the annual Indian Auto Expo
Chinese attendees are not welcome at India’s Auto Expo next week due to concerns about the coronavirus.
Chinese guests are prevented from attending the show because of “government policy” an Indian Society of Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM) spokeswoman said.
Yet Chinese cars will be on display.
Other events across Asia will be missing the large delegations that usually come from Chinese firms because of travel restrictions.
Changing car markets
India and China have much at stake in spurring domestic car sales as well as exports, making such industry events vital to drum up business.
New Indian car sales fell 16% last year and China, the world’s largest car market, saw an 8% dip as both markets saw increased turnover in used cars. However there is interest in newer models in the electric vehicle segment, according to Chinese market consultancy LMC Automotive and SIAM figures.
India’s Tata Motors, owner of the Land Rover and Jaguar brands, has developed electric car models for sale at home and abroad, while China’s SAIC Motor and Great Wall Motor also offer electric vehicles for the domestic and export markets. That makes auto shows like the one in India next week important venues to showcase the newest models.
Ripple effect
With hotels and conference fees paid in advance and lunch and dinner meetings arranged months earlier, missing a big industry show has a major ripple effect on economic activity. Events like the Auto Expo in suburban New Delhi, or the Singapore air show due to take place next week draw thousands of out-of-town guests.
In China, the conference circuit has come to a standstill with over 20,000 infections and more than 420 people dead as the virus spreads from the epicentre of the city of Wuhan.
In the case of the Singapore Airshow organisers have faced cancellations by vendors from China, including aircraft maker Comac, and reduced attendance by companies from elsewhere in the world concerned about the spread of the virus outside of China. Singapore has reported 24 cases. India to date has seen three coronavirus cases.
To mitigate the impact, both events have highlighted plans to screen throngs of guests for fever and ensure thorough sanitation measures as well as access to medical care to ensure they can carry on even at reduced attendance.
Tokyo (Reuters) – Japan on Saturday moved to contain the economic impact of a coronavirus outbreak originating in China as strict new measures aimed at limiting the spread of the virus, including targeting foreign visitors, came into effect.
Japan had 17 confirmed cases as of Friday, including some without symptoms. One of the most recent was a bus guide who worked on a bus tour for tourists from China – the same tour as a bus driver who also came down with the virus.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told a Saturday meeting of a government task force coordinating Japan’s response to the virus to come up with steps aimed at easing the impact of the outbreak on Japan’s economy.
Abe has made tourism a key part of his economic policy, with a large proportion of foreign visitors from China, and major Japanese companies have a number of factories in China.
“I ask ministers to compile measures to use reserves (in the state budget) and implement them as soon as possible,” Abe was quoted by Kyodo news agency as saying.
“The new coronavirus is having a major impact on tourism, the economy and our society as a whole. The government will do its utmost to address the impact.”
No further details were given, though Abe stressed ensuring that Japanese residents have access to medical checkups and masks, which have been selling out around the nation.
New measures to fight the disease took effect on Saturday, including banning the entry of Chinese holding passports issued by Hubei, where the disease is thought to have originated, as well as all foreigners who had visited the province within two weeks, whether they show symptoms or not.
The government also brought forward implementing measures including compulsory hospitalisation and the use of public funds for treatment by six days to Saturday.
Of the 2.6 million tourists who came to Japan in December 2019, nearly 600,000 were Chinese, outnumbered only by South Koreans, government data shows. Japan aims to have 40 million tourists visit the country in 2020, up from 31.8 million in 2019.
On Friday, the president of Japanese airline ANA Holdings (9202.T) said it was considering suspending flights to China after February reservations plunged, Jiji news agency reported.
JTB Corporation, Japan’s largest travel agency, said it was suspending tours to China throughout February, Kyodo news agency reported.
will close its borders to all new visitors from mainland China, including foreigners who have been there within the past 14 days, becoming the first Southeast Asian country to do so in a bid to stem the spread of the deadly coronavirus
.
The island nation has China as one of its biggest trading partners and is a popular destination for Chinese tourists. Figures from the Singapore Tourism Board showed that 248,000 travellers from the mainland entered Singapore last November, while 3.42 million mainland Chinese tourists visited in 2018.
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The visa suspension will come into effect immediately so travellers can be informed in advance, while the travel restriction will start at 11.59pm on Saturday.
As of Friday, Singapore has 13 confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus, all of whom are travellers from the Chinese city of Wuhan. Health authorities have stressed that there is no evidence of community spread within the city state as of now.
The coronavirus has infected almost 10,000 people around the world, killing 213. The World Health Organisation has declared the outbreak an international public health emergency.
The move is an escalation of Wednesday’s announcement that Singapore was stopping the entry of new travellers who had been to Hubei province, the epicentre of the outbreak. Wuhan is Hubei’s capital.
China coronavirus: Singapore’s seven habits for good hygiene
30 Jan 2020
Residents and citizens of Singapore who have been to China will be able to come into the city state, but will be subject to a 14-day leave of absence during which they are encouraged to stay at home.
The move to close its borders to Chinese visitors comes on the back of local authorities’ assessment that more people in other parts of China are and will be affected by the virus.
The Singapore government will on Saturday announce a fiscal package to help businesses and citizens during the crisis.
Coronavirus: global travel restrictions imposed on Chinese travellers
31 Jan 2020
National development minister Lawrence Wong, who co-chairs a multi-ministry task force to deal with the virus, said the outbreak had already impacted the economy and “will be going on for some time”.
Said Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong: “It’s going to hurt us. China is a very big source of tourists for Singapore. [With the outbreak], that’s tailed off already considerably.”
Lee said tourism from other sources would also be affected as people took precautions, pinpointing the food and beverage, travel and hotel industries as those that were “bound to be significantly affected”.
“I expect the rest of the economy also to be affected because with China in semi-lockdown mode now, their economy is bound to slow down and our economy is quite tightly engaged with theirs, they are our biggest trading partner.”
Summit between Chinese, South Korean and Japanese leaders could yield results for future of Korean peninsula, analyst says
North Korea has promised an unwelcome “Christmas present” if the US does not show the “right attitude” for talks. Photo: KCNA
Chinese President Xi Jinping has again stressed the need for tensions on the Korean peninsula to be resolved through dialogue, as the deadline looms in North Korea’s threat to give the United States an unwelcome “Christmas gift”
.
With just over a week to go until Pyongyang’s year-end deadline for Washington to change what it says a policy of hostility, Xi held separate talks with South Korean President Moon Jae-in and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Beijing on Monday.
Moon and Abe will also join Chinese Premier Li Keqiang for a trilateral summit in Chengdu, Sichuan province, on Tuesday.
The first trilateral leadership talks took place in 2008, but were not held in 2013 and 2014, or in 2016 and 2017.
Xi said China and South Korea “both insist on maintaining peace and stability on the peninsula, and advocate solving problems through dialogue and consultation”, state news agency Xinhua reported on Monday.
“China supports South Korea in continuing to improve its relationship with
and injecting impetus for the Korean peninsula peace talks,” the report said.
Moon said the suspension of talks between the US and North Korea and heightened tensions along the peninsula “are not beneficial to both our countries and North Korea”, according to South Korean news agency Yonhap.
Moon also said that China had played an “important role” in efforts for the denuclearise the peninsula, the report said.
North Korea has signalled impatience over the stalled talks with the US, and the fading hopes for an end to Washington’s economic sanctions.
In April, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un said that he would “wait” until the end of the year to decide whether the US had the “right attitude” to allow a resumption of negotiations, but no signs of further talks have emerged.
Then earlier this month Pyongyang warned that Washington would receive a “Christmas gift”, and US actions would determine whether the present would be good or bad.
In an apparent sign of frustration with the US, North Korean news agency KCNA reported on Sunday that Kim held a meeting of the Workers’ Party of Korea to “bolster the overall armed forces of the country” to deal with the “the fast-changing situation”.
The US imposed crippling sanctions on North Korea’s economy in 2017, though many countries, including China, South Korea and Japan, have also tightened measures against the North.
South Korea and Japan both scaled back people-to-people links in 2016, China banned coal exports to the North in 2017. Earlier this year, Trump thanked China and Russia for maintaining sanctions against Pyongyang.
As diplomats make last-ditch attempts to stop renewed confrontation, US special envoy for North Korea Stephen Biegun shuttled around the region last week, meeting senior officials in China, South Korea and Japan. Biegun urged North Korea to return to negotiations, and said the US “does not have a deadline” for talks.
China and Russia also proposed last week that the United Nations Security Council
Xi’s meeting with Moon also comes as Beijing tries to mend ties with Seoul to prevent neighbouring nations from getting closer to Washington.
Relations between China and South Korea deteriorated in 2017 after Seoul deployed a US-led missile defence system known as THAAD, which Beijing deemed as a security threat to its own territory.
On Monday, both Xi and Moon said in their meeting that they looked forward to improving relations between their countries.
“We have been friends and partners that have continued close cooperation,” Xi said. “We have a wide range of common understandings in various fields, including on further developing bilateral relations, facilitating regional peace, stability and prosperity, and defending multilateralism and a free trade system.”
Sun Xingjie, a North Korea specialist at Jilin University, said the US signal was “very clear” in Beigun’s comments.
“They still want to continue discussions,” he said.
Sun also said the talks in Chengdu on Tuesday would likely play an important role in the future of resolving problems on the Korean peninsula.
“After returning to the platform these last couple years, I believe this will become an important, normalised place for discussions. Whatever problems they run into, the platform should continue to move forward,” Sun said.
This is the third instalment in a four-part series examining the brewing US-China tech war over the development and deployment of artificial intelligence tech
The US is home to five of the world’s top 10 universities in the AI field, which includes computer vision and machine learning, while China has three
For those Chinese with long-term plans to stay in the US, a major obstacle lies in getting work visas, especially in the current trade war environment. Illustration: Perry Tse
After working in the United States for more than a decade, Zheng Yefeng felt he had hit a glass ceiling. He also saw that the gap in artificial intelligence between China and the US was narrowing.
Last year Zheng, who worked as a researcher at Siemens Healthcare in New Jersey, made a decision that addressed both problems. He accepted an offer to head up the medical research and development team at Tencent’s YouTu artificial intelligence lab in Shenzhen, known as China’s Silicon Valley.
“There was almost no room for promotion if I stayed in the US,” he said, expressing a common dilemma faced by experienced Chinese tech workers in America.
With the US-China trade war leading to tighter scrutiny of Chinese nationals working in the US tech industry, people like Zheng are moving back to China to work in the burgeoning AI sector, especially after Beijing designated AI a national priority. The technology’s varied applications have attracted billions of dollars of venture capital investment, created highly valued start-ups like SenseTime and ByteDance, and sparked a talent war among companies.
That has created an odd symbiotic relationship between the two countries vying for AI supremacy. The US, with its superior higher education system, is the training ground for Chinese AI scientists like Zheng, who obtained a PhD from the University of Maryland after earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees at China’s premier Tsinghua University.
“Many professors in China have great academic ability, but in terms of the number [of top professors], the US is ahead,” said Luo Guojie, who himself accepted an offer from Peking University to become an assistant professor after studying computer science in the US.
Among international students majoring in computer science and maths in US universities, Chinese nationals were the third largest group behind Indians and Nepalese in the 2018-2019 academic year, representing 19.9 per cent, according to the Institute of International Education.
[To build] the best universities is not easy. The university is a free speech space, whereas in China, this is not the case Gunther Marten, a senior official with the European Union delegation to China
The South China Morning Post spoke with several Chinese AI engineers who decided to stay and work in the US after their studies. They only agreed to give their surnames because of the sensitivity of the issues being discussed.
A 25-year-old Beijinger surnamed Lin graduated from one of China’s best engineering schools in the capital before heading to a US university for a master’s degree in computer science in 2017. Like some of his peers, he found the teaching methods in China to be outdated.
“It’s hard to imagine that a final exam of a coding course still asked you to hand write code, instead of running and testing it on a computer,” said Lin, who now works as a software engineer for Google in Silicon Valley.
“Although we still had to take writing tests [in the US], we had many practical opportunities in the lab and could do our own projects,” he added.
A Facebook software engineer surnamed Zhuang had a similar experience at his university in Shanghai.
“Many engineering students [in China] still get old-school textbooks and insufficient laboratory training,” he said. “Engineering practices for AI have been through a fast iteration over the past few decades, which means many Chinese students are not exposed to the most updated knowledge in the field, at least not in the classroom.”
Zhuang also noted out that many classes in China are taught in Chinese, meaning engineering graduates are not fluent in English, the preferred language of the global AI research community.
The US is home to five of the world’s top 10 universities in the AI field, which includes computer vision and machine learning, while China has three. Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pennsylvania ranks No 1 while China’s Tsinghua University is No 2, according to CSrankings, which bases the list on papers published since 2009.
US tech chief: China is threatening US’ lead in global AI race
With its top institutions and an open culture that encourages freedom of speech, including unfettered internet access, the US has become a magnet for the brightest AI students the world over.
In 2018, 62.8 per cent of PhD degrees and 65.4 per cent of master’s degrees in computer science, information science and computer engineering programmes in the US were granted to “non-resident aliens”, according to a survey by the Computing Research Association.
“[To build] the best universities is not easy,” Gunther Marten, a senior official with the European Union delegation to China, said on the sidelines of the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen in October. “The university is a free speech space, whereas in China, this is not the case.”
When these US-educated AI scientists finish studying, most take advantage of a rule allowing them to stay in the country for three years to gain work experience.
Of the foreign nationals taking part in last year’s Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), a major machine learning event for AI professionals, 87 per cent of those whose papers made it to the oral presentation stage went to work for American universities or research institutes after earning their PhD, according to MacroPolo, a think tank under the Paulson Institute.
“China has many great universities and companies, especially in certain subfields of AI such as computer vision, but many people remain hesitant to move to China due to the political environment, quality of life concerns and workplace issues,” said Remco Zwetsloot, a research fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET).
China’s PhD students miserable, yet hopeful: survey
Some of the US-trained Chinese AI engineers told the Post they were scared off by China’s “996” working culture: 9am to 9pm, six days a week. Tech firms in China typically expect their employees to work long hours to prove their dedication.
Lin, the Beijinger who now works for Google, used to be an intern at one of China’s largest internet giants. “I worked from the time I woke up until going to bed,” he said, “At Google, I’ve been confused because many people here only work till 5pm but Google is still a global leader.” Lin said he would be happy to return to China if the 996 work culture eases.
Graduates throw their caps in the air as they pose for a group photo during the 2019 commencement ceremony of Tsinghua University in Beijing. Tsinghua ranks as China’s top university for AI. Photo: Xinhua
Chen, a female postgraduate student at Carnegie Mellon, who recently accepted a job offer from Google, once interned at Beijing-based AI unicorn SenseTime, where she worked from 10am to between 8pm and 10pm most days.
A SenseTime spokesperson said the company has adopted flexible working hours for its employees.
Besides a better work-life balance, Chinese graduates look for jobs in Silicon Valley because of the higher pay.
“If you include pre-tax income, many of us get offers that pay more than 1 million yuan (US$142,000) a year but in China the salaries offered to the best batch of fresh undergraduates are about 200,000 to 300,000 yuan (US$28,000 to US$43,000),” Chen said.
Still, for those Chinese with long-term plans to stay in the US, a major obstacle lies in getting work visas, especially in the current trade war environment. Most AI-related workers are on H-1B visas that allow US companies to employ non-US nationals with expertise in specialised fields such as IT, finance and engineering.
However, the number of non-immigrant H-1B visas granted has started to fall since 2016, when it peaked at 180,000, according to the US Department of State, and US tech companies have complained that a policy shift by the Trump administration has made the approval process longer and more complicated.
In 2017, President Donald Trump requested an overhaul of the H-1B visa programme, saying he did not want it to enable US tech companies to hire cheaper foreign workers at the expense of American jobs. He also wants to give priority to highly skilled people and restrict those wanting to move to the US because of family connections.
Science graduates from overseas countries can stay in the US with their student visas for up to three years while competing for the hard to get work visas, which are granted based on undisclosed mechanisms. Overseas students already working in the US can apply for so-called green cards, which offer permanent residency.
After working for a major US tech company for almost three years on a student visa, one Chinese software engineer, who spoke to the Post on condition of anonymity, said she was relocated to the US firm’s Beijing office last year after failing to obtain a H-1B work visa.
“While there might be individual cases, it seems like the current tensions have not – at least as of a few months ago – led to noticeable changes in the overall number of Chinese students staying in the US after graduating,” said CSET’s Zwetsloot.
Some Chinese AI scientists use Twitter to announce their decision to stay. Chen Tianqi, who just obtained a PhD at the University of Washington in Seattle, and Jun-Yan Zhu, a CMU and UC Berkeley alumnus currently working at Adobe, each tweeted that they would join Carnegie Mellon as assistant professors next year.
To achieve the goal of turning China into “the world’s primary AI innovation centre” by 2030, according to a 2017 blueprint issued the State Council, the central government has stepped up efforts to attract US-educated talent.
The Thousand Talents Plan has seen more than 6,000 overseas Chinese students and academics return since its was established in 2008, but because of escalating tensions with the US, Beijing has played down the initiative.
Longer term, Beijing’s willingness to invest significant sums into the AI sector could see more Chinese return for the better employment opportunities. Between 2013 and the first quarter of 2018, China attracted 60 per cent of global investment in AI, according to a Tsinghua University report.
China’s spending on AI may be far lower than people think
Chinese authorities are investing heavily in the sector, with the city of Shanghai setting up a 10 billion yuan (US$142 million) AI fund in August and Beijing city government announcing in April it would provide a 340 million yuan (US$48 million) grant to the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence.
“More and more senior people like me have come back, and some start their own businesses,” said Zheng, the Siemens Healthcare researcher who joined Tencent. “It’s easier for Chinese to seek venture capital in China than in other countries.”
SHANGHAI, Dec. 11 (Xinhua) — Chinese tourists will travel to more overseas destinations during the Spring Festival holiday in 2020, said a report released by the country’s largest online travel agency Trip.com Group.
Chinese tourists have booked trips to 419 overseas cities in over 100 countries and regions during the seven-day holiday beginning Jan. 24, 2020, said Trip.com, adding that both figures are new highs for the group.
Boasting warm weather, Australia and New Zealand are among the most popular destinations for Chinese during the period. Trips to Italy, Britain, Spain, Russia, France and the United Arab Emirates are also bestsellers, according to the report.
Ninety percent of Trip.com Group’s users have chosen high-quality travel products and services. Private travel groups with tour guides and flexible schedules have also been favored by tourists.
The fact that Chinese are willing to spend more money and time on traveling shows their growing incomes and higher living standards, said Peng Liang, a researcher with the tourist data research center of Trip.com Group.
As more Chinese travel overseas for holidays, the world will also share the benefits of China’s development, said Peng.
Chinese made 6.3 million outbound trips during the Spring Festival holiday in 2019, up 12.48 percent year on year.
(Reuters) – Asian companies dominate the market for electric vehicle (EV) batteries and they are expanding their production capacity in Europe, China and the United States in a fight to win lucrative contracts from global automakers.
Some carmakers worry, however, there won’t be enough batteries for all the EVs they plan to launch in the coming years and a bitter row between South Korea’s SK Innovation and LG Chem risks exacerbating the potential shortfall.
Below are details of the world’s leading EV battery makers with details of their customers and expansion plans:
CATL
China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL), the world’s biggest EV battery maker, counts BMW (BMWG.DE), Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE), Daimler (DAIGn.DE) – which makes Mercedes cars – Volvo, Toyota Motor Corp (7203.T) and Honda Motor Co (7267.T) among its customers.
The company emerged as a major force partly thanks to Beijing’s policy of only subsidising vehicles equipped with Chinese batteries in the world’s biggest EV market. Beijing is phasing out EV subsidies next year.
CATL, which operates factories in China, is building its first overseas plant in Germany and is considering a U.S. factory.
Japan’s Panasonic, a supplier of U.S. EV pioneer Tesla (TSLA.O), said it has installed equipment to ramp up production at Tesla’s Nevada plant to 35 GWh from its current production of around 30 GWh as of late October. Panasonic has said it is investing about $1.6 billion in the factory.
Panasonic also produces EV batteries in Japan, China and plans to shift some of its plants to a new joint venture with Toyota. Panasonic’s clients also include Honda and Ford Motor Company (F.N).
China’s BYD, which is backed by U.S. investor Warren Buffett, is also one of the world’s biggest EV battery makers. It mainly uses them in-house for its own cars and buses. BYD said last year it is was considering cell production in Europe.
The South Korean firm was an early industry mover, winning a contract to supply General Motor’s (GM.N) Volt in 2008. It also supplies Ford, Renault (RENA.PA), Hyundai Motor (005380.KS), Tesla, Volkswagen and Volvo.
It is investing 3.3 trillion won ($2.8 billion) to build and expand production facilities near Tesla’s plant in Shanghai. It has a joint venture (JV) in China with Geely Automobile Holdings (0175.HK), which makes Volvos, and is in talks with other carmakers about JVs in major markets.
The firm is considering building a second U.S. factory in addition to its facility in Michigan and is expanding its plant in Poland.
SAMSUNG SDI CO LTD (006400.KS) Samsung SDI an affiliate of South Korean tech giant Samsung Electronics (005930.KS), has EV battery plants in South Korea, China and Hungary, which supply customers such as BMW (BMWG.DE), Volvo and Volkswagen. Samsung SDI is investing about 1.2 billion euros ($1.3 billion) to expand its factory in Hungary though the EU is investigating whether Budapest’s financial support complies with the bloc’s state aid rules.
Samsung started production last year on the Hungary plant, which will produce batteries for 50,000 EVs a year.
SK INNOVATION CO LTD (096770.KS) LG Chem’s cross-town rival SK Innovation supplies batteries to Volkswagen, Daimler and Kia Motors (000270.KS), as well as Jaguar Land Rover [TAMOJL.UL] and Ferrari (RACE.MI).
An oil refiner that came to the battery industry late, SKI is investing about $3.9 billion to build three plants in the United States, China and Hungary, with a goal of expanding its annual production capacity to 33 GWh by 2022.
SKI currently operates one battery factory in South Korea, with a capacity of 4.7 GWh annually.
It set up a joint venture with Beijing Automotive Industry Corporation (BAIC) of China in August 2018 and another Chinese partner. It is in talks with Volkswagen about another battery JV and is building a $1.7 billion factory in the U.S. state of Georgia, not far from Volkswagen’s Chattanooga plant.
Researcher says some might find it hard to accept that early humans they assumed to be their ancestors ‘were stupid’
Report suggests that isolation may have made Peking Man less adaptable
Peking Man is the earliest human sub species discovered in China. Photo: Reuters
“Peking Man”, the Stone Age humans who are believed to be ancestors of the Chinese, left little evidence that they had ever evolved, according to a Chinese scientist.
“It may be hard for some people to accept, but evidence shows they [
] were stupid,” said Professor Wei Qi, a researcher with the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.
In 1929, a nearly complete skull of Homo erectus pekinensis was discovered in a cave at Zhoukoudian in southwest Peking, as the Chinese capital was then known.
Peking Man became a household name as the earliest human sub species discovered in China, and some scientists maintained that they passed their DNA on to present-day Chinese.
Peking Man is thought to be an ancient ancestor of modern Chinese. Photo: AP
In a paper for the journal Fossils to be published at the end of the month, Wei compared stone tools found at the Peking Man site to those made by the Nihewanians, palaeolithic humans who lived in what is now Yangyuan, northern Hebei province, more than a million years ago.
According to the theory of evolution, the human brain’s complexity should increase over time, expanding creativity and improving the quality of tools.
Wei said his study found very little evidence of evolution in Peking Man. He said they tended to work a piece of stone by repeatedly striking it on one side but rarely turning it.
How Asian fossils could rewrite history of human evolution
Most of the stones worked by the Nihewanians for cutting or other purposes had marks all over them. “It means they would try another side to get a better result,” Wei said. “That is a sign of intelligence.”
He said there was more evidence in Peking Man finds, including many coarse artefacts and few finely processed tools.
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Other researchers have said the same thing over the years. Pei Wenzhong, a palaeontologist who discovered some of the first Peking Man remains, said the tools appeared primitive compared to other early human artefacts, but there was no investigation at the time.
A Chinese report suggests there is little evidence of evolution to be found in Peking Man remains. Photo: UPI
Wei, who analysed more than 140 finds dated to roughly 700,000 years ago, said the structural changes in Peking Man skulls found in different layers of sediment from various times suggested an unusually slow evolution over half a million years.
Professor Chen Quanjia, a palaeoanthropologist with the college of humanities at Jilin University in northeastern China, said there was an appearance of roughness to Peking Man tools, but that did not mean a lack of intelligence.
“The blame lies in the material,” he said.
Peking Man made tools with quartz, the only material available in the area. Quartz is not easy to handle, often creating a rough surface that makes further processing difficult.
The caves of Zhoukoudian on the outskirts of Beijing are still a treasure trove for archaeologists. Photo: AFP
Wei said material could not explain the difference. A few fine tools made with quartz were found at Zhoukoudian but they were dated to about 300,000 years ago.
“Making high-quality tools with quartz is not a problem, but [that becomes possible] only when the maker becomes smart enough,” he said.
100,000 year old human remains ‘show evidence of cannibalism’
Why Peking Man crafts were so poor remains a big question. Wei said that some patterning on their tools suggested they might be an offshoot of the Nihewanians that was driven out and settled in Zhoukoudian – now a World Heritage Site – about 200km (124 miles) away.
In that isolated environment, Peking Man might have interbred over many generations, Wei said.
This increases the chances of offspring being born with so-called deleterious traits such as inherited conditions and illnesses that affect quality of life and the ability to adapt and survive.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption Port Talbot employs just under half of Tata’s 8,385 UK workforce
Tata Steel plans to cut as many as 3,000 jobs across its European business in another bid to come to terms with a “severe” international steel market.
The company wants to focus on higher-value products, it said, adding there would be no plant closures.
About two thirds of the job cuts will be office-based, it added.
The announcement comes after a merger with German rival Thyssenkrupp was blocked during the summer. Bosses had hoped the deal could reduce costs.
“Today we are highlighting important proposals towards building a financially strong and sustainable European business,” said Henrik Adam, chief executive of Tata Steel in Europe.
“We plan to change how we work together to enable better cooperation and faster decision-making. This will help us become self-sustaining and cash positive in the face of unprecedented severe market conditions, enabling us to lead the way towards a carbon-neutral future.”
The business employs about 20,000 people and is owned by India’s Tata.
Port Talbot steelworks employs just under half of Tata’s 8,385-strong workforce in the UK.
Wales’ economy minister Ken Skates said: “I am seeking an urgent conversation with Tata to establish what this means for workers in Wales and how we can support those affected by this announcement.”
It also said it would seek to “preserve thousands of jobs in a key foundation industry for the UK” but did not put a number on how many would be saved.
British Steel employs about 4,000 people in Scunthorpe and Teesside.
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 