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.
The third session of the 13th National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) opens at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, May 21, 2020. (Xinhua/Li Tao)
BEIJING, May 21 (Xinhua) — China’s top political advisory body started its annual session Thursday afternoon in Beijing.
Xi Jinping and other Chinese leaders attended the opening meeting of the third session of the 13th National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), held at the Great Hall of the People.
Attendees at the meeting paid a silent tribute to martyrs who died fighting COVID-19 and compatriots who lost their lives in the epidemic.
The agenda for the session was reviewed and approved at the meeting.
Wang Yang, chairman of the CPPCC National Committee, delivered a work report of the Standing Committee of the CPPCC National Committee to the session.
The report noted the role of political advisors in the fight against the COVID-19 epidemic, saying that they have submitted more than 1,300 reports and suggestions on preventing and controlling the epidemic, resuming work and production, stabilizing public expectations and strengthening law-based governance.
Giving full play to role of the CPPCC as a specialist consultative body, 71 consultation meetings, 97 research trips as well as online consultations were organized in the past year, it said.
The report made arrangements for the CPPCC’s work in 2020 in six aspects, urging political advisors to fulfil their duties around achieving a moderately prosperous society in all respects.
Attendees were also briefed on the handling of proposals submitted since the previous annual session of the top political advisory body.
People work at a construction site of a utility tunnel in Wuhan, central China’s Hubei Province, April 30, 2020. (Xinhua/Xiao Yijiu)
BEIJING, May 1 (Xinhua) — China is getting the world’s largest workforce back to work as the nationwide battle against COVID-19 has secured major strategic achievements.
The unprecedented fight has nurtured new trends in the workplace. For example, more attention is being paid to public health and e-commerce to boost consumption and emerging sectors brought by new applications based on the country’s rapid new infrastructure development of 5G networks and data centers.
In this aerial photo taken on April 29, 2020, representatives of frontline health workers fighting COVID-19 attend a bell-ringing ceremony at the Yellow Crane Tower, or Huanghelou, a landmark in Wuhan, central China’s Hubei Province. (Xinhua/Xiao Yijiu)
ANGELS OF PUBLIC HEALTH
Ye Man, head nurse of gastrointestinal department of Hubei General Hospital East District, one of the five remaining COVID-19 designated hospitals in Wuhan, is taking her first weeklong vacation since January.
The 34-year-old mother of two started to take a week off on Monday, one day after her hospital cleared all remaining confirmed COVID-19 patients. The nine ICU wards in her hospital had been kept occupied over the past several months.
Friday marked International Workers’ Day, and the start of China’s five-day public holiday. Ye said she planned to visit urban parks with her family during the holiday.
At her busiest point, she and her colleagues took care of a ward filled with 40 COVID-19 patients.
“It was a really tough time,” she recalled. She had to wear a protective gown and a mask for nine hours a day and be separated from her family to avoid possible cross-infections.
Wuhan, capital of central China’s Hubei Province and once hard hit by COVID-19, cleared all confirmed cases in hospitals on April 26. Over 42,000 medical workers mobilized nationwide to aid Hubei have contributed to achieving a decisive outcome in the fight to defend Hubei and Wuhan.
In an inspection tour to Wuhan on March 10, President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, lauded medical workers as “the most beautiful angels” and “messengers of light and hope.”
To reward brave and dedicated medics, major tourist sites in Hubei are offering free entry to medical staff over the following two years.
Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, learns about development of the black fungus industry in Jinmi Village of Xiaoling Township in Zhashui County, Shangluo City, northwest China’s Shaanxi Province, April 20, 2020. (Xinhua/Xie Huanchi)
LIVESTREAMING ANCHORS
“We have a new batch of supplies today. Those who did not get the goods should hurry to buy now,” said Li Xuying, a livestreaming anchorwoman selling agaric mushrooms in Zhashui, a small county deep in the Qinling Mountains in northwest China’s Shaanxi Province.
Li has been prepared for a boom of online shopping in the holiday, because online buyers rushed to her livestreaming website to place orders, after Xi inspected the county and chatted with her in the village of Jinmi during a recent tour to Shaanxi.
“I used to sell goods worth about 50,000 yuan (7,070 U.S. dollars) on average after a six-hour livestreaming session. Now the sales are 10 times that,” she said.
Li was one of the 10 sales staff sent by the local agricultural e-commerce firm to Chinese e-commerce platform Taobao’s headquarters for livestreaming training. She said livestreaming is effective in bridging buyers and farmers, through which viewers can watch planting and harvesting online.
With the number of netizens in China reaching 904 million in March, e-commerce has been one of the popular means of promoting the sale of farm produce and helping farmers shake off poverty. Despite the impact of COVID-19, the country is determined to eradicate absolute poverty by the end of this year.
Workers work at the construction site of a 5G base station at Chongqing Hi-tech Zone in Chongqing, southwest China, April 15, 2020. (Xinhua/Wang Quanchao)
HI-TECH WORKERS IN “NEW INFRASTRUCTURE” BUILDING
As an elasticity calculation engineer of Alibaba Cloud, Zhao Kun and his colleagues always stay on alert for high data flow, for example, brought by the anticipated online shopping spike during the holiday.
“The profession, which may sound obscure, is actually closely connected to everyone’s life, as cloud computing is the infrastructure supporting high-tech applications of artificial intelligence and blockchain,” said Zhao.
The Chinese leadership has underscored expediting “new infrastructure” development to boost industrial and consumption upgrading and catalyze new growth drivers.
Seizing the opportunities of industrial digitization and digital industrialization, China needs to expedite the construction of “new infrastructure” projects such as 5G networks and data centers, and deploy strategic emerging sectors and industries of the future including the digital economy, life health services and new materials, President Xi has said.
During the epidemic, Zhao and his colleagues expanded more than 100,000 cloud servers to ensure the stable operation of “cloud classrooms” and “cloud offices” for millions of people working and studying from home.
In the “new infrastructure” building, people like Zhao contribute to constructing the virtual infrastructure of an ecosystem, which enables e-commerce, e-payment, online teaching and the digital transformation of manufacturing and supply chain management.
In early April, China released a plan on promoting the transformation of enterprises toward digitalization and intelligence by further expanding the application of cloud and data technologies, to nurture new business models of the digital economy.
Photo taken with a mobile phone on April 24, 2020 shows a handover ceremony of medical equipment donated by China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation (CRRC) Zhuzhou Locomotive Co. Ltd. in Berlin, Germany. China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation (CRRC), the world’s largest rolling stock manufacturer by production volume, donated a shipment of medical equipment to Germany via the German Red Cross on Friday to help the country fight the coronavirus. Responding to the call from the German government and the Chinese Embassy in Germany, and in accordance with an arrangement between CRRC and CRRC Zhuzhou Locomotive Co. Ltd. (CRRC ZELC), the company donated 1,000 protective suits, 20,000 FFP2 masks and 80,000 surgical masks. (CRRC ZELC/Handout via Xinhua)
BERLIN, April 24 (Xinhua) — China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation (CRRC), the world’s largest rolling stock manufacturer by production volume, donated a shipment of medical equipment to Germany via the German Red Cross on Friday to help the country fight the coronavirus.
Responding to the call from the German government and the Chinese Embassy in Germany, and in accordance with an arrangement between CRRC and CRRC Zhuzhou Locomotive Co. Ltd. (CRRC ZELC), the company donated 1,000 protective suits, 20,000 FFP2 masks and 80,000 surgical masks.
CRRC ZELC said that the donated materials will be distributed to medical staff and volunteers who are fighting the pandemic on the frontlines.
Cheng Jian, general manager of CRRC ZELC Verkehrstechnik GmbH, said that the only way to overcome the crisis is to unite strengths and meet the challenges together.
“We wish to undertake our social responsibility as part of the community. We firmly believe that with joint efforts of the international community, Germany will quickly overcome the crisis, and production and life will return to normal soon,” Cheng said.
According to Jens Quade, president of the Mueggelspree regional branch of the German Red Cross, the risk of new coronavirus infections could be reduced through the generous donation from CRRC ZELC.
“The donated material will be distributed to the Berlin Red Cross, Berlin hospitals and/or medical institutions. We will do our best to provide the necessary assistance to the people who are most in need,” Quade said.
KATHMANDU, April 19 (Xinhua) — A German scholar has recently found that the right to education for Uygurs and people of other ethnic groups is well protected in China’s Xinjiang region, as young people there enjoy increasingly better opportunities.
Michael Heinrich, who has been teaching German in Minzu University of China for more than five years, said in an article published on Online Khabar news website in March that he has “paid close attention to the development of Chinese education in recent years, especially the education situation in ethnic minority areas.”
Heinrich said he has taught a Xinjiang Uygur student, who often talks with him about the education situation in her hometown and appreciates government policies on education.
The Uygur student has told Heinrich that she lives in a place where she receives Islamic religious education and China’s nine-year compulsory education, and the Uygur students in Xinjiang can enjoy preferential policies, such as extra points in college entrance examination, special policies for college admissions, and employment policy support.
In recent years, the Chinese government has intensified policy support on education in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, and increased investment in educational resources, especially those on vocational education, the article read.
“Through vocational education, more Uyghur Muslim students can enhance their survival skills and work harder by themselves and improve their living standards with these hands,” it said.
For some time, Xinjiang has been plagued by terrorism, religious extremism and separatism, according to the passage, and carrying out vocational education and training in Xinjiang is an effective measure to promote the rule of law and a practical action to protect the vital interests of people of all ethnic groups there.
It is also a just move in fighting extremism and terrorism to contribute to the stability in Xinjiang, it added.
Some Western media outlets as well as some U.S. politicians often slander the Chinese government under the guise of “human rights,” which does not only disregard the facts but also interferes with China’s sovereignty, Heinrich pointed out.
The situation in Xinjiang that they saw was completely different from the stories told by some Western politicians and media, Heinrich quoted some people who have visited Xinjiang and witnessed its development as saying.
The rights to life and development of people of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang are protected to the largest extent, Heinrich added.
NEW DELHI (Reuters) – Indian and Pakistani troops in disputed Kashmir are engaged in their most frequent cross-border fighting of at least two years, official data shows, even as both nuclear-armed rivals battle surging coronavirus outbreaks.
Kashmir has long been a flashpoint between the neighbours but tension was renewed after New Delhi withdrew the autonomy of the Himalayan region last August and split it into federally-administered territories.
Both countries claim the region in full, but rule only parts, and often accuse each other of breaching a 2003 ceasefire pact by shelling and firing across the Line of Control (LoC), an informal border in Kashmir, and of killing dozens every year.
Indian Army data reviewed by Reuters shows 411 ceasefire violations by Pakistan’s military in March, the highest number in a single month since at least 2018. That compares with 267 violations in March last year recorded by the Indian Army.
“(The) Pakistan Army never initiates ceasefire violations along LoC, but it has always responded befittingly to Indian Army’s unprovoked firing,” said Major-General Babar Iftikhar, of the public relations wing of the Pakistan Army.
Iftikhar said Pakistan’s military had recorded 705 ceasefire violations by the Indian Army since the beginning of the year.
The Indian Army data showed 1,197 Pakistani violations during the same period.
Reuters is not in a position to independently verify the competing claims.
Four Indian army officials said the heightened border activity was a cover to help militants from Pakistan-backed groups infiltrate into Indian Kashmir, as some troops help to run health camps and hand out food in the battle on the virus.
“The increase in ceasefire violations is an indication that Pakistan is trying to push militants into the Kashmir valley,” said one of the officials, who all sought anonymity because they were not authorised to speak to media.
India has 5,734 infections, including 166 deaths, while Pakistan has reported 4,072 cases and 58 deaths, with the military of each helping its government’s efforts against the virus.
As summer approaches, infiltration into Kashmir typically picks up. An Indian security official said between 250 and 300 militants were estimated to be ready to cross over from Pakistan, citing intelligence reports.
“This is the time when our (border) fence is the weakest,” with damage caused by winter snows, said the official, who sought anonymity.
On Monday, the Indian Army said in a statement it killed five Pakistan-backed militants at the LoC during a firefight in heavy snow, with five of its special forces soldiers also killed.
Pakistan denies giving material support to militants in Kashmir but says it provides moral and diplomatic backing for the self-determination of Kashmiri people.
BEIJING/SHANGHAI (Reuters) – Chinese President Xi Jinping told U.S. President Donald Trump during a phone call on Friday that he would have China’s support in fighting the coronavirus, as the United States faces the prospect of becoming the next global epicentre of the pandemic.
The United States now has the most coronavirus cases of any country, with 84,946 infections and 1,259 deaths. Hospitals in cities like New York and New Orleans struggle to cope with the wave of patients.
Xi’s offer of assistance came amid a long-running war of words between Beijing and Washington over various issues including the coronavirus epidemic.
Trump and some U.S. officials have accused China of a lack of transparency on the virus, and Trump has at times called the coronavirus a “China virus” as it originated there, angering Beijing.
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In the call, Xi reiterated to Trump that China had been open and transparent about the epidemic, according to an account of the conversation published by the Chinese foreign ministry.
Trump said on Twitter that he discussed the coronavirus outbreak “in great detail” with Xi.
“China has been through much & has developed a strong understanding of the virus,” Trump said. “We are working closely together. Much respect!”.
The World Health Organization has said the United States, which saw 17,099 new coronavirus cases and 281 deaths in the past 24 hours, is expected to become the epicentre of the pandemic.
CHINA CUTS FLIGHTS
Like U.S. hospitals now, China’s medical system struggled to contain the coronavirus just two months ago, but draconian city lockdowns and severe travel restrictions has seen China dramatically ease the epidemic.
Mainland China on Friday reported its first local coronavirus case in three days and 54 new imported cases, as Beijing ordered airlines to sharply cut international flights, for fear travellers could reignite the coronavirus outbreak.
The 55 new cases detected on Thursday were down from 67 a day earlier, the National Health Commission said on Friday, taking the tally of infections to 81,340. China’s death toll stood at 3,292 as of Thursday, up by five from a day earlier.
The central province of Hubei, with a population of about 60 million, reported no new cases on Thursday, a day after lifting a lockdown and reopening its borders as the epidemic eased there.
The commercial capital of Shanghai reported the most new imported cases with 17, followed by 12 in the southern province of Guangdong and four each in the capital Beijing and the nearby city of Tianjin.
Shanghai now has 125 patients who arrived from overseas, including 46 from Britain and 27 from the United States.
In effect from Sunday, China has ordered its airlines to fly only one route to any country, on just one flight each week. Foreign airlines must comply with similar curbs on flights to China, although many had already halted services.
About 90% of current international flights into China will be suspended, cutting arrivals to 5,000 passengers a day, from 25,000, the civil aviation regulator said late on Thursday.
From Saturday, China will temporarily suspend entry for foreigners with valid visas and residence permits, in an interim measure, the foreign ministry added.
Before the new curbs, foreign nationals made up about a tenth of the roughly 20,000 travellers arriving on international flights every day, an official of China’s National Immigration Administration said last week.
As commercial flights dwindle, Chinese students from wealthy families are paying tens of thousands of dollars to fly home on private jets.
International demand for chartered and private flights into China increased 227% in March from a year earlier, said Shanghai-based private jet service provider iFlyPlus.
Notably, requests for flights from the United States to China rose 10-fold in late March, iFlyPlus told Reuters.
BEIJING (Reuters) – Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Wuhan, the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak, on Tuesday, the first time he has done so since the epidemic began and a sign that Beijing believes its efforts to control the virus are working.
His arrival in the city, where the virus is believed to have first taken hold late last year, comes after its spread in mainland China has sharply slowed in the past week and as attention has turned to preventing imported infections from overseas hot spots such as Iran, Italy and South Korea.
News of the visit gave a lift to Chinese stocks, with the blue-chip index .CSI300 climbing back into positive territory after falling as much as 1% in morning trade.
“It is obvious that Xi could not have visited Wuhan earlier because the risk of him contracting the virus there was initially too high,” Zhang Ming, a professor at Renmin University in Beijing, told Reuters.
“He is there now to reap the harvest. His being there means the CCP (Communist Party of China) may declare victory against the virus soon,” Zhang said.
China came in for criticism at home and globally over its early response to the outbreak, suppressing information and downplaying its risks, but its draconian efforts at control, including the lock-down of Wuhan and Hubei province where it is originated, have been effective at curbing the spread.
Hubei province, of which Wuhan is the capital, said on Tuesday it would implement a “health code” system to allow people in areas at a medium or low risk of contracting the coronavirus to start travelling.
During his trip to Wuhan, Xi will “visit and express regards to medical workers, military officers and soldiers, community workers, police officers, officials and volunteers who have been fighting the epidemic on the front line, as well as patients and residents during the inspection,” state news agency Xinhua said.
Separately, Taiwan’s government said on Tuesday a second round of evacuations of its citizens who had been stranded in Wuhan had begun, after weeks of arguments between the Chinese-claimed island and Beijing over the arrangements.
NEW CASES FALL
Mainland China had 19 new coronavirus infections on Monday, the National Health Commission said on Tuesday, down from 40 a day earlier. It also marked the third straight day of no new locally transmitted coronavirus cases outside of Hubei.
Of the new cases, 17 were in Wuhan, while one was in Beijing and one other in Guangdong due to people arriving from abroad, according to the health authority.
That brings the total number of confirmed cases in mainland China so far to 80,754.
However, Chinese authorities have ramped up warnings about the risks from foreigners and Chinese nationals travelling to China from viral hot spots abroad such as Iran and Italy.
The one case in Beijing on Monday was due to a traveller from Britain, and the one in Guangdong was an imported case from Spain. As of Monday, there have been 69 imported cases.
More than 114,300 people have been infected by the coronavirus globally and over 4,000 have died, according to a Reuters tally of government announcements.
Outside China, Italy, South Korea and Iran have reported the most cases and deaths.
Since the outbreak, 59,897 patients have been discharged from hospitals in China. Recently discharged patients need to go into quarantine for 14 days.
In Wuhan, 12 of the 14 temporary hospitals dedicated to treating coronavirus patients have closed, with the remaining two due to shut on Tuesday.
On Saturday, a small hotel used to quarantine people under observation in southern Fujian province collapsed, killing 20, while 10 had yet to be rescued.
Of the 71 people inside the hotel in Quanzhou city at the time of the collapse, 58 were in under quarantine, the Quanzhou city government said.
As of the end of Monday, the overall death toll from the coronavirus outbreak in China reached 3,136, up by 17 from the previous day.
Hubei reported 17 new deaths, all of which were in Wuhan.
Xi, who was mostly absent from Chinese state media coverage of the crisis in its early days, has become for more visible in recent weeks.
The Global Times, a nationalist tabloid published by the official People’s Daily, on Tuesday detailed the various instructions and actions Xi had given and taken between Jan. 7 and March 2 to combat the epidemic.
“Xi personally commands the people’s war against the epidemic. He has been paying constant attention to the epidemic prevention and control work and made oral or written instructions every day,” the newspaper said.
Japanese Prime Minster Shinzo Abe (R, front) meets with Yang Jiechi (L, front), a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the CPC Central Committee, in Tokyo, Japan, Feb. 28, 2020. (Xinhua/Gang Ye)
TOKYO, Feb. 28 (Xinhua) — China and Japan agreed on Friday to step up public health cooperation to contain the outbreak of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) epidemic.
The pledge was made during a meeting between Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Yang Jiechi, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the CPC Central Committee.
During the meeting, Yang said China and Japan assisted each other in the fight against COVID-19 and worked together to overcome the difficulties, thus deepening the friendship between the two countries.
China sincerely thanks Japan for its precious support, and is willing to continue providing support and help for Japan’s fight against the epidemic, strengthen bilateral and multilateral medical and health cooperation, so as to jointly safeguard the health and wellbeing of the peoples of the two countries and the world, he said.
Yang said the China-Japan relations have maintained a sound momentum of development. He noted that Chinese President Xi Jinping and Abe held two successful meetings last year, leading efforts in building China-Japan relations in line with the requirements of the new era.
China is ready to work with Japan to implement the important consensus reached by the leaders of the two countries, respect each other, seek common ground while reserving differences, and work together to build a new pattern of bilateral relations featuring joint cooperation, win-win and mutual benefit, said Yang.
Xi’s upcoming state visit to Japan is of great significance and China is ready to maintain close communication with Japan and make preparations for the visit, he said.
China firmly supports Japan in successfully hosting the Tokyo Olympic Games, he added.
For his part, Abe said Xi’s upcoming state visit to Japan this year is of great importance and Japan will make careful preparations to ensure the success and fruitful results of the visit.
The peoples of Japan and China have shown friendly feelings in their joint fight against the COVID-19 epidemic, Abe said.
He said Japan speaks highly of China’s positive achievements in the fight against the virus and is ready to strengthen exchanges and cooperation with China in information sharing and epidemic prevention and control, and send a positive signal to the international community of jointly tackling the challenges to global public health security.
Also on Friday Yang attended the eighth China-Japan high-level political dialogue with head of Japan’s national security council Shigeru Kitamura and met with Japanese Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi.
An insect-killing fungus has been turned into a mass-produced biopesticide that will face its biggest challenge in East Africa
Current swarm has put 13m people at risk of famine and this will be the first large-scale test of its effectiveness
Young locusts in Somalia, where the fungus will be used to try to kill them. Photo: AP
Chinese factories are producing thousands of tonnes of a “green zombie fungus” to help fight the swarms of locusts in East Africa.
Metarhizium is a genus of fungi with nearly 50 species – some genetically modified – that is used as a biological insecticide because its roots drill through the insects’ hard exoskeleton and gradually poisons them.
In China it was named lu jiang jun, which means green zombie fungus, because it gradually turns its victims in a green mossy lump.
There are now dozens of factories across the country dedicated to producing its spores and despite the curbs introduced to stop the spread of Covid-19, many of them have resumed operations and are shipping thousands of tonnes to Africa.
Plague fears as massive East Africa locust outbreak spreads
11 Feb 2020
These factories are set up in a similar way to breweries, growing the spores on rice which is kept in carefully controlled conditions to ensure the correct temperature and humidity.
Each plant can produce thousands of tonnes of fungi powder per year, each gram of which contains tens of billions of spores.
“I am sending off a truckload right now. Our stock is running out,” said the marketing manager of a production plant in Jiangxi province. “Some customers need it urgently. They need it to kill the locusts.”
The need is particularly pressing in East Africa at the moment, where abnormally high levels of rainfall during the dry season allowed hundreds of billions of locusts to hatch in recent months.
So far the swarms have devastated crops in countries such as Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and Uganda and are moving on to neighbouring countries.
Up to 13 million people face the risk of famine in East Africa. Photo: AFP
The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has warned the situation could be the “worst in decades” and the resulting famine may affect 13 million people and cause international food prices to soar.
Last week, Science magazine reported that the Somalian government, working with the FAO, was preparing to a metarhizium species that only kills locusts and grasshoppers in what it described as the largest ever use of biopesticides against the insects.
Scientists do not believe that the fungus will be enough to solve the problem – monitoring the outbreak and targeting their breeding grounds will be more important in the long-run – but if it proves effective it could be an important weapon to target future outbreaks.
It will take time to gauge the effectiveness, partly because each fungus will take several days to take effect and partly because of the sheer scale of the challenge; a single swarm in Kenya was estimated to contain between 100 billion and 200 billion locusts.
By fair means or fowl: how Chinese herdsmen are planning to stop a locust invasion
17 Apr 2018
The locusts have also swept eastward into the Middle East, travelling up to 150km (90 miles) a day, and are moving closer to China now that they have now reached some of its neighbours, including India and Pakistan.
At present China’s agriculture ministry believes some locusts may follow the monsoon into the country but “the chances of them causing damage is very small”.
Most scientists agree the swarms will not have lasting effect on food production but say developing countries can tap into China’s cutting-edge anti-locust technology.
Radar stations have been set up all the way along China’s western and southern borders to detect possible clouds of locusts, while unmanned devices lure the insects into traps to collect data about their species population and size.
A locust being eaten inside out by the metarhizium fungi. Photo: Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of Maryland
The data is streamed to the ministry’s programme command, which is responsible for the planning and coordination of the national efforts to prevent an outbreak.
The scientists also said that planes loaded with biological and chemical sprays were standing by.
Today, most locust outbreaks happen in developing countries that do not have advanced monitoring networks and some of them are unable to produce pesticides on a mass scale, according to Li Hu, an associate professor with the China Agricultural University in Beijing.
The Chinese locust treatment technologies were highly advanced, and usually cheaper than competing solutions from the West, he said.
Chinese researchers are now working with colleagues in other countries to help them solve the problem.
One disadvantage of the Chinese research is that it is mostly focused on local species, or the East Asia migratory locust. The desert locusts currently swarming East Africa have different genes and behaviour, and Li warned that some methods that work in China might not work elsewhere.
A giant indoor farm in China is breeding 6 billion cockroaches a year. Here’s why
26 Apr 2018
There were some sightings of the species reported in Yunnan and Tibet in the past, but they did not build up to large colonies, Professor Kang Le, lead scientist of the locust research programme with the Institute of Zoology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, told China Science Daily last week.
The vast west China region of Xinjiang, which shares a border with eight countries, is currently too cold for a locust migration, but once temperatures start to rise in the spring it could see locusts swarming across the border with Afghanistan.
Shi Wangpeng, a senior government locust expert, told China Business Network on Sunday that China should be on high alert because many Afghan farms had already been affected.
“These areas share a long border with us, there are almost no barriers,” he was quoted as saying by the Shanghai-based magazine.
China has a long and bitter history of locust swarms, with more than 840 being recorded in the official records over the past 2,700 years.
One famine, in the year 628 was so devastating that even the Tang dynasty emperor Taizong was reported to have run short of food and resorted to eating the insects to survive.
China has a long and bitter history of locust swarms. Photo: AFP
This, in turn, means that China’s rulers have long been looking for innovative ways to solve the problem
In the past farmers tried remedies such as building huge fires, burying the insects in ditches or trying to kill them with sticks.
In one campaign organised by prime minister Yao Chong in 715, the farms collected 9 million sacks of dead locusts and managed to save a significant proportion of their crops, according to historic text.
In more recent times more sophisticated technologies have been deployed to tackle the menace.
Some researchers have spent decades chasing locust colonies and studying their individual and collective behaviour everywhere from coastal areas to inland deserts, and in 2014 Chinese scientists released the world’s most comprehensive genetic map of locusts.
Researchers have also developed chemical agents that can disorient swarms of locusts and disperse them.
Chinese scientists first became interested in the green zombie’s potential in the 1980s after discovering that South Pacific islanders had been using them to kill insects on coconut trees.
Research by US scientists confirmed its effectiveness in the 1990s and the Chinese started importing the fungus from the United States and Britain.
Their experiments led to the development of newer and deadlier strains and mass production started in the past decade.
Other fungi or bacteria can be used to fight locusts, and some laboratories are working with agricultural technology companies to modify their genes to turn them into more deadly or precise killers.
One genetically engineered species of microsporidia, another type of insect-killing fungus, for instance, can generate three times as many as the spores to those produced by nature species, according to a document from the China Association of Agricultural Science Societies last year.
While it remains to be seen whether the current swarms will reach China, these treatments have been effective in the past and there has not been a locust outbreak in China for a decade.
Comic crusader Priya, a gang-rape survivor who earlier campaigned against rape and acid attack, is back in a new avatar. This time she is fighting the trafficking of girls and women for sex.
The “modern-day female superhero” was first launched in December 2014, exactly two years after the horrific gang rape of a young woman on a bus in Delhi, to focus attention on the problems of gender and sexual violence in India.
In the latest edition – Priya and the Lost Girls – she takes on the powerful sex-trafficker Rahu, the evil demon who runs an underworld brothel city where he has entrapped many women, including Priya’s sister Lakshmi.
Indian-American actor and writer Dipti Mehta, who wrote the script of the comic, draws on ancient Indian mythology to create larger-than-life fantastical characters and delivers a powerful feminist statement.
The story of Lost Girls begins when the protagonist returns home to find that there are no girls in her village.
She then mounts her flying tiger Sahas (Hindi for courage) and arrives in Rahu’s den. It’s a city ruled by greed, jealousy and lust, where women exist only to serve and please men – and those who resist are turned into stone.
Image copyright PRIYASHAKTI
Priya is threatened and attacked, a woman who works for Rahu tries to lure her into the sex trade saying: “If you work for us, you’d serve only five to six men and not 20”, but in the end, good wins over evil and she manages to vanquish Rahu and liberate her sister and all the other trafficked girls.
But victory still eludes her. The families of rescued girls refuse to take them back. The survivors are treated like “lepers”, facing stigma, scorn and ridicule.
But Priya and the other girls stand up to confront patriarchy, says Ms Mehta, “just as women have broken their silence to talk about MeToo”, the campaign against sexual harassment and abuse that started in Hollywood in October 2107 and later spread to many other parts of the world.
“I was very clear from the start that Lost Girls can’t be just another comic book where good guy wins and evil dies, it had to be much more than that,” Ms Mehta says.
Image copyright PRIYASHAKTI
Ram Devineni, the Indian-American creator of the comic series, told the BBC that he had decided to focus on sex trafficking in this edition after visiting Sonagachi, India’s largest red-light area in the eastern city of Kolkata, where he met several women engaged in sex work.
“Half of them told me they had been tricked into coming there and, once there, they were forced into the sex trade. The other half said they’d agreed to do this for a living because they were dirt poor and they had no alternative.
“Often there were two to three women sharing a small dingy room, many of them had young children who lived with them, and some of them said their children slept in the same bed where they serviced clients.
Mr Devineni says that from his conversations with them, he realised that many of the women there could leave, but chose not to.
“Most believed in the idea of sacrifice, for the sake of their families, their children. The shackles that hold them back are mostly emotional and psychological coercion.”
Some of their stories, he says, have found their way into the Lost Girls, which will be launched digitally on Monday to coincide with the start of United Nation’s 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-based Violence.
Image copyright PRIYASHAKTIAccording to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, human trafficking is the second largest organised criminal business in the world after the arms trade. It is even ahead of the drugs trade.
“It’s a multi-billion-dollar industry,” anti-trafficking activist Ruchira Gupta told the BBC on the phone from New York.
Ms Gupta, who supports trafficked girls and women in India through her charity Apne Aap Women Worldwide, says there are 100 million people trapped in human trafficking globally, of which 27 million are in India alone, and most of the trafficking is in girls and young women.
India, Bangladesh and Nepal, she says, make up “the epicentre” of global sex trafficking.
Ms Gupta, who collaborated on Priya and the Lost Girls, says she plans to take the comic to schools and colleges in India and the US to use it as a talking tool, “as a conversation starter on what is a very difficult topic”.
The only way to fight trafficking, she believes, is to “de-normalise” sex trade – and cinema, art and pop culture are tools that can help do that.
The comic is made to appeal to young people. After its launch, it can be downloaded for free anywhere in the world; it also has “augmented reality features”, which means people can see special animation and movies by scanning the artwork with their smartphones.
Image copyright PRIYASHAKTI
“People often make flippant comments to say that prostitution is the oldest occupation in the world, but they don’t realise that trafficking is not some poor woman getting money in exchange for having sex with a man. It is the extreme exploitation of most vulnerable girls,” Ms Gupta says.
To stop this “commodification” of girls, she adds, we need to create revulsion in men’s minds about sex trade – and it’s best to catch them young.
“We must work with young boys and teenagers, 13 to 14 year olds, through storytelling and pop culture. They learn about sex from porn sites which portray sex workers as happy hookers, and no-one sees the girl behind her.
“I want to demolish that myth of the happy hooker. I want to ensure that people see the girl behind her.”
Artwork by Syd Fini and Neda Kazemifar
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