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Aerial photo taken on May 19, 2020 shows staff members performing via livestreaming on a cellphone at a historical and cultural area of Fuzhou, southeast China’s Fujian Province. May 19 marks the China Tourism Day. Local authorities in Fuzhou conduct livestreaming via cellphones to enable people elsewhere to have a chance to taste the local cultures.
Source: Xinhua
Aerial photo taken on Sept. 21, 2019 shows a steel girder being lifted by a crane at the construction site of the Pingtan Strait Road-rail Bridge in southeast China’s Fujian Province. China on Wednesday completed the main structure of the world’s longest cross-sea road-rail bridge in Fujian. The last steel girder, weighing 473 tonnes, was bolted on the Pingtan Strait Road-rail Bridge, another mega project in China, on Wednesday morning. With a staggering span of 16.34 km, the bridge connects Pingtan Island and four nearby islets to the mainland of Fujian Province. (Xinhua/Lin Shanchuan)
FUZHOU, Sept. 25 (Xinhua) — China on Wednesday completed the main structure of the world’s longest cross-sea road-rail bridge in its southeastern province of Fujian.
The last steel truss girder, weighing 473 tonnes, was bolted on the Pingtan Strait Road-rail Bridge, another mega project in China, on Wednesday morning.
Hundreds of bridge builders clad in orange overalls, as well as government officials, hailed the completion on the bridge deck, with several rounds of fireworks being set off to celebrate the moment.
With a staggering span of 16.34 km, the bridge connects Pingtan Island and four nearby islets to the mainland of Fujian Province.
The bridge, which is expected to open to traffic next year, can help shorten travel time from two hours to half an hour between Fuzhou, capital city of Fujian Province and Pingtan, a pilot zone set up to facilitate trade and cultural exchanges across the Taiwan Strait.
“Of all the bridges being built across the world, this is no doubt the most challenging,” said Wang Donghui, chief engineer of the project, adding that it is China’s first and the world’s longest cross-sea road-rail bridge.
The project has attracted worldwide attention from the start of construction in 2013 as it spans an area off the coast of southeast China long seen as a “no-go zone” for bridge-building.
The region has strong gales and high waves for most of the year and is known as one of the world’s three most perilous seas along with Bermuda and the Cape of Good Hope.
Workers had to battle the notoriously strong winds, choppy waters and rugged seabed in the region to drill 1,895 piles into the ocean.
MORE THAN MEGA PROJECT
The road-rail bridge has a six-lane highway on the top and a high-speed railway at the bottom, which is designed to support bullet trains traveling as fast as 200 km per hour. It is a part of the 88-km Fuzhou-Pingtan railway.
In the past, Pingtan was a backwater island of humble fisheries. It did not even have a bridge connecting it to the mainland until 2010 when the Strait Bridge began operating for cars only.
In 2010, China established the Pingtan Comprehensive Pilot Zone to facilitate cross-Strait exchange and cooperation, ramping up its efforts to improve the island’s infrastructure.
Today, skyscrapers are popping up all along the shoreline, with the glow of construction work filling the night sky. Meanwhile, thousands of Taiwan residents swarm into the booming island to live and start businesses.
The island has accommodated more than 1,000 shops and companies set up by Taiwan residents, according to government statistics.
Chen Chien-hsiang, a 29-year-old man who moved from Taiwan to Pingtan two years ago, believes that the new bridge will help attract more businesses to the island and further boost its economic development.
“The new bridge means more than a mere mega project,” Chen said. “It also promises a brighter future for people from Taiwan who chose to live and work here.”
INFRASTRUCTURE MANIAC
Huang Zhiwei, 22, found himself making history by lifting the last piece of the bridge girder from a ship about 80 meters below the bridge deck, an undertaking that he had never expected when he joined the project a year ago as an intern.
His parents, unhappy about their son’s career choice, felt relieved after several video chats during which their son showed them his working and living conditions at the construction site.
“With so many advanced technologies and safety measures, I am convinced that we will accomplish the mission, and I am very proud of my contribution,” said the young operator.
More than 1.24 million tonnes of steel have been used for the bridge, enough to build 190 Eiffel Towers, and 2.97 million cubic meters of cement, nine times the amount of cement used to build the Burj Khalifa towers in Dubai, the world’s tallest skyscraper.
“We could not possibly have realized the construction 15 years ago for lack of advanced construction technologies and equipment such as the drilling machine and ship cranes we have developed today,” said Xiao Shibo, an engineer of the China Railway Major Bridge Engineering Group Co., Ltd. The bridge has made history in many aspects, Xiao added.
China is dubbed as an “infrastructure maniac” for countless dazzling megaprojects, with the Chinese builders breaking their own world records.
China is home to the world’s highest bridge, longest cross-sea bridge and 90 out of the 100 highest bridges built this century.
From 2015 to 2020, China’s transportation investment is expected to exceed 15 trillion yuan (2.1 trillion U.S. dollars), with a substantial portion reserved for bridge construction.
Source: Xinhua
People in Han-style costumes participate in a blessing ceremony celebrating the Mid-Autumn Festival in Fuzhou, southeast China’s Fujian Province, Sept. 14, 2019. (Xinhua/Lin Shanchuan)
Source: Xinhua
Scientists in southeast China say they have synthesised a crystal with the potential to significantly improve the performance of lasers used in consumer and military equipment.
Crystals of caesium bismuth germanate (CBGO) can turn low-energy beams into high-energy emissions with unparalleled efficiency, according to Professor Mao Jianggao, team leader at the Fujian Institute of Research on the Structure of Matter, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Fuzhou.
The team looked at several candidate crystals in their experiments. Compared with widely used potassium dihydrogen phosphate crystals, the CBGO crystal was 13 times more efficient at turning infrared lasers into more energised green beams.
“This is a record performance,” Mao said on Tuesday. “This is why we think the crystal may have potential.”
Their findings were published in the German weekly scientific peer-reviewed journal Angewandte Chemie, or Applied Chemistry, last month.
The researchers said CBGO crystals could be a way around a problem that has limited the performance of lasers – the huge amount of electricity needed to power them.
The demand on power is great because existing technology is not efficient at converting low-energy beams to high-energy ones – one reason that laser weapons are not yet as common as scientists predicted in the 1960s.
CBGO belongs to a family known as non-linear crystals, which cause abrupt changes to energy that passes through them. The scientists found that CBGO crystals could double the frequency of a laser beam.
As high-energy lasers can be created by merging two low-energy photons, or particles of light, a process known as frequency doubling, CBGO crystals are an ideal medium, and the higher frequency of the laser, the more energy it carries.
Many military and civilian applications required high-energy beams, they said. These included directed energy weapons designed to destroy drones or missiles, or China’s prototype Guanlan anti-submarine warfare satellite, which will use a green laser to penetrate water to a depth of 500 metres (1,640 feet) to detect a target.
Mao said his team’s research was at an early stage and that years of testing would be needed before the CBGO crystals found their way to market.
The CBGO crystal grown in the Fuzhou laboratory was the size of a grain of sand, he said. For industrial use, crystals would need to be at least the size of a dice.
Growing them was a very slow and challenging job, and there was no certainty that CBGO crystals could be grown on an industrial scale, Mao said.
Chinese military could soon disable sensors on enemy missiles using suitcase-sized device after ‘groundbreaking’ study on ultrafast lasers
China is a world leader in crystal research, and some of those most commonly used in laser devices were developed by Chinese scientists thanks to heavy investment from central government.
Professor Li Qiang, deputy director with the Institute of Laser Engineering at Beijing University of Technology, said the discovery of CBGO was encouraging, but its success should be evaluated not only on its efficiency, but also on attributes such as mechanical strength, tolerance to laser damage, and stability in extreme environments such as high humidity.
“Lots of crystals have been proposed over the decades, but only a handful are useful. It’s a high-risk business,” Li said. “China has achieved a leading position in this field not because of luck, but by continuous effort by several generations of researchers through countless failures.”
Source: SCMP
BEIJING, Aug. 12 (Xinhua) — “A spring breeze blew into Sijiqing.”
This is how seniors at the Beijing-based nursing home recalled a visit in 2013 by President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission.
During the visit to the Sijiqing Home for the Elderly, Xi chatted with senior citizens, asked them about their health, families and lives.
Xi stressed the need to improve the management and service quality of elderly care institutions to ensure that every senior citizen can live a carefree, healthy, comfortable and happy life.
More than five years on, Liu Jinwen, a member of the elderly fashion models team at Sijiqing, said the visit had a great impact on them.
“Senior citizens should maintain a positive outlook on life and spend their old age gracefully,” Liu said. “To that end, we set up the models team to make our lives more ‘beautiful!'”
Liu is just one of the growing number of happy seniors in China.
Under Xi’s leadership, the country has over the past few years formulated a series of measures to boost elderly care and witnessed a marked improvement of the lives of the senior citizens.
BETTER NURSING HOMES
The services at nursing homes are related to the happiness of more than 200 million old people in China, especially the 40 million of them who have lost the ability in full or in part to take care of themselves.
In 2017, a four-year campaign was launched nationwide to boost nursing homes’ service quality. More rules and regulations on the management of elderly care institutions have also been drawn up.
At Sijiqing, a lot of cultural activities were organized. A “Silver Age” college was set up. And the nursing home teamed up with a local hospital to provide fast access for senior citizens to quality medical treatment.
“It’s really convenient now,” said Zhang Jin, a Sijiqing nursing home resident.
IMPROVED COMMUNITY-LEVEL SERVICES
Another field of senior care that has benefited a lot from policy support is community-level services.
Community-based elderly care is important to China’s old-age care system. About 90 percent of the Chinese elderly prefer to spend their later years at home, 6 percent at community-level elderly care centers and only 4 percent at nursing homes, according to statistics.
But community-level elderly care centers also play a key role in providing food and medical services to senior citizens who opt to stay at home.
Liu Jianguo, 86, and his wife are among the people who benefit.
The couple, living in the southeastern city of Fuzhou, go to the community elderly daycare center almost every day.
“My wife and I usually spend the whole day here,” Liu said, praising the center for its environment, facilities and staff.
Across China, all urban communities and more than half of rural communities had established community-based old-age service facilities as of the end of 2018.
In China, a comprehensive elderly care service system is taking shape, meeting the needs of the elderly who prefer to spend later years at home, community-level centers or nursing homes.
Source: Xinhua
Photo taken on May 5, 2019 shows the booth of Xinhua News Agency at the 2nd Digital China Exhibition in Fuzhou, southeast China’s Fujian Province. The 2nd Digital China Exhibition runs from May 5 to 9 at the Fuzhou Strait International Conference & Exhibition Center. (Xinhua/Wei Peiquan)
Source: Xinhua
When the lid was removed from the cup there was a strong smell of disinfectant, Tang said.
“I asked staff workers about the drink, but they just took it and smelled it, without giving any explanation. They threw the drink into the rubbish when we were not looking, but we took it back,” Tang said.
Doctors said the woman’s symptoms were caused by sodium dichloroisocyanurate, a chlorine compound widely used to kill bacteria in water by the catering industry and by the leisure sector in swimming pools.
On its Weibo feed, McDonald’s described the incident as unintentional and said staff would be given more training.
“McDonald’s has paid great attention to the incident and is deeply sorry for the error made by a staff member of our restaurant,” it said.
BRUSSELS, April 6 (Xinhua) — China-European Union (EU) relations in tourism get a boost as the 2018 EU-China Tourism Year has scored a success, an official recently said.
During the tourism year, China and the EU held more than 100 promotional activities. It “has been extremely successful,” said Eduardo Santander, executive director of the European Travel Commission (ETC).
There was a 5.1-percent year-on-year increase in Chinese arrivals in EU destinations in 2018, and among the top ones in terms of the volume of Chinese arrivals were Britain, Germany and France, according to the latest figures from the ETC and the air travel analysis agency ForwardKeys.
“We continue to see the benefits in 2019,” Santander added. “The growth in Chinese travellers has been solid, and the near future, judging by current bookings, will see the EU continuing to increase its share of this valuable market, not just to traditional destinations, but lesser-known and emerging ones as well.”
Chinese bookings to the EU for the first four months of 2019 are 16.9 percent ahead of where they were at the end of 2017, said the ETC, adding that this compares very favorably to the global trend, which is 9.3 percent ahead.
According to a recent report by China Tourism Academy and China’s online travel agency Ctrip, 70 percent of Chinese tourists in 2018 chose “package tours” when traveling in Europe, due to language, visa, culture and other factors.
Nevertheless, the proportion of independent and customized travel continues to rise. In 2018, the demand for customized European tours booked by the travel website increased by 127 percent over the past year, far higher than the growth rate of the overall market, said the report.
In addition, a number of new routes were launched between China and Europe in 2018, including direct flights from Fuzhou to Moscow, Changsha to London, Jinan to Paris, and Shenzhen to Brussels. In 2018, there were more than 600 flights a week between China and Europe, according to the report.
Ctrip in 2018 forecast that consumption of each tourist in Europe will exceed 25,000 yuan (about 3,721 U.S. dollars) in two years, with the total annual consumption to reach 150 billion yuan (about 22.3 billion dollars).
“Our findings confirm what a concerted effort to boost tourism can achieve. It also appears to have lasting effects, as we can see in the forward booking figures,” said Olivier Jager, CEO of ForwardKeys.
China’s domestic travel agencies are also deepening the cooperation with Europe. For example, the SkyScanner, Ctrip’s online travel search platform, set up its first overseas calling service center in Edinburgh in April 2018.
Source: Xinhua
continuously updated blog about China & India
continuously updated blog about China & India
continuously updated blog about China & India
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 