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Beware the Waking Dragon
Combo photo taken on May 3, 2020 shows Cao Xiongbin checking the temperature of his colleague (left) and posing for a photo at the construction site of the Renhuai-Zunyi expressway in Zunyi, southwest China’s Guizhou Province. Cao, 25, from Jingdezhen of Jiangxi Province, has been working as a staff member on the COVID-19 control and prevention since early time this year. Many young workers have stuck to their positions during Labor Day holiday. (Xinhua/Liu Xu)
Source: Xinhua
Zeng Zhenguo (L), a member of the medical assistance team supporting the virus-hit Wuhan in Hubei Province, hugs his wife after 14-day quarantine at the Xianghu area of the First Affiliated Hospital of Nanchang University in Nanchang, east China’s Jiangxi Province, April 15, 2020. The 141 members of the medical assistance team reunited with their families on Wednesday after 14-day quarantine. (Xinhua/Wan Xiang)
CHANGSHA, March 26 (Xinhua) — Du Xu, a postgraduate from Central South University of Forestry and Technology (CSUFT), turned on his laptop and prepared for his dissertation pre-defense online.
While at home in eastern China’s Shandong Province, Du presented his dissertation to five professors for the first time through the remote video connection.
“Half a month ago, the university informed us to prepare an online pre-defense, find out the tutors’ opinions on the first draft and then revise it,” the 26-year-old said. Although he had experience with an opening thesis defense and other face-to-face forms, he was not familiar with the process of online defense, which made him feel nervous.
According to the CSUFT, all the postgraduate dissertations must be pre-defended before being submitted for examination to ensure the quality. The graduate school of the university adjusted the arrangement amid the epidemic. Online defense started on Feb. 10 to ensure that the graduate students could graduate on time.
“Since our defense is open and anyone can click the link to join, there were 55 students online when I spoke,” Du said. The open online defense can help us check missing key points and learn from each other. Some students also recorded the defense process to follow up on the comments of the tutor to further modify their dissertation, according to Du.
The university said the pre-defense would be submitted via the Internet, and the degree management office has set up an online platform for it.
Feng Jiajin, a graduate of the Hunan Railway Professional Technology College (HRPTC), who works as an intern at the Nanchang Railway Bureau in eastern China’s Jiangxi Province, also needs to demonstrate his graduation project through an online defense.
On March 18, Feng launched a video conference for his final project defense in the office via software on his mobile phone during his lunch break. More than 10 teachers from his college attended the meeting.
In front of the camera, Feng talked about his graduation project “Ultrasonic Ranging and Reversing System” and displayed the slides on the screen with explanations.
When displaying his final product, he showed the results of the graduation project in different situations.
“Vocational schools focus on students’ practical ability. Before the formal defense, the instructor first reviewed the students’ graduation projects and the statements. Only when the work is qualified are the students are allowed to participate in the defense and display,” said Xiong Yi with HRPTC.
According to the college, members of the dissertation defense committee ask questions about the relevant theoretical knowledge and the design methods, which the students should answer one by one. Finally, the members of the defense committee discuss the defense process and results. The results will be announced after a secret ballot. The entire process of the dissertation defense will be recorded, screenshot and saved as the defense record.
“The outbreak of coronavirus won’t affect the students’ graduation and seeking employment. Before the start of the new semester, the university will use online defense to ensure their graduation on time,” said Zhang Ying, vice president of HRPTC, adding that in March, the school will have more than 600 graduates participate in online defense.
Source: Xinhua
NANJING, March 19 (Xinhua) — Chinese cities are encouraging residents to dine out and shop with measures such as handing out e-vouchers to boost consumption sectors hit hard by the novel coronavirus outbreak.
Like many living in the eastern city of Nanjing, Wang Linlin was waked up by her alarm clock at midnight and with a few clicks on her cellphone, she was ready to meet her luck of the draw: getting a meal voucher worth 100 yuan (about 14.2 U.S. dollars).
“I’ve always been thinking about hanging out and having hotpot with my friends after the epidemic, so getting a voucher would be great,” Wang said.
Nanjing has been giving out vouchers worth 318 million yuan to its residents since Sunday. People are invited to participate in lotteries for e-vouchers which can be used in restaurants, gymnasiums, bookshops as well as tourist spots, helping the service sector bounce back.
The voucher bonus has been well received as more than 1.6 million local citizens have registered for the lotteries as of Monday, according to the Nanjing Big Data Administration Bureau.
Besides Nanjing, many other regions have also been taking similar actions.
Macao gives out vouchers totaling 2.2 billion patacas (about 275 million U.S. dollars) to its residents. The city of Ningbo in east China’s Zhejiang Province is issuing consumption vouchers worth 100 million yuan while the city of Jinan, east China’s Shandong Province, is handing out vouchers worth 20 million yuan to stimulate spending on tourism and culture.
Due to the coronavirus outbreak, Chinese customers have shied away from restaurants and shopping malls. China’s retail sales of consumer goods, a major indicator of consumption growth, declined 20.5 percent year on year in the first two months of this year, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.
“People are more willing to dine out with the vouchers, which can boost confidence in the catering sector and finally get the economy back on track,” said Shen Jiahua, chairman of a chain restaurant company in Nanjing.
After the coronavirus outbreak ends, people are eager to spend generously. According to a survey conducted by the Jiangsu consumers council, nearly 90 percent of the respondents expressed suppressed consumption desire.
Restaurants, shopping malls, movie theaters, gymnasiums and tourist spots are the top five destinations for consumers to unleash their spending spree after normal life resumes, the survey showed.
Local officials across China have been taking the lead in recent days in patronizing restaurants and shopping malls, hoping to use their appearances in public to persuade more residents to go outside.
In provinces such as Jiangsu, Anhui, and Jiangxi, government notices have urged officials to dine out and go shopping to help related businesses through the epidemic period.
“Government officials are using their actions to convey confidence and support work resumption and consumer spending,” commented a Chinese netizen.
Source: Xinhua
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Source: SCMP
JIUJIANG, China (Reuters) – People are leaving and entering China’s Hubei province by foot over a bridge spanning the Yangtze river, despite a virtual lockdown on vehicle traffic due to a coronavirus epidemic that has killed more than 200 people.The Yangtze divides Jiujiang in Jiangxi province and Huanggang in neighbouring Hubei, one of the cities hardest hit by the coronavirus outbreak and now sealed off from the rest of China to try to contain it.
But the foot traffic over the Yangtze shows gaps in the lockdown, adding to doubts over its effectiveness and providing a glimpse of life inside the epicentre of what the World Health Organization (WHO) has called a global emergency.
Wu Minzhou, a 40-year-old business owner who was fishing near the bridge on the Jiangxi side, said he was worried about exceptions being made for people leaving Hubei.
“Because there’s an … incubation period at play here, if they head out, for example, to cities in the north of China, then it’s highly possible they will infect those areas too,” he said.
While vehicles are not allowed over the bridge, it is open to some pedestrians. Police explained that people were still entering Hubei and they could still get out, but only in “special circumstances”.
Those included people who were in Hubei but booked train tickets to leave from Jiujiang before the Lunar New Year.
“Everyone’s panicking right now, but I think things are not that bad,” migrant worker Guan, 45, told Reuters after crossing from Hubei.
A 40-year-old woman, who only gave her surname as Li, said she was heading back to her home in Huizhou, Guangdong province, with her son.
She had to show their train tickets at the checkpoint and get their temperatures taken on the Hubei side of the bridge before being allowed to make the long trek into Jiangxi.
Another man told Reuters that he had driven to the bridge from Jiujiang with his friend, who was going the other way home to Hubei, a province of about 60 million people.
“But once you get back you cannot come out again,” said the man, who gave his surname as Tian. “You have to stay there, stay at home. You can’t come out.”
The epidemic, believed to have originated in a seafood market in the Hubei provincial capital of Wuhan, prompted the WHO to declare a global emergency on Thursday, only the sixth time it has done so.
Trains and other public transportation have been suspended, roads have been sealed off and checkpoints established at tollgates around Wuhan. The special measures have been extended to other cities in Hubei province.
Though Jiujiang itself has not officially been locked down, its streets were mostly deserted and its tourist sites closed on what was officially the last day of China’s Lunar New Year celebrations on Thursday.
“This year … we are all just following what the government has asked us to do. That is, we’re at home almost all the time,” said local taxi driver Guo Dongbo, 59. “We don’t go out and nobody else is out on the streets either.”
In one of the residential areas of Jiujiang, a city of nearly five million people, a man carried a loudspeaker playing a recorded message ordering anyone who has been to Hubei recently to go and register with the local residents’ committee.
By Friday, the city had 42 confirmed cases of infection.
Elsewhere, shops were mostly shuttered, and the few restaurants that remained open were nearly empty.
“Normally at this time of year a lot of people come here. Now there’s nobody,” said a vegetarian restaurant owner near the Donglin Buddhist temple in Jiujiang.
Source: Reuters
China needs to divert more water to its arid northern regions and invest more in water infrastructure as shortages get worse because of pollution, overexploitation and rising population levels, Premier Li Keqiang has said.
China’s per capita water supplies are around a quarter of the global average. With demand still rising, the government has sought to make more of scarce supplies by rehabilitating contaminated sources and improving efficiency.
Water remained one of China’s major growth bottlenecks, and persistent droughts this year underlined the need to build new infrastructure, Li told a meeting of senior Communist Party officials on Monday. An account of the meeting was published by China’s official government website.
Local government bonds should be “tilted” in the direction of water infrastructure, he said, and innovative financing tools were also needed.
He also called for research into new pricing policies to encourage conservation.
Li said China’s water supply problems had been improved considerably as a result of the South-North Water Diversion Project, a plan to divert billions of cubic metres of water to the north by building channels connecting the Yangtze and Yellow rivers.
He said opening up more channels to deliver water to regions north of the Yangtze River Delta would support economic and social development and optimise China’s national development strategy, according to a summary of the meeting on the government website.
China is in the middle of a wide-reaching programme to clean up the Yangtze River, its biggest waterway, and put an end to major development along its banks.
Local governments have been under pressure to dismantle dams, relocate factories and even ban fishing and farming in ecologically fragile regions.
But experts say the ongoing campaign to divert the course of the Yangtze to other regions is still causing long-term damage to the river’s environmental health.
Many cities that had polluted their own water sources had drawn replacement supplies from the Yangtze, exceeding the river’s environmental capacity, said Ma Jun, founder of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, which monitors water pollution.
Beijing already relied on diversion channels from the Yangtze to supply 70 per cent of its water, but had done little to improve conservation or reduce per capita consumption, which was higher than many Western countries, he said.
“[Diversion] has caused so much suffering and needs so many dams to keep up supply, and that has impacted biodiversity,” he said.
Source: SCMP
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESAn apparent police ban on all mahjong parlours in a Chinese city led to panic among aficionados of China’s national pastime.
Police in Yushan in southeast China first announced the ban at the weekend, saying it was to curb illegal gambling and “purify social conduct”.
This led to shock and outrage with many calling the strategic, tile-based game the “quintessence of Chinese culture”.
Police then clarified that only unlicensed parlours would be shut.
It comes after several other cities also announced parlours encouraging gambling would be shut.
Mahjong is one of the most popular games in China, especially with older people.
While it does not have to be played with money, it is common for players to gamble with small amounts. A typical mahjong game could see players bet anywhere from $1 to $15.
On 20 October, police in Yushan, a small county in China’s southeast Jiangxi province, issued a statement announcing that all mahjong parlours in the county would be “closed” by 22 October.
Authorities said the ban would be enacted in an effort to “push forward the campaign against crimes and gangs… [to] solve the gambling and noise problem [and] purify social conduct”.
Gambling is illegal in China but under Jiangxi province law, those who engage in “win-loss entertainments such as mahjong and poker involving a small amount of money… shall not be punished”.
However, the law adds that people who “[gamble] money of more than 200 yuan ($28; £21)” could be subject to punishment.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESIt wasn’t long before the backlash kicked in.
Some people pointed out that while China does face a widespread problem of illegal gambling dens, many mahjong parlours are in fact, legally operated with licenses.
Another commenter on social media site Weibo said: “Not all people play mahjong for gambling,” according to state media ECNS.
“My grandparents play mahjong as part of their daily entertainment”.
Others said it was a “lazy” solution by the government in an attempt to curtail illegal gambling.
“Mahjong [itself] is not a problem. People can gamble with anything,” said one comment on Weibo.
But one social media user saw the positive side of the ban, saying: “Finally! I have been woken up numerous times [by] mahjong players.”
Mahjong is known to be quite a noisy game, as the heavy tiles often make clacking sounds as they are shuffled around.
But their joy was short lived. Just one day after they made the announcement, Yushan authorities revised their statement, saying licensed mahjong parlours would not be affected.
They also clarified that the ban was meant to target places that encouraged “illegal gambling”.
Despite this, some licensed parlour owners told local news outlets that they were also not operating amid the clampdown, but it was unclear whether that was voluntary or enforced by officials.
Several other cities in Jiangxi have also banned mahjong in recent days, but had made it clear in their announcements that registered mahjong parlours would not be affected.
The game has also gone on to gain popularity in the West – and has recently made several appearances in mainstream pop culture.
It was featured as part of a pivotal moment in the Hollywood blockbuster Crazy Rich Asians, where two main characters met for a showdown of a game at a mahjong parlour.
Source: The BBC
Professor He Hongping and his colleagues came to the conclusion by testing the interaction between rare earths and different types of clay. Through their research they found that kaolinite – or china clay – was the best at absorbing rare earths from water.
The clay, named after Gaoling village near Jingdezhen, a centuries-old ceramic production centre in east China’s Jiangxi province, is a raw material for porcelain production.
While kaolinite is found in many countries, those places do not have rare earth deposits – probably because of the lack of acid rain, He said.
“You need the right environment.”
He said that rocks that contained tiny amounts of rare earth elements weathered faster in an acid environment, but the acidity could not be too high or the rare earth might run off before it could be captured by the clay.
Why Beijing cut tax rate on rare earths amid trade war
Rainwater with the right natural acidity often occurred in areas around 20 degrees latitude, such as southern China, he said.
The last step was to locate the source rock. Granite formed in volcanic eruptions between 100 million and 200 million years ago is considered to be the main source of rare earths.
He said that part of the Pacific tectonic plate containing rare elements might have been forced under the Eurasian Plate and was pushed to the surface as magma that formed rocks.
Other countries could learn from the Chinese experience, said He, whose team submitted their findings to the research journal Chemical Geology.
Recent discoveries in Vietnam, Australia and North Carolina in the United States conformed to the Guangzhou team’s theory, but there was still more research to do, he said.
“Rare earth deposits are quite unlike minerals such as copper. Sometimes they occur in this mountain but not in another nearby with almost the same geological features. Sometimes they occur in one half of the mountain but not in the other.”
With China and the US engaged in a trade war, and Beijing cutting taxes on mining companies looking for these elements, the pressure was on to unlock the secrets of China’s abundant rare earth deposits, he said.
Does China’s dominance in rare earths hold leverage in trade war?
Dr Huang Fan, associate researcher with the China Geological Survey, said the Guangzhou discovery would help geologists to find more rare earths.
Most rare earth mines were located along the borders between provinces such as Guangdong and Jiangxi, but recently there were discoveries on a plateau in Yunnan province, where few geologists believed rare earths could be found, he said.
“There are many more rare earth deposits out there waiting for us.”
Source: SCMP
NANCHANG, Oct. 6 (Xinhua) — Unlike most of his peers with an unquenchable thirst for urban life, Zhou Jing, a 23-year-old farmer painter, has a special affinity for the golden paddy fields of his hometown.
Zhou, who lives in a small town of Lichuan County, east China’s Jiangxi Province, would drive a tractor on the bumpy country road to the fields every morning, and pack up the paddies in gunny bags with his father.
With a paintbrush in hand and a paintbox on his desk, he was busy coloring a nearly finished oil painting of a bumper autumn harvest in the glow of several groggy light bulbs.
Painting in his small studio fills a pleasant hour after a day’s farm work for the young farmer who has studied painting for seven years. The scratch of paintbrushes is euphonic to his ear.
Although he chose farm work over further study or migrant work after graduating from middle school in 2012, Zhou later signed up to learn to paint at a local industrial park specialized in oil painting.
“I was hesitant, but I knew I should make a living by myself as soon as possible,” he said.
Yet his early paintings were no more than simple compositions of colored blocks, since the young man was not professionally trained. Zhou worked hard and continued to draw long after his classes had ended.
Years of practice did indeed make perfect. Zhou gradually developed his own painting style, as well as the unity of colors. He was finally recognized and started his new career as a registered painter at the industrial park in April.
Life in the countryside is improving as unremitting efforts have been made by the Chinese government to increase support for agriculture, rural areas and farmers. In Lichuan, with a population of less than 300,000, oil wall paintings by the farmers can be found everywhere.
Lichuan was selected as the “Hometown of Chinese Folk Culture and Art” for its oil painting industry in January, with the industrial park’s annual output reaching 300 million yuan (about 41.9 million U.S. dollars). More than 1,000 farmer artists have been trained, increasing their annual income by over 10,000 yuan.
“When I was little I used to envy those who ate chicken drumsticks, food that for me existed only on my drawing paper,” Zhou said. “I had long dreamed of being able to live such a life, and now those dreams have become a reality.”
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 