Youth | CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon

18/05/2020

Xi Focus: Xi replies to letter from Pakistani students studying in Beijing

A graduating foreign student takes selfies at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, east China’s Zhejiang Province, June 28, 2018. (Xinhua/Long Wei)

BEIJING, May 18 (Xinhua) — Chinese President Xi Jinping extended welcome to excellent youth from all countries in the world to study in China in his Sunday reply to a letter from all Pakistani students studying in the University of Science and Technology Beijing (USTB).

In his letter, Xi encouraged the students to communicate more with their Chinese peers and join hands with youth from all countries to contribute to promoting people-to-people connectivity and building a community with a shared future for humanity.

Learning that the students have enriched their knowledge and made quite a few Chinese friends while studying in China, Xi said he felt happy for the achievements they have made.

“As you have felt, since the COVID-19 epidemic broke out, the Chinese government and schools have always cared for the lives and health of foreign students studying in China, providing all-round help for them,” Xi noted.

The Chinese government and people put people’s lives first and treat foreigners in the country the same as Chinese nationals, making no exception in offering them care, Xi wrote.

Photo taken on Nov. 7, 2019 shows the autumn scenery of the University of Science and Technology Beijing in Beijing, capital of China. (Xinhua/Chen Yehua)

Xi said he learned that many foreign students have expressed their support to the Chinese people in various ways during China’s fight against COVID-19.

“A friend in need is a friend indeed,” he said, adding that China will continue providing various help to all foreign students studying in the country.

While welcoming excellent youth from other countries to study in China, Xi encouraged them to learn more about the country, communicate more with their Chinese peers and tell the world more about the China they see.

The USTB currently has 52 Pakistani students. They recently wrote about their experiences and feelings of studying in China in a letter to Xi and expressed their gratitude to the university for providing care and help for them after the COVID-19 outbreak.

They also expressed their aspirations to join in building the Belt and Road after graduation and contribute to enhancing China-Pakistan friendship.

Source: Xinhua

Posted in Beijing, Belt and Road, capital, China, China-Pakistan friendship, chinese government, Chinese President Xi Jinping, community, connectivity, countries, COVID-19 epidemic, foreign students, Foreigners, Hangzhou, humanity, letter, Pakistani, people-to-people, schools, shared future, students, study, studying, Sunday, Uncategorized, University of Science and Technology Beijing (USTB), welcome, World, Youth, zhejiang province, Zhejiang University | Leave a Comment »

29/04/2020

Spotlight: China leads global green development with concrete actions

BEIJING, April 28 (Xinhua) — China has achieved much progress in environmental protection and taken the lead in green development in recent years.

The efforts have exemplified Chinese President Xi Jinping’s proposal of “working together for a green and better future for all” made a year ago in his speech at the opening ceremony of the International Horticultural Exhibition 2019 Beijing.

In the keynote speech, Xi proposed a five-point initiative on promoting green development, namely pursuing harmony between man and nature, pursuing the prosperity based on green development, fostering a passion for nature-caring lifestyle, pursuing a scientific spirit in ecological governance, and joining hands to tackle environmental challenges.

China’s hard work on environment protection has paid off.

The ecological environment has improved significantly. People are enjoying more days of blue sky, cleaner water, and fertile land.

China has achieved the goal of zero growth of desertified land by 2030 set by the United Nations ahead of time. Besides, forest stock volume increased by 4.56 billion cubic meters compared with that of 2005.

Carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP in 2018 fell by 45.8 percent compared with that of 2005, exceeding the target set for the year.

After more than 30 years of hard work, the seventh largest desert in China, the Kubuqi Desert in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, once known as the “sea of death” difficult for birds to fly across, has turned into a green valley.

In January 2020, in a letter in reply to the student representatives of the Global Alliance of Universities on Climate, the Chinese president mentioned his thoughts about ecological civilization in his youth.

“Over four decades ago, I lived and worked for many years in a small village on the Loess Plateau in western China. Back then, the ecology and environment there was seriously damaged due to over-development and the local people were trapped in poverty as a result,” Xi wrote.

“This experience taught me that man and nature are a community of life and that the damage done to nature will ultimately hurt mankind,” said Xi.

China’s progress and achievements are recognized worldwide.

The ecological civilization and green development advocated by China are actually an endeavor to find a way to balance economic development and environmental protection, said John Cobb, Jr., the founding president of the Institute for Postmodern Development of China and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Noting that the endeavor is a remarkable exploration, he expressed his hope that it will succeed.

China is on the right path in dealing with global climate change and achieving sustainable development, said Borge Brende, president of the World Economic Forum.

In addition to making efforts at home, China has also rolled out a series of measures to support the global combat against climate change.

In September 2015, ahead of the Paris climate change conference, Xi pledged a 20-billion-yuan (3-billion-U.S. dollars) China South-South Climate Cooperation Fund, which was dedicated to help other developing countries combat climate change.

China has also been fulfilling the obligations of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement, and achieved the goal of its intended nationally determined contributions submitted to the secretariat of the Climate Change Convention as scheduled.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres expressed his appreciation for China’s important contributions to addressing the climate change and building a green “Belt and Road,” and said he expects China to continue to play a leading role in addressing the climate change and other issues.

“Lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets,” a concept put forward by Xi in 2005 when he visited Yucun Village in southeast China’s Zhejiang Province as the party chief of the province, has become the motto of the Lao Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment.

In March 2020, when Xi returned to Yucun, he said that economic development should not be achieved at the expense of the ecological environment. To protect the ecological environment is to develop the productive forces, he said.

The history of civilizations shows that the rise or fall of a civilization is closely tied to its relationship with nature, Xi said at the International Horticultural Exhibition last year.

Only by joining hands can the humankind advance a global ecological civilization and march towards the bright future of building a community with a shared future for mankind.

Source: Xinhua

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28/04/2020

China honors young individuals, groups for outstanding contributions

BEIJING, April 28 (Xinhua) — China’s youth organizations awarded May Fourth Medals to 94 individuals and 34 groups Tuesday for their great contributions to the country.

The medals, which are awarded annually, are the top honor for young Chinese. The Central Committee of the Communist Youth League and the All-China Youth Federation released the list of winners.

Medical teams assisting Hubei Province to combat the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) epidemic are among the groups awarded.

Covering a wide range of sectors, the individual winners include firefighters, military personnel, scholars, teachers, engineers, workers and medical staff.

Among the list, 34 were honored posthumously, including those who sacrificed their lives in the fight against COVID-19.

Source: Xinhua

Posted in All-China Youth Federation, awarded, Beijing, China, contributions, COVID-19, engineers, fight, firefighters, groups, honors, hubei province, individuals, lives, May Fourth Medals, medical staff, military personnel, novel coronavirus disease, organizations, outstanding, posthumously, sacrificed, scholars, teachers, The Central Committee of the Communist Youth League, Uncategorized, workers, young, Youth | Leave a Comment »

06/10/2019

Xinhua Headlines: China’s Greater Bay Area busy laying foundation for innovation

As China aims to develop its Greater Bay Area into an international innovation and technology hub, innovation and entrepreneurship resources are shared in the area to provide more opportunities for young Hong Kong and Macao entrepreneurs.

The provincial government of Guangdong has stepped up efforts to improve basic research capability, considered the backbone of an international innovation and technology hub, by building large scientific installations and launching provincial labs.

by Xinhua writers Liu Yiwei, Quan Xiaoshu, Wang Pan, Jing Huaiqiao

GUANGZHOU, Oct. 5 (Xinhua) — Hong Kong man Andy Ng was surprised his shared workspace Timetable was rented out completely only six months after it had started operation in Guangzhou, capital of south China’s Guangdong Province.

While studying economics at City University of Hong Kong, Ng set up his first business, developing an online education platform, but soon realized the Hong Kong market was too small. After earning a master’s degree in the UK in 2017, Ng returned to China and chose Guangzhou as his new base.

Timetable is now accumulating popularity and even fans in Dianping.com, China’s major online consumer guide. Ng feels lucky that his business caught the implementation of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) development plan.

The bay area, covering 56,000 square km, comprises Hong Kong and Macao, as well as nine cities in Guangdong. It had a combined population of about 70 million at the end of 2017, and is one of the most open and dynamic regions in China.

Aerial photo taken on July 11, 2018 shows the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge in south China. (Xinhua/Liang Xu)

In July 2017, a framework agreement on the development of the bay area was signed. On February 18 this year, China issued the more specific Outline Development Plan for the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. One of its major aims is to develop the area into an international innovation and technology hub.

OPPORTUNITIES FOR YOUTH

The plan proposes that innovation and entrepreneurship resources be shared in the bay area to provide more opportunities for young Hong Kong and Macao entrepreneurs.

An incubator for entrepreneurship, Timetable is home to 52 companies, including 15 from Hong Kong and Macao, such as Redspots, a virtual reality company that won the Hong Kong Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Awards 2019.

“I persuaded them one by one to come here,” Ng said. “I told them of my own experience that the GBA is a great stage for starting a business with ever-upgrading technologies, ever-changing consumer tastes and a population 10 times that of Hong Kong.”

Timetable is a startup base of the Guangzhou Tianhe Hong Kong and Macao Youth Association, which has assisted 65 enterprises founded by Hong Kong and Macao young people since its establishment in October 2017.

The association and its four bases provide a package of services from training and registering to policy and legal consultation, said Chen Jingzhan, one of the association founders.

Tong Yat, a young Macao man who teaches children programming, is grateful the association encouraged him to come to Guangdong, where young people enjoy more preferential policies to start their own businesses.

“The GBA development not only benefits us, but paves the way for the next generation,” Tong said. “If one of my students were to become a tech tycoon in the future and tell others that his first science and technology teacher was me, I would think it all worthwhile.”

In the first quarter of this year, there were more than 980 science and technology business incubators in Guangdong, including more than 50 for young people from Hong Kong and Macao, said Wu Hanrong, an official with the Department of Science and Technology of Guangdong Province.

INNOVATION HIGHLAND

As the young entrepreneurs create a bustling innovative atmosphere, the Guangdong government has stepped up efforts to improve basic research capability, considered the backbone of an international innovation and technology hub, by building large scientific installations and launching provincial labs.

Several large scientific facilities have settled in Guangdong. China Spallation Neutron Source (CSNS) operates in Dongguan City; a neutrino observatory is under construction in Jiangmen City; a high intensity heavy-ion accelerator is being built in Huizhou City.

Aerial photo taken on June 23, 2019 shows the construction site of the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) in Jiangmen, south China’s Guangdong Province. (Xinhua/Liu Dawei)

Guangdong also plans to build about 10 provincial labs, covering regenerative medicine, materials, advanced manufacturing, next-generation network communications, chemical and fine chemicals, marine research and other areas, said Zhang Yan, of the provincial department of science and technology.

Unlike traditional universities or research institutions, the provincial labs enjoy a high degree of autonomy in policy and spending. A market-oriented salary system allows them to recruit talent from all over the world, and researchers from other domestic organizations can work for the laboratories without giving up their original jobs, Zhang said.

The labs are also open to professionals from Hong Kong and Macao. Research teams from the universities of the two special administrative regions have been involved in many of the key programs, Zhang said.

For example, the provincial lab of regenerative medicine and health has jointly established a regenerative medicine research institute with the Chinese University of Hong Kong, a heart research center with the University of Hong Kong, and a neuroscience research center with the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST).

Photo taken on July 24, 2019 shows a rapid cycling synchrotron at the China Spallation Neutron Source (CSNS) in Dongguan, south China’s Guangdong Province. (Xinhua/Liu Dawei)

Guangdong has been trying to break down institutional barriers to help cooperation, encouraging Hong Kong and Macao research institutions to participate in provincial research programs, exploring the cross-border use of provincial government-sponsored research funds, and shielding Hong Kong researchers in Guangdong from higher mainland taxes.

NANSHA FOCUS

Located at the center of the bay area, Guangzhou’s Nansha District is designed as the national economic and technological development zone and national free trade zone, and is an important pivot in building the area into an international innovation and technology hub.

The construction of a science park covering about 200 hectares started on Sept. 26. Gong Shangyun, an official with the Nansha government, said the park will be completed in 2022.

Jointly built by the Guangzhou government and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the science park will accommodate CAS research institutes from around Guangzhou, including the South China Sea Institute of Oceanology, the South China Botanical Garden (SCBG) and the Guangzhou Institute of Energy Conversion.

Ren Hai, director of the SCBG, is looking forward to expanding the research platforms in Nansha. “We will build a new economic plant platform serving the green development of the Pearl River Delta, a new botanical garden open to the public, and promote the establishment of the GBA botanical garden union.”

Wang Ying, a researcher with the SCBG, said the union will help deepen the long cooperation among its members and improve scientific research, science popularization and ecological protection. “Predecessors of our botanical garden have helped the Hong Kong and Macao counterparts gradually establish their regional flora since the 1950s and 1960s.”

HKUST also started to build a new campus in Nansha the same day as the science park broke ground. “Located next to the high-speed rail station, the Guangzhou campus is only a 30-minute journey from the Hong Kong campus. A delegation from the HKUST once paid a visit to the site and found it very convenient to work here,” Gong said.

Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) Carrie Lam hoped the new campus would help create a new chapter for the exchanges and cooperation on higher education between Guangzhou and Hong Kong, and cultivate more talents with innovative capabilities.

Nansha’s layout is a miniature of the provincial blueprint for an emerging international innovation and technology hub.

“We are seeking partnership with other leading domestic research institutions and encouraging universities from Hong Kong and Macao to set up R&D institutions in Guangdong,” said Zhang Kaisheng, an official with the provincial department of science and technology.

“We are much busier now, because research institutes at home and abroad come to talk about collaboration every week. The GBA is a rising attraction to global scientific researchers,” Zhang said.

Source: Xinhua

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18/03/2016

We’re not gonna take it | The Economist

DELHI found itself under siege last month. Young men blocked roads and canals that feed people and water into the city. They looted, set fires and dragged women out of cars to rape them. The protesters, from a relatively privileged group of land-owning peasants called Jats, were agitating to be included in India’s list of “other backward classes”, which guarantees university places and government jobs.

Faced with dry taps, Narendra Modi’s government was eventually forced to concede to the demand.

This is the fury to which Somini Sengupta refers in the subtitle of her sharply observed study of India’s young, “The End of Karma: Hope and Fury Among India’s Young”. The median age in India is 27. Every month between 2011 and 2030, nearly 1m Indians will turn 18. Those coming of age this month were born well after the country started opening up its markets in 1991; they have spent their formative years in a world of optimism and rapid economic growth. But Ms Sengupta calls India “a democracy that makes promises it has no intention of keeping”. Advertisement

By 2030 the majority of Indians will be of working age. This could be what economists call a “demographic dividend”, creating a high worker-to-dependent ratio—or it could be a time bomb. India is producing nowhere near enough jobs for the tens of millions of young people joining the workforce every year.

The argument running through Ms Sengupta’s book, made of seven richly detailed portraits of young Indians, is both simple and beguiling. For centuries Indians born into wretched circumstances have accepted their lot as karma—punishment for misdeeds in past lives. This belief explains the persistence of the caste system, and the remarkable fact that a country that is home to one in three of the world’s poor has not come apart at the seams. But young people no longer accept karma, argues Ms Sengupta. Ideas of aspiration and free will have entered the Indian consciousness. Young Indians today demand the right to shape their own futures. If fury is in ample supply, so is hope.

Yet at every step the young are thwarted. It starts in the womb. A traditional preference for boys means that India has one of the most skewed sex ratios in the world: 1.13 boys for every girl, second only to China. (The ratio in America is 1.05.) One in three children under five is underweight. Nearly two-thirds of food meant for early-childhood feeding programmes is pilfered. A rare bright spot is education: in 2013, 96% of primary-school-age children were enrolled. But here, too, India fails its young. By the age of ten, only 60% of students can complete work at the level of a five-year-old. More than half cannot subtract.

Source: We’re not gonna take it | The Economist

Posted in Economics, India alert, Social & cultural, Youth | Leave a Comment »

Tags: Affirmative action, Bharatiya Janata Party, Delhi, Gujarat, Haryana, India, Jat people, Narendra Modi, New Delhi, Other Backward Class

27/08/2012

* Is a Youth Revolution Brewing in India?

NY Times: “Among the world’s major countries, India has the youngest population, and the oldest leaders. A startling four-decade gap between the median age of India’s people and that of its government officials most recently reared its head with a heavy-handed and widely-maligned crackdown on free speech on the Internet.

History shows us that generations with an exceptionally high youth ratio create political movements that shake up their systems and leave a profound impact on history. America’s baby boomers – the 79 million people born between 1946 and 1964 – led the charge in the civil rights movement and the sexual revolution.

In China, out of the stormy Cultural Revolution emerged the country’s current crop of leaders, who have taken it to remarkable heights of prosperity and power. More recently, in the Arab Spring there is evidence of a strong correlation between the ratio of the population under 25 and the urge to overthrow unresponsive governments.

Whether India will follow the same path may become apparent in the very near future.

There are some signs that the beginnings of India’s own youth revolt are stirring – the “India Against Corruption” protests, which swept Delhi on Sunday, involved a about a thousand protesters, mostly young men, who broke through barricades meant to protect their elder politicians’ homes and battled with the police.

The India Against Corruption political movement unleashes youth disenchantment against the establishment, using new means of communication like Twitter and Facebook as its fuel. Still, it is headed by an iconic 75-year-old Gandhian – call it shades of a youth movement, with the structure of a traditional Indian family.

India now has around 600 million people who are younger than 25, and nearly 70 percent of its 1.2 billion population is under 40. It is an unprecedented demographic condition in the history of modern India, and in absolute numbers it is unprecedented anywhere in the world. It also comes at a time when much of the developed world and China have aging populations.

The country’s median age of 25 is in sharp contrast to the average age of its cabinet ministers, 65, which is a far bigger gap than in any other country – Brazil and China are next with age gaps just under 30 years. In the United States the gap is 23 years, and in Germany it is less than 10.

Beyond the Internet crackdown, there are other disturbing signs that the age and thought gap between the majority of India’s citizens and their aging leaders is stifling India’s teeming youth.

We see this at play when the chairwoman of the National Commission for Women tells women to “be careful about how you dress,” after a young woman was sexually assaulted in public by a group of men in Guwahati.

We see it when a police officer wielding a hockey stick cracks down on Mumbai’s buzzing night life, and is defended by the state’s home minister. We see it in the inability to overhaul the country’s jaded bureaucracy that stifles fresh ideas.

Most tellingly, perhaps, we see it in the lack of political will to open up key sectors of the economy like retail to foreign competition, under the populist pretense of protecting existing jobs. This protectionism is far removed from the economic realities of the past two decades – India has been one of the clear winners of globalization. But as one writer put it, “The decision-makers in the Indian political class are still stuck in the mental framework of the 1970s, which is when they were blooded in politics.””

via Is a Youth Revolution Brewing in India? – NYTimes.com.

India is going censorship mad (news.techeye.net)

Posted in India alert, Inequalities, Politics, unrest, Youth | Leave a Comment »

Tags: Arab Spring, baby boomers, Cultural Revolution, Delhi, India, India Against Corruption, modern india, National Commission for Women, politics

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