Must-watch powerful speech by Uyghur student Zilala Mamat @Cornell TEDxCornell, on China’s ongoing genocide against her people — new, July 29, 2024:
Magnus Fiskesjö, magnus.fiskesjo@cornell.edu
Source: NYT (6/13/24)
China Is Testing More Driverless Cars Than Any Other Country
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Assisted driving systems and robot taxis are becoming more popular with government help, as cities designate large areas for testing on public roads.
By
A Baidu driverless robot taxi with nobody in the front seats traveling in Wuhan, China, last month.Credit…Qilai Shen for The New York Times
The world’s largest experiment in driverless cars is underway on the busy streets of Wuhan, a city in central China with 11 million people, 4.5 million cars, eight-lane expressways and towering bridges over the muddy waters of the Yangtze River.
A fleet of 500 taxis navigated by computers, often with no safety drivers in them for backup, buzz around. The company that operates them, the tech giant Baidu, said last month that it would add a further 1,000 of the so-called robot taxis in Wuhan.
Across China, 16 or more cities have allowed companies to test driverless vehicles on public roads, and at least 19 Chinese automakers and their suppliers are competing to establish global leadership in the field. No other country is moving as aggressively.
The government is providing the companies significant help. In addition to cities designating on-road testing areas for robot taxis, censors are limiting online discussion of safety incidents and crashes to restrain public fears about the nascent technology.
Surveys by J.D. Power, an automotive consulting firm, found that Chinese drivers are more willing than Americans to trust computers to guide their cars. Continue reading China is testing more driverless cars than any other country
Source: NYT (4/19/24)
Opinion: Xi Thinks China Can Slow Climate Change. What if He’s Right?
By
Credit…Minh Hoang/EPA, via Shutterstock
At first glance, Xi Jinping seems to have lost the plot.
China’s president appears to be smothering the entrepreneurial dynamism that allowed his country to crawl out of poverty and become the factory of the world. He has brushed aside Deng Xiaoping’s maxim “To get rich is glorious” in favor of centralized planning and Communist-sounding slogans like “ecological civilization” and “new, quality productive forces,” which have prompted predictions of the end of China’s economic miracle.
But Mr. Xi is, in fact, making a decades-long bet that China can dominate the global transition to green energy, with his one-party state acting as the driving force in a way that free markets cannot or will not. His ultimate goal is not just to address one of humanity’s most urgent problems — climate change — but also to position China as the global savior in the process.
It has already begun. In recent years, the transition away from fossil fuels has become Mr. Xi’s mantra and the common thread in China’s industrial policies. It’s yielding results: China is now the world’s leading manufacturer of climate-friendly technologies, such as solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles. Last year the energy transition was China’s single biggest driver of overall investment and economic growth, making it the first large economy to achieve that. Continue reading Xi thinks China can slow climate change
Source: NYT (3/7/24)
How China Came to Dominate the World in Solar Energy
Beijing is set to further increase its manufacturing and installation of solar panels as it seeks to master global markets and wean itself from imports.
By
A solar farm owned by the Huaneng Group in Shilin, China. Credit…Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times
China unleashed the full might of its solar energy industry last year. It installed more solar panels than the United States has in its history. It cut the wholesale price of panels it sells by nearly half. And its exports of fully assembled solar panels climbed 38 percent while its exports of key components almost doubled.
Get ready for an even bigger display of China’s solar energy dominance.
While the United States and Europe are trying to revive renewable energy production and help companies fend off bankruptcy, China is racing far ahead.
At the annual session of China’s legislature this week, Premier Li Qiang, the country’s second-highest official after Xi Jinping, announced that the country would accelerate the construction of solar panel farms as well as wind and hydroelectric projects.
With China’s economy stumbling, the ramped-up spending on renewable energy, mainly solar, is a cornerstone of a big bet on emerging technologies. China’s leaders say that a “new trio” of industries — solar panels, electric cars and lithium batteries — has replaced an “old trio” of clothing, furniture and appliances.
The goal is to help offset a steep slump in China’s housing construction sector. China hopes to harness emerging industries like solar power, which Mr. Xi likes to describe as “new productive forces,” to re-energize an economy that has slowed for more than a decade. Continue reading How China came to dominate solar
Source: China Digital Times (12/7/23)
Interview: Lobsang Yangtso on Tibet’s Environmental Crisis
By Sophie Beach
Lobsang Yangtso
As the U.N. COP28 Climate Summit is underway in the United Arab Emirates, bringing together thousands of political leaders and environmental activists, one topic that is sure to get little attention there is the environmental crisis facing Tibet. Tibet is currently warming three times as fast as the rest of the world. It has the largest reserves of fresh water in the world outside the Arctic and Antarctica, supplying water to one fifth of the world’s population through the flow of its rivers to downstream countries. The Chinese government is extracting Tibet’s natural resources through damming and mining, destroying rivers and mountains that are considered sacred to much of the local population.
In the latest installment in our interview series focusing on Tibet, we spoke to Lobsang Yangtso, the Environmental Researcher at the International Tibet Network. She was born in Kham, Tibet, and later moved with her family to India. She received her PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, where she wrote her thesis on “China’s Environmental Security Policies in Tibet: Implications to India, 2001-2013.” She has also worked as a Research Associate at the Centre for China Analysis and Strategy, New Delhi. She regularly attends international environmental conferences and forums as an expert on Tibet’s environment. She recently spoke with CDT about how China’s infrastructure development is destroying Tibet’s environment, the challenges for Tibetans of being heard on the international stage, and how neighboring countries could do more to hold China accountable for the environmental destruction that is impacting the whole region. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
China Digital Times: You were born and spent the early part of your life in Tibet before leaving for India with your family. Could you tell us about the environment where you lived in Tibet, and how those early years might have influenced your current work?
Lobsang Yangtso: I was born in a semi-nomadic family, meaning that when I was in Tibet, my family used to do farming and keep animals as well. And so my village was very rural, where most of the people do farming as their livelihood. So that has really influenced how I see climate change and its impact on farming, and specifically on the farmers. I escaped from Tibet to India in 1991. Then in 2016, after 25 years, I was able to go back home and visit family. During that time, I realized that the farming and livelihoods, and how people depend on farming and animals, has really changed a lot. In front of my house in Tibet, there used to be a small river. And when I was very young, we could just drink straight from that river. Then when I went back home in 2016, that small river was not drinkable at all. I could see lots of waste and garbage on the river. So that has also changed a lot. In my hometown, how people live and how they worship the mountain deities, and believe in the sacred mountain—I still remember that way of life. That has also been their way of protecting the environment. The kind of work that I do right now, I can really see the impact. It’s really important, the impact of climate change on farmers and nomads, and how the local people understand the environment. So these issues are very close to my heart. Continue reading Lobsang Yangtso on Tibet’s environmental crisis
Source: The China Project (10/20/23)
How China is attempting to change nature conservation
China is undergoing a great experiment — tightly controlled and driven by big data — that it hopes will offer an alternative way of protecting the planet. For all our sakes, let’s hope it works.
By Kyle Obermann
Beijing, as a critical bird habitat along one of the world’s most important migrating bird corridors, has included 26% of its land and water inside ERLs, including bodies of water like lakes of the Summer Palace. Photo by Kyle Obermann.
I was surprised to encounter the White House amid Sichuan’s Qionglai Mountains, decrepit, looking like a scene out of a post-apocalyptic movie. Surprised, partly because I had not been in China long, and didn’t yet know about the replica White Houses, Eiffel Towers, and Jackson Holes in random valley towns. But mostly surprised because I was traveling through a nature reserve.
Of course, China’s first nature reserve is only as old as Tom Hanks. Vestiges of the recent past are overgrown across many of China’s protected areas: felled trees, empty mines, destroyed shrines, inspirations from U.S. government infrastructure. Proof that despite imperfections, China’s protected area system at least effectively rewilded and preserved some of the 18% of terrestrial land it covers on paper.
These days, in an effort that goes unnoticed by most of the world, China’s leadership is pushing further to build what Jessica Gordon of the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment once called the “world’s most comprehensive ecosystem-based land planning strategy” and raise the percentage of protected land area to 35% through Ecological Conservation Red Lines (ERLs). This innovation has the potential to make China a leader in global conservation, be exported elsewhere along the Belt and Road Initiative, and strengthen the state’s control over its land and people.
Continue reading How China is attempting to change nature conservation
NEW PUBLICATION: Questioning Borders: Ecoliteratures in China and Taiwan, by Robin Visser
I’m pleased to announce that my new book, Questioning Borders: Ecoliteratures in China and Taiwan (Columbia UP, 2023), is now available at https://cup.columbia.edu/book/questioning-borders/9780231199810.
Questioning Borders explores recent ecoliterature by Han and non-Han Indigenous writers of China and Taiwan, analyzing relations among humans, animals, ecosystems, and the cosmos in search of alternative possibilities for creativity and consciousness. It comprises 7 chapters:
Introduction: Ecoliteratures Inhabiting Borders
1. Beijing Westerns and Hanspace Elixirs in Southwest China
2. Grassland Logic and Desert Carbon Imaginaries in Inner Mongolia
3. Sacred Routes and Dark Humor in Grounded Xinjiang
4. Cosmic Ecologies and Transcendent Tricksters on the Tibetan Plateau
5. Island Excursions and Indigenous Waterways in Activist Taiwan
Epilogue: Indigenous Entanglements in Techno Hypersubjectivity
Robin Visser <rvisser@email.unc.edu>
The First Prism Monograph Supplement Book Launch
We are delighted to announce the publication of Prism’s first supplemental issue At Home in Nature: Technology, Labour, and Critical Ecology in Modern China authored by Prof. Ban Wang at Stanford University. The first Prism monograph supplement launch, hosted by Prism’s editor-in-chief Prof. Zong-qi Cai, will be held online at 6-9 PM (Pacific Time)/ 9-12 pm (EST) on August 3, 2023. The ZOOM meeting ID is 948 4417 6786, and the password is 62236914.
From the eco-critical perspective, this book critiques anthropocentricism, technoscientific hubris, and ecologically destructive modes of production. Examining modern discourse, literature, film, and science fiction, it views the domination of nature and labor under capitalism and technocrats as the culprit of ecological crises and human alienation. Alternatively, utopianisms of nonalienated labor keep alive the ideals of resonance between humans and Earth. The Table of Contents is listed below:
Introduction
Chapter One. Confucianism and Nature: Ecological Motifs in Kang Youwei’s Great Community
Chapter Two. Lu Xun’s Mytho-ecological Refutation of Technocrats
Chapter Three. Romancing Landscape and Human Animal: Shen Congwen
Chapter Four. We Are the Dragon King: Labor and Happiness
Chapter Five. Farewell to the God of Plague: The Revolution in Medicine
Chapter Six. Dignity and Misery of Labor
Chapter Seven. Art and Labor in Han Song’s Regenerated Bricks
Chapter Eight. Toxic Colonialism, Alienation, and Posthuman Dystopia in Chen Qiufan
Chapter Nine. Artificial Intelligence, Affective Labor, and Death in Life
Chapter Ten. Critical Ecotopia in Hao Jingfang’s Vagabonds
Epilogue Continue reading At Home in Nature
International Symposium on “Affective Anthropocene: Contextualizing Feelings and Environments under Climate Change”
Date: 1-2 June 2023
Venue: WLB 105, Wing Lung Bank Building for Business Studies, Hong Kong Baptist University and online (mix-mode)
Organizer: The Anthropocene and Chinese Contemporary Cultures Research Consortium, Department of Humanities, Hong Kong Baptist University
Co-organizer:
Department of Translation, Interpreting and Intercultural Studies, Hong Kong Baptist University
Master of Arts (MA) in Producing for Film, Television and New Media, Hong Kong Baptist University
Cultural Literacy Programme (LIVE), Office of Student Affairs, Hong Kong Baptist University
In popular perception and imagination, narratives about climate future and ecological crisis usually fall into one of these categories: utopia and apocalypse. Meaning-making narrative or storytelling with characters, drama, and connecting threads is significant because it reveals how scientific findings on the Earth’s future is communicated to the public and hence to drive collective action. Mitigation or adaptation to climate crisis requires habitual-cultural, eco-social changes, and communal values in order to overcome public inertia, procrastination and paralysis. But overemphasis on narrative or storytelling, i.e. “tell the climate story well,” may simplify moral values and reinforce binary thinking as found in many popular climate discourses. Climate narratives of either dystopian thrillers or techno-utopias not only may fail to accommodate the contingencies and unpredictability of real life, but they also could be subjected to the appropriations by nation-states for fulfilling political ambitions and nationalist agenda, by big corporations for marketing strategies, and by ideologists or visionaries for other manipulative purposes. Continue reading Affective Anthropocene symposium
Source: NYT (2/23/23)
China’s Cities Are Cutting Health Insurance, and People Are Angry
Local governments, short on money after three years of “zero Covid” and faced with many more retirees, are raising costs and overhauling benefits.
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Protesters in Wuhan, China, many of them retired, objected last week to a revision in municipal health insurance. Credit…Keith Bradsher/The New York Times
Local governments across China, facing a financial tipping point after three years of expensive Covid measures, are forcing abrupt changes on the country’s health care system, squeezing benefits and angering citizens.
Thousands of seniors, who are most vulnerable to the cutbacks, converged on municipal parks and other public spaces in recent days to protest the changes. They gathered in the chilly northeastern city of Dalian, in semitropical Guangzhou nearly 1,500 miles away and in Wuhan in central China, where the Covid pandemic began at the end of 2019.
One of the most immediate problems is that municipal insurance funds that pay for many people’s hospital care are running out of money. The funds, supported by taxes on employers, face big deficits that city governments are required by law to top up.
To free up money to bail out hospitals, municipalities have started contributing much less to another important category of insurance, known as personal health accounts, which the middle class uses to pay for medicine and outpatient care. Continue reading Anger over cutting health insurance
Source: The China Project (2/17/23)
From prizewinning author to censored chronicler of COVID in Wuhan — Q&A with Murong Xuecun in exile
Murong Xuecun rose to fame as an internet writer, and then won a prestigious official literature award in 2010. But then the state turned on him. His most recent book, ‘Deadly Quiet City,’ tells the stories of eight people in Wuhan in the spring of 2020.
By Jeremy Goldkorn
Illustration by Nadya Yeh.
He was “one of China’s most famous cyber-writers,” the state-run newspaper China Daily said in 2004, describing Mùróng Xuěcūn 慕容 雪村, the pen name of Hǎo Qún 郝群. Those were heady days: The China Daily is a propaganda sheet, but back then, it dared to print a story about Murong Xuecun that opens like this:
He describes himself as pessimistic and lacking ambition, he says he’s ugly and vulgar and likes good food and drink above all else.
His novel, Chengdu, Leave Me Alone Tonight (成都，今夜请将我遗忘) was a… trend setter [that] sparked a series of books describing life in modern Chinese cities where the young abandon idealism in search of fortune.
Murong says he writes for fun. He says he’s never had any ambitions to make [it] big in Chinese literary circles, and has no interest in dealing with “profound” social issues.
There is no way a passage like that would appear in the China Daily today. Murong, too, has changed. He is still something of a punk, but he has found himself dragged willy-nilly, or perhaps rather willingly, into “profound social issues.”
In 2010, he published The Missing Ingredient of China (中国, 少了一味药), an investigative piece about a criminal gang running a pyramid scam, which won that year’s People’s Literature Prize (人民文学奖). But he was not allowed to give his acceptance speech, which was a searing indictment of the censorship process at Chinese publishing houses and media. (The New York Times later published a translation of the speech.) Continue reading Interview with Murong Xuecun
Response to “Li Wenliang: The Man Who Was Wrong to Have Been Right,” introduced and translated by Geremie R. Barmé: my translation of the document below that circulated on WeChat in January 2023.–Martin Winter
Picture circulated on WeChat in January 2023
UNDERSTOOD [Warning to Dr. Li Wenliang]
We hope you calm down
to reflect thoroughly
and heed our solemn warning:
If you persist,
unwilling to repent,
in illegal activities,
you will be punished according to law!
Have you heard and understood?
Handwritten answer: Understood
Warned person signature: Li Wenliang
[two red thumb prints over signature]
Warning persons signatures: Hu …, Xu …
Date: 2020/1/3
Wuhan Public Security Bureau, Wuchang section (red stamp)
Translated by MW, 2023
Source: The China Project (2/1/23)
Li Wenliang: The man who was wrong to have been right
Dr. Lǐ Wénliàng 李文亮 is the doctor who tried to warn his colleagues about the spread of COVID-19 in Wuhan in early 2020, was silenced by the authorities, and forced to write a self-criticism. This is a translation of that document by renowned Sinologist Geremie Barmé to mark Li’s death three years ago this week.
By Geremie R. Barmé
An image that circulated on Chinese social media in early 2020, before being censored, of “epidemic-fighting hero Li Wenliang” (抗疫英雄李文亮 kàngyì yīngxióng Lǐ Wénliàng).
February 1, 2023, marks three years since Dr. Lǐ Wénliàng 李文亮 posted his last message: “I got a positive nucleic-acid test today. The dust has settled, and the diagnosis has finally been confirmed.” A week later, on February 7, 2020, COVID-19 killed him.
On December 30, 2019, the same day that China’s Contagious Disease Commission circulated a memo to hospitals in Wuhan to be on the lookout for a new form of pneumonia, Li saw a patient’s report indicating the presence of a form of the SARS coronavirus. At 17:43 that day, Li told a private WeChat group of his medical school classmates, “Seven confirmed cases of SARS were reported from Huanan Seafood Market.” He also posted the patient’s examination report and CT scan image to the group. At 18:42, he added, “It has been confirmed that they are coronavirus infections, but the exact virus strain is being subtyped,” and suggested to his classmates that they alert their families.
When news of Li’s remarks spread, his superiors put him under investigation and, on January 3, 2020, he was interrogated by the Wuhan police. As a result, Li was issued with a formal warning and was censured for “publishing untrue statements.” He was also made to sign a letter of repentance. As the epidemic spread, and despite an official attack on him, unofficially, Dr. Li’s “whistle-blowing” was widely praised. Although his warning had been ignored and suppressed, Li’s confession was soon vitiated by events. On January 31, Li released details of his interrogation on social media. Continue reading Li Wenliang: The man who was wrong to have been right
Source: NYT (1/31/23)
China’s Covid Tsunami Recedes, Bringing Relief, Grief and Anxiety
Officials say an onslaught of infections has slowed, and many people seem eager to move on. But fresh flare-ups could bring more illness and deaths.
By Chris Buckley and
A closed PCR testing booth sits idle in Shanghai. China’s Covid cases fell dramatically and case numbers peaked in December, according to Chinese public health officials. Credit…Alex Plavevski/EPA, via Shutterstock
When China abruptly abandoned “zero Covid,” accelerating an onslaught of infections and deaths, many feared a prolonged tide rippling from cities into villages. Now, two months later, the worst seems to have passed, and the government is eager to shift attention to economic recovery.
Doctors who were mobilized across China to treat a rush of Covid patients say in phone interviews that the number of patients they are now seeing has fallen. Towns and villages that had hunkered down under the surge of infections and funerals are stirring to life. Health officials have declared that Covid cases “already peaked in late December 2022.”
“Now the pandemic is already being forgotten from people’s minds,” Gao Xiaobin, a doctor on the outskirts of a small city in Anhui Province in eastern China, said by telephone. “Nobody is wearing masks anywhere. That’s all gone.”
The true toll of the outbreak is hard to delineate, with infections and deaths shrouded by censorship and poor data collection. Officially, China has reported nearly 79,000 confirmed Covid-related deaths that occurred in hospitals since Dec. 8. But researchers say that is a drastic undercount because it excludes deaths outside hospitals. Continue reading China’s Covid tsunami recedes
Happy new year. This sad news, fwd by Magnus Fiskesjö <nf42@cornell.edu>
Source: Japan Times (1/21/23)
Chinese who lost relatives to COVID angry at failure to protect elderly
By MARTIN QUIN POLLARD REUTERS
Beijing resident Zhang, 66, who has lost four people close to him since early December as COVID-19 cases spiked in China, at the Forbidden City in Beijing on Jan. 13. | REUTERS
BEIJING – Former high school teacher Ailia was devastated when her 85-year-old father died after displaying COVID-like symptoms as the virus swept through their hometown in the southeastern province of Jiangxi.
While her father was never tested, Ailia and her mother were both confirmed positive around the same time and she believes that COVID-19 was a cause in his death.
As hundreds of millions of Chinese travel to reunite with families for the Lunar New Year holiday, many will do so after mourning relatives who died in the COVID-19 wave that has raged across the world’s most populous country.
For many, bereavement is mixed with anger over what they say was a lack of preparation to protect the elderly before China suddenly abandoned its “zero-COVID” policy in December after nearly three years of testing, travel restrictions and lockdowns. Continue reading Anger at failure to protect elderly