Innholdsfortegnelse for Vol. 60/No. 8 i Beijing Review

THAILAND Buddhists chant sutras and pray on February 11 at Wat Asokaram in central Thailand’s Samut Prakan Province to celebrate the traditional Buddhist festival of Maka Bucha THE PHILIPPINES A man attempts to walk across a damaged bridge in Surigao City on February 11. An earthquake, which caused seven deaths, had hit the region the day before INDIA A rocket blasts off from the spaceport of Sriharikota in the eastern state of Andhra Pradesh on February 15. It successfully sent 104 satellites to space, setting a new world record MEXICO A child squeezes through an opening in the border fence between Mexico and the United States in Tijuana on February 6. U.S. President Donald Trump recently announced the construction of more barriers to prevent illegal migration BELGIUM Photos taken on…

Comments to yinpumin@bjreview.com Xia Yu, an 11-year-old student from Yanqing District in Beijing, has been learning to ski for one year now. “At the beginning, I was afraid. But now, I have fallen in love with the sport,” Xia said. “I [especially] enjoy the exciting downhill journey.” Xia Yang, his father, encourages his choice of sport. “I’m glad to see my son derive happiness and confidence from it,” he said. “If he chooses skiing as his profession one day, I will support him.” Today, more and more people like the Xia father-and-son duo are taking up ice and snow sports—these have become hot after Beijing and Zhangjiakou in neighboring Hebei Province were named hosts of the 2022 Winter Olympics by the International Olympic Committee in 2015. Allocation of venues According…

Jim Boyce, founder of Grapewallofchina.com, a website about Chinese wine, has been reporting on China’s emerging wine market for almost a decade. The 48-year-old consultant has traveled extensively in the country’s wine regions, organizing winetasting events, wine study and discovery trips, and charity events. He is now considered an authority not only on Chinese wine, but also on all things alcoholic in China, be it baijiu or beer. A seasoned public relations man, Boyce is also a zhongguotong—an old China hand—so he understands all the arcane details of doing business and the subtlety of communication in China. A turning point The year 2009 is still etched in Boyce’s memory. It was the first time wines from the Silver Heights Vineyard, located in northwest China’s Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, featured in…

Antarctic Expedition A bird’s eye view of China’s icebreaking research vesselX ue Long (Snow Dragon ), carrying the 33rd Chinese Antarctic expedition team, on February 14. The team has found a new site i n the Ross Sea for the country’s fifth research station in Antarctica. Cargo Spacecraft China plans to launch its first cargo spacecraft via a Long March-7 Y2 carrier rocket in April, sources said on February 13. The Tianzhou-1 cargo spacecraft, which departed from Tianjin on February 5, arrived at the Wenchang Space Launch Center in south China’s Hainan Province on February 13 for assembly and testing, accord-ing to the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA). Consisting of a cargo capsule and a propellant capsule, Tianzhou-1 , the first cargo spacecraft independently developed by China, has a takeoff…

Comments to liuyunyun@bjreview.com The author is an op-ed contributor to Beijing Review and a researcher with the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation After the United Kingdom’s decision to withdraw from the European Union (EU), the outcome of the German fed-eral election, one of the EU’s pillar members, will have a profound influence on the EU’s future. Much of this will depend on whether the winner decides to reform Germany’s employment and welfare policies in order to promote economic efficiency. Undue social policies Presently, the EU is over-regulated in these areas, with policies and rules that are politically correct but which seriously undermine efficiency and distort markets. Take women’s representation as an example. Improvements have been significant, but just like any other employees, women should be appointed on…

Four years ago, Nurahmet Memet was a farmer in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. Today, he no longer leads a hardscrabble life in southern Kargilik County, next to the Taklamakan Desert, and instead has become a successful company manager and businessman after relocating to central Xinjiang. Though Kargilik’s area of 30,000 square km is twice as big as Beijing’s, its population of more than 500,000 is only 2.5 percent of the capital’s. Agriculture is the county’s economic mainstay and many locals in the countryside have seldom ventured outside their village, never even going to Kashgar, a trade hub with a time-honored history only 250 km away, or Urumqi, the regional capital, 1,500 km away. Memet’s family has lived on farming in Kargilik for generations and he had thought he…

In a comedy show about telephone scams staged during the 2017 Spring Festival Gala on Beijing TV, the voice of the skit’s swindler had a Henan provincial accent. A lawyer from Henan has since filed a lawsuit accusing the show’s director and actors and also the TV station of regional discrimination and harming the reputation of Henan people. The lawsuit demands the accused publicly apologize to Henan people and pay compensation of 1 yuan ($0.16) for every person from Henan. The director of the show explained that he played the part of the fraudster using his native Shandong Province accent, which sounds similar to that of Henan Province, as the two provinces share a common border. Some people therefore say the lawyer has overreacted and wants to attract attention by…

Exports and Imports China’s foreign trade rebounded at the start of 2017, with exports and imports both up significantly. Nonetheless, the rise of trade protectionism will put a damper on the growth of exports. China’s yuan-denominated exports rose 15.9 percent year on year in January, up from 0.6 percent in December, while imports increased 25.2 percent, up from 10.8 percent, customs data showed on January 10. Foreign trade volume reached 2.18 trillion yuan ($314.2 billion) in January, up 19.6 percent year on year. That led to a monthly trade surplus of 354.53 billion yuan ($51.58 billion), down 2.7 percent from a year earlier, according to figures from the General Administration of Customs (GAC). Trade with the European Union, China’s biggest trading partner, climbed 14.1 percent year on year in January,…

Comments to dengyaqing@bjreview.com Three years have elapsed since the synergetic development of the Beijing- Tianjin-Hebei (Jing-Jin-Ji) region was first put forward as a major national strategy by Chinese President Xi Jinping in February 2014. Xi called for the coordination and inte-gration of the economic zone surrounding Beijing. Now, a fledging Capital Economic Circle is taking shape. The planned area encompasses Beijing, Tianjin and part of Hebei Province, a cluster inhabited by over 100 million people—three times as many as that of the Tokyo megalopolis—and covering a total area of over 200,000 square km. In the past three years, an array of break-throughs have been made in establishing the economic circle, which represents an an-swer to a number of urban diseases currently afflicting Beijing, such as traffic jams and air pollution.…

At the break of dawn on a crisp cold January morning, seniors sauntered into the Purple Bamboo Park in Beijing’s Haidian District. The picturesque park is a place where visitors can catch a glimpse of Chinese seniors’ colorful activities such as dancing, singing, martial arts and Chinese chess games. Dance to the music Nowadays, it is literally impossible to walk through a major Chinese park at dawn or dusk without bumping into a group of square dancers, and the Purple Bamboo Park is no exception. Various types of square dancers gathered at the park throughout the morning some in groups neatly arranged in lines and some in ballroom-style pairs. They danced to a wide spectrum of music genres, ranging from classical music, ballads, passionate songs and pulse-quickening rock-and-roll. On an…

As reality shows flood China’s TV screens, a program aimed at popularizing classical Chinese poetry has gone viral. The second season of the Chinese Poetry Conference aired on China Central Television (CCTV) from January 29 to February 7 not only achieved high audience rat-ings—12.3 percent of all viewership for the final, but also won favorable reviews. Both seasons were rated above 8 out of 10 on Douban.com, one of China’s most popular review sites. The show features a series of quizzes test-ing contestants’ memory and understanding of Chinese poetry throughout the ages, from The Book of Songs—the first anthology of poetry in China, spanning the Western Zhou Dynasty (1,046-771 B.C.) and the Spring and Autumn Period (770-476 B.C.)—to works by Mao Zedong. A section called Feihualing, dur-ing which two competitors…

Winter in northeast China is long. And very cold. During these frozen months, China’s northeast corner comes into its own. The countryside becomes caked with snow, and the icy streets of its cities wake up to a bitter frost every day as the sun struggles to break through the morning mist. These conditions lend themselves to a unique and warm winter culture—none more so than in Jilin Province, the heart of northeast China. In January just ahead of the traditional Spring Festival, Jilin showed off its winter tourism resources to a group of foreign journalists and students. Changchun, the industrial and modernized provincial capital, is the usual point of arrival for visitors to Jilin. Several hotels have bedrooms with views over South Lake, a park featuring a picturesque and perhaps…