Innholdsfortegnelse for Vol.64/No.4 i Beijing Review

INDONESIA Rescuers and a sniffer dog search for survivors in collapsed buildings after a 6.2-magnitude earthquake hit Mamuju, West Sulawesi, on January 18. The death toll exceeded 81 UGANDA Supporters celebrate in capital city Kampala on January 16 after the Electoral Commission announced incumbent President Yoweri Museveni’s victory in the presidential election FIJI Schoolboys pose for a photo at a primary school in Suva on January 19. The new academic year kicked off on that day with nearly 200,000 students returning to their school desks RWANDA A police officer urges passengers to keep physical distancing at a bus station in Kigali on January 19. The government brought the capital city back into lockdown after a surge in novel coronavirus cases SPAIN People gather near the site of a large explosion…

This is a pivotal moment in the U.S.-China relationship. That is not just because the United States has elected a new president. While the administration of Joe Biden can be expected to conduct a careful reassessment of actions that the United States has taken against China over the past four years, there is little chance of returning to the earlier state of play. In large part that is because the previous administration of Donald Trump raised a number of critical concerns over important structural tensions between the United States and China—namely, innovation policy, intellectual property rights, technology transfer, subsidies to state-owned enterprises and cyber security. On all of these accounts, the allegations that the U.S. trade representative lodged against China in March 2018 were based on very weak evidence. But…

There is a great deal of speculation regarding a Joe Biden presidency, including whether it will soothe the existing toxic relationship between the U.S. and China. While many credit Donald Trump with “standing up to China” and question whether Biden will do the same, these same pundits doubt the ever-worsening relationship between the two world powers will materially change under the Biden administration. This is based on two false assumptions: First, Trump’s actions on China have been effective; second, Biden’s mindset, experience, and leadership approach will not take him in a different direction. Biden’s approach to China will be fundamentally different not because he is especially, or even slightly, pro-China, but because his mindset and experiences have shaped a style of leading that is so fundamentally different from Trump’s. Where…

Recovering from the contraction caused by the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) epidemic, China’s economy saw a better-than-expected performance in 2020. The GDP expanded 2.3 percent year on year to 101.59 trillion yuan ($15.6 trillion), exceeding the 100-trillion-yuan ($15.42 trillion) mark for the first time. The per-capita GDP exceeded $10,000 for two consecutive years, narrowing the gap with high-income countries, data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) showed. Despite the 6.8-percent contraction in the first quarter last year, the GDP resumed positive year-on-year growth in the second quarter to 3.2 percent, finally reaching 6.5 percent in the fourth quarter. Throughout the whole year, notable progress was made in industrial restructuring, the use of clean energy and opening up the market, Ning Jizhe, head of the NBS, told a press conference…

It was 90 years ago when Winston Churchill thought it was absurd to grow a chicken but eat only parts of it. In an essay titled Fifty Years Hence he published in 1931, he envisioned the meat people would eat in the future. “We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium,” he wrote in the essay. The lab-grown meat that Churchill imagined in the essay didn’t appear until the 2010s, decades later than he assumed. In 2013, the first lab-grown hamburger patty was developed successfully and fried up in the Netherlands. The hissing sound from the frying pan kicked open the door of the synthetic meat world. Scientists from other countries…

First Launch of the Year A Long March-3B carrier rocket carrying the Tiantong 1-03 satellite blasts off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Sichuan Province in southwest China on January 20, marking the country’s first space launch in this year. The satellite will set up a mobile network with ground facilities to deliver stable and reliable mobile communication services for users in China and its neighboring regions. CPC Memorial Hall The site of the first National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in Shanghai is slated to reopen after a bout of renovations in celebration of the Party’s centennial founding anniversary in July, Xinhua News Agency reported on January 19. As part of the facelift, the century-old stone-gate house will have its walls cleaned and roof tiles…

Beijing Review: According to Forbes, the U.S. will become the world’s largest oil and gas exporter in the next few years. China is the world’s largest importer of crude oil, and the U.S. accounted for 7 percent of China’s imports through mid-September 2020, according to London-based market intelligence firm Vortexa Ltd. How can the two countries expand their energy cooperation? Mitchell F. Stanley: The United States has tremendous natural resources and is extraordinarily good at exploration, development and innovation in the energy sector. The last few years have been very difficult due to the fact that the U.S. has begun to shift from energy imports to exports and from oil infrastructure to gas export infrastructure. Also, the uncertainty in the policy framework, tariff policy in particular, undermined what all markets…

The mobile Internet has changed the everyday life of the Chinese, with the revolution in payment methods being a major highlight. QR code-based solutions have replaced cash payments in most consumption scenarios and facilitated transactions beyond borders and imagination. Third-party payment service providers like Alipay and WeChat Pay have become a new industry with more new players joining in. Recently, the sector welcomed a new star: U.S. giant PayPal. PayPal is the first foreign digital payment platform licensed to provide services in China, a milestone event. The stage was set for the American company’s entry in September 2019, when the Chinese central bank approved PayPal’s acquisition of 70-percent equity in GoPay, a Beijing-based third party payment service provider, and the deal was wrapped up in December that year. Dan Schulman,…

As a doctor in a psychiatric hospital in north Beijing, Liu Huaqing has witnessed how Internet addiction shatters the life of children and their families. One of his patients at the Beijing HuiLongGuan Hospital was a 12-year-old boy who had not been to school since November 2020. Instead, he stayed at home, glued to his smartphone for more than 15 hours a day, playing games and watching short videos. He often went to bed at 3 or 4 a.m. and stopped following the most basic daily hygiene routine such as brushing his teeth or taking a shower. His broken-hearted mother said recently he became quick-tempered, even violent. When angered, he would damage things at home. “If teenagers spend too much time playing mobile games to the point it seriously affects…

Non-conflict, non-confrontation, mutual respect and win-win cooperation. These are the principles China follows in its relations with the U.S. With the new Joe Biden administration in the White House, Beijing Review asked Chinese and U.S. analysts for their views on why these concepts are relevant and how the world’s most important bilateral relationship can go forward. On January 20, Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th U.S. president on the steps of the Capitol, two weeks after violent protesters stormed the building. The 78-year-old takes the helm at a time when the country is both deeply divided and mired in the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19). Amid high expectations the task ahead is tough. Biden has to tackle racial conflicts and the widening gap between the rich and the poor.…

The 2020 U.S. election, with a complex and controversial outcome, has seen the dust settle after months of farce and chaos with Joe Biden sworn in as the 46th U.S. president on January 20. However, party polarization still continues in the U.S. and more complicated confrontations between the Democrats and Republicans are anticipated in the future. What will be the future of China-U.S. relations? Historic choice China and the U.S. both have their distinctive histories, cultures and values. They have different national systems and social governance and foreign relations policies. In the past, they learned to cooperate after a period of confrontation. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the U.S. followed a foreign policy with anti-communism and anti-socialism as its core concept, and carried out…

The new year has come with good tidings for Africa despite the devastating economic effects of the novel coronavirus pandemic on the global economy. On the first day of 2021, African countries officially opened their markets under the continental free trade agreement (FTA) for duty-free trading of goods and services across borders. Coincidentally, on the same day, the UK’s much talked about Brexit deal kicked off, officially marking the end of the UK-EU relationship. Initially, Africa’s FTA was scheduled to commence on July 1, 2020; but due to the pandemic, it was postponed to give African countries ample opportunity to contain the spread of the coronavirus. An FTA is an accord among countries whose main objective is to lower barriers to imports and exports among themselves. Under the auspices of…

Although China’s auto market shrank in the early months of 2020 as the novel coronavirus epidemic dampened demand, car sales have continued to expand in recent months. Data from the China Passenger Car Association (CPCA) shows that sales dropped 6.8 percent year on year last year, contracting from the year-on-year decline of 7.3 percent in 2019 as resumed sale of new-energy vehicles (NEVs) made key contributions. According to China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, NEV sales stood at 1.37 million units in 2020 with a year-on-year increase of 10.9 percent. The CPCA projected, the total sales this year could reach 1.5 million units as exports and domestic demands further resume. “Domestic NEV makers faced production suspension caused by the epidemic, financing difficulties and reduced government subsidies in 2020. The pressure forced…

Recalling the days of working on the ocean, Chen Yong, 65 years old, still has fresh memories. “It was a difficult job working on the sea. Even I, who majored in marine fishery, often got seasick,” he told Beijing Review. Chen, former Vice President of Dalian Ocean University (DOU), has devoted almost all of his working years to developing marine ranching in China, which he believes is key to China’s marine ecological restoration and protection. China is a large maritime country, and overfishing has strained the nation’s marine resources. Haven for fish In 1978, Chen was admitted into the DOU, then known as Dalian Fisheries University, in the coastal city of Dalian, Liaoning Province in northeast China, where he majored in marine fishery. Eight years after graduation, he became a…