Innholdsfortegnelse for Vol.64/No.51 i Beijing Review

The essence of China’s economic policy for 2022 is to “prioritize stability while pursuing steady progress,” as signaled by the annual Central Economic Work Conference which took place from December 8 to 10. This shows that the Chinese Government has a clear understanding of the risks hidden within the country’s current economic operations and has thus far paid these the proportional attention. The conference also studied the current situation at home and abroad before setting clear targets for economic development in 2022. The session further outlined the 2022 economic tasks from seven aspects: continuing the implementation of a proactive fiscal policy and prudent monetary policies, the uninterrupted stimulation of market entity vitality via macroeconomic policies, a deepening of supply-side structural reform with a focus on smoothing out national economy circulation,…

The U.S. hosted the virtual “Summit for Democracy” on December 9-10. It is a striking irony that it occurred shortly after the U.S. chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, which it invaded basically to establish “democracy” and eliminate terrorism. Bombings of Yugoslavia, military intervention in Iraq and Libya, “democratic transformation” and “color revolutions” worldwide, triggered by the U.S., did not result in stability or prosperity, but all ended in turbulence, wars, humanitarian disasters and refugee crises, sowing the seeds of death and destruction, leaving nothing of value behind. This political show depended on a purely American categorization. The Russian Foreign Ministry pointed out that it demonstrated how the U.S. prefers to create new dividing lines. Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Thailand Don Pramudwinai said the gathering was a token of…

Pardon the pun. Having recently experienced the delights of being blocked by Adrian Zenz on Twitter, I came to realize that he’d actually added me to a long list of people whose opinions do or did not quite align with his own, more particularly those views homing in on the topic of Xinjiang. Born and raised in this northwestern region of China myself, I sometimes share my connections with the area on social media platforms, like the aforesaid one. My goal is to add a sense of balance and local perspective to the distorted Xinjiang narrative dominating headlines around the globe. What I struggled to understand about Zenz’s decision to ban me from his following was: If this man really is who he declares himself to be, namely an outspoken…

Laos, a landlocked country surrounded by five neighbors including China and Thailand, used to have only 3.5 km of railway. However, that situation has begun to change on December 3 with the opening of the China-Laos Railway, a 1,035-km line connecting Kunming in Yunnan Province of China with the Lao capital of Vientiane. On that day, Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Lao counterpart Thongloun Sisoulith jointly inaugurated the railway, a landmark project under the Belt and Road Initiative, a blueprint proposed by China in 2013 to mainly boost trade and infrastructure connectivity along the ancient trade routes of the Silk Road and the Maritime Silk Road. Xi, who is also General Secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, met with Thongloun, General Secretary of the Lao People’s…

Though I am by no means the Secret Santa—‘tis the season—of sustainable design, one aspect thereof, I am infatuated with—from head to toe: traditional artisanal skill-ship. A gift passed down from parents to children, teachers to pupils. Knowledge that survived generations, in some cases hundreds of years. It’s fair to say that nowhere in the world has the knowledge of the past generations been preserved to the extent it has been in Asia, with my personal focus homing in on China. I am lucky to have met some of the movers and shakers in China’s realm of fashion design. As I spent time with them and got to see their work process, I realized how important their roots were to them. They may have studied in London or New York,…

MASTER OF GUNPOWDER GIFTS 10.5 MLN Wang Zeshan, a dynamite specialist and academician with the Chinese Academy of Engineering, recently made an individual donation of 10.5 million yuan ($1.65 million) to the Nanjing University of Science and Technology in support of talent cultivation and research efforts. The 86-year-old explosives expert born in Jilin Province is the winner of the 2017 State Preeminent Science and Technology Award, the nation’s highest scientific award, and is known as “the king of explosives” for his contributions to the study of energetic materials with a series of theories and applications. Over 60 years of research in the field, Wang designed several new propellant charging theories and technologies, improving the launch range of China’s artillery by more than 20 percent and lifting the nation’s ballistic performance…

In today’s American politics, being hard on Russia and China seems to be the new “politically correct” suit to try on. As if a reincarnation of McCarthyism, politicians dove right in, regardless of the negative effects of this apparent hard lesson in the past. On December 7, mere hours before the virtual meeting between the heads of state of Russia and the U.S. was set to take place, Donald Trump appeared on air and publicly mocked President Joe Biden for not being tough enough, saying that he would be in a weak position, comparing it to “the New England Patriots playing your high school football team.” As if in response to those skeptical comments, the White House released a statement saying that Biden was, in fact, playing tough. National Security…

Economic Data China’s economy continued its recovery momentum in November despite downward pressure, with major indicators staying within a reasonable range, data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) showed on December 15. Retail sales of consumer goods went up 3.9 percent year on year in the month, while value-added industrial output increased 3.8 percent year on year. Fixed assets investment gained 5.2 percent year on year in the first 11 months of the year, with investment in hi-tech industries accelerating, the data showed. The real sector of the economy registered solid expansion. The output of the hi-tech manufacturing sector jumped 15.1 percent in November, up 0.4 percentage point from October. Specifically, the output of new-energy vehicles logged an increase of 112 percent, while that of industrial robots and integrated…

The Belt and Road Initiative, proposed in 2013 by Chinese President Xi Jinping, improves cooperation among its participants in terms of both economic and cultural development. Latin American countries started to join the initiative in 2017, and as of 2019, 19 of them signed related memoranda of understanding with China. As defined at the Second Ministerial Meeting of the China-Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) Forum in 2018, the region is the natural extension of the initiative. In particular, it has its relevance for the 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road. Due to its geopolitical proximity to the area, the U.S. reaction to the initiative was one of distrust, which probably contributes to some Latin American countries’ delay in joining the initiative. The four largest economies in Latin America are…

Since the 18th Communist Party of China (CPC) National Congress was held in 2012, President Xi Jinping has frequently mentioned human rights, expounding on a series of concepts on their development and depicting bright prospects for China’s human rights cause. All these have displayed President Xi’s deep understanding of how to better respect and protect human rights as well as the fixed determination of the CPC and the Chinese Government to promote them. President Xi’s vision for human rights has greatly enriched China’s related theory, providing important guidance on the nation’s practices in human rights protection. The CPC and the Chinese Government have always put the people’s rights to subsistence and development first, persistently adapting the universality of human rights to China’s national conditions and sparing no efforts to push…

Xu Tao, a 28-year-old from Taiwan, started a business with his mainland classmate Bao Guanyu in Beijing. Xu had launched businesses in Taipei three times during his university years but none proved successful. When he was deciding whether he should stay in Taiwan or go to the United States after graduation, his classmate Bao, who was on an exchange program at his university, told him about shared bikes and food delivery services on the mainland and presented him with a third choice—going to the mainland. Their company is an online job-hunting platform called HR Tech China. In the beginning, the company had difficulties finding investors and suffered capital chain rupture. However, Xu didn’t give up. During the hardest time, the company’s core team delivered parcels during the day and developed…