Day: August 18, 2022

Advertisement On the night of August 2, many Chinese people were tracking U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s travels online. They either joined the millions of people looking at Flightradar24, or watched live streaming and discussed online. People believed that they were witnessing history – a possible shoot-down of the House speaker’s plane or a sudden military operation to reunify Taiwan. That, obviously, did not happen. However, the direction of history has changed. Since Pelosi’s visit, the future of the cross-strait issue has surged toward military conflict, in the minds of…

However, a decade ago, it only accounted for 6.4 per cent of the world’s most-cited papers, lagging far behind the United States’ 41.2 per cent, said the report, which is compiled annually by the Tokyo-based National Institute of Science and Technology Policy. Citations are a standard way for a research paper to refer to earlier works and acknowledge where the paper’s ideas and methods come from. They have become a common measure of the importance and impact of research. Advertisement The report uses “fractional counting” to divvy up credit for…

China’s habit of pouring cash into strategic industries creates opportunities for corruption. Just look at the microchip business. The “Big Fund” was created in 2014 to spur self-reliance in chipmaking. Backed by state investors, it has raised 343bn yuan ($50bn). But several of the fund’s executives are suspected of corruption, including its head, Ding Wenwu. Listen to this story.Enjoy more audio and podcasts on iOS or Android. Your browser does not support the <audio> element. Listen to this story Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitask…

Red song society is redder than red. For more than a decade the privately run website and its social-media accounts have been pumping out articles that praise Mao Zedong and Marxism more enthusiastically than most Communist Party officials do. It sees no fault with the late dictator; it attacks capitalism—and its growth in China—with a vengeance. “Sing red songs; promote righteous ways” is its motto, handwritten at the top of the home page. Listen to this story.Enjoy more audio and podcasts on iOS or Android. Your browser does not support…

Public payphones don’t usually ring. So when one started buzzing in Beijing recently, people picked it up. On the other end of the line were residents of Huludao, some 400km away. All had the same story. The city’s factories were polluting the air. Some nights it smelled of chocolate; other nights, of chemicals. Most people kept their windows shut, yet they still struggled to breathe. The government refused to act, said residents. So some started calling the payphone. Listen to this story.Enjoy more audio and podcasts on iOS or Android.…

When shanghai lifted its two-month lockdown in June, it hoped to see citizens flocking back to the shops in relief. Instead it has witnessed people fleeing a store in alarm. On August 13th health authorities discovered that a close contact of a child infected with covid-19 had visited an ikea outlet in the city. Under Shanghai’s strict virus-control regulations, the store had to be immediately locked down, so that everyone inside could be whisked off to quarantine. But panicked shoppers rushed for the exits, pushing past guards. Listen to this…

The southern Chinese province of Hainan, a coastal region like Xiamen, has recorded more than 10,000 cases of Covid-19 since the beginning of August, and the authorities have said they believe this outbreak is likely to be linked to the fishing community. BBC