What do you want to be the you grow up?
Gen Z Chinese athletes are a new breed. Zheng Qinwen, the 21-year-old tennis gold medallist, said in her interview that she welcomed the title “Queen Wen.” “This may not align with Chinese culture of humility, but I feel so very proud now. Call me Queen Wen, because I honor the name”.
The 1951 PRC Labour Law set the retirement age at 50 for women and 60 for men, when life expectancy was 43 years—a reasonable policy then. However, by 2023, China’s average life expectancy had risen to 77 years. Given this increase, it should be updated to align retirement policies with current realities.
A Guangdong company has banned anyone born in the year of the dog from applying for a job, lest it bring bad luck to the boss. Sanxing Transportation posted a job description for a clerk’s role with a monthly salary of 3,000-4,000 yuan but an employee told Hubei Television that they wouldn’t consider any applicant born in the year of the dog, no matter how qualified, because the company head was a “dragon” and “dragons and dogs do not get along well”.
When Google China launched in 2006, the iPhone did not exist, Google was one-fifth its current size and the Chinese internet was a backwater of knockoff products. Google’s Chinese search engine represented the most controversial experiment to date in internet diplomacy. To get into China, the young company that had defined itself by the motto “Don’t be evil” agreed to censor the search results shown to Chinese users.
In a piece about the gender imbalance in China, Men Without Women: The ominous rise of Asia’s bachelor generation, Niall Ferguson writes,
That has scary implications. Remember, most of Hemingway’s stories in Men Without Women are about violence. They feature gangsters, bullfighters, and wounded soldiers. The most famous story is called simply “The Killers”. It may be that the coming generation of Asian men without women will find harmless outlets for their inevitable frustrations, like team sports or video games. But I doubt it. Either this bachelor generation will be a source of domestic instability, whether Brazilian-style crime or Arab-style revolution—or, as happened in Europe, they and their testosterone will be exported. There’s already enough shrill nationalism in Asia as it is. Don’t be surprised if, in the next generation, it takes the form of macho militarism and even imperialism. Lock up your daughters.
Once upon a time, such paranoia would have earnt you a spell of therapy or a basket-weaving holiday. Nowadays it gets you a TV series. No wonder Wetern civilisation’s going down the drain.
Olympic team won 40 gold, 27 silver and 24 bronze medals competing in 232 events across 30 sports, beating the 39 golds at the London Olympics. China’s six traditional strongholds, including diving, table tennis and weightlifting, amassed 27 gold medals, 68% of the tota, showcasing the nation’s long-term efforts in scientific training.
China, US finish Paris Olympics with 40 golds each, US wins on Silver tiebreaker. For the first time since Beijing 2008, where China had the home team advantage, the US did not win on golds. China broke into events that it had never excelled at, like swimming, while sweeping Table Tennis, Diving and Weightlifting and half of the Shooting golds. The US will further adjust the rules (as it did when the IOC capped entries per country in Weightlifting, a sport dominated by China) and will in LA 2028 (by reducing diving events) but there’s only so much it can do to stave off its eventual decline relative to China as it breaks into traditional western strongholds.
Urban and rural incomes are slowly converging:
General mental ability testing and adverse impact in the United Kingdom: a meta-analysis with more than two million observations. Jan Te Nijenhuis and colleagues carry out a meta-analysis of race differences in intelligence in the UK. Analyzing data from dozens of samples from tens of thousands of individuals, they find that compared to whites, blacks score 0.65sd lower, South Asians score 0.33sd lower and Chinese score 0.15sd higher.
Free education in China you say? Well, it’s complicated. My daughter goes to a
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public school here. Which is essentially free: you have to pay for books, uniform, some accident insurance, small fees for this or that, probably does not add to more than about $100 per year. Add notebooks, book bag, etc, and it’s about $150? $200? So far so good. But getting into a college-prep high school is very competitive: out of 1000 middle school students, only 1/3 will be accepted to schools that train you for the infamous Gaokao college entrance exam. The rest go to technical schools for a high school education. This leaves 700 competing for 350 spaces in high schools. That would be roughly 1 in 2. So what does that lead to? An educational arms race.
Polluters now liable to restore environment. China has adopted a restorative justice approach to handling environmental pollution cases as part of efforts to enhance its ecological governance system, the Supreme People’s Procuratorate said on Monday. In the first half of this year, 1,597 individuals were prosecuted in 668 cases for environmental pollution offenses, according to the top procuratorate. It said that environmental pollution crimes present a mix of old and new challenges, requiring comprehensive strategies and intensified governance efforts. In February, the top procuratorate launched a special nationwide operation focused on addressing livelihood issues, including the protection of the environment and natural resources, which will run until December.
80% of the sand used in China’s construction industry is manufactured: solution to a crisis? Sand has been used in buildings for at least 60,000 years but now, 50 billion tonnes of sand and gravel – stones larger than sand – is extracted for construction every year, enough to build a wall 27 meters (88 feet) wide and 27 meters high around the planet.
Nine point plan for a greener, cleaner electricity system by 2027:
Power system stability guaranteed.
Large-scale and high-proportion new energy external transmission breakthroughs.
High-quality development of distribution network.
Construction of intelligent dispatching systems.
Improvement of new-energy system-friendly performance
Upgrade to a new generation of coal power.
Optimize power system regulation capacity.
Expand electric vehicle charging facility network.
Enhance demand-side synergy capacity
Action Plan for Low-Carbon Transformation and Construction of Coal Power Generation (2024 – 2027). By 2027, the CO2/kWh of related projects will be reduced by 50% compared to the average in 2023, approaching the carbon emission level of natural gas power generation units. Transformation Methods:
Biomass Co-Firing. Utilize biomass resources such as agricultural and forestry wastes, psammophytes, and energy plants.
Green Ammonia Co-Firing. Utilize surplus electricity from renewable energy sources such as wind power and solar power to produce green hydrogen through electrolysis of water and synthesize green ammonia, and implement the co-firing of green ammonia in coal power units to replace part of the coal.
Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage. Adopt technologies such as chemical methods, adsorption methods, and membrane methods to separate and capture carbon dioxide in the flue gas of coal boilers, and realize the regeneration and purification and compression of carbon dioxide through methods such as pressure and temperature adjustment. Promote and apply geological utilization technologies such as efficient carbon dioxide enhanced oil recovery and chemical utilization technologies such as hydrogenation of carbon dioxide to methanol. Implement carbon dioxide geological storage based on local conditions.
Accelerating the Comprehensive Green Transformation of Economic and Social Development (State Council) positive progress will have been made in the green transformation of key fields:
By 2030
the green production mode and lifestyle will have basically taken shape,
the synergy capacity of pollution reduction and carbon reduction will be significantly enhanced,
the efficiency of the main resource utilization will be further improved,
the policy and standard system supporting green development will be further improved, and
remarkable results will have been achieved in the comprehensive green transformation of economic and social development.
By 2035
the economic system of green, low-carbon and circular development will be basically established,
the green production mode and lifestyle will be widely formed,
remarkable progress will have been made in the synergy of pollution reduction and carbon reduction,
the main resource utilization efficiency will reach the international advanced level,
economic and social development will have fully entered the green and low-carbon track,
carbon emissions will have steadily decreased after peaking, and
the goal of a Beautiful China will have been basically achieved.
Xi Jinping: “The length of time for implementation is not just one or two years, but rather accumulating small steps to reach a thousand miles, with a long-term vision. ‘Our understanding of time is not measured in decades or centuries, but in centuries or millennia.’ Following through with a blueprint to the end, success does not necessarily have to be attributed to me, but success must include me—this is the Communist Party’s view of achievements. The speed of implementation and advancement is also not a matter of one or two years, but rather ‘constantly being concerned’ and seizing every moment. We have timetables and roadmaps, and work backwards from deadlines. General Secretary Xi Jinping often measures time in days: how long it has been since the goal was set, and how many days are left until the goal is achieved. The work of the Party and the nation is advanced stage by stage in relay fashion, ‘neither delaying nor rushing ahead’.”
