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China’s street vendor policy may encourage emergence of street artists

More Chinese artists might take to the streets for performances now that the Chinese government has loosened its grip on street vendors in order to boost the economy amid the COVID-19 pandemic, an official of China’s culture department said on Thursday.

In 2018, Chengdu, Southwest China’s Sichuan Province, became one of the earliest cities in China to launch a street culture program, themed ” a city with music.”  Now, in light of the improved domestic COVID-19 situation, street artists in Chengdu have begun to resume their performances, bring back vitality to the city.

“The supporting street vendor policy and the performances of street artists could become a win-win strategy benefiting the local economy,” Zhao Liangliang, an official of the Chengdu Culture Center, told the Global Times on Thursday. 

She added that the project has matured nicely over the past two years. 

“Some officials from cities including Zhuhan city in South China’s Guangdong Province and Jinan city in East China’s Shandong Province have come here for a visit and communication, and they are considering the possibility of implementing the program in their cities,” Zhao said.

According to reports, a total of 27 cities in China are promoting the development of street vending. Many Chinese netizens have shown their support of these programs and have further called for the promotion of street artist culture as well.

“We could learn from some Western countries to include more street entertainers in addition to street vendors,” a Chinese netizen posted on Sina Weibo.

Street artist Chen Huan Photo: Courtesy of Chen HuanChen Huan, better known by his street artist name Hot Pot Brother, has been a street singer for a year and a half. He told the Global Times on Thursday that in Chengdu, only artists who have a street art performance license are allowed to perform at the 60 designated location around the city, most of which are hot scenic spots or shopping centers. Like street artists in Western countries,  Chinese street artists perform for tips.

According to Zhao, artists can apply for four types of performance – vocal performances, instrumental performances, intangible cultural heritage handicrafts and storytelling. Applicants need to submit their CV first and then undergo an interview process in which they must perform in front of professional artists. 

She added that the artists usually perform on Fridays and weekends from 5pm to 9pm. 

While singing for two hours may sound exhausting to many people, Chen said that it makes him very happy. 

“I really like singing on the street. I feel much more relaxed compared to singing on TV. I sometimes lose track of time when putting my all in a performance,” Chen said, noting that one of the most rememberable signs he was doing well was when the audience gave him a total of eight bottles of water during a show.

Street artist Du Jingping Photo: Courtesy of Du JingpingDu Jingping, better known as Du Yuanqi, is one of the first batch of street artists in Chengdu. She told the Global Times on Thursday that she often changes her songs depending on the day’s weather or the theme of some public holidays. 

“For example, when I knew I was going to perform on Children’s Day, I prepared some songs that children like,” she said, adding that it was very convenient for people to check what performances are available on an app created by the Chengdu Culture Center.

She noted that she has also been feeling a bit of pressure as the quality of street artists has improved. 

“We have about 200 to 300 street artists in Chengdu and some of them have even participated in some popular music TV shows.”

Both Chen and Du said the number of audiences now that they are performing again has dropped somewhat, but that they are still excited to be back on the streets and helping create an atmosphere for residents. 

https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1190623.shtml#.Xtualu1TD40.facebook


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World’s largest marine dual-fuel low-speed engine WinGD X92DF

5-26-20, China Shipbuilding Group Winterthur Gas & Diesel (WinGD).温特图尔发动机 launched the world’s largest marine dual-fuel low-speed engine WinGD X92DF, the engine has passed the Bureau Veritas classification approval, will be manufactured by Shanghai Sinoship Mitsui Diesel Engine Co.上海中船三井造船柴油机有限公司. Compared with the previous dual-fuel low-speed marine engines, the WinGD X92DF has advantages in terms of more power, intelligent control and environment-friendliness.
WinGD X92DF hits a milestone:
first, Chinese ships now have their own advanced and even world-leading domestic power system;
second, Chinese ship power research has the core technology, starts to develop a supply chain;
third, China has achieved a new breakthrough in independent high-end marine equipment R&D and manufacturing.

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Iceland signs free-trade cooperation with China

Iceland is the first country to break the European trade norm and sign free-trade cooperation with China, a short time ago, 250,000 tons of seafood, including salmon and white fish, was flown directly into China. As the first Icelandic country to use air transport for trade, this method enhances the freshness of seafood and at the same time increase the volume of trade between the two sides. According to “Iceland Morning News”, Icelandic airplanes first cooperated with the German logistics group on the transportation of medical supplies from China during the coronovirus outbreak, Iceland saw the advantages of air transport for seafood. Iceland, as the only country in Europe that enjoys zero tariff for export to China, needs to export large quantities of Pacific and Atlantic salmon, white fish and other seafood to China. If it can improve the efficiency, the subsequent gains is substantial. It should be noted that while transportation costs have risen, Iceland has also raised the cost of seafood, which has increased significantly by 0.7% in the first quarter of this year compared to last year. However, even so, the Chinese market is still a “seller’s market”, and has given Iceland a taste of the success.
In fact, Iceland’s cooperation with China is not only limited to seafood, but also includes cooperation in other areas to a greater or lesser extent. For example, Iceland’s mobile phone company Nova’s public announcement earlier this month that it agreed to work with Huawei’s 5G project and that Huawei 5G would be available in its area of involvement shortly thereafter. Not only will Iceland’s communications network be speeded up, but it will also lead to further development in the field of scientific research. Secondly, Iceland is also working with the Chinese tourism industry. According to Icelandic authorities, Iceland’s tourism industry has received 23,372 Chinese tourists in the first quarter of this year, up 6.2% year-on-year, against a backdrop of an international epidemic that is still having more or less of an impact. The data based on February and March after the coronaviru outbreak, is down 18.02%, 43.4% year-on-year. In other words, although the tourism revenue in February and March was not satisfactory enough to meet Iceland’s expectations of 130,000 Chinese tourists in 2020, Chinese tourists have started to look at Iceland as a destination, it is expected that Iceland’s tourism industry will be booming after the epidemic is completely under control.
When it comes to Europe’s trade with China, pork trade is an good example. The German “Economic News” reported that most of the EU countries are in a state of production self-sufficiency, not able to export much excess, but EU pork exports have become one of its major foreign trade, it is not an exaggeration to say that China’s import of pork helps EU out of the epidemic. During the first quarter, with total pork exports up 4.2% compared to 2019. 75.6 tonnes of pork, which accounts for 54% of EU pork exports, went to China, up 76% from last year. Moreover, even though the epidemic and transport costs combined has led to a one-third increase in pork prices, it has not been able to meet import demand, prompting EU to hit a record €3.5 billion in pork export revenues in the first quarter of the year. However, compared to China’s large increase in imports, countries such as the UK, South Korea, Japan and other countries have seen a more or less significant decrease in their imports. Among them, the UK fell 37.4 percent year-on-year to just 170,000 tons; South Korea fell 39.4 percent year-on-year to just 50,000 tons; and Japan fell 14.8 percent year-on-year to just 101,000 tons. This shows the significance in China’s market.

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Largest-yet special economic zone in South China’s Hainan

China on Monday unveiled a mega project to build its largest-yet special economic zone in South China’s Hainan Province into a world-class free trade port, with one of its major focuses on escalating the development of its financial market. Given that the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region has served as China’s largest free trade port but is now being threatened by the US with revocation of its special privileges, there are rising concerns that Hong Kong’s future status and role are under a cloud, and the city may even be replaced by Hainan.

Though similar concerns were raised in 2018, Hainan will be cultivated into a new financial center to develop alongside Hong Kong in a coordinated manner, rather than replacing Hong Kong as an international financial hub.

Without aiming to replace any aspect of Hong Kong or any other economic entities, building Hainan into a free trade port with Chinese characteristics will be similar to China’s former campaign to cultivate the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone – it is a step to deepen China’s reform and opening-up. 

Hainan will become a free trade port closely related to Hong Kong, yet will maintain some distance. With favorable housing conditions and natural environment, and sufficient talent resources, Hainan is capable of attracting financial institutions to extend long-term investment businesses from Hong Kong, and thereafter explore business in the Chinese mainland.

Take the UK’s two financial centers, London and Edinburgh, as examples. The coordinated development patterns of Hong Kong and Hainan as different kinds of financial centers could also divert financial industries into different cities of the country, and that will largely reduce risks.

Hong Kong’s major advantages are free capital convertibility, entry and exit, as well as a sound shorting and hedging mechanism, which is more suitable for short-term capital hoping for high returns. By contrast, Hainan, with an increasingly open financial market, will be a better choice for foreign investors who intend to further expand in the Chinese mainland market in the long run.

Foreign capital could also seek different kinds of investments in the two regions, like buying fixed income products in Hong Kong and launching high-tech venture investments in Hainan.

It would be a triple-win strategy for Hainan, Hong Kong and foreign capital, combining the advantages of the two financial markets and allowing investors to form better portfolios to make both short-term and long-term profits.

China is cultivating new economic growth points while actively adapting to the changing international trade order. Currently, the European and American economies are experiencing downturns, which have reduced their say in the global economy. And the US is trying to change the order and rebuild international trade rules in its own favor so as to maintain its global economic dominance. Before new international trade rules are established, China’s proactive move to build Hainan as a world-class free trade port could pave the way for it to hold a stronger position in the future.

While constructing a high-quality, high-standard Hainan free trade port, the future development of the island province’s foreign trade is facing rosy opportunities. It sits geographically in the middle of the Chinese mainland, Japan and South Korea, as well as Southeast Asian nations like Vietnam and Thailand.

In the first quarter, Hainan’s goods exports hit 8.25 billion yuan ($1.16 billion), up 5.4 percent year-on-year. Its exports to ASEAN and countries along the Belt and Road Initiative have grown faster than the overall national level. 

Hainan’s current foreign trade is facing the same coronavirus blow as all countries around the world. But as ASEAN markets and the Chinese mainland have effectively brought the virus under control, their demand has surged amid economic recovery, especially for health, electronic and internet products, leading to a rebound in Hainan’s exports to these markets.

Hainan should make the best of its geographic advantage and develop its foreign trade in the “Hainan+N” model. For the services industry, it could focus on “Hainan+Japan, South Korea” cooperation. For the manufacturing industry, it should consider “Hainan+ASEAN.”

The island province is currently facing great opportunities to develop into a globally influential, high-level free trade port. It’s expected that in the future, the ships and airplanes that leave Hainan will not only be loaded with cargo, but will also be full of ideas and wisdom, and, more importantly, full of Hainanese experience and characteristics.

https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1190347.shtml




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Huawei’s semiconductor chips subsidiary is hiring global genius

Huawei’s semiconductor chips subsidiary is hiring global genius amid a US chip ban, a move that experts said is a well-planned counter to US bullying that shows the company’s confidence in becoming self-sufficient in chips supply in about two years.

Huawei’s chip design company HiSilicon announced that it is recruiting talented young people from around the world, and offering competitive salaries and positions, according to media reports. The recruitment targets the world’s outstanding post-graduate and doctoral students who have graduated or will graduate from January 1, 2017 to December 31, 2021. 

This recruitment program shows that Huawei is expanding its talent base and preparing to expand the scope of research and development, which shows its confidence to the outside world.
“In the future, Huawei may face rising attack from the US, which will force it to expand its recruitment of talent to expand its scope of research and development,” 
The US’ latest move to restrict Huawei comes after Washington made a rule change that would require foreign manufacturers using US chipmaking equipment to get a license before being able to sell semiconductors to Huawei.

As the China-US technology battle continues to heat up, the US Semiconductor Industry Association is seeking $37 billion in federal funding for factory construction and research.

To shield its operations from the US crackdowns, Huawei has stockpiled up to two years’ worth of crucial chips, according to the Nikkei Asian Review. The stockpile shows that Huawei is confident of upgrading its manufacturing ability within two years, experts said.
“In two years, the problems facing Huawei could be eventually solved. It may be able to diversify its supply chain as China is stepping up the construction of its own semiconductor foundry sector. Technology will also be upgraded to a relatively large degree within two years,” 

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Lion land and air autonomous vehicle

Tsinghua University 清华大学 Professor of Vehicle and Carrier Academy, Chinese Academy of Engineering fellow Li Jun’s team successfully developed the first generation of Lion land and air autonomous vehicle. It is the world’s first electric land/air drone with integrated intelligent navigation.

The drone uses a traditional 2-wheel drive chassis for better range on ground navigation, the rotors are used to achieve a higher degree of maneuverability. It features vertical take-off and landing, hovering, 3D navigation, ground cruising, automatic object avoidance and tracking, and other functions.

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Trump threatened to invoking an 1807 Insurrection Act to mobilize the military

Trump threatened to invoking an 1807  Insurrection Act to mobilize the military around the country and “quickly solve the problem.”

“I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them. I am also taking swift and decisive action to protect our great capitol, Washington, DC. What happened in this city last night was a total disgrace,” , “Those who threaten innocent life and property will be arrested, detained and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. I want the organizers of this terror to be on notice that you will face severe criminal penalties and lengthy sentences in jail.”

The Insurrection Act is brief. It allows the president, at the REQUEST of a state government, to federalize the National Guard and to use the remainder of the Armed Forces to suppress an insurrection against that state’s government. It further allows for the president to do the same in a state without the explicit consent of a state’s government if it becomes impracticable to enforce federal laws through ordinary proceedings or if states are unable to safeguard its inhabitants’ civil rights.
The general purpose of the Insurrection Act is to limit presidential power, relying on state and local governments for initial response in the event of insurrection. The Posse Comitatus Act prohibits the use of the United States Army and Air Force (which has also been extended by executive direction to the Navy) for routine law enforcement. Actions taken under the Insurrection Act, as an “Act of Congress”, are exempt from the Posse Comitatus Act.

Read the Act. Or arrest the governors first, then move the troops in. Then again, the coup can go either ways.

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French Revolution and our current moment

Fear sweeps the land. Many businesses collapse. Some huge fortunes are made. Panicked consumers stockpile paper, food, and weapons. The government’s reaction is inconsistent and ineffectual. Ordinary commerce grinds to a halt; investors can find no safe assets. Political factionalism grows more intense. Everything falls apart. This was all as true of revolutionary France in 1789 and 1790 as it is of the United States today.
Analogies between the first months of the French Revolution and our current moment are easy to draw. Fauci, the infectious-diseases expert whom Trump often sidelines or ignores, is Jacques Necker, the popular finance minister to Louis XVI. Necker’s firing in early July 1789 was viewed widely as a calamity: “It was like losing your father,” the mathematician and astronomer Jean Sylvain Bailly wrote in his memoirs. The recent spike in American gun and ammunition sales recalls the Parisians who stormed the Bastille Fortress in the hope of finding weapons and gunpowder. (They incidentally released a handful of individuals imprisoned there, but that was not the crowd’s original intent.) The conflict among city, state, and federal officials over coronavirus-related closures directly parallels 1789’s municipal revolutions, in which some cities had leaders who quickly proclaimed devotion to the new National Assembly, while the leaders of other cities remained loyal to the old structures of absolutist royal power and the mayors and aldermen of yet others were violently deposed.
Much like the past 40 years in the United States and Western Europe, the 1700s were a period of remarkable economic, social, and technological transformation. Comparatively cheap mass-manufactured goods from Britain and China sparked what historians call the 18th-century “consumer revolution.”
As sources of information proliferated, long-standing sources of authority (monarchy, aristocracy, and the established Church) feared losing power and turned reactionary. At the same time, the longer-term transformations on which these social and cultural innovations were built—the growth of European overseas empires and the emergence of settler colonialism, massive silver exports from South and Central America, the trans-Atlantic slave trade—continued, and in ever more brutal forms. More than 6 millionAfricans were sold into slavery in the 18th century—a time that some still call the “Age of Enlightenment.”
In the summer of 1789, as peasants attacked chateaus and revolutionaries vowed to “abolish privilege,” many members of the elite felt that their world had suddenly fallen apart. In truth, it had been disintegrating for decades. Today, as in the 1790s, an old order is ending in convulsions. Even before the coronavirus prompted flight cancellations and entry bans, climate activists were rightly telling us to change our modes and patterns of travel. Even before nonessential businesses were shut by government orders, online shopping and same-day deliveries were rapidly remaking retail commerce, while environmental concerns and anti-consumerism were revolutionizing the fashion industry. The pandemic and resulting public-health crisis have caused an abrupt and salutary revaluation in which cleaners, care workers, grocery-store stockers, and delivery drivers are gaining recognition for the essential work they have been doing all along. Taken together, these changes may not look like a revolution—but real revolutions are the ones that nobody sees coming.

The men and women who made the French Revolution—a revolution which, in a few short and hectic years, decriminalized heresy, blasphemy, and witchcraft; replaced one of the oldest European monarchies with a republic based on universal male suffrage; introduced no-fault divorce and easy adoption; embraced the ideal of formal equality before the law; and, for a short time at least, defined employment, education, and subsistence as basic human rights—had no model to follow, no plans, no platform agreed upon in advance. As the UCLA historian Lynn A. Hunt has argued, they made it up as they went along. Yet for more than two centuries, elements of their improvised politics have been revolution’s signature features: a declared sovereignty, devised symbols, an anthem, war. At the junction Americans face today, however, we need to imitate not the outcome of the French revolution but the energy, creativity, and optimism of the French revolutionaries.
Human beings are responsible both for much of what is wrong and for much of what could be right about the world today. But we have to take responsibility. In hindsight a revolution may look like a single event, but they are never experienced that way. Instead they are extended periods in which the routines of normal life are dislocated and existing rituals lose their meaning. They are deeply unsettling, but they are also periods of great creativity. As some Americans take shelter in their homes from a newly arrived threat and others put their health at risk to combat it, we can all mourn lost certainties, but we can also set about intentionally creating new possibilities. To claim this moment as a revolution is to claim it for human action.

Original post:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/revolution-only-getting-started/609463/?fbclid=IwAR3DByO414oVcNbU5VCI_A9a8PEGwiwOzsMKdZdiD8lj4P2hTaJH7gb2Ec4

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A breakthrough for China in deep water gas field exploitation in the South China Sea

A submarine pipeline at a depth of 1,542 meters on the south side of the E3-E2 sections of the Lingshui 17-2 gas field has been successfully completed, marking a breakthrough for China in deep water gas field exploitation in the South China Sea.

The Lingshui 17-2 gas field – the first deep water field established by a Chinese company – is located in the South China Sea near South China’s Hainan Province. 

The operational depth of the field, which is also the China National Offshore Oil Corporation’s (CNOOC’s） first self-operated deep water field, is 1,220-1,560 meters with trillions of cubic meters of exploitable gas reserves.

The field is expected to be operational by the end of China’s 13th Five-Year Plan (2020). It will have an annual gas output of 3-5 billion cubic meters, which could promote the exploitation of deep-water gas resources.

Submarine pipeline is the main artery that transports oil and gas and is regarded as the lifeline of the offshore oil and gas production system. 

Three hundred meters below sea level is considered to be deep water and 1,500 meters is known as ultra deep water. Due to the complex and changeable submarine environment, constructing an ultra deep water submarine pipeline is a challenge, it also has strict requirements on the pipeline’s quality and size.

Prior to the construction of the Lingshui field, ultra deep water submarine pipelines were mostly built by foreign countries.