China's Environment, Society & Propaganda
This week's roundup
Environment
A construction team completed an 11 km. tunnel in Yunnan Province Wednesday, the largest segment of a water diversion project to relieve severe water shortages in the central part of the province.
Sinopec’s Xinjiang Green Hydrogen Project plant produces 20,000 tonnes of green hydrogen annually using only solar power and water, and reducing CO2 emission by 485,000 tonnes, the same as 300,000 trees can absorb.
Society
Shanghai has 261 medical hospice facilities with 1,224 beds in medical facilities also available for hospice care, while the service can care for another 1,800 patients in their homes. The city has created hospice service standards and regulations, IT-based management and quality control and innovation.
Twelve regions now include cochlear implant surgery in their insurance programs, a game-changer for China’s 27 million-strong Deaf community, many of whom have been unable to receive cochlear implant surgery due to its prohibitively high $65,000 cost–of which governments will now pay $50,000. America’s Medicare first included the procedure in 2022.
Higher education enrollment tops 60%, up from 30% in 2012. 10.42 million students were enrolled in 3,074 universities, colleges and vocational schools nationwide. Beijing tops the country with 92 higher education institutions. In 1949 80% of Chinese were illiterate.
Starbucks streamed a six-episode mini-drama on Douyin, a new advertising approach for global brands in China, where the size of the micro-drama industry reached about $5 billion in 2023. Released with one episode per day, the short drama is set in ancient times, in a society unfamiliar with coffee.
Guide To Finding Supreme People’s Court Materials: Selected Journals Of Spc Divisions. Susan Finder has been observing the Supreme People’s Court for over 30 years. She is a member of the international commercial expert committee of the China International Commercial Court (CICC) of the Supreme People’s Court.
From 2018 - 2023, rural area income growth has been stronger than urban: about 35% over five years vs 25% in urban areas. The policies to reduce the historically large gap between urban and rural areas seem to be showing results. The latter can be seen in the data for the urban-rural gap which has been steadily decreasing:
Planning a trip to China? For phone service, I used eSim (you need a
recent, top-end phone) and Airalo (a company that provides eSim services) and my phone was perfect throughout. You don’t have a Chinese phone number, or any phone number, but you have WeChat and WhatsApp and can phone through them if necessary. I use Astrill VPN, but did not turn it on for my phone, because what eSim and Airalo do is connect you to Internet service providers in China, so of course I did not want to block that. Google services worked like a charm. Foreigners can now pay via WeChat (Weixin) and Alipay: enter your credit card number and you’re ready to go. –David Ownby.
Freshly discharged from Zhongshan City Hospital, Jerry Grey writes, “The total cost for my stay, 4 nights, 5 days, all my food, treatment, scans, doctor’s fees, was $778, AUD$1115, or £595. The biggest difference is, doors and windows are left open while examinations are going on, as a foreigner especially we are objects of curiosity”.
3 million Taiwan people have entered the mainland this year, up 68% YoY, and the number of Taiwanese citizens applying to settle in the mainland has exceeded the total of the previous 10yrs.
Above: The 19th Route Army during the Shanghai War of 1932.
Environment
Beijing announced a $2.5 trillion energy-saving and environmental protection industry by 2030, raising non-fossil energy consumption above 25% of the total national energy consumption, and utilizing 4.5 billion tons of major solid waste annually.
A Giant NGO will Turn Waste Into Resources, as the country promotes upgrades to industrial equipment and consumer good trade-ins to boost the economy. A senior official at the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China’s top economic planning agency, said that the commission “supports the establishment of a national resources recycling group to create a functional resource recovery and utilization platform,” the first official statement on the new state enterprise.
Propaganda
Westerners constantly speculate about what Xi Xinping is thinking– a man who has literally published volumes of Xi Xinping Thought. They speculate about where China is going–when the party publishes five-year plans. You never see this covered, instead you get mendacious morons imagining what is happening in China, and other morons nodding sagaciously.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, China’s state media excelled at boosting international support for its political and economic systems. Compared to the placebo group, exposure to Chinese messages tripled the proportion of respondents who preferred the Chinese political model to its U.S. counterpart, from 16% to 54%. The exposure also nearly doubled the preference for the Chinese economic model over the US one, raising it from 30 percent to 58 percent. Head-to-head, global audience preferences still shifted toward China, albeit less dramatically (from 16 to 32 percent in the political domain and from 30 to 40 percent in the economic domain).China’s influence operations possess a distinct edge in molding global attitudes in its favor. The Diplomat.
It reduced the white male labor supply in Western states by 28%, suggesting that Chinese workers were creating a substantial multiplier effect in the Western economy;
It reduced the total manufacturing output by 62%;
It reduced manufacturing establishments by 54-69%.
That article from the diplomat is too funny. Like no shit, people prefer tangible economic development to an abstract notion of "democracy"