Tag Archives: China

Beijing has been vigorously promoting new energy vehicle (NEV) for years to tackle air pollution. As of June, the city is home to 135,400 NEVs, with 92,300 charging piles, according to the Beijing Municipal Commission of City Management.

A multi-storey NEV charging station went into operation in SOHU modern city, a busy downtown area of Beijing on Aug. 8. The station, covering more than 4,000 square meters, is equipped with 101 charging piles. More than 500 cars can be charged here daily, and online payment for charging is available.

Beijing has been building charging stations and piles around malls, traffic hubs, office buildings, highway service areas, tourist attractions, as well as regular gas stations. The city is home to 1,873 public NEV charging stations, making charging possible in a five-kilometer range within the city’s Sixth Ring Road.

According to an official of the Beijing Municipal Commission of City Management, Beijing plans to build no less than 3,000 public charging piles this year. By 2020, NEV charging facilities will be available every 0.9 kilometers in downtown Beijing, the sub-center of Beijing, the new airport and the Winter Olympics venues.

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Chinese Internet authorities have opened cases to investigate three social media platforms — Tencent’s Wechat, Sina Weibo and Baidu Tieba, for not stopping the circulation of illegal online content, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) said F… read more

A trial of five individuals related to fugitive Guo Wengui opened Friday in the northeast China city of Dalian. Qu Long, former executive of Tianjin Huatai Holding Group Ltd., and former Huatai chairman Zhao Yun’an were accused of misappropriation of … read more

Reporters from the China-South Asia and Southeast Asia Center visited the Chengdu Research Base for Giant Panda Breeding in early August. This “Home of the Panda” looks quite different than it did when I visited 10 years ago. There are many more facilities and many more giant pandas in the thickened forest.

Giant panda in Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding [Photo / China.org.cn]

Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding was founded in 1987, starting out with just six sick and starving giant pandas rescued from the wild. Today, there are over 180.

The Giant panda is an endangered species found only in a few mountain ranges in central China, mainly in Sichuan Province but with some in neighboring Shaanxi and Gansu. In the late 1970s, there were estimated to be only around 1,000 living in the wild.

According to the latest census (2014) by China’s State Forestry Administration, this population had grown by 268, or 16.8%, to a total of 1,864. In late 2016, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) changed the classification of the species from “endangered” to “vulnerable.”

Meanwhile, as of December 2014, a total of 49 giant pandas were living in captivity outside China.

However this much-loved distinctive black and white animal is an extremely vulnerable species threatened by continued habitat loss and habitat fragmentation, and by a very low birthrate, both in the wild and in captivity.

Breeding giant pandas is incredibly hard. Female pandas only ovulate once a year. Not only that, but the window that a male panda has to inseminate the female while in ovulation is only about 36-40 hours. And in captivity, many male pandas appear uninterested in mating or do not seem to know how to proceed.

The survival rate of newborn panda cubs is very low even under conditions of artificial rearing and in the wild even lower.

Despite these difficulties, the research base has managed to produce a “Panda Boom” phenomenon in recent years.

Up to 2015, it had managed to breed 143 giant panda cubs, serving as the largest artificial breeding population for captive giant pandas that ensures the genetic quality and the individual health of the population.

Over the past 30 years, researchers have tackled such key technological bottlenecks for captive giant pandas as artificial feeding and management, breeding and rearing infants, diseases prevention and population heredity management.

The base has made many technology breakthroughs and achieved multiple original innovative scientific results. More than 70 scientific projects of the Base have been awarded national, provincial or municipal technical innovation honors and scientific progress awards.

While paying much attention to both scientific research and tourism development, it has shaped a sustainable development mode of “industry-university-research-tourism cooperation.”

By simulating the wild ecological environment for giant pandas through landscape architecture, it has set up a delivery room, breeding area, scientific and research center and hospital in an orderly manner, and many luxurious “villa residences” for the giant pandas are scattered in the forest.

In 1998, the base was evaluated as a World Nature Heritage site. In 2006, it was listed as the AAAA tourism attraction and, by 2015, was receiving three million tourists a year.

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Thousands of people in China are making “finger knots” to show off the flexibility of their fingers.

Screenshots from Weibo feature the “finger knot”.

The “finger knot” requires someone to interlock their digits to form a knot.

Weibo, China’s equivalent to Twitter, users have been quick to share pictures of them doing the difficult hand trick.

The new social media craze has spread quickly and caught the attention of the Daily Mail and BuzzFeed.

The BuzzFeed even made a video to teach viewers how to do it.

Web users around the world also gave the hand trick challenge a go and shared pictures of their attempts on Instagram and Twitter.

The craze first started when Chinese actor Zhang Yishan was seen making a difficult finger move in a popular TV show, which has had 860 million hits on its Internet pages up to Thursday.

Zhang made the finger move with his right hand, putting his little finger on top of his thumb while keeping the other three fingers straight.

The finger move looks easy, but many viewers said it is ‘physically impossible’ and the difficulty is to keep the little finger on top of the thumb.

The craze was spurred on by a challenge from Nigerian website KRAKS TV that posted this photo to its Twitter account.

Chinese TV personality Li Sisi posted a photo of her trying the challenge onto her Weibo page and challenged web users to make a knot with their fingers.

Li’s followers immediately joined in and created more difficult hand tricks.

Why some can and some can’t

Dr Jane Simmonds, a registered physiotherapist at the University College London, said those who could perform the difficult finger tricks are likely to have joint hypermobility, a common phenomenon present in 20 to 30 percent of the general population, according to the Daily Mail’s report.

As Dr Simmonds said, joint hypermobility is more common in children and females, and also in Asian and Afro-Caribbean ethnic populations, which may be a reason for the popularity of finger tricks in China.

Daniel Brown, a consultant hand surgeon at The Bone & Joint Centre at Spire Liverpool Hospital, said only a small number of people can do the finger trick that Chinese actor Zhang Yishan has performed.

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