Indholdsfortegnelse for Vol.66/No.33 i Beijing Review

During his visit to Kazakhstan in September 2013, President Xi Jinping put forward the initiative of jointly building the Silk Road Economic Belt, which, together with the 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road he proposed the following month in Indonesia, constitutes the Belt and Road Initiative. One decade on, this initiative, with the participation of more than 150 countries, has contributed to increased connectivity along and beyond the ancient Silk Road routes. The Belt and Road Initiative calls on countries to focus on a diversified, independent, balanced and sustainable approach to development. The role of governments is to adopt favorable policies and build platforms, while the initiative’s implementation relies on the market and the involvement of enterprises. Over the past decade, many Chinese companies have taken Belt and Road countries as key…

Since the Joe Biden administration took office in January 2021, guided-missile destroyers of the U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet, headquartered in Yokosuka, Japan, sailed through the Taiwan Straits 12 times in 2021 and seven times in 2022. In the first half of this year, the People’s Liberation Army Eastern Theater Command tracked and monitored U.S. warships’ transits through and a U.S. warplane’s flights over the Taiwan Straits in January, February, April and June. At a time when cross-Straits relations are at a low point, with Taiwan leader Tsai Ingwen’s pursuit of “Taiwan independence,” the frequent maneuvering of U.S. warships and reconnaissance planes there is highly provocative. It not only runs counter to the one-China policy that the U.S. Government has claimed it upholds, but also borders on a violation of international…

Was die Nationen als Nationen getan haben, haben sie für die menschliche Gesellschaft getan. That’s German for “What nations have done as nations, they have done for human society.” On May 27, 2022, Chinese President Xi Jinping delivered a speech at the 39th group study session of the Political Bureau of the 19th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC). In his speech, Xi quoted the line, which derives from a manuscript written by German philosopher Karl Marx (1818-83) in March 1845 entitled Über F. Lists Buch: Das nationale System der politischen Ökonomie, which translates as About F. List’s Book: The National System of Political Economy. F. List stands for Friedrich List (1789-1846), one of the most prominent economic philosophers of the 19th century. In his 1841 book…

The all-wooden Dengchigou Catholic Church stands at an altitude of 1,765 meters in Dengchigou, a small village in Baoxing County, Ya’an City, Sichuan Province in southwest China. This is where, in 1869, French missionary Armand David laid eyes on a distinctive black-and-white pelt and then bought a complete, dead specimen from local hunters. That same year, the New Archives of the Museum of Natural History in Paris published a report stating that the “black-and-white bear” David had discovered was a new species named Ailuropoda melanoleuca, literally “cat foot, black and white.” Better known as the giant panda. As the birthplace of giant panda-related culture, Dengchigou still plays a significant role in the history of the beloved mammal, which has existed for 8 million years. In recent years, the village has…

My life has been a constant journey of discovery, a journey through and discovery of knowledge, experiences, different cultures, fresh tastes and new people. As a child born in a remote village in Nepal, I often wondered if there was a world beyond those gigantic hills that enveloped my village. Life beyond the luscious green forests, was it different from mine? Did people out there speak the same language I spoke? Did they celebrate festivals the way I did? Did they have two loving grandparents like I had? I would pester my grandmother at night to tell me about the world outside. Just like me, she, too, was in the dark when it came to this wonderful, hidden world. My learning and discovery started from a small Nepalese town called…

Fitch Ratings downgraded the United States’ long-term foreign-currency issuer default rating (IDR) from “AAA” to “AA+” on August 1, raising concerns among global investors about the U.S. credit. This is the second time in America’s history that a top-three U.S. ratings firm has downgraded its IDR, after Standard & Poor’s in 2011 lowered its rating one notch below the top grade. The move leaves Moody’s as the only of the three big ratings firms still giving the U.S. the AAA rating. Why did the rating agency choose to downgrade the U.S. sovereign rating at this time, despite the bipartisan agreement in early June to suspend the debt limit until January 2025? According to a report released by Fitch on August 1, the move reflects “the expected fiscal deterioration over the…

In early August, Mongolian Prime Minister Luvsannamsrai Oyun-Erdene paid his first visit to the United States during his tenure. In an exclusive interview with Reuters, Oyun-Erdene said he’d reached several important agreements during his meeting with U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, including the further deepening of rare earth mining cooperation between the two countries. Many attribute the U.S. efforts in the global search for rare earth to the Chinese Government’s export controls on gallium and germanium, two niche metals critical to the semiconductor industry. But in fact, neither gallium nor germanium are rare earth elements (REEs). REEs, an irreplaceable and non-renewable resource in civil, military and nuclear industries, comprise just 17 elements from the periodic table, which features 118 elements in total. REE resources have played a critical role in…

After days of downpours brought on by typhoon Doksuri from late July to early August, BooksChina.com (Books China), one of the country’s first domestic online book sales platforms, suffered a devastating loss. Over 4 million books were soaked and damaged to varying degrees in its storage center located in Zhuozhou City, Hebei Province, one of the most severely affected regions during the disaster. Books China said as a small company that has meager profits, it hasn’t recovered from the difficulties. It managed to get through the three-year-long pandemic and then encountered this disaster. “We will strive to save ourselves and survive,” a post on its official account on Chinese tech giant Tencent’s Weixin super app read on August 3, the third day that the company’s storage facilities had been flooded.…

NEV GIANT SEEKS FURTHER GROWTH Wang Chuanfu, Chairman of BYD, China’s largest new-energy vehicle (NEV) manufacturer, has predicted new-energy passenger cars will account for 70 percent of the country’s auto market by 2025. He made the prediction during a press conference held as the company’s 5 millionth NEV rolled off the production line on August 9. Wang spent several years as a government researcher, until he entered the private sector and founded his own company BYD in 1995. Today, BYD ranks 212th on the Fortune Global 500 list. In the first half of this year, BYD’s share in the domestic automotive market reached 10.6 percent, and its share in the NEV market was 33.5 percent. In 2022, China’s new-energy passenger cars accounted for 63 percent of the world’s total. No…

Multipolarity is deepening while Western power fades. To defend sovereignty and development and to promote peaceful coexistence, nations of the Global Majority, a collective term for ethnic groups that are not considered to be white and constitute approximately 85 percent of the global population, must strengthen their discourse capacity. Today, the unipolar world of U.S. and Western hegemony is in the process of being replaced by a multipolar international system. Some refer to this process as leading to a “polycentric” world order and others refer to it as a “pluralist” world order. The main features of this new international situation developing before our very eyes are: the rise of China, and Asia at large, and the return of Russia. Also, we see many countries showing a renewed interest in the…

Despite a recent pullback in domestic inflation, the U.S. Federal Reserve (Fed) on July 26 raised its key interest rate by a quarter of a percentage point to a range between 5.25 and 5.5 percent, marking the 11th rate hike since March 2022. Since 2021, the U.S. has seen its consumer price index, which measures the monthly change in prices paid by consumers, rise continuously, at one point even hitting a 40-year record, at 9.1 percent. Incessant inflation was eating into consumers’ purchasing power and so, to rein in inflation, the Fed had to take a monetary-tightening approach by frequently raising interest rates. Contributing factors include excessive money printing in the past few years leading to excessive liquidity, as well as manufacturing moving to other countries, thus increasing the gap…