Innehållsförteckning för Vol.66/No.32 från Beijing Review

The 31st FISU World University Games Summer, or the Summer Universiade, took place in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, on July 28-August 8. Student athletes from around the world gathered there to demonstrate the charm of competitive sports while at the same time enjoying a cultural feast. FISU, or the International University Sports Federation, is the global organization providing world-class sports events to student athletes. A total of 6,500 athletes from 113 countries and regions competed in 269 events across 18 sports during this Summer Universiade. Although the Chengdu Universiade was rescheduled twice from 2021 to 2023 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, China completed all the necessary preparations. The concepts of low carbon and environmental protection ran through the entire setup, while advanced technology was widely used in venue construction, operation and…

Athletes at the Chengdu Universiade were not only focused on the competition at hand, but also took the opportunity of visiting Chengdu to experience some local culture. From hugging pandas to trying hotpot, they made the most of their stay in the city, which is known for its rich cultural heritage and leisurely lifestyle. Comments to wanghairong@cicgamericas.com…

The classic Hollywood action slash spy movie seems to have dulled in recent years. Judging by the myriad of “disappointing” reviews, even the latest installment in the Mission: Impossible franchise, Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One, seems unable to save the genre from its decline. Perhaps filmmakers could look to U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director William Burns’ fireside chat moderated by American network National Public Radio’s flagship news program All Things Considered host Mary Louise Kelly at the Aspen Security Forum 2023 for some inspiration. According to Burns, the U.S. has made progress in rebuilding its intelligence network in China to ensure it has “strong human intelligence capability to complement what we can acquire through other methods.” Burns’ commentary basically confirmed rumors of the U.S. intelligence network in China taking…

Cheng Zhen gave birth to her second child last year and her firstborn is expected to attend primary school in a couple of years. To improve the growing family’s living conditions, the 31-year-old mom has developed a stronger desire to purchase an apartment in Beijing. Due to a job transfer, Cheng and her husband moved to Beijing in 2018 from neighboring Tianjin Municipality where they tied the knot and obtained a mortgage to buy their first home. Since moving to the Chinese capital, the couple has been renting. “We’ve been thinking about selling our Tianjin apartment and buying a new one in Beijing, but this way we will become second-time buyers, meaning we will need to make a higher down payment and pay a higher interest rate on our loan,”…

FIRST NATIONAL DATA ADMINISTRATOR Liu Liehong, former CEO and Chairperson of state-owned telecom giant China Unicom, was appointed head of the newly unveiled National Data Administration on July 28 amid China’s ongoing efforts to improve data management. Liu, 54, began to head China Unicom in August 2021. Before that, he served as the vice minister of industry and information technology, the country’s top industry regulator, following a career in electronics and information technology. The National Data Administration was created as part of the country’s plan to reform state institutions adopted earlier this year. Its responsibilities include planning China’s digital economy, as well as the sharing and development of the country’s data resources, promoting smart cities and the exchange of information resources across industries. Chunky Children People’s Daily July 28 For…

Featuring a big head, big eyes and a big round belly, a robot named after Rongbao, the panda mascot of the Chengdu World University Games, or the Universiade, held in the capital of Sichuan Province, drew widespread attention at the Games. Rongbao is a service robot with emergency functions. It can deliver first-aid kits, automated external defibrillators (AEDs)—portable, life-saving devices designed to treat people experiencing sudden cardiac arrest, and other medical tools. When an emergency occurs, people can directly call the Rongbao robot using a mini-program on the ubiquitous super app Weixin on their mobile phones, and the robot will deliver a first-aid kit and an AED at a speed of 1.2 meters per second, or around 4.3 km per hour. After arriving at the location, the robot automatically plays…

A China-Europe freight train departed from Yiwu in Zhejiang Province, east China, on July 29 for Madrid, Spain, marking the 10,000th China-Europe freight train trip this year alone. Those trains have accumulatively transported 1.08 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs), a unit of volume used in maritime and rail transport statistics, of goods this year, up 27 percent year on year. The China-Europe freight train service is a flagship program of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a China-proposed initiative boosting connectivity along and beyond the ancient Silk Road routes. It took seven years, from 2011 to 2018, for the first 10,000 trips to be finished. But that same number of trips took place within the first seven months of this year. As of late June this year, 73,000-plus trips had…

A whip cracks in the hot and humid summer night air encasing China’s national capital in late July. Two sixty-something men each hold a long, leather whip with which they are spinning a large, stone top. They get the top whirling and twirling by wrapping the whip around it, placing it on the pavement and then pulling the whip like a ripcord. As the top begins its wild spin, the men lash it with booming cracks of their whips to keep it going. In addition to these sonic snaps, the same airwaves carry aloft massive kites sporting tails bejeweled with colorful flashing LED lights to increase visibility and visual flair. Also in the air are the sounds of babyboomers, sexagenarians and septuagenarians, belting out the hits with the aid of…

In my mid-20s, after growing up largely in the rural south and then attending university in Washington, D.C., I visited Chicago for business, staying downtown a few blocks from Lake Michigan, which was already dancing with ice in early December. There are limits on building heights in Washington, and Chicago was the first truly big city I had visited. The experience was a bit overwhelming, tinged with “batophobia,” the fear of being in or near tall buildings. Indeed, standing on those cold, windswept sidewalks of the Windy City, gusts almost blowing me over, I felt the whole city might come tumbling down on me like bowling pins. Twenty years later, including a decade of living in Shanghai, I revisited Chicago for a conference. And what occurred to me then was…

On July 29, China’s National Meteorological Center (NMC) upgraded an orange alert for rainstorms to a red alert in Beijing and its surrounding cities. Typhoon Doksuri, which had lashed the Philippines and China’s Taiwan region and Fujian Province, had now begun releasing heavy rainfall on this part of north China. China has a four-tier weather warning system, with red representing the most severe warning, followed by orange, yellow and blue. It was the second rainstorm red alert issued since the system was established in 2010, with the previous one issued in 2011. Heavy rainstorms Between the evening of July 29 and the morning of August 2, Beijing recorded an average of 261 mm of rain, with maximum rainfall exceeding 740 mm in a reservoir in Changping District, making it the…

On the evening of June 22, a Kunqu Opera performance titled The Peony Pavilion, an epic romantic tragicomedy based on a short story from the Song Dynasty (960-1279), took to the stage of Beijing’s Northern Kunqu Opera Theater, starring Wei Chunrong in the role of the female protagonist, Du Liniang. Despite having performed the part on stage over 300 times, Wei still arrived at the theater four hours early, being the first actress backstage to get her makeup done and inspect the props. This is a habit she’s maintained ever since first entering the world of Kunqu in 1982. At 7:00 p.m. sharp, The Peony Pavilion opened to a packed audience. Wei, dressed in a delicate pink gown, enchanted onlookers with her exquisite singing as her gently waving fingers seemed…

I was born in a small city in southern Peru called Arequipa, also known as the “white city,” because many of its buildings are built from a volcanic material called sillar, which is usually white. Arequipa is a small town with a population of under 1 million. Since I was very young, I have always wanted to travel, learn about other cultures and learn to speak more languages. The first time I came into contact with Chinese culture was in 2016, the year before I graduated from university. The Confucius Institute in Arequipa launched a promotional campaign at my university. Confucius Institutes, named after ancient Chinese philosopher and educator Confucius (551-479 B.C.), serve as nonprofit public institutions to help foreigners better understand China by teaching the Chinese language and culture…