Sheng Tianxing, a tea trader from Zhejiang Province, is still looking forward to taking his seat on a space flight in 2016.Credit Qilai Shen for The New York Times
The deadly crash of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo in California may be raising concerns in the United States over the safety of space tourism, but so far it does not seem to have dampened the enthusiasm of would-be astronauts in China.
“Even if my body doesn’t work, my mind will always be determined to go into space,” said Sheng Tianxing, a 41-year-old tea trader from the southeastern province of Zhejiang. In June, he put down $100,000 to reserve a seat on a rocket that promises to carry him into space for about six minutes in 2016.
“I haven’t thought about the money issue at all. Anything can go wrong. If you worry about this, you’ll just have too many things to worry about,” said Mr. Sheng, who had just returned from a holiday in France. Read more…
With new aid and investments, Beijing seems to be coming to grips with Afghanistan’s role in its national security, Matthew Rosenberg reports. Read more »
An unmanned Chinese spacecraft that returned to Earth after orbiting the moon late last month carried with it a selection of Chinese music, including a song by Peng Liyuan, a famous singer and the wife of China’s president, Xi Jinping.
Ms. Peng’s song, “In the Field of Hope,” was one of 10 included on a microchip carried in the capsule during its mission, which was intended to test equipment and techniques for lunar orbit and re-entry for a future unmanned journey to the moon and back, the state news agency Xinhua reported.
Other works on the device, called the China Dream Music Microchip, included the composer Tan Dun’s symphony “Heaven Earth Mankind”; a recording of the pianist Lang Lang playing Li Huanzhi’s “Spring Festival Overture”; a song sung by China’s version of the Three Tenors: Dai Yuqiang, Wei Song and Mo Hualun; and performances by other Chinese artists on the violin, cello, pipa, guqin and guzheng.
“On the eight-day mission, Chinese musicians’ passion and dreams sang out to the vastness of space,” Xinhua said. Read more…
It would not be easy for the average Mac user to be hit by this malware, but it points to new ways in which hackers are targeting Apple products, Nicole Perlroth reports. Read more »
Tanzania has lost thousands of elephants to ivory poachers.Credit Ben Curtis/Associated Press
BEIJING — When President Xi Jinping of China and his entourage of government officials and business leaders arrived in Tanzania in March 2013, it was to officially promote economic ties between the two countries.
But according to a report by the Environmental Investigation Agency, a nongovernmental organization based in London, members of the Chinese delegation used Mr. Xi’s visit as an opportunity to procure so much illegal ivory that local prices doubled to about $318 a pound. Two weeks before Mr. Xi arrived, Chinese buyers purchased thousands of pounds of poached tusks, which were “later sent to China in diplomatic bags on the presidential plane,” said the report, which was released on Wednesday.
The Chinese government has been trying to prove itself a responsible state actor that is serious about abolishing corruption and abiding by international law. But the report, “Vanishing Point: Criminality, Corruption and the Devastation of Tanzania’s Elephants,” details Chinese diplomats and military personnel colluding with Tanzanian officials and Chinese crime syndicates to send illegal ivory to China, decimating Tanzania’s elephant population in the process.
“Tanzania is the largest source of poached ivory in the world and China the largest importer of smuggled tusks,” the organization said in a statement.
A Chinese official denied the accusations and denounced the organization that issued the report. Read more…
Visitors wrestle for signed photos of Rei Mizuna, a popular Japanese adult film actress, who was on stage promoting a sex toy at the Guangzhou Sex Culture Festival on Nov. 9, 2013.Credit Adam Dean for The New York Times
Shortly before Men’s Health Day on Oct. 28, reports of a new study of sex in China, presented in jokey and sympathetic language, raced through the Internet.
The topic was guaranteed to attract as much attention in China as anywhere else: A sexual revolution has been underway in the country since at least the early 1990s with the easing of severe Maoist-era repression.
Chinese men, overworked and overstressed, were suffering high levels of impotence, said the study, ‘‘China Ideal Sex Blue Book.’’ Only a little over half of the thousands interviewed were achieving full erections, which it described as being ‘‘like a cucumber.’’ (It described its opposite as ‘‘like tofu.’’) Read more…
A miner talks on his mobile phone at a coal mine in Changzhi, Shanxi Province.Credit Reuters
The Natural Resources Defense Council has presented research that attempts to take on the Herculean task of quantifying the environmental, social and economic toll of China’s reliance on coal.
The report, released Tuesday by the New York-based environmental organization, is part of its China Coal Consumption Cap Project, begun last October in conjunction with Chinese government research organizations, universities and industry groups to help China begin diminishing its use of coal by 2020. Researchers from Tsinghua and Peking universities, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and other government-affiliated bodies worked together to develop concrete figures that, according to the study, show how a broad range of ecological problems and human suffering resulting from coal consumption can be discussed in terms of cold, hard cash.
Yang Fuqiang, senior adviser on energy, environment and climate change at the council, said that the report was a response to China’s lack of clear quantitative data on the external costs of coal use. ‘‘In order to understand the true impact of coal, we absolutely must talk about all of the hidden costs to society behind it as an industry.’’ Read more…
Rocks were piled in front of the Zhengshan Village Christian Church in Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, on July 16 to prevent government workers from moving in equipment to take down the cross.Credit Didi Tang/Associated Press
Communist Party investigators have warned officials in the eastern province of Zhejiang, where several Christian churches have been demolished or forced to remove prominent crosses over the past year, against practicing religion. The brief message was included in a statement from the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection describing its recent tour of the province.
The central commission, an antigraft body, recently concluded investigative tours of 10 provinces and regions, as well as a state-owned automaker, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the State General Administration of Sport.
The commission typically releases statements that broadly outline problems it has uncovered, but details emerge only later if cases against prominent officials are pursued. The Zhejiang statement, like those for other provinces, focused on issues of corruption and abuse of power. The mention of religion was brief and made no specific reference to a recent campaign against churches in the Zhejiang city of Wenzhou, which has a large number of Christians as well as Buddhists and Taoists. Read more…
Brittney Griner, left, during the 2014 FIBA Women's World Championship semi-final basketball match in Istanbul on Oct. 4.Credit Ozan Kose/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
An American basketball star playing in China was assaulted by a man with a knife on Monday but said she was only scratched in the encounter.
“First let me say I’m ok!!!!” the basketball player, Brittney Griner, wrote on her Instagram account. The Phoenix Mercury center, who is playing this winter with the Beijing Great Wall of the Women’s Chinese Basketball Association, was boarding a bus with teammates in the northeastern city of Shenyang when a man chased them with a large knife.
Ms. Griner was wearing two jackets, and the knife didn’t cut completely through, The Associated Press reported. “I was thinking I was going to end up stabbed in China and if he got to us at the back of the bus, I was going to have to fight this man with a knife,” she wrote in an email to The A.P. Read more…
Schoolchildren in Hefei, Anhui Province. The proposed changes in educational materials appear to be part of a broader shift in thinking about the importance of Chinese tradition in shaping national identity.Credit Jianan Yu/Reuters
Education officials in China are considering changes to elementary and middle school textbooks that would expand the study of Chinese philosophy and literature, a shift that some education experts say is connected to recent efforts by the government to emphasize China’s cultural heritage.
At an annual education conference this past weekend in the southwestern city of Chengdu, Wang Xuming, president of the state-owned Language and Culture Press, told reporters that his publishing house had revised its Chinese language and literature textbooks to increase the proportion of guoxue, literally “national studies,” referring to the study of Chinese culture, in textbooks to 35 percent, up from 25 percent, the state news agency Xinhua reported.
Mr. Wang, a former spokesman for the Ministry of Education, said the proposed changes had already been submitted to the ministry. If approved, he said, the new textbooks would be introduced next September in time for the new school year. While there are many education publishers in China, Language and Culture Press, along with the People’s Education Press and the Higher Education Press, is widely regarded as one of the leading publishing houses for teaching materials. Read more…
