Walking through the bustling Huaqiangbei commercial area in Shenzhen city, South China's Guangdong Province, the largest electronics retail market in China, one is immediately impressed by its international atmosphere. Foreign faces busily pass by, and English logos adorn almost every big tower, showcasing various products from LED to mobile phones, all made in China for the world.
The scenes at Huaqiangbei are a symbol of the city's vibrant trade. Despite global headwinds, Shenzhen, an epitome of China's manufacturing and commerce, remains resilient.
Fueled by an industrial upgrade on the back of government support, Shenzhen has experienced a sustained economy-wide transformation. Notably, the city's exports have shifted from labor-intensive sectors to high-value products including electronic devices and electric vehicles (EVs).
The shift has boosted Shenzhen's economy, which remains on an upward trajectory, driven by the high-end products generated in the city, industry experts said.
Global competitiveness
Mohamed, a Yemeni businessperson who frequently visits the city to meet local business partners and place orders, kicked off a "pilgrimage" at the Huaqiangbei commercial area to restock his electronics store in Yemen.
In an interview with the Global Times, he said that he has been coming here for many years, rating the products for their cost-effectiveness and high quality.
Despite global inflation and the extension of the supply chain to neighboring Asian countries in the past several years, Mohamed is impressed with the competitiveness of Chinese products. He said that there is nowhere else to find better products than Shenzhen. Mohamed's sentiments are not isolated. Numerous high-tech enterprises, which originated and flourished in Shenzhen, are collectively bolstering the city's industrial prowess, building up the city's competitiveness.
At a local production line of the domestic mobile phone maker Honor, the production of a mobile phone takes only 28.5 seconds, with 75 percent of the work being done by automated tools, the Global Times learned from the company.
Honor's exports experienced significant growth, achieving a 200 percent increase in its overseas markets in 2023.
Attaching great importance to product innovation, the company has invested 10 percent of its revenue in research and development (R&D) every year since it was spun off in November 2020. Its R&D investment intensity now ranks among the top six in the country, Song Yiwen, president of Honor's supply chain management department, told the Global Times.
BYD, the EV manufacturing giant based in Shenzhen, also achieved notable results outside of China in 2023.
The car-maker secured the title of the top-selling new-energy vehicle in Brazil for several months in 2023 and became cumulative sales champions in Thailand, Singapore and Colombia from January to October 2023, BYD told the Global Times.
While consistently exporting high-quality products to overseas markets, BYD has built core technological advantages in new energy areas such as batteries, motors, and electronic controls.
In the warehouse of MBE International, a Shenzhen-based logistics company, workers are using forklifts to neatly arrange goods from all over the country. Most of these goods are high-value-added electromechanical products that will be shipped to overseas markets.
Tang Lingli, general manager of the logistics company, with over 20 years of experience in the industry, has been a witness of how industry transformation has brought about changes to foreign trade.
About 20 years ago, Shenzhen's logistics facilities were not well-developed, and the volume of goods handled was so restricted that handling 1,000 tons of goods in a month was considered to be a great feat, Tang recalled.
Nowadays, MBE International's monthly shipping volume reaching 16,000 tons is the norm, and the value of transported goods has significantly increased, she said.
"From shoes, clothing, and bags to electronic products, we have witnessed high-quality development and transformation and upgrading of Shenzhen's foreign trade," Tang said.
Advanced technology
The Shenzhen Bureau of Commerce told the Global Times that the city is robustly supporting emerging sectors such as advanced technology and high-end manufacturing.
"Shenzhen is actively accelerating its global product outreach, encouraging traditional industries to increase investments in technology," the bureau said.
The goal is to improve the quality and tech features of exported goods, boost the competitiveness of exported goods like electronic products, and increase overall export volume to strengthen Shenzhen's position in exports, according to the local commerce bureau.
Latest data the Global Times obtained from Shenzhen Customs shows that Shenzhen's import and export volume from January to November amounted to 3.51 trillion yuan ($489 billion), showing a year-on-year growth of 6.3 percent. This growth rate places Shenzhen at the forefront among the top 10 major foreign trade hubs in the country.
Specifically, the city's exports have surged by 13.6 percent during the period. It is anticipated that Shenzhen is positioned to secure its 31st consecutive first-place finish in terms of annual exports in the Chinese mainland.
The electronic information industry has remained Shenzhen's pillar industry. Exports of electromechanical products, mainly computer communications and other electronic equipment, account for over 70 percent of the total exports, according to media reports.
Looking forward, foreign trade in 2024 is expected to be better than last year because the year 2023 experienced the lingering impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in the first quarter, Li Chang'an, a professor at the Academy of China Open Economy Studies of the University of International Business and Economics, told Global Times on Wednesday.
The upgrading and transformation of industries have been pivotal in boosting exports, and this year they will play an even more critical role in driving the nation's foreign trade growth, Li said.
At the recent 2023 Dalian International Marathon that was recently held in Dalian Northeast China's Liaoning Province, an atypical yet dangerous scene took place when a random pickup truck accidentally ran onto the competition's racetrack.
While no one was physically hurt, the accident had major repercussions for veteran Chinese marathon athlete Yin Shunjin. The pickup truck drove uncontrollably onto the track and blocked Yin's way just as the athlete was heading toward the finish line.
Yin managed to beat his best personal record despite the accident, finishing with a time of 2 hours and 11 minutes and 50 seconds. Although he did not manage to win the championship, his record was merely 30 seconds behind the competition's gold medal winner.
Taking into consideration the fact that Yin had to go an "extra mile" to avoid the truck, Xiao Bingxin, a sports expert in Shanghai, told the Global Times that the accident may lead to "a re-evaluation of Yin's record and performance."
The organizing committee of the current Dalian International Marathon quickly made a public announcement following the incident. It revealed that an investigation found that the accident was caused by the vehicle's driver. The organizing committee also apologized to the runners and guaranteed it would work to prevent similar accidents in the future.
Following the organizing committee's announcement, a representative of the Chinese Athletics Association (CAA), also said that the CAA noticed the incident and has organized meetings aimed at "finding solutions for the accident."
"The final resolution to the incident will be announced through the official platform of the CAA. The competition's organizing committee will also provide related information to the public," the CAA member said.
Having its first game organized in 1987, the Dalian International Marathon is one of the most mature marathons in China. The 2023 session has attracted athletes from 25 countries and regions around the world, including Russia, Belgium and Australia. The competition embraces runners of a wide age range, with the oldest competitor 78 years old and the youngest runner just 6 years old.
Chinese competitor Yin Shunjin is 38 years old. He has won multiple championships at marathons, including the marathon competition at the Jiayuguan Great Wall that was held merely two weeks before the Dalian competition.
The incident has also sparked criticism from netizens concerning the "professionalism" of the marathon organizers.
On China's X-like Sina Weibo, some netizens expressed their concern for the runners' safety and more people have said that they 'felt sorry for Yin.'
"The whole thing wasn't a mere accident; it speaks a lot about how professionalism and a good attitude are critical to sports competitions. Athlete don't get a second chance," a netizen posted on Sina Weibo.
There is a saying that a history of Zhejiang's literature is half a history of Chinese literature.
In Beijing's National Museum of Modern Chinese Literature (NMMCL), the permanent exhibition about the contemporary Chinese literature is dominated by writers and works from East China's Zhejiang Province.
Now Zhejiang has its own venue to showcase its profuse literary resources.
On September 25, 2023, two important events in the history of Chinese literature were celebrated: the birthday of Lu Xun, a 20th century literary giant from Shaoxing, Zhejiang, and the establishment of Zhejiang Literary Center (ZLC) in Hangzhou. It was the 142nd anniversary of Lu Xun's birthday.
Opening to the public in late October, ZLC is the second largest literature museum in China with a total of nine exhibition halls, only surpassed by the capital's NMMCL.
As a new landmark of Zhejiang, the museum is the brainchild of generations of people in Zhejiang's literary sector as it carries the responsibility of cultural inheritance and promotion of Zhejiang literature, whose writers takes up over 60 percent of the exhibitions at the NMMCL.
More importantly, the museum is designed to meet the public's needs for literature. Its big data platform and use of digital technologies brought classic literature scenes to life and added new dimensions to literature appreciation.
Cheng Shiqing, curator of ZLC, told the Global Times that the museum is committed to creating a year-round literature-sharing platform that caters to individuals of all ages.
"We will try to host themed lectures every week and curate featured exhibitions every quarter of the year to foster a love for literature among the public, and deepen their understanding and appreciation of the literary world," said Cheng.
On the one hand, the museum will bring together excellent literary resources from home and abroad. On the other hand, it will promote more outstanding Zhejiang writers to the national and international stage. These are the two missions of the museum.
In a bid to bring the development of literature to a new height, the museum is on course to build three research centers, one dedicated to Chinese literature big data, one to contemporary children's literature research, and one to China's international collaborative translation.
"The translation center is dedicated to promoting exchanges with foreign writers and we welcome foreign counterparts to Hangzhou to experience the rich history of Chinese literature," Cheng said.
Three-dimensional exhibits
In addition to the conventional way of displaying exhibits, one of the highlights of the museum is to present classic scenes of literary works by means of digital technology, giving readers an immersive experience into the process of creation.
Having refined 129 photos from Lu Xun's life, the modern literature hall of the museum pulled together a dynamic view of the literary giant's journey in writing.
A towering 14-meter-high space is meticulously designed to connect the four distinct landscapes of Zhejiang with their corresponding poems and poets. This provides visitors with a poetic perspective of how the region's breathtaking natural beauty inspired a series of classic rhymes.
Paintings in the Song Dynasty (960-1279) were used as symbols to show the boldness and gracefulness of the poems written in that period.
Scenes from some classic works such as Lu Xun's Hometown, Mao Dun's Spring Silkworms, and Dai Wangshu's Alley in the Rain, were reproduced and presented at the museum.
"Leveraging the massive amount of data, we have applied digital technology in presenting a Chinese literary geography and various informational graphs. The smart devices added a new dimension to the conventional exhibits," said Cheng.
"Taking a big step in the application of digital innovations, we are trailblazers in digitizing Chinese literature. We hope to set an example for the industry," the curator said.
Interactive space
Since its official opening on October 28, the museum has received about 3,000 daily reservations, and some well-designed events and exhibitions have drawn floods of visitors on weekends.
One of the most popular exhibitions pays tribute to Louis Cha (Cha Leung-yung), also known as Jin Yong, another literary legend from Zhejiang.
The show is dedicated to commemorating Jin's 100th birthday in 2024. Born in Haining in 1924, Jin was regarded as one of the greatest and most popular martial arts writers.
Xu Jing, an official with ZLC's publicity department, told the Global Times that the exhibition sheds light on Jin's life and works, and it's also the first time that some manuscripts of the writer has been presented to the public.
Swords, bows and arrows, which are featured in Jin's novel, were replicated and installed in the hall to give visitors an interactive experience of Jin's "martial arts world," and a digital reading space was set up to allow people to read or listen to his novels.
Various versions of Jin's novels are on display, including the earliest versions originally serialized in newspapers, which were widely circulated in the Chinese mainland, as well as abroad through versions in English, French and Japanese.
Younger readers have been captivated by a space dedicated to children's literature.
"We wish to make the children's literature space into a parenting space, where adults and children can interact and develop a love for reading and writing. It will also evoke adult readers' childhood memories," said Cheng.
"We want to have relics find their home in our museum. Most importantly, we want literature lovers to find their home in the museum," Cheng said.
Three scientists, Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L'Huillier, won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics "for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Tuesday.
"Cognitive Warfare" has become a new form of confrontation between states, and a new security threat. With new technological means, issues are planted and disinformation spread so as to change people's perceptions and thus alter their self-identity. Launching cognitive warfare against China is an important means through which Western anti-China forces attack and discredit the country. Under the manipulation of the US-led West, the "China threat theory" has continued to foment.
Certain politicians and media outlets have publicly smeared China's image by propagating the "China's economic collapse" theory and "forced labor in Xinjiang" fallacy in an attempt to incite and provoke anti-China reprisals among people in certain countries. These means all serve the evolution of the US' covert China containment strategy in a bid to maintain its hegemony.
The Global Times is publishing a series of articles to systematically reveal the intrigues of the US-led West's cognitive warfare targeting China, and expose its lies and vicious intentions, in an attempt to show international readers a true, multi-dimensional, and panoramic view of China.
This is the fourth installment in the series. In this installment, we invite Tuersun Aibai, an expert from the School of Journalism and Communication at Xinjiang University, to share his thoughts on and analysis of the long-term "forced labor" smear campaign by certain Western anti-China forces, with the aim of defaming the Xinjiang region through tens of thousands of groundless, biased news stories. In recent years, anti-China forces in the West have hyped up the so-called forced labor narrative, an accusation to systematically vilify China, as an attempt to tarnish the country's image on the international stage, weaken its international reputation, and alienate the nation by jeopardizing its friendly and cooperative relations with other countries.
In order to understand the political and economic motives behind their "forced labor" fallacy, as well as the exploration of the narrative's manipulation strategies, transmission paths, and methods of the fallacy, I conducted a statistical analysis of over 30,000 Xinjiang-related stories from 22 media outlets in 15 countries and regions.
From these, I selected 189 pieces published by 13 media outlets that spread the "forced labor" slander for further analysis and found out that the claim of "forced labor" concocted by anti-China forces in the West is a new discourse pattern and narrative framework, which has gradually evolved from the framework of early public opinion manipulation, into a comprehensive economic blockade and repression of Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
How 'forced labor' smear grows
Based on the analysis of 189 stories published by 13 overseas media outlets, I found that the evolution process of the "forced labor" smear campaign can be divided into three phases.
The first phase is a "topic brewing period" that spanned from December 2018 to March 2020.
In December 2018, the Associated Press (AP) first claimed that a company in Xinjiang's Hotan city had cooperated with local education and training program institutions to sell clothes made by the program's trainees to the US. The story was later quoted by many overseas media outlets and caught the attention of the US government, which in turn required that certain clothing and outdoor recreation product brands such as Adidas inspect their industrial chains, and enforced a prohibition of the importation of so-called forced labor products.
On December 18 that year, Voice of America (VOA) published a story titled US Sportswear Traced to Factory in China's Internment Camps, in which it alleged that Chinese government was "forcing some detainees to work in manufacturing and food industries." Two days later, VOA published a second article titled US Reviews Report of Imports from Forced Labor in China Camp, quoting several infamous Xinjiang separatists as stating that there was "forced labor" at Xinjiang's vocational education and training centers. Other mainstream US media sources such as The New York Times (NYT) also published similar stories with incendiary claims that month.
During that period, claims of "forced labor" were introduced by US media outlets as fodder for a new anti-China topic of focus, and its transmission scope was mainly within the US and its media sources. The claim only served to attack the trainees working at the clothing industry in the region after receiving vocational education.
The second phase of the West's "forced labor" smear campaign, a "topic fomentation period," spanned from March 2020 to December 2021.
On March 1, 2020, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), a think tank reliant on US defense funds and is keen to concoct and amplify various anti-China topics, released a "research report" titled Uygurs for sale 'Re-education,' forced labor, and surveillance beyond Xinjiang. The ridiculous report attacked China's efforts in accelerating Xinjiang's development, and slandered the employment placements of trainees from Xinjiang's vocational education and training program. Western media outlets later widely referenced and quoted the report.
By further fueling the "forced labor" narrative, some so-called "human rights groups" and media outlets called on governments in Western countries such as the US and the UK to investigate the industrial chains and asked local enterprises to cut ties with their Chinese counterparts that use Uygur labor.
In March 2020, Switzerland's Better Cotton Initiative (BCI) proposed that some major clothing brands ban the use of Xinjiang-sourced cotton using the groundless "forced labor" accusations as a pretext, claiming that the production cotton in Xinjiang "violated labor rights," and "violated human rights." Following this call to action, certain US congressmen introduced the so-called "Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA)," which required companies to obtain certification from the US government that any product imported from Xinjiang into the US was not produced with the use of "forced labor." The bill also required the US president to "identify and designate" visa or financial sanctions against any foreign person who "knowingly engages" in the "forced labor" in the Xinjiang region.
The "forced labor" fallacy continued to grow in the European Union (EU). In December 2020, the European Parliament passed a resolution on Xinjiang, falsely alleging the use of "forced labor" in the region. It required EU member countries to impose sanctions on Xinjiang officials and boycott so-called "forced labor" products from Xinjiang.
During this period, the scope of the "forced labor" smear campaign had further expanded, and some Western governments introduced related bills to "legally" base their "forced labor" accusations. The smear campaign targeted not only the employment of surplus rural labor in Xinjiang, but also extended to more industries in this region such as tomato cultivation in the agricultural sector and the photovoltaic and solar energy product manufacturing industries.
Legislatures, judiciaries, border defense, and the commerce departments of some Western countries banded together to form a community of mutual interests in this smear campaign. Western media sources, NGOs, think tanks, and enterprises also followed suit, cooperating closely with governments from the public opinion and "academic" standpoints.
The third phase, which started from January 2022 and is currently ongoing, is the "instrumentalization and politicization period."
Sample analysis based on media coverage suggested that the focus of media outlets in most countries has shifted to the "force labor" fallacy, while the US and the UK conversely remain focused on actively hyping up the fallacy. Data showed that eight US- and UK-based media outlets published a total of 24 stories attacking Xinjiang between January and April in 2022.
In this phase, the "forced labor" smear campaign entered a new "practice stage," serving the West's goals of escalating the economic suppression of China by indiscriminately attacking all the products made in Xinjiang and all the enterprises in the region.
Worse still, with the Xinjiang-related "bills" coming into effect, anti-China forces in the West have completed the transition from public opinion attacks, to the introduction of legislative economic sanctions. Now the public opinion campaign has turned into an economic war waged against China. The "forced labor" fallacy has become an integral part of the Western anti-China forces' strategic containment of China. Tactics of public opinion manipulation
The "forced labor" fallacy did not emerge accidentally. Thanks to a long-term planned process and a clear manipulation strategy of public opinion by Western anti-China forces, who, prey on different countries' perceptions of the human rights concept to create and hype up lies under the guise of "protecting human rights," the fallacy gained momentum.
The concept of human rights is regarded as a value deeply influenced by the historical and cultural traditions of different countries. There are both commonalities and differences in the understanding of human rights among countries. Therefore, the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as the European Declaration of Human Rights, do not specifically give a universal definition of the standards of human rights.
Since the founding of the People's Republic of China, the Chinese government has regarded the rights to subsistence and development as fundamental human rights, fully protected the political, economic, social, and cultural rights of the people of all ethnic groups, and continuously promoted and elevated the development of human rights work in practice. China has written human rights protection into the country's Constitution and the Constitution of the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC), and further promoted the systematization and legalization of human rights protection. China has also held human rights forums and issued a white paper to comprehensively elaborate its concept of human rights.
However, the anti-China forces in the West, who ignore the differences in human rights concepts between China and the West and China's achievements in the protection and promotion of human rights, politicize, weaponize, and instrumentalize the concept of human rights by employing the "forced labor" fabrications and hype.
Some biased western media sources, by citing misleading quotes, wantonly attack the human rights situation in China, so as to promote the spread of the "forced labor" accusation by employing several tactics.
Tactic one: 'Criminalize' Chinese government
The "forced labor" accusation falsely alleges that the purpose of the transfer of the employment policy in Xinjiang region is to "strip" Uygurs of their cultural identity and "assimilate" them. Western anti-China forces have further fabricated lies claiming that China committed so-called "crimes against humanity" and "crimes of genocide" in the region.
For instance, on March 2, 2020, an Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) article quoted an ASPI researcher as saying that the goal of the labor transfers was "political," with an aim toward the "stripping of their unique culture and identity." On November 25, The Global and Mail cited some infamous anti-China "human rights groups" that "Uygurs and other Turkic minorities have been subject to forced labor as part of China's plan to control the Uygur population in the region." On August 23, 2021, the Washington Post quoted an anti-China group's statement as saying that "no American corporation should be doing business in a region that is the focal point of a campaign of genocide targeting a religious and ethnic minority."
The reality is that, the Uygur population has increased from 3.61 million in 1953 to 11.62 million in 2020, an increase of over three-fold, while the Chinese national population growth rate over the same period only grew two-fold. The growth rate of the Uygur population has been higher than the national average.
For instance, on June 24, the Washington Post groundlessly claimed that a Chinese company "recruits and employs Uygurs and other minorities via state labor programs that aim to place them in factories." On March 7, CNN quoted a British scholar as saying that the job programs in Xinjiang "are often non-consensual, and people who refuse can be punished with internment."
Contrary to the lies and rumors they fabricated, the fact is that workers of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang region, including those who were transferred for employment and those who had completed their studies in learning institutions and training centers, have the agency to choose their preferred jobs and regions of placement. They sign labor contracts and receive remuneration in accordance with the law, and enjoy various social insurance benefits.
The total number of rural migrant workers in China reached 30.7 million in 2021, of which 3.2 million were from Xinjiang. With an increase in the number of stable employment, the economic income of the people of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang has continued to increase, and the regional per capita gross domestic product (GDP) had increased from 45,476 yuan ($6,225.9) in 2017 to 53,593 yuan in 2020.
Tactic three: Stigmatizing assistance measures for transfer employment
The "forced labor" smear campaign claims that the Chinese government assigns staff to "monitor" Uygur employees, and even defames the existence of administrators of ethnic and religious affairs for Uygur employees at local companies, terming it as "monitoring."
On April 27, 2021, The Guardian quoted a member of an Australian anti-China group as saying that Uygurs were "held in secure compounds, working extremely long hours and under constant surveillance, and with political indoctrination as part of their daily routine." On March 9, 2020, a Washington Post article even ridiculously described the psychological counseling rooms as having been set for the purpose of thought policing Uygur employees.
Such psychological rooms, far from solely being found in Xinjiang, are part and parcel of many Chinese and foreign enterprises to help relieve psychological pressure experienced by employees. This is a common international practice. In November 2019, Chinese authorities issued the Specification of Healthy Enterprise Construction (trial), which requires employers to attach importance to their employees' physical and mental health, and encourages enterprises to set up mental health counseling rooms.
Tactic four: Distorting service work for labor transfer employment
On March 2, 2020, ABC quoted an ASPI researcher and separatist as saying that Uygur workers "are often transported across China in special segregated trains," and "authorities and factory bosses continue to closely monitor them." On April 27, 2021, The Guardian claimed that Uygurs employees "have limited or no communications with their families; mothers have been separated from their babies and families have been torn apart," citing the words of an anti-China separatist.
China fully protects the legitimate rights and interests of workers of all ethnic groups in law, policy, and practices, which advocate equal pay for equal work without discrimination against any ethnic groups. Chinese laws expressly stipulate that Uygur people enjoy the same rights as other ethnic groups, and Chinese enterprises have no right to and nor should they restrict their freedom.
Chinese citizens enjoy freedom of religious belief, and the state guarantees normal religious activities. Uygur employees participate in religious activities on the premise that they abide by China's laws and regulations, the enterprise's rules, and normal work routines.
Tactic five: Attacking China by citing misleading, tendentious claims
Based on my analysis of 189 stories from 13 media outlets, I found that when hyping up the "forced labor" smear, overseas anti-China media sources mainly cited "research report" published by the ASPI and anti-China scholar Laura Murphy, and the remarks of the separatist organization "World Uyghur Congress" along with its affiliated bodies.
A considerable number of their Xinjiang-related stories cited anti-China politicians and scholars to support their narratives, lack field research and first-hand information. The stories did not provide any reliable information, let alone contain actual interviews conducted with Uygur employees.
For example, in the article Canadian watchdog asked to probe allegations that imports made with forced labor in China published on April 11, 2022, The Globe and Mail quoted an "executive director" of a so-called "Uygur rights advocacy project" based in Ottawa as saying that he hopes a probe will drive Canada to take greater action against imports made using "forced labor."
Obviously, some Western media outlets achieve their goals of misleading their audiences and spreading fallacies by unilaterally quoting false statements made by some anonymous and anti-China sources, and using sensational and biased headlines. Their stories and quotes, without investigating the actual situation on the ground in Xinjiang region, lack verifiability. The information they convey in their stories is full of malicious speculation and lies.
Western anti-China forces concocted the "forced labor" fallacy as a means to serve their goal of suppressing China's economic development. To clarify the lies and show the world a real Xinjiang, China should make more efforts in several aspects, such as focusing on the international communication with the Arab world and developing countries, strengthen the public dissemination of accurate information, while also paying close attention to the slanderous tactics employed by anti-China forces to defame China.
"Venezuela is going to the Moon!" Gabriela Jimenez, Venezuela's vice president and minister of science and technology, wrote with great excitement in a twitter post on Tuesday after she signed a joint statement on the China-led International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) with Zhang Kejian, administrator of the China National Space Administration (CNSA) on Monday via video link.
According to Jimenez, Venezuela has become the first country in Latin America to join the project.
According to the CNSA official release, the joint statement says the two sides will engage in extensive and in-depth cooperation in the areas of ILRS demonstration, engineering implementation, operation and application, including jointly demonstrating scientific goals, joint design, instrument development, scientific instrument deployment, scientific and technological experiments, data sharing and analysis, education and training.
China and Venezuela have a long history of cooperation in the aerospace field and have achieved remarkable results. The signing of this joint statement marks a new step in the cooperation between the two countries and has significant implications for promoting scientific and technological progress as well as economic and social development, read the statement.
Dinosaurs Among Us Now open With help from fossils and life-size models, this exhibit lays out the evidence — from feathers to nesting behavior — that links dinosaurs to birds.
American Museum of Natural History, New York City Life in One Cubic Foot Now open In this interactive exhibit, count up the different types of organisms that pass through a cubic foot of land or water in a single day in various habitats, including a coral reef in French Polynesia. Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Washington, D.C. Benjamin Dean Astronomy Lectures: Tiny Moons Around Asteroids April 4 A researcher from the SETI Institute will discuss the technology that astronomers use to image asteroids that have satellites, as well as describe potential future missions to these space rocks.
California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco COURTESY OF U-M KELSEY MUSEUM OF ARCHAEOLOGY Leisure and Luxury in the Age of Nero: The Villas of Oplontis Near Pompeii Through May 15 Opulent jewelry and art, along with a collection of more mundane artifacts, recovered from ruins near Pompeii help visitors appreciate the economic disparities between ancient Rome’s wealthy elite and lower socioeconomic classes.
University of Michigan Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, Ann Arbor Invisible Boundaries: Exploring Yellowstone’s Great Animal Migrations Opens May 27 The migrations of elk, deer and other animals of Yellowstone National Park are highlighted in this exhibit, which also examines conservation efforts to protect these creatures, whose travels take them well beyond the park’s boundaries.
More than 25 years before the star-studded Los Angeles premiere of An Inconvenient Truth, glaciologist Lonnie Thompson was about as far away from the red carpet as possible. It was 1978, and high in the rugged Andes, Thompson and fellow scientists were witnessing the first glimpses of a pending worldwide disaster. Rising temperatures were melting ancient titans of ice and snow. Mammoth glaciers were disappearing at unprecedented rates and withering to the smallest sizes in millennia. The delicate balance of Earth’s climate was upset.
As research mounted, scientists around the world from fields as diverse as chemistry and astronomy were coming to grips with a newfound truth: Carbon dioxide spewed by fossil fuel burning and other greenhouse gases were warming the world at an alarming rate, potentially threatening the health and livelihoods of millions of people. Despite the gravity and urgency of their findings, the scientists’ warnings fell mostly on deaf ears for years.
Until 2006. Six years after his unsuccessful presidential campaign, Al Gore reentered the national spotlight to release An Inconvenient Truth, which heavily featured Thompson’s mountaintop research. Thompson missed the premiere of the documentary because he was gearing up to return to South America’s vanishing ice. But the film did what he and other researchers had been unable to do: “It got climate change on the radar,” Thompson says. Last December, Gore was on hand in Paris as 195 nations committed to the most ambitious pledge yet to fight back against climate change and curb carbon emissions (SN: 1/9/16, p. 6).
In the 10 years since the movie sparked increased public discussion, climate scientists have made major advances. More observations, faster climate-simulating computers and an improved understanding of the planet’s inner workings now provide a clearer window on how Earth’s climate will change.
Some of the bold forecasts of the 2006 movie are holding, and others are on an accelerated track. A few of the most dire warnings need revising, says Thompson, at Ohio State University in Columbus. And plenty of questions remain. In a controversial paper in March in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, researchers argued that the effects of climate change could be even more severe and sudden than current predictions.
While a lot has changed, the fundamental understanding of climate change, dating back to the 19th century recognition that carbon dioxide warms the planet, has held strong, he says.
“The physics and chemistry that we’ve known about for over 200 years is bearing out,” Thompson says. “We’ve learned so much in the last 10 years, but the fact that the unprecedented climate change of the last 40 years is being driven by increased CO2 hasn’t changed.”
The far-reaching effects of climate change — from ocean acidification to disrupted ecosystems — are too numerous to examine all at once. But below are a few of the areas where climate scientists have made significant progress since 2006. Hurricanes 2006: The warming ocean could fuel more frequent and more intense Atlantic hurricanes.
2016: Hurricane frequency has dropped somewhat; hurricane intensities haven’t changed much — yet.
In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast. Floodwaters covered roughly 80 percent of New Orleans, 1,836 people died, hundreds of thousands became homeless and the most active Atlantic hurricane season on record was far from over. As the last storm fizzled, damages had reached $160 billion, meteorologists had run through the alphabet of preselected storm names and many people, including Gore, were indicting global warming as a probable culprit.
“Hurricanes were the poster child of global warming,” says Christopher Landsea, a meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Hurricane Center in Miami. “In reality, it’s a lot more subtle than that.”
Tropical cyclones, such as Atlantic hurricanes, are stirred up where seawater is warmer than the overlying air. Because climate change raises ocean temperatures, it made sense that such storms could strike more often and with more ferocity. A closer look at hurricanes past and future suggests, however, that the relationship between warming and hurricanes is less clear-cut. Several studies in the mid-2000s examining the history of Atlantic hurricanes pointed to an overall rise in the number of 20th century storms in step with warming sea surface temperatures. Scrutinizing those numbers, Landsea uncovered a problem: Hurricane-spotting satellites date back only to 1961’s Hurricane Esther. Before then, storm watchers probably missed many weaker, shorter-lived storms. Taking this into account, Landsea and colleagues reported in 2010 that the number of annual storms has actually decreased somewhat over the last century.
That decrease could be explained by climate factors other than rising sea surface temperatures. Changes in atmospheric heating can increase the variation in wind speed at different elevations, known as wind shear. The shearing winds rip apart burgeoning storms and decrease the number of fully formed hurricanes, researchers reported in 2007 in Geophysical Research Letters.
The overall frequency of storms, however, is less important than the number of Katrina-scale events, says Gabriel Vecchi, an oceanographer at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J. Category 4 and 5 storms, the most violent, make up only 6 percent of U.S. hurricane landfalls, but they cause nearly half of all damage. Vecchi and colleagues used the latest understanding of how hurricanes form and intensify to forecast how the storms will behave under future climate conditions. The work, published in 2010 in Science, predicted that the frequency of Category 4 and 5 storms could nearly double by 2100 due to ocean warming, even if the overall number of hurricanes doesn’t rise. At present, however, climate change’s influence on hurricanes is probably too small to detect, Vecchi says, adding that Katrina’s wrath can’t be blamed on global warming.
Future hurricanes will cause more damage, Landsea predicts, whether or not there’s any change in storm intensity. Rising sea levels mean floodwaters will climb higher and reach farther inland. Hurricane Sandy, which stormed over New Jersey and New York in October 2012, had weakened by the time it reached the coast. But it drove a catastrophic storm surge into the coastline that caused about $50 billion in damages. If sea levels were higher, Sandy’s surge would have reached even farther inland and damage could have been much worse.
Many vulnerable areas such as St. Petersburg, Fla., are woefully underprepared for threats posed by storms at current sea levels, Landsea warns. Higher sea levels won’t help. “We don’t need to invoke climate change decades down the line — we’ve got a big problem now,” he says. Ocean circulation 2006: Freshwater flowing into the North Atlantic could shut down the ocean conveyor belt that shuttles warm water toward Western Europe.
2016: The ocean conveyor belt may already be slowing, but it’s not much of a conveyor belt at that.
Last year may have been Earth’s hottest on record (SN: 2/20/16, p. 13). But for one small corner of the globe, 2015 was one of the coldest. Surface temperatures in the subpolar North Atlantic have chilled in recent years and, oddly enough, some research suggests global warming is partly responsible.
An influx of freshwater from melting glaciers and increasing rainfall can slow — and possibly even shut down — the ocean currents that ferry warm water from the tropics to the North Atlantic. About 10 years ago, scientists warned of a possible abrupt shutdown of this “ocean conveyor belt.” After years of closely monitoring Earth’s flowing oceans, researchers say a sudden slowdown isn’t in the cards. Some researchers report that they may now be seeing a more gradual slowing of the ocean currents. Others, meanwhile, have discovered that Earth’s ocean conveyor belt may be less of a sea superhighway and more of a twisted network of side roads.
The consequences of a sea current slowdown won’t be anywhere near as catastrophic as the over-the-top weather disasters envisioned in the 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow, says Stephen Griffies, a physical oceanographer at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. “The doomsday scenario is overblown, but the possi The Atlantic mixing that feeds the currents is powered by differences in the density of seawater. In the simple ocean conveyor-belt model, warm, less-dense surface water flows northward into the North Atlantic. Off Greenland, cold, denser water sinks into the deep ocean and flows southward. This heat exchange, known as the Atlantic overturning circulation, helps keep European cities warmer than their counterparts elsewhere in the world.
Ten years ago, scientists knew from past changes in Earth’s climate that temperature shifts can disrupt this density balance. Freshwater from the shrinking Greenland ice sheet and increased rainfall make the North Atlantic waters less dense and therefore less likely to sink. Investigations into Earth’s ancient climates show that the overturning circulation weakened around 12,800 years ago, probably causing cooling in Europe and sea level rise along North America’s East Coast, as piled-up water in the north sloshed southward.
Tracking sea surface temperatures, researchers reported last year that the Atlantic overturning circulation significantly slowed during the 20th century, particularly after 1970. Comparing the recent slowdown with past events, the researchers reported in March in Nature Climate Change that the rapid weakening of the circulation is unprecedented in the last 1,000 years.
That result isn’t the final word, though, says Duke University physical oceanographer Susan Lozier. Scientists have directly measured the speed of the ocean circulation only since the deployment of a network of ocean sensors in 2004. Earlier Atlantic circulation speed changes have to be gleaned from less reliable indirect sources such as sea surface temperature changes. “If you look at the most recent results, there’s a decline, yes,” she says. “But we can’t say that’s part of a long-term trend right now.” And effects on Europe’s climate could be masked by other factors.
Another challenge is that over the last 10 years, “the ocean conveyor-belt model broke,” Lozier said in February at the American Geophysical Union’s Ocean Sciences Meeting in New Orleans. From 2003 through 2005, she and colleagues tracked the movements of 76 floating markers dropped into the North Atlantic and pulled around by ocean waters. If the model was right, these markers should have traveled along the southward-flowing part of the conveyor belt. Instead, the markers moved every which way, the researchers reported in 2009 in Nature.
“We went from this simple ribbon of a conveyor belt to a complex flow field with multiple pathways,” Lozier says. Determining past and possible future effects of climate change on ocean currents will require more measurements and a better understanding of how the ocean truly flows, she says.
Even if the overturning circulation cuts out completely, the resulting cooling effect will probably be short-lived, Griffies says. “At some point, even if the circulation collapses, it would only be 10 or 20 years before the global warming signal would overwhelm that cooling” in Europe, he says. “This is not going to save us from a warmer planet.” Drought, Climate and Conflict 2006: Climate change exacerbated droughts that contributed to regional conflicts, such as the war in Darfur.
2016: Drought conditions worsened by climate change helped spark the Syrian civil war.
Following escalating unrest and a wave of demonstrations across the Arab world, a bloody civil war broke out in Syria in 2011. The ongoing conflict sparked an international crisis and has left hundreds of thousands of people dead and millions more displaced. While the root cause of the conflict centered on clashes between the Syrian government and its people, multiple studies argue that climate change helped stoke the flames of rebellion.
Mounting evidence from around the world has indicted climate change in several recent severe droughts from Syria to California. Computer simulations and direct measurements of weather patterns show that climate change can redirect the paths of rainstorms and cause higher temperatures that dry out soil. In March 2015 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers estimated that decades-long shifts in Syria’s rainfall and temperatures doubled or even tripled the severity of the three-year drought that preceded the Syrian civil war. Using tree rings, a separate group reported this March in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres that 1998 through 2012 was the driest period in the Eastern Mediterranean since at least 1100.
The recent drought upset regional food security, prompted a mass migration into urban areas and emboldened anti-government forces, 11 retired U.S. admirals and generals wrote in a 2014 report published by CNA, a nonprofit research and analysis organization in Arlington, Va. The clash joins another conflict partly pinned on climate change: the war in Darfur, which broke out in 2003 following a decades-long drop in regional rainfall.
Since the 1970s, droughts have become longer and more severe across the globe, and scientists expect that trend to continue. Dwindling agricultural production in certain high-population areas such as parts of Africa could lead to food shortages that spark refugee crises, the report warned.
“We see more clearly now that while projected climate change should serve as a catalyst for change and cooperation, it can also be a catalyst for conflict,” the retired admirals and generals wrote. Arctic Ice 2006: The Arctic could see its first sea ice–free summers in the next 50 to 70 years.
2016: Arctic summer sea ice may disappear as early as 2052.
The top of the world could see its first iceless summer roughly a decade sooner than thought in 2006, according to a 2015 report (SN Online: 8/3/15). Simulating how sea ice interacts with the ocean using the latest understanding of how sea ice and climate interact, scientists estimated that the North Pole will be ice-free around 2052, nine years earlier than previous simulations suggested. Last year saw the fourth smallest footprint of summer sea ice in the Arctic on record. Ice-free Arctic summers would open the region to shipping and could affect climates elsewhere by redirecting the winds that circle the North Pole, the researchers wrote. The loss of reflective sea ice could also hasten warming as the dark ocean absorbs more sunlight. Newly open passages may also allow mingling of animals from formerly separated habitats (SN: 1/23/16, p. 14). Antarctic Ice Sheet 2006: Rising temperatures are warming the Antarctic and melting the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
2016: The West Antarctic Ice Sheet could cross a point of no return.
In 2002, an ice behemoth crumbled. Antarctica’s Larsen B Ice Shelf, after 12,000 years of frozen stability, collapsed. The breakdown rapidly shattered 3,250 square kilometers of ice — an area about the size of Rhode Island (SN: 10/18/14, p. 9).
“Larsen B was a real wake-up call,” says Maureen Raymo, a marine geologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y. “It was like, ‘whoa, this ice shelf didn’t just slowly retreat on its edge — the whole thing just collapsed catastrophically over the course of two weeks.’ ” Now with 10 years of on-the-ice research, scientists warn that the rest of the West Antarctic ice could share a shockingly swift fate unimaginable a decade ago. The ice sheet’s collapse would raise global sea levels by about 3 meters (SN: 6/14/14, p. 11).
Ice shelves line about 45 percent of the Antarctic coast and help slow the flow of the continent’s ice into the sea. For healthy ice shelves, the flow of ice from inland balances losses from melting and icebergs snapping off the shelf’s seaward edge. Rising temperatures below and above the ice can fracture and thin the ice, upsetting this balance.
The loss of just a few ice shelves in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could destabilize the whole region, according to new research by climate scientists Anders Levermann and Johannes Feldmann of the University of Potsdam in Germany. In a computer simulation, the researchers found that the loss of a few key ice shelves around Antarctica’s Amundsen Sea would trigger a domino effect. Seawater would flow into the flanks of other ice and expedite melting. Such a collapse would annihilate the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet within hundreds to thousands of years, they predict.
Once started, this chain reaction would be unstoppable, the researchers reported last November in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Even if global temperatures return to normal, the ice sheet would still be doomed, according to the simulation. In 2014, researchers reported that one of those keystone ice shelves, the Thwaites Glacier, is on track to recede past an underwater ridge currently stalling its retreat and undergo catastrophic collapse in as few as two centuries. Exactly what magnitude of warming will push the West Antarctic Ice Sheet past the point of no return remains uncertain, says Richard Alley, a glaciologist at Penn State. “It’s hard to predict how the ice will fracture,” he says. “That’s why you don’t want to tiptoe up on the disaster point. The edge between ‘it’s still there’ and ‘it’s had a catastrophic failure’ is something to be completely avoided.”
The other half of the Antarctic continent has shown more resistance to climate change, and hasn’t kept up with the global warming trend of the last few decades. That’s good news, since the East Antarctic Ice Sheet holds more water than its sibling — enough to raise sea levels by about 60 meters if it fails.
Last year, however, researchers using radar to penetrate the Antarctic ice announced that East Antarctica’s largest glacier, Totten Glacier, is still vulnerable. It may be at risk from encroaching ice-melting seawater. Radar maps revealed two seafloor troughs that could allow warm ocean water to melt the glacier’s underside, the researchers reported in Nature Geoscience. The glacier alone holds enough water to raise global sea levels by at least 3.3 meters, though its collapse could take centuries, the researchers noted. Sea Level Rise 2006: Melting ice and expanding seawater are raising global sea levels.
2016: Historical evidence suggests sea levels can rise more than 10 times as fast as they are now.
In the Indian Ocean, a city seems to rise out of the waves. The island of Malé, the capital of the Maldives and home to more than 150,000 people, sits just two or three meters above sea level (SN: 2/28/09, p. 24). The residents of Malé are a small portion of the approximately 200 million people worldwide living along coastlines within five meters of sea level. By the end of the century, as sea levels reach inland and coastal communities grow, the population at risk of rising waters may balloon to as high as 500 million.
The global average sea level currently rises about three millimeters per year, with a meter of total sea level rise expected by 2100 if carbon emissions aren’t curtailed. Some areas, such as the U.S. East Coast, are experiencing even faster sea level rise. In February, researchers reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that 20th century sea level rise was faster than any other century since Rome was founded (SN: 4/2/16, p. 20).
While sea levels are rising fast, they have the ability to climb even faster. Scientists are looking further into the future and investigating just how fast sea level rise could get, especially with a hypothetical collapse of the Antarctic ice sheets. Results gleaned from past warm periods suggest that sea levels can rise much faster than suggested just a few years ago — more than 10 times the present rate.
“Sea level is probably the biggest irreversible risk of global warming,” Columbia’s Raymo says. “I expect a hell of a lot more people are going to be personally impacted by a one-meter rise in sea level than by the extinction of the grand ladybug of something or other.”
Most records of ancient climates provide only a snapshot of how high sea levels have reached at a given time, not how quickly they moved up or down. But on a 2005 expedition to Tahiti, a research team caught a break. Because coral reefs require plenty of light to thrive, they typically take root in waters shallower than 10 meters deep. As sea levels rose in the past, corals moved higher up the newly submerged coastline. Off the coast of Tahiti, the researchers sampled fossils of ancient corals from the last 150,000 years buried in layers of ocean sediment. Dating the corals using the known decay rate of radioactive uranium into other elements, the researchers created an accurate, long-term sea level record.
Around the end of Earth’s last glacial period, about 14,650 years ago, sea levels rose about 14 to 18 meters, the researchers reported in 2012 in Nature. What surprised those researchers is how quickly this rise happened: Sea levels rose at least 46 millimeters per year during that period. The scientists concluded that at least half of the 14 meters of sea level rise during this bout of warming originated from melting Antarctic ice.
“The scary thing, and this is why it’s kind of apocalyptic, is that once you start these things, they don’t stop,” Raymo says. “Everything we see shows that, if you look in the past, each increment of warmth seems to correlate with increasingly higher sea level.” Extreme Temperatures 2006: Warming temperatures will cause more frequent and more deadly heat waves.
2016: Humidity may make future heat waves deadlier; cold snaps are on the decline.
Last summer, sweltering heat waves scorched India and Pakistan. The extreme temperatures killed thousands of people and were two of the deadliest heat waves since 1900. Such lethal heat will become more common as the planet continues warming, climate scientist Ethan Coffel of Columbia University said last December at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting. The problem, Coffel said, is that climate change will raise humidity in many places alongside temperature as hot air wicks up more moisture. The evaporation of sweat keeps people cool when it’s hot, but high humidity can slow or even shut off this skin-cooling evaporation. Rising humidity will make rising temperatures more deadly than previously feared, he said. By the 2060s, Coffel predicts, 250 million people worldwide could face deadly levels of heat and humidity at least once a year.
While heat waves worsen, researchers say that another killer weather phenomenon will become less common. The frequency of abnormally cold periods in North America will decrease by roughly 20 percent by the 2030s, researchers reported last year (SN Online: 4/2/15). The work overturned previous projections of a rise in cold snaps over the coming decades as climate change redirects frigid Arctic winds. From 2006 through 2010, about twice as many people in the United States died from cold-related causes, such as hypothermia, than from excessive heat. Climate Action 2006: The long-term effects of climate change deserve immediate action.
2016: Taking action comes with other, more immediate perks.
After decades of troubled negotiations and false starts, 195 nations from around the world gathered last December in Paris and agreed to take action on climate change (SN: 1/9/16, p. 6). The new commitment, to reverse the rise in greenhouse gas emissions and limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial level, would have seemed impossible 10 years ago. Delegates will meet in a few years to decide whether to target a more ambitious limit of 1.5 degrees.
What’s changed is motivation, says Andrew Jones, a system dynamics modeler at Climate Interactive, a nonprofit organization in Washington, D.C., that works in partnership with MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Rather than focus on global climate benefits of curtailing fossil fuel emissions, which will take years to pan out, climate action is now increasingly driven by more immediate benefits, he says, such as improving public health. In February, researchers estimated that ambitious climate action in the United States would improve air quality enough to prevent 295,000 premature deaths by 2030 and save the economy hundreds of billions of dollars in medical costs. “Waiting for climate results is delayed gratification — it’s difficult to motivate continued action,” Jones says. “But if you reduce burning coal, air quality improves almost immediately.”
China, the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, backed the new climate deal after years of dragging its feet. The change of heart was chiefly driven by a desire to cut air pollution, not combat climate change, says MIT atmospheric scientist Kerry Emanuel. Earlier in December, smog-filled Beijing issued the country’s first pollution red alert and shut down the city until conditions improved.
Scouring recent climate change pledges, Jones and colleagues found that 60 percent of commitments, including those made by the United States, Mexico and South Korea, were explicitly motivated by short-term public health and economic benefits. Jones helps maintain C-ROADS, a climate simulator that forecasts the long-term outcome of climate action plans. Understanding and embracing the benefits of climate action will be essential to paving a path forward, Jones says, because C-ROADS has demonstrated that there are “hundreds” of ways to meet the 2-degree warming goal.
“We’ve moved from whether we’re going to do this to how we’re going to do this,” he says. “And that is very encouraging.”
Meeting the challenges posed by climate change will be hard, but Lonnie Thompson remains optimistic. “Three-and-a-half years ago I had a heart transplant,” he says. “At any other time in human history, this would have been thought of as impossible — my father died at age 41 of a heart attack. As human beings we’ve made tremendous progress on so many fronts. There will always be this resistance to change, but as a species, we’re capable of dealing with those changes.”
