China: Farming having become more mechanised, ecotourism inspires people to live in villages
Terry Townshend, a wildlife conservationist and biodiversity adviser to Beijing’s government, has since 2017 been training yak herders in Qinghai in the kinds of skills that ecologists hope could be a model for sustainable development. In 2016, he met the official responsible for Zaduo, a county in Qinghai Province where...
Ordinary Chinese drive ecotourism, central government provides incentives to create jobs
Terry Townshend, a wildlife conservationist and biodiversity adviser to Beijing’s government, has since 2017 been training yak herders in Qinghai in the kinds of skills that ecologists hope could be a model for sustainable development since 2017. In 2016, he met the official responsible for Zaduo, a county in Qinghai...
China ‘imports’ ecotourism projects to cushion local yak herders against loss of land to new national parks
China plans to announce the first parks to be included in its new protected-areas system later this year. It is aiming to replace the current fragmented network of poorly managed protected areas with a national-park model similar to that in other nations. Since the idea was mooted in 2013, the...
From 30m to zero: WHO declares China malaria free, cites artemisinin drug as key
The World Health Organization (WHO) today is certifying China as free of malaria, after a decades-long effort drove an estimated annual toll of 30 million cases in the 1940s, including 300,000 deaths, to zero in 2017. Along the way, China developed new surveillance techniques, medicines and technologies to break the...
New information on Wuhan researchers’ illness fuels suspicion on origin of Covid
A US intelligence report found that several researchers at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology fell ill in November 2019 and had to be hospitalised, a new detail about the severity of their symptoms that could fuel further debate about the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, according to two people briefed...
New report accuses China of serious crimes against humanity in Xinjiang region
The Chinese government is committing crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in the northwest region of Xinjiang, Human Rights Watch said in a report released on Friday. The Chinese leadership is responsible for widespread and systematic policies of mass detention, torture, and cultural persecution, among other offenses....
China’s five-year plan focuses on scientific self-reliance
Scientific and technological self-reliance takes centre stage in China’s latest five-year plan — a result of recent tensions with the United States and other Western nations spilling over into the realm of science, say researchers. The 14th five-year plan, which sets out China’s vision for social and economic development over...
Espionage: It’ll take years for US, Europe to unpack China’s and Russia’s spying sprees
First it was SolarWinds, a reportedly Russian hacking campaign that stretches back almost a year and has felled at least nine US government agencies and countless private companies. Now it’s Hafnium, a Chinese group that’s been attacking a vulnerability in Microsoft Exchange Server to sneak into victims’ email inboxes and...
Chinese scientists are caught between Western bias and pro-government messaging
Shortly after the World Health Organization visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology on February 3, a reporter from an international newspaper asked me whether China’s censorship would present an ‘insurmountable’ barrier to reaching an impartial conclusion on Covid-19’s origins. At the same time, my phone displayed headlines from a nationalist...
WHO mission revisits theory that coronavirus is spread through frozen meat
Momentum is growing for the suggestion that the coronavirus can spread from infected frozen wildlife. A World Health Organization (WHO) fact-finding mission in China did not rule out the idea that this mode of transmission contributed to early outbreaks of Covid-19 – although investigators say it is unlikely to have...
