News on China's scientific and technological development.

Beijing's new international airport, expected to be the world's largest, is scheduled to open on September 30, 2019, according to the latest plans released for the massive infrastructure project.

A detailed timeline for the project was released on Friday, according to the People's Daily. Construction of the airport, its auxiliary facilities, and the airport expressway are all due to be completed in June next year.

The airport will include a station for a high-speed train to the Xiongan New Area in neighboring Hebei Province. It will also incorporate a subway station for a new airport express line.

The airport, located 46 kilometers south of downtown Beijing, is designed to take pressure off the overcrowded Beijing Capital International Airport in city's northeast.

Click to expand...

China’s tech funding boom: is Europe asleep on the job?

The EU would appear to embrace technological innovation, but the reality is that the rest of the world will be in control

On matters of industrial strategy and international competition, there’s no contrast starker than that between the hapless resignation of Europe and the steely determination of China. Unsurprisingly, it has been China – not Europe – that has proposed, with little success, forming a common front against Donald Trump’s trade tantrums. Even Washington’s bullying cannot awaken European policymakers from their slumber – or, as seems more likely, their moderately lubricated afternoon nap.

Hardly a week passes without a new alarming announcement that Beijing has managed to outmanoeuvre Brussels in yet another domain. Last week brought three such developments.

First, China Merchants Group, a state-owned company, joined forces with SPF Group and Centricus – asset managers based in Beijing and London respectively – to form a $15bn fund to compete with SoftBank’s $100bn Vision Fund, launched to invest in the most promising technology firms worldwide. This comes weeks after Sequoia Capital, America’s finest venture capital firm, closed the first round of fundraising on its $8bn Vision Fund alternative.

Second, Contemporary Amperex Technology, one of the largest manufacturers of lithium-ion batteries in China and a major beneficiary of its government’s efforts to steer this industry towards world leadership, signed a €1bn deal with BMW, with the intention of building its own factory in Europe to satisfy soaring demand for its batteries.

Daimler, another crown jewel of the German car industry, is now reportedly considering placing a similar order.

Third, Bolloré Group, one of France’s most important conglomerates, with activities spanning paper, energy and logistics businesses, entered a deal with Chinese technology giant Alibaba. Bolloré is hoping to use Alibaba’s sprawling cloud-computing empire across its operations, including in its battery-making division.

There is a neutral, even positive, interpretation of these developments. European capital – British in the first case, German in the second, French in the third – is taking advantage of lucrative opportunities. China just happens to offer more of them at the moment.

And yet, each of the three developments reveals major gaps in Europe’s industrial strategy. It’s one thing for European capital to be passively invested into most promising robotics or AI projects worldwide: Daimler, for example, is one of the few European backers of the Vision Fund. It’s quite another thing to be doing it with the goal of creating Europe’s own champions in these fields.

The European Commission’s strategy on artificial intelligence, published in April 2018, rests on the untested assumption that Brussels will succeed in mobilising nearly €18bn of private capital to complement a couple of billions that will be found in existing European programs. This, however, will require convincing the likes of Daimler – whose biggest shareholder today is China’s Geely – that their investments should go to some European tech fund, rather than to SoftBank or China Merchants Group.

It’s a challenge similar to Europe’s efforts, unsuccessful so far, to push European industry towards creating a European manufacturer of batteries for electric cars, if only to minimise its reliance on China and South Korea (the European Battery Alliance, an industry-wide initiative championed by the European commission, was launched last year, but has not borne much fruit yet).

European leaders seem to recognise the battery challenge – and so do Germany’s powerful trade unions – but it’s hard to see how it will be solved when the likes of BMW and Daimler keep placing billion dollar-orders with Chinese battery manufacturers.

The story on cloud computing, increasingly bundled with artificial intelligence services, is not much different: even if the European industry wanted to turn away from Amazon or Microsoft and use a European provider, it just does not have much choice. It is essentially hemmed in by American and Chinese giants.

This dependence was easier to justify when global trade was running smoothly and all industries looked alike (looked equally unimportant from the perspective of national or regional interests). Now that the European car industry finds itself under heavy fire from Trump, Brussels is severely constrained in its response.

When Trump threatens Europe’s most important industry, the logical thing to do would be to threaten retaliation against America’s own most important industry, which, whatever Trump himself believes, is actually based in Silicon Valley and Seattle, not Detroit.

This, however, is not an option: no one is going to believe that Europe, which has inserted services from Alphabet, IBM, Microsoft and Amazon deep into the infrastructure of its hospitals, energy grids, transportation systems, and universities is going to shut them off.

The best it can hope for, at this point, is to diversify its reliance on the US giants by doing some business with the Chinese ones.

None of this bodes well for Europe’s ability to remain at the centre of the global economy. Its industrial giants will not fade away but they will be increasingly dominated by foreign owners and foreign technology. While, in the rosier days of globalisation, this might even have been hailed as laudable, under today’s new normal this strategy borders on the suicidal. Those afternoon naps of European policymakers increasingly look like a coma.

Click to expand...

China is accelerating its timetable for a space station, with the core capsule expected to be launched in 2020, says Yang Liwei, director of the China Manned Space Engineering Office and the country's first astronaut.

Yang told Chinese media recently that the two experiment modules of the space station will be sent into space in 2021 and 2022. Three or four manned missions and several cargo spacecraft are planned in 2021 and 2022.

After construction of the main parts of the space station, a capsule holding a large optical telescope will be sent into the same orbit to fly with the station, Yang said.

During construction of the station, the number of manned space missions will rise to about five a year, compared with once every two or three years when China began sending astronauts into space more than a decade ago. Astronaut recruitment will be expanded.

Born in Suizhong County, of Huludao City, northeast China's Liaoning Province, in 1965, Yang has the rank of major general. He became China's first astronaut when he went into space aboard the Shenzhou-5 craft on Oct. 15, 2003.

"Every second of that day was totally new to me. Nothing can surpass that stunning memory," Yang recalled.

China drew up a manned space flight plan code named "Dawn Project" in the 1970s, but lacked the economic and technological conditions to implement it.

In 1986, the State Council listed space technology in a high-tech development plan. In 1992, China launched its manned space flight program. The success of Shenzhou-5 made China the third country to acquire manned space travel technology on its own.

China gained space transport technologies through the Shenzhou-5 and Shenzhou-6 spacecraft, and extra-vehicular space-walk technologies through the Shenzhou-7 mission.

The Shenzhou-8 and Shenzhou-9 missions helped China master autonomous and manned rendezvous and docking technologies. China's manned space flight technologies have matured since the Shenzhou-10 mission. From Shenzhou-5 to Shenzhou-11, China has sent 11 astronauts into space.

Yang said he could only eat prepared food like moon cake when he was aboard Shenzhou-5. But when Shenzhou-11 carried Jing Haipeng and Chen Dong to China's first space lab Tiangong-2 in 2016, the two astronauts chose more than 100 kinds of food for their one-month stay.

Yang likened Shenzhou-5 to a tractor and Shenzhou-11 to a limousine.

"When Shenzhou-5 was orbiting the Earth in 2003, I could communicate with the ground controllers only 15 percent of the time. When Jing and Chen were in space in 2016 they could communicate with the ground for 85 percent of the flight. They could watch news programs, use mobile phones, send messages to the ground and log on to the Internet," Yang said.

China has become a major power in space, but still lags behind the leading powers, Yang said.

China's reform and opening up over the past four decades have emancipated mindset, promoting economic growth and enhancing comprehensive national strength. The past 20 years have witnessed the rapid development of its space industry, Yang said.

Exploration of the unknown is the impetus of human advancement. Many technologies first developed during space exploration are later used to benefit ordinary people, such as CT or MRI for medical use, Yang said.

"I'm expecting more resources for the development of the space industry. China's space station will be a platform for more advanced space science experiments to serve economic and social development on Earth," Yang said.

Click to expand...

Ancient tools discovered in China by archaeologists suggest that there may have been a hominin presence outside Africa earlier than previously thought, according to a study published Wednesday in Nature.

A team, led by Professor Zhaoyu Zhu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, found a series of stone tools from the Early Pleistocene at Shangchen in the Chinese Loess Plateau.

The oldest of the tools can be dated to 2.12 million years ago, which are 270,000 years older than the 1.85-million-year-old skeletal remains and stone tools from Dmanisi, Georgia, which were previously the earliest evidence of humanity outside Africa.

"While we have yet to discover related hominin fossils at Shangchen, and thus unable to clarify who made these tools, we might be talking about a very primitive kind of hominin," Zhu told Xinhua.

The Chinese Loess Plateau covers about 270,000 square kilometers. According to the study, 80 stone artefacts were found predominantly in 11 different layers of fossil soils which developed in a warm and wet climate. Among these stones were cores, flakes, scrapers, points and borers, and picks, which suggest evidence of early tools. A further 16 items were found in six layers of loess that developed under colder and drier conditions.

These 17 different layers of loess and fossil soils were formed during a period spanning almost a million years. It shows that early types of humans occupied the Chinese Loess Plateau under different climatic conditions between 1.2 million and 2.12 million years ago, the study shows.

"Our discovery means it is necessary now to reconsider the timing of when early humans left Africa," said Professor Robin Dennell from the University of Exeter, who participated in the study.

Click to expand...

Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Megvii employees at the company’s offices in Beijing.CreditGilles Sabrié for The New York Times

Click to expand...

Jura said:

now I read
Tools discovered in China hint earlier humanity outside Africa
Xinhua| 2018-07-12 01:38:24

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

am adding

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Click to expand...

Hendrik_2000 said:

This is very interesting documentary from CCTV 4 program "Across China" With English sub
It is about raising Salmon in China where the water is too hot for Salmon So how are they going to solve it?
By lowering the fish farm. But how are you going to raise and lower fish farm for 30000 Salmon.
By building it from round steel structure with net and who is going to built is You guess it Wuchang shipyard the same people who built submarine.
But where they get the power to blow the water from ballast tank .They use ingenious wave power to do it
But how about shark that will raid this fish farm. they built special net tough enough to pull a truck.
More and more you will see this military tech goes civilian and Civilian tech goes military
Who fund this project Not SOE but private enterprises. Yup this lady you see on the video

Click to expand...