Tallest tree in Asia, as tall as the Statue of Liberty, found in China
The tree was found to stand 335 feet tall, according to a statement from Peking University, just taller than the 305-foot Statue of Liberty. Yarlung Zangbo Grand Canyon is considered the deepest canyon on land in the world, reaching an average depth of around 16,000 feet and a maximum depth of 19,714 feet.
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With G7 in Japan, China hosts summit with central asia neighbors
With G-7 leaders meeting in Japan, China kick-started its first-ever Central Asia summit on Thursday. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan are all in attendance for the two-day event. Leaders met one-on-one with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday before group discussions on Friday. According to the Chinese foreign ministry, this is the first major diplomatic event China has hosted this year.
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China and Central Asia have long been vital partners on the global stage. In 2013, Beijing launched its trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative in Kazakhstan and has since spent billions of dollars on transportation and infrastructure in the region. China is Central Asia’s largest trading partner. Last year, trade reached a record high of $70 billion, including $31 billion with Kazakhstan alone. This year is proving to be no different; already, China and Central Asian nations have conducted more than $24.8 billion in trade. Just as Central Asia relies on Chinese trade and investment, Beijing depends on Central Asia for key resources. Many Chinese cities rely on natural gas pipelines from Turkmenistan and oil from Kazakhstan.
If you had asked me how much trade China would get from these neighbors, I wouldn't have guessed it was that high. Though, it is notable that this is still a fraction of China's trade with other countries. For example, according to ustr.gov:
U.S. goods and services trade with China totaled an estimated $615.2 billion in 2020. Exports were $164.9 billion; imports were $450.4 billion. The U.S. goods and services trade deficit with China was $285.5 billion in 2020.
China is currently our largest goods trading partner with $559.2 billion in total (two way) goods trade during 2020. Goods exports totaled $124.5 billion; goods imports totaled $434.7 billion. The U.S. goods trade deficit with China was $310.3 billion in 2020.
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Ding Liren is the new world champion for chess
Ding Liren of China is the new world chess champion, succeeding Magnus Carlsen who announced last year that he would not defend his title. Ding Liren's journey to this is the stuff of movies.
Carlsen held the title for ten years and seemingly could hold it for ten more. His desire to not defend the title is probably a combination of a few things, including simply just being tired of the work required for it and preferring to be the best player in the world without having to worry about the championship tournament.
Had he chosen to defend it, the match would have been him vs. Ian Nepomniachtchi. Since Carlsen decided to abdicate his throne it became Nepomniachtchi against the second-place finisher in the tournament which chooses who gets to fight for the title: Ding Liren.
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A Chinese spy balloon is over the western US
I don't know why but I find this wild. Not that I thought the US never had spies fly over it, just to hear about it. Also, given Google and satellites, a flying spy vessel just feels antiquated.
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Kowloon Walled City
Kowloon Walled City was an ungoverned and densely populated de jure Imperial Chinese enclave within the boundaries of Kowloon City, British Hong Kong. Originally a Chinese military fort, the walled city became an enclave after the New Territories were leased to the United Kingdom by China in 1898. Its population increased dramatically following the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong during World War II. By 1990, the walled city contained 50,000 residents within its 2.6-hectare (6.4-acre) borders. From the 1950s to the 1970s, it was controlled by local triads and had high rates of prostitution, gambling, and drug abuse.
In January 1987, the Hong Kong government announced plans to demolish the walled city. After an arduous eviction process, and the transfer of de jure sovereignty of the enclave from China to Britain, demolition began in March 1993 and was completed in April 1994. Kowloon Walled City Park opened in December 1995 and occupies the area of the former walled city. Some historical artifacts from the walled city, including its yamen building and remnants of its southern gate, have been preserved there.
That post with odds things on Wikipedia reminded me of Kowloon. I loved learning about Kowloon so much that I worked a fantasy version of it into my previous D&D campaign. And, I'm sure I'll do similar again. Just a fascinating bit of world history.
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Looking at the change to China's demographics and the impacts of its one-child policy compounding with the world downturn in reproductive rates
To be honest, I don't think I had heard about the Great Chinese Famine before. Definitely going to read more about it as it is one of those world events which happened just sixty years ago, which seems recent enough to be shocking to hear about outside of the third-world regions.
From the article:
This doesn't mean that China as a country or as a world power is locked into irreversible decline. What's happening in China is happening at varying speeds in most countries, as the world — with the exception of still-young regions like sub-Saharan Africa — completes the transition from high fertility to low, with two-thirds of the planet living in nations that do not have enough children to replace their population through reproduction alone.
A good note that Africa is still seeing increases, largely because they are so low that the marginal improvements still have major impacts. But also I found the insight about the majority of the planet are below replacement rates.
Personally, I think being below replacement rates is a good thing. Population growth continuing creates a lot of problems across a swath of areas of the world. And if we can find quasi equilibrium long term that that will be a good thing.
In 2015, the Chinese government did something it almost never does: It admitted it made a mistake, at least implicitly.
The ruling Communist Party announced that it was ending its historic and coercive one-child policy, allowing all married couples to have up to two children.
The one-child policy had helped lead to the mother of all demographic dividends, the term for the economist boost created when a country’s birth and death rates both decline. Between 1980 and 2015, China’s working-age population grew from 594 million to a little over 1 billion. China’s dependency ratio — the total young and elderly population relative to the working-age population — fell from over 68 percent in 1980 to less than 38 percent in 2015, which meant more workers for every non-working person.
The one-child policy was shortsighted to slow the population growth so that the underlying communist infrastructure could scale with population growth. And the huge growth in the number of young workers for every non-workers is fantastic in the short term, but looms huge long term as that younger generation soon becomes the non-workers.
And the issue this leads to is well explained here:
For all its power and aggregate wealth — it is by most accounts the world’s second-largest economy — on a per capita basis, it’s still a middle-income country at best. To reach anything like a per capita parity with a country like the UK, let alone the US, would require years more of high-powered economic growth that will be increasingly difficult to pull off in an aging nation. In the end, China could get old before it gets rich.
And if China can’t grow faster, the elderly will bear the brunt of the cost. A 2013 study estimated that nearly a quarter of China’s seniors live below the poverty line, and the country — like many others in East Asia, including richer nations like Japan and South Korea — has little in the way of old-age support. That was less of a problem when older adults could count on being taken care of by their children, but decades of the one-child policy has left an inverted pyramid known as “4-2-1,” with four grandparents and two parents depending on one child.
The 4-2-1 pyramid is an example of something that makes perfect sense but isn't an obvious thing when you first look at the "one-child policy" as a layperson. The insights about the economy and the living conditions for the elderly were also interesting; I had thought China was perhaps somewhat better off. I knew they weren't universally high-income, but this makes it sound like they are further off of it than I had imagined.
It’s worth repeating that this state of affairs was, for the most part, inevitable. The fertility transition — the drastic drop in fertility as countries become richer — is as close to an iron law as demography has. There is no foreseeable situation where China could have developed as it has if its mid-1960s fertility rates of six to seven children per woman had continued, and much of that drop was due to improvements in infant mortality that gave parents confidence their children would live to adulthood.
Another good insight that what is happening isn't because of one-child, but rather one-child exacerbates it or perhaps accelerates it.
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China, Albania and Cuba are all higher than the USA in Life Expectancy
But stagnation is one thing, the collapse since 2019 is a phenomenon of a different quality. It is a full measure of the disaster that was the COVID pandemic in the United States. Over a million Americans died of COVID, one of the worst outcomes on the planet.
According to the CDC, half the disastrous fall in life expectancy is attributable to COVID with the opioid epidemic being a second significant factor.
In living memory China's life expectancy languished at levels prevailing in the West a hundred years ago. By the 1980s, thanks to the provision of basic sanitation, a minimum standard of living and health care, Communist China had surged ahead of most other developing countries. Chartbook Newsletter #28 showcased the reports of the World Bank on this startling fact. China's dramatic economic growth since the 1980s propelled further steady increases.
In terms of healthy years of life, China overtook the United States already in 2018. At the time the United States was one of only five countries - the others being Somalia, Afghanistan, Georgia and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines - that were experiencing a fall in healthy life expectancy at birth. Extrapolating those trends, China was expected to overtake the United States in absolute life expectancy by the mid 2020s. The divergence in the handling of the COVID pandemic has brought that moment forward to 2021.
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The US gets caught with sock puppet social media against China and Russia
Not exactly surprising.
The data analyzed came from 146 Twitter accounts (which tweeted 299,566 times), 39 Facebook profiles, and 26 Instagram accounts, along with 16 Facebook pages and two Facebook groups. Some of the accounts were meant to appear like real people and used AI-generated profile pictures. Meta and Twitter didn’t specifically name any organizations or people behind the campaigns but said their analysis led them to believe they originated in the US and Great Britain.
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Yitang Zhang didn't get to go to middle or high school but he is a mathematician today
As a boy in Shanghai, China, Yitang Zhang believed he would someday solve a great problem in mathematics. In 1964, at around the age of nine, he found a proof of the Pythagorean theorem, which describes the relationship between the lengths of the sides of any right triangle. He was 10 when he first learned about two famous number theory problems, Fermat’s last theorem and the Goldbach conjecture. While he was not yet aware of the centuries-old twin primes conjecture, he was already taken with prime numbers, often described as indivisible “atoms” that make up all other natural numbers.
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"US Navy deploys warships east of Taiwan ahead of Pelosi ‘trip’"
My RSS political feeds are awash in discussion around Pelosi's trip to Taiwan and the resulting saber rattling from China. Personally, I think it's very much the correct move for the US to make these moves to show China that it can't do to Taiwan what Russia is doing to Ukraine.
I will be surprised if it escalates. China is seeing what the economic sanctions are doing to Russia and while they are much much healthier economically than Russia, it will still be a massive impact even aside from the costs of an actual war.
We'll see.
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The growing professional bridemaid industry in China
Xie Yuke has attended over 40 weddings in the past two years and is now making a living from it.
The 22-year-old has flown more than 140,000 kilometers and traveled around China working as a professional bridesmaid.
It’s a fast-growing industry in China and is “expected to grow by 25% to 30% a year,” Cao Zhonghua, an expert at the Chinese Traditional Culture Promotion Council, told state broadcaster CCTV Wednesday.
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She Spent a Decade Writing Fake Russian History. Wikipedia Just Noticed
Essentially the worst case scenario that makes Professors proclaim Wikipedia an unfit source for school.
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