新闻摘要|News Digest

Society——A tale of eight Harvard researchers coming back to China（SupChina）

China is making remarkable progress in reversing its brain drain（智囊流失） as more as more and more overseas students are returning to their home country. In addition to fresh graduates, some senior researchers abroad are embarking on（开始） the same path.

Related Reading:

Why are growing numbers of overseas Chinese students returning home?

哈佛八博士后“集体归国”记

My Comment:

Unlike the 1980‘s generation to study abroad, more students and scholars today are apt to come back home for future development.

Finance——China’s Ant Financial Pushes U.S. to Approve MoneyGram Deal（Bloomberg）

Ant Financial is expected to make a third try for U.S. approval of its takeover of MoneyGram International Inc. as a secretive national security panel throws up hurdles（设置障碍） for Chinese investors seeking to buy American companies. The preparations underscore the trouble Chinese buyers face in persuading the panel that investigates foreign acquisitions to greenlight takeovers.

The prolonged review comes amid heightened political tensions. The Trump administration has upheld a hard line against（坚决反对） Chinese takeovers of American businesses, even as it seeks China’s aid to resolve the North Korean nuclear crisis. Two members of the House of Representatives have urged CFIUS to conduct a “full and thorough” investigation of the deal, arguing it could give China access to critical U.S. financial infrastructure.

Related materials:

Wikipedia: MoneyGram

Politics——Trump move to block chipmaker deal bad for America - Xinhua （Reuters）

U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to block a Chinese-backed firm from buying a U.S.-based chipmaker this week is detrimental to（对…有害） America’s growth and the global economy. Security reviews of investments in sensitive sectors “should not be used as a tool to implement protectionism”, it added, echoing comments by a Commerce Ministry spokesman last week.

Xinhua called it “penny wise and pound foolish（大事聪明，小事糊涂） … It is a short-sighted move to take protectionist measures amid sluggish global growth（在疲软的全球经济增长中）…Chinese investment is not ‘Trojan Horse（特洛伊木马）’ with hidden purposes.”

My Comment:

There are several consecutive cases about takeovers from China remaining to be reviewed by Trump’s administration, which shows that China are suffering great trading shock by American protectionism.

Tech——China En Route to Driverless-Car Road Testing（Caixin）

The government is considering giving the green light to driverless car companies to conduct tests on public roadways, a move that is expected to help ambitious Chinese firms pull ahead in autonomous driving. A July video of Robin Li, testing an autonomous vehicle on Beijing’s Fifth Ring Road（五环路） — with his hands off the wheel — set off a debate（激起争论） about whether the excursion（尝试） was legal.

If China allows road testing of unmanned cars（无人车，用法类似unmanned satellite） soon, Chinese companies could get a head start（走在别人前面）in an industry already teeming with（充满）foreign competitors. Road testing is crucial to the development of self-driving technology because computers must become familiar with a variety of road conditions, to improve their “sensing” and “decision-making” programs – two of the three key aspects of the autonomous driving technology that also include “execution.”

Related materials:

Baidu Steers Into Self-Driving Car Venture With Partner

My Comment:

Nowadays, China’s automakers, internet conglomerates and new startups, in cooperation with, are beginning to get a head start in the AI-related fields.

Tech——General Motors Sets Timetable for Shift to Electric（Caixin）

China this month joined the U.K. and France in saying it will eventually ban sales of gasoline- and diesel-powered cars（汽油、柴油车）. The announcement has stirred up（激起） concern among foreign automakers in the world’s biggest auto market.

General Motors Co. is getting ready for the day when every vehicle in China will be propelled（向前推进） by some sort of electric technology, Automakers that fall short of（达不到） the target could buy credits from competitors that have a surplus.

My Comment:

Beijing made an important step towards green cars(including EV and HEV) and green economy and almost all automakers follow the footsteps with the avoidance of lagging behind.

Tech——SWITZERLAND’S GETTING A DELIVERY NETWORK FOR BLOOD-TOTING DRONES（Wired）

Companies like Amazon are working to make that happen, complicated logistics and thorny regulations mean it’s likely to be years before you start hearing the whir of rotors on your front porch.

The latest of these comes from Silicon Valley startup Matternet, which has been testing an autonomous drone network over Switzerland, shuttling blood and other medical samples between hospitals and testing facilities. Instead of operating from large centralized drone airports, every hospital can install its own base to keep drones running, without onsite technicians to recharge or reload them.

每日一词|Word of the Day

Mainly summarized from SupChina newsletter

0919 宣传 Propaganda

The Great Hive of Propaganda

At China Media Project, David Bandurski writes on how recent regulations really do call on everyone to “say the correct thing in the correct way.”

Regulations published last week on the management of chat groups and social media postings are just the latest sign that “media controls are now centered not, as they were in the past, solely on the gatekeeping media, but on users — which is to say, citizens — themselves.”

Bandurski says that it might be time for a new word to replace the “Great Firewall” to describe China’s “vast system of technical and regulatory controls on the internet… meant to insulate China from the contagion of the outside. It is probably more suitable now to think instead of a Great Hive of firewalls around the individual, a buzzing nest of connections from which users may be insulated at will.”

In other news of censorship and control: The Global Times reports that a man in the eastern city of Nanjing has been detained by the police for selling Virtual Private Network (VPN) services to help Chinese users get around internet controls.

0920 火箭男 Rocket Man

MAGA Man vs Rocket Man

Donald Trump’s maiden speech at the United Nations general assembly

In his address to the UN in New York on September 19, the U.S. President said the following:

The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea. Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.

• The Guardian commented: “What was left, when the muted applause died down in the UN chamber, was a sense of incoherence and a capricious menace hanging in the air.”
• A day previously, on September 18, the New York Times reported (paywall) that U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said that the U.S. “had found military options to handle the nuclear crisis on the Korean Peninsula that would not put the South Korean capital, Seoul, at grave risk, though he refused to elaborate on what those might be.”
• Reuters reports that China’s foreign ministry responded to Mattis’ comments by saying “military threats in words or in action… cannot promote and advance a resolution.”
• The White House has published a readout of a phone call between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping on September 18.
• Xinhua News Agency has published a short report on the call with a slightly different emphasis.

They want to be capable of obliterating the city of New York

Andrei Lankov is one of the sharpest interpreters of North Korean government. He completed his graduate studies at Leningrad State University in 1989, attended Pyongyang’s Kim Il-sung University in 1985, and wrote The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia which we recommended on our SupChina summer reading list earlier this year.

Lankov gave an interview to CNN about the possible results from informal backchannels between North Korea and the U.S., likely to be especially active during the U.N.’s general assembly. He is not optimistic:

• He says that Russia and China are coming close to “their own red line” concerning North Korea.
• On whether backchannel talks might have any chance of calming down tensions in Northeast Asia, he said: I don’t see these talks are going to bring about any result. The North Korean position is quite clear: First they want to be capable of obliterating the city of New York and the city of Washington a number of times.Once they are certain, they might be willing to start talking, but we cannot be sure.

0921 基因 genes

Collecting genes in Chengdu

The Wall Street Journal reports (paywall) on West China Hospital at Sichuan University in Chengdu, whose “goal is to collect and analyze vast amounts of genetic data from Chinese citizens to help unearth the causes of diseases from cancer to schizophrenia, and pave the way for novel treatments.”

• China, says the Journal, “has raced ahead with amassing people’s genetic samples” with “dozens of institutions collecting genetic data,” while the U.S. is hampered by existing laws and concerns about patient privacy and the use of medical data.
• However, China may be building up problems in its data set for later, because there is apparently so far no procedure for how to store the collected genetic data, and no means of connecting it to behavioral or environmental factors.
• The Journal says the Chinese government has “awarded more than $200 million to more than 100 such projects,” and plans to spend “more than $9 billion” on the program up through 2030.
• Some observers see a sinister motivation: In May this year, Nature published an article subtitled “Alarms raised over suspected efforts to collect massive numbers of genetic samples from citizens,” which discusses gene collection activities in the tense far-western Xinjiang.

Chengdu is noteworthy as the city where the genetic database is being built. Aside from great food and many other charms, the city is actively promoting itself as an academic and entrepreneurial powerhouse.

• SupChina recently published a story on a Chengdu government program to attract foreign startups.
• Chengdu was also recently ranked as “first tier” by a national media organization: We wrote about the new tiering list, and included this grumble from one Chinese internet user: “Almost all the resources in Sichuan were invested in Chengdu. It’s unfair to other second-tier and third-tier cities in the province.”
• Aside from gene collection and foreign startups, Chengdu also has pandas, Chinese hip-hop, nearby beautiful mountains, and the legendary residence of poet Du Fu 杜甫 in a nice park where you can drink tea. SupChina has a brief guide to visiting Chengdu.

0922 信用评级 credit rating

China gets an A+, and that’s not a good thing

Standard and Poor’s (S&P), one of the world’s “Big Three” credit-rating agencies that evaluate countries and companies by the risk of investing in them, has downgraded its score for China from AA- to A+, one notch lower. Moody’s, one of the other Big Three, gave China a similar downgrade in May. By comparison, the U.S. has a rating of A++, while South Africa is at BB+, which is the highest classification for a deadbeat debtor, sometimes called “junk” status.

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Levine 文章的价值在于提醒我们对加密聊天软件保持怀疑。我们的隐私究竟应该靠技术来保护，还是靠政府监管？技术主义者通常会在「杀人的是人而不是刀」的技术中立主义理念下选择前者，但今天的大规模加密即时通讯软件的运营成本远超普通的冷兵器，这使得保持中立不再是一件易事。而当我们看到谷歌与 Facebook 等公司的社会角色已经逐渐溢出传统科技公司的领域，在公共事务中有着越来越大的权力时，反感政府监管的人，也需要重新思考自己是否更愿意接受一个公共权力部分被这种事实上的类政府角色接管的现实。（以上评论来自我所订阅的一天世界付费会员通讯）

（最后更新于2017.09.22）

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