Podcasts about shanghai academy

China's carrier rocket fleet has expanded further, as the newest type in the Long March family, the Long March 12, made its debut flight on Saturday night from Wenchang, Hainan province.11月30日晚，长征系列中最新型的长征十二号运载火箭在海南省文昌市点火起飞，中国的运载火箭队伍进一步壮大。The flight also marked the first mission of the Hainan International Commercial Aerospace Launch Center, the nation's first spaceport dedicated to facilitating commercial operations.这次发射是海南商业航天发射场的首次任务，它是全国首个专门用于促进商业运营的航天发射场。As a large crowd of spectators gathered at the coastal launch complex, four liquid oxygen-kerosene engines on the rocket's first stage roared with dazzling flames at 10:25 pm, and the rocket rose into the night sky from the No 2 launchpad at the new space complex.晚上10时25分，当大批观众聚集在沿海发射场时，一级火箭上的四个液氧煤油发动机在耀眼的火焰中轰鸣，火箭从新航天发射场的2号发射台升入夜空。After a short while, two experimental satellites separated from the rocket and entered their preset orbit, marking the success of the launch mission.过了一会儿，两颗试验卫星与火箭分离，进入预设轨道，标志着发射任务取得成功。Designed by the Shanghai Aerospace System Engineering Institute, the Long March 12 is the 22nd member of the Long March family, the backbone of China's space sector, and the 17th in the operating fleet.长征十二号运载火箭由上海航天技术研究院研制，是中国航天领域的中坚力量——长征系列的第22位成员，也是正在营运中的第17位成员。The institute is part of the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology, which belongs to the State-owned industry conglomerate China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp.上海航天技术研究院隶属于国有企业集团中国航天科技集团公司。The Long March 12 is the first Chinese rocket with a diameter of 3.8 meters. Most Chinese rockets have a diameter of 3.35 meters, a standard width set in the 1960s due to rail transportation factors.长征十二号运载火箭是中国第一枚直径为3.8米的火箭。大多数中国运载火箭的直径为3.35米，这是20世纪60年代由于铁路运输因素而设定的标准宽度。At 62.6 meters tall, the two-stage model is the second-tallest among all Chinese rockets, exceeded only by the 62.8-meter Long March 5.火箭全长62.6米，在中国所有火箭中排名第二，仅次于62.8米的长征五号。The vehicle is propelled by engines fueled by liquid oxygen and kerosene and has a liftoff weight of more than 430 metric tons. It is capable of transporting spacecraft with a combined weight of more than 12 tons to a low-Earth orbit, or 6 tons of satellites to a typical sun-synchronous orbit at an altitude of 700 kilometers, according to the Shanghai academy.运载火箭由液氧和煤油燃料发动机推进，起飞质量约430吨。上海航天技术研究院称，它的近地轨道运载能力不少于12吨，700公里太阳同步轨道运载能力不少于6吨。The new model will effectively improve China's capability to send spacecraft to a sun-synchronous orbit and deploy satellite networks in low orbits, it noted, adding that research and development started in May 2020 and finished in June this year.新型号将有效提高中国航天器太阳同步轨道入轨能力和低轨多星座组网能力。Xie Li, a senior designer of the new model, said the rocket features new technologies and equipment.中国航天科技集团谢立表示，该运载火箭采用了新技术和新设备。"It is the first Chinese rocket equipped with an automatic ignition-malfunction detection system.... After the engines are ignited, the system will detect whether the engines are functioning well, and if the result is good, the system will unleash the hold-down clamps, allowing the engines to reach full power to lift off.“这是中国首枚配备牵制释放技术系统的火箭……火箭点火之后，系统会对火箭进行故障诊断。诊断到火箭是正常以后，牵制释放机构就会打开，让火箭飞出去。”"When the rocket begins to fly, the system will continue performing real-time checks on the vehicle's condition, and if any anomaly occurs, the system will take necessary measures such as to replan the trajectory to make sure the satellites can be deployed into their preset orbit," he said.他说：“当火箭开始飞行时，系统将继续对其状况进行实时检查，如果出现任何异常，系统将采取必要措施，如重新规划轨道，以确保卫星能够部署到预设轨道。”Another advantage is that the new type needs a short time for prelaunch preparations at the service tower, which means that the launch facility can serve more space missions in a given time, thus enhancing the spaceport's operational efficiency, according to the designer.另一个优点是，新型火箭在发射塔进行发射前准备的时间很短，这意味着发射设施可以在给定的时间内为更多的航天任务提供服务，从而提高航天发射场的运行效率。In addition, the fuel tank of the rocket's second stage is made of a cutting-edge aluminum alloy that boasts lighter weight and better strength.此外，火箭第二级的燃料箱由最先进的铝合金制成，重量更轻，强度更高。"Compared with other types of aluminum alloy used on previous Long March-series rockets, the new material is up to 15 percent lighter in structural weight and 28 percent higher in tensile strength," Xie said.“与以往长征系列火箭使用的其他类型铝合金相比，新材料的结构重量减轻了 15%，抗拉强度提高了28%。”谢立说。Regarding the 3.8-meter diameter, he said that a wider body enables the rocket to have four engines on its first stage, while the 3.35-meter-wide models have two. Moreover, being wider means the rocket can contain more propellants. All of these give the new model a greater carrying capacity, he added.关于直径3.8米的火箭，他说，较宽的火箭体可以使火箭的第一级有四个发动机，而3.35米宽的型号只有两个。此外，更宽意味着火箭可以装载更多的推进剂。谢立补充，所有这些都赋予了新型火箭更强大的运载能力。The Long March 12 mission marked China's 59th space launch this year and the 548th flight of the Long March family.长征十二号运载火箭发射任务是中国今年的第59次航天发射，也是长征系列运载火箭的第548次发射。spaceportn. 航天发射场propellantn. 推进剂tensileadj. 可伸展的；拉力的

Stable China-United States business ties would contribute to the security and stability of global industrial supply chains, fostering a favorable policy environment for collaboration between companies from both sides, said market watchers and business executives on Wednesday.10月9日，市场观察人士和企业高管们表示，稳定的中美经贸关系将有助于全球产业链供应链的安全和稳定，为双方企业的合作创造有利的政策环境。China's Ministry of Commerce said on Tuesday that China has called on the US to promptly lift sanctions on Chinese companies and enhance the business environment for its firms operating in the US.10月8日，根据中国商务部消息，中方敦促美方及早取消对中国企业的制裁，并改善中国企业在美营商环境。During a phone call with US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo on the same day, China's Minister of Commerce Wang Wentao expressed serious concerns over US policies on semiconductors, targeting China, and restrictions on Chinese intelligent connected vehicles.中国商务部部长王文涛当天同美国商务部长雷蒙多举行通话，重点就美对华半导体政策、限制中国网联车等表达严正关切。It is necessary to clarify national security boundaries in the economic and trade fields, as it is conducive to maintaining the security and stability of global industrial supply chains and creating a favorable policy environment for cooperation between the business communities from the two countries, Wang stressed.王文涛强调，厘清经贸领域国家安全边界尤为必要，有利于维护全球产业链供应链安全稳定，为两国业界合作创造良好政策环境。This conversation was part of the institutional communication arrangement between the commerce authorities of both countries, said the Ministry of Commerce.商务部表示，本次通话是两国商务部门机制性沟通安排。As many global industries, such as electronics, automotive and pharmaceuticals, rely on components and materials sourced from both China and the US, a stable relationship can minimize disruptions and prevent production delays and supply shortages in many business areas, said Wang Zhongmei, a researcher at the Institute of World Economy of Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.上海国际问题研究院世界经济研究所研究员王中美表示，由于电子、汽车和制药等许多全球产业都依赖来自中国和美国的零部件和材料，稳定的关系可以最大限度地减少干扰，防止许多业务领域出现生产延误和供应短缺。Zhang Yongjun, a researcher at the China Center for International Economic Exchanges in Beijing, warned that given various factors such as the upcoming US election in early November, it is critical to view Sino-US economic and trade relations with caution.中国国际经济交流中心研究员张永军表示，考虑到即将到来的11月初美国大选等各种因素，谨慎看待中美经贸关系至关重要。In the short term, there will be challenges, but in the long run, the trend of mutually beneficial cooperation between China and the US remains unchangeable, said Zhang.张永军认为，短期内会有挑战，但从长远来看，中美互利合作的趋势不会改变。"For US companies, China is an indispensable market," he added. "If trade tensions escalate, these companies may once again urge the US government to adopt a more proactive and balanced economic and trade policy. Business needs can, to a certain extent, influence government actions."“对于美国公司来说，中国是不可或缺的市场。”张永军补充，“如果贸易紧张局势升级，这些公司可能会再次敦促美国政府采取更积极、更平衡的经贸政策。商业需求可在一定程度上影响政府的行动。”According to the 2024 Kearney FDI (foreign direct investment) Confidence Index, reflecting investors' expectations for FDI over the next three years, China's global ranking has risen from seventh to third place.根据科尔尼发布的2024年外商直接投资信心指数（反映投资者对未来三年外商直接投资的预期），中国的全球排名从第七位上升到第三位。"Multinational companies initially looked at China as a supplier and then as a huge market. But now, increasingly, we are looking at China as an innovation center," said Andrew Wu, general manager of the China branch of US-based commercial data and analytics firm Dun & Bradstreet.“跨国公司最初将中国视为供应商，后来又将其视为一个巨大的市场。但现在，我们越来越多地将中国视为创新中心。”美国商业数据和分析公司邓白氏中国区总裁吴广宇说。Also viewing China as crucial to its global business strategy, Willie Tan, CEO of Skechers China, South Korea and Southeast Asia, said that despite external challenges, China remains a crucial market for global brands. Its vast consumer base, strategic importance in global supply chains and ongoing commitment to reform and innovation create significant opportunities.斯凯奇中国、韩国及东南亚首席执行官陈伟利也认为中国对其全球业务战略至关重要。他表示，尽管面临外部挑战，但中国仍然是全球品牌的重要市场。其庞大的消费群体、在全球供应链中的战略重要性以及对改革和创新的持续投入创造了重大机遇。With over 3,500 stores in China, the US footwear brand plans to continue market expansion in the coming years.该美国鞋类品牌在中国拥有3500多家专卖店，计划在未来几年继续扩大市场。Mark Jaffe, CEO of the Greater New York Chamber of Commerce, said that no one wants to halt cooperation and exchange between the two countries. China and the US have already established long-term partnerships in fields such as artificial intelligence and pharmaceuticals.美国大纽约商会会长马克·加菲认为，没有人愿意停止两国之间的合作与交流，中美两国已在人工智能和制药等领域建立了长期合作伙伴关系。In the face of increasingly intense global competition, Jaffe said it will be necessary for the two sides to further expand and deepen trade relations in the future.加菲表示，面对日益激烈的全球竞争，双方未来有必要进一步扩大和深化贸易关系。In the first eight months of 2024, the US remained China's third-largest trading partner, with the total trade value between the two countries reaching 3.15 trillion yuan ($446.21 billion), up 4.4 percent year-on-year and accounting for 11 percent of China's total foreign trade value, statistics from the General Administration of Customs showed.海关总署数据显示，2024年前8个月，美国仍是中国第三大贸易伙伴，两国贸易总值达3.15万亿元人民币（约4462.1亿美元），同比增长4.4%，占中国外贸总值的11%。promptlyadv. 迅速地；立即地sanctionn. 制裁indispensableadj. 不可或缺的semiconductorn. 半导体pharmaceuticaladj. 制药的

Dagens gäst i Novus podd är Carl Piva, VD för Internetstiftelsen. Carl Piva är en visionsdriven ledare med omfattande global erfarenhet inom digital teknik och samhällsförändring. Som VD för Internetstiftelsen leder han ett team på 100 personer och som levererar en viktig del av Sveriges internet. Parallellt är Carl ordförande för Stockholm Green Innovation District, ett av Europas mest innovativa distrikt. Carl har fungerat som rådgivare till Europeiska kommissionen, Vita huset och ett flertal större städer, är Honorary Research Fellow vid Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences och älskar att arbeta i mellanrummet mellan samhällets behov och teknikens möjligheter. Vi bjuder på ett samtal där vi får veta mer om Internetstiftelsens roll och syfte och hur det startade. Samtalet kretsar även kring ”Svenskarna och internet” där Novus gör undersökningen åt Internetstiftelsen, om EU regler och utmaningen med att anpassa sig efter nätjättarnas algoritmer. Avslutningsvis pratas det en hel del om AI och spaningar om effekten på samhället när AI kommit ytterligare lite längre. Som vanligt leder Torbjörn Sjöström samtalet.

Keith Tam is an information designer, typographer, and academic. He is currently Head of Department of Communication Design and Director of the Centre for Communication Design at the Hong Kong Design Institute; Distinguished Research Fellow at the Type Lab of the Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts, Shanghai University. His previous appointments include Associate Professor and Director of the MA Information Design programme at the University of Reading, UK; leader of the Communication Design discipline and founding leader of the Information Design Lab at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University

In this podcast episode, CTFEG Chief Strategy Officer Jennifer Ma sits down with Victoria Shanghai Academy (VSA) Head of Academy, Dr. Maggie Koong to explore how VSA is fostering well-rounded students with the skills of tomorrow: critical thinking, problem solving, adaptability, team building, and more. Dr. Koong also highlights VSA's new Performing Arts Centre in the interview, which features an Innovation Hub and Black Box Theater, which provide a dynamic environment for student to develop their many skills and talents. Tune in to hear more! **The views, comments and opinions expressed by the hosts and guest speakers in this Podcast session are personal views of their own and do not reflect the views nor positions of CTF Education Group. CTF Education Group makes no representations or warranties about the accuracy, reliability, completeness of such views, comments and opinions.

From Snake Island to the San Diego waterfront, from DC to the Baltic Sea - if there's a maritime issue worth considering, we'll try to pack it in for the hour this Sunday.As with the normal Melee format, we have open topic, open chat, and open phones - so if there is an issue you'd like covered, now's your time.- USS Bonhomme Richard Article: https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2022/07/15/vice-admiral-and-two-dozen-others-punished-for-uss-bonhomme-richard-fire/- Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences report on Chinese demographics: https://theconversation.com/chinas-population-is-about-to-shrink-for-the-first-time-since-the-great-famine-struck-60-years-ago-heres-what-it-means-for-the-world-176377- EU Allows Cargo To Flow Via Russian Port Of Kaliningrad: https://gcaptain.com/eu-cargo-russian-port-of-kaliningrad/- The End of Global Order: A Conversation with Sam Harris, Peter Zeihan and Ian Bremmer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqsVR9Hl2oQBooks:- Wayne P. Hughes, Jr., USN: Fleet Tactics: Fleet Tactics And Naval Operations: https://amzn.to/3cnU5n9- Sandy Woodward: One Hundred Days: The Memoirs of the Falklands Battle Group Commander: https://amzn.to/3cfHPFj

Adam Segal, Ira A. Lipman chair in emerging technologies and national security and director of the Digital and Cyberspace Policy Program at CFR, leads a conversation on cyberspace and U.S.-China relations. FASKIANOS: Welcome to the first session of the Winter/Spring 2022 CFR Academic Webinar Series. I'm Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. Today's discussion is on the record, and the video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org/academic. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We are delighted to have Adam Segal with us to discuss cyberspace and U.S.-China relations. Adam Segal is CFR's Ira A. Lipman chair in emerging technologies and national security and director of the Council's Digital and Cyberspace Policy program. Previously, he served as an arms control analyst for the China Project at the Union of Concerned Scientists. He has been a visiting scholar at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, MIT's Center for International Studies, the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, and Tsinghua University in Beijing. And he's taught courses at Vassar College and Columbia University. Dr. Segal currently writes for the CFR blog, Net Politics—you should all sign up for those alerts, if you haven't already. And he is the author several books, including his latest, The Hacked World Order: How Nations Fight, Trade, Maneuver, and Manipulate in the Digital Age. So, Adam, thanks very much for being with us. We can begin with a very broad brush at cyberspace, the role cyberspace plays in U.S.-China relations, and have you make a few comments on the salient points. And then we'll open it up to the group for questions. SEGAL: Great. Irina, thanks very much. And thanks, everyone, for joining us this afternoon. I'm looking forward to the questions and the discussion. So broadly, I'm going to argue that the U.S. and China have the most far-reaching competition in cyberspace of any countries. And that competition goes all the way from the chip level to the rules of the road. So global governance all the way down the to the chips that we have in all of our phones. Coincidentally, and nicely timed, last week the Washington Post did a survey of their network of cyber experts about who was the greater threat to the United States, China or Russia. And it was actually almost exactly evenly split—forty to thirty-nine. But I, not surprisingly, fell into the China school. And my thinking is caught very nicely by a quote from Rob Joyce, who's a director at the National Security Agency, that Russia is like a hurricane while China is like climate change. So Russia causes sudden, kind of unpredictable damage. But China represents a long-term strategic threat. When we think about cyberspace, I think it's good to think about why it matters to both sides. And on the Chinese side, I think there are four primary concerns. The first is domestic stability, right? So China is worried that the outside internet will influence domestic stability and regime legitimacy. And so that's why it's built an incredibly sophisticated system for controlling information inside of China that relies both on technology, and intermediate liability, and other types of regulation. China is worried about technological dependence on other players, in particular the U.S., for semiconductors, network equipment, and other technologies. And they see cybersecurity as a way of reducing that technology. China has legitimate cybersecurity concerns like every other country. They're worried about attacks on their networks. And the Snowden revelations from the—Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor—show that the U.S. has significant cyber capabilities, and it has attacked and exploited vulnerabilities inside of China. And while the Chinese might have used to think that they were less vulnerable to cyberattacks given the shape of the Chinese network in the past, I think that probably changed around 2014-2015, especially as the Chinese economy has become increasingly dependent on ecommerce and digital technology. It's now—GDP is about a third dependent on digital technology. So they're worried about the same types of attacks the United States is worried about. And then, fourth and finally, China does not want the United States to be able to kind of define the rules of the road globally on cyber, create containing alliances around digital or cyber issues, and wants to constrain the ability of the U.S. to freely maneuver in cyberspace. Those are China's views. The U.S. has stated that it's working for a free, open, global, and interoperable internet, or an interoperable cyberspace. But when it looks at China, it has a number of specific concerns. The first is Chinese cyber operations, in particular Chinese espionage, and in particular from that Chinese industrial espionage, right? So the Chinese are known for being the most prolific operators, stealing intellectual property. But they're also hacking into political networks, going after think tanks, hacking activists—Uighur activists, Tibetan activists, Taiwanese independence activists. We know they're entering into networks to prepare the battlefield, right, so to map critical infrastructure in case there is a kinetic conflict with the United States—perhaps in the South China Sea or over the Taiwan Strait—and they want to be able to deter the U.S., or perhaps cause destructive attacks on the U.S. homeland, or U.S. bases in South Korea, or Japan. The U.S. is also extremely concerned about the global expansion of Chinese tech firms and Chinese platforms, for the collection of data, right? The U.S. exploited the globalization of U.S. tech firms. Again, that was something that we learned from the Snowden documents, that the U.S. both had legal and extralegal measures to be able to get data from users all around the world because of their knowledge of and relationship to U.S. tech firms. And there's no reason to believe that the Chinese will not do the same. Now, we hear a lot about, you know, Huawei and the national intelligence law in China that seems to require Chinese companies to turnover data. But it would be very hard to believe that the Chinese would not want to do the same thing that the U.S. has done, which is exploit these tech platforms. And then finally, there is increasingly a framing of this debate as one over values or ideology, right? That democracies use cybertechnologies or digital technologies in a different way than China does. China's promoting digital authoritarianism, that has to do about control of information as well as surveillance. And the U.S. has really pushed back and said, you know, democracies have to describe how we're going to use these technologies. Now, the competition has played itself out both domestically and internationally. The Chinese have been incredibly active domestically. Xi Jinping declared that cybersecurity was national security. He took control of a small leadership group that became a separate commission. The Cyberspace Administration of China was established and given lots of powers on regulating cybersecurity. We had a creation of three important laws—the cybersecurity law, the data security law, and the private—personal information protection law. We see China pushing very hard on specific technologies they think are going to be important for this competition, especially AI and quantum. And we see China pushing diplomatically, partly through the idea of what's called cyber-sovereignty. So not the idea that internet is free and open and should be somewhat free from government regulation, but instead that cyberspace, like every other space, is going to be regulated, and that states should be free to do it as they see fit, as fits their own political and social characteristics, and they should not be criticized by other states. They promoted this view through U.N. organizations in particular. And they've been working with the Russians to have a kind of treaty on information and communication technologies that would include not only cybersecurity, but their concerns about content and the free flow of information. The U.S. right now is essentially continuing a policy that was started under the Trump administration. So part of that is to try and stop the flow of technology to Chinese firms, and in particular to handicap and damage Huawei, the Chinese telecom supplier, to put pressure on friends to not use Huawei. But the most important thing it did was put Huawei on an entity list, which cut it off from semiconductors, most importantly from Taiwan Semiconductor, which has really hurt the Huawei of products. The U.S. tried to come to an agreement about—with China about what types of espionage are considered legitimate. And not surprisingly, the U.S. said there was good hacking and back hacking. And the good hacking is the type of hacking that the U.S. tends to do, and the bad hacking is the type of hacking that the Chinese tend to do. So, basically the argument was, well, all states were going to conduct political and military espionage, but industrial espionage should be beyond the pale. Or if you put it—you can think of it as the way President Obama put it, you can hack into my iPhone to get secrets about what I'm discussing with my Cabinet, but you can't hack into Apple to get the secrets about how iPhones are made to give to Huawei. There was an agreement formed in 2015, where both sides said they weren't going to engage in industrial espionage—cyber industrial espionage. For about a year and a half, that agreement seemed to hold. And then it—and then it fell apart. The Chinese are engaged in that activity again. And as a result, the U.S. has once again started indicting Chinese hackers, trying to create—enforce that norm through indictments and naming and shaming. The U.S. probably also—although I have no evidence of it—has engaged in disrupting Chinese hackers. So we know under the Trump administrationm Cyber Command moved to a more forward-leaning posture, called defending forward or persistent engagement. We've heard about some of those operations against Russian or Iranian actors. John Bolton, before he left the NSC, suggested they were getting used against Chinese cyberhackers as well. So what comes next? And it's often hard, if not impossible, to end cyber talks on a positive note, but I will try. So I think from a U.S. perspective, clearly the kind of tech pressure, not only of Huawei but on a broader range of companies, is going to continue. The Biden administration has shown no signal that it is going to roll any of that back. And it's actually expanded it, to more companies working on quantum and other technologies. The Biden administration has worked much more actively than the Trump administration on building alliances around cybersecurity. So in particular, the tech and trade competition group with the Europeans and the quad, with Australia, India, and Japan all have discussions on cybersecurity norms. So how do you actually start imposing them? Now, where you would hope that the U.S. and China would start talking to each other, again, is where I hope the Biden administration can eventually get to. So there were some very brief discussions in the Obama administration. The Trump administration had one round of talks, but that were not particularly useful. The Chinese were very unwilling to bring people from the People's Liberation Army to actually kind of talk about operations, and generally were in denial about that they had any cyber forces. But you want both sides really to start talking more about where the threshold for the use of force might be in a cyberattack, right? So if you think about—most of what we've seen, as I said, is spying. And so that is kind of the—is below the threshold for use of force or an armed attack, the thing that generally triggers kinetic escalation. But there's no general understanding of where that threshold might be. And in particular, during a crisis, let's stay, in the street or in the South China Sea, you want to have some kind of clarity about where that line might be. Now, I don't think we're ever going to get a very clear picture, because both sides are going to want to be able to kind of skate as close to it as possible, but we would certainly want to have a conversation with the Chinese about how we might signal that. Can we have hotlines to discuss those kind of thresholds? Also, we want to make sure that both sides aren't targeting each other's nuclear command and control systems, right, with cyberattacks, because that would make any crisis even worse. There's some debate about whether the Chinese command and control systems are integrated with civilian systems. So things that the U.S. might go after could then perhaps spillover into the Chinese nuclear system, which would be very risky. So you want to have some talks about that. And then finally, you probably want to talk—because the Chinese open-source writing seems to suggest that they are not as concerned about escalation in cyber as we are. There's been a lot of debate in the U.S. about if escalation is a risk in cyber. But the Chinese don't actually seem to think it's much of a risk. And so it would be very useful to have some discussions on that point as well. I'll stop there, Irina, and looking forward to the questions. FASKIANOS: Thank you, Adam. That was great analysis and overview and specifics. So we're going to go first to Babak Salimitari, an undergrad student at the University of California, Irvine. So please be sure to unmute yourself. Q: I did. Can you guys hear me? SEGAL: Yeah. Q: Thank you for doing this. I had a question on the Beijing Olympics that are coming up. Recently the told the athletes to use, like, burner phones because the health apps are for spying, or they've got, like, security concerns. What specific concerns do they have regarding those apps, and what do they do? SEGAL: So I think the concerns are both specific and broad. I think there was a concern that one of the apps that all of the athletes had to download had significant security vulnerabilities. So I think that was a study done by Citizens Lab at the University of Toronto. And it basically said, look, this is a very unsafe app and, as you said, allowed access to health data and other private information, and anyone could probably fairly easily hack that. So, you know, if you're an athlete or anyone else, you don't want that private information being exposed to or handled by others. Then there's, I think, the broader concern is that probably anybody who connects to a network in China, that's going to be unsafe. And so, you know, because everyone is using wi-fi in the Chinese Olympics, and those systems are going to be monitored, those—your data is not going to be safe. You know, I'm not all that concerned for most athletes. You know, there's probably not a lot of reason why Chinese intelligence or police are interested in them. But there are probably athletes who are concerned, for example, about Xinjiang and the treatment of the Uighurs, or, you know, maybe Tibetan activists or other things, and maybe have somewhere in the back of their minds some idea about making statements or making statements when they get back to the U.S. or safer places. And for those people, definitely I would be worried about the risk of surveillance and perhaps using that data for other types of harassment. FASKIANOS: I'm going to take the written question from Denis Simon, who received two upvotes. And Denis is senior advisor to the president for China affairs and professor of China business and technology. When you say “they” with respect to Chinese cyber activity, who is “they”? To what extent are there rogue groups and ultranationalists as well as criminals involved? SEGAL: Yes, Denis, will send me a nasty email if I don't mention that Denis was my professor. We're not going to go how many years ago, but when I was at Fletcher. So, and Denis was one of the first people I took—was the first person I took a class on Chinese technology. So, you know, and then I ended up here. So I think, “they.” So it depends what type of attacks we're talking about. On the espionage side, cyber espionage side, what we've generally seen is that a lot of that was moved from the PLA to the Ministry of State Security. The most recent indictments include some actors that seem to be criminal or at least front organizations. So some technology organizations. We do know that there are, you know, individual hackers in China who will contract their services out. There were in the '90s a lot of nationalist hacktivist groups, but those have pretty much dissipated except inside of China. So we do see a lot of nationalist trolls and others going after people inside of China, journalists and others, for offending China or other types of violations. So “they” is kind of a whole range of actors depending upon the types of attack we're talking about. FASKIANOS: Thank you. So our next question we're going to take from Terron Adlam, who is an undergraduate student at the University of Delaware. And if you can unmute yourself. Q: Can you hear me now? FASKIANOS: Yes. Q: Hi. Good evening. Yes. So I was wondering, do you think there will be a time were we have net neutrality? Like, we have a peace agreement amongst every nation? Because I feel like, honestly, if Russia, U.S., Mexico, any other country out there that have a problem with each other, this would be, like, there's rules of war. You don't biohazard attack another country. Do you think—(audio break)—or otherwise? SEGAL: So I think it's very hard to imagine a world where there's no cyber activity. So there are discussions about can you limit the types of conflict in cyberspace, though the U.N. primarily. And they have started to define some of the rules of the road that are very similar to other international law applying to armed conflict. So the U.S.' position is essentially that international law applies in cyberspace, and things like the International Humanitarian Law apply in cyberspace. And you can have things like, you know, neutrality, and proportionality, and distinction. But they're hard to think about in cyber, but we can—that's what we should be doing. The Chinese and Russians have often argued we need a different type of treaty, that cyber is different. But given how valuable it seems, at least on the espionage side so far, I don't think it's very likely we'll ever get an agreement where we have no activity in cyberspace. We might get something that says, you know, certain types of targets should be off limits. You shouldn't go after a hospital, or you shouldn't go after, you know, health data, things like that. But not a, you know, world peace kind of treaty. FASKIANOS: Thank you. So I'm going to take the next question from David Woodside at Fordham University. Three upvotes. What role does North Korea play in U.S.-China cyber discussions? Can you China act outside of cybersecurity agreements through its North Korean ally? SEGAL: Yeah. I think, you know, like many things with North Korea, the Chinese probably have a great deal of visibility. They have a few levers that they really don't like using, but not a huge number. So, in particular, if you remember when North Korea hacked Sony and because of the—you know, the movie from Seth Rogan and Franco about the North Korean leader—those hackers seemed to be located in northern China, in Shenyang. So there was some sense that the Chinese probably could have, you know, controlled that. Since then, we have seen a migration of North Korean operators out of kind of north China. They now operate out of India, and Malaysia, and some other places. Also, Russia helped build another cable to North Korea, so the North Koreans are not as dependent on China. I think it's very unlikely that the Chinese would kind of use North Korean proxies. I think the trust is very low of North Korean operators that they would, you know, have China's interest in mind or that they might not overstep, that they would bring a great deal of kind of blowback to China there. So there's been very little kind of—I would say kind of looking the other way earlier in much of North Korea's actions. These days, I think probably less. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I'm going to take the next question from Joan Kaufman at Harvard University. And if you can unmute yourself. Q: Yes. Thank you very much. I'm also with the Schwarzman Scholars program, the academic director. And I wanted to ask a follow up on your point about internet sovereignty. And, you know, the larger global governance bodies and mechanisms for, you know, internet governance and, you know, China's role therein. I know China's taken a much more muscular stance on, you know, the sovereignty issue, and justification for firewalls. So there's a lot—there are a lot of countries that are sort of in the me too, you know, movement behind that, who do want to restrict the internet. So I just—could you give us a little update on what's the status of that, versus, like, the Net Mundial people, who call for the total openness of the internet. And where is China in that space? How much influence does it have? And is it really—do you think the rules of the road are going to change in any significant way as a result of that? SEGAL: Yeah. So, you know, I think in some ways actually China has been less vocal about the phrase “cyber sovereignty.” The Wuzhen Internet Conference, which is kind of—China developed as a separate platform for promoting its ideas—you don't see the phrase used as much, although the Chinese are still interjecting it, as we mentioned, in lots of kind of U.N. documents and other ideas. I think partly they don't—they don't promote as much because they don't have to, because the idea of cyber sovereignty is now pretty widely accepted. And I don't think it's because of Chinese actions. I think it's because there is widespread distrust and dissatisfaction with the internet that, you know, spans all types of regime types, right? Just look at any country, including the United States. We're having a debate about how free and open the internet should be, what role firms should play in content moderation, should the government be allowed to take things down? You know, we've seen lots of countries passing fake news or online content moderation laws. There's a lot of concern about data localization that countries are doing because of purported economic or law enforcement reasons. So I don't think the Chinese really have to push cyber sovereignty that much because it is very attractive to lots of countries for specific reasons. Now, there is still, I think, a lot of engagement China has with other countries around what we would call cyber sovereignty, because China—countries know that, you know, China both has the experience with it, and will help pay for it. So certainly around the Belt and Road Initiative and other developing economies we do see, you know, the Chinese doing training of people on media management, or online management. There was this story just last week about, you know, Cambodia's internet looking more like the Chinese internet. We know Vietnam copied part of their cybersecurity law from the Chinese law. A story maybe two years ago about Huawei helping in Zambia and Zimbabwe, if I remember correctly, in surveilling opposition members. So I think China, you know, still remains a big force around it. I think the idea still is cyber sovereignty. I just don't think we see the phrase anymore. And I think there's lots of demand pulls. Not China pushing it on other countries, I think lots of countries have decided, yeah, of course we're going to regulate the internet. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Next question, from Ken Mayers, senior adjunct professor of history and political science at St. Francis College. Following up on Denis Simon's question, to what extent to Chinese state actors and U.S. state actors share concerns about asymmetric threats to cybersecurity? Is there common ground for discussion? And I'm going to—actually, I'll stop there, because— SEGAL: All right. So I'm going to interpret asymmetric threats meaning kind of cyber threats from other actors, meaning kind of nonstate or terrorist actors, or criminal actors. So I think there could be a shared interest. It's very hard to operationalize. Probably about six or seven years ago I wrote a piece with a Chinese scholar that said, yes, of course we have a shared interest in preventing the proliferation of these weapons to terrorist actors and nonstate actors. But then it was very hard to figure out how you would share that information without exposing yourself to other types of attacks, or perhaps empowering your potential adversary. On cyber—for example, on ransomware, you would actually expect there could be some shared interest, since the Chinese have been victims of a fair number of Russian ransomware attacks. But given the close relationship between Putin and Xi these days, it's hard to imagine that the U.S. and China are going to gang up on Russia on ransomware. So, again, I think there could be, it's just very hard to operationalize. FASKIANOS: Great. Thank you. So just to follow on from Skyler Duggan, who is an undergraduate at the University of Waterloo. Likewise, to these questions, how do we differentiate individual criminal groups from the state? And how can we be sure this isn't China just trying to abdicate—or, one party, he doesn't specify, trying to abdicate the responsibility? SEGAL: Yeah, I think—because there's—one of the challenges faced by the U.S. and other liberal democracies is that we tend to primarily keep a fairly tight legal control over the cyber operations. They tend to be, you know, intelligence operations or military operations. So Title 10 or Title 50. There's kind of a whole set of legal norms around it. The U.S. does not rely on proxy actors. And other, you know, liberal democracies tend to don't. And U.S. adversaries in this space tend to do so. We know Iran does. We know Russia does. We know China does, although less than the others. Now according to this discussion group that I mentioned before at the U.N., the group of—what's called the group of government experts, one of the norms that all the actors agreed upon was the norm of state responsibility, which is a common one in international law, that you are responsible for whatever happens in your territory. So using proxies should not, you know, be able to give you an out. You shouldn't be able to say, well, it's happening from our territory, we just—you know, we don't know who they are and we can't control them. But, you know, in operation that norm is being fairly widely ignored. Now, the other problem, of course, is the—is how do you actually decide who the actor is, the attribution problem, right? So here, you know, a lot of people are basically saying, well, we have to rely on the U.S. or the U.K. or others to say, well, you know, we say it's these actors, and how do we know—how do we know for sure? Now, attribution is not as hard as we once thought it was going to be. When I first, you know, started doing the research for the book that Irina mentioned, attribution was considered, you know, a pretty big challenge. But now, you know, there's a fairly high expectation that the U.S. will be able to eventually identify who's behind an attack. Now, it may take some time. And we may not be able to completely identify who ordered the attack, which is, you know, as you mentioned, the problem with the proxies. But it's not—it's also not completely reliant on digital clearances. It's not just the code or the language of the keyboard. All those things can be manipulated, don't necessarily give you proof. Lots of time the U.S. is pulling in other intelligence—like, human intelligence, signals intelligence, other types of gathering. So, you know, part of it is how much do we believe the attribution, and then how much of it is—you know, what can you do with it afterwards? And, you know, I don't think the proxy problem is going to go away. FASKIANOS: Great. So I'm going next to Tim Hofmockel's question. It's gotten seven upvotes. He's a graduate student at Georgetown University. To flip Denis Simon's question: Who should the “we” be? To what extent should the U.S. intelligence community and the Department of Defense cooperate on offensive cyber operations? And how would we signal our intentions in a crisis given the overlap in authorities between the intelligence community and DOD? SEGAL: Yeah. I mean, so right now NSA and Cyber Command are dual hatted, meaning that one person is in charge of both of them, General Nakasone. So to some extent that could theoretically help deconflict between kind of intelligence gathering, offensive operations, and kind of signaling to the Chinese. But it's unclear. It's very—signaling in cyber so far seems to be kind of developing and unknown. That seems to be one of the big theories between the U.S. taking these more kinds of operations and, in fact, kind of bringing the fight to the Chinese is a very kind of sociological understanding of deterrence is that over time both sides will kind of understand where those red lines are by engaging and seeing where they're acting. You know, others have talked about could you create some kind of watermark on the actual attack or vulnerability, so that the—you know, you might discover some type of malware in your system and there'd be like a little, you know, NFT, maybe, of sorts, that says, you know, the U.S. government was here. We're warning you not to do this thing. You know, a lot of these have, you know, kind of technical problems. But the question of signaling I think is really hard, and that's part of the reason why, you know, I think these discussions are so important, that at least we have a sense that we're talking about the same types of things, and the same general set of tools. But I think probably through cyber signaling is going to be really hard. It's going to be mostly other types of signaling. FASKIANOS: Next question from Maryalice Mazzara. She's the director of educational programs at the State University of New York's Office of Global Affairs. How can people who are working with China and have a very positive relationship with China balance the issues of cybersecurity with the work we are doing? Are there some positive approaches we can take with our Chinese colleagues in addressing these concerns? SEGAL: Good question, Ali. How are you? So I guess it's very—so I do think there are forward-looking things that we can talk about. You know, several of the questions have asked, are there shared interests here? And I do think there are shared interests. You know, you we mentioned the proliferation one. We mentioned the nonstate actors. You know, there is a lot of language in the most recent statement from the Chinese government about—you know, that the internet should be democratic and open. I don't think they mean it in the same way that we do, but we can, I think, certainly use that language to have discussions about it and hope push to those sides. But I think it is hard because it is—you know, partly because government choices, right? The U.S. government chooses to attribute lots of attacks to China and be very public about it. Chinese for the most part don't attribute attacks, and don't—they talk about the U.S. as being the biggest threat in cyberspace, and call the U.S. The Matrix and the most, you know, damaging force in cyberspace. But for the most part, don't call out specific actors. So they kind of view it—the Chinese side is often in a kind of defensive crouch, basically saying, you know, who are you to judge us, and you guys are hypocrites, and everything else. So I think there are lots of reasons that make it hard. I think probably the way to do it is to try to look forward to these shared interests and this idea that we all benefitted immensely from a global internet. We now have different views of how open that internet should be. But I think we still want to maintain—the most remarkable thing about it is that we can, you know, still communicate with people around the world, we can still learn from people around the world, we can still draw information, most information, from around the world. And we want to, you know, keep that, which is a—which is—you know, not to use a Chinese phrase—but is a win-win for everybody. FASKIANOS: Great. I see a raised hand from Austin Oaks. And I can't get my roster up fast enough, so, Austin, if you can unmute and identify yourself. Q: So I'm Austin Oaks. And I come from the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater. And I used to live in Guangdong province in China. And I used to go visit Hong Kong and Macau, more Hong Kong, very often. And Hong Kong has this very free internet, which China doesn't particularly like. Macau tends to be more submissive to Beijing rather than Hong Kong does. But Chinese government has kind of started to put in people in the Hong Kong government to kind of sway the government into Beijing's orbit more. So then how—so what is China doing in the cyberspace world for both of its separate administrative regions? Because one is a lot easier to control than the other. SEGAL: Yeah. So I think the idea of Hong Kong's internet being independent and free is—it's pretty much ending, right? So the national security law covers Hong Kong and allows the government to increasingly censor and filter and arrest people for what they are posting. We saw pressure on U.S. companies to handover data of some users. A lot of the U.S. companies say they're going to move their headquarters or personnel out of Hong Kong because of those concerns. So, you know, it certainly is more open than the mainland is, but I think long-term trends are clearly pretty negative for Hong Kong. I expect Macau is the same direction, but as you mentioned, you know, the politics of Macau is just so much different from Hong Kong that it's less of a concern for the Chinese. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I'm going to take the next written question from Robert Harrison, a law student at Washburn University School of Law. My understanding is that there have been significant thefts of American small and medium-size business intellectual property by Chinese-based actors. This theft/transfer of knowledge may reduce the competitive edge from the original property holder. Are there any current efforts to curb IP thefts? Any ongoing analysis of the Belt and Road Initiative to evaluate the use of IP acquired by theft? SEGAL: Yeah. So, you know, as I mentioned, the U.S. tried to reach this agreement with China on the IP theft challenge. China held to it for about a year, and then essentially kind of went back to it. It's been very hard to quantify the actual impact of what the theft has been. You know, there are numbers thrown around, a certain percent of GDP, or 250 billion (dollars) a year. There is what's called the IP Commission, which is run out of the National Bureau of Asia Research that has been updating its report. But it's very hard because, you know, a lot of the knowledge and data that's stolen is tacit knowledge. Or, you know, is actual blueprints or IP, but they don't have the tactic knowledge. So you can have the blueprints, but it's then hard to turn from that to an actual product. And it's hard in the civilian space to kind of track lots of products that seem stolen from U.S. products, as opposed to—on the military side you can look at, oh, here's the Chinese stealth jet. It looks a lot like the U.S. stealth jet. Now, this could be physics. It could be intellectual property theft. But it's harder on the commercial side to kind of put a number on it and see what the impact is. Although clearly, it's had an impact. We do know that Chinese operators, you know, go after other targets other than the U.S., right? So they certainly go—are active in Europe. We've seen them in Southeast Asia. Most of that is probably political espionage, not as much industrial espionage. Although, there has been—has been some. I don't know of any specific cases where we can point to anything along the Belt and Road Initiative that, you know, seems in and of itself the outcome of IP theft. FASKIANOS: I'm going to take a written question from Caroline Wagner, who is the Milton and Roslyn Wolf chair in international affairs at Ohio State University. Chinese actors seem to have incredibly pervasive links to track online discussions critical of China. Are these mostly bots, or are there human actors behind them? SEGAL: So I'm going to interpret that to me for the net outside of China. So, yes. I think what we're learning is there's several things going on. Part of it is bots. So they have, you know, a number of bots that are triggered by certain phrases. Some of it is human, but increasingly probably a lot of it is machine learning. So there was a story maybe last month in the Post, if I remember it correctly, about, you know, Chinese analytical software data companies offering their services to local Ministry of State Security to basically kind of scrape and monitor U.S. platforms. And that is primarily going to be done through, you know, machine learning, and maybe a little human operations as well. FASKIANOS: Thank you. And this is a bit of a follow-on, and then I'll go to more. William Weeks, who is an undergraduate at Arizona State University asks: What role does unsupervised machine learning play in China's cyberspace strategy? SEGAL: Yeah, it's a good question. I don't have a lot of details. You know, like everybody else there, they are going to start using it on defense. It is a big push on what's called military-civil fusion. You know, we know that they are trying to pull in from the private sector on AI, both for the defense and the offense side. But right now, all I can give you is kind of general speculation about how actors think about offense and defense with ML and AI. Not a lot of specifics from the Chinese here. FASKIANOS: Thank you. OK, Morton Holbrook, who's at Kentucky Wesleyan College. Q: Yes. Following up on your comment about Hong Kong, about U.S. companies reconsidering their presence due to internet controls, what about U.S. companies in China and Beijing and Shanghai? Do you see a similar trend there regarding internet controls, or regarding IPR theft? SEGAL: I think, you know, almost all firms that have been in China, this has been a constant issue for them. So it's not particularly new. I think almost all of them have, you know, made decisions both about how to protect their intellectual property theft—intellectual property from theft, and how to maintain connections to the outside, to make them harder. You know, VPNs were fairly widely used. Now they're more tightly regulated. We know that the Chinese actually can attack VPNs. So it think, you know, those issues have been constant irritants. I think, you know, COVID and the lack of travel, the worry about getting kind of caught up in nationalist backlashes online to, you know, Xinjiang issues or if you refer to Taiwan incorrectly, those are probably higher concerns right now than these kind of more constant concerns about cyber and IP. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Anson Wang, who's an undergraduate at the University of Waterloo. We have three upvotes. Is China considered the major threat to the U.S. hegemony because China is actively trying to replace the U.S. as the new global hegemon? Or simply because China is on a trajectory to get there, without or without their active intention in involving other countries' internal politics, the same way that the U.S. does? SEGAL: Yeah. So I think this is a—you know, a larger question about what China wants in the world. And do we—you know, we do we think it has a plan or ideology of replacing the U.S.? And does it want—or, would it be happen even with regional dominance? Does it just want to block U.S. interest and others? It's a big debate. You know, lots of people have contrasting views on where they think China is coming. I'll just use the cyber example. And I think here, you know, the Chinese started with wanting to block the U.S., and prevent the U.S. from criticizing China, and protect itself. I don't think it had any desire to reshape the global internet. But I think that's changed. I think under Xi Jinping they really want to change the definitions of what people think the state should do in this space. I think they want to change the shape of the internet. I don't think they want to spread their model to every country, but if you want to build their model they're certainly welcome to help you. And they don't mind pushing, perhaps highlighting, in some cases exploiting the weaknesses they see in the U.S. as well. FASKIANOS: OK. Thank you. I'm going to go to Helen You, who's a student at NYU. It appears that governments are reluctant to restrict their cyber capabilities because they fundamentally do not want to limit their own freedom to launch cyberattacks. As a result, countries fail to follow voluntary norms on what is permissible in cyberspace. To what extent are industry standards influencing international cybersecurity norms? And what incentives would need to be in place to move these conversations forward? SEGAL: Yeah, that's a great point. I mean, I think that's one of the reasons why we haven't seen a lot of progress, is because states don't have a lot of reason to stop doing it. The costs are low, and the benefits seem to be high. Now, I understand your question in two separate ways. One, there is a kind of private attempt to push these norms, and basically arguing that states are going too slow. Part of that was promoted by Microsoft, the company, right? So it promoted the idea of what they were calling the Digital Geneva Convention, and then they have been involved in what's now known as the Paris Accords that define some of these rules, that the U.S. just signed onto, and some other states have signed onto. But again, the norms are pretty vague, and haven't seemed to have that much effect. There's a thing called the cybersecurity—Global Cybersecurity Stability Commission that the Dutch government helped fund but was mainly through think tanks and academics. It also has a list of norms. So there is a kind of norm entrepreneurship going on. And those ideas are slowly kind of bubbling out there. But you need to see changes in the state to get there. That's when we know that norms matter. And that we really haven't seen. On the—there is a lot of work, of course, going on, on the standards of cybersecurity, and what companies should do, how they should be defined. And that happens both domestically and internationally. And of course, the companies are very involved in that. And, you know, that is much further, right? Because that has to do about regulation inside of markets, although there's still, you know, a fair amount of difference between the U.S. and EU and other close economies about how those standards should be defined, who should do the defining, how they should be implemented. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I'm going to take group two questions from Dr. Mursel Dogrul of the Turkish National Defense University. In a most recent article we focused on the blockchain literature expansion of superpowers. In terms of publications and citations, China clearly outperformed the United States and Russia. Do you believe the technological advancement will have an impact on the cybersecurity race? And the Michael Trevett—I don't have an affiliation—wanted you to speak a little bit more about the cyber triangle with Russia. How are China and Russia coordinating and cooperating? SEGAL: Yeah. So the first question, you know, clearly, as I have briefly mentioned in my opening comments, that the Chinese are pushing very hard on the technologies they think are going to be critical to the—to the future competition in this space—blockchain, quantum, AI. The Chinese have made a lot of advances on quantum communication and quantum key distribution. Probably behind the U.S. on quantum computing, but it's hard to say for sure. And blockchain is a space the Chinese have developed some usages and are rolling some test cases out on the security side and the internet platforming side. On the China-Russia question, so closer cooperation. Most of it has been around cyber sovereignty, and the ideas of kind of global governance of cyberspace. The Chinese were, you know, pretty helpful at the beginning stages, when Russia started using more technological means to censoring and controlling the Russian internet. So helping kind of build some of the—or, export some of the technologies used in the China great firewall, that the Russians could help develop. Russia is pretty much all-in with Huawei on 5G. And so a lot of cooperation there. Although, the Russians are also worried about, you know, Chinese espionage from Russian technology and other secrets. They did sign a nonaggression cyber pact between the two, but both sides continue to hack each other and steal each other's secrets. And have not seen any evidence of cooperation on the operations side, on intelligence. with them doing more and more military exercises together, I would suspect we would perhaps start seeing some suggestion that they were coordinating on the military side in cyber. But the last time I looked, I didn't really see any—I did not see any analysis of that. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Next question from Jeffrey Rosensweig, who is the director of the program for business and public policy at Emory University. Q: Adam, I wonder if you could fit India in here anywhere you would like to? Because it think it'll be the other great economy of the future. SEGAL: Yeah. So India's a—you know, a really interesting actor in this space, right? So, you know, India basically think that it has two major cyber threats—Pakistan, and China being the other. China, you know, was reportedly behind some of the blackouts in Mumbai after the border clash. I am somewhat skeptical about reporting, but it's certainly a possibility, and there's no reason to doubt the Chinese have been mapping critical infrastructure there. India pushed back on TikTok and ByteDance. You know, also concerns about data control and other things. There is a long history of kind of going back and forth on Huawei. The intelligence agency has not really wanted to use, but others wanting to help, you know, bridge the digital divide and build out pretty quickly. India right now is talking about its own type of 5G. But from a U.S. perspective, you know, I think the most important thing—and this is often how India comes up—is that, you know, we want India to be an amplifier, promoter of a lot of these norms on cyber governance, because it is a, you know, developing, multiethnic, multiparty democracy. And so we want it just not to be the U.S.' voice. Now, India's a pretty complicated, difficult messenger for those things these days, right? India leads the world in internet shutdowns, and we've seen a lot of harassment of opposition leaders and other people who are opposed to Modi. So it's not going to be easy. But I think the U.S. for a long time has hoped that we could forge a greater understanding on the cyber side with India. FASKIANOS: Great. I'm going to take the next question from Michael O'Hara, who is a professor at the U.S. Naval War College. And I'm going to shorten it. He asks about China's fourteenth five-year plan, from 2021 to 2025. It includes a section titled “Accelerate digitalization-based development and construct a digital China.” Do you see their five-year plan as a useful way for thinking about Chinese future in cyberspace? SEGAL: Yes. So we're on the same page, the digital plan came out two or three weeks ago. It was just translated. Yeah, I mean, the plan is useful. Like, all Chinese plans are useful in the sense that it certainly gives us clear thinking about the direction that China wants to go, and the importance it puts on a topic. You know, the implementation and bureaucratic obstacles and all those other things are going to play a role. But as I mentioned, I think, you know, the Chinese economy is becoming increasingly digitalized. And in particular, they want to digitize, you know, more and more of the manufacturing sector and transportation, mining, other sectors that are traditionally not, you know, thought of as being digital, but the Chinese really want to move into that space. Now, from a cybersecurity perspective, that, you know, raises a whole range of new vulnerabilities and security issues. And so I think that's going to be very high on their thinking. And just today I tweeted a story that they held a meeting on thinking about cybersecurity in the metaverse. So, you know, they're looking forward, and cybersecurity is going to be a very high concern of people. FASKIANOS: Well, we couldn't have the Naval Academy without the U.S. Air Force Academy. So, Chris Miller, you wrote your question, but you've also raised your hand. So I'm going to ask to have you articulate it yourself. Q: Well, actually, I changed questions, Irina. Adam, thank you. FASKIANOS: Oh, OK. (Laughs.) But still, the Air Force Academy. Q: So two quick questions. I'll combine them. One is: I'm curious how you see the new cyber director—national cyber director's role changing this dynamic, if it at all, or changing the parts of it on our side of the Pacific that we care about. And second of all, curious how you see China viewing the Taiwanese infrastructure that they probably desire, whether or not they eventually take it by force or by persuasion. SEGAL: Yeah. So I don't think the NCD changes the dynamic very much. You know, I think there's lots of—you know, everyone is watching to see how the NCD and the National Security Council, and CISA, the Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency, work out the responsibilities among the three of them, which will have an impact, you know, of making us more secure. And, you know, Chris Inglis, the head of the NCD has given lots of talks about how they're going to manage and work together. And I think we're beginning to see some signs of that. But I think that's probably the most direct impact it'll have on the dynamic. Your second question, you know, I think primarily is about, you know, Taiwan Semiconductor. And, you know, do the Chinese eventually decide, well, chips are so important, and the U.S. is working so hard to cut us off, that, you know, for all the other reasons that we might want to see Taiwan, you know, that one is going to get moved up? You know, I think it's a possibility. I think it's a very low possibility. I do think we don't know what the red lines are on the tech war, right? You know, there's been talk about cutting off SMIC, the Shanghai manufacturer of integrated circuits, are also a very important company to the Chinese. Would that push the Chinese to do more aggressive or assertive things in this space? You know, what is it that we do in that space that eventually pulls them out? But I think it's very hard—(audio break)—that they could capture TSMC in a shape that would be useful. Am I breaking up? FASKIANOS: Just a little bit, but it was fine. We have you now. SEGAL: Yeah. That you could capture TSMC in a shape that would be useful, right? I mean, there was that piece, I think, that was written by an Army person, maybe in Parameters, that, you know, the U.S. and Taiwan's plan should be basically just to—you know, to sabotage TSMC in case there's any invasion, and make that clear that that's what it's going to do. But even without that risk, you're still dealing—you know, any damage and then, flight of people outside of Taiwan, because the Taiwanese engineers are really important. So it would be very high risk, I think, that they could capture it and then use it. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Well, I am sorry that we couldn't get to all the questions, but this has been a great conversation. Adam Segal, thank you very much for being with us. You know, you're such a great resource. I'm going to task you after this, there was a question from Andrew Moore at the University of Kansas about other resources and books that you would suggest to learn more about China and cybersecurity. So I'm going to get—come to you after this for a few suggestions, which we will send out to the group along with the link to this video and the transcript. So, Andrew, we will get back to you and share with everybody else. And so, again, you can follow Dr. Segal on Twitter at @adschina. Is that correct, Adam? SEGAL: That's right. FASKIANOS: OK. And also sign up for—to receive blog alerts for Net Politics you can go to CFR.org for that. Our next webinar will be on Wednesday, February 9, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time. And we're excited to have Patrick Dennis Duddy, director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Duke, to talk about democracy in Latin America. So thank you for being with us. You can follow us on Twitter at @CFR_Academic. Visit CFR.org, foreignaffairs.com and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for new research and analysis on other global issues. And again, Adam, thank you very much for being with us. We appreciate it. SEGAL: My pleasure. FASKIANOS: Take care. FASKIANOS: Welcome to the first session of the Winter/Spring 2022 CFR Academic Webinar Series. I'm Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. Today's discussion is on the record, and the video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org/academic. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We are delighted to have Adam Segal with us to discuss cyberspace and U.S.-China relations. Adam Segal is CFR's Ira A. Lipman chair in emerging technologies and national security and director of the Council's Digital and Cyberspace Policy program. Previously, he served as an arms control analyst for the China Project at the Union of Concerned Scientists. He has been a visiting scholar at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, MIT's Center for International Studies, the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, and Tsinghua University in Beijing. And he's taught courses at Vassar College and Columbia University. Dr. Segal currently writes for the CFR blog, Net Politics—you should all sign up for those alerts, if you haven't already. And he is the author several books, including his latest, The Hacked World Order: How Nations Fight, Trade, Maneuver, and Manipulate in the Digital Age. So, Adam, thanks very much for being with us. We can begin with a very broad brush at cyberspace, the role cyberspace plays in U.S.-China relations, and have you make a few comments on the salient points. And then we'll open it up to the group for questions. SEGAL: Great. Irina, thanks very much. And thanks, everyone, for joining us this afternoon. I'm looking forward to the questions and the discussion. So broadly, I'm going to argue that the U.S. and China have the most far-reaching competition in cyberspace of any countries. And that competition goes all the way from the chip level to the rules of the road. So global governance all the way down the to the chips that we have in all of our phones. Coincidentally, and nicely timed, last week the Washington Post did a survey of their network of cyber experts about who was the greater threat to the United States, China or Russia. And it was actually almost exactly evenly split—forty to thirty-nine. But I, not surprisingly, fell into the China school. And my thinking is caught very nicely by a quote from Rob Joyce, who's a director at the National Security Agency, that Russia is like a hurricane while China is like climate change. So Russia causes sudden, kind of unpredictable damage. But China represents a long-term strategic threat. When we think about cyberspace, I think it's good to think about why it matters to both sides. And on the Chinese side, I think there are four primary concerns. The first is domestic stability, right? So China is worried that the outside internet will influence domestic stability and regime legitimacy. And so that's why it's built an incredibly sophisticated system for controlling information inside of China that relies both on technology, and intermediate liability, and other types of regulation. China is worried about technological dependence on other players, in particular the U.S., for semiconductors, network equipment, and other technologies. And they see cybersecurity as a way of reducing that technology. China has legitimate cybersecurity concerns like every other country. They're worried about attacks on their networks. And the Snowden revelations from the—Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor—show that the U.S. has significant cyber capabilities, and it has attacked and exploited vulnerabilities inside of China. And while the Chinese might have used to think that they were less vulnerable to cyberattacks given the shape of the Chinese network in the past, I think that probably changed around 2014-2015, especially as the Chinese economy has become increasingly dependent on ecommerce and digital technology. It's now—GDP is about a third dependent on digital technology. So they're worried about the same types of attacks the United States is worried about. And then, fourth and finally, China does not want the United States to be able to kind of define the rules of the road globally on cyber, create containing alliances around digital or cyber issues, and wants to constrain the ability of the U.S. to freely maneuver in cyberspace. Those are China's views. The U.S. has stated that it's working for a free, open, global, and interoperable internet, or an interoperable cyberspace. But when it looks at China, it has a number of specific concerns. The first is Chinese cyber operations, in particular Chinese espionage, and in particular from that Chinese industrial espionage, right? So the Chinese are known for being the most prolific operators, stealing intellectual property. But they're also hacking into political networks, going after think tanks, hacking activists—Uighur activists, Tibetan activists, Taiwanese independence activists. We know they're entering into networks to prepare the battlefield, right, so to map critical infrastructure in case there is a kinetic conflict with the United States—perhaps in the South China Sea or over the Taiwan Strait—and they want to be able to deter the U.S., or perhaps cause destructive attacks on the U.S. homeland, or U.S. bases in South Korea, or Japan. The U.S. is also extremely concerned about the global expansion of Chinese tech firms and Chinese platforms, for the collection of data, right? The U.S. exploited the globalization of U.S. tech firms. Again, that was something that we learned from the Snowden documents, that the U.S. both had legal and extralegal measures to be able to get data from users all around the world because of their knowledge of and relationship to U.S. tech firms. And there's no reason to believe that the Chinese will not do the same. Now, we hear a lot about, you know, Huawei and the national intelligence law in China that seems to require Chinese companies to turnover data. But it would be very hard to believe that the Chinese would not want to do the same thing that the U.S. has done, which is exploit these tech platforms. And then finally, there is increasingly a framing of this debate as one over values or ideology, right? That democracies use cybertechnologies or digital technologies in a different way than China does. China's promoting digital authoritarianism, that has to do about control of information as well as surveillance. And the U.S. has really pushed back and said, you know, democracies have to describe how we're going to use these technologies. Now, the competition has played itself out both domestically and internationally. The Chinese have been incredibly active domestically. Xi Jinping declared that cybersecurity was national security. He took control of a small leadership group that became a separate commission. The Cyberspace Administration of China was established and given lots of powers on regulating cybersecurity. We had a creation of three important laws—the cybersecurity law, the data security law, and the private—personal information protection law. We see China pushing very hard on specific technologies they think are going to be important for this competition, especially AI and quantum. And we see China pushing diplomatically, partly through the idea of what's called cyber-sovereignty. So not the idea that internet is free and open and should be somewhat free from government regulation, but instead that cyberspace, like every other space, is going to be regulated, and that states should be free to do it as they see fit, as fits their own political and social characteristics, and they should not be criticized by other states. They promoted this view through U.N. organizations in particular. And they've been working with the Russians to have a kind of treaty on information and communication technologies that would include not only cybersecurity, but their concerns about content and the free flow of information. The U.S. right now is essentially continuing a policy that was started under the Trump administration. So part of that is to try and stop the flow of technology to Chinese firms, and in particular to handicap and damage Huawei, the Chinese telecom supplier, to put pressure on friends to not use Huawei. But the most important thing it did was put Huawei on an entity list, which cut it off from semiconductors, most importantly from Taiwan Semiconductor, which has really hurt the Huawei of products. The U.S. tried to come to an agreement about—with China about what types of espionage are considered legitimate. And not surprisingly, the U.S. said there was good hacking and back hacking. And the good hacking is the type of hacking that the U.S. tends to do, and the bad hacking is the type of hacking that the Chinese tend to do. So, basically the argument was, well, all states were going to conduct political and military espionage, but industrial espionage should be beyond the pale. Or if you put it—you can think of it as the way President Obama put it, you can hack into my iPhone to get secrets about what I'm discussing with my Cabinet, but you can't hack into Apple to get the secrets about how iPhones are made to give to Huawei. There was an agreement formed in 2015, where both sides said they weren't going to engage in industrial espionage—cyber industrial espionage. For about a year and a half, that agreement seemed to hold. And then it—and then it fell apart. The Chinese are engaged in that activity again. And as a result, the U.S. has once again started indicting Chinese hackers, trying to create—enforce that norm through indictments and naming and shaming. The U.S. probably also—although I have no evidence of it—has engaged in disrupting Chinese hackers. So we know under the Trump administrationm Cyber Command moved to a more forward-leaning posture, called defending forward or persistent engagement. We've heard about some of those operations against Russian or Iranian actors. John Bolton, before he left the NSC, suggested they were getting used against Chinese cyberhackers as well. So what comes next? And it's often hard, if not impossible, to end cyber talks on a positive note, but I will try. So I think from a U.S. perspective, clearly the kind of tech pressure, not only of Huawei but on a broader range of companies, is going to continue. The Biden administration has shown no signal that it is going to roll any of that back. And it's actually expanded it, to more companies working on quantum and other technologies. The Biden administration has worked much more actively than the Trump administration on building alliances around cybersecurity. So in particular, the tech and trade competition group with the Europeans and the quad, with Australia, India, and Japan all have discussions on cybersecurity norms. So how do you actually start imposing them? Now, where you would hope that the U.S. and China would start talking to each other, again, is where I hope the Biden administration can eventually get to. So there were some very brief discussions in the Obama administration. The Trump administration had one round of talks, but that were not particularly useful. The Chinese were very unwilling to bring people from the People's Liberation Army to actually kind of talk about operations, and generally were in denial about that they had any cyber forces. But you want both sides really

I speak with Dr. Alessandro Arduino, the Co-Director of the Security & Crisis Management programme at the Shanghai Academy of Social Science (SASS-UNITO). Dr. Alessandro Arduino is the principal research fellow at the Middle East Institute (MEI), National University of Singapore. He is the co-director of the Security & Crisis Management International Centre at the Shanghai Academy of Social Science (SASS) and an associate at Lau China Institute, King's College London. His two decades of experience in China encompasses security analysis and crisis management. His main research interests include China, Central Asia and Middle East and North Africa relations, sovereign wealth funds, private military/security companies, and China's security and foreign policy. Alessandro is the author of several books and he has published papers and commentaries in various journals in Italian, English and Chinese. His most recent book is China's Private Army: Protecting the New Silk Road (Palgrave, 2018).

Congress increasingly recognizes that the Chinese Communist Party poses a mortal peril to our country and the rest of the world, which it seeks to dominate. Both houses have just approved bipartisan bills to counter the CCP's advantages in key technologies with ominous military applications. Thus, legislators should also weigh in on the Chinese Communists' success on an even more worrying front – namely, their deep compromise of top policymakers in the Biden Administration, from the President on down. Reportedly, a key addition to their ranks is Thomas Zimmerman, a Special Assistant to the President for Presidential Personnel. He's been a Fellow at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, which the FBI warns has close ties to China's spy agency. Such appointments are a clear counter-intelligence threat to America's national security. To learn more about the magnitude of this danger, visit AccountabilityInitiative.org. This is Frank Gaffney.

Last week, a cyberattack on the Colonial Pipeline system forced the shutdown of one of the nation’s most critical pieces of energy infrastructure, spurring price spikes and panicked buying to fill up tanks. While the pipeline is back up and running, the lasting significance of the Colonial outage--the largest attack on the US energy system in history--should not be overlooked.  In this edition of Columbia Energy Exchange, host Jason Bordoff is joined by Bob McNally and Adam Segal, leading experts on energy and cybersecurity, respectively, to examine what happened with the Colonial Pipeline system and what lessons should be drawn about the vulnerability and resilience of critical energy infrastructure.  Bob McNally is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy, and the founder and President of the Rapidan Energy Group. From 2001 to 2003, Bob served as the top international and domestic energy adviser on the White House staff. He is the author of the book Crude Volatility, published through the Center on Global Energy Policy book series. Adam Segal is the Ira A. Lipman chair in emerging technologies and national security, and director of the Digital and Cyberspace Policy program at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). He is the author of the  book The Hacked World Order: How Nations Fight, Trade, Maneuver, and Manipulate in the Digital Age. Before coming to CFR, Adam was an arms control analyst for the China Project at the Union of Concerned Scientists. He has been a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for International Studies, the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, and Tsinghua University in Beijing. 

A Quick Summary In this show, the “Where's Your Head At?” hosts talk with Tony Little about how he started his career in education, his advice for leaders and whether the past or future is a better time to live in. Tony's rich experience at Eton College is discussed along with the concept that “leaders must work from the heart”. You will also hear Tony's insightful thoughts on what will be important in education in the next 20 years.    Show notes In this episode… Introduction of Tony Little (2.45) What is Tony doing today? (4.50) How did Tony get into education? (7.30) What was the genesis of Tony's first book? (8.20) What is key for a good leader? (11.10) What made Eton special and what is the ‘game changer' in education today? (12.20) Can we substitute teachers with tech? (15.20) Advice for school leaders today (17.30) How do we get the balance right? (18.50) Where would Tony prefer to live...in the past or the future? (20.30) Leaders must carve out time for themselves (23.20) What were the key lessons Tony witnessed in his career? (24.20) How to contact Tony (27.30)   Bio  Tony Little Tony Little spent seven years as housemaster of Brentwood School, seven years as the headmaster of Chigwell School, six years as headmaster of Oakham School and 13 years as Head Master of Eton College. From 2015-18 he was Chief Education Officer of GEMS Education responsible for ensuring the quality of education across the global chain. From September 2018 he became President of the World Leading Schools Association, Shanghai Academy, developing a new generation of not-for-profit, needs-blind high schools in China. He also became Chair of the Laurus Trust, a multi-academy trust operating in the Manchester area. Since September 2020 he is the Chair of Governors at London Academy of Excellence, Stratford. Also the author of two books: An Intelligent Person's Guide to Education, and "Adolescence - How to Survive It",    Tony Little was educated at Eton College in Berkshire where he was a music scholar, and at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he was a choral scholar and gained an upper second class honours degree in English language and literature. He received a Master of Arts in English as well as Postgraduate Certificate in Education (Distinction) at Homerton College, Cambridge   Link Tony's Email Address: tonyrlittle@icloud.com 

This week is the second part of our two-part series on Chinese commercial launch. For those who missed Part I, a history of Chinese Commercial Launch, check out Episode 2 of this podcast!Last time we left off at the dawn of China’s private launch era. Having discussed the major state-owned companies and their respective rockets, we will now shift our attention to the plethora of privately-owned launch companies entering the Chinese market today. Some key takeaways:The launch industry in China is big, and it is surprisingly diverse. As discussed last time, the biggest players in the launch industry in China are subsidiaries of CASC—namely the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), and the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST). These two companies produce all current Long March rockets. With that said, the past 6 years have seen the launch industry become much bigger than just these two companies.Late 2014 saw the Chinese government publish “Document 60”, which began the process of opening specific industries, including launch, to private investment. Since the publishing of Document 60, we have seen no less than 15 commercial/most privately-owned launch companies emerge in China. Most of these companies aspire to build full rockets, though some have elected to focus on specific technologies, i.e. propulsion systems. Indeed, the number of new launch startups is so great, that people within the industry refer to a “First Generation” and “Second Generation” of Chinese private launch companies. Today, we provide a rundown of the companies, their rockets, the challenges and opportunities that they face, and what we might expect from these companies moving forward. Feel free to engage in a discussion with us through the comment section or by email. Follow us on YouTube and on https://www.dongfanghour.com/. And feel free to give this episode a thumbs-up/Like. It helps the channel!

Today's guest is Red Hong Yi – a Malaysian architect turned full-time artist known for painting without a paintbrush! One of the sweetest, friendliest and most talented people I know and am privileged to call a friend.

The recent kidnapping of three Chinese miners in the southwestern Nigerian state of Osun highlights the vulnerability that confronts the Chinese in many parts of Africa. Chinese companies are well-known for being willing to work in highly volatile regions, even amid civil wars in places like the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan, and Mali among others. Until recently, Chinese companies opted to not invest in security measures or contracted with international firms like G4S who've been active on the continent for many years. That's now starting to change as Chinese private security contractors see an opportunity to provide protective services to companies all along the Belt and Road including Africa. "In light of China’s “going out’’ policy, the need to support China’s State-Owned Enterprises that are investing in high-risk areas has expanded the Chinese market for security services," according to Dr. Alessandro Arduino, Co-Director of the Security & Crisis Management International Centre at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. "Risk assessment and mitigation in the African countries participating in the BRI requires a wide range of security services along both the maritime and land routes," he added in a recent column written for the China-Africa Research Initiative. Dr. Arduino joins Eric to discuss the growing market for Chinese protective services in Africa and the risks confronting these security contractors who are operating in new, unfamiliar territory. JOIN THE DISCUSSION: Facebook: www.facebook.com/ChinaAfricaProject Twitter: @eolander | @stadenesque  SUPPORT THIS PODCAST. BECOME A SUBSCRIBER TO THE CHINA AFRICA PROJECT. Your subscription supports independent journalism. Subscribers get the following: A daily email newsletter of the top China-Africa news. Access to the China-Africa Experts Network Unlimited access to the CAP's exclusive analysis content on chinaafricaproject.com Subscribe today and get one month free with the promo code PODCAST: www.chinaafricaproject.com/subscribe

In recent years, China has taken an increasingly active role in global affairs. From the managers of state owned enterprises to political and military leaders, Chinese have looked abroad, including to the resource rich Middle East. What does Chinese engagement mean for the region? What opportunities and challenges does the Belt and Road Initiative bring? Dr. Pan Guang, professor at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, Vice President of Chinese Association for Middle East Studies and director of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and Belt and Road Studies Center, joined the National Committee in New York on October 20, 2017 for a conversation with National Committee Vice President Jan Berris that addresses these critical questions. The National Committee on U.S.-China Relations (www.ncuscr.org) is the leading nonprofit nonpartisan organization that encourages understanding of China and the United States among citizens of both countries.

In recent years, China has taken an increasingly active role in global affairs. From the managers of state owned enterprises to political and military leaders, Chinese have looked abroad, including to the resource rich Middle East. What does Chinese engagement mean for the region? What opportunities and challenges does the Belt and Road Initiative bring? Dr. Pan Guang, professor at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, Vice President of Chinese Association for Middle East Studies and director of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and Belt and Road Studies Center, joined the National Committee in New York on October 20, 2017 for a conversation with National Committee Vice President Jan Berris that addresses these critical questions. The National Committee on U.S.-China Relations (www.ncuscr.org) is the leading nonprofit nonpartisan organization that encourages understanding of China and the United States among citizens of both countries.

This is Special English. I'm Ryan Price in Beijing. Here is the news. China has experienced an increase in cases of online data leaks in the past few years due to the development of the "cyber black market". That&`&s according to a report by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences&`& Institute of Information. The report is entitled "The Annual Report on Development of Cyberspace Security in China". It says cases relating to information leaks have become more frequent since last year, including the high-profile case involving Gfan, China&`&s largest online platform for Android systems. In the case, data of the platform&`&s more than 23 million users, including their names, passwords and email addresses, were made public on the internet. An estimated 560,000 people were engaged in the industry in the first six months of this year. From June last year to June this year, economic losses resulting from text message spam, online scams and information leaks totaled 91 billion yuan, roughly 13 billion U.S. dollars. Such losses were attributed to the cyber black market, a commercial chain where participants including hackers and network operators gain profits illegally. The industry is a growing multi-billion-US dollar economy. Experts say the most effective way of addressing the problem is to pass legislation on protecting information and clarify governmental departments&`& obligation on law enforcement and supervision. This is Special English.Northeast China has seen a population loss of more than 1 million people in the last ten years. Among them, many are high income earners and well-educated who are seeking better jobs and lifestyles outside the region.The National Development and Reform Commission released the information to counter earlier reports that northeast China was losing a population of one million people each year. Northeast China refers to the three provinces of Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang. It had long been one of China&`&s industrial heartlands. But in recent decades, northeast China is seeing a slower economic growth, which is a major concern of the regional governments. Wage levels for college graduates are similarly uncompetitive due to a relatively poor economy. The average salary levels in the region are one of the lowest in the country. The National Development and Reform Commission says many talents in the region have turned to companies elsewhere in China which offer better terms and conditions of employment.But some commentators suggested that it is not all about money; and the system has long applied restrains to the development of individuals. A low birth rate has also in contributed to the downward trend in the population growth in northeast China. You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Ryan Price in Beijing. Chinese astronaut Yang Liwei said he heard mysterious knocks during his trip in space.Yang recalled his experience in space during a recent interview with China Central Television. He said the unusual situation he was met with in space were non-causal knocks that appeared from time to time during his travel in the spaceship more than ten years ago.He explained the noise often suddenly appeared without any rhyme or reason. "It neither came from outside nor inside the spaceship, but it sounded like someone was knocking on the spaceship, as if someone was using a wooden hammer to hit an iron bucket." Those were Yang&`&s words when he was talking about how he was nervous at first, and how he moved close to the porthole to try to find out what the noise was. However, nothing out of the ordinary appeared on both the inside and outside of the spaceship.After returning to earth, he told technicians about the noise, and tried to imitate it with some instruments so as to solve the mystery. But upon reflection, Yang has said he has never heard the exact noise again.But the same noise was heard by astronauts onboard other spaceships including the Shenzhou 6 and Shenzhou 7 space crafts. In October 2003, Yang returned to earth in his re-entry module after a 21-hour trip in space. After his trip, Yang became the world&`&s 241st human being to visit outer space.This is Special English.Public facilities across Beijing will soon have their own QR codes so that the public can access the "identity information" and interact with the city management.From things like dustbins to street signs and even bus stop boards, all facilities in Beijing will have their own QR code displayed on them before 2018.Currently, 50 streets including Beijing&`&s central thoroughfare, the Chang&`&an Avenue, have major public facilities with QR codes on them. When scanned, the code opens an information page on the smart device. The information tells people whom to contact to report any damage to public facilities or whoever is responsible for maintenance and repair.People can also use the social-networking app WeChat to report any issues to the management or search for the nearest metro stations or public restrooms.This is Special English.China&`&s top economic planner has approved a plan to build an intercity railway network linking Beijing and neighboring city Tianjin as well as Hebei province. The blueprint targets the year 2020 as its initial phase. The whole system consists of nine rail lines with a total length of 1,100 kilometers. The National Development and Reform Commission estimated the total investment to be 250 billion yuan. That&`&s roughly 36 billion U.S. dollars. The network is a major infrastructure project of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei integrated development plan. Three major lines will connect Beijing, Tianjin and the capital of Hebei Province with high-speed trains traveling at up to 350 kilometers per hour. The commuting time between any pair of the three cities will be cut down to less than an hour. Last year, China passed the Outline of Collaborative Development of Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei Province. The outline proposed removing some of Beijing&`&s noncapital functions to neighboring areas to control pollution and improve transport conditions. Experts say the new railway network will greatly boost real estate development in the area. The preparatory work of certain lines, including that from Beijing to Tangshan city, has already started.You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Ryan Price in Beijing. You can access the program by logging on to newsplusradio.cn. You can also find us on our Apple Podcast. If you have any comments or suggestions, please let us know by e-mailing us at mansuyingyu@cri.com.cn. That&`&s mansuyingyu@cri.com.cn. Now the news continues.Plans are in the pipeline for an animated movie featuring the prehistoric Sanxingdui Ruins in southwest China&`&s Sichuan Province.The film, "The Golden Mask", tells the story of a golden mask found during the excavation of some mysterious ruins.The movie features fantasy, adventure and also time travel. It is said to be produced and screened on 3D and IMAX screens and will be released in 2019.With an investment of 20 million U.S. dollars, the movie has secured copyright certificates from China and the United States. The crew includes a director, an art designer and a composer from Hollywood.A spokesperson said in a recent news release that the movie aims to spread the mysterious culture that surrounds Sanxingdui Ruins.The ruins are located some 40 kilometers from Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan. They are believed to be remnants of the ancient Shu Kingdom that disappeared for unknown reasons some 3,000 years ago.Sprawling over an area of 12 square kilometers, the ruins are listed among China&`&s top 10 archaeological findings of the 20th century, and are seen as representing the origins of ancient Chinese civilization.This is Special English.Gripping tiny slices of sheer rock and hoisting himself up 3,000 feet with only his strength, Adam Ondra quietly inched his way up one of the world&`&s most challenging rock walls and into the record books.Ondra, a 23-year-old from the Czech Republic, took eight days to finish the free-climb up the Dawn Wall of the famed El Capitan in California&`&s Yosemite National Park.Ondra&`&s recent accomplishment was the second-ever free assent of the wall.Nearly two years ago, U.S. climbers Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson were first to chart and conquer the route, a feat that took the pair 19 days.Jorgeson said it&`&s like being a proud parent, in a way, because he feels honored that Ondra was drawn to the challenge. He said that is the point: To raise the bar so someone else can do the same thing and stand on your shoulders.Unlike climbers who need more elaborate equipment, free-climbers use their strength and ability to grasp tiny cracks and lips in the granite rock with their fingertips and toes. They use ropes and harnesses only for safety to catch if they fall.Throughout the climb, Ondra took to social media to post about the cold, soaking rain and the pain from the granite wearing down the skin on his fingers. He also celebrated victories.He wrote on Instagram as he neared the top that it was hard to find the words to describe how he felt. One of his posts said that he had made it up the Wino Tower and had no more hard pitches to guard his way to the top. He said this made him feel that he could not ask for a better day.You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Ryan Price in Beijing. Stone helmets, armor and animal remains are among the latest archaeological finds at Emperor Qinshihuang&`&s mausoleum in Xi&`&an in northwest China.The items have been found in the celebrated site, which is home to China&`&s iconic Terracotta Warriors.During a recent excavation, archaeologists have found out about the mausoleum&`&s general structure, which was previously unknown. A large number of new pits have been discovered. Among them, more than 400 were located within the mausoleum and dozens of small tombs were found near the site.Experts believe the stone helmets and armor were not for wearing, but their real functions remained unknown. The finds also include several thousand pieces of animal remains and other animal-related objects, making it the largest number of animal-related discoveries ever found in a single site.One of the most commonly seen animals unearthed at the site were horses. Horse images can be found on pottery and copper wares. Other animals include some very rare bird species and beasts.This is Special English.A total of 160 items originally received by public servants as business gifts went up for auction recently in central China&`&s Hubei Province.The gift items were turned in by staff from almost 30 government organs, public institutions and state-owned enterprises in the past two years in Wuhan, the provincial capital.China does not allow public servants to receive gifts. Those who take business gifts must hand them in and register them within one month. The auction was seen by many as showing the local government&`&s determination to fight corruption.Jewelry, paintings, watches and electronic devices were among the items for the auction. The initial bidding price of all items totaled almost 600,000 yuan, roughly 86,000 U.S. dollars.Around 200 people showed up at the event and almost the auctions were successful.（全文见周日微信。）

This is Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing. Here is the news. Following the implementation in January of harsher rules against bribes and gifts, provincial governments are abolishing special accounts that have been misused by officials to hide ill-gotten gains. In August, the Guizhou government joined at least three other provinces in canceling a special bank account that officials had used to deposit money and remain under the radar of graft investigators. The first "clean governance accounts" were established in the 1990s to reduce corruption while protecting the privacy of officials. Over a dozen provincial-level governments had established such accounts. The provinces of Sichuan and Gansu, as well as the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, recently eliminated them. Usually, the accounts are managed by the local discipline inspection authorities and banks. The names of the depositor and the sum are not disclosed, and the money is turned over to the local treasury. Zhuang Deshui, a professor at Peking University, explained that the accounts were designed as an outlet for officials who are remorseful. However, some officials have misused the service. Many use the account as an umbrella or safe haven. For example, some corrupt officials only deposit bribes when they face an investigation. This is Special English. This year will witness 7.6 million students graduating from universities and colleges across China. This summer is also the first employment season after the universal two-child policy came into effect. As a result, female graduates are facing more severe competition and pressure in job hunting. Overt and covert gender discrimination floods recruitment notices. Examples of more explicit discrimination include "only male", "male preferred", "married mother preferred", "higher educational background for female candidates", "appearance and height required" and "obligations of no marriage and no reproduction in certain years". However, even covert discrimination can be quite obvious, such as when employers inquire about female applicants' marital status and thoughts on family planning, or stress that the position requires frequent overtime and is therefore more suitable for men. According to a 2014 survey conducted by the Women's Studies Institute of China, WSIC, 86 percent of female graduates in Beijing, Hebei and Shandong say they have experienced gender discrimination while job hunting. Marriage, childbearing and employment are all women's rights, and are protected by law, explained Ma Yan, a researcher with WSIC. However, Ma said, childbearing does increase costs to employers. For example, in the wake of the universal two-child policy, many local governments have extended mandated maternity from one month to three. You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing. China has launched a new high-resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar imaging satellite from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in northern Shanxi Province. The Gaofen-3 satellite was launched off the back of a Long March 4C rocket. It was the 233rd flight mission by a Long March carrier rocket. This is China's first Synthetic Aperture Radar imaging satellite that is accurate to one meter in distance. It covers the globe with an all-weather, 24-hour observation service and will be used for disaster warning, weather forecasting, water resource assessments, and the protection of maritime rights. With 12 imaging modes, the high-definition observation satellite is capable of taking wide pictures of earth and photographing detailed scenarios of specific areas. Gaofen-3 is also China's first low orbit remote sensing satellite that has a lifespan of eight years. It is able to provide high-definition remote sensing data for its users over long periods of time. Since the inception of the Gaofen project in 2013, China has had an increasingly clear view of the planet. Launched in April 2013, Gaofen-1 can cover the globe in just four days. Gaofen-2 was sent into space in August 2014 and is accurate to 0.8 of a meter in full color and can collect multispectral images of objects 3 meters or longer in length. Gaofen-4, launched late last year, is China's first geosynchronous orbit high-definition optical imaging satellite and the world's most sophisticated. The Gaofen-3 and the Long March 4C rocket were developed by the China Academy of Space Technology and the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology, under the guidance of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation. This is Special English. China's military is likely to deploy the Type-96B tank as the pillar of its tank fleet, replacing most of its old models. Military observers say the excellent capabilities of the Type-96B qualified it to be the backbone of China's tank force. The Type-96B is the strongest variant of the Type-96 family and is truly an advanced, third-generation main battle tank. The army will use it to replace the old tanks including the Type-59 and Type-69 models. The latest developments came as the Type-96B delivered impressive performances in the Masters of Automobile and Tank Hardware competition, also known as the Tank Biathlon, held recently in Moscow. China sent several Type-96B tanks to take part in the tank competition, the most watched part of the Russia-hosted International Army Games. The eight-day individual part of the competition involved 54 teams from 17 countries, with the Chinese delegation scoring the highest. The Chinese military had more than 7,000 tanks in active service by the end of last year, and the majority of the armored force is still equipped with tanks made several decades ago. However, experts say it is unrealistic for the Chinese military to purchase and deploy the new tanks on a large scale due to their high price and limited production capacity. You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing. A Chinese woman has received 1.7 million yuan, roughly 260,000 U.S dollars, for a wrongful murder conviction that put her behind bars for 13 years. The court in Yunnan Province ruled that Qian Renfeng's confession was made under duress and that she was not guilty of the murder charge she was convicted for in 2002. Qian was working at a nursery where a toddler died of food poisoning and two other children were hospitalized. Qian, who had prepared the children's meals that day, was forced into confessing that she had mixed rat poison into the food. It was on the basis of this forced confession that she was found guilty of murder. In 2013, procurators in the province reopened her case. The investigation took almost two years. Last year, the procurators ruled that there was a lack of evidence to support the conviction, and advised the provincial higher court to rehear the case. In December last year, the higher court quashed the sentence, ruling that it lacked sufficient evidence to determine guilt beyond reasonable doubt. She was exonerated and released. Qian had filed for up to 9 million yuan, roughly 1.5 million U.S. dollars, in damages. You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing. You can access the program by logging on to newsplusradio.cn. You can also find us on our Apple Podcast. If you have any comments or suggestions, please let us know by e-mailing us at mansuyingyu@cri.com.cn. That's mansuyingyu@cri.com.cn. Now the news continues. The designer of the tall, lane-straddling bus Song Youzhou has said the bus can run smoothly despite doubts raised in some quarters. The bus, known as the Transit Elevated Bus, allows cars to pass beneath. The feasibility of the vehicle was questioned after a test run last month in Hebei Province. The bus is 22 meters long, 8 meters wide and 5 meters tall. It is designed with a passenger area high above the ground, with a capacity of 300 people. The legs of the bus reach over lanes of ordinary traffic, creating a sort of moving tunnel. Vehicles less than 2 meters high can pass beneath it. The bus was designed to relieve traffic pressure on roads. But media and internet users have questioned whether the bus will work as expected, because some vehicles are taller than two meters and the huge vehicle can face many challenges on the road. According to Song, more than 90 percent of the vehicles in cities are salon cars and SUVs which are within 2 meters in height. He said most of them can run under the bus, thus helping to improve the utilization rate of roads. This is Special English. Though tipping is not widely practiced on the Chinese mainland, some restaurants in the economic powerhouse of Shanghai are now facilitating rewards for waiters through scanning a QR code, usually for 3 to 5 yuan, roughly 45 to 75 US cents. Using a loudspeaker, a barbecue store in Shanghai suggests that customers are welcome to tip through online payment platforms including WeChat, in recognition of the good service they receive. At the entrance to another restaurant, an eye-catching poster pledges a 10 yuan coupon to those who have given tips of up to 3 yuan. Another store, which is part of a restaurant chain, also joined the trend in encouraging tipping, as a means to improve service. A restaurant worker said she received as many as 60 tips a day for her excellent service, which brings her 3,600 yuan extra a month. She said she felt a sense of self-worth through the tips. But one customer said she was embarrassed to give 4 yuan in cash to a waiter but was happy to scan a QR code to transfer the money via her cellphone. But there are also customers who are clearly not ready for the practice simply because tipping is not a must in China. You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing. A college student from East China says her dream is to see more Chinese women succeed in their ambition to become entrepreneurs. Twenty-one-year-old Hong Xinyu was China's representative at the Girls-20 Summit in Beijing. She told the international gathering that her plan is to open a workshop to help women who are unable to go to college get training in management. Hong said Chinese women still don't have enough opportunities to achieve career success. One important reason is that many of them lack management ability and entrepreneurship. Twenty-four young women joined this year's Girls 20 summit. They were chosen for their experience, ambition and learning ability among more than 1,700 applicants from G20 member countries. The Girls20 was established in 2009. It is an organization based in Canada that is devoted to promoting greater female participation in the workforce around the world. The head of Girls 20, Farah Mohamed, said China stands out internationally for producing impressive examples of women who are in power, particularly in business. Eight of the world's top-10 richest self-made women are from China, compared with two from the United States. Zhou Qunfei, who heads touch-screen maker Lens Technology, stormed to the top of the list with her 8 billion U.S.-dollar fortune. This is Special English. （全文见周六微信。）

Dr. Huang Kaifeng, Director, General Administrative Office, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Dr. Krishnamurthy Sriramesh, Professor, Brian Lamb School of Communications, University Faculty Scholar, Purdue University.

Dr. Lan Ni. Associate Professor, Jack J. Valenti School of Communication, University of Houston and Dr. Duan Gang, Chief Editor, Social Sciences Weekly, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences

Dr. Lan Ni. Associate Professor, Jack J. Valenti School of Communication, University of Houston and Dr. Duan Gang, Chief Editor, Social Sciences Weekly, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences

Dr. Huang Kaifeng, Director, General Administrative Office, Shanghai Academy of SocialSciences Dr. Krishnamurthy Sriramesh, Professor, Brian Lamb School of Communications, University Faculty Scholar, Purdue University.

Dr. Huang Kaifeng, Director, General Administrative Office, Shanghai Academy of SocialSciences Dr. Krishnamurthy Sriramesh, Professor, Brian Lamb School of Communications, University Faculty Scholar, Purdue University.

完整文稿请浏览微信周日第三条。This is NEWS Plus Special English. I'm Liu Yan in Beijing. Here is the news. Homicide rate in China is as low as Switzerland, a country known as one of the safest nations. The homicide rate in China last year was 0.7 per 100,000 residents, which is lower than such developed countries as the United States, the United Kingdom and France. Chinese Communist Party's political affairs department made the announcement during a national conference in Dalian, Liaoning province. There has been a consistent decline in severe violent crimes in China, including rape, abduction, robbery, blast, murder and arson. According to Public Security Bureau, the number of the registered cases between January and March has decreased by 16 percent year-on-year. However, the authority pointed out that many crimes nowadays are being committed over the Internet, including commercial fraud, online pyramid schemes and invasion of privacy. It urged the public security departments to set up "online police stations" and to step up efforts to prevent the spread of rumors, firearm-trafficking and drug-trafficking online. This is NEWS Plus Special English. China has sent a satellite into space to aid urban management by monitoring traffic and smog. Pujiang-1 was among four micro-satellites on the carrier rocket Long March-11 that lifted off from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China. Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology said the satellite was designed around the idea of promoting "smart city" construction. It can monitor the weather, traffic and population density of a city. For instance, Pujiang-1 can instantly report the location of oil slick should there be a spill on the Huangpu River in Shanghai. The satellite can also be used to support resources surveys, as well as emergency response and rescue. The designers said its antenna holder was 3D printed, the first time such a process has been used by China in its satellite production. This is NEWS Plus Special English.

更多内容请关注我们今日的微信，搜索：英语环球 NEWSPlusThis is NEWS Plus Special English. I'm Liu Yan in Beijing. Here is the news.A plan that will enable China to evaluate the compulsory education system for the first time has been launched, with experts saying it will assist in policy-making and promote quality education across the country. The plan was drawn up by the State Council's Education Supervision and Guidance Committee, and is designed to test the academic performance and physical and mental health of junior middle school and primary school students. It will also examine factors that affect their performance and health. Officials from the education ministry's supervision office say that due to a lack of statistics, the authorities have been unable either to evaluate the standard of the compulsory education system or to analyze the problems that exist; and now the implementation of the plan will enable them to do so. A random selection of students in the fourth and eighth grades on the mainland will take a test consisting of two parts. Six subjects will be tested including the Chinese language, mathematics, science, physical education, art and general knowledge.The results will not be used in any admission process or to assess individual students or schools, so it will not insert new workload for students or new pressure on the schools.This is NEWS Plus Special English.Hong Kong's new Police Commissioner Stephen Lo has said he will focus on fighting cybercrime and terrorism to maintain Hong Kong's safety and stability.Lo said at a press conference that the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government has earmarked funding to establish a new Cyber Security and Technology Crime Bureau within the force, noting a rise in the number of cybercrimes in recent years.He said he plans to boost training, equipment, investigation capabilities and overseas cooperation on cyber security as commissioner.He stressed that while there is no intelligence suggesting an immediate terrorist threat to Hong Kong, the city should be prepared. The police will boost intelligence gathering and exchange, as well as training and cooperation with international law enforcement agencies on counter-terrorism.In his remarks, Lo pledged to do his best to ensure that Hong Kong remains one of the safest and most stable societies in the world.Retiring Police Commissioner Andy Tsang said he was confident Lo could lead the force in overcoming future challenges.Tsang also urged protesters and politicians to obey the law while fighting for their political beliefs and rights.This is NEWS Plus Special English.A 21-year-old Tibetan girl who helped rescue a kidnapped woman on a train has won praise from the public for her brave act.On April 18, Cering Yumco, a sophomore at Tianjin University of Science and Technology, was sleeping on a train when a woman woke her up. The train was going from Chengdu, capital of southwest China's Sichuan Province, to Beijing.The woman told her in a low voice that she was being abducted by the man at her side. The woman did not report to police for fears of putting her children in danger. She asked Yumco for help.The suspected trafficker woke up when the two were whispering. After observing the man for a few more hours, Yumco spoke to the police on the train.Train police and Yumco continued to monitor the man until the train arrived in Beijing the next day.When the train pulled in at the Beijing West Railway Station, the man was taken away by police expecting them. The woman was rescued. Yumco's story has gone viral on the internet. Web users expressed their praise and said she has set a good example for young people.You are listening to NEWS Plus Special English. I'm Liu Yan in Beijing. Chinese researchers have used 3D printing technology to make a safer space suit for astronauts while spacewalking.A research center under the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation used a 3D printer to create the vent pipes and the flanges connecting the pipes used on extravehicular space suit.The vent pipe and the flange as a whole can improve the reliability and safety of the space suit, and suits can be made more efficiently. Researchers will use the technique to make more parts.China plans to launch its second orbiting space lab, Tiangong-2, next year, and aims to put a permanent manned space station into service around 2022.The Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology has successfully developed a multi-laser metal 3D printer, enabling astronauts to print items with just one 3D printer in space.The 3D printing technology is suitable for making objects with complicated structures and odd shapes, such as the valves of rocket engines.There are still many difficulties to overcome in 3D printing in space. Researchers are still developing materials suitable for 3D printing; and the precision of 3D printed items needs to be improved.This is NEWS Plus Special English.Chinese scientists have completed the genome sequencing of grass carp and produced the world's first whole genome map for the fish.The genome sequencing was a three-year collaborative project between the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Sun Yat-sen University based in the southern province of Guangdong.A genome is the full complement of an organism's DNA, complex molecules that direct the formation and function of all living organisms. The research has helped scientists to understand the evolutionary history of grass carp, and it is of great importance to the breeding of stronger species in the future.The research of grass carp will also help understanding of human diseases, since grass carp can carry the same bacterial and viral diseases as humans.Grass carp make up 16 percent of the world's cultured fish, and China is the world's largest grass carp culturing country.

更多内容，请关注我们今日的微信，搜索：英语环球 NEWSPlus1. Chinese researchers have used 3D printing technology to make a safer space suit for astronauts while spacewalking.A research center under the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation used a 3D printer to create the vent pipes and the flanges connecting the pipes used on extravehicular space suit.The vent pipe and the flange as a whole can improve the reliability and safety of the space suit, and suits can be made more efficiently. Researchers will use the technique to make more parts.China plans to launch its second orbiting space lab, Tiangong-2, next year, and aims to put a permanent manned space station into service around 2022.The Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology has successfully developed a multi-laser metal 3D printer, enabling astronauts to print items with just one 3D printer in space.The 3D printing technology is suitable for making objects with complicated structures and odd shapes, such as the valves of rocket engines.There are still many difficulties to overcome in 3D printing in space. Researchers are still developing materials suitable for 3D printing; and the precision of 3D printed items needs to be improved.

A report out in mid-February by the Beijing-based Social Science Academic Press and the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences ranked the Chinese capital as the second-worst out of 40 global cities for its environmental conditions. Shanghai fared only marginally better. The official Chinese report went as far as to describe Beijing as "barely suitable for living" and after last week's six-day smog fest, one wouldn't argue against that. It's estimated that between 350,000 and half a million people die prematurely as a result of air pollution here in China every year and cancer rates are shooting up like never before. All of that, of course, has been blamed on factory emissions and the toxins these chemical plants and steel productions pump into our air round the clock every day, and many blame central and local governments' inertia and incompetence in enforcing their policies in cutting emissions. Just earlier this week, a drone to disperse smog was unveiled which would spray chemicals into the air, causing air particles to freeze and then dropping to the ground. But that's only a solution to the smog--rather than tackling the root causes of it. - Jennifer Turner, Director, China Environment Forum - Xuemei Bai, Professor and Researcher, Human ecology & urban environment, Australian National University

I like to think of Sherman Cochran and Andrew Hsieh‘s new book as Downton Abbey: Shanghai Edition. It is that gripping, and will keep you turning the pages that eagerly. At the same time, The Lius of Shanghai (Harvard University Press, 2013) is also an important, innovative, and timely intervention into the historiography of families, institutions, and the politics of modern China. The book is a family history of an exceptionally prominent (and exceptionally fascinating) business family in China during the first half of the twentieth century. Emerging from a cache of letters written between the late 1920s and early 1950s and held at the Center for Research on Chinese Business History in the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, the project ultimately expanded to incorporate an archive of roughly 2,000 family letters that chronicle the relationships, educations, careers, romantic and political entanglements, and physical and emotional health of all of the members (literate and not) of this large and growing family. Sherm and I talked about the arc of the story in the context of the broader political transformations of modern China, his own narrative choices in structuring the book, and the larger significance of the book for reshaping the way we think about power relationships and the history of Chinese families. It is a wonderfully gripping and masterfully written model of the historian’s craft, and I hope you enjoy the conversation and the book as much as I did! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I like to think of Sherman Cochran and Andrew Hsieh‘s new book as Downton Abbey: Shanghai Edition. It is that gripping, and will keep you turning the pages that eagerly. At the same time, The Lius of Shanghai (Harvard University Press, 2013) is also an important, innovative, and timely intervention into the historiography of families, institutions, and the politics of modern China. The book is a family history of an exceptionally prominent (and exceptionally fascinating) business family in China during the first half of the twentieth century. Emerging from a cache of letters written between the late 1920s and early 1950s and held at the Center for Research on Chinese Business History in the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, the project ultimately expanded to incorporate an archive of roughly 2,000 family letters that chronicle the relationships, educations, careers, romantic and political entanglements, and physical and emotional health of all of the members (literate and not) of this large and growing family. Sherm and I talked about the arc of the story in the context of the broader political transformations of modern China, his own narrative choices in structuring the book, and the larger significance of the book for reshaping the way we think about power relationships and the history of Chinese families. It is a wonderfully gripping and masterfully written model of the historian’s craft, and I hope you enjoy the conversation and the book as much as I did! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As China's comprehensive power grows domestically and internationally, so too does its global cultural presence and government efforts to enhance its international image. Are China's efforts to expand and enhance its soft power producing positive results--or is China's image abroad tarnished? In this lecture, Professor Shambaugh will discuss findings from his research in China on different dimensions of China's global cultural footprint and soft power. Professor Shambaugh is recognized internationally as an authority on contemporary Chinese affairs and the international politics and security of the Asia-Pacific region. He is a widely published author of numerous books, articles, book chapters and newspaper editorials. He has previously authored six and edited sixteen volumes. His newest books are China's Communist Party: Atrophy & Adaptation; American and European Relations with China; and The International Relations of Asia (all published in 2008). Other recent books include Power Shift: China & Asia's New Dynamics (2005); China Watching: Perspectives from Europe, Japan, and the United States (2007); China-Europe Relations (2007); Modernizing China's Military (2003); The Odyssey of China's Imperial Art Treasures (2005); and The Modern Chinese State (2000). Professor Shambaugh is a frequent commentator in international media, and has contributed to leading scholarly journals such as International Security, Foreign Affairs, The China Quarterly, and The China Journal. Before joining the faculty at George Washington, he taught at the University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies, where he also served as Editor of The China Quarterly (the world's leading scholarly journal of contemporary Chinese studies). He also served as Director of the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (1985-86), as an analyst in the Department of State Bureau of Intelligence and Research (1976-1977) and the National Security Council (1977-78), and has been a Nonresident Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at The Brookings Institution since 1998. He has received numerous research grants, awards, and fellowships -- including being appointed as an Honorary Research Professor at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (2008- ), a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (2002-2003), a Senior Fulbright Research Scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Institute of World Economics & Politics (2009-2010), and a visiting scholar at institutions in China, Germany, Japan, Hong Kong, Russia, Singapore, and Taiwan. Professor Shambaugh has held a number of consultancies, including with various agencies of the U.S. Government, The Ford Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, The RAND Corporation, The Library of Congress, and numerous private sector corporations. He serves on several editorial boards (including International Security, Journal of Strategic Studies, Current History, The China Quarterly, China Perspectives) and is a member of the International Institute of Strategic Studies, National Committee on U.S. China Relations, the World Economic Forum, The Council on Foreign Relations, Pacific Council on International Policy, Committee on Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific (CSCAP), The Asia Society, Association for Asian Studies, and International Studies Association. Professor Shambaugh received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Michigan, an M.A. in International Affairs from Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of International Studies (SAIS), and B.A. in East Asian Studies from The Elliott School of International Affairs at The George Washington University. He also studied at Nankai University, Fudan University, and Peking University in China.

As China's comprehensive power grows domestically and internationally, so too does its global cultural presence and government efforts to enhance its international image. Are China's efforts to expand and enhance its soft power producing positive results--or is China's image abroad tarnished? In this lecture, Professor Shambaugh will discuss findings from his research in China on different dimensions of China's global cultural footprint and soft power. Professor Shambaugh is recognized internationally as an authority on contemporary Chinese affairs and the international politics and security of the Asia-Pacific region. He is a widely published author of numerous books, articles, book chapters and newspaper editorials. He has previously authored six and edited sixteen volumes. His newest books are China's Communist Party: Atrophy & Adaptation; American and European Relations with China; and The International Relations of Asia (all published in 2008). Other recent books include Power Shift: China & Asia's New Dynamics (2005); China Watching: Perspectives from Europe, Japan, and the United States (2007); China-Europe Relations (2007); Modernizing China's Military (2003); The Odyssey of China's Imperial Art Treasures (2005); and The Modern Chinese State (2000). Professor Shambaugh is a frequent commentator in international media, and has contributed to leading scholarly journals such as International Security, Foreign Affairs, The China Quarterly, and The China Journal. Before joining the faculty at George Washington, he taught at the University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies, where he also served as Editor of The China Quarterly (the world's leading scholarly journal of contemporary Chinese studies). He also served as Director of the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (1985-86), as an analyst in the Department of State Bureau of Intelligence and Research (1976-1977) and the National Security Council (1977-78), and has been a Nonresident Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at The Brookings Institution since 1998. He has received numerous research grants, awards, and fellowships -- including being appointed as an Honorary Research Professor at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (2008- ), a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (2002-2003), a Senior Fulbright Research Scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Institute of World Economics & Politics (2009-2010), and a visiting scholar at institutions in China, Germany, Japan, Hong Kong, Russia, Singapore, and Taiwan. Professor Shambaugh has held a number of consultancies, including with various agencies of the U.S. Government, The Ford Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, The RAND Corporation, The Library of Congress, and numerous private sector corporations. He serves on several editorial boards (including International Security, Journal of Strategic Studies, Current History, The China Quarterly, China Perspectives) and is a member of the International Institute of Strategic Studies, National Committee on U.S. China Relations, the World Economic Forum, The Council on Foreign Relations, Pacific Council on International Policy, Committee on Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific (CSCAP), The Asia Society, Association for Asian Studies, and International Studies Association. Professor Shambaugh received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Michigan, an M.A. in International Affairs from Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of International Studies (SAIS), and B.A. in East Asian Studies from The Elliott School of International Affairs at The George Washington University. He also studied at Nankai University, Fudan University, and Peking University in China.