Podcasts about Zhang

Are wearable devices like Fitbits, Apple Watches, and fitness trackers really worth it? In this episode of the “NASM CPT Podcast,” host Rick Richey dives deep into the science and practical truth behind modern wearable tech.

State of the Arts Episode 296 is now available on Spotify! I'm immensely honored to welcome Ada Zhang, an opera singer turned stage manager to my podcast this week. After attending Peking University, my multitalented guest attended graduate school at Columbia University, majoring in theatre with an emphasis on stage management. She has worked on multiple iconic productions, including the Wicked International Tour, the Kinky Boots Asia Tour and the SIX Aragon Tour. When she's not onstage, this caring creative is a huge advocate for The Tank NYC, an off-off Broadway theatre that supports young artists who are in their early career and curates equity and diversity in the performing arts. It is a privilege to present this accomplished guest on my podcast this week!

The values Americans hold dear—such as freedom of speech, religious liberty, and democratic elections—are weaponized by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), says Tianliang Zhang, an author, historian, and popular commentator on China affairs.In this episode, he argues that the CCP devised a master plan called “America against America” to exploit those very freedoms and openness in order to undermine U.S. interests.The concept was developed by Wang Huning in 1989, chairman of China's top political advisory body, the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC).“But how to implement that, that's the unrestricted war,” Zhang says.Unrestricted warfare is a CCP doctrine of leveraging everything as a tool of war, whether it be fentanyl, the media, or election integrity.How is this war waged in practice? The transnational repression targeting Falun Gong practitioners is one such example.The Falun Gong meditation practice was popular in China during the 1990s. An estimated 70 million to 100 million people took it up, crediting it for health benefits and mental well-being. In 1999, the CCP unleashed a nationwide persecution, subjecting the practitioners to various abuses, including slave labor and forced organ harvesting.“CCP sees it as [the] number one threat in its history … so they use American media, they use the freedom of speech here, they use the justice system here to persecute Falun Gong [practitioners],” Zhang said.The CCP's goal, Zhang says, is to “eliminate all the independent thoughts” that do not conform to communist ideology.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Discover the secrets of strength, resilience, and longevity that have stood the test of time! In this episode of “Random Fit,” hosts Wendy Batts and Ken Miller take you on a journey around the world to explore cultural conditioning and ancient proverbs from Iceland, Serbia, Saudi Arabia, Norway, China, and the Philippines.

Last time we spoke about the Japanese offensive at Changsha. In late September 1941, fighting in China had become a brutal struggle of endurance. Japanese forces kept pushing forward, but China—though battered by heavy losses—refused to yield. Help from abroad was slowly beginning to matter. American aid reached China through groups like the Red Cross, and volunteers later associated with the Flying Tigers offered crucial support to Chinese operations. Against this backdrop, Changsha in Hunan became the center of a dangerous autumn campaign. Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist leadership treated the city as strategically vital, knowing that its fate could influence the wider course of the war. In the end, the resistance at Changsha showed China's key advantage: resilience. The city's defense helped slow the Japanese advance, break up momentum, and create uncertainty as the campaign continued.   #212 The Autumn Battle of Changsha, 1941 Welcome to the Fall and Rise of China Podcast, I am your dutiful host Craig Watson. But, before we start I want to also remind you this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Perhaps you want to learn more about the history of Asia? Kings and Generals have an assortment of episodes on history of asia and much more  so go give them a look over on Youtube. So please subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry for some more history related content, over on my channel, the Pacific War Channel where I cover the history of China and Japan from the 19th century until the end of the Pacific War. In late September 1941, the war in China had already entered its fifth year. By then the conflict had lost whatever remained of novelty and had settled into something harsher and more exhausting: a long war of attrition fought across enormous distances, under conditions of chronic shortage, strategic uncertainty, and repeated local catastrophe. Japan still possessed formidable military strength. Its armies could strike hard, move fast, and exploit superior firepower, air support, and communications in individual campaigns. Yet the larger shape of the war had begun to change. China had not collapsed. The Nationalist government still stood. Chinese armies, however battered, still held the field. The line between survival and defeat remained dangerously thin, but it had not broken. This was the situation in which the autumn campaign in Hunan and Hubei unfolded.   The struggle around Changsha did not occur in isolation. It belonged to a wider military and political moment. In Europe, the war had already expanded into a continent-wide convulsion. Germany and the Soviet Union were locked in a massive struggle after the German invasion in June. Leningrad was under threat, Kiev had become the scene of disaster, and the approach of the battle for Moscow suggested that still greater bloodshed lay ahead. Stalin had pressed Churchill to open a second front in Europe and had been refused. The global balance of war was shifting, but not yet in any way that guaranteed relief to China.   In Asia, Japan continued to press forward. The pressure on China remained immense. Yet by mid-1941 China's position, though still precarious, no longer looked quite as desperate as it had in earlier years. International sympathy had grown. Material aid, however limited, was beginning to take more concrete form. In July, the American Red Cross sent China medical supplies worth millions of dollars. In August, more than a hundred retired American pilots and mechanics came together to aid China against Japan. The air unit they formed, later celebrated as the Flying Tigers, meant more than aircraft and personnel alone. It signaled that China's war was no longer quite so isolated. That change in atmosphere did not produce calm in Chongqing. It sharpened urgency.   For Chiang Kai-shek, the possibility that the international situation might slowly improve for China carried with it a hard implication: China had to endure long enough to benefit from it. That meant surviving not in abstract terms, but in particular places, against particular offensives, at moments when a local defeat might have consequences far beyond the immediate battlefield. In the autumn of 1941, one of those places was Changsha. Changsha had long occupied an outsized place in the military geography of the war. It stood as the capital of Hunan, a hinge between regions, and a vital position in the defense of central China. Its security affected the Xiang River basin, communications across the province, and the broader defensive posture shielding approaches toward the wartime capital. To lose it, even temporarily, would be more than a symbolic blow. It would threaten the larger balance of the front in south-central China and test whether Japanese offensives could still force dramatic strategic results.   At the same time, the battle for Changsha was not a simple contest between one Chinese army and one Japanese army facing each other across a fixed line. It was part of a larger operational struggle linking the Ninth War Zone with supporting actions from the Third, Fifth, and Sixth War Zones. It involved frontal resistance, hurried reinforcement, mobile defense, rear harassment, and the constant effort to turn Japanese momentum into Japanese overextension. Chinese commanders were trying not merely to survive a blow, but to absorb it, stretch it, and eventually strike back against an enemy whose speed could become a liability once supply lines lengthened and formations dispersed. This was the burden resting on the Military Commission in Chongqing.   There, while reports arrived in fragments and maps were revised hour by hour, Chiang Kai-shek spent long stretches in the operations room watching the situation in Hunan and Hubei develop. He had already ordered the various war zones to support the Ninth War Zone's operations, and now he followed the campaign with intense concentration. His attention moved repeatedly toward reports from the Sixth War Zone and Chen Cheng's counteroffensive toward Yichang, for Yichang was tied not only to local fighting in Hubei but also to the defense of the Yangtze approach and therefore to the security of Chongqing itself. In his mind, Hunan and Hubei had become the focal point of China's war effort in that season.   Meanwhile at the front, the situation was deteriorating fast. Japanese forces pressing into northern Hunan had already imposed severe strain on the Chinese defense. Blocking units had been battered back. Communications were uncertain. Some formations fought stubbornly but could not hold; others dissolved more quickly than hoped. The Japanese advance toward Changsha created exactly the kind of crisis Chinese commanders feared most: one in which the enemy moved with enough force and speed to threaten a major city before a coherent defensive response could be reassembled. Chinese units had to be thrown into action as they arrived, often after exhausting marches, often with incomplete knowledge of the situation, and often under immediate pressure from artillery, aircraft, and aggressive infantry assaults. Yet even at this dangerous stage, the campaign contained an opportunity as well as a threat.   The deeper Japanese units pushed into Hunan, the more exposed their rear became. Supply depots, transport lines, and communications stretched farther behind the spearhead. Chinese formations that had been driven aside were not always destroyed; some remained capable of reappearing to strike roads, depots, and isolated detachments. If Changsha represented the visible center of the struggle, the enemy rear represented its hidden vulnerability. The Chinese aim, therefore, was not simply to defend passively around the city. It was to combine stubborn resistance in front with harassment and disruption behind, so that Japanese advance would become increasingly difficult to sustain. The battle that followed unfolded under these pressures: a threatened city, a strained but unbroken defense, commanders forced to improvise under severe danger, and a wider international war that made every local decision feel heavier than the ground on which it was taken.   This subtle improvement in China's larger situation did not mean safety. China was still battered, under-resourced, and vulnerable. Japanese forces still possessed enormous advantages in mobility, firepower, and air power in many sectors. Large parts of the country remained occupied or threatened. Yet by mid-1941 something in the atmosphere had changed. In July, the American Red Cross sent China medical supplies worth millions of dollars. In August, more than a hundred retired American pilots and mechanics came together to aid China in its struggle against Japan. The air unit they formed would become famous under the name by which China knew them: the Flying Tigers. Their significance exceeded their immediate tactical value. They represented a visible sign that China was not entirely abandoned to isolation.   For Claire Chennault, romantic, aggressive, and optimistic by temperament, the new situation encouraged increasingly bold thoughts. For the first time he included in his planning the idea that Japanese home territory might one day be bombed from bases in China. Such schemes were ambitious and perhaps premature, but their very existence reveals an altered horizon of possibility. A country that imagines striking back is already psychologically in a different position from one concerned only with preventing collapse.     Yichang mattered directly to the fighting in Xiangbei, but it also mattered independently. It was tied to the security of the Yangtze approach and therefore to the defense of Chongqing. It belonged not only to the immediate problem of battlefield maneuver but to the larger question of whether China could do more than absorb Japanese offensives. Could Chinese forces exploit enemy overstretch? Could Japanese advances be turned into liabilities? Could local counterattacks and rear harassment generate effects greater than the raw size of the forces involved? By September 1941, these questions were no longer hypothetical. They were urgent. In Chiang's mind, Hunan and Hubei had become the focal point of China's war effort in that season.   The struggle around Changsha was central to that effort. From Chongqing, Chiang telegraphed Commander Xue Yue of the Ninth War Zone with instructions that made both the danger and the opportunity plain. The message emphasized that the enemy in northern Hunan, though still pressing hard, had already been bravely intercepted by Chinese units and was now exhausted, with lines of advance increasingly difficult to sustain. This, Chiang argued, created an excellent opportunity for Chinese forces to strike at the enemy's rear and seek annihilation rather than mere delay. He urged officers and soldiers alike to remain determined to destroy the enemy. Even if Japanese troops advanced to the vicinity of Changsha itself, Chinese forces were to renew their efforts, maintain their confidence in victory, and prevent the enemy from establishing a foothold.   The telegram also pointed to the broader operational picture. Japanese troops drawn from the sectors of the Fifth and Sixth War Zones had been committed to the invasion of northern Hunan, leaving their rear areas dangerously exposed. The Third, Fifth, and Sixth War Zones had launched supporting offensives on the twenty-third. Therefore, the Ninth War Zone had to strike resolutely and fiercely, preventing the Japanese from coordinating their forces and frustrating any attempt to occupy Changsha. The message was at once exhortation and operational logic. It reflected the core Chinese problem in the campaign: the Japanese thrust was dangerous and had to be blocked, but the very speed and depth of that thrust could also expose the attacker. Yet by the time Chiang sent his instructions, the danger around Changsha was already severe. After the 74th Army had been beaten back, there was no major Chinese force north of the city that could confidently block the Japanese advance in a straightforward, stable line. The Japanese 4th Division, together with the Hayabuchi Detachment, had defeated the 95th Division of the Chinese 37th Army and pushed toward Changsha. The prospect that the city might fall, at least temporarily, was no longer remote.   In response, Xia Chuzhong's 79th Army from the Sixth War Zone was ordered to move toward the city. Its vanguard was Wang Jiaben's 98th Division. That movement was a forced march in the literal sense. It was not a flourish of language but an admission of emergency. Troops were pushed beyond ordinary endurance because there was no time to gather strength under favorable conditions. Changsha could not wait for convenience, rest, or ideal concentration. Either reinforcements arrived in time to fight immediately, or they arrived too late to matter. Wang Jiaben was no stranger to battle. A veteran officer from the Yunnan Army, he had fought the Japanese repeatedly—more than twenty times since the outbreak of the War of Resistance. He belonged to that generation of commanders who had been shaped by the fragmented military politics of Republican China but whose careers were now being rewritten by the national emergency of the anti-Japanese war.   During the First Battle of Changsha, he had already distinguished himself. He led troops in a counterattack along the Tongcheng line in southern Hubei and intercepted retreating Japanese forces at Longmenchang and Changshoujie, killing more than a thousand enemy soldiers. He had experience, reputation, and a sense of what it meant to fight in the Changsha theater. This time he marched from Changde, driving his division forward with all possible speed. By noon on September 26 the 98th Division reached a position about two kilometers northeast of Changsha. There was scarcely time to settle the men. No careful preparation was possible. They had arrived because the city was in danger, and battle began almost at once. At dusk the division engaged the Hayabuchi Detachment.   The fighting continued until late in the night without decisive result. That in itself was costly enough. Troops who have just completed a punishing march are already close to the limits of their endurance. To be thrown immediately into combat magnifies every weakness: thirst, fatigue, confusion, and the difficulty of building fieldworks under pressure. What the soldiers of the 98th Division could do that night, they did with their hands and whatever tools they had. They scraped positions out of the earth. They assembled makeshift cover. Officers moved along the line trying to impose order on terrain that had become a battlefield almost as soon as it was occupied. At dawn on September 27 the Japanese intensified the pressure from the air.   More than twenty aircraft bombed the 98th Division's positions, tearing apart the earthworks that officers and soldiers had spent the night constructing. Bombing had a double effect. Physically, it damaged positions, wounded men, and disrupted preparations. Psychologically, it reminded defenders that they were being observed from above and struck by an enemy against whom they could often do little in the sky. Immediately after the bombing came a fierce infantry assault. Wang Jiaben and several other commanders went down to their respective regiments to supervise the fighting personally. This was dangerous, but under such circumstances commanders often believed that presence itself mattered. When fieldworks are collapsing, shell bursts are continuous, and communications are unreliable, authority must sometimes be carried by a body rather than a wire. The defenders held.   Again and again the Japanese attacked. Again and again they were repulsed only to reorganize and come on once more. Every minute the Chinese line remained in place was bought with blood. Fallen and wounded men were carried rearward in what seemed an endless stream. The cost of resistance accumulated visibly before the eyes of those still fighting. By noon even water could no longer be delivered to the front. That detail reveals the intensity of the battle more clearly than many grander statements could. A line that cannot be supplied even with water has reached a condition of severe strain. During brief pauses in the fighting, officers and soldiers pulled out dry rations and chewed them slowly, swallowing with difficulty while they waited for the next attack. Such moments are among the most characteristic in battle: not the long, smooth continuity imagined in peacetime rhetoric, but brief interludes of miserable necessity between explosions. At two in the afternoon the crisis deepened sharply.   A unit of the Japanese 4th Division worked its way behind the 98th Division's position and attacked from the rear. This was the kind of tactical development every defending commander dreads. A force can endure heavy frontal pressure if its line remains coherent and its rear reasonably secure. But when enemy troops appear behind a position, the entire structure of defense begins to dissolve. There, behind the line, were more than a hundred Chinese wounded awaiting evacuation. Japanese soldiers attacked them with bayonets. One of the wounded Chinese soldiers, already beyond ordinary capacity for resistance, rushed forward and detonated a grenade against a Japanese attacker. It was an act of desperation, but also of defiance. The episode captures something essential about the tone of the battle around Changsha. This was not a neat engagement between organized lines alone. It was a desperate collision in which even the badly wounded were drawn into last resistance. For Wang Jiaben, however, the tactical reality was impossible to deny. If he stayed where he was, the division might be annihilated. Personal courage could not alter encirclement. Resentfully, bitterly, and under the kind of pressure that leaves permanent scars on a commander's memory, he ordered retreat. When he led the survivors off the battlefield, fewer than half his men remained.   Reinforcements from another direction now entered the struggle. The Provisional 2nd Army of the Seventh War Zone dispatched the Provisional 8th Division under Zhang Junsong. At seven in the evening on September 27, Zhang's force arrived at Zuojiatang on the eastern outskirts of Changsha. Personnel of the Ninth War Zone waiting there reported grim news: a Japanese detachment had already entered the city that afternoon, and another detachment was only three kilometers away. The situation invited rashness. A commander arriving near a threatened city at dusk, with reports that the enemy is already inside, may feel compelled to hurl troops forward immediately in a gesture of resolution. Yet night fighting in an urban approach without adequate reconnaissance can turn courage into waste. Zhang Junsong considered the matter carefully. He concluded that to rush blindly into the city at night would likely produce confusion and heavy losses. Instead he first sought to strike the enemy outside the city. His troops deployed quietly and crept forward through the darkness, launching a probing attack. But they soon discovered that the Japanese were fully prepared and not vulnerable to easy surprise. The line could not be broken. With no prospect of success, the force withdrew.   The moment is revealing because it shows how narrow the margin had become. Chinese commanders were trying to recover initiative while still groping through uncertainty. Reports were incomplete, Japanese dispositions difficult to fix, and every hour dangerous. On the evening of September 28, the 79th Army's 6th Provisional Division occupied Yuelu Mountain west of Changsha. From that height officers and soldiers looked across the Xiang River toward the city. Changsha, for the first time, was in Japanese hands. The emotional force of that sight can only be imagined. Changsha had lived for years under threat. It had been defended, contested, prepared, and feared. The possibility of its loss had hovered over military planning and public consciousness alike. Now the danger had become fact. A city that had stood as an object of effort and anxiety was visibly occupied by the enemy. No single feeling could have governed the men who saw it. There must have been anger, shame, weariness, and dread—but also stubbornness. For in war a city seen in enemy hands is not always simply lost. Sometimes it is a summons.   Late that night Zhao Jiping, commander of the 6th Provisional Division, received a telegram from Xue Yue. He read it and then stood before the map for a long time. Days of anxiety began to lift. He was not alone in that reaction. Many Chinese generals involved in the campaign had felt that they were fighting a confused and chaotic battle. Japanese movements had been broad, rapid, and difficult to pin down. The Ninth War Zone had thrown numerous units into blocking actions, yet both well-regarded formations and weaker, improvised units had repeatedly failed to hold. After ten days of combat, Chinese losses were heavy. But Japanese forces too had been worn, stretched, and damaged. Only now, as the Japanese reached the apparent culmination of their advance, did the Ninth War Zone begin to recover rhythm. Chaos did not disappear, but it became more legible. The possibility of a more ordered counteroffensive emerged.   In the early hours of September 29, Zhao Jiping issued the order to force a crossing of the Xiang River and attack the enemy in Changsha. The preparations consumed the entire day. River crossings under combat conditions are among the most delicate operations in war. Boats must be assembled or found. Units must be organized into waves. Timing matters. Surprise matters. The location of landing points matters. The men themselves matter most of all, because they must sit exposed in fragile craft knowing that the real test will begin not in the middle of the river but at the far bank. Late that night the division crossed secretly by boat in six groups. The crossing itself went well enough. The river did not betray them. The groups made progress in darkness. Yet everyone involved understood that smooth movement on the water did not guarantee success. The crucial question was what waited at the landing points. It was expected that the troops going ashore at Daximen would be first to meet the Japanese. Once battle began there, the rest of the crossing accelerated.   Chinese soldiers landed, attacked fiercely, and drove the enemy back from the riverbank. The momentum of the assault mattered. In such moments hesitation on shore can doom an entire crossing, but aggression can seize a foothold before the defender fully stabilizes. By the time Chinese forces entered the city, dawn was breaking. Then came street fighting. Changsha had ceased to be an objective on a map. It became again what cities become in war: a place of corners, walls, alleys, debris, smoke, and sudden death. Fighting in a city strips away much of the abstraction through which campaigns are often remembered. Streets channel movement. Buildings become cover, obstacles, or traps. Distances shrink but danger multiplies. A few men behind masonry can delay many more. Noise magnifies confusion. The city itself seems to fragment into a hundred separate battlefields. For Changsha, the long season of anxious anticipation ended in direct flame.   Yet to understand the campaign only through the struggle at Changsha would be incomplete. While the city drew attention as the central prize, another set of operations was unfolding across Hunan and Hubei—less dramatic in appearance perhaps, but strategically significant. These were the actions of the 27th Army Group under Yang Sen. If the fighting around Changsha demonstrated the pressure of frontal battle, Yang Sen's operations illustrated another principle entirely: the stubborn, opportunistic use of weaker forces to harass, sting, and trouble a stronger enemy from behind. The 27th Army Group was composed largely of Sichuan troops. Their presence speaks to one of the larger political transformations of the war. Republican China had long been fractured by regional militarism. Armies had often owed stronger loyalty to commanders, provinces, or local power structures than to any unified national command. Yet the anti-Japanese war compelled a partial reordering of those loyalties. Many warlord forces, however imperfectly integrated, now turned their weapons outward under Nationalist command.   There were exceptions. Some men, like Han Fuqu, had preserved their own strength at the cost of military responsibility and lost both opportunity and honor in doing so. But in the main, especially among middle and lower-ranking officers and ordinary soldiers, the imperative of national survival overrode provincial identity. Men from distant regions marched and fought in terrains not their own because the war no longer permitted a narrow conception of interest. Yang Sen himself was an old warlord soldier, one of those figures formed in the fractured military world of earlier decades. By 1941 he was deputy commander of the Ninth War Zone and commander-in-chief of the 27th Army Group. Along the Hunan-Hubei-Jiangxi border he had long been cautious in his operations.   At the beginning of the northern Hunan battle, his troops proved unable to withstand the force of the Japanese offensive and retreated in disorder into mountains and forests. That fact should not be softened. They were pushed back. But retreat did not mean disappearance. This is where Yang Sen's role became important. Once the main Japanese force had advanced far ahead, the troops that had scattered began to reemerge. They knew the terrain. They knew the roads, villages, passes, and wooded approaches. If they could not defeat the Japanese in a grand collision, they could search for openings behind the advancing columns.   On September 20, as the Japanese main force drove into the heart of northern Hunan, Yang Sen led elements of the 4th, 58th, and 20th Armies in pursuit for an entire day. The main body of the 4th Army had already been badly beaten at the Xinqiang River line, and only the 60th Division, recently transferred from the 37th Army, remained relatively intact. That single fact sharply defined the weakness of his means. He was not pursuing with fresh and powerful forces prepared for a decisive encounter. He was pursuing with fragments, survivors, and such units as still retained some offensive potential. But the Japanese, intent on rapid advance southward, paid too little attention to what followed behind them. That was the opening Yang Sen needed.   On the morning of September 21, the 60th Division acted on information supplied by an old beggar. Such details often sound almost literary, but they remind us that war in China was never fought by armies alone. Villagers, refugees, peddlers, guides, boatmen, and the destitute all participated in the circulation of military knowledge. A beggar could see what a reconnaissance officer had missed. On the basis of that tip, the 60th Division launched a surprise attack on the supply depot of the Japanese 40th Division at Zhangjiayuan. Division Commander Dong Yu led the action.   The Chinese quickly overwhelmed the more than three hundred Japanese troops guarding the depot. Once they broke in, they discovered an astonishing quantity of matériel: shell boxes, ammunition, food, medicine, gasoline, explosives, protective clothing, telephone wire, body bags, stretchers, and more, all stacked beneath heavy canvas. For men accustomed to scarcity, it must have seemed almost unreal. Dong Yu, delighted, is remembered as exclaiming to his deputy commander, "It's practically a department store!" The line has a momentary comic brightness in the middle of war, and that is part of why it survives. But its deeper significance lies in what it reveals. A modern army advancing deep into hostile territory is sustained by accumulation—ammunition, fuel, wire, medicines, rations, transport materials. To seize such a depot is not merely to take objects. It is to grasp the hidden skeleton of movement. Dong Yu then issued a one-word order: "Move."   At once the whole division became a swarm of carriers. Officers and soldiers grabbed whatever they could and began hauling the captured supplies away. The scene must have been one of extraordinary improvised energy—riflemen transformed into laborers, war reduced for a moment to the brute physical act of lifting, dragging, and carrying. They moved like ants dismantling a storehouse. But there was too much to remove and too little time. Before even two regiments had completed the work, the Japanese returned in force. Enraged, they sent more than a dozen aircraft to bomb the troops carrying off the captured crates, while over a thousand infantrymen rushed in on the ground. Dong Yu immediately ordered the men to abandon what remained and destroy it. Amid deafening explosions, the 60th Division withdrew from Zhangjiayuan. The Japanese pursued hard, driving them back into the mountains before finally stopping. Measured purely in terms of territorial occupation, the action changed little. The Chinese did not hold the depot. They were forced back again. But judged in operational terms, the raid mattered. Supplies had been captured, destroyed, or disrupted. Japanese rear security had been embarrassed. Time and energy had been consumed in response. In a campaign where the Japanese were racing south and depending increasingly on stretched lines, such harassment was not trivial.   After September 23, Yang Sen expanded these efforts. He sent whole divisions to harass the Japanese rear while also dispatching battalions and companies to ambush supply columns and disrupt transport lines. This was not the kind of warfare that produces neat dramatic maps in conventional military histories. The actions were scattered, local, opportunistic, and often inconclusive. Yet precisely for that reason they can be misunderstood. Not every useful military action ends in the destruction of an enemy division. Sometimes its value lies in forcing a stronger opponent to spend attention where he had hoped to spend only momentum. These operations were costly and uncertain. Small Chinese units striking roads and depots risked encirclement or aerial punishment. Yet they possessed one advantage: they did not need to win a grand battle to matter. They needed only to make movement harder, supply more precarious, and the rear less secure.   On September 25, even after the 26th and 37th Armies had suffered defeat elsewhere, Yang Sen gathered the troops that still retained some offensive capacity and launched another attack. In these actions, the 90th Division captured Wukou; the 59th Division reached the north bank of the Miluo River; the 60th Division advanced to Donggang; and elements of the 58th Army controlled the Yuanba–Zheyangqiao highway line by the twenty-sixth. These gains were not the dramatic centerpiece of the campaign. But they formed part of the cumulative pressure on Japanese operations. Every road contested from the rear, every convoy threatened, every depot exposed, and every forced diversion of troops weakened the enemy's ability to convert tactical advance into stable success.   The battlefield was fluid enough that Yang Sen's headquarters itself had to keep moving—from the Miluo River northward to Pingjiang. Mobile headquarters in such conditions lived under constant uncertainty. Reports arrived late or contradictory. Rumors outran facts. The front could bend in unpredictable ways. A command post that seemed safely behind the line in the morning might by afternoon lie only a few kilometers from enemy forces. Years later Mao Jiuyin, who had then served as an operations staff officer under Yang Sen, recalled the old commander's outward behavior in those dangerous days. Yang Sen, Mao remembered, was always joking with the people around him and could still laugh and talk during battle. On one occasion he even joked with his bodyguard about putting chili oil in his tea. To younger staff officers, such behavior appeared almost absurd.   Yet they knew how dangerous their situation often was. Sometimes they were only a few kilometers from the main Japanese forces. There is more than anecdote in this memory. Old commanders often cultivated a style of ease under danger not because they felt no fear, but because they believed visible calm itself was part of command. Men take emotional bearings from those above them. A commander who panics spreads panic faster than any enemy breakthrough. Yang Sen was sixty years old during the Second Battle of Changsha, and he liked to remark that he was five years older than Chiang Kai-shek. Age had not removed him from the front. His function in the campaign was not to shatter the enemy in one decisive frontal blow. It was to persist, reappear, sting, and remain troublesome. The 27th Army Group followed the Japanese nearly all the way to the outskirts of Changsha.   They did not fight many large set-piece engagements. That was never their main value. But the Japanese could not ignore them. If Japanese units turned and tried to hit them directly, they tended to dissolve into the landscape. If the Japanese pushed on and ignored them, they reappeared to sabotage roads, hit supply lines, and create alarms in the rear. Even Japanese official histories later described them memorably. They called them "like a swarm of annoying flies." The phrase was meant as contempt. But as so often happens in war, an insult became an accurate description of effect. If these Chinese troops could not be tigers in formal battle, they could still become intolerable as flies. And under certain conditions—fatigue, heat, uncertainty, stretched supply, shaken morale—flies can become more oppressive than an enemy would like to admit.   When later generations look back on campaigns, they often search for a single explanatory image. But the fighting of September 1941 resists reduction to one symbol alone. What gives the campaign its force in memory is not one isolated episode, but the convergence of several pressures at once: a city under threat, a command trying to coordinate multiple fronts, exhausted reinforcements thrown directly into battle, Japanese forces advancing quickly but becoming increasingly vulnerable the farther they pushed, and Chinese troops in the rear refusing to disappear after defeat. Seen from Chongqing, the campaign was a matter of telegrams, maps, and the management of strategic risk. Seen from the front, it was a matter of thirst, mud, broken fieldworks, sudden bombing, exhausted marching, and the uncertainty of whether the next order meant reinforcement, retreat, or death. Seen from the Japanese side, it was initially an aggressive advance toward an important objective, but one increasingly troubled by stretched supply, difficult terrain, and the persistent reappearance of Chinese forces behind the line of movement.   At the same time, the campaign reveals a Chinese war effort that had become more resilient than in the earliest years of the conflict. The Japanese advance toward Changsha was dangerous and at moments appeared close to success. Chinese blocking forces suffered severe defeats. Units arrived exhausted and were hurled into action at once. Commanders lost men at devastating rates. Changsha itself briefly fell into enemy hands. And yet the city was not simply surrendered as an accomplished fact. Chinese forces regrouped. Orders were coordinated across war zones. Reinforcements marched at desperate speed. Counterattacks were mounted. Forces west of the Xiang prepared and crossed back into the city. Elsewhere, troops under Yang Sen gnawed at the Japanese rear and made advance more costly than a map of front lines alone might suggest. This combination of desperate frontal resistance and incessant rear harassment was one of the characteristic strengths of China's resistance in this stage of the war. China could not always match Japanese power in one concentrated blow. But it could absorb, delay, fragment, and trouble that power across space and time. That is why the struggle around Changsha in late September 1941 deserves to be remembered not merely as a sequence of engagements, but as a layered event in which tactical battle, morale, logistics, political endurance, and international context all converged.   I would like to take this time to remind you all that this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Please go subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry after that, give my personal channel a look over at The Pacific War Channel at Youtube, it would mean a lot to me. In late September 1941, Japan pushed deeper into China, but Chinese forces—supported gradually by international help—kept resisting. Changsha in Hunan became the central point of the conflict, seen as vital to strategic control in south-central China. Meanwhile, elsewhere in Hunan and Hubei, Yang Sen's 27th Army Group—often using smaller, opportunistic actions—reappeared behind Japanese lines to disrupt depots and convoys. Even when Chinese gains were temporary, the cumulative pressure delayed Japanese momentum.       

Warum suchen manche Menschen ständig den nächsten Kick, während andere vor allem in emotionalen Momenten Entscheidungen treffen, die sie später bereuen? In dieser Folge von Betreutes Fühlen schauen Leon und Atze auf die vielen Gesichter der Impulsivität: Sensation Seeking, emotionale Impulse und die Frage, warum manche Menschen besser innehalten können als andere. Eine Folge über die Kunst, sich manchmal treiben zu lassen – und manchmal besser nicht. Fühlt euch gut betreut Leon & Atze Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/leonwindscheid/ https://www.instagram.com/atzeschroeder_offiziell/ Mehr zu unseren Werbepartnern findet ihr hier: https://linktr.ee/betreutesfuehlen Tickets: Atze: https://www.atzeschroeder.de/#termine Leon: https://leonwindscheid.de/tour/ Quellen Berg, J. M., Latzman, R. D., Bliwise, N. G., & Lilienfeld, S. O. (2015). Parsing the heterogeneity of impulsivity: A meta-analytic review of the behavioral implications of the UPPS for psychopathology. Psychological Assessment, 27(4), 1129–1146. https://doi.org/10.1037/pas0000111 Chase, H. W., & Ghane, M. (2023). Seeking pleasure, finding trouble: Functions and dysfunctions of trait sensation seeking. Current Addiction Reports, 10(2), 140–148. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40429-023-00484-5 Fisher-Fox, L., Prestigiacomo, C. J., & Cyders, M. A. (2024). Urgency theory in the context of broader emotion theories: A conceptual review. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 15, Article 1403639. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2024.1403639 Mallard, T. T., Tubbs, J. D., Jennings, M., Zhang, Y., Gustavson, D. E., Grotzinger, A. D., … Sanchez-Roige, S. (2026). Characterizing the pleiotropic architecture of impulsivity and its links to psychopathology and neurodevelopment. American Journal of Psychiatry, 183(1), 31–47. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.20240382 Maples-Keller, J. L., Berke, D. S., Few, L. R., & Miller, J. D. (2016). A review of sensation seeking and its empirical correlates: Dark, bright, and neutral hues. https://doi.org/10.1037/14854-008 McCabe, C. J., Louie, K. A., & King, K. M. (2015). Premeditation moderates the relation between sensation seeking and risky substance use among young adults. Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, 29(3), 753–761. https://doi.org/10.1037/adb0000075 Psychology Today. (2000, November). Are you a risk taker? https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/200011/are-you-a-risk-taker Reuters. (2026, July 1). Two people unfurl peace banner from New York's Empire State Building spire. https://www.reuters.com/world/two-people-unfurl-peace-banner-new-yorks-empire-state-building-spire-2026-07-01 Sperry, S. H., Lynam, D. R., Walsh, M. A., Horton, L. E., & Kwapil, T. R. (2016). Examining the multidimensional structure of impulsivity in daily life. Personality and Individual Differences, 94, 153–158. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2016.01.018 The Guardian. (2024, July 16). Skywalkers: A Love Story review. https://www.theguardian.com/film/article/2024/jul/16/skywalkers-a-love-story-review Verma, A. K., & Chivukula, U. (2023). The effect of affect, sensation seeking, and premeditation on risky decision-making: Conditional process analysis. PLOS ONE, 18(2), e0281324. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0281324 Wormington, B., Imms, P., & Derks, E. M. (2026). To lump or not to lump: Evidence for impulsivity as a multidimensional construct. American Journal of Psychiatry, 183(1), 4–6. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.20240382 Wüllhorst, V., Lützkendorf, J., & Endrass, T. (2024). Validation of the German long and short versions of the UPPS-P Impulsive Behavior Scale. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 80(10), 2099–2116. https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.23724 Reaktion: Julia Ditzer Produktion: Murmel Productions

As artificial intelligence evolves into a core driver of global industrial competition, China's strong power supply system and its forward-looking computing-electricity synergy strategy will give it an unparalleled edge in rolling out AI infrastructure, according to experts, corporate executives and on-the-ground evidence.专家、企业高管及实地证据表明，随着人工智能发展成为全球产业竞争的核心驱动力，中国强大的电力供应体系及其前瞻性的算电协同战略，将为其部署AI基础设施提供无与伦比的优势。Zhang Qin, former deputy chairman of the China Association for Science and Technology and fellow of International Academy of Artificial Intelligence Sciences, said that "AI is creating an explosive demand for energy, and the solution lies in safe, reliable and green power. China has great strength in that area".中国科协原副主席、国际人工智能科学院院士张勤表示，“人工智能正在催生爆炸性的能源需求，解决方案在于安全、可靠且绿色的电力。中国在这一领域拥有强大实力”。"Apart from solar and wind power, nuclear energy can also be a crucial power supply for data centers if safety is guaranteed. This is a technological frontier to be conquered rather than a barrier to AI adoption," Zhang told China Daily on the sidelines of the recent World Internet of Things Top 500 Summit in Beijing.张勤在近日于北京举行的世界物联网500强峰会期间接受《中国日报》采访时表示：“除了风能和太阳能，核能若安全保障到位，同样可以成为数据中心的关键电力来源。这是一个有待攻克的技术前沿，而非AI应用的障碍。”The comments came as China embraces AI with open arms. The value of its core AI industries exceeded 1.2 trillion yuan ($177 billion) last year, maintaining annual growth of more than 20 percent for several consecutive years, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.这些言论正值中国全力拥抱AI之际。据工业和信息化部数据，去年中国核心AI产业产值超过1.2万亿元人民币（约合1770亿美元），连续数年保持20%以上的年增长率。Furthermore, the country is turning AI into real-world applications and a driver of economic growth. In the first half of this year, China's industrial output of AI-related sectors, including integrated circuit manufacturing and in-vehicle intelligent equipment manufacturing, grew more than 30 percent year-on-year.此外，中国正将AI转化为实际应用和经济增长的驱动力。今年上半年，中国集成电路制造、车载智能设备制造等AI相关产业的工业产值同比增长超过30%。Wei Zhigang, chairman of CNNC Hainan Nuclear Power Co, said that as AI triggers unprecedented global demand for computing power, "the ultimate constraint has become clear: the need for vast, stable electricity supplies".中核集团海南核电有限公司董事长魏志刚表示，随着人工智能引发全球对算力的空前需求，“最终的约束已变得清晰：对庞大而稳定电力供应的需求”。Tech giants such as Microsoft and Google are actively exploring small modular nuclear reactors, or SMRs, to power AI data centers.微软、谷歌等科技巨头正积极探索利用小型模块化核反应堆为AI数据中心供电。Wei added that CNNC's Linglong One — the world's first onshore commercial SMR — is nearing completion, and the company plans to begin commercial operations later this year. One key advantage of SMRs, Wei said, is their flexible placement, allowing them to be deployed right where computing power is needed, enabling close load-matching.魏志刚补充说，中核集团的“玲珑一号”，全球首个陆上商用小型模块化核反应堆已接近完工，公司计划于今年晚些时候开始商业运营。他指出，SMR的一大优势在于其部署灵活性，可直接建在算力需求地，实现就近负荷匹配。Zhou Ji, a senior researcher at market consultancy Pangoal, said that "China's energy system has an edge in three dimensions: scale, structure and system, which constitutes solid support for AI computing infrastructure at the foundational level".市场咨询机构盘古智库高级研究员周济表示，“中国能源体系在规模、结构和体制三个维度上具有优势，这为AI算力基础设施奠定了坚实基础”。Regarding scale, China ranks first in the world in total electricity generation and also leads in incremental growth. In terms of structure, the country has the world's largest installed capacity of new energy, with the share of green power continuing to rise, Zhou said.周济指出，在规模上，中国发电总量位居全球第一，增量增长同样领先；在结构上，中国拥有全球最大的新能源装机容量，绿色电力占比持续上升。As for system, China's ultra-high-voltage grid technology enables cross-regional optimization of power resources, while the country is also adopting a pioneering approach that aligns computing infrastructure with clean energy sources, he added.他补充说，在体制上，中国的特高压电网技术实现了电力资源的跨区域优化配置，同时，中国还在采取一种开创性做法，即让算力基础设施与清洁能源协同布局。Looking ahead, the Beijing Institute of Technology's Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research projected that by 2030, China's data centers will consume about 525.76 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, accounting for 4.8 percent of the country's total societal electricity use.展望未来，北京理工大学能源与环境政策研究中心预测，到2030年，中国数据中心将消耗约5257.6亿千瓦时电力，占全社会用电量的4.8%。In the United States, meanwhile, the amount of electricity consumed by data centers is expected to cause significant tightening across the national power market.与此同时，美国数据中心的电力消耗预计将导致全国电力市场显著趋紧。That strain is already feeding through to the real economy, as big tech data centers are driving up power bills for manufacturers across the US Rust Belt, Reuters reported. For example, the Belden Brick Co in Sugarcreek, Ohio, a 141-year-old enterprise, saw its electricity costs surge 90 percent last year, largely due to rising power demand from regional data centers.据路透社报道，这种压力已传导至实体经济，大型科技数据中心正在推高美国“铁锈地带”制造商的电费账单。例如，俄亥俄州舒格克里克市拥有141年历史的贝尔登砖公司，去年电费飙升了90%，主要原因是区域数据中心的电力需求不断增长。China, by contrast, is taking a coordinated, long-term approach. Wang Hongzhi, head of the National Energy Administration, has said that China's energy system will become significantly more secure, resilient and structurally optimized by 2030, driven by over 20 trillion yuan in planned investments for key energy projects and emerging sectors.相比之下，中国正采取协调一致、着眼长远的方法。国家能源局局长王宏志表示，在重点能源项目和新兴领域计划投资逾20万亿元的推动下，到2030年，中国能源系统将显著提升安全性、韧性和结构优化水平。To accommodate the surging electricity demand driven by AI, Wang said China will closely align national computing hubs with large renewable bases in the western regions, advancing the synergy between computing and electricity, while simultaneously promoting distributed power, microgrids and virtual power plants to meet localized computing needs.王宏志表示，为满足AI驱动的激增电力需求，中国将把全国算力枢纽与西部地区大型可再生能源基地紧密对接，推进算电协同，同时推广分布式电源、微电网和虚拟电厂，以满足本地化算力需求。A virtual power plant is a network of small, distributed energy resources, such as solar panels and electric vehicle chargers, that are connected and managed as one.虚拟电厂是一个由小型分布式能源资源（如太阳能电池板和电动汽车充电桩）组成的网络，这些资源被连接起来并作为一个整体进行管理。Song Yunbo, chief sustainability officer of GCL Group, a major Chinese new energy company, said that China "already generates over one-third of its electricity from renewables — a global leader — and the country's energy surplus makes it an ideal testing ground for AI-driven applications".中国新能源巨头协鑫集团首席可持续发展官宋赟波表示，中国“已有超过三分之一的电力来自可再生能源全球领先而国家的能源富余使其成为AI驱动应用的理想试验场”。Miao Qing, chairwoman of Yingli Group, another Chinese new energy company, said AI-powered virtual power plants are reshaping electricity systems by aggregating distributed renewables, storage and flexible loads to smooth peaks and valleys while dynamically responding to real-time market prices.另一家中国新能源企业英利集团董事长苗青表示，AI驱动的虚拟电厂正在重塑电力系统，通过聚合分布式可再生能源、储能和灵活负荷，削峰填谷，同时动态响应实时市场价格。Miao said China has already built more than 530 virtual power plants, and the prospects for wider application are "very promising".苗青表示，中国已建成530多个虚拟电厂，更广泛的应用前景“非常乐观”。load-matching /ləʊd ˈmætʃɪŋ/负荷匹配incremental growth /ˌɪŋkrɪˈmentəl ɡrəʊθ/增量增长installed capacity /ɪnˈstɔːld kəˈpæsəti/装机容量ultra-high-voltage grid /ˈʌltrə haɪ ˈvəʊltɪdʒ ɡrɪd/特高压电网cross-regional optimization /krɒs ˈriːdʒənəl ˌɒptɪmaɪˈzeɪʃən/跨区域优化配置societal electricity use /səˈsaɪətəl ɪˌlekˈtrɪsəti juːs/全社会用电量Rust Belt /rʌst belt/铁锈地带coordinated /kəʊˈɔːdɪneɪtɪd/协调一致的

Warum kreisen unsere Gedanken manchmal ständig ums Essen? Mit Ernährungspsychologe Frédéric Letzner sprechen wir über Food Noise, Diäten und Verbote, emotionales Essen, intuitive Ernährung, Bodybuilding, Social Media und GLP‑1‑Abnehmspritzen. Dabei geht es um die Frage, wann Gesundheitsstreben kippt – und wie ein entspannteres Verhältnis zu Essen und Körper entstehen kann. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dominiks Buch zur pflanzenbasierten Sporternährung im UTB-Verlag: https://www.utb.de/doi/book/10.36198/9783838560328 Dominiks Gesundheitscommunity: www.gsundes-hannover.de Dominiks Online-Knie-Kurs: https://gsundes-hannover.de/knieschmerzen/ Dominiks Online-Rücken-Kurs: https://copecart.com/products/34bd5abb/checkout Marcs veganes Online-Fitness-Coaching: https://vegainer-academy.com/ Marcs Online-Kurs: https://www.copecart.com/products/a50f88f2/checkout Frédérics Instagram-Kanal: https://www.instagram.com/frederic.letzner.official/?hl=de Frédérics Webseite: https://fredericletzner.de/ Frédérics Online-Kurse: https://fredericletzner-kurs.de/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dieser Podcast wird unterstützt von der Firma Watson Nutrition. Die Firma bietet als einzige umfassend laborgeprüfte Nahrungsergänzungsmittel für eine optimierte Nährstoffversorgung. Zum Angebot zählen Multi-Supplemente, Mono-Supplemente, Sportsupplemente wie Kreatin oder auch Proteinriegel, Shakes und essenzielle Aminosäuren Mit dem Code veganperformance erhältst du 5 % Rabatt auf deine Bestellung.  Zur Firmenwebseite: Watson Nutrition ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Redaktionelle Anmerkungen 00:16:10:17–00:17:08:17 – Trauma und Disziplin: Trauma ist ein Risikofaktor für Adipositas und Binge Eating, aber keine belegte Erklärung für „die meisten“ Fälle. „Die allermeisten adipösen Menschen sind hochdiszipliniert“ sollte als therapeutische Erfahrung Frédérics gekennzeichnet werden, nicht als epidemiologischer Fakt. 00:21:54:17–00:29:47:17 – Bodybuilding und Clean Eating: Bodybuilding ist keine „Essstörung der Männer“. Es kann mit erhöhtem Risiko für gestörtes Essverhalten und Muskeldysmorphie verbunden sein. Ebenso können rigide Clean-Eating-Regeln und Essanfälle zusammenhängen, gehören aber nicht zwangsläufig zusammen. 00:51:58:17–00:56:05:17 – Fasten, Körperhass und Veganismus: Fasten „zerstört“ Hunger- und Sättigungssignale nicht generell. Es kann bei vulnerablen Menschen problematisch werden. Auch die behauptete hohe Dunkelziffer an Essstörungen unter vegan lebenden Menschen ist nicht belegt. Eine vegane Ernährung kann in Einzelfällen Restriktion verdecken, ist aber nicht automatisch ein Risikomarker. 01:09:03:17–01:09:58:17 – Langzeitfolgen von GLP-1: „Langzeitfolgen sind unbekannt“ ist zu grob. Es liegen inzwischen Daten über mehrere Jahre vor; offene Fragen betreffen besonders lebenslange Anwendung und sehr seltene Folgen. Quellenverzeichnis American Psychiatric Association. (2022). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed., text rev.). American Psychiatric Association Publishing. Arnaut, T., Duncan, S., Faurby, M., Hahn-Pedersen, J. 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L., Davies, M., Van Gaal, L. F., Kandler, K., Konakli, K., Lingvay, I., McGowan, B. M., Kalayci Oral, T., Rosenstock, J., Wadden, T. A., Wharton, S., Yokote, K., Kushner, R. F., & STEP 1 Study Group. (2022). Weight regain and cardiometabolic effects after withdrawal of semaglutide: The STEP 1 trial extension. Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism, 24(8), 1553–1564.

This week on That Tech Pod, we sit down with Vicky Zhang, Chief Product Director at DESLOC, and Zoe Zou, Channel Director at DESLOC, to talk about the future of smart home security and whether smart locks are finally ready for the mainstream.Our conversation explores DESLOC's latest innovation, the V150 Plus, which the company says is the world's first low-light self-charging smart lock. Vicky explains how the technology captures ambient light instead of relying on direct sunlight, making continuous charging practical even for shaded front doors. We also tackle the questions every homeowner has: What happens if the power goes out? What if your Wi-Fi is down? Can someone fool facial recognition with a photo, video, or even a realistic mask? The team breaks down how modern authentication systems use liveness detection and multiple layers of security to defend against spoofing attempts while keeping everyday access simple.Beyond the technology, we challenge the team on the broader question of trust. Are smart locks actually safer than a traditional deadbolt? What have Kickstarter backers taught DESLOC about what consumers really want? And as AI and automation become more common in our homes, where should we draw the line between convenience and control? Whether you're a smart home enthusiast or a healthy skeptic, this episode offers a practical look at where connected home security is headed and the engineering decisions that make it work.Interested in the DESLOC V150 Plus? Check out the Kickstarter campaign here: DESLOC V150 Plus on Kickstarter.DESLOC is a smart home technology company focused on rethinking home access through innovative security solutions. The company develops connected smart locks that combine fingerprint recognition, facial recognition, keypad entry, and mobile access with an emphasis on reliability, ease of use, and security. Its latest product, the DESLOC V150 Plus, uses low-light solar technology to continuously recharge in a wide range of lighting conditions, including shaded entryways and cloudy weather. Vicky Zhang is Chief Product Director at DESLOC, where she leads product strategy and innovation for next-generation smart home security solutions. With extensive experience in smart lock development, user experience design, and authentication technologies, she helps bring innovative products from concept to market. Zoe Zou is Channel Director at DESLOC, working closely with global distribution partners and technology communities to expand the company's international presence while helping shape future product development through market insights.

On episode 3 of Lab Notes, Amir Zohrenejad sits down with Qizheng Zhang to explore one of the fastest-moving areas of AI research: recursive self-improvement. Together, they discuss Meta-Harness, context engineering, and why the future of AI may depend as much on the software surrounding models as the models themselves. The conversation also examines evaluation, agentic systems, and the limits of today's autonomous AI research.

It's Marvel Monday and we're entering the Ten Rings! ABOUT SHANG-CHI AND THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS Shang-Chi, the master of weaponry-based Kung Fu, is forced to confront his past after being drawn into the Ten Rings organization. AIR DATE & NETWORK FOR SHANG-CHI AND THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS September 3, 2021 | Theatrical Release CAST & CREW OF SHANG-CHI AND THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS Director: Destin Daniel Cretton Writers: Dave Callaham, Destin Daniel Cretton, Andrew Lanham Cast: Simu Liu as Shaun/Shang-Chi Awkwafina as Katy Tony Leung Chiu-wai as Xu Wenwu Ben Kingsley as Trevor Slattery Meng'er Zhang as Xialing Fala Chen as Li Michelle Yeoh as Ying Nan BRAN'S MOVIE SYNOPSIS A thousand years ago, a dude named Xu Wenwu discovers the mystical ten rings which grant godly powers including immortality. He gains crazy power and wealth for the next 1000 years. In 1996, Wenwu searches for Ta Lo, a village said to harbor mythical beasts. He travels through a magical forest to the village entrance but is stopped by a guardian, Ying Li. They flirt via fighting and fall in love. They end up having two kids, Shang-Chi & Xialing. In the present day, Shang-Chi works as a parking valet in the States with his best friend Katy. One day, they are attacked on a bus by men who steal a pendant that Li gave to Shang-Chi. We find out that the Ta Lo villagers rejected Wenwu so Li chose to leave with him. Wenwu abandoned his organization and locked away the ten rings. But clearly something's happened! Shang-Chi & Katy go to find Xialing, because they assume it was the Ten Rings that took his pendant and will go after the matching one Xialing has. They find Xialing at a secret fight club which she founded after escaping from Wenwu at 16. The Ten Rings attack the fight club and capture Shang-Chi, Katy, & Xialing. At the Ten Rings' compound, Wenwu uses the pendants to reveal a mystical map leading to Ta Lo. Wenwu explains that he has heard Li calling and believes she has been held captive in Ta Lo behind a sealed gate. He plans to destroy the village unless they release her. But that's not possible because she's dead. When Shang-Chi is seven years old, Li is murdered by Wenwu's enemies, the Iron Gang. Knowing his dad is crazy, they are like nah. We aren't helping you. They escape with the aid of disgraced actor Trevor Slattery and his mystical friend Morris, who guides them through the enchanted forest to Ta Lo. The group meets Li's sister Ying Nan who makes sure they are trained up. Wenwu and the Ten Rings arrive and attack. Wenwu overpowers Shang-Chi, and attacks the Gate he thinks his wife is being held behind. Turns out it's not his wife, it's the Dweller-in-Darkness. Wenwu saves Shang-Chi but is killed by the Dweller-in-Darkness. He gives the rings over to Shang-Chi before he dies. Shang-Chi and company are able to slay the Dweller-in-Darkness. Afterward, Shang-Chi and Katy return to San Francisco where no one believes their story. The sorcerer Wong shows up to get them. In a mid-credits scene, Wong introduces Shang-Chi and Katy to Bruce Banner and Carol Danvers and the group discusses the origins of the rings. Watch the show on Youtube - www.deckthehallmark.com/youtubeInterested in advertising on the show? Email bran@deckthehallmark.com Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Fluent Fiction - Mandarin Chinese: Triumph Under Pressure: Wei's Bold Move in the Boardroom Find the full episode transcript, vocabulary words, and more:fluentfiction.com/zh/episode/2026-07-19-07-38-19-zh Story Transcript:Zh: 炎热的夏天，阳光透过公司办公室的玻璃墙，把每个人的影子拉得长长的。En: On a scorching summer day, sunlight streamed through the glass walls of the company office, stretching everyone's shadows long.Zh: 魏正在努力为下午的重要客户演示做最后的准备。En: Wei was diligently making final preparations for an important afternoon presentation to clients.Zh: 她是公司里的中层经理，总感觉自己的才华被忽视。En: As a mid-level manager in the company, she often felt that her talents were overlooked.Zh: 魏希望这次能够通过成功的演示取得客户的合同，从而得到上司的赞赏和应有的认可。En: Wei hoped to secure the client contract through a successful presentation and thereby earn praise and deserved recognition from her superiors.Zh: 演示材料铺在会议桌上，但魏注意到有一个重要的文件不见了，这让她心头一紧。En: Presentation materials were spread out on the conference table, but Wei noticed an important document was missing, which made her heart race.Zh: 这时，威胁她信心的是张，一个总是持怀疑态度的高级经理。En: What threatened her confidence at this moment was Zhang, a senior manager who always had a skeptical attitude.Zh: 张常常对魏指指点点，对她的能力表示质疑。En: Zhang frequently pointed fingers at Wei and questioned her abilities.Zh: 魏咬着牙，不愿让张看到她的犹豫。En: Wei gritted her teeth, unwilling to let Zhang see her hesitation.Zh: 她叹了口气，决定向同事李求助。En: She sighed and decided to ask her colleague Li for help.Zh: 李是个乐于助人的人，总在需要时给予支持。En: Li was a helpful person who always offered support when needed.Zh: “别担心，”李微笑着说，“你已经准备得很好了，En: "Don't worry," Li said with a smile, "You have already prepared well.Zh: 我们一定能找到解决办法。”En: We will certainly find a solution."Zh: 两人合力将缺失的内容填补完整。En: The two of them worked together to fill in the missing content.Zh: 然而，魏心里还是七上八下。En: However, Wei still felt uneasy.Zh: 在客户面前，她必须表现得无懈可击。En: In front of the clients, she had to perform flawlessly.Zh: 然而，在演示过程中，魏惊讶地发现，有一些关键数据被张动了手脚，故意消失了。En: Yet, during the presentation, Wei was surprised to find that some crucial data had been tampered with and deliberately removed by Zhang.Zh: 就在那瞬间，魏深吸一口气。En: At that moment, Wei took a deep breath.Zh: 她知道这是证明自己的时候了。En: She knew this was the time to prove herself.Zh: 她决定依靠自己的记忆，自信地重新调整了自己的讲解节奏。En: She decided to rely on her memory, confidently adjusting the cadence of her presentation.Zh: 魏用流畅的言辞和锐利的分析赢得了客户的笑容和赞赏。En: With fluent speech and sharp analysis, Wei earned the clients' smiles and praise.Zh: 演示结束后，客户给予了热烈的掌声，魏的上司露出满意的微笑，对她竖起大拇指。En: After the presentation, the clients gave a warm round of applause, and Wei's supervisor smiled with satisfaction, giving her a thumbs-up.Zh: 魏心里松了一口气。En: Wei breathed a sigh of relief.Zh: 她成功了，不仅赢得了合同，也赢得了同事们的尊重和公司的认可。En: She had succeeded, not only winning the contract but also earning the respect of her colleagues and recognition from the company.Zh: 经过这次经历，魏意识到自己的价值，也学会了挺直腰板，不再让张这种人左右自己的自信心。En: Through this experience, Wei realized her own value and learned to hold her head high, no longer letting people like Zhang undermine her confidence.Zh: 她明白到，未来的路，会有挑战，但她已做好了准备去迎接每一个新的挑战。En: She understood that the road ahead would have challenges, but she was ready to face each new challenge.Zh: 办公室的玻璃墙外，阳光仍然明亮，魏的心情也如同天空一般开阔。En: Outside the office's glass walls, the sunlight was still bright, and Wei's mood was as open as the sky. Vocabulary Words:scorching: 炎热的diligently: 努力overlooked: 忽视talents: 才华recognition: 认可conference: 会议hesitation: 犹豫tampered: 动了手脚cadence: 节奏fluent: 流畅的sharp: 锐利的applause: 掌声relief: 松了一口气undermine: 左右colleagues: 同事superiors: 上司skeptical: 怀疑态度attitude: 态度pointed fingers: 指指点点support: 支持uneasy: 七上八下flawlessly: 无懈可击praised: 赞赏adjusting: 重新调整shine: 明亮confidence: 自信心challenge: 挑战preparations: 准备secure: 取得sigh: 叹了口气

Only in this past year did it come on my radar that some therapy clinics are offering prenatal therapy. While I can personally relate to the desire to have a therapist guide you through such a complex stage of health, I thought that because it isn't offered widely, the evidence base would probably be weak.I couldn't have been more wrong. The evidence for prenatal prevention therapy is robust for improving:Pelvic health. Pelvic floor muscle training during pregnancy reduces urinary incontinence by 28% and cuts the risk of severe perineal tears in half (Zhang et al., 2024).Pregnancy outcomes. Prenatal exercise programs lower the risk of gestational diabetes by 25%, hypertensive disorders by 33%, and cesarean delivery by 14% (Xiang et al., 2026).Mental health. Mind-body interventions like yoga, mindfulness, and cognitive behavioral therapy significantly reduce prenatal anxiety, depression, and stress — while also improving pain management and self-efficacy (Miao et al., 2026).Maternal role and quality of life. OT-specific prenatal interventions improve maternal quality of life, emotional regulation, and coping — with benefits that persist into the postpartum period (Karakus & Akyurek, 2026).Despite this evidence, prenatal therapy remains vastly underutilized. The gap between what the research supports and what is actually available to pregnant individuals represents one of the biggest opportunities in our profession right now.In this course, we'll welcome Marissa Ruhl from Thrive OT, who is paving the way in offering these services and will share what she has learned about helping to build a thriving practice around this massive need.See full course details here:https://otpotential.com/continuing-education/course/prenatal-therapy See all OT CEU courses here:https://otpotential.com/ceu-podcast-coursesCheck our our live webinar schedule here:https://otpotential.com/live-ot-ceu-webinarsSupport the show by using the OTPOTENTIAL Medbridge Code:https://otpotential.com/blog/promo-code-for-medbridgeTry 2 free OT Potential courses here:https://otpotential.com/free-ot-ceusSupport the show

In this episode we speak with Alon Goren from UC San Diego about his work at the intersection of genomic technology development and chromatin biology. We discuss how his lab studies how the epigenome is regulated, how disruption of that regulation contributes to disease, and how technology can be improved to make results more robust and reproducible. We talk about his early interest in biology, how that developed through medical research training, and how a molecular biology lab shaped the direction of his career. He explains how curiosity about how cells and organisms work led him toward genomics and chromatin research. We then discuss several methods from his career, including early direct sequencing approaches for small amounts of DNA and RNA, ChIP-based methods for chromatin regulators, and work on improving ChIP-seq workflows. He explains why antibody choice matters, why monoclonal antibodies can improve reproducibility, and how automation helped scale the process. We also cover his work on spike-in normalization, including the risks of using exogenous chromatin incorrectly and the need for better safeguards in genome-wide comparisons. He describes a newer approach that uses two spike-ins to provide multiple checks on normalization. Finally, we discuss his work on short tandem repeats, zebrafish heart regeneration, and SIRT6-related polymerase pausing, as well as a newer platform that converts molecular interactions into sequencing-readable barcodes. He closes by stressing the importance of validation, careful protocol design, and methods that can be used reliably by multiple people. References Ram, O., Goren, A., Amit, I., Shoresh, N., Yosef, N., Ernst, J., Kellis, M., Gymrek, M., Issner, R., Coyne, M., Durham, T., Zhang, X., Donaghey, J., Epstein, C. B., Regev, A., & Bernstein, B. E. (2011). Combinatorial patterning of chromatin regulators uncovered by genome-wide location analysis in human cells. Cell, 147(7), 1628–1639. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2011.09.057 Busby, M., Xue, C., Li, C., Farjoun, Y., Gienger, E., Yofe, I., Gladden, A., Epstein, C. B., Cornett, E. M., Rothbart, S. B., Nusbaum, C., & Goren, A. (2016). Systematic comparison of monoclonal versus polyclonal antibodies for mapping histone modifications by ChIP-seq. Epigenetics & chromatin, 9, 49. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13072-016-0100-6 Patel, L. A., Cao, Y., Mendenhall, E. M., Benner, C., & Goren, A. (2024). The Wild West of spike-in normalization. Nature biotechnology, 42(9), 1343–1349. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-024-02377-y Ben-Yair, R., Butty, V. L., Busby, M., Qiu, Y., Levine, S. S., Goren, A., Boyer, L. A., Burns, C. G., & Burns, C. E. (2019). H3K27me3-mediated silencing of structural genes is required for zebrafish heart regeneration. Development (Cambridge, England), 146(19), dev178632. https://doi.org/10.1242/dev.178632 Patel, L., Cao, Y., Xu, T., Modolo, E., Dishon, T., Zhang, L., Mendenhall, E., Heinz, S., Simon, I., Benner, C., & Goren, A. (2025). Improved spike-in normalization clarifies the relationship between active histone modifications and transcription. Genomics. https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.11.25.690627 Xu, T., Wang, J., Shin, Y., Cao, Y., Zhang, L., Modolo, E., Dishon, T., Fisher, J., Norton, M., Fry, C. J., Farjoun, Y., Mendenhall, E., Heinz, S., Benner, C., & Goren, A. (2026). Multiplexed measurements of protein-protein interactions and protein abundance across cellular conditions using Prod&PQ-seq. Genomics. https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.01.01.697286 Related Episodes Taking ChIP from Yeast to ENCODE to Enable Genome-Wide Regulatory Protein Mapping (Peggy Farnham) Comparing CUT&Tag to ENCODE ChIP-Seq in Alzheimer's Disease Samples (Sarah Marzi) Chromatin Profiling: From ChIP to CUT&RUN, CUT&Tag and CUTAC (Steven Henikoff) Contact Epigenetics Podcast on Mastodon Epigenetics Podcast on Bluesky Dr. Stefan Dillinger on LinkedIn Active Motif on LinkedIn Active Motif on Bluesky Email: podcast@activemotif.com

With markets back in rotation mode, OptionsPlay's Tony Zhang says he's watching how that rotation plays into a climb of tensions between the U.S. and Iran, along with CPI and PPI pointing to an inflation downtrend. He says hyperscalers need to show earnings growth to restore long-term investor confidence in tech. Tony highlights one of those hyperscalers: Amazon (AMZN), which he likes due to its recent outperformance. He sees a similar trend in Alibaba (BABA) but warns his bullishness here is more speculative. Tony offers example options trades for Amazon and Alibaba. ======== Schwab Network ========Empowering every investor and trader, every market day.Options involve risks and are not suitable for all investors. Before trading, read the Options Disclosure Document. http://bit.ly/2v9tH6DSubscribe to the Market Minute newsletter - https://schwabnetwork.com/subscribeDownload the iOS app - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/schwab-network/id1460719185Download the Amazon Fire Tv App - https://www.amazon.com/TD-Ameritrade-Network/dp/B07KRD76C7Watch on Sling - https://watch.sling.com/1/asset/191928615bd8d47686f94682aefaa007/watchWatch on Vizio - https://www.vizio.com/en/watchfreeplus-exploreWatch on DistroTV - https://www.distro.tv/live/schwab-network/Follow us on X – https://twitter.com/schwabnetworkFollow us on Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/schwabnetworkFollow us on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/schwab-network/About Schwab Network - https://schwabnetwork.com/about

This week on the Who What Wear Podcast, Who What Wear Shopping Director Bobby Schuessler sits down with Nordstrom Fashion Director Linda Cui Zhang to talk about Nordstrom's 125th Anniversary Sale. Cui Zhang and Schuessler give the full rundown on everything from the trends in the 9 to Know section to the 50 new brands debuting in the sale. Plus, Cui Zhang is sharing the one item she would recommend everyone buys from this year's sale. Make sure to shop  Nordstrom's 125th Anniversary Sale, starting July 18.  Watch this episode on our new YouTube channel⁠⁠⁠⁠, and be sure to subscribe!

This week on the Who What Wear Podcast, Who What Wear Shopping Director Bobby Schuessler sits down with Nordstrom Fashion Director Linda Cui Zhang to talk about Nordstrom's 125th Anniversary Sale. Cui Zhang and Schuessler give the full rundown on everything from the trends in the 9 to Know section to the 50 new brands debuting in the sale. Plus, Cui Zhang is sharing the one item she would recommend everyone buys from this year's sale. Make sure to shop  Nordstrom's 125th Anniversary Sale, starting July 18.  Watch this episode on our new YouTube channel⁠⁠⁠⁠, and be sure to subscribe!

Artist Entreprenuer Susan Zhang rejoins the Feeding the Starving Artist podcast. In addition to her work with the Concert Truck, Susan is an acclaimed pianist with "astounding musical authority" (Columbia Free Times), Susan made her orchestral debut at the age of twelve with the Augusta Symphony. She has since been featured as a soloist with the South Carolina Philharmonic, the Aiken Civic Orchestra, the University of South Carolina Symphony, and the Atlanta Symphony Youth Orchestra. She has performed in Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre and Woodruff Arts Center as well as numerous other venues in North America, Europe, and Asia. Her recordings have been featured on SC Public Radio.Susan was a prizewinner of the Thousand Islands Chopin Competition, the Bauru-Atlanta Competition, the Burgos International Music Festival Competition, the Arthur Fraser International Piano Competition, South Carolina MTNA Young Artist Competition, and the University of South Carolina Concerto Competition. Her summer festival appearances include Pianofest in the Hamptons, the Banff Piano Master Class, Burgos International Music Festival, the Southeastern Piano Festival, and Brevard Music Center.Susan is a graduate of the Eastman School of Music, Peabody Conservatory, and the University of South Carolina. Her primary teachers have included Marina Lomazov, Joseph Rackers, Enrico Elisi, and Boris Slutsky. Susan has served on faculty at the Gilman School and Peabody Conservatory.

Fluent Fiction - Mandarin Chinese: Liang's Unyielding Artistry: Triumph of a Stormy Festival Find the full episode transcript, vocabulary words, and more:fluentfiction.com/zh/episode/2026-07-14-22-34-01-zh Story Transcript:Zh: 在破旧的仓库里，骄阳透过破碎的窗子洒下斑驳的光影，空气中弥漫着尘土和旧铁的气味。En: In the rundown warehouse, the glaring sun streamed through the broken windows, casting mottled light and shadows, and the air was filled with the scent of dust and old iron.Zh: 梁站在梁柱旁，眼中满是决心。En: Liang stood beside a beam, her eyes full of determination.Zh: 她是个不走寻常路的艺术家，总想用独特的方式打动人心。En: She was an artist who never took the ordinary path, always striving to move people with unique approaches.Zh: 龙舟节快到了，这次展览机会对梁来说至关重要。En: The Dragon Boat Festival was approaching, and this exhibition opportunity was crucial for Liang.Zh: 但要完成她的艺术装置，她需要帮助和资源。En: But to complete her art installation, she needed help and resources.Zh: 她的哥哥伟总是很务实，不太相信她能靠艺术生活。En: Her brother, Wei, was always very pragmatic and didn't quite believe she could make a living through art.Zh: 他总劝她找份稳当的工作，但梁不为所动。En: He constantly advised her to find a stable job, but Liang was undeterred.Zh: 她想证明自己的能力。En: She wanted to prove her ability.Zh: 梁找到张，虽然张常对她的艺术计划表示怀疑，但他愿意在这个炎热的夏夜帮她。En: Liang found Zhang, and although he often expressed doubts about her artistic plans, he was willing to help her on this hot summer night.Zh: 仓库是他们的秘密基地，在这里，他们一同翻找可用的材料。En: The warehouse was their secret base, where they rummaged together through usable materials.Zh: 旧木板、生锈的铁条和破布，都是他们创作的素材。En: Old planks, rusty iron bars, and torn fabric were the materials for their creation.Zh: 时间紧迫，梁常常工作到深夜。En: Time was pressing, and Liang often worked late into the night.Zh: 那些被时间遗忘的设备和工具，在她的手下重新焕发生机。En: Those pieces of equipment and tools forgotten by time were revitalized under her hands.Zh: 虽然条件艰难，她依然坚定不移。En: Although the conditions were difficult, she remained steadfast.Zh: 每当她感到动摇，仓库那种神秘和激励的氛围都会再次唤醒她的灵感。En: Whenever she felt shaken, the warehouse's mysterious and inspiring atmosphere would once again awaken her inspiration.Zh: 节日当日，观众聚集在展览馆外，期待着她的揭幕。En: On the day of the festival, the audience gathered outside the exhibition hall, eagerly anticipating her unveiling.Zh: 天空渐渐变得阴沉，仿佛随着梁心中的紧张一起翻滚。En: The sky gradually turned overcast, seemingly mirroring the tension in Liang's heart.Zh: 随着她揭开作品，雷声伴着她的展示，暴雨应声而至。En: As she unveiled her work, thunder accompanied her presentation, and a torrential downpour ensued.Zh: 然而，雨水带来的改变出乎意料，水滴从装置滑落，反射出七彩的光，令观众震撼万分。En: However, the change brought by the rain was unexpected; water droplets slid off the installation, reflecting a kaleidoscope of colors, leaving the audience in awe.Zh: 大家为这个意外结局鼓掌喝彩，所有的疑虑在赞扬声中烟消云散。En: They applauded and cheered for this unanticipated ending, and all doubts vanished amid the praises.Zh: 那一刻，梁不再在意外界的认同，她知道自己的努力没有白费。En: At that moment, Liang no longer cared about external validation; she knew her efforts were not in vain.Zh: 自信的火种在她心中燃起，这次成功让她明白，她的艺术不需要别人的认可，也无需证明给任何人看。En: A spark of confidence ignited within her, and this success made her realize that her art did not need others' recognition or validation.Zh: 她的声音，她的愿景，从此就是她的全部。En: Her voice, her vision, from now on, were her everything.Zh: 梁微笑着看着天空，雨渐止，但她心中的艺术之雨，正滋润着她今后的每一步。En: Liang smiled as she looked up at the sky; the rain gradually stopped, but the artistic rain in her heart was nourishing every step she would take in the future. Vocabulary Words:rundown: 破旧的glaring: 骄阳mottled: 斑驳的determination: 决心pragmatic: 务实stable: 稳当undeterred: 不为所动rummaged: 翻找planks: 木板steadfast: 坚定不移revitalized: 焕发生机inspiring: 激励overcast: 阴沉tension: 紧张unveiling: 揭幕thunder: 雷声torrential: 暴ensued: 应声而至kaleidoscope: 七彩awestruck: 震撼万分applauded: 鼓掌validation: 认同ignited: 燃起nourishing: 滋润warehouse: 仓库exhibition: 展览installation: 装置fabric: 布mysterious: 神秘anticipated: 期待

Miembros del cartel y excompañeros describen cómo Zhang Zhidong supuestamente vinculó productos químicos chinos con laboratorios de drogas mexicanos.

Imagine you're a chef.  You are shown the recipe for a soup. It has five ingredients.  You're told to improve the recipe.  What do you do?  96% of people reveal a bias when answering this question. And that bias makes marketing less effective, communication less engaging and products less appealing.  Find out why in today's episode of Nudge with the award-winning professor Leidy Klotz.  Warning: this episode contains explicit language.  --- Become an FSB member: https://get.fsb.org.uk/nudge/ Leidy's book, Subtract: https://amzn.to/4df4duk Leidy's latest book, In a Good Place: https://amzn.to/4tzjCvE  Join 11,934 readers of the Nudge Newsletter: https://www.nudgepodcast.com/mailing-list Unlock the Nudge Vaults: https://www.nudgepodcast.com/vaults Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/phill-agnew/  --- Today's sources:  Adams, G. S., Converse, B. A., Hales, A. H., & Klotz, L. E. (2021). "People systematically overlook subtractive changes." Nature, 592(7853), 258–261. Rogers, T., & Lasky-Fink, J. (2023). Writing for busy readers: Communicate more effectively in the real world. Dutton. Zhang, Y., Fishbach, A., & Kruglanski, A. W. (2007). The dilution model: How additional goals undermine the perceived instrumentality of a shared path. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(3), 389–401

Olivia Zhang is founder of Cancer Kids First and author of YOUth, the young person's guide to starting a nonprofit. She explains exactly how teens can turn big ideas into real world impact.

This week on Sinica, in a special episode recorded at the Davos On Air booth at the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Dalian, I sat down with Angela Huyue Zhang, professor of law at USC's Gould School of Law and author of High Wire: How China Regulates Big Tech and Governs Its Economy, and S. Alex Yang, professor of management science and operations at London Business School. Angela and Alex — who are also married, and who arrived at this collaboration from opposite ends of the academy — have developed what I think is one of the most useful new mental models for understanding China's political economy: the platform state. Their argument is that we should think of the Chinese state less as a central planner or owner and more as a platform company like NVIDIA or Apple, one that builds architecture, sets standards, and governs an ecosystem within which fiercely competitive private firms fight it out. Value accrues at the system level rather than as firm profit, and the payoff may decide who wins the race to put AI to work across an entire economy.5:37 – Three puzzles the framework is built to solve: profitless dominance in solar, EVs, and batteries; why the "grabbing hand" hasn't strangled Chinese innovation; and how China is attempting both zero-to-one invention and one-to-hundred scaling at once7:57 – The platform state thesis: why the Chinese government behaves like a platform company, how nurturing an ecosystem of private firms solves the information deficit that cripples command-and-control, and why over-entry, involution, and consolidation are a repeated pattern — from EVs to the 140-plus humanoid robot companies operating today16:13 – The aha moment: how a paper on the legal infrastructure of physical AI became the platform state idea over the Zhang-Yang dinner table, and whether this is a new species of political economy or the East Asian developmental state in new clothes20:44 – State conditions: why state capacity and domestic scale are the two preconditions for the model, and why an ambitious Vietnam — which has the top-down capacity — may still find the Chinese playbook impossible to replicate23:39 – Profitless dominance by design: harvesting versus extracting, the Uber analogy, overshooting as a control-theory strategy for nudging sectors, and how the anti-involution campaign and the 60-day supplier payment mandate show the state moderating the very competition it engineered30:33 – Organized chaos: from the bike-sharing graveyards of the O2O wars to today's disciplined market, the exit of more than 400 EV makers since 2018, and why the survivors of China's "Premier League" of competition are now turning profitable32:59 – The 3Gs playbook: growing markets by solving the cold-start problem, from Liuzhou's EV test drives to Beijing's green license plates, and how subsidy is only one lever among many38:36 – Governing the ecosystem like Apple runs its App Store: why Beijing regulates generative AI with a light touch but physical AI is a different species entirely, law as the sixth layer of the AI stack, why robotaxis scale faster in China than in the U.S., and the state-convened standard-setting that's driving down humanoid robot costs46:54 – Two flywheels: the familiar data-and-cost flywheel and the deeper state capacity flywheel, and how the National AI Fund's small but voting stake in DeepSeek aligns a complementor with the domestic stack — tilting the ecosystem toward Chinese chips53:28 – Guarding the moat: automotive data rules and Tesla's stalled FSD ambitions, the unwound Manus sale, China's own small yard and high fence, and the closing provocation — that America could build the smartest frontier models and still lose the diffusion race to "artificial good-enough intelligence." Plus: the case for coopetition, and what policymakers should (and shouldn't) borrow from the platform stateLinks from the episodeAngela's paper on law as the sixth layer of China's AI stack:The Sixth Layer: The Legal Infrastructure for Physical Artificial Intelligence in China (SSRN)Three Project Syndicate op-eds on the platform state idea:The Rise of the Chinese Platform State by S. Alex Yang & Angela Huyue ZhangAre Government Stakes the Key to AI Sovereignty? by Angela Huyue ZhangOvercapacity Is China's Biggest AI Advantage by Angela Huyue ZhangTwo Management Science papers on commercial platforms:Crowd-Judging on Two-Sided Platforms: An Analysis of In-Group BiasImproving Dispute Resolution in Two-Sided Platforms: The Case of Review BlackmailSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

President Xi Jinping called for all-out efforts on Tuesday in emergency rescue, medical treatment for the injured and the resettlement of affected people, after multiple regions were hit by severe flooding.Xi, who is also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, also urged that every effort be made to safeguard people's lives and property while minimizing casualties and preventing secondary disasters.Recent heavy rain and strong winds have caused dam breaches and landslides in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region and Hubei and Gansu provinces, resulting in heavy casualties and economic losses.In the face of severe challenges posed by floods, Xi called on local governments and relevant departments to implement existing flood prevention measures, and thoroughly inspect and rectify potential hazards involving rivers, lakes, reservoirs and areas prone to geological disasters.He also called for stronger monitoring, early warning and emergency preparedness, as well as solid disaster prevention and relief efforts.Premier Li Qiang also urged authorities to strengthen monitoring of rainfall and flood conditions, improve hazard detection and early warning, and carry out emergency rescue and disaster relief with all-out efforts.The Organization Department of the CPC Central Committee has allocated 60 million yuan ($8.8 million) from Party membership funds to support flood prevention and disaster relief efforts in five provincial-level regions.Recent extreme weather has battered multiple regions across China, with record-breaking rainfall and landslides causing heavy casualties and widespread damage. Rescue operations continue as authorities race against time to save lives.Typhoon Maysak, the 10th typhoon of this year, unleashed historically rare and prolonged torrential rains across the region, said Cai Yunge, executive vice-chairman of Guangxi.Cai said the extreme weather had hit 63 counties and districts in Guangxi, with a total of 375,000 people affected. The death toll rose to six, with 11 others reported missing, while 130,000 residents had been urgently evacuated to safer ground as of Tuesday evening. Agricultural damage has been substantial, with approximately 12,900 hectares of crops destroyed, he added.Huang Lu, deputy head of Nanning's emergency management bureau, said 1,343 personnel from the fire, police and health departments, supported by 106 vehicles and 38 boats, were carrying out rescue operations and epidemic prevention work.Temporary shelters have been established at six locations across Hengzhou and stocked with drinking water, food, bedding and lighting supplies. Eleven temporary medical stations have also been set up to provide round-the-clock medical services, according to local authorities.The armed police detachment in Nanning sent more than 160 personnel and 14 vehicles, along with rubber boats and communications equipment, to the disaster area.After arriving in Yunbiao township of Hengzhou at 5:30 pm on Monday, rescuers found floodwaters in low-lying areas reaching depths of one meter. Some houses were submerged to the second floor, with water depths reaching up to three meters. An estimated 55,000 to 60,000 residents in the township were trapped, prompting urgent search and evacuation operations, the detachment said."We rushed to the site as soon as we got the order and carried out searches house by house — not a single person should be left behind," said Wei Hao, one of the deployed officers.Zhang Shaoqing, another member of the armed police detachment, said that rain continued throughout the night, and their clothes never dried. "Honestly, we were numb after a while, but every time we carried someone out and they said thank you, we felt we could keep going," Zhang said.As of Tuesday afternoon, the detachment had rescued and evacuated 306 people, delivered 1,500 relief supply items and provided on-site medical assistance to 56 people.The National Development and Reform Commission allocated 100 million yuan from the central budget on Monday to support post-disaster restoration in Guangxi.In Gansu, a landslide struck a village in Longnan at 6:56 am on Tuesday. As of 9 pm, rescuers had located 31 of the 33 people reported missing, five of whom died despite all efforts. Search operations continued.In Hubei, severe convective weather — caused by the vertical movement of air driven by heat — swept across eastern parts of the province on Monday evening, bringing heavy rain, thunderstorms and tornadoes to some townships. As of Tuesday morning, the storms had affected 14,600 people, killing 11 and leaving one missing.The extreme weather destroyed 22 homes and damaged another 4,855. Rescue and disaster relief efforts were proceeding in an orderly manner, while authorities continued to verify the extent of damage.Local resident Qian Xiaobo, 38, said: "It was terrifying. This is the first time I've experienced such strong wind and rain. The roof was blown off, the second-floor walls were soaked, and all the glass on the first floor shattered."His father was injured and was hospitalized, but his life was not in danger."I'll remain positive," Qian said.Yu Hao, captain of the Huanggang fire and rescue brigade, said his unit received deployment orders at 11:15 pm on Monday and arrived at the scene in less than two hours. Roads were blocked, electricity was cut off and houses had collapsed, making rescue operations extremely difficult, he said.They searched house by house. Despite the challenges, Yu said his team always puts people's safety first and has remained in good condition while pushing on despite fatigue.

The British government recently announced a ban on all social media usage for children up to the age of 16.  But will the ban work?  Today on Nudge, I explore the psychology of restrictions, bans and friction.  Warning: this show is restricted to those aged 16 or over.  --- Become an FSB member: https://get.fsb.org.uk/nudge/ Use code NUDGE for 10% off your FSB membership.  Unlock the Nudge Vaults: https://www.nudgepodcast.com/vaults Subscribe to my newsletter: https://www.nudgepodcast.com/mailing-list  Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/phill-agnew/  --- Today's sources:  Driscoll, R., Davis, K. E., & Lipetz, M. E. (1972). Parental interference and romantic love: The Romeo and Juliet effect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 24(1), 1–10. Freedman, J. L. (1965). Long-term behavioral effects of cognitive dissonance. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1(2), 145–155. Mazis, M. B., Settle, R. B., & Leslie, D. C. (1973). Elimination of phosphate detergents and psychological reactance. Journal of Marketing Research, 10(4), 390–395. Spence, C., & Wang, Q. J. (2017). Assessing the impact of closure type on wine ratings and mood. Beverages, 3(4), 52. Zellinger, D. A., Fromkin, H. L., Speller, D. E., & Kohn, C. A. (1975). A commodity theory analysis of the effects of age restrictions upon pornographic materials. Journal of Applied Psychology, 60(1), 94–99. Zhang, K., Allard, T., & Bagchi, R. (2025). The token-effort effect: Trivial redemption effort increases price promotion effectiveness. Journal of Marketing.

Cardio has been the default prescription for heart health for decades, but a growing body of evidence suggests we've been overlooking a major protective tool: strength training. We dig into a large, long-running research dataset that followed more than 117,000 women for nearly 15 years and found a powerful link between resistance training and lower heart attack risk. The number that stops people in their tracks: at least two hours of weekly strength training was associated with a dramatically lower risk of heart attack, with meaningful reductions in major cardiovascular events too.We also slow down and explain what those results do and don't mean. Because the study is observational, it can't prove that lifting weights directly prevents heart attacks. So we talk through why associations can still be useful, what “dose dependent” patterns add to the story, and how lifestyle factors like sleep, nutrition, and smoking can blur the picture. Then we connect the dots on plausible mechanisms, including better blood pressure control, improved insulin sensitivity, healthier body composition, less visceral fat, and protection against age-related muscle loss and declining function.If lifting feels intimidating, we make it practical. You don't need to live in the gym or become a powerlifter to get benefits. We share an achievable weekly target (think 90 to 120 minutes), simple ways to start with dumbbells, resistance bands, machines, or bodyweight movements, and why pairing strength training with aerobic exercise may be the best overall approach for cardiovascular disease prevention.If this helped you rethink your workout plan, subscribe, share the episode with a friend, and leave a review so more people can find the show. What's one strength move you could start this week?Study Citation:Zhang, T, Zhang, Y, Lee, D. et al. Resistance Training, Aerobic Activity, Television Viewing, and Risk of Major Cardiovascular Events in U.S. Women. JACC. null2026, 0 (0) .https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jacc.2026.04.036Send us a (voice ) message with this link, we would love to hear from you. Standard message rates may apply.Support the showProduction and Content: Edward Delesky, MD, DABOM & Nicole Aruffo, RNArtwork Rebrand and Avatars:Vantage Design Works (Vanessa Jones) Website: https://www.vantagedesignworks.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vantagedesignworks?igsh=aHRuOW93dmxuOG9m&utm_source=qrOriginal Artwork Concept: Olivia Pawlowski

Hello Interactors,Welcome to summer where Interplace turns its attention to physical geography and the environment. It's already a crazy El Niño — thanks in large part to global warming — and the United States is having a big birthday. How might these be related and what to do about it?What follows is not a celebration or a condemnation, but more of a reckoning. I look at what was built, what was deliberately forgotten, and what is now continually arriving, season by season, in forms of weather the founders could not have imagined.Although Alexander Humboldt — one of the world's most famous scientists at the time — did warn Jefferson of the effects of human-induced climate change in 1804. He based his prediction on changes he observed in forests and water systems as a result of mono-crops and industrial “steam and gas”. Jefferson ignored him.BUILDING, BURNING, BILLOWING BACKOn this momentous 250th Fourth of July, when the world is experiencing record level extreme weather events, let's reflect on how over the last 250 years the United States helped build, extract, and then burn the material and political conditions that made climate change possible. From the beginning, it tied itself to land, extraction, mobility, and expansion. Over time those commitments became an energy system built on coal, oil, gas, highways, suburbs, industrial agriculture, and a development model that treated nature as an inexhaustible storehouse. That legacy is now legible in the atmosphere itself. Let's light a Roman Candle in celebration!Even before the 4th of July fireworks celebrations create another nationwide 42% average increase in fine particulate matter (Seidel, et al., 2015), the United States bears the single largest share of cumulative historical CO₂ emissions of any nation . We represent roughly 20 percent of the global total since 1850 contributing approximately 0.2°C of warming to date (Carbon Brief, 2021; UNEP, 2023). To represent four percent of the world's current population and be responsible for nearly a fifth of its cumulative warming is not a coincidence of geography or fake news. It is the outcome of deliberate choices about how a republic would be organized, energized, and expanded across two and a half centuries.The United States has long imagined freedom in spatial terms: movement, property, settlement, mastery, frontier, and circulation. Those abstract ideals were made real through land theft and remade landscapes, as well as through infrastructure built in significant part by African and African American enslaved labor. Each step along the way depended on ever-greater throughput of energy, labor, and material. In that sense, the country's history is also a history of how thought became organized around extraction and exploitation, until those thoughts and actions themselves became a kind of common sense. But by the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries increased industrialization meant emissions grew. They surged during the postwar era and peaked in the early 2000s — a trajectory that maps almost exactly onto the spatial project of suburban expansion, highway construction, and fossil-fuel-dependent agriculture (Climate Change Tracker, 2024). Two-thirds of the country's cumulative warming impact derives from fossil CO₂ alone. The built environment of American freedom is as inseparable from the chemical footprint it left behind as a firecracker's scattered debris and carbon residue.This leaves us with a climate crisis that is not just the result of a few bad policy choices in the late twentieth century. We exist in a cumulative outcome of a long national project that normalized combustion as prosperity and treated atmospheric consequence as some distant abstraction. Kind of like turning up the radio to drowned out the sound of your car making a funny noise. The federal state government played a central role in this process. Not only through direct policy and subsidies, but through the development of roads, ports, power systems, agricultural regimes, and military logistics that expanded the scale of fossil dependence at every scale of national life.The fossil fuel industry understood this trajectory earlier than the public was permitted to know. A systematic analysis published in Science found that ExxonMobil's own scientists accurately projected and skillfully modeled global warming due to fossil fuel burning from as early as 1977. These projections are consistent with subsequent observations. And yet, for decades, the company publicly pushed doubt and denial (Supran, Rahmstorf, & Oreskes, 2023). Consequently, what America projects as “economic growth”, fueled enormously by the fossil fuel industry, is embedded not only in a collective national memory but in the scientific record.The irony is that America's confidence in its own permanence rested on a false sense of geography. The landscape seemed stable because the costs were displaced in the form of upstream mining, downstream pollution, hidden emissions, imported and exported harm, and deferred climate effects. The effects on the atmosphere made that displacement impossible to sustain. The ‘progress' that had been scattered across space and time returns as heat, drought, fire, flood, and increasingly volatile weather. We built a world in which the rewards of extraction were immediate while the penalties were delayed. Call it what you will — the climate crisis is just the debt of delay, dressed as disaster.KNOWING, NEGLECTING, NEUTERING KNOWLEDGEThe USA did not simply keep burning and expanding on autopilot. By the late twentieth century, it had also begun to lose the institutional capacity to understand what its own trajectory meant. The problem was no longer that the 1970's scientific picture Exxon had already portrayed was absent. The evidence was clear. By the early 1990s the United States had ratified the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and formally accepted the goal of returning greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels by the end of the decade.The barrier to progress was not ignorance, but a degraded relationship between knowledge and power. This was engineered in part by more fossil fuel industry campaigns to sow doubt about science it privately accepted. Historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway documented how a loose-knit network of industry-connected scientists ran effective campaigns to mislead the public on issues from tobacco to climate change. They exploited the media's tendency toward false balance and keeping controversy alive long after scientific consensus had been reached (Oreskes & Conway, 2010). The strategy was to make certainty seem uncertain, and it worked. For decades, political inaction persisted through every window of action that may have helped.By the mid-1990s, climate change had become legible enough for federal institutions to name, study, and plan around, but the machinery of governance was being bent in the opposite direction. Newt Gingrich and the Republicans who rose with him may not have invented anti-government politics, but they weaponized it. Curiously, through pro-governmental politics. While their rhetoric promised efficiency and modernization, in practice it often meant cutting staffs, weakening committees, abolishing subcommittees, and treating the legislature less as a site of deliberation than as a theater of permanent combat. After all, their own staffers affectionately referred to Gingrich and his wrecking crew as ‘jihadists' — even as those same politicians promulgated and attached that term as a slur toward Muslims. One of the most consequential acts of this period was the 1995 defunding of the Office of Technology Assessment. This was a bipartisan, independent body that had produced over 750 reports on complex scientific and technical questions since 1974, including major studies on energy policy, environmental risk, and the long-range consequences of atmospheric change. Gingrich had vowed to kill the OTA during his 1994 election campaign. He kept his promise, and with it eliminated one of Congress's primary mechanisms for converting scientific knowledge into durable legislative capacity (Wikipedia, Office of Technology Assessment; AAAS Science, 2019).A legislature cannot respond intelligently to a long-range atmospheric crisis if it has stripped away the very mechanisms designed to synthesize evidence, test assumptions, and tackle complex questions over time. What replaced deliberations mediated by experts was a vacuum quickly filled by industry lobbyists — the same industry that, amongst themselves, knew exactly what Gingrich was doing. Research on institutional dynamics in climate governance consistently finds that fragmented policy, weak intergovernmental coordination, and the erosion of technical capacity are among the most significant barriers to effective long-range climate action (Jaisridhar et al., 2025; Birchall, Bonnett, & Kehler, 2023).The thinning of Congress's own cognitive infrastructure in 1995 was a bureaucratic adjustment that disabled the country's capacity to govern on topics beyond the timescales and dimensions of a single administration. The political system was becoming less capable of converting recognition into sustained action precisely as the need for that conversion became most urgent. The United States not only helped create the conditions for warming but undermined its own capacity to govern the effects warming created. The atmosphere was warming and so was the willful weakening of the world's most powerful potential partner in planetary protection.CASCADES, CRISES, AND COMING TO TERMSWhat follows is not simply a warmer world, but a less legible and actionable one. Once a political system weakens its own capacity to think long-term, it becomes ill-equipped to face a future that arrives not as a single rupture but as a cascade of self-reinforcing disruptions. We've all experienced or read about hotter summers, fire, more erratic rainfall, stressed coasts, shifting storm tracks, and weather that no longer behaves as the old seasonal calendar once did. Anthropogenic warming is already increasing variability in frequency and severity of weather systems. This in turn can alter local precipitation variability, storm behavior, and the climatic conditions on which seasonal expectations have long depended (Robinson, 2021; Wang et al., 2017; Scher & Messori, 2019). In several regions, climate change is expected not only to shift average conditions but to change seasonal predictability itself — especially for rainfall — making the future harder to read through the calendars and risk assumptions modeled and built from the past (Le et al., 2023; Delsole et al., 2014).Even now, the atmosphere offers a live demonstration of this instability. On June 11, 2026, NOAA officially declared that El Niño has arrived — with a 63 percent probability of reaching “very strong” intensity, defined as sea surface temperature anomalies of at least +2°C in the equatorial Pacific. This would rank it among the largest events in the historical record (NOAA, 2026). What makes 2026 categorically different from prior super events is not just its projected intensity but its baseline. This El Niño begins from the warmest ocean temperatures in human history, layered onto anthropogenic warming that has already pushed the planet to 1.55°C above preindustrial levels.As one paper argued in April, the El Niño is the accelerant; the fuel was already stacked (Hansen et al., 2026). The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has placed an 86 percent probability on at least one year between 2026 and 2030 surpassing 2024 as the warmest on record, with 2027 — when El Niño's thermal lag typically produces its most extreme global signals — as the most likely candidate (WMO, 2026).When that variability is layered onto long-term warming, the result is not just discomfort but a deeper erosion of climatic predictability. ENSO — the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, the coupled ocean-atmosphere system that drives El Niño's periodic warming and its counterpart La Niña's cooling across the tropical Pacific — is not a new phenomenon, but its behavior is changing. Model evidence indicates that ENSO-related rainfall variability is likely to intensify and shift eastward under greenhouse warming, creating more severe and sometimes novel climate conditions across the terrestrial tropics (Cai et al., 2021; Rifai, Li, & Malhi, 2019). The question is no longer whether the climate will change, but how many of the social and political structures built on climatic regularity can survive that change.Climate change is often presented as a technical or environmental problem to be solved. Especially amidst a culture of pervasive techno-optimism. But climate change is way more fundamental than this. It's a reordering of the relationship between how we need to think and the geography in which we exist. This includes political geography and a reordering of political imagination as it relates to physical geography. The old originally envisioned republic of the USA assumed that land could be mastered, seasons could be predicted, and institutions could absorb shock without losing coherence. Those assumptions no longer hold.The old assumption that infrastructure could be planned around stationary baselines is increasingly at odds with the evidence. We can already see how energy systems show measurable vulnerability to climatic uncertainty and extremes. Modeled systems evidence declines in reliability and large performance gaps when future weather variation is not adequately incorporated into planning (Perera et al., 2020; Ouyang et al., 2023).As a result, the challenge ahead is not adaptation to these changes in the narrow sense, but reconstruction of our relationship to them in the broad sense. This may seem impossible in today's American political system, but truly Democratic societies will need stronger scientific institutions, more durable legislative capacity, and trustworthy public agencies able to interpret risk before disaster becomes routine. They will need not only infrastructure, but intelligence. Embodied intelligence — embodied engagement with physical and social environments rather than as a purely singular-brain augmented by LLM computation. This includes a renewed ability to gather, preserve, and act on knowledge over long horizons.The literature on adaptation governance is clear that resilience depends on organizational learning, intergovernmental collaboration, inclusive planning, and long-term institutional capacity. Short-term, reactive, market or donor-driven interventions that respond to emergencies without building the durable frameworks that prevent them won't work (Birchall et al., 2026; Rahman & Islam, 2024). What this means practically is the reconstitution of the kind of congressional expertise that was dismantled in 1995. We need not merely revive the OTA but to imagine a broader democratic intelligence infrastructure capable of thinking on the timescales that climate change demands — decades, generations, and centuries. Without that, climate change will continue to be experienced as a succession of emergency, political, or market conditions rather than as a governable transformation.We can do this. After all, a country that once imagined itself through movement, expansion, and mastery made a certain kind of freedom seem natural. A new kind of freedom can be made to seem natural too. But right now our current system returns prosperity for many — but heat, flood, instability, and constraint for all. What was built now must be lived within — good and bad — while what was extracted must now live in the atmosphere — all bad. What gets burned today, will burn more later. The political order that was built through extraction, combustion, and territorial expansion must confront the atmospheric and hydrological consequences of those choices.That confrontation will only intensify. Past century's cumulative emissions have already committed the planet to changes that will outlast any government, living generation, or institution that exists. Including you and me. The next 250 years will belong less to societies that imagine escape than to those that can build the institutional intelligence, infrastructural redundancy, and long-term public capacity required to inhabit a less legible and hospitable climate (Ouyang et al., 2023; Jaisridhar et al., 2025).So, as you watch the rocket's red glare and bombs bursting in air — sending even more smoke, chemicals and debris everywhere — know the flag will still be there. But to endure, it must repair an institution to be once again knowledgeable and fair.ReferencesBirchall, S. J., Villeneuve, K., Rose, D., Baran, N. N., & Adams, S. (2026). Exploring the modifying effects of adaptive capacity on resilience to climate change across 4 coastal cities in British Columbia, Canada. Cities.Birchall, S. J., Bonnett, N. L., & Kehler, S. (2023). The influence of governance structure on local resilience: Enabling and constraining factors for climate change adaptation in practice. Urban Climate.Cai, W., McPhaden, M., Grimm, A., Rodrigues, R., Taschetto, A., Garreaud, R., … Vera, C. (2020). Climate impacts of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation on South America. Nature Reviews Earth & Environment.Cai, W., Santoso, A., Collins, M., Dewitte, B., Karamperidou, C., Kug, J., … Zhong, W. (2021). Changing El Niño–Southern Oscillation in a warming climate. Nature Reviews Earth & Environment.Carbon Brief. (2021). Analysis: Which countries are historically responsible for climate change?Climate Change Tracker. (2024). United States of America: Historic contribution to global warming since 1850.Delsole, T., Yan, X., Dirmeyer, P., Fennessy, M., & Altshuler, E. (2014). Changes in seasonal predictability due to global warming. Journal of Climate.Holgate, C., Evans, J., Taschetto, A., Gupta, S. A., & Santoso, A. (2022). The impact of interacting climate modes on east Australian precipitation moisture sources. Journal of Climate.Jaisridhar, P., Nirosha, R., Jasimudeen, S., Senthilkumar, M., Ponsneka, I., & Raja, P. (2025). Institutional dynamics in climate change adaptation: A bibliometric analysis. Frontiers in Environmental Science.Le, P., Randerson, J., Willett, R., Wright, S., Smyth, P., Guilloteau, C., Mamalakis, A., & Foufoula-Georgiou, E. (2023). Climate-driven changes in the predictability of seasonal precipitation. Nature Communications.Oreskes, N., & Conway, E. M. (2010). Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. Bloomsbury Press.Ouyang, H., Tang, X., Zhang, R., Baklanov, A., Brasseur, G., Kumar, R., Han, Q., & Luo, Y. (2023). Resilience building and collaborative governance for climate change adaptation in response to a new state of more frequent and intense extreme weather events. International Journal of Disaster Risk Science.Perera, A., Nik, V., Chen, D., Scartezzini, J., & Hong, T. (2020). Quantifying the impacts of climate change and extreme climate events on energy systems.Rahman, M. M., & Islam, M. S. (2024). Institutional dynamics and climate adaptation: Unveiling the challenges and opportunities in coastal Bangladesh.Rifai, S., Li, S., & Malhi, Y. (2019). Coupling of El Niño events and long-term warming leads to pervasive climate extremes in the terrestrial tropics.Robinson, W. (2021). Climate change and extreme weather: A review focusing on the continental United States.Scher, S., & Messori, G. (2019). How global warming changes the difficulty of synoptic weather forecasting.Supran, G., Rahmstorf, S., & Oreskes, N. (2023). Assessing ExxonMobil's global warming projections.UNEP. (2023). Current and historic contributions to global warming and emissions in the United States from 1850 to 2021. Statista.Wang, X., Jiang, D., & Lang, X. (2017). Future extreme climate changes linked to global warming intensity. Science Bulletin.Hansen, J., Kharecha, P., Morgan, D., & Vest, J. (2026, April 15). Super-Duper El Niño. Columbia University Earth Institute.National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (2026, June 11). El Niño forms, expected to strengthen, say NOAA forecasters [Press release].NOAA Climate Prediction Center. (2026, June 11). ENSO diagnostic discussion. National Weather Service.Seidel, D. J., & Birnbaum, A. N. (2015). Effects of Independence Day fireworks on atmospheric concentrations of fine particulate matter in the United States. Atmospheric Environment.World Meteorological Organization. (2026). Global annual-to-decadal climate update 2026–2035. WMO. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

In 2020, Airwallex lost nearly half its revenue overnight. Today it's worth $11 billion.Jack Zhang reflects on the decisions that kept the company alive, raising capital during uncertainty, and leading through its toughest chapter.This episode is a candid look at why Jack chose to keep building, even when a $1.2 billion acquisition was on the table.Guest: Jack Zhang, founder and CEO, AirwallexConnect with Jack ZhangXLinkedInConnect with JoubinXLinkedInEmail: grit@kleinerperkins.comFollow Grit on: LinkedInX​Learn more about Kleiner Perkins

In this interview I met with Dr. Juxuan Zhang (Osaka University) to discuss her research on the history of the Chinese apparel industry since 1979. Her paper with Prof Pierre-Yves Donzé (Osaka University) investigates the structural transformation of the Chinese apparel industry from 1980 to 2020. Following an approach of industry studies and classic business history, it focuses on the 10 largest apparel companies in the four decades since the 1980s. Drawn from a broad range of published sources and official data, it analyses the ownership transition and entrepreneurial strategies of these companies under the changing institutional context. The findings show how different types of firms were able to use regulations and policies to dominate the industry. The study contributes to literature by exhibiting the dynamics of the industry development from the perspective of companies and entrepreneurs. Read the full research for free here Presented by Paula de la Cruz-Fernández, Ph.D. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

This episode is part two of a special three-part series exploring culture in the construction industry. Across the series, we unpack the challenges and opportunities shaping the future of the sector, including mental health, workforce sustainability, diversity, leadership, and the evolving expectations of construction workplaces. Rita Zhang is an Associate Professor at RMIT University and a leading researcher in construction health and safety. For more than a decade, she has worked closely with industry to better understand the factors that influence safety performance, worker wellbeing, and organisational culture across construction projects. In this episode, Rita shares insights from several major research projects, including improving communication between apprentices and supervisors, examining women's experiences on male dominated construction sites, and exploring how subcontracting arrangements can influence safety outcomes. She also discusses the growing role of mental health in workplace safety, the potential of AI to support risk management, and how the Safety and Health Innovation Network (SHINE) is helping industry and researchers work together to address emerging challenges. Resources and links: Rita Zhang on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rita-peihua-zhang-50089255/ Connect: The Society of Construction Law Australia website: https://www.scl.org.au/ The Society of Construction Law Australia on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/society-of-construction-law-australia/ Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this podcast series are those of the individual contributors and are not necessarily endorsed by the Society of Construction Law Australia (SoCLA). The content is provided for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, professional, or other advice. Listeners should consider their own circumstances and seek appropriate advice from qualified professionals before acting on any information contained in this podcast. This show is produced in collaboration with SoundCartel. Visit soundcartel.com.au for more information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this interview I met with Dr. Juxuan Zhang (Osaka University) to discuss her research on the history of the Chinese apparel industry since 1979. Her paper with Prof Pierre-Yves Donzé (Osaka University) investigates the structural transformation of the Chinese apparel industry from 1980 to 2020. Following an approach of industry studies and classic business history, it focuses on the 10 largest apparel companies in the four decades since the 1980s. Drawn from a broad range of published sources and official data, it analyses the ownership transition and entrepreneurial strategies of these companies under the changing institutional context. The findings show how different types of firms were able to use regulations and policies to dominate the industry. The study contributes to literature by exhibiting the dynamics of the industry development from the perspective of companies and entrepreneurs. Read the full research for free here Presented by Paula de la Cruz-Fernández, Ph.D. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In this interview I met with Dr. Juxuan Zhang (Osaka University) to discuss her research on the history of the Chinese apparel industry since 1979. Her paper with Prof Pierre-Yves Donzé (Osaka University) investigates the structural transformation of the Chinese apparel industry from 1980 to 2020. Following an approach of industry studies and classic business history, it focuses on the 10 largest apparel companies in the four decades since the 1980s. Drawn from a broad range of published sources and official data, it analyses the ownership transition and entrepreneurial strategies of these companies under the changing institutional context. The findings show how different types of firms were able to use regulations and policies to dominate the industry. The study contributes to literature by exhibiting the dynamics of the industry development from the perspective of companies and entrepreneurs. Read the full research for free here Presented by Paula de la Cruz-Fernández, Ph.D. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this interview I met with Dr. Juxuan Zhang (Osaka University) to discuss her research on the history of the Chinese apparel industry since 1979. Her paper with Prof Pierre-Yves Donzé (Osaka University) investigates the structural transformation of the Chinese apparel industry from 1980 to 2020. Following an approach of industry studies and classic business history, it focuses on the 10 largest apparel companies in the four decades since the 1980s. Drawn from a broad range of published sources and official data, it analyses the ownership transition and entrepreneurial strategies of these companies under the changing institutional context. The findings show how different types of firms were able to use regulations and policies to dominate the industry. The study contributes to literature by exhibiting the dynamics of the industry development from the perspective of companies and entrepreneurs. Read the full research for free here Presented by Paula de la Cruz-Fernández, Ph.D. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Leonardo da Vinci once wrote that the key to developing a “complete mind” was to “study the science of art. Study the art of science. Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.”In 2009, Sherry Zhang and a group of dedicated California parents who were disillusioned with the schools in their area decided to co-found an academic institution that would put this philosophy into practice.A former Silicon Valley entrepreneur and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory postdoctoral chemist, Zhang shares her unexpected journey from working in a garage tech start up to being a founding member of a classical academy.In this episode, Zhang discusses the core philosophy behind classical education—built upon three tenets: truth, goodness, and beauty. She reveals how intensive training in classical Chinese dance, ballet, visual arts, and music causes students to develop habits of perseverance, focus, and attentiveness that transfer to academics.In an age dominated by instant gratification and digital distraction, Zhang explains how the structure of classical arts provides order that children long for.One student, Hugo, came to the San Francisco High School of the Arts unable to focus and with failing grades. After one year at the school, he began to prosper academically, and his mother was stunned. His story is just one among many, Zhang says.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Dr. Luyi Kathy Zhang, MD has sat with thousands of people and their families in the final moments of their lives, learning from the choices they've made and what often goes unsaid. In this episode, she joins Jennifer Reid, MD to talk about caregiver guilt, the “burden of being a burden,” and why she treats self-care less like an indulgence and more like a clinical skill in her daily work. What makes Dr. Zhang's perspective so disarming is that she refuses to treat death as a subject that requires hushed tones. She brings the same matter-of-fact warmth to a hospital room at Bellevue as she does to her writing and videos about her experiences working in end-of-life care. She and Dr. Reid also discuss how listeners can start on a path to less guilt and more meaning in their lives today. Her ABCs of Deathbed RegretDr. Zhang shares the framework she returns to again and again at the bedsides of the dying. It's not a list of regrets about money or career, but 3 quieter, more human wishes so many people have spoken about in their final days.Authenticity. “I wish I had been more true to myself.” The regret of having lived as who was expected, rather than who they actually were.Bravery. “I wish I had the courage to pursue my dreams.” The risk that felt too frightening to take, looked back on as the one that mattered most.Connection. “I wish I had kept in touch.” The relationship left untended, or never repaired.As Dr. Zhang puts it, her hope isn't that we wait for a deathbed to feel the pull of one of these, but that we notice which one lands hardest right now, and treat that as the signal worth acting on.About Dr. Luyi Kathy ZhangDr. Luyi Kathy Zhang is a hospice and palliative care physician, certified coach and hypnotist, author, and TEDx speaker. She is an assistant professor at NYU School of Medicine and directs the End of Life Serenity Unit at Bellevue, the nation's oldest public hospital. Having sat with thousands of dying patients and heard their deepest secrets, biggest regrets, and final wishes, Kathy now shares that deathbed wisdom through her writing, speaking, and content, on a mission to help the rest of us start living the life we truly want, long before we reach the end of it.Dr. Zhang's Website: https://luyikathyzhang.com/Her TEDx talk!On Instagram as Dr. Luyi Kathy Zhang https://www.instagram.com/dr.luyikathyzhang

In this episode, NG Zhang, founder and CEO of Canaan Inc., shares his journey in Bitcoin mining technology, from early ASIC development to modern innovations like heat reuse and energy integration. We talk about the evolution of mining hardware, industry trends, and future prospects.Timestamps:(00:00) –  Intro and Early Days of Bitcoin Mining(03:40) –  From FPGA to ASIC Technology(06:22) –  The Avalon A16 Series(09:07) –  Reliability and Durability of Mining Machines(12:15) –  Failure Rates and Useful Life(14:40) - Primary Market and Secondary Market for Mining(16:40) –  Small Scale vs. Large Scale Mining(22:00) - What % is home mining today?(23:00) - Heat Recovery(29:00) - Different methods of cooling in Bitcoin Mining(31:40) - Mining machine form factor(32:40) - Stratum V2 Support?(37:35) - Market Dynamics: Public vs. Private Miners(39:50) –  Energy Grid Integration and Bitcoin Mining(44:25) - Efficiency gains are slowing down in bitcoin miningLinks: https://www.canaan.io/Stephan Livera links:Follow me on X: @stephanliveraSubscribe to the podcastSubscribe to Substack

Send us Fan MailHaiyu Zhang grew up in China and moved to the US as a teenager. You can find her online at https://hz2784.github.io/. We're Sonja and Nick — parents of a dyslexic kid and your guides on this journey. We created Dyslexia Journey because we know how isolating it can feel when your child struggles with reading and school isn't helping. Every episode brings practical strategies, expert interviews with psychologists, educators, and reading specialists, plus real stories from dyslexic adults who've thrived. Whether you're a parent navigating diagnosis, IEPs, and accommodations, or a dyslexic adult looking for community — this show is for you. Got a question or a guest idea? Reach out at parentingdyslexiajourney@gmail.com. Also check out our YouTube channel! https://www.youtube.com/@ParentingDyslexiaJourney

Fluent Fiction - Mandarin Chinese: From Shadow to Center: Wei Shifu's Heartfelt Festival Gathering Find the full episode transcript, vocabulary words, and more:fluentfiction.com/zh/episode/2026-06-17-07-38-20-zh Story Transcript:Zh: 夏日的阳光洒在北京这座繁忙城市的一个安静角落，这里是一个幽静的高档小区。En: The summer sun spilled over a quiet corner of the bustling city of Beijing, here in a serene upscale residential area.Zh: 小区的草坪修剪整齐，现代化的公寓楼被柳树环绕，恍如城市中的绿洲。En: The lawns were neatly trimmed, and the modern apartment buildings were surrounded by willows, like an oasis in the city.Zh: 魏师傅是一位中年保安，负责这个小区的安全工作。En: Wei Shifu was a middle-aged security guard responsible for this community's safety.Zh: 他每天认真巡逻，对小区的每一个角落了如指掌。En: He patrolled diligently every day, knowing every corner of the area like the back of his hand.Zh: 魏师傅很热爱他的工作，但他时常感到孤独。En: Wei Shifu loved his job, but he often felt lonely.Zh: 住在这里的人总是忙忙碌碌，似乎把他当成背景的一部分。En: The residents here were always so busy, seeming to consider him just a part of the background.Zh: 很少有人停下来向他问好或交流，就算偶尔有人路过，也只是匆匆点头致意。En: Few people stopped to greet or chat with him; even those who occasionally passed by would only nod hurriedly.Zh: 魏师傅心里渴望能和这些人有更多的交流，希望被他们真正看见。En: Wei Shifu longed to communicate more with these people, hoping to be truly seen by them.Zh: 随着端午节临近，魏师傅想出了一个办法。En: As the Duanwu Festival approached, Wei Shifu came up with an idea.Zh: 他想到自己的长处之一就是包粽子，于是决定在小区里贴一张通知，邀请小区的居民们参加一个小型聚会。En: He thought of one of his strengths—making zongzi—and decided to post a notice in the community, inviting the residents to a small gathering.Zh: “端午节要到了，”他在通知上写道，“我想邀请大家到小区的花园里，一起过个热闹的节日。En: "The Duanwu Festival is coming," he wrote on the notice, "I would like to invite everyone to the community garden to celebrate a lively holiday together.Zh: 我会准备些传统的粽子，希望大家能一起来。”En: I will prepare some traditional zongzi, and I hope everyone can join."Zh: 聚会当天，魏师傅早早地来了，他在花园里设好了桌椅，摆上了自己精心准备的粽子和茶水。En: On the day of the gathering, Wei Shifu arrived early, setting up tables and chairs in the garden and laying out the carefully prepared zongzi and tea.Zh: 阳光洒在他的脸上，额头泛着汗，他心里却有些忐忑。En: The sun shone on his face, his forehead had beads of sweat, yet he felt a bit anxious.Zh: 他不知道会有多少人来，甚至担心会不会一个人也没有。En: He wasn't sure how many people would come, or if anyone would show up at all.Zh: 就在这时，刘女士带着两个孩子走了进来，紧接着是张先生和他的太太。En: Just then, Ms. Liu came in with her two children, followed by Mr. Zhang and his wife.Zh: 他们对魏师傅的用心表示感谢，并夸赞他的粽子香气扑鼻。En: They expressed gratitude for Wei Shifu's thoughtfulness and praised the delightful aroma of his zongzi.Zh: 有了他们的带动，陆陆续续又来了几个家庭，花园里逐渐热闹起来。En: Encouraged by their presence, a few more families gradually joined, and the garden became lively.Zh: 大家聊着天，分享自己的故事，还有人向魏师傅请教包粽子的技巧。En: Everyone chatted, shared their stories, and some even sought Wei Shifu's advice on making zongzi.Zh: 这场聚会不仅温暖了魏师傅的心，也让小区居民们感受到了不一样的温情。En: This gathering warmed not only Wei Shifu's heart but also allowed the community residents to experience a different kind of warmth.Zh: 魏师傅因此充满信心，并意识到自己并不只是那个默默无闻的守护者，他也是真正属于这个社区的一部分。En: It filled Wei Shifu with confidence and made him realize that he was not just an unnoticed guardian; he was truly a part of this community.Zh: 夕阳余晖下，小区的花园里满是欢声笑语，时间仿佛暂时停驻。En: Under the glow of the setting sun, the community garden was full of laughter and cheer, as if time had momentarily paused.Zh: 魏师傅微微一笑，他终于感到自己找到了归属。En: Wei Shifu smiled slightly, finally feeling that he had found his place of belonging. Vocabulary Words:serene: 幽静upscale: 高档residential: 小区oasis: 绿洲patrolled: 巡逻diligently: 认真lonely: 孤独background: 背景gathering: 聚会celebrate: 过（节日）traditional: 传统forehead: 额头beads: 泛anxious: 忐忑presence: 带动sought: 请教confidence: 信心unnoticed: 默默无闻warmth: 温情belonging: 归属chat: 交流notice: 通知invite: 邀请prepare: 准备gratitude: 感谢praise: 夸赞aroma: 香气扑鼻gradually: 逐渐cheer: 欢声pause: 停驻

In this episode of BRAVE COMMERCE, Rachel Tipograph and Sarah Hofstetter sit down with Felicia Zhang, Head of Marketing at Bar Keeper's Friend, to discuss what it takes to modernize an iconic brand while maintaining the trust that made it successful in the first place. Drawing on experience across global brands including Nike, Oreo, and Nestlé, Felicia shares lessons from her transition to a smaller, more agile organization, where speed, experimentation, and continuous improvement are critical to success.The conversation explores why brands perform best when they're willing to launch, learn, and iterate rather than waiting for perfect conditions. Felicia also shares how her approach to leadership has evolved over time, including the importance of empowering teams to take action, embracing uncertainty, and finding optimism through periods of change.Key TakeawaysLaunching a strong V1 and improving through iteration often drives more progress than waiting for a perfect launch.The most effective teams combine strategic thinking with a willingness to roll up their sleeves and execute.Leadership becomes more effective when leaders focus less on controlling outcomes and more on empowering people and solving problems. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Send us Fan MailIn this episode of the WTR Small-Cap Spotlight podcast, Chris Zhang, Vice President of Corporate Development and Strategy of Maison Solutions Inc. (Nasdaq: MSS) joins host Tim Gerdeman, Vice Chair, Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Water Tower Research, and WTR Analyst James Kisner. Maison is a specialty grocery retailer serving Asian-American and other ethnic communities, operating HK Good Fortune stores in Southern California and Lee Lee International Supermarkets in Arizona. Zhang lays out the company's tech-driven transformation across four pillars: store inventory, sales and order operations, customer privacy, and customer loyalty, with AI-powered forecasting and replenishment furthest along and perishables the first problem it tackles. He details the newly announced collaboration framework with SupplyAi and MiniMax aimed at embedding AI in everyday food-retail workflows, the direct-sourcing strategy across Asia including the Guizhou Moutai distribution agreement, and the company's Worldcoin (WLD) treasury position and early proof-of-human exploration. The conversation closes with the operating KPIs and milestones that would signal the AI and solutions strategy is working over the next 12 months.

Last time we spoke about the Hubei-Henan Campaign of 1940-1941. In November 1940, a Central Hubei operation using multiple task forces aimed to exploit Chinese dispersal, achieving only local successes and no lasting territorial gains. The Japanese then tried again in late January 1941 with a major offensive into southern Henan. Despite concentrating a large force, the campaign failed strategically. After the Henan failure, Japan attempted to regain momentum in spring 1941 by attacking western Hubei around Yichang on the Yangtze. Despite an initial barrage and rapid early gains, Japanese forces became exposed in a narrow salient. The Chinese reorganized their river defenses and launched a converging counteroffensive, driving the invaders back and ending the engagement where it began, with the Japanese suffering heavy casualties and their westward push thwarted.   #206 The Battle of Shanggao Welcome to the Fall and Rise of China Podcast, I am your dutiful host Craig Watson. But, before we start I want to also remind you this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Perhaps you want to learn more about the history of Asia? Kings and Generals have an assortment of episodes on history of asia and much more  so go give them a look over on Youtube. So please subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry for some more history related content, over on my channel, the Pacific War Channel where I cover the history of China and Japan from the 19th century until the end of the Pacific War. The year 1940 had brought a particular humiliation. In August of that year, Communist General Peng Dehuai had launched the Hundred Regiments Offensive — a massive, coordinated assault across North China that shattered Japanese rail and supply lines, embarrassed Imperial General Headquarters, and demonstrated that the Chinese were far from finished. Japan's response had been brutal, the infamous "Three Alls" campaign of reprisals across the countryside. But the damage had been done, and the attention of Imperial General Headquarters shifted northward. The autumn of 1940 had also seen the First Battle of Changsha, where the Japanese 11th Army under General Sonobe Yahachirō pushed south into Hunan Province expecting to overwhelm the Chinese defenders and finally deal a decisive blow to Chiang Kai-shek's armies. Instead, General Xue Yue — the "Tiger of Changsha" — had allowed the Japanese to advance deep into his prepared killing ground before counterattacking from multiple directions. The Japanese had been forced to retreat in disorder, and the front in Hunan and Jiangxi settled once again into sullen stalemate. It was in this atmosphere of frustrated ambition and strategic inertia that the seeds of Shanggao were sown. By February 1941, Imperial General Headquarters had decided to redeploy the 33rd Division — then garrisoned in the town of Anyi, in northwestern Jiangxi — to North China. The transfer was scheduled to begin in early April, and it made strategic sense: the north required reinforcement, and the front in Jiangxi had been quiet enough that one division could be spared. The problem was that the 33rd Division's departure would leave a gap in Japanese dispositions, and no significant offensive operation had yet been conducted to weaken the Chinese forces that would be left facing a thinned-out Japanese line. Lieutenant General Ōga Shigeru, the energetic commander of the Japanese 34th Division, saw opportunity in the window that existed before the 33rd departed. His division was concentrated around Xishan and Wanshou Palace, astride the Xiang–Gan Highway — the main road running westward through Jiangxi — and across that highway lay the town of Shanggao and the Chinese forces defending it. Ōga proposed exploiting the presence of both divisions for a coordinated strike: a sharp, limited offensive to crush Chinese field forces around Nanchang and the Jiangxi interior before the 33rd Division's train north. The 11th Army headquarters, now commanded by General Marube, endorsed a cautious concept — a "quick strike" with limited objectives. But the 34th Division's staff, energized by Ōga's ambition, had already run well ahead of this guidance. Large-scale requisitioning of coolies for logistics was underway; training exercises aimed at the specific terrain around Shanggao had been conducted; planning had progressed in far more detail than a "limited" operation warranted. This eagerness would prove to be the Japanese undoing before the first shot was fired. Chinese intelligence networks, always attentive to the movement of porters and the telltale preparations that preceded a Japanese offensive, quickly detected the scale of these preparations and reported them to General Luo Zhuoying, commander of the Chinese 19th Army Group. By the time the Japanese columns were forming up to march, Luo had already hardened his defenses and laid the groundwork for a trap. General Luo Zhuoying was not a passive commander. He served simultaneously as commander of the 19th Army Group and as Deputy Commander of the 9th War Zone — the latter post placing him directly under General Xue Yue, the victor of Changsha. Luo had spent the lull after Changsha doing what Chinese commanders across the theater had learned was essential: reorganizing, retraining, and above all improving the defensive architecture of his sector. The plan Luo devised for meeting the anticipated Japanese offensive was elegant in its simplicity and demanding in its execution. Rather than contesting the Japanese advance at the frontier, he would allow the enemy to push westward, yielding ground through three successive defensive lines while bleeding the attackers at every step. The first and second lines would slow the Japanese, exact casualties, and stretch their logistics. The third line — anchored at Shanggao itself — would be the killing ground. There, the Chinese forces would hold fast while other formations swung around the Japanese flanks and rear to close the encirclement. The Japanese, having marched deep into Chinese-held territory with their supply lines thinning and their flanks exposed, would find themselves surrounded rather than victorious. For this plan to work, each Chinese formation had to perform its role with discipline. The 70th Corps, deployed in the north along the arc from Shitou Street through Fengxin to Jing'an, would have to conduct a controlled fighting retreat — yielding ground but making the Japanese pay for it, never breaking and running. The 49th Corps would hold the southern flank and create conditions for flanking action. And the 74th Corps — General Wang Yaowu's elite formation, comprising the 51st, 57th, and 58th Divisions — would hold the final line at Shanggao and serve as the anvil upon which the Japanese advance would shatter. The 74th Corps was by 1941 one of the most battle-hardened formations in the Nationalist Army. It had fought at Shanghai in 1937, at Wuhan in 1938, and in the hills and valleys of Jiangxi through the years since. Its men knew the terrain around Shanggao. They had prepared positions in depth, studied the approaches, and rehearsed the defensive plan Luo had designed. When the Japanese came, they would be ready. Against the Chinese 70,000 — distributed across eleven divisions in four corps, with additional provincial security forces for local coverage — the Japanese would throw roughly 20,000 men: three major formations advancing in coordinated columns. The disparity in numbers was stark, but the Japanese had the advantages of offensive initiative, air superiority, and the formidable fighting quality that the Imperial Army had demonstrated throughout the war in China. The question was whether those advantages would be enough to overcome a prepared defense wielded by a commander who had invited the attack. The operational plan devised by the Japanese 11th Army called for three columns to converge simultaneously on Shanggao from north, center, and south — a classic encirclement concept that, if executed with precision, would catch the Chinese defenders in a tightening vice. In the north, the main force of the 33rd Division under Lieutenant General Sakurai Shōzō would drive westward from its bases around Anyi and Ganzhoujie, descending the Liao River valley to threaten the Chinese right flank and prevent the 70th Corps from interfering with operations in the center.In the center, Ōga's 34th Division would advance along the Xiang–Gan Highway — the direct route from Nanchang toward Shanggao — capturing the town of Gao'an along the way and pressing relentlessly westward until it reached the main defensive positions. This was the principal striking force, the column designed to crack open the Chinese defenses and seize the objective.In the south, the Independent Mixed 20th Brigade under Major General Ikeda would cross the Jin River and advance along its south bank, eventually swinging north to link up with the 34th Division and complete the encirclement of whatever Chinese forces remained in the Shanggao area. The plan was coherent on paper. But it contained a structural flaw so serious that, in retrospect, it is difficult to understand how the 11th Army's staff allowed it to proceed uncorrected. The success of any converging operation depends on synchronization — on each column hitting its objectives on schedule and maintaining communication with the others so that each can react to developments on the other prongs. Yet the 11th Army headquarters made no recorded effort to coordinate the 33rd and 34th Divisions before the battle began. There was no forward command post established to oversee the operation. General Marube remained at Hankou, hundreds of miles to the north, throughout the battle — as remote from the fighting as a Tokyo bureaucrat. Operational decisions were left entirely to the individual divisions, with no mechanism to coordinate their actions if something went wrong. Something was going to go wrong. Luo Zhuoying had seen to that. On the morning of March 15, 1941, all three Japanese columns stepped off simultaneously, advancing into the misty hills and rice paddies of northwestern Jiangxi. In the north, Sakurai's 33rd Division moved briskly from Anyi toward Fengxin. The town fell by noon, and the division pressed westward in good order. The Japanese infantry moved confidently along the Liao River valley, experienced soldiers who had fought across China and had no particular reason to expect what was coming. The Chinese 70th Corps gave ground — as it had been ordered to — but did so on its own terms, occupying and then abandoning successive pieces of high ground along both banks of the river, making the Japanese advance uncomfortable and costly. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the 33rd Division was being drawn forward into terrain that favored the defender. By March 18 and 19, the 33rd Division had pushed all the way to Guzhu'ao and Huamenlo — a considerable advance, but one that had taken the division far from its base at Anyi. And it was here, far from support and with flanks increasingly exposed, that the Chinese blocking forces closed in. Chinese infantry, who had been waiting in prepared positions in the high ground overlooking the river valley, launched coordinated counter-attacks that struck the 33rd Division from multiple directions. The fighting was fierce and costly. In two days of close combat, the division suffered more than 2,500 casualties — a grievous toll that represented a significant fraction of its effective strength. The northern column had been stopped dead. On March 19, Sakurai ordered the 33rd Division to reverse course. By March 23, after four days of painful withdrawal under pressure, it had pulled back to Anyi — the same place it had started. The northern prong of the Japanese offensive had accomplished nothing except the loss of thousands of men. In the south, the Independent Mixed 20th Brigade had a rougher start. Its initial attempt to cross the Gan-Jin river junction at noon on March 15 was repulsed by Chinese defenders, and it was only under cover of darkness that the brigade managed to force a crossing. Once across, it moved westward along the south bank of the Jin River, but progress was slow and contested. A detachment — the Gan River Detachment — ran into fierce resistance from the 26th Division of the Chinese 49th Corps on March 19. The brigade's main body meanwhile fought its way through the 51st Division of the 74th Corps, but the 107th Division and elements of the 51st managed to contain the advance at the Laichunling–Zhutoushan line. On the night of March 20, the main body of the 20th Brigade crossed the Jin River at Huifu to link up with the 34th Division — but a portion of its troops, cut off on the south bank, was destroyed by Chinese forces. The southern column was across the Jin River, but it had taken losses and was already engaged in ways its planners had not anticipated. In the center, the 34th Division fared best in the early going. Ōga's division moved westward from Xishan along the Xiang–Gan Highway on March 16, and by the 17th had captured Gao'an — a meaningful early success. The Chinese 74th Corps, executing Luo's plan faithfully, dispatched only screening forces east of the Tangpu River to slow the Japanese advance rather than contesting it decisively. The main body of the 74th Corps fell back to the third-line positions at Sixi, Guanqiao, and Tangpu, preparing the killing ground that Luo had designated. Simultaneously, the 26th Division and most of the 105th Division from the 49th Corps were shifted across the Gan River to operate south of the Jin River on the Japanese left flank, and the 72nd Corps was ordered to maneuver on a wide envelopment around Daxia and south of Ganfang. By March 20–21, the 34th Division had pressed forward to attack the Chinese positions at Sixi and Guanqiao. Ōga's men were confident — they had taken Gao'an, they were moving, and the objective of Shanggao lay within reach. But as the division pushed toward Shangjijia, it ran squarely into the 57th and 58th Divisions of the 74th Corps, fighting with a tenacity that told the Japanese plainly enough: this was where the Chinese intended to stand. The week of March 21–24 brought the battle to its crisis. The 34th Division hammered at the Chinese positions defending Shanggao itself, while on the flanks, the fighting took on a character that neither side had entirely anticipated. On March 21, General Wang Yaowu — commanding the 74th Corps from his headquarters in Shanggao — decided it was time to do more than absorb Japanese blows. He ordered General Li Tianxia to clear Japanese forces from the south bank of the Jin River and advance on Gao'an, with the aim of cutting the 34th Division's supply line and threatening its rear. It was an aggressive move, and if it had worked, it might have produced a decisive result earlier than history would record. It did not work — at least not immediately. That very evening, the Independent Mixed 20th Brigade, which had been reorganizing after the chaos of the river crossing, launched a powerful offensive at dawn on the 22nd. Li Tianxia's lead elements had barely set out from Shitou Street when they collided head-on with the main force of the 20th Brigade, which had crossed back from the north bank of the Jin River. The Japanese thrust was coordinated and aggressive: one column circled wide to attack Lazhu Mountain; another swung south of Hu Family west of Shitou Street to strike Li's division in the flank and rear; and nine aircraft with four artillery pieces bombarded the Chinese positions from north to south. Li's division could not hold against this convergent assault and fell back to the high ground southwest of Shitou Street. Wang Yaowu reacted quickly. He ordered Li's main body to wheel left to face the new threat and simultaneously dispatched the Army's Field Supplementary Regiment — held in reserve near Yintang — on a forced march to Huayang to block the Japanese westward drive. This regiment, racing down roads strafed by nine enemy aircraft, covered 15 li per hour and seized Huayang and the high ground to its northeast by around seven in the morning. By nine, the 20th Brigade arrived in strength and — supported by more than ten aircraft — launched a fierce assault on the regiment's positions. The regiment's officers and men held firm, taking heavy casualties but refusing to break. Frustrated at Huayang, the 20th Brigade shifted its effort to the Kuang Family area, linking up with over a thousand men who had crossed from Baichetou to the south bank and pushing along the river toward Xiongfang in an attempt to outflank the Chinese left wing. The Supplementary Regiment sent its 1st Battalion with a mortar company to meet this threat, and the two forces met in a fierce engagement. When the Japanese reinforced their assault and deployed incendiary bombs and poison gas, Xiongfang fell by early afternoon — but Li Tianxia immediately sent two regiments from his right flank to take it back, and by midnight the position was in Chinese hands again. Shitou Street and Jigong Ridge were simultaneously recaptured. The Independent Mixed 20th Brigade now found itself in an increasingly uncomfortable position, fighting with the Jin River at its back and the initiative slipping away. Meanwhile, the main event was being fought in the rubble and ridgelines around Shanggao itself. From March 22 to 25, the 34th Division and whatever remnants of the 20th Brigade could contribute threw themselves repeatedly at the defensive line anchored on Stone Arch Bridge, Xia Po Bridge, Xu Lou, Pan Family Bridge, Cloud Head Mountain, and Lei Family Mountain. This was not the fluid, mobile warfare that the Japanese had envisioned but brutal, grinding attritional combat for individual strongpoints and ridgelines, with positions changing hands multiple times in a single day. The Japanese air arm was deeply involved. Ōga's division had close air support that could operate even in poor weather, and Group 3 of the Japanese Air Force hammered the Chinese positions with sustained effort. On the morning of March 24, after the 34th Division fed in more than 3,000 additional troops transferred across the Jin River, the Air Force dispatched over seventy aircraft that dropped more than 1,700 bombs, largely destroying the defensive positions of Liao Lingqi's division. The Japanese exploited the resulting chaos and twice broke through gaps in the line — but were driven out each time by Chinese counterattacks. At noon, enemy aircraft bombarded in relays and Japanese infantry broke through at Xia Po Bridge. It was at this moment that Li Hanqing, commanding the Chinese infantry defense in that sector, did what officers throughout history have done when systems fail and only personal example can stem the tide: he personally led his officer cadre in repeated counter-attacks, hand-to-hand fighting in the rubble until the Japanese were finally expelled. By this point, the 34th Division's offensive capacity was nearly spent. At the same time — and this was the critical shift that would determine the battle's outcome — General Luo Zhuoying recognized that the moment to spring the trap had arrived. The northern column had already been broken and sent reeling back toward Anyi. The southern column was pinned against the Jin River with its back to the water. The central column was bled white against the defenses of Shanggao. Luo now ordered all his armies to close in from multiple directions. On the morning of March 22, he had already begun revising his orders; by noon on the 23rd, the forces of Liu Duoquan and Li Jue had occupied Shitou Street, Guanqiao Street, and Yanggong Market, pressing on Huifu and Gaoyao. The encirclement of the 34th Division was not yet complete, but its shape was unmistakably forming. By March 25, the 34th Division knew it was in mortal danger. Surrounded on three sides, its ammunition running low and its casualty lists growing by the hour, the division urgently appealed to the 11th Army for rescue. The message that arrived in Hankou was a shock. General Marube and his staff, who had remained at their distant headquarters throughout the battle without establishing a forward command post, had not properly grasped the scale of the disaster unfolding in Jiangxi. The lack of coordination between the 33rd and 34th Divisions — the structural flaw that had been built into the operation from its conception — had allowed Luo Zhuoying to defeat each column separately, and now the central column faced annihilation. The 11th Army responded in a scramble. Chief of Staff Kinoshita was dispatched by aircraft to Nanchang with Operations Staff Officer Lieutenant Colonel Yamaguchi and Captain Ōne to organize a relief operation. The 33rd Division — barely recovered from its own battering in the north — was ordered to sortie immediately and fight its way to the 34th Division's relief. Sakurai organized his battered 33rd Division into three rescue columns. Infantry Brigade Commander Araki Shōji took the right column, leading Infantry Regiment 215 with one mountain artillery battalion. Infantry Regiment 214 formed the left column. The divisional commander himself led the central column with the main divisional force. On March 24 and 25, all three columns sortied from strongpoints at Niuxing, Fengxin, and other positions, attacking across the Wuqiao River and through Cunqian Street toward Tangpu and Guanqiao. The relief operation brought the battle to its most complicated moment. On the morning of March 25, the 33rd Division launched a fierce assault on the forces that Luo Zhuoying had positioned to tighten the encirclement from the north — striking Zhang Yanchuan's division at Kengkou Leng, Jiezipo, and Nancha Luo. Zhang's division, struck simultaneously from the front and rear, withdrew at dusk to near Tu Di Wang Temple, where it linked up with Tang Boyin's division. What happened next became one of the most controversial decisions of the entire battle. Zhang Yanchuan was serving as deputy army commander in the absence of Li Jue from the front. Surveying the situation — his own division under heavy pressure, the 33rd Division's relief columns pushing aggressively — Zhang concluded that the position was untenable. On his own authority, without authorization from Luo Zhuoying or any superior commander, he withdrew both his own and Tang Boyin's divisions to Fenghuang Market and Zhuangfang. The consequence was immediate and severe. The withdrawal opened a corridor through which the 33rd Division entered Guanqiao and linked up with the encircled 34th Division. An encirclement that had taken days of blood and sacrifice to construct was torn open by a single unauthorized decision. Luo Zhuoying, when he received word of Zhang's withdrawal the following morning, was furious — but he could not change what had already happened. He could only adapt. The breakout itself was an ordeal. A portion of the 34th Division that attempted to escape to the east was intercepted near Huifu by a division of the 49th Corps and lost roughly half its strength before being compelled to turn back. The main body ultimately broke out on March 27, withdrawing in march order that told its own story of disaster: headquarters, baggage, artillery, casualties, field hospital, rear guard — all moving in what the records describe as "a wretched state." On the night of March 27, Japanese troops escorting the 34th Division's field hospital — a field artillery company of the 8th Battery — were completely annihilated in a Chinese night attack. When the division reached Longtuan Xu on March 28, the stretcher-bearer column carrying the wounded stretched some seven to eight kilometers along the road. That same day, the 33rd Division's Infantry Regiment 214 finally made contact with the 34th Division's headquarters, completing what amounted to a rescue of men who had already endured their defeat. The 33rd Division's mountain artillery batteries exhausted their entire ammunition supply covering the retreat and required emergency aerial resupply drops to continue. The 34th Division limped back to its original garrison on April 2. Despite the setback caused by Zhang Yanchuan's unauthorized withdrawal, Luo Zhuoying did not abandon his design. Assessing his situation on the morning of March 26, he found reason for cautious optimism: Wang Yaowu's army was still making progress at Shanggao; the Japanese south of the Jin River had largely been cleared; and Sichuan Army and Northeastern Army units that had been moving to reinforce the battle had now reached the field, meaning Chinese forces retained significant numerical superiority. He resolved to execute a second encirclement. At nine in the morning of March 26, Luo issued strict orders: Zhang Yanchuan's and Tang Boyin's divisions were to immediately comply with their original orders and block the enemy near Guanqiao; Yu Chengwan's division was to attack northward via Pan Family Bridge; Liao Lingqi's and Song Yingzhong's divisions were to press toward Guanqiao with full force; Wang Kejun's division was to strike the enemy's flank and rear east of Guanqiao; Fu Yi's division was to advance south of Jiang Family Isle; and Chen Liangji's division was to swing southeast via Changpu to complete the enemy's destruction. The second ring was being drawn. On March 28, as the 34th Division's battered column trudged eastward toward survival, Wang Kejun's division advancing from Yanggong Market moved to intercept it. The Chinese occupied high ground north and south of Yanggong Market and along Mozi Ridge, and what followed was a grinding all-day battle that fixed the Japanese column at the Xiama Bei–Huxing Ridge line. Part of the 20th Brigade, moving up from Gao'an to assist the withdrawing 34th Division, was blocked near Long Tu Market. Liao Lingqi's division pursued the enemy rear guard to the Changling–Manmei high ground, where the fighting erupted with renewed intensity. At noon, part of Li Tianxia's division arrived and deployed along the Shangluoxiang–Shanyuan–Fangtounao line to harass the Japanese right flank; part of Yu Chengwan's division reached Longxing Mountain and outflanked Guanqiao Street from the south. The surviving Japanese defenders in Guanqiao withdrew into the town for a last stand, and after Liao's division pressed the assault, street fighting raged until five in the afternoon, when over 600 defenders were annihilated. Over 2,000 troops of the Independent Mixed 20th Brigade conducted a fighting withdrawal from Long Tu Market and Yanggong Market, covered by Japanese aircraft bombing to shield the 34th Division's retreat. By noon on March 30, the Japanese had abandoned both strongpoints and scattered northeastward. One group of over 600 men fled directly into the main positions of Zhang Yanchuan's division — an ironic fate, given Zhang's earlier withdrawal — and were largely annihilated. The encircling forces had been essentially dispersed, and the two pursuit columns now pressed forward under the overall direction of General Xue Yue, who had assumed personal coordination of the chase. On March 27, Luo Zhuoying — confident that victory was secured — issued a general order for a final offensive and announced substantial cash rewards to his troops: prizes offered for the capture of Japanese officers, artillery pieces, regimental colors, and other materiel. The rewards were both a practical incentive and a mark of how far the battle had tipped. By midnight on March 31, Chen Hongshi's advance column had recovered Gao'an; Wang Tiehan's division had recovered Xiangfu Guan. On April 2, the divisions of Zhang Yanchuan and Song Yingzhong recovered Fengxin; that afternoon Wang Tiehan's division took back Xishan and Wanshou Palace — the very base from which the 34th Division had launched its offensive. By April 3, the pursuing armies had reached the vicinity of Dacheng and Ganzhoujie. On April 8 and 9, the 70th Corps recovered the outpost strongpoints around Anyi before halting operations. The Japanese had retreated into their original positions and were defending from prepared terrain. The pursuit was over. The Battle of Shanggao had lasted nineteen days and nights. No battle of the Second Sino-Japanese War was ever free of the fog of competing claims, and Shanggao was no exception. On March 29, before the pursuit had even concluded, Luo Zhuoying telegraphed Chiang Kai-shek with his accounting of the victory. His numbers were dramatic: Major General Iwanaga, the Japanese infantry commander, killed; regimental commander Colonel Hamada, killed; over 15,000 Japanese killed or wounded in total. Chinese losses, Luo reported, exceeded 20,000. Ten guns, over a thousand rifles, and numerous machine guns had been captured. His superior, General Xue Yue, was skeptical. In a telegram to Chiang Kai-shek on April 5, Xue reduced Luo's numbers by twenty percent, reporting 12,520 Japanese killed or wounded and 14 prisoners captured. The discrepancy between two Chinese commanders reporting on the same battle speaks to the difficulty of battlefield accounting in any era, and suggests something of the competitive pressures that shaped how Chinese commanders reported their victories to Chongqing. The official Chinese histories, compiled after the war in the History of the War of Resistance, reported approximately 15,000 Japanese killed or wounded, 17 prisoners taken, and significant quantities of captured materiel: 6 mountain guns, 1 mortar, 24 light machine guns, 408 rifles, 24 grenade launchers, and over 111,717 rounds of various ammunition. Chinese casualties, by the same records, were 17,119 killed or wounded and 2,814 missing. Japanese records for the battle do not survive — a consequence of the wholesale destruction of Imperial Army documentation at the war's end. Contemporary scholars, working from other sources, estimate actual Japanese combat losses at approximately 5,500 killed and wounded. This is substantially lower than the Chinese claims, as was nearly always the case in the war, but represents a significant defeat by any measure: roughly a quarter of the force committed, many of them veterans impossible to replace. Chiang Kai-shek subsequently awarded the victorious Chinese units a commendation prize of 150,000 yuan — a substantial sum that marked the battle's significance in Nationalist eyes. The outcome at Shanggao was not accidental. Several interlocking factors combined to produce a Chinese victory, and each deserves consideration. The most fundamental was Luo Zhuoying's defensive plan. The decision to trade space for time — to absorb the Japanese advance through three successive defensive lines rather than contest the frontier — required both tactical confidence and a willingness to accept initial setbacks that could easily be misread as defeat. Chinese forces had to give ground, and they did. They had to suffer through the early days of Japanese advance without breaking and running, drawing the enemy forward and allowing the encirclement to take shape. That they largely succeeded in executing this plan reflects the improving quality of the Nationalist Army by 1941: better trained, better led at the operational level, and — critically — equipped with a strategic design that matched the actual balance of forces. The defeat in detail of the Japanese columns was equally important. By neutralizing the 33rd Division in the north before it could contribute to the central effort, and by pinning the 20th Brigade against the Jin River with its back to the water, Luo's forces ensured that the 34th Division faced the third-line defenses essentially alone — outnumbered, overextended, and unsupported. The Japanese operational concept had been a three-pronged convergence; what actually materialized was a single exhausted division hammering at a prepared defense while two other columns were rendered ineffective. The absence of coordination within the Japanese 11th Army was a gift that kept giving throughout the battle. No forward command post. No mechanism for the divisions to adjust their operations in response to each other's situations. No ability to recognize, in real time, that the northern column was being destroyed and redirect resources accordingly. General Marube's decision to remain at Hankou while his men died in Jiangxi was not merely an administrative failure; it was an operational catastrophe. Japanese commanders acknowledged this failing explicitly after the battle, but the acknowledgment changed nothing for the dead. Zhang Yanchuan's unauthorized withdrawal — the single most consequential individual decision of the battle — ultimately prevented a complete annihilation of the 34th Division rather than affecting the battle's outcome. The 34th Division escaped; but it did so in a "wretched state," having lost enormous numbers of men and equipment. It broke out, not triumphed. The encirclement Luo had constructed was torn open, but the Japanese paid dearly for the breach. The consequences of Shanggao rippled outward in ways that shaped the subsequent course of the war in central China. The transfer of the 33rd Division to North China — the original logistical rationale for the entire operation — was delayed by the division's involvement and subsequent losses at Shanggao. When it finally arrived at the Battle of Central Plains  the following month, it did so on the eve of battle with no time for preparation or orientation, entering combat under severely disadvantaged conditions. The operation that was supposed to facilitate a smooth redeployment had instead damaged one of the two units involved and delayed the other. For the Chinese 74th Corps, Shanggao had an ironic consequence. The Japanese 11th Army, following the battle, formally designated the 74th Corps as a priority target — a "standing enemy" and directed its forces to seek out and destroy it in future operations. At the First Battle of Changsha that September, the 11th Army specifically oriented its forces against the 74th Corps, a testament to the lasting impression that corps's fierce resistance at Shanggao had made on its adversaries. The compliment of being specifically targeted by the enemy was one the 74th Corps had earned in blood at Shanggao's ridgelines and shattered bridges. More broadly, the battle was widely regarded at the time, and has been regarded since, as one of the most significant Chinese tactical victories of the first four years of the War of Resistance. Its significance lay not only in the casualties inflicted — those were contested and probably inflated in the Chinese records — but in what it demonstrated. The improving tactical and operational competence of the Nationalist Army was on display. The deliberate defense, the layered withdrawal, the coordinated encirclement — these were not the operations of an army that had been fighting desperately for survival since 1937 and had learned nothing. They were the operations of an army that had studied its defeats and adapted. Shanggao did not change the strategic situation in China. The front in Jiangxi remained where it had been; the Japanese still occupied Nanchang and the major cities; Chiang Kai-shek was still in Chongqing and the war was still far from over. But it demonstrated something important: that the Chinese Army, given capable commanders, a sound plan, and the discipline to execute it, could do more than survive Japanese offensives. It could reverse them, encircle them, and pursue them back to where they came from. I would like to take this time to remind you all that this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Please go subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry after that, give my personal channel a look over at The Pacific War Channel at Youtube, it would mean a lot to me. In March–April 1940, Japanese forces attacked Shanggao with a limited, multi-pronged plan. Chinese troops used elastic defense and coordinated counter-moves, turning initial advantages into a trap. After intense fighting and air strikes, a coordinated encirclement and timely breakout routed the Japanese, forcing retreat despite their numbers in a costly battle.

In this episode of “The Business of Blueberries,” Kasey Cronquist, president of the U.S. Highbush Council (USHBC) and the North American Blueberry Council (NABC), is joined by Haiying Zhang, USHBC's director of global business development. Zhang has spent the last several years helping position U.S. blueberries for growth far beyond our domestic market by building relationships and helping exporters better understand where global demand is expanding. Zhang shares what she's seeing firsthand in the global market, and where the greatest opportunities for growth lie.“As a result, what you are seeing in these markets is a lot of media coverage about USA Blueberries. So we successfully generate the buzz about our product. That's our goal. And in many of these markets, if you look at the product life cycle, we are still at the introductory stage … meaning we have a long runway to go. And so it's very important that we build, reach new customers and we also inspire existing customers to increase their purchasing frequency, and that's why we invest the dollars .” – Haiying Zhang Topics covered include: An introduction to Zhang and her work with USHBC. The significance and impact of the USHBC recently earning a $1 million Foreign Agriculture Service Grant from the USDA.Details on the USHBC Export Database and the USHBC Supplier Database that can help highlight blueberry operations during global market discussions.Crop ReportThe Blueberry Crop Report is an update on crop conditions and markets throughout important blueberry growing areas. Today you'll hear from Alan Schreiber in Washington, TJ Hafner in Oregon, Alec Arena in New Jersey, Ryan Rainey in Michigan, Derrin Wheeler in Georgia, Pat Goin in Indiana, Sunny Brar in British Columbia and Kristen Brinkley in North Carolina. This was recorded on June 11, 2026.

A New Episode of the FOR ETERNIA PODCAST, the Official Podcast of He-Mania.com has hit the airwaves!   In this latest episode, AJ and “Masters of the Universe” Movie (2026) actor Jon Xue Zhang discuss the story behind his role as Ram Man in the new "Masters of the Universe" film, bodybuilding and so much more!   So please join us for this very fun discussion!   Visit us at He-Mania.com!  

Check out my Tronic Radio on your favorite streaming platforms here: https://ssyncc.com/tronic-podcast 01.Mickey Zhang & Ken Ishii - Untitled 02.Eric Sneo - Wake Up (2021 Remastered) 03.L.K. - Turmoil [ONHCET] 04.Fran LF,FENIM0RE - Caùsa (FANK Remix) [Vibrant Collective] 05.Seigg - Street Knowledge [AKRONYM] 06.Lorenz.Audio - Scanline [Clone Basement Series] 07.John Monkman - Entropy [Beesemyer Music] 08.Phara - Order Disorder [Phaaar] 09.Uun - Structural Obedience [Ego Death] 10.GODO - Unpaused [KR RECORDS] 11.Ignez - Immersion [Somov Records] 12.GCOD - Kaizoku [OUTCAST RECORDINGS] 13.Poni hoax - Hypercommunication (Alter Ego Remix) [Tigersushi Records] 14.Mickey Zhang - Come Back This show is syndicated & distributed exclusively by Syndicast. If you are a radio station interested in airing the show or would like to distribute your podcast / radio show please register here: https://syndicast.co.uk/distribution/registration

For episode 742 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Chi Zhang, co-founder and CEO of Kite, which is building the base layer for the agentic internet. Her extensive background encompasses AI, big data, and product management.

Today, we'll talk about the pioneering educator Zhang Boling and how he built a private education system in modern China while navigating war, politics, and shifting ideologies, leaving behind a complex yet enduring legacy as a patriotic educator.

Content warning: childhood abuse, childhood sexual abuse, sexual assault, rape, abduction, missing persons, gun violence, murder, and mental illness.Amber Rodgers is a survivor, business professional, and creative from Texas. As early as she can remember, her life was filled with chaos. By the time she was fourteen, she was a multi-crime survivor, and by 19 she would serve as a witness in her best friend's murder trial. Amber moved forward by cultivating a successful career and loving family, until her past trauma instigated a cascading effect in her mental health and relationships. Although Amber has shared portions of her story at-large, it took her decades and a life-altering mental health journey to realize the deep impact her teen years had had on her. The Broken Cycle Media team is deeply appreciative of Amber's transparency, rawness, and advocacy. These episodes are dedicated in loving memory of Kytrina Marie Locascio.Sources: -Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “About Adverse Childhood Experiences.” CDC, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2025, https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/aces/. -Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs).” CDC Vital Signs, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/aces/index.html. -Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Psychosocial Factors and Health Equity.” CDC, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, https://www.cdc.gov/dhdsp/health_equity/psychosocial.htm. -Felitti, Vincent J., et al. “Relationship of Childhood Abuse and Household Dysfunction to Many of the Leading Causes of Death in Adults: The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study.” American Journal of Preventive Medicine, vol. 14, no. 4, 1998, pp. 245–258.-Hughes, Karen, et al. “The Effect of Multiple Adverse Childhood Experiences on Health: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” The Lancet Public Health, vol. 2, no. 8, 2017, pp. e356–e366. doi:10.1016/S2468-2667(17)30118-4.-McKay, Matthew T., Laura Kilmartin, Aisling Meagher, Mary Cannon, Colm Healy, and Mary C. Clarke. “A Revised and Extended Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Relationship between Childhood Adversity and Adult Psychiatric Disorder.” Journal of Psychiatric Research, vol. 156, 2022, pp. 159–174. PubMed, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36274532/. -Swedo, Elizabeth A., et al. “Prevalence of Adverse Childhood Experiences Among U.S. Adults—Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, 2011–2020.” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, vol. 72, no. 26, 2023, pp. 707–715, https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7226a2.htm. -Zhang, Y., et al. “Cumulative Adverse Childhood Experiences and Risk of Mental Disorders: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 2026, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001691826007559. Accessed 2 June 2026.For additional resources and a list of non-profit organizations that can help, please visit http://www.somethingwaswrong.com/resources*Thank you again to Rula and Quince for sponsoring this episode. *Remember, Rula patients typically pay $15 per session when using insurance. Connect with quality therapists and mental health experts who specialize in you at https://www.rula.com/wcn #rulapod *And don't forget to elevate your summer wardrobe, go to quince.com/wcn for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada too.

The UFC Apex is and has always been the home of quality matchmaking.  Volkov vs Cortes-Acosta and more undercard action in our latest bonus episode: https://www.patreon.com/heavyhands  Heavy Hands merch: https://www.redbubble.com/shop/ap/64577943?asc=u  CONTENTS: 00:00 Intro 6:33 Muhammad vs Bonfim 25:43 Allen vs Shahbazyan 35:01 Ziam vs Nolan 45:59 Song vs Figueiredo 57:13 Zhang vs Menifield 58:59 Pavlovich vs Teixeira 1:05:09 Rei Tsuruya & Cody Haddon