Until recently studies of the Third Pole were piecemeal—not surprising, given its remoteness, the altitude, the harsh weather and the fact that little love is lost between the countries among which it is divided. In 2009, however, Yao Tandong of the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, in Beijing, Lonnie Thompson of the Ohio State University and Volker Mosbrugger of the Senckenberg World of Biodiversity, in Frankfurt, started an international programme involving these countries, called the Third Pole Environment (TPE). Last month, its fourth workshop met in Dehradun, India.

[…] One outcome of the workshop […] has been to establish that the overall ice cover of the Third Pole, like that of the two real poles, is shrinking. Another is to show how precarious and piecemeal data about the area are. Its role as the source of so many rivers means that absence of data matters. The Chinese Academy of Sciences, of which both Dr Yao’s and Dr Wu’s institutes are part, has therefore set up a fund of 400m yuan ($65m) for research on the Third Pole and, crucially, a quarter of this is earmarked for work outside China. [Source]

At Tea Leaf Nation (via CDT), Hongxiang Huang reported this week that scrutiny of environmental issues in Tibet is often affected by the region’s political sensitivity. For more information on the Third Pole, see thethirdpole.net, an offshoot of chinadialogue.

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Post tags: Chinese Academy of Science, climate change, glaciers, global warming, Himalayas, Tibet, Tibet environment
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Overconsumption among humans is not the only problem, however. Among the various side effects of China’s surging meat consumption is the large-scale adoption of American-style intensive farming techniques, including routine preventative dosing of animals. A paper published last week by researchers at the Chinese Academy of Science and Michigan State University documents the consequent proliferation of drug-resistant bacteria at three large pig farms around China. From Maryn McKenna at Wired:

If you’ve followed news about food in China (at this blog or elsewhere), you’ll have seen that regulation of food safety is failing under the twin pressures of needing to produce a lot of protein and wanting to make a lot of money. (I think of food in China as being where the United States was before Upton Sinclair came along.) This lack of regulation is as true for agricultural antibiotic use as it is for other aspects of food production. China is both the largest producer and the largest consumer of antibiotics in the world, and it is putting almost half of its annual production into agriculture: about 96 million kilograms, which by my math (using the newest ADUFA numbers in my last post) works out to about 7 times what the US is using each year.

[…] To quote from the paper: “The diverse set of resistance genes detected potentially confer resistance to all major classes of antibiotics, including antibiotics critically important for human medicine.”

[…] Their summation:

The diversity and abundance of (antibiotic resistance genes) reported in this study is alarming and clearly indicates that unmonitored use of antibiotics and metals on swine farms has expanded the diversity and abundance of the antibiotic resistance reservoir in the farm environment. The coenrichment of ARGs and transposases further exacerbates the risks of transfer of ARGs from livestock animals to human-associated bacteria, and then spread among human populations.

Overuse of antibiotics in agriculture is still a major problem in the United States, where 80% of all antibiotics sold are consumed by farm animals and the industry has fought beak and trotter to resist regulation. In a New York Times report last September, Sabrina Tavernise summed up the stakes:

Antibiotics are considered the crown jewels of modern medicine. They have transformed health by stopping infections since they went into broad use after World War II. But many scientists say that their effectiveness is being eroded by indiscriminate use, both to treat infections in people and to encourage growth in chickens, turkeys, cows and pigs.

Whatever the cause, resistant bacteria pose significant public health risks. Routine infections once treated with penicillin pills now require hospitalizations and intravenous drip antibiotics, said Cecilia Di Pentima, director of clinical services at the Infectious Diseases Division at Vanderbilt University’s Department of Pediatrics. Infections from such strains of bacteria are believed to cause thousands of deaths a year.

“The single biggest problem we face in infectious disease today is the rapid growth of resistance to antibiotics,” said Glenn Morris, director of the Emerging Pathogens Institute at the University of Florida. “Human use contributes to that, but use in animals clearly has a part too.”

See further discussion of “the doomsday scenario of a world without antibiotics” at the Bulletin of the World Health Organization in 2010, and a Telegraph report on antibiotic overuse in China and its dangers from the same year.

Last month, Shanghai-based researchers shed new light on one process by which bacteria develop resistance. From Alice Yan at South China Morning Post:

Now researchers at Fudan University’s Shanghai Medical College say they have uncovered an important mechanism leading to resistance. The team, led by Professor Alastair Murchie, a British molecular biologist, said in a paper in the peer-reviewed journal Cell last week, that they had found a special section of ribonucleic acid (RNA) in some infectious bacteria that could make antibiotics useless.

[…] Murchie said that while aminoglycoside antibiotics accounted for only about 20 per cent of all antibiotics, the research was important because drug resistance remained a significant threat due to the way it evolved and emerged.

“It’s important that we understand the underlying mechanism [of] why resistance happens, how are the bacteria so flexible and why do they respond so well to treatment by antibiotics?” Murchie said.

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Post tags: agriculture, agriculture policy, antibiotics, Chinese Academy of Science, disease, meat, Ministry of Health, pork, public health, research, United States, world health organization
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The capital will take 180,000 old vehicles off the road and promote clean energy autos among government departments, the public and the urban cleaning sector, which includes street cleaners and trash collectors, Wang Anshun said at the opening of a session of the Beijing Municipal People’s Congress, the municipal legislature.

The heating systems of 44,000 old, single-story homes and coal-burning boilers downtown are to be replaced with clean energy, Wang said as he delivered a government work report.

The city will also speed up the promotion of clean energy in rural areas and strictly control dust in construction projects, said Wang.

He vowed to strengthen air quality monitoring and analysis, as well as the release of such information.

The promise of increased transparency, itself coming on the heels of a wave of unusually frank coverage in state media, was accompanied by a call for public comment on the new regulations. From Dexter Roberts at Bloomberg Businessweek:

In another sign that Beijing officials are, for now, leaning toward openness, officials will allow the city’s 20 million residents to weigh in on draft regulations aimed at curbing the Chinese capital’s horrendous air pollution, according to a notice posted Jan. 20 on the Beijing municipal government website. The public can comment on the proposed new measures until Feb. 8, the day before China shuts down for the annual Chinese New Year festival, said the statement issued by the city’s legal affairs office.

“This is important. Now public scrutiny should play a key role in promoting pollution control and enforcement of this rule,” says Ma Jun, director of the Beijing-based Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs. Ma’s environmental advocacy group plans to comment through the online platform that the municipal government has created for this purpose.

Edward Wong argued at The New York Times on Sunday that Beijing’s “extraordinary surge” in air pollution was one of several drivers of growing demands for political input. But Reuters reported a generally unfavorable response to the plans on Sina Weibo:

“These plans are just dreams,” wrote one user.

Others said the phasing out of old cars would make little difference in a city where about 250,000 new cars hit the road every year, albeit with supposedly higher emissions standards.

“These ‘old cars’ are what the ordinary people drive. You people can only dare talk about this subject when you start phasing out all the cars officials drive,” wrote another user.

Other doubts remain about the likely effectiveness of public consultation, enforcement, and of rules targeted only at the city itself. From Yin Yeping at Global Times:

Zhang Yuanxun, a professor of resources and environment at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that a lack of law enforcement will be a problem.

“The punishments enshrined in the regulations are too strict and broad. It will require many more law enforcement officers to ensure its effective implementation,” he said.

“The old laws were not enforced, not to mention this new one,” he said.

[…] “Also, just restricting the local atmospheric pollution would have little contribution to its improvement if there are no changes in the pollution conditions in the surrounding areas [of Beijing],” [Zhou Rong, climate and energy director of Greenpeace] said.

Wang Yan, a resident working in international trade, said she thinks the new laws should have been launched already.

“I don’t think I’ll offer comments on the new regulation since I doubt if my voice will be heard,” she said, adding targeting street barbecues is ridiculous.

At chinadialogue, Gavin Lohry suggested an additional measure that might help address a range of environmental concerns, from air quality and energy consumption to drainage:

Green roofs – roofs covered with plant vegetation – first gained popularity in Germany and have since been spreading around the world. They help cities reduce storm water runoff, cool the urban environment, absorb air pollution, insulate buildings and increase biodiversity. With enough green roof adoption, Beijing could realise positive impacts on the environment and improved quality of life.

My research on the topic found that in Beijing there is around 93 million square metres of roof space suitable for cost effective green roof adoption. If the cheapest and most basic forms of green roofs covered the suitable roof space, the urban environment would be substantially improved.

Under this scenario air particle pollution could be reduced by as much as 880,000 kilograms every year, equivalent to taking 730,000 cars off the road. The roofs could reduce storm water by 3.5 million cubic metres during large rain events, equivalent to filling the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square with two metres of water or 1,400 Olympic swimming pools.

Any boost to Beijing’s drainage infrastructure would be valuable in the event of more storms like last summer’s, which killed 77 people. But there are no easy solutions: the problems are tangled, often beyond the scope of local government policies, or out of human control entirely. From Jonathan Kaiman at The Guardian:

Deborah Seligsohn, an expert on China’s environment at the University of California, San Diego, said that there is no silver bullet for the country’s air pollution. The underlying causes are dynamic and diverse: power plants, small factories, automobile emissions, rampant construction, farmers burning coal for heat. “One of the things about the air quality in Beijing is that it varies a lot more than it used to,” she said.

Beijing’s air quality fluctuates with the weather – a strong wind from the north can blow the smog to sea, she said, while south-eastern winds trap the air against a nearby mountain range, drowning the city in a pea-soup haze.

[…] Beijing has taken significant steps to combat pollution – it invested an estimated $10bn before the 2008 Olympics to raise emissions standards, replace residents’ coal stoves with natural gas heaters, and relocate a ring of steel plants on the city’s outskirts. Yet Beijing still shares its airspace with six surrounding provinces which may not adhere to comparable environmental standards.

“One of the fundamental problems is that the environmental regulators don’t have sufficient authority and resources to overcome the forces that are creating the pollution,” said Alex Wang, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and an expert on China’s environmental law.

The problem is indeed hardly limited to Beijing, as Peking University professor Pan Xiaochuan angrily pointed out while blasting the term “Beijing Cough” as an “extreme insult” to the city. Other cities have been even more severely affected, and Shanghai has not escaped. From Reuters:

Shanghai, too, is improving public communication of air pollution data, as Angel Hsu describes on her blog:

[… B]y far my favorite innovation Shanghai’s EPB has made so far is in the use of this little air quality mascot to communicate what the various levels of pollution on the normalized AQI index mean. For the most part, things take a sour turn for AQI girl (let’s just call her that, I’m not sure if she has an official name) after the Good (51-100) part of the range. I like how they coordinated her hair color with the official color codes of different pollutant thresholds – it’s a great way for people to automatically remember and understand what the different colors mean. AQI girl also provides a much more people and user-friendly means to calculate air quality, as opposed to other cartoon characters or anime figures that they could gone with.

[…] I can only imagine next will come a video game for AQI girl, that will feature her navigating Shanghai’s polluted streets, having to dodge roadside exhaust coming from tailpipes, all the while remembering to wear her face mask when she sees AQI readings above 150.

The Wall Street Journal’s Brian Spegele and Wayne Ma described the obstacles to implementing deeper and broader solutions. Proposed changes inevitably raise questions of who will pay for them.

Over the long term, drawing down emissions will require costly upgrades to industrial facilities and oil refineries, measures resisted by state-owned companies unable to pass costs on to consumers and local governments that depend on industrial output for revenue.

[…] Though attention over the years has focused on power plants and passenger-car emissions, China’s pollution problems are complex and spread broadly across the economy. Mr. Zhao, of Nanjing University, and a research team studied the effectiveness of Chinese government policies in curbing emissions between 2005 and 2010 and estimated PM2.5 from coal-fired power generation fell roughly 21% as cleaner technologies took hold. Meanwhile, PM2.5 emissions from iron and steel production rose roughly 39% to 2.2 million metric tons, according to the estimates, as output increased.

China is particularly struggling to curb what are known as secondary pollutants, formed when primary pollutants—such as emitted sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, from coal burning and other sources—undergo reactions in the atmosphere. The government has had some success targeting primary pollutants, but analysts say it is just beginning to target secondary pollutant problems, including particulate matter that is harmful to human health.

Spegele also discussed a range of air pollution issues with the Journal’s Deborah Kan:

Officials have been careful to manage expectations, stressing that real change will take years, just as the current situation was years in the making. South China Morning Post’s Li Jing spoke to Qu Geping, whose career in shaping China’s environmental policy included a stint as the country’s first environmental protection administrator from 1987 to 1993. Qu lamented that the present of emergency was foreseen thirty years ago, when China nearly chose a different development path to avoid it. He blames the lost opportunity on government according to “the rule of men”, rather than rule of law.

“I would not call the past 40 years’ efforts of environmental protection a total failure,” he said. “But I have to admit that governments have done far from enough to rein in the wild pursuit of economic growth … and failed to avoid some of the worst pollution scenarios we, as policymakers, had predicted.”

[…] But, Qu said, if the central government had respected a policy that it released in 1983, China could be in a much better place now.

“The State Council published a document that year, stipulating that economic and urban construction should synchronise with environmental protection, so that the three legs of social development could reach a co-ordinated benefit,” he said. “It was a pragmatic and feasible strategy, even more approachable than the notion of ‘sustainable development’ enshrined by the United Nations years later.”

[…] “Why was the strategy never properly implemented?” he said. “I think it is because there was no supervision of governments. It is because the power is still above the law.”

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Post tags: 2008 Olympics, air pollution, air quality, Beijing, Beijing environment, beijing flood 2012, Chinese Academy of Science, clean air, clean energy, factories, forbidden city, greenpeace, industrial pollution, law enforcement, Ma Jun, PM2.5, power plants, rule of law, Shanghai, state-owned enterprises, steel, Tiananmen Square, Wang Anshun
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Kekexili – also known as Hoh Xil – is one of the least populated areas on earth. It has been a national reserve since 1995, but for many years after it was the site of a murderous conflict between poachers and the Wild Yak Brigade, a patrol of vigilantes committed to protecting endangered species.

Chief among them was the chiru, or Tibetan antelope, which was almost hunted to extinction due to the demand of wealthy foreign consumers for its fine shahtoosh wool. A gritty 2004 film about their plight and the killing of the brigade’s leader prompted the government to strengthen protection. Chiru numbers have since started to recover and the animal was made a mascot for the Beijing Olympics ….

“This is China’s most precious nature reserve. There are explicit prohibitions against crossings,” said Wu Zhu, the conservationist heading the campaign against the promotion tour. “It has a ‘No Human Zone’, which as the name implies, is not supposed to be visited by anyone, yet Snow have gone ahead with their promotion even before they have permission ….”

There have been previous transgressions. The Chinese Academy of Sciences has reportedly brought businessmen to the area in the name of research, Ericcson is said to have taken in high-end clients and the Comfort Travel Agency in Shandong has offered trips for photographers.

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Post tags: alcohol, Beijing Olympics, Chinese Academy of Science, Kekexili, Tibet environment, Tibetan antelopes, wildlife preservation
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Alan Trounson, president of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, one of the world’s richest stem cell research organizations, recently visited China for the first time in five years ….

“I’m rocked … with what this country can do in such a short time. So imagine the next five years or next 10, and I would think it’s very likely the science here will be the dominant science, probably in the world,” he adds.

But in terms of pure numbers, China still has a long way to go before it catches up with the U.S.

“If we compare in absolute dollars, the Chinese are spending about a third or a little bit more than what the U.S. is putting into science and technology development,” says the University of Oregon’s Denis Simon, putting the figures in context.

While spending is growing at an average of 20% per year, a recent Wall Street Journal article suggested that, behind a veil of surging patent filings, China’s science investment was not producing real results in proportion to its quantity. One reason for this inefficiency is widespread plagiarism by Chinese researchers, an issue explored in the third part of the series:

In 2008, when her scientific publication, the Journal of Zhejiang University-Science, became the first in China to use CrossCheck text analysis software to spot plagiarism, Zhang was pleased to be a trailblazer. But when the first set of results came in, she was upset and horrified.

“In almost two years, we find about 31 percent of papers with unreasonable copy[ing] and plagiarism,” she says, shaking her head. “This is true ….”

Wang Lingyun has [one] explanation for the rampant plagiarism and copying: political hierarchy … “China is still a society of official standard thought,” he says. “Everything is run by officials, and a higher-rank official can crush a lower rank. Many academics who commit plagiarism are also officials, so they’re seldom held responsible. Words from people of a lower rank mean little.”

The second instalment focuses on China’s supercomputers, one of which, Tianhe-1A, was for six months the worlds fastest. But one expert at the Chinese Academy of Science dismisses it as a glorified games machine, citing a lack of software optimised to use all of its (US-made) processors.

Today, China boasts 61 out of the top 500 supercomputing sites in the world — making it second only to the U.S., which has 255.

“The striking thing is, back in 2001, China had zero computers on the list,” says Jack Dongarra from the University of Tennessee, who helps compile the top 500 list. “So China very quickly grew its high-performance computing capabilities, and are now No. 2 on the list in terms of the number of high-performance computers deployed ….”

However, China lags far behind the U.S. in software development. Computer scientists in China say just 10 percent of Beijing’s investment goes to software. And a lack of applications that use its own machines could hamper China’s supercomputer development.

Dongarra, of the University of Tennessee, says it’s still too early to tell whether China’s most powerful supercomputer is simply an expensive white elephant.

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Post tags: Chinese Academy of Science, plagiarism, research and development, science, super computer
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In February, Caixin, a leading news weekly, quoted soil expert Chen Tongbin, a research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources (Environmental Remediation Research Centre), as saying 10 per cent of China’s farmland had been contaminated by heavy metals, the leading culprits being cadmium and arsenic ….

Much of the Pearl River Delta has been polluted by heavy metals, according to an investigation conducted by the State Environmental Protection Administration. The study found that 40 per cent of farms and vegetable plots in the region had been polluted by heavy metals ….

Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, says weak enforcement means there is a lack of incentive for manufacturers and buyers to act. Experts say companies are reluctant to spend money on advanced pollution-control equipment because that would cut into profits in a competitive environment. And, says Ma, local officials are “still putting gross domestic product ahead of environmental protection and public health”.

Even when polluters are punished, says Ma, “the penalty is not sufficient to really discourage [them]. The cost of violating is still lower than the cost of compliance. So we see some of the factories having problems year after year, just paying [the fines] without solving the problem.”

Ma warns that heavy metals pose a bigger threat than most other pollutants because they don’t decompose naturally, instead becoming more concentrated over time. Furthermore, victims of industrial pollution have limited legal protection.

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Post tags: cadmium batteries, Chinese Academy of Science, factories, farmland, industrial pollution, lead poisoning, Ma Jun
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JW: You’ve been interviewed a lot lately by journalists. Do you feel you get asked the right kinds of questions about the water situation? Or, to put it another way, is there a question you wish you’d be asked–or asked more often?

KP: I think journalists have generally asked me the right questions, but of course they almost never have space to print the whole interview (if “print” is even the right verb these days), and I’m sometimes surprised by which parts of it they think are most worth using. If it were up to me, I think I’d focus more on the link between water problems and rural/urban issues, the connections between water shortages and poor enforcement of environmental regulations, and the ways that both of these are related to tensions between different levels of government. Probably most of the water savings that you could achieve without greatly reducing economic output are in agriculture, where a lot of irrigation is very inefficient (and not just in China); in fact, I think there’s a good case to be made that if you put anything like the cost of the South-North water diversion project into fixing a million leaky faucets, lining a million unlined irrigation ditches, enforcing existing wastewater treatment standards (allowing more water to be re-used), etc., etc., you could do more to alleviate the problem (and more safely) than the diversion project will do. But for Beijing there are at least two problems with that.

First, a huge construction project like the diversion is something they can oversee directly; making sure a million pipes get fixed and rules get enforced requires a lot more reliance on local government, and they can’t necessarily count on that …. Second, one way to strongly encourage local compliance in saving water is to make water more expensive – but this would hit farmers hardest, and the government is genuinely concerned about how far farmers’ incomes lag behind most other people’s already. Do you really want to increase that gap further …?

Good journalists certainly know that China’s central government is much more limited than most Westerners realize, but I think they don’t emphasize that often enough – it’s a hard idea for people to shake, so maybe you have to push the point even harder than a particular individual story really requires. But if the cumulative effect of emphasizing that again and again were to break more people of the idea that Beijing is an all-powerful juggernaut, this would be of tremendous benefit to public understanding of China. Focusing on the mega-projects themselves, on the other hand, tends to reinforce the idea of an enormous concentration of power at the center.

One such mega-project, reported yesterday on CDT, is the proposed diversion of billions of cubic metres of water from the Yarlung Zangbo/Brahmaputra river upstream of the Indian border. But Chinese authorities have denied any intention of executing the scheme. From The Hindu:

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hong Lei said in response to a question on India’s concerns about a diversion plan that China adopted “a responsible attitude towards the development of cross border water resources.”

“We adopt a policy that protection goes together with development, and take into full consideration the interests of downstream countries,” Mr. Hong said.

Recent media reports in India suggested China was considering a plan to divert the river’s waters, citing comments from Wang Guangqian, an academic at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

But other experts The Hindu spoke to said the government had not considered Mr. Wang’s – and others’ – proposals to divert the waters of the Yarlung Tsangpo, as the Brahmaputra is known in Tibet, citing the heavy costs involved and technical difficulties of such a project.

They stressed Mr. Wang’s proposal was not new — he had proposed a diversion plan as early as in 2001.

The article notes, however, “there is growing consensus for developing hydropower [as opposed to diversion] projects in the upper reaches.”

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Post tags: Chinese Academy of Science, local officials, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, south-to-north water diversion project, Tibet, water crisis
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Zhucheng’s early Cretaceous relics, Liaoning’s feathered dinosaurs and Xinjiang’s wealth of Jurassic material are among the Chinese treasure troves reshaping our understanding of ancient life on Earth, and the processes that have created the world around us. “Some of the new material from China is breathtaking,” said Dr Paul Barrett, a palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum. “Firstly, the sheer number of new species is impressive. Secondly, some of the dinosaurs that have been discovered have had major impacts on evolutionary debates.”

Local legend in Zhucheng tells of battling black and white dragons: tales rooted, perhaps, in the mighty jaws and femurs found by farmers. For years, residents boiled the “dragon bones” in medicinal soups or ground them into powder.

Excavations began here in the 60s and their pace has dramatically accelerated in recent years as China has poured vast amounts of money into scientific research. More than 50 tonnes of dinosaur fossils have emerged from 30 sites around the town. One remarkable 500-metre-long bone bed has yielded more than 15,000 items. Another site is pitted with 3,000 footprints.

Making sense of it all are dinosaur hunters such as Professor Xu Xing and his colleagues at the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Xu has identified more than 30 dinosaurs and co-authored papers naming another 20 or so. “I would say I am one of the luckiest people in the world because I have continued finding great species. That makes you even more addicted; it’s like smoking,” he confided.

Accompanying the article is a gallery showing some of the bizarre creatures whose remains have been found in China. (“We did not make these creatures up,” Branigan claims …) The unfamiliarity of the artists’ impressions comes in part from the bright feathers covering most of the dinosaurs, which contrast with the reptilian scales in traditional depictions. These feathers have been a focus of Professor Xu’s work. A post on the Guardian’s “Notes & Theories” science blog from late last year discussed the outdated perception of “naked dinosaurs”:

While walking through a natural history museum gift shop a few years back, I spotted a plush Velociraptor among the piles of dinosauriana. Frankly, it looked pretty stupid. Covered in a soft, fuzzy coat of faux-feathers, it lacked the reptilian menace of the predatory dinosaurs I remembered from my youth. This theropod looked more likely to cuddle someone to death than sink its hyperextendable toe claws into its hapless victim. Surely the feathers were just speculation based on the close relationship between some dinosaurs and birds? Velociraptor never would have looked so silly ….

Some might prefer their favorite dinosaurian predators to have looked just like their depictions in Jurassic Park, but the truth of the matter is that we now know otherwise. In fact, in 2007 it was found that the arms of Velociraptor had little round knobs which would have been anchors for long arm feathers, and the discovery of an early cousin of Tyrannosaurus coated in fuzzy feathers named Dilong [“Emperor Dragon”, one of Professor Xu’s discoveries from Liaoning] means that even the most imposing predator of the Cretaceous may have been covered in feathers during at least part of its life. It is no more fantastic to restore feathers to these dinosaurs or their coelurosarian relatives than it is to depict our hominin ancestors as being covered in hair. It requires an evolutionary perspective to see, but today there is simply no excuse to depict a coelurosaur without feathers.

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Post tags: Chinese Academy of Science, dinosaur bones, dinosaurs, dragon, fossil, Liaoning, paleontology
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Detractors complain that high-speed rail is too expensive for the Zhang in the street. Migrant labourers, 230m of whom are expected to make the journey home during Spring Festival, are not in enough of a hurry to pay a premium for speed, they argue. (Or as Patrick Chovanec of Tsinghua University puts it with a dose of economese, “The bulk of the long-distance passenger traffic, especially during the peak holiday periods, is migrant workers for whom the opportunity cost of time is relatively low.”) While some travellers are having such a hard time getting tickets home this holiday season that they have unveiled their underpants in protest, it is reported that on one line $352 luxury sleeper tickets are going begging.

This mismatch raises questions about the $300 billion being thrown at high-speed rail this decade. Many newly added lines are making hefty losses and many are thought to be operating at under half capacity. The Chinese Academy of Sciences, an influential official think-tank, seems to be in the sceptics’ corner: fretting about unsustainable levels of debt, it was reported in November to have recommended the government reconsider its plans. Chinese leaders were said to have ordered a review, and construction of a Maglev line between Shanghai and Hangzhou has since been reported “shelved”.

Some economists make even more dismal arguments. Mr Chovanec attacks one of the main legs of the economic case for high-speed rail in China, that transporting passengers thus would free up track desperately needed for shifting coal. Much of China’s fuel travels by road: a 62-mile traffic jam outside Beijing lasting 10 days last August was only the most visible sign. But if fast trains are out of reach for the masses, there will be little or no relief for either rail or road networks. Critics say the proliferation of expensive trains has pushed poorer travellers back onto the roads, clogging them with 70,000 more buses this Spring Festival, although hundreds of extra trains have also been laid on. Improving China’s languishing logistics network for freight would be a better use of the cash, Mr Chovanec posits.

The article cites other, less direct benefits, however, from exports to national prestige. Another article in the newspaper last month described China’s backing of rail expansion across South-East Asia, noting that “Empire-builders love railways”:

THE rapid expansion of its high-speed railways has got China plenty of attention. Yet ambitions do not stop at the border. On its southern flank China is renewing a push to lay tracks to mainland South-East Asia. The region’s leaders have dreamed since the 1990s of seamless rail travel between Singapore and Kunming, capital of the south-western Chinese province of Yunnan. South-East Asia’s existing network of railways is creaking, patchy and underfunded. Most goods move about the region by lorry and ship. But that creates choke points while running up fuel bills. An integrated rail system could be just the ticket.

Enter China, chequebook in hand. It has recently signed agreements to build new lines in Laos and Thailand, while it extends its network from Kunming to the China-Laos border. These lines are meant to be ready by 2015. The benefits may be huge. Most countries along the route have already hitched their wagons to China’s outsize economy and are eager for more trade. China’s free-trade agreement with the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN), which took effect a year ago, has cut tariffs on most traded goods. The region still has natural resources, which China is keen to strip.

See also: Rail Chaos as Millions of Chinese Travellers Head for Home – Audio Slideshow

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Chinese Academy of Science, coal, high-speed rail, Kunming, Laos, south east asia, Spring Festival, thailand, transportation
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The crisis of tainted food is still spreading deeper and wider in China. Melamine contamination is now found in milk, dairy products, candies, and chicken eggs. It has now become apparent that, for many years, the chemical melamine has been added to animal feed and milk to artificially inflate the reading of protein levels. This intentional act is responsible for the pet food scare a year and half ago and has now caused four infant deaths and thousands of children in hospitals suffering from kidney stones and other illnesses.

Although the addition of melamine has been a wide-known secret in China, nobody really know how it got started. About a month ago, a netter posted in XYS an advertisement of technology transfer, dated July 30, 1999, from the Chinese Academy of Science. The ad promotes a new, cheap, and easy-to-make additive for animal feed that would boost the nitrogen content of the feed. It had a simple description of the raw materials (industrial organic chemicals and fertilizers) and equipments (boilers, mixers, and driers) involved and a price for the expertise and training. It did not, however, disclose the name or content of the additive.

See also a previous CDT post: “Greed, Science, and Melamine,” from an Asia Times article.

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Chinese Academy of Science, Fang Zhouzi, melamine
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The trail of greed and negligence that allowed melamine – a toxic industrial chemical – to slip from modified animal fodder into the human food chain has now led to some of China’s top scientists – many of whom are widely regarded to have put personal profit over the public safety of billions.

Recent reports have found that China’s top scientific research body – the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) – “discovered” as early as 1999 that adding melamine to food could boost its protein levels. In turn, the reports allege that rogue biologists cashed in on their chemical invention by promoting the sale of products containing melamine – even charging for training in how to use them – for years.

As a result, China’s high-profile nationwide campaign to boost science and scientific research is being reconsidered with an eye to social responsibility, and the possible “economic adulteration” of all Chinese products.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Chinese Academy of Science, food safety, melamine, science
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