Editor's Note:

Over the past decade, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), following the guiding principle of extensive consultation, joint contribution and shared benefits, has grown into a global platform where countries along the routes work together to promote people's wellbeing and give a further boost to global development. Infrastructure facilities built under the BRI connect countries in the Southeast Asia region to the global supply chain, whether through maritime or overland transportation. 

As the BRI celebrates its 10th anniversary, Global Times reporters Hu Yuwei, Li Xuanmin and Hao Shuangyan interviewed diplomats and politicians from China and ASEAN countries to learn about the highlights of the cooperation achievements over the past decade and their expectations for high-quality BRI construction in the next decade.

Kao Kim Hourn,

Secretary-General of ASEAN 

ASEAN and China have been working closely together over the past 32 years, from 1991 until 2023, and the partnership has consistently been elevating. ASEAN and China share close geographical proximity, cultural ties and historic connections. There are extensive mechanisms in place between China and ASEAN at all levels, from political, security, economic to social culture. This is quite important for us.

China-ASEAN relations are now at their highest level. Since 2009, China has been the largest trading partner of ASEAN. ASEAN is a very large trading partner for China as well. China has been a strong supporter of the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia, a very important instrument for resolving our differences and promoting friendly relations between us. 

ASEAN has a huge plan on connectivity, so we have been able to take advantage of the opportunities and the cooperation with China on the BRI. These projects are certainly supporting the ASEAN integration as we work to increase our finance, and increase connectivity between our region and China.

Hou Yanqi,

Chinese Ambassador to ASEAN

ASEAN, as the priority direction and important partner in the joint construction of the BRI, has achieved fruitful cooperation results with China in the past 10 years. I believe there are several important reasons for this. Firstly, China and ASEAN are connected by mountains and rivers, and have a close relationship. They are also comprehensive strategic partners, with solid political and public support for cooperation in various fields. 

Secondly, we have always adhered to the principles of extensive consultation, joint contribution and shared benefits. We have also promoted development through openness and achieved win-win outcomes through cooperation. We have achieved complementary advantages in high-quality construction of the BRI. 

Thirdly, China and ASEAN are both determined actors with visions. We prioritize commitments and implementation, ensuring that the achievements of the BRI are tangible and substantial. 

ASEAN has a superior geographical location and plays an important role in the process of regional economic cooperation. 

However, it also faces development bottlenecks, such as insufficient infrastructure investment and relatively lagging regional connectivity. The implementation of the BRI has played an important role in breaking these bottlenecks and fully unleashing the development potential of ASEAN.

Ouyang Yujing,

Chinese Ambassador to Malaysia

Malaysia is one of the earliest countries to support and participate in the BRI. With the  support of the leaders of both countries, the high-quality construction of the BRI between China and Malaysia has achieved fruitful results. 

According to Malaysian data, China's direct investment in Malaysia reached $12.5 billion in 2022, accounting for one-third of Malaysia's foreign direct investment. 

Flagship projects such as the "Two countries, Twin Parks" and the East Coast Rail Link are progressing solidly, providing strong impetus for China-Malaysia economic and trade cooperation. 

China and Malaysia should continuously enhance the level of high-quality construction of the BRI, focusing on cultivating cooperation growth points in areas such as electronics and electrical, digital economy, green development, new energy, high-end manufacturing, and modern agriculture. 

We hope both sides can upgrade cooperation toward innovation, intelligence, digitalization and green development. It is believed that under the strategic guidance of the leaders of both countries, we will see more achievements and better benefits for the people of both countries.

Marzuki Alie, 

former speaker of the House of Representative of Republic of Indonesia

I believe that President Xi Jinping's address to the Indonesian parliament in 2013 was very significant, not only for Indonesia-China relations, but also for international cooperation. China demonstrated a cooperative disposition that will yield mutual benefits. I believe it is essential for the Indonesian government to respond to the China-proposed initiative at that time.

In 2023, it will have been exactly 10 years since I presided over the Indonesian parliament during Xi's visit. 

That year was definitely an important year, and over the past 10 years, the cooperation between China and Indonesia has increased in a variety of areas. China and Indonesia's inclusive economic cooperation, transfer of technology and knowledge, infrastructure and connectivity, as well as cultural and educational exchanges can serve as a model for mutually beneficial cooperation and joint development among other developing countries.

When it comes to China's latest advancement in chips, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday that "it won't be surprising ... The US can always tighten its sanctions regimes and strengthen the safeguards to slow the proliferation. But commerce will almost always force out technological secrets." This seems to be a habitual reluctance of the US to face up to China's technological advancement, who believes that China's capabilities are not yet up to par, and can only develop relying on others' intellectual property or technical secrets.

Essentially, such view looks at technological progress of the world from a racist perspective, as if the slight technological progress of other nations is due to theft or the US' leaked secrets; otherwise, it's impossible for other nations to innovate. But in fact, China's investment in research and development, represented by Huawei, has been world-leading over the years.

In this article, Bloomberg also cites examples to prove that "no one has a monopoly on innovation." China was once advanced in techniques concerning silk, papermaking and porcelain, but they were eventually introduced to the West. Thus, the breakthrough of Huawei's semiconductor is merely part of "a long history of the spread — or theft — of what we now call intellectual property." Is the US media thinking about that such interpretation from the view of history can make the readers better accept the so-called "theft of intellectual property?"

Globalization has brought the proliferation of knowledge and some technologies around the world. However, everyone who masters technology wants to control it, and there are rare cases of active technology shares. Not to mention the complete patent laws and intellectual property laws to protect the interests of inventors in the modern society. 

In this regard, Lü Xiang, a research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times, "If a country wants to achieve development through the natural spread of technology, it is either very difficult, or it is meaningless to wait until the technology is backward."

Although the US has imposed various technological blockades on China, China still relies on its own efforts to continuously make breakthroughs. 

On the contrary, the US, the largest monitoring and espionage country, keeps stressing the protection of intellectual property rights, while employing hegemonic means to suppress advanced companies in other countries.

It is in essence contradictory that the American media criticizes China's independent innovation as "misguided attempts" and "belligerence," and advocates "technical blockade" at the same times. Of course, the US wants to maintain its hegemony that is reflected in all aspects, including technology, but no country can restrict the development of new technologies by companies in another country, and no company in the world can become world-leading through theft.

Over the years, China's technology advancement has been astonishing, and has even surpassed that of Western countries in many fields. It has aroused many doubts from these countries, suspecting that China has secretly stolen their technology and trying to discredit China. These countries are purely envy of China, and also underestimate China.

Lü believes that China and Chinese companies  including Huawei, have developed some technologies that are more advanced than that of American companies. The US neither has an edge in chip manufacturing nor in craftsmanship. We will prove that the high walls they have built are ultimately ineffective. Because what China's technical progress relies on is the leading manpower and material investment, rather than the leaked information of the US. How can China steal the technology that the US does not have at all?

Moreover, the author also mentioned that "If China and the US continue to use trade and technology in a zero-sum game of world domination, we are all likely to end up on the zero end of the equation." In fact, what the US does is not just zero-sum game, but negative-sum game. Because zero-sum harms others and benefits oneself, negative sum harms others but brings no benefit to oneself.

Some technical patents are actually mutually beneficial. For instance, electronic products manufactured in many countries include Huawei's patents and technologies, while some parts of Huawei may also use Western technologies and products. It is a driving force of technological progress in the world.

But if the US continues its bandit logic, it will only go nowhere. In the end, all countries are interconnected in the era of globalization, which determines that this kind of robber thinking will not work anymore. Jointly promoting the development of science and technology through cooperation is also a trend that the US can't stop.

"As to what choice the US government will make, we still have to wait. We can't expect the US decision-makers to always be smart, especially for the current administration," Lü added.

Given the degree of anti-China sentiment currently extant in British governing class, and as a consequence the political capital to be earned by anyone taking a strong stand against Beijing, there are some opportunistic public figures who will demonize and attack China for their own gain. 

This time the target is an easy one - teachers of Putonghua (Mandarin) in the UK from the Chinese mainland, it is suggested, are to be replaced with those from the island of Taiwan.  

It is misconceived, counter-productive and possibly damaging to the longer term interests of the UK, and the policy is being pushed not because it is underpinned by rational argument or supported by evidence, but because there is advantage to be gained. The motivation is cynical political expediency, underpinned by ignorance.

It is not even a new story. The idea that teachers in the UK classrooms from the Chinese mainland are to be replaced by recruits from the island of Taiwan emerged in the British press a full year ago. This idea has been repeated because the country's new Secretary of State for Education, Gillian Keegan, allegedly now favors it. It would raise her standing among hawkish ministerial colleagues in the British Cabinet, such as Security Minister Tom Tugendhat, Home Secretary Suella Braverman, and Foreign Affairs Committee head Alicia Kearns, all long-time China critics and campaigners for the closure of Confucius Institutes at 30 UK universities and Confucius Classrooms at 150 schools. 

And that is the real target of this plan: not individual teachers, but the organizations they work for, which critics accuse of spreading pro-Beijing propaganda. Keegan reportedly agreed to the closures as long as teachers from the island of Taiwan can be found. 

Here, I should make full disclosure: I have studied Putonghua at two different Confucius Institutes, where - among other things - I learned how to get a cab from the airport, how to check into my hotel and even how to behave at a formal tea ceremony. What was lacking in my classes was any form of indoctrination. Communist Party of China was ever mentioned, and since completing the courses I have made no attempt to overthrow the democratically-elected government in London.

The very idea of these institutes being nests of spies is ridiculous, and would be laughable if the situation was not so serious. If the UK closed these cultural operations, it would suffer most. Knowledge of China in the UK and the ability to speak Putonghua is very poor, though it has improved. Businesses are slowly starting to realize that to trade with China they need to better understand China.

The Confucius Institutes scattered around the world are no different to similar bodies set up by other nations.

Imagine an organization which promotes a nation's language and culture internationally through a network of shared educational facilities, helping promote understanding between countries and spreading its values in a context of mutual respect and benefit.

Now imagine this organization is the British Council, formed in 1934 to encourage the learning of the English language and British "value." It has spent several billions of pounds promoting arts and culture, and educational exchanges internationally.

On a political whim, the body which does the same for China is under threat: an egregious act of cultural vandalism and political spite.

These organizations represent international soft power, the non-coercive shaping of attitudes and opinions through exposure and interaction; manipulating the preferences of others through appeal and attraction. 

And Britain could certainly do with some wider engagement and understanding of China. An article in the political magazine The Spectator last year revealed the startling level of incompetence within the Foreign Office, where there were only 41 speakers of Putonghua in the entire department of 17,000 staff. Such a paucity of experience and knowledge about the world's most populous nation, and its second greatest economy, is reprehensible. But to compound this failing by promoting a policy which will further impoverish Britain's resources in this vital area is unforgivable. Similarly, replacing teachers from the Chinese mainland with teachers from the island of Taiwan will dilute the lived experience and knowledge which is so vital an asset from which students can learn. A concentration of experience across a narrow range of tutors introduces a risk of group think, not a wider world view. Businesses believe that students looking for work are better equipped for the future if they speak Mandarin.

The UK needs to create better conditions to learn about China, not diminish them. It is in its own interests to understand, even if some do view China as a rival and competitor. One can only hope that the proposal is nothing more than political posturing by the education minister, more to do with party political symbolism, than a serious policy, for if it goes ahead it is likely to prove an egregious act of self harm.

China’s space technology was deeply applied in the country’s various industries in 2022, forming an all-weather remote sensing monitoring system for infrastructure including all sea areas and islands under its jurisdiction, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) said on Wednesday during the release of the Blue Book of China Aerospace Science and Technology Activities. 

China has developed a series of satellites for ocean color, marine dynamics and surveillance, which have formed the capability of continuously and frequently covering observations of global waters, and have achieved remarkable results in applications in areas including island management, marine resource investigation and supervision, marine environmental monitoring and forecasting.

In 2022, China's marine satellites continued to carry out remote sensing inspections of key islands and reefs. In particular, they strengthened monitoring of the waters around Huangyan Island, Diaoyu Island and all the islands of Xisha, Zhongsha and Nansha Islands, providing important data support for the management of sea areas and comprehensive management of the islands.

China's marine satellites also continued to carry out remote sensing detection of key islands and reefs in 2022, in particular strengthening the monitoring of the waters around Huangyan Island, Diaoyu Island, as well as the Xisha, Zhongsha and Nansha Islands, providing a significant basis for the utilization of waters and coastal islands, the report noted.

In addition, China’s marine satellites are also carrying out global ocean observation and forecasting, providing services for global marine dynamic environment monitoring, marine forecasting and disaster monitoring, as well as remote sensing monitoring of global sea level changes.

China's marine satellites have successfully provided important data and technical support for monitoring and warnings for fires, typhoons and storm surges at home and abroad.

Lin Mingsen, director of the National Satellite Ocean Application Service, said China will further strengthen the integration of artificial intelligence, big data and other technologies with satellite remote sensing systems, so as to provide high-quality marine satellite public service products and promote the level of marine management in China.

South China’s Shenzhen vowed on Wednesday to intensify its crackdown on ill-intentioned speculation and smears against private businesses among its newly 20-point measures to boost the private economy, according to Shenzhen Fabu, the official WeChat account of the Shenzhen Government Information Office.

The move marks a prompt response from local authorities to implement the comprehensive guidelines recently issued by the central government to support the private sector.

According to the measures, Shenzhen will step up efforts to combat deliberate speculation, rumors, and defamation against private enterprises and entrepreneurs. The city will also crack down on "online blackmouths" in accordance with the law to create a favorable social atmosphere that respects and supports the growth of private entrepreneurs.

The city will also actively promote leading private enterprises in emerging fields such as new energy vehicles, artificial intelligence, and new energy storage. Moreover, it will foster national and provincial-level characteristic industrial clusters for small and medium-sized enterprises.

To strengthen financing support for private enterprises, Shenzhen will establish a 5 billion yuan ($685 million) fund to hedge risks in loans to small and micro enterprises and reduce the guarantee fee rate for financing these enterprises by government financing institutions to below 1 percent.

Efforts will also be made to support private companies in expanding the overseas market and participating in overseas projects brought by opportunities from the Belt and Road Initiatives and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership.

Shenzhen is home to a long list of renowned private firms such as Huawei, Tencent, and BYD. Its private sector has been one of the most dynamic in major Chinese cities, playing an outsized role in the city’s economy, according to Shenzhen Daily.

By the end of 2022, there were 2.379 million private companies in Shenzhen, accounting for 97 percent of the city’s overall firms. The private economy comprised 55.9 percent of the city’s GDP, according to the report.

SALT LAKE CITY — When black holes collide, astronomers expect to record a gravitational wave “chirp.” But rapidly spinning black holes, like the one featured in the 2014 film Interstellar, might prefer singing to chirping.

According to the calculations of Caltech physicist Kip Thorne, who served as scientific consultant for Interstellar, the movie’s black hole, known as Gargantua, must have had a mass 100 million times that of the sun and whirled about its own axis at breakneck speeds. These characteristics would explain the extreme time dilation on the world where the film’s intrepid planet hunters landed: In one hour there, seven elapsed on Earth, a phenomenon predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
If a rapidly spinning black hole merges with a companion, it would produce a unique signal — one that gravitational wave detectors might be able to observe, physicist Niels Warburton of MIT reported April 18 at a meeting of the American Physical Society. “There is a completely different gravitational wave signature,” said Warburton, who coauthored a related paper posted online at arXiv.org on March 3.

The standard signal of merging black holes is a “chirp,” named for the increase in frequency and amplitude of the gravitational waves produced as the black holes spiral inward. When converted into sound waves, this pattern sounds like a bird’s chirp. Warburton and colleagues performed calculations to determine the gravitational wave signature from a merger with a black hole spinning at nearly full tilt. Instead of a chirp, they found the gravitational waves would instead maintain a constant pitch, but slowly fade away.

“It was certainly very unexpected to see something that didn’t chirp,” says physicist Jolyon Bloomfield of MIT, who was not involved with the research. “This is really quite interesting work. It shows that the chirp actually goes away — something else is happening here.”

If such black hole mergers occur in nature, next-generation gravitational wave observatories like the Evolved Laser Interferometer Space Antenna might provide proof of their existence. Plans call for eLISA to measure gravitational waves from space beginning in 2034. “These are definitely detectable with eLISA,” Warburton said.

The Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, which made the first detection of gravitational waves in 2015 (SN: 3/5/16, p. 6), might be able to observe such mergers if the conditions were just right. Although LIGO can’t observe the mergers of black holes as massive as Gargantua, smaller spinning black holes would produce a similar effect.
Finding black holes like Gargantua would have an impact beyond Hollywood. Spinning black holes are “really interesting from a fundamental physics point of view,” says Samuel Gralla of the University of Arizona in Tucson, a coauthor on the new paper.

Black holes can spin up faster and faster as they suck in matter, but scientists think there’s a limit to how fast they can go. At the center of a black hole is a singularity, or region of infinite density, which is hidden by an event horizon — the surface beyond which nothing can escape the black hole’s greedy pull. But if the black hole twirls too fast, the singularity becomes exposed. Such a “naked singularity,” as it is known, is thought to be impossible to reach, because the known laws of physics would break down.

According to the scientists’ calculations, black hole mergers sing when the larger black hole is rotating just below the limit, at 99.99 percent of its maximum speed. This makes singing black holes an enticing prospect for understanding physics at its extremes.

A newly discovered species of tomato belongs in a haunted house, not on a sandwich.

Fruit from the bush tomato plant Solanum ossicruentum bears little resemblance to its cultivated cousins. The Australian tomato, about a couple centimeters wide, grows enclosed in a shell of spikes. These burrs probably help the fruit latch on to the fur of passing mammals, which then spread the tomato’s seeds elsewhere, researchers at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pa., report May 3 in PhytoKeys.

Slice open the fearsome fruit and within five minutes, its sticky white-green flesh appears to bleed, flushing bright red to dark maroon in response to air exposure. One brave researcher tasted an unripe fruit and deemed it salty. The bush tomato becomes no more appetizing with time: Mature fruits harden into dry, bony nuggets.

The tomato’s gruesome qualities inspired its name, courtesy of a group of Pennsylvanian seventh-grade science students: “Ossicruentum” combines the Latin words for “bone” and “bloody.”

Social media supporters of the Islamic State, or ISIS, form online groups that may provide clues crucial to predicting when terrorist attacks will take place, a new analysis finds.

These virtual communities drive ISIS activity on a Facebook-like site called VKontakte, say physicist Neil Johnson of the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Fla., and colleagues. VKontakte, a social networking service based in Russia with more than 350 million users, allows messaging in many languages and is used worldwide.
In the June 17 Science, Johnson’s team describes a mathematical model that predicts online groups of ISIS supporters will proliferate days before real-world Islamic State attacks. That’s just what happened in September 2014, researchers say. Pro-ISIS groups on VKontakte mushroomed the day before Islamic State forces overran Kobane, a small Syrian town.

The researchers refer to groups of followers of an online page that form spontaneously as aggregates. “Our work suggests that, to manage and monitor online ISIS activity, we need to focus on aggregates rather than individuals,” Johnson says.

Pro-ISIS aggregates on VKontakte exchanged information on issues such as recruiting fighters to Syria and how to survive drone attacks.

The new model suggests that authorities need to shut down online pro-ISIS groups in their early stages. Small-scale aggregates favoring the same cause gradually expand when left alone and eventually merge into a much larger online community that’s more difficult to break up, Johnson’s model forecasts.

“This is the first serious, large-scale, data-driven study that shows how online support develops for terrorist groups such as ISIS,” says computer scientist V.S. Subrahmanian of the University of Maryland in College Park, who builds computational models of terror networks. But it remains to be seen whether the new model can predict when and possibly where future Islamic State attacks will occur, Subrahmanian cautions.
Johnson’s team identified 196 pro-ISIS aggregates, consisting of 108,086 individual followers, which operated between January 1 and August 31, 2015. Intelligence agencies, hackers and website moderators work to shut down these online groups, but to a lesser extent on VKontakte than on Facebook.

Pro-ISIS aggregates rapidly adapted to these survival threats in several ways, the researchers say. Fifteen percent of aggregates changed their online names; 7 percent flipped back and forth between opening their content to any VKontakte user or to current aggregate followers only; and 4 percent engaged in a digital form of reincarnation. Pro-ISIS aggregates under unusually intense attack by hackers and others opted for reincarnation, Johnson says.

Reincarnating aggregates disappeared and then returned, often within weeks, with new names and at least 60 percent of the same followers as before. Aggregates that vanished appear to have reassembled without any direction or urging from one or a few members, Johnson says. New names of reincarnated groups often resembled original names enough to alert former members but not enough to trigger VKontakte’s automated system for identifying names of probable pro-militant groups, he points out.

As with predictions of terror attacks based on the expansion of pro-ISIS aggregates, the new model shows promise in predicting when mass public protests will occur based on sudden jumps in numbers of pro-protest aggregates, the scientists say. There is a difference: Reincarnation did not appear within the last three years among Facebook aggregates consisting of civil protesters in Brazil and several other Latin American countries, the researchers found. Those online groups experienced fewer pressures to shut down than pro-ISIS aggregates on VKontakte did.

Johnson’s analysis moves the study of online militant groups forward, says terrorism analyst J.M. Berger of George Washington University in Washington, D.C. But it’s likely that considerably fewer members of pro-ISIS aggregates than the total studied in the new analysis were actually hard-core Islamic State supporters, Berger contends. Concerted efforts to shut down online terrorist networks have depressed numbers of committed ISIS supporters using social media, in his view. Berger and a colleague have found that English-language Twitter use has declined sharply among ISIS supporters over the last two years, due to suspensions of their accounts by the social media site.

Johnson suspects most pro-ISIS aggregate members were staunch supporters, since aggregates aggressively weed out those deemed unserious or hostile.

Terrorists use chains of social and messaging sites online to achieve their ends, Subrahmanian says. How that works, and whether the same aggregate operates under different guises from one site to the next, has yet to be studied.

Parasites can drive their hosts to do weird, dumb things. But in certain oak trees, the parasites themselves get played.

“Creepy and awesome,” says Kelly Weinersmith of Rice University in Houston, who has helped reveal a Russian doll of nested parasitisms.

The saga begins when two majestic live oak species in the southeastern United States send out new shoots, and female crypt gall wasps (Bassettia pallida) arrive to lay eggs. A wasp mom uses the delivery ­end of her reproductive tract to drill through tree bark, injecting each of her eggs into a separate spot in the oak.
Wasp biochemistry induces the tree to form a botanical womb with an edible lining largely free of oak defense chemicals. The tree is hijacked into nurturing each larva, and wasp life is good — until the unlucky ones get noticed by a second exploiter.

Another wasp species, a newly discovered Euderus, arrives, barely visible to the naked eye but “amazingly iridescent,” Weinersmith says. Her colleague at Rice, Scott Egan, named these jewel blue and green specks after Set, an Egyptian god of evil and chaos.
E. set wasps enslave the B. pallida as laborers and living baby food. E. set females sense their prey inside the gall and inject eggs that hatch and feed on the original occupant. When the invaders mature, they are typically too frail to dig themselves out of the tree.But that’s not a problem, Weinersmith, Egan and colleagues report in the Jan. 25 Proceedings of the Royal Society B. That’s because, despite having a gnawing parasite inside, B. pallida wasps dig a tunnel to freedom.

Almost. When infested with E. set, the tunnelers don’t manage a large enough hole for their own escape. They die with their heads plugging the tunnel exit, perfect for the E. set attackers, who chew an escape hole through the stuck noggins.

Weinersmith and Egan may be the first to describe E. set’s manipulation, but what could be a much earlier example was collected by Alfred Kinsey — yes, that Kinsey. Before shocking mid-20th century America with explicit chronicles of human sexual behavior, he specialized in gall wasps.

Kinsey named more than 130 new species in just three years, collecting at least 5.5 million specimens, now at New York’s American Museum of Natural History. One of his Bassettia has its head stuck in a too-small exit hole in a stem, suggesting a chaos-and-death wasp lurks inside.