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A root cause of why the US-launched smear campaign against the Chinese economy has become hysterical lies in the fact that only by vilifying China can the US-led West find an excuse for its unjust actions and attacks against the Chinese economy. 

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published an article on Sunday with a sensational headline "The World Is in for Another China Shock." Its narrative sounded contagious and suited to the taste of political elites in Washington, especially when they resort to protectionist measures against ordinary Chinese goods.

Some Western media outlets are seeking to create a climate of public opinion in which the Western economy falls victim to China's "dumping" of cheap goods, so as to pave the way for further protectionist measures such as anti-dumping and anti-subsidy investigations into Chinese products.

With the WSJ serving as a vanguard, the US delivers a great deal of propaganda about "China flooding global markets with cheap goods," and uses that propaganda as a camouflage for its protectionist measures against China. It's an old trick by the US that should be condemned.

In recent years, Chinese industries have made steady progress in high-end manufacturing segments, including electric vehicles, batteries, solar panels, wind turbines and more. China's rise has increasingly raised concerns from some Western politicians, observers and media outlets. It's no surprise when they adopt protectionist trade measures to suppress Chinese enterprises, but they should not expect China to yield to these disgraceful acts.

It should be noted that China enters the global market with a peaceful and cooperative manner in line with global trade norms. China became a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001. China is a staunch supporter of free trade. 

The price advantage of Chinese goods can be attributed to multiple factors, including a complete industry chain, relatively low labor costs, and scientific and technological innovation. None of those seem to be factors related to China's "dumping of cheap goods."

The WSJ wrote in its article that the US and the global economy experienced a "China shock" - a boom in imports of cheap Chinese-made goods - in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and now, "a sequel might be in the making" as China doubles down on its exports. The author has a far more negative attitude toward the sequel's impact on the Western economy. This view is almost universal in the West at present.

Why is the West so much more afraid of the "sequel" that it needs to resort to protectionist measures to curb China's development? This reflects a lack of confidence by the West. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the West experienced an upward growth cycle, taking an open mind toward globalization. However, after the 2008 financial crisis, and especially in more recent years, the Western economy has faced a series of challenges. 

Amid the rise of anti-globalization sentiment and trade protectionism, some Western governments pin their hopes on putting up trade barriers to protect their own industries, although such measures will hinder industrial upgrading and the cultivation of emerging sectors.

It's a shame that some Western analysts claim "Chinese companies are flooding foreign markets with products they can't sell at home." The opposite appears to be true. Thanks to China's commitment to high-quality development and continuous progress in technological innovation, Chinese goods are increasingly competitive in the global market. Chinese ingenuity, diligence and adaptability have ensured sufficient supply of everything from daily necessities to high-quality tech products, allowing Chinese manufacturing to make great contribution to stabilizing global trade during a challenging time. China is by no means exporting excess capacity or dumping products they can't sell at home.

Meanwhile, the Chinese market is big enough to accommodate players from China, the West and other countries at the same time. Chinese officials have repeatedly stressed that foreign investment is welcome in China and the door to China will only open further.

China is the top trading partner for many countries in the world. The country is also a key market for many major international companies. There are many opportunities that foreign companies can take advantage of, including the large and fast-growing consumer market and investor-friendly policies. One thing is clear: China is important for multinational companies that want to be globally competitive.

Engaging with the Chinese market is seen as an opportunity rather than a risk. To the world economy, China is a contributor, rather than a saboteur that makes it suffer losses, or a "China shock."

European business groups are emphasizing the potential of the Chinese market this year, particularly in sectors such as new energy and healthcare, and anticipating more cooperation and government support in further tapping into these opportunities.

These comments were made ahead of China's annual two sessions, one of the most significant political gatherings each year, during which a more comprehensive picture of the world's second-largest economy last year will be reviewed while also laying a solid foundation for the economic recovery in 2024.

In a written interview with the Global Times, Jens Eskelund, president of the European Chamber of Commerce in China, said that the EU chamber has relatively modest expectations for the Chinese market this year while noting the potential of China's economy remains large.

In terms of the specific new potential that EU businesses intend to pursue, Eskelund said that the fight against climate change is one area where the EU's and China's interests significantly overlap, and where European companies have a wealth of expertise to bring to the China market.

China's aging population also creates opportunities and needs in the healthcare sector. Creating the right regulatory healthcare framework is necessary to both attract and reward innovation, while at the same time creating a sustainable and affordable management infrastructure, Eskelund said.

"China remains an important market for our member companies," Juha Tuominen, chairman of the FinnCham Beijing, told the Global Times, referring to the latest surveys last year in which Finnish companies' views on the Chinese market potential were positive.

The member companies of FinnCham represent a cross-section of industries, particularly when it comes to machinery, energy and digitalization. Moreover, booming cities such as Southwest China's Chengdu and Chongqing and Central China's Wuhan, Hubei Province, are attracting Finnish companies' attention, Tuominen said.

Healthcare and well-being are also new sectors where Finnish companies in China find opportunities, Tuominen said.

"For our members and Finnish companies, keeping sustainability and carbon neutrality high on the priorities list in China will be good news. In general, this situation is important to Finnish companies as they are among global leaders in sustainable technology and innovation across the board," the chairman said.

Speaking about the primary areas of interest for the upcoming two sessions, the heads of the foreign business chambers expressed expectations for more opening-up and support for foreign businesses.

Tuominen said that a key issue will be measures to boost consumption. "Naturally, we will be keeping an eye on what kind of government stimulus will be available to enhance business opportunities for our members," Tuominen said.

A topic of intense interest will be this year's GDP growth target, as "it will set the tone for business activities for sure," Tuominen said.

Eskelund said that the EU chamber will be interested to see how much emphasis will be placed on improving the business environment for foreign firms.

China has ramped up efforts to improve the business climate for foreign companies, with new policy guidelines being rolled out, and actual implementation of these policies has gradually landed on the ground.

Guidelines outlined by the State Council, China's cabinet, in mid-August 2023, put forward 24 specific measures in six areas to further optimize the foreign investment environment and intensify efforts to attract foreign investment.

Recently, China's Ministry of Commerce held a special roundtable on the implementation of the 24 pro-foreign investment measures, with the participation of representatives from more than 60 foreign-funded enterprises and nine foreign business associations, the ministry's spokesperson He Yadong said at a press conference on February 29.

During the meeting, the EU Chamber of Commerce in China said that the 24 measures are of great significance and exciting to European enterprises, and the implementation of relevant policies is worthy of affirmation, according to media reports.

On the whole, more than 60 percent of the measures have been implemented or made positive progress, and the vast majority of foreign-funded enterprises said that their confidence in investing in China was further enhanced, according to He.

The European Union on Wednesday failed to pass a controversial law that would hold big companies responsible for human rights and environmental abuses in their suppliers after some opposite voices see it as “administrative burden” and “fear of an uneven playing field on the global stage,” South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported.

The legislation itself lacks credibility and appears to be an attempt to use human rights and environment issue to suppress China, which is doomed to fail, experts said.

The rules would have required EU firms with more than 500 staff and €150 million ($162.7 million) net turnover worldwide to conduct detailed audits of their suppliers and partners, including those in China. 

A Wednesday vote of the bloc’s 27 members in Brussels fell short of the qualified majority required to adopt the proposed rules.

Big member states including Germany and Italy abstained along with 10 other countries, diplomatic sources confirmed, while Sweden voted against the rules – leaving them below the required threshold of 14 member states with populations representing at least 65 percent of the union’s citizens, SCMP reported.

An EU diplomat said that members abstained for reasons that included the “administrative burden” and “fear of an uneven playing field on the global stage.”

Pro-business political parties around Europe were also concerned about the administrative burden the rules may require. Companies had also warned the laws would have left them disadvantaged when competing against firms that do not have to comply.

The fact that the law did not pass shows that politicizing economic and trade activities is not in line with the agreements of most EU member states, Cui Hongjian, a professor from the Academy of Regional and Global Governance with Beijing Foreign Studies University, told the Global Times on Thursday.

Those countries holding opposing views must also consider that keeping on this path will only further deteriorate the China-EU economic and trade cooperation, Cui said.

"The biggest problem facing Europe right now is the increasing contradiction between its desire to make a political impact and the need to consider its actual interests. If Europe does not change this trend, it will be difficult for it to achieve its goals," Cui said.

The controversial law is actually another form of so-called decoupling, Li Yong, a senior research fellow at the China Association of International Trade, told the Global Times on Thursday.

It is not surprising that  it has not succeeded. Trying to prevent Chinese companies from cooperating with the EU or European countries by distorting facts would only add meaningless costs to economic and trade, Li said. 

Chinese authorities have been rejecting EU accusations of so-called human rights violation. The groundless accusation on China’s human rights conditions, spreads disinformation, tarnishes China’s image and gravely violates China’s internal affairs, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning told a press conference in December.

China is committed to propelling economic and trade cooperation with Egypt, supporting Chinese enterprises to invest in the country, particularly in the emerging fields, Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao said at a meeting with Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly.

During the meeting on Wednesday, Wang said that China is willing to enhance China-Egypt economic and trade cooperation. He highlighted the potential for collaboration in emerging sectors such as information and telecommunication technology, smart cities, e-commerce, green development, and high-tech industries.

Wang noted the continuous expansion of China-Egypt relations and the high level of bilateral economic and trade cooperation. He stated that China's modernization offers vast opportunities for other economies, including Egypt, and China welcomed Egypt's active participation in the high-quality construction of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

Madbouly acknowledged the long-standing friendship between Egypt and China and thanked China for its valuable support over the years. He looked forward to the development in the relations between the two countries in various fields, including economy and trade. Egypt is keen to continue participating in BRI cooperation and welcomes Chinese enterprises to invest in Egypt.

Wang emphasized the importance of close communication and cooperation between China and Egypt within the frameworks of China-Arab and China-Africa cooperation.

Following the meeting, Wang and Egyptian Minister of International Cooperation Rania Al-Mashat signed a handover certificate for a project to support Egypt's satellite assembly and testing.

Egypt is an important trading partner for China in Africa. According to the General Administration of Customs, China-Egypt bilateral trade reached 111.2 billion yuan ($15.5 billion) in 2023.

Wang's visit is among the latest developments in China-Africa cooperation. On Wednesday, China and the Republic of Sierra Leone signed a joint statement on deepening their comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership, As Sierra Leone's President Julius Maada Bio is on a state visit to China from Tuesday to Saturday, highlighting the ongoing engagement between China and African nations.

Back in 2004, archaeologists excavated two pits in northern China that looked a lot like homebrewing operations. Constructed between 3400 and 2900 B.C. by the Yangshao culture, each pit contained the remnants of a stove and assorted funnels, pots and amphorae.

Now, Jiajing Wang of Stanford University and colleagues report that the pottery shards contain residue and other evidence of starches, chemicals and plant minerals from specific fermented grains. The ancient beer recipe included broomcorn millet, barley, Job’s tears and tubers — that probably gave the beer a sweet flavor, the team writes May 23 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The findings predate the earliest evidence of barley in China by around 1,000 years. Beer may have been consumed at social gatherings, and brewing, not agriculture, spurred the introduction of barley to China, the researchers argue.

Climate commotion
In “Changing Climate: 10 years after An Inconvenient Truth” (SN: 4/16/16, p. 22), Thomas Sumner reported on the progress scientists have made revising forecasts of the far-reaching effects of climate change — from extreme temperatures and sea level rise to severe drought and human conflict — in the decade since the Oscar-winning film’s release.

Reader response to the article was overwhelming, with hundreds of online comments. Some people enjoyed the in-depth look at climate change science, while others expressed skepticism about humans’ contribution to climate change and a general distrust of climate scientists.

“One of my goals for this article was to highlight that climate change research has itself changed over the last decade,” Sumner says. Scientists are still working to understand how the consequences of atmospheric warming will play out in the coming centuries. But one big message from the last decade of research is that the fundamentals have held up: Natural variability exists, says Sumner, but human activities are largely responsible for the current warming trend.
“The question now is what impact will human contributions have down the line and what should we do to prevent and mitigate those effects,” he says.
Plastic feast
Sarah Schwartz wrote about the discovery of a microbe, Ideonella sakaiensis, that chows down on a hard-to-degrade polymer in “This microbe makes a meal of plastic” (SN: 4/16/16, p. 5).
Online commenters were amazed by this new plastic-gobbling organism. “This is great news,” Dan said. “Our world would be doomed if there wasn’t a microbe able to do this.” Chuckawobbly wondered how long it takes I. sakaiensis to digest the plastic. And Jean Harlow was concerned about the potential by-products of worldwide plastic digestion. “The waste product would be a significant amount … of what?” she asked.

Researchers observed that I. sakaiensis almost completely degraded a thin film of polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, after six weeks in a laboratory. But when extracted from the bacterium, the proteins used to break down plastic begin working in about 18 hours.

I. sakaiensisappears to break PET into smaller molecules, like amino acids and carbon dioxide, says coauthor Kenji Miyamoto of Keio University in Yokohama, Japan. But it would probably be hard for the microbe to break down plastic in the outdoors because of its specific growth requirements, he says. Miyamoto envisions that it could be possible to use the specialized proteins in a closed environment to break PET down into molecules such as terephthalic acid— one of the plastic’s main building blocks, which seems benign in the environment.

Prairie dog predators
Herbivorous prairie dog mothers routinely kill baby ground squirrels that encroach on their territories, researchers found. Competition for resources may be a contributing factor to the killings, Susan Milius reported in “Killer prairie dogs make good moms” (SN: 4/16/16, p. 14).

One reader had other ideas. Audrey Boag wondered if prairie dog moms kill ground squirrels to protect their pups from predation or from diseases carried by the squirrels. “In either case, minimizing the number of ground squirrels would pay in lifetime biological fitness,” she wrote.

“We never observed a ground squirrel kill or injure an adult or juvenile prairie dog,” says study coauthor John Hoogland. “Perhaps such attacks sometimes occur underground.” Hoogland notes that the majority of ground squirrels killed by prairie dogs were juveniles, which are too small to be a threat.

One threat, however, is a species of disease-carrying flea that infests both animals. Hoogland found that prairie dog killers and their offspring had fewer fleas than nonkillers and their offspring, “but this trend was not significant,” he says.

No, that’s not the sun. It’s Jupiter, ablaze with infrared light in new images taken in preparation for the Juno spacecraft’s July 4 arrival at the king of the planets. This image shows how heat welling up from deep within the planet gets absorbed by gas in the atmosphere, which can tell researchers how stuff moves around beneath Jupiter’s thick blanket of clouds. Juno won’t look for infrared light, but it will (among other things) measure how much microwave radiation is being blocked by water lurking within Jupiter’s atmosphere.

The map is pieced together from multiple images obtained at the Very Large Telescope in Chile over the past several months. Ground-based images such as these will help researchers understand what Juno is peering at each time it swoops in close to Jupiter’s clouds over the next 20 months.

For women thinking about fertility treatments, there may be one less thing to worry about.

A long-term study shows that women who underwent in vitro fertilization are not significantly more likely to develop breast cancer than women in the general public or women who opted for other fertility treatments. The results are reported July 19 in JAMA.

The fertility treatment alters progesterone and estradiol levels in women trying to get pregnant. Yo-yoing hormones have been linked to an increase in a woman’s odds of developing breast cancer, but studies are divided on whether IVF itself actually ups cancer risk.

Alexandra van den Belt-Dusebout of the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam and her colleagues tracked 19,158 women who underwent in vitro fertilization treatment between 1983 and 1995 and 5,950 women who underwent other fertility treatments between 1980 and 1995.

Following up two decades later, the team found that 948 of the women had developed breast cancer. But breast cancer rates didn’t differ much between groups: 163.5 per 100,000 women for those who had IVF compared to 167.2 women on other fertility treatments and 163.3 women in the general public.

These orderly patterns of dark blue dots indicate where individual chlorine atoms are missing from an otherwise regular grid of atoms. Scientists manipulated these vacancies to create a supersmall data storage device.

The locations of vacancies encode bits of information in the device, which Sander Otte of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and colleagues describe July 18 in Nature Nanotechnology. The team arranged and imaged the vacancies using a scanning tunneling microscope. The storage system, which can hold a kilobyte of data, must be cooled to a chilly −196° Celsius to work.
To demonstrate the technique, the researchers transcribed an excerpt from a famous 1959 lecture by physicist Richard Feynman, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” which predicted the importance of nanotechnology. In each block, paired rows represent letters. Blocks marked with an “X” were unusable. The encoded 159 words of text fill a region a ten-thousandth of a millimeter wide.

If scaled up, the researchers say, the technology could store the full contents of the U.S. Library of Congress in a cube a tenth of a millimeter on each side.

Plastic cling wrap with nano-sized pores could give “cool clothes” a new meaning.

The material lets heat escape, instead of trapping it like traditional fabrics, Stanford University materials scientist Yi Cui and colleagues report in the Sept. 2 Science. It could help people keep cool in hot weather, Cui says, and even save energy by reducing the use of air conditioning.

“It’s a very bold new idea,” says MIT physicist Svetlana Boriskina, who wrote an accompanying commentary. Demand for the new material could be far-reaching, she says. “Every person who wears clothes could be a potential user of this product.”
Current cooling devices include wearable fans and wicking fabrics; both rely on evaporation to cool human skin. But skin also sheds heat in another way — as infrared radiation. Clothing holds this heat close to the body, Cui says. If infrared radiation could instead pass through fabric, he reasoned, people would feel a lot cooler.

But the fabric would have to be transparent only to infrared wavelengths. To visible light, it would need to be opaque. Otherwise, the clothing would be see-through.

Cui found just one material that satisfied both requirements: a commercially available plastic used in lithium-ion batteries. The material, called nanoporous polyethylene, or nanoPE, is a cling wrap‒like plastic that lets infrared radiation through. But unlike cling wrap, the material isn’t clear: It blocks visible light.

Tiny pores speckled throughout the fabric act as obstacles to visible light, Boriskina says. When blue light, for example, hits the pores, it scatters. So do other colors. The light “bounces around in different directions and scrambles together,” she says. To human eyes, the resulting color is white.

The pores scatter visible light because they’re both in the same size range: The diameters of the pores span 50 to 1,000 nanometers, and the wavelengths of visible light range from 400 to 700 nanometers. Infrared light emitted by the body has a much larger wavelength, 7,000 to 14,000 nanometers, so the plastic’s tiny pores can’t block it. To infrared light, the pores are barely bumps in the road, not barriers.
The pores are kind of like small rocks at a beach, Boriskina says. They’ll interfere with the motion of small waves, but big waves will wash right over.

Cui and colleagues tested nanoPE by laying it on a hot plate warmed up to human skin temperature — 33.5° Celsius. NanoPE raised the “skin” temperature by just 0.8 degrees(to 34.3° C). “But when you put on cotton, my God, it rose to 37,” Cui says. “It’s hot!”

The researchers also tried to make nanoPE more wearable than plastic wrap. They coated it with a water-wicking chemical, punched holes in it to make it breathable, and layered it with cotton mesh. Now, the team is working on weaving the fabric to make it feel more like traditional textiles.

“Within five years, I hope someone will start wearing it,” Cui says. “And within 10 years, I hope most people will be wearing it.”