Auroras Announce the Solar Cycle: More Frequent Opportunities To See the Northern and Southern Lights

By MICHAEL CARLOWICZ, NASA EARTH OBSERVATORY OCTOBER 17, 2021

October 12, 2021

The 25th cycle is underway, and it brings more frequent opportunities to see the northern lights and southern lights.

Solar Cycle 25 is underway, and that means more frequent opportunities to see auroras—more commonly known as the northern lights and southern lights. One of the best opportunities in recent years occurred on October 11-12, 2021.

In the early morning hours of October 12, 2021, the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the NOAA-NASA Suomi NPP satellite acquired images of the aurora borealis, or northern lights, around the Northern Hemisphere. The scene above is a mosaic of several satellite passes showing auroras over eastern North America, the North Atlantic, and Greenland. (Click on the downloadable image to see a wider view stretching to Alaska.) The nighttime satellite image was acquired with VIIRS “day-night band,” which detects light in a range of wavelengths from green to near-infrared and uses filtering techniques to observe signals such as airglow, auroras, city lights, and reflected moonlight.

That same night, astronaut Shane Kimbrough photographed the aurora (image below) from his perch on the International Space Station. The night brought the first sustained, widespread glance at the northern lights for mid-latitude viewers in several years. Many photographers and aurora chasers captured photos that night, some of which were shared with the Aurorasaurus citizen science project.

October 12, 2021

Solar cycles track the activity level of the Sun, our nearest star. A cycle is traditionally measured by the rise and fall in the number of sunspots, but it also coincides with increases in solar flares, coronal mass ejections (CMEs), radio emissions, and other forms of space weather. These bursts of magnetized plasma and energetic waves from the Sun’s atmosphere energize the gases and particles in Earth’s magnetosphere and send them plunging down in colorful light displays in the upper atmosphere. Scientists have forecasted the next peak of solar activity (solar maximum) will be reached in mid-2025.

According to the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center, the Sun erupted with a solar flare and CME on October 9, 2021, and the storm arrived at Earth late on October 11. Geomagnetic storm activity reached G2 on a scale from G1 to G5. It was likely the first head-on CME impact of the new solar cycle. NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO-A) and the Solar Dynamics Observatory captured images of the flare and CME.

You can participate in aurora citizen science through Aurorasaurus. The project team tracks auroras around the world via reports to its website and on Twitter, then generates a real-time global map of those reports. Citizen scientists log in and verify the tweets and reports, and each verified sighting serves as a valuable data point for scientists to analyze and incorporate into space weather models. The Aurorasaurus team, in collaboration with citizen scientists and the scientific community, published the first scientific study of Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement (STEVE), an aurora-like phenomenon that appears closer to the equator and flows from east to west. The project is a public-private partnership with the New Mexico Consortium supported by the National Science Foundation and NASA.

Astronaut photograph acquired on October 12, 2021, with a Nikon D5 digital camera. The photograph was provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations Facility and the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, Johnson Space Center. NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens, using VIIRS day-night band data from the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership.

Seismology and Geophysics: Understanding the Devastating Haiti Earthquakes

By SARAH COSTELLO, MIT SCHOOL OF SCIENCE OCTOBER 17, 2021

Haiti earthquake damage.

Assistant professors Camilla Cattania and William Frank discuss the science behind the 2010 and 2021 earthquakes in Haiti.

On August 14, 2021, a magnitude 7.2 earthquake struck Haiti. The largest earthquake in the region since 2010, the disaster left at least 2,000 people dead, 12,000 people injured, and nearly 53,000 houses destroyed. Two assistant professors in the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences discuss why the region is susceptible to earthquakes and what has changed — in Haiti and in earthquake science — since the devastating 2010 event, when the country had only one seismometer.

Camilla Cattania is a seismologist with experience in numerical modeling, earthquake physics, and statistical seismology; and William Frank is a geophysicist focused the physical mechanisms that control deformation within the Earth’s crust.

Camilla Cattania (left) and William Frank are assistant professors in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences focused on earthquake science. Credit: Photos courtesy of the faculty

Q: Why is Haiti prone to earthquakes?

Cattania: I’ll start with the broad tectonics setting. The island of Hispaniola, which comprises Haiti and the Dominican Republic, is sandwiched between the North American plate to the north and the Caribbean plate to the south. Haiti is primarily on a tiny plate that’s sandwiched between the two. At each plate boundary it has faults, fractures within the Earth’s crust, running approximately east to west. The earthquake happened in the southern-most fault system, called the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault system, where there are faults with slightly different orientations, creating complex fault geometry. The northern plate is moving to the west while the southern plate is moving to the east, causing earthquakes along this fault zone.

Frank: Not only do you have the sliding motion from east to west, but you also have compressive, or squeezing, motion at the plate boundary that is accommodated by other nearby faults. For example, one of the big questions for the 2010 earthquake is: What fault did it actually occur on? It looked like it was right next Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault system, but was it was on a translational, or sliding, fault or a compressive fault? There are lots of outstanding questions about the complexity of what, from far away, looks simple.

Cattania: The region transitions between horizontal motion, in which plates slide past each other, to the compressive motion William described, which has some vertical motion. Even in this earthquake, preliminary models show that there was a bit of both.

Another question would be: Why now? Why have there been two earthquakes recently? The Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault system has been associated with earthquakes in 1751, 1770, 1860, without much in between. A long period of time without seismicity can increase the likelihood that you will have an earthquake because you have had more time to accumulate stresses. Moreover, the 2010 earthquake, which happened on a subsidiary fault, further increased the stress at the location of the 2021 earthquake.

The Gonâve microplate and surrounding fault zones. Credit: NASA WorldWind (retouched by mikenorton)

Q: What is the same and what is different about this earthquake versus the 2010 earthquake?

Frank: The 2010 earthquake happened on a fault that wasn’t previously identified, one of the faults that accommodates the compressive motion of the plate boundary. The question we have now is whether this recent earthquake is on the main translational fault, or whether it’s also on another fault that accommodates compressive motion. If that were the case, it would be the same plate boundary, but a different faulting regime.

Cattania: The reason there are so many unknowns is because this region was very sparsely instrumented up until 2010, when Haiti had no permanent seismic network. Now the region has more seismometers, and people also have portable, low-quality seismometers in their homes that provide a large quantity of measurements. The quality of the data that we have from this earthquake is superior compared to anything we would have had in 2010 or before. I think we’ll have more answers in the future to some of these questions than we did before because the instrumentation has improved between these two events.

Frank: Increased instrumentation allows us to get a better image of what’s happening in the fault zone during the main earthquake and the aftershocks that follow. The parallel story on why that’s possible is that during the 2010 earthquake, there was no seismology at the State University of Haiti. Now, there’s a geoscience department that’s recruiting and training seismologists.

There’s an informational website that is the result of an exciting collaboration between geoscience researchers in Haiti and the University of Nice in France, where they publish real-time locations and detections of aftershocks. It provides enormous amounts of data that is publicly available. Overall, there’s much more activity within Haiti, of instrumentation, of general interest in earthquake hazard, and of people to study the data, than there was during the 2010 earthquake.

Cattania: Another difference between these events was their magnitude. The first one was 7; this latest was 7.2. But the location was also different — the first was closer to Port-au-Prince and generally more populated areas. The fact that this one is stronger doesn’t necessarily imply that it’s more damaging.

Q: What does your research tell us about future earthquakes in this area? What do we know as a scientific community?

Cattania: We cannot predict with certainty the location or the magnitude of huge earthquakes in this area, or anywhere else; however, we do know the typical properties of aftershocks. Basically, you will feel hundreds of earthquakes in the first few weeks, and then this number gradually goes down unless one of these earthquakes happens to be large enough to start a new sequence.

How does the earthquake affect the fault system? We had an earthquake in 2010 that happened to the east of the current earthquake, and it increased the amount of stress where the 2021 earthquake happened. If you look at a map of this area, it’s clear that there are other segments of this same fault system on which major earthquakes haven’t happened for a long time. There is a possibility of other damaging earthquakes occurring on the same fault system.

Frank: For me, what’s most related to my research is developing efficient ways to detect, identify, and characterize the aftershocks. We’ve developed signal processing techniques that we can use on the seismic data to identify the earthquakes, and once we’re able to identify them, we’re able to get good locations. We’re able to study the occurrence rate of these aftershocks.

These aftershock catalogs are extremely important to understanding the extent of rupture and to identifying the actual faults and planes that they occur on. There are two simple ways to identify the structure. You can look at the main earthquake itself, or at the rupture zone of the main earthquake, where the aftershocks often delineate where the main earthquake happened. And once you can identify, locate, and characterize those aftershocks, you can better model the earthquake.

Cattania: My work has been about including geometrical complexity in aftershock forecasts. When you’re trying to figure out where aftershocks will happen, you need to know as much as possible about the orientation of existing faults, and sometimes you have to make simplified assumptions about it. I’ve developed methods that help better include everything we know, using data and the type of information that William was describing, to try to infer how an aftershock will evolve given what the fault geometry looks like and how variable it is in this region. My methods allow you to take refined information about fault geometry to produce better aftershock forecasts.

Frank: That’s why I’m excited to be here with Camilla — because we can make that direct connection.

 

Primates’ Ancestors May Have Left Trees To Survive Asteroid That Wiped Out the Dinosaurs

By CORNELL UNIVERSITY OCTOBER 17, 2021

A chimpanzee in Kibale National Park, Uganda. Credit: Daniel J. Field

When an asteroid struck 66 million years ago and wiped out dinosaurs not related to birds and three-quarters of life on Earth, early ancestors of primates and marsupials were among the only tree-dwelling (arboreal) mammals that survived, according to a new study.

Arboreal species were especially at risk of extinction due to global deforestation caused by wildfires from the asteroid’s impact.

In the study, computer models, fossil records, and information from living mammals revealed that most of the surviving mammals did not rely on trees, though the few arboreal mammals that lived on – including human ancestors – may have been versatile enough to adapt to the loss of trees.

The study points to the influence of this extinction event, known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary, on shaping the early evolution and diversification of mammals.

 “One possible explanation for how primates survived across the K-Pg boundary, in spite of being arboreal, might be due to some behavioral flexibility, which may have been a critical factor that let them survive,” said Jonathan Hughes, the paper’s co-first author and a doctoral student in the lab of Jeremy Searle, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Co-first author Jacob Berv, Ph.D. ’19, is currently a Life Sciences Fellow at the University of Michigan.

The study, “Ecological Selectivity and the Evolution of Mammalian Substrate Preference Across the K-Pg Boundary,” was published on October 11, 2021, in the journal Ecology and Evolution.

The earliest mammals appeared roughly 300 million years ago and may have diversified in tandem with an expansion of flowering plants about 20 million years prior to the K-Pg event. When the asteroid struck, many of these mammal lineages died off, Hughes said.

“At the same time, the mammals that did survive diversified into all the new ecological niches that opened up when dinosaurs and other species became extinct,” Hughes said.

In the study, the researchers used published phylogenies (branching, tree-like diagrams that show evolutionary relatedness among groups of organisms) for mammals. They then classified each living mammal on those phylogenies into three categories – arboreal, semi-arboreal and non-arboreal – based on their preferred habitats. They also designed computer models that reconstructed the evolutionary history of mammals.

Mammal fossils from around the K-Pg are very rare and are difficult to use to interpret an animal’s habitat preference. The researchers compared information known from living mammals against available fossils to help provide additional context for their results.

Generally, the models showed that surviving species were predominantly non-arboreal through the K-Pg event, with two possible exceptions: ancestors of primates and marsupials. Primate ancestors and their closest relatives were found to be arboreal right before the K-Pg event in every model. Marsupial ancestors were found to be arboreal in half of the model reconstructions.

The researchers also examined how mammals as a group may have been changing over time.

“We were able to see that leading up to the K-Pg event, around that time frame, there was a big spike in transitions from arboreal and semi-arboreal to non-arboreal, so it’s not just that we are seeing mostly non-arboreal [species], but things were rapidly transitioning away from arboreality,” Hughes said.

Reference: “Ecological selectivity and the evolution of mammalian substrate preference across the K–Pg boundary” by Jonathan J. Hughes, Jacob S. Berv, Stephen G. B. Chester, Eric J. Sargis and Daniel J. Field, 11 October 2021, Ecology and Evolution.
DOI: 10.1002/ece3.8114

Co-authors include Daniel Field, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Cambridge; Eric Sargis, a professor of anthropology at Yale University; and Stephen Chester, an associate professor of anthropology at Brooklyn College.

The study was funded by the National Science Foundation.

 Carbon Capture: A green way forward? | Plan It Green

Oct 17, 2021

Al Jazeera English

With fossil fuel emissions still rising, we need innovative answers to how we can slow global warming, and fast. Carbon capture and storage is one such idea. But as our Environment Correspondent Nick Clark finds out, there are fears it could divert attention from other sustainable solutions.

 

Eurasian consolidation ends the US unipolar moment

Shanghai Cooperation Organization's 20th-anniversary summit heralded the beginning of a new geopolitical and geo-economic order

Participant leaders pose for a photo ahead of Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Summit in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, on September 17. 

Photo: AFP / Iranian Presidency / Handout / Anadolu Agency

By PEPE ESCOBAR 

ASIATIMES.COM

SEPTEMBER 22, 2021

The 20th-anniversary summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, enshrined nothing less than a new geopolitical paradigm.

Iran, now a full SCO member, was restored to its traditionally prominent Eurasian role, following the recent US$400 billion trade and development deal struck with China. Afghanistan was the main topic – with all players agreeing on the path ahead, as detailed in the Dushanbe Declaration. And all Eurasian integration paths are now converging, in unison, towards the new geopolitical – and geoeconomic – paradigm.

Call it a multipolar development dynamic in synergy with China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

The Dushanbe Declaration was quite explicit on what Eurasian players are aiming at: “a more representative, democratic, just and multipolar world order based on universally recognized principles of international law, cultural and civilizational diversity, mutually beneficial and equal cooperation of states under the central coordinating role of the UN.”

For all the immense challenges inherent to the Afghan jigsaw puzzle, hopeful signs emerged on Tuesday (September 21), when former Afghan president Hamid Karzai and peace envoy Abdullah Abdullah met in Kabul with Russian presidential envoy Zamir Kabulov, China’s special envoy Yue Xiaoyong and Pakistan’s special envoy Mohammad Sadiq Khan.

This troika – Russia, China, Pakistan – is at the diplomatic forefront. The SCO reached a consensus that Islamabad will coordinate with the Taliban on the formation of an inclusive government that including Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras.

The most glaring, immediate consequence of the SCO’s not only incorporating Iran but also taking the Afghan bull by the horns, fully supported by the Central Asian “stans,” is that the Empire of Chaos has been completely marginalized.

Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting of the Council of Heads of State of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) held in Dushanbe, via videoconference, at the Novo-Ogaryovo state residence, outside Moscow, Russia.

 Photo: AFP / Alexei Druzhinin / Sputnik

From Southwest Asia to Central Asia, a real reset has as its protagonists the SCO, the Eurasia Economic Union, the BRI and the Russia-China strategic partnership. Iran and Afghanistan – the missing links heretofore, for different reasons – are now fully incorporated into the chessboard.

In one of my frequent conversations with Alastair Crooke, a prominent political analyst, he evoked once again Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard: everything must change so everything must remain the same.

In this case, imperial hegemony, as interpreted by Washington: “In its growing confrontation with China, a ruthless Washington has demonstrated that what matters to it now is not Europe but the Indo-Pacific region.” That’s Cold War 2.0 prime terrain.

The fallback position for the US – which possesses little potential to contain China after having been all but expelled from the Eurasia heartland – had to be a classic maritime power play: the “free and open Indo-Pacific,” complete with Quad and AUKUS, the whole setup spun to death as an “effort” attempting to preserve dwindling American supremacy.

The sharp contrast between the SCO continental integration drive and the “we all live in an Aussie submarine” gambit (my excuses to Lennon-McCartney) speaks for itself. A toxic mix of hubris and desperation is in the air, with not even a whiff of pathos to alleviate the downfall.

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi attends the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Summit in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, on September 17, 2021.

 Photo: AFP / Iranian Presidency / Handout / Anadolu Agency

The Global South is not impressed. Addressing the forum in Dushanbe, Russian President Vladimir Putin remarked that the portfolio of nations knocking on the SCO’s door was huge.

Egypt, Qatar and Saudi Arabia are now SCO dialogue partners, on the same level with Afghanistan and Turkey. It’s quite feasible they may be joined next year by Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Serbia and dozens of others.

And it doesn’t stop in Eurasia. In his well-timed address to CELAC, Chinese President Xi Jinping invited no fewer than 33 Latin American nations to be part of the Eurasia-Africa-Americas New Silk Roads.

Remember the Scythians

Iran as a SCO protagonist and at the center of the New Silk Roads has been restored to a rightful historic role. By the middle of the first millennium BCE, northern Iranians ruled the core of the steppes in Central Eurasia. By that time the Scythians had migrated into the western steppe, while other steppe Iranians made inroads as far away as China.

Scythians – a northern (or “east”) Iranian people – were not necessarily just fierce warriors. That’s a crude stereotype. Very few in the West know that the Scythians developed a sophisticated trade system, as described by Herodotus among others, that linked Greece, Persia and China.

And why’s that? Because trade was an essential means to support their sociopolitical infrastructure. Herodotus got the picture because he actually visited the city of Olbia and other places in Scythia.

The Scythians were called Saka by the Persians – and that leads us to another fascinating territory: the Sakas may have been one of the prime ancestors of the Pashtun in Afghanistan.

What’s in a name – Scythian? Well, multitudes. The Greek form Scytha meant northern Iranian “archer.” So that was the denomination of all the northern Iranian peoples living between Greece in the West and China in the East.

Map of Scythia: Wikipedia

Now imagine a very busy international commerce network developed across the heartland, with the focus on Central Eurasia, by the Scythians, the Sogdians, and even the Xiongnu – who kept battling the Chinese on and off, as detailed by early Greek and Chinese historical sources.

These Central Eurasians traded with all the peoples living on their borders: that meant Europeans, Southwest Asians, South Asians and East Asians. They were the precursors of the multiple ancient Silk Roads.

The Sogdians followed the Scythians; Sogdiana was an independent Greco-Bactrian state in the 3rd century B.C. – encompassing areas of northern Afghanistan – before it was conquered by nomads from the east who ended up establishing the Kushan empire, which soon expanded south into India.

Zoroaster was born in Sogdiana; Zoroastrianism was huge in Central Asia for centuries. The Kushans for their part adopted Buddhism: and that’s how Buddhism eventually arrived in China.

By the first century CE, all these Central Asian empires were linked – via long-distance trade – to Iran, India and China. That was the historical basis of the multiple, ancient Silk Roads – which linked China to the West for several centuries until the Age of Discovery configured the fateful Western maritime trade dominance.

Arguably, even more than a series of interlinked historical phenomena, the denomination “Silk Road” works best as a metaphor of cross-cultural connectivity. That’s what is at the heart of the Chinese concept of New Silk Roads. And average people across the heartland feel it because that’s imprinted in the collective unconscious in Iran, China and all Central Asian “stans.”

Revenge of the heartland

Glenn Diesen, professor at the University of South-Eastern Norway and an editor at the Russia in Global Affairs journal, is among the very few top scholars who are analyzing the process of Eurasia integration in depth.

His latest book practically spells out the whole story in its title: Europe as the Western Peninsula of Greater Eurasia: Geoeconomic Regions in a Multipolar World.

Diesen shows, in detail, how a “Greater Eurasia region, that integrates Asia and Europe, is currently being negotiated and organized with a Chinese-Russian partnership at the center. Eurasian geoeconomic instruments of power are gradually forming the foundation of a super-region with new strategic industries, transportation corridors and financial instruments. Across the Eurasian continent, states as different as South Korea, India, Kazakhstan and Iran are all advancing various formats for Eurasia integration.”

The Greater Eurasia Partnership has been at the center of Russian foreign policy at least since the St Petersburg forum in 2016. Diesen duly notes that, “while Beijing and Moscow share the ambition to construct a larger Eurasian region, their formats differ. The common denominator of both formats is the necessity of a Sino-Russian partnership to integrate Eurasia.” That’s what was made very clear at the SCO summit.

It’s no wonder the process irks the Empire immensely, because Greater Eurasia, led by Russia-China, is a mortal attack against the geoeconomic architecture of Atlanticism. And that leads us to the nest-of-vipers debate around the EU concept of “strategic autonomy” from the US; that would be essential to establish true European sovereignty – and eventually, closer integration within Eurasia.

Glenn Diesen. Photo: we.hse.ru

European sovereignty is simply non-existent when its foreign policy means submission to dominatrix NATO. The humiliating, unilateral withdrawal from Afghanistan coupled with the Anglo-only AUKUS was a graphic illustration that the Empire doesn’t give a damn about its European vassals.

Throughout the book, Diesen shows, in detail, how the concept of Eurasia unifying Europe and Asia “has through history been an alternative to the dominance of maritime powers in the oceanic-centric world economy,” and how “British and American strategies have been deeply influenced” by the ghost of an emerging Eurasia, “a direct threat to their advantageous position in the oceanic world order.”

Now, the crucial factor seems to be the fragmentation of Atlanticism. Diesen identifies three levels: the de facto decoupling of Europe and the US propelled by Chinese ascendancy; the mind-boggling internal divisions in the EU, enhanced by the parallel universe inhabited by Brussels eurocrats; and last but not least, “polarization within Western states” caused by the excesses of neoliberalism.

Well, just as we think we’re out, Mackinder and Spykman pull us back in. It’s always the same story: the Anglo-American obsession in preventing the rise of a “peer competitor” (Brzezinski) in Eurasia, or an alliance (Russia-Germany in the Mackinder era, now the Russia-China strategic partnership) capable, as Diesen puts it, “of wrestling geoeconomic control away from the oceanic powers.”

As much as imperial strategists remain hostages of Spykman – who ruled that the US must control the maritime periphery of Eurasia – definitely it’s not AUKUS/Quad that is going to pull it off.

Very few people, East and West, may remember that Washington had developed its own Silk Road concept during the Bill Clinton years – later co-opted by Dick Cheney with a Pipelineistan twist and then circling all back to Hillary Clinton who announced her own Silk Road dream in India in 2011.

Diesen reminds us how Hillary sounded remarkably like a proto-Xi: “Let’s work together to create a new Silk Road. Not a single thoroughfare like its namesake, but an international web and network of economic and transit connections. That means building more rail lines, highways, energy infrastructure, like the proposed pipeline to run from Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan, through Pakistan and India.”

Hillary does Pipelineistan! Well, in the end, she didn’t. Reality dictates that Russia is connecting its European and Pacific regions, while China connects its developed east coast with Xinjiang, and both connect Central Asia. Diesen interprets it as Russia “completing its historical conversion from a European/Slavic empire to a Eurasian civilizational state.”

So in the end we’re back to … the Scythians. The prevailing neo-Eurasia concept revives the mobility of nomadic civilizations – via top transportation infrastructure – to connect everything between Europe and Asia.

We could call it the Revenge of the Heartland: they are the powers building this new, interconnected Eurasia. Say goodbye to the ephemeral, post-Cold War US unipolar moment.

Time for China’s Belt and Road to go green

Beijing's recent vow to stop funding coal-fired power projects abroad could fuel a new era of low-carbon development

By YIXIAN SUN

SEPTEMBER 29, 2021
ASIATIMES.COM

Emissions are discharged from a coal-fired power plant in Changchun city in northeast China's Jilin province. 

Photo: AFP / Wang zhendong / Imaginechina

Chinese President Xi Jinping recently announced at the UN General Assembly that China “will not build new coal-fired power projects abroad.”

Chinese banks have already swung into gear. Three days after Xi’s speech, the Bank of China declared it would no longer provide financing for new coal mining and power projects outside China from the last quarter of 2021.

Xi’s statement is expected to affect at least 54 gigawatts of proposed China-backed coal plants that are not yet under construction. Shelving these would save CO₂ emissions equivalent to three months of global emissions.

This pledge from the world’s largest public financier of overseas coal plants could usher in a new era of low-carbon development. But that depends on what happens in the countries where China had funneled money into coal power.

Many of these places urgently need new energy infrastructure. Will China’s investments here be redirected to renewable energy – or simply disappear?
Chinese support for renewables abroad

One positive sign came in the same speech to the UN, when Xi indicated that “China will step up support for other developing countries in developing green and low-carbon energy.”

China’s overseas energy investments grew as part of the Belt and Road Initiative. Launched in 2013, Xi’s signature foreign-policy effort increased China’s cooperation with the rest of the world through infrastructure development, unimpeded trade, financial integration and policy coordination.

China has continued to provide finance for the Belt and Road Initiative during the pandemic, and investment in renewables made up most (57%) of the country’s financial support for overseas energy projects in 2020 – up from 38% in 2019.


Beijing has supported wind and solar projects in more than 20 developing countries since 2013, including Ethiopia and Kenya. And Chinese banks and companies have also expanded their overseas investments in renewable energy over the last decade.

China’s overseas renewable energy portfolio has grown with the belt and road initiative. China’s Global Power Database/Boston University, Author provided

While the trends are positive, challenges remain. China’s overseas investment policy remains guided by the non-interference principle. This means that Beijing is supposed to let host countries determine the type of energy projects, and only requires Chinese firms to comply with host-country regulations.

Research shows that China’s finance for coal in Asia was largely driven by demand in recipient countries. This is because the domestic policies of these countries prioritized improving energy access over reducing emissions, and coal was a cheap and proven source.

Inadequate grid infrastructure and politicians skeptical of renewable energy in countries receiving Chinese investment have also hampered development. In Indonesia, business leaders and politicians formed pro-coal lobby groups to influence the design of China-backed projects.

China’s new pledge tells prospective recipient countries that coal finance is no longer an option. China must now promote its offer of investment in renewables. Drawing on its domestic experiences, Beijing should provide subsidies or tax cuts to companies willing to build renewable energy projects outside China.

Chinese energy developers are often wary of investment risks in developing countries due to their unfamiliarity with local politics. The Chinese government can help by increasing coordination between Chinese companies and local governments, businesses and communities in host countries.

Over the past decade, China has supported many developing countries to increase their energy generating capacity with financing, affordable technology and quick project delivery.

China has taken the first step to stop funding coal. It’s now time to adopt policies that support the overseas activities of its renewable energy developers.

Yixian Sun, Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in International Development, University of Bath.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Why ASEAN finally took a stand on Myanmar

Regional bloc has a bevy of good reasons to block junta representatives from attending this month's summit meeting

By BERTIL LINTNER

ASIATIMES

OCTOBER 18, 2021

The Myanmar national flag (C) is seen with flags of member countries attending the 35th Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit in Bangkok, November 2019. Myanmar's junta chief will be excluded from an upcoming ASEAN summit, the group said on October 16, 2021, a rare rebuke as concerns rise over the military government's commitment to defusing a bloody crisis. 

Photo: AFP / Romeo Gacad

Has the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) for the first time foregone its longstanding policy of “non-interference” in the internal affairs of one of its ten member states by blocking a representative of Myanmar’s junta from attending the bloc’s upcoming summit in Brunei? And, if so, why?

Is it concern over a February 1 coup and the brutal repression of massive public opposition to the military power grab, which has left more than a thousand dead and many more who have been arrested and tortured?

Or is it simply a face-saving gesture from a regional bloc that has come under increasing criticism for being ineffective and therefore is losing its credibility at a time when global superpowers are playing a rising role in the region’s power politics?


ASEAN is heavily dependent, especially on what may come after the pandemic, on the goodwill of the US and other Western nations that in no uncertain terms have condemned Myanmar’s coup and urged the bloc to do more to restore normalcy in the country.

Myanmar demonstrators have also condemned the bloc for its inactivity and set ASEAN flags alight at public protests in the old capital of Yangon.

To be sure, ASEAN can hardly be described as a gathering of liberal democracies. The bloc’s current chair, Brunei, is an absolute monarchy. Two of its members — Vietnam and Laos — are communist-ruled one-party states.

Cambodia is governed by Prime Minister Hun Sen, who has recently outlawed the political opposition and in the process made the country into an even harsher autocracy.

Singapore also lacks fundamental freedoms when it comes to the media and civil rights and Malaysia is best described as a semi-democracy. Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines, is known for his disdain of the media and all opposition to his rule.

In Thailand, the military has staged several coups to oust elected governments and retains an outsized political role despite 2019 elections. That leaves, ironically given its history of autocratic rule, Indonesia as the most, some would argue the only, democratic ASEAN member.

Commander-in-Chief of Myanmar’s armed forces and head of Myanmar’s coup regime Senior General Min Aung Hlaing attends the 9th Moscow Conference on International Security in Moscow, Russia on June 23, 2021. 

Photo: AFP via Anadolu Agency / Sefa Karacan

ASEAN’s two cardinal principles, non-interference and consensus, have until now made it impossible for the bloc to take any decisive action when there has been trouble in or between its non-democratic member states. But it is also clear that ASEAN leaders are running out of patience with the Myanmar junta, known as the State Administration Council (SAC).

Its leader and now self-appointed prime minister, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, paid a one-day visit to Jakarta on April 24, where he and his ASEAN partners agreed on what was called “a five-point consensus” comprising calls for an immediate cessation of violence and the exercise of utmost restraint and a dialog among all parties concerned to seek a peaceful solution to the crisis.

It was also decided to appoint a special envoy by the ASEAN chair to “facilitate mediation in the dialogue process” and to provide humanitarian assistance through AHA, the ASEAN Coordinating Center for Humanitarian Assistance on disaster management.

Even Min Aung Hlaing agreed that the special envoy and his delegation should be given the right to visit Myanmar and there meet with “all parties concerned.”

ASEAN’s decision to prevent junta representatives from participating in the summit, which is scheduled to take place on October 26-28 via videoconference, was explained in a statement issued at the bloc’s foreign ministers’ meeting — also online — on October 15.

While noting “the principles enshrined in the ASEAN charter”, meaning non-interference, the ministers stated that “the situation in Myanmar was having an impact on regional security as well as the unity, credibility and centrality of ASEAN as a rules-based organization.”

ASEAN would, therefore, “invite a non-political representative from Myanmar to the upcoming Summits.” Who that “non-political” individual will be is unclear, nor how and by whom he or she would be appointed.

The junta’s response was that it had cooperated on the five-point consensus by accepting the appointment of Brunei’s Foreign Minister Erywan Pehin Yusof as ASEAN’s special envoy — and that it had distributed aid delivered through AHA “to those in need.” But the envoy was not allowed to meet the deposed and detained president Win Myint and state counselor Aung San Suu Kyi because they are facing criminal charges in Myanmar courts.

In other words, the SAC has closed the door to any dialogue with the ousted leaders and opponents to military rule. The Myanmar foreign ministry also remarked that Myanmar “hopes that he [the ASEAN envoy] will be able to avoid actions from anyone with the intention of putting politically motivated actions and pressures on Myanmar.”

Protesters hold posters with the image of detained civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi during a demonstration against the military coup in Naypyidaw on February 28, 2021. (Photo by STR / AFP)

SAC has always claimed that it assumed power constitutionally, because the president had decided to hand over power to the generals, which he has the right to do under the country’s 2008 constitution.

According to the SAC, the military-appointed First Vice President Myint Swe, a retired lieutenant-general, had taken over the presidency from Win Myint, who the military body claimed had resigned for health reasons.

But during court testimony on October 12, Win Myint let it be known that he was in good health. According to his lawyer Khin Maung Zaw, the military had tried to force him to relinquish his post hours before the February 1 coup by warning him he could be seriously harmed if he refused.

Win Myint replied that he “would rather die than consent”, the lawyer stated in an English language text message sent to reporters. That undermined any SAC claim of legality, even under the 2008 constitution, which was drafted under the auspices of the military.

ASEAN’s initiative to block Myanmar appears to have been taken by Malaysia’s Foreign Minister Saifuddin Abdullah who, on October 6, even said that his country is ready to consider holding dialogue with Myanmar’s National Unity Government (NUG) — consisting of ousted MPs and other opposition figures — if SAC does not fully cooperate with the five-point consensus.

Indonesia’s outspoken Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi went even further in a Twitter message on October 15 that said Myanmar “should not be represented at the political level until Myanmar restores its democracy through an inclusive process.”

But, regional security analysts argue, ASEAN’s annoyance with the SAC’s intransigence and the bad rap the bloc has received because of Myanmar’s membership may not be directed solely by concerns about democracy and human rights.

Malaysia and Indonesia have for years been at the receiving end of a flood of Muslim Rohingya refugees from Myanmar. According to UNHCR, at the end of August, there were 179,390 refugees and asylum seekers registered with the international body in Malaysia.

Of those, 102,990 are Rohingyas, 22,470 Chins (a mainly Christian minority) and 29,390 from other ethnic groups from conflict-affected areas in Myanmar. Although the exact number is unknown, thousands of Rohingya refugees have also ventured in rickety boats to Indonesia.

A wooden boat carrying suspected Rohingya migrants detained in Malaysian territorial waters off the island of Langkawi on April 5. 

Photo: AFP / Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency

Attempts to have them repatriated have failed; neither Malaysia nor Indonesia is in a position to integrate the high number of people fleeing oppression and persecution in Myanmar.

The February 1 coup has also been bad for intra-ASEAN business. Singapore exported US$2.7 billion worth of goods to Myanmar in 2020, mainly mineral fuels, oil, electronics and machinery. But companies from Singapore and other ASEAN members may now face sanctions and boycotts for dealing with Myanmar.

Trade with Vietnam was also booming before the coup, with Vietnamese companies investing in real estate and a huge new modern shopping mall in Yangon. Mytel, one of Myanmar’s top telecom operators, is a joint venture between the military-controlled Myanmar Economic Corporation and Viettel, which is owned by the Vietnamese military.

Vietnam, hardly a democracy, would not normally have cared about a military takeover in a foreign country, but the Vietnamese can hardly be pleased to see their co-owned communication towers being blown up by anti-junta protestors and other investments being ruined because of the coup.

No serious observer of the post-coup situation in Myanmar believes that the SAC would ever engage in a meaningful dialogue with Win Myint, Aung San Suu Kyi and other ousted — and now detained — leaders.

So ASEAN is stuck with an ostracized member that had dragged its reputation in the mud and there is little it can do about it than what it has done already: wait and see what happens next.

In true ASEAN manner, the foreign ministers’ statement “reiterated that Myanmar is an important member of the ASEAN family” so Myanmar should be given “the space to restore its internal affairs and return to normalcy.”

But not many will be holding their breath on that one. Myanmar is in turmoil, and there is very little ASEAN can do about it apart from symbolic summit snubs.

US elites’ imperial corruption compares to Opium War

Starting this column, I couldn't have envisioned what smartphones and social media would do to a generation

By SPENGLER AKA DAVID P. GOLDMAN

ASIATIMES.COM

OCTOBER 18, 2021

Opium War fighting. Source: National Army Museum

This series of essays debuted in January 2000 with a meditation on tech stocks. I forecast that – contrary to the then-prevailing wisdom – internet equities would blossom by feeding on the moral rot of the society underneath them.

Not in my darkest rumination could I have envisioned the corruption of a whole generation of American youth through smartphones and social media, as documented by Professor Jean Twenge of the University of California San Diego. I repost below my maiden essay, “What if Internet Stocks Aren’t a Bubble?”

This has a direct bearing upon Professor Justin Yifu Lin’s thesis that China today stands with respect to the United States as the United States and Germany stood with respect to Great Britain at the end of the 19th century. An excerpt from Professor Lin’s new book was published by Asia Times on October 11.

China, he maintains, will lead the Fourth Industrial Revolution just as America and Germany led the Second Industrial Revolution.

It was Britain that had the technology in the late 19th century, not America. (Germany invented the modern chemical industry and some key features of modern metallurgy.)

Thomas Edison did not invent the light bulb, contrary to the fable told to American schoolchildren. British scientist Joseph Swan invented the light bulb, Edison’s industrial laboratory tried thousands of materials until it discovered that a bamboo filament would last ten times longer than previous materials, and made it commercially viable.

Edison engaged in flagrant intellectual property theft. Swan sued him successfully for patent infringement and won a huge settlement.

Why didn’t Britain commercialize the light bulb? The answer lies in the corruption of empire. Britain’s best and brightest left Eton and Harrow and went into colonial service, and made fortunes on the sale of British textiles to India, Indian opium to China, and Chinese tea and silks to the West.

Britain’s country houses were built on the quick money that was there to be earned from empire, and the British upper class eschewed the dirty work of manufacturing in favor of the faux-aristocracy of the nouveau riche masquerading as landed gentry. Ambitious Americans built factories, and ambitious Germans earned doctorates in chemistry while ambitious Englishmen went East of Suez.

America has no empire in the old sense of the world; when Americans occupy foreign countries they lose money rather than make money. But America’s financial and tech monopolies have the same effect. During the 2000s, Wall Street’s derivatives desks picked off the brightest engineers, and during the 2010s, the tech companies recruited the smartest engineers and computer scientists.

America graduates barely 40,000 mechanical engineers each year, not surprising considering that Americans lost interest in manufacturing two decades ago.

The tech monopolies offer rewards beyond the imagination of greed and have concentrated American wealth in the hands of the smallest number of people in history. And they feed on a culture of insouciant hedonism that values individual self-expression as a matter of religious dogma while enforcing a vicious conformity upon young people

.

Social media are the opium of the 21st century, and the young tech wizards who infest Silicon Valley are the moral successors of the young Etonians who forced India to grow the drug and forced China to buy it.

The tech elite displays an arrogance that puts to shame Rudyard Kipling’s idea of a “white man’s burden.” It believes that it can change human nature by melding man and machine through artificial intelligence, and that its success in spellbinding young Americans through entertainment portends a new sort of humanity brought about by social engineering.

Many of its doyens believe that human consciousness can be downloaded onto computer chips, achieving a sort of silicon-based immortality. Its arrogance and pretensions exceed those of Alexander and Caesar. It has contempt for the homely values of family and nation that knit the lives of ordinary Americans.

That is why China is likely to emerge as the dominant force in the world during the 21st century. It isn’t that the Chinese are smarter or more innovative. America’s virtual empire has become a sinkhole for the country’s enterprise and talent, and its spectacular profitability derives from activity that enervates and corrupts the American character.

Here, for reference, is my maiden “Spengler” essay from January 2000:

What if internet stocks aren’t a bubble?

By now, every business publication in the known universe has printed black-and-white evidence that Internet stocks are a bubble. The evidence generally boils down to one calculation, namely that the popular dot.com names would have to achieve annual earnings growth rates several times larger than Microsoft’s in order to justify their present equity price.

What if it isn’t a bubble? What if consumers want to double or quadruple their spending on whatever it is the Internet has to offer every year for the next 20 years? What if they will pay a premium to watch their favorite episode of Pee-Wee Herman or the Lone Ranger rather than the latest sit-com? What if they will spend heavily to explore the cutting edge of anatomical possibility on the porn sites?

Recall the dying, drug-addicted Howard Hughes, a recluse in the penthouse suite of a Las Vegas hotel, hair and fingernails untrimmed for months. That was in the 1960s, and Hughes passed the time watching film after film in his private screening room, a plutocrat’s privilege. With the wonder of the Internet, cable hookups, and the Time Warner-AOL film library, every Internet user can turn into a dissipated freak like Howard Hughes. That’s American democracy at work.

Internet stocks just might offer good value in a world of Howard Hughes wannabees. Consumers of the world unite: you have nothing to lose but your brains. Ask yourself: are you sure, really sure, that this isn’t happening?

Long white hair, outgrown fingernails, pills, dark rooms and tissues to keep away the dirt were among the descriptions of the life of billionaire Howard R. Hughes in his last years. 

Photo: AFP / Getty Images

Why should it surprise anyone? There’s nothing new under the sun. The silly cant about the ”new economy” and the ”Internet Age” ultimately will go the way of other imposters. That does not reduce the likelihood that the great fortunes of our epoch will continue to be made on the Internet for some time. Yes, electronic auctions save the trouble of attending the live sort, and an electronic marketplace has advantages over the medieval fair (although it is less entertaining).

What enthralls the Internet’s true believers is the limitless download of cheap and salacious entertainment: pornography, popular music, gossip, flirting, fantasy role-playing, and, of course, shopping.

Now that the market capitalization of Internet companies enables them to gobble up traditional providers of goods and services, the Internet seems like the driving force of global markets. The world economy will depend upon the adolescent tastes of computer owners in the industrial world.

The bubble could pop, or – frightening thought – it might actually succeed. Reordering the priorities of the world economy around the vices of affluent people is nothing new. We went through all of this before in the 17th century.

Item: After the conquest of the New World, Spain’s entire capture of precious metals went to India and China to pay for luxury cloth and spices. That did for approximately 90 percent of the indigenous pre-Colombian population.

Item: The African slave trade instituted by the Portuguese and later the British first produced sugar in Brazil and the Caribbean, to be turned into cheap intoxicants for the European market. Tobacco was a second absorber of slave labor. Cotton became important much later. Production of these vices did for a third of the West African population.

Item: In order to sell cheap cotton cloth to India, the East India Company arranged for Indians to grow opium and for Chinese to buy it. All the silver mined in Latin America, which two centuries earlier had passed to China to pay for silks, found its way back to Europe to pay for opium. That did for untold millions of Indians and Chinese.

Does the Internet shrink the world? How can we compare it to an earlier technological revolution, namely ocean navigation – including breakthroughs in astronomy, shipbuilding, time measurement, map-making? At the end of the day, silks, cottons, coffee, tea, spices, sugar, rum and tobacco ruined four continents as the world’s capital flowed to Western Europe.

This time the world’s capital is flowing to the United States. America’s capital account surplus (equal to its current account deficit) presently stands at 4 percent of Gross Domestic Product, the largest proportion on record. A billion dollars a day in foreign capital makes its way to the American capital markets. Three-quarters of the world’s free savings flow to the US, from emerging Asia as well as from Europe and Japan. Rather than borrow money from the rest of the world, non-Japan Asia on balance now lends money to the United States.

If the rest of the world wants to put its savings at the service of turbo-charged pop culture, no one should blame the Web promoters. Tobacco, rum, silks and slaves were a sustainable growth industry three hundred years ago. Why not the Web today?

China marches on towards Fourth Industrial Revolution

Pundit predictions of China's demise are the latest self-consoling illusions of a lazy elite who can't see the AI writing on the wall

By DAVID P. GOLDMAN

AKA SPENGLER

ASIATIMES.COM

OCTOBER 8, 2021

China's is investing more in productivity-enhancing technologies than the United States. 

Image: Twitter


NEW YORK – When Covid-19 hit China before it hit the rest of the world, the meme in the Western media called it China’s “Chernobyl moment.” China’s remarkable success in suppressing the pandemic put that to rest. But every hiccup in Chinese markets elicits new predictions of Chinese economic decline.

Stratfor’s George Friedman declares that “China’s power has been vastly overestimated” and that China will have to dial back its global ambitions due to straitened circumstances.

Hal Brands and Michael Beckley write in Foreign Policy that “the problem is that China is declining.” “Since the late 2000s,” they claim, “the drivers of China’s rise have either stalled or turned around entirely.”

These are self-consoling illusions of a lazy elite that has allowed America’s manufacturing, technological and education advantages to erode over the past 20 years – an elite that has nothing to say about reversing the decline.

China has a nasty financial problem in an over-leveraged real estate sector, but countries with large current surpluses and huge saving rates don’t have crises. They have reorganizations. And China does have a demographic problem, not nearly as serious as in Japan, South Korea or Taiwan, and only slightly more serious than America’s.

What the punditeska thinks is light at the end of the tunnel is, rather, the headlamp of the oncoming express, namely the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Americans don’t remember the Panic of 1873 and the six-year Long Depression that followed – nor the Panics of 1893, 1896, 1901, or 1907. They remember the transcontinental railroad, the McCormack reaper, Andrew Carnegie’s leadership in steel-making, John D. Rockefeller’s provision of cheap kerosene for lighting, the electrification of cities and Henry Ford’s mass production of the Model T. All that really mattered in fin-de-siècle America was the Second Industrial Revolution that lifted America to the status of a world power.

Carnegie borrowed his steelmaking process from the British inventor Henry Bessemer and Edison lifted the electric light bulb from the British inventor Joseph Swan (who successfully sued Edison for patent violations). Britain’s talent earned easy money from the Empire, leaving Americans to turn British ideas into mass production on a hitherto unknown scale.

Today it’s the Americans who don’t want to get their hands dirty, and the best American talent programs smartphone apps in the hope of instant wealth.

The US is playing catch-up with China in the 5G race. 

Photo: AFP / Getty Images / Josep Lago

A generation from now, the Chinese won’t remember the misery of Ant Financial, or the failure of property giant Evergrande, or this year’s power shortage, or any number of minor interruptions of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. They will remember automated warehouses, smart ports running on 5G networks, mines operated by remote control, factories run by self-programming robots and driverless taxis.

All of this is happening now in China, and at scale. The linked videos on Youtube provide more information than anything you will read in the Western media. China’s artificial intelligence (AI) applications look like science fiction, but they are real as rain, and happening before our eyes.

The application of big data and AI to flexible manufacturing, smart logistics, health care and other fields promises to transform economic life as profoundly as the Second Industrial Revolution changed the United States and Germany.

Historians well may date the AI revolution to January 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic hit China. As former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Harvard historian Graham Allison wrote last August:

The virus has also pulled back the curtain on one of this century’s most important contests: the rivalry between the United States and China for supremacy in artificial intelligence (AI). The scene that has been revealed should alarm Americans. China is not just on a trajectory to overtake the US; it is already surpassing US capabilities where it matters most.

Most Americans assume that their country’s lead in advanced technologies is unassailable .… In fact, China is already a full-spectrum peer competitor in terms of both commercial and national-security AI applications. China is not just trying to master AI; it is mastering AI ….

To stop the spread of the virus, China locked down the entire population of Hubei province – 60 million people. That is more than the number of residents in every state on the US East Coast from Florida to Maine. China maintained this massive cordon sanitaire by using AI-enhanced algorithms to track residents’ movements and scale up testing capabilities while massive new health-care facilities were being built ….

Top Chinese tech companies responded quickly by creating apps with “health status” codes to track citizens’ movements and determine whether individuals needed to be quarantined. AI then played a critical role in helping Chinese authorities enforce quarantines and perform extensive contract tracing. Owing to China’s large-scale datasets, the authorities in Beijing succeeded where the government in Washington, DC, failed.

I broke this story in Asia Times in March 2020.

All of China’s major ports are at or close to full automation. Industrial automation, although impressive, is still in pilot phase: Huawei says that it has 16,000 private 5G networks under development for factory automation, a small fraction of the country’s 2.8 million factories (as of 2015), but more than enough for proof of concept. And the Chinese telecom giant has installed 5G networks in 1,800 of the country’s 34,000 hospitals.

China turned a population of subsistence farmers into industrial workers, moving 600 million people from countryside to city in less than 40 years, increasing per capita income tenfold in the process.

China has built out its 5G infrastructure faster than the US.

 Photo: Facebook

It took the US from 1870 to 1995 to dectuple its real per capita GDP. China did this in the 28 years from 1992 to 2020. It certainly is the case, as Brand and Beckley write, that China has taken advantage of this source of growth. China’s leadership is bad at many things, but it is very good at one big thing, and that is planning for future productivity.

Deng Xiaoping turned China’s peasants into factory workers, and Xi Jinping is turning the sons of factory workers into engineers. Only 2% of Chinese aged 55 or older – those in their 20s when Deng Xiaoping began China’s economic reforms in 1989 – received university education. But 27% of Chinese now in their 20’s have university degrees, and the proportion will keep rising.

China now graduates seven times as many STEM baccalaureates as the US and three times as many STEM doctorates. A 2020 Chinese survey claims that the proportion of Chinese high school students who intend to pursue tertiary education is higher than is the case with their American counterparts.

An industrial nation with Western living standards is already gestating inside China. Economist Lin Yifu, a former World Bank official, points out that China’s most developed provinces and cities are a country within a country, with per capita GDP approaching that of the United States. In a book scheduled for release later this month, he writes:

At the end of the 19th century, the United States and Germany led the second industrial revolution. At that time, the highest income and technology levels were in the United Kingdom. The United States and Germany were at a stage of catching up in terms of income levels. In terms of purchasing power parity, the per capita GDP of the United States in 1870 was 76.6% of that of the United Kingdom, and that of Germany was 57.6% of that of the United Kingdom.

The seven provinces and cities with the highest per capita GDP in my country – Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian, and Guangdong – have a total population of 350 million. The per capita GDP of these seven provinces and cities has reached 54.5% of that of the United States, which is roughly the same level as Germany’s per capita GDP relative to UK’s per capita GDP when Germany began to lead the second industrial revolution.

Yin adds, “In technology R&D, human capital is the main input.” China, he notes, has a much larger talent pool with a population four times that of the United States. “China’s sheer size gives it “economies of scale,” with “lower marginal cost of products and services,” and “stronger competitiveness in the international market. When new technological standards are set in competition with developed countries, my country’s population and the size of its market gives it a comparative advantage.”

In addition, “My country is the country with the most complete set of industries, so that the time required for new technology to advance from concept to production will be the shortest, and at the lowest cost.”

China is serious, focused and disciplined in its campaign to lead the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The US at best gives lip service to the concept, and at worst ignores the problem, the better to focus on “diversity” and “equity.”