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New Scientist: China Special (11 items)
7.11.7

China special: Growing pains of a superpower - opinion
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/mg19626291.400-china-special-growing-pains-of-a-superpower.html
Web Links

* China: The next science superpower?
* CIA World Factbook - China
* World Bank China Data and Statistics
* National Bureau of Statistics of China

THE 21st century, we are told, will be China's. Usually this is
intended as a warning: if the world's leading economies fail to
respond to the Chinese "threat", we will face a second-class future
trailing in the wake of the People's Republic.

This blinkered view gets us nowhere. China is a proud nation with a
turbulent history, and it makes no secret of its superpower
ambitions. It is certainly a fierce competitor for resources -
witness the panic in the US about China's thirst for oil, and what
that means for fuel prices. But this vast and diverse country is
already much more than a simple adversary. Without China's supply
of cheap manufactured goods, massive overseas investment and
talented labour, the world's economy would be in serious trouble.

In this age of globalisation, China is also a partner - which is
why we should all be concerned about the challenges ahead. China
faces immense social, political and environmental problems, and
whatever is a problem for China is by definition a problem for
everyone else too. Today in rich western countries, people worry
about poisoned Chinese pet food and imported toys tainted with
lead. Tomorrow, it could be a global climate meltdown driven by
China's exploding demand for energy.

China's leaders are no fools. Most senior members of the central
government were trained in that most practical of disciplines,
engineering. They know that the nation's present trajectory is
unsustainable, both economically and environmentally. If China is
to continue its remarkable development, it must transform itself
from an exporter of cheap manufactured goods built to western
blueprints into what its leaders call an "innovation nation" - able
to sustain its growth through home-grown ingenuity. So they are
pouring huge sums into science, particularly at the applied end of
hot fields like nanotechnology and renewable energy. China's
spending on research and development has more than doubled in the
past five years, and official plans call for a further rise - from
1.34 per cent of GDP in 2005 to 2.5 per cent by 2020.

If the plan bears fruit, some of the innovations that will be
needed to solve global problems are likely to come from China.
Already, top Chinese researchers and entrepreneurs trained abroad
are returning to their homeland in unprecedented numbers. They are
emphatic about one thing: wanting China to be able to stand with
the US and other leading nations as an equal partner.

Can China really reinvent itself as a lean, green technological
superpower? Will the rural poor get left behind as the urban middle
class reaps the benefits of rapid economic growth? Or will the
economic miracle falter or even collapse? And can the Communist
Party maintain its grip on power through it all? Will it ultimately
be an engine of reform, or an obstacle to change? Will China
eventually embrace democracy as it is practised in the west? Or
does conflict lie ahead?

These are interesting times in China. Talk to westerners who live
there and you will hear the refrain: "The longer I stay, the more I
realise that I don't understand." So rather than trying to provide
a top-down view of what China is all about, we sent our reporters
across the country with a simple brief: profile fascinating people
and compelling projects to give a snapshot of a superpower in the
making. We also asked a leading China-watcher to comment on what
it's like to be governed by a Politburo of engineers.

Over the following 22 pages you'll meet an observant Muslim who
grows grapes in the province that borders Kazakhstan, a science
writer who moonlights as a fraudbuster, and entrepreneurs in
Beijing who are giving the internet a Chinese flavour. Along the
way you'll learn of an epidemic of spinal injury, China's ambitions
to build the world's first quantum computer, and a growing debate
over whether the notorious "one-child policy" needs to be relaxed.
There is some good news, some bad news, and more than a few
surprises.

If you care about the future, you should care about China. If you
want to see its future in the making, you really should visit.
Failing that, let us be your guide.

There are 23 comments.

China
By Mike
Thu Nov 08 12:33:46 GMT 2007
Given what I've read about the chinese worshipping Mao, who I
gather ordered all Chinese culture and academia destroyed and
called it the 'great leap forward' - and given the present
stupidity of the West in spending vast sums of money to secure the
dregs of oil on this planet, together with the stupidity of
developing countries in destroying all their natural resources and
environment to produce biofuel - I would think it a miracle if
China were to come up with viable long term renewable energy
solutions, or if they just find a suitably vast energy resource and
extract from there.
I frequently read about such energy sources ( the majority of the
sunlight we don't use, atoms, neutrinos, antimatter, vacuum energy)
and none of them are ever used.
It would be a miracle if China did this, and well done to them if
they did - it would be a return to the ingenuity they embraced and
represented in the past.

China
By Stefan Stoss
Thu Nov 08 15:05:24 GMT 2007
Way for small farmer to keep up with urban money is to cultivate or
wildcraft herbs and spices needed by TCM
does New scientist and chinese leadership know the state and
infinite value of TCM ?
vaccum energy [ zero point energy from space ? ] mentioned in
comment one, can be tapped ( nuances reserved ) economically and
today, perhaps only in meditation and only in transcendental
meditation (TM) according to John Hagelin

Living And Working In China. .
By Diana Martin.
Thu Nov 08 18:59:34 GMT 2007
My 41 year old Son,Paul,teaches English and Business studies in
China for the past 4 years-Enjoys the job,the poeple,who are quick
to learn and take studies seriously-He is also Bi-lingual,and has
been "headhunted" again-He has seen a few changes-for the
better--Trains on time and clean-and fast.So are the planes..Goods
are cheaper there,and also a few UK and USA based shops are
bringing in some shoppers.Everyone learns from multi-mixture of
people-and a difference in Towns and villages,as the World over-
He has also worked and lived in Norway,and Israel-and knows the
score-compared to what the Media says..


Subject: Comments - New Scientist
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China
By Roger Garcia-marenco
Thu Nov 08 19:46:58 GMT 2007
Super power have been a damned entities in the human history and
may be even before, the Dinos were such a thing as are Crocs and
all them are traditionaly ruthless predators that do more truly
harm than anything else and the good things from them are at the
end more of the same, look at Rome, Brittish,and USA today.
So, what could we think about an eventual chinese empire? More of
the same I guess.

China's Economic Growth
By Neil Dawe
Thu Nov 08 20:06:50 GMT 2007
China's leaders may have been trained in that most practical of
disciplines--engineering--and know that the nation's present
trajectory is unsustainable, both economically and environmentally,
but if they think they can continue its remarkable development,
able to sustain its growth through home-grown ingenuity, then they
are fools.
Economic growth relies on finite ecosystems, specifically their
resources and biodiversity for raw materials as throughput to the
economy. So economic growth is anathema to healthy ecosystems, upon
which all life on the planet depends.
Because of this infinite growth mindset, ecosystems are
continuously being degraded to the point where the Millennium
Ecosystem Assessment concluded that the ability of the planet's
ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for
granted." Sounds significant to me.
It was the economist, Kenneth Boulding, who said "Anyone who
believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is
either a madman or an economist."
If China's leaders believe they can "sustain [China's] growth,"
well, we know they are not economists.

China's Economic Growth
By Bingling
Fri Nov 09 00:25:15 GMT 2007
As a Chinese with major in public health, I appreciate your
attention to China. Fortunately, we have noticed that Chinese
government has realized the sustainability, and also I know that
ecologists and specialists in environment and health fight all the
way with the broken of the normal principles. Now we have seen some
changes. And we hope all of us support and help China to finish
this transfer.

China's Economic Growth
By Luke Andrew Marsh
Sun Nov 11 23:59:26 GMT 2007
The big question is not if china solves the issues of the modern
day it's when and how fast they do it in relation to everyone else.
The solutions to all the problems have already been thought up and
are in development.
Some of these concepts won't succeed and others will and a lot of
them require more power not less to develop them.
Ok here goes
Energy
Main Solution =
Fuel cell systems
In full swing estimate 2022 (ML
Hydrogen fission systems
In full swing estimate
2028
Redevelopment of wild life
Advanced Genetic engineering and Electro exostensiation
in full swing estimate 2036
Human Population
Colinisation of Mars
In full swing estimate 2043
Colinisation of harder to populate areas here on earth.
In full swing estimate 2024
The point being is that Japan rising was mind blowing. For example
I might not be here talking to you on the net if it didn't.
China rising now thats something else.

China
By C. Segundo
Thu Nov 08 20:13:24 GMT 2007
After living in central China for two years, and being working in
one of the National Key Laboratories, I just wonder when these
'miracles' will start to be reality. Scary? perhaps yes. But, in my
personal opinion, it perhaps is largely due that we are not used to
the rate and extent of ingenuity happening over there. Perhaps is
that the other kind of freedom we need as to solve the basic global
problems, such as: energy, natural resources, pollution, access to
medicine.
True, more you live there less you understand, but also you witness
the rate of change, and that alone makes you realize that also,
while in there, you need to change if really is your interest to
catch up with 'the modern China'.
Many things are told here in the West about China and we make jokes
always associating it with the 'made in China' brand. We do not
realize that over there things are changing. True, not on every
thing and not at the same rate; that is part of the complexity in
the actual understanding. However, right or wrong, things are
changing and only history will tell us how right and how wrong it
was.
As science researcher, I only can say that Science is happening in
China, and this is at an impressive pace.

China
By Steven
Fri Nov 09 04:34:16 GMT 2007
I dont mean any harm but, I feel that we need to take care of home
and leave others alone. How would we feel if another country came
to the U.S. And told us how to live and what to believe ! I mean
think about it !

China
By David
Fri Nov 09 09:28:34 GMT 2007
I worked in china for 6 years & its my opinion that top chinese
leaders may want to reform but too many of them are milking the
system effectively & don't want reforms in case it affects their
skamming - its an old story in china the mts are high & beijing is
far away ...some of the rural poor are no better off than they were
1000 years ago while are are super-rich & this i9s communism with
chinese characteristic!

Re: China
By Jan
Fri Nov 09 11:40:43 GMT 2007
Mike - you're American, right? Mao Zedong is regarded as a great
hero in China, and with good reason, since he more than anything
was the leader that brought China from being a weak, feudal society
oppressed by foreign powers, to a modern superpower. He has many
faults, but you can't take that away from him, so speak with a bit
more respect.
The Chinese have always been clever people, and if anybody can find
a way through the morass we are in now (mostly due the West's
Industrialisation under Capitalism), it is quite likely the
Chinese.

Re: China
By Mike
Fri Nov 09 12:45:20 GMT 2007
Ok, point taken and understood. Also, I should point out that I am
not an American.
One other thing that springs to mind about Mao is that after he
ordered various cultural, artistic and academic things destroyed he
said that the destruction had perhaps been a little excessive and
was regrettable.
I should have mentioned that before as well.
I did note that the Chinese were ingenious and hope they would be
again - actually I think that could be applied to the world as a
whole.
Too often in this world are ideas and innovations mentioned then
disappear - like most of the inventions published on sites like
newscientist.com it seems, never to see the light of day.
If China will encourage innovation and ideas and invest in making
these real things that we can use in everyday life then I think
that I'll put my faith in China and hope for the best.

Subject: Comments - New Scientist
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Are Chinese Companies Balanced?
By Oliver Lehmann
Sat Nov 10 06:49:07 GMT 2007
I do not believe that China, or India or any other of the recently
growing nations, will be able to develop sustainable growth.
In USA and Europe, we have a long history of balance between
engineering and humanity disciplines. This discipline shapes
progress in a way, that the question of "what can we do?" is
accompanied by the questions "what do we really want to do?"
China's educational system is almost completely neglecting
humanities and investments almost exclusively go into technical
training.
Most Chinese companies have managers, but no leaders. Without
leadership, an enterprise is bound to get lost one day in
overwhelming complexities on both technical and organizational
level, and in short-term objectives that are contradicting each
other. As they do not have an intrinsic goal beyond making money
and winning market shares, they cannot develop and follow
strategies.

Are Chinese Companies Balanced?
By Mike
Mon Nov 12 08:53:32 GMT 2007
Going for shares and money worked for the West for a long time; and
we may ask if we really want to do something but seem to say yes
regardless of the terrible consequences and lack of return.

Are Chinese Companies Balanced?
By Mike

Mon Nov 12 08:56:58 GMT 2007
This comment has been found to be in breach of our terms of use and
has been removed.

Are Chinese Companies Balanced?
By Mike
Mon Nov 12 08:59:06 GMT 2007
This comment has been found to be in breach of our terms of use and
has been removed.

Growing Economy Of China
By China Special: Growing Pains Of A Superpower
Mon Nov 12 10:46:08 GMT 2007
Sir
China and India economy rising is not a new phenomena. The
population is huge and the work force is at the click of the finger
unlike the West where the labor is not flexible to work the hours
that Indians and Chinese put in.
I thank you
Firozali A.Mulla MBA PhD
P.O.Box 6944
Dar-Es-Salaam
Tanzania
East Africa

China Biggest Economy In The World
By Ali Uzun
Tue Nov 13 11:52:52 GMT 2007
I think that China will be soon the strongest and most powerful
country in economy. It has more than 1500 billion dollars in their
banks. In fact China is totally depended on America. I heard in the
news that China will change their money into euros or Pounds. The
value of the dollar is still in decline. That is bad for China.
They will loss a lot of money. China is maybe the most powerful
economic country. US can prevent their rise, so that means US will
control China in economy, but that is hardly to do. Economic war
will be bad for te two countries.

China Biggest Economy In The World
By Christian Felow
Wed Nov 14 14:17:24 GMT 2007
You are right, it is true, US can prevent their rise, if they will.

China Biggest Economy In The World
By Stephan Rosing

Thu Nov 15 12:30:36 GMT 2007
The world cannot bear the consequences of caging this dragon. Don't
even try.

China Biggest Economy In The World
By Liu Wen
Thu Nov 15 16:45:33 GMT 2007
I have to say that your comment was too affirmative
how did you come to a conclusion like "China totally depands on
USA"?what about USA without China?
I'm a Chinese in China now.

I'm A Chinese
By Liu Wen
Thu Nov 15 16:39:05 GMT 2007
Interesting to read this article.
China is not as misrable as you thought.

I'm A Chinese
By Mike
Fri Nov 16 18:56:11 GMT 2007
I read that China holds US treasury notes - if this is the case and
it dumps all the dollars it holds in reserve along with treasury
notes then it would naturally go for the Euro, much as Brazilian
model Giselle and US rapper Jay Z appear to have done. If Russia
does the same...
...then will China and Russia join forces to compete with Europe?
Would Europe be able to compete?
As for the dragon metaphor - I would go with this one I made up;
The dragon moves.
The dragon pauses.
The dragon moves.

Beyond the Great Firewall
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19626292.000&print=true
* 07 November 2007
* Gregory T. Huang

IT'S a familiar scene the world over. Rows of young men hunched
over glowing screens, looking like they've been there for days.
They are immersed in virtual worlds, surfing the web, or shopping
for gadgets.

I'm in a wang ba, or net bar, on bustling Chengfu Street in
Beijing. The scene appears at odds with the popular perception of
China as a ruthless suppressor of internet freedom: in the run-up
to the Chinese Communist Party congress last month, western media
reported the censoring of blogs, suspension of websites and even
whole internet service providers being closed down. Yet when I
ducked into one of the dozens of net bars in the vicinity of
Tsinghua University, I couldn't find an empty seat. Welcome to the
Chinese internet.

I peek at the screens and see no trace of Google, YouTube, eBay or
other western sites. Not because they are blocked - most of the
time they aren't - but because users prefer the home-grown
versions. Instead of Google, most web searches here use Baidu, the
most popular search engine in China and the fourth most visited in
the world. And while the hugely popular role-playing game World of
Warcraft wins the global battle, it is a mere minnow in China
compared with Fantasy Westward Journey - created by NetEase, a
company based in Guangzhou, Guangdong province. New
Chinese-language news and video sites are popping up every week.

It is true that censorship is a big issue in China, but there's
plenty going on that the censors don't touch. The vast majority of
Chinese net users aren't interested in organising pro-democracy
meetings or using politically sensitive search terms. Like most
users, they are more likely to spend their time tracking down the
latest news, entertainment and gossip, or communicating with
friends and family. Catering to these predilections is a booming
business for the companies and entrepreneurs currently building
China's presence on the web. The rest of the world has been largely
oblivious to this development, but not for much longer. "Because
they will become the largest group of users, the Chinese will to
some extent be driving how internet technology evolves," says
global media specialist Rebecca MacKinnon at the University of Hong
Kong.

Indeed, the sheer number of users in China - 162 million and
counting - is shifting net demographics dramatically (see Chart).
Although users in the US still outnumber those in China, the
average Chinese user spends 14 to 19 hours per week online,
compared with 7 to 10 hours in the US, according to internet polls.
And the number of Chinese websites has mushroomed to meet the
demands of this net-hungry audience.

It wasn't always so. Chinese net companies lagged behind the west
for years, especially in management expertise. They too went
through the dotcom bubble-burstings that followed the millennium,
but a wave of savvy start-ups since 2004 has meant that Chinese web
companies and users have all but caught up. For every YouTube there
are a dozen video-sharing sites, such as Todou and 6rooms. For
every Facebook, there are hundreds of social networking sites, such
as Xiaonei (which means "on campus"), started by a Tsinghua
University graduate. And for every Yahoo, there is a cheeky upstart
web portal such as Qihoo, based in Shanghai, to hijack its market
share. Qihoo even secured $45 million in funding from US venture
capitalists. Some of these sites are blatant copycats, but most are
tailored to Chinese web tastes - by incorporating anime-like
characters and more on-screen movement than typical western sites,
for example.

A few big winners stand out. Take Baidu, arguably the leading
internet company in China. It is used for everything from people
and product searches, to looking up information in a
Wikipedia-style format, to finding pirated music files. The company
has grabbed about 60 per cent of the search market, compared with
its nearest rival, Google, at about 20 per cent. The reason many
prefer Baidu is that its Chinese-language search works better than
others, especially for recognising people's names within strings of
Chinese characters. Another key factor is that Baidu is a trusted
brand name with the weight, and investment, of the central
government behind it. And it is expanding. Baidu chief scientist
William Chang plans to grow his team of engineers from 700 to more
than 1000 by early next year.

Having made his name at Infoseek - a search engine start-up based
in Silicon Valley in the mid-1990s - Chang has a broad perspective
on both Baidu and its users. "By and large, Chinese users search
for the same things as US users," he says. Workers at other local
internet firms generally agree. "The surprising thing is that
Chinese users are not so different from western users," says Qi
Zhong, a developer at HiPiHi, a virtual-worlds start-up in Beijing
whose user interface looks a lot like that of virtual world Second
Life.

Nevertheless, some clear cultural differences are shaping the
Chinese net. Users are much younger, on average, and overwhelmingly
urban compared with the west (see Diagram), so there is a greater
emphasis on social networking and entertainment sites. Online
gaming is much bigger than in the west, and sharing of MP3s and
movies is rampant, due to a lack of copyright law enforcement.

The sheer amount of time spent online in China means that "kids are
living on the net", says Chang. They get the majority of their news
from the internet - their only source independent of the government
- and so competition for this online audience is fierce.

Inevitably, some sites find themselves outside of Chinese law. All
political and porn sites that the authorities discover, as well as
Wikipedia and certain other news and information sites, sit behind
the "great firewall of China" - they are inaccessible to internet
servers within the country. On a day-to-day basis, though, most
Chinese web surfers appear indifferent to these controls. "People
don't know what they don't know," says MacKinnon. "Censorship is
more subtle than most outsiders think."

There are surprising hints, however, that China's internet policies
could become more open. "People in leadership worry about the
stability of society," says Ma Songde of Beijing's Institute of
Automation, who until last year served in the central government as
vice-minister of science and technology. "But blocking sites is not
a good method. I think this will be changed within 10 years. People
should have access to all information." Ma hopes this will happen
gradually as China builds a more democratic society.

Whether or not the government is ready, there are sure to be major
growing pains. In the next five years, many people from rural areas
- home to some 700 million people - are expected to log on. Many
villages, even remote ones, already have at least one net bar. How
to handle the digital divide in the countryside, says Ma, is "a
serious problem in economics and technology, and there are
different motivations at every level" of government.

Everyone seems to agree that the internet will soon be ubiquitous
in China. Then what? Will there continue to be two internets,
effectively separated by language, culture and the great firewall?
Or will the Chinese net dissolve its borders and integrate with the
rest of the globe? "China still has to interact with the world,"
says MacKinnon. If they wall themselves off "they won't be able to
function as a global economic power". Whatever the net impact on
its culture and politics, booming China has come so far, so fast,
that it's unlikely to turn back now.

Weblinks

* Rebecca MacKinnon: Facebook goes to China
* 
http://rconversation.blogs.com/rconversation/2007/10/facebook-goes-t.html
* William Chang, Baidu
* http://ir.baidu.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=188488&p=irol-govBio&ID=161381
* NetEase: Fantasy Westward Journey
* http://corp.163.com/eng/games/fantasy_westward.html
* HiPiHi
* http://www.hipihi.com/index_english.html
* Ministry of Science and Technology of the People's Republic of China
* http://www.most.gov.cn/eng/


China special: Engineers rule, OK?
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19626292.200&print=true
* 07 November 2007
* Richard P. Suttmeier

CONTEMPORARY China is a nation led by technocrats. The current
generation of leaders is made up mostly of graduates from some of
China's leading universities, typically trained in science and
engineering. Until this year's 17th National Congress of the
Communist Party of China, which closed on 22 October, every member
of the central bastion of power - the Standing Committee of the
Politburo - was an engineer by training. President Hu Jintao is a
graduate of Beijing's Tsinghua University, often referred to as
China's MIT, while the premier, Wen Jiabao, trained as a geologist.

For those in the west, where lawyers dominate the political
establishment, China provides an intriguing contrast. How did the
country come to be led by a cohort of technocrats? Does their
technical mindset define the way they rule? Do they govern as
engineers and scientists? And, most importantly, do they govern
well?

The current leadership's rise came after a century of frustrated
attempts to build modern scientific and technological capabilities
in China. The country's weakness in the 19th and early 20th
centuries in the face of a technologically superior west called for
the development of science and technology as a project of national
salvation. Yet the revolution that brought the Communist Party to
power was peasant-based, so when the People's Republic was
established in 1949 there was a tension between peasant nationalism
and aspirations for scientific and technological development.

Many of today's political elite received their higher education -
typically in narrow and specialised fields of engineering - in the
late 1950s and early 1960s. Their training was intended to produce
intellectuals of a new sort - both "red" and "expert" - but by the
time they had completed it the political radicalism that culminated
in the Cultural Revolution was becoming increasingly hostile to
educated professionals and led to the near total disruption of
research and education.

The "red experts" comprising today's technocratic leadership
suffered this disruption early in their adult lives, and this has
instilled in them a fear of political instability. Many were forced
to work in the countryside, experiencing first-hand China's poverty
and underdevelopment. These experiences, too, helped to shape their
world views and approaches to governance - as did the factional
alliances that are so important to elite Chinese politics.

Rise of the technocrats

The current leadership's rise began with the reforms initiated by
Deng Xiaoping at the end of the 1970s. Deng's "four modernisations"
included agriculture, industry and national defence, as well as
science and technology. Scientific and technological development
was seen as critical for modernising the other three realms, and
efforts to recruit people with technical training into leadership
positions began in earnest in the early 1980s.

It should come as no surprise that China's technocratic leaders
have invested heavily in science and technology, emphasised
education and supported the remarkable infrastructure development
of the past two decades. They have thrown their weight behind
massive engineering projects such as the South-North Water Transfer
Project, intended to relieve chronic water shortages on the densely
populated North China Plain by diverting flow from the Yangtze
river.

The technocratic orientation of China's leaders also shows through
in their wider approach to policy-making. They are deliberative in
their approach to technical and political decisions, and show
respect for expert judgements in making policy choices, often
inviting academic specialists to hold seminars for them before
decisions are made. There is also a strong reliance on quantitative
indicators to assess policy outcomes. Contrasting with the respect
shown for data and analysis in informing official decisions,
however, the government retains tight control over information - as
seen during the SARS outbreak four years ago, for instance - and
employs increasingly sophisticated techniques to do so. This can be
seen as one consequence of the leadership's fear of political
instability.

Chinese political leaders are also expected to articulate moral
visions. For the current leadership, this includes the notion of
employing a concept of "scientific development" to build a
"harmonious society" - an attempt to marry traditional values of
Confucian orderliness with modern professional approaches to good
governance. It seeks to address a variety of negative consequences
of China's "unbalanced" economic growth - including widespread
corruption, increasingly serious inequalities, wasteful materials
and energy use, a rapidly degrading environment and a regulatory
framework that is too weak to prevent industrial and product safety
violations.

While many of these challenges have strong technical components,
they are not strictly speaking technical problems. Unlike the
promotion of technological and economic development that the
leadership has been concerned with over the past decade, achieving
a "harmonious society" requires solutions that may be at odds with
a technocratic world view. For instance, in areas of product
safety, China clearly needs to strengthen its science base. Yet
building regulatory agencies with integrity and authority involves
an appreciation of the subtleties of institutional design - not
necessarily the stock-in-trade of narrowly trained engineers.

Has the post-Mao tradition of technocratic leadership been good for
China? In many ways it has, but even among Chinese scientists there
are those who argue that things were better before it became so
well established. In the past, when senior officials responsible
for science and technology were not themselves trained as
scientists or engineers, they nevertheless recognised the value
scientists placed on maintaining a degree of professional autonomy
and respected the importance of scientific integrity. Now some
contend that Chinese science has become caught up in a web of
bureaucratic politics and short-term commercial gains that has
weakened prospects for genuinely creative achievement and opened
the door to serious scientific misconduct.

At this year's party congress, candidates for top positions
included people trained in social science and humanities, in
addition to the usual cast of engineers. Among those elevated to
the Politburo's standing committee were Shanghai party secretary Xi
Jinping and Li Keqiang, party boss in Liaoning province - both of
whom trained in social sciences. These newcomers may be more
accustomed to viewing societal problems as involving open, complex
systems in which subtle political adjustment and
institution-building are more appropriate than technological fixes.

The vision of a strong and prosperous China built on scientific and
technological capabilities is sure to be shared by the next
generation of China's leaders, but they are unlikely to be cut from
quite the same technocratic cloth as the current leadership. For
much of the history of the People's Republic, China's best and
brightest sought to serve the nation through science and
engineering. The China of the 21st century is far more complicated,
and routes to national service have become more diverse.
Long-neglected fields of social science and humanities have
acquired new stature in Chinese universities and now attract a
share of the students who will become China's future leaders.

The current leadership has been remarkably successful in mobilising
resources for economic growth, but it has failed to devise
institutions for managing the social costs of this development. The
evidence is mounting that China can no longer afford a simple
technocratic approach imposed from the top down. It needs a more
inclusive politics.

Related Articles

* China appoints "Mr Clean" as science minister
* http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19426033.400
* 11 May 2007
* Interview: Win or lose, it's fighting back that counts
* http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19325861.600
* 15 January 2007
* Replumbing the planet
* http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg17823984.900
* 7 June 2003

Weblinks

* Richard P. Suttmeier on China's 15-year science and technology
plan
* http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-59/iss-12/p38.html
* 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China
* 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventeenth_National_Congress_of_the_Communist_Party_of_China


China special: Exposing the science charlatans
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19626291.900&print=true
* 07 November 2007
* Richard Fisher

IT WAS supposed to be a national triumph, but instead it became a
serious embarrassment. Four years ago, Chen Jin's star rose fast
after he unveiled a new computer chip. It was billed as China's
first home-grown digital signal processor - the kind of chip that
forms the guts of devices from digital cameras to mobile phones.
Buoyed by millions of dollars from both the central and Shanghai
governments, Chen set up a company called HISYS Technology to
mass-produce the chips.

His fall was spectacular. In January 2006, an anonymous tipster
claimed Chen had bought chips made by electronics giant Motorola,
sanded off the logos and presented them as his own. Chen's
employers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University later concluded that he
had falsified results. He was fired, and "China's chip" was no
more.

Chen's is not the only recent high-profile case of scientific fraud
in China. Last year, surgeon Hui Liu, assistant dean at Beijing's
Tsinghua University Medical School, was sacked after padding his CV
with publications by another H. Liu. And in 2002, Yang Jingan, a
prominent researcher in artificial intelligence at the Hefei
University of Technology, was caught plagiarising a string of
papers - producing brazen Chinese translations of western research,
with figures, equations and all.

With the Chinese authorities failing to stem a rising tide of
misconduct, the grassroots are taking matters into their own hands.
All three of the disgraced scientists were accused by fellow
researchers on the New Threads website. The effort has won respect
as the most serious attempt in China to grapple with science fraud,
but is not without controversy. As the number of allegations has
grown, some scientists claim that the whistleblowers are getting
out of control, pursuing personal vendettas, blighting careers on
scant evidence, and damaging China's scientific reputation.

New Threads' founder, Fang Shimin, became China's leading science
cop almost by accident. He set up the website in the 1990s as a
poetry and literature forum for Chinese expats, while training as a
molecular biologist in San Diego. But as he heard of corruption
back home in China, Fang got angry. "No independent critical voices
could be heard, so I decided to do something about it," he says.
"Fraud is harming the public, dimming the future of Chinese science
and obstructing the progress of Chinese society."

Now working in Beijing as a science writer, Fang is a mild-mannered
man - a far cry from his online reputation as a firebrand,
attacking alleged wrongdoers under his nom de guerre of Fang
Zhouzi. One case in particular made his name. Since the mid-1990s,
some Chinese biochemists had been making extravagant claims about
the health benefits of nutritional supplements of "pure DNA"
extracted from animal organs. Fang first heard about it in 2001,
when one of the scientists was quoted in a Chinese newspaper. He
criticised the claims on New Threads, gaining wide coverage in the
Chinese media.

Fang claims that New Threads has exposed more than 700 cases of
fraud, corruption and pseudoscience since 2000. But few of the
allegations have been followed up by the authorities, so it is
impossible to say how many cases have been proved. Most of the
accusations come from working scientists who prefer to remain
anonymous. "If you are a whistleblower, you become an outsider,"
explains Zhao Nanyuan, an engineer at Tsinghua University, who
applauds Fang's efforts. Given the sluggish official response to
misconduct, other scientists agree that New Threads is necessary.
"The universities never take these things seriously," claims He
Shigang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Biophysics
in Beijing, who argues that institutions have a vested interest in
covering up cases of fraud in their midst.

Indeed, until New Threads came along, fraudsters had apparently
been thriving. "Cheating has become popular, especially among
students," says Zhao, who blames a wider culture of fraud in modern
Chinese society. Before they can get a higher degree, many
scientists have to publish a certain number of papers, some in
high-profile international journals, and the suspicion is that some
resort to faking data or plagiarism.

As China pours money into science, the prospect of making pots of
cash may even tempt established scientists into committing fraud.
Each year, the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of
China ranks research institutions according to how many papers
appear in a database of the top 3700 scientific journals. So to
raise their profile, many institutions offer scientists cash for
papers, some paying more than $100,000 for a report published in
Nature or Science.

Fake research in a leading journal and the chances are you will be
found out. But in the lower tiers of science publishing, this
system of payments provides ample opportunity for unscrupulous
scientists to make money by copying others' work or fabricating
results. "It's a get-rich-quick thing," suggests He.

The Chinese authorities are aware of the problem. Last year, the
Ministry of Science and Technology established an office to accept
reports of fraud; and in February, the Chinese Academy of Sciences
outlined new ethics rules for scientists. But Fang is unimpressed.
"The authorities are just paying lip service," he claims. Creating
guidelines is one thing, he points out, but making sure scientists
follow them is another. Fang complains that the vast majority of
cases exposed on New Threads have been officially ignored. Indeed,
the government has blocked access to the website inside China at
various times.

Like many Chinese scientists, Fang wants the government to
establish a powerful body to investigate alleged misconduct. Last
year, 120 US-based Chinese scientists led by microbiologist
Xin-Yuan Fu of Indiana University wrote an open letter to science
minister Xu Guanghua and other officials calling for China to adopt
mechanisms to deal with allegations of fraud. But in what many saw
as a swipe at New Threads, they added: "There is neither consistent
punishment for the guilty nor legitimate protection of the
innocent. Such confusion damages not only the reputation of those
involved in the allegation, but also the research environment in
China and the trust of the international community in Chinese
scientists."

Even some of Fang's supporters have reservations about his
name-and-shame approach. "Originally I trusted everything on the
website because Fang did the investigations himself," says He. But
he fears that as the site has grown, some people are being falsely
accused. What's more, some of the accusations on New Threads are
subjective - for example, claims that scientists have wasted money
on spurious research.

Fang says that he follows strict rules before posting an allegation
from a would-be whistleblower: demanding that they reveal their
identities to him, asking for evidence, consulting experts and
investigating the details himself if need be. "So far there is no
evidence that the reputation of an innocent person has been damaged
by us," he says.

But Fang has fought, and lost, three libel actions. One of the
plaintiffs was Xiao Chuanguo, a urologist at Huazhong University of
Science and Technology in Wuhan. Xiao sued Fang for criticising his
application to become a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences,
which later failed. Fang claimed that Xiao had not spent enough
time in China to be eligible, had tweaked his publication record,
and exaggerated the importance of a surgical technique he invented.

In July 2006, a Wuhan court ruled against Fang and ordered him to
pay Xiao $3750 in compensation. "Fang did a good job at the
beginning of his fighting against the 'academic corrupt', but he
has caused more damage than good," says Xiao.

Fang remains defiant. His supporters, meanwhile, have raised more
than $55,000 in two legal fighting funds. "The courts so far
haven't tried to enforce the libel rulings on me, probably due to
the roar of public rage," Fang claims. "This setback won't affect
my campaign." Until the central government takes up the challenge,
New Threads seems set to remain the fraudbusters' best hope.

Celebrity death match

A suicide pact might not be the conventional way to resolve an
academic quarrel, but that's what one Chinese philosopher suggested
last year. The argument started when science writer Fang Shimin
criticised philosopher Li Ming, who claimed on his blog to have
solved a complex mathematical problem called the four-colour
theorem.

This states that for a flat area broken up into contiguous chunks -
a map of China, for instance - you need only four colours to ensure
that no two adjacent regions are the same colour. Using a computer,
mathematicians Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken at the University
of Illinois found a proof in the 1970s. But Li, who has no academic
affiliation, reckoned he could prove the theorem with only a pen
and paper, using traditional Chinese philosophy and a secret system
of geometry.

Fang challenged Li to publish details, starting an online war of
words that spilled into the Chinese media - until Li suggested
settling the dispute with a suicide pact: whoever was proved wrong
should take their own life. For once, Fang declined the challenge.

Related Articles

* Computer chip fraud scandalises China
* http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn9172
* 15 May 2006
* New rules proposed to catch science fraud
* http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn10682
* 29 November 2006
* A sceptic's work is never done
* http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18925372.400
* 4 February 2006

Weblinks

* New Threads
* http://www.xys.org/intro_eng.html
* Open letter to China's science minister
* http://www.scidev.net/misc/Open_letter.doc


China special: One child, one big problem
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19626291.800&print=true
* 07 November 2007
* Rachel Nowak

IT HAS been called the demographic sweet spot - a huge working-age
population supporting a relatively small number of old and young
people - and it has helped power China's economic explosion. China
hit that sweet spot because of decades of social engineering. In
the late 1950s, Mao Zedong promoted large families to power his
economic vision of a Great Leap Forward, and by 1976 the population
had almost doubled. This prompted the introduction of national
family planning policies to restrict the number of children a
couple could have. With some modifications, these policies are
still in place. They were designed to put a brake on runaway
population growth, end poverty and encourage economic development.
In part, the plan has worked: today almost 72 per cent of Chinese
people are of working age.

But the country's drive to reduce birth rates - known outside China
as the one-child policy - might have sown the seeds of a massive
demographic pile-up. When today's parents are old, how will their
children support them?

Something similar is happening in parts of Europe and Asia, where
falling birth rates are raising the average age of the population.
In China, though, this change will be especially dramatic. In a
paper to be published this month Wolfgang Lutz, a demographer at
the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in
Laxenburg, Austria, predicts that the ratio of over-65s to
15-to-65-year-olds in China will increase almost threefold between
2010 and 2035. That means for each person over 65 there will be
just three working-age people, compared to 10 today (Vienna
Yearbook of Population Research 2007)

So should China relax or abandon the one-child policy to avoid an
impending demographic crisis? Some demographers say that if it
doesn't the country risks an economic crash. Others argue that the
policy should stay in place to prevent the already huge population
outgrowing available resources. Ultimately, however, making any
kind of decision comes down to knowing how many people there are in
China already and how many babies are being born each year. Because
of the country's social engineering policies, that's trickier than
it sounds.

The so-called one-child policy is actually a raft of regional
regulations with many exemptions. In some regions certain ethnic
minorities are not included, for example, and remarried couples can
have a child together even if they have children from a previous
relationship. In fact only about a third of people of reproductive
age are limited to one child. The regulations are enforced with
varying degrees of rigour in different regions. Public education is
widely used to instruct couples on the benefits of having just one
child, and in some places there are fines and other penalties for
having too many children. In the early days, women having more than
one child in the strictest areas faced forced sterilisation or
abortion - practices that are now banned.

Despite the penalties there are good reasons to flout the rules.
Though the government has recently set up a state pension scheme,
most people in rural areas assume they will be dependent on their
children - and most importantly their sons - to provide for them
during their old age. So often couples opt not to register births,
especially when the firstborn is female.

The total number of these "missing babies" is unknown, and that has
led to huge discrepancies in birth-rate estimates. Of the 30 or so
recently published estimates for 2000, the Chinese national census
is the lowest, at 1.22 children per woman. This is way below
replacement levels and is believed by virtually no one. Other
estimates put the figure at up to 2.3 children using various
criteria to correct for the missing babies. The National Population
and Family Planning Commission of China assumes a birth rate of
1.8, a figure that some demographers believe is a dangerous
overestimation which could make the government complacent. "Every
national population survey indicates that it is lower than 1.6, and
most scholars believe it is between 1.6 and 1.7," says Qiang Ren of
the Institute of Population Research at Peking University.

Zhongwei Zhao, a demographer at the Australian National University
in Canberra, agrees. "If you believe the total birth rate is around
2 then there would be no need to relax current family planning
policy," he says. "We are worried that [birth rates] may have
already fallen to 1.6 or lower. If that is correct, and it
continues for 20 or 30 years, then China will have huge problems.
The Chinese government needs to consider adjusting the policy now."

Estimates for the ratio of boys to girls, which will also have an
impact on future birth rates, are just as variable. The natural
human sex ratio is for 103 to 107 boys to be born for every 100
girls. Estimates for China vary from 106 to 123, depending on who
is doing the counting (see "It's raining men").

Ultimately, though, it is already too late to stop the rapid ageing
of Chinese society, says Ren, who worked with Lutz on his
predictions of future age dependency. But he feels that an increase
in birth rates could soften the impact. "In light of our study, we
think the Chinese government should consider relaxing its current
family planning policies," Ren says.

In the past few years, the government has made some changes. In
many regions couples who are both only children can now have a
second child, for example. But as China develops further, and
urbanisation, better education for women and the higher cost of
raising children drive the birth rate still lower, some
demographers fear it may be too little too late.

It's raining men

The one-child policy and a cultural preference for boys has driven
many parents to opt for sex-selective abortion, creating such a
huge deficit of girls that by 2025 there could be 30 million fewer
women than men aged between 20 and 49, and 47 million fewer by
2050, according to a recent study published in China (Market and
Population Analysis, vol 1, p 17).

It's a dire situation. Fewer women will further depress national
birth rates, placing an additional burden on an already ageing
society. There could also be knock-on effects on mental health. "We
are concerned about single men being marginalised in poor, rural
areas, and the real impacts this will have on their parents, who
rely on them, on their communities, and on their psychological
well-being," says Li Shuzhuo of the Institute of Population and
Development Studies at Xi'an Jiaotong University in Xi'an.

With Chinese society already undergoing dramatic change, it's
difficult to predict the more subtle implications of a future
society with a glut of males. Some speculate that it will lead to
more widespread and open homosexuality. Others fear that an excess
of testosterone-driven young men will bring more violence, crime
and sexually transmitted disease to the country.

The government would prefer not to find out. In 2003 it launched
the "Care for Girls" project, run by the National Population and
Family Planning Commission of China. The scheme introduced
"pro-girl" policies in 24 counties with the highest excess of boys
at birth (see Map). Measures included enforcing a ban on
sex-selective abortion; improved maternal and child healthcare;
financial incentives; and the promotion of gender equality. The
result was that the number of boys born for every 100 girls fell
from an average of more than 130 to below 120.

Last year, the government rolled out the Care for Girls campaign
nationwide with the aim of returning the sex ratio at birth to
normal within 15 years. In the meantime, China may have to find a
way to care for its boys too.

Related Articles

* Hidden legacy of China's family plan
* http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19125592.000
* 8 July 2006
* Sowing the seeds of starvation
* http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18324651.000
* 18 September 2004
* Population Earth: Enough already?
* http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19125711.100
* 30 September 2006
* The hidden cost of sex selection
* http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg13818712.500
* 1 May 1993

Weblinks

* Transition and Challenge: China's Population at the Beginning
of the 21st Century, edited by Zhongwei Zhao and Fei Guo, 2007
* http://www.oup.co.uk/pdf/0-19-929929-3.pdf
* Wolfgang Lutz
* http://www.populationasia.org/People/Wolfgang_Lutz.htm
* Zhongwei Zhao
* http://adsri.anu.edu.au/people/zhongwei.php


China special: Quantum revolution
http://technology.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19626292.100&print=true
* 07 November 2007
* Gregory T. Huang

THIS is where the revolution might begin. One night five years ago,
Jian-Wei Pan had a vivid dream. Sitting in front of him was the
world's first quantum computer. It was a strange mix of translucent
solid and swirling fluid with a piercing beam of blue light
emanating from within. He approached it, trying to figure out how
it worked, but it was too fuzzy to examine. Nor could he imagine
where it had come from. Did it have a "Made in China" sticker on
it? "I have no idea," Pan laughs.

In his lab at the University of Science and Technology of China
(USTC) in Hefei, Pan is now striving to make his dream a reality.
When I visit, it is buzzing with activity. In an office thick with
cigarette smoke, young professors argue over their latest
experiments, while in the next room students scurry around a vast
optics bench, adjusting lasers, lenses and detectors. If all goes
to plan, the first quantum computer worth shouting about will be
built right here.

Hefei is in some ways an improbable birthplace for such a
revolutionary device. Hours away from the tech powerhouses of
Shanghai and Guangzhou, this quiet town in south-east China has
till recently been better known for its traditional tofu and sesame
cakes than cutting-edge physics. Pan and his colleagues are
changing that, and have already placed the USTC - and the country
as a whole - firmly on the quantum computing map.

If a working quantum computer can be devised, it promises to easily
eclipse the power of today's fastest supercomputers. With that
glittering goal in mind, a plethora of groups around the world are
racing to build one. Pan's approach is different from the rest.
What makes it particularly promising is that it combines a quantum
memory with a new architecture known as cluster states.

Pan believes his team's method could be scaled up to perform useful
calculations more reliably and easily than any other scheme devised
so far. The competition is tremendous, but researchers who have
worked with Pan wouldn't bet against him producing the goods. "His
group is one of the leading groups worldwide in developing quantum
technology," says physicist Caslav Brukner at the University of
Vienna, Austria.

As an idea, quantum computing has been around since the early
1980s. It envisages harnessing the weird properties of quantum
mechanics to perform tasks that classical computers cannot do in a
reasonable time, such as searching large stores of data, or
factoring the huge numbers that underlie today's most secure
encryption schemes. The power of a quantum computer comes from the
fact that a quantum particle can exist in more than one state at a
time. So unlike a data bit in an ordinary computer, which can have
the value of either 0 or 1, a quantum bit (or qubit) can
simultaneously have the value 0, 1 or any "superposition" of the
two. So perform a calculation using qubits and you get a huge
number of calculations for the price of one.

Foreign origins

Things get even more interesting when you add the quantum
phenomenon known as entanglement, which can link the properties of
several qubits. With only a few hundred entangled qubits, it is in
principle possible to represent more numbers than there are atoms
in the universe. A quantum computer that uses entangled qubits
could perform different sets of calculations on a huge number of
inputs all at once. At least that's the theory. So far, quantum
computers' practical mathematical abilities are no better than
those of the average 10-year-old.

Pan began learning about the practical side of quantum computing in
1994, as a novice graduate student with Anton Zeilinger, who was
then at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. At the time,
virtually no experimental quantum research was happening in China.
Not long after Pan arrived in Innsbruck, Zeilinger asked him:
"What's your future plan?" Pan says he didn't hesitate: "I want to
have a lab in China like yours."

Soon afterwards, he began building ties with researchers in his
homeland. Starting in 1997, he returned to China once a year to
give lectures and meet students and faculty at various
universities, including USTC. In 2001, with three Nature papers
under his belt, he won a $250,000 grant from the Chinese Academy of
Sciences to spend three months a year establishing quantum
information research in China - the first grant of its kind. By
2003, he was splitting time equally between his labs at the
University of Heidelberg in Germany and at USTC.

In the meantime dozens of groups around the world, including
Zeilinger's in Austria, had been pursuing various approaches to
quantum computing using photons, trapped ions, superconductors or
quantum dots as their qubits. Pan's experience of using photons for
quantum communication has convinced him these are the way forward.

Each approach has its merits, but there is one problem that they
all face: the entangled states crucial for quantum computation are
horribly fragile. The hardest part of manipulating qubits is
keeping the entanglements intact and forming new ones as needed
during the course of the calculation.

Cluster states are an attempt to solve this problem. Instead of
performing multiple operations over time on a given set of qubits,
each step of the calculation has its own set. This has the
advantage that you don't need to manipulate the entanglements
during the calculations and thereby risk destroying them. Instead,
the entanglements are prepared at the start and then left alone
(New Scientist, 25 March 2006, p 42). But this technique has
drawbacks too. Many more qubits have to be entangled before the
calculation starts, and these entangelments have to be preserved
for longer than is needed with other approaches.

Pan and his team are now working to overcome these problems, and in
May they reported the first four-qubit cluster state using only two
photons. It's a promising start: other groups have created
four-qubit cluster states but these tend to use more photons or
atoms, which could be far trickier to handle in large numbers.
What's more, Pan's method seems to create cluster states more
reliably.

Scaling up nevertheless presents a daunting technical challenge, as
it involves keeping track of so many photons. "It's like trying to
kill six birds with one stone," says Zeng-Bing Chen, a colleague of
Pan's at USTC.

That's where quantum memory comes in. Pan knew from his work on
quantum communication that you can use an isolated group of cooled
atoms to absorb the quantum state of a photon that hits them. The
atoms can collectively store this state for a few microseconds
before transferring it to another photon. In June Pan's group
reported a version of this quantum memory and they hope it could
eventually provide a simple way to entangle a network of qubits.

Their ultimate goal is to use this type of storage to set up
entanglements of 100 or more qubits, which would be enough to start
doing practical quantum computing. The quantum memory would help
keep track of the photons' states until the exact moment they are
needed.

Don't expect this to happen tomorrow, though. Pan warns that it may
take more than 10 years to achieve a useful result. But fast
forward a decade or two and the shiny new computer you are
unpacking may look unlike any other PC you've ever owned before.
Except for one little thing: the "Made in China" label on the box.

Quantum World - Learn more about a weird world in our comprehensive
special report.

Back to their roots

Jian-Wei Pan is emblematic of a generation of young Chinese
researchers who are returning to their homeland after establishing
themselves in the west. Pan did his postgraduate training in Anton
Zeilinger's prestigious group in Austria, and then set up a lab at
the University of Heidelberg in Germany (see main story). He
returned to China full-time earlier this year.

Attracting star Chinese researchers back from abroad is part of the
government's strategy for building up the nation's science and
technology. Computer scientist Andrew Yao and Nobel physics
laureate Chen Ning Yang, who is now in his 80s, have both been
wooed back in the past three years. Yao specialises in the theory
of cryptography and communication and won the Turing award,
computing's equivalent of a Nobel prize, in 2000. Both now have
labs at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

"Ten years ago it was very difficult to attract people with
permanent positions in the US or Europe to China," says Hou
Jianguo, executive vice-president of the University of Science and
Technology of China (USTC), where Pan now has his lab. "Gradually
that has changed."

In 1996, the Chinese Academy of Sciences began its "Hundred
Talents" programme, offering lucrative research grants to lure top
professors in all areas of science back to China. Having achieved
its initial goal of bringing back 100 top researchers by the year
2000, the programme has gone on to boost the number of elite
returnees to more than 1000.

According to the Ministry of Science and Technology, a total of
more than 20,000 researchers have been attracted back to China in
the past 10 years, via more than 100 funded channels. "It is
getting more competitive here," says Tieniu Tan, the academy's
deputy secretary general. "Salaries are still not as good as
abroad, but many new PhDs are returning."

A returning faculty member can expect to earn anywhere between half
and two-thirds as much as they would in a comparable position in
the US or Europe, but because the cost of living is generally much
lower than in the west, this is enough to achieve a standard of
living which is, if anything, higher.

Scientists setting up their own research groups can steal a march
on competitors in the west because of the much lower wages expected
by junior staff in China. Pan says graduate students at USTC earn
less than $200 a month - only 12 to 15 per cent of what their
European or American counterparts would be paid. This is one of the
factors that is allowing relatively new Chinese research labs to
catch up with established ones elsewhere. "The whole level is going
up fast," Pan says.

Related Articles

* Quantum computers: march of the qubits
* http://technology.newscientist.com/article/mg18925441.500
* 25 March 2006
* Quantum threat to our secret data
* http://technology.newscientist.com/article/mg19526216.700
* 13 September 2007
* Blueprints drawn up for quantum computer RAM
* http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn12516
* 21 August 2007
* Half-quantum cryptography promises total security
* http://technology.newscientist.com/article/mg19626266.000
* 20 October 2007

Weblinks

* Quantum physics and quantum information at the University of
Science and Technology of China
* http://quantum.ustc.edu.cn/index.asp
* Chinese Academy of Sciences
* http://www.cas.ac.cn/
* Andrew Yao's homepage at Tsinghua University
* http://itcs.tsinghua.edu.cn/yao/
* Chen Ning Yang Nobel prize biography
* http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1957/yang-bio.html


China special: Small farmer/big pharma
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19626291.700&print=true
* 07 November 2007
* Phil McKenna
* Richard Fisher

Farmers in the far west of China might be living on a different
planet from workers in Beijing's booming biotech firms...

Kasam Sayim, farmer

KASAM SAYIM doesn't have a cellphone and has never used a computer.
"I'm an old man. I have no use for them," he says.

Sayim is a 63-year-old grape farmer from Hando village in Xinjiang
province in north-west China. He is Uighur, a member of a Muslim
minority group that has its own language and uses a modified Arabic
script. Sayim doesn't speak Mandarin.

The Turpan basin, where he lives, is the second lowest place on
Earth apart from the Dead Sea. It gets so hot and dry that from May
to October the villagers drag their beds - and often their TV sets
- outside and sleep under the stars. Officially Xinjiang province,
some 3000 kilometres west of Beijing, is in the same time zone as
the capital. But Sayim and his neighbours set their clocks to
"Xinjiang time", 2 hours behind Beijing - in part to keep in sync
with daylight but also as a subtle expression of local autonomy. He
drives a small motorised cart but has never been to Ürümqi, the
provincial capital, 320 kilometres away.

Relatively wealthy among his peers, Sayim has seven sheep, about 1
hectare of farmland and six children - all of whom were born before
official efforts to limit population growth came into effect. His
children all have cellphones and one, who attended university, uses
email on a computer at work.

While Sayim has resisted the temptation to go wireless, he does
have a landline which he uses to phone relatives and to check on
the price of grapes. When New Scientist visited in August, they
were netting about $0.60 per kilogram. In a good year, Sayim and
his family can make about $5300 selling their grapes and raisins.

On a typical day, Sayim gets up at 5 am to pray, the first of five
times he will face west towards Mecca. Usually he is asleep by 9
pm. From late August to mid-September, most of his waking hours are
spent harvesting the grapes. Before lunch and in the evening, the
men cart basketfuls of grapes to a single-roomed mud-brick building
where the women hang them up by the bunch to dry. Winds blowing
through the latticed walls will turn the grapes into raisins within
three weeks.

The grape-growing industry has experienced a boom in recent years
and most farmers in the region seem to be prospering. In part, this
has been fuelled by an emerging wine industry - although Sayim, as
a Muslim, does not drink alcohol.

But not all of western China's rural communities are thriving. In
neighbouring Gansu province, a crippling drought has left millions
in dire poverty. In 2005, the average annual net income of a farmer
in Gansu was about $150. And while Uighurs in the Turpan basin seem
to enjoy relative cultural and religious freedom, Uighur separatist
movements closer to the Kazakh border have been brutally suppressed
in recent years.

Even in this remote corner of China, changes wrought by the
nation's economic development are beginning to take root. When
Sayim was a teenager he helped dig and maintain the karez, an
underground irrigation system that brings snowmelt from distant
mountains to his village. His payment for a summer's work was three
sheep and a 50-kilogram bag of corn. Today, Sayim would rather his
grandchildren stay on at school than work on the karez. "Going to
college is the most important thing they can do," he says.

Wang Lingyun, scientist

"DOES Julie Andrews really sing in The Sound of Music?" Wang
"Lillian" Lingyun is debating musicals with a colleague. It is late
Friday afternoon, and we're enjoying the weekly happy hour, when
staff at the Beijing labs of Danish biotech firm Novo Nordisk meet
to gossip, snack, and discuss allegedly lip-synching nuns.

It has been a busy day. Wang's first task each morning is to check
the experiments left to run overnight. Her team is seeking proteins
with a high affinity for receptors on the surface of cancer cells
in the hope of turning them into drugs. One of today's proteins
looks promising, and so will be tested further. As Wang stacks the
samples, she enthuses about the work. "Proteins are like people.
They each have their own personality," she says. "Some are very
fragile. You should take care of them."

After gaining a PhD at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute
of Biophysics in Beijing, Wang chose to use her skills in drug
discovery. Curing cancer is close to her heart, as both of her
parents died of the disease within a few years of each other while
she was a student.

Ten minutes drive away is the apartment the 32-year-old owns with
her husband. They met during their undergraduate studies at Jilin
University in Changchun, north-east China. He now works for a
clinical trials company in the same science park. Their wedding was
more modest than those of friends, because it fell during the 2003
SARS epidemic, when people avoided large gatherings for fear of
infection.

The couple chose their apartment because of its garden, where Wang
grows cucumbers, chilli, tomatoes and a cherry tree. For the short
commute, she bought a new Ford Focus in 2005. A colleague overhears
us discussing the car and teases: "She is rich!" Wang bristles and
shoots back: "You're just saving your money."

Wang is coy about how much she earns. But she suggests that a
scientist with a PhD can earn $1000 to $1300 per month working for
a pharmaceutical company - more if employed by a western firm.
Competition for jobs is high. Foreign-trained Chinese scientists,
especially those returning from the US, are beating researchers
from local universities to the best jobs. "I'm lucky," says Wang.
"Now it's almost impossible for a fresh PhD to get a job here."

Over a working lunch of western fast food, Lillian gives a
presentation in English on breast cancer genetics to around 30
colleagues. But her life is not all hard work. She regularly meets
friends at restaurants in central Beijing, and recently learned to
ride. "The horse is so tall, while I am so small," she smiles.

Work also merges with social life, through company "family days",
which have ranged from an auction to raise money for children with
diabetes in north-west China to a day out planting trees near the
Great Wall.

Then there is the happy hour. But now it is time for Wang to jump
into the company minibus to play badminton at the local sports
centre. The Julie Andrews debate will have to wait for another
week.


China special: The backbone of spinal research
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19626291.600&print=true
* 07 November 2007
* Jane Qiu

WHEN Yang Gui-rong was taken to the Chengdu Army Kunming General
Hospital more than a year ago, after an accident diving into a
pool, he could move only his mouth and eyes and was struggling to
breathe. Surgeons transplanted fetal cells into the injured spinal
cord in Yang's broken neck. With intensive rehabilitation, he
slowly regained feeling and movement in his arms. Today, Yang is on
the hospital's wheelchair rugby team, which won a silver medal in
the Chinese Games for the Disabled in May. "We didn't expect he
would survive the surgery," says Shen Caihong, head nurse in the
hospital's spinal injuries centre. "Now his progress is visible
almost on a daily basis."

Yang is just one individual hit by an epidemic of spinal injuries
in China that is a direct consequence of the nation's economic
development. Over the past decade, the rate of spinal cord injuries
has increased roughly tenfold, largely due to the car crashes that
have become common as the burgeoning middle class has taken to the
wheel, plus numerous accidents in the nation's booming construction
and mining industries - which have terrible safety records.

"With 60,000 new cases per year, China now has more patients with
spinal cord injuries than anywhere else in the world," says Wise
Young of Rutgers University in New Jersey. "This means that new
therapies can be tested more quickly and cheaply." To seize this
opportunity - and hopefully in the long run to help patients like
Yang - the Hong Kong-born neurologist has set up the China SCI
Network, encompassing 22 centres across the country, with the aim
of conducting clinical trials that meet the highest international
standards.

That will be a tough task, however, as China has a poor record for
conducting rigorous clinical research. What's more, in the past few
years some Chinese surgeons have become notorious for charging
paralysed patients - both Chinese and "medical tourists" from
abroad - thousands of dollars for experimental cell transplants
that have not yet been shown to work. As New Scientist learned on a
visit to one of China SCI's showcase centres in Kunming, capital of
Yunnan province in south-west China, they include some of the
surgeons in Young's own network.

If anyone can bring order to the clinical chaos then maybe Young
can. In 1990, while at New York University, he led a landmark trial
showing that a steroid called methylprednisolone can help recovery
from spinal injury. Later he became famous as the doctor who
treated Christopher Reeve. And today, he is excited about further
improving patients' prospects by using a combination of lithium
pills and transplants of stem cells taken from umbilical cord
blood. Widely used to treat mood disorders, lithium can also coax
stem cells into producing a cocktail of factors that help damaged
nerve cells to grow. In addition to making these growth factors,
Young hopes that transplanted stem cells may serve as a "bridge"
across severed spinal cords, helping nerve fibres to grow back.

In August 2008, Young aims to begin a trial of the therapy
involving 440 patients, half of them paralysed during the previous
year, the rest with older spinal injuries. But before it can begin,
there is a huge amount of work to do. For example, the
participating centres are now observing patients who will
eventually take part in the trial, recording information about
their ability to feel and move - essential for assessing the
therapy's potential benefits. At the same time, 20 patients at the
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology are taking lithium
alone. And in the coming months, further small studies will begin
involving lithium alone, stem cell transplants, or both. Young is
also negotiating with pharmaceutical firms to add a third
component: drugs known to block molecules in the spinal cord that
inhibit nerve growth.

Best practice?

The participating centres must also meet Good Clinical Practice
(GCP) international guidelines, which stipulate how clinical trials
should be run, including procedures for informed consent and
ethical review. This is no small task, as Chinese doctors have
until recently paid scant attention to such niceties. So over the
past two years, Young has concentrated on training China SCI's
staff.

Efforts to get the network's centres certified for GCP with the
state Food and Drug Administration have been hampered by scandals
involving the agency. In July, its former head, Zheng Xiaoyu, was
executed for corruption. For now, seven of the centres hold GCP
status, and Young believes the rest will follow by next summer.
"Regardless of the result of the clinical trial, it will be a
significant achievement if we could demonstrate that it can be run
in China," he says.

The Kunming centre, which New Scientist visited in late July,
already has its GCP certification. There is an optimistic
atmosphere, as patients with some mobility exercise in the
ring-shaped corridor, while others in the rooms that lead from it
practise fine movements with their fingers. Between rehabilitation
sessions they are wheeled by their carers into the picturesque
garden, which has lawns, a pond and a path that winds over bridges
towards a pagoda.

Even here, however, the murkier side of Chinese medicine is not far
beneath the surface. Shen, the head nurse, would only let me speak
to Yang and one other patient. But later that evening the families
of others at the hospital sought me out at my hotel. They were
anxious to learn more about the therapies their loved ones had
received, for which they had paid a small fortune.

In today's China, patients must often pay for medical care out of
their own pockets (see Chart) - and unlike in other countries with
largely private-sector healthcare, medical insurance is not widely
available.

The wife of one man whose neck was broken and his spinal cord
crushed in a work accident was distraught, her family having paid
more than $25,000 over the past six months: "He hasn't improved at
all. We are running out of money." Relatives of other patients said
they had paid up to $10,000 for the surgery itself and about $1250
per month for inpatient care. "The doctors said that they will use
the most advanced therapy from the US," one man told me, worried
about his cousin with a broken back. "They said that it's
promising, but now we are not sure."

Patients usually expect to be charged for therapies that have been
proved to work, not those that are still experimental. Like Yang,
some of the patients were given transplants of fetal Schwann cells,
which make the myelin that insulates healthy nerve fibres. Although
researchers at the University of Miami have shown that Schwann cell
transplants can help animals with spinal injuries, they have yet to
start clinical trials. The Kunming centre, meanwhile, published its
first results on a group of 53 patients in two Chinese journals
earlier this year, claiming that they showed improved movement and
sensation after eight weeks. Specialists in spinal injury say that
is too soon after the surgery to draw any definite conclusions.
"You would really need to go out beyond six months," says James
Guest, also at the University of Miami, who questions the Kunming
group's failure to report any adverse events. "You can't do 53
surgeries without complications," he argues.

Quizzed about the charges made to patients, one surgeon at the
Kunming centre confirmed the families' stories. But centre director
Zhu Hui claims that any fees were for non-experimental aspects of
the therapy. "There is a big gap between what you heard and the
reality," she told New Scientist.

At least one other surgeon in the China SCI Network is definitely
charging for experimental therapies. Huang Hongyun of the Beijing
Xishan Hospital has treated hundreds of patients with fetal cells
from the olfactory bulb, which links the nose to the brain. Western
experts have complained about his failure to publish the results -
and last year, when neurologists including Guest examined seven of
Huang's spinal injury patients, they reported that none showed any
significant improvement, while five had suffered complications,
including meningitis.

Huang used to work in Young's lab, and his former boss defends his
inclusion in the network. "Huang genuinely believes in his
treatment with all his heart and mind, and is trying very hard to
improve it," Young says. "He is the most experienced surgeon on
cell transplantation in the world."

Young adds that his priority is to ensure that China SCI's trials
are conducted properly, not to police the activities of its members
outside of these trials. "As long as they don't throw it into my
face, I am not going to investigate," he says.

Some observers - both western and Chinese - are troubled by Young's
pragmatic attitude. "Offering unproven therapies outside the
network's trials could harm its reputation and credibility," says
Timothy Caulfield of the Health Law Institute at the University of
Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. And Qiu Renzong, a bioethicist at the
Institute of Philosophy of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
in Beijing, is openly critical: "How could a doctor turn a blind
eye to practices which exploit patients with devastating
conditions?"

Yang, for one, does not feel exploited. "I will stand up one day,"
he says hopefully. But it is hard to tell whether the cell
transplants he received have really made a difference, since people
with spinal injuries sometimes improve spontaneously over time. If
a miracle treatment for spinal injuries is to emerge from China, it
will need to be backed up by hard evidence, not a series of glowing
testimonies from carefully chosen patients.

Culture clash

In April last year, Zhang Gongyao flew in the face of 5000 years of
tradition. In the Chinese journal Medicine and Philosophy, he
argued that traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) verges on a hoax,
and called for it to be removed from the public health system
within five years. It touched a nerve, sparking a fierce debate in
the Chinese media and earning Zhang and his backers a rebuke from
the health ministry.

TCM emphasises the balance and harmony of the human body. It takes
a holistic approach to treatment, which takes into account a
person's symptoms and characteristics. Central to its practice are
concepts such as yin and yang, primal and opposing forces within
objects and processes, and the spiritual energy known as qi, which
is said to flow through channels in the body, causing illness if
blocked.

According to Zhang, a philosopher of science at the Central South
University in Changsha, Hunan province, traditional treatment is
just superstition. But TCM, which encompasses herbal remedies and
acupuncture, has many adherents who were swift to launch a
counter-attack in print, on TV and online. Even some of those who
agree that its core concepts have no scientific basis suggested
that Zhang had gone too far in calling for its abolition. Others,
such as Fu Jinghua, a retired researcher with the China Academy of
Chinese Medical Sciences in Beijing, argued that TCM deals with Tao
- the way and order of the universe - and so cannot be evaluated
scientifically.

That is just what the Chinese government now proposes to do,
however. In March it announced a plan, backed by 16 Chinese
ministries, to spend more than $130 million over the next five
years on research into the effectiveness of TCM. That seems
reasonable, says Edzard Ernst of the University of Exeter, UK, who
studies complementary and alternative medicine: "It's a matter of
sorting the chaff from the grain." But as the plan does not demand
the gold standard of double-blind, randomised clinical trials, some
scientists fear that evidence-based TCM will remain an elusive
goal.

Related Articles

* Stem cell cocktail could cure spinal injury
* http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8911
* 28 March 2006
* Stem cells: Miracle postponed?
* http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18925421.600
* 11 March 2006
* Stem cell scaffolds repair rodent spinal cord damage
* http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8741
* 18 February 2006
* Greater than the parts
* http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg17022925.000
* 26 May 2001

Weblinks

* China SCI Network
* http://www.hku.hk/hkuscif/wise.htm


China special: The solar power king
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19626291.500&print=true
* 07 November 2007
* Richard Fisher
* Phil McKenna

Watch an interview with the mayor of Rizhao and the director of
Mountain Yoga about how they are now using solar water heaters

SHI ZHENGRONG is an unlikely contender for the title of China's
richest man. He is a green entrepreneur in a nation that is home to
16 of the world's 20 most polluted cities. Last year, Forbes
magazine ranked him top of mainland China's rich list, with a net
worth of $2.2 billion. Only electrical retailer Wong Kwong Yu kept
him from retaining the title in 2007.

Shi is head of Suntech Power, based in Wuxi, which is one of the
largest producers of solar-cell modules in the world. He represents
the kind of home-grown success story in both technology and
business that will be needed in spades to meet the crushing energy
demands of the emerging superpower.

China's demand for energy is expected to nearly double by 2020, far
surpassing the needs of any other country. The consequences for the
global climate, and for the health of its own citizens, are stark.
This year, according to the International Energy Agency in Paris,
China's carbon dioxide emissions will overtake those of the US,
largely because of its overwhelming reliance on coal. That means
more air pollution, which already causes more than half a million
premature deaths in China every year, according to recent
estimates.

In an effort to prevent disaster, the Chinese government's current
50-year energy plan seeks to reduce coal use from 67 per cent of
the nation's total energy consumption in 2003 to 55 per cent in
2020, and 40 per cent in 2050 (see Chart). The difference would be
met by a large increase in natural gas and renewable energy. Solar
power is a major part of the plan and could drive down the use of
coal further, if only it were not so expensive.

Bringing down those costs is where Shi could really make his mark.
His journey to the top of the solar tree began in the 1980s. He
felt prospects for a young physicist were slim in China, so he
moved to Australia's University of New South Wales (UNSW) in
Sydney. After his fellowship ended he won a job at a university
spin-off company called Pacific Solar, which was developing
thin-film solar cells. There his group was among the first in the
world to grow crystalline silicon on glass at a low temperature - a
key advance in commercialising solar cells. Martin Green, Shi's
mentor at UNSW, is glowing about his ex-colleague. "Zhengrong was
an excellent scientist - always able to make progress where others
would have stalled," he says.

By the late 1990s, however, Shi got itchy feet. "I felt a little
bit bored of what I was doing, because there were no more
challenges," he says. He had been visiting China to lecture and was
spending much of his time as a sort of solar guru to students,
business people and government officials. "The country lacked a
true expert," he says.

A friend eventually persuaded him that China had become more
supportive of entrepreneurs, so Shi decided to move his family back
home. In 2001, with 11 patents in his pocket and a truckload of
bravado, he approached Chinese investors for the money to set up a
solar energy company. The regional government of Wuxi, an aspiring
industrial hub near Shanghai, stumped up $6 million and helped
bring in another $5 million in research grants. Winning such
support would have been unlikely in Australia, Shi says, or in any
country whose government does not invest directly in companies.

However, as Suntech grew, the official backing that had got the
firm off the ground became a millstone around its neck. By 2004,
the government's political hand-wringing and lack of business
expertise were holding the company back, says Shi. "They wanted to
control the company. That was a very stressful time. I can tell you
my blood pressure went up." He was determined to cut the apron
strings, and resolved to quit if the state presence stayed. "If you
cannot run a company in the way you like, then there are endless
politics, struggling. It can kill it."

Facing down the local party bosses was a brave move, but it paid
off. Wuxi's government investors eventually backed away, selling
their stake for a big pay-off after accepting that their meddling
could discourage future entrepreneurs. Free of its ties, in
December 2005 Suntech floated on the New York Stock Exchange,
initially valued at more than $5 billion.

Today, Suntech is worth about $7 billion and does most of its
business with countries that subsidise solar power, such as Germany
and Spain. It has provided photovoltaic panels for large projects,
ranging from the new roof on San Francisco airport's third terminal
to a 130-kilowatt system that will help power the Beijing National
Stadium being built for the 2008 Olympics.

Unsurprisingly, Shi is bullish about China going solar to meet its
escalating energy needs. "There's no choice: China has to go
renewable," he says. Looking at the haze of air pollution outside
Shi's 63rd-floor office window in Shanghai, it is hard to disagree.
Shi says the government is taking notice of wind and biomass as
renewable energy sources, and solar farms attached to the grid will
be next.

Not everyone is optimistic about the government's plan to go green,
however. "A plan is one thing, how you implement it is another,"
says C. S. Kiang, a climate scientist and dean of the College of
Environmental Sciences at Peking University.

There is good reason for his concern. In 2005, China's National
People's Congress passed the Renewable Energy Promotion Law, which
commits the country to producing 15 per cent of its power from
clean energy sources by 2020. Despite this, the construction of
coal power plants has continued unabated, with more than two major
plants being added to the electric grid per week in 2006, says Eric
Martinot, a visiting scholar at the Tsinghua-BP Clean Energy
Research and Education Center in Beijing.

The discrepancy between plan and action is due in part to conflicts
of interest between local governments and Beijing's central
authority. This will be a major issue in future. "The central
government cannot control local governments as much any more,
because they now have their own money," says Kiang.

That paves the way for companies such as Suntech to play a big role
in China's energy future. Martinot says it is likely the country
will meet its renewable energy targets, but this will depend on
industrial development and pricing levels. Because of its high
cost, solar power will probably remain a small slice of the pie for
a while: Suntech's sales in China for 2007 are only 1.5 per cent of
its total, but Shi expects that to increase as solar costs fall and
energy demand soars.

Given the billionaire's record, it is tempting to believe him.
However, the greening of China will depend on others following in
his footsteps. Many researchers have the right expertise, Shi says,
but lack patience. "We need to be careful about short-sightedness.
Chinese scientists are doing some good work, but the country has
become so materialistic."

Energy and Fuels - Learn more about the looming energy crisis in
our comprehensive special report.

Solar city

A 2-hour bus ride from the beer capital of Tsingtao takes you to
Rizhao in Shandong province, a charming coastal city of 3 million
whose name means "sunshine" - for good reason.

When foreign guests visit, Mayor Li Zhaoqian takes them to the roof
of the Shanshui (Mountain Water) Hotel. At first glance the view
could be that of any city: an endless expanse of apartment
buildings stretching out in all directions. A closer look, however,
reveals rows of cylindrical solar collectors blanketing nearly
every building. Unlike anywhere else in the world, more than 99 per
cent of the city centre's residents rely on solar energy for their
hot water. "It's cheap, it's convenient and it's clean," says Li.

On a tour of the city, Li, a former engineering professor, points
out boulevards lined with solar-powered street lamps. He enthuses
over the methane-capturing abilities of the city's waste-water
treatment plants. With financial backing from the central
government, Rizhao has pursued renewable energy schemes that have
transformed the city into a model for green development throughout
China.

Solar hot water is a small but significant step in this direction.
The push in Rizhao came 10 years ago, when the city began giving
tax breaks and preferential land allocations to factories that
manufacture solar heaters. Since then, use of solar hot water has
boomed throughout China, exceeding that of the rest of the world
combined, and leading to a small offset of carbon emissions (see
charts 'Solar hot water/heating' and 'China's carbon savings from
renewable energy', right).

More than 35 million homes now use the devices for hot water, which
would otherwise comprise 12 to 20 per cent of a household's
electricity bill. In villages around Dezhou, 300 kilometres north
of Rizhao, thousands of people use public bathhouses fuelled by the
sun. And in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, half of the
city's 4.7 million residents use solar water heaters.

Last year $2.5 billion worth of these devices were manufactured in
China. Han Jian-gong, general manager of Beijing Sunpu Solar,
explains how they work. Each heater consists of about a dozen
parallel glass tubes connected to a large water tank. Sunlight
passes through the glass cylinders and heats black absorber tubes
inside, which then transfer their heat to the tank. The least
expensive units cost around $150, about the same as an electric
water heater. "Right now the competition is very hot," says Han,
noting that more than 2000 companies in China make these solar
heaters.

Han's company was one of the first. It was founded in the late
1980s with help from German aerospace engineers who had worked on
the original design. Earlier this year, Sunpu Solar landed a
contract for 45,000 tubes that will provide hot water, heating and
possibly solar-based air conditioning for buildings used in the
2008 Olympics.

The success of that project, however, will hinge on the city's
ability to clean up its runaway air pollution. Sunpu runs its own
solar air-conditioning system, fuelled by a massive solar-collector
array on its roof, but on a recent visit by New Scientist the sky
was so thick with smog that the building was forced to rely on
back-up power.

Back in Rizhao, all new buildings since 2002 have frames installed
on their rooftops or walls and internal plumbing suitable for solar
hot water, which has been heavily promoted. "I don't like the word
'propaganda', but we did do a lot of education with area residents
and in local schools on the importance of using clean energy," Li
says.

Recently Jinan, the capital of Shandong province, adopted similar
requirements for new construction sites. In April, Chen Deming, the
vice-minister of China's National Development and Reform
Commission, said a similar policy would be announced for all of
China. "More and more cities will adopt our policies," says Li, who
was recently promoted to city chairman of the National People's
Congress.

Phil McKenna

Related Articles

* Eco-cities special: A Shanghai surprise
* http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19025561.700
* 21 June 2006
* Solar power - seriously souped up
* http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19025531.600
* 31 May 2006
* Look, no carbon footprint!
* http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19325941.800
* 09 March 2007
* China unveils climate action plan
* http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn11986
* 04 June 2007

Weblinks

* Suntech Power
* http://www.suntech-power.com
* Eric Martinot, Tsinghua University
* http://www.martinot.info/china.htm
* Martin Green, University of New South Wales
* http://www.pv.unsw.edu.au/Staff/martingreen.asp
* C. S. Kiang, China-US Climate Change Forum
* http://chinausclimate.org/en/person/538
* International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook 2007
* http://www.iea.org/Textbase/publications/free_new_Desc.asp?PUBS_ID=1927