There are no longer dugongs in China. In a study published Wednesday, Researchers declared the marine mammal, also known as the fork-tailed manatee or sea pig, extinct – only three people surveyed from coastal communities in China said they had seen a dugong in the past five years. The fork-tailed manatee, native to saltwater, had inspired numerous myths and stories about sirens and mermaids in China, like its relatives in other oceans. And this despite its rather inelegant appearance, which resembles a floating potato. According to researchers, precisely this ponderous progress has doomed the dugongs: Overfishing and ship accidents have now led to their extinction in China.
The fate of the dugongs shows an obvious problem of our time: The mass extinction of animal and plant species caused by humanity’s expansion. The People’s Republic wanted to take action against the extinction of species and made big promises, not least at the biodiversity conference in Kunming. However, as Ning Wang analyzes, there are massive problems with implementation. China’s foreign projects, in particular, contribute little to the preservation of biodiversity – on the contrary. The prospects for an agreement on globally valid targets at the COP Biodiversity Conference in December are anything but rosy.
Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei does not have a rosy view of the future either. In a memo that initially was not intended for the public, he prepares his employees for tough years ahead. For Huawei, it is no longer about expansion, but only about “survival,” he wrote. In China’s social networks, Ren apparently hit a nerve, as Fabian Kretschmer reports – in the comment section, displeasure about the current economic situation in the People’s Republic was apparent. Our author took a closer look at the Huawei CEO’s wake-up call.
An estimated eight million animal and plant species are left on earth, ten percent of which are found in China. Whether it’s the (red) panda, snow leopards, or alligators: The habitats of many species have become smaller and smaller due to human expansion and habitat destruction. The expansion of agricultural land, the sealing of surfaces, and deforestation are central factors for the displacement of animals from their habitats, and more and more plant species are disappearing. According to the World Biodiversity Council (IPBES), around one million animal and plant species are acutely threatened with extinction.
Because China is one of the countries with the most animal and plant species, the Beijing leadership proclaimed the beginning of a new era in biodiversity conservation in 2012. Chinese scientists are not holding back with praise for their achievements in preserving biodiversity in their own country. According to Huang Chengming, a professor at the Zoological Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), China has continuously improved its forest biodiversity monitoring network over the past 20 years by establishing a forest area monitoring system.
The People’s Republic has also established a national species data bank that counts more than 10,000 species and 85,000 copies of biological resources. These include seeds or tissues that are archived and preserved for future animal or plant breeding and conservation.
“Monitoring and conducting research is important to understand how an ecosystem and the inhabitant species function and what is necessary to stop species extinction. But it is only one of many needed measures,” says Florian Titze, WWF expert on international biodiversity policy. He stresses not only the importance of preserving biodiversity but rather that a functioning ecosystem is capable of producing clean water and air. “Like many other countries, China is still far from initiating the systemic change we need to conserve biodiversity,” said Titze.
Under the bold motto “man and nature need to coexist in harmony,” State and Party leader Xi Jinping most recently called on people at the 15th UN Biodiversity Conference (COP15) to fight together for biodiversity.
Nevertheless, the time is right for Xi Jinping to set an example as the host country of the UN Conference on Biological Diversity. And as is so often the case, he is doing so by making financial promises. At the very first meeting of the COP15 summit, he announced a new fund of $237 million (€200 million) to support biodiversity conservation in developing countries (China.Table reported). The Economist assessed Xi’s announcement as an attempt to contrast himself with the United States on the subject. The latter had not signed the 1993 UN conventions on biodiversity – China, on the other hand, was one of the early signatories. Moreover, the US currently has a senate with “one of the worst records of any country in ratifying human rights and environmental treaties“, the Economist wrote in February of this year.
According to WWF expert Titze, there are significant differences between individual countries in their concept of what would be needed and provided for more species protection. According to a study published by Nature magazine, around $700 billion would be necessary to finance these measurements. Seen in this light, the sum propagated everywhere by the Chinese state media is hardly significant.
The fact that Xi wants to provide the money primarily for developing countries seems noble at first glance. However, on closer inspection, the plan appears in a different light. A Nature study published last fall shows that China’s development financing abroad creates risks for global biodiversity. Authors of Nature magazine conclude that 63 percent of projects funded by China overlap with critical habitats, protected areas, or indigenous territories.
In addition, up to 24 percent of the world’s endangered birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians are potentially affected by these projects. They live in so-called hotspots, located primarily in northern sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and parts of South America. “Overall, China’s development projects pose greater risks than those of the World Bank, particularly in the energy sector,” the Nature report concludes.
The prospects of succeeding in agreeing on globally valid targets at the COP Biodiversity Conference in December are anything but rosy. The previous UN plan to conserve biodiversity, adopted in Aichi, Japan, in 2010, already shows how little has been achieved.
The targets set for the period 2011 to 2020 have largely been missed. The most recent report on the state of biodiversity (CBD) showed that of the 20 targets set at that time, only six had been achieved. Things are not looking any better for the December meeting. In June, instead of reaching a consensus on many of the 23 targets contained in the framework document, as expected, delegates agreed on only two.
Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei is a man who has spent his life in an existential struggle with the outside world. Raised in abject poverty as the eldest of seven children, he founded his telecommunications company in a garage in southern China with less than $5,000 in start-up capital. And even as the world’s leading network equipment supplier, the 77-year-old refers to his employees as “officers” and the sales team as “front-line soldiers”.
But even judging by his martial worldview, Ren Zhengfei’s latest statements are so devastating that they have sent parts of Chinese society into a veritable state of shock: In a leaked memo to his employers, Ren writes of a prolonged global recession. It goes on to say: For Huawei, it is no longer about expansion, but solely about “survival”. What’s more, “marginal businesses will be shrunk and closed”. Moreover, there is “no ray of hope” for Huawei in the coming “three to five years” – given the Covid measures, the Ukraine war, and the “blockade by the USA”.
In China, the Huawei founder has hit a direct nerve with his remarks. “This is not the speech of an entrepreneur, but reflects the opinion of the people about the current economic situation,” wrote one user on the online platform Weibo.
Indeed, the national economic sentiment in China is currently more depressing than it has been for more than three decades. Urban youth unemployment has reached the historic 20 percent mark, the real estate crisis is growing, and the constant threat of Covid lockdowns has deeply unsettled large sections of the population. Economic recovery is stagnating massively, and domestic consumption is at rock bottom.
The Japanese investment bank Nomura is now forecasting growth of only 3.3 percent for the coming year – a catastrophic figure by Chinese standards. After all, well over ten million university graduates will enter the labor market this year alone. Many of them are unlikely to find adequate prospects in their home countries.
Ren Zhengfei’s alarming wake-up call seems all the more remarkable compared to his ostentatiously displayed self-confidence a little over three years ago. In November 2019, just a few months before the outbreak of the pandemic, the entrepreneur invited a few selected journalists to his residence in Shenzhen in southern China.
At the time, a good-humored gentleman welcomed them in proper style, wearing a salmon-pink shirt and olive-green jacket. Even then, Washington had decided on its technology boycott against Huawei, but Ren took this in stride – outwardly, at least: “The American government can do whatever it thinks is right for its own companies. But I can assure you that we will continue to grow without American technology,” he said, confident of victory.
The current economic figures paint a much more ambivalent picture. For the first time in two years of downward trend, Huawei was able to increase its sales by 1.4 percent in the second quarter. Net profit, on the other hand, fell by 35 percent year-on-year. In addition, Huawei has disappeared from the list of the world’s leading smartphone producers. What somewhat cushioned the group was its still strong division as a network equipment provider.
However, as Ren Zhengfei’s latest memo suggests, the company now faces further painful restructuring processes. All employees, it says, should lower their expectations and “face reality”: “The first thing is to survive and we can only have a future if only we survive”, Ren wrote in his dramatic way of speaking.
And suddenly, it makes sense what most visitors to the Huawei campus in Shenzhen at the end of 2019 dismissed as pure paranoia: Ren Zhengfei had prominently displayed photos of a Soviet fighter plane, its wings already riddled with artillery shells, on the walls of the office space. The metaphor is more apt than ever: the Huawei plane is still flying but already severely battered. Fabian Kretschmer
“In our family, there was always the funny anecdote that my grandpa only takes cold showers,” Weina Zhao says. “It wasn’t until I researched for my film Weiyena that I found out why.” Weina Zhao was born in Beijing and moved to Vienna with her family when she was three years old. Her parents even named her after this city in Chinese. During her sinology studies at the local university, she became more and more interested in the film industry, took on smaller jobs, and, after completing her master’s degree, decided, together with Judith Benedikt, to make a film about her family history.
“The film was an excuse so that I could finally ask the questions I was interested in,” says the 36-year-old. She says it’s typical for children of immigrant parents to know little about their immigration history and that she has always felt it was better not to ask about it. “Through my role as director, I change as a daughter and granddaughter,” Weina says as a narrator in the documentary. “Intimate questions are disguised as a game. As a stranger in a professional role, suddenly my approach is no longer uncomfortable.”
Weiyena tells China’s 20th-century history through Weina’s family: her great-grandfather, who helped Mao Zedong to power and then became a persecuted Communist Party member. Her grandmother, who suffered under Japanese occupation during World War II, or her grandfather, who was persecuted and taken to a labor camp during the Cultural Revolution. To this day, he takes cold showers because his skin burned under the hard work in the sun back then. “Only when I translated my family’s story into German did I feel all the suffering and brutality of their lives,” Weina says. “Maybe German is the language in which I feel.”
Seven years passed from the first idea to its publication two years ago. “Weiyena” has broken years of silence in her family. She hopes the film will inspire others to get to the bottom of their family history. “It is silence that creates transgenerational trauma. All my life, my mother has protected me from her past and that of our family. But I know that her wounds extend into my life as well. We can only resolve those traumas when we talk about them.”
In her work, Weina is working on the topics of identity and language. With friends, she founded “Perilla” two years ago, a magazine by and for the Asian diaspora. “Perilla is not about educating others about being Asian or consciously breaking down stereotypes. We just wanted to open a space where Asian diasporic people can create and publish, a space that allows identity.”
Weina no longer questions her own identity. She is Austrian and Chinese. She is neither more than the other. She has also given up being in-between. Svenja Napp
These fish ponds are neatly lined up in an industrial park in Weishan in Shandong province. In this aerial view, they almost look like modern art.
There are no longer dugongs in China. In a study published Wednesday, Researchers declared the marine mammal, also known as the fork-tailed manatee or sea pig, extinct – only three people surveyed from coastal communities in China said they had seen a dugong in the past five years. The fork-tailed manatee, native to saltwater, had inspired numerous myths and stories about sirens and mermaids in China, like its relatives in other oceans. And this despite its rather inelegant appearance, which resembles a floating potato. According to researchers, precisely this ponderous progress has doomed the dugongs: Overfishing and ship accidents have now led to their extinction in China.
The fate of the dugongs shows an obvious problem of our time: The mass extinction of animal and plant species caused by humanity’s expansion. The People’s Republic wanted to take action against the extinction of species and made big promises, not least at the biodiversity conference in Kunming. However, as Ning Wang analyzes, there are massive problems with implementation. China’s foreign projects, in particular, contribute little to the preservation of biodiversity – on the contrary. The prospects for an agreement on globally valid targets at the COP Biodiversity Conference in December are anything but rosy.
Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei does not have a rosy view of the future either. In a memo that initially was not intended for the public, he prepares his employees for tough years ahead. For Huawei, it is no longer about expansion, but only about “survival,” he wrote. In China’s social networks, Ren apparently hit a nerve, as Fabian Kretschmer reports – in the comment section, displeasure about the current economic situation in the People’s Republic was apparent. Our author took a closer look at the Huawei CEO’s wake-up call.
An estimated eight million animal and plant species are left on earth, ten percent of which are found in China. Whether it’s the (red) panda, snow leopards, or alligators: The habitats of many species have become smaller and smaller due to human expansion and habitat destruction. The expansion of agricultural land, the sealing of surfaces, and deforestation are central factors for the displacement of animals from their habitats, and more and more plant species are disappearing. According to the World Biodiversity Council (IPBES), around one million animal and plant species are acutely threatened with extinction.
Because China is one of the countries with the most animal and plant species, the Beijing leadership proclaimed the beginning of a new era in biodiversity conservation in 2012. Chinese scientists are not holding back with praise for their achievements in preserving biodiversity in their own country. According to Huang Chengming, a professor at the Zoological Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), China has continuously improved its forest biodiversity monitoring network over the past 20 years by establishing a forest area monitoring system.
The People’s Republic has also established a national species data bank that counts more than 10,000 species and 85,000 copies of biological resources. These include seeds or tissues that are archived and preserved for future animal or plant breeding and conservation.
“Monitoring and conducting research is important to understand how an ecosystem and the inhabitant species function and what is necessary to stop species extinction. But it is only one of many needed measures,” says Florian Titze, WWF expert on international biodiversity policy. He stresses not only the importance of preserving biodiversity but rather that a functioning ecosystem is capable of producing clean water and air. “Like many other countries, China is still far from initiating the systemic change we need to conserve biodiversity,” said Titze.
Under the bold motto “man and nature need to coexist in harmony,” State and Party leader Xi Jinping most recently called on people at the 15th UN Biodiversity Conference (COP15) to fight together for biodiversity.
Nevertheless, the time is right for Xi Jinping to set an example as the host country of the UN Conference on Biological Diversity. And as is so often the case, he is doing so by making financial promises. At the very first meeting of the COP15 summit, he announced a new fund of $237 million (€200 million) to support biodiversity conservation in developing countries (China.Table reported). The Economist assessed Xi’s announcement as an attempt to contrast himself with the United States on the subject. The latter had not signed the 1993 UN conventions on biodiversity – China, on the other hand, was one of the early signatories. Moreover, the US currently has a senate with “one of the worst records of any country in ratifying human rights and environmental treaties“, the Economist wrote in February of this year.
According to WWF expert Titze, there are significant differences between individual countries in their concept of what would be needed and provided for more species protection. According to a study published by Nature magazine, around $700 billion would be necessary to finance these measurements. Seen in this light, the sum propagated everywhere by the Chinese state media is hardly significant.
The fact that Xi wants to provide the money primarily for developing countries seems noble at first glance. However, on closer inspection, the plan appears in a different light. A Nature study published last fall shows that China’s development financing abroad creates risks for global biodiversity. Authors of Nature magazine conclude that 63 percent of projects funded by China overlap with critical habitats, protected areas, or indigenous territories.
In addition, up to 24 percent of the world’s endangered birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians are potentially affected by these projects. They live in so-called hotspots, located primarily in northern sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and parts of South America. “Overall, China’s development projects pose greater risks than those of the World Bank, particularly in the energy sector,” the Nature report concludes.
The prospects of succeeding in agreeing on globally valid targets at the COP Biodiversity Conference in December are anything but rosy. The previous UN plan to conserve biodiversity, adopted in Aichi, Japan, in 2010, already shows how little has been achieved.
The targets set for the period 2011 to 2020 have largely been missed. The most recent report on the state of biodiversity (CBD) showed that of the 20 targets set at that time, only six had been achieved. Things are not looking any better for the December meeting. In June, instead of reaching a consensus on many of the 23 targets contained in the framework document, as expected, delegates agreed on only two.
Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei is a man who has spent his life in an existential struggle with the outside world. Raised in abject poverty as the eldest of seven children, he founded his telecommunications company in a garage in southern China with less than $5,000 in start-up capital. And even as the world’s leading network equipment supplier, the 77-year-old refers to his employees as “officers” and the sales team as “front-line soldiers”.
But even judging by his martial worldview, Ren Zhengfei’s latest statements are so devastating that they have sent parts of Chinese society into a veritable state of shock: In a leaked memo to his employers, Ren writes of a prolonged global recession. It goes on to say: For Huawei, it is no longer about expansion, but solely about “survival”. What’s more, “marginal businesses will be shrunk and closed”. Moreover, there is “no ray of hope” for Huawei in the coming “three to five years” – given the Covid measures, the Ukraine war, and the “blockade by the USA”.
In China, the Huawei founder has hit a direct nerve with his remarks. “This is not the speech of an entrepreneur, but reflects the opinion of the people about the current economic situation,” wrote one user on the online platform Weibo.
Indeed, the national economic sentiment in China is currently more depressing than it has been for more than three decades. Urban youth unemployment has reached the historic 20 percent mark, the real estate crisis is growing, and the constant threat of Covid lockdowns has deeply unsettled large sections of the population. Economic recovery is stagnating massively, and domestic consumption is at rock bottom.
The Japanese investment bank Nomura is now forecasting growth of only 3.3 percent for the coming year – a catastrophic figure by Chinese standards. After all, well over ten million university graduates will enter the labor market this year alone. Many of them are unlikely to find adequate prospects in their home countries.
Ren Zhengfei’s alarming wake-up call seems all the more remarkable compared to his ostentatiously displayed self-confidence a little over three years ago. In November 2019, just a few months before the outbreak of the pandemic, the entrepreneur invited a few selected journalists to his residence in Shenzhen in southern China.
At the time, a good-humored gentleman welcomed them in proper style, wearing a salmon-pink shirt and olive-green jacket. Even then, Washington had decided on its technology boycott against Huawei, but Ren took this in stride – outwardly, at least: “The American government can do whatever it thinks is right for its own companies. But I can assure you that we will continue to grow without American technology,” he said, confident of victory.
The current economic figures paint a much more ambivalent picture. For the first time in two years of downward trend, Huawei was able to increase its sales by 1.4 percent in the second quarter. Net profit, on the other hand, fell by 35 percent year-on-year. In addition, Huawei has disappeared from the list of the world’s leading smartphone producers. What somewhat cushioned the group was its still strong division as a network equipment provider.
However, as Ren Zhengfei’s latest memo suggests, the company now faces further painful restructuring processes. All employees, it says, should lower their expectations and “face reality”: “The first thing is to survive and we can only have a future if only we survive”, Ren wrote in his dramatic way of speaking.
And suddenly, it makes sense what most visitors to the Huawei campus in Shenzhen at the end of 2019 dismissed as pure paranoia: Ren Zhengfei had prominently displayed photos of a Soviet fighter plane, its wings already riddled with artillery shells, on the walls of the office space. The metaphor is more apt than ever: the Huawei plane is still flying but already severely battered. Fabian Kretschmer
“In our family, there was always the funny anecdote that my grandpa only takes cold showers,” Weina Zhao says. “It wasn’t until I researched for my film Weiyena that I found out why.” Weina Zhao was born in Beijing and moved to Vienna with her family when she was three years old. Her parents even named her after this city in Chinese. During her sinology studies at the local university, she became more and more interested in the film industry, took on smaller jobs, and, after completing her master’s degree, decided, together with Judith Benedikt, to make a film about her family history.
“The film was an excuse so that I could finally ask the questions I was interested in,” says the 36-year-old. She says it’s typical for children of immigrant parents to know little about their immigration history and that she has always felt it was better not to ask about it. “Through my role as director, I change as a daughter and granddaughter,” Weina says as a narrator in the documentary. “Intimate questions are disguised as a game. As a stranger in a professional role, suddenly my approach is no longer uncomfortable.”
Weiyena tells China’s 20th-century history through Weina’s family: her great-grandfather, who helped Mao Zedong to power and then became a persecuted Communist Party member. Her grandmother, who suffered under Japanese occupation during World War II, or her grandfather, who was persecuted and taken to a labor camp during the Cultural Revolution. To this day, he takes cold showers because his skin burned under the hard work in the sun back then. “Only when I translated my family’s story into German did I feel all the suffering and brutality of their lives,” Weina says. “Maybe German is the language in which I feel.”
Seven years passed from the first idea to its publication two years ago. “Weiyena” has broken years of silence in her family. She hopes the film will inspire others to get to the bottom of their family history. “It is silence that creates transgenerational trauma. All my life, my mother has protected me from her past and that of our family. But I know that her wounds extend into my life as well. We can only resolve those traumas when we talk about them.”
In her work, Weina is working on the topics of identity and language. With friends, she founded “Perilla” two years ago, a magazine by and for the Asian diaspora. “Perilla is not about educating others about being Asian or consciously breaking down stereotypes. We just wanted to open a space where Asian diasporic people can create and publish, a space that allows identity.”
Weina no longer questions her own identity. She is Austrian and Chinese. She is neither more than the other. She has also given up being in-between. Svenja Napp
These fish ponds are neatly lined up in an industrial park in Weishan in Shandong province. In this aerial view, they almost look like modern art.
