Solar panels and sheep turn desert in China into eco-pastureland - CGTN
On a high-altitude plateau that was once the upper Yellow River's worst wind-erosion zone, one of the world's largest solar parks is showing how photovoltaic infrastructure can double as rangeland – a model that aligns with the "Beautiful China" goal of integrating ecological restoration with green industry under the country's 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-2030).
Before construction began in 2012, the Talatan area in Hainan Prefecture saw more than two months of force-8 winds each year – winds with sustained speeds of 62 to 74 kilometers per hour. As a result, the sand and gravel advance by 10 meters annually. The Mongolian word "talatan" means "vast grassland," but for decades the area was barren, with scattered dry grass poking through the sand.
Today, millions of photovoltaic (PV) panels across 600 square kilometers act as a wind barrier, cutting surface wind speed and reducing moisture evaporation. The change has allowed grass to regenerate beneath the panels. According to the local forestry and grassland authorities, the annual grass yield has reached 174 kilograms per mu (about 2.6 tonnes per hectare) – enough feed to support 100,000 sheep.
Sang Baichuan on Why Foreign Investment in China Is Falling
In the essay below, Sang Baichuan asks whether China and foreign investors can continue to “choose each other” after three consecutive years of declining foreign direct investment. His answer is neither a straightforward reassurance that nothing has changed nor a simple narrative of foreign companies abandoning China.
Sang, an outspoken Professor of Economics and Dean of the Institute of International Economy, the University of International Business and Economics, acknowledges the scale of the decline, the deterioration in returns experienced by some foreign businesses, and the continued existence of operational barriers in areas including government procurement, data transfers, standard-setting and regulatory implementation. But he rejects the argument that falling investment primarily reflects Beijing’s loss of interest in foreign capital. Instead, he assigns greater weight to the property downturn and the weakness in domestic demand that followed it, the disruptive effects of digital and intelligent transformation, and, most fundamentally, the increasingly restrictive international investment environment….
His recommendations focus on three areas: better coordination between opening-up policies and sector-specific regulations in services; clearer and more predictable rules for the cross-border movement of scientific and technological data; and stronger support for foreign investment in high-tech manufacturing amid expanding Western investment-screening regimes.
China’s one-person company boom - by Jiang Jiang
OPC, short for One-Person Company, has become one of China’s hottest startup concepts. The defining idea is simple: a single founder wielding AI as a force multiplier. It began gaining traction in the second half of last year and has become even more popular this year.
One important trigger was China’s OpenClaw craze earlier this year. OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent project that helps users build teams of AI assistants, caught on in China around February 2026 and soon spread beyond the tech community. Tencent Cloud and Alibaba Cloud began offering setup services for non-technical users, while short videos of people running their own AI agents flooded Chinese social media….
Below are five stories I compiled from three recent articles — one published by Bingdian Weekly, a WeChat publication affiliated with China Youth Daily; one by Southern Weekly; and another by the well-known Chinese technology and business WeChat blog Wuxiaobo Channel….
China’s Nordic Reset? Four Stops, Three Tests, No Easy Answers
…It is reported that Finland wasn’t part of the original itinerary. Helsinki asked to be added once it learned of the trip. Finland’s government announced Wang’s stop in Finland and Valtonen’s attendance at the NATO summit on the same day, June 30. Valtonen herself said she appreciated the signals China has sent so far aimed at preventing the Ukraine crisis from escalating, adding that “even as China-Russia ties have deepened, at least this kind of support for global peace has held.”
In Norway, Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide invited Wang for a walk along Oslo’s scenic waterfront. Photos Eide shared on X showed them walking arm in arm. Eide told reporters afterwards that he sensed China’s support for peace, and that both sides understood an end to the war would benefit everyone….
In the development of any large-scale emerging industry with foreseeable future demands, severe overcapacity is almost inevitable due to market dynamics. This is because nobody can predict the level of demand the industry will eventually settle on, hence perpetual trial and error.
The trial-and-error phase will never result in continuous insufficient capacity, as price hikes and profit expansions from undercapacity make this state unsustainable. Conversely, severe overcapacity often leads to a belief that the surplus is temporary and future demand growth will absorb the excess. The market will not realize the true level of stable demand until anticipated demand growth repeatedly fails to materialize, by which time the industry is already entrenched in overcapacity….
Even in the United States, which claims minimal government intervention and full reliance on market forces, industries such as railroads, automobiles, telecommunications, and computers have faced similar overcapacity issues, demonstrating the universality of this phenomenon….
Regarding China’s strategies to address overcapacity disputes:
First, strategically, China should unwaveringly shift towards expanding domestic demand, with a particular focus on increasing domestic consumption to drive economic growth.
Second, efforts should be made to maintain stable aggregate demand, smooth out economic fluctuations, maintain exchange rate flexibility, and ensure international coordination and communication of macroeconomic policies.
Third, when emerging industries achieve competitive advantages, China should promptly phase out related supportive industrial policies. This includes guiding the internationalization of industry supply chains, production, and sales systems to enhance resilience against trade frictions and promoting the timely market-based elimination of inefficient capacity.
Finally, China should strive to uphold a rules-based international trade system centered around the WTO, continue to advocate for and promote free trade, maintain restraint and rationality, and address trade disputes through agreed-upon dispute resolution mechanisms.
A Chinese research university plans to phase out traditional English classes, citing the ability of artificial intelligence (AI) translators to bridge language barriers in real time.
In a video posted to the university’s social media account on July 2, Zhao Wei, the provost of Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology (SUAT), announced that the institution would do away with standard English courses in favour of classes that emphasised cross-cultural skills.
China’s global image has rebounded from its pandemic-era lows, with international views of both the country and President Xi Jinping improving as confidence in the United States has declined, according to a new Pew Research Centre survey.
The survey, released on Wednesday, polled more than 45,000 people across 37 countries spanning every region of the world, including many advanced economies and emerging markets, such as Argentina, Australia, France, Ghana, India, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Turkey and the US.
“Views of China were at or near historic lows in many countries during the Covid-19 pandemic but have since steadily increased,” Jonathan Schulman, a research associate at Pew Research Centre, said in a statement to the South China Morning Post.
Yaghi hopes to lead team using AI to create materials to tackle global challenges such as carbon neutrality and water shortages.
Omar Yaghi, the winner of last year’s Nobel Prize for chemistry, has joined China’s Tsinghua University to lead a new AI-driven research centre.
The 61-year-old materials scientist will head a team working on ways artificial intelligence (AI) can transform the design and synthesis of new materials and shorten their development cycle “by orders of magnitude”, Tsinghua said on Friday.
Speaking at his appointment ceremony, Yaghi said he hoped to develop materials to tackle major environmental challenges such as water shortages, carbon neutrality and sustainable development….
Yaghi was previously the James and Neeltje Tretter professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. He shared the 2025 Nobel Prize with Richard Robson and Susumu Kitagawa for their work on metal-organic frameworks, which are ultra-porous, spongelike materials created by linking metal ions with carbon-based molecules.
These and other related materials have the highest surface areas known to date, allowing them to capture and convert carbon, harvest water from desert air and absorb hydrogen to produce clean energy.
The ABCF mission is to build a deeper understanding between the Chinese people and Barbadians and Caribbean people from all walks of life. The association’s focus is on personal experiences, people-to-people contact, cultural exchanges and exchanges of ideas, and the facilitation of travel, business and study. From the outset we aim to learn from and build on the experiences of the Caribbean and China, and to develop mutual understandings and support that will be to the benefit of both sides.
