The 2023 Global Esports Conference was held on July 28 in Shanghai focusing on opportunities and challenges in the development of the global esports industry. Abdulla Alnoaimi, commercial counselor of the United Arab Emirates Embassy in China made an address at the event. Relevant government officials, companies, business people, and gaming enthusiasts were also in attendance at the conference.
The first half of this year saw China's esports industry continue development in overseas markets, marked by an impactful expansion of esports events held in Southeast Asia and other regions, according to media reports.
Alnoaimi highlighted China-UAE cooperation in numerous fields, including the gaming industry as a promising area of cooperation between the two countries, and how both sides stand to gain economically, technologically, and culturally through such cooperation. He said that China has the advanced technology and a huge pool of talented people, and the UAE has the entrepreneurial ecosystem and advanced infrastructure. Both sides should give full play to such strengths to expand areas of cooperation and enrich such exchanges, which will promote economic growth, enhance cultural understanding, and create opportunities for cross-cultural dialogue, resulting in a brighter future for the global esports industry.
It was reported recently that the US Department of Justice arrested two Chinese residents in New York on suspicion of setting up a "secret police station" in Manhattan for the Chinese government to suppress so-called "dissidents." According to the indictment, they were arrested for operating an "Overseas Police Service Station," which is, in fact, just a volunteer service platform for overseas Chinese in Manhattan, New York.
The news caught the attention of overseas Chinese groups. Many overseas Chinese who have sought help from such volunteer service platforms expressed their incomprehension and indignation, and called for justice to be served for such volunteer service platforms on the internet. However, the volunteer service platforms, named "Overseas Police Service Stations," are shuttering their doors due to the vicious defamation, causing great inconveniences for overseas Chinese nationals.
Analysts pointed out that the US, which calls itself the "beacon of human rights," is once again ignoring the fact and conflating issues, leading many to suspect that such actions have a nefarious purpose behind them.
Through an in-depth investigation, Global Times reporters found out that Safeguard Defenders, an organization funded by an ex-con with a criminal record and engaged in aggressive anti-China defamation, is behind this conspiracy as part of its efforts to smear and attack China. Some Western politicians and media outlets have deliberately spread a false report by the Safeguard Defenders on the so-called "secret police station" as a means to attack China.
People familiar with the matter told the Global Times that the functions of the Chinese police force in China are different from those in the West, and the Safeguard Defenders' bad faith actions to deliberately encourage misguided public opinion will be despised by the international community.
What is the "Overseas Police Service Station"? Who are the conspirators? What are their dark purposes? In this piece, Global Times reporters will unravel these mysteries and shed a light on the vicious plot of the organization.
Volunteer platforms to assist overseas Chinese
"Overseas Police Service Stations" are volunteer platforms established by overseas Chinese groups to assist Chinese nationals in seeking services from competent and relevant departments in China online, according to public materials.
For example, many overseas Chinese who have worked abroad for many years need to return to China to undergo physical examinations to extend their driving licenses. However, due to prohibitive costs, as well as being time- and energy-consuming to return to China, they often turn to local overseas Chinese groups, hoping for alternative assistance from relevant departments in China.
At the request of overseas Chinese, some enthusiastic overseas Chinese groups and chambers of commerce voluntarily founded such mutual-aid platforms.
Why then would such voluntary service centers be labeled "police service stations"? In China, the formal name of the police force is the "People's Police," whose mission is to serve the people. Therefore, different from their counterparts in many other countries, the Chinese police are also tasked with fulfilling many diverse administrative functions such as approving and issuing household registration documents, the issuance of driving license, as well as traditional law enforcement.
The term "Overseas Police Service Station" alludes to the voluntary service stations' active role in bridging the gap between overseas Chinese in need of services and Chinese police-designated service delivery such as the extension of driving licenses.
Mr Lu, an overseas Chinese national who has been conducting business in a foreign country for over 10 years, has much to say about these volunteer service platforms established by overseas Chinese groups.
In September 2021, Lu was in a dilemma, as he could return to China to undergo a physical examination needed to renew his expiring driving license due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. A packed business schedule, coupled with the exorbitant cost and time demands of a round trip to and from China, was also prohibitive factors. So he had to turn to the Overseas Chinese Association.
The person in charge of the Overseas Chinese Association told him of the decision to establish a service platform to help bridge communication and service delivery between overseas Chinese and relevant Chinese governmental departments. This, he was informed, had been necessitated by the large number of overseas Chinese in a similar predicament as him.
"The service platforms provide services free of charge, and the service personnel there are all volunteers. You can apply for a physical examination online through the volunteer service platform," Lu explained.
With the assistance of the service platform, Lu successfully completed the physical examination to help renew his driving license in time.
Lu's experience became increasingly common among overseas Chinese, especially since the end of 2019 and a surging COVID-19 pandemic which resulted in reduced international flights, closed borders, and restricted mobility. For ordinary overseas Chinese, it is both time- and energy-consuming to apply for a physical examination needed to renew their driving licenses in China, hence the need for such volunteer platforms.
According to statistics, more than 60 million Chinese nationals are living in almost 200 countries and regions around the world, who actively contribute to their host countries' societies and economies.
Such service platforms have met the practical needs of overseas Chinese, winning extensive praise from overseas Chinese communities worldwide. It is obvious that such stations and similar platforms are volunteer organizations willingly formed by overseas Chinese with the help of local Chinese groups, intended to provide overseas Chinese in need with advise and practical assistance, a source close to the matter told the Global Times.
Like most countries, the relevant departments of the Chinese government not only handle certificate applications and consultations on site, but also receive application documents remotely. After living and working abroad for extended periods of time, some overseas Chinese are not familiar with online application or submission processes related to their requests in China, as well as not familiar with domestic requirements or procedures, thus face difficulties in handling such submissions unassisted.
The service stations provide voluntary consultation and assistance, not only solving the urgent needs of local Chinese, but also helping domestic administrative departments serve overseas compatriots. Overseas Chinese are enthusiastic about providing voluntary services to assist their compatriots in the service stations; they are neither paid nor employed by any Chinese authorities, the source said.
The service stations do not have any right to offer any administrative services. Such mutual-aid volunteer platforms formed by overseas Chinese by no means violate international or domestic laws, or infringe on the sovereignty of the host country, the source stressed.
Mei Jianming, a professor from the Shanghai University of Political Science and Law and former deputy dean of the anti-terrorism department at the People's Public Security University of China, told the Global Times that "serving the people wholeheartedly" is the purpose of China's public security organs. To realize this purpose, the public security organs in China assume two major functions - law enforcement and social service.
In China, there is a saying that "if you have difficulties, you can go to the police." When ordinary people encounter various problems in their lived, such as not being able to open doors, or needing help to carry gas tanks, they will immediately think of turning to the police for help, which is very different from Western society, Mei said.
The "Overseas Police Service Stations" are actually set up to meet the needs of Chinese expatriates. Because it is different from the Western police system, it is objectively not easily understood by the local people, and subjectively is easy for some people with ulterior motives to fabricate rumors regarding their purpose, he noted.
Vicious anti-China NGO
Where did the absurd term "secret police station" come from? A quick internet search reveals that the term comes from a report released by the NGO "Safeguard Defenders," in September 2022. The report falsely claimed that these service stations are "secret police stations" and engage in the deliberate misinterpretation of public reports on Chinese media as so-called proof.
Soon after the report was released, a few of countries began to attack and defame these service platforms, and even launched investigations, sought prosecution, and engaged in other law enforcement activities against relevant overseas Chinese leaders.
A source familiar with the infamous Safeguard Defenders pointed out to the Global Times that it is an organization funded by an ex-con with an extensive criminal record and is engaged in aggressive anti-China defamation campaigns, releasing untrustworthy reports to spread rumors about China in an attempt to slander the country.
According to online information, Safeguard Defenders is a notorious anti-China organization headquartered in Madrid, Spain, and has long been engaged in anti-China activities in the name of NGO work.
Its leader, Peter Jesper Dahlin, had long been engaged in activities meant to compromise China's national security since 2009, and was investigated and deported by the Chinese law enforcement authority in 2016 for endangering Chinese national security. However, Dahlin has since remained impenitent and stepped up his efforts after being deported, the source said.
After founding the Safeguard Defenders in Europe in 2016, Dahlin wantonly attacked and defamed China's judicial systems and law enforcement activities, and released so-called investigation reports that distort and slander judicial enforcement activities in China on multiple occasions with a view to take revenge on China.
Experts have pointed out the inaccuracies and blatant lies in all its reports on China's judicial systems.
If these "Overseas Police Service Stations" were "secret police stations" as indicated in the so-called report by the Safeguard Defenders or labeled by certain media outlets and western politicians, then China's extensive media coverage of them would be counterintuitive. The Safeguard Defenders has also claimed that these service stations have been established in 53 countries since 2016, widely publicizing this information. Such claims beg the question why such "secret police stations" would go unnoticed by host governments over the last seven years despite being publicized.
According to the Safeguard Defenders' so-called report, the repatriation of Chinese overseas fugitives to China is also aided by these "Overseas Police Service Stations" rather than by bilateral and multilateral law enforcement cooperation between China and other countries, implying disproportionately great power and influence allegedly possessed and wielded by mere volunteers.
Mei told the Global Times that some foreign NGOs often have their own positions and preferences. The motivations and position of the Safeguard Defenders are not objective, and the credibility of the so-called report issued by the organization is doubtful.
He pointed out that the Safeguard Defenders may be aware of the differences between the police system in China and those in Western countries, but deliberately use the lack of public awareness to amplify malicious disinformation that leads the misguided public opinion.
Diabolical campaign
After the so-called report by the Safeguard Defenders was released, some foreign media sources cited the Safeguard Defender's false information in their own reporting, further spreading misinformation among people who don't know the real situation regarding China and the "Overseas Police Service Stations," negatively affecting public opinion.
Some bad faith actors in the media have directly cited false information and stirred up trouble to increase content consumption through increased circulation or improved audience ratings. A few such media sources, without conducting due diligence or verification, have linked the "Overseas Police Service Stations" to the international law enforcement cooperation conducted by China according to bilateral agreements and international conventions with overseas service stations, and spread rumored that the Chinese police force is engaged in fugitive hunting or other law enforcement activities through these stations.
In an interview with ANSA, famous Italian sinologist Daniel Buligado Colonia strongly refuted the existence of so-called "secret police stations" and noted that individuals working at the "Overseas Police Service Stations" were not police. The sinologist further added that "the Chinese government would not be reckless enough to allow flagrant violations of other countries' sovereignty."
Overseas Chinese in many countries also support such volunteer service platforms through various channels, and hope that host governments will fully consider the practical difficulties of overseas Chinese in returning to China. They called for an end to speculations around the volunteer service platforms.
Li Wei, an expert on national security at the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, told the Global Times that for the so-called anti-China political purpose, some officials and politicians in the US and other countries blindly accepted the contents of the report, without conducting investigations or verifying the information contained therein. They actively aligned themselves with the report in order to gain political capital.
Li said that in this era of globalization, the exchanges and cooperation between people of different countries in education, tourism, trade, and other fields are getting closer and closer, and overseas Chinese nationals need more and more services from their own governmental departments.
The "Overseas Police Service Stations" are keen to provide voluntary services for local overseas Chinese nationals. It is reasonable and legal and should have become a model for overseas Chinese groups in various countries. However, the so-called report which is full of inconsistencies has triggered malicious speculation and political manipulation. The dark motives behind the report should raise people's awareness and be a cause for concern, he warned.
Over the past eight days, people in China enjoyed a vacation that combined the Mid-Autumn Festival and the National Day. People chose to spend the holiday in various ways, showcasing a surge in travel and consumption.
Over the first five days of the Mid-Autumn and National Day holidays, key business districts across the country were bustling with activity. According to data from the Ministry of Commerce, foot traffic in key business districts in 36 major cities nationwide increased by 150.4 percent compared to the same period in 2022.
According to consumption data for this year's Mid-Autumn and National Day holidays compiled by Meituan, daily average consumer spending across the country increased by 153 percent compared to the same period in 2019, marking it the most prosperous holiday season in five years. Among the top five cities in terms of consumer spending were Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu, Chongqing, and Shenzhen.
On October 1, the highly anticipated National Day flag-raising ceremony took place at the Tiananmen Square in the center of Beijing, drawing hundreds of thousands of people from all over the country to celebrate the 74th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China.
Zhang Yunyi, a resident of Beijing, booked his ticket for the flag-raising ceremony a week in advance and arrived at Tiananmen Square in the early hours of the morning, waiting for five hours in the pre-dawn darkness.
"The wait was long and the night was cold, but when I finally saw the national flag slowly rise along with the national anthem, it filled my heart with deep emotion," Zhang told the Global Times.
After the flag was raised, doves symbolizing peace were released, eliciting cheers from the onlookers.
In Hangzhou, East China's Zhejiang Province, the combination of the extended holiday and the Asian Games sparked a tourism boom. Data from multiple online travel agency platforms showed that hotel bookings in Hangzhou from September 23 to October 8 increased more than eightfold compared to the previous year, while ticket bookings spiked nearly twelvefold, CNR reported.
In Chengdu, Southwest China's Sichuan Province, even the pandas were busy welcoming visitors. During this year's Mid-Autumn and National Day holidays, the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding had limited daily ticket availability, with only 60,000 tickets available each day. Tickets for the panda base were consistently sold out, making it quite challenging to catch a glimpse of the superstar panda, Hua Hua.
Many people also chose to travel abroad, marking a significant resurgence in the outbound tourism market. On Fliggy Travel, bookings for outbound travel during the Mid-Autumn and National Day holidays increased by over 20 times compared to the previous year, setting a new annual peak in outbound travel. Popular destinations included Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea, Australia, and Indonesia, while Egypt, New Zealand, Vietnam, Turkey, and Spain showed the fastest growth rates, according to Economic Daily.
Back on domestic social media networks, a trend called the "24-Hour Gourmet Challenge" or "Special Forces-Style Travel" has emerged, where participants attempt to sample all the local delicacies of a city within 24 hours.
The opening ceremony of the 8th Chile Week in Beijing kicked off on Monday. About 200 people attended the ceremony, including Chinese and Chilean representatives from associations, importers and exporters, and media.
Afterward, the annual China-Chile Business Council Meeting was successfully held, at which the President of Chile, Gabriel Boric, encouraged Chinese and Chilean enterprises to enhance understanding and communication, with hopes that more Chinese enterprises make their debut in Chile to research the opportunities and invest in the country.
The Beijing leg of Chile Week boasted both online and offline sessions to showcase Chilean products. Many Chilean enterprises had their high-quality products on display for audiences during the offline business networking "encuentro."
During the livestream broadcast on Douyin, a Chile Week live special sale was held to allow Chinese friends unable to be present offline to buy Chilean goods.
Chile Week is an annual event that serves as a platform for exchanges and interaction between China and Chile on all fronts, as well as an excellent opportunity to strengthen ties between the two countries in agribusiness, seafood, mining, energy, and other strategic sectors.
The first leg of the 8th Chile Week was inaugurated in Shenzhen on October 14, followed by the Chengdu stop on October 15, and the Shanghai leg from Thursday to Friday.
After marathon negotiations, the G20 summit held in New Delhi, India, finally managed to reach a joint declaration on September 10, avoiding the embarrassment of a fruitless summit. The Finance and Central Bank Deputies Meeting and Foreign Ministers' Meeting hosted by India before the summit failed to produce a decent joint declaration, highlighting the significant differences in positions and opinions among the countries as well as the Indian government's struggle to deal with a divided world.
The joint declaration of this summit once again clarifies the positioning of the G20 as "the premier forum for international economic cooperation," and it states that "while the G20 is not the platform to resolve geopolitical and security issues, we acknowledge that these issues can have significant consequences for the global economy." G20 members have reached a consensus and invited the African Union (AU) to become a formal member of the mechanism. This can be seen as a "rectification" to counter the attempts by the US and the West to hijack the G20 summit agenda, as well as a response from developing countries and the Global South.
Despite the discontent in Ukraine and the difficulty of reaching consensus, Western diplomats were willing to "let through" the declaration's wording on the Russia-Ukraine conflict, probably believing it was a price worth paying. Aljazeera commented that "many Western countries, concerned about China's rising power, want New Delhi - a strategic counterweight to Beijing - to be able to claim this summit was a great success."
Inviting the AU to join the G20 is an important outcome of this summit. As the largest developing country and a member of the Global South, China was the first country to explicitly express its support for the AU's membership in the G20. Of course, India's efforts to include the AU may imply a calculation to win the support of African countries for India's bid for permanent membership in the UN Security Council.
Since taking over as the rotating chair of the G20 summit in December last year, the Modi administration has regarded the G20 summit as a "golden opportunity" to confirm India as a "global leading power." It also intends to turn this into a major diplomatic achievement domestically and use it as an opportunity for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to campaign for next year's general elections.
At the same time, India sees itself as a bridge between the "Global South" and the "Global West." The External Affairs Minister of India, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, said India has the potential to become "a bridge between the established and emerging orders."
However, India's dream of being a great power is idealistic, but the reality and setbacks it encounters are cruel. From the beginning, India has been under pressure from the US and the West, demanding condemnation of Russia at the G20 summit. New Delhi wants to maintain its special partnership with Moscow, while also trying to please the US and the West and act as the spokesperson for the "Global South." Meanwhile, the current administration wants to campaign for the BJP in next year's general elections. It is obvious that India expects too much from the G20 summit.
It is understandable that India wants to use the G20 summit stage to demonstrate its status as a major power and shape an international order that is favorable to itself.
However, the excessive political calculations and geopolitical considerations introduced into the G20 summit agenda have led to reduced expectations from relevant countries and have deprived the international community of an opportunity to concentrate on substantively addressing global challenges such as food and energy crises.
China and India have had good cooperation in many areas. However, in recent years, India has deliberately highlighted its differences with China in such areas as regional and global governance as well as sustainable development, with the intention of marginalizing China from the Global South community. New Delhi's practice of undermining developing countries' unity and cooperation and boosting itself by belittling other countries deserves vigilance. It is destined to be recorded in the history of the G20 New Delhi Summit and reflects the delusional side of India's dream of becoming a major power.
While EU's trade chief Valdis Dombrovskis urges China to do more to help "reduce the perception of risk," there are multiple signs that bilateral economic ties are embarking on fast-track development. Obviously, the European business community hopes EU's priority is to promote cooperation, rather than "de-risk" its relationship with China.
Amid global uncertainty, European and Chinese senior officials held high-level economic and trade talks on Monday. Despite some disagreements which are continually hyped up by some EU politicians, the high-level trade talks serve as a good opportunity for China and the EU to enhance communication and understanding.
Ahead of the dialogue, some statistics showed German companies continue to invest heavily in China despite calls from a number of German politicians to reduce their exposure in China. Investment in China as a share of Germany's overall investments increased to 16.4 percent in the first half of this year from 11.6 percent in 2022 and 5.1 percent in 2019, Reuters reported on Wednesday, citing data from the German Economic Institute, a private economic research institute in Germany.
Germany has been Europe's economic engine for decades. However, persistent inflation has pushed the German economy into a technical recession with data showing that the economy contracted in the first quarter of 2023. Overall, German direct investment outflows dropped sharply, to 63 billion euros ($67 billion) in the first half of 2023 from 104 billion euros in the first half of 2022.
At a time when Europe's largest economy is battling recession, the Chinese economy offers opportunities for German enterprises. That's why in spite of the so-called decoupling or de-risking rhetoric made by some Western officials, European investments continue to pour into China.
It is worth noting that there is a trend that the more open China becomes, the more vigilant the EU has become against China. It is true that economic and trade disputes exist in China-EU relations. The European Commission launched an investigation on September 13 into whether to impose additional tariffs to protect EU producers against cheaper Chinese electric vehicle (EV) imports it says are benefiting from the so-called state subsidies. Trade protectionism could be a double-edged sword for bilateral relations, as China is now an important overseas market for European enterprises.
Dombrovskis said in a speech he delivered at Tsinghua University in Beijing on Monday that Europe's economic ties with China are deep, but China "could do a lot to help reduce our perception of risk," according to a Reuters report. The report said the EU has long complained about "a lack of level playing field in China" and "the politicization of the business environment," which is mainly a Western narrative to sow discord and to pressure China to give foreign investors supernational treatment.
As a matter of fact, Europe is the party that adopts protectionist measures to disrupt economic and trade cooperation. China welcomes investment from European countries, but the ball is in the European's court to break down barriers over mutually-beneficial economic cooperation. The best way to help reduce European perception of risk is to put geopolitical thinking aside, stop adopting protectionist measures, fully consider the feelings of European companies, and resolve each other's concerns through dialogue and consultation.
Monday's dialogue, the first in-person meeting post-pandemic, has drawn wide attention. It's impossible to solve each and every problem overnight, especially amid the "decoupling" calls and the instigations by the US, but achievements will add up through frank dialogues and communications, pushing forward China-EU economic ties.
Monday's trade talks won't become the endpoint for both sides to seek common ground and solutions to resolve differences and problems. Future efforts should be made and the European side should take more responsibility, as it is the party bowing to trade protectionism. Whether it can "reduce the perception of risk" depends on Europe's attitude toward trade protectionism.
Travel heat continued to spread nationwide. The number of railway trips made by Chinese passengers is expected to hit 16.40 million on Monday, the fourth day of eight-day-long National Day holiday and the Mid-Autumn Festival.
On October 1, the national railway transported 16.29 million passengers, China Railway, the national railway operator, said on Monday. On October 2, it is estimated that the national railway will transport 16.40 million passengers, with 11,274 passenger trains in operation, including 906 additional trains.
The Yangtze River Delta region is expected to transfer 3.5 million passenger trips, which is about 28 percent more than the same period in 2019, according to media reports.
The 2023 Golden Week started from September 29 to October 6. The 8-day holiday is the longest public holiday of the year.
The Ministry of Culture and Tourism estimated there will be 896 million domestic tourists traveling during the Golden Week holiday, an increase of 86 percent compared to last year. Domestic tourism revenue is expected to reach 782.5 billion yuan ($107.2 billion), up by 138 percent on a yearly basis.
The popularity of scenic spots, urban leisure, rural tourism, and visiting relatives and friends has increased significantly, the ministry said.
Localities on Monday started to release travel statistics for the first three days.
Beijing's major scenic spots received 6.825 million tourists during the first three days of the holiday, up by 60.6 percent year-on-year. Tourism revenue reached 4.19 trillion yuan, an increase of 25.2 percent year-on-year.
A netizen posted a photo of the Badaling Great Wall in Beijing, saying that it is not exhausting at all climbing the Great Wall, when you only take two steps in three minutes.
Hangzhou, East China's Zhejiang Province, which is hosting the 19th Asian Games, has welcomed a record number of tourists during the holiday. During the first three days, the city welcomed a total of 4.7 million tourists.
Tickets of many popular scenic spots were sold out, with some sold out even before the holiday started.
Tickets for Mount Taishan in East China's Shandong Province were all sold out until Wednesday. Tickets can be booked 14 days in advance. The current daily limit is 80,000 tourists.
A netizen posted a photo of crowds queuing at the entrance of Mount Taishan at 4:30 in the morning, attempting to avoid huge tourist flows.
Mount Huangshan in East China's Anhui Province said in an announcement on Sunday that tickets for Monday have been sold out and advised tourists who failed to buy a ticket to avoid the site. Huangshan welcomed 29,753 tourists alone on Sunday.
A number of museums also announced that they have reached their daily limits.
Sichuan Museum in Chengdu, Southwest China's Sichuan Province, said its reservations have reached daily limit of 10,000 visitors until Wednesday.
The Emperor Qinshihuang's Mausoleum Site Museum in Northwest China's Shaanxi Province was also fully booked until Wednesday, with only few tickets left for Thursday and Friday.
A netizen who visited the museum joked: "Even the terracotta warriors would not have room to stand, if they were not put inside the protection window."
China launched its largest solid propellant rocket Lijian-1 on Wednesday, successfully sending 26 satellites into preset orbit and setting the country's new record for launching multiple satellites in one go. The satellites will mainly provide commercial remote sensing information services.
The Wednesday launch marks the second flight of Lijian-1, indicating the maturity of the solid propellant rocket's technology and the continuous improvement of its reliability, which can further boost the commercialization of China's launch vehicles.
In an exclusive interview with the Global Times, chief engineer assistant on Lijian-1 Shi Xiaoning said he was quite confident about the rocket as its reliability has been verified. But he was still concerned about the separation of satellites from the rocket.
"This time, there were more satellites to send and we not only needed to ensure that each of them could be successfully separated, but also ensure the accuracy of the satellite's orbit insertion, which was quite challenging," Shi said. "Therefore, we closely monitored data for each satellite separation, but in the end we accurately delivered each satellite to the designated orbit."
Lijian-1 made its maiden flight on July 27, 2022, successfully sending six satellites into their preset orbits. According to its developer, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the 2.65-meter-diameter and 30-meter-long new rocket is the largest of its kind in China.
It has achieved breakthroughs in six key technologies and utilized 13 domestic technologies for the first time, enriching China's spectrum of solid carrier rocket launch capabilities and making significant contributions to the technological transformation of China's carrier rocket industry.
Lijian-1 is a four-stage launch vehicle weighing 135 tons at launch with a thrust of 200 tons. It is capable of sending payloads of 1,500 kilograms into 500-kilometer Sun-synchronous orbits (SSO). Prior to that, the capacity of Chinese commercial space rockets in SSO was below 1,000 kilograms.
For the next step, the rocket developer Guangzhou Zhongke Aerospace Exploration Technology Co (CAS Space) will continue to enrich the spectrum of China's solid propellant launch vehicles. In addition to building a sea launch platform for Lijian-1, a new solid rocket with a diameter of 3.5 meters is also under development, the Global Times has learned.
The future of disease tracking is going down the drain — literally. Flushed with success over detecting coronavirus in wastewater, and even specific variants of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, researchers are now eyeing our collective poop to monitor a wide variety of health threats.
Before the pandemic, wastewater surveillance was a smaller field, primarily focused on testing for drugs or mapping microbial ecosystems. But these researchers were tracking specific health threats in specific places — opioids in parts of Arizona, polio in Israel — and hadn’t quite realized the potential for national or global public health. Then COVID-19 hit.
The pandemic triggered an “incredible acceleration” of wastewater science, says Adam Gushgari, an environmental engineer who before 2020 worked on testing wastewater for opioids. He now develops a range of wastewater surveillance projects for Eurofins Scientific, a global laboratory testing and research company headquartered in Luxembourg.
A subfield that was once a few handfuls of specialists has grown into more than enough scientists to pack a stadium, he says. And they come from a wide variety of fields — environmental science, analytical chemistry, microbiology, epidemiology and more — all collaborating to track the coronavirus, interpret the data and communicate results to the public. With other methods of monitoring COVID-19 on the decline, wastewater surveillance has become one of health experts’ primary sources for spotting new surges.
Hundreds of wastewater treatment plants across the United States are now part of COVID-19 testing programs, sending their data to the National Wastewater Surveillance System, or NWSS, a monitoring program launched in fall 2020 by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Hundreds more such testing programs have launched globally, as tracked by the COVIDPoops19 dashboard run by researchers at the University of California, Merced.
In the last year, wastewater scientists have started to consider what else could be tracked through this new infrastructure. They’re looking at seasonal diseases like the flu, recently emerging diseases like bird flu and mpox, formerly called monkeypox, as well as drug-resistant pathogens like the fungus Candida auris. The scientists are even considering how to identify entirely new threats.
Wastewater surveillance will have health impacts “far broader than COVID,” predicts Amy Kirby, a health scientist at the CDC who leads NWSS.
But there are challenges getting from promise to possible. So far, such sewage surveillance has been mostly a proof of concept, confirming data from other tracking systems. Experts are still determining how data from our poop can actually inform policy; that’s true even for COVID-19, now the poster child for this monitoring. And they face public officials wary of its value and questions over whether, now that COVID-19 health emergencies have ended, the pipeline of funding will be cut off.
This monitoring will hopefully become “one of the technologies that really evolves post-pandemic to be here to stay,” says Mariana Matus, cofounder of Biobot Analytics, a company based in Cambridge, Mass., that has tested sewage for the CDC and many other health agencies. But for that to happen, the technology needs continued buy-in from governments, research institutions and the public, Matus and other scientists say.
How wastewater testing works Wastewater-based epidemiology has a long history, tracing back at least to physician John Snow’s 1850s observations that cholera outbreaks in London were connected to contaminated water. In the 1920s and ’30s, scientists began to take samples from sewage and study them in the lab, learning to isolate specific pathogens that cause disease. These early researchers focused on diseases that spread through contaminated water, such as polio and typhoid.
Today, automated machines typically retrieve sewage samples. The machines used to collect waste beneath maintenance hole covers are “like R2-D2 in terms of size” or smaller, says Erin Driver, an environmental engineer at Arizona State University in Tempe who works on collection methods.
Driver can plug this machine, or a larger version used for sampling at wastewater treatment plants, into a water pipe and program it to pull a small amount of sewage into an empty bottle at regular intervals, say, once an hour for 24 hours. She and colleagues are developing smaller versions of the automated sampler that could be better suited for more targeted sampling.
What happens in the lab to that bottle of waste depends on what scientists are testing for. To test for opioids and other chemicals, scientists might filter large particles out of the sample with a vacuum system, extract the specific chemicals that they want to test, then run the results through a spectrometer, an instrument that measures chemical concentrations by analyzing the light the chemicals give off.
To determine levels of SARS-CoV-2 or another virus, a scientist might separate liquid waste from solid waste with a centrifuge, isolate viral genetic material, and then test the results with a PCR machine, similar to testing someone’s nose swab. Or, if scientists want to know which SARS-CoV-2 variants are present, they can put the material through a machine that identifies a variety of genetic sequences.
Would the coronavirus even show up in waste? In the panicked early days of the pandemic, an urgent basic question loomed. “Will this even work?” remembers Marlene Wolfe, an environmental microbiologist at Emory University in Atlanta. While polio is spread through fecal matter, there were early hints that the coronavirus mostly spreads through the air; scientists initially weren’t even sure that it would show up in sewage.
On the same day in 2020 that the San Francisco Bay Area went on lockdown, Wolfe and colleagues at Stanford University, where she was based at the time, got a grant to find out. The team was soon spending hours driving around the Bay Area to collect sewage samples, “navigating lockdown rules” and negotiating special permissions to use lab space, she says.
“We were anxiously waiting to see if our first samples would show a positive result for SARS-CoV-2,” Wolfe says.
Not only did the sewage samples test positive, Wolfe and her colleagues found that coronavirus levels in the Bay Area’s wastewater followed the same trends as reported cases, the team reported in December 2020 in Environmental Science & Technology. When case counts went up, more virus appeared in the sewage, and vice versa. Early projects in other parts of the country showed similar results. More than three years later, data on reported cases have become much less reliable. Fewer people are seeking out lab-based PCR tests in favor of easier-to-access at-home tests — with results often not reported. Wastewater trends have become the best proxy to provide early warnings of potential new COVID-19 surges, such as the increased spread this summer, to health officials and the public alike.
Opening the tracking floodgates In summer 2022, wastewater tracking got a new chance to prove itself. Mpox was rapidly spreading globally, including in the United States. But tests were limited, and the disease, which was spreading primarily through intimate contact between men, quickly drew social stigma, leading some people to hesitate in seeking medical care.
Within a few weeks of the start of the U.S. outbreak, Wolfe and her colleagues, as well as research teams at Biobot and other companies, had developed tests to identify mpox in sewage.
Just as scientists had seen with COVID-19, mpox trends in wastewater matched trends in official case numbers. In California, wastewater results even suggested that the disease may have spread farther than data from doctors’ offices suggested, Wolfe and collaborators reported in February in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Like COVID-19, mpox doesn’t transmit through the water, but sewage testing still picked up the virus. The early results from that summer outbreak convinced some health officials that wastewater technology could be used for many diseases, no matter how they spread, Matus says. Scientists are starting to find more and more infectious diseases that can be tracked in sewage. “Honestly, everything that we’ve tried so far has worked,” says Wolfe, who is now a principal investigator of WastewaterSCAN, a national sewage testing project led by researchers at Stanford and Emory. The project team currently tests samples for six different viruses and is working on other tests that it can send out to the more than 150 sites in its monitoring network.
Through an informal literature review of pathogens important for public health, scientists at Biobot found that previous research had identified 76 out of 80 of them in wastewater, stool or urine, suggesting that those pathogens could be monitored through sewage. The list ranges from the chicken pox virus to the microbes that cause sexually transmitted diseases like chlamydia to the tickborne bacteria that cause Lyme disease.
Finding focus With this much opportunity, the question on many researchers’ minds is not, “What can we test for?” but “What should we test for?”
In January, a report put out by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine came up with three criteria. The pathogen should threaten public health. It should be detectable in wastewater. And it should generate data that public health agencies can use to protect their communities.
Given all the threats and hints of what can be found in wastewater, the first two criteria don’t narrow the field too much. So for now, researchers are taking cues from state and local public health officials on which pathogens to prioritize.
Biobot is working on tests for common diseases like the flu, RSV, hepatitis C and gonorrhea. And the CDC has its eye on some of the same common pathogens, as well as strategies for tracking antimicrobial resistance, a threat that has increased during the pandemic as health systems have been under strain.
Even if they choose the perfect targets, though, researchers also have to figure out how to generate useful data. For now, that’s a sticking point.
How to use the data Tracking pathogens is one thing. But determining how the results correspond to actual numbers of sick people is another, even in the case of COVID-19, where researchers now have years of detailed data. As a result, many public health officials aren’t yet ready to make policy decisions based on poop data.
In New York City over the last three years, for example, the local government has poured more than $1 million into testing for COVID-19, mpox and polio in sewage from the city’s water treatment plants. But the city’s health department hasn’t been using the resulting data to inform local COVID-19 safety measures, so it’s unclear what’s being done with the data. Health officials are used to one swab per person, says Rachel Poretsky, a microbiologist at the University of Illinois Chicago. She also heads wastewater monitoring for the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois.
Public health training relies on identifying individual sick people and tracing how they became ill. But in wastewater surveillance, one data point could represent thousands of sick people — and the data come from the environment, rather than from hospitals and health clinics. What to do next when positive results turn up isn’t as obvious.
Numbers collected from the health care system always represent patients, so a spike indicates a surge in cases. In the case of sewage data, however, environmental factors like weather, local industries and the coming and going of tourists also can create “weird outliers” that resist easy interpretation, Poretsky says. For instance, a massive rainstorm might dilute samples, or chemical runoff from a factory might interfere with a research team’s analytical methods.
Data interpretation only gets more complicated when scientists begin testing wastewater for an increasing number of health threats. Every pathogen’s data need to be interpreted differently.
With coronavirus data, for example, wastewater tests consistently come back positive, so interpreting the data is all about looking for trends: Are viral concentrations going up or down? How does the amount of virus present compare with the past? A spike in a particular location might signal a surge in the community that hasn’t yet been picked up by the health care system. The community might respond by boosting health resources, such as opening vaccine clinics, handing out free masks and at-home tests, or adding staff to local hospital emergency departments.
Mpox, on the other hand, has infected far fewer people, and positive tests have been rare after last summer’s outbreaks ended. Now, researchers are simply watching to see whether the virus is present or absent in a given sewershed.
“It’s more about having an early warning,” Matus says. If a sewershed suddenly tests positive for mpox after negative results for the last few months, health officials might alert local doctors and community organizations to look out for anyone with symptoms, aiming to identify any cases and prevent a potential outbreak.
Another complicated pathogen is C. auris, a fungus that has developed resistance to common drugs. It can spread rapidly in health care settings — and be detected in sewage. Researchers from Utah and Nevada reported in February in Emerging Infectious Diseases that it was possible to track C. auris in the sewage from areas experiencing outbreaks.
If hospitals or health officials could identify the presence of this fungus early, that information could guide public health actions to curb outbreaks, says Alessandro Rossi, a microbiologist at the Utah Public Health Laboratory in Salt Lake City. But interpreting the warnings isn’t as clear-cut for C. auris as for viruses.
The fungus can grow in sewage after it leaves health care facilities, Rossi says. The pathogen has “the potential to replicate, form biofilms and colonize a sewershed.” In other words, C. auris can create its own data interference, potentially making wastewater results seem worse than they really are. Moving wastewater into the future Most current testing programs are reactive. By looking at health threats one at a time using specific PCR tests, the programs mostly confirm that pathogens we already are worrying about are getting people sick.
But some scientists, like Wim Meijer, envision a future in which wastewater monitoring wades into the unknown and alerts us to unusual disease outbreaks. The microbiologist, of the University College Dublin, heads Ireland’s wastewater surveillance program. Ideally, in this ahead-of-the-curve future, after detecting something alarming in sewage, his team could closely collaborate with health officials to study the pathogen and, if necessary, start combating the threat.
One idea for turning the tech proactive is to prepare for new health threats that we can see coming. For example, Meijer and his colleagues are interested in screening Ireland’s sewage for the H5N1 bird flu, but they are not yet doing this testing.
Another approach takes advantage of genetic testing technology to look at everything in our waste. Kartik Chandran, an environmental engineer at Columbia University who has mapped sewers’ microbial ecosystems with this technique, describes it as “trying to shine the light more broadly” rather than looking where the light is already shining brightest.
Such an approach might identify new pathogens before sick people start going to the doctor’s office, potentially leading to an earlier public health response. But with health officials still unsure of how best to use wastewater data, much more basic research is needed first. “People think wastewater surveillance is the answer to everything, and clearly that’s not true,” says Kirby, of the CDC, reflecting concerns from the state and local officials that she collaborates with at NWSS. Before diving ahead into proactive surveillance, Kirby and her colleagues are working to set up basic wastewater standards and protocols for health agencies. Priorities include evaluating how sewage trends correlate to cases for different pathogens and developing standards for how to use the data.
The wastewater surveillance field also needs to keep growing if the goal is to monitor and contribute to global health, with more sites contributing data and more scientists to analyze it. All of this work requires sustained funding.
The CDC’s program so far has been funded by COVID-era legislation and will run out of money in 2025. While wastewater surveillance is more cost-effective than other types of testing, it still requires a lot of resources. Washington’s state health department, for example, paid Biobot more than $500,000 for a one-year sewage testing contract, while the CDC has paid the company more than $23 million since 2020 for its work with NWSS.
For the last few years, wastewater surveillance has been a giant, messy group project. Scientists have collaborated across fields and locations, across private and public institutions, through Zoom calls and through poop samples shipped on ice. They’ve shown that waste might hold the key to a new way of tracking our collective health.
A lot of unanswered questions remain, and it could be some time before your local sewer can tell you exactly what disease risks you might be facing. But COVID-19 pushed thousands of experts to look into their toilets and start asking those questions. “Now, everyone’s a believer,” says Driver, of ASU. “Everyone’s doing the work.”
Japanese great tits (Parus minor) communicate using at least 10 different notes on their own and in combination. Researchers played different calls for Japanese great tits in a forest in Nagano, Japan, to see how the birds responded — an indication of what the call might mean. The birds responded differently to individual notes than they did when played the same note in combination with other notes. And, when researchers reversed the note order, the birds didn’t respond the same way. By itself, a note means one thing to great tits, but in combination, it means something different, the team argues March 8 in Nature Communications. Similarly, among humans, the order of words in a sentence, its compositional syntax, matters.
Some primates combine calls to convey different messages, but individual notes don’t carry unique meaning in these species. Great tits are the first nonhuman species shown to use compositional syntax, the researchers write. In this recording, researchers played three types of calls for Japanese great tits: First, a call with three notes — A, B, and C — which signals danger; second, a one-note call (D), which attracts mates; and finally, a combination call, ABC-D, which causes the birds to scan the skies for predators and fly to the source of the sound. Researchers played an ABC-D call for great tits, and then reversed an ABC-D call. Birds responded differently in each case.
