Foreign

US hegemonic mindset shows indifference to general trend of world development

Published

5 years ago

August 5, 2021

At present, the world is faced with a volatile situation and an evident rebound of the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, the daily number of newly confirmed COVID-19 cases in the US has exceeded the country’s peak in last summer and keeps rising sharply.

The US, however, is still focusing its energies on containing China rather than fighting the pandemic.

While continuously trying to manipulate the COVID-19 origin tracing through political means, the US government has frequently sent senior officials to neighboring countries of China, which, according to international media outlets, has been aimed at building a ring of encirclement against China in a bid to put pressure on China.

Such despicable maneuvers of the US have once again shown that the US turns a blind eye to the general trend of global development and still hasn’t figured out how to deal with a more confident and up-and-coming China that shoulders its responsibilities as a major country.

In the face of changes and a pandemic both unseen in a century, the world needs major countries to show their sense of responsibility and courage more than ever.

China has played the role of a responsible major country both in the battle against the COVID-19 pandemic and the efforts to boost global economic recovery, becoming a stabilizer in today’s world which is undergoing profound changes.

China has actively supported the work of the World Health Organization (WHO), promoted global anti-epidemic cooperation, and honored its promise to make its COVID-19 vaccine a global public good. The country has exported and donated massive anti-epidemic supplies and vaccines to foreign countries and become the world’s largest and most stable supplier of anti-epidemic materials.

After entering its new development stage, China has continued to open its door wider to the rest of the world and improve the business environment, creating new opportunities for enterprises from various countries, including the US.

US industrial and commercial circles generally look forward to developing healthy, stable, and mutually beneficial US-China economic and trade relations, oppose economic and trade decoupling of the two countries, and hope to deepen the pragmatic cooperation between the two sides in economy and trade, said Myron Brilliant, executive vice president and head of International Affairs at the US Chamber of Commerce.

In contrast, the US, where the number of COVID-19 cases has topped 35 million and the death toll from the pandemic has surpassed 620,000, has not only failed to contain the pandemic at home and caused the serious spread of the virus to its neighboring countries due to its inadequate response, but demonstrated its destructive power through a series of selfish misdeeds, including withdrawing from the WHO, hoarding COVID-19 vaccines, and intercepting anti-epidemic supplies of other countries.

Tracing the origins of the COVID-19 has a significant bearing on whether mankind can find effective ways to prevent similar pandemics in the future. The US, which has politicized the COVID-19 origin tracing and stigmatized China in total disregard of facts, has been in fact encumbering global fight against the pandemic.

As world economy has already been highly integrated, the US wages wars against China in such fields as trade and science and technology, attempting to contain China’s development by pursuing protectionism and unilateralism.

The stark contrast between itself and China hasn’t made the US reflect on and correct its domestic and foreign policies. Instead, the US has become increasingly anxious about China’s achievements. As a result, the country takes any opportunity to thwart China’s development and lets irrational thinking dominate its strategy toward China.

In the eyes of the US, a China that has become strong is the biggest threat to its hegemony. This wrong conception of China comes from its unbalanced mentality and distorted world view.

As the largest economy in the world, the US couldn’t accept China’s rising in all respects, and the difficult domestic problems it faces are fueling its impulse to demonize China.

At the same time, no country can confront alone the increasing global challenges, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, terrorism, and sluggish global economic recovery, which is a basic reality of the current era.

As pointed out by US magazine Foreign Affairs, “But a return to the pre-Trump status quo is not possible. The world—and the United States—have changed far too much. And although hailing the return of American hegemony might seem comforting to Americans, it reveals a degree of tone-deafness to how it sounds to the rest of the world.”

The US has always pinned its hope on the support of its allies in containing China. However, the fact is that its obstinate persistence in the wrong course has led to a decline in its influence. With fading appeal, the US can by no means rebuild its leadership through containing China.

In recent years, the US, taking the “American First” approach in pursuing economic development, has used tariffs as a weapon to contain the development of its trade partners and gone further and further down the wrong path of protectionism and unilateralism.

Meanwhile, the glory of American democracy is gone. At the beginning of this year, the US Capitol building was occupied by violent protesters, which became a typical event triggered by American democracy disorder.

Although the current US administration claimed that it would rebuild the country’s wounded democracy, it still hasn’t found effective solutions to deep-rooted problems like gun violence, outcry against racism, the gap between the rich and poor, social division, and political polarization.

After the US emerged as the sole global super power, it has reveled in being the sole super power, and is paying the price for abusing unchecked power at home and abroad, pointed out former US Ambassador to China Stapleton Roy.

China has enjoyed continuous and steady economic recovery and growth, suggested latest economic data, which showed that the Chinese economy has demonstrated extraordinary resilience, and that the country has become the largest trading partner of the European Union and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

No country wants to and can afford to decouple from China, a country with about 1.4 billion people. The international community understands well the consequence of US coercing other countries into choosing sides.

As German Chancellor Angela Merkel pointed out, without China, countries will never find solutions to issues in many fields.

Seeking cooperation with China and jointly coping with crises so as to create a better future for the world is what the international community expects from the US and what a major country is supposed to do.

As an old Chinese saying goes, “A just cause enjoys abundant support while an unjust cause finds little.” Recently, more than 300 political parties, social organizations and think tanks from over 100 countries and regions submitted a joint statement to the WHO Secretariat to oppose politicizing COVID-19 origin-tracing, which once again proved that the overwhelming aspiration of the people and global justice forces never change just because of the coercion from the US.

At present, the only right choice for the US is to face realities, correct its mentality, discard the anti-China strategy, return to rational and pragmatic measures, and find a way through dialogue for the two major countries which have different social systems, cultures, and are in different development stages to realize peaceful coexistence while concentrating efforts on solving domestic problems.

By Zhong Sheng, People’s Daily

Foreign

Shantou taps new growth momentum via AI token exports

Published

2 months ago

June 15, 2026

Our Reporter

By Li Gang, People’s Daily

As artificial intelligence (AI) accelerates the transformation of global industries, a new form of digital trade is emerging in the southern Chinese city of Shantou: exporting computing services measured not in physical goods, but in AI tokens.

In late April, Shantou, Guangdong province completed full-chain verification for what has become known as “token exports” — a model in which computing power remains within China while high-value AI services are delivered to overseas users. Within just one month, average daily token usage surged from 100 million to the tens-of-billions level.

The practical application of this model is already well underway.

Recently, when a user in Singapore activated an AI-powered toy and gave a simple command — “Tell me a fairy tale” — the spoken command traveled through the network directly to a dedicated overseas computing zone inside a computing center in Shantou.

Local deployed AI agents wrap up speech recognition in under one second and craft custom story content, firing the finished audio back to the Singapore-based toy device in as little as 0.1 seconds.

The user repeated the process multiple times, eventually listening to five stories in total. Approximately 100,000 tokens were consumed during the interaction and billed in real time at a rate of 2 yuan ($0.3) per one million tokens.

When payment arrived, a complete commercial cycle was achieved, marking the successful realization of Shantou’s “token export” model.

Tokens represent the smallest discrete calculation unit for large AI models to process information. They have become a key indicator of intelligent computing capacity and, increasingly, a new carrier of value in the digital economy.

Inside the China (Shantou) Pilot Zone for Economic and Cultural Cooperation with Overseas Chinese, token exports are already transforming the economics of electricity.

Today, overseas users across multiple countries and regions in Southeast Asia are accessing token services generated in Shantou.

“Data flows in from abroad and all processed outputs head back overseas, with zero compromise to end-user experience,” explained Cai Qichen, an engineer at the Shantou Branch of wireless carrier China Mobile. “Token costs have already been integrated into product service packages, making future usage more convenient.”

According to estimates from toy manufacturer SHOWMAC based in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, using Shantou’s computing services reduces costs by more than 30 percent compared with directly purchasing overseas computing resources.

Meanwhile, inside computing centers, turning electricity into AI tokens delivers dramatic value appreciation. A kilowatt-hour of electricity, which comes at a cost of roughly 0.5 yuan($0.07) , can be transformed through AI computing into tokens and then exported at a price of 11 yuan($1.6), representing a twenty-two-fold increase.

As one of eastern Guangdong’s major offshore wind power bases, Shantou has already connected 1.2 million kilowatts of installed capacity to China’s power grid.

The electricity itself does not need to cross borders. Computing power remains within China. What gets exported instead are high-value digital services, turning electricity into a form of hard currency for cross-border digital trade.

Ultra-low network latency forms the technical backbone making token exports feasible.

“More than half of China’s outbound bandwidth carried by international submarine cables lands in Shantou, and the city is also home to five undersea trunk cables linking destinations worldwide,” said Hong Zhebin, chief technology officer of the international submarine cable landing station operated by the Shantou branch of wireless carrier China Telecom.

“The latency between Shantou and Singapore is only 32.7 milliseconds, quicker than the blink of an eye,” Hong added.

Hong Yu with the Shantou Branch of China Mobile, added that Shantou’s overseas computing services offer stable response speeds, regulatory compliance, and substantial cost advantages.

“Our pricing is only 1/3 to 1/2 that of mainstream international platforms, while customer retention exceeds 70 percent,” Hong told People’s Daily.

Yet building a complete end-to-end system is only the starting point. Shantou is now attempting to transform itself from a transit city for digital infrastructure into an ecosystem hub.

Leading computing companies and developers are gathering rapidly. Pilot platforms have passed acceptance reviews. Commercial closed loops have already emerged in applications ranging from AI toys to intelligent manufacturing, with large-scale operations expected soon.

Shantou’s Chenghai district has long been known as the “toy capital of China.” As AI becomes increasingly integrated with the toy industry, the city has launched an AI toy innovation center and the Shantou AI Laboratory, striving to become the “AI toy capital of China.”

At the exhibition space of one local tech firm sits Amy, an AI desktop robot capable of fluid multilingual conversation.

“It is equipped with a multilingual intelligent voice interaction system capable of real-time recognition and conversation in dozens of languages,” said the company’s general manager Chen Ruifeng.

The technology has already been integrated into multiple AI toy products exported to countries including the United Kingdom, Russia, and Japan.

Shantou’s token export model allows AI toy manufacturers to access domestic large language models at costs far below those of overseas alternatives.

“The cost of using overseas AI models can be dozens of times higher than domestic models,” Chen said. The company’s AI toys currently run on Chinese large models including DeepSeek and Doubao.

“Token exports have significantly increased both product value-added and international competitiveness,” he said.

The Shantou branch of wireless carrier China Unicom, together with a Guangdong-based tech firm, has established dedicated lines connecting Shantou and Vietnam, delivering cross-border computing services to Aachen Sv, a Chinese-invested fiber-optic company operating in Vietnam.

Vietnamese users accessing large models such as DeepSeek and Qwen experience extremely low latency with zero packet loss. “In less than a month, more than a dozen companies have approached us for consultations,” an employee of the Guangdong-based tech firm said.

Meanwhile, the Guangdong branch of China Mobile has launched an OpenClaw intelligent agent framework, providing integrated AI service packages that allow traditional toys to complete intelligent upgrades in as little as 15 days.

From toys to textiles, cross-border e-commerce, and high-end manufacturing, tokens are increasingly becoming the digital fuel powering Shantou’s industrial upgrading.

Foreign

Sanxingdui Museum transforms ancient relics into interactive experiences

Published

3 months ago

May 31, 2026

Our Reporter

By Song Haoxin, People’s Daily

What if museum visitors could truly interact with cultural relics rather than merely observe them through glass displays? At the Sanxingdui Museum in southwest China’s Sichuan province, a specially designed interactive hall is revolutionizing cultural engagement.

Within this 1,300-square-meter space, nearly every exhibit invites touch, operation, or participation. Visitors immerse themselves in installations inspired by the ancient Shu civilization, blending education with entertainment.

By trying on replicas of headwear on bronze statues discovered in Sanxingdui Ruins, for example, visitors can not only take photos of themselves but also learn about the symbolic meanings behind different headpieces.

Guests can don replicas of bronze statue headwear from the Sanxingdui Ruins, learning their symbolic meanings while capturing photos. Augmented reality allows dancing alongside virtual Sanxingdui figures for social media sharing. A creation zone even enables “time travel” to experience ancient bronze-casting and construction techniques.

These innovations transform traditional museum visits, offering deeper cultural understanding through hands-on interaction. “This hall emerged from extensive brainstorming,” explained Zhu Yarong, deputy director of the management committee of the Sanxingdui Ruins site.

“We’re transitioning from passive relic viewing to interactive engagement, bridging the gap between audiences and history.”

Previously, museum experiences were largely one-directional with limited engagement. Visitors viewed relics through display cases, usually stopping mainly to take photographs, with relatively limited forms of engagement. By liberating artifacts from display cases into interactive settings, Sanxingdui is pioneering a shift from didactic presentation to open cultural dialogue.

Traditional exhibition spaces remain popular, while digital innovations attract growing interest. A VR project employs digital twin technology to recreate 1:1 scale excavation sites — complete with protective shelters and cabins — placing visitors at the archaeological forefront.

Another project, Heaven and Earth Echoes — Sanxingdui Panoramic Sound and Vision Digital Art Theater, features an interactive panoramic LED dome with a diameter of 20 meters and a resolution approaching 16K. The massive dome creates a deeply immersive atmosphere. By waving digital torches in their hands, visitors can trigger sacred birds to circle above them across the dome, experiencing the ancient Shu civilization through an interplay of sound and imagery.

“The digital technology made me feel as if I were racing across the Mamu River. That sense of traveling through time was incredible,” said Hao Yong, a tourist from southwest China’s Chongqing municipality who came specifically to experience a virtual reality program.

From passive observation to active participation, Sanxingdui Museum continues introducing new interactive experiences that transform cultural relics into living carriers of dialogue and engagement, helping keep the sparks of Chinese civilization alive for new generations.

Foreign

A living testimony about MKA: The Aondoakaa that I know Written By Brahms Tor-Ikuan

Published

3 months ago

May 19, 2026

milcah

My people of Benue State,

I am not speaking to you today as a politician. I am speaking as a brother whose family was held up by Chief Mike Kaase Aondoakaa, MKA, when we had no one else to hold onto.

My elder brother, Verem Ukaa-Ikuan, was not just my blood. He was a very dear and close friend to Chief MKA. When my brother fell ill and was diagnosed with liver damage caused by poisoning, MKA didn’t treat it as someone else’s problem. He took it on as his own.

He worked closely with Verem during his time as Attorney General of the Federation, and when the sickness came, he moved immediately. Searches were conducted, and Apollo Hospital in India was earmarked for a liver transplant. Every travel arrangement was made personally by Chief MKA.

But we hit a wall. Verem was too weak to fly a long commercial flight. Only an air ambulance could get him to India alive. At that time, there was only one functional air ambulance in the entire country, owned by Julius Berger. It was completely out of reach for even the most high-profile citizens.

Chief MKA went all out. He did not give excuses. He did not delay. He used every connection and every ounce of influence he had to secure that air ambulance for my brother.

On the day it was secured, Barr. Terna Yaji, his Senior Special Assistant, called me a few minutes after 6pm. He told us to prepare Verem for departure and take him to Makurdi airport very early the following morning. I informed him, my brother passed on at exactly 6 o’clock a few minutes ago. I told Barr. Terna Yaji, and I saw a devastated MKA.

During the burial, Chief MKA was out of the country on national assignment. He was pained that he could not be there physically. His entire team, led by the late Onov Tyuulugh, represented him fully. And his message to us at the burial has never left me:

“If death were law, as the Attorney General, a law would have been made no matter what to ensure Verem will just not die but live forever.”

That is who Mike Kaase Aondoakaa is when nobody is watching. He does not abandon his people. He does not forget. He stood with our family then, and he has stood with us till date.

Now he is asking for the chance to govern Benue State.

Benue needs a governor with a heart like that. A governor who fights for you even when there’s no political gain. A governor who sees you as family, not as a vote.

I am standing with Chief Mike Kaase Aondoakaa for Governor of Benue State.
For compassion that moves to action.
For loyalty that does not fade.
For leadership that proves itself in the darkest hour.

Join me. Let us give Benue a leader who has already shown what he will do for us.

God bless Chief Mike Kaase Aondoakaa.
God bless Benue State.

Brahms Tor-Ikuan, a beneficiary of MKA’s benevolence writes from Makurdi