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Case Study: China

The Chinese government introduced the ‘One Child Policy’ in 1979. The aim of this policy was to attempt to control population growth. The policy limited couples to one child. Under this policy couples have to gain permission from family planning officials for each birth.

If families followed this policy they received free education, health care, pensions and family benefits. These are taken away if the couple have more than one child.

The benefits of this policy are that the growth rate of China’s population has declined. Without the policy it is estimated that there would be an extra 320 million more people in a country whose population is estimated to be 1.3 billion.

The scheme has caused a number of problems in China. This is particularly the case for hundreds of thousands of young females. Many thousands of young girls have been abandoned by their parents as the result of the one child policy. Many parents in China prefer to have a boy to carry on the family name. As a result large numbers of girls have either ended up in orphanages, homeless or in some cases killed. Also, 90% of foetuses aborted in China are female.

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The Economy of China: A Case Study on the Second-largest Economy in the World

Harshit Verma

The world has about 775 crore people living on its surface. If you look at the population graph, you will notice a straight line facing the sky. The rate at which the population is growing makes a steep graph.

The world is divided into continents and countries. Most people live in china. China is the most populous country in the world. In fact, China has been the most populous for a long time now. When we write ‘for a long time, it means centuries. The first census showed the Chinese population at 583 million and by the fifth census, it had risen to double at 1.2 billion. The Chinese population now has crossed a mark of 1.4 billion people. It also covers most geographical time zones after that of Russia. This means that the country is not just big in population but also huge in the area.

A big country like that of China needs a lot of products and services. They need a lot of goods to meet the needs of people residing in that country. Some of the goods can be imported and the rest have to be produced in the home country. In fact, most goods that they can’t import or the goods that are not economical to import, they have to manufacture by themselves.

Not to mention that China is one of the cheapest labour countries out there. In this article, we are gonna cover the economy of this country. We will discuss what comprises the most in this economy and what are its driving factors. Read on to know more about the second-biggest economy in the world.

China: The Most Populous Country China: The Culture China: The Economy The Reasons for Economic Growth in China What can go wrong with China? FAQ

China: The Most Populous Country

China or the Republic of China (official name) is a country in East Asia. As we mentioned earlier it is the biggest, in terms of population. It contains the largest number of people than any country. This country also spans and covers most geographical time zones after Russia.

The country has 23 provinces, 4 municipalities, 5 autonomous regions and 2 SARs (Special administrative regions). The capital of China is Beijing . The largest city in China, which is also the financial centre, is Shanghai . In terms of technological and innovative approaches, the city of Shenzhen tops the chart in this country.

China at its inception emerged as one of the very first civilisations. It was the fertile land basin of a river named Yellow that marked its beginning. After the civilization boom, China also emerged as one of the first economically strong countries. Their time as a strong economic power also remained for almost most of the two millennia (thousand years).

Also, the political system of this country is based on monarchies. It has been this way for almost a thousand years (Millenia). This means that for those many years, China’s political system was controlled by rulers and then their heirs and then their heirs. This is what we call an absolute hereditary monarchy. This system of political control began from the ‘ Xia dynasty in about the 21st Century BCE. Moreover, since then the country of China has seen multiple expansions, fractions and re-unities.

China: The Culture

The culture of such a big country is expected to be special and unique. Since very ancient times, the culture has been heavily influenced by the philosophy of Confucianism. Which is a tenet in philosophy. This is also known as a truism and inspires people to live a humanistic, rationalistic and very simple life.

The culture there in the past also offered examinations, tests. Those exams were to be passed by a person to get a highly prestigious and better status in society. This is one of the reasons why China has a long history of writing and calligraphy. In fact, calligraphy, writing poetry and painting are more celebrated than other forms of art like dancing or dramatics. Its culture also inspires people to be diving deep into the lanes of history to know about their past. This also invokes the trait of an inward-looking behaviour of Chinese people in the past, this ran at a national level of thought process.

China: The Economy

It is an aforementioned fact that China is big and has a lot of people. It has to cater to about 1.4 billion people for its sustenance. This really marks that the economy must be big and effective. However, this is not as easy as it seems.

Even though China is the largest in terms of population, we cannot really say that it is the biggest when it comes to the economy. It is second in terms of magnitude just after the United States . It is important to note that economies are weighed in terms of GDPs. GDP stands for the gross domestic product. That is in simpler terms, the sum total of all the valuable products or services that a country produces in a financial year.

According to the GDPs, in the pandemic year 2020, China is seen to have the second-largest GDP in the world. Here are the top five countries according to the GDP ranks.

When we talk in terms of GDP, we measure it in dollars. We can also notice that China may be the second largest in GDP but it is the largest in terms of PPP.

PPP stands for purchasing power parity. PPP is a popular macroeconomic analysis metric that is used to compare economic productivity and standards of living between countries in purchasing power. The theory follows a theory known as the “Basket of goods” for comparing the purchasing power of different countries.

China tops the list when we see through the lens of purchasing power parity. This shows us the fact that even if the Chinese economy is the second-largest, the citizens of China are better in purchasing power and economic productivity than that most countries. Please note that PPP here does not mean a paycheck protection program , made by the CARES Act.

China’s growth rate (In annual terms) is displacing that of the United States of America. Many think that China’s rate will overtake the United States in terms of Nominal GDP too in the upcoming years. Don’t get scared of the terminology “Nominal GDP”. Nominal GDP is a form of GDP that is in the current rates, without accounting for the effect of inflation on the GDP. So, this is a GDP at the current market price.

There are many reasons for china that made this country get this spot of a top tier pacer in the economic race. We will discuss more in a second. But let us get some overview, China has progressively opened its economy with the whole world, continuously for more than forty years. This reveals a good reason why its economy is on a paced growth and why the standards of people there have been improving vastly.

The Chinese government has gradually phased out collectivised agriculture too. It means the type of agriculture in which multiple farmers can hold land and share workloads of the agriculture activity. Thus, it helps in sharing Profits and losses among farmers and makes farming a little more smooth sailing.

Collectivised farming has also boosted flexibility for market prices and increased the autonomy of businesses. When a country’s agriculture is doing well, it can then pay more attention to the industrial sector and thus China’s domestic and foreign trade magnitudes are also rising at a good rate of growth.

The Reasons for Economic Growth in China

By far we have discussed China and its economy. We have seen that it is a rapidly growing economy with such a behemoth sort of population. This might interest you in how this big country is fostering growth with such a huge number of people and how it is able to raise citizens' standard of living. This is the part of the article where we discuss the reasons for such growth in China. How it is becoming, what it is becoming and what are the main drivers of growth for this economy.

The Manufacturing Hub of the world

China, if you don’t know, is the manufacturing hub of the world. If you are using a product that is sold by a brand or even a local product then it is a good possibility that the product would be manufactured in China.

Yes, look around yourself. Your favourite Apple products are assembled in china, your favourite Converse or Nike sneakers are made in China, and most things that you can think of are manufactured in China. Do you ask for a reason? The reason is obviously cheap labour.

With such a big population, China has some special benefits over any other country in the world. It can provide a good basis for cheap labour. For that one reason, it has emerged as the global capital of manufacturing items.

Besides its large hands on the textile industry, the economy also is big on machinery, processing of food items, Cement for infrastructure, consumer goods and many many more fields.

Moreover, China is not a huge hub only for domestic manufacturing plants, it also caters to the needs of foreign companies to come and manufacture there or assemble items. Famous examples may include Apple. Apple designs their products in California and they are assembled in China. Adding to this, The Chinese software and IT industry grew by over 14.2% from 2018 to 2019, generating revenue of approximately $940 billion.

Heavy Focus on Industries

Another reason which makes this country a big economy is its industries. As any normal developing country, China knows that for growing its economy, it needs to pay attention to the industries that are set in its territory. So they focus extensively on that.

China is a super friendly nation when it comes to industries wanting to set up manufacturing plants there. Results of which are the fact that China is the world's biggest steel manufacturer . This shows a strong will of steel.

The Chinese government began opening up the economy for the whole world in 1978. Which is also known as globalisation. So it began its reforms for economic development under the leader named Deng Xiaoping. That was a turning point in the history of this big country, after the reforms it went on to become the fastest-growing major country globally.

According to a report, the growth rates were averaging 10% over 30 years. China also has three of the ten largest stock exchanges in India. They are located in prime cities like Shanghai, Hong Kong and Shenzhen. They are big in terms of market capitalisation and trading volume. All these factors establish that China is an industrial hub.

The Medicines industry

Abbreviated as Pharmaceutical industry. China has one of the best, state of the art medical supply chains. The growth trends in this industry copy the whole of China. It grows almost as China grows, which is rapid. China had the second-largest pharmaceutical market in the world as of 2017.

The pharmaceutical industry follows the same structure as most of the world. They have manufacturers at the top and then middlemen or distributors and then retail stores communicate directly to the general public. However, the global share of China's medicines is seen less. With a big population, it is forecasted to grow even more and is still one of the biggest in terms of scale.

The Population’s Demand-pull

As mentioned earlier, China is very populous. Which makes it a generator of huge demands. Brands all over the world try to target this demand to get some share of this market. So this has become one of the most important drivers of economic growth for that country. It is a consumer paradise with all types of demands for goods, be it normal or luxury items.

China has some of the biggest shopping malls in the world. They, not to mention, stimulate growth in a good direction. The retail lines of China contributed about 1.8 trillion dollars to the Gross domestic product.

China is also the home to the E-Commerce giant Alibaba. It is responsible for giving a lasting boost to the already big consumerism in China. A report said that Alibaba on a shopping festival achieved something sort of called a miraculous sale. It touched a sales record of 540.3 billion Yuan (it is about 84.5 billion dollars), which is a huge record for such a huge country. This gave a much-needed boost to the consumer sector. Even today it is one of the benchmarks for sales all over the world.

Tourism and travel is also big sector in China. It reportedly contributed 992 billion dollars to the Chinese GDP in the year 2019. Other sectors that are the prime demand pullers are transportation, construction and estate.

What can go wrong with China?

China, however big it may seem from the outside, can go weak from the inside. There can be many premises on which the country is not doing well. For example, China uses a lot of Non-renewable resources to produce power, electricity. The population needs it and the shift in this sector seems impossible. This marks the country as a huge member of the world's pollution and a big emitter of greenhouse gases.

As we discussed previously, the China government is a monarch at its core. This makes enough space for corruption. The government is however trying to curb corruption and make the country more flexible and friendly for the world’s businesses. This can take time and if not done correctly can leave a bad impression on the image of China. This problem is not just one faced. It is a multifaceted problem, as it can lead to fewer industries in China and thus low employment rates in the country.

Speaking of that, China also faces the problem of unemployment . It needs to place people with enough skillsets for employment. Which is also a big deal in a country as big as China.

In addition to the political and the internal housing issue, one more issue lurks there. The recent downward trend of the labour industry. This means that China is slowly losing the crown of the cheapest labour in the world . The reason for this can be inflation and the digitalised working models and economy. China is losing its position to other cheap labour countries like Pakistan, India etcetera. For India, it is good news but if China has to retain its manufacturing position then it needs to be more ready for this changing technological world.

As we discussed above, China is a big country with a huge population and big demands. It is important to note that it, obviously, also has some cracks. Some cracks in the economy that are not severe but if not cured could sink a big ship.

The recent Evergrande fail was one such big example of how things can go wrong. China has seen real estate bubbles in its history too. The previous bubble burst and hit the whole world’s market, more recently the Evergrande crisis made the investors scared of investing in China.

It is a good point to say that “With great powers comes great responsibilities”. China has a load of the most people on the globe, which can be overwhelming to the government. In these times of pandemic, the future remains random and uncertain.

The fact that the Covid 19 pandemic originated from the heart of China also is affecting the Chinese economy in the wrong manner. It has defamed China in some sense. This is the reason that some industries are looking to shift base to developing countries like India.

For China, it remains a tough call to tackle a pandemic and the future of its economy. Again, it is not supposed to be easy to handle such a big and populous economy.

Is China a developed country?

Yes, China is one of the largest developing countries in the world.

What is China's GDP?

The gross domestic product (GDP) of China is around 14.87 trillion U.S. dollars as of 2020.

Is China the fastest growing economy?

Yes, China ranks second in the world's fastest-growing economy.

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How Google took on China—and lost

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Google's first foray into Chinese markets was a short-lived experiment. Google China’s search engine was launched in 2006 and abruptly pulled from mainland China in 2010 amid a major hack of the company and disputes over censorship of search results. But in August 2018, the investigative journalism website The Intercept reported that the company was working on a secret prototype of a new, censored Chinese search engine, called Project Dragonfly. Amid a furor from human rights activists and some Google employees, US Vice President Mike Pence called on the company to kill Dragonfly, saying it would “strengthen Communist Party censorship and compromise the privacy of Chinese customers.” In mid-December, The Intercept reported that Google had suspended its development efforts in response to complaints from the company's own privacy team, who learned about the project from the investigative website's reporting.

Observers talk as if the decision about whether to reenter the world’s largest market is up to Google: will it compromise its principles and censor search the way China wants? This misses the point—this time the Chinese government will make the decisions.

Google and China have been locked in an awkward tango for over a decade, constantly grappling over who leads and who follows. Charting that dance over the years reveals major shifts in China’s relationship with Google and all of Silicon Valley. To understand whether China will let Google back in, we must understand how Google and China got here, what incentives each party faces—and how artificial intelligence might have both of them dancing to a new tune.  

The right thing to do?

When www.google.cn launched in 2006, the company had gone public only two years before. The iPhone did not yet exist, nor did any Android-based smartphones. Google was about one-fifth as large and valuable as it is today, and the Chinese internet was seen as a backwater of knockoff products that were devoid of innovation. Google’s Chinese search engine represented the most controversial experiment to date in internet diplomacy. To get into China, the young company that had defined itself by the motto “Don’t be evil” agreed to censor the search results shown to Chinese users.

Central to that decision by Google leadership was a bet that by serving the market—even with a censored product—they could broaden the horizons of Chinese users and nudge the Chinese internet toward greater openness.

At first, Google appeared to be succeeding in that mission. When Chinese users searched for censored content on google.cn, they saw a notice that some results had been removed. That public acknowledgment of internet censorship was a first among Chinese search engines, and it wasn’t popular with regulators.

“The Chinese government hated it,” says Kaiser Kuo, former head of international communications for Baidu. “They compared it to coming to my house for dinner and saying, ‘I will agree to eat the food, but I don’t like it.’” Google hadn’t asked the government for permission before implementing the notice but wasn’t ordered to remove it. The company’s global prestige and technical expertise gave it leverage. China might be a promising market, but it was still dependent on Silicon Valley for talent, funding, and knowledge. Google wanted to be in China, the thinking went, but China needed Google.

Google’s censorship disclaimer was a modest victory for transparency. Baidu and other search engines in China soon followed suit. Over the next four years, Google China fought skirmishes on multiple fronts: with the Chinese government over content restrictions, with local competitor Baidu over the quality of search results, and with its own corporate leadership in Mountain View, California, over the freedom to adapt global products for local needs. By late 2009, Google controlled more than a third of the Chinese search market—a respectable share but well below Baidu’s 58%, according to data from Analysys International.

The Chinese government cracked down on political speech in 2013, imprisoning critics and instituting new laws against “spreading rumors” online—a one-two punch that suffocated political discussion.

In the end, though, it wasn’t censorship or competition that drove Google out of China. It was a far-­reaching hacking attack known as Operation Aurora that targeted everything from Google’s intellectual property to the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. The attack, which Google said came from within China, pushed company leadership over the edge. On January 12, 2010, Google announced, “We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all.”

The sudden reversal blindsided Chinese officials. Most Chinese internet users could go about their online lives with few reminders of government controls, but the Google announcement shoved cyberattacks and censorship into the spotlight. The world’s top internet company and the government of the most populous country were now engaged in a public showdown.

“[Chinese officials] were really on their back foot, and it looked like they might cave and make some kind of accommodation,” says Kuo. “All of these people who apparently did not give much of a damn about internet censorship before were really angry about it. The whole internet was abuzz with this.”

But officials refused to cede ground. “China welcomes international Internet businesses developing services in China according to the law,” a foreign ministry spokeswoman told Reuters at the time. Government control of information was—and remains—central to Chinese Communist Party doctrine. Six months earlier, following riots in Xinjiang, the government had blocked Facebook, Twitter, and Google’s YouTube in one fell swoop, fortifying the “Great Firewall.” The government was making a bet: China and its technology sector did not need Google search to succeed.

Google soon abandoned google.cn, retreating to a Hong Kong–based search engine. In response, the Chinese government decided not to fully block services like Gmail and Google Maps, and for a while it allowed sporadic access from the mainland to the Hong Kong search engine too. The two sides settled into a tense stalemate.

Google’s leaders seemed prepared to wait it out. “I personally believe that you cannot build a modern knowledge society with that kind of [censorship],” Google chairman Eric Schmidt told Foreign Policy in 2012. “In a long enough time period, do I think that this kind of regime approach will end? I think absolutely.”

Role reversal

But instead of languishing under censorship, the Chinese internet sector boomed. Between 2010 and 2015, there was an explosion of new products and companies. Xiaomi, a hardware maker now worth over $40 billion, was founded in April 2010. A month earlier Meituan, a Groupon clone that turned into a juggernaut of online-to-offline services, was born; it went public in September 2018 and is now worth about $35 billion. Didi, the ride-­hailing company that drove Uber out of China and is now challenging it in international markets, was founded in 2012. Chinese engineers and entrepreneurs returning from Silicon Valley, including many former Googlers, were crucial to this dynamism, bringing world-class technical and entrepreneurial chops to markets insulated from their former employers in the US. Older companies like Baidu and Alibaba also grew quickly during these years.

In 2017, the government launched a new crackdown on virtual private networks, software widely used for circumventing censorship.

The Chinese government played contradictory roles in this process. It cracked down on political speech in 2013, imprisoning critics and instituting new laws against “spreading rumors” online—a one-two punch that largely suffocated political discussion on China’s once-raucous social-media sites. Yet it also launched a high-profile campaign promoting “mass entrepreneurship and mass innovation.” Government-funded startup incubators spread across the country, as did government-backed venture capital.

That confluence of forces brought results. Services like Meituan flourished. So did Tencent’s super-app WeChat, a “digital Swiss Army knife” that combines aspects of WhatsApp, PayPal, and dozens of other apps from the West. E-commerce behemoth Alibaba went public on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2014, selling $25 billion worth of shares—still the most valuable IPO in history.

Amidst this home-grown success, the Chinese government decided to break the uneasy truce with Google. In mid-2014, a few months before Alibaba’s IPO, the government blocked virtually all Google services in China, including many considered essential for international business, such as Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Scholar. “It took us by surprise, as we felt Google was one of those valuable properties [that they couldn’t afford to block],” says Charlie Smith, the pseudonymous cofounder of GreatFire, an organization that tracks and circumvents Chinese internet controls.

The Chinese government had pulled off an unexpected hat trick: locking out the Silicon Valley giants, censoring political speech, and still cultivating an internet that was controllable, profitable, and innovative.

AlphaGo your own way

With the Chinese internet blossoming and the government not backing down, Google began to search for ways back into China. It tried out less politically sensitive products—an “everything but search” strategy—but with mixed success.

In 2015, rumors swirled that Google was close to bringing its Google Play app store back to China, pending Chinese government approval—but the promised app store never materialized. This was followed by a partnership with Mobvoi, a Chinese smart-watch maker founded by an ex-Google employee, to make voice search available on Android Wear in China. Google later invested in Mobvoi, its first direct investment in China since 2010.

In March 2017, there were reports that authorities would allow Google Scholar back in. They didn’t. Reports that Google would launch a mobile-app store in China together with NetEase, a Chinese company, similarly came to naught, though Google was permitted to relaunch its smartphone translation app.

Then, in May 2017, a showdown between AlphaGo, the Go-playing program built by Google sibling company DeepMind, and Ke Jie, the world’s number one human player, was allowed to take place in Wuzhen, a tourist town outside Shanghai. AlphaGo won all three games in the match—a result that the government had perhaps foreseen. Live-streaming of the match within China was forbidden, and not only in the form of video: as the Guardian put it, “outlets were banned from covering the match live in any way, including text commentary, social media, or push notifications.” DeepMind broadcast the match outside China.

During this same period, Chinese censors quietly rolled back some of the openings that Google’s earlier China operations had catalyzed. In 2016, Chinese search engines began removing the censorship disclaimers that Google had pioneered. In 2017, the government launched a new crackdown on virtual private networks (VPNs), software widely used for circumventing censorship. Meanwhile, Chinese authorities began rolling out extensive AI-powered surveillance technologies across the country, constructing what some called a “21st-century police state” in the western region of Xinjiang, home to the country’s Muslim Uighurs.

Despite the retrograde climate, Google capped off 2017 with a major announcement: the launch of a new AI research center in Beijing. Google Cloud’s Chinese-born chief scientist, Fei-Fei Li, would oversee the new center. “The science of AI has no borders,” she wrote in the announcement of the center’s launch. “Neither do its benefits.” (Li left Google in September 2018 and returned to Stanford University, where she is a professor.)

If the research center was a public symbol of Google’s continued efforts to gain a foothold in China, Google was also working quietly to accommodate Chinese government restrictions. Dragonfly, the censored- search-engine prototype, which has been demonstrated for Chinese officials, blacklists key search terms; it would be operated as part of a joint venture with an unnamed Chinese partner. The documents The Intercept obtained said the app would still tell users when results had been censored.

Other aspects of the project are particularly troubling. Prototypes of the app reportedly link users’ searches to their mobile-phone number, opening the door to greater surveillance and possibly arrest if people search for banned material.

In a speech to the Dragonfly team, later leaked by The Intercept, Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search, explained Google’s aims. China, he said, is “arguably the most interesting market in the world today.” Google was not just trying to make money by doing business in China, he said, but was after something bigger. “We need to understand what is happening there in order to inspire us,” he said. “China will teach us things that we don’t know.”

In early December, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told a Congressional committee that "right now we have no plans to launch in China," though he would not rule out future plans. The question is, if Google wants to come back to China, does China want to let it in?

China’s calculus

To answer that question, try thinking like an advisor to President Xi Jinping.

Bringing Google search back certainly has upsides. China’s growing number of knowledge workers need access to global news and research, and Baidu is notoriously bad at turning up relevant results from outside China. Google could serve as a valuable partner to Chinese companies looking to expand internationally, as it has demonstrated in a patent-sharing partnership with Tencent and a $550 million investment in e-commerce giant JD. Google’s reentry would also help legitimize the Communist Party’s approach to internet governance, a signal that China is an indispensable market—and an open one—as long as you “play by the rules.”

Google’s exit in 2010 marked a major loss of face for the Chinese government. If leaders give the green light to Project Dragonfly, they run that risk again.

But from the Chinese government’s perspective, these potential upsides are marginal. Chinese citizens who need to access the global internet can still usually do so through VPNs (though it is getting harder). Google doesn’t need to have a business in China to help Chinese internet giants gain business abroad. And the giants of Silicon Valley have already ceased their public criticism of Chinese internet censorship, and instead extol the country’s dynamism and innovation.

By contrast, the political risks of permitting Google to return loom large to Xi and his inner circle. Hostility toward both China and Silicon Valley is high and rising in American political circles. A return to China would put Google in a political pressure cooker. What if that pressure—via antitrust action or new legislation—effectively forced the company to choose between the American and Chinese markets? Google’s sudden exit in 2010 marked a major loss of face for the Chinese government in front of its own citizens. If Chinese leaders give the green light to Project Dragonfly, they run the risk of that happening again.

A savvy advisor would be likely to think that these risks—to Xi, to the Communist Party, and to his or her own career—outweighed the modest gains to be had from allowing Google’s return. The Chinese government oversees a technology sector that is profitable, innovative, and driven largely by domestic companies—an enviable position to be in. Allowing Google back in would only diminish its leverage. Better, then, to stick with the status quo: dangle the prospect of full market access while throwing Silicon Valley companies an occasional bone by permitting peripheral services like translation.

Google’s gamble

Google does have one factor in its favor. If it first entered China during the days of desktop internet, and departed at the dawn of the mobile internet, it is now trying to reenter in the era of AI. The Chinese government places high hopes on AI as an all-purpose tool for economic activity, military power, and social governance, including surveillance. And Google and its Alphabet sibling DeepMind are the global leaders in corporate AI research.

This is probably why Google has held publicity stunts like the AlphaGo match and an AI-powered “Guess the Sketch” game on WeChat, as well as taking more substantive steps like establishing the Beijing AI lab and promoting Chinese use of TensorFlow, an artificial-intelligence software library developed by the Google Brain team. Taken together, these efforts constitute a sort of artificial-intelligence lobbying strategy designed to sway the Chinese leadership.

This pitch, however, faces problems on at least three battlegrounds: Beijing; Washington, DC; and Mountain View, California.

Chinese leaders have good reason to feel they’re already getting the best of both worlds. They can take advantage of software development tools like TensorFlow and they still have a prestigious Google research lab to train Chinese AI researchers, all without granting Google market access.

In Washington, meanwhile, American security officials are annoyed that Google is actively courting a geopolitical rival while refusing to work with the Pentagon on AI projects because its employees object to having their work used for military ends.

Those employees are the key to the third battleground. They’ve demonstrated the ability to mobilize quickly and effectively, as with the protests against US defense contracts and a walkout last November over how the company has dealt with sexual harassment. In late November more than 600 Googlers signed an open letter demanding that the company drop the Dragonfly project, writing, “We object to technologies that aid the powerful in oppressing the vulnerable.” Daunting as these challenges sound—and high as the costs of pursuing the Chinese market may be—they haven’t entirely deterred Google’s top brass. Though the development of Dragonfly appears to have, at the very least, paused, the wealth and dynamism that make China so attractive to Google also mean the decision of whether or not to do business there is no longer the company’s to make.

“I know people in Silicon Valley are really smart, and they’re really successful because they can overcome any problem they face,” says Bill Bishop, a digital-media entrepreneur with experience in both markets. “I don’t think they’ve ever faced a problem like the Chinese Communist Party.”

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China case study, situation analysis of the effect of and response to covid-19 in asia.

This case study provides a snapshot of the educational responses and effects of COVID-19 in China and is part of a comprehensive assessment of the effects of and responses to COVID-19 on the Education Sector in Asia.

The case study considers the direct effects of school closures and reopening and identifies its impact on learners, their families as well as on the overall education system. The objectives of the analysis are:

• to assess and estimate the various impacts of the COVID-19 epidemic on the education sector and stakeholders in China;
• to examine policy and financial implications on progress towards achieving SDG 4-Education 2030; and
• to identify examples of promising responses and strategies in education and associated social sectors, which can be shared with other countries. Finally, the case study presents lessons learned and recommendations for building back better and increasing the resilience of the education system to future shocks.

This case study includes an in-depth thematic deep dive looking at the implementation of inclusive and equitable distance education during COVID-19.

This case study is based on a comprehensive desk-review of qualitative and quantitative evidence and on key informant interviews with relevant education officials, local authorities and teachers.

The case study is a collaboration between UNESCO, UNICEF ROSA and UNICEF EAPRO partly funded by the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) under the UNESCO-UNICEF-World Bank joint project on Global and Regional Response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Nearly half of all children in East Asia and Pacific are deprived of good nutrition due to inequitable food systems, poor feeding practices, and climate crises – UNICEF

Climate Action for the Last Mile: Reaching the Most Vulnerable Children

UNICEF welcomes Ms. Hannah Nguyen as a new member of the UNICEF International Council in support of girls’ empowerment

Sweltering heat across East Asia and the Pacific puts children’s lives at risk - UNICEF

Growing Populations, Changing Landscapes: Studies from India, China, and the United States (2001)

Chapter: chinese case studies: an introduction, chinese case studies: an introduction.

Zhao Shidong Institute of Geographic Science and Natural Resources, Chinese Academy of Sciences

With the rapid development of China's economy over the last decades, its land use patterns have changed significantly, especially since the central government's adoption of socioeconomic reform policies, beginning in the late 1970s. Across China, the speed and scale of land use change have varied because of the country's diverse natural and socioeconomic conditions. In order to understand the process and the mechanism of land use change, and then provide a solid basis for the future sustainable planning of land use in China's many different regions, the Chinese research team chose the Jitai Basin, a typical rural area, and the Pearl River Delta, characterized by rapid urbanization, as its study sites (see map , p. 178).

JITAI BASIN

The Jitai Basin, located in Jiangxi Province in south-central China, is made up of four counties that contain two cities. At the end of 1995, the Jitai Basin was home to 2.47 million people; its population density was 198 persons per square kilometer.

Historically, the Jitai Basin was a relatively developed area for agricultural production and handcraft industries such as shipbuilding and textiles, because the Ganjiang (Gan River) served as a main transportation artery between north and south. But with the development of modern industry and communications, the opening of foreign trade ports (Guangzhou, Shanghai, Fuzhou, Xiamen, and Ningbo) in the late nineteenth century, and the building of the Guangzhou–Wuhan and Wuhan–Beijing

railways, the direction of the flow of goods changed rapidly, weakening the transportation function of the Ganjiang River. From then on, China saw its economy grow rapidly in coastal areas, and the Jitai Basin gradually lost its dominant position in communications and the economy and slipped into a declining state.

After the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the central government began to promote the development of the more rural regions of the country. As a result, in the 1950s and 1960s the Jitai Basin was the beneficiary of significant investment in an industrial program, technological assistance, and an influx of trained migrants from the more developed regions. Development of the country as a whole, however, was at a very low level, and cultural, political, and economic restrictions hampered the assistance efforts. In the end, then, no significant socioeconomic development occurred in the Jitai Basin from 1949 to 1978, and, indeed, population pressure and extreme economic policies resulted in serious damage to the region's natural resources. For example, overcutting of forests to provide fuel for steel smelters caused deforestation and soil erosion. And the expansion of agriculture to marginal hilly and mountainous areas in order to meet the subsistence demands of the rapidly growing population for food and fuel further accentuated the serious problems of environmental degradation.

Since the introduction of government reforms in 1978, the Jitai Basin has achieved relatively remarkable economic development in absolute terms. With implementation of the “household responsibility” system in 1982, agricultural productivity increased and the transition from cereal production to cash crop production (such as fruits and vegetables) accelerated. Meanwhile, the local government, aware of the damage to the ecosystem generated by deforestation and soil erosion, successfully implemented a series of policies to reforest the hills and mountains. Despite these achievements, the Jitai Basin still lags behind the coastal regions in economic development and urbanization. In fact, the gap between its socioeconomic development and that of developed regions (for example, the Pearl River Delta) is widening. One important reason is that the central government's economic development strategy tends to favor coastal areas. Other reasons are the Jitai Basin's location in China's hinterlands and its limited access to investment, technology, and the markets in metropolitan areas. In addition, because the region had a surplus of agricultural laborers stemming from the significant lack of development of the nonagricultural sectors, the massive out-migration of young laborers from the Jitai Basin to developed regions such as the Pearl River Delta increased. This development relieved the pressure on local employment, but also weakened agricultural production.

PEARL RIVER DELTA

Formed by the alluvium delivered by the West, North, and East Rivers, the Pearl River Delta is located in southern China's Guangdong Province. The study region, which lies in the central part of Pearl River Delta, consists of 13 counties or cities, which belong to six municipalities and are distributed on either side of the Pearl River estuary. The Pearl River Delta is one of the most heavily populated regions of China. In 1995 its permanent population density was 743 persons per square kilometer, compared with 378 for all of Guangdong Province and 126 for China as a whole.

Historically, the Pearl River Delta was known nationally for its production of grain, sugar, silk, freshwater fish, and fruits. Indeed, the region was referred to as the “Fish and Rice County.” The Delta also was one of the places in China where modern industry first appeared. However, from 1866, when industry first arrived, to 1949, when the new China was founded, the region's economy developed very slowly, and many residents of the Delta left to earn a living abroad. One factor in its slow growth was its location; because the Delta is situated at the frontier of the national defense, very few of the important industries were allowed to set up operations in the region.

After implementation of socioeconomic reforms in 1978, the Delta quickened its pace of development and now is one of the richest areas in China. But rapid industrialization and urbanization also have produced dramatic changes in the Pearl River Delta's landscape, as well as environmental pollution. Overall, within less than 20 years the Delta area was transformed from a rural agricultural area into a highly developed region through rapid industrialization and urbanization. Within this process, the interactions between population growth, land use change, and the relevant economic and environmental problems are complex and unique.

As the world's population exceeds an incredible 6 billion people, governments—and scientists—everywhere are concerned about the prospects for sustainable development.

The science academies of the three most populous countries have joined forces in an unprecedented effort to understand the linkage between population growth and land-use change, and its implications for the future. By examining six sites ranging from agricultural to intensely urban to areas in transition, the multinational study panel asks how population growth and consumption directly cause land-use change, and explore the general nature of the forces driving the transformations.

Growing Populations, Changing Landscapes explains how disparate government policies with unintended consequences and globalization effects that link local land-use changes to consumption patterns and labor policies in distant countries can be far more influential than simple numerical population increases. Recognizing the importance of these linkages can be a significant step toward more effective environmental management.

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Understanding ecological civilization in China: From political context to science

• Ecological Civilization
• Published: 13 July 2023
• Volume 52 , pages 1895–1909, ( 2023 )

Cite this article

• Bing Xue   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-7790-1216 1 , 2 ,
• Bin Han 1 , 3 ,
• Hongqing Li 2 ,
• Xiaohua Gou 4 ,
• Hong Yang 5 ,
• Heiko Thomas 6 &
• Stefan Stückrad 7  

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China’s concept of “ecological civilization” can be understood as a new system of development and governance based on the perspective of political decision-making. Environmental management, ecological restoration, and green development are its primary principles—distinctly different from industrial and agricultural-oriented civilizations. In this paper, we evaluate the evolution of political connotations of the ecological civilization concept in China over the past 15 years through a textual analysis approach. Additionally, we systematically outline an ecological civilization indicator system and analyze its evolutionary process, applicable scales, and role in guiding the implementation of the ecological civilization concept. Eco-civilization demonstration sites and experiences are also discussed, followed by a review of academic research and policy-making responses. Finally, we propose different perspectives on the outlook for the future of ecological civilization development in China.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks for the support from URA Project (Urban-Rural Assembly, Grant No. 01LE1804A1) funded by German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41971166). The authors are grateful to two anonymous referees and to Bo Söderström whose insightful comments helped producing a better paper.

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• NATURE INDEX
• 05 June 2024

Why China has been a growing study destination for African students

• Rachel Nuwer 0

Rachel Nuwer is a freelance writer based in New York City.

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African students at Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University in Fuzhou. Credit: Xinhua/Shutterstock

Winnifred Kansiime was finishing her undergraduate degree in environmental health sciences at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, when she received an offer that she could not refuse: a place in a three-year master’s programme in environmental engineering at Xiangtan University in China, preceded by a year there learning Mandarin — with all expenses paid by the Chinese government. The course, which Kansiime completed in 2016, paved the way for her current pursuit of a doctorate in public health at Makerere. More than that, she says, “I wound up having the best time of my life in China.”

Kansiime is one among tens of thousands of African students who have pursued undergraduate or graduate studies in China, primarily in the subjects of engineering, science, business or management. Although African students have been studying in China since the 1960s, over the past decade their numbers have risen dramatically. In 2006, just 2% of China’s international students came from Africa; by 2018, that proportion had risen to nearly 17%.

Nature Index 2024 China

According to China’s Ministry of Education, of the 81,562 African students who were studying in China in 2018, 6,385 were pursuing a PhD — representing about 20% of all foreign students undertaking a doctoral degree in the country. In 2018, the Chinese government pledged to provide 50,000 scholarships for African students to pursue higher-education studies in China over the following three years. By 2020, China was outranked only by France as the top destination for African students pursuing higher education abroad, according to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think tank headquartered in Washington DC.

Detailed data on foreign students in China since the COVID-19 pandemic started in 2020 was unavailable at the time of writing. But in general, the country’s strict lockdown policies have had a negative impact on international enrolment, says Benjamin Mulvey, a sociologist at the University of Glasgow, UK, and author of Mapping International Student Mobility Between Africa and China . “Lots of students were locked out” of China, “and students were also locked in”, he says of the pandemic. Some foreign students, particularly those from Africa, also faced discrimination and scapegoating at the height of the outbreak. Some restaurants, malls and hospitals in China banned Black people from entering, for example, and some African students were thrown out of their apartments, Mulvey says.

In 2021, the Chinese government reaffirmed its logistical and monetary support for African students at the triennial Forum on China–Africa Cooperation, a multilateral meeting that is part of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Launched in 2013 as a global infrastructure development strategy, the BRI is underpinned by economic and geopolitical motivations on China’s part and has so far reached around 150 countries. At the 2021 meeting, officials did not commit to a specific number of scholarships for African students as they have done in previous years, stating only that China will continue to train professionals through the programme. But assuming government support does come, Mulvey expects African student enrolment in China to pick up again soon.

Chinese government scholarships have always been a big part of the draw for African students. Mulvey says they are “underpinned” by a desire to enhance diplomatic links between China and African countries. Some scholarships, therefore, “go to the children of politicians and business people in a less-than-transparent process”, he says. “But there are also students from quite disadvantaged backgrounds who receive scholarships.”

Although most African postgraduate students receive financial support, the majority of undergraduates still pay their own tuition. They often come from middle-class families and are attracted by the relative affordability of studying in China compared with North America or Europe. But whether they receive a scholarship or not, virtually all African students who study in China are beneficiaries of a deliberate Chinese government strategy to strengthen ties with the continent, says Wen Wen, a higher-education researcher at Tsinghua University in Beijing. “Nowadays, higher education is becoming part of geopolitics,” she says. “China has a very clear goal to project its influence in the Belt and Road countries, and African countries are definitely part of this initiative.”

Source: UNESCO

The Chinese government is “quite explicit that the purpose in giving these scholarships is improving soft power and having people strategically positioned in Africa who could open doors for Chinese business and industry”, says Natasha Robinson, a postdoctoral researcher in education at the University of Oxford, UK. Although this quid pro quo relationship is sometimes portrayed in a negative light, Wen sees it as mutually beneficial. “China helps to train African PhD students, doctors and engineers, and when those students return to their country, they bring back China’s academic atmosphere and scientific research standards,” she says. “From this perspective, I think it’s quite good.”

African students might also have “a sense that China is the future, and it’s good to have familiarity with it”, Robinson adds. “They already speak English, so having Chinese under their belt is really valuable.”

However, not every African student who studies in China has the positive experience that Kansiime did. If students are on the receiving end of racism or are disappointed in the calibre of the education they receive, then China’s goal of developing soft power can backfire, Robinson says. In such cases, African graduates “certainly come back knowing China, but they don’t necessarily come back loving China”.

Opportunities and obstacles

For most African students, the appeal of studying in China is multi-fold. First and foremost, China provides access to educational resources that usually are not available back home, Robinson says. “If you want to do any natural-sciences research, then China’s facilities are much superior.” But language barriers can pose a difficulty in making the most of these resources. “There’s only so much you can do in a year” of learning Mandarin, Robinson points out.

Winnifred Kansiime. Credit: Courtesy of Winnifred Kansiime

Kansiime, for example, was proficient enough after a year of intensive Mandarin tuition for general communication, but not for the technical language of her engineering courses, which were all taught in Chinese. She came to rely on online software and “super helpful” classmates and professors for translation assistance, she says. She also watched instructional YouTube videos and accessed free digital courses from universities in Europe and the United States to supplement the Chinese lectures. The silver lining of all this extra work, she says, was that she came away with a better grasp of the material.

On the other hand, Kansiime did feel like she missed out on developing a strong relationship with her master’s supervisor, who did not speak English fluently. This is a typical situation reported by African students, Robinson says. “There have been students we’ve spoken to who were told their postgraduate studies would be in English, but then turn up and find that their supervisor doesn’t speak English.”

Martha Muduwa, a doctor and clinical-trials coordinator at the Mbale Clinical Research Institute in Uganda, completed her undergraduate degree in medicine and surgery at Capital Medical University in Beijing in 2019. She had applied to universities in both China and the United Kingdom but opted for China in part because of the lower cost of tuition, which a family member paid. Muduwa’s courses were all in English, but she sometimes struggled to understand her professors, whose grasp of the language varied. She was confronted with other language-related disparities too, including an English library that was “just one tiny room”, she says, compared with the larger Chinese library that spanned three floors. She also learnt that the Chinese students and international students who were studying in Chinese were given “a lot more opportunities” than the students following programmes in English, she says, including a greater diversity of course options and a chance to participate in research.

Most international students missed out on many opportunities, but Muduwa made the most of things, she says, by learning to advocate for herself in the classroom and at a hospital internship. “If you were not pushy, you got nothing out of your internship,” she says. Many of her classmates “never even examined a single patient”, but Muduwa says she was able to get hands-on experience, including assisting in operations, by having a more forceful attitude.

Expanded worldviews

Studying in China can also provide African students with more intangible benefits. “It’s good to experience other cultures,” Kansiime says. “It makes you an open-minded person and willing to accept and understand other people’s views and perceptions of things.”

Muduwa adds that the Chinese friendships she made had “really enhanced my experience of their culture” and that she “absolutely loved the food”. African students — who typically live in international dormitories separate from Chinese students — also benefit from an opportunity to make friends from around the world. “You’re all foreigners in this place,” Kansiime says. “You have to mix and make your own community together.”

Outside of the campus environment, though, African students in China very often find themselves singled out for their race, Mulvey says. In public, Muduwa was constantly aware of people photographing or pointing at her, and some even touched her without asking for permission. “You’re on your phone on the subway, you’re minding your own business, and someone would start playing with your braid,” she says. Although most of this attention seemed to be driven by curiosity, she also saw overt racism, including job offerings that listed different salaries for Black or white English-language teachers.

Source: China Ministry of Education

Mulvey knows of some African students who remain in China to do a postdoc or take on an assistant professorship, but longer-term stays are “quite rare”, he says. Although there are more avenues now than in the past to get post-study work visas in China, it is still a very difficult process. In addition, “many African students have families and jobs back in their home countries”, Robinson says. “This, coupled with a feeling of foreignness in China, means that many choose to return.”

Researchers have yet to conduct large-scale studies of what happens after these former students return home, says Mulvey, including how, if at all, they use their degrees; whether they put their Chinese-language skills to use; whether they contribute in a tangible way to building positive relations with China; and the impression they take away from their time in the country. “There is very little research on this, though it is a crucially important avenue for future research,” Mulvey says.

In interviews Robinson conducted with 27 African students who formerly studied in China, a few did say that they were continuing to collaborate with Chinese colleagues. Robinson had expected the number of collaborations to be higher, she says, and typically in these relationships, “Chinese scholars would do the experiment and calculations, and African researchers would write it up”. For Africans returning home after years of study in China, this “is not an amazing outcome”, she adds. Although Africans who studied in China often have the skills to do experimental research, the problem is that they might lack the resources and facilities at their home institutions, and therefore are reliant on Chinese colleagues.

Kansiime, for her part, says she would “highly recommend” studying in China. Muduwa is more measured. “I would recommend China to African students, but with caution,” she says. “They’d have to manage their expectations and consider the fact that they might not get 100% of what they want from the university experience.”

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Why the Pandemic Probably Started in a Lab, in 5 Key Points

By Alina Chan

Dr. Chan is a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard, and a co-author of “Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19.”

This article has been updated to reflect news developments.

On Monday, Dr. Anthony Fauci returned to the halls of Congress and testified before the House subcommittee investigating the Covid-19 pandemic. He was questioned about several topics related to the government’s handling of Covid-19, including how the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which he directed until retiring in 2022, supported risky virus work at a Chinese institute whose research may have caused the pandemic.

For more than four years, reflexive partisan politics have derailed the search for the truth about a catastrophe that has touched us all. It has been estimated that at least 25 million people around the world have died because of Covid-19, with over a million of those deaths in the United States.

Although how the pandemic started has been hotly debated, a growing volume of evidence — gleaned from public records released under the Freedom of Information Act, digital sleuthing through online databases, scientific papers analyzing the virus and its spread, and leaks from within the U.S. government — suggests that the pandemic most likely occurred because a virus escaped from a research lab in Wuhan, China. If so, it would be the most costly accident in the history of science.

Here’s what we now know:

1 The SARS-like virus that caused the pandemic emerged in Wuhan, the city where the world’s foremost research lab for SARS-like viruses is located.

• At the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a team of scientists had been hunting for SARS-like viruses for over a decade, led by Shi Zhengli.
• Their research showed that the viruses most similar to SARS‑CoV‑2, the virus that caused the pandemic, circulate in bats that live r oughly 1,000 miles away from Wuhan. Scientists from Dr. Shi’s team traveled repeatedly to Yunnan province to collect these viruses and had expanded their search to Southeast Asia. Bats in other parts of China have not been found to carry viruses that are as closely related to SARS-CoV-2.

The closest known relatives to SARS-CoV-2 were found in southwestern China and in Laos.

Large cities

Mine in Yunnan province

Cave in Laos

South China Sea

The closest known relatives to SARS-CoV-2

were found in southwestern China and in Laos.

philippines

The closest known relatives to SARS-CoV-2 were found

in southwestern China and Laos.

Sources: Sarah Temmam et al., Nature; SimpleMaps

Note: Cities shown have a population of at least 200,000.

There are hundreds of large cities in China and Southeast Asia.

There are hundreds of large cities in China

and Southeast Asia.

The pandemic started roughly 1,000 miles away, in Wuhan, home to the world’s foremost SARS-like virus research lab.

The pandemic started roughly 1,000 miles away,

in Wuhan, home to the world’s foremost SARS-like virus research lab.

The pandemic started roughly 1,000 miles away, in Wuhan,

home to the world’s foremost SARS-like virus research lab.

• Even at hot spots where these viruses exist naturally near the cave bats of southwestern China and Southeast Asia, the scientists argued, as recently as 2019 , that bat coronavirus spillover into humans is rare .
• When the Covid-19 outbreak was detected, Dr. Shi initially wondered if the novel coronavirus had come from her laboratory , saying she had never expected such an outbreak to occur in Wuhan.
• The SARS‑CoV‑2 virus is exceptionally contagious and can jump from species to species like wildfire . Yet it left no known trace of infection at its source or anywhere along what would have been a thousand-mile journey before emerging in Wuhan.

2 The year before the outbreak, the Wuhan institute, working with U.S. partners, had proposed creating viruses with SARS‑CoV‑2’s defining feature.

• Dr. Shi’s group was fascinated by how coronaviruses jump from species to species. To find viruses, they took samples from bats and other animals , as well as from sick people living near animals carrying these viruses or associated with the wildlife trade. Much of this work was conducted in partnership with the EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based scientific organization that, since 2002, has been awarded over $80 million in federal funding to research the risks of emerging infectious diseases.
• The laboratory pursued risky research that resulted in viruses becoming more infectious : Coronaviruses were grown from samples from infected animals and genetically reconstructed and recombined to create new viruses unknown in nature. These new viruses were passed through cells from bats, pigs, primates and humans and were used to infect civets and humanized mice (mice modified with human genes). In essence, this process forced these viruses to adapt to new host species, and the viruses with mutations that allowed them to thrive emerged as victors.
• By 2019, Dr. Shi’s group had published a database describing more than 22,000 collected wildlife samples. But external access was shut off in the fall of 2019, and the database was not shared with American collaborators even after the pandemic started , when such a rich virus collection would have been most useful in tracking the origin of SARS‑CoV‑2. It remains unclear whether the Wuhan institute possessed a precursor of the pandemic virus.
• In 2021, The Intercept published a leaked 2018 grant proposal for a research project named Defuse , which had been written as a collaboration between EcoHealth, the Wuhan institute and Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina, who had been on the cutting edge of coronavirus research for years. The proposal described plans to create viruses strikingly similar to SARS‑CoV‑2.
• Coronaviruses bear their name because their surface is studded with protein spikes, like a spiky crown, which they use to enter animal cells. T he Defuse project proposed to search for and create SARS-like viruses carrying spikes with a unique feature: a furin cleavage site — the same feature that enhances SARS‑CoV‑2’s infectiousness in humans, making it capable of causing a pandemic. Defuse was never funded by the United States . However, in his testimony on Monday, Dr. Fauci explained that the Wuhan institute would not need to rely on U.S. funding to pursue research independently.

The Wuhan lab ran risky experiments to learn about how SARS-like viruses might infect humans.

1. Collect SARS-like viruses from bats and other wild animals, as well as from people exposed to them.

2. Identify high-risk viruses by screening for spike proteins that facilitate infection of human cells.

2. Identify high-risk viruses by screening for spike proteins that facilitate infection of

human cells.

In Defuse, the scientists proposed to add a furin cleavage site to the spike protein.

3. Create new coronaviruses by inserting spike proteins or other features that could make the viruses more infectious in humans.

4. Infect human cells, civets and humanized mice with the new coronaviruses, to determine how dangerous they might be.

• While it’s possible that the furin cleavage site could have evolved naturally (as seen in some distantly related coronaviruses), out of the hundreds of SARS-like viruses cataloged by scientists, SARS‑CoV‑2 is the only one known to possess a furin cleavage site in its spike. And the genetic data suggest that the virus had only recently gained the furin cleavage site before it started the pandemic.
• Ultimately, a never-before-seen SARS-like virus with a newly introduced furin cleavage site, matching the description in the Wuhan institute’s Defuse proposal, caused an outbreak in Wuhan less than two years after the proposal was drafted.
• When the Wuhan scientists published their seminal paper about Covid-19 as the pandemic roared to life in 2020, they did not mention the virus’s furin cleavage site — a feature they should have been on the lookout for, according to their own grant proposal, and a feature quickly recognized by other scientists.
• Worse still, as the pandemic raged, their American collaborators failed to publicly reveal the existence of the Defuse proposal. The president of EcoHealth, Peter Daszak, recently admitted to Congress that he doesn’t know about virus samples collected by the Wuhan institute after 2015 and never asked the lab’s scientists if they had started the work described in Defuse. In May, citing failures in EcoHealth’s monitoring of risky experiments conducted at the Wuhan lab, the Biden administration suspended all federal funding for the organization and Dr. Daszak, and initiated proceedings to bar them from receiving future grants. In his testimony on Monday, Dr. Fauci said that he supported the decision to suspend and bar EcoHealth.
• Separately, Dr. Baric described the competitive dynamic between his research group and the institute when he told Congress that the Wuhan scientists would probably not have shared their most interesting newly discovered viruses with him . Documents and email correspondence between the institute and Dr. Baric are still being withheld from the public while their release is fiercely contested in litigation.
• In the end, American partners very likely knew of only a fraction of the research done in Wuhan. According to U.S. intelligence sources, some of the institute’s virus research was classified or conducted with or on behalf of the Chinese military . In the congressional hearing on Monday, Dr. Fauci repeatedly acknowledged the lack of visibility into experiments conducted at the Wuhan institute, saying, “None of us can know everything that’s going on in China, or in Wuhan, or what have you. And that’s the reason why — I say today, and I’ve said at the T.I.,” referring to his transcribed interview with the subcommittee, “I keep an open mind as to what the origin is.”

3 The Wuhan lab pursued this type of work under low biosafety conditions that could not have contained an airborne virus as infectious as SARS‑CoV‑2.

• Labs working with live viruses generally operate at one of four biosafety levels (known in ascending order of stringency as BSL-1, 2, 3 and 4) that describe the work practices that are considered sufficiently safe depending on the characteristics of each pathogen. The Wuhan institute’s scientists worked with SARS-like viruses under inappropriately low biosafety conditions .

In the United States, virologists generally use stricter Biosafety Level 3 protocols when working with SARS-like viruses.

Biosafety cabinets prevent

viral particles from escaping.

Viral particles

Personal respirators provide

a second layer of defense against breathing in the virus.

DIRECT CONTACT

Gloves prevent skin contact.

Disposable wraparound

gowns cover much of the rest of the body.

Personal respirators provide a second layer of defense against breathing in the virus.

Disposable wraparound gowns

cover much of the rest of the body.

Note: ​​Biosafety levels are not internationally standardized, and some countries use more permissive protocols than others.

The Wuhan lab had been regularly working with SARS-like viruses under Biosafety Level 2 conditions, which could not prevent a highly infectious virus like SARS-CoV-2 from escaping.

Some work is done in the open air, and masks are not required.

Less protective equipment provides more opportunities

for contamination.

Some work is done in the open air,

and masks are not required.

Less protective equipment provides more opportunities for contamination.

• In one experiment, Dr. Shi’s group genetically engineered an unexpectedly deadly SARS-like virus (not closely related to SARS‑CoV‑2) that exhibited a 10,000-fold increase in the quantity of virus in the lungs and brains of humanized mice . Wuhan institute scientists handled these live viruses at low biosafet y levels , including BSL-2.
• Even the much more stringent containment at BSL-3 cannot fully prevent SARS‑CoV‑2 from escaping . Two years into the pandemic, the virus infected a scientist in a BSL-3 laboratory in Taiwan, which was, at the time, a zero-Covid country. The scientist had been vaccinated and was tested only after losing the sense of smell. By then, more than 100 close contacts had been exposed. Human error is a source of exposure even at the highest biosafety levels , and the risks are much greater for scientists working with infectious pathogens at low biosafety.
• An early draft of the Defuse proposal stated that the Wuhan lab would do their virus work at BSL-2 to make it “highly cost-effective.” Dr. Baric added a note to the draft highlighting the importance of using BSL-3 to contain SARS-like viruses that could infect human cells, writing that “U.S. researchers will likely freak out.” Years later, after SARS‑CoV‑2 had killed millions, Dr. Baric wrote to Dr. Daszak : “I have no doubt that they followed state determined rules and did the work under BSL-2. Yes China has the right to set their own policy. You believe this was appropriate containment if you want but don’t expect me to believe it. Moreover, don’t insult my intelligence by trying to feed me this load of BS.”
• SARS‑CoV‑2 is a stealthy virus that transmits effectively through the air, causes a range of symptoms similar to those of other common respiratory diseases and can be spread by infected people before symptoms even appear. If the virus had escaped from a BSL-2 laboratory in 2019, the leak most likely would have gone undetected until too late.
• One alarming detail — leaked to The Wall Street Journal and confirmed by current and former U.S. government officials — is that scientists on Dr. Shi’s team fell ill with Covid-like symptoms in the fall of 2019 . One of the scientists had been named in the Defuse proposal as the person in charge of virus discovery work. The scientists denied having been sick .

4 The hypothesis that Covid-19 came from an animal at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan is not supported by strong evidence.

• In December 2019, Chinese investigators assumed the outbreak had started at a centrally located market frequented by thousands of visitors daily. This bias in their search for early cases meant that cases unlinked to or located far away from the market would very likely have been missed. To make things worse, the Chinese authorities blocked the reporting of early cases not linked to the market and, claiming biosafety precautions, ordered the destruction of patient samples on January 3, 2020, making it nearly impossible to see the complete picture of the earliest Covid-19 cases. Information about dozens of early cases from November and December 2019 remains inaccessible.
• A pair of papers published in Science in 2022 made the best case for SARS‑CoV‑2 having emerged naturally from human-animal contact at the Wuhan market by focusing on a map of the early cases and asserting that the virus had jumped from animals into humans twice at the market in 2019. More recently, the two papers have been countered by other virologists and scientists who convincingly demonstrate that the available market evidence does not distinguish between a human superspreader event and a natural spillover at the market.
• Furthermore, the existing genetic and early case data show that all known Covid-19 cases probably stem from a single introduction of SARS‑CoV‑2 into people, and the outbreak at the Wuhan market probably happened after the virus had already been circulating in humans.

An analysis of SARS-CoV-2’s evolutionary tree shows how the virus evolved as it started to spread through humans.

SARS-COV-2 Viruses closest

to bat coronaviruses

more mutations

Source: Lv et al., Virus Evolution (2024) , as reproduced by Jesse Bloom

The viruses that infected people linked to the market were most likely not the earliest form of the virus that started the pandemic.

• Not a single infected animal has ever been confirmed at the market or in its supply chain. Without good evidence that the pandemic started at the Huanan Seafood Market, the fact that the virus emerged in Wuhan points squarely at its unique SARS-like virus laboratory.

5 Key evidence that would be expected if the virus had emerged from the wildlife trade is still missing.

In previous outbreaks of coronaviruses, scientists were able to demonstrate natural origin by collecting multiple pieces of evidence linking infected humans to infected animals.

Infected animals

Earliest known

cases exposed to

live animals

Antibody evidence

of animals and

animal traders having

been infected

Ancestral variants

of the virus found in

Documented trade

of host animals

between the area

where bats carry

closely related viruses

and the outbreak site

Infected animals found

Earliest known cases exposed to live animals

Antibody evidence of animals and animal

traders having been infected

Ancestral variants of the virus found in animals

Documented trade of host animals

between the area where bats carry closely

related viruses and the outbreak site

For SARS-CoV-2, these same key pieces of evidence are still missing , more than four years after the virus emerged.

For SARS-CoV-2, these same key pieces of evidence are still missing ,

more than four years after the virus emerged.

• Despite the intense search trained on the animal trade and people linked to the market, investigators have not reported finding any animals infected with SARS‑CoV‑2 that had not been infected by humans. Yet, infected animal sources and other connective pieces of evidence were found for the earlier SARS and MERS outbreaks as quickly as within a few days, despite the less advanced viral forensic technologies of two decades ago.
• Even though Wuhan is the home base of virus hunters with world-leading expertise in tracking novel SARS-like viruses, investigators have either failed to collect or report key evidence that would be expected if Covid-19 emerged from the wildlife trade . For example, investigators have not determined that the earliest known cases had exposure to intermediate host animals before falling ill. No antibody evidence shows that animal traders in Wuhan are regularly exposed to SARS-like viruses, as would be expected in such situations.
• With today’s technology, scientists can detect how respiratory viruses — including SARS, MERS and the flu — circulate in animals while making repeated attempts to jump across species . Thankfully, these variants usually fail to transmit well after crossing over to a new species and tend to die off after a small number of infections. In contrast, virologists and other scientists agree that SARS‑CoV‑2 required little to no adaptation to spread rapidly in humans and other animals . The virus appears to have succeeded in causing a pandemic upon its only detected jump into humans.

The pandemic could have been caused by any of hundreds of virus species, at any of tens of thousands of wildlife markets, in any of thousands of cities, and in any year. But it was a SARS-like coronavirus with a unique furin cleavage site that emerged in Wuhan, less than two years after scientists, sometimes working under inadequate biosafety conditions, proposed collecting and creating viruses of that same design.

While several natural spillover scenarios remain plausible, and we still don’t know enough about the full extent of virus research conducted at the Wuhan institute by Dr. Shi’s team and other researchers, a laboratory accident is the most parsimonious explanation of how the pandemic began.

Given what we now know, investigators should follow their strongest leads and subpoena all exchanges between the Wuhan scientists and their international partners, including unpublished research proposals, manuscripts, data and commercial orders. In particular, exchanges from 2018 and 2019 — the critical two years before the emergence of Covid-19 — are very likely to be illuminating (and require no cooperation from the Chinese government to acquire), yet they remain beyond the public’s view more than four years after the pandemic began.

Whether the pandemic started on a lab bench or in a market stall, it is undeniable that U.S. federal funding helped to build an unprecedented collection of SARS-like viruses at the Wuhan institute, as well as contributing to research that enhanced them . Advocates and funders of the institute’s research, including Dr. Fauci, should cooperate with the investigation to help identify and close the loopholes that allowed such dangerous work to occur. The world must not continue to bear the intolerable risks of research with the potential to cause pandemics .

A successful investigation of the pandemic’s root cause would have the power to break a decades-long scientific impasse on pathogen research safety, determining how governments will spend billions of dollars to prevent future pandemics. A credible investigation would also deter future acts of negligence and deceit by demonstrating that it is indeed possible to be held accountable for causing a viral pandemic. Last but not least, people of all nations need to see their leaders — and especially, their scientists — heading the charge to find out what caused this world-shaking event. Restoring public trust in science and government leadership requires it.

A thorough investigation by the U.S. government could unearth more evidence while spurring whistleblowers to find their courage and seek their moment of opportunity. It would also show the world that U.S. leaders and scientists are not afraid of what the truth behind the pandemic may be.

More on how the pandemic may have started

Where Did the Coronavirus Come From? What We Already Know Is Troubling.

Even if the coronavirus did not emerge from a lab, the groundwork for a potential disaster had been laid for years, and learning its lessons is essential to preventing others.

By Zeynep Tufekci

Why Does Bad Science on Covid’s Origin Get Hyped?

If the raccoon dog was a smoking gun, it fired blanks.

By David Wallace-Wells

A Plea for Making Virus Research Safer

A way forward for lab safety.

By Jesse Bloom

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

Alina Chan ( @ayjchan ) is a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard, and a co-author of “ Viral : The Search for the Origin of Covid-19.” She was a member of the Pathogens Project , which the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists organized to generate new thinking on responsible, high-risk pathogen research.

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The state of AI in early 2024: Gen AI adoption spikes and starts to generate value

If 2023 was the year the world discovered generative AI (gen AI) , 2024 is the year organizations truly began using—and deriving business value from—this new technology. In the latest McKinsey Global Survey  on AI, 65 percent of respondents report that their organizations are regularly using gen AI, nearly double the percentage from our previous survey just ten months ago. Respondents’ expectations for gen AI’s impact remain as high as they were last year , with three-quarters predicting that gen AI will lead to significant or disruptive change in their industries in the years ahead.

About the authors

This article is a collaborative effort by Alex Singla , Alexander Sukharevsky , Lareina Yee , and Michael Chui , with Bryce Hall , representing views from QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey, and McKinsey Digital.

Organizations are already seeing material benefits from gen AI use, reporting both cost decreases and revenue jumps in the business units deploying the technology. The survey also provides insights into the kinds of risks presented by gen AI—most notably, inaccuracy—as well as the emerging practices of top performers to mitigate those challenges and capture value.

AI adoption surges

Interest in generative AI has also brightened the spotlight on a broader set of AI capabilities. For the past six years, AI adoption by respondents’ organizations has hovered at about 50 percent. This year, the survey finds that adoption has jumped to 72 percent (Exhibit 1). And the interest is truly global in scope. Our 2023 survey found that AI adoption did not reach 66 percent in any region; however, this year more than two-thirds of respondents in nearly every region say their organizations are using AI. 1 Organizations based in Central and South America are the exception, with 58 percent of respondents working for organizations based in Central and South America reporting AI adoption. Looking by industry, the biggest increase in adoption can be found in professional services. 2 Includes respondents working for organizations focused on human resources, legal services, management consulting, market research, R&D, tax preparation, and training.

Also, responses suggest that companies are now using AI in more parts of the business. Half of respondents say their organizations have adopted AI in two or more business functions, up from less than a third of respondents in 2023 (Exhibit 2).

Gen AI adoption is most common in the functions where it can create the most value

Most respondents now report that their organizations—and they as individuals—are using gen AI. Sixty-five percent of respondents say their organizations are regularly using gen AI in at least one business function, up from one-third last year. The average organization using gen AI is doing so in two functions, most often in marketing and sales and in product and service development—two functions in which previous research  determined that gen AI adoption could generate the most value 3 “ The economic potential of generative AI: The next productivity frontier ,” McKinsey, June 14, 2023. —as well as in IT (Exhibit 3). The biggest increase from 2023 is found in marketing and sales, where reported adoption has more than doubled. Yet across functions, only two use cases, both within marketing and sales, are reported by 15 percent or more of respondents.

Gen AI also is weaving its way into respondents’ personal lives. Compared with 2023, respondents are much more likely to be using gen AI at work and even more likely to be using gen AI both at work and in their personal lives (Exhibit 4). The survey finds upticks in gen AI use across all regions, with the largest increases in Asia–Pacific and Greater China. Respondents at the highest seniority levels, meanwhile, show larger jumps in the use of gen Al tools for work and outside of work compared with their midlevel-management peers. Looking at specific industries, respondents working in energy and materials and in professional services report the largest increase in gen AI use.

Investments in gen AI and analytical AI are beginning to create value

The latest survey also shows how different industries are budgeting for gen AI. Responses suggest that, in many industries, organizations are about equally as likely to be investing more than 5 percent of their digital budgets in gen AI as they are in nongenerative, analytical-AI solutions (Exhibit 5). Yet in most industries, larger shares of respondents report that their organizations spend more than 20 percent on analytical AI than on gen AI. Looking ahead, most respondents—67 percent—expect their organizations to invest more in AI over the next three years.

Where are those investments paying off? For the first time, our latest survey explored the value created by gen AI use by business function. The function in which the largest share of respondents report seeing cost decreases is human resources. Respondents most commonly report meaningful revenue increases (of more than 5 percent) in supply chain and inventory management (Exhibit 6). For analytical AI, respondents most often report seeing cost benefits in service operations—in line with what we found last year —as well as meaningful revenue increases from AI use in marketing and sales.

Inaccuracy: The most recognized and experienced risk of gen AI use

As businesses begin to see the benefits of gen AI, they’re also recognizing the diverse risks associated with the technology. These can range from data management risks such as data privacy, bias, or intellectual property (IP) infringement to model management risks, which tend to focus on inaccurate output or lack of explainability. A third big risk category is security and incorrect use.

Respondents to the latest survey are more likely than they were last year to say their organizations consider inaccuracy and IP infringement to be relevant to their use of gen AI, and about half continue to view cybersecurity as a risk (Exhibit 7).

Conversely, respondents are less likely than they were last year to say their organizations consider workforce and labor displacement to be relevant risks and are not increasing efforts to mitigate them.

In fact, inaccuracy— which can affect use cases across the gen AI value chain , ranging from customer journeys and summarization to coding and creative content—is the only risk that respondents are significantly more likely than last year to say their organizations are actively working to mitigate.

Some organizations have already experienced negative consequences from the use of gen AI, with 44 percent of respondents saying their organizations have experienced at least one consequence (Exhibit 8). Respondents most often report inaccuracy as a risk that has affected their organizations, followed by cybersecurity and explainability.

Our previous research has found that there are several elements of governance that can help in scaling gen AI use responsibly, yet few respondents report having these risk-related practices in place. 4 “ Implementing generative AI with speed and safety ,” McKinsey Quarterly , March 13, 2024. For example, just 18 percent say their organizations have an enterprise-wide council or board with the authority to make decisions involving responsible AI governance, and only one-third say gen AI risk awareness and risk mitigation controls are required skill sets for technical talent.

Bringing gen AI capabilities to bear

The latest survey also sought to understand how, and how quickly, organizations are deploying these new gen AI tools. We have found three archetypes for implementing gen AI solutions : takers use off-the-shelf, publicly available solutions; shapers customize those tools with proprietary data and systems; and makers develop their own foundation models from scratch. 5 “ Technology’s generational moment with generative AI: A CIO and CTO guide ,” McKinsey, July 11, 2023. Across most industries, the survey results suggest that organizations are finding off-the-shelf offerings applicable to their business needs—though many are pursuing opportunities to customize models or even develop their own (Exhibit 9). About half of reported gen AI uses within respondents’ business functions are utilizing off-the-shelf, publicly available models or tools, with little or no customization. Respondents in energy and materials, technology, and media and telecommunications are more likely to report significant customization or tuning of publicly available models or developing their own proprietary models to address specific business needs.

Respondents most often report that their organizations required one to four months from the start of a project to put gen AI into production, though the time it takes varies by business function (Exhibit 10). It also depends upon the approach for acquiring those capabilities. Not surprisingly, reported uses of highly customized or proprietary models are 1.5 times more likely than off-the-shelf, publicly available models to take five months or more to implement.

Gen AI high performers are excelling despite facing challenges

Gen AI is a new technology, and organizations are still early in the journey of pursuing its opportunities and scaling it across functions. So it’s little surprise that only a small subset of respondents (46 out of 876) report that a meaningful share of their organizations’ EBIT can be attributed to their deployment of gen AI. Still, these gen AI leaders are worth examining closely. These, after all, are the early movers, who already attribute more than 10 percent of their organizations’ EBIT to their use of gen AI. Forty-two percent of these high performers say more than 20 percent of their EBIT is attributable to their use of nongenerative, analytical AI, and they span industries and regions—though most are at organizations with less than $1 billion in annual revenue. The AI-related practices at these organizations can offer guidance to those looking to create value from gen AI adoption at their own organizations.

To start, gen AI high performers are using gen AI in more business functions—an average of three functions, while others average two. They, like other organizations, are most likely to use gen AI in marketing and sales and product or service development, but they’re much more likely than others to use gen AI solutions in risk, legal, and compliance; in strategy and corporate finance; and in supply chain and inventory management. They’re more than three times as likely as others to be using gen AI in activities ranging from processing of accounting documents and risk assessment to R&D testing and pricing and promotions. While, overall, about half of reported gen AI applications within business functions are utilizing publicly available models or tools, gen AI high performers are less likely to use those off-the-shelf options than to either implement significantly customized versions of those tools or to develop their own proprietary foundation models.

What else are these high performers doing differently? For one thing, they are paying more attention to gen-AI-related risks. Perhaps because they are further along on their journeys, they are more likely than others to say their organizations have experienced every negative consequence from gen AI we asked about, from cybersecurity and personal privacy to explainability and IP infringement. Given that, they are more likely than others to report that their organizations consider those risks, as well as regulatory compliance, environmental impacts, and political stability, to be relevant to their gen AI use, and they say they take steps to mitigate more risks than others do.

Gen AI high performers are also much more likely to say their organizations follow a set of risk-related best practices (Exhibit 11). For example, they are nearly twice as likely as others to involve the legal function and embed risk reviews early on in the development of gen AI solutions—that is, to “ shift left .” They’re also much more likely than others to employ a wide range of other best practices, from strategy-related practices to those related to scaling.

In addition to experiencing the risks of gen AI adoption, high performers have encountered other challenges that can serve as warnings to others (Exhibit 12). Seventy percent say they have experienced difficulties with data, including defining processes for data governance, developing the ability to quickly integrate data into AI models, and an insufficient amount of training data, highlighting the essential role that data play in capturing value. High performers are also more likely than others to report experiencing challenges with their operating models, such as implementing agile ways of working and effective sprint performance management.

About the research

The online survey was in the field from February 22 to March 5, 2024, and garnered responses from 1,363 participants representing the full range of regions, industries, company sizes, functional specialties, and tenures. Of those respondents, 981 said their organizations had adopted AI in at least one business function, and 878 said their organizations were regularly using gen AI in at least one function. To adjust for differences in response rates, the data are weighted by the contribution of each respondent’s nation to global GDP.

Alex Singla and Alexander Sukharevsky  are global coleaders of QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey, and senior partners in McKinsey’s Chicago and London offices, respectively; Lareina Yee  is a senior partner in the Bay Area office, where Michael Chui , a McKinsey Global Institute partner, is a partner; and Bryce Hall  is an associate partner in the Washington, DC, office.

They wish to thank Kaitlin Noe, Larry Kanter, Mallika Jhamb, and Shinjini Srivastava for their contributions to this work.

This article was edited by Heather Hanselman, a senior editor in McKinsey’s Atlanta office.

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