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Enterprises from the Taiwan region are optimistic about the economic development of the Chinese mainland and pledge to continue investing to better take advantage of the economic recovery in 2024, representatives of business and industry groups from the island told the Global Times on Monday.

The representatives also stressed their strong expectations for the mainland and the Taiwan region to continue to uphold the 1992 Consensus, opposing secessionism while maintaining peaceful and steady relations and cooperation across the Straits.

The remarks came on the sidelines of the annual two sessions, during which the Government Work Report will be released, outlining the development direction of the world's second-largest economy and setting economic and policy goals for 2024.

On this special occasion, businesses from the Taiwan region are embracing the mainland market, calling for peaceful and integrated development across the Straits with more interaction and cooperation.

The mainland's active efforts on promoting infrastructure development nationwide in recent years, with new roads being built and subway systems being launched, reflected the determination of the central and local governments in boosting the economy, Lai Cheng-i, chairman of the General Chamber of Commerce of the Taiwan island, told the Global Times on Monday.

Despite facing challenges such as China-US trade tensions, the lingering impact from the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the mainland's economy still achieved a remarkable growth rate of 5.2 percent in 2023. This growth rate significantly surpassed that of other major economies worldwide including the US at 2.5 percent, the EU at 0.5 percent, the UK at 0.1 percent and Japan at 1.9 percent.

The mainland's GDP growth also far exceeded the 1.31 percent rate of the Taiwan region.

Business representatives of the Taiwan region said that this economic achievement is commendable and it reaffirms the nation's position as the primary engine driving global economic growth.

"Despite the tough international situation in 2023, the mainland's economic growth remained strong, backed up by the government's efforts and consumption recovery, and I am confident that this trend will continue in 2024," Lai said.

Local governments, including East China's Fujian Province, neighboring the Taiwan region, are constantly improving policies and measures to promote the integrated development of their regions and Taiwan, which have brought significant benefits to businesspeople from the island. It's also made more companies, including those headed by young entrepreneurs, more willing to develop and invest in the mainland, the chamber head said.

There are strong expectations for more trade to take place on both sides.

The first shipment of 23.96 tons of grouper fish from the island of Taiwan arrived in Xiamen, Fujian Province on January 11, marking the formal resumption of related trade after the mainland customs lifted the ban on imports in late December, according to media reports.

Lai expects that there will be more farm and fishery products exported to the mainland.

Moreover, there are expectations for more tourism activities to be promoted across the Straits.

Speaking about the new potential for cooperation, Teng Tai-Hsien, secretary-general of the Straits Economic & Cultural Interchange Association, gives the examples of the mainland's continuous adjustment of its economic structure in moving in the direction of low-carbon consumption, high automation and digitalization, and companies from the island love to take part in the industrial transformation.

Opportunities have emerged in the vast domestic market ranging from the healthcare industry, spurred by an aging population, to modern agriculture and education, Teng said, noting that "businesses of the island of Taiwan should seize the opportunity presented by the mainland's economic transformation and upgrading."

Businesses of the Taiwan island remain optimistic about investing in the mainland this year as the mainland's economy is expected to continue its steady growth trajectory.

In 2023, the Taiwan region approved 328 cases of direct investment in the mainland totaling $3.04 billion. Teng said that 71.23 percent of listed companies in Taiwan had invested in business operations in the mainland.

"After these enterprises generate profits in the mainland, they often intend to reinvest. I believe that the scope of investment will expand this year," Teng said.

The Taiwan secessionist Democratic Progressive Party continues to implement a decoupling policy targeting the mainland, including on the chip industry and people-to-people exchanges, which has affected normal economic interactions across the Straits. Regional business representatives have called for sustainable and stable cross-Straits relations.

This year, the annual two sessions are crucial for the development of cross-Straits relations, especially given the severe impact of "Taiwan independence" secessionist forces and external forces, business representatives told the Global Times.

It is hoped that the two sessions will continue to uphold peaceful and integrated development, promote more exchanges and cooperation across the Straits, and naturally bring the two sides closer together, Teng said.

Over the years, the mainland has offered many preferential policies to businesses from the Taiwan region. For example, the nation is making Fujian Province a demonstration zone for integrated development across the Taiwan Straits, a move that is highly attractive to the businesses from the island.

"It is hoped that more measures like this will be implemented, allowing businesses from the Taiwan region to thrive in the mainland while creating a closer cooperation space for cross-Straits economic and trade exchanges," Teng said.

Chinese officials have called on Chinese and US businesses to expand cooperation and help stabilize bilateral ties, as US companies continue to express great interest in the Chinese market; however, Chinese officials are also firmly countering Washington's slander and crackdowns against China.

This is the current dynamic between China and the US in terms of economic and trade ties, and it will remain the situation for the foreseeable future, as Washington has adopted a "two-faced" approach in both seeking to stabilize ties as well as cracking down on China in areas where the US is lagging behind, experts said on Sunday.

On Friday, when addressing the annual appreciation dinner of the American Chamber of Commerce in China (AmCham China) in Beijing, Chinese Vice President Han Zheng called for business circles of the two countries to consolidate the foundation of friendship and mutual trust and expand areas of cooperation, the Xinhua News Agency reported on Saturday.

Han said that the Chinese economy has strong resilience, potential and vast space, and new drivers and advantages are still growing, China will unswervingly expand opening-up at a high level, and it welcomes more US companies to invest and develop in China.

Such a welcoming attitude has also been echoed by many Chinese officials amid increasing interactions between officials and businesses of the two countries in recent months. In the latest positive engagement, senior Chinese officials met with a visiting US delegation led by Suzanne P. Clark, president and CEO of the US Chamber of Commerce (USCC). During meetings, Chinese officials welcomed US businesses to invest and do business in China, while also firmly pushing back against "decoupling" and "small yard and high fence" approaches.

Many US business leaders have expressed opposition to economic decoupling. In a statement sent to the Global Times, the USCC said that in meetings with Chinese leaders during the trip, it "emphasized its longstanding support of mutually beneficial US-China commercial ties that do not compromise US national security interests" and "underscored that decoupling is not an option."

However, the USCC statement also contained claims that have been widely hyped by US officials and media outlets, including "heavy-handed commercial pressure tactics, digital protectionism and intellectual property theft."

The need for the US business community to strike a delicate balance between pursuing win-win cooperation and supporting the US government's efforts to protect "national security" underscored the chilling effect of Washington's efforts to contain China's rise, even though the US officially and publicly repeats pledges not to seek to decouple from or contain China, experts said.

"The 'two-faced' US approach when it comes to economic and trade ties with China has been very clear. It has always been seeking to cooperate in areas where it needs cooperation, while cracking down on China where it cannot compete," Gao Lingyun, an expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times on Sunday.

Such an approach has also been vividly displayed over the past few days. At the AmCham China dinner on Friday, US Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns said that "the [US] wants to keep trade going forward with China. We are not seeking to decouple these two major global economies."

However, almost at the same time as Burns uttered those words, the US government announced on Friday that it was opening an investigation into whether Chinese vehicle imports pose national security risks to the US, which could lead to restrictions or even bans on imports of Chinese-made electric vehicles (EVs), according to Reuters.

In what has been widely described on Chinese social media as absurd, clichéd "China threat" claims against Chinese EVs, US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo even suggested that China could, "with the flip of a switch," make millions of cars "disabled."

"Forget about how few Chinese EVs are in the US… we didn't know until now how powerful Chinese EVs are," a Chinese auto industry analyst surnamed Zhang told the Global Times in a mocking tone.

"But think about it again, with so many Tesla cars in China, does it mean Washington can also realize this 'with the flip of a switch'?"

Chinese officials have harshly criticized unfounded US claims against Chinese EVs.

In responding to the planned US probe, Mao Ning, a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said on Friday that China's door has been open to global auto companies, including US auto companies, but by contrast, the US has engaged in trade protectionism and set up obstacles including discriminatory subsidy policies to obstruct access to the US market by China-made cars.

"Such acts of politicizing economic and trade issues will only hinder the development of the US auto industry itself," Mao said.

Gao said that China has been very clear and consistent about its approach toward the US, that it aims to boost mutually beneficial cooperation with the US, but will also counter crackdowns by the US whenever necessary.

"Even when we are fighting back against the US crackdown measures, our ultimate goal is to ensure win-win cooperation," Gao said.

The "price war" among automakers in China that started in early 2023 has shown no signs of abating. Particularly in the new-energy vehicle (NEV) sector, both traditional and emerging players keep cutting prices or launching limited-time promotions, tactics that analysts anticipate will persist throughout the year.

XPeng Motors, one of the smart EV startups, announced on Sunday that all models of its G6 series will be discounted by 20,000 yuan ($2,779) until March 31, with prices starting at 189,900 yuan after the discount.

Huawei-backed AITO on Saturday launched limited-time promotions for its M5 series. On Friday, nine carmakers, including Geely, SAIC Volkswagen, Rising Auto and Chery, announced price reductions or limited-time promotions.

Auto giant BYD fired the first shot in this round of the "price war" after the Spring Festival holidays, introducing new versions of two models that are 20,000 yuan cheaper than the previous versions. US-based Tesla followed suit by launching limited-time discounts of up to 34,600 yuan for buyers.

The recent "price war" in the passenger vehicle market is fundamentally driven by the replacement of old technologies with new ones, and the transition from traditional fuel vehicles to NEVs, Cui Dongshu, secretary-general of the China Passenger Car Association, told the Global Times on Sunday.

"As a new market order emerges, intense competition between old and new manufacturers ensues, and this process is expected to persist for several years until a new industry landscape takes shape," Cui said.

In the rapid growth expected in the coming years, 2024 is expected to be a pivotal year for NEV producers to establish a solid footing in the market, Cui said.

China's NEV industry started early and has developed rapidly. With more than 100 manufacturers in the market, the competition is fierce. Top players are leveraging "price wars" to squeeze out smaller firms with limited innovation and funding, Zhang Xiang, director of the Digital Automotive International Cooperation Research Center of the World Digital Economy Forum, told the Global Times on Sunday.

The "price war" will persist throughout the year, Zhang said, noting that 2024 will be very significant for the players as governments at all levels roll out policies to promote vehicle consumption.

During the tone-setting Central Economic Work Conference held in Beijing in December 2023, Chinese leaders stressed that consumption of products, including NEVs and electronic products, should be stimulated.

In January, domestic NEV sales reached 1.06 million, accounting for 66 percent of the global market share, data from the CPCA showed.

"Price competition in the electric vehicle sector reflects a fully competitive market, offering consumers better deals and serving as a key competitive advantage for China's electric vehicles in the global market," Cui said.

NEV exports also performed strongly in January, particularly in Southeast Asian and European markets, which reflected the strength of China's industry chain and produced growth in both the domestic market and exports, Cui noted.

In 2023, China's vehicle production reached 30.16 million, up 11.6 percent year-on-year, while sales hit 30.09 million, up 12 percent. Both output and sales set new records, ranking first in the world for 15 consecutive years, data from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers showed.

Back in 2004, archaeologists excavated two pits in northern China that looked a lot like homebrewing operations. Constructed between 3400 and 2900 B.C. by the Yangshao culture, each pit contained the remnants of a stove and assorted funnels, pots and amphorae.

Now, Jiajing Wang of Stanford University and colleagues report that the pottery shards contain residue and other evidence of starches, chemicals and plant minerals from specific fermented grains. The ancient beer recipe included broomcorn millet, barley, Job’s tears and tubers — that probably gave the beer a sweet flavor, the team writes May 23 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The findings predate the earliest evidence of barley in China by around 1,000 years. Beer may have been consumed at social gatherings, and brewing, not agriculture, spurred the introduction of barley to China, the researchers argue.

Climate commotion
In “Changing Climate: 10 years after An Inconvenient Truth” (SN: 4/16/16, p. 22), Thomas Sumner reported on the progress scientists have made revising forecasts of the far-reaching effects of climate change — from extreme temperatures and sea level rise to severe drought and human conflict — in the decade since the Oscar-winning film’s release.

Reader response to the article was overwhelming, with hundreds of online comments. Some people enjoyed the in-depth look at climate change science, while others expressed skepticism about humans’ contribution to climate change and a general distrust of climate scientists.

“One of my goals for this article was to highlight that climate change research has itself changed over the last decade,” Sumner says. Scientists are still working to understand how the consequences of atmospheric warming will play out in the coming centuries. But one big message from the last decade of research is that the fundamentals have held up: Natural variability exists, says Sumner, but human activities are largely responsible for the current warming trend.
“The question now is what impact will human contributions have down the line and what should we do to prevent and mitigate those effects,” he says.
Plastic feast
Sarah Schwartz wrote about the discovery of a microbe, Ideonella sakaiensis, that chows down on a hard-to-degrade polymer in “This microbe makes a meal of plastic” (SN: 4/16/16, p. 5).
Online commenters were amazed by this new plastic-gobbling organism. “This is great news,” Dan said. “Our world would be doomed if there wasn’t a microbe able to do this.” Chuckawobbly wondered how long it takes I. sakaiensis to digest the plastic. And Jean Harlow was concerned about the potential by-products of worldwide plastic digestion. “The waste product would be a significant amount … of what?” she asked.

Researchers observed that I. sakaiensis almost completely degraded a thin film of polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, after six weeks in a laboratory. But when extracted from the bacterium, the proteins used to break down plastic begin working in about 18 hours.

I. sakaiensisappears to break PET into smaller molecules, like amino acids and carbon dioxide, says coauthor Kenji Miyamoto of Keio University in Yokohama, Japan. But it would probably be hard for the microbe to break down plastic in the outdoors because of its specific growth requirements, he says. Miyamoto envisions that it could be possible to use the specialized proteins in a closed environment to break PET down into molecules such as terephthalic acid— one of the plastic’s main building blocks, which seems benign in the environment.

Prairie dog predators
Herbivorous prairie dog mothers routinely kill baby ground squirrels that encroach on their territories, researchers found. Competition for resources may be a contributing factor to the killings, Susan Milius reported in “Killer prairie dogs make good moms” (SN: 4/16/16, p. 14).

One reader had other ideas. Audrey Boag wondered if prairie dog moms kill ground squirrels to protect their pups from predation or from diseases carried by the squirrels. “In either case, minimizing the number of ground squirrels would pay in lifetime biological fitness,” she wrote.

“We never observed a ground squirrel kill or injure an adult or juvenile prairie dog,” says study coauthor John Hoogland. “Perhaps such attacks sometimes occur underground.” Hoogland notes that the majority of ground squirrels killed by prairie dogs were juveniles, which are too small to be a threat.

One threat, however, is a species of disease-carrying flea that infests both animals. Hoogland found that prairie dog killers and their offspring had fewer fleas than nonkillers and their offspring, “but this trend was not significant,” he says.

No, that’s not the sun. It’s Jupiter, ablaze with infrared light in new images taken in preparation for the Juno spacecraft’s July 4 arrival at the king of the planets. This image shows how heat welling up from deep within the planet gets absorbed by gas in the atmosphere, which can tell researchers how stuff moves around beneath Jupiter’s thick blanket of clouds. Juno won’t look for infrared light, but it will (among other things) measure how much microwave radiation is being blocked by water lurking within Jupiter’s atmosphere.

The map is pieced together from multiple images obtained at the Very Large Telescope in Chile over the past several months. Ground-based images such as these will help researchers understand what Juno is peering at each time it swoops in close to Jupiter’s clouds over the next 20 months.

For women thinking about fertility treatments, there may be one less thing to worry about.

A long-term study shows that women who underwent in vitro fertilization are not significantly more likely to develop breast cancer than women in the general public or women who opted for other fertility treatments. The results are reported July 19 in JAMA.

The fertility treatment alters progesterone and estradiol levels in women trying to get pregnant. Yo-yoing hormones have been linked to an increase in a woman’s odds of developing breast cancer, but studies are divided on whether IVF itself actually ups cancer risk.

Alexandra van den Belt-Dusebout of the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam and her colleagues tracked 19,158 women who underwent in vitro fertilization treatment between 1983 and 1995 and 5,950 women who underwent other fertility treatments between 1980 and 1995.

Following up two decades later, the team found that 948 of the women had developed breast cancer. But breast cancer rates didn’t differ much between groups: 163.5 per 100,000 women for those who had IVF compared to 167.2 women on other fertility treatments and 163.3 women in the general public.

These orderly patterns of dark blue dots indicate where individual chlorine atoms are missing from an otherwise regular grid of atoms. Scientists manipulated these vacancies to create a supersmall data storage device.

The locations of vacancies encode bits of information in the device, which Sander Otte of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and colleagues describe July 18 in Nature Nanotechnology. The team arranged and imaged the vacancies using a scanning tunneling microscope. The storage system, which can hold a kilobyte of data, must be cooled to a chilly −196° Celsius to work.
To demonstrate the technique, the researchers transcribed an excerpt from a famous 1959 lecture by physicist Richard Feynman, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” which predicted the importance of nanotechnology. In each block, paired rows represent letters. Blocks marked with an “X” were unusable. The encoded 159 words of text fill a region a ten-thousandth of a millimeter wide.

If scaled up, the researchers say, the technology could store the full contents of the U.S. Library of Congress in a cube a tenth of a millimeter on each side.

Plastic cling wrap with nano-sized pores could give “cool clothes” a new meaning.

The material lets heat escape, instead of trapping it like traditional fabrics, Stanford University materials scientist Yi Cui and colleagues report in the Sept. 2 Science. It could help people keep cool in hot weather, Cui says, and even save energy by reducing the use of air conditioning.

“It’s a very bold new idea,” says MIT physicist Svetlana Boriskina, who wrote an accompanying commentary. Demand for the new material could be far-reaching, she says. “Every person who wears clothes could be a potential user of this product.”
Current cooling devices include wearable fans and wicking fabrics; both rely on evaporation to cool human skin. But skin also sheds heat in another way — as infrared radiation. Clothing holds this heat close to the body, Cui says. If infrared radiation could instead pass through fabric, he reasoned, people would feel a lot cooler.

But the fabric would have to be transparent only to infrared wavelengths. To visible light, it would need to be opaque. Otherwise, the clothing would be see-through.

Cui found just one material that satisfied both requirements: a commercially available plastic used in lithium-ion batteries. The material, called nanoporous polyethylene, or nanoPE, is a cling wrap‒like plastic that lets infrared radiation through. But unlike cling wrap, the material isn’t clear: It blocks visible light.

Tiny pores speckled throughout the fabric act as obstacles to visible light, Boriskina says. When blue light, for example, hits the pores, it scatters. So do other colors. The light “bounces around in different directions and scrambles together,” she says. To human eyes, the resulting color is white.

The pores scatter visible light because they’re both in the same size range: The diameters of the pores span 50 to 1,000 nanometers, and the wavelengths of visible light range from 400 to 700 nanometers. Infrared light emitted by the body has a much larger wavelength, 7,000 to 14,000 nanometers, so the plastic’s tiny pores can’t block it. To infrared light, the pores are barely bumps in the road, not barriers.
The pores are kind of like small rocks at a beach, Boriskina says. They’ll interfere with the motion of small waves, but big waves will wash right over.

Cui and colleagues tested nanoPE by laying it on a hot plate warmed up to human skin temperature — 33.5° Celsius. NanoPE raised the “skin” temperature by just 0.8 degrees(to 34.3° C). “But when you put on cotton, my God, it rose to 37,” Cui says. “It’s hot!”

The researchers also tried to make nanoPE more wearable than plastic wrap. They coated it with a water-wicking chemical, punched holes in it to make it breathable, and layered it with cotton mesh. Now, the team is working on weaving the fabric to make it feel more like traditional textiles.

“Within five years, I hope someone will start wearing it,” Cui says. “And within 10 years, I hope most people will be wearing it.”

Researchers have digitally unwrapped and read an ancient Hebrew scroll that’s so charred it can’t be touched without falling apart. It turns out the document contains the oldest known Biblical text outside of the roughly 2,000-year-old Dead Sea Scrolls, the investigators say.

Archaeologists discovered the scroll’s remnants in a synagogue’s holy ark during a 1970 excavation in Israel of En-Gedi, a Jewish community destroyed by fire around 600.

In a series of digital steps, slices from a 3-D scan of the En-Gedi scroll were analyzed to bring letters and words into relief on a pieced-together, virtual page. Those images revealed passages from the book of Leviticus written in ink on the scroll’s disintegrating sheets. Radiocarbon results date the scroll to approximately 300, making it the earliest copy of an Old Testament book ever found in a holy ark, scientists report September 21 in Science Advances.

This computerized recovery and conservation process can now be used to retrieve other ancient documents “from the brink of oblivion,” the researchers say.