Guo Rui

Chinese students are starting to make plans for a post-coronavirus world and remain optimistic about studying abroad, but do have concerns about Beijing’s strained relationships with some foreign countries.  About half of the Chinese students surveyed by EIC Education, an education consultancy based in China, said they would like to go overseas this year or next.  60% of them said they would feel safe leaving home after getting a Covid-19 vaccination.  About 60% of students will feel confident about leaving if travel restrictions are eased for foreign students, infections at the destination stay low and on-campus teaching resumes. 30% of students preferred Britain to study, followed by 24.5

Chinese President Xi Jinping has charged the southern metropolis Shenzhen with taking China’s innovation and economic reforms to a higher level at a time when the world had entered a time of “turmoil and changes.” In a wide-ranging speech to mark the 40th anniversary of the establishment of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, Xi also called on the municipality to better integrate the two economies of Hong Kong and Macau into the Greater Bay Area and to attract young people from Hong Kong to study and live on the mainland. In the 50-minute-long speech, Xi laid out a wide range of economic and political missions for Shenzhen, which has been a front runner of China’s reform experiment for 40 ye

Ren Zhiqiang, a prominent real estate tycoon and a vocal critic of the Communist Party leadership, has been put on trial in Beijing for alleged corruption. A member of the party, Ren was a long-standing critic of China’s leadership, earning him the nickname Ren the Big Cannon. His most recent article, circulating online since March, was critical of the authorities’ initial missteps in handling the coronavirus, Beijing’s attempts to promote its successes in containing the outbreak and President Xi Jinping’s expansion of power. Although Ren did not mention Xi by name, he made references in his article to an “emperor” and a “clown” who personally directed China’s fight against Covid-19. Ren ha

When the fundraising campaign started last week, 17-year-old high school student Joyce Peng thought the target might have been too ambitious. The plan was to raise 90,000 yuan ($13,100) for sanitary products for girls in a remote, mountainous part of southwest China. Joyce and her friends, part of a feminist club called Stand TogetHer in Chengdu, Sichuan province, launched the online charity campaign. Their doubts were quickly erased. In just over a day, the group raised just under 125,000 yuan ($18,240) to help 700 impoverished girls at a primary school in Liangshan Yi autonomous prefecture, one of the poorest parts of the country, access sanitary products. “I’m very excited and so happy,”

China still faces the risk of a second wave of coronavirus infections, but another big outbreak is unlikely thanks to the country’s tight prevention and control measures, according to the country’s top respiratory disease specialist. “With our intensive follow-up monitoring procedures, the risks of a second wave [of coronavirus infections] exist but another peak is unlikely to occur [in China],” Zhong Nanshan said. Zhong, who heads a team of experts advising the Chinese government on the pandemic, said the authorities should not be complacent, with the coronavirus continuing to spread around the world. In addition, most people in China and East Asia had yet to develop immunity to the pathoge

The blame game between the US and China is putting important Covid-19 research at risk, according to China’s most renowned respiratory expert. Zhong Nanshan, 83 – who had a leading role in fighting the 2002-03 severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) epidemic and now advises the Chinese government on Covid-19 – said scientists around the world needed to team up to establish where the new coronavirus, which causes Covid-19, had come from. He said US epidemiologist Ian Lipkin, whom he had known since they worked together on the Sars outbreak, had approached him with a method to establish how the virus jumped to humans. But the work could be stalled for fear it would be distorted by political a

A top respiratory disease expert in China has attributed the heavy fatalities in the United States from Covid-19 to a failure by policymakers to heed the advice of scientists. Zhong Nanshan, a prominent scientist who has helped lead China’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, said the US performed admirably during the Sars epidemic 17 years ago but it was “completely different” now. “You can say that [the US] carried out very extensive screening or more screening than other countries … But the heavy casualties still shocked me,” said the director of China’s National Clinical Research Center for Respiratory Disease in an exclusive interview with the South China Morning Post. The US has rep

A leading public figure in mainland China’s fight against the coronavirus has suggested that Hong Kong should ease its border restrictions to boost its sluggish economy.  Zhong Nanshan, a top Chinese infectious disease expert who is often called a “Sars hero” for his pivotal role in fighting the 2002-2003 outbreak, said a mutually recognized health system between the city and the mainland could enable cross-boundary travelers to skip mandatory Covid-19 quarantines.  In an exclusive interview with the South China Morning Post, Zhong also praised Hong Kong for its efforts to contain the new coronavirus and called for more cross-border interaction to reboot the city’s economy. “Hong Kong has do

China has issued a lengthy rebuttal dismissing claims it mishandled the Covid-19 pandemic and denying claims that there had been safety problems at a virology lab in the Chinese city of Wuhan. The 11,380-word rebuttal follows an escalating war of words between China and the United States over the origin of the coronavirus that causes Covid-19. The statement was posted on the Chinese foreign ministry’s website on Saturday and has been published by state media outlets. Last week, President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said there was evidence that linked the secure facility to an accidental leak of the pathogen, although Pompeo later changed his tune and said it “could be wr

Geneticists from Britain and Germany have mapped the evolutionary path of the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 and determined there are currently three versions of it spreading around the world. The discovery of how the variants were formed and then spread could help scientists to identify its source and explain why it is so contagious. The researchers analyzed the first 160 complete viral genomes sequenced from patients between December 24 and March 4, then reconstructed the early evolutionary pathway of Covid-19 in humans through its mutations. “There are too many rapid mutations to neatly trace a Covid-19 family tree. We used a mathematical network algorithm to visualize all the plausibl