Torbjørn Færøvik's Blog, page 344

Thanks to COVID, China's New Currency Is the Potato

Forget the Digital Yuan. The People's Republic of China has a new currency. It's called the Potato. University students in Xian prefer to take potatoes over cash for tutoring services, Charles Burton, a China watcher at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, tells Newsweek. The tutors also accept rice, he says. Want to buy cotton swabs in that central Chinese city of 13 million? Potatoes are the medium

Hong Kong Officials Among Group Quarantined After COVID Exposure at Birthday Party

Two people tested positive for COVID-19 after attending a birthday party with over 150 people, requiring several Hong Kong officials and lawmakers to go into quarantine on Friday. Health authorities said that roughly 170 guests who were at the party would be considered as close contact to the two people who tested positive. Everyone who was at the party, including nine government officials and

China Locks Down City Containing One of World's Busiest Ports, Could Impact Supply Chain

The Chinese industrial city of Ningbo has been shut down due to COVID-19 and the lockdown has its port continuing to be backed up. Located in the Zhejiang province of China, Ningbo is home to the third-largest port in the world. However, lockdown measures could worsen the already-disrupted port as worldwide supply chain woes persist. The city is currently experiencing a small but impactful wave

Hong Kong's free press is being 'gutted.' Here's what the world loses

In the past year, two of Hong Kong's biggest pro-democracy media outlets were toppled after enormous government pressure, a series of arrests and police raids on their newsrooms. A third organization — the five-year-old Citizen News — announced last week that it would shut down, too. But unlike Apple Daily and Stand News, Citizen News didn't wait for police to come knocking before closing shop."

Cold War-style power grab plays out with deadly consequences on the streets of Kazakhstan

The politics of Kazakhstan are notoriously opaque and bureaucratic, but in the past few days President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has shed his image as a compliant, colorless placeholder. With a little help from Moscow, Tokayev has ruthlessly turned the tables on his mentor, Nursultan Nazarbaev, the man who ruled Kazakhstan from independence in 1991 to 2019 and was still known as Leader of the Nation,

As order is restored in Kazakhstan, its future is murkier than ever

For many Kazakhs, the full story behind the unrest of the past week remains as murky as the mist that enveloped Almaty, the country’s largest city and the centre of violence, at the same time.People were unable to access accurate information, as an internet blackout froze almost all access to the outside world during a tragic few days of violence in which military vehicles rolled through the

Snøhetta's upcoming Beijing Sub-Center Library in China is not like your average city library.

Snøhetta's upcoming Beijing Sub-Center Library in China is not like your average city library. It will feature glazed walls that enclose a series of tree-shaped columns, as well as a forest canopy-like roof. The idea behind its eye-catching design is that visitors will be able to enjoy a light-filled environment that plays on the idea of sitting under a tree and reading a book.The Beijing

Ian Buruma: History by Decree

Song Gengyi, a journalism teacher in Shanghai, was firedlast month for doing her job. She had encouraged her students to verify official accounts of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, the orgy of mass murder and rape perpetrated in the then-Chinese capital by the Imperial Japanese Army. Another teacher, Li Tiantian, who protested against the firing, was punished by being committed to a psychiatric

Take a look inside the new driverless bullet train China just unveiled for the Olympics

China is pulling out all the stops for the Beijing Games, unveiling a new bullet train just for the Olympics. The driverless Fuxing bullet train travels at speeds of 217 miles per hour and can carry 564 passengers per trip in its eight carriages. It is being put on the tracks just in time for the Beijing Games, to ferry passengers along the 108-mile journey between the Chinese capital and

Why China Has Big Plans To Build A Lot Of Nuclear Weapons

Why Is China Building So Many Nuclear Weapons? The US Defense Department’s annual report on China’s military, released in November, again illustrated the breathtaking pace and scale of China’s conventional-military modernization.The report also highlighted several developments that could threaten the US more directly than China’s conventional forces — namely China’s “large-scale expansion of its