XI'S TOUR FOCUSES ON POVERTY, ECOLOGY

President Xi Jinping inspected poverty alleviation work in Shaanxi province on Tuesday amid the nation's efforts to overcome the impact of the novel coronavirus pandemic and improve people's livelihoods.

Xi visited a tea plantation in Jiangjiaping, a village in Pingli county, on Tuesday morning. The plantation, covering 80 hectares, has helped more than 300 poverty-stricken people to increase their annual income by an average of 1,100 yuan ($155).

He also visited a community, a township hospital and a primary school on Tuesday, the second day of his inspection tour.

On Monday afternoon, Xi visited the village of Jinmi in Zhashui county, where he talked with villagers who were preparing for livestreaming marketing of their agricultural products. Located in the Qinling Mountains, the village has shaken off poverty in recent years by developing the black fungus industry.

E-commerce is an emerging business with great potential, which can promote sales of agricultural products, help rural residents shake off poverty and facilitate rural vitalization, Xi said.

China has set the goal of lifting all of the country's people out of poverty by the end this year. The number of impoverished people had been brought down from 98.99 million in 2012 to 5.51 million by the end of last year, according to the State Council Leading Group Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development.

Despite the pandemic, China is determined to realize the goal of reducing the nation's impoverished population to zero this year.

Early last month, Xi presided over a symposium on poverty alleviation, during which he stressed overcoming the impact of the novel coronavirus outbreak to secure a "complete" victory in the fight against poverty.

It is the president's second domestic trip within three weeks following his inspection tour of Zhejiang province.

While visiting Niubeiliang National Nature Reserve in the Qinling Mountains on Monday, Xi instructed local officials to be guardians of the ecological environment of the region, which is the natural boundary between the country's north and south.

"Illegal construction in the Qinling Mountains is a big lesson," he said. "From now on, any official working in Shaanxi should above all learn this lesson, avoid repeating the same mistake and work as a guardian of the ecological environment of the mountains."

The Qinling Mountains are home to a huge variety of plants and rare wildlife such as giant pandas, golden monkeys and crested ibis.

Attaching great importance to the environmental protection of the Qinling Mountains, Xi gave instructions on tackling the illegal construction of villas in the area, demanding a thorough investigation into the persistent problem of illegal construction and the failure of officials concerned to comply with orders from the central authorities.

Since July 2018, more than 1,100 illegal villas at the northern foothills of the Qinling range have been demolished and a number of officials were investigated.

NEW INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECTS EXPECTED TO BOOST ECONOMY

China is accelerating the development of new infrastructure in an effort to hedge against the impact of the novel coronavirus outbreak and spur the economy amid mounting downside pressure, said government officials and experts.

Unlike traditionally defined infrastructure such as railways, highways and airports, the new type of infrastructure projects include new infrastructure for digital transformation, intelligent upgrades and innovative development, said Wu Hao, director of the Department of High-Tech Industry at the National Development and Reform Commission.

"Led by new development concepts, the new infrastructure is driven by technological innovation and based on information networks to meet the needs of high-quality development," Wu said at a news conference on Monday.

The news caused shares of new infrastructure-related companies traded in Shanghai and Shenzhen to rise on Tuesday. According to Shanghai-based information provider Wind Info, shares of internet data centers companies increased by 3.34 percent, cloud computing firms by 1.97 percent and big data companies by 1.47 percent.

Wu's remarks came after the country urged faster development of a new round of new infrastructure such as 5G networks and data centers at a meeting of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee last month.

According to Wu, the new infrastructure can be divided into three categories-information-based infrastructure, converged infrastructure supported by applications of new technologies such as the internet, big data and artificial intelligence, and innovative infrastructure that support scientific research, technology and product development.

Typically, the new infrastructure involves a number of key fields including 5G, internet of things, industrial internet, cloud computing, blockchain, data centers, smart computing centers and smart transportation, Wu said.

Experts said the big spending on new infrastructure is a key move to cushion the impact of the epidemic and is in line with the government's ambitions to transition from an export-led manufacturing economy toward a high-tech and innovation-driven one. It will also help expand domestic demand, maintain economic stability, restructure the economy and further advance China's core competitiveness.

"The new round of intelligent and digital infrastructure involves a series of key fields in social and livelihood fields such as telecommunications, electricity, transportation and digital economy," said Chen Duan, executive director of Zhongjing Digital Economy Research Center.

"In the short term, such big spending on new infrastructure will be a key move to strengthen countercyclical adjustment, which will also help weather the economic fallout of the coronavirus epidemic. In the long run, it will boost new types of consumption in fields such as online shopping, prompt the growth of new businesses such as livestreaming and accelerate the pace of upgrading the traditional industries."

Compared with the heavy-asset traditional infrastructure with long-term returns, the new types of high-tech infrastructure are more likely to attract investment from private investors, which will inject new impetus into the economy, Chen added.

"The new infrastructure has shown a direction for the better, with a key focus on invigorating a new type of production factor in data," said Cui Lili, director of the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics' Institute of E-Commerce. "Faster development in new infrastructure will fulfill the needs for deepening supply-side structural reforms and promoting industrial upgrades."

POWERFUL SURVEY TELESCOPE DUE TO BE BUILT BY 2022

Chinese scientists are building the world's most powerful widefield survey telescope of its class in the northern hemisphere near the "Mars Camp" in Qinghai province. Construction of the telescope is due to be completed by 2022 and it will begin surveying the night sky around 2023.

Scientists hope its panoramic view will lead to new astronomical discoveries, such as finding faint celestial bodies or studying how the structure of galaxies changes over time. It can also be used to monitor space debris to ensure the safety of spacecraft during future explorations.

On April 16, the University of Science and Technology of China signed a cooperation agreement with the Haixi Mongol and Tibetan autonomous prefecture in Qinghai province. They plan to build the telescope on top of Saishiteng mountain near the town of Lenghu in the prefecture, famed for being China's "Mars Camp" due to its eerily eroded desert landscape that closely resembles the surface of the red planet.

The instrument is called the Wide Field Survey Telescope, or WFST, and has an estimated cost of 200 million yuan ($28 million), according to project information obtained by China Daily.

It boasts a 2.5-meter in diameter optical telescope and a 750-million-pixel, 1.5 metric ton camera, making it the most capable widefield survey telescope of its class north of the equator.

Zheng Xianzhong, a researcher at the Purple Mountain Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, one of the key institutions behind the project, said in a presentation last year that the telescope can survey the entire northern sky once every three nights, and collect around 400 terabytes of image data annually over its six-year operation period.

This survey speed is on par with the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope currently being built in Chile, which is the world's flagship wide-field telescope at 8.4 meter in diameter, equipped with a 3.2-billion-pixel camera, and used for surveying the southern sky.

The WFST is "complementary and has synergy with the LSST in terms of sky accessibility and science", Zheng said.

"The WFST is a powerful survey machine, and its six-year survey period will yield the deepest imaging of the northern sky, providing key data for multiple scientific research."

NASA also has a new wide-field survey telescope in the pipeline, albeit in space rather than ground-based, called the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope. However, this hefty $3.2 billion project has faced repeated threats of cancellation by the current United States administration, and its fate remains undecided.

The US currently has the Sloan Digital Sky Survey in New Mexico that also uses a 2.5-meter wide-angle telescope, but it cannot survey the entire northern sky.

Christian Ready, an astronomy lecturer at Towson University in the United States, said most telescopes study the universe by focusing on a relatively small area of the sky for up to several hours at a time.

"But the rest of the sky isn't sitting still," he said. "As many as 1 million supernovae explode in distant galaxies every single day, but in order to keep track of the changing skies, we need a telescope unlike anything built before."

Large telescopes are also notoriously expensive and difficult to build. Therefore, engineers are building more compact and cost-effective telescopes that can take pictures of the universe with greater width and depth than before.

Wide-field survey telescopes achieve this goal by bouncing light between multiple mirrors before capturing them on a giant camera.

Given how most of the survey telescopes north of the equator are clustered in the US, Japan, and the Canary Islands, the WFST's longitude coordinate can complement that of its foreign peers, allowing continuous monitoring of the northern night sky if working together.

BEIJING ISSUES PLANS FOR REOPENING SPORTS VENUES

The Beijing Municipal Bureau of Sports issued a work plan for fitness venues to reopen safely on Tuesday.

According to the plan, epidemic prevention and control is the first priority.

Beijing requires all venues to adhere to the principle orderly opening, and gradually open starting from low-risk places and sports that are low or no contact. Sports venues with contact and confrontation will open last.

The plan has made requirements for the scope of the opening of physical fitness venues. Physical fitness venues include public stadiums, public fitness facilities and commercial physical fitness venues.

According to the requirements for the suspension of the opening of high-risk places, the shower facilities of physical fitness places, swimming venues and fitness places opened by using underground space will not be opened.

CAMPAIGN TO BOOST SAFETY IN WORKPLACE

The Work Safety Committee of the State Council, the country's Cabinet, has launched a campaign to "remove safety hazards at the root" and effectively curb major accidents in workplaces across the country in about three years.

The campaign, which will run through the end of 2022, will cover nine major sectors, including coal mines, hazardous chemicals, industrial parks and urban construction, according to a media release from the Ministry of Emergency Management, where the office of the committee is based.

While promoting in-depth study of President Xi Jinping's statement on safety production in government bodies and enterprises to raise awareness of work safety, efforts will also be made to further improve the country's mechanism to strengthen responsibilities of local governments, supervising authorities and enterprises in safety management, it said.

It also vows to establish public risk control and screening systems for hazards while introducing more laws, regulations and compulsory work safety standards or revising current ones.

Under such mechanisms, instead of being pushed by the authorities in "a passive manner", enterprises will ramp up safety management, risk control and hazards screening proactively, it stressed.

With technical innovation bolstered and construction of relevant infrastructures beefed up, the campaign is expected to help "modernize" the country's work safety governance system and safe production capability by the end of 2022.

By that time, major workplace accidents will have been effectively curbed following a continuous decline in accident count, it noted.

The release also pledges to strengthen financial support from governments of different levels to help foster a batch of companies specialized in providing technical services on work safety.

By grading companies by types, law enforcement will be carried out in various ways. In addition to surprise inspections, law enforcement officers will be dispatched outside the regions where they work, it said.

It also reiterated that those who perform poorly during the campaign will be sternly punished.

"To ensure down-to-earth achievement from the campaign, those who resort to dereliction of duty or fail to achieve goals on time will be held accountable in a stern manner," it said.

A total of 29,519 people were killed in workplace accidents in the country in 2019, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

The number of workplace accidents dropped by 18.3 percent, and the death toll fell by 17.1 percent year-on-year in 2019. The year before, they dropped 6.5 and 8.6 percent, respectively, according to the ministry.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice. - Thomas Paine