NATION SHIFTING TO HIGH-QUALITY DEVELOPMENT

China's move from export-driven growth to promoting the integration of the domestic and overseas markets reflects the country's shift to nurturing new edges in global competitiveness and fostering high-quality development despite the headwinds it faces, experts and business executives said on Wednesday.

China needs to give full play to the advantages of its ultra-large domestic market and work toward a new model of development in which the domestic economic network takes the primary role, with the domestic and international economic networks complementing each other, President Xi Jinping told senior business executives from domestic and foreign companies at a symposium on Tuesday.

Xi said the country will open up wider to the outside world during the process, fully unleash the potential of its domestic demand, enable better connectivity between the domestic and international markets and give priority to innovation in science and technology.

Wuhan Guide Infrared Co Chairman Huang Li, who attended the symposium, said: "Despite headwinds such as the mounting backlash against globalization, China is still open-minded to embrace the outside world and will continue to stick to opening up, which will inject new impetus into future growth."

"In the next step, we must continue to pursue high-quality development, give priority to technological innovation and master core technologies," Huang added.

Yang Yuanqing, chairman and CEO of Chinese tech giant Lenovo, agreed, saying that the meeting has shown that the government attaches greater importance to boosting the confidence of market entities.

"China's new development plan to combine the construction of the domestic market system with the expansion of international markets will not only help strengthen the resilience of its economic development, but also provide huge growth opportunities for the world economy," Yang said.

"More efforts should be made to promote the development of digitization, automation and intelligence in manufacturing."

Under the previous export-oriented mode of growth, China grew its economy into the world's second-largest through low-cost factory production. It's now time for the country to move on, said Cui Fan, a professor of international trade at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing.

Xi's remarks suggest that the country is moving toward the next stage of development through deepening reforms and opening-up, which will further integrate China into the world economy, Cui said.

"China does not deny the importance of opening-up. In fact, the country is pursuing a new development plan, focusing on its domestic market and meeting domestic needs," Cui said.

CHINA EMBARKS ON FIRST INDEPENDENT MISSION TO MARS

China launched its first independent Mars mission on Thursday from the Wenchang Space Launch Center in Hainan province, marking the start of the nation's planetary exploration program.

As the launch sequence started at 12:41 pm, 10 engines at the bottom of the Long March 5 carrier rocket's first core stage and four boosters roared to life, generating a combined thrust of more than 1,000 metric tons to lift the gigantic vehicle and its payload, the Tianwen 1 robotic probe, into a bright blue sky dotted with white clouds from the coastal launch complex in Wenchang.

The 57-meter rocket, the strongest and most technologically sophisticated in China's launch vehicle family, flew for more than half an hour before placing the spacecraft on an Earth-Mars transfer trajectory. The flight set a speed record for the country's rocket fleet as it surpassed the escape velocity of 11.2 kilometers per second required to get away from Earth's gravitational pull.

If everything goes according to schedule, the 5-metric ton Tianwen 1, which consists of two major parts – an orbiter and a landing capsule – will travel more than 400 million kilometers in nearly seven months before getting captured by the Martian gravitational field, the China National Space Administration said.

Several mid-course and deep-space correction maneuvers will be made during the spaceflight to make sure the probe is precisely aimed at the red planet.

After the probe enters Mars orbit, it will revolve around the planet for two to three months to investigate the landing capsule's preset landing site before descending to release the landing capsule, which will gradually drop through the Martian atmosphere.

During the entry, descent and landing process, the capsule will first use a heat shield to decelerate, which means the craft will rely on aerodynamic drag to slow itself down. It will then deploy a parachute to further reduce the speed and drop its heat shield and later its back shell. In the next step, the capsule will drop the parachute and ignite its retrorockets.

When the craft reaches about 100 meters above the surface, it will suspend the descent and spend some time observing and analyzing the selected landing point to check for obstacles like rocks. With a positive result, the lander will continue descending until the last moment, when the retrorockets will be shut down, allowing it to touch down steadily on Martian soil, according to the administration.

Experts have dubbed the entire landing operation, expected to take about seven minutes, "the riskiest moment" of the Mars mission.

The lander will later unlock the rover to allow it to move onto the Martian surface.

Weighing about 240 kilograms, the rover, which has yet to be named, has six wheels and four solar panels and will be able to move 200 meters per hour on Mars. It carries six scientific instruments, including a multispectral camera, ground-penetrating radar and a meteorological measuring device, and is expected to work on the planet for about three months. If the highly autonomous machine functions well, it will become the fifth rover deployed on Mars, following four from the United States.

Meanwhile, the orbiter will continue circling the red planet for mapping and measurement tasks with seven scientific apparatus, including a high-resolution imager and a magnetometer. It will also relay signals between ground control and the rover.

China's first Mars rover is scheduled to soft-land on a suitable site in the southern part of Mars' Utopia Planitia around May 2021, said Liu Tongjie, spokesman for the Tianwen 1 mission.

INDUSTRIAL PROGRESS ON TRACK: REGULATOR

China is capable of sustaining a relatively sound momentum in industrial development in the second half of this year, despite challenges from the COVID-19 pandemic and global economic downward pressure, said the nation's top industry regulator on Thursday.

Xin Guobin, vice-minister of industry and information technology, said the fundamentals of China's industrial economy remain good, and the long-term positive trend will not change due to short-term challenges.

His comments came after industrial output, a key gauge of industrial activity in the country, rose by 4.4 percent year-on-year in the second quarter of the year, compared with the 8.4 percent plunge in the first quarter due to the novel coronavirus epidemic, data from the National Bureau of Statistics showed.

Industrial output growth rose to 4.8 percent year-on-year in June, compared with 4.4 percent in May, marking the third consecutive month that the barometer has remained in the positive territory since the epidemic, thanks to the effective epidemic containment and business resumption measures, said the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

High-tech industries and emerging digital technologies are gaining traction and playing a key role in shoring up the economy. By the end of June, China has built 410,000 5G base stations in total, with 257,000 of them constructed in the first half of this year.

Currently, China has 66 million 5G users, with a total 197 types of 5G devices gaining network access license, and the 5G smartphone shipment hit 86.23 million units this year.

The policy to encourage auto consumption showed an obvious effect, with the growth of added value of the auto industry reaching 12.2 percent in May and 13.4 percent in June.

The small and medium-sized enterprises showed a recovery trend with the major economic indicators changing from negative to positive in the second quarter of this year. The revenue of the SMEs saw an increase of 8.6 percent year-on-year in April and 3 percent year-on-year in May, with the total profits rising 14.9 percent and 14.1 percent, respectively.

Thirteen enterprises in China have started building production capacity for COVID-19 vaccines, and 9 of them have been approved to start clinical trials, the nation's top industry regulator said.

Huang Libin, spokesman for the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said Chinese enterprises have been closely tracking the research and development of COVID-19 vaccines, and they are stepping up efforts to prepare for the large-scale production of COVID-19 vaccines in the future.

WHEN VANITY TRUMPS SCIENCE, DIPLOMACY SELF-DESTRUCTS

The desperate quality of failing US administration is painfully evident in the gross mishandling of the pandemic and the frittering away of diplomatic good will, so much so that influential Republican strategists have taken the tack, "Don't defend Trump, blame China".

The sudden demand on Tuesday that China close its consulate in Houston is in keeping with the erratic behavior of the embattled US administration.

What crazy new provocation will he come up with? Because it is certain there will be more in the months leading up to the election, which polls and pundits alike say he is likely to lose.

The expulsion of Chinese diplomats in Houston will bring to a close a long and productive chapter of US-China relations and raises fears about the rise of a new kind of McCarthyism in the United States based on a bigoted hatred of China. The Houston consulate, opened in November 1979, was the first consular mission to open during the honeymoon after the US and China established diplomatic relations, not long after Deng Xiaoping's visit to Texas during which he famously donned a cowboy hat. The positive energy of those heady, early days has been lost replaced by something a lot more negative.

A tit-for-tat dynamic is already painfully evident as the world's two biggest economies tussle in trade and security affairs. Just as journalist expulsions have come to be expected in response to journalist expulsions, and withering diplomatic invective is met with the same, it can be fully expected that a US consulate may be closed in China in response.

At least part of the ire being exhibited the by the US State Department under the belligerent leadership of former CIA chief Mike Pompeo is founded on diplomatic tomfoolery.

The US Consulate in Wuhan has largely been running on empty since a mysterious coronavirus, now known as Covid-19, first began ravaged the central Yangtse River region. Now they want to return.

Pompeo's spokesperson and other underlings have asserted that "diplomatic immunity" should be extended to include "virus immunity" which is to say, US diplomats should be able to enter China any time they please without taking the same tests and preventative quarantine measures as everyone else.

Diplomats are traditionally accorded perks not available to ordinary citizens, such as diplomatic channels at airports, diplomatic pouch privileges, the right to rip up parking tickets and ignore petty violations of the law, but since when are diplomats free to put the health and safety of others at risk?

It is immoral, and not at all diplomatic, to put countless others at risk in this way.

Trump's State Department has a weak record of compliance with public health guidelines and scientific protocol going back to the time when State arranged to evacuate US citizens from the Diamond Princess cruise ship. Passengers who tested positive were put on the same flight as those who tested negative. Early documented transmission of the virus on US soil dates mostly to the botched "rescue" of US citizens who had been stranded in port or at sea on various commercial cruises.

What's more, US diplomats who boarded the Diamond Princess in Yokohama Port in March 2020 did not take adequate safety precautions, did not get tested on the faulty presumption that diplomats were immune to that sort of thing.

XI INSPECTS NORTHEAST CHINA'S JILIN PROVINCE

Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, on Wednesday inspected northeast China's Jilin Province.

While visiting Lishu, a county in the city of Siping, Xi went to a demonstration zone for green food production and a farmers' cooperative to learn about grain production, the protection and use of black soil, as well as mechanized and large-scale farming.

Xi also visited the memorial hall for the Siping battle in the Chinese People's War of Liberation and paid his tribute to revolutionary martyrs.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

Men fail much oftener from want of perseverance than from want of talent. - William Cobbett