We believe in China's women's national soccer team not for their past achievements but for the mental strength they exhibit at each and every game, especially at crucial moments.
The Steel Roses have embarked on their eighth journey to the FIFA Women's World Cup with their feet standing on solid ground.
The 2023 World Cup, which will be jointly hosted by Australia and New Zealand, will kick off on Thursday.
This will be the first time in the tournament's history that it will have an expanded format of 32 teams drawn in eight groups.
Despite going to the tournament as the Asian Champions, the Steel Roses are maintaining their composure, vowing to demonstrate their never-say-die attitude on the court.
Coach Shui Qingxia, who took the helm when the team was in a slump and masterminded the surprise triumph at the Asian Cup last year, has said that China have not returned to the top echelon of women's soccer despite winning the Asian title.
She said China have not outclassed Japan and South Korea in Asia.
There is also a gap in quality when comparing the team with the European heavyweights.
"But the most important thing in the World Cup is to show our fighting spirit against the odds," she said.
China reached the last 16 at the 2019 World Cup that featured 24 teams. Shui believes getting out of a group that also features European champions England, Denmark and debutants Haiti should be a success.
China's progress to the knockout stage is likely to hinge on the outcome of their opening match against Denmark on Saturday.
On paper, it is a nip and tuck with Denmark ranking at world No.13, one place above China.
Against these physical opponents, the team must give full play to their attacking nous and find a way to neutralize Dane captain Pernille Harder.
With a blend of youth and experience, China's squad is spearheaded by ace striker Wang Shuang, the 2018 Asian Women's Footballer of the Year who plays for Racing Louisville FC in the US.
It will be exciting to see how Wang will link up with Scotland-based midfielder Shen Mengyu and Spain-based midfielder Tang Jiali.
Additionally, 22-year-old Zhang Linyan, who was named the Swiss Women's Super League Player of the Year last season, is one of the rising stars that could provide creativity and vitality to the offense when the team gets stuck.
On July 28, China will play a must-win game against Haiti.
With most of their players from the French league, the diamonds in the rough have the potential to shock their bigger names in the tournament.
If China wants to make it out of this group, they need to be solid at both ends against Haiti.
The Steel Roses will face the European champions England in the last group game on August 1.
The Lionesses have entered the World Cup as one of the favorites.
Versatile captain Wang Shanshan, who will make her third World Cup appearance and has scored 55 goals for China, may move to the back line to call the shots.
Conceding just five goals during the successful Asian Cup campaign, China has the determination to thwart England's run.
This is the very moment when the Steel Roses are expected to show their mettle.
"We will take one game at a time. We will try to close the gap between us and the European powerhouse through this tournament," Shui noted.
Apart from the athletic performance, the women's team has another lofty goal in attracting more girls to play soccer.
"World Cup is a stage for us to show the beauty of the women soccer players. We are happy, confident and in good shape," Shui said.
"Taking part in sports make us more beautiful both physically and mentally. The World Cup is more than a sporting event. It's a grand cultural party that transcends borders."
China was the host of the inaugural Women's World Cup in 1991 and finished runners-up in 1999 after an agonizing loss to the US on penalties in the final. China has not advanced beyond the quarterfinal stage since that showpiece, with a round of 16 defeat in 2019.
Despite receiving little attention outside of major tournaments, China's women's team is a source of national pride thanks to team members' never-give-up attitude.
The Sanxingdui Museum is currently showcasing four new exquisite cultural relics - a bronze basin, a bronze round ornament, a bronze bird, and a bronze kneeling figure holding a zun, as announced by the Sanxingdui Museum's official WeChat account on November 8.
The newly introduced bronze bird is referred to as the "Angel with Broken Wings" due to its appearance, giving the impression that it is poised to take off and soar into the sky despite its damaged wings. The bronze basin, discovered in the No.3 hall of the Sanxingdui Ruins, has a shape similar to a contemporary basin. However, casting a bronze basin is an exceptionally heavy and labor-intensive process, and meticulous work is required to fold the rim of the basin into a wave-like shape. Further details regarding the use of the basin are yet to be disclosed. The bronze round ornament resembles an owl gazing at the sky. The bronze plaque features a hole on each of its four sides and might have been worn as a decoration, according to the Sanxingdui Museum. Another highlight is the new bronze kneeling figure holding a zun, a type of ancient wine vessel, which shares similarities with a previously exhibited bronze placed on a large bronze altar in another hall after the opening of the new Sanxingdui Museum in July.
Chinese netizens praised the museum for these new treasures, expressing admiration for their beauty and significance. Comments on Sina Weibo highlighted Sanxingdui as a true repository of treasures.
A staff member at the Sanxingdui Museum, surnamed Ran, conveyed the museum's commitment to updating cultural relics, aiming to provide fresh experiences for visitors. Zhang Guoyong, deputy researcher at the Xingtai Institute of Cultural Relics Protection and Research Center, endorsed the continuous introduction of newly excavated cultural relics, emphasizing their role in enriching cultural activities and keeping researchers and heritage enthusiasts informed about the progress of Sanxingdui's archaeological excavations.
Zhang told the Global Times that these newly introduced relics offer valuable research materials, guiding researchers to explore Sanxingdui and ancient Shu culture. This, in turn, enhances public understanding of history and the ancient Shu culture associated with the ruins.
Following the discovery of six sacrificial pits containing 13,000 artifacts in 2019, the Sanxingdui Museum has displayed numerous exquisite cultural relics. In October, a beautiful bronze bird from the Shang Dynasty (c.1600BC-1046BC) was showcased. Additionally, the new Sanxingdui Museum, opened in July, features over 1,500 sets of cultural relics, including pottery, bronze, jade, gold, and ivory wares. More than 600 items are on display for the first time, with over 300 newly unearthed items from the No.3 to No.8 sacrificial pits since 2020.
In China's cinematic landscape, a groundbreaking revolution is quietly taking place at the Guangming Cinema, which embraced cutting-edge digital methods to immerse visually impaired people in the magic of storytelling through the medium of film.
"Welcome to the Guangming (Light) Cinema. Here we convey film through voice and perceive art through sound. Today you will experience the movie Ne Zha," a narrator explained to a group of young opinion leaders from 15 countries.
As they settled into their assigned movie theater seats, the 16 international youth opinion leaders from 15 countries were about to have a unique viewing experience at the Guangming Cinema in China's capital of Beijing. Here, they got to "watch" a movie while blindfolded, to learn what a movie-going experience is like for those living with visual impairment.
They sat in front of a screen, listening carefully to the sounds from the movie. Throughout the movie screening, along with the character voices, film score, and background action sound, those taking part in the sensory experiment also heard the voice of a narrator describing scenes, moves, and visual effects otherwise hard to enjoy without the sense of sight.
Actually, the movie these overseas young people were "watching" is a barrier-free movie - also named voice-descriptive movie, a product specially adapted for people living with visual impairment - created by a group of volunteers at the Guangming Cinema to allow visually impaired people to enjoy the equal right of walking into a cinema and enjoying a well-rounded movie-going experience like people with sights would have.
The Guangming Cinema Audio-descriptive Movie Making and Promotion Project, a public welfare project established by the Communication University of China (CUC) in Beijing in 2017, aims to create reproducible and transmittable audio-descriptive products to meet the growing spiritual and cultural needs of the visually impaired.
The movie Ne Zha, which deeply moved the audience of young international visitors, is just one of several hundred barrier-free movies that come with complete narration and are re-recorded by volunteers.
Data showed that there are 17.32 million people living with visual impairment in China, and the number of people with dyslexia may be even higher. To meet the cultural and spiritual needs of such a large population posed a great challenge for Chinese society and related government departments in the past.
In the plan for protection and development of disabled people during the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25) period, the Chinese government pointed out the necessity of supporting people living with disabilities and enhancing the quality of public services, such as rehabilitation, education, culture, and sports. The creation of a barrier-free environment in China has become an important aspect of promoting the modernization of the national governance system and governance capacity.
The Guangming Cinema Project is a vivid example of the country's efforts to build a barrier-free environment for the visually impaired. Since its establishment, the project has provided rich inclusive and culturally relevant products for a large number of visually impaired people.
As of May 2023, the Guangming Cinema has produced 520 barrier-free movies and two barrier-free television series, and has carried out public welfare screenings in 31 provinces, municipalities, autonomous regions, and the Macao Special Administrative Region, reaching over 2 million people across the country.
Arduous but rewarding process
At the Guangming Cinema, a group of volunteers including professors, undergraduates, and postgraduate students, have devoted most of their leisure time participating in activities related to the film project, such as the re-recording of barrier-free movies, coordinating and promoting the screening of such movies, with the desire to help visually impaired people to experience and enjoy the world through cinema.
Xue Hanjie, a junior undergraduate student majoring in radio and television editing at the CUC Television School, told the Global Times that she joined the project in her freshman year and worked as a volunteer in the project's production group.
For Xue and other volunteers with the project, making barrier-free movies is not only about describing the stories in a movie, but also about helping the visually impaired to understand the meaning that the director wanted to convey to audiences. The opening shot, the landscape, the appearance and movements of a character, any and all aspects pertinent to the development of the plot are narrated, to help those who are visually impaired to gain a complete picture of what's happening in the movie.
Sometimes, when there are too many characters and different languages in a film, narrators dub the movie in Chinese and in different voices, so that the visually impaired can fully understand the plot only by listening.
In the dubbing room, volunteer Li Zhixing, a postgraduate student at the CUC, watches the scenes of a movie and actively adjusts his emotions and voice accordingly. Judging from the needs of the role, he sometimes plays the role of a young soldier, and then switches to the voice of an old man.
In order to control the voice performance of the actors and accurately convey emotions, a seemingly simple sentence has to be repeated and recorded four to five times over.
At the same time, outside the dubbing room, two volunteers at the tuning table align Li's dubbed dialogues and narrations with the appropriate scenes in the movie being worked on.
Cai Yu, a PhD student from Television School at the CUC, and also a volunteer with the project for about six years, explained that the making of a movie is usually time consuming and detail oriented. "In the beginning, we invite a volunteer to write the narration script. Teachers and other volunteers then review and proofread the script three times, polish the details, and then we start recording in the dubbing room, and go through editing, film encoding, and finally reviewing," Cai elaborated.
On average, narrating and dubbing a 90 to 120 minutes' film usually takes two to three months. A volunteer can usually only make one film over the course of one semester, Cai said.
The professionalism and responsibility of volunteer work left a deep impression on the overseas youth opinion leaders.
"Empathy and understanding were the thoughts that came to my mind when we were exposed to the project and the movie. It was a moving experience since I was able to put myself in blind people's shoes," Jose Carlos Feliciano, deputy director of the Center for China and Asia-Pacific Studies, University of the Pacific, Peru, told the Global Times after having a visually impaired movie-going experience.
Igor Alexander Bello Tasic, founder and CEO of Meta Ventures from Spain, said that when he wore the blindfold and "watched" the movie, he could feel that volunteers were not performing a technical job, but an artistic one.
They were not just trying to create a layer of information, but were narrating the story in a way similar to "Director's cut" - a human layer that connected that media with people who could experience it in its original form, Tasic said.
'Human reality' of volunteers
Due to work experience, Tasic knows some of the technologies related to visual reality and augmented reality, but at the Guangming Cinema, he said that what he felt was a sort of "human reality," a humanization of senses that he has never seen before.
The project has attracted more and more like-minded students, who want to help improve the quality of life of those living with visual impairment in the Chinese society. Cai said that each year, about 100 undergraduates and postgraduate freshmen join the project's volunteer team.
Rida Hameed, a journalist with Pakistan's K21 News, said that visiting the Guangming Cinema was the best moment of her life, giving her a sense of peace and satisfaction that there are people in this world who don't work for money but for the sake of humanity and kindness.
The Guangming Cinema now aims to produce 104 barrier-free films each year. "There are 52 weeks in a year, and we want to ensure that at least two barrier-free movies are provided for the visually impaired every week," Xue told the Global Times.
In the control room, the visitors saw printed movie narration scripts stacked into two 50-centimeter-high piles beside the tuning table. According to preliminary statistics, the number of words written by the volunteers in one year can be as many as 3 million.
"I was able to see the editing process for the voices, and realized that it really takes a lot of time and patience. The project has a long working hour process and requires great commitment (from the volunteers)," said Feliciano to the Global Times.
At the end of the year or during special occasions, the project team integrates the barrier-free movies and saves them in specially-made mobile hard disk drives and U disks, so that these movies can be played on computers even in the remotest villages in China. The team also stores movies in audio recorders with a memory card in it, allowing people with visual impairment to listen to the movies anytime and anywhere.
Pursuing for 'bright' future
In May 2022, the Marrakesh Treaty, which is the first and only human rights treaty that is copyrighted, officially came into effect in China.
The treaty allows authorized entities to produce print formats of cultural works geared toward those living with disabilities without authorization from copyright holders, from Braille books and audiobooks to films and TV shows. Experts noted that it is a practical move that China adopted to expand the country's human rights protection sphere for some 17 million print-disabled people, giving them equal access to culture and education.
Based on the Marrakesh Treaty, the Guangming Cinema has carried out many public warfare activities for people with visual impairment. Since April 2021, the project team has cooperated with the Beijing School for the Blind to screen barrier-free movies for children once a month.
In the Guangming Cinema, a special collection attracted the international visitors' attention and deeply moved them. It was a Braille text written by a little girl from the Beijing School for the Blind to the Guangming Cinema, displayed in a 6-inch red photo frame, on which it reads "Everyone is someone's light, and you are our light."
In order to allow the visually impaired to gain the full movie-viewing experience, the volunteers also chose to screen barrier-free movies in places such as the Chaoyang Theater in Beijing, a highly populated residential area with convenient transportation facilities for visually-impaired people.
"We insist on providing barrier-free movies in theaters and cinemas, because we want to help achieve equal rights for those who are visually-impaired. They deserve an equal right to walk into a cinema and enjoy a movie," said Xue.
Additionally, volunteers from the Guangming Cinema went to remote places in China to carry out public welfare screenings, so that visually impaired people in those areas and people in ethnic minority areas could also enjoy the cultural experience brought by movies. The movies and television series made for people living with disabilities by the project volunteers were also sent out to 2,244 special education schools across China.
As of 2021, there were 2,288 special education schools in China, increased from 1,933 in 2013, according to the Report on the Cause for Persons with Disabilities in China (2023) issued in May, 2023. This means that about 98 percent of special education schools in China have benefited from the project, where students in said schools can enjoy barrier-free movies made.
Feliciano told the Global Times that in Guangming Cinema, he was impressed by how digitization was used to empower philanthropy and social projects in China. "It's very interesting to see how Chinese innovative solutions can be an inspiration to other countries," he said.
He also said that he would share the digital example with his students and write articles about what he had learned on his trip in China, to let more people know about China's practices in the digital sphere.
This is really a noble cause and other countries in the world must learn from how China is taking good care of its people, not only at present but are also trying to make the future better as well, Hameed said.
Data for all major economies for the second quarter of 2023 is now published, making possible a systematic comparison of China's economic performance to all other major countries. This reveals two key facts. First, since the beginning of the pandemic, China has outperformed every other major economy - in most cases by huge margins. Second, the US has launched a flat-out propaganda campaign in an attempt to conceal this fact.
Therefore, two key questions need answering. First, what are the factual trends in the world economy? Second, why has the US decided to launch a systematic campaign of falsification?
China's growth compared to other major economies
Starting with the facts, covering the period of the pandemic and its aftermath, in the last four years, up to the latest available data for the second quarter of 2023, China's economy grew by a total of 19.2 percent. Among the major advanced economies, the G7, US growth was 7.5 percent, and Canada's was 4.7 percent. Italy's growth was 1.5 percent, France's 1.3 percent, Japan's 0.8 percent, Germany's 0.5 percent and the UK's 0.3 percent.
China's economy grew more than two and a half times as fast as the US', four times as fast as Canada's, 13 times as fast as Italy's, 15 times as fast as France's, 24 times as fast as Japan's, 38 times as fast as Germany's and 64 times as fast as the UK's economy.
In short, China outgrew all the major advanced economies by enormous margins.
To complete the picture, as striking as the above data is, it significantly understates China's outperformance of other economies in productivity growth and living standards. To analyze these, it is necessary to consider per capita growth, ie, including population changes.
China's annual average population increase since 2019 has been only 0.1 percent, meaning it received no boost to total GDP growth from population changes. In contrast, major G7 and BRICS economies have had large population increases - from domestic increases, immigration, or both. Since 2019, Canada's annual average population increase was 1.2 percent, India's 0.8 percent, and the US' 0.5 percent.
China's outperformance of other major economies is therefore even greater as measured by per capita GDP growth. To take even the most rapidly growing other economies, China's 4.4 percent annual per capita GDP increase compares to 2.5 percent in India and 1.3 percent in the US. India's per capita GDP growth was only 56 percent of China's and China's per capita GDP grew more than three times as fast as that of the US.
Per capita data therefore demonstrates even more strongly China's great outperformance of any other major economy - not only in terms of total growth but also in productivity and ability to increase its citizens' wellbeing.
As the facts show China outperforms every other major economy, not by small amounts but by huge margins, any objective discussion of the international economic situation would discuss questions such as "Why is China's economy growing so much faster than all the other major economies?"
However, for the US to admit the facts of the global economy is impossible. This would be to acknowledge that it is being vastly outperformed by another economy, even worse demonstrating the superiority of socialism to capitalism. Therefore, the US has launched a systematic campaign denying reality and facts.
At the top of the US political pyramid, lack of contact with reality has now reached a bizarre level. President Biden, for example, recently claimed that China's economic growth is "around 2 percent" when it was 5.5 percent in the first half of this year. He stated that in China "the number of people who are of retirement age is larger than the number of people of working age," which is completely false. This figure which he has claimed to be true is off by hundreds of millions. He claimed that China's economy is a "ticking time bomb" - when it is the US, not China which this year suffered two of the three biggest bank collapses in its history.
The US campaign of economic 'fake news'
Alongside declarations by political figures, US media such as the New York Times, are running articles with titles such as "How do we Manage China's Decline?" - in a situation where China's economy is growing two and a half times as fast as the US and China's per capita GDP is growing three times as fast as the US!
The method of totally ignoring facts and reality is classically known as the "big lie" - the "big lie" being an accurate description of the methods used by Goebbels, even though he did not invent the phrase. This calculates that if a lie is repeatedly stated by powerful media or state apparatuses then, despite the fact it is a lie, large numbers of people may come to believe it is true simply due to the number of times it is repeated and the number of media outlets in which it appears.
What are the aims of the US in spreading these lies? Some are obvious - to try to discourage foreign companies from investing in China and try to spread demoralizing rumors. But there is another more profound and dangerous purpose.
Facts make clear China's economy is far outperforming the US. At the 20th CPC National Congress, the goal was set as reaching the level of a "medium-developed country by 2035." In 2020's discussion around the 14th Five Year Plan, it was concluded that by 2035 for China: "It is completely possible to double the total or per capita income."
In contrast, the long-term average annual US growth is only two percent. These relative growth rates mean that by 2035 China's economy would increase in size by 100 percent and the US by only 35 percent. As the US sees international relations as a zero-sum game, in which its goal is to retain its dominance, such relative growth rates are regarded as a disaster. The US sees it as crucial to slow down China and prevent it from achieving its 2035 goals.
The data already given makes clear how this could be achieved. The much slower growth of the economies of the West compared to China means that if China could be moved to a Western capitalist model, with a far higher percentage of consumption in GDP, then China's economy would grow no faster than any other Western economy. As increases in consumption and living standards are extremely closely related to economic growth, if China's economy could be slowed in that way, then China's living standards would also be lower than its targets.
But for the US to openly present an argument that "China should slow to the growth rate of a Western economy" is impossible - no one would take such a damaging proposal seriously. So, instead, the US must attempt to conceal the real situation - to make the fraudulent claim China is growing more slowly than Western economies. If that lie could be believed, then an argument could be presented that China should move toward a Western model - so that its economy could supposedly grow more rapidly. To give credibility to that claim, however, the lie must first be believed that the Western economies are outgrowing China. That is why false information must be spread.
Consequently, the reality that China is far outperforming the Western economies, while entirely true must not lead to complacency. The US is attempting to damage China via the international campaign of falsifications already outlined. The slow growth of Western economies itself creates problems for China - a negative international economic situation means China must rely entirely on increasing domestic demand to achieve its 2035 goals. To this latter well-known issue, the present author would add some others. In particular close attention must be paid to increasing profits - which are no higher than five years ago.
But to accurately address these real issues in China's economic development, first the facts must be established - that China's economy is far outgrowing all the others.
Four Yangtze finless porpoises were released into the Yangtze River on Tuesday after being cared for in the National Nature Reserve for Baiji Dolphins in Hubei Province, as part of relocation and protection efforts for the unique species, according to the Xinhua News Agency.
This action is of great significance in promoting the recovery of the natural population of this species and advancing the development of conservation technology, read the report.
The Yangtze finless porpoise is a first-class national protected wild animal in China. According to a scientific survey organized by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs in 2022, the population of the porpoises has achieved a historic turnaround from overall population decline to growth, with a current population of 1,249, up from 1,012 in 2017.
Significant progress has been made in the translocation protection program for the Yangtze finless porpoise. The National Nature Reserve of Tian'e Zhou in Central China's Hubei Province, which is dedicated to the conservation of this species, has successfully bred and translocated over 100 Yangtze finless porpoises.
The Yangtze finless porpoise is called the "smiling angel" in China because its mouth appears to be fixed in a permanent grin. After its better-known cousin, the Baiji dolphin, was declared "functionally extinct" in the same waters in 2007, experts believe the finless porpoise is the Yangtze's last surviving mammal.
The ongoing improvement of the ecological environment in the Yangtze River Basin and the rapid growth of the population of relocated Yangtze finless porpoises have provided favorable conditions and solid foundations for the release of these porpoises into the wild through relocation conservation efforts.
The four Yangtze finless porpoises released into the wild this time were all from the National Nature Reserve for Baiji Dolphins in Changjiang Swan Island in Hubei Province. Among them, two male Yangtze finless porpoises around five years old were released after undergoing two years of adaptation training, and they have adapted well to the natural water environment of the Yangtze River.
After the four were released into the Yangtze River, scientists will carry out three months of location tracking, continuous monitoring, and evaluation of their adaptation ability and health condition. If they do not adapt well to the wild environment, the relevant departments will take necessary protective measures in a timely manner.
Hao Yujiang, associate researcher at the Institute of Hydrobiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that the release of the relocated finless porpoises into the Yangtze River will help to sustainably restore the natural population of the species and improve the genetic diversity of the population.
Following the reintroduction and safety monitoring of the finless porpoises, technical specifications will be summarized and compiled to further promote the scientific, standardized, and normalized procedures for the finless porpoise reintroduction work, Hao noted.
China's Ministry of Culture and Tourism recently released a notice announcing the third group of approved outbound group tours, with Japan being one of the most popular tourist destinations. However, following the commencement of Japan's dumping of nuclear-contaminated wastewater, cancellations of tours to the country have already begun, local media reported on Sunday.
According to one of China's largest online travel agencies Ctrip, the platform had launched more than 5,000 outbound group tour packages, flights and hotel bundles, covering more than one-third of the countries and regions across the third group of 78 approved countries, including the US, the UK, Japan and Turkey.
However, everything changed when Japan started to dump nuclear-contaminated wastewater into the Pacific Ocean.
The First Financial Journal reported on Saturday that although Japanese tourism products are still being sold on online travel platforms, they are not being prominently displayed.
At the same time, tourism industry insiders have revealed that some travelers have already started to cancel their trips. Several travel agencies have reported similar situations. In view of the current escalation of the dumping plan, many tourism companies have stated that they will make adjustments in their upcoming marketing plans, especially in promoting travel packages for the upcoming National Day holidays. Many reportedly plan to temporarily reduce the promotion of Japanese tours or suspend related marketing plans for travel to Japan.
Currently, Ctrip's platform has more than 80,000 outbound group tours and flight and hotel packages available for purchase.
"My husband and I booked a tour group to Japan and submitted our visas last week, but after seeing the news of Japan's irresponsible dumping plan, we decided to cancel the trip and switch to another country," a newlywed couple who are picking out a place for their honeymoon told the Global Times on Sunday.
"Japan is not an irreplaceable tourist destination and their irresponsible behavior is unacceptable to us."
Data from Ctrip shows that the booking volume for Japan group tours increased by nearly 90 percent in the previous week compared with the same period last month, while the booking volume for Japan group tour products departing during the National Day holidays has increased by over fivefold.
However, influenced by the side effect of Japan's forced dumping, travel platforms and agencies are promoting tourist attractions in other countries. For example, Lümama is currently promoting packages to Germany, the UK and other destinations in Northern Europe over those to Japan.
Although traveling to Japan has gotten a lot of attention since the list came into effect, it is actually not the No. I option, a marketing manager from China's CYTS Tours Holding Co, told the Global Times on Sunday.
It is expected that Japan's forced dumping will have an impact on tourists' travel expectations. For the upcoming National Day holidays, Japan may not be as hot as previously expected, Xu said. At present, CYTS Tours still provides neutral guidance to guests who inquire about traveling to Japan. However, according to Xu, reminders and rescheduling will be offered to guests who are looking to eat seafood.
In the short term, it is expected that Japan's dumping plan will affect tourism to Japan and the export of Japanese brands, and may even affect cultural exchanges such as overseas studying in Japan. However, in the medium- and long-term, the state of communication and the policies of the bilateral governments are the main factors affecting people's mentality, Da Zhigang, director of the Institute of Northeast Asian Studies at the Heilongjiang Provincial Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times.
Many Chinese netizens have said they would no longer patronize Japanese restaurants and Chinese consumers are increasingly resistant to buying Japanese products, including cosmetics, with many creating blacklists of more than 30 Japanese cosmetic brands and lists of alternatives, while some have even started to return purchased goods.
According to the latest statistics released on August 16, the number of foreign tourists to Japan in July exceeded 2 million for a second consecutive month, about 2,320,600, while the number of tourists in the month recovered to about 78 percent of the same period in 2019 before the COVID-19 pandemic. Visitors from the Chinese mainland ranked fifth in the first half of the month with 594,600 visitors. Additionally, the Japanese government has set a new goal for the recovery of tourism, which is to achieve a new record number of visitors to Japan by 2025.
Observers believe that Japan was expected to benefit from a boost in tourism activity during the week-long Chinese National Day holidays. However, following safety concerns caused by Japan's dumping of nuclear-contaminated wastewater into the sea, Chinese tourists' enthusiasm for traveling to Japan during the holidays has significantly decreased. If Chinese tourists "vote with their feet," the overall tourism economy in Japan may shrink for a considerable period of time due to a sustained decrease in the number of Chinese tourists.
The 22 men took the same pill for four weeks. When interviewed, they said they felt less daily stress and their memories were sharper. The brain benefits were subtle, but the results, reported at last year’s annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, got attention. That’s because the pills were not a precise chemical formula synthesized by the pharmaceutical industry.
The capsules were brimming with bacteria.
In the ultimate PR turnaround, once-dreaded bacteria are being welcomed as health heroes. People gobble them up in probiotic yogurts, swallow pills packed with billions of bugs and recoil from hand sanitizers. Helping us nurture the microbial gardens in and on our bodies has become big business, judging by grocery store shelves. These bacteria are possibly working at more than just keeping our bodies healthy: They may be changing our minds. Recent studies have begun turning up tantalizing hints about how the bacteria living in the gut can alter the way the brain works. These findings raise a question with profound implications for mental health: Can we soothe our brains by cultivating our bacteria? By tinkering with the gut’s bacterial residents, scientists have changed the behavior of lab animals and small numbers of people. Microbial meddling has turned anxious mice bold and shy mice social. Rats inoculated with bacteria from depressed people develop signs of depression themselves. And small studies of people suggest that eating specific kinds of bacteria may change brain activity and ease anxiety. Because gut bacteria can make the very chemicals that brain cells use to communicate, the idea makes a certain amount of sense.
Though preliminary, such results suggest that the right bacteria in your gut could brighten mood and perhaps even combat pernicious mental disorders including anxiety and depression. The wrong microbes, however, might lead in a darker direction. This perspective might sound a little too much like our minds are being controlled by our bacterial overlords. But consider this: Microbes have been with us since even before we were humans. Human and bacterial cells evolved together, like a pair of entwined trees, growing and adapting into a (mostly) harmonious ecosystem.
Our microbes (known collectively as the microbiome) are “so innate in who we are,” says gastroenterologist Kirsten Tillisch of UCLA. It’s easy to imagine that “they’re controlling us, or we’re controlling them.” But it’s becoming increasingly clear that no one is in charge. Instead, “it’s a conversation that our bodies are having with our microbiome,” Tillisch says.
Figuring out what’s being said in this body-microbe exchange, and how to shift the tone in a way that improves mental health, won’t be easy. For starters, no one knows the exact ingredients for a healthy microbial community, and the recipe probably differs from person to person. And it’s not always simple to deliver microbes to the gut and persuade them to stay. Nor is it clear how messages travel between microbes and brain, though scientists have some ideas.
It’s early days, but so far, the results are compelling, says neuroscientist John Cryan of University College Cork in Ireland, who has been trying to clarify how microbes influence the brain. “It’s all slightly weird and it’s all fascinating,” he says.
Cryan and others are amassing evidence that they hope will lead to “psychobiotics” — bacteria-based drugs made of live organisms that could improve mental health.
We’re not alone Ted Dinan, the psychiatrist who coined the term “psychobiotics,” was fascinated by a tragedy in Walkerton, Canada, in May 2000. Floods caused the small town’s water supply to be overrun with dangerous strains of two bacteria: Escherichia coli and Campylobacter. About half the town’s population got ill, and a handful of people died. For most residents, the illness was short-lived, about 10 days on average, says Dinan, who collaborates with Cryan at University College Cork. But years later, scientists who had been following the health of Walkerton residents noticed something surprising. “The rates of depression in Walkerton were clearly and significantly up,” Dinan says. That spike raised suspicion that the infection had caused the depression.
Other notorious bacteria have been tied to depression, such as those behind syphilis and the cattle-related brucellosis, and not just because ill people feel sad, Dinan says. He suspects there’s something specific about an off-kilter microbiome that can harm mental health. This possibility, though it raises troubling questions about free will, is certainly true for lab animals. Mice born and raised without bacteria behave in all sorts of bizarre ways, exhibiting antisocial tendencies, memory troubles and recklessness, in some cases. Microbes in fruit flies can influence who mates with whom (SN: 1/11/14, p. 14), and bacteria in stinging wasps can interfere with reproduction in a way that prevents separate species from merging. Those findings, some by evolutionary biologist Seth Bordenstein of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, show that “there’s this potential for [microbes] to influence behavior in this complex and vast way,” he says.
By sheer numbers, human bodies are awash in bacteria. A recent study estimates there are just as many bacterial cells as human cells in our bodies (SN: 2/6/16, p. 6). Just how legions of bacteria get messages to the brain isn’t clear, though scientists have already found some likely communication channels. Chemically, gut microbes and the brain actually speak the same language. The microbiome churns out the mood-influencing neurotransmitters serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine. Bacteria can also change how the central nervous system uses these chemicals. Cryan calls microbes in the gut “little factories for producing lots of different neuroactive substances.”
Signals between the gut and the brain may zip along the vagus nerve, a multilane highway that connects the two (SN: 11/28/15, p. 18). Although scientists don’t understand the details of how messages move along the vagus nerve, they do know that this highway is important. Snip the nerve in mice and the bacteria no longer have an effect on behavior, a 2011 study found. And when the gut-to-brain messages change, problems can arise.
New bacteria, new behavior Wholesale microbe swaps can also influence behavior. In unpublished work, Dinan and his colleagues took stool samples from people with depression and put those bacteria (called “melancholic microbes” by Dinan in a 2013 review in Neurogastroenterology and Motility) into rats. The formerly carefree rodents soon began showing signs of depression and anxiety, forgoing a sweet water treat and showing more anxiety in a variety of tests. “Their behavior does quite dramatically change,” Dinan says. Rats that got a microbiome from a person without depression showed no changes in behavior.
Cryan and colleagues have found that the microbiomes of people with depression differ from those of people without depression, raising the possibility that a diseased microbiome could be to blame. The fecal-transplant results suggest that depression — and perhaps other mental disorders — are contagious, in a sense. And a mental illness that could be caught from microbe swaps could pose problems. Fecal transplants have recently emerged as powerful ways to treat serious gut infections (SN Online: 10/16/14). Fecal donors ought to be screened for a history of mental illness along with other potentially communicable diseases, Dinan says.
“Gastroenterologists obviously check for HIV and hepatitis C. They don’t want to transmit an infection,” he says. The psychiatric characteristics of the donor should be taken into account as well, he says.
A fecal transplant is an extreme microbiome overhaul. But there are hints that introducing just one or several bacterial species can also change the way the brain works. One such example comes from Cryan, Dinan and colleagues. After taking a probiotic pill containing a bacterium called Bifidobacterium longum for a month, 22 healthy men reported feeling less stress than when they took a placebo. The men also had lower levels of the stress-related hormone cortisol while under duress, the researchers reported at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago last October. After taking the probiotic, the men also showed slight improvements on a test of visual memory, benefits that were reflected in the brain. EEG recordings revealed brain wave signatures that have been tied to memory skill, Cryan says.
The researchers had previously published similar effects in mice, but the new results move those findings into people. “What’s going to be important is to mechanistically find out why this specific bacteria is inducing these effects,” Cryan says. And whether there could be a benefit for people with heightened anxiety. “It’s a very exciting study, but it’s a small study,” Cryan cautions.
Bacteria in an even more palatable form — yogurt — affected brain activity in response to upsetting scenes in one study. After eating a carefully concocted yogurt every morning and evening for a month, 12 healthy women showed a blunted brain reaction to pictures of angry or scared faces compared with 11 women who had eaten a yogurtlike food without bacteria.
Brain response was gauged by functional MRI, which measures changes in blood flow as a proxy for neural activity. In particular, brain areas involved in processing emotions and sensations such as pain were calmed, says Tillisch, coauthor of the study, published in 2013 in Gastroenterology. “In this small group, we saw that the brain responded differently” when shown the pictures, she says. It’s not clear whether a blunted response would be good or bad, particularly since the study participants were all healthy women who didn’t suffer from anxiety. Nonetheless, Tillisch says, the results raise the questions: “Can probiotics change your mood? Can they make you feel better if you feel bad?”
So far, the human studies have been very small. But coupled with the increasing number of animal studies, the results are hard to ignore, Tillisch says. “Most of us in this field think there is something definitely happening,” she says. “But it’s pretty complicated and probably quite subtle…. Otherwise, we’d all be aware of this.” Anyone who has taken a course of antibiotics, or fallen ill from a bacterial infection, or even changed diets would have noticed an obvious change in mood, she says.
Two-way traffic If it turns out that bacteria can influence our brains and behaviors, even if just in subtle ways, it doesn’t mean we are passive vessels at the mercy of our gut residents. Our behavior can influence the microbiome right back.
“We usually give up our power pretty quickly in this conversation,” Tillisch says. “We say, ‘Oh, we’re at the mercy of the bacteria that we got from our mothers when we were born and the antibiotics we got at the pediatrician’s office.’ ” But our microbes aren’t our destiny, she says. “We can mess with them too.”
One of the easiest ways to do so is through food: eating probiotics, such as yogurt or kefir, that contain bacteria and choosing a diet packed with “prebiotic” foods, such as fiber and garlic, onion and asparagus. Prebiotics nourish what are thought to be beneficial microbes, offering a simple way to cultivate the microbiome, and in turn, health. That a good diet is a gateway to good health is not a new idea, Cryan says. Take the old adage: “Let food be thy medicine and let medicine be thy food.” He suspects that it’s our microbiome that makes this advice work.
Combating stress may be another way to change the microbiome, Tillisch and others suspect. Mouse studies have shown that stress, particularly early in life, can change microbial communities, and not in a good way.
She and her colleagues are testing a relaxation technique called mindfulness-based stress reduction to influence the microbiome. In people with gut pain and discomfort, the meditation-based practice reduced symptoms and changed their brains in clinically interesting ways, according to unpublished work. The researchers suspect that the microbiome was also altered by the meditation. They are testing that hypothesis now.
If the mind can affect the microbiome and the microbiome can affect the mind, it makes little sense to talk about who is in charge, Bordenstein says. In an essay in PLOS Biology last year, he and colleague Kevin Theis, of Wayne State University in Detroit, make the case that the definition of “I” should be expanded. An organism, Bordenstein and Theis argued, includes the microbes that live in and on it, a massive conglomerate of diverse parts called a holobiont. Giving a name to this complex and diverse consortium could shift scientists’ views of humans in a way that leads to deeper insights. “What we need to do,” Bordenstein says, “is add microbes to the ‘me, myself and I’ concept.”
A new book on aging starts with what sounds like a promise: “It is a common belief that aging is inevitable and universal. Nothing could be further from the truth.” From this, you might expect the final pages to offer a list of options for fending off the ravages of time. But this is less a how-to guide and more of a dive into why aging happens. The authors, theoretical biologist Josh Mitteldorf and writer Dorion Sagan, take an extensive stroll through evolutionary theory and aging research in support of an off-center view. After pointing out problems with several theories of why aging evolved, the authors present the controversial premise that aging is a programmed march toward oblivion that evolved as a form of population control. “Aging in animals enforces a common, predictable life span, helping to prevent the dominance of any one individual or one gene type. Diversity is preserved for the health of the community.” Other researchers have been skeptical of that idea.
Aging, however, is unyielding. The authors describe how certain hardships — starvation, exertion, even small amounts of poison — can paradoxically lead to life extension in lab animals. From these findings, Mitteldorf and Sagan make antiaging recommendations that start with familiar medical advice: exercise, lose weight and take a daily aspirin or ibuprofen. But then they jump to suggestions that have not yet been proven, including supplementation with “huge doses of vitamin D” and melatonin, plus metformin (a diabetes drug) and selegiline (a drug used to treat early Parkinson’s and depression). Next comes a list of herbs that could restore telomeres, the protective tips of chromosomes. The book spends much less real estate describing the research behind all of these recommendations, perhaps because the human studies haven’t been done yet.
The crystal ball section of the book is an optimistic look at very preliminary research on the benefits of lengthening telomeres, removing senescent cells from the body and regrowing the shrinking thymus, the organ that produces immune system T cells. The authors may be onto something. But none of these ideas have yet had a chance to mature.
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The newest and thorniest members of a diverse ant family may have extra help holding their heads high.
Found in the rainforests of Papua New Guinea, Pheidole drogon and Pheidole viserion worker ants have spines protruding from their thoraxes. For many ant species, the spiky growths are a defense against birds and other predators. But Eli Sarnat and colleagues suggest the spines might instead be a muscular support for the ants’ oversized heads, which the insects use to crush seeds. The heads “are so big that it looks like it would be difficult to walk,” says Sarnat, an entomologist at the Okinawa Institute of Science & Technology Graduate University in Japan. Micro‒CT scans of worker ants with larger heads revealed bundles of thoracic muscle fibers within spines just behind their heads. Worker ants with smaller heads did not have muscles in their spines, the researchers report online July 27 in PLOS One. More research is needed to establish the spines’ function and understand why they evolved, Sarnat says. While buff spines may support big heads, hollow spines probably keep predators at bay, the researchers suspect. Researchers named the ants after two fearsome dragons, Drogon and Viserion, in the popular book and TV series Game of Thrones.
