China tries to tempt couples into marriage with music festival wedding booths | South China Morning Post
Officials across China have been racking their brains to think of ways to reverse a sharp decline in the country’s marriage rate over the past few years. Their latest idea: Las Vegas-style weddings at popular music festivals.
Local officials in Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, made headlines over the weekend when they set up a temporary registry office at the Super Strawberry Music Festival – the latest in a string of eye-catching local initiatives designed to tempt couples to tie the knot.
Eligible mainland Chinese couples at the festival were able to get married on the spot with just their ID cards and three passport-sized photos, according to the civil affairs bureau in Urumqi’s Shuimogou District.
Chinese scientists develop low-cost cell therapy for cancer, asthma, autoimmune diseases | South China Morning Post
Chinese researchers have come up with a cheaper and easier way of delivering a highly specialised, personalised cell therapy to treat blood cancers and other serious diseases.
This new method is much easier to programme than the conventional approach and is available at a fraction of the cost, according to experts in the field.
The treatment, known as CAR-T, is a type of immunotherapy that has taken off in recent years and has also shown promise in treating other conditions such as asthma and autoimmune diseases. However, these cell therapies are difficult to produce and deliver to patients, and they are expensive.
As China’s speedy maglev train breaks records, US ambitions go off the rails | South China Morning Post
3M, Caterpillar and other American firms gathered in Beijing on Friday to discuss rail transit and supply-chain opportunities
A week after China said its supercharged rail system has reached speeds of 600km/h (373mph), US President Donald Trump seemingly pulled the plug on American rail progress.
In a controversial move being challenged by the state of California, Trump cancelled US$4 billion in federal funding for its high-speed railway project.
Regardless of the outcome of any legal challenge, Trump’s announcement highlights the contrasting development paths of the economic superpowers in their rail aspirations, or lack thereof.
Chinese woman is disabled in car crash, lover disappears after pledging support | South China Morning Post
Heartbroken paraplegic considers legal action after being left to fend for herself; boyfriend responsible for her severe injuries vanishes.
The boyfriend of a Chinese woman has shocked social media by abandoning her just three months after she was made paraplegic in a car accident for which he was primarily responsible.
On April 5, the woman, surnamed Bai, 25, was travelling with her boyfriend, surnamed Zhang, and members of his family near a reservoir in Gansu province, northwestern China.
Zhang was at the wheel and Bai was the front-seat passenger.
Ex-top China student gets low exam score, kicked out by parents who change door code | South China Morning Post
A high school graduate in China who sat the country’s university entrance exam in June was kicked out of his home by his parents who thought his score was not high enough to get him into a prestigious school.
Teenager Xiaokai, who lives in Huaihua in central Hunan province, called the local Hunan TV for help after he found he could not go back home because his parents had changed the door passcode.
They also decided to cut off his financial aid.
The boy’s parents were angry because he achieved a score of 575 out of 750 in the university entrance exam, known as “gaokao” in China.
In China, delivery robots now ride the subway to restock 7-Eleven stores | South China Morning Post
Subway trains across the southern Chinese megacity of Shenzhen welcomed an unusual new set of passengers on Monday, as the city deployed a fleet of delivery robots to restock convenience stores scattered around its subway system.
Dozens of squat delivery robots have now begun riding subway trains across the network during off-peak hours, exiting at each station where a 7-Eleven is located to make deliveries, according to a report by local news outlet SZNews.
The project is the first of its kind in the world and marks the latest step in Shenzhen’s push to expand the use of robots from the factory floor to other areas of urban life, the report said.
China tames ‘sea of death’ with high-voltage renewable energy power loop | South China Morning Post
Final phase of 15-year megaproject encircling Tarim Basin will soon be a major part of the regional electricity grid
Chinese construction crews have completed encircling the Tarim Basin – one of the most forbidding places on Earth – with an extra-high voltage “energy ring”.
The project, which took 15 years to build, transforms the vast inland basin – home to China’s largest desert – into a massive new-energy transmission hub.
The 4,197km (2,608-mile) power transmission and transformation project in an area of the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region known as the “sea of death” was completed on Sunday, state broadcaster CCTV reported.
China’s luxury hotels sell street food to survive tough business climate | South China Morning Post
Catering at luxury hotels typically involves high-end banquets and formal entertainment, with exquisite decor and masterfully crafted dishes often seen as worth the high price tag.
But for many consumers in China, that is changing.
In July, the five-star Zhongwu Hotel in Changzhou, Jiangsu province – ranked second among 10 luxury hotels in the city on Trip.com – surprised observers when it launched a street vendor service offering budget meal boxes prepared by its catering team.
China cuts US Treasury holdings for third month amid trade war, debt ceiling fears | South China Morning Post
China trimmed its US Treasury holdings for a third straight month in May, amid escalating trade tensions with Washington and mounting concerns over a sweeping tax and spending bill.
Beijing’s holdings fell to US$756.3 billion from US$757.2 billion in April, according to US Treasury Department data. That was the lowest level since March 2009, based on figures compiled by Wind.
The decline has continued since March, when China dropped to third place among foreign holders, behind Japan and the United Kingdom.
How important is "Century of Humiliation" in China? (china-translated.com)
…At this stage, it seems to me that the English term “Century of Humiliation” has all the hallmarks of a linguistic device found and popularized by Western intellectuals themselves to encapsulate their own understanding of China, and then took the central stage in the discourse environment….
We should always be mindful of these oversimplified, manufactured realities that we create. At least when it comes to the “Century of Humiliation” narrative, I can see there are at least three major perils associated with it.
First, it trivializes the experience of the observed side. There is a whole body of rich experiences and real human emotions that can also point to many different directions. All these details are lost: Oh, so that’s Century of Humiliation. I got it!
The more obvious problem is that fixation on a single phrase also runs the risk of over-representing what it actually is. There is no denying that the images and memories represented by “Century of Humiliation” are a key component of the modern Chinese mind, a key building block of modern Chinese nationhood, and a lot of our actions and choices today are responding to these memories. But it’s not the only building block. It’s not even the most important building block. Contemporary Chinese people live in a far, far more complex world, and our mental worlds juggle between personal dreams, familial duties, self-growth, material desires, entertainment, aspirations for a just and fair society, curiosity, over-competition, safety, personal well-being, memories of Confucian doctrine, memories of cosmopolitanism like that of the Tang as well as memories of both brotherly camaraderie as well as unscrupulous scheming like that from the Romance of Three Kingdoms -- all alongside our unconscious response to the “Century of Humiliation”, which is but one page in our recent history….
….In the case of China, our system is authoritarian (or patriarchal), but decidedly not expansionist. Sometimes, I think the Western intellgentsia has often projected their own worst fear - the fear total loss of liberty under an authoritarian system - onto China to extrapolate that China will extend its not-so-inspiring governance model to other people. In fact, we worry too much about internal disorders to care about others, and we are not interested in converting others into our way of life at all.
Voices in harmony: China, US youth choirs sing in shared spirit - CGTN
The Bond with Kuliang: 2025 China-US Youth Choir Festival Gala Concert took place in Fuzhou on July 11, bringing together over 20 outstanding youth choirs from both countries. With powerful performances and heartfelt melodies, young singers lit up the stage and carried forward a legacy of friendship, mutual respect and cultural exchange. The event celebrated not only musical excellence, but also the growing bonds between the next generation of China and the United States.
1,500 drones light up Chongqing at low-altitude economy expo - CGTN
A mesmerizing display of 1,500 drones lit up the night sky above Shuanggui Lake National Wetland Park in Chongqing as part of the first Western China Low-Altitude Economy Expo. The event runs from July 11 to 13 and features an array of activities, including drone light shows, a low-altitude economy development conference, aircraft exhibitions, aviation-themed lectures, and science education sessions.
4:30 A.M. at a day labour market in China, a drink to start a day’s toil (eastisread.com)
China’s informal labour markets are fleeting theatres of toil—unmarked spaces that spring to life before dawn and vanish by the break of day, playing out daily in nearly every major city, from Shanghai to Hefei. In Guiyang, the capital of the mountainous, landlocked province of Guizhou, one such stage comes alive at 4:30 a.m. A stretch of bare concrete bursts into motion—minivans idle, hard hats bob in the half-light, and a seventy-year-old woman pours shots of baijiu for men too old for formal employment but too young to stop working.
Guan Tao warns over-expectation of stablecoins (eastisread.com)
In my view, however, stablecoins represent more of a technological rather than monetary innovation. While new payment technologies, including stablecoins, may improve the efficiency of cross-border transactions, they are unlikely to alter the multipolar evolution of the international monetary system or fundamentally shift the trajectory of internationalisation for emerging currencies.
The stablecoins legislatively endorsed by the U.S. and Hong Kong are value-based, decentralised tokens pegged to fiat currencies, differing from China’s earlier account-based, centralised central bank digital currency (CBDC). Nevertheless, the two share considerable comparability. As former People’s Bank of China (PBOC) Governor Zhou Xiaochuan noted, CBDC consists of digital currency (DC) and electronic payment (EP)—a framework that stablecoins also follow….
The recently launched cross-border payment connect between mainland China and Hong Kong offers a compelling case for analysing improvements in cross-border payment efficiency.
By linking the mainland’s Internet Banking Payment System (IBPS) and Hong Kong’s Faster Payment System (FPS), the payment connect will support participating institutions to provide efficient, convenient and safe cross-border payment services for residents in both the mainland and Hong Kong.
This weekly newsletter is put together by DeLisle Worrell, President of the ABCF. Visit us at Association for Barbados China Friendship | (abcf-bb.com).
Thanks to everyone who sent contributions for this week’s Update. Please send items of interest to me via the contact page at ABCF-BB.com or to info@DeLisleWorrell.com
The ABCF mission is to build a deeper understanding between the Chinese people and Barbadians and Caribbean people from all walks of life. The association’s focus is on personal experiences, people-to-people contact, cultural exchanges and exchanges of ideas, and the facilitation of travel, business and study. From the outset we aim to learn from and build on the experiences of the Caribbean and China, and to develop mutual understandings and support that will be to the benefit of both sides.
