Could China’s Very Hot Summer Revive Action on Climate Change?

A ChinaFile Conversation

By Ilaria Mazzocco, Lauri Myllyvirta & more on September 9, 2022

For more than two months, China—along with the rest of the globe—has been struggling with extreme heat and severe droughts. Hundreds of cities are facing temperatures in the 90s and higher, and Beijing last month issued its first nationwide drought warning in nearly a decade. In terms of area spanned, the heatwave has set a global record. As in summers past, the severe heat has led to spikes in energy use which economists warn will likely lead to supply chain snarls. In Sichuan province, many factories were forced to suspend operations for more than a week.

Nathaniel Sher

on September 6, 2022

Nathaniel Sher is a Senior Research Analyst at Carnegie China, where he researches China’s foreign policy and U.S.-China relations. His writings have appeared in Foreign Policy, Wired, the Wire China, and The Tsinghua International Relations Review. He received his B.A. in History from Oberlin College and M.A.s in International Relations from Tsinghua University and the University of Chicago.

The American-Trained Rocket Scientist Who Shaped China’s Surveillance System

An Excerpt from ‘Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control’

By Josh Chin & Liza Lin on September 6, 2022

The role Qian Xuesen would play in propelling China into a technological and ideological clash with the United States seems almost fated in retrospect. Born in Hangzhou in 1911, the year China’s last dynasty crumbled, Qian had traveled to the United States on a scholarship to study aeronautics and quickly impressed professors with his precision and imagination. The U.S. military granted him clearance to work on classified projects during World War II, despite his not being an American citizen, after mathematician Theodore von Kármán recommended him to the Army Air Forces as an “undisputed genius.” At age 37, he was named founding director of a new jet propulsion center at the California Institute of Technology funded by the Guggenheim family.

Liza Lin

on September 6, 2022

Liza Lin is an award-winning journalist for The Wall Street Journal based in Singapore. Fluent in Mandarin, she has covered the region for almost 15 years, with eight of those years spent in Shanghai. She was part of the Journal team that won the Loeb Award in 2018. She also contributed to the newspaper’s coverage of Chinese leader Xi Jinping that was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting in 2021. She has won numerous accolades from the New York Press Club and the Society of Publishers in Asia. Lin is a former Fulbright Scholar, and the co-author of Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control.