Day: December 15, 2023

Under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China has contributed a lot to advancing global human rights and welfare through inclusive international cooperation, said experts worldwide while commenting on a latest BRI report.

The report, titled “For a Better World — Looking at the Past Decade of Jointly Pursuing the Belt and Road Initiative from a Human Rights Perspective,” was released by the China Foundation for Human Rights Development and Xinhua’s think tank New China Research last week.

By using a large number of cases and data, the report demonstrates the positive role of the BRI in helping local people better realize their rights to survival and development and achieve broader human rights protection in the past decade, and summarizes the inspiration of the BRI for global human rights governance.

“The Xinhua study … offers an excellent overview of the enormous contributions of the BRI to global wellbeing and the fulfillment of fundamental economic and cultural rights,” said Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University in the United States.

Taking the landmark projects the China-Laos Railway and Jakarta-Bandung high-speed railway as examples, Wirun Phichaiwongphakdee, director of the Thailand-China Research Center of the Belt and Road Initiative, said the BRI enabled the world to achieve unprecedented connectivity.

The think tank report, Phichaiwongphakdee said, has made the world see the contribution of the BRI to the development of human society, and also let developing countries “that have long been suppressed by Western countries on human rights” see China’s success on the path of human rights development.

While driving economic growth and improving infrastructure construction in participating countries, primarily in developing countries, the BRI has also improved the living standards of their people, said Decio Machado, an international political analyst and a Spanish citizen who has been living in Ecuador for years.

Its philosophy of putting people first and promoting cooperative development brings positive forces to the development of human rights, fairness, and social justice, solidifying the foundation of human rights development, he added.

“I fully agree with the report’s description that the cooperative construction of the Belt and Road conforms to the strong desire of people of partner countries to live a better life,” said Rafael Quintero, former deputy foreign minister of Ecuador.

Echoing Quintero’s point, Mohammed al-Jubouri, professor of media at the Baghdad-based al-Iraqia University, said that the report, based on objectivity and professionalism, is very important for giving clear, realistic examples and numbers about what the BRI has achieved.

In Iraq, the BRI contributes to bettering local lives in the fields of energy and education, the professor said, adding that Chinese companies play a vital role in raising Iraq’s electricity and oil production, alleviating the suffering of its people, and increasing its income, while their construction of hundreds of schools ends the lack of schools for Iraqi students.

“A large number of cases and data in the report … proved that the initiative has essentially helped many developing countries overcome their development bottlenecks such as infrastructure deficits,” said Anna Malindog-Uy, vice president of the Manila-based think tank Asian Century Philippines Strategic Studies Institute.

“Through those collaborative projects, the Belt and Road cooperation has created more jobs, and provided more vocational training and education opportunities for the people in partner countries, and thus improved their livelihoods in the process of development,” she added.

The Long March family of Chinese launch vehicles marked a 500th spaceflight on Sunday by launching a Long March-2D carrier rocket to send a remote sensing satellite to space from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Sichuan Province in the southwest of China.

In addition to the Long March family, China is also witnessing the boom of a commercial space industry. Many private space startups are busy creating and testing reusable rockets, sending payloads into orbit and aiming to catch up with world-leading peers in the industry.

SUCCESSFUL LAUNCHES

China’s commercial space industry has achieved notable breakthroughs in 2023 with a series of successful rocket launches completed.

One of these happened this past Sunday at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China, where a Chinese commercial reusable rocket named SQX-2Y successfully completed its second flight test mission, the first reuse of such a rocket in China.

The rocket, propelled by a liquid oxygen methane engine, was developed by Beijing Interstellar Glory Space Technology Ltd., better known as iSpace. It also successfully completed a vertical take-off and landing flight test on Nov. 2.

Meanwhile, on Dec. 9 the Zhuque-2 Y-3 carrier rocket was sent into space from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center.

It was the third flight mission of the Zhuque-2 carrier rocket and the success of this launch mission made Zhuque-2 China’s first commercial liquid carrier rocket to complete successive launches.

This same launch center also saw activity on Dec. 5 when China launched a CERES-1 Y9 carrier rocket, sending two new satellites to their planned orbits, and marking the 11th flight mission of the CERES-1 rocket series.

Developed by Beijing-based Galactic Energy, CERES-1 is a small-scale solid-propellant carrier rocket designed to send micro-satellites to low orbit.

The launch mission on Dec. 5 was the first by this commercial rocket developer to successfully send satellites to the twilight orbit.

KEY TECHNOLOGIES

The hat-trick of rocket launches in the first ten days of December can be seen as confirmation of the rapid advancement of China’s commercial space industry.

The high cost of rocket launches is regarded as a “roadblock” that hinders mankind’s large-scale access to space, and the reusability of launch vehicles is the most important means of reducing such costs.

To develop recoverable and reusable launch vehicles is a must for commercial spaceflight companies both at home and abroad in order to pursue the highest input-output ratio, said Ji Haibo, chief designer of the iSpace rocket SQX-2Y.

The two recent successful launches have verified the rapid reuse capability of this rocket, which means iSpace has made inroads into mastering a series of key technologies for the low-altitude return and landing of reusable rockets and their reuse, Ji added.

Methane is inexpensive and easy to purchase, and the characteristics of liquid oxygen methane, which is resistant to coking and carbon buildup, are conducive to the maintenance of engines and rockets, making its use one of the feasible paths to building reusable rockets, said Liu Lei, general manager of the engine R&D department of LandSpace.

Independently developed by LandSpace, the Zhuque-2 is China’s first medium- and large-size liquid rocket with liquid oxygen and methane as propellants.

Soon after the successful liftoff of the Zhuque-2 Y-3 carrier rocket, LandSpace unveiled its development plan for the Zhuque-3, which will be propelled by its methane engines.

LandSpace said the first stage of Zhuque-3 will be reusable for no less than 20 launches and designed with a strong launch capability that can help build a large-scale satellite internet constellation.

All these technological breakthroughs would not have been achieved without policy support. In 2014, the Chinese government opened up the country’s space sector to private investment, with numerous aerospace startups founded shortly afterwards.

Galactic Energy was co-founded by Xia Dongkun with other partners in 2018.

The company provides commercial carrier rocket launch services and has unveiled research plans named after the Ceres and Pallas asteroids.

“Ceres and Pallas are asteroids that seemed far away from the Earth when they were discovered. However, now a human-made space probe has visited Ceres. We hope that rockets developed by our company will also bring space, which previously seemed so far away, closer to people’s daily lives,” said Xia, a former senior technician with the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology.

EXTENSIVE APPLICATION

Rockets are the most important vehicles for achieving space programs, and the main customers of commercial space companies now are commercial satellite companies.

“We are more aimed at the commercial market. What customers need is what we will seek to research and develop,” said Xia.

Guodian Gaoke, a Beijing-based commercial sci-tech firm, had their four satellites, Tianqi 21-24, sent to space aboard the CERES-1 rocket on Sept. 5.

The four satellites are part of the Tianqi low-Earth orbit Internet of Things constellation.

According to the company, the 38-satellite constellation will go into operation in 2024. It will provide global data services for application scenarios such as emergency communications, ecological environment monitoring, and tower detection.

Large-capacity rockets can certainly launch small commercial low orbit satellites, but the “starting price” is higher, said Pei Yao, a senior staff member at Guodian Gaoke.

Commercial rocket companies have developed small-capacity, low-orbit launch plans that can accurately match this demand, and the prices they offer are much lower, providing an additional option for satellite companies, added Pei.

Commercial rockets and satellites are both important components of China’s commercial space industry, and the size of this market has now exceeded one trillion yuan (about 141 billion U.S. dollars), with the number of registered and effectively operating commercial space enterprises in China exceeding 400.

“Through continuous research, development and improvement, commercial rocket companies have been able to work out a set of standardized processes applicable to the whole industrial chain, driving commercial spaceflight towards a virtuous circle and making it more and more popular,” Liu said confidently.

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US State Department and Georgia

The U.S. State Department supports the December 14 decision of the European Council to grant Georgia the status of a candidate country for EU accession and to start accession negotiations with Ukraine and Moldova. According to the White House, America is ready to help Georgia “carry out necessary reforms”.

State Department spokesman Matthew Miller statement

“The United States welcomes the December 14 European Council decision on EU enlargement as a powerful affirmation of the candidates’ European future. Today’s decision to begin accession negotiations with Ukraine and Moldova, to grant candidate status to Georgia, and to begin accession negotiations with Bosnia and Herzegovina as soon as it meets the necessary criteria, provides hope and encouragement to these states and their citizens to continue reforms to strengthen their desire to become EU members. This is a historic moment for Europe and the transatlantic partnership.

The U.S. continues to support the EU enlargement process and stands ready to help candidate countries and future EU candidates implement important reforms. At this important moment for the transatlantic community, we urge these countries to seize the opportunity to realize their full democratic and economic potential and secure Europe’s future.”

Yesterday, on 14 December, the European Council decided to start accession negotiations with Ukraine and Moldova and to grant Georgia the status of an EU candidate country.

Prior to this decision, the General Secretariat of the European Council published an enlargement opinion. The Council called on Georgia to demonstrate a clear commitment to EU values, to continue to make progress on its reform program and to meet the conditions set by the Commission.

The Council generally welcomes the good legal framework, institutional structure and active civil society, including monitoring organizations, and states that this provides a solid basis for advancing democratic and rule of law reforms in Georgia.

The EU Council of Ministers emphasizes that Georgia must ensure full respect for fundamental rights, including media freedom and pluralism, freedom of opinion, assembly and expression, and the protection of LGBT persons from intimidation, violence and discrimination.

“The Council emphasizes the strong expectation that Georgia will significantly strengthen compliance with the EU’s common foreign and security policy positions and restrictive measures, including against Russia and Belarus. This will be a clear sign of the country’s strategic choice to join the European Union,” the document says.

The Defense Ministry of the Republic of Korea has expressed protest to Russia and China because military aircraft of the two countries entered the air defense identification zone unilaterally established by Seoul on December 14

The interview of Elvis Antonio Alam Loran, Ambassador of the Dominican Republic to Azerbaijan and Türkiye, who lives in Ankara, to Report:

Azerbaijan produced 151.5 tons of ethylene (+22.7%) in January-November of this year, Report informs, citing the State Statistical Committee.