Tracking People’s Daily — October 6, 2020

Page 1: We still have a slimmer holiday edition of the paper; so there isn’t a lot of news. But still there’s one noteworthy piece on the front page. It talks about China’s R&D expenditure and how that’s supporting sci-tech development and innovation.

“The National Bureau of Statistics, the Ministry of Science and Technology, and the Ministry of Finance recently jointly issued the Statistical Bulletin of National Science and Technology Expenditures in 2019, showing that the total investment in research and experimental development (R&D) in my country in 2019 was 2214.36 billion yuan.” That’s around 2.23% of China’s GDP.

“In 2019, corporate R&D expenditures increased by 11.1% over the previous year, accounting for 76.4% of the national R&D expenditures and contributing 68.5% to its growth.”

“basic research funding in 2019 was 133.56 billion yuan, an increase of 22.5% over the previous year…”

Page 3: Two pieces on this page that are worth noting. First, a story with multiple datelines looking at how the world has positively reacted to China’s development of a community of common destiny. The piece basically has analysts from different parts of the world, Cambodia, Brazil, South Korea, Russia, Serbia, Egypt — talking about different aspects of China’s domestic economic reform, underscoring how it has helped economic globalisation. So revamping of the negative lists system, the import expo, the creation of national demonstration zones, BRI and so on.

Next, a commentary pushing back against criticism of China on environmental issues. “Some American politicians have gained notoriety for their “great retrogression” on climate and environmental issues, and they have long been known. What’s ridiculous is that in order to discredit China, they have played the “climate environment card” absurdly.” There’s then data provided about how China has contributed to the climate change fight, while the US continues to dither.

Page 4: One piece to note. Here’s some data on flights across the country and customer footfalls in malls. The numbers, of course, show a positive trend. I honestly don’t understand what the footfalls numbers imply. But here’s the flight-related data.

• “The reporter learned from the Civil Aviation Administration: On the 4th, there were 14,386 flights across the country, of which 13,470 were domestic flights operated by domestic airlines, an increase of 11.83% year-on-year. On the 5th, the national flight schedule is 14,241.”

If you are keen on figuring out what sort of normalcy prevails in China at the moment. Do check out this thread by The Economist’s Simon Rabinovitch.