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China

Trouble In The Air Between Shanghai And The U.S.

BEIJING DAILY, cyYES.com (China)

SHANGHAI - The Americans are stirring trouble again. This time it's the U.S. Consulate in Shanghai.

Following the American Embassy in Beijing, the Shanghai consulate announced two days ago that it's going to publish the air quality index every hour using the PM 2.5 measurement that tallies micro-particles.

For the first day, the published readings were between two to three times higher than the official figure published by the Shanghai Environmental Protection Bureau, according to the report by cnYES.com.

Again, this aroused a tornado of discussion among China's netizens. "We don't want beautiful figures. What we want is the true statistic," one blogger declared.

Last December when the northern coastal area, including Beijing, was covered by thick smog for weeks, the US Embassy staff in the capital posted a hazardous high PM2.5 index 10 times the European Union's maximum ratio of 50, causing alarm amongst residents.

The storm set off earned the American ambassador the label of "troublemaker" from pro-regime commentators. The Beijing daily wrote: "Instead of committing himself to developing Sino-US relations, the American Ambassador seems to be looking for faults and deliberately making trouble in China." the Beijing Daily wrote.

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Economy

Lithium Mines In Europe? A New World Of Supply-Chain Sovereignty

The European Union has a new plan that challenges the long-established dogmas of globalization, with its just-in-time supply chains and outsourcing the "dirty" work to the developing world.

Photo of an open cast mine in Kalgoorlie, Australia.

Open cast mine in Kalgoorlie, Australia.

Pierre Haski

-Analysis-

PARIS — It is one of the great paradoxes of our time: in order to overcome some of our dependencies and vulnerabilities — revealed in crises like COVID and the war in Ukraine — we risk falling into other dependencies that are no less toxic. The ecological transition, the digitalization of our economy, or increased defense needs, all pose risks to our supply of strategic minerals.

The European Commission published a plan this week to escape this fate by setting realistic objectives within a relatively short time frame, by the end of this decade.

This plan goes against the dogmas of globalization of the past 30 or 40 years, which relied on just-in-time supply chains from one end of the planet to the other — and, if we're being honest, outsourced the least "clean" tasks, such as mining or refining minerals, to countries in the developing world.

But the pendulum is now swinging in the other direction, if possible under better environmental and social conditions. Will Europe be able to achieve these objectives while remaining within the bounds of both the ecological and digital transitions? That is the challenge.

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