China leads at re- booted MWC2021
▶ 5G will reach one in five worldwide by 2021, attracts billions of dollars
In a rare move, the GSMA, the world’s largest telecom industry body that organizes the annual Mobile World Congress, launched this year’s event in China in February, as the rest of the world was still struggling with COVID- 19.
After the world entered the era of 5G commercialization amid the epidemic in 2020, it is expected to embrace fullscale application on the business side in 2021, with China continuing to take the lead.
“As we are very proud to note, this is the first physical event after the pandemic,” Si Han, head of GSMA Greater China, said in a keynote speech on Tuesday.
China has launched 718,000 5G base stations, accounting for 70 percent of the global total, Liu Liehong, vice minister of Industry and Information Technology, said in the keynote speech on Tuesday.
The country has more than 200 million 5G subscribers, with 218 types of 5G smartphones on the market, Liu noted. Application scenarios of 5G are empowering industries including mining, healthcare, ports and manufacturing, and cumulative investment in 5G networks has surpassed 260 billion yuan ($ 40.2 billion).
In recent years, by viewing China as a systemic and strategic rival on the high- technology front, the US has used its sovereignty to challenge China in the 5G race. But the industry itself seems to have gone in a different direction, in contrast to the Washington- led global containment of Chinese companies like Huawei, calling for a larger, deeper and more comprehensive collaboration on application and technological standards.
Under the US’ extreme crackdown and multiple rounds of sanctions, Huawei survived and grew in 2020. In spite of the pandemic, it signed more telecom contracts overseas while supplying more than 300 networks in more than 170 countries and regions, a senior executive said on Tuesday.
“Our performance in 2020 was relatively robust, which basically met our expectations,” Ken Hu, Huawei’s rotating chairman, said in a keynote speech at the MWC2021 in Shanghai.
Revenues and profits both grew slightly last year, which could not have happened without the cooperation of the industry and its partners, Hu noted.
Huawei has signed more than 1,000 contacts concerning 5G empowering businesses, covering over 20 industries.
Hu told the audience that in Indonesia, for example, the company deployed over 50,000 base stations amid the pandemic.
China has launched 718,000 5G base stations, accounting for 70 percent of the global total, Liu Liehong, vice minister of Industry and Information Technology, said.
China’s central government’s “No. 1 document” for 2021 will boost the development of rural industries, including the development of a more self- reliant domestic seed industry, and integration with manufacturing and services sector aimed at diversifying the income of farmers, according to experts.
According to Li Guoxiang, a research fellow focusing on agriculture at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who focuses on seeds security, the No. 1 document in 2021 will revitalize China’s rural areas by diversifying industry in rural areas.
“The problem with China’s rural areas is that apart from manual farming, some rural areas have no other industries,” Li told the Global Times, “By promoting policy reform in rural areas, it needs to industrialize the agricultural sector, and introduce more manufacturing and services by encouraging farmers to extend their agricultural production capacity.”
According to Li, the diversification of rural industries has made significant achievement in eastern China around the Yangtze River Delta, where the local agricultural sector has extended into more sophisticated processing of the crops and fruits, increasing local farmers’ income and has been attracting more talent back home.
But Li also noted that the strategy should apply to different parts of the country, such as in the northern and western parts of China, where some people are still struggling with relatively low living standards.
“In less developed parts of the country, the No. 1 document will aim to address urban- rural disparities and modernize the rural economy by improving infrastructure, supporting innovations in science and technology, advancing supply- side structural reform in agriculture, and deepening basic rural reforms including rural land ownership and subsidy system reforms,” Li said.
The direction pinpointed in the document also draws on new issues, for example, the coronavirus- effected 2020, and potential challenges over the next few years, according to Jiao Shanwei, editor- inchief of cngrain. com, a website specializing in grain news.
“Compared to past years’ polices, this year’s No. 1 document stressed the importance of using advanced technology and human capital to facilitate the development of agriculture,” Jiao said, “Over the past year, the problem of rising food prices that has effected the world seems to be intensifying. The COVID- 19 pandemic has affected the food supply chain, highlighting the demand for the world’s second- largest economy to strengthen self- reliance in grain supply. “
A Focus on grain security
Among the issues highlighted in rural policy this year, cultivation of grain and poultry was especially important, as the country seeks to upgrade technology across the agricultural sector to achieve a higher degree of self- reliance.
According to the No. 1 document released by China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs on Monday, China will strengthen its establishment of resources center for crops, poultry, livestock and marine fishery, and will give long- term support to key breeding program.
“China is capable of producing a large variety of grain seeds. China’s selfselected crop breeding acreage accounts for more than 95 percent of farming, and increasingly the seeds are domestically engineered,” Zhang Taolin, vice minister of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, said Monday.
The self- sufficiency ratio of key livestock, poultry, and aquatic products have already reached 75 and 85 percent, respectively, according to Zhang.
Industry experts say that the importance of crop and poultry cultivation has been underscored over recent years, but the level of attention shifted to seeds and breeding in this year’s No. 1 document is beyond expectation.
“It is unprecedented that the No. 1 document places its main focus on breeding and seed security. There is a suite of policies aimed at supporting livestock breeders and seed producers,” Jiao said.
According to Jiao, the policy also shows that in terms of crop seeds, China still lags significantly behind the US, which currently takes up to more than 35 percent of the global seeds market. China’s crops seeds market size was growing at a slow rate of around 3 percent before 2016, compared to the global average growth of 8.88 percent from 2005 to 2018.
In some of the crop seed technologies, China has made significant headways. According to Li Xinhai, head of Biotechnology Research Institute with the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, in recent years, China is self- sufficiency in seed cultivation in wheat and rice. Corn seeds developed by China also account for 91 percent in domestic market. However, there are still many challenges in terms of technological innovation.
“We fall behind developed countries mainly in the basic research into breeding traits. We lack in technological innovation when it comes to precise and efficient breeding,” Li said, adding that “there are not enough varieties to meet the demand of high quality agricultural development.”
According to Li, core technologies for future advances in seed breeding, including the core technical tools of gene editing, are still controlled by the US, and China should strengthen its efforts in basic research and cultivation technologies.
“We must put maximum effort into seed cultivation,” Li noted, “the more advanced a country is, the more attention
it gives to seeds security.”
While Facebook has agreed to restore its news service in Australia over the next few days, the incident has the potential to be a landmark in strengthening the resolve of global regulators to tighten their grip on tech giants.
In a statement updated on Tuesday, Facebook said that “after further discussions, we are satisfied that the Australian government has agreed to a number of changes and guarantees that address our core concerns...”
The agreement, which ends the contentious dispute between the US tech giant and the Australian government, is certainly a welcome development. Global lawmakers have been watching closely as to how the two parties would find a balance and reach compromise on whether tech giants should pay news publishers.
Fundamentally, Facebook’s news blockade in Australia is nothing but a struggle for influence among all parties. From the publishers’ point of view, it is a justified request to ask platforms to pay for their work, while in the eyes of tech giants, they help increase public exposure for the publishers in the internet era, so why should they pay for the favor?
While the dispute only took place in Australia, Canberra’s legislation may become a precedent for other countries and discussions surrounding how to put tech giants under stricter scrutiny and regulation will only intensify. Since Facebook banned news in Australia, government officials and news outlets in the UK, Canada and other Western countries have strongly criticized the American tech giant. This is because it has already become a common concern for governments around the world as to how to rein in the power of digital giants while minimizing disruption to the internet- related industries.
It should be noted that although there is growing sense of urgency in terms of digital antitrust in many countries, the complication of the work cannot be underestimated. This is because each tech giant with enormous digital power may make different choices when facing regulatory requirements, which, to a certain extent, adds to the complexity of regulation and supervision.
While Google chose to cut deals with major news groups that will ensure its services continue to be available in Australia, the subsequent supervision and negotiation could prove challenging. And it is impossible and unrealistic for governments to come up with new rules for every such giant.
In this sense, the future battle over digital regulation will be complicated and a prolonged process. Regulation for tech giants is a brand new field for many countries, which still need time and precedents to find their own ways. How to set up policies and rules will largely determine the future development of the internet economy for each country, so caution is still needed during the process.