New lab set up for supervision of Yangtze estuary
A LABORATORY was launched by Shanghai Ocean University and the Shanghai Aquatic Wildlife Conservation and Research Center yesterday, the day China’s first Yangtze River protection law came into effect.
The law is the first in China made for a specific river basin and aims to promote well-coordinated environmental conservation and avoid excessive development.
As well as strengthening protection of the ecology of Asia’s longest river, the law also restricts exploitation of shorelines and imposes tougher punishments for violations that could damage the environment. Fishing, for example, is banned in all of the Yangtze’s natural waterways, including in its main tributaries and lakes.
The university has been cooperating with the center in many areas, including the protection of the Chinese sturgeon, finless porpoise and other marine life in the estuary, and the rescue of endangered aquatic wildlife.
The new laboratory is their latest cooperation. It will carry out systematic investigation and long-term supervision on aquatic life resources and the environment at the estuary and develop the biology-friendly technology needed.
It aims to supervise rare aquatic life, tagged aquatic life, important economic organisms and the estuary environment around the clock and build a database for aquatic wildlife protection and research.
The laboratory will assess aquatic life resources and the environment, and the endangered species situation, such as the Chinese sturgeon and finless porpoise, and important aquatic animals including coilia and eel seedlings. They will also evaluate the effect of protection zones and fishing bans and release a regular local water health index report.
A NANJING Massacre survivor died at the age of 95 yesterday, reducing the number of registered survivors to 70, said the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders.
Cai Lihua was the second survivor to die this year.
“In the winter of 1937, Japanese soldiers suddenly broke into my house. I watched with my own eyes as they tied my father’s hands and hung him on a wooden ladder before brutally stabbing his eyes with a bayonet, making egg-sized holes in my father’s eyes, and then killed him with several shots,”
Cai once said in a testimony.
“My mother was also stabbed in the back and a bullet grazed her scalp. I was there and narrowly escaped by hiding under a table.”
The Nanjing Massacre took place when Japanese troops captured the city on December 13, 1937. Over six weeks, they killed about 300,000 civilians and unarmed soldiers in one of the most barbaric episodes of World War II.
The Chinese government has preserved the survivors’ testimony, recorded in both written documents and video footage. These records of the massacre were listed by UNESCO in the Memory of the World Register in 2015.
WHILE the bulk of limited stocks of COVID-19 vaccines are being hoarded by wealthy countries, most of the world’s population, who live in developing countries, are being left defenseless in the face of the deadly pathogen.
Fighting the pandemic is a common war involving all humanity.
The billions of people who will not be inoculated soon due to the uneven distribution of vaccines are exposing the Achilles’ heel of global anti-COVID19 efforts.
Junaid Iqbal, a 29-year-old young doctor, joined a field hospital last year in northern Pakistan’s Gilgit to fight the pandemic and his battle has lasted for almost one year.
“Never in my life had I wished to be vaccinated and immune from the virus like I did in the hardest of those days,” Iqbal said, recalling the time when his mother was infected with the virus at home, but he couldn’t go back to look after her.
However, when he realized that rich countries had started rolling out vaccinations for their citizens, he became concerned that it would take a long time for him, a frontline health worker in a third-world country, to be vaccinated.
What concerns Iqbal has also worried Chief of the World Health Organization Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who said in January that deals between some highincome economies and manufacturers of COVID-19 vaccines are undermining the WHO-led COVAX initiative, a global initiative to ensure equal access to COVID-19 vaccines for all participating countries.
Of some 50 countries where COVID-19 vaccines are being administered, nearly all are wealthy nations and 75 percent of doses have been deployed in only ten countries, according to the WHO chief, who warned earlier that “the world is on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure” due to vaccine nationalism.
Describing global governance amid the pandemic as “the weakest in contemporary days,” Khalid Rehman, director-general of the Institute of Policy Studies, an Islamabad-based think tank in Pakistan, believed that some countries are seeking to prioritize their own interests.
Prejudices that are being applied in global governance should be abandoned and the world needs to come together against global challenges with “an aim to jointly create a better future for humanity, not for one country, not for a group of countries, but for humanity at large,” noted the Pakistani expert.
In an effort to promote the fair distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, China has joined the COVAX initiative and vowed to provide 10 million COVID-19 vaccine doses to the program to meet the needs of developing countries.
Liberal assistance
Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said last Thursday that China has provided vaccine assistance to at least 53 developing countries and exported vaccines to 27 countries.
Pakistan is the first country to get China’s vaccine assistance in February. Iqbal, who worried about when he could be vaccinated, finally received his first jab, saying that the shot gave him strength to fight against the virus during the second wave of infections in the country.
Earlier in January, Indonesian President Joko Widodo, among other Indonesian senior officials, received his first shot of the COVID-19 vaccine developed by China.
Later, many heads of state including Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Chilean President Sebastian Pinera received the Chinese-made vaccine shots before massive vaccination programs in their countries, showing their confidence in the Chinese vaccines.
Praising China’s efforts to offer its vaccines to the international community, Margaret Chan, a former WHO chief, said that COVID-19 vaccines are in short supply, but equitable vaccine distribution, especially to developing countries, is critical as the pandemic won’t be controlled until it is controlled everywhere.
“In a globalized world, our vulnerability is universal and the international community must work together in solidarity in the face of a common health crisis,” she said.
“The COVID-19 pandemic is a clear test of international cooperation — a test we have essentially failed,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on September 24 last year during a video conference, warning that facing the pandemic, “global response is more and more fragmented.”