Editor’s note for Tuesday, October 12, 2021

My thoughts today:

Xi Jinping dialed in by video chat to a UN meeting of the parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity held in Kunming today. But he didn’t phone it in.

He formally announced China’s first batch of national parks with a protected land area of nearly 89,000 square miles, launched a $232 million biodiversity protection fund for developing countries, and said that the first phase of a ginormous new renewable energy project had launched, with solar and wind farms being constructed “in the desert” to produce 100 gigawatts of power — “more than the entire wind and solar capacity installed in India…[and] four times as much power as the Three Gorges Dam,” according to Bloomberg.

Harvard’s Chinese language program has relocated from Beijing to Taipei, the Harvard Crimson reports.

According to Program Director Jennifer L. Liu, the program decided to move to Taipei due to a perceived lack of friendliness from the host institution, Beijing Language and Culture University. In recent years, the program began to have difficulties accessing the classrooms and dorms they needed.

It’s just another lesion in the diseased China-U.S. relationship. But the pain of this one may be felt more acutely in Beijing. Ivy League schools are perhaps the last American institutions that the Chinese political elite truly respect.

Tutoring crackdown update: Yesterday we reported on parents and employees lining up outside the Shanghai offices of edutech company OneSmart, demanding repayment after it effectively ceased operating, a victim of China’s ban on for-profit tutoring companies.

Today, OneSmart has announced the suspension of its business.

Our word of the day is immovable cultural relics (不可移动文物 bùkě yídòng wénwù).

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief