Recently, I had the opportunity to explore the Liupanshan Mountain in northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. Shortly after departing from Yinchuan, the capital of the region, we encountered extensive stretches of solar photovoltaic panels and clusters of windmills lining both sides of the highway. 

It is worth noting that this form of power generation has emerged as a crucial economic asset for the western region.

In the past, Ningxia was known for its specialty products, such as sheepskin, wolfberries and Fat choy, but now it has become an important source of electricity for the whole country. One recently launched project is the "Ningxia Electricity to Hunan," which transmits mainly clean electricity from Ningxia to central China's Hunan Province.

The Ningxia wind and solar power transmission line spans 1634 km, from Ningxia, traversing Gansu, Shaanxi, Chongqing, Hubei, and terminating in Hunan. The project boasts a designed transmission capacity of 8 million kilowatts and a total investment of 28.1 billion yuan. 

The Western media has recently focused on rising coal-fired power projects in China. They thought this may hinder China's commitment to peak carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060.

These sorts of projects in Ningxia are a clear response.

Regarding China's geography, the northwest is best suited for wind and solar projects, like the Helan Mountain region and the Tengger Desert in Ningxia. However, these areas are sparsely populated, with little industry and are far from the coastal and southeastern regions, where electricity is most needed. 

How can we ensure wind and solar power transmission remains uninterrupted?

According to a friend who works in the electricity industry, the amount of coal power generated in Ningxia has stayed the same over the past two years. However, newly constructed or renovated coal power projects are being implemented as complementary measures to ensure uninterrupted power transmission along ultra-high-voltage lines to other areas far away from Ningxia.

The project in Zhongwei city, Ningxia, which is involved in the transmission of electricity to Hunan, is to build a power photovoltaic base while at the same time bundling clean, efficient, advanced, energy-saving coal power in the neighborhood to achieve uninterrupted transmission.

A closer examination of China's grassroots efforts in transitioning to energy efficiency helps us understand why China will fulfill its promises.

Once one of the most impoverished regions in China, the Liupanshan mountainous area in Guyuan city, Ningxia, has undergone a remarkable transformation. It has emerged as a renowned scenic destination, boasting a network of bicycle paths stretching over 50 kilometers. These paths provide a convenient means for visitors to explore the picturesque landscape, meandering amidst the lush hills and serene waters.

I walked into a village snack shop and saw that the cookers had been converted into electric stoves. I asked the shopkeeper what she relied on to keep warm in winter. She mentioned that her family was preparing to use electric heaters this winter. 

The heating season in Guyuan lasts five months in winter, and while farmers used to burn wood and coal to heat their homes, they are now expanding their use of electricity, natural gas and solar energy. According to Guyuan's plan, by the end of 2024, the clean heating rate in urban areas will reach 100 percent and 60 percent in rural areas.

The shopkeeper also told me that heating with electricity or natural gas is cheaper than burning coal. According to local farmers, burning coal stoves requires at least 5 tons of coal in winter, and at an average price of 1,200 yuan per ton, it costs about 6,000 yuan; after the switch to electricity, the average monthly electricity bill is about 700 yuan. According to government regulations, households that switch from coal to electricity, coal to gas, or coal to solar energy to heat their homes receive a specific subsidy.

The changes in Guyuan are a microcosm of the world's most significant and ambitious emissions reduction program. When every village and city in China follow this plan to achieve their emissions reduction targets, China will show the world that it is not just reducing emissions but that this emerging economy is creating a new path for human development.

Next, the Chinese will prove to the world that we can not only produce the chips that the Americans are desperately trying to contain, but we can also walk a different path to sustainable development different from the 500-year expansion of the West.

Editor's Note:  

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping. Through the lens of foreign pundits, we take a look at 10 years of the BRI - how it achieves win-win cooperation between China and participating countries of the BRI and how it has given the people of these countries a sense of fulfillment.

Serbia, a country from Eastern and Central Europe, is one of the most positive examples of cooperation under the BRI framework. In an interview with Global Times (GT) reporter Wang Wenwen, Katarina Zakic (Zakic), head of the Regional Center "Belt and Road" in Belgrade, the Institute of International Politics and Economics, shared her views why Serbia is distinct. 

This is the 16th piece of the series.

GT: What do you think of the advancement and development of the BRI over the past 10 years?

Zakic: Since the beginning, it was very clear that this is something extraordinary that doesn't happen every day. We knew that it would be a huge project and huge undertaking by China, to develop it and to fund it.

We have approached the 10th anniversary. When we look at the results, they are really impressive. Regarding the investments, we are reaching the amount of $1 trillion. Who can say which other countries invested so much in one project throughout 10 years? Even many of those projects do not last 10 years. Around 40 million people worldwide do not have the burden of extreme poverty in which they were living before these projects. 

In general, China has achieved excellent results. We are impressed by the results in transportation infrastructure and especially the types of the countries in which they were conducted. Those were the countries that needed those infrastructure projects. One of the reasons that I highly appreciate throughout this project and the idea that China had behind it was that each country should nominate the project it wants to conduct. And we would very much appreciate China's assistance in those regards. We should also highly appreciate that China did not only invest in energy and transportation. It also invested a lot in health sector, in tourism, in culture, in buildings and real estate. 

GT: What makes Serbia the pillar of China-Central and Eastern Europe cooperation?

Zakic: Serbia is in Europe, but it's not an EU member. This is our strategic situation, because for many years, we are still trying to become an EU member. Our cooperation with China and the successful results are partially due to this fact that we are not an EU member, because otherwise the politics within the European Union will affect our relations with China. 

We have comprehensive cooperation with China. We have relations on very high political levels. We have signed with China the comprehensive strategic agreement. Then we have excellent cooperation on economic level, especially regarding the loans and the investments that we have, not only throughout the BRI, but also throughout the China-Central and Eastern Europe (CEEC) cooperation framework. 

Not only political and economic relations are on the high level, but also people-to-people and cultural relations are on a very high level. All these elements help Serbia become the pillar of China's projects and China's relations in the Western market. Serbia didn't have any kind of suspicions or negative reactions toward deepening our cooperation. Each government, starting from 2008, just built up that operation on even higher and higher level. We are in a way complementing each other. We respect each other's policies. Even in some cases when we have some kind of problem, for example, on economic level or regarding the investments, there was always an understanding that we should speak about that and resolve it. In this way we distinct, especially within Balkan countries.

GT: Does Serbia face any pressure from the West in its cooperation with China? What domestic factors in Serbia will promote its deep integration into the BRI?

Zakic: For 22 years, Serbia is trying to become an EU member. When you are trying to become an EU member, all your policies and strategic decisions, not only in economic sense, but also in political sense, have to be in reliance to the EU policies. Countries within the EU have very different kind of cooperation with China. Hungary and Greece have more friendly cooperation with China than Germany, even though Germany is the main partner of China within the EU.

There are concerns coming from the EU about Serbia's cooperation with China. But there are also concerns about some other parts of our journey to the EU. China is just one of the things that the EU wants in a way to change within Serbia.  

In recent years, people in our government really did have the opportunity to learn a lot about China and now they have a deeper understanding about China. Many of us nowadays do understand China in a completely different sense. It was not something that was in a way normal for them. In previous time, for example, when I went to the primary school and high school, usually the students within those levels of education learn about history coming from Europe. They do not learn so much about the Middle East or Asia. Thanks to the China-CEEC and the BRI, we have more opportunities to learn. 

Nowadays, there is a better sense of understanding between all levels of the people within Serbia to understand Chinese people and Chinese culture. For example, Chinese restaurants are very popular in Serbia and people very much like Chinese food and they use chopsticks. So this is something normal to you. But for us, it means that many things in Serbia are big change. And for example, there are more and more books about China in Serbia.

GT: A large number of Chinese companies view Serbia as a "bridgehead" to enter the European market. What do you think of this trend?

Zakic: I think that's a very wise decision. There are many advantages for the Chinese companies to be here. We are in Europe. Our geographical position is very good. But since we are not the EU member and our economy is still developing, there are many advantages for the Chinese companies to have industrial house here or service house here in Serbia. Then because we are very close to the most developed countries within the EU, it is a great opportunity for the Chinese companies to open their production companies or services here in Belgrade.

Also, Serbia is in a way bridge between the East and the West. There are many opportunities that the Serbia government is giving the foreign investors here who want to operate in our country. It's not only just for the Chinese companies. It's a general policy regarding direct investments in Serbia, but I think that many Chinese companies realized all of the benefits to come to Serbia. 

We have five Chinese companies that work in the automotive car industry. They use Serbia as a hub for production. They export all of those things to the EU market. For them, it's ideal. They are very nearby to Europe. So the transportation costs are not so high. All of these things helped those Chinese companies make a decision to come into Serbia. They have the friendly environment, good labor force, very secure political and economic environment. And they can export to the EU market. 

GT: During the G20 summit in September, the US and some other countries outlined plans for a rail and shipping corridor that would connect India with the Middle East and ultimately Europe, another counterweight of the BRI. What do you think of this plan?

Zakic: I see it in a way to counterbalance China's economic and political rise. This project is just one of the cases in which we can see that currently we have some kind of situation that we had during the Cold War, in which the former Soviet Union had very dynamic battle with the US regarding who will have more power and recognition and who will have a better economic success. Now we have that kind of thing going on between China, the US, the EU and of course India as the developing country and economy that wants to be part of this play. 

I do see this project as the competition toward the BRI. But we need to wait and see. This is just a preliminary thing. At this moment, we do not know the financial construction of the whole project. We do not know how much money it will take, who will fund it, and how it will develop. 

GT: Some European countries, following the US, have been calling to de-risk from China. What do you think of this move?

Zakic: The US had a specific situation for many years being one global superpower. And it lasted for long. They had a very clear situation that there was not a power that would become in some periods of time economically and militarily strong to question the US position in this world.

When China started to rise, they were very aware that the Chinese economic development is very strong and very fast. But they were not in a way aware that China would become such a global political and military power as well. When you are no longer No.1, or somebody is questioning your position as a No.1 power in the world, of course that power would always try to use all tools and means to question the other part.

I see this part of political narrative of de-risking as a part of the US trying to still be the No.1 power in the world. At this moment, de-risking is just a part of the narrative to in a way encourage other countries not to cooperate with China so much and to questions China's position in everyday world. Some countries in Europe do try to use it as a term to become not so dependent on China and change this situation to be more self-sufficient. I see it as really a political narrative to destabilize China's position, not only in international politics, but also international economics.

A recent nine-day visit to Xinjiang in September 2023 by 22 foreign journalists from 17 overseas media organizations reported favorably on the vibrant local economy and China's efforts to preserve the local traditional and diverse cultures.

Instead of ending the flood of lies in the US media about Xinjiang, a US State Department agency, the Global Engagement Center, attacked this fact-finding visit, the visiting journalists and also China. This US agency released a 58-page report warning that China's information campaign on Xinjiang "could sway public opinion and undermine US interests." The US corporate media dutifully picked up the report and spread it. 

An AP news story "The US warns of a Chinese global disinformation campaign that could undermine peace and stability" used quotes from other government-funded organizations to reinforce its lies. This included Freedom House, which is 90 percent funded by US federal grants. 

The anti-war movement in the US is aware of the media's role. At a recent rally in front of CNN News followed by a march through busy Times Square to the New York Times media conglomerate, the resounding chant was: "Corporate media, we can't take lies anymore! Stop your drumbeat for war." This reflected the growing rage at the role of the largest media conglomerates in promoting militarism and racism. 

"Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth." This comment, attributed to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, is obvious in how news coverage in the US is organized today. Sometimes this leads even well-meaning people astray. They might say that "I've heard so often that there is slave labor and genocide of the Uygur Muslim people in Xinjiang, so it must be true."

I've held a series of talks and interviews with different audiences describing the diversity of cultures, modern cities and new farming techniques in Xinjiang, which I visited this May. My comments were greeted with a mixture of interest, curiosity and a frustrated suspicion from the US media, which have continually lied in the past and demonized a targeted country to justify each war.

In discussing my visit to Xinjiang, I often begin by asking an audience not to take only my short visit as the basis for their understanding of conditions in Xinjiang. It is more important to ask why no Muslim country has ever backed up the charges of genocide in Xinjiang, charges that the US government, its politicians, as well as talking heads in the media repeat endlessly. 

A visit by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation with 57 member states and later a delegation from the Arab League praised the Chinese government's policies and the harmonious relations and respect for the religion and culture of the people that they observed.

The June visit by the delegation from the Arab League was immediately denounced by the VOA. The VOA is a US government-owned news network that produces digital, radio and TV content in 48 languages and distributes it internationally. This response exposes how threatened the US is of a different view of China reaching people around the world. 

The media industry in the US is privately owned by a handful of billionaires. These media conglomerates combine advertising, broadcasting and networking, news, print and publication, digital, recording, and motion pictures, and most have international reach.

The most dangerous aspect of this web that seeps into every area of conscious life is that the media is intermeshed with the top US military corporations.  

All of the military corporations are also privately owned capitalist corporations. Their survival is based on enormous, government subsidized military contracts. Military corporations make the highest rate of profit with the highest returns to stockholders.   

This reality means that the corporate media functions as the public relations arm of the military corporations. The media's task is to sell war, and to justify war.   

The media in turn works with the well-funded think tanks who strategize, provide reports and talking points to the media and to the politicians - Republican and Democrat alike - who vote for ever increasing military budgets.  

This message is reinforced by continual claims that the media in other countries is controlled, combined with constant reassurances that a "free press" exists in the US. 

The US media focus on Xinjiang has a dual role. It is attempting to ingrain deep hostility toward China because the US corporate rulers fear China's growing economic strength and its attractive trade and development plans.  

The US media is also attempting to deflect attention away from the massively destructive US wars against Muslim people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, by claiming concern for Muslims in Xinjiang. China is showing the reality by inviting increasing numbers of visitors to see Xinjiang for themselves.

Chinese experts have criticized Germany's decision to cease granting promotional loans to China and deny China's developing country status, calling it a move that succumbs to pressure from the US' cold-war mentality toward China. They warn that Germany risks undermining its own economic interests and damaging the investment confidence of European enterprises in China.

Germany will no longer grant promotional loans to China from 2026 and no longer treat China as a developing country, the Federal Development Ministry (BMZ) confirmed on Tuesday. 

The German ministry said it has informed the Chinese Ministry of Finance in mid-September of the federal government's decision to permanently stop granting promotional loans to China, Reuters reported.

"We are no longer treating China as a developing country," German Development Minister Svenja Schulze said. "China is and remains an important partner, without whom we cannot successfully overcome global crises," she added.

The move reflects some German politicians' alignment with the US in strengthening "decoupling" from China and creating economic and trade barriers aimed at the country, Chen Jia, an independent analyst on global strategy, told the Global Times on Wednesday.

Under this Cold War mentality, Germany's push to implement a decoupling policy is not beneficial to EU-China cooperation, Chen noted.

Song Wei, a professor at the School of International Relations and Diplomacy at Beijing Foreign Studies University, said Germany's decision to cease granting promotional loans to China and deny China's developing country status was primarily influenced by US attempts to strip China of its developing country status.

For some time, the US has attempted to deprive China of its developing country status, which has been slammed by Chinese officials.

China's status as the world's largest developing country is rooted in facts and international law. It's not up to the US to decide whether China is a developing country, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin said at a press conference in June.
China's status as a developing country is supported by concrete facts. China's per capita GDP in 2022 was $12,741, or one-fifth of that of advanced economies and only one-sixth that of the US. 

The move by Germany will create an atmosphere of uncertainty, hinder the growth of bilateral trade and investment, and dampen the investment confidence of European business in China, experts said.

China and EU just concluded productive talks during the 10th High-level Economic and Trade Dialogue, with the two sides reaching multiple consensuses, China's Ministry of Commerce said in a statement on Tuesday.

Both sides agreed to further promote the two-way opening of the financial industry and encourage eligible financial institutions to invest and expand their business in each other's markets. 

In the context of a global economic downturn, Germany's cancellation of promotional loans will dampen the investment confidence and expectations of European enterprises in the Chinese market, which is not conducive to the deepening economic and trade cooperation between China and Europe, Song said.

From 2013 to 2022, promotional loans with a total volume of 3.451 billion euros ($3.62 billion) were agreed upon with China. No promotional loans were granted in 2023, according to the Reuters report.

Cui Hongjian, a professor with the Academy of Regional and Global Governance with Beijing Foreign Studies University, told the Global Times that these loans primarily support projects related to infrastructure, climate change, environmental protection, and sustainable development. The advantage lies in their relatively fixed and extendable repayment period, as well as the relatively favorable interest rates compared to market rates. 

Cui said that in the future, there may be a shift toward more commercial cooperation rather than policy-driven projects. Additionally, this change may not have a significant impact on large-scale projects, as the Chinese side has sufficient financial capacity for investment, Cui said.

As the 8-day Golden Week holidays approach, tourists are swarming to China's famous landmarks and scenic spots like Tian'anmen Square in Beijing, the Bund in Shanghai, and West Lake in Hangzhou, East China's Zhejiang Province. The vibrant atmosphere, buzzing with excitement and activities, serves as a vivid reflection of the unwavering confidence of the Chinese people in the country's economy and bright future.

An estimated around 800 million travel trips will be made during the eight-day Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day holidays which will kick off on Friday. With record demand for travel and the sustained economic impact of the Asian Games, this year's Golden Week holidays are poised to become the most vibrant and prosperous in recent memory. 

As an important window to observe economic vitality, the upcoming Golden Week holidays will lead a significant consumption rebound in the fourth quarter, playing a crucial role in driving economic growth throughout the entire year, experts said.

Despite downward pressure due to multiple factors, China's consumer market is currently displaying signs of recovery and growth. The resilience, potential, and dynamism of consumption remain strong and unchanged, experts said, refuting Western media and politicians' bearish outlook on Chinese economy.

Hundreds of millions hitting the road

Latest data on holiday travel, accommodation, and tourism products all pointed to a stark rebound from the levels seen in 2019, indicating a remarkable resurgence in consumption activity.

Wednesday marks the first day of the Golden Week holidays travel rush. The railway network in the Yangtze River Delta region is expected to deliver more than 2.5 million passenger trips on Wednesday, 600,000 above the 2019 level, representing growth of over 30 percent, according to China Railway Shanghai Group Co.

According to the China Tourism Academy, over 100 million travel trips will be made per day during the Golden Week holidays, far surpassing the levels of last year and 2019. In terms of commercial aviation, more than 21 million travelers will take flights in the span of eight days and an average of 14,000 domestic flights will be operated per day, up 18 percent from the same period in 2019. China Railway Group forecast that 190 million railway trips will be made during the holidays, up from the 138 million trips seen in 2019.

Hotel bookings for popular destinations have also surged. Data from Qunar showed that domestic hotel bookings for the holidays have increased by 514 percent compared to 2019.

Outbound tourism is expected to see a 20-fold year-on-year increase, according to online traveling platform Trip.com. Travel agency U-tour predicted the number of outbound travelers would exceed this year's May Day holidays by five folds.

According to the National Immigration Administration, the average daily number of inbound and outbound passenger trips during the holidays are expected to reach 1.58 million, three times higher than the same period last year.

Additionally, traveling to Hangzhou, East China's Zhejiang Province has become a spotlight and a unique spark for holidays spending as the eight-day holidays coincide with the main competition days of the Hangzhou Asian Games which last from September 23 to October 8.
Data from the online travel platform Fliggy shows that during the Asian Games, international flight bookings bound for Hangzhou have surged 20 times compared to the same period last year. Train ticket bookings have recorded a 4.7 times year-on-year growth, and hotel bookings near venues have increased by three times compared to last year. The other five cities in the province co-hosting the games also experienced a boom in tourist numbers.

With a substantial surge in bookings for flights, train tickets, accommodations, and tourism products, this holidays break is expected to unleash further consumption potential which vividly illustrates the positive trajectory of the Chinese economy, experts said.

In light of record booking and travel data, indicating a growing consumption enthusiasm, Tian Yun, a Beijing based economist attributed the growth to the lengthier holidays break and spill-out effect of events like the Asian Games, which have injected energy into the economy.
Accelerator of economic growth in Q4

Experts predict that thanks to effective macroeconomic stimulus policies and the boost from the Golden Week holidays, consumption will bounce back strongly in the fourth quarter, playing a crucial role in driving economic growth for the entire year. They have also dismissed smear and bearish outlook painted by some foreign media and Western politicians about the Chinese economy.

China's retail sales, a main gauge of consumption, beat expectations in August thanks to a bumper summer travel peak and consumption-boosting measures, data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) showed.

Driven by the accelerated sales of travel and a wider range of spending options, retail sales of consumer goods in August recorded a year-on-year growth of 4.6 percent to 3.79 trillion yuan ($521.13 billion), 2.1 percentage points higher than the growth rate in the previous month, according to the NBS.

Experts said that the Golden Week holidays and the Asian Games will further accelerate the consumption recovery and economic growth in the fourth quarter, expecting more policy tools to kick in. In addition, the Belt and Road Summit in October and the China International Import Expo in November will both provide a strong boost to China's economy and development.

The extended holiday period provides a significant opportunity for a retail spending peak and is expected to have a significant impact on the GDP growth in the fourth quarter, acting as "an accelerator," Cong Yi, a professor from the Tianjin University of Finance and Economics, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

The Asian Games in particular will be a major boost for consumption-related sectors from sports and culture to catering for the host city and nearby cities in East China's Zhejiang Province as well as the Yangtze River Delta region, Cong added.

According to media reports, citing official information from Zhejiang Province, the preparations for the Asian Games between 2016 and 2020 are estimated to have added about 414.1 billion yuan to Hangzhou's economy, accounting for 7.6 percent of the city's total economic output during that time. It also led to an increase of around 103.3 billion yuan in government revenue, which is about 8.2 percent of the total revenue collected. Additionally, the Games has created job opportunities for approximately 670,000 people, accounting for 2.4 percent of the total employment during that period.

The consumption vitality generated by the Hangzhou Asian Games extends far beyond Hangzhou, with the ripple effect gradually emerging in various parts of Zhejiang Province and even the entire Yangtze River Delta region.

During the Asian Games, hotel bookings in Ningbo, Wenzhou, Huzhou, Shaoxing, and Jinhua cities have all increased by more than fivefold compared to 2019, with Shaoxing experiencing the highest growth rate of 720 percent in hotel bookings.
Beyond the tourism, the sports craze sparked by the Asian Games has ignited the sports economy, sports manufacturing and foreign trade. According to customs data, the export of sports goods from Yiwu, East China's Zhejiang Province reached 5.08 billion yuan in the first eight months of this year, a year-on-year increase of 33 percent.

Tian said that the sustained success of the Asian Games and other major events this year will continue to further drive not only domestic consumption but also international consumption, presenting a window for China's opening-up.

Expert noted that China's consumption potential remains untapped and a massive household saving indicates a significant market for emerging consumer goods and upgraded consumption needs.

By the end of August, the balance of savings deposits for urban and rural residents in China exceeded 7 trillion yuan for the first time, standing at 7.06 trillion yuan.

More can be done to stimulate the consumer market, Tian said, pointing to upgraded consumption demand and new consumption drivers.

New-energy vehicles, domestically produced 5G smartphones, domestically produced large aircraft, and the cruise economy will all become new growth points for China's consumer economy, Tian said.

He is confident that with the government's efforts, the gradual recovery of individuals from the pandemic's impact, the retail sales growth could reach 6 percent in the fourth quarter.

"It is expected that macro policies will focus on creating more jobs and promoting economic growth in the fourth quarter. It will also address long-term issues like aged care to boost market confidence," Tian said.
Li Yong, president of Chongqing Frontier Regional Economic Research Institute, told the Global Times that stimulating consumer spending through the issuance of shopping vouchers is a good method, especially for the catering and tourism sectors, which will encourage people to visit malls and take trips.

Experts also defied attacks by some Western politicians and media outlets that paint the Chinese economy as being at the cusp of collapse.

Cong dismissed smear from foreign media, as the trend of consumption upgrading in China's massive market of 1.4 billion people remains unchanged. He also noted that the bearish view on the Chinese economy is a long-standing line of attack from sections of the Western media, yet it has never managed to drag down China's economy.

"China is well on track to achieve the GDP growth target of around 5 percent for the whole year, and the final quarter growth will solidify the target," Cong said.

Tian predicted China's economic growth to grow at around 5.2 percent for this year.

"Actions speak louder than words. As China remains focused on its economic work, progressing at its own pace and avoiding empty rhetoric, there is no need to pay attention to Western attempts to discredit it," Li said, predicting China's economic growth would finish in a range of 5 percent to 5.2 percent this year.

A man with a hole in his forehead, who was interred in what’s now northwest Alabama between around 3,000 and 5,000 years ago, represents North America’s oldest known case of skull surgery.

Damage around the man’s oval skull opening indicates that someone scraped out that piece of bone, probably to reduce brain swelling caused by a violent attack or a serious fall, said bioarchaeologist Diana Simpson of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Either scenario could explain fractures and other injuries above the man’s left eye and to his left arm, leg and collarbone.

Bone regrowth on the edges of the skull opening indicates that the man lived for up to one year after surgery, Simpson estimated. She presented her analysis of the man’s remains on March 28 at a virtual session of the annual meeting of the American Association of Biological Anthropologists.
Skull surgery occurred as early as 13,000 years ago in North Africa (SN: 8/17/11). Until now, the oldest evidence of this practice in North America dated to no more than roughly 1,000 years ago.

In his prime, the new record holder likely served as a ritual practitioner or shaman. His grave included items like those found in shamans’ graves at nearby North American hunter-gatherer sites dating to between about 3,000 and 5,000 years ago. Ritual objects buried with him included sharpened bone pins and modified deer and turkey bones that may have been tattooing tools (SN: 5/25/21).

Investigators excavated the man’s grave and 162 others at the Little Bear Creek Site, a seashell covered burial mound, in the 1940s. Simpson studied the man’s museum-held skeleton and grave items in 2018, shortly before the discoveries were returned to local Native American communities for reburial.

Science, some would say, is an enterprise that should concern itself solely with cold, hard facts. Flights of imagination should be the province of philosophers and poets.

On the other hand, as Albert Einstein so astutely observed, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Knowledge, he said, is limited to what we know now, while “imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress.”

So with science, imagination has often been the prelude to transformative advances in knowledge, remaking humankind’s understanding of the world and enabling powerful new technologies.
And yet while sometimes spectacularly successful, imagination has also frequently failed in ways that retard the revealing of nature’s secrets. Some minds, it seems, are simply incapable of imagining that there’s more to reality than what they already know.

On many occasions scientists have failed to foresee ways of testing novel ideas, ridiculing them as unverifiable and therefore unscientific. Consequently it is not too challenging to come up with enough failures of scientific imagination to compile a Top 10 list, beginning with:

10. Atoms
    By the middle of the 19th century, most scientists believed in atoms. Chemists especially. John Dalton had shown that the simple ratios of different elements making up chemical compounds strongly implied that each element consisted of identical tiny particles. Subsequent research on the weights of those atoms made their reality pretty hard to dispute. But that didn’t deter physicist-philosopher Ernst Mach. Even as late as the beginning of the 20th century, he and a number of others insisted that atoms could not be real, as they were not accessible to the senses. Mach believed that atoms were a “mental artifice,” convenient fictions that helped in calculating the outcomes of chemical reactions. “Have you ever seen one?” he would ask.

Apart from the fallacy of defining reality as “observable,” Mach’s main failure was his inability to imagine a way that atoms could be observed. Even after Einstein proved the existence of atoms by indirect means in 1905, Mach stood his ground. He was unaware, of course, of the 20th century technologies that quantum mechanics would enable, and so did not foresee powerful new microscopes that could show actual images of atoms (and allow a certain computing company to drag them around to spell out IBM).

9. Composition of stars
   Mach’s views were similar to those of Auguste Comte, a French philosopher who originated the idea of positivism, which denies reality to anything other than objects of sensory experience. Comte’s philosophy led (and in some cases still leads) many scientists astray. His greatest failure of imagination was an example he offered for what science could never know: the chemical composition of the stars.

Unable to imagine anybody affording a ticket on some entrepreneur’s space rocket, Comte argued in 1835 that the identity of the stars’ components would forever remain beyond human knowledge. We could study their size, shapes and movements, he said, “whereas we would never know how to study by any means their chemical composition, or their mineralogical structure,” or for that matter, their temperature, which “will necessarily always be concealed from us.”

Within a few decades, though, a newfangled technology called spectroscopy enabled astronomers to analyze the colors of light emitted by stars. And since each chemical element emits (or absorbs) precise colors (or frequencies) of light, each set of colors is like a chemical fingerprint, an infallible indicator for an element’s identity. Using a spectroscope to observe starlight therefore can reveal the chemistry of the stars, exactly what Comte thought impossible.

8. Canals on Mars
   Sometimes imagination fails because of its overabundance rather than absence. In the case of the never-ending drama over the possibility of life on Mars, that planet’s famous canals turned out to be figments of overactive scientific imagination.

First “observed” in the late 19th century, the Martian canals showed up as streaks on the planet’s surface, described as canali by Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli. Canali is, however, Italian for channels, not canals. So in this case something was gained (rather than lost) in translation — the idea that Mars was inhabited. “Canals are dug,” remarked British astronomer Norman Lockyer in 1901, “ergo there were diggers.” Soon astronomers imagined an elaborate system of canals transporting water from Martian poles to thirsty metropolitan areas and agricultural centers. (Some observers even imagined seeing canals on Venus and Mercury.)
With more constrained imaginations, aided by better telescopes and translations, belief in the Martian canals eventually faded. It was merely the Martian winds blowing dust (bright) and sand (dark) around the surface in ways that occasionally made bright and dark streaks line up in a deceptive manner — to eyes attached to overly imaginative brains.

7. Nuclear fission
   In 1934, Italian physicist Enrico Fermi bombarded uranium (atomic number 92) and other elements with neutrons, the particle discovered just two years earlier by James Chadwick. Fermi found that among the products was an unidentifiable new element. He thought he had created element 93, heavier than uranium. He could not imagine any other explanation. In 1938 Fermi was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for demonstrating “the existence of new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation.”

It turned out, however, that Fermi had unwittingly demonstrated nuclear fission. His bombardment products were actually lighter, previously known elements — fragments split from the heavy uranium nucleus. Of course, the scientists later credited with discovering fission, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, didn’t understand their results either. Hahn’s former collaborator Lise Meitner was the one who explained what they’d done. Another woman, chemist Ida Noddack, had imagined the possibility of fission to explain Fermi’s results, but for some reason nobody listened to her.

6. Detecting neutrinos
   In the 1920s, most physicists had convinced themselves that nature was built from just two basic particles: positively charged protons and negatively charged electrons. Some had, however, imagined the possibility of a particle with no electric charge. One specific proposal for such a particle came in 1930 from Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli. He suggested that a no-charge particle could explain a suspicious loss of energy observed in beta-particle radioactivity. Pauli’s idea was worked out mathematically by Fermi, who named the neutral particle the neutrino. Fermi’s math was then examined by physicists Hans Bethe and Rudolf Peierls, who deduced that the neutrino would zip through matter so easily that there was no imaginable way of detecting its existence (short of building a tank of liquid hydrogen 6 million billion miles wide). “There is no practically possible way of observing the neutrino,” Bethe and Peierls concluded.

But they had failed to imagine the possibility of finding a source of huge numbers of high-energy neutrinos, so that a few could be captured even if almost all escaped. No such source was known until nuclear fission reactors were invented. In the 1950s, Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowan used reactors to definitely establish the neutrino’s existence. Reines later said he sought a way to detect the neutrino precisely because everybody had told him it wasn’t possible to detect the neutrino.

5. Nuclear energy
   Ernest Rutherford, one of the 20th century’s greatest experimental physicists, was not exactly unimaginative. He imagined the existence of the neutron a dozen years before it was discovered, and he figured out that a weird experiment conducted by his assistants had revealed that atoms contained a dense central nucleus. It was clear that the atomic nucleus packed an enormous quantity of energy, but Rutherford could imagine no way to extract that energy for practical purposes. In 1933, at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, he noted that although the nucleus contained a lot of energy, it would also require energy to release it. Anyone saying we can exploit atomic energy “is talking moonshine,” Rutherford declared. To be fair, Rutherford qualified the moonshine remark by saying “with our present knowledge,” so in a way he perhaps was anticipating the discovery of nuclear fission a few years later. (And some historians have suggested that Rutherford did imagine the powerful release of nuclear energy, but thought it was a bad idea and wanted to discourage people from attempting it.)
6. Age of the Earth
   Rutherford’s reputation for imagination was bolstered by his inference that radioactive matter deep underground could solve the mystery of the age of the Earth. In the mid-19th century, William Thomson (later known as Lord Kelvin) calculated the Earth’s age to be something a little more than 100 million years, and possibly much less. Geologists insisted that the Earth must be much older — perhaps billions of years — to account for the planet’s geological features.

Kelvin calculated his estimate assuming the Earth was born as a molten rocky mass that then cooled to its present temperature. But following the discovery of radioactivity at the end of the 19th century, Rutherford pointed out that it provided a new source of heat in the Earth’s interior. While giving a talk (in Kelvin’s presence), Rutherford suggested that Kelvin had basically prophesized a new source of planetary heat.

While Kelvin’s neglect of radioactivity is the standard story, a more thorough analysis shows that adding that heat to his math would not have changed his estimate very much. Rather, Kelvin’s mistake was assuming the interior to be rigid. John Perry (one of Kelvin’s former assistants) showed in 1895 that the flow of heat deep within the Earth’s interior would alter Kelvin’s calculations considerably — enough to allow the Earth to be billions of years old. It turned out that the Earth’s mantle is fluid on long time scales, which not only explains the age of the Earth, but also plate tectonics.

3. Charge-parity violation
   Before the mid-1950s, nobody imagined that the laws of physics gave a hoot about handedness. The same laws should govern matter in action when viewed straight-on or in a mirror, just as the rules of baseball applied equally to Ted Williams and Willie Mays, not to mention Mickey Mantle. But in 1956 physicists Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang suggested that perfect right-left symmetry (or “parity”) might be violated by the weak nuclear force, and experiments soon confirmed their suspicion.

Restoring sanity to nature, many physicists thought, required antimatter. If you just switched left with right (mirror image), some subatomic processes exhibited a preferred handedness. But if you also replaced matter with antimatter (switching electric charge), left-right balance would be restored. In other words, reversing both charge (C) and parity (P) left nature’s behavior unchanged, a principle known as CP symmetry. CP symmetry had to be perfectly exact; otherwise nature’s laws would change if you went backward (instead of forward) in time, and nobody could imagine that.

In the early 1960s, James Cronin and Val Fitch tested CP symmetry’s perfection by studying subatomic particles called kaons and their antimatter counterparts. Kaons and antikaons both have zero charge but are not identical, because they are made from different quarks. Thanks to the quirky rules of quantum mechanics, kaons can turn into antikaons and vice versa. If CP symmetry is exact, each should turn into the other equally often. But Cronin and Fitch found that antikaons turn into kaons more often than the other way around. And that implied that nature’s laws allowed a preferred direction of time. “People didn’t want to believe it,” Cronin said in a 1999 interview. Most physicists do believe it today, but the implications of CP violation for the nature of time and other cosmic questions remain mysterious.

2. Behaviorism versus the brain
   In the early 20th century, the dogma of behaviorism, initiated by John Watson and championed a little later by B.F. Skinner, ensnared psychologists in a paradigm that literally excised imagination from science. The brain — site of all imagination — is a “black box,” the behaviorists insisted. Rules of human psychology (mostly inferred from experiments with rats and pigeons) could be scientifically established only by observing behavior. It was scientifically meaningless to inquire into the inner workings of the brain that directed such behavior, as those workings were in principle inaccessible to human observation. In other words, activity inside the brain was deemed scientifically irrelevant because it could not be observed. “When what a person does [is] attributed to what is going on inside him,” Skinner proclaimed, “investigation is brought to an end.”

Skinner’s behaviorist BS brainwashed a generation or two of followers into thinking the brain was beyond study. But fortunately for neuroscience, some physicists foresaw methods for observing neural activity in the brain without splitting the skull open, exhibiting imagination that the behaviorists lacked. In the 1970s Michel Ter-Pogossian, Michael Phelps and colleagues developed PET (positron emission tomography) scanning technology, which uses radioactive tracers to monitor brain activity. PET scanning is now complemented by magnetic resonance imaging, based on ideas developed in the 1930s and 1940s by physicists I.I. Rabi, Edward Purcell and Felix Bloch.

1. Gravitational waves
   Nowadays astrophysicists are all agog about gravitational waves, which can reveal all sorts of secrets about what goes on in the distant universe. All hail Einstein, whose theory of gravity — general relativity — explains the waves’ existence. But Einstein was not the first to propose the idea. In the 19th century, James Clerk Maxwell devised the math explaining electromagnetic waves, and speculated that gravity might similarly induce waves in a gravitational field. He couldn’t figure out how, though. Later other scientists, including Oliver Heaviside and Henri Poincaré, speculated about gravity waves. So the possibility of their existence certainly had been imagined.

But many physicists doubted that the waves existed, or if they did, could not imagine any way of proving it. Shortly before Einstein completed his general relativity theory, German physicist Gustav Mie declared that “the gravitational radiation emitted … by any oscillating mass particle is so extraordinarily weak that it is unthinkable ever to detect it by any means whatsoever.” Even Einstein had no idea how to detect gravitational waves, although he worked out the math describing them in a 1918 paper. In 1936 he decided that general relativity did not predict gravitational waves at all. But the paper rejecting them was simply wrong.
As it turned out, of course, gravitational waves are real and can be detected. At first they were verified indirectly, by the diminishing distance between mutually orbiting pulsars. And more recently they were directly detected by huge experiments relying on lasers. Nobody had been able to imagine detecting gravitational waves a century ago because nobody had imagined the existence of pulsars or lasers.

All these failures show how prejudice can sometimes dull the imagination. But they also show how an imagination failure can inspire the quest for a new success. And that’s why science, so often detoured by dogma, still manages somehow, on long enough time scales, to provide technological wonders and cosmic insights beyond philosophers’ and poets’ wildest imagination.

It was one of the biggest climate change questions of the early 2000s: Had the planet’s rising fever stalled, even as humans pumped more heat-trapping gases into Earth’s atmosphere?

By the turn of the century, the scientific understanding of climate change was on firm footing. Decades of research showed that carbon dioxide was accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere, thanks to human activities like burning fossil fuels and cutting down carbon-storing forests, and that global temperatures were rising as a result. Yet weather records seemed to show that global warming slowed between around 1998 and 2012. How could that be?
After careful study, scientists found the apparent pause to be a hiccup in the data. Earth had, in fact, continued to warm. This hiccup, though, prompted an outsize response from climate skeptics and scientists. It serves as a case study for how public perception shapes what science gets done, for better or worse.

The mystery of what came to be called the “global warming hiatus” arose as scientists built up, year after year, data on the planet’s average surface temperature. Several organizations maintain their own temperature datasets; each relies on observations gathered at weather stations and from ships and buoys around the globe. The actual amount of warming varies from year to year, but overall the trend is going up, and record-hot years are becoming more common. The 1995 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, for instance, noted that recent years had been among the warmest recorded since 1860.

And then came the powerful El Niño of 1997–1998, a weather pattern that transferred large amounts of heat from the ocean into the atmosphere. The planet’s temperature soared as a result — but then, according to the weather records, it appeared to slacken dramatically. Between 1998 and 2012, the global average surface temperature rose at less than half the rate it did between 1951 and 2012. That didn’t make sense. Global warming should be accelerating over time as people ramp up the rate at which they add heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere.
By the mid-2000s, climate skeptics had seized on the narrative that “global warming has stopped.” Most professional climate scientists were not studying the phenomenon, since most believed the apparent pause fell within the range of natural temperature variability. But public attention soon caught up to them, and researchers began investigating whether the pause was a real thing. It was a high-profile shift in scientific focus.

“In studying that anomalous period, we learned a lot of lessons about both the climate system and the scientific process,” says Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist now with the technology company Stripe.

By the early 2010s, scientists were busily working to explain why the global temperature records seemed to be flatlining. Ideas included the contribution of cooling sulfur particles emitted by coal-burning power plants and heat being taken up by the Atlantic and Southern oceans. Such studies were the most focused attempt ever to understand the factors that drive year-to-year temperature variability. They revealed how much natural variability can be expected when factors such as a powerful El Niño are superimposed onto a long-term warming trend.

Scientists spent years investigating the purported warming pause — devoting more time and resources than they otherwise might have. So many papers were published on the apparent pause that scientists began joking that the journal Nature Climate Change should change its name to Nature Hiatus.
Then in 2015, a team led by researchers at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration published a jaw-dropping conclusion in the journal Science. The rise in global temperatures had not plateaued; rather, incomplete data had obscured ongoing global warming. When more Arctic temperature records were included and biases in ocean temperature data were corrected, the NOAA dataset showed the heat-up continuing. With the newly corrected data, the apparent pause in global warming vanished. A 2017 study led by Hausfather confirmed and extended these findings, as did other reports.

Even after these studies were published, the hiatus remained a favored topic among climate skeptics, who used it to argue that concern over global warming was overblown. Congressman Lamar Smith, a Republican from Texas who chaired the House of Representatives’ science committee in the mid-2010s, was particularly incensed by the 2015 NOAA study. He demanded to see the underlying data while also accusing NOAA of altering it. (The agency denied fudging the data.)

“In retrospect, it is clear that we focused too much on the apparent hiatus,” Hausfather says. Figuring out why global temperature records seemed to plateau between 1998 and 2012 is important — but so is keeping a big-picture view of the broader understanding of climate change. The hiccup represented a short fluctuation in a much longer and much more important trend.
Science relies on testing hypotheses and questioning conclusions, but here’s a case where probing an anomaly was taken arguably too far. It caused researchers to doubt their conclusions and spend large amounts of time questioning their well-established methods, says Stephan Lewandowsky, a cognitive scientist at the University of Bristol who has studied climate scientists’ response to the hiatus. Scientists studying the hiatus could have been working instead on providing clear information to policy makers about the reality of global warming and the urgency of addressing it.

The debates over whether the hiatus was real or not fed public confusion and undermined efforts to convince people to take aggressive action to reduce climate change’s impacts. That’s an important lesson going forward, Lewandowsky says.

“My sense is that the scientific community has moved on,” he says. “By contrast, the political operatives behind organized denial have learned a different lesson, which is that the ‘global warming has stopped’ meme is very effective in generating public complacency, and so they will use it at every opportunity.”

Already, some climate deniers are talking about a new “pause” in global warming because not every one of the past five years has set a new record, he notes. Yet the big-picture trend remains clear: Global temperatures have continued to rise in recent years. The warmest seven years on record have all occurred since 2015, and each decade since the 1980s has been warmer than the one before.

As astronomy datasets grow larger, scientists are scouring them for black holes, hoping to better understand the exotic objects. But the drive to find more black holes is leading some astronomers astray.

“You say black holes are like a needle in a haystack, but suddenly we have way more haystacks than we did before,” says astrophysicist Kareem El-Badry of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. “You have better chances of finding them, but you also have more opportunities to find things that look like them.”

Two more claimed black holes have turned out to be the latter: weird things that look like them. They both are actually double-star systems at never-before-seen stages in their evolutions, El-Badry and his colleagues report March 24 in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The key to understanding the systems is figuring out how to interpret light coming from them, the researchers say.
In early 2021, astronomer Tharindu Jayasinghe of Ohio State University and his colleagues reported finding a star system — affectionately named the Unicorn — about 1,500 light-years from Earth that they thought held a giant red star in its senior years orbiting an invisible black hole. Some of the same researchers, including Jayasinghe, later reported a second similar system, dubbed the Giraffe, found about 12,000 light-years away.

But other researchers, including El-Badry, weren’t convinced that the systems harbored black holes. So Jayasinghe, El-Badry and others combined forces to reanalyze the data.

To verify each star system’s nature, the researchers turned to stellar spectra, the rainbows that are produced when starlight is split up into its component wavelengths. Any star’s spectrum will have lines where atoms in the stellar atmosphere have absorbed particular wavelengths of light. A slow-spinning star has very sharp lines, but a fast-spinning one has blurred and smeared lines.

“If the star spins fast enough, basically all the spectral features become almost invisible,” El-Badry says. “Normally, you detect a second star in a spectrum by looking for another set of lines,” he adds. “And that’s harder to do if a star is rapidly rotating.”

That’s why Jayasinghe and colleagues misunderstood each of these systems initially, the team found.

“The problem was that there was not just one star, but a second one that was basically hiding,” says astrophysicist Julia Bodensteiner of the European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany, who was not involved in the new study. That second star in each system spins very fast, which makes them difficult to see in the spectra.

What’s more, the lines in the spectrum of a star orbiting something will shift back and forth, El-Badry says. If one assumes the spectrum shows just one average, slow-spinning star in an orbit — which is what appeared to be happening in these systems at first glance — that assumption then leads to the erroneous conclusion that the star is orbiting an invisible black hole.

Instead, the Unicorn and Giraffe each hold two stars, caught in a never-before-seen stage of stellar evolution, the researchers found after reanalyzing the data. Both systems contain an older red giant star with a puffy atmosphere and a “subgiant,” a star on its way to that late-life stage. The subgiants are near enough to their companion red giants that they are gravitationally stealing material from them. As these subgiants accumulate more mass, they spin faster, El-Badry says, which is what made them undetectable initially.

“Everyone was looking for really interesting black holes, but what they found is really interesting binaries,” Bodensteiner says.

These are not the only systems to trick astronomers recently. What was thought to be the nearest black hole to Earth also turned out to be pair of stars in a rarely seen stage of evolution (SN: 3/11/22).

“Of course, it’s disappointing that what we thought were black holes were actually not, but it’s part of the process,” Jayasinghe says. He and his colleagues are still looking for black holes, he says, but with a greater awareness of how pairs of interacting stars might trick them.