China has made remarkable achievements in promoting the green and low-carbon energy transition and will continue to pursue green, high-quality environmental development to achieve its carbon peak and carbon neutrality goals. Here are some facts and figures about China’s green energy development.

This philosophy for green and sustainable development has well pictured one of the defining features of China in the new era. Under such a guideline, China’s green transition is rapidly gaining momentum, from developing non-fossil energy to updating the industrial structure, from investing in low-carbon technologies to transforming the transport sector.

Wang, now 43 and working as deputy head of Temuli, Butuo county, Liangshan Yi autonomous prefecture, Southeast China’s Sichuan province, said she would have lived a very different life if she had quit school and got married as her parents had wanted.

In the 1990s, most of the girls who lived in villages deep in Sichuan’s mountains dropped out of school after just a few years because they were either engaged or destined to become housewives in arranged marriages. When Wang Fumei told her parents about her dream of attending classes again, she was met with opposition. Her mother refused because Wang was the family’s oldest child, so she had to do farm work and take care of her younger siblings. The lack of available labor meant the family could only just make ends meet by planting corn and rice. Wang went on a hunger strike to protest her parents decision. On the seventh day, however, seeing Wang’s determination, her parents finally allowed her to go to school and her arranged marriage was canceled.

“I envied the lifestyle of female teachers and doctors in my village. I knew my parents had their difficulties, but the only thing in my mind back then was that education can change people’s destinies. If I wasn’t permitted to go to school, then I’d rather die.” she said.

She cherished the opportunity so much that she devoted all her time to studying. In 2000, she returned to Butuo to work as a civil servant. At the same time, she made up her mind to improve the lives of the people in the village, and also helped solve the problem of local children dropping out of school as there was still an attitude of “boys over girls” in the isolated village.

“No matter how capable you are and no matter what situation you are in, you must be grateful in your heart. Only you can change your destiny: no one else can do that for you,” she said.

Benefiting from the growing popularity of social media and a craze for traditional culture, hanfu, a traditional style of clothing once worn by the Han people, has enjoyed a fresh lease of life thanks to a new wave of young Chinese devotees, including Liu and Yang.

The 1980s-born rocket scientist Liu is also a cofounder of a hanfu community in Beijing called Hua Yan Hui. The community was founded in 2011 following a hanfu revival movement that emerged from the desire to express national identity and growing cultural confidence. “At first, people who wore hanfu in public felt occasionally uneasy, including me, while more passers-by asked about their clothing style”, says Liu. It was not the looks from others but her limited knowledge on the traditional Chinese clothing that had terrified her.

Another person, Yang Kunning, was born in the 1990s and works in public relations. She is fond of sharing her love for hanfu online. She opened an account on the video-sharing platform Bilibili and posted videos featuring herself wearing the traditional attire. Thousands of comments and likes pour into her channel as viewers find her videos attractive and creative — blending traditional culture with modern dance movements.

“Social media has made hanfu culture popular in China and abroad, which contributes to the rapid development of China’s economy” says Yang. The hanfu market in China was estimated to reach 12.54 billion yuan ($1.81 billion) in 2022 and is expected to rise to 19.11 billion yuan by 2025, according to research firm iMedia Research.

“It will be a rewarding experience to participate in events in the Forbidden City and other historical palaces in the capital city,” says Yang. She believes that classics will never go out of style as the popularity of sprouts increases around the world.

The AI chatbot pheomenon ChatGPT is changing the world and has kicked off a new global AI race, but couldn’t it replace humans?

ChatGPT is one of the hottest topics in tech right now, the AI powered chatbot attracted over 100 million users just two months after launch in late November. So, what is it? The GFT pat stands for Generative Pre-Trained Transformer. It’s a form of AI capable of understanding human language and generating surprisingly detailed and coherent answers to questions in a conversational format. ChatGPT is so good that people are using it to write essays, draft script, pass exams and the correct computer code, all of which it can do within seconds. Some have even asked the Chatbot for psychological counselling or to create a personalized weight-loss plans.

But what does the advent of ChatGPT mean for ordinary people? The elephant in the room is whether it will eventually replace humans in some jobs. Universal access to a capable and versatile AI powered digital assistant would significantly boost productivity in many sectors. Teachers are now using ChatGPT to write presentations, and product managers are using it to create marketing campaigns. As with any disruptive technology, ChatGPT will change the labor landscape. The jobs most immediately at threat include customer service, computer programming, graphic, design, and content creation. We have already seen AI technology replacing translators and interpreters. However, notably the impact of ChatGPT on education cannot be overstated. One study even found that 89 percent of US college students admitted using ChatGPT for their assignments. Some public schools have banned ChatGPT outright and some science journals now prohibit listing ChatGPT as a co-author on papers.

So, the healthy development of this kind of technology will depend on enforcing honest, safe and responsible use. This will likely be a global undertaking for multiple governments, companies and academia working in collaboration.