Category: Uncategorized

By Li Xinping, People’s Daily
China has maintained the world’s largest handler of express delivery parcels for nine consecutive years, collecting and delivering a total of 110.58 billion parcels last year, up 2.1 percent from 2021.
In other words, on average, nearly 80 parcels were collected from and shipped to each Chinese in 2022.
In 2022, the express delivery sector’s revenue increased 2.3 percent from a year ago to reach 1.06 trillion yuan ($156.26 billion), with a capability to manage as many as 700 million parcels on a daily basis.
The sector reported outstanding performance in the rural market. As of the end of 2022, a total of 430,000 express service stations had been set up across the country, including 990 county-level delivery centers and 278,000 village-level courier stations.
Last year, the courier industry vigorously promoted integrated development of passenger, cargo, and mail transportation. Nearly 20,000 delivery vehicles were put into use in the rural market, and 1,888 routes opened to traffic to support passenger and mail transportation.
As of the end of 2022, 95 percent of all administrative villages across the country had been connected to express delivery services.
Xiangshi is a township located nearly 20 kilometers away from downtown Neijiang city, southwest China’s Sichuan province. It administers three communities and 11 administrative villages.
As a mountainous and sparsely populated township, Xiangshi was once express delivery-isolated. Besides, the emerging online car-hailing services brought fierce competition to the township’s traditional passenger transportation business.
To connect the township to courier services and tackle the challenges faced by the traditional passenger transportation business, local authorities came up with an idea of having the transportation and postal sectors share their personnel and equipment with each other.
“My van is multipurpose now. It carries both parcels and passengers. I can send 6,300 pieces of express delivery parcels every month with the van,” said Li Jun, a bus driver in Xiangshi township.
In 2022, around 100 million parcels were shipped to and from rural areas across China on a daily basis. Such remarkable performance couldn’t have been achieved without using intelligent systems and upgrading automation devices, which improved sorting efficiency.
At a rural express delivery service center owned by Cainiao Network, the logistics arm of China’s Alibaba Group, in Yuncheng county, Heze, east China’s Shandong province, there is an automatic sorting system that comes with 242 exits. It is able to sort tens of thousands of parcels shipped by different courier companies based on their shipping addresses.
According to Zhang Tongchun, who’s in charge of the service center, it takes only four hours for the automatic sorting system to sort 50,000 pieces of express delivery parcels, which is 1.5 times faster than before.
In addition, Cainiao Network has equipped its village-level stations with intelligent devices to further improve efficiency.
Zheng Chen, who heads a Cainiao service station in Chenlukou village in Yuncheng county, told People’s Daily that he would paste a smart light bar to each parcel that enters the station, which will beep and be lighted up when the QR code on the parcel is scanned. It only takes six to seven seconds for customers to find their parcels, Zheng said.
Stable express delivery service stations are the most important guarantee for the sale of farm products on e-commerce platforms.
Yongji, Yuncheng of Shanxi province, is one of the largest grape producers in north China. However, troubled by high logistics cost, many village-level express delivery service stations in the city had left.
To tackle the problem, postal authorities of Yuncheng decided last year to optimize the operational structure of the local courier business by handing over all village-level deliveries to one courier company, aiming to lower the cost of express delivery service stations and help stabilize the courier business in the city.
According to Wang Lei, head of the Yongji branch of ZTO Express that won the bid to run village-level courier business, courier stations have been set up in 195 administrative villages of Yongji only seven months after the decision was implemented.
Last year, the number of express parcels collected by courier stations of ZTO Express in Yongji surged by 40 percent. More and more local specialties in the city have been sold to the rest of the country, and their prices have also been lifted.
As of the end of 2022, 117 “gold medal” courier projects had been implemented to better assist the development of modern agriculture.

By Wang Ke, Cao Wenxuan, People’s Daily
China, the most promising consumption market in the world, is seeing a dramatic rise in the culture and tourism sector as the Chinese New Year, the most important festival of the year for Chinese people, approaches.
The demand for cultural and tourism products is increasing at an accelerated rate, boosting confidence in the recovery of the industry and guiding its innovative development.
“There are more and more visitors coming to Sanya. I received three batches of tourists this morning alone,” said Wang Yu, who works in the tourism industry in Sanya, south China’s Hainan province.
According to statistics released by Sanya Phoenix International Airport, the airport handled 929,000 passengers in the first 15 days of January this year, up 15.3 percent year on year.
A report on tourism consumption during the 2023 Chinese New Year, or Spring Festival, issued by Tongcheng Travel, a market leader in China’s online travel industry, said there has been a significant rise in traveling demand during the Chinese New Year period this year, especially for medium- and long-distance trips.
The Spring Festival travel rush officially started on Jan. 7. The number of ticket orders received by Tongcheng Travel for trains departing on the Chinese New Year’s Eve and a day before surged 31 percent from a year ago, ranking first in the past three years. Between Jan.1 and 8, the consultation volume for long-distance travel products scheduled for the Spring Festival vacation increased nearly 20-fold. Besides, the search volume for hot destinations, such as Xishuangbanna, Changbai Mountain, Sanya, and Xiamen, more than doubled from a year ago.
The per-customer transaction of travel products scheduled for the Spring Festival period has increased by over 70 percent from a year ago, and the numbers of hotel and tourist site ticket bookings have increased by nearly 20 percent, said Alibaba’s travel portal Feizhu. There is also a significant rise in the distance and duration of trips as well as the number of travel companions, according to Feizhu. Besides, the bookings for high-end hotels also improved by nearly 30 percent, and those for rural B&Bs increased by over 100 percent.
Li Donghan, owner of a B&B hotel in Dali, southwest China’s Yunnan province, told People’s Daily that all rooms had already been booked for the Spring Festival period. The man has cooperated with local farmers to sell local specialties and artware at his B&B.
“There are around 7,000 B&B hotels in Dali. A large portion of the rooms have been booked for the period from now to the Spring Festival vacation, and the figure is over 90 percent in some high-end B&B hotels,” said Li Haizhong, head of the homestay association of Dali.
In a theater near the Emperor Qinshihuang’s Mausoleum Site Museum in Lintong district, Xi’an, northwest China’s Shaanxi province, a show about the renowned Terracotta Warriors is chased after nowadays.
Qiao Lida, who manages affairs for the show, told People’s Daily that the show was first staged at the end of 2022 and has played to a full house almost every time. “To meet the demand for tourists, we’ll for the first time keep playing the show during the Spring Festival,” Qiao said.
The demand for culture and tourism consumption in China is upgrading thanks to the accelerated integration of the culture and tourism sectors and the constant development of the market. Market entities on the supply side are closely following the new trend of the consumption upgrading to offer new and higher-quality products and services that better meet the demand of tourists.
“I never thought that I could visit the Weishan Lake tourist site for free,” said Li Xu, a university student from Jining, east China’s Shandong province. The tourist site offered 10,000 free tickets for university students returning to the city during the winter vacation, and is staging a series of splendid activities such as fireworks shows and lantern fairs.
Local authorities across China have rolled out policies to support the recovery and expansion of culture and tourism consumption.
Shanxi province’s culture and tourism department recently unveiled a list of tourist sites that offer ticket discounts ranging from 20 percent to 90 percent. A total of 106 sites were on the list.
The tourism authorities in southwest China’s Guizhou province said tourists visiting the province between Dec. 16, 2022 and Feb. 28, 2023 can enjoy free tickets of tourist attractions, as well as 50 percent discounts on expressway tolls and hotel expenses.
An official with the Ministry of Culture and Tourism said new policies will be launched to further relieve tourism enterprises’ burden, boost the tourism industry, and promote consumption, so as to vitalize the industry’s confidence and make it more energetic.

By Yang Xun, People’s Daily
The year 2022 was the International Year of Glass, and Albert Chen, managing director of Schott in China, one of the leading specialty glass companies in the world from Germany, shared with People’s Daily a story about glass.
Over the past 30 years, the German manufacturer has always been committed to improving its manufacturing and processing technologies of ultra-thin glass. However, it lacked an opportunity to massively launch its products in the market, till it learned from negotiations with its Chinese partners that many Chinese tech firms were seeking solutions for producing curved screens.
“The success of our technologies and products came from not only the demand of Chinese tech firms for new technologies but also the strong industrial chain of the Chinese electronics industry and its vital consumption market,” Chen said.
He noted that the potential of the Chinese market is obvious to all, and expanding investment in China is an important strategy adopted by many multinational companies, including Schott.
Schott started its business in China in 2002. So far, its total sales volume in the country has hit 2.55 billion yuan ($381 million).
Chen told People’s Daily that Schott has enjoyed prosperous development in China over the past two decades, and with the general expectation of the Chinese economy picking up in 2023, it is believed that the investment environment for foreign companies in the country will keep being optimized.
Over the recent years, Schott has continuously expanded its investment in China, introducing high-end production lines and establishing an Asia-Pacific R&D center.
Many new outcomes were delivered in China by the German manufacturer, including mobile phone screens made of curved ultra-thin glass, a transistor outline header for 5G fronthaul, and an encapsulation design for the light engines of augmented reality glasses.
Besides, the company has also inked agreements about optical communication with Chinese corporations at the China International Import Expo for three consecutive years, contributing its part to the development of the Chinese 5G market.
“China is Schott’s fastest-growing consumption market. The Chinese market enjoys advantages in its size and also in its vitality for innovation,” Chen said.
In 2021, Schott set up an Asia-Pacific R&D center in Suzhou, east China’s Jiangsu province, to offer frontier technical support for its ultra-thin glass, 5G communication, virtual reality and augmented reality, as well as energy storage businesses.
So far, the company has invested 20 million yuan in the construction of an application center in China. It plans to invest 8 million to 10 million yuan each year to promote the development of the center.
“We’ll keep contributing to the innovation and R&D of Chinese brands, to make full use of our technical advantages and benefit the country through close cooperation on the application of technologies,” Chen noted.
According to him, China has always been the fastest-growing market of Schott in the past five years. He told People’s Daily that China’s business environment is conducive to the development of innovative enterprises. The Chinese government has constantly widened access for foreign capital, handed down the power to approve administrative items, and streamlined administrative approvals, which relieves the burden of enterprises and creates a market featuring efficiency, equity, convenience, and freedom for foreign enterprises.
“As a high-tech firm, Schott has benefited from the reduced enterprise income tax rate of 15 percent and the policy on granting additional tax deductions for R&D costs. It is also facilitated by the streamlined customs procedures and optimized customs approvals,” Chen told People’s Daily.
China is the world’s second largest economy, largest trading country in goods, and the top destination of foreign investment. Its economic development draws global attention.
Chen said that as China takes solid steps towards high-quality economic development, foreign enterprises still enjoy huge development potential in the country.
“China, as a source of stable growth for global economy, will make more contributions to building an open world economy and a better future for mankind in the post-pandemic era,” Chen said.

By Liu Leyi
Driven by the development of a new generation of information technology, intelligent logistics is speeding up in China, giving a leg up to the country’s development.
According to statistics, the overall market size of China’s intelligent logistics stood at 35.67 billion yuan ($5.11 billion) in 2020, and the figure surged to 128.05 billion yuan as of October this year, with an average annual compound growth of over 70 percent.
With digitalization, modern warehouses are no longer merely “transfer stations,” but key nodes that offer targeted services. Intelligent warehousing systems now play a crucial role in the logistics sector.
In smart warehouses, cargos are sorted and moved by logistics robots, and real-time information about cargo vehicles is shown on big screens. What’s more, the “last kilometer” problem is now solved by unmanned delivery vehicles that are able to carry all types of parcels.
In the warehouse of an industrial park owned by Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com in Yiwu, east China’s Zhejiang province, over 100 automated guided vehicles are employed. Guided by QR codes and an inertial navigation system, these vehicles are able to precisely deliver cargos to staff members of the warehouse.
“Warehousing is becoming smarter and smarter, turning from person-to-goods to goods-to-person,” said Weng Bo, who’s in charge of the warehouse.
Weng told People’s Daily that the warehouse is able to handle 1,500 orders per hour, which is three times more efficient than traditional models, and the whole industrial park can process as many as 70,000 orders on a daily basis.
Resources are integrated for cargo transport, too. For instance, Wellong Etown, a logistics company based in Zhenjiang, east China’s Jiangsu province, has established a smart online cargo dispatching platform that enables shippers and truck drivers to receive freight forwarding solutions on their mobile phones. With a satellite positioning system developed by the company, the departure time, locations, and destinations of delivery vehicles can all be traced.
Automated and intelligent devices are gradually being employed at the delivery end, with contactless delivery becoming “standard configuration.”
In October this year, six smart delivery vehicles of JD Logistics, a supply chain solutions and logistics services provider of JD.com, were put into trial operation in a testing base for autopilot vehicles in Shunyi district, Beijing.
These vehicles, which can recognize traffic lights, detect pedestrians and keep staying in the right lane, have a maximum capacity of 200 kilograms and a range of 100 kilometers. They are able to complete over 200 deliveries per day.
These vehicles can send parcels to service areas that are far from distribution centers and then hand them to couriers for final deliveries.
He Tian, vice president of JD.com and head of JD Logistics AI and Data Science, told People’s Daily that intelligent logistics would enter a new era by 2025, in which artificial intelligence would contribute to the efficient automated development of all logistics links.
“In the future, we’ll keep developing the logistics sector with technologies and constantly improving delivery efficiency and service quality to ensure the safety of all logistics links,” He noted.

By Mbakwe I. Mbakwe

The Biblical cock has scant crowed thrice and Peter has denied not just his masters but himself as well. Labour Party presidential candidate in the 2023 election, Mr. Peter Obi has now clearly lost out even before Nigerians file out to cast their ballot; this failure is purely of his own making, and he has only himself to blame and no one else. Like the Biblical Peter, who didn’t realize he was denying Jesus until the third cockcrow brought him to his senses, Peter the son of Obi is either blissfully unaware of the failure that has landfall in his camp, or he is a scam artist that knows what game he is playing – making monetary profits off campaign donations. Either way, someone has to bell the proverbial cat. Who will tell Peter Nwa-Obi the truth?

Obi’s uncouth and fanatical followers, the OBIdients are welcome to call for my head for the things I wrote here. But the truth is that “Ndị mmadụ anaghị ekwe ka nwanne ha gba ọtọ n’ahịa.” Only those of us that truly love Peter Obi and are committed to the Igbo cause can be frank with him to the point of alerting him to his diminishing chances and to counsel on how he should proceed.

Far from the prospective seeming candidate who snatched the Labour Party ticket from factional candidate, Chief Diga Ezenwafor at the cusp of party primaries earlier in the year, when the OBIdient frenzy was born, Obi’s popularity has travelled down south faster than a brakeless rickety bus career downhill on an abandoned village road. He has been prematurely demystified even before the campaigns of other candidates turn the heat on him. Like some would say, the bottom fell out of Peter Obi’s container of lies even before he had gotten his tainted goods to the market.

Most prominently. the exposé by Anambra state governor, Professor Chukuwma Soludo, the successor to Peter Obi’s successor as governor of that state, is one that should have made a right thinking-politically savvy candidate pull out of the race, re-assess the damage done to his image, and then decide whether to again contest in the future. Obi’s pedantic response to the weighty issues that Soludo flagged is enough warning sign to those who still think this demagogue has anything of value to add in the growing zeal to rebuild Nigeria. Soludo dismissed Obi’s so called achievements, largely some phantom investments, as “worth next to nothing” and a wrong economic choice for a people ravaged by the kind of poverty that held the state in its grip. The investments were also heavily mired in conflict of interest having been trapped in enterprises that are practically Obi’s family businesses, creating a scenario where the lines between Anambra state’s commonwealth and Obi’s family businesses were inexplicably blurred. It is shocking that all Obi could say was how he has tried his best as a trader and Soludo should now try his as a professor. Such arrogant insistence on not being accountable is one that Nigerians cannot afford to toy with and one that quickly deflated the OBIdient frenzy. People may be desperate for a change in the status quo but certainly not stupid to the point of entrusting the country to someone who has subtly admitted to being an unprincipled greedy trader.

Worse than Obi’s penchant for dubious investment is his dubious manipulation of issues. On one hand is frantically marketing himself as a detribalized fanatic, who is not the Igbo candidate but on the other hand he is obsessively scheming to be accepted as the Yoruba anointed candidate. The miscalculation of this approach is already evident in how he has so far failed to get the blanket endorsement of Afenifere like he got from Ohaneze, a body that is so virulent in its frenzied demand for the presidency to be allocated to an Igbo person that it is not seeing the damage it has visited on the Obi candidacy by such act. Unaware that the Yoruba nation is not mentally programmed as the Ohaneze hive mind tendency, Obi hauled the now controversial Afenifere leader, Pa Ayo Adebanjo, to his rally in Ibadan, Oyo state without the realizing the error – he should have gone there to market himself on a neutral basis instead of pushing to be seen as the Yoruba candidate, something which another candidate, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu of the All Progressive Congress (APC) is not doing even though he is from the Yoruba nation.

Nwa-Obi deluding himself as the Yoruba candidate is one thing he may genuinely believe, but it is alarming, sufficiently so, for him to think that Nigerians will be oblivious of his Pandora Papers scandal, something for which his peers in other jurisdictions would be in jail for the remainder of their natural lives. Excerpts from a story by Premium Times read, “But beyond the facade of priggish speeches and appearances, an investigation by PREMIUM TIMES has now shown that Mr Obi is not entirely transparent in his affairs as he likes Nigerians to believe…Mr Obi is one of the individuals whose hidden business activities was thrown open by the project. Indeed, he has a number of secret business dealings and relationships that he has for years kept to his chest. These are businesses he clandestinely set up and operated overseas, including in notorious tax and secrecy havens in ways that breached Nigerian laws.” Obi, infamously quipped to reporters who interviewed that “I am sure you too will not like to pay inheritance tax if you can avoid it,” while lying that he was unaware he should declare assets he jointly owned with his family. So, this character is running to preside over the taxes paid by hardworking Nigerians while stashing his own billions of naira in tax havens. This is irresponsible hypocrisy.

Worse than the hypocrisy of not paying his share of taxes while positioning himself to steal even more publicly owned money is the irresponsible double facedness of a separatist-terrorist sympathizer aspiring to lead a united Nigeria. The defunct republic of Biafra, the subject of a bitter civil war is one of Obi’s pet projects – he had openly justified why he would not condemn the separatist Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), which has been unleashing terror attacks as part of its drive to break away the southeast region from Nigeria. Obi is so invested in this terrorist agitation that he structured his campaign activities in the region to comply with a destructive Monday sit-t-home that has been permanently called by the IPOB. In fact, some analysts have been able to articulate how the online/cyber arm of IPOB was the foundation for the OBIdient Movement that Peter Obi’s campaign is built upon. The smoking gun is their resort to threat of violence and abuses they hurl at those not in their camp, consistent with the way IPOB trolls operated on the social media platforms. This clarification has opened the eyes of other persons of other ethnicities that had naively aligned with the OBIdient Movement to reassess their affiliation and they have left in droves.

And there is no forgetting the lies. Obi damaged himself by becoming notorious as that candidate whose “good morning” greeting has to be factchecked. He even lied about doing things he didn’t do as governor of Anambra state. He needs someone to tell him the truth that he didn’t do those things and that someone probably lied to him whilst he was governor and thought he knows it all. His lies got so overwhelming that even those of us that are his kinsmen found them repulsive as such behaviour does not tally with the level of integrity for which Ndigbo is known. These lies damaged his brand and will have consequences at the polls and this would require that he steps back to undo the damage he has done to himself and to the credibility of the Igbo nation.

Even among our people in Anambra state are those who struggle to understand how they will back a man who never treated them as citizens of the state but rather saw and treated them as non-Catholics. People suffered economic losses and humiliation because Saint Obi decided that they are less than human because they are Protestants and Pentecostals, it didn’t matter that they are Christians. Such persons have alerted the nation that an Obi presidency would be fanatically Catholic to the exclusion of other sectarian persuasions. The circuit he has been running to night vigils and morning mass is a sad warning that whatever fanatical tendencies he exhibited as a governor would be amplified as a president and the electorates have since decided that there is no sense in signing up for such a destructive leadership.

In view of the foregoing, it has become crucial to ask who will tell Peter Obi the truth. One can make excuses that desperation made him to lie to Nigerians but how does one rationalize Obi lying to himself that he still stands a chance in spite of these negatives stacked high against him? There is obviously a need for someone, probably older or younger than him to tell him the truth. This is definitely not Peter Obi’s time, so, he should quietly withdraw from the race, return to his former party and support Atiku Abubakar of the People Democratic Party (PDP), who guarantees a faster route to an Igbo presidency. But who will tell Peter the son of Obi the truth?

Mbakwe is a retired educationist based in Enugu.