A taste of Qingming: Traditional shefan in Tongren - CGTN
As Qingming Festival approaches, spring returns to the earth with all things coming back to life. It is the perfect time to make shefan, a traditional Chinese rice dish.
In Tongren, Guizhou, local shefan is made with mugwort, glutinous rice, rice, wild garlic, cured pork, dried tofu, peanuts and other ingredients.
'Now I Met Her:' A heartwarming family comedy for Qingming Festival - CGTN
The heartwarming comedy Now I Met Her opened in theaters in China on Friday, giving movie audiences a family-viewing option during the country's Qingming Festival.
Directed by up-and-coming director Xiao Luxi, the film unfolds an emotionally resonant tale. With ingenious and delicate storytelling techniques, it delves into the life of a son who gains a profound understanding of his mother's entire life journey through the pages of a diary.
Nearly 300 million trips on Qingming Day as spring break boosts travel - CGTN
China's Ministry of Transport said the total number of cross-regional passenger trips on the first day of the Qingming Festival holiday is estimated at 295.91 million on Saturday, up 2.7% year on year.
Driven by overlapping spring breaks in some regions, overall travel during the Qingming holiday is expected to increase by about 6% compared with the same period last year.
Sichuan and Guizhou provinces in southwest China, Jiangsu and Anhui provinces in east China, as well as many cities in other provinces introduced their first-ever spring break this year.
China requires enterprises to build low-carbon supply chains
In January, the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission （SASAC）issued the Guidelines for the Construction of Green and Low-Carbon Supply Chains by Central State-owned Enterprises （SOEs）, requiring Central SOEs to fully integrate the concept of green and low-carbon development into the entire life cycle of supply chain planning, design, procurement, production, logistics, and recycling, and establish a closed-loop management system covering the entire chain.
Just Central SOEs? Actually, the chain is much longer.
China’s Central SOEs are mainly in pillar industries such as energy, telecommunications, electric power, infrastructure construction and manufacturing, with an extremely large scale and a large number of upstream and downstream enterprises. By guiding Central SOEs to establish green and low-carbon supply chains, the government is effectively promoting the green transformation the entire economic sector.
Wang Jinjie: Chinese companies' rise and retreat in Ethiopia
Ethiopia once stood as one of the clearest showcases for Chinese industrial expansion in Africa, with industrial parks and export-oriented factories helping to fuel a sense of rapid transformation. But ethnic conflict, political fragmentation, and mounting foreign-exchange pressures have since turned that promise into a tougher lesson in the fragility of frontier investment. It is against this backdrop that Wang Jinjie, a Research Assistant Professor at Peking University’s National School of Development (NSD) and Institute of South–South Cooperation and Development (ISSCAD), and Deputy General Secretary of the Peking University Center for African Studies, examined what the rise and fall of Chinese companies in Ethiopia can teach investors about resilience, risk, and the future of industrialisation in Africa.
China’s hunger for the unvarnished - by Zichen Wang
At the end of March, China fixated on two men. One was mourned. Zhang Xuefeng, the country’s most famous adviser on university majors and admissions, died suddenly on March 24 after collapsing while exercising at work. The other was celebrated. ZXMOTO, founded by Zhang Xue, a former mechanic, won twice on a world championship circuit, turning a niche motorcycle brand into a national sensation almost overnight. One belonged to the anxious world of gaokao, jobs and class mobility. The other belonged to engines, risk and manufacturing ambition.
Justin Yifu Lin: The Basics of New Structural Economics
This article is a comprehensive introduction to new structural economics, as articulated by its proposer, Justin Yifu Lin, former Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank (2008-2012).
At the core of new structural economics is the argument that developing countries are structurally distinct economies, with different factor endowments, different comparative advantages, and therefore different paths to industrial upgrading. Their failures stem not from an absence of the industries or institutions found in rich countries, but from policies that ignore the production structure they actually possess.
Developing countries should start with sectors aligned with their current comparative advantage, use those sectors to build savings, capital, and productive capacity, and then upgrade gradually into more sophisticated industries. Technology can be upgraded through latecomer learning, finance should fit the needs of the real economy, capital flows should be opened selectively rather than indiscriminately, and the government should act actively and pragmatically in support of structural transformation
Battling pet lover spends years fighting for justice for her beloved canine, facing down bullies, rumour-mongers.
A Chinese woman who sacrificed her job and life to get revenge on a neighbour who poisoned her pet dog to death has shown her face publicly for the first time.
After her beloved pet dog Papi, a 13-year-old white West Highland Terrier, was poisoned and killed in a children’s playground in her residential compound in Beijing in 2022, Li Yihan has dedicated her life to defending the animal’s rights.
Police found a 65-year-old man surnamed Zhang, who lived in the neighbourhood, to be the perpetrator.
He reportedly left pieces of chicken dipped in sodium fluoroacetate, an extremely toxic, odourless salt in the playground. It is also highly poisonous to humans.
Hongkongers crossed the border into Shenzhen in droves on the second day of the Easter holiday on Saturday, drawn by a wider range of bargain-priced shopping, dining and entertainment options, as well as new landmark attractions including a futuristic tech museum.
While bracing for heavy rain, many travellers cited mainland China’s broader selection of shopping centres and restaurants, along with more affordable prices as key draws. Some also said neighbouring Shenzhen boasted fresh cultural and leisure complexes rarely found in Hong Kong.
America’s ability to understand and manage its most consequential strategic relationship is eroding.
Fewer than 2,000 Americans are currently estimated to be studying in China—a fraction of the 11,000 U.S. students there in 2019. As shown in the data below, this reflects a drastic decline from previous decades.
If this trend continues, the United States will face a critical shortage of grounded China expertise within a decade as today’s specialists retire without replacement. In response, the USCET Working Group—comprising experts from government, research universities, and law—spent months consulting over 50 organizations to diagnose this challenge and chart a path forward.
Transcript: Cheng Li-wun embraces Beijing trip
In her press briefing, the Kuomintang chair described the mainland visit as an effort to lower tensions and restart dialogue, and said Taiwan need not choose between China and the United States.
Beijing announced this morning that Xi Jinping had invited Cheng Li-wun, leader of Taiwan’s opposition Kuomintang (KMT), to visit the Chinese mainland with a party delegation from April 7 to 12.
Speaking to reporters in Taipei at around 11 a.m., Cheng said she would gladly accept the invitation and described the trip as an effort to ease tensions across the Taiwan Strait while maintaining Taiwan’s ties with the United States. The visit would be the first by a sitting KMT chair to the mainland in a decade.
China’s Farmers’ Pensions and the Politics of Waiting
In 2025, the worst post I wrote was a speculative one: I guessed that the Communist Party of China Central Committee might use its recommendations for the 15th Five-Year Plan to signal a substantial increase in the urban and rural residents’ pension, a benefit received mainly by elderly farmers. That did not happen.
Now, at the end of March 2026, it is clear that neither the Government Work Report released earlier this month nor the 15th Five-Year Plan points in that direction. That is striking because calls to raise pensions for urban and rural residents became arguably the biggest social-policy story of this year’s Two Sessions, which adopted the two documents. Public attention was intense, the pressure was real, but at the level of top-line policy signaling, Beijing still stopped well short of endorsing the kind of meaningful increase many had hoped for.
This weekly newsletter is put together by DeLisle Worrell, President of the ABCF. Visit us at Association for Barbados China Friendship | (abcf-bb.com).
Thanks to everyone who sent contributions for this week’s Update. Please send items of interest to me via the contact page at ABCF-BB.com or to info@DeLisleWorrell.com
The ABCF mission is to build a deeper understanding between the Chinese people and Barbadians and Caribbean people from all walks of life. The association’s focus is on personal experiences, people-to-people contact, cultural exchanges and exchanges of ideas, and the facilitation of travel, business and study. From the outset we aim to learn from and build on the experiences of the Caribbean and China, and to develop mutual understandings and support that will be to the benefit of both sides.
