China’s GDP exceeded the 100-trillion-yuan，threshold in 2020.

China’s goods imports and exports increased by 1.9% on year to 32.16 trillion yuan in 2020, a record high.

FDI into the Chinese mainland, in actual use, expanded 6.2% year on year to a record high of nearly 1 trillion yuan in 2020.

Experts say China’s growth will help drive the global economy.China’s GDP growth in 2020 will be a good signal for the world economy.

China’s growth has attracted world’s attention:

The New York Times said, “Keeping the virus at bay has been critical to China’s economic success over the past year. While the pandemic ravages other nations, Beijing’s aggressive top-down approach kept the virus from spreading rapidly across the country.”

Taz said, the reason why China becomes the only major economy which avoided shrinking is that China acted decisively to fight against the pandemic and took a lot of economic stimulus measures. Meanwhile, the world has a strong demand of China’s goods.

Korea JoongAng Daily pointed out that China’s economic performance of 2020 can be described as: China provided best answer in the face of the worst environment.

China’s continuous economic growth also brings opportunities to the world.

IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said China’s pivot towards domestic consumption-driven growth with the process of opening up will inject more growth momentum into global economic recovery.

Margit Molnar, head of the China Desk of OECD said, “China was the first country to fully recover.”"That has a very big importance for the world because it means the second biggest economy in the world has recovered. This means a huge source of demand for all the other countries."

Ronnie Lins, director of the China-Brazil Center for Research and Business, pointed out that thanks to the proper measures to prevent and control the epidemic, China’s resumption of work and production and the resumption of business and markets have accelerated, and China’s economy is recovering steadily, which will help The world economy is free from the impact of the new crown epidemic.

China will make more contribution to global economic recovery in 2021

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Tuesday projected that China’s economy will grow by 8.1 percent in 2021, 0.1 percentage point below the October forecast, according to the latest update to its World Economic Outlook.

Swiss economist and former trade negotiator Philippe G. Nell said that China has become the growth engine of several industries and economic sectors in the world. Global trade development will benefit from China’s increasingly bigger middle-income group and the transformation to consumption-oriented economy.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has announced further commitments to cut carbon emissions in a speech at the Climate Ambition Summit last Saturday.

The commitments include a decline of carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP by over 65 percent from the 2005 level, an increase of the share of non-fossil fuels in primary energy as well the forest stock volume and the goal to bring the installed capacity of wind and solar power to over 1.2 billion kilowatts.

AMBITIOUS LONG-TERM TARGETS

In September, China for the first time announced a concrete long-term target of peaking carbon emissions before 2030 and reaching carbon neutrality in 2060 at the UN General Assembly, which is regarded as a major fillip for the global fight against warming climate.

Emissions peak would signal a significant turning point. Once the peak occurs, annual carbon dioxide emissions will be reduced year by year in the future.

Carbon neutrality refers to a balance between emitting carbon and absorbing carbon to achieve net zero carbon dioxide emissions. The Paris Agreement requires a global joint effort to go carbon neutral sometime in the second half of the 21st century, so as to prevent over 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming.

Besides changes in economic structure, transition to more renewable energy consumption for electricity generation and other uses can also help mitigate environmental degradation. Non-fossil sources include nuclear, hydroelectric, and other renewable energy including geothermal, solar, tidal, wind, wood and so on. The share of non-fossil energy consumption in China for 2019 rose to 15.3 percent while coal still took up the biggest share with 58 percent.

Forest stock not only provides information on existing wood resources but also a basis for estimating the amount of carbon contained, since green plants can offer nature-based solutions in the climate plan of removing carbon dioxide from our atmosphere.

As the strong commitments put China closely in line with the efforts made by the EU, UK and other developed countries and regions, it should never be ignored that, China is still in the process of developing its economy with heavy reliance on coal as a dominant energy source. Taking such bold moves toward a net-zero carbon life in the near future is still a gargantuan task for China.

There has been a long-running debate in societies around the world whenever issues or protests arise that question our way of life and our value judgements: is violence justified when seeking justice?

That debate has been rekindled by the deaths or injuries suffered by black men at the hands of US police in recent months, and the subsequent violent response. Systemic racial injustice following generations of failure to deal with or even acknowledge the problem has become a political issue. It seems like the elephant in the room was not only in plain view, but was being well fed and watered.

In a more generalised context, the unrest has raised the question of whether violence can ever be a legitimate tool in the quest for justice, particularly when that quest is denied or goes unanswered?

Those who wanted to condemn violence and rioting during protests quoted him as saying “I will always continue to say, that riots are socially destructive and self-defeating,” while those who wished to justify rioting quoted him as saying “a riot is the language of the unheard.”

Every protest movement must decide which “weapons” it will use and how to use them effectively. If it chooses violence, then it must understand that it will be met with violence and the full force of the law so that any moral advantage it might have achieved will be lost – despite, perhaps, the rightness of its cause.

In Hong Kong, this factor played out negatively for the protest movement. Even though many people still believed in the rightness of the cause, the weakness of violence allowed the government to exploit the moral and legal failure to its advantage. If the protest movement is to succeed, it must re-evaluate its “weapons” more critically and, choose those that more directly target the injustices it wishes to redress, and use them in a way that will regain large-scale public support.