While writing about China isn’t regional reporting, it is important enough to one local reader to send this video to us thinking “you might want to use it in your publication”.

Ironically, the next day another local reader concerned about China sent us a link to a December 2017 Atlantic article on the “Race to Find Aliens First – The Atlantic.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/12/what-happens-if-china-makes-first-contact/544131/

Essentially, China has built a state-of-the-art radio dish in the country, the largest in the world, and perhaps the largest dish in the universe.  It is an observatory to listen for a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence.

According to an August 26, 2016 article in sciemcemag.org by Dennis Normile, “World’s largest radio telescope will search for dark matter, listen for aliens.

In a stunning landscape of jagged limestone hills in southwestern China, engineers are putting the finishing touches on a grand astronomy facility: a half-kilometer-wide dish nestled in a natural depression that will gather radio signals from the cosmos. The world’s largest radio telescope will catalog pulsars; probe gravitational waves, dark matter, and fast radio bursts; and listen for transmissions from alien civilizations.”

Many residents who lived on the site of the dish had to be relocated to clear ground for the new observatory.  Some of the displaced villagers attracted bad press, which included the headline in The New York Times: “China Telescope to Displace 9,000 Villagers in Hunt for Extraterrestrials.”

Sergio Mota, a member of our Board of Directors who lives in the Bronx, had this to say about that:

“My thought on this video comes from a purely foreign policy arena.

Despite these advertised electronic advancements how China can lead the world when its proposing to create a social credit system that marks citizens negativity when they protest against the government (many negativity marks may lead to jail or the loss of a job) .

China has used the money its generated from it robust economy to fund various projects that show its growth to the world but this growth isn’t from grind and grit. Some of the manufactured cities are ghost shells and do not exhibit proper urban planning techniques.

What a lot of people miss when analyzing China in a USA vs China scenario is that China is landlocked between Russia, India, and several competitive Pacific area nations. This geographic boundary around China makes it harder for them to assume global leadership.

One thing this video fails to mention is the lack of sea power that China process in comparison to the United States. What interested me the most isn’t a USA vs China (its just war mongering) scenario as the rest of the world is predicting but a question as what won’t change despite China’s growth.”