US-based Citigroup Inc plans to launch a wholly owned investment banking unit in China by the end of 2024, according to Reuters, adding to an increasing number of global financial institutions that are actively expanding their presence in the Chinese market.

While some foreign media outlets and institutions continue to paint a grim picture of the Chinese market's outlook, global investors' concrete business plans in China are a "vote of confidence" in its economic prospects, Chinese analysts said on Friday, noting that continuous financial opening-up and an improving business environment offer greater opportunities for global businesses.

Citing an unnamed source, Reuters reported on Thursday that Citigroup aims to launch a wholly owned China investment unit by the end of 2024 and hire about 30 employees. The unit, which will focus on the Chinese capital market, could hire nearly 100 people in the coming years, including local hires and transfers from Hong Kong and other markets, according to Reuters.

Reached by the Global Times on Friday about the report, Citi China referred to a New Year's message from Christine Lam, CEO of Citi China, in which she talked about Citi's long history and extensive presence in the Chinese market.

"The Chinese market is extremely important in Citigroup's global strategy," Lam said in the message posted on the company's WeChat account, pointing to two trips made by Jane Fraser, CEO of Citigroup, to China in 2023.

"In this market full of opportunities, Citi will remain committed to providing excellent cross-border services to corporate and institutional clients," Lam said. "At the same time, we will continue to help foreign-funded institutions participate in China's ever-opening market and share the new opportunities brought by China's opening-up and development."

Reports of Citi's plans for the Chinese market came just two days after Chinese regulators approved US-based AllianceBernstein Holding LP's application for a license to run its wholly owned mutual fund business in China.

Following the approval, "AllianceBernstein will provide Chinese investors with domestic investment products and solutions, and help tap investment opportunities in China's local market," the company said in a statement sent to the Global Times on Tuesday.

The plans by Citi and AllianceBernstein are latest examples of the growing number of foreign financial institutions that are expanding in the Chinese market, which shows their confidence in the Chinese economy amid continuous opening-up and an improving business environment, analysts said.

"It is mostly foreign media outlets and so-called analysts who are smearing the Chinese economy because of bias and political and other motives, but for businesses that are seeking opportunities and profits, they are obviously optimistic about China's economic prospects," Li Yong, a senior research fellow at the China Association of International Trade, told the Global Times.

Li said that China's continued financial opening-up measures and efforts to improve the business environment, including through institutional opening-up, have made "tangible progress," which explains the growing expansion by foreign businesses in the Chinese market.

"Also, importantly, Chinese officials of all levels pay great attention to foreign businesses and they often hold talks with foreign executives to not just hear about the problems they face but actually solve them," Li said.

During her visit to China in June, Fraser met with several Chinese regulators and clients. During a meeting with Li Yunze, head of the National Financial Regulatory Administration (NFRA), Fraser expressed confidence in China's economic and financial development and Citi will continue to expand in the Chinese market, according to an NFRA statement.

In October, Citigroup was one of several global financial institutions that raised China's 2023 economic growth forecast. Citi expected China's GDP growth to reach 5.3 percent in 2023 up from its earlier forecast of 5 percent.

Chinese regulators have also stepped up efforts to expand market access for overseas financial institutions. In December 2023, the China Securities Regulatory Commission approved six overseas institutional investors' qualifications to conduct businesses in the Chinese market, bringing the total to 81 in 2023.

China's Central Financial Work Conference in October, a crucial meeting that sets financial work priorities for the coming years, called for efforts to promote high-level financial opening-up. Specifically, the meeting called for the steady expansion of institutional opening-up in the financial sector, improved cross-border investment and financing facilitation, and more foreign financial institutions and long-term capital to expand and conduct businesses in China.

"There is a growing number of reasons that more foreign capital will flow into China's capital market in 2024," Yang Delong, chief economist at Shenzhen-based First Seafront Fund Management Co, told the Global Times on Friday, noting that China's economic recovery is expected to speed up, while the US is entering a cycle of rate cuts which will pressure financial markets.

Artists from China and Uzbekistan wrapped up their concert on a high note on Tuesday in Qingdao, East China's Shandong Province. 

The concert was dedicated to commemorating the fifth anniversary of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Qingdao Summit, promoting cultural exchanges among Belt and Road Initiative partner countries and strengthening cooperation between SCO partner countries. 

The concert, featuring renowned singers and conductors from China and Uzbekistan, was held in four Chinese cities - Lanzhou, Xining, Xi'an and Qingdao - from Friday to Tuesday, offering an artistic feast for local music lovers.

Rustam Abdullaev, chairman of the Union of Composers and Bastakors of Uzbekistan, told the Global Times that "the kind and hard-working characteristics of people in China and Uzbekistan give us a lot in common in music."

One work was jointly performed by artists from China and Uzbekistan. Based on the distinctive music of China and Uzbekistan, the symphony celebrates the friendship and shows that in the context of jointly building the Belt and Road Initiative, China and Eurasian countries are committed to creating a better future.

A newly fabricated material does more than just hold up under pressure. Unlike many ordinary objects that shrink when squeezed, the metamaterial — a synthetic structure designed to exhibit properties not typically found in natural materials — expands at higher pressures.

This counterintuitive material is made up of a grid of hollow 3-D crosses — shaped like six-way pipe fittings — mere micrometers across. When surrounding pressure of air, water or some other substance increases, the crosses’ circular surfaces bow inward. Because of the way these crosses are connected with levers, that warping forces the crosses to rotate and push away from each other, causing the whole structure to expand, says study coauthor Jingyuan Qu, a physicist at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany.
The researchers were “very clever about how they connected this quite complex set of structural elements,” says Michael Haberman, a mechanical engineer at the University of Texas at Austin, who wasn’t involved in the work.

Qu and colleagues fashioned a microcube of their metamaterial, described in a paper accepted to Physical Review X, from a plasticlike substance, using a microversion of 3-D printing. When the researchers placed the material inside a gas chamber and cranked up the air pressure from one bar (about the atmospheric pressure at sea level) to five bars, the cube’s volume increased by about 3 percent.
Until now, researchers have only described such pressure-expanding metamaterials in mathematical models or computer simulations, says Joseph Grima, a materials scientist at the University of Malta in Msida not involved in the work. The new metamaterial provides “much-needed proof” that this type of stuff can actually be fabricated, he says.

Adjusting the thickness of the crosses’ surfaces could make this new metamaterial more or less expandable: The thicker it is, the less the structure expands. A metamaterial fine-tuned to stay the same size under a wide range of pressures could be used to build equipment that withstands the crushing pressures of the deep sea or the vacuum of outer space.

NASA is going for the gold. Its GOLD mission — short for Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk mission — is slated for launch January 25, the agency announced January 4. GOLD will study the zone where Earth’s atmosphere meets outer space. Its goal is to better understand how both solar and terrestrial storms affect the ionosphere, an upper atmosphere region crucial for radio communications.

Earth’s ionosphere, where incoming cosmic and solar rays interact with the atmosphere to create charged particles, extends from about 75 to about 1,200 kilometers above the planet’s surface. From its geostationary orbit 35,000 kilometers high, GOLD will monitor the ionosphere’s density and temperature using an instrument called an ultraviolet imaging spectrograph. Previous satellites have provided snapshots of the ionosphere, but this is the first time an instrument will keep track of changes in the layers through time, collecting data every 30 minutes.

GOLD is the first NASA mission to be launched aboard a commercial communications satellite. NASA plans to launch a complementary mission, the Ionospheric Connection Explorer, later this year. That mission will travel directly through the ionosphere, studying its makeup, density and temperature.

“The strangest place in the whole universe might just be right here.” So says actor Will Smith, narrating the opening moments of a new documentary series about the wonderful unlikeliness of our own planet, Earth.

One Strange Rock, premiering March 26 on the National Geographic Channel, is itself a peculiar and unlikely creation. Executive produced by Academy Award–nominated Darren Aronofsky and by Jane Root of the production company Nutopia and narrated by Smith, the sprawling, ambitious 10-episode series is chock-full of stunningly beautiful images and CGI visuals of our dynamic planet. Each episode is united by a theme relating to Earth’s history, such as the genesis of life, the magnetic and atmospheric shields that protect the planet from solar radiation and the ways in which Earth’s denizens have shaped its surface.
The first episode, “Gasp,” ponders Earth’s atmosphere and where its oxygen comes from. In one memorable sequence, the episode takes viewers on a whirlwind journey from Ethiopia’s dusty deserts to the Amazon rainforest to phytoplankton blooms in the ocean. Dust storms from Ethiopia, Smith tells us, fertilize the rainforest. And that rainforest, in turn, feeds phytoplankton. A mighty atmospheric river, fueled by water vapor from the Amazon and heat from the sun, flows across South America until it reaches the Andes and condenses into rain. That rain erodes rock and washes nutrients into the ocean, feeding blooms of phytoplankton called diatoms. One out of every two breaths that we take comes from the photosynthesis of those diatoms, Smith adds.
As always, Smith is an appealing everyman. But the true stars of the series may be the eight astronauts, including Chris Hadfield and Nicole Stott, who appear throughout the series. In stark contrast to the colorful images of the planet, the astronauts are filmed alone, their faces half in shadow against a black background as they tell stories that loosely connect to the themes. The visual contrast emphasizes the astronauts’ roles as outsiders who have a rare perspective on the blue marble.
“Having flown in space, I feel this connection to the planet,” Stott told Science News . “I was reintroduced to the planet.” Hadfield had a similar sentiment: “It’s just one tiny place, but it’s the tiny place that is ours,” he added.
Each astronaut anchors a different episode. In “Gasp,” Hadfield describes a frightening moment during a spacewalk outside the International Space Station when his eyes watered. Without gravity, the water couldn’t form into teardrops, so it effectively blinded him. To remove the water, he was forced to allow some precious air to escape his suit. It’s a tense moment that underscores the pricelessness of the thin blue line, visible from space, that marks Earth’s atmosphere. “It contains everything that’s important to us,” Hadfield says in the episode. “It contains life.”

Stott, meanwhile, figures prominently in an episode called “Storm.” Instead of a weather system, the title refers to the rain of space debris that Earth has endured throughout much of its history — including the powerful collision that formed the moon (SN: 4/15/17, p. 18). Stott describes her own sense of wonder as a child, watching astronauts land on our closest neighbor — and how the travels of those astronauts and the rocks they brought back revealed that Earth and the moon probably originated from the same place.

It’s glimpses like these into the astronauts’ lives and personalities — scenes of Hadfield strumming “Space Oddity” on a guitar, for example, or Stott chatting with her son in the family kitchen — that make the episodes more than a series of beautiful and educational IMAX films. Having been away from the planet for a short time, the astronauts see Earth as precious, and they convey their affection for it well. Stott said she hopes that this will be the ultimate takeaway for viewers, for whom the series may serve as a reintroduction to the planet they thought they knew so well. “I hope that people will … appreciate and acknowledge the significance of [this reintroduction],” she said, “that it will result in an awareness and obligation to take care of each other.”
Editor’s note: This story was updated on March 19, 2018, to add a mention of a second executive producer.