Wall Street Journal Video:
http://www.wsj.com/video/disney-cuts-ties-to-youtube-superstar-pewdiepie/AF3B6886-3245-4C48-AD5D-098F1E1ABEA9.html
PewDiePie's Response Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwk1DogcPmU
This really shows how the News today became an industry, not a service. The news (even well reputed news sources) are extremely biased to the extent of speaking falsehood. Have you ever clicked a "click-bait" looking title? After reading the actual content, the reader is almost always disappointed or has a "meh' response as the title is exaggerated compared to the content itself. Wall Street Journal's video and articles (along with other news sources) took so many things from Pewdiepie's video out of context, I actually thought they were straight-up trolling the viewers. I realized eventually that these news sources new that 99% of the viewers would simply read the article, take it as truth, and move on, never taking time to watch pewdiepie's videos to check the truth. News sources today have taken advantage of that and literally writes whatever they want to. The goal isn't to inform the reader or present factual truth. Most new sources today has a goal to get the most click/views, and thus creates the most controversial news (taking things out of context) to get more views on their webpage. I personally, would recommend the Philip de Franco show on youtube as a reliabe and non-biased news source.
2017년 6월 13일 화요일
2017년 6월 6일 화요일
Kenya election: Kenyatta blames primaries chaos on turnout (with Response)
Kenya election: Kenyatta blames primaries chaos on turnout
Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta has blamed huge voter turnout for the chaos at his party's primaries on Friday, which led to them being cancelled.
In many areas across the country, there were delays, with some skirmishes also reported as contestants accused their opponents of rigging.
Mr Kenyatta admitted to reporters that not enough election materials had been provided.
The primaries are in preparation for August's national poll.
The election will take place nearly a decade after disputed election results fuelled violence that left more than 1,000 dead and 500,000 displaced.
However elections in 2013 passed off relatively peacefully.
Mr Kenyatta said his Jubilee Party had underestimated the number of people who would turn out for the nominations.
"Let us avoid pointing fingers," he said in a series of tweets.
@JUBILEEPARTYK
@JUBILEEPARTYK
@JUBILEEPARTYK
Mr Kenyatta called on voters and contestants to be patient as the party prepared to repeat the vote in the affected areas.
The Jubilee party was holding primaries in 21 out of the 47 counties on Friday, most of them party strongholds.
Nominations in the capital Nairobi had already been pushed back to Monday. The remaining counties will nominate their candidates on Tuesday.
Parties must hold their primaries by Wednesday, the election authorities have said.
Last week, similar polls for the opposition Orange Democratic Movement led by former Prime Minister Raila Odinga witnessed violence, particularly in the western Kenya region.
Mr Kenyatta is seeking a second term in office.
He is being opposed by a coalition of opposition parties known as the National Super Alliance, which is expected to announce its presidential candidate next week.
Cited:
"Kenya Election: Kenyatta Blames Primaries Chaos on Turnout." BBC News. BBC, 22 Apr. 2017. Web. 06 June 2017. <http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-39679089>.
Response:
I think it's great that he isn't blaming opposing sides for the chaos as it will spur more violence. I hope things go peacefully like the last election. This article is from the BBC, isn't biased by the looks of it and is written to update readers on what's happening in the Kenyan Elections this year.
Response:Your Guide to the Main Political Players in Kenya’s Elections
Excited for the results this year- not that it will affect me in any way. Since I'm leaving to college in a couple of months, this elections should mean nothing to me. However, I love Kenya and is interested in how things turn out. By the looks of it, the main figures are actually son of the first president (Jomo Kenyatta), son of the first vice president(Jaramogi Odinga) and others. Even Korea's previous president (President Park) was the daughter of a dictator who ruled Korea for 25 years. Although this is not the case for Kenya necessarily, we can see these figures highlighted as they are descendants of iconic figures. Anyways I hope the election goes well and there is no violence involved throughout the entire process.
Your Guide to the Main Political Players in Kenya’s Elections
Your Guide to the Main Political Players in Kenya’s Elections
by
2017년 3월 7일 화요일
Response: Deforestation in Brazil increased 30% in 12 months, agency says
It's quite ridiculous how many trees people can cut down in such a short amount of time. I also read this other article that talked about how people lost the motivation to preserve the amazon rain forest. It was like a movement for a while and then it kind of stopped. A lot of things can get done once the media gets the world's attention and it goes viral. When that heated viral subject disappears in the news people often forget and move on. I personally like trees and this is really disheartening. As part of my research project this article was a good read. No bias, just good informative article.
Deforestation in Brazil increased 30% in 12 months, agency says
RIO DE JANEIRO – In the 12-month period that ended last August, deforestation in Brazil increased in almost 30 percent.
It is an all-time record that has set off a loud alarm among scientists, environmentalists and everyone who knows that the region is not only the so-called “lung of the planet” but also home to about 2.5 million species of insects, tens of thousands of plants and about 2,000 birds and mammals.
According to the latest report by the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), the Brazilian agency that monitors deforestation, between July 2015 and August 2016 roughly 3,100 square miles went up in smoke mostly to give way to farmland and further cement the country’s position as the world’s top exporter of meat products.
Activists and experts agree that such depredation has been in large part possible to the loosening of the nation’s environmental laws and also to budget cuts that have left vast stretches of rain forest to the mercy of greed.
Cristiane Mazetti, a spokesperson for Greenpeace, said the Forest Code of 2012 brought about a sort of “deforestation amnesty” that contributes to the increase of tree felling by creating a sense of impunity.
She said the issue is hardly getting any government attention and that apathy seems to have taken over.
"We live a political moment in Brazil that puts the environmental issue in second, maybe third,” she told Fox News. “Congress spent a year focused on the impeachment vote of former President Dilma Rousseff and now prioritizes the approval of austerity measures. It has not allowed this issue to advance," she said.
In addition, the allocation of funds for surveillance, monitoring and prevention has been dropping dramatically. In 2015 approximately $22 million were devoted to this end; in 2016 only $7 million were used for this purpose, according to the Environmental Ministry data.
To put an end to what some are calling an epidemic, in 2015 Greenpeace introduced a bill in Congress calling for a “zero deforestation policy.” It was filed along with 1.4 million signatures supporting the initiative.
The bill is currently in the consultation phase, which means the population has until the end of 2017 to issue opinions and recommendations.
Environmentalists hope that the new law will reinstate some of the regulations that they say protected the land. Before 2012, any tree-cutting had to be justified and explained by a number of government agencies. Today, all that is required is a single permit issued by the Ministry of Agriculture in a matter of weeks.
Greenpeace has dubbed Agriculture Minister Blairo Maggi “the largest forest destroyer in Brazil.”
According to Paulo Barreto, a researcher at the Instituto do Homem e Meio Ambiente da Amazônia (Imazon), the steady expansion of the country's farming borders is also being stimulated by an increase in cattle prices.
However, he said Brazil could still benefit from its oversized livestock – the largest in the world – without dilapidating the Amazon rain forest if “the government was vigilant, if it didn't change the rules. But when the [deforestation] threat increases and government weakens protection — that mix leads to this escalating situation," he said.
Large infrastructure projects in the Amazon region, such as the new Belo Monte Hydroelectric Plant, in the state of Para, have worsened the problem by “leading to a disorderly urban growth of the site, pollution and even the flooding of various areas," according to the Socio-Environmental Institute (ISA).
No wonder that in the INPE report released recently, Para is at the top of the list, with approximately 1,200 square miles (38 percent of the state) of deforested land in just 12 months.
Environmentalists say the magnitude of the threat demands a serious effort by the government and the world.
"There is also a lack of ambition to combat the problem,” Mazetti said. “Last year, the government set a goal to end illegal deforestation by 2030. But if we [continue to] allow this practice, admittedly illegal, for another 15 years, how can we achieve this goal?" she said.
Work Cited:
Torres, Carolina. "Deforestation in Brazil Increased 30% in 12 Months, Agency Says." Fox News. FOX News Network, 16 Feb. 2017. Web. 07 Mar. 2017. <http://www.foxnews.com/science/2017/02/16/brazil-lost-almost-one-third-its-amazon-rain-forest-in-12-months-agency-says.html>.
Work Cited:
Torres, Carolina. "Deforestation in Brazil Increased 30% in 12 Months, Agency Says." Fox News. FOX News Network, 16 Feb. 2017. Web. 07 Mar. 2017. <http://www.foxnews.com/science/2017/02/16/brazil-lost-almost-one-third-its-amazon-rain-forest-in-12-months-agency-says.html>.
2017년 2월 28일 화요일
'Good vibration' hand pumps boost Africa's water security (Response Included)
The simple up-and-down motion of hand pumps could help scientists secure a key water source for 200 million people in Africa.
Growing demand for groundwater is putting pressure on the resource while researchers struggle to accurately estimate the future supply.
But a team from Oxford University says that low-cost mobile sensors attached to pumps could solve the problem.
Their study shows that pump vibrations record the true depth of well water.
While fresh water from Africa's rivers and lakes is hugely important for people, it is dwarfed by the amount of groundwater available, estimated to be 100 times greater than the annual renewable fresh resource.
Groundwater lies in aquifers under the surface of the earth and is often extracted from wells by pumps. In many places these are simple devices, operated by hand.
In 2012 the Oxford research team started a trial in Kenya where hand pumps in 60 villages were fitted with data transmitters.
The idea was they would monitor the motion of the pump and the amount of water extracted on an hourly basis - if the pump wasn't working, a message was sent to a repair company and workers were dispatched to fix the problem.
The innovation cut the average repair time from over a month to less than three days.
Now the scientists have found another way to interpret the data from the accelerometers fitted to the pump handles.
They discovered that when the water is being drawn from a deep aquifer, it produces different vibrations than when the liquid comes from a shallow one.
"It's quite a simple and elegant solution to estimating groundwater and how it varies over time," co-author Dr Rob Hope from Oxford's School of Geography and the Environment told BBC News.
"In East Africa at the moment there's quite a severe drought, in South Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya, and a lot of this might be dealt with earlier with these sorts of systems.
"If you can predict that groundwater levels are going down rapidly, rather than getting to problem and dealing, with it you can predict it much earlier on."
While the accelerometers and mobile data technology in the system is a fairly simple arrangement, the statistical analysis of the information is quite sophisticated.
Researchers took recordings of pumping lasting between 20 seconds and three minutes at different sites in Kenya and Oxford.
The scientists say the vibration value analysis is akin to the complex systems that monitor vibrations in aircraft.
"This project is a great example of using the latest developments in low-cost mobile sensors and machine learning," said lead author Dr David Clifton, associate professor of engineering science at Oxford.
"Working closely with development experts, we can help tackle water security, which is an issue of huge importance in the developing world."
There are now about 300 sensors installed across Kenya as an early warning system and some 15,000 people who are paying small premiums for rapid repairs. There has been very little damage or attempts to steal the technology in the communities in which they are installed, as people value the service.
The researchers believe the system can be rapidly scaled up and rolled out to other communities. With up to a million hand pumps dotted around Africa, they believe there is now a great opportunity to capture highly useful groundwater data.
What is groundwater?
When water falls as rain or snow, much of it either flows into rivers or is used to provide moisture to plants and crops. What is left over trickles down to the layers of rock that sit beneath the soil.
And just like a giant sponge, this groundwater is held in the spaces between the rocks and in the tiny interconnected spaces between individual grains in a rock like sandstone.
These bodies of wet rock are referred to as aquifers. Groundwater does not sit still in the aquifer but is pushed and pulled by gravity and the weight of water above it.
The movement of the water through the aquifer removes many impurities and it is often cleaner than water on the surface.
This "accidental infrastructure" could allow a network of hand pumps across the region to transmit data to the cloud to create a public dataset that would be widely used.
"Rather than just seeing these pumps as concrete and iron littered around Africa, these systems could be the little sentinels giving you this very valuable information," said Dr Hope,
"Mining companies, agriculture, institutional investors and communities could all benefit from this.
"I've been working in Africa for 15 years and I think it's one of the most exciting things that we've been working on and the results that we've had have been very promising."
Response
This article talks about how the 'Good vibration' hand pump is saving so many lives around Africa by providing a close water source. I experienced this first hand as I lived in a place called Namulanda (Uganda) and the first two years or so, we had no tap water. We used rain water that was clean or semi-clean water from a 'Good vibration' hand pump nearby when rain water from the tanks ran out. It was funny because you would see a line of native Ugandans and a random Asian in the middle. Water truly is the most important aspect in solving poverty in Africa as it provides sanitation, surplus of time (for jobs and other activities etc), and literally life (agriculture, just drinking water etc.) This article had no bias except for the fact of praising the British for helping out Africa with these pumps. They are doing a good job to be honest. Go water.
Work Cited
McGrath, Matt. "'Good Vibration' Hand Pumps Boost Africa's Water Security." BBC News. BBC, 24 Feb. 2017. Web. 28 Feb. 2017. <http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39077761>.
2017년 2월 21일 화요일
Legal marijuana sales creating escalating damage to the environment (Response Included)
Marijuana sales have created an economic boom in U.S. states that have fully or partially relaxed their cannabis laws, but is the increased cultivation and sale of this crop also creating escalating environmental damage and a threat to public health?
In an opinion piece published by the journal Environmental Science and Technology, researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Lancaster University in the U.K. have called on U.S. federal agencies to fund studies that will gather essential environmental data from the legal cultivation farms and facilities.
In an opinion piece published by the journal Environmental Science and Technology, researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Lancaster University in the U.K. have called on U.S. federal agencies to fund studies that will gather essential environmental data from the legal cultivation farms and facilities.
This information could then be used to help U.S. states minimize any environmental and public health damage caused by this burgeoning industry and aid legal marijuana growers in making their business environmentally sustainable.
State-by-state legalization is effectively creating a new industry in U.S., one that looks set to rival all but the largest of current businesses. In Colorado alone, sales revenues have reached $1 billion, roughly equal to that from grain farming in the state. By 2020 it is estimated that country-wide legal marijuana sales will generate more annual revenue than the National Football League.
But the article, titled "High Time to Assess the Environmental Impacts of Cannabis Cultivation" co-authored by William Vizuete, associate professor of environment sciences and engineering at UNC's Gillings School of Global Public health and Kirsti Ashworth, research fellow at Lancaster University's Lancaster Environment Centre say that this expanded cultivation carries with it serious environmental effects.
Their article points out that cannabis is an especially needy crop requiring high temperatures (25-30 °C for indoor operations), strong light, highly fertile soil and large volumes of water - around twice that of wine grapes. In addition, the authors state that the few available studies of marijuana cultivation have uncovered potentially significant environmental impacts due to excessive water and energy demands and local contamination of water, air, and soil.
For example, a study of illegal outdoor grow operations in northern California found that rates of water extraction from streams threatened aquatic ecosystems. High levels of growth nutrients, as well as pesticides, herbicides and fungicides, also found their way back into the local environment, further damaging aquatic wildlife.
Controlling the indoor growing environment requires considerable energy with power requirements estimated to be similar to that of Google's massive data centers. No significant data has been collected on the air pollution impacts on worker's public health inside these growing facilities or the degradation of outdoor air quality due to emissions produced by the industrial scale production of marijuana.
The authors emphasize, however, much of the data on marijuana cultivation to date has come from monitoring illegal cannabis growing operations.
Dr Ashworth of Lancaster Environment Centre said: "The illegal status of marijuana has prevented us from understanding the detrimental impacts that this industrial scale operation has on the environment and public health."
"This is an industry undergoing a historic transition, presenting an historic opportunity to be identified as a progressive, world-leading example of good practice and environmental stewardship."
The continued expansion of legalization by the states does offer significant opportunities for the US Department of Agriculture, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), National Institutes of Health (NIH, and Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to fund research into legal cannabis cultivation to protect the environment.
"Generating accurate data in all the areas we discussed offers significant potential to reduce energy consumption and environmental harm, protect public health and ultimately, improve cultivation methods," said Dr Vizuete . "There are also significant potential public health issues caused by emissions from the plants themselves rather than smoking it. These emissions cause both indoor and outdoor air pollution."
Response:
Short Summary is that Marijuana is not only detrimental for public health (if it's used as drugs) but is also ruining the environment. Marijuana apparently requires a lot of nutrients and water to supply its growth and that as we all learned in biology, ruins the top soil- eventually ruining the soil altogether. I think this is another good reason people should stop cultivating Marijuana. This article wasn't really biased but took the time to explain the significance of the damage this is causing.
Work Cited:
"Legal Marijuana Sales Creating Escalating Damage to the Environment." Phys.org - News and Articles on Science and Technology. N.p., 21 Feb. 2017. Web. 21 Feb. 2017. <https://phys.org/news/2017-02-legal-marijuana-sales-escalating-environment.html>.
2017년 2월 7일 화요일
Why Do Chinese Restaurants Have Such Similar Names (Response Included)
Chinese restaurants are ubiquitous across America from big cities to suburban strip malls to dusty back roads, to highway gas stations. They are frequently the heart of small towns. They offer up a familiar menu of comfort food, but also similar-sounding names. And that’s no accident. Even though the majority of the 50,000 Chinese restaurants in the United States are not large chain franchises, family-owned mom-and-pop shops adhere to a tried and true gustatory tradition.
“Familiarity is one of their biggest selling points,” says Cedric Yeh, who as project head of the Sweet and Sour Initiative at the National Museum of American History, studies Chinese foodways (see artifacts below) and helped put together a 2011 exhibition on Chinese food in America at the museum.
Many Chinese restaurant names are chosen for their auspiciousness—out of the owners’ desire for success. They include words like golden, fortune, luck and garden. In Mandarin, garden is “yuan,” a homophone for money.
The word play, says Yeh, is usually lost on American diners. To Americans, some names may make no sense or translate in a funny way, says Yeh, whose parents had a Chinese restaurant named Jade Inn in Springfield, Massachusetts, when he was younger.
One of the words that means good fortune in Cantonese is spelled most unfortunately “fuk.” Restaurants incorporating that word have gotten lots of attention, especially in the social media era, says Yeh, who also serves as deputy chair of the division of Armed Forces History.
“I don’t think they ever stopped and thought about why that might attract attention,” says Yeh.
An online Chinese Restaurant Name Generator pokes playful fun at the stew of name possibilities, spitting out “Goose Oriental,” “Mandarin Wall,” “#1 Tso,” and “Fortune New Dynasty.” Auspicious, perhaps, but maybe not the catchiest.
But Chinese restaurant names are packed with significance to Chinese people. Take “Fragrant Harbor”—the name for Hong Kong, says Andrew Coe, a Brooklyn-based author of Chop Suey, A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States. Chinese people would understand that it’s a Hong Kong-style restaurant, he says.
Names—along with menus and decor—established by the first owner of a restaurant rarely change, even if the business changes hands multiple times, as they often do, Coe says. The Chinese restaurants follow a formula. “They believe in consistency and not scaring away the customers,” Coe says. If the name changes, it could mean a change in cuisine.
Most Chinese restaurants in America also get their menus, their décor and even their workers from a small group of distributors, most based in New York, although some are in Chicago, Los Angeles and Houston, a city with a growing Chinese population, Coe says.
Chinese restaurants—ones that also catered to Americans, and not just Chinese immigrants—didn’t start to proliferate until the late 19th century. The center of the Chinese food universe was New York City, where many Chinese ended up after fleeing racial violence in the American west. In the east, especially in the roiling immigrant stew that was New York City at the time, while anti-Chinese sentiment existed, it was no more virulent than the bigotry against other immigrants, Coe says.
Immigrants from Canton (the southern province that surrounds Hong Kong and now known as as Guangdong) opened most of the early U.S. restaurants. Cantonese influence continues to be strong, but with another wave of Chinese immigrants in the 1970s and 1980s, the cuisine and culture of Fujian province joined the American mix, along with dishes from Hunan, Sichuan, Taipei and Shanghai. And now, with growing numbers of Chinese students attending American universities, interesting regional influences are showing up in perhaps unexpected places like Pittsburgh, says Coe.
But the names all continue to be similar and say something to both American and Chinese diners, says Yeh. “You want to give the customer the idea that you’re coming to a Chinese restaurant,” he says. The restaurant also has to pitch itself as something more exotic than the Chinese place down the street, so it may become a little more fanciful with the name, he adds.
The Washington Post in 2016 analyzed the names of some 40,000 Chinese restaurants and determined that “restaurant,” “China,” and “Chinese” appeared together in about one-third of the names. “Express” was the next most popular word, with “Panda” running close behind, in part because there are more than 1,500 “Panda Express” restaurants, part of a chain.
“Wok,” “garden,” “house,” and “kitchen,” also were frequently used. “Golden” was the most-proffered color, and panda and dragon were the most well-used in the animals category.
The panda-China connection in restaurant names is a more recent thing, but both the dragon and phoenix are traditionally associated with Chinese culture and history, Coe says. “Imperial” also has deep connotations for Chinese people, evocative of its past. For restaurants, “it implies a kind of elevation of the food,” says Coe, but often, not much else might be a cut above. One of Coe’s favorite restaurants in Queens, “Main Street Imperial Chinese Gourmet,” has wonderful food, but is basically a hole in the wall, he says.
As far as Coe is concerned, the name is far less important than the food. “What most Americans seem to believe about Chinese food is that it should be cheap and not very exotic and served very quickly,” he says. They expect something a little sweet, greasy, not too spicy, no weird ingredients, and some deep-fried meat.
Cantonese food is delicate and light, with many steamed or boiled items. “It’s one of the great cuisines of the world,” says Coe.
But at restaurants that cater more to Americans, the food has been altered to fit those diners’ expectations “that it’s almost completely unrecognizable”—unlike the names.
Work Cited
Ault, Alicia. "Why Do Chinese Restaurants Have Such Similar Names?" Smithsonian.com. Smithsonian Institution, n.d. Web. 07 Feb. 2017. <http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/why-do-chinese-restaurants-such-similar-names-180961996/>.
Response:
Well, before anything else, I want to say this article was enlightening and shed light on one of the biggest misunderstanding in my life. That is actually the only thing I can say. This article doesn't have a bias as it is informational of why Chinese Restaurants sound the same. Good article, good read.
2017년 1월 30일 월요일
Response: China's gamble for global supremacy in era of Trump
I felt like this article really covered the topic of the Current World Issues class currently. To summarize this rather long article, it just talked about how the Chinese thought about the decline of America's economy, global influence, and political stability. For China, according to Xin, they didn't necessarily compete for the top, it was more of the front-runners backing down and pushing China to the top. It was also mentioned how China thought Socialism was better than America's Capitalism after seeing the political disunity among the American people. China has been supportive for Globalism for quite a time now and this "era of Trump" would be a great opportunity to take leadership in the global market. BBC really doesn't have a bias or side in issues outside their country, so I feel like this article was fair. The purpose of this article was to show how China thought about the political unrest in America and how it is an opportunity to strive for global supremacy. The article was really intriguing to read as Xin even compared Trump to Mao, a former dictator of China. Anyways, peace.
China's gamble for global supremacy in era of Trump
At his inauguration last week President Trump reframed the American mission from leadership of a global rules-based system in the interests of all, to 'America first'. Meanwhile the leader of Communist China rebranded his prickly protectionist power as the defender of globalisation and shared values. So after week one in this upside down new world, how stands China's bid for global leadership?
'Trump confirms socialism is the way'
A week is just a week, but when it comes to strategic focus, China is on course. It's easier to look laser sharp when the competition is in disarray. Here the internal difficulties of the US and the European Union are helpful to China.
As Chinese Foreign Ministry official Zhang Jun put it in a discussion with foreign journalists: "If people want to say China has taken a position of leadership, it's not because China suddenly thrust itself forward as a leader. It's because the original front-runners suddenly fell back and pushed China to the front."
In the past week alone, a bitter row over the size of the crowd at the Trump inauguration, followed by street protests the next day, underlined the divisions of the world's superpower even at the very moment which was supposed to heal.
For China's citizens, brought up to see street protests as dangerous, this was another symptom of dysfunction in a political system they've been taught to distrust.
And next, an American president echoed Beijing's message that the mainstream American media can't be trusted.
So it's been a week to put a spring in the step of China's communists, to shake off the inferiority complex of an autocratic political system, and even to advance the claim that China's system is superior.
Among business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, President Xi talked the language of global togetherness, but back home his Communist Party's flagship newspaper, the People's Daily, lost no time in declaring the bankruptcy of Western politics.
"The emergence of capitalism's social crisis is the most updated evidence to show the superiority of socialism and Marxism," it said.
This ideological inoculation is invaluable for Xi Jinping ahead of the vital Communist Party Congress which will clarify China's leadership line-up for the next five years.
What's more, greater political confidence at home allows him to focus out.
The inauguration of a billionaire celebrity promising to make America great again through building walls confirms the view of some in Beijing that the United States is in terminal decline, and that this is a moment of opportunity for China.
President Xi's favourite slogans are the "China Dream" and the "great rejuvenation of the Chinese people". But it's all happening faster than his predecessors could have imagined.
It's less than two decades since China fully entered a US-led world of global capitalism.
When China joined the World Trade Organization, it complained bitterly about living under rules made by the US and its friends, while fully expecting to live under those rules for decades to come.
But November's American presidential election finished what the 2008 financial crisis had begun: a shift in worldview. And now we are one week into the new leadership mission set out by President Xi at Davos.
In comparison, Xi Jinping looks balanced
A word about character.
In China there are some who compare Mr Trump's character and leadership style with China's Chairman Mao. They point to the former's relentless tweeting as a new version of the latter's daily deluge of quotations.
They note other similarities: the unpredictability, distrust of media, and overwhelming self-confidence.
Some admire and some despise, but Donald Trump, they say, is a great disrupter in the Maoist mould.
All of which is a discussion which takes some of the heat off President Xi at home. Until recently critics accused him of Maoist tendencies after his relentless concentration of titles and power and his frenetic media personality cult.
But as China's citizens look out on a world of strongmen this week, their own president may seem comparatively sober, predictable and experienced: not too much the Caesar, nor too little, for a global leader in our age.
China becomes the voice of globalisation
Meanwhile Mr Xi's outward facing message, that China wants a world of fair trade and globalisation, got a boost this week from several quarters, including the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).
The Chinese-led development bank said it is set for expansion. It currently has nearly 60 members and now says another 25 are likely to join this year.
Two years ago when the AIIB was launched, it became a symbol of the pulling power of China's money and nimble diplomacy when US allies lined up to join despite strong US opposition.
This week, AIIB president Jin Liqun told journalists, it was China's turn to contribute to the world: "China needs to do something that can help it be recognised as a responsible leader."
But in the long view, if this week is to be remembered as a tipping point towards Chinese power, it will not be because of anything announced in Beijing but because of what happens in Washington.
One of President Trump's first acts in office was to sign an executive order withdrawing the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade pact which the Obama administration had insisted would cement US leadership in Asia.
"Protection will lead to greater strength", said Mr Trump. But in an open letter, outgoing US ambassadors in the region disagreed.
"Walking away from TPP may be seen by future generations as the moment America chose to cede leadership to others in this part of the world and accept a diminished role."
Certainly in response to the Trump announcement, US ally and TPP signatory Australia immediately said it hoped to recast the trade agreement without the US, and said China might be invited to join.
China remains unchallenged in Asia...
Asia is the key testing ground where the US stands in the way of China's ambitions.
Since the end of World War Two, Washington has insisted that the US is in Asia for the good of all and invested decades in diplomacy and defence to maintain the liberal international order.
On the campaign trail, Mr Trump expressed impatience with that investment. And having withdrawn from the TPP, the Trump administration will have to find a new way to nurture key allies and partners in the region and to reassure them that 'America first' does not mean everyone else last.
But at the same moment, China's diplomats and bankers are stepping up their efforts and their focus does not waver.
Last year, Beijing turned an international legal defeat over the South China Sea into a diplomatic triumph by charming and disarming the Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte.
In the Trump era, it has other US allies in its sights. Only this week, Thailand confirmed funding for the purchase of a Chinese submarine.
... and not afraid to defend itself
But on security, the week also saw a cloud on China's leadership horizon.
The new White House spokesman Sean Spicer seemed to echo warnings to China from incoming Secretary of State Rex Tillerson when he sketched out a position on the South China Sea.
"We're going to make sure that we defend international territories from being taken over by one country," said Mr Spicer.
It's not clear exactly what he meant or exactly what Mr Tillerson meant, but a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman immediately restated China's claim to sovereignty in the region, and insisted that Beijing would be resolute in defending its own rights and interests.
If the Trump administration is to push back against China in the South China Sea it will need support from US allies who ask themselves whether Mr Trump has the strategic focus necessary for such a risky undertaking.
China will naturally encourage those doubts given its preference for making domination of the South China Sea a fait accompli with as little fuss as possible.
But there are many players, many unpredictable variables and many wrong moves in this game.
One week into the new world order, China's leaders may feel some things are playing into their hand. But it will be many months, perhaps years, before they can judge whether China's global gamble is a win against Trump's America.
Work Cited
Gracie, Carrie. "China's Gamble for Global Supremacy in Era of Trump." BBC News. BBC, 27 Jan. 2017. Web. 30 Jan. 2017. <http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-38766887>.
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