Sofa Sportsmen

People in China play online games, and of those an elite 1,001 have become professional “e-sports” players. China makes up 57% of the global e-sports audience, viewing 3.5 billion hours of e-sports videos last year. At $24.4 billion, China’s video game market is the world’s largest.

At Your Service

From 2012 to 2016, China’s service sector employment grew by 60.67 million, while employment in agriculture and in the secondary sector fell by 42.8 million and 8.91 million respectively. In 2016 the service sector accounted for 337.6 million total jobs, 43.5% of China’s total 776-million-strong workforce.

Virtual Venture

In the first half of the year, 65 “initial coin offerings,”(ICO) that is sales of crypto-currency by firms for the purpose of fundraising, attracted $396 million from 105,000 investors in China. However, China banned the practice in September amid a wider crypto-currency crackdown and has required many companies to refund investments.

Core Technology

Scientists at China’s fusion reactor, the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak facility, in the central city of Hefei set a new fusion record in July. The team generated temperatures more than 3 times that of the sun’s core for more than 100 seconds, more than double the previous time at the facility.

Stalled Migration

After a battle against capital flight, China’s capital flows ran a $16 billion surplus in the first half of the year, as compared with a $417 billion deficit in 2016. Foreign exchange reserves rose for a sixth straight month in July, up $80 billion from January’s five-year low.

Dirty Money

International sewage and water treatment firms are set to chase big opportunities in environmental cleanup in China. China pledged to lay 126,000 kilometers of new sewage pipes by 2020, enough to circle the globe three times, and raise urban wastewater treatment by 50 million cubic meters a day, equal to 20,000 Olympic-size pools. China’s annual environmental spend is estimated at RMB 3 trillion ($441 billion) over the next five years.

Robo Shop

F5 Future Store, a Guangzhou-based convenience store that features no human staff, raised $4.4 million from venture capital fund Sinovation Ventures. It plans to open 30-50 stores in the second half of the year.

Green Dragon

According to China’s National Bureau of Statistics, the Middle Kingdom accounts for about half of world’s legal cannabis cultivation, which is used in textiles and pharmaceuticals. For farmers, the famed cash crop can bring in more than RMB 10,000 ($1,500) per hectare, as compared to just a few thousand RMB for common grains.