A squadron of highly-skilled divers of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) navy brave challenging underwater environments to provide crucial support to submarines in daring rescue missions.
Chinese navy divers serve as a crucial form of defense in some of the world’s most challenging deep-water environments, with missions ranging from search-and-rescue operations and submarine support to salvages.
"Divers literally put our lives on the line, because no matter how skilled you are, you cannot defy nature's unpredictability. And our ethos is to risk our lives to save others," said Li Liang, a diver at a naval rescue detachment of the PLA.
With a tenure exceeding two decades, Li emphasized that their team has consistently strived to surpass boundaries, driven by a collective commitment to navigate increasingly complex waters.
Significant advancements have been achieved in saturation diving—a method facilitating extended operations at significant depths, albeit fraught with substantial challenges and risks.
"This set of equipment, independently developed by our country, fills a gap in deep-sea diving operations and significantly enhances our submarine support and rescue capabilities," said Yang Hefu, a soldier at a naval rescue detachment of the PLA.
At an interview, another diver named Chen Can recalled a mission in early April, involving a fishing boat collision off China's southwestern coast, where they successfully used saturation diving to rescue and recover at extreme depths for the first time.
"Silence reigned. Visibility was zero. I was cautioned to move carefully to prevent triggering another collapse and getting buried. After the last body was recovered, I was instructed to wait until the all-clear due to sharks in the vicinity," said Chen.
Divers must undergo an extensive decompression process under rigorous medical supervision to ensure their safe ascent to the surface. Trust and teamwork are paramount, placing significant demands on these divers.
"As our People's Navy ventures deeper into the ocean, saturation diving is a growing trend to guarantee immediate support to our forces. Each mission presents new challenges, and it requires a calm mind, strong fortitude, and independent thinking. Nowadays, we also need to manage remotely operated vehicles to make our work safer and more efficient," said Li.
Behind every successful mission lies an unwavering commitment to their country and its people, as well as their loved ones.
"My wife was especially worried as she's pregnant this year. So when I achieve good results, I want her to know first that my efforts have paid off and to feel proud that her husband is capable of achieving something great," Chen said.
Chinese PLA Navy enhances underwater rescue capabilities through advanced diving training
Shanghai, a leading force for Chinese modernization, is accelerating the pace of building itself into a science and technology innovation center with global influence.
The tech-savvy metropolis is now speeding up the transition from structure building to function strengthening. Taking strengthening the capability of fostering original sci-tech innovations as the main task, it is pursuing both sci-tech innovation and institutional innovation to significantly improve its comprehensive strength in science and technology as well as the overall effects of innovations.
Over the past 10 years since Shanghai began building itself into an international science and technology innovation center, it has reaped fruitful results in sci-tech innovation, which has pushed the metropolis' GDP across the 4-trillion-yuan (about 570 billion U.S. dollars) mark.
In 2023, Shanghai's total research and development expenditure accounted for 4.4 percent of its GDP, and the city's fiscal expenditure on science and technology rose by 36.7 percent to 52.8 billion yuan (about 7.47 billion U.S. dollars).
Driven by science and technology advances, Shanghai's industrial transformation has sped up. The combined scale of the three leading industries of artificial intelligence, integrated circuits, and biomedicine in the city has reached 1.6 trillion yuan (about 226 billion U.S. dollars).
At the National Local Joint Humanoid Robot Innovation Center in Shanghai's Zhangjiang Science City, Qinglong, an open-source general-purpose humanoid robot with a height of 182 centimeters and up to 43 active degrees of freedom, is being trained to pick up oranges.
"After some training, the robot will be able to complete this move by itself when it encounters a similar scenario in the future," said Shi Zhihua, trainer of robot Qinglong.
Thanks to an advanced control software, Qinglong can skillfully perform fast walking, avoid obstacles, go uphill and downhill, and resist impact.
"We plan to build a venue that can simultaneously train 1,000 robots by 2027," Shi said.
The Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility (SSRF), a third-generation medium-energy synchrotron light source facility with 46 laboratories, has been operating around the clock to serve researchers from around the country, whose experiments cover a wide range of fields such as life sciences, materials science and chemical catalysis.
"We are using the SSRF's light to observe the phase change process of this material when it's heated to 1,100 degrees Celsius," said Song Shuang, a PhD candidate of Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
"Our team is developing materials for the energy sector," said Miao Zhikai, a researcher of Tianjin University.
"We are developing cathode materials for sodium-ion batteries," said Li Guodong, a researcher of Fudan University.
Though the laboratories at the SSRF have been running at full capacity, researchers still have to apply for them months in advance, reflecting the vibrancy of innovation in Shanghai.
Shanghai blazes sci-tech frontiers to boost innovation-driven modernization
