HarmonyOS NEXT has laid the foundation for China to build an operating system ecosystem, said an expert on Tuesday following the launch of the first fully homegrown operating system developed by Chinese tech giant Huawei.
Huawei on Tuesday released the milestone operating system in Shenzhen City of south China's Guangdong Province, marking a watershed achievement in developing China's homegrown mobile operating system.
It has also become the third-largest mobile operating system, following Apple's iOS and Android.
The newly released native HarmonyOS has achieved full-stack independent development, covering everything from the operating system kernel, file system, programming language, compiler, and programming framework, to the AI framework and large models.
It has become China's first fully independently-developed mobile operating system. Previous versions of HarmonyOS had utilized parts of Android's open-source code.
"The function [of our operating system] has leaped forward thanks to our brand-new systemic framework. We've deeply integrated the ecosystem of software, hardware, and cloud, resulting in a more than 30 percent increase in smoothness. With our new distributed soft bus [system], we've achieved seamless cross-end collaboration, enabling a smoother delivery. This marks a further upgrade in our full-scenario experience, with connection speeds tripling, connection capacity increasing fourfold, and power consumption reduced by more than 20 percent," said Yu Chengdong, executive director of Huawei.
The biggest difference between the newly released HarmonyOS and Android or Apple's systems lies in its use of a distributed architecture, which enables cross-device collaboration. Developers can achieve one-time development and multi-device deployment. This stems from the fact that HarmonyOS was initially designed with the Internet of Everything in mind.
It is known that there are now over 15,000 native HarmonyOS applications and meta services available, covering 18 industries. General office applications can provide services to more than 38 million businesses nationwide.
"We've often said [in the past] that China's IT industry lacked both chips and 'soul'. After the chip issue was addressed, we still lacked our own 'soul' due to our dependence on foreign operating systems. With the launch of Huawei's HarmonyOS, we've largely addressed this issue. If we compare the Internet to a piece of land, we finally have our own land where we can plant our own 'crops'. In the past, we were planting our crops on someone else's land. The success of HarmonyOS has established a model for building an operating system ecosystem, which I believe is the most pivotal achievement," said Xu Zhen, researcher, Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
HarmonyOS NEXT lays foundation for China to build operating system ecosystem: expert
HarmonyOS NEXT symbolizes ingenuity of China's homegrown operating system: expert
HarmonyOS NEXT symbolizes ingenuity of China's homegrown operating system: expert
The Exhibition Hall of Evidence of Crimes Committed by Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army in northeast China's Harbin released on Thursday a 38-minute video of a former member of Unit 731, a notorious Japanese germ-warfare unit during World War II (WWII).
In the footage, former Unit 731 member Tsuruo Nishijima detailed how the unit used meteorological data to carry out bacterial dispersal and frostbite experiments.
The video was recorded in 1997 by Japanese scholar Fuyuko Nishisato and donated to the exhibition hall in 2019, according to the hall, which was built on the former site of the headquarters of Unit 731 in Harbin, capital city of Heilongjiang Province.
Nishijima joined Unit 731 in October 1938 and served in the unit's meteorological squad. The squad was not a simple observation section but rather an auxiliary force supporting the unit's human experiments in the field by measuring wind direction, wind speed and other conditions to ensure optimal experimental results.
Nishijima confirmed in the footage that "the meteorological squad had to be present at every field experiment." He testified to the "rainfall experiments" conducted by Unit 731, which involved aircraft releasing bacterial agents at extremely low altitudes.
At a field-testing site in Anda City, Heilongjiang, Unit 731 aircraft descended to about 50 meters above the ground and sprayed bacterial culture liquids onto "maruta" -- human test subjects -- who were tied to wooden stakes. Each experiment involved about 30 people, spaced roughly 5 meters apart. After the experiments, the victims were loaded into sealed trucks and transported back to the unit, where their symptoms and disease progression were recorded over a period of several days.
Nishijima also revealed that a Japanese military doctor once died after removing the mask and becoming infected during an experiment, indirectly proving the extreme virulence of the bacterial agents.
The video further disclosed details of the meteorological squad's involvement in frostbite experiments. To study wartime needs in frigid regions, the invading Japanese army forced the victims to expose their bodies for five to ten minutes in temperatures ranging from minus 20 to minus 35 degrees Celsius and observed their physical reactions.
"For example, during frostbite experiments, we would be sent outside to observe the weather. They wouldn't bring many people out at once, only two or three, who would be forced to take off their upper garments or all their clothes. In fact, it was already quite tough to stay out there for five to ten minutes, because it was too cold," Nishijima said.
According to the exhibition hall, Unit 731 had a separate frostbite laboratory, with Hisato Yoshimura serving as the leader of the unit's frostbite study squad from 1938 to 1945.
In a paper on frostbite published in 1941, Yoshimura recorded data from live human experiments to study the occurrence of frostbite and pathological changes in the human body under different conditions.
"This is a form from the paper. Titled 'The Severity and Process of Frostbite,' it divides frostbite into three stages. The symptoms of the first-degree frostbite are redness and swelling. Blisters appear in the second stage. And the third-degree frostbite features necrosis and ulceration. It says here that, in the third stage, from the 50th to the 60th day, toes and fingers detached. There is no doubt that these data were obtained through numerous human experiments," said Tan Tian, a researcher of the exhibition hall.
Nishijima's video, a piece of oral history from a perpetrator's perspective, further reconstructs the criminal chain of Unit 731 and once again demonstrates that the invading Japanese army's biological warfare crime was systematic and inhumane, and was an undeniable historical truth, according to the exhibition hall.
"Unit 731's frostbite experiments were essentially conducted to prevent and treat frostbite during combat in cold environments. However, for the so-called prevention and treatment of frostbite, they caused frostbite on living people for experiments and data analysis. So in nature, it still serves the purpose of war," said Jin Shicheng, director of the Department of Publicity, Education and Exhibition at the hall.
Unit 731 was a top-secret biological and chemical warfare research base established in Harbin as the nerve center for Japanese biological warfare in China and Southeast Asia during WWII.
At least 3,000 people were used for human experiments by Unit 731, and more than 300,000 people in China were killed by Japan's biological weapons.
Video offers new evidence of Japan's wartime germ-warfare crimes in northeast China
