On March 25, China opened its annual Zhongguancun Forum, with visitors welcomed by a robot playing the piano in the entrance hall. There were also robots on piano and drums playing the well-known tune, “Jasmine Flower.” Zhongguancun is the area of Beijing where many of China’s universities and scientific institutes are located. The Forum will last from March 25–29.
On the first day, the Natural Science Foundation of China reviewed the major achievements of China during 2025. These included an analysis of the depletion of the mantle of the Moon on the Moon’s far side, which was garnered from the material returned by the Chang’e-6 mission; the EAST, a large-scale scientific facility for controlled nuclear fusion, achieving steady-state operation at one hundred million degrees Celsius; the world’s first case of transplanting a gene-edited pig liver into a human body; an innovative method for scalable production of flexible, ultra-flat diamond films; and AR glasses from tech company LLVISION, supporting real-time translation of more than 100 languages.
