Li Jianguo, a 49-year-old teacher at the Tianjin Vocational Institute, is set to be named as one of the "2022 most beautiful teachers"-an annual public award sponsored by the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the Ministry of Education.

Li has stood out by taking the lead in the training of students in vocational skills, gaining a number of honors including being named as a national role model teacher. He has mentored(指导)seven national-level technique experts and a team of 14 technique masters. One of his students, Guo Jinpeng, who graduated from the institute in 2007, became a college teacher at the Chengdu Auto Vocational and Technical School and was named as a national role model teacher in 2019. 

Li's nomination as one of the "2022 most beautiful teachers" reflects that China is focusing on the importance of vocational education and aims to foster(培养)more leading personnel with the spirit of craftsmanship in the manufacturing industry.

At an international vocational and technical education conference in Tianjin last month, Li noted that there is no difference between vocational education and ordinary education, and vocational education is not secondary nor should it ever be treated as less than ordinary education. "Vocational education has the mission of fostering a quality workforce and technical experts for the country. The hardworking spirit is the key to building any ordinary people into leading personnel," he said.

Li joined the institute in 1993 and later founded a machinery engineering practice center, providing free training to 7,500 people a week. In 2015, he led a team of teachers to work for 40 days to repair 124 machine tools in the center. Li has devoted himself to building the country's first additive manufacturing technique and application center at the institute to satisfy the thirst for the country's human resources in 3D printing. 

People have been painting pictures for at least 30,000 years. The earliest pictures were painted by people who hunted animals. They used to paint pictures of the animals they wanted to catch and kill. Pictures of this kind have been found on the walls of caves in France and Spain. No one knows why they were painted there. Perhaps the painters thought that their pictures would help them to catch these animals. Or perhaps human beings have always wanted to tell stories in pictures.

About 5,000 years ago, the Egyptians and other people in the Near East began to use pictures as kind of writing. They drew simple pictures or signs to represent things and ideas, and also to represent the sounds of their language. The signs these people used became a kind of alphabet.

    The Egyptians used to record information and to tell stories by putting picture-writing and pictures together. When an important person died, scenes and stories from his life were painted and carved on the walls of the place where he was buried. Some of these pictures are like modern comic strip stories. It has been said that Egypt is the home of the comic strip. But, for the Egyptians, pictures still had magic power. So they did not try to make their way of writing simple. The ordinary people could not understand it.

By the year 1,000 BC, people who lived in the area around the Mediterranean Sea had developed a simpler system of writing. The signs they used were very easy to write, and there were fewer of them than in the Egyptian system. This was because each sign, or letter, represented only one sound in their language. The Greeks developed this system and formed the letters of the Greek alphabet. The Romans copied the idea, and the Roman alphabet is now used all over the world.

These days, we can write down a story, or record information, without using pictures. But we still need pictures of all kinds: drawing, photographs, signs and diagrams. We find them everywhere: in books and newspapers, in the street, and on the walls of the places where we live and work. Pictures help us to understand and remember things more easily, and they can make a story much more interesting.

With the largest population in the world, China has the most mouths to feed on the planet. Consequently, food waste is a great problem in China. It is reported that more than 6% — or 35 million kgs — of the country's total food production is lost before reaching consumers, in the household and warehouse storage, transport and processing sectors. With an ever-growing population, it's imperative to deal with food waste in China.

Thankfully, policies covering food waste have been rapidly emerging in recent years. Since 2010, the Chinese government has selected 100 cities and encouraged them to explore alternative waste management systems. In 2016,China amended(修改) its Solid Waste Law to stop illegal dumping(倾倒) and promote recycling and reuse of waste, including food. Restaurants will soon be charged a fee for the amount of food waste they produce. And China is using a good food waste processing method called anaerobic digestion, a process that transforms organic waste into biogas, which can be used as energy, or turned into biofuel.

Moving forward, policymakers should consider loss and waste reduction to be as important as increasing production. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, the current policy system of agricultural subsidisation(补贴) mainly includes price guarantees and subsidies for crops, production materials, seeds and agricultural machinery, which leads to local governments focusing on crop production while paying little attention to the wastage in the supply chain. There should also be increased investment in the construction of new warehouses and special funds for storage, transport, and processing technologies.

If food waste were a country, it would be the third-largest emitting(排放) country in the world, generating about 8% of total greenhouse gas emissions. This issue is not location-specific, but an issue that affects every living thing on the planet and should therefore be seen as an essential area to take action in.