The district office handling my work permit sent a group WeChat message today.

The message mentioned calling "Anti-epidemic Headquarters Office" to ask about situation of foreigners' vaccination, and citing response "foreigners should be able to get vaccine after July 1st", and that "foreigners in prefectures can get it now, but in Kunming city cannot".

Anything new about vaccinating foreigners in Kunming?

On hearsay I'd share that last week my wife's Chinese colleague saw a foreigner getting the vaccine at a clinic in Kunming. She apparently asked about it, and was told that it was possible because the foreigner was enrolled in China's (medical) social insurance scheme.

English schedule for the Euros and more: www.sinoepg.net/

CCTV-5 will be showing the matches live at least for the first weekend, with Chinese commentary of course.

If there are concurrent matches, then 5+ would be showing the other overlapping one. That's a common use for the 5+ channel, used for example with UEFA Champions League broadcasts.

5+ used to go with suffix "live events" in past, supposedly focusing more on live broadcasts/replays of events of lesser/no domestic importance, in order to reserve the main channel for Chinese sports or international sports of bigger domestic interest.

Nowadays it seems to be showing more live ice hockey and tennis than the main channel. Varies by season though.

Yes, minorities were excluded from family planning. Still my wife, who is Yi and the youngest of 3 siblings, always jokes how her parents had to "buy" her. There was some kind of fee/fine for having her in the 80s.

I have little experience of rural China outside Yunnan, but it is my understanding that it's rougher up here than in many other provinces.

From what I have seen here, I cannot imagine lot of rural families wanting to have more children without intent and possibility to send them to study, work and live in cities. Even sending them to Yiwu to make sneakers may not be a viable option in coming decades.

In the mountains you simply don't have enough flat land to farm. Maybe somewhere else there is justification to raise more farmers, but also in those places farming machinery works better.

Mind you these are places that should be also high on China's poverty reduction agenda, and having more babies in already impoverished villages would be quite counter-productive.

China doesn't currently depend on income tax of its workers the same way western countries do.

In particular rural residents, most of them, never in their lives go above the current 5000 RMB per month limit to pay taxes. Even in cities like Kunming lot of jobs are below that.

The problem of shrinking workforce is slightly different problem here than elsewhere. Despite all the talk of AI and robotics, China still needs hands to make things, and above all consumers to drive the economy.