Will social kisses survive Covid?

There is a ‘pervasive presence of Chinese military-linked conglomerates and universities in the sponsorship of high-technology research centres in many leading UK universities’. When the think tank Civitas recently revealed this, Cambridge University denounced the report as misinformation and pushed Civitas to qualify it. Thus, when Civitas had referred to Cambridge’s Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with China’s National University of Defence Technology (NUDT), Cambridge wanted it added that the MoU had been ‘signed in the wake of the UK… government’s encouragement to create a “golden decade” for the UK-China relationship. That MoU produced no research, no collaborations, no funding and has been expired for three years’. Why, then, was it signed, one wonders? A grimly amusing link is between a bye-fellow of Gonville and Caius College who is also ‘a Distinguished Professor and a 1,000-talent plan awardee’ at NUDT and a NUDT academic called Xienwen Ran. They have done research work together. Dr Ran is billed at NUDT as a ‘doctor of theology’, but his theology seems highly weaponised. In 2019 he published (not with the fellow of Caius) A method to optimize the electron spectrum for simulating thermo-mechanical response to x-ray radiation 6 (‘The X-ray pulse originating from high altitude nuclear detonation (HAND) is mainly soft X-ray and its intensity is high enough [to] lead to severe thermo-mechanical deformation of unpenetrated material…’).

When we finally re-emerge from Covid, will we kiss one another socially? When I was a boy, whom to kiss was quite a complicated question. Many older people virtually never kissed anyone, and even in my generation some were much more reticent or choosy than others. Then — from the 1980s, I would say — it became usual to kiss almost everyone of the opposite sex at parties if you had met them before and even — by the 21st century — if you hadn’t.