Chinese President Xi Jinping has called for all-out efforts to push forward military reform with the support of the entire nation and the Communist Party of China (CPC).

Xi, also general secretary of the CPC Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), made the remarks Monday afternoon at a group study attended by members of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee.

The group study focused on reform of the military in size, structure, and formation.

Carried out in a bold and resolute way, national defense and military reform has taken historic steps and achieved historic breakthroughs and achievements in major fields, pumping great power into building a strong army, Xi said.

The reform mainly includes optimizing the country’s military size, structure, and formation, and solving structural contradictions that hinder the development of national defense and the armed forces, he said.

As the reform deepens, China will have a smaller army with better combat capability and optimized structure, the president said.

“Quantity should be reduced and quality improved to build a capable and efficient army, and labor intensity should become S&T-oriented,” Xi said, adding that China is developing a joint operation force system with an elite force at its core.

He reiterated that reform on national defense and armed forces is an overall and revolutionary change, with unprecedented strength, depth and breadth.

“We should be resolute, confident, brave and vigorous to achieve victory in such reform,” he said, calling for close following of decisions made by the CPC Central Committee and the CMC.

Xi said that the reform should take the correct direction, inspections should be strengthened, and various reform measures should be put into practice.

He said that the adjustment and reform of policies and systems will directly influence the vital interests of officers and soldiers, the army’s morale, the military’s vitality as well as the reform’s overall performance.

Military authorities should intensify relevant research, map out systematic and proactive reform plans, and enhance the “sense of gain” among officers and soldiers, Xi said.

Xi also stressed consolidation and spread of theoretical, practical and institutional achievements acquired through the national defense and military reform.

Chinese authorities Tuesday defended their management measures on virtual private networks (VPN), saying the measures will have no negative impact on law abiding businesses and individuals.

All businesses operating within China need to properly register with the authorities and every business with a website needs to obtain an Internet Content Provider license and display it at the bottom on their website.

“Our measures aim to better regulate the behavior of China’s VPN market and they will only target unregistered businesses and individuals providing VPN services for cross-border use,” Zhang Feng, chief engineer of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), said at a press conference.

Authorities are aware that some foreign trade companies and transnational companies need to use a VPN for office work and they are allowed to have access to VPN service via registered providers, said Zhang.

The chief engineer noted that authorities have set different standards for various services including big data and cloud computing.

“Most of the registered VPN services are available in the cloud and are backed up by data centers. If the data centers [of unregistered providers] lack sufficient protection, there will be huge risks for enterprises,” he said.

While countries differ in their management of VPN services, it is a common practice for authorities to develop an registration system for these services, said Wen Ku, another official with the MIIT, adding there are similar systems for VPN providers based in the United States, European and other Asian countries.

“Chinese law prohibits the spread of harmful, violent and terrorist information,” said Wen.

Chinese scientists have made another breakthrough in quantum communication, demonstrating long-distance free-space quantum key distribution during daylight.

In the past, long-distance free-space quantum communication experiments could only be performed at night, because sunlight, or sunlight noise, prohibits quantum communication in transmission under conditions of high channel loss over long distances.

Therefore, the world’s first quantum satellite, Quantum Experiments at Space Scale (QUESS) launched by China in 2016, can only send photons at night, and it takes at least three days for QUESS to cover all ground stations around the Earth.

A team from the University of Science and Technology of China led by Pan Jianwei, an academician with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has overcome the sunlight noise issue and demonstrated free-space quantum key distribution over 53 km during the day.

Pan’s team chose a wavelength of 1,550 nanometers and developed free-space single-mode fibre-coupling technology and ultra-low-noise upconversion single-photon detectors to achieve the daytime distribution.

The new technology was announced on Monday in the journal of Nature Photonics.

“Our experiment has proved the feasibility of satellite-based quantum in daylight, and laid a foundation for a satellite-constellation-based global quantum network,” said Pan.

Quantum communication is ultra-secure as a quantum photon can neither be separated nor duplicated. Accordingly, it is impossible to wiretap, intercept or crack information it transmits.

China is striving to set up the first-ever global quantum communication network by around 2030, through linking a satellite constellation consisting of dozens of quantum satellites and ground-based quantum communication networks.