BEIJING, March 14 (Xinhua) -- The development road of China will be bumpy and even thorny in the next few years, Premier Wen Jiabao told a press conference Sunday rightly after the conclusion of the national legislature's annual session.He called for unslackened efforts to tackle difficulties, saying "we must have firm confidence."Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao smiles during a press conference after the closing meeting of the Third Session of the 11th National People's Congress (NPC) at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, March 14, 2010."No matter how high a mountain is, one can always ascend to the top. The only way out and hope when facing difficulties lie in our own efforts," Wen said.He also said he holds deep love for the country and vowed strong commitments in the next three years of his term.
BEIJING, March 5 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on Friday reiterated determination to curb the excessive growth of home prices in major cities and satisfy people's basic need for housing.He made the pledge while delivering a government work report to the Third Session of the 11th National People's Congress(NPC), China's top legislature, which is the latest demonstration of the government's determination to tame the runaway home prices.Driven by record bank lending and favorable tax breaks, China saw a sharp residential property price hike nationwide in the past year, triggering heated public complaints and fears of possible assets bubble.China's home prices in 70 large- and medium-sized cities, a housing price trend barometer, climbed 9.5 percent in January 2010 from a year earlier, the fastest growth in 19 months. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao delivers a government work report during the opening meeting of the Third Session of the 11th National People's Congress (NPC) at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, March 5, 2010Wen promised an increased supply of low-cost housing and common residential houses, restraining of speculative purchase, tighter land use management and stricter control of bank credit.A total of 63.2 billion yuan (9.25 billion U.S.dollars) will be spent by the central government in low-income housing in 2010, an increase of 8.1 billion yuan, or 14.7 percent over last year, Wen said.The government will also build 3 million housing units for low-income families and renovate 2.8 million shanty units, he said.Wen's remarks indicate the government's regulation target in the real estate sector this year, which will emphasize on satisfying demand of mid- and low-income families while ensuring a healthy development of the market, said Gu Yunchang, vice president of China Real Estate Research Association."To curb the excessive growth of home prices is a must for the healthy development, or else the foaming market would bring destructive consequences to the industry," said Gu.China's central and local governments has begun to take moves to deflate the housing bubble since late last year, including reimposing a sales tax on homes sold within five years of their purchase and raising down payment requirement for families buying a second or more houses with bank loans.In another move to cool the property market, the People's Bank of China, the central bank, announced twice within a month to raise the deposit reserve requirement ratio earlier this year.During an online chat with the Chinese Internet users last week, Wen expressed his confidence in the government measures in response to complaints over soaring home prices."It is the government's responsibility to guide the property market. I am confident that the government will ensure the healthy development of the property market," he said.
BEIJING, Jan. 18 (Xinhua) -- The quality of China's agricultural produce including vegetables, domestic animals and aquatics was improved in 2009, the Ministry of Agriculture said Monday.The ministry released an annual report based on monitoring results of agricultural products, saying 96.4 percent of vegetables had met safety standards in 2009, up 0.1 percentage points year on year.The rate was 99.5 percent for domestic animals, up 0.8 percentage points, and 97.2 percent for aquatic products, up 1.5 percentage points.The monitoring of fruits, mushrooms and tea, for the first time in 2009, found 98 percent, 95.2 percent, and 94.8 percent of products in the three categories met standards.In 2009, the inspections became more detailed, covered more categories, and were carried out in 259 large and medium-sized cities, compared with only 36 major cities previously, the ministry said.The ministry said it would step up the control over the use of prohibited pesticides and veterinary drugs in 2010 in order to further improve the quality and safety of agricultural produce.
CHANGSHA/HARBIN, Feb. 12 (Xinhua) -- As Chinese people are embracing the arrival of the Year of Tiger on Saturday, zoologists are worried about the survival of South China Tigers as the endangered species are facing a serious problem of inbreeding.No traces of the tigers have been found in the last decade, they said.The number of captive South China tigers (Panthera tigris amoyenesis) rose to 92 in 2009 from 60 in 2007 but all the tigers were the offsprings of six wild South China tigers which were caught more than 40 years ago, said Deng Xuejian, a professor with the Department of Biology of Hunan Normal University, based in Changsha, capital of central China's Hunan Province."The inbreeding may lead to genetic freaks, low survival rates and poor physical makeup," Deng said.All the genes have come from two male and four female tigers, which had lead to highly identical genes in the offspring, Deng said."The situation may reduce the genetic diversity and cause degradation or even the extinction of the species," he said.The tigers would lose genetic diversity if their genes were too similar, said Ma Zaiyu, president of veterinary hospital of Changsha Zoo."The number of the members of a species should be at least 1,000 to maintain the stability of the species," Ma said.Zoologists estimated the number of wild South China tigers could have been less than 30 in the 1990s. The remaining wild tigers are presumed to live in the remote areas of Guangdong, Hunan, Fujian and Jiangxi provinces, Deng Xuejian said.Based on analysis of relevant date combining field investigation, Deng estimated the number of wild South China tigers could be less than 10.No traces of wild South China tigers were reported in Hunan in the last two years, said Zhou Shuhuai, director of wildlife protection section of the Hunan provincial forestry bureau."The number is limited and the tigers scatter in different areas, which make it difficult for natural breeding between wild tigers," said Huang Gongqing, a tiger expert at South China Tiger Breeding Base in Suzhou, a city of east China's Jiangsu Province."The extinction of the wild tigers will happen sooner or later," Huang warned.Some experts have said that there may be already no wild South China tigers. "However, we cannot know as the animal is very difficult to trace," Deng said.Ma Zaiyu said to avoid extinction of the species, more captive tigers should be bred, and some genes might be recovered when the population reaches 1,000, while Deng suggested continuous search for wild tigers to enrich the captive tigers' genes.The situation is much better for the Siberian tigers (panthera tigris altaica) in northeast China as the number of the wild ones is quite stable, experts said.The number maintains at around 20 in China, among which 10 to 14 are in Heilongjiang Province and eight to ten are in Jilin Province, said Sun Haiyi, deputy director of Heilongjiang Wildlife Institute"But no more young tigers under one year old have been discovered in the past two years. The reason might be the number of female tigers are less than the males and the animals are relatively isolated by the mountains," Sun said.China established a breeding base for the Siberian tigers in Heilongjiang in 1986 and the number of captive tigers has increased from eight to current more than 800, Sun said.Experts called for more efforts to protect the habitats of the tigers for the purpose of protection and re-wilding of the tigers.
JINAN, Feb. 22 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese vocational school said Monday it has got bored with the repeated reports carried by the New York Times insisting that it was a source of the Google cyber attacks."The reports are too boring, simply unfounded and politically orientated," Li Zixiang, Party chief of the privately-run Lanxiang Vocational School (Lanxiang) in east China's Shandong Province, told Xinhua."We really do not want to read such reports again. If the reporter still has doubts, I invite him to come to our school to talk with us personally," he said.The New York Times has filed two reports recently claiming the cyber attacks on Google and other American firms last year have been traced to Shanghai Jiaotong University (SJTU) and Lanxiang.Google said last month that it might pull out of the Chinese market, citing it services had been hacked by sources originating in China and that it disagreed with some Chinese government policies.In the latest report, the New York Times insisted that Lanxiang had ties with the Chinese military as it was founded on land donated by the army and had sent graduates to join the army."We had indeed used abandoned barracks for teaching venues when our school was founded in 1984, but the barracks were not a 'donation' because we must pay rent regularly for it," Li said."We have already moved out of the old barracks and built our own new teaching buildings," he said.Currently, Lanxiang has more than 20,000 students learning vocational skills such as cooking, auto repair and hairdressing."Like any other country, our school graduates can join the army if they so wish. But you cannot say a school has a military background just because some of its graduates are servicemen," Li said.
BEIJING, March 20 (Xinhua) -- The appreciation of renminbi, or China's currency yuan, will not help tackle the global economic imbalance, economists said here Saturday.The idea that yuan's appreciation would cure global economic imbalance was not going to happen, Angel Gurria, secretary general of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, said at the China Development Forum 2010.To solve trade imbalance, countries such as the United States and China should seek measures to encourage domestic consumption, improve social well-being and reform pension system, instead of sticking to the exchange rate issue, Gurria said.The exchange rate adjustment, especially between the United States and China, would not help cut the U.S. trade deficit, while one way to tackle the problem is to loose restrictions on high-technology exports to China, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said.Since China overtook Germany to become the world's largest exporter, the country is facing increasing criticism for devaluating the yuan to earn artificial price advantages. Some U.S. senators have recently ratcheted up pressure on yuan appreciation and urged the government to label China as currency manipulator."If the U.S. government names China as a currency manipulator, quite unfortunately, it will hurt the bilateral relations at least in short and medium term," said Li Daokui, director of the Center for China in the World Economy of Tsinghua University."The two countries should be cooperative to solve the problem, while naming China as a currency manipulator will be no help," Li said."After all, it will not be in the interests of the United States, China and the whole world if the two countries' disputes escalate into a trade war," he said.
武汉屁股上面全是疙瘩每天都瘙痒
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jan. 14 (Xinhua) -- A wood board improvised as a table with all medicine on it -- this is a "mobile hospital" the Chinese rescue team was able to set up to treat those injured in Haiti's capital city Port-au-Prince after the 7.0-magnitude earthquake hit the impoverished Caribbean country on Tuesday. A large number of injured Haitians have stood in line waiting to be treated by the Chinese doctors on the plaza in front of the quake-affected Prime Minister's Office building. Members of a Chinese emergency rescue team inspect the collapsed building of the headquarters of the UN Stabilization Mission in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Jan. 14, 2010. The Chinese emergency rescue team arrived in Haiti's capital Port-au-Prince early Thursday local time, to help the rescue operation after an earthquake in which up to 100,000 people are feared dead and eight Chinese are still missing. Five patients at a time were carried to the humble "mobile hospital" by volunteers. Most of them suffered physical traumas and the long-time exposed wounds were infected in many of the cases, Hou Shike, chief doctor of the rescue team told Xinhua on Thursday. The Chinese doctors expressed their sorrow for the lack of medication supplies in Haiti, a country believed to be the poorest of the western hemisphere. "Doctors and medicine are of great need here," Hou said in a painful tone. With each "Merci (Thank you)" from a cured patient, the medicine that the rescuer brought from China becomes less. "Now we see the patients are still able to move. But when the infection gets worse, the consequences will be critical," Hou said, apparently worried. "I hope there are more rescue teams joining us," he said. China's rescue team arrived in Port-au-Prince on early Thursday morning, with 50 members of the International Rescue Team of China, three rescuer dogs and more than 20 tons of equipment and humanitarian aid. The Chinese government officials from the Foreign Ministry and Public Security Ministry and media also arrived on a chartered plane. Members of a Chinese emergency rescue team inspect the collapsed building of the headquarters of the UN Stabilization Mission in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Jan. 14, 2010. The Chinese emergency rescue team arrived in Haiti's capital Port-au-Prince early Thursday local time, to help the rescue operation after an earthquake in which up to 100,000 people are feared dead and eight Chinese are still missing. An earthquake of 7.0 magnitude struck Haiti on Tuesday, destroying buildings and basic infrastructures, leaving thousands of people dead and millions affected, including the United Nations' Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH). It was announced Thursday that a total of four police, 19 soldiers and 13 civilian staff members with the UN mission have died and hundreds of UN personnel unaccounted for. According to United Nations' statistics, 70 percent of Haiti's population lives in poverty and half of its 8.5 million people are unemployed. The Food and Agriculture Organization has designated Haiti as one of the world's most economically vulnerable countries.
SHANGHAI, March 12 (Xinhua) -- Shanghai General Motors (SGM) is contacting the owners of 2,065 Captive jeeps to recall the vehicles for repair due to risk of steering malfunction, the company said on Friday.The defected vehicles were manufactured by GM Daewoo Auto in the Republic of Korea between Sept. 18, 2007 and Dec. 31, 2008, said a spokesman with SGM.China's General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (GAQSIQ) released a bulletin on Friday, approving SGM's application for the recall.SGM had received no customer reports on the defect, the spokesman said.GAQSIQ has stopped the importation of GM Daewoo Auto's Captive jeeps, according to the bulletin.
BEIJING, Jan. 27 (Xinhua) -- China is scheduled to issue 26 billion yuan (3.82 billion U.S. dollars) of book-entry treasury bonds from Jan. 28, the Ministry of Finance (MOF) announced Wednesday.The two-year bonds, the first batch of treasury bonds this year, will be issued on the national inter-bank bond market and securities exchange market on Jan. 28 and Jan. 29, the MOF said in a statement on its website.The bonds have a fixed annual interest rate of 2.01 percent and will be available for trading from Feb. 2. Interest will be paid annually. The principal will be paid upon maturity on Jan. 28, 2012.
BEIJING, March 2 (Xinhua) -- A senior public security official of China on Tuesday urged relevant departments and local authorities to do a good job in ensuring security and maintaining stability as the annual national parliamentary and advisory sessions approach.All local authorities and relevant departments should make further efforts to ensure the meetings of the National People's Congress (NPC) and the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) go on safely and smoothly, Yang Huanning, administrative vice minister of public security, said at a national teleconference."The task of ensuring security and maintaining stability during the two sessions remains onerous" despite previous efforts in this regard, said Yang."We should keep clear-minded and never lower our guard," Yang warned.He urged local officials to do more work in dissolving social conflicts and try to root up troubles that may disturb stability.The vice minister also ordered to minimize the inconvenience that security measures might cause to people's life and work.Incidents that might disturb social stability and threaten security should be handled properly and strictly according to the law, Yang warned.Huang Ming, vice minister of public security, demanded at the same meeting emergencies and breaking events be dealt with promptly and properly.The annual full session of the CPPCC National Committee, the top advisory body, is slated to open Wednesday afternoon, while that of the NPC, the national legislature, is scheduled to open Friday.