Innholdsfortegnelse for July 23, 2015 i Beijing Review

Booming Agricultural Trade Workers make preparations to export vegetables to Russia at an international logistics center in Mudanjiang, northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province, on July 15. Adjacent to Russia, Mudanjiang has been engaged in establishing export channels for agricultural products. By now, the total area of production bases that target the Russian market has exceeded 200,000 mu (13,333 hectares) in Mudanjiang Economy Unaffected The recent stock market turbulence will not have a major spillover effect on China’s real economy, global rating agency Moody’s said on July 16. The equity market turmoil does not warrant a change in the agency’s fore-cast that China’s real economic growth will reach 6.5 to 7.5 percent this year and 6 to 7 percent in 2016, Moody’s Investors Service said in a report China’s stock market has…

China’s GDP growth leveled off at 7 per-cent in the first half of this year, with an array of optimistic signs, such as better structure, improved growth quality, faster-than-expected job creation and accelerated growth of residents’ income, boding well for the ongoing reform. To stabilize economic growth, the Chinese Government unveiled a number of policies and measures, ranging from launching key infrastructure projects to remolding the investment and financing system, from lowering the reserve requirement ratios and interest rates to promoting tax cuts, from encouraging innovation and entrepreneurship to initiating the Made in China 2025 strategy. “They have begun to take effect, and the national economy is undergoing positive changes,” said Sheng Laiyun, spokesman for the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). As a matter of fact, some key indicators have…

Du, a Beijing resident in her 60s, believes that an antibiotic is a panacea for the maladies of her now 6-year-old grand-daughter Guoguo. Du began to take care of her granddaughter since the child was merely 2 months old, for the girl’s parents were busy. She is comfortable with her caretaker duties except when the girl runs high fevers. Then, the anxious grandma will feed the girl antibiotics or take her to a private child clinic nearby for intravenous infusion. The transfusion room in the clinic is chronically full of patients suffering from symptoms like fevers and coughing. In China, many people take antibiotics as a quick cure-all. A report recently released by researchers at the Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry revealed that China used approximately 162,000 tons of antibiotics in…

The past month has been unforgettable for investors in China’s A-share market. A sharp fall in stock index, a sudden drain on liquidity and a panic sentiment are all unprecedented in the history of China’s stock market. With the government’s direct intervention, the stock market has stabilized, but it still faces the arduous task of reconstruction after such a disaster—how to improve the institutions and lay foundations for long-term stable development of the stock market. Sustainable and sound development of the stock market will depend on whether the government and all market participants can reflect on this stock market crisis in a right way. The A-share market plunge this time, without any signs previously, forced heavily involved investors to be liquidated, blindsiding them and pushing them into a panic. How…

Dear Readers, Forum is a column that provides a space for varying perspectives on contemporary Chinese society. We invite you to submit personal viewpoints on past and current topics (in either English or Chinese). yanwei@bjreview.com Please provide your name and address along with your comments In the face of increasingly frequent conflicts between patients and hospitals, in which medical staff have been hurt or even killed by disgruntled patients, Chinese legislature has taken action. It is deliberating an amendment to the country’s criminal law, which will make troublemaking in hospitals a criminal offence. These disputes occur for various reasons. Sometimes, patients have too high expectations as regards the hospital’s ability to cure them, ignoring the fact that owing to the limitations of medical science, a lot of diseases remain incurable.…

MEXICO Armed police block a tunnel by which the country’s drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman escaped from prison in Almoloya de Juarez township on July 13 FRANCE President Francois Hollande inspects guards during the annual Republic Day military parade in Paris on July 14 JAPAN Opposition lawmakers leave in protest of the adoption of a series of controversial security bills by the lower house of parliament in Tokyo on July 16. The forcible passage of the bills marked an overturn of Japan’s decades-long “purely defensive” security posture SPAIN A man leaps over a running bull during the festival of San Fermín in Pamplona on July 11 UNITED STATES Scientists celebrate a successful flyby of Pluto by the space probe New Horizons and examine a picture taken by the probe…

• The consumer price index (CPI), a main gauge of inflation, rose 1.3 percent. The producer price index (PPI), which measures inflation at the wholesale level, contracted 4.6 percent. • Foreign trade decreased 6.9 percent to 11.53 trillion yuan($1.86 trillion). Exports increased 0.9 percent to 6.57 trillion yuan($1.06 trillion), while imports dropped 15.5 percent to 4.96 trillion yuan($798.56 billion). • Value-added output of industrial enterprises above a designated size—principal business revenue of more than 20 million yuan ($3.15 million) a year—grew 6.3 percent. • Fixed assets investment totaled 23.71 trillion yuan ($3.82 trillion), up 12.5 percent after adjusting for inflation. • Investment in the property sector reached 4.4 trillion yuan ($708.4 billion), up 5.7 percent after adjusting for inflation • Retail sales of consumer goods totaled 14.16 trillion yuan ($2.28…

After 14 years of development, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) has set its sights on goals for the next decade at the 15th meeting of the Council of SCO Heads of State that was held in Ufa, the capital of Russia’s Bashkortostan Republic, on July 9-10. The SCO, established in Shanghai in 2001, is committed to building friendly neighbor relations and maintaining security and stability in the Central Asian region through multilateral cooperation. Leaders of the SCO member states—China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan—approved the SCO Development Strategy for 2015 to 2025 at the Ufa summit, mapping out a comprehensive blueprint for the group’s cooperation in a wide range of fields of politics, security, economy and people-to-people exchanges. Meanwhile, with the entry of India and Pakistan into the organization,…

After China’s high-speed train maker CNR Corp. Ltd.’s merger with its long-lost rival CSR Corp. Ltd. in March, a new wave of re-form for China’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs) seems imminent and imperative. Against this background, after Zhou Laizhen, Vice Minister of Civil Aviation Administration, disclosed the budding thought concerning air freight reorganization at the China Civil Aviation Development Forum on June 24, rumors over a consolidation of the country’s three largest airline cargo carriers began to gain ground. Though a concrete plan of the consolidation has not been unveiled, the State- Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council, China’s top regulatory agency for SOEs, allegedly has started preparatory studies. As Zhou said, the possible merger will give birth to the largest colossal air freight company in Asia…

The National Ballet of China (NBC) brought two classic works to Koch Theater in New York City as part of this year’s Lincoln Center Festival—a 2008 adaptation of Peony Pavilion and the beloved 50-year-old The Red Detachment of Women. Both works evoke an iconic vision of China, the first a Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) world of hidden passion, in which each subtle word or movement has great sub-text, the other a bold and revolutionary cry of freedom from the birth of modern China. “The NBC is bringing to us two distinctive and very different ballets this season. Both ballets tell us something about the long history of China at very different times in its history,” said Lincoln Center Festival Director Nigel Redden, adding that while Peony Pavilion is a familiar story…

Joint Efforts Chinese and French volunteers select reusable bricks before they began to renovate a centennial house in Yunshantun Village Fortress in Anshun, Guizhou Province, on July 15. Yunshantun was first built in 1381 during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). The 15-day renovation program, coinitiated by several heritage protection groups in China and France, drew 15 Chinese and five French participants. More Newborns China’s newborn population grew to 16.87 million last year, thanks partly to the country’s relaxation of the family planning policy, a health official said at a press conference on July 10. There were almost 1 million more newborns in 2014, compared to 15.92 million in 2010, said Yang Wenzhuang, an official with the National Health and Family Planning Commission. Yang said that the increase was prompted by a…

The author is a contributing writer to Beijing Review U.S. President Barack Obama continues a good month with a “historic” deal reached on Iran’s nuclear program in mid-July. The incident marked a break-through in diplomatic relations immediately compared to Richard Nixon’s establishment of ties to China more than 40 years ago and was labeled a “leap of faith” that has the possibility to alter the course of world peace. The agreement does not seek to stop Iran’s course to become a nuclear power— it merely attempts to delay the threat until Western powers can restructure the deeply adversarial nature of relations between Iran and the United States. Its success remains to be seen, but even critics agree that the deal marks the sunrise of a new era. “Today, after two…

‘It is a magnificent city that can make any dream come true!” Tim Cook, CEO of Apple Inc., commented while visiting Shanghai on May 14. After making efforts for more than a decade to construct the city into an international center of economy, finance, trade and shipping, Shanghai now is making steps toward becoming a center of science and technology. On May 25, Shanghai announced that by 2020, it will have formed the basic structure for science and technology innovation. It will then spend another 10 years completing core functions as a hi-tech innovation center. Following this, a series of policies has been released in early July. Shanghai made this plan based on one- year of solid research led by the top municipal leadership. Building Shanghai into a science and…

Decades of living abroad have not meant Seychellois- Chinese entrepreneur James Quincy Liao has forgotten his motherland. The business-man recently returned to China to attend the First Overseas Chinese Industrial and Commercial Congress in Beijing from July 6-7. Along with some 300 overseas Chinese from 79 countries, Liao was met by Premier Li Keqiang on the first day of the gathering. The term “overseas Chinese” refers to Chinese people who have lived abroad for a long period of time and may or may not have retained their original Chinese citizenship. Premier Li raised high hopes for those attending the meeting. He encouraged overseas Chinese entrepreneurs to help China upgrade its economy by making the most of their advantages in terms of capital, technologies and management expertise. He also expressed hopes…

For those tired of the hustle and bustle of mega Chinese cities like Beijing and Shanghai, there is a tranquil sylvan retreat, just two hours away by flight from the capital— yet few people know about it. For instance, Abdou Lahad, a 25-year-old Senegalese student studying Chinese in Ningxia University, said, “Before I got a government scholarship to study in Ningxia, I had never heard of the place in my life. Even in Beijing, there are people who have no idea where Ningxia is.” Yet Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region in northwest China, sandwiched between Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and Gansu Province, was a flourishing trade hub on the ancient Silk Road. It boasts an ancient civilization that built towering mausoleums for its rulers, known as the Oriental Pyramids, and is…