Innholdsfortegnelse for September 22, 2016 i Beijing Review

CPI and PPI China’s consumer price index (CPI), a main gauge of inflation, grew 1.3 per-cent year on year in August, down from July’s 1.8 percent, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) announced on September 9. In August, the index dropped for the fourth consecutive month from 2.3 percent in April, when the CPI reached its highest level since July 2014. On a month-on-month basis, the CPI rose 0.1 percent in August. NBS statistician Yu Qiumei attributed the moderate inflation largely to eased food prices. The price of pork rose 6.4 percent year on year in August, slowing from the 16.1-percent rise registered in July. Since January 2016, the CPI has been calculated using a new comparison base and has included more products and services, while slightly reducing the…

Stepping back a couple of millennia into ancient China’s Han Dynasty (202 B.C.-A.D. 220), one could observe a round ball stuffed with feathers being kicked about eagerly. The game of cuju, played by aristocrats and peas-ants alike, spanned several Chinese dynasties. Around the 9th or 10th century, professional teams were established across many Chinese cities, and tales spread of legendary matches featuring thousands of spectators. According to the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), football’s international gov-erning body, cuju was the world’s earliest form of soccer. However, for the birthplace of mod-ern football, fast-forward to 19th-century Victorian Britain. On the playing fields of England’s most prestigious private schools, various sets of rules were drawn up, gradually harmonizing and evolving into a single and universally accepted code. Over the…

What is common to a housewife in Zhejiang, a lama in Gansu and a pro-fessional basketball team in Sichuan? To put it simply, all of them “go” to the same hospital. But to see it from a wider perspective, they are all beneficiaries of a technological revo-lution that is seeking to make quality healthcare available to all, no matter how far they live from prestigious hospitals or what their financial sta-tus is. The new trend of “Internet hospitals” has become visible with the Wuzhen Internet Hospital coming up in Wuzhen, an ancient town in east China’s Zhejiang Province, last year. It is the brainchild of the We Doctor group, a startup that shot to prominence when it was reported that its investors included heavyweights like the Hillhouse Capital Group,…

Despite the continued slowdown in pri-vate sector investment during the first half of this year, Wang Jianlin, founder and Chairman of the Dalian Wanda Group, brimmed with confidence about the Chinese market. “During the same period, tourism invest-ment, for example, has seen strong growth of 30.5 percent year on year, indicating that industries with development potential are able to attract the eyes of investors,” said Wang, China’s richest person. He was attending the International Investment Forum 2016, part of the 19th China International Fair for Investment and Trade, held in Xiamen, southeast China’s Fujian Province, from September 8-11. Harley Seyedin, President of the American Chamber of Commerce in South China (AmCham South China), echoed Wang’s sentiments, maintaining a positive outlook on the Chinese economy. That was the 14th year AmCham…

President Xi Jinping, also General Secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and Chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), confers a military flag to Commander Li Shisheng and Political Commissar Yin Zhihong of the Wuhan Joint Logistics Unit as the CMC established a joint logistics support force in Beijing on September 13. In addition to the Wuhan base, five joint logistics support centers have also been set up in Wuxi, Guilin, Xining, Shenyang and Zhengzhou.…

THE UNITED STATES People observe the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the country at the site of the World Trade Center buildings in New York City that were destroyed on September 11, 2001 SOUTH KOREA People watch a large TV screen at a railway station in Seoul as news breaks of a 5.3-magnitutde earthquake detected in North Korea on September 9. The earthquake was caused by a nuclear test, according to subsequent reports CROATIA A voter casts a ballot at a polling station in Zagreb in the country’s parliamentary election on September 11 ITALY Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz holds the Golden Lion award for his movie, The Woman Who Left, at the Venice Film Festival on September 10 IRAQ A police officer stands guard at the site…

After attending the G20 Hangzhou Summit in China, state leaders of East Asia and some other countries moved to Vientiane, the Laotian capital, for a series of an-nual summits convened by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), whose rotat-ing presidency is held by Laos this year. Chinese Premier Li Keqiang attended three leaders’ meetings with ASEAN at the center on September 7-9. The three meet-ings were the 19th ASEAN-China Summit, the 19th ASEAN Plus Three (China, Japan and South Korea) Summit, and the 11th East Asia Summit which U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev also attended. At the annual ASEAN Summit, held in Vientiane on September 6, leaders of all 10 members engaged in a discussion with the theme Turning Vision into Reality for a…

In a garden at the foot of the Luofu Mountain in south China’s Guangdong Province, sweet wormwood dips and sways in the gentle wind. The plant, found across China, has saved the lives of millions of people worldwide. Wormwood is a herb also known as Artemisia annua or qinghao in Mandarin, and it has brought fame to the 2015 Nobel medical laureate Tu Youyou, who extracted artemisinin from the plant to treat malaria. Tu drew inspiration from a classic medical book titled The Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergency Treatments, written by ancient pharmacist and alchemist Ge Hong. Ge lived in seclusion on Luofu Mountain between the 3rd and 4th century. Because of Ge’s contribution to the de-velopment of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), the herb-rich Luofu Mountain, lo-cated in the city…

A Day to Say Thanks A student gives a teacher a kiss of gratitude at an event marking the 32nd Teachers’ Day, which fell on September 10, in a kindergarten in Nanfeng County, south China’s Jiangxi Province. Rights Protection The judicial authorities have reformed many areas in order to further improve the legal procedures for safeguarding human rights, according to a white paper issued by the State Council Information Office on September 12. The white paper, titled New Progress in the Judicial Protection of Human Rights in China, said the government has reformed the case admission system by converting the case-filing review system into a case- filing registration system. China has revised its Criminal Procedure Law and implemented legal principles, in dubio pro reo , as well as the exclusion…

Upon hearing that a young woman from east China’s Shandong Province had died of a heart attack after being swindled by a telecom fraudster, Zhao Xiaocong, a freelancer living in Beijing, felt his temper rising. Zhao has also been a victim of telecom fraud. Last year, he received a phone call claiming that one of his friends had been injured in a traffic accident in north China’s Hebei Province and had been sent to a near-by hospital. The fraudster, who gave Zhao his friend’s name and other credible informa-tion, asked Zhao to send 3,000 yuan ($449) to pay for his friend’s emergency medical treatment. Without hesitation, Zhao remitted the money, but when he phoned his friend the next day, he found out he had been defrauded. “In fact, I frequently…