Innholdsfortegnelse for 12/22/2016 i Beijing Review

November CPI The consumer price index (CPI), a main gauge of inflation, grew 2.3 percent year on year in November, up from October’s 2.1 percent, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) announced on December 9. On a month-on-month basis, the CPI rose 0.1 percent in November. NBS statistician Sheng Guoqing attributed the stronger growth of inflation to higher food and fuel prices. Vegetable prices jumped 5.5 percent month on month, as the cold weather disrupted supplies, contributing 0.14 percentage points to CPI growth. On a year-on-year basis, vegetable prices soared 15.8 percent, compared with a 13-percent increasein October. The prices of petrol, diesel, gas, coal, water and electricity also increased in November, also due to the cold weather. However, the price of fruit and pork continued to fall from October,…

Comments to chenran@bjreview.com While driving their railway freight wagon back and forth to de-liver equipment, Li Xiaohua and Peng Zhanbin enjoy a bonus—watching wildlife pass-ing by. The Chinese veterans have been working at the construction site of the Mombasa-Nairobi Standard-Gauge Railway (SGR) in Kenya since May 2016. Officially started on December 12, 2014, the 472-km railway by China Road and Bridge Corp. (CRBC) is the biggest infrastructure project in Kenya since its independence in 1963. It is also considered the flagship of Kenya Vision2030, the development plan that seeks to realize a medium-industrialized Kenya by then. The existing meter-gauge railway built by the British to connect port city Mombasa and capital Nairobi has been used for over a century. Its annual freight volume began decreasing due to lack of maintenance…

Comments to yinpumin@bjreview.com Luo Yixiao’s story was heart-rending. The 5-year-old in Shenzhen, a city in south China’s Guangdong Province, had been diagnosed with leukemia and her family pro-fessedly did not have money to pay for her expensive treatment. Her father Luo Er posted an online ap-peal for help in November 2016. It caught the eye of Shenzhen-based financial compa-ny Xiaotongren, which said it would donate 1 yuan ($0.15) each time someone reposted the appeal. Consequently, the appeal went viral on different social platforms. In five days it had been read over 100,000 times on WeChat alone. Readers also chipped in and more than 2 million yuan ($297,177) was raised. Then there was a revelation. More information surfaced on the Internet, indicating Luo’s family, far from being poor, had three apartments…

A major task for China’s macroeconomic regulation is to advance supply-side structural reform. The top priority of such reform is to reduce excess production capacity, including by shutting down zombie companies—poorly-performing state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Zombie companies emerged due to government intervention, not market forces. Closing these non-productive, loss-making businesses, however, requires both the government and the market to take a role. If shutdown of such companies solely depends on companies or local governments that would voluntarily do so, a major problem will arise. Industries such as steel and coal have cy-clical production fluctuations. Assuming no change in the overall demand for a specific product, local governments face a so-called “prisoner’s dilemma” in reducing excess pro-duction capacity in a particular industry. Local authorities and companies typically hope that while rivals make…

Students sing a song to commemorate the victims of the Nanjing Massacre in Nanjing, capital of east China’s Jiangsu Province, on December 13, the 79th anniversary of the atrocity and China’s third National Memorial Day. Japanese invaders captured Nanjing, China’s capital at the time, on December 13, 1937 and began a rampage that lasted more than a month. Over 300,000 unarmed Chinese soldiers and civilians were murdered. December 13 was designated as National Memorial Day for Nanjing Massacre Victims in February 2014.…

ISRAEL An F-35 fighter jet arrives at the Nevatim Air Force Base near Beersheba City. Israel’s air force received its first two F-35 advanced stealth fighters from the United States on December 12 EGYPT Pallbearers carry the coffin of a Cairo cathedral bombing victim during a funeral in Cairo on December 12. At least 24 people were killed in the church blast a day earlier INDIA Huge waves lash the Marina Beach in Chennai, capital of the southern state of Tamil Nadu, as cyclone Vardah approaches on December 12 MALAYSIA Sultan Muhammad V of Kelantan, who succeeded Tuanku Abdul Halim Mu’adzam Shah as Malaysia’s head of state, reviews a guard of honor in Kuala Lumpur on December 13 UNITED NATIONS UN Secretary General-designate Antonio Guterres takes the oath of office…

Comments to chenran@bjreview.com In the spacious, bright and slightly noisy sew-ing section of Tanzania Tooku Garments, Shraban Kitwana works fast at his desk, quickly unhooking two pieces of a pair of trou-sers from the dispatching machine and partly stitching them together on his sewing machine in just 10 seconds. The 21-year-old is one of the few male workers at the company’s sewing section, working there for two years. “I like this job,” he smiled. “Gender is not a problem at all.” Grooming talent Established in July 2012 by J.D. United Manufacturing Corp., a global supplier of garments and home textiles headquartered in Changzhou, east China’s Jiangsu Province, the garment company is located inside the Benjamin William Mkapa Special Economic Zone in Dar es Salaam. With an investment of $16 million,…

Comments to liuyunyun@bjreview.com The author is a former senior staff member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and an op-ed contributor to Beijing Review President-elect Donald Trump’s pick of Rex Tillerson for secretary of state offers many possibilities to improve the conduct of the United States’ foreign relations. A realistic, practical, and businesslike approach to foreign relations is certainly in order for Washington. But Tillerson faces political obstacles. During the campaign, Trump made it clear that he wants a new foreign policy and new people to create and implement it. He criticized the policy of unnecessary inter-vention and war in the Middle East and said he wanted to improve relations with major powers such as Russia. He said he wanted new thinking and a policy that puts “America…

Comments to zhouxiaoyan@bjreview.com As the United States and other developed countries grapple with rising trade pro-tectionism and nationalism, can China assume the mantle of leadership in terms of globalization? The Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road (the Belt and Road Initiative), a strategy conceived by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013 to boost infrastructure construction, trade and investment between Asia and Eurasia, links more than 70 countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe to revive the ancient Silk Road. China’s trade with the countries that have joined the initiative had already surpassed $1 trillion in 2015, according to the Ministry of Commerce. But unlike the original Silk Road, this new project promotes globalization with Chinese features by reorganizing value chains and the rules governing…

Snow Beauty Artists create a snow sculpture for the 29th Harbin Sun Island International Snow Sculpture Art Expo in Harbin, capital of northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province, on December 12. The expo is planned to open on December 22. New Online Rule A new Ministry of Culture regulation will require those who present streamed online shows to register using their real names. Operators of online shows will have to identify presenters via interviews or video calls, and apply for a license from provincial cultural authorities. The documents will be filed with the ministry. The regulation, which comes into effect on January 1, 2017, also requires the operators to obtain a permit from the ministry before running online channels in Hong Kong and Macao special administrative regions and Taiwan of China and…

Comments to liuyunyun@bjreview.com The author is an op-ed contributor to Beijing Review and a researcher at the Pangoal Institution The world in 2016 has seen plenty of dramatic political events, engendering a sense among the international com-munity of the United States’ receding lead in global affairs. Meanwhile, proactive diplomacyby China, now one of the world’s major players, has come to the fore. Chinese wisdom The 11th G20 Summit, hosted by China in Hangzhou in September, is one of the highlights of Chinese diplomacy in 2016. On the basis of China’s agenda-setting efforts, the summit’s success was cemented by the release of the Hangzhou Communiqué, in which G20 leaders stated their determination to foster an innovative, invigorated, interconnected and inclusive world economy to usher in a new era ofglobal growth and…

Comments to zanjifang@bjreview.com When Li Si was a child, his role model was Zhang Haidi, the writer who has been called China’s Helen Keller for overcom-ing childhood paraplegia to become an activist for the rights of people with disabilities. One of his primary school books carried Zhang’s photograph and to him, she symbolized the qualities of cherishing life and striving for self-improvement. After he grew up, Li became a social worker,working to support people with disabilities in Shenzhen, a major city in Guangdong Province. He started his career in social services in 2008, the same year in which Zhang became president of the China Disabled Persons’ Federation (CDPF). The eight years since have been a golden period for the cause of people with disabilities in China, witnessing the 2008 Beijing…

Comments to dengyaqing@bjreview.com Two years after the launch of the Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect program, China introduced another stock trading link between the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong. This move serves to further push forward the yuan’s internationalization and ce-ments Hong Kong’s status as an offshore yuan hub. “Only by opening wider to the outside world and constantly advancing the marketization, legalization and internationalization of China’s capital market can the real economy be better served, making the capital market more competitive,” said Liu Shiyu, Chairman of China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC), in his speech at the launch ceremony of the Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Connect program on December 5. His view echoed that of Wu Lijun, Chairman of Shenzhen Stock Exchange, who believes that with the Shenzhen-HK program in place, the…

Comments to jijing@bjreview.com Hu Jiaojiao, an aficionado of mountain climbing and rafting, was first intro-duced to the Access Water project when she helped organize a lecture in 2011 for Norwegian polar explorer Liv Arnesen at the China University of Geosciences (Beijing), where she was studying for a master’s degree in enter-prise management. The project, cofounded by Arnesen and U.S. explorer Ann Bancroft in 2000, is a global awareness and outreach program aimed at spurring people around the world to join hands in solving the global water crisis. The initiative seeks to educate young people and engage them through a water education curriculum. Bancroft and Arnesen have handpicked a woman from each continent to create an international team to undertake water expeditions and educational programs on one continent every few years,…