Innholdsfortegnelse for Vol. 60/No. 14 i Beijing Review

ITALY EU leaders on March 25 attend a gathering to mark the 60th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, the foundation of the European integration process, with a major ceremony in the Italian capital NORTH KOREA Top leader Kim Jong Un visits the remodeled Korean Revolution Museum in Pyongyang, emphasizing the importance of revolutionary traditions, on March 28 PAKISTAN People gather at the collision site of a passenger train and an oil tanker in the Sheikhupura District of Punjab Province on March 28. At least two people were killed and 10 others injured THAILAND Brides-to-be compete in the EAZY Running of the Brides contest in Bangkok on March 25. A total of 250 coupels participated in the event in hopes of winning a wedding package worth 1 million baht ($28,984)…

When Zhu Hui sat down to watch the match between China and Iran on the night of March 28, there was little optimism about the chances of the Chinese national team. They had lost almost all their group matches, and only a surprise victory over South Korea a week earlier had kept their hopes alive of surviving the qualifying rounds to reach the 2018 FIFA World Cup. “China’s fledgling revival under Marcello Lippi will be tested by the strong Iranian team in the World Cup qualifying match on March 28,” the headlines screamed, and the fears were proved to be well-founded when Iran won 1-0. But Zhu, a professional football coach, finds a silver lining in the defeat. “I am actually satisfied,” said the 35-year-old, who coaches at Lehuo, a…

Meng Fang, a 32-year-old woman, has been searching in vain to buy an apartment in Beijing since early 2015. “The price of an apartment that I once planned to buy at 4.5 million yuan ($653,000) in 2015 has now soared to 9.3 million yuan ($1.34 million),” said Meng. She eventually gave up on buying it because the owner refused to meet her. This January, Meng decided to lower her expectations, hoping to withdraw from the fierce home purchasing battle before the Lunar New Year holidays (January 27 to February 2). The apartment she took a fancy to was priced at 9.5 million yuan ($1.37 million), with a tax of 600,000 yuan ($87,102), and was located around the Fifth Ring Road in north Beijing. “Just when the home owner and I…

I think I have the best of two worlds. I was born in Bangladesh, and I grew up in China, the land of Confucius and my second home. The earliest and most prominent memories of my life are from China, and Chinese is a language I have spoken since childhood. When I was just over 2 years old, my parents and I moved to Beijing. My father received an invitation from China Radio International to work as a language expert in their Bengali language department. Bengali is the official language of Bangladesh as well as one of the official languages of India. It is spoken in South Asia as well as wherever there is a Bengali community worldwide. My father told me that he always had a dream of traveling…

A Time for Remembrance People gather in Lhasa, Tibet Autonomous Region in southwest China, to celebrate Serfs’ Emancipation Day on March 28. The day marks the freeing of 1 million people, or 90p ercent of the region’s population at that time, from the feudal serf system in 1959. Zero Hunger Plan China’s Ministry of Agriculture (MOA) and the UN World Food Programme (WFP) on March 28 jointly announced the launch of a strategic plan to address food security in China and other developing countries. The five-year plan (2017-21), a collaboration among MOA, WFP and other partners, will help realize the goal of ending hunger, achieving food security and improved nutrition, and promoting sustainable agriculture, one of the 17 goals raised by the UN for its 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.…

On March 12, Xiao Yaqing, Chairman of the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council (SASAC), urged centrally administered state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to strictly control haphazard investment practices and consider market rules when determining their development strategies. Xiao said central SOEs have to increase profits and improve profitability, otherwise fundamentally reducing their debt levels and eliminating the associated risks will be impossible. In previous years, central SOEs reduced their asset-liability ratios by expanding asset scale and investment. Pressure brought by the global economic downturn, however, exposed problems that such expansion had concealed, and the ratios soon started to rise again. As supervisory authorities have strengthened their oversight in recent years, expansion of investment and assets by central SOEs has been slowed, and their debt ratios have stopped…

The pipa is a traditional Chinese musical instrument belonging to the category of plucked instruments. The name “pipa” is made up of two Chinese syllables, “pi” (?) and “pa” (?), which refer to the two major hand postures when the instrument is played: “Pi” is to strike the strings outward with the right hand, and “pa” is to pluck the strings inward toward the palm of the hand. The pipa, also called the Chinese lute, is one of the most popular Chinese instruments and has been played for almost 2,000 years in China. The instrument has a pear-shaped wooden body with four or five strings. The earliest record of the pipa in China’s history can be dated back to the Qin Dynasty (221–206 B.C.). The Tang Dynasty (618-907) was a…

Glass Manufacture Upgrading Robots work along an automatic production line of a glass manufacturer in Shahe City of Hebei Province on March 26. Shahe, home to over 600 glass producers, is gearing up fori ndustrial transformation and upgrading so as to make glass production greener and more diversified. AIIB’s New Members Canada will join the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), making it the first North American country to join the organization. Canada is one of the 13 applicants approved by AIIB’s Board of Governors, bringing the bank’s total approved membership to 70. The approved applicants include five regional economies— Afghanistan, Armenia, Fiji, China’s Hong Kong and Timor-Leste. There are also eight members from beyond the region, including Belgium, Canada, Ethiopia, Hungary, Ireland, Peru, Sudan and Venezuela. Furthermore, AIIB President Jin…

On March 24, Yang Kai, Chairman of China Huishan Dairy Holdings, a company that covers the entire dairy value chain from plantation to dairy farming and manufacturing and is based in northeast China’s Liaoning Province, issued an announcement. “In light of the significant decrease in the share price of China Huishan Dairy Holdings in the morning, the company requested the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong to halt trading in its shares with effect from 1:00 p.m. today,” it said. “The company will issue an announcement as soon as practicable after it has completed its inquiries.” The “significant decrease” refers to a plunge of more than 90 percent in the company’s stock price, which saw Huishan Dairy’s market value diminish by nearly $4 billion. The share price plummeted from 2.81 Hong…

When Beijing resident Huang Mei leaves home for work in the morning, she usually carries two bags of trash in hand. One contains kitchen waste and the other miscellaneous items such as paper, plastics and cans. Behind her apartment building stand three garbage bins in green, blue and grey meant respectively for recyclables, kitchen waste and other garbage. She puts the trash bags into the bins accordingly. Huang is a staunch supporter of garbage classification. The community she resides in, Shangdi Dongli of Haidian District, is a garbage classification pilot. The project started in October 2013. A bulletin board near the community’s property management office informs residents how to classify garbage. Kitchen waste collected from the community is shipped to an organic resource regeneration center to be made into fertilizer,…

It was the hand of destiny, says Raman Kapur, a veteran acupuncturist in India’s capital New Delhi, which pushed him to learn the ancient healing art. As a young doctor who was studying for his master’s degree entrance examination, Kapur was prodded by his sister and brother-in-law, both doctors in Adelaide, Australia, to do something new instead of following the conventional path in modern medicine. “Why don’t you study acupuncture?” they asked him. “It has caught on like a forest fire in Australia.” Kapur had never heard of acupuncture before. It was the early 1980s, when the mobile phone had not yet been invented, and acupuncture was an unknown phenomenon in India. Still, a long conversation with an Australian doctor who had been doing acupuncture for three years convinced him,…

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 Are robots eating up human posts? The answer seems to be “yes” in some manufacturing sectors, as robots have not only led to the disappearance of some posts, but are also forcing lower wages on human laborers. In this situation, anti-artificial intelligence (AI) activists say people can no longer turn a blind eye to the negative effects of automation. How can the challenges posed to human employment by robots be countered? In a recent interview, Microsoft founder Bill Gates proposed to tax robots. He believes…