The first high-speed railway linking Beijing and north China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region went into service Monday, cutting the travel time between Hohhot and Beijing, about 500 km apart, from over 9 hours to about two hours with the launch of the new service.
Pingtang Bridge, the highest concrete bridge tower in the world, on Monday opened to traffic in SW China’s Guizhou.
The bridge will serve as a major connection on the Pingtang-Luodian Expressway. The opening of the bridge will reduce the travel time between Pingtang and Luodian from over two and a half hours to about one hour.
A self-elevating wind turbine installation vessel has been delivered Thursday to a subsidiary of China Communications Construction Company.
The vessel, developed by Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries Co., Ltd., integrates multiple functions such as large equipment hoisting, installation and transportation.
It is 90 meters long and 40.8 meters wide. With a deck area of 2,400 square meters and a variable load of around 3,200 tonnes, the ship can accommodate three six-megawatt wind turbines or two eight-megawatt wind turbines.
Former Secretary General of the League of Arab States talked about China, its development and its Belte and Road Initiative.
During the last four decades, China has been praised worldwide for its economic growth represented by a series of impressive numbers. Among this data, China is frequently shown as the leading Asian country in terms of the number of billionaires created each year as a consequence of capital shifting from West to East. Cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Shenzhen have constantly climbed up the rankings of cities where the highest number of millionaires and billionaires live and work.
This glittering data cannot hide the fact that China is still a developing country where poverty remains present, especially in rural areas and the western part of the country. The latest data released on Feb 15 of this year by the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics show that at the end of 2018, there were over 16 million people living below the official poverty line.
According to the goals of China’s government, poverty reduction will have been accomplished when standards such as access to food, clothing, compulsory education for children, basic medical treatment and good living conditions are all met.
In order to deliver these goals by 2020, China should lift out of poverty an average of 8 million rural residents each year from now to 2020. The country has seen a steady decline in the number of impoverished rural residents from nearly 100 million in late 2012 to 16 million by the end of 2018, as shown in data from China’s National Bureau of Statistics. By the end of 2019, this number should be around 6 million and reach zero by the end of 2020.
Most of the poor in China live in the countryside, where farming is generally the only form of employment. One option could be migration to big cities, which have the best job opportunities, but the household registration system or hukou creates a lot of limitations, such as living conditions in the outskirts of the cities and restricted access to schools for children.
The elimination of rural poverty represents without a doubt one of the main policy goals of President Xi Jinping. Last year it was identified, along with financial risk and curbing pollution, as one of the “three tough battles” for controlling economic policy, and it was also central to the commitment of the Fifth Plenary Session of the 18th Chinese Communist Party (CCP) held in October 2015 to deliver a “moderately prosperous society” by 2021, when the CPC will celebrate its centenary.
The government has in the last few years strongly increased its financial support, and local government funding has also been part of the equation. Financial institutions such as the Agricultural Development Bank of China, Agricultural Bank of China and Rural Credit Co-operative have increased their contributions of issued loans for relevant projects.
Local and provincial levels have been given political pressure, as the central government has set poverty alleviation as an indicator that government officials are evaluated on, besides GDP and social stability. In order to avoid any shortcuts, government officials have been forbidden from simply distributing funds without finding ways of reaching sustainable and steady income streams.
The strategy deployed by the government is to go for the final mile toward full eradication by targeting individual households in need of support, instead of whole villages, counties or provinces. In this way the funds provided at a discounted rate by government and financial institutions will be utilized for building rural infrastructure and will encourage self-development, creating sustainability through a mass entrepreneurship and innovation campaign.
If China is able to accomplish its 2020 goal, it will be 10 years ahead of schedule to meet the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals’ target of ending global poverty by 2030.
China’s contribution to global poverty reduction has been remarkable during the last four decades, having lifted out of poverty over 700 million people, more than the entire population of Europe, and serving as an example for countries afflicted by the same problem, such as those in Africa.
When poverty is officially eliminated, it will certainly become one of the most important legacies of President Xi and a very admirable one, since poverty eradication is a common goal for humankind.
The first road bridge linking Russia and China is complete following the launch of a natural gas pipeline between the two countries.
The new bridge, which spans the River Amur and is expected to open in the spring, will link the city of Blagoveshchensk in Russia’s Far East with Heihe in northeastern China in an effort to move larger amounts of freight traffic and agricultural products between the two countries.
Construction started in 2016, and while it was completed on the Chinese side by October 2018, the Russian side took longer and was more expensive. The bridge itself required the construction of more than 12 miles of new roads, which was done by a Russo-Chinese company.
The project cost about $295 million and spans more than 1,700 feet, according to CBS News. About 2 million Chinese tourists and 4 million metric tons of goods are expected to cross each year.
This was the first Chinese-built power plant in Europe, whose opening led to the creation of jobs and a pouring of investment into the infrastructure of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
A tour inside the Stanari Thermal Power Plant, which has become a source of pride in the local community.
Tsinghua Unigroup, one of China’s leading chipmakers, has hired Japanese semiconductor industry veteran Yukio Sakamoto as a senior vice president and also head of the company’s Japan unit.
Sakamoto, 72, served as chief executive of once-leading Japanese chipmaker Elpida Memory, which was established by combining the memory chip units of NEC and Hitachi.
Sakamoto led Elpida for over a decade, from 2002 to 2013, successfully listing the company’s shares on the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2004. But the financial crisis and falling chip prices hurt the company’s finances, eventually leading to its bankruptcy in 2012 and its acquisition by U.S. peer Micron Technology the following year.
Besides Sakamoto’s experience, the Chinese government-backed Unigroup likely aims to put his connections in Japan and beyond to work as it expands its reach.
Pay back to United States.
In a move to stem its property prices from soaring beyond the grasp of ordinary folks like in Hong Kong, Shenzhen is introducing a new reform to its housing system.
The municipal government this week published a regulation stipulating that plots sold for subsidised housing should be priced at 30% to 40% of a benchmark land rate which it has just implemented across the city, reported the South China Morning Post yesterday.
Newly affordable homes in its downtown area, where the special economic zone originally was, will be capped at 50,000 yuan (RM29,601) per sq m (10.8 sq ft). In other areas, the ceiling price for affordable homes will be 20,000 and 30,000 yuan per sq m, reported the state-run Shenzhen Special Zone Daily.
The mega tech-city which links mainland China to Hong Kong has become a place with one of the most expensive properties when its average residential price increased more than 10 times to above 50,000 yuan per sq m between 2005 and 2015.
