China Chronicles January 31, 2013
- Carbon monoxide kills 12 in NE China mine
CARBON monoxide has been blamed for the Tuesday deaths of 12 workers in a coal mine in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, a local official said today.
Three workers entered the Yongsheng mine in Dongning County to pump out water before passing out from carbon monoxide poisoning around 10:30 am Tuesday, said Zhang Fuguang, deputy head of the county government.
Zhang said an initial investigation showed that a dense buildup of carbon monoxide in the mine was caused by self-igniting coal in an old mine located adjacent to the Yongsheng mine.
The mine's managers organized volunteer rescue efforts to locate the workers, but the rescuers were also poisoned, as they had no equipment to detect the carbon monoxide.
More than 30 professional rescuers arrived Tuesday afternoon and pulled 20 people out of the mine, including the trapped workers. Twelve of the people, including the head of the mine, died despite medical treatment.
The other eight are being treated at local hospitals, where they are in stable condition.
- NPC cuts back on extravagance
Flowers, banquets, gifts, welcoming ceremonies and more importantly, useless long-winded speeches will all be a thing of the past as China's top legislature laid out strict instructions for its annual session next month.
Xi Jinping has made cutting back on extravagance and waste a key theme of his first few weeks in office since becoming Party chief in November, seeking to assuage anger at corruption.
The first annual session of the 12th NPC will start on March 5, during which top state leaders, including the country's president, will be elected.
"Deputies will be encouraged to focus on key issues and avoid empty talk," the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress said in a statement.
"There will be no flowers in deputies' hotel rooms and no welcoming ceremonies at the airport or railway stations," it added.
"All deputies will eat at buffets without expensive food or alcohol, while extravagant galas, gifts and performances will not be arranged," the statement said.
Unpopular traffic controls, which often include shutting down busy main roads and worsening already terrible traffic in the capital city, will also be kept to a minimum, according to the statement.
Xi has already told officials to end their normal practice of giving stultifying speeches and pre-arranging fawning welcomes from local people and banished alcohol from military functions.
Li Jianguo, vice chairman of the NPC Standing Committee, is also pushing for improved working style during the session, the statement said. Li made the remarks after Xi called for the return to the fine tradition of "being diligent and thrifty."
The NPC Standing Committee statement said expenditures will be tightened for the session.
NPC deputies will be encouraged to focus on key issues and avoid empty talk, while the media will be encouraged to report more on deputies from grassroots areas.
The number of session staffers will also be strictly controlled, the statement said.
- Woman represents Shanxi for 12th time
SHEN Jilan, an 84-year-old villager in north China's Shanxi Province, was elected deputy to China's parliament for the 12th time yesterday.
She and 69 other delegates were chosen at the first session of the 12th Shanxi Provincial People's Congress.
Shen has a wealth of political experience from six decades. After holding her status as a national model worker from 1952 to 1996, she has now become the only person in China to be consecutively elected 12 times as a deputy to the NPC.
"I will try my very best to do practical things for the people," she said after the session, adding that what she cares about most is building China into a moderately prosperous society and helping more people get rich.
At the age of 25, Shen broke a millennia-old Chinese convention in the early 1950s by pushing for equal pay for women, although she found it hard to communicate her concerns to the country's leaders at the time.
"My heart just beat like a drum when I sat there," recalled Shen of her early experiences as an NPC deputy. "Imagine, I was just one of the only 147 female deputies in the then 1,200-member Congress.
"Everything was fresh to me."
Shen met Chairman Mao Zedong in Beijing in 1954, fulfilling the biggest dream for Chinese people at that time.
Over the years, Shen has put forward many proposals related to agriculture, water conservation and tree planting.
- Privacy fears a festival concern
AS though struggling to get a ticket back home for the Spring Festival holiday was not good enough, young Chinese are increasingly complaining about their probing parents and relatives wanting to know their salary and marital status.
The festival, which falls on February 10 this year, marks the start of the Chinese Lunar New Year, an annual occasion for family get-togethers and reunions.
A recent post on Sina Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, listed a string of questions that young Chinese are likely to face when they return home to their families - questions that cover everything, including salary and love life, that many are deriding them as too invasive.
Nearly 200,000 people have left comments on the post, revealing their own embarrassing experiences. A woman named Geng Lu cited a litany of questions that she faced during previous visits.
"How much did you get for the year-end bonus? Do you have a boyfriend yet? When are you going to get married?" she wrote. "The cross-interrogations freak me out. The thought of being embarrassed makes me hesitant to rush home for the festival," the 24-year-old woman said.
Geng is just one of the increasing number of young people who say they feel suffocated by their relatives' overwhelming concern about their private lives.
The difficulty young people are having in accepting their relatives' well-intended inquiries can be attributed to the fact that the two generations are growing apart in terms of how they believe the former should live their lives, said Xia Xueluan, a sociology professor at Peking University.
For centuries, Chinese parents have believed in marrying off their children at an early age, with expectation too for grandchildren. However, youngsters now are more inclined to set their own timetable regarding marriage and kids, Xia said.
Salaries, like marital status, are more a matter of privacy that young people would rather their parents did not pry into. Some of them come up with white ! lies regarding their salaries and marital status, or even rent a partner!
"The essence of the Spring Festival should be family reunions and affection, which should not be overshadowed by materialism," said Zhang Taofu, a journalism professor at Fudan University.
- Xi elected NPC delegate
PARTY General Secretary Xi Jinping and 58 others were elected deputies to the 12th National People's Congress, or China's legislature, in Shanghai yesterday.
Shanghai's Party Secretary Han Zheng and Acting Mayor Yang Xiong were also among those elected. The Standing Committee of the NPC will evaluate their qualifications.
- Top energy head faces probe for bank fraud
China has started criminal investigation into its top energy administrator for fraudulently trying to arrange a bank loan for a businessman after a journalist blew the whistle on the scandal on the Internet.
"Relevant departments of the central government have launched a criminal investigation in response to my whistleblowing," Luo Changping, deputy managing editor of Caijing magazine, wrote on his twitter-like Sina Weibo yesterday.
In a weibo post on December 6, Luo claimed that Liu Tienan, head of the National Energy Administration, helped to arrange US$200 million in bank loan for businessman Ni Ritao.
Ni sought the loan from two Chinese banks, claiming that the money would be used for the acquisition of New Skeena, a Canadian pulp mill - which he had already bought.
The attempt to get loan nearly succeeded and Liu's family had reportedly received kickbacks from Ni.
The National Energy Administration issued denials on December 6, slamming Luo for "pure slander."
But the administration was criticized for being quick to deny the allegations, especially as it targeted an individual and not the agency.
The NEA is under the National Development and Reform Commission, China's top planning agency, of which Liu is also a vice director.
Luo also alleged that Liu had forged his academic credentials and sent death threats to his mistress after their love went sour when he served in the Chinese Embassy in Tokyo in the late 1990s.
Luo said yesterday he had been assisting authorities with the investigation for the past weeks and won't be making any further comments before an official announcement is made.
Liu was in Moscow with Vice Premier Wang Qishan for an energy conference when the scandal first broke.
He has since carried on with his work, delivering a speech at the annual national energy work conference earlier this month.
The National Energy Administration wasn't available for comment yesterday, nor was the Central Commission fo! r Discipline Inspection, the Communist Party of China's graft-battling body which is headed by Wang.
Liu was appointed director of the NEA at the end of 2010.
- PLA Navy fleet to conduct open sea exercises
A CHINESE People's Liberation Army Navy fleet has set off from a military port in east China's Qingdao City for regular open sea training in the west Pacific, military sources revealed yesterday.
The fleet departed on Tuesday morning and comprises three ships - the missile destroyer Qingdao and the missile frigates Yantai and Yancheng - carrying three helicopters, all from the North China Sea Fleet.
During the voyage, the fleet is scheduled to conduct multi-program training sessions in an area where China has been carrying out regular patrols, according to the sources.
Tian Zhong, the fleet commander, said conducting training in international waters is a normal practice among various navies around the world, as well as part of China's regular efforts to improve the PLA Navy's combat capabilities.
The fleet aims to boost its capabilities in carrying out diversified military missions through the open-sea training, according to Tian.
The fleet will conduct more than 20 types of exercises, including maritime confrontation, open-sea mobile combat, law enforcement missions and open-sea naval commanding.
The training area will include the Yellow, East China and South China seas, the Miyako Strait, the Bashi Channel and in areas east of Taiwan Island.
As part of the ongoing open-sea training, the fleet held a four-hour confrontation drill in the Yellow Sea on Tuesday with another PLA Navy fleet set to depart for escort missions in areas off Somalia.
The missile destroyer Qingdao and the missile frigates Yantai and Yancheng are all domestically produced ships.
The Qingdao, which is among China's second-generation missile destroyers, was commissioned in 1993 and has taken part in more than 50 key missions, including escort missions in the Gulf of Aden. It has a displacement of 4,800 tons. The Yantai was commissioned in 2011 and Yancheng last year. Both have a displacement of 4,050 tons.
- 'House sister' scandal nets 7, including 4 cops
China has detained seven people, including four police officers from three provincial areas, for their roles in a scandal related to a woman who used multiple identities to buy properties.
Dubbed the "house sister" by savvy netizens after the scam was uncovered, the woman turned out to be the owner of more than 20 apartments.
The arrested will be subject to a criminal investigation for alleged violations, according to a statement issued by the Ministry of Public Security yesterday.
Police investigation found that Gong Ai'ai, a resident of Shenmu County in northwest China's Shaanxi Province, had at least two identities - Gong Ai'ai and Gong Xianxia - and several hukous, the Chinese household registration record.
Gong reportedly owns more than 20 properties worth about 1 billion yuan (US$159 million) in Beijing, some of which were purchased using fake identities.
According to an earlier ministry statement, Gong first registered as a resident in Shenmu. Later she registered three identities respectively in two counties in the neighboring Shanxi Province and Beijing between 2004 and 2008.
Two police officers in Shanxi Province have been detained for helping Gong obtain fake household registration certificates, local authorities told Xinhua news agency yesterday.
Officers Li Youbing and Bai Wenkui are suspected of violating household registration management laws and aiding Gong, a former deputy head of a bank in Shenmu County, Xinhua said.
Another officer in Beijing's Fangshan District, surnamed Liu, and a policeman in Shenmu's police department identified only as Zhang were also detained.
Two others, an employee and a retired personnel from the Beijing Education Examination Authority, and an executive from a Beijing training company, are also in the dock, the statement said.
The ministry said it has launched a special campaign in the identity and hukou administrative system to comb out fake and duplicated identity records. It said 121 pol! ice officers were punished for fraud relating to hukou in recent years.
The statement said the "house sister" scandal had highlighted loopholes in the household registration system. The certificates are necessary to secure education and medical care, as well as to restrict property purchases.
- Japan urged to create conditions to foster ties
CHINESE Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei yesterday urged Japan to create conditions for the normal development of bilateral relations.
Hong said he noted that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had called for a summit between Japan and China to mend bilateral relations hampered by their recent territorial disputes.
China attaches importance to developing relations with Japan, Hong said, stressing that the country hopes that Japan will make joint efforts with China to overcome major difficulties to bring bilateral ties back to the track for normal development.
The spokesman confirmed that Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi met with Tomiichi Murayama, former Japanese prime minister and honorary advisor to the Japan-China Friendship Association, and the body's chief, Koichi Kato, in Beijing on Tuesday.
- Debate over restriction on fireworks
Although firecrackers are a significant part of China's biggest annual holiday, the Spring Festival, air pollution concerns have led some to call for limits on their use.
Record levels of smog that have shrouded north China in recent weeks have led policy-makers to work on pollution solutions. However, their ideas are aimed more at cutting vehicle emissions and cleaning up heavily polluting factories, leaving netizens to make their own suggestions to cut down on use of firecrackers.
Firecrackers are set off during the Spring Festival to create a jubilant atmosphere and ward off evil spirits, as per Chinese mythology. However, they also cause a dense cloud of smoke that has been the subject of complaints for many years.
According to figures released by the Beijing Municipal Environmental Monitoring Center, PM2.5 readings exceeded 200 micrograms per cubic meter during last year's Spring Festival, largely due to firecrackers.
Readings of PM2.5, or airborne particles measuring less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter, is used to determine air quality. A reading of 200 micrograms per cubic meter means serious pollution.
On Sina Weibo, about 40,000 posts yesterday discussed ways to restrict the use of fireworks during the Spring Festival, which begins from February 10 this year.
Some 2,000 bloggers have said that they will set off fewer firecrackers this year because of smog concerns.
"Xiaojiudeyeye," a native of Qingdao in east China's Shandong Province, said he hopes the city will ban firecrackers during the seven-day holiday.
In an online poll conducted by the People's Daily, the flagship newspaper of the Communist Party of China, nearly 70 percent of respondents said they will not set off any fireworks.
However, others have argued that an arbitrary ban on the Spring Festival tradition will dilute the holiday atmosphere.
"Paradise1212" said China needs to shut down factories that pollute the air instead of restraining cultural customs. Another! advocated the use of "electronic firecrackers" that can create laser images in the sky similar to fireworks.
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Parkview Green is a brand new retail, office and boutique hotel development in Beijing's CBD.
The large suites in the hotel are just stunning; some even contain private swimming pools on their semi-indoor balconies. - Marching Soldiers
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Parkview Green is a brand new retail, office and boutique hotel development in Beijing's CBD.
It also contains a large amount of modern Chinese artwork, such as these soldiers. - Huizhou District, Huangshan, Anhui Province / PR China
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© André Vogelaere. All my images are protected under international authors copyright laws and may not be downloaded, not be used on websites or blogs, reproduced, copied, transmitted or manipulated without my written explicit permission.
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