Innholdsfortegnelse for March 12, 2015 i Beijing Review

To Russia With Love The first regular cargo train service linking northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province to central Russia leaves on its maiden voyage on February 28. The cargo train, carrying oil exploration equipment, pulled out of Xiangfang Railway Station in the provincial capital of Harbin, arrived in Biklyan, Russia, in 10 days. PMI Rebounds Chinese manufacturing business activity rebounded slightly in February but still stayed in contraction territory after falling to a 28-month low in January, official data showed on March 1. The manufacturing purchasing managers’ index (PMI), a key measure of factory activity in China, posted at 49.9 in February, up from 49.8 in the previous month, according to the data released by the National Bureau of Statistics and the China Federation of Logistics and Purchasing. A reading above…

As the old saying goes, time is money. That is especially true in the business world, where even a small temporal delay may cost millions of dollars. Tedious approval procedures cost time and therefore threaten businesses’ viability. To this end, when Chinese Premier Li Keqiang took office in March 2013, he promised that streamlining government administration would be on top of the reform agenda. He pledged to cancel or decentralize over one third of the approval items in the State Council, China’s cabinet, within his tenure. Over the past two years, the Chinese Government has made great efforts to ease market maneuverability by reducing the amount of administrative approvals required for businesses. Less administrative approvals also entail simpler procedures, take a shorter time to be processed and involve more transparency.…

Jack Ma, founder of China’s largest ecommerce business, the Alibaba Group, expressed his view on working with the government in January at Davos, Switzerland, during the World Economic Forum. “Fall in love with the government, but don’t marry them,” he said. Last September, Alibaba recorded the world’s largest initial public offering at $25 billion at the New York Stock Exchange. The role of government is indispensable in ensuring fair competition, improving the market system and fighting monopoly and other anticompetitive practices, said Liu Shijin, Deputy Director of the Development Research Center of the State Council, China’s cabinet. On the other side, Internet companies like Alibaba live on exploring new market opportunities, such as e-commerce and Internet finance. “What is bracing us is the market,” said Alibaba in a statement in…

With electric drills, laser cutting machines, sandpaper and circuit boards scattered around, Beijing Makerspace, located in Zhongguancun International Digital Design Center, could be mistaken for a typical engineering workshop. Yet, it differs from a regular workshop in that it is a laboratory where people can share resources and creative ideas and build things together. The lab’s mission is to develop open-source hardware and encourage innovation. Here people share knowledge so that anyone can build on what somebody else has done, which is expected to facilitate innovation. “Once you get an idea, you can come to the Makerspace and make it true,” said Wang Shenglin, the lab’s founder, “Because it’s a lab for anyone who has a dream.” Interesting gadgets Founded in 2011, the lab has given birth to some interesting…

A cursory glance at Dangdang.com’s recently published list of the top 10 bestselling children’s books in China in 2014 reveals one salient and perhaps sobering fact: Of the 10 titles on the list compiled by China’s premium bookselling website, only two were originally written in Chinese. The Magic School Bus by American authors Joanna Cole and Bruce Degen and The Adventures of Tintin by Belgian cartoonist Hergé (real name Georges Remi, 1907-83) came in at first and second places respectively. The two original Chinese-language entries were authored by Taiwan-based scholar Wei-Ping Chen and Chinese American writer Liu Yong. So why the dearth of authors from the Chinese mainland on the list? What is it about the work of domestic children’s writers that has so failed to capture the imagination of…

Britain’s Prince William visits the Shijia Hutong Museum in Beijing on March 2 during his first trip to China. The museum showcases the traditional lifestyle experienced in the narrow alleys, or hutongs, which used to traverse the Chinese capital. The Duke of Cambridge, the second in line to the British throne, visited China to mark the beginning of the 2015 China-UK Year of Cultural Exchange, designed to familiarize the two nations with each other’s cultures. The four-day trip also took him to Shanghai and southwest China’s Yunnan Province. The prince’s visit to China is the first by a senior British royal in nearly three decades, with the last having been Queen Elizabeth II’s tour in 1986.…

CHILE Villarrica Volcano, 18 km south of Pucón in southern Chile, erupts on March 3. Local authorities issued a red alert and urged the immediate evacuation of 3,385 people in the area SOUTH KOREA President Park Geun Hye (center) cheers during a ceremony celebrating the March First Independence Movement Day, the anniversary of the 1919 uprising against Japanese colonial rule, in Seoul on March 1 IRAQ Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi (center) arrives in the city of Samarra by military helicopter on March 1. Abadi announced the launch of a major offensive in and around Tikrit to retake one of the Islamic State group’s main strongholds LIBYA With mediation of the UN special envoy to Libya Bernardino Leo n(left), a political dialogue is resumed between the Libyan General National Congress and…

Robert Parkinson, founder and CEO of RMG Selection, a China-focused international recruitment and human resources consultancy company, recently applied for an ICP (Internet content provider) license for his company and it took him less than a month. When he carried out the same process for another website five or six years ago, the whole process took more than two months, Parkinson recalled. The Chinese Government’s drive to streamline administration and delegate power to lower levels has made it much more convenient for foreign companies to do business in China. “Things have become a little bit easier. The reform has encouraged smaller and mediumsized companies to enter the market because it becomes quicker to establish an enterprise within China,” Parkinson said. Simplified procedures Jens-Peter Otto who had worked in China for…

When Chinese President Xi Jinping first unveiled the Chinese dream concept in 2012, some observers interpreted his idea as a vague attempt to foster unity among the Chinese people. Two years later, Xi’s governing style has been widely recognized for making fruitful achievements in economic reform, anti-corruption and international relations. Few would still claim that the Chinese dream is empty rhetoric, as the reality behind the vision takes shape day by day. The Chinese dream is not limited to the Chinese people themselves in isolation from the world. The Chinese leader envisions the further integration and in-depth cooperation of the global community as necessary conditions for achieving the Chinese dream in the modern era. In the past two years, President Xi has visited more than 30 countries covering five continents,…

Three months after the previous rate cut, the People’s Bank of China (PBC), the country’s central bank, slashed benchmark interest rates by 0.25 percentage points on March 1, bringing the one-year benchmark lending rate to 5.35 percent and one-year benchmark deposit rate to 2.5 percent. The PBC also lifted the deposit rate ceiling from 1.2 times the benchmark rate to 1.3 times to further promote interest rate liberalization. The PBC said in a statement that the focus of the rate cut this time is allowing benchmark rates to continue to guide market rates, further lower financing costs and provide a neutral monetary environment for economic restructuring, transformation and upgrading. On February 5, the PBC cut the reserve requirement ratio (RRR) for all financial institutions by 0.5 percentage points, and on…

Lantern Festival Children in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, make sticky rice dumplings, or yuanxiao in Chinese, and shape them in various animals on March 4. The festival, which fell on March 5 this year, is celebrated on the 15th day of the Chinese Lunar New Year and marks the end of the Spring Festival. Online Citizenship The People’s Daily , the newspaper of the Communist Party of China (CPC), urged Internet companies and influential social media users to take responsibility in safeguarding a “clean, healthy and dynamic” cyberspace on March 4. The paper said in an editorial that “collective life” online is based on free choice by Internet users and full of varied content and information. According to the editorial, ecommerce companies should clear counterfeit goods from their platforms and search…

Since Ppdai.com, China’s first peer-to-peer (P2P) lending company, was set up in 2007, the number of P2P lending platforms in the country has been growing rapidly. By October 31, 2014, China had had a total of 1,474 P2P lending companies, and the lending amount had been far higher than that in the UK or the United States. This has certainly alleviated financing difficulties faced with small and medium-sized enterprises and promoted development of an inclusive financial system. As an emerging innovative form of financial organizations, P2P lending also involves risks. For instance, many of such platforms have suddenly gone missing, causing losses to investors and casting a slur on the reputation of the industry. One of the main reasons for the chaos in the P2P lending industry is a lack…

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 Approaching China’s Lunar New Year, which this year fell on February 19, an online picture of two street cleaners asking for fewer firecrackers to be set off went viral and generated widespread interest. The couple was photographed standing in a street holding a heart-shaped card calling on young people to cut back on the number of firecrackers they used so that they would be able to return home earlier for a reunion dinner with their family. Their message ended with the words. “Thank you for…

It’s a typical Friday: I leave work, get on the subway and check WeChat to figure out where to meet my friends for dinner. My friend’s not in the mood to type, though, so I get a phone call a couple minutes later. “Hello?” I answer, trying to make myself heard over the background noise, a combination of mechanical churning and conversation. As I’m talking, I notice everyone on my car slowly turning around to look at me—but that’s expected, right? I’m a foreigner—in theory, I look and talk differently from the majority of people around me. But up until this point, there was no indication that I was foreign, because I’m Asian American. In other words, I look like everyone else until I open my mouth. I look Chinese…