Innholdsfortegnelse for August 20, 2015 i Beijing Review

A New Pillar Workers assemble a numerical control cutting machine in Xingtai, north China’s Hebei Province, on August 10. Equipment manufacturing replaced the steel industry as the dominant industry in the province in the first half of the year. Exchange Rate Reform The Chinese currency, the yuan, dropped sharply in value as China improved its exchange rate formulation system to better reflect the market. China’s central bank tried to improve its central parity system to better reflect market developments in the exchange rate of the yuan against the U.S. dollar. Effective on August 11, daily central parity quotes reported to the China Foreign Exchange Trade System before the market opens should be based on the closing rate of the inter-bank foreign exchange rate market on the previous day, supply and…

In the business world, there are no ever-lasting friends or everlasting enemies. There are only friends with the same interests. The proverb was exemplified by a recent teaming up between China’s largest e-commerce giant Alibaba and leading electronics retailer Suning, which also owns the country’s third largest online marketplace. According to the deal reached on August 10, NYSE-listed Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. will pay 28.3 billion yuan ($4.4 billion) for a 20-percent stake in Suning Commerce Group Co. Ltd., and in turn, Suning will agree to invest 14 billion yuan ($2.2 billion) to ac-quire a 1.1-percent stake in Alibaba. With this strategic combination, the two heavyweights will establish an all-round online-to-offline system encompassing e-commerce, logistics, aftersales services, marketing and big data. “Both Alibaba and Suning are now at the crossroads.…

Beijing will move some local industries and functions unrelated to its role as the country’s capital to the suburbs and neighboring Hebei Province and Tianjin. The announcement was made at a meeting of the Beijing Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) on July 11. The municipal leadership also approved a roadmap for developing the Tongzhou District, to the east of the downtown area, as the capital’s subsidiary administrative center and promote the regional integration of Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei. Construction of the Tongzhou center is due to be completed by 2017. “The Beijing Municipal Government offices and affiliated institutions will be shifted gradually to Tongzhou to make the city’s central areas less crowded,” said Huang Yan, Director of the Beijing Municipal Commission of Urban Planning. The shift…

Lobster is one of the most popular delicacies originating from the deep sea. High in protein and low in fat, it is a very healthy meat and also contains a high concentration of Omega 3 fatty acids that are good for both your heart and your brain. Eating lobster provides you with a range of nutritional benefits while at the same time giving you its customary sweet-savory taste. This August, live lobsters, imported all the way from Boston, Massachusetts in the United States, will be the main attraction at Cépe, one of Beijing’s finest dining rooms, which features Italian-style haute cuisine and is located at The Ritz-Carlton Beijing, Financial Street. Enjoy a mouth-watering five-course meal prepared by Chef Ryan and his team, featuring Lobster Salad, Baby Lobster Carpaccio, Lobster Tea…

BRAZIL The 43rd WorldSkills Competition opens in Sao Paulo on August 11, with the participation of 1,192 competitors from 59 countries and regions. The biennial event aims at promoting global vocational education and skills excellence ZIMBABWE President Robert Mugabe reviews the guard during the annual Defense Day parade in Harare on August 11, as part of celebrations for the country’s independence from British colonial rule 35 years ago INDIA Rescuers place an injured person into an ambulance at the scene of a stampede in a goddess Durga temple in Jharkhand’s Deoghar District on August 10, in which at least 11 people were killed and 50 more injured SOUTH KOREA Demonstrators hold a rally in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul on August 12, demanding that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo…

In 2000, throughout March and April, Beijing was engulfed in one of the worst spell of sandstorms in history. It was at that time that many Chinese people became acutely aware of the threat of worsening land degradation in the country’s north. Fifteen years later, however, the situation has dramatically improved. In this process, a substantial number of strategies to tackle desertification have been implemented in China, some of which began as far back as 1977 when the First UN Conference on Desertification was held in Nairobi, Kenya. In his opening address at the Fifth Kubuqi International Desert Forum held in north China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region on July 28-29, Zhang Jianlong, head of China’s State Forestry Administration, said, “As one of the countries in the world most severely hit…

After months of searching for a school-district home for his school-age daughter, Wang Feng, a resident in Shenzhen, south China’s Guangdong Province, finally signed a housing sales contract on March 8 to buy a second-hand home in downtown Shenzhen’s Luohu District. The 68-square-meter apartment was sold to Wang at 2.15 million yuan ($336,690), or 32,000 yuan ($5,011) per square meter, according to the contract. Wang placed 50,000 yuan ($7,830) as an earnest money deposit that day and put 570,000 yuan ($89,260) in a third-party custodian account in a bank as down payment on April 3. All that remained was to fill out some paper-work to secure bank loans in order to finalize the deal. However, things soon took an unexpected turn for Wang. After the government released a raft of…

V-Day Preparation Visitors walk past a parterre with the Great Wall pattern at the Tiananmen Square in Beijing on August 12. Flower decorations will be placed in late August to greet a military parade on September 3, which will be held in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War. Housing Subsidies China plans to spend an additional 5 billion yuan ($782 million) on renovating substandard rural housing in earthquake-prone areas, the Ministry of Finance said on August 12. The funds pledged came after a 31.5-billion-yuan ($4.92 billion) budget was dedicated to renovating dilapidated houses in rural areas, bringing the total subsidies to 36.5 billion yuan ($5.7 billion), up from 23 billion yuan ($3.59 billion) last year. The…

French fries, chips, mashed potato, barbecued potato, curry—if culinary uses for potatoes seem endless, it’s because they probably are. Zhang Aiguo, a chef in Beijing, can make more than 1,000 potato dishes out of this seemingly modest vegetable. At the 2015 World Potato Congress held in Beijing on July 28-30, he displayed more than a hundred varieties of potato dishes and staple potato foods, including dumplings, steamed buns, pizza, noodles and even cookies. Broad a-peel Zhang, nicknamed the “potato chef,” has been working in the restaurant of Rose Garden Villa community for 10 years. Coming from a village in east China’s Shandong Province, Zhang’s love for the potato stems from his interest in developing more food varieties for vegetarians. “I haven’t liked meat since I was a child, and the…

Will China’s debt problem develop into a crisis affecting the whole world? Foreign analyst Bert Dohmen, who holds grim views on the Chinese economy, recently expressed his concerns. Three years ago in his book The Coming China Crisis, he had predicted the following sequence of events: “record debt, mal-investments, excessive debt-financed speculation in real estate, 64 million empty condominiums, a credit crunch followed by a credit crisis, and then a crash.” In the past three years, however, China’s GDP has been growing 7.6 percent annually on average. This rate is lower than that before the global financial crisis, but still leaves China as the country experiencing the most rapid speed of growth worldwide. In the meantime, China has improved its economic structure significantly: Since 2014, the service sector has made…

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 At the 56th International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) held in Chiangmai, Thailand, in July, the U.S. team won gold while the Chinese team, which had won 18 championships in the past quarter of a century, came in at second place. This result soon became a talking point across China. For years, Olympic math has been considered a strong point of China’s oft-criticized education system, as the Chinese team could always be relied upon to secure a gold medal. Participation in Olympic math was also once used…