Innholdsfortegnelse for April 14, 2016 i Beijing Review

Growing Bank Cards The total number of bank cards issued by China’s banking institutions reached 5.44 billion at the end of last year, putting average per capita bank card ownership at 3.99, the latest data from the People’s Bank of China showed on April 5. Debit card issuance reached 5.01 billion and credit cards totaled 432 million. As of the end of 2015, banking institutions had extended 7.08 trillion yuan ($1.1 trillion) in credit to credit card owners, increasing 26.4 percent year on year. Credit card loans more than six months overdue accounted for 1.23 percent of the total credit loans outstanding, down 0.3 percentage points from the ratio seen a year earlier, the central bank said. Dismissing Downgraded Rating In response to lowering the outlook on China’s sovereign credit…

Comments to wanghairong@bjreview.com On a sunny afternoon earlier this month, an employee from leading Chinese telecommunication company Huawei Technologies traveled to Tsinghua University to meet with students and potential partners at the iCenter, a hatchery for innovative projects and entrepreneurs. In a spacious room on the first floor of the newly built Lee Shau Kee Science and Technology Building, which houses the center, two students demonstrated their virtual reality equipment and programs to Huawei and other prospective investors. The duo are from OwlReality, a Tsinghua-based startup founded by third-year doctoral computer science candidate Wen Ziyu that develops virtual reality software. “With help from Chuang-plus, we completed the registration process for our company in one day,” Wen told Beijing Review. Chuang-plus is a platform set up by Tsinghua University to assist…

Comments to yulintao@bjreview.com During the recently closed fourth Nuclear Security Summit (NSS) held in Washington, D.C., Chinese President Xi Jinping and his U.S. counterpart, Barack Obama, had their first meeting of 2016. It was the eighth one-on-one meeting of the two presidents in the three years since Xi took office. It was also reported to be the only bilateral meeting Obama held during this year’s summit. The top leaders of the two countries are also expected to meet for a dialogue session again this September in Hangzhou, when China hosts the Group of 20, or G20, summit. The high frequency of top-level communication is seemingly an indication that Sino-U.S. ties are now one of the most critical relationships among world powers. Such a link is determined not only by their…

Comments to zanjifang@bjreview.com On March 31, China and the United States caught the world’s attention when they announced, in a joint statement, that the two countries will sign the Paris Agreement, the boldest international climate change agreement to date, on April 22 and “take their respective domestic steps in order to join the agreement as early as possible this year.” The statement was newsworthy for several reasons. First, since the agreement requires 55 countries, representing 55 percent of global emissions, to sign and ratify the document for it to come into effect, getting the world’s two largest emitters—that also represent the world’s two largest economies— provides a massive impetus for other countries to follow suit. Second, after helping secure a successful outcome at the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris,…

Comments to dengyaqing@bjreview.com Roughly 125,000 years ago, primitive human beings radically altered the course of history and made their first step toward civilization by taming fire. Jumping forward to about 3,000 years ago, Chinese people were among the first to have found and used coal in cooking, heating and metallurgy. Then in 1925, two German scientists— Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch—invented a process which converted a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide extracted from coal into liquid hydrocarbons. This revolutionized the use of energy sources, as it was the stepping stone to creating the modern fuel industry. “Coal has played a significant role for much of human history,” said Wu Daohong, President of Shenwu Environmental Technology Co. Ltd., a Shenzhen-listed company based in Beijing, who also admitted that the energy…

SYRIA Syrian army sets off leftover mines in the historic city of Palmyra in Homs Governorate on April 1. Days ago, the Syrian Government retook the ancient city from the “Islamic State” terrorist group VIET NAM Tran Dai Quang is sworn in as the country’s president in Hanoi on April 2 UNITED STATES First lady Michelle Obama plants vegetables with school children in the Kitchen Garden on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, D.C. on April 5 AZERBAIJAN The country’s Defense Ministry announces a unilateral cease-fire on April 5 in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh after four days of military conflict with Armenia REPUBLIC OF CONGO Residents evacuate the conflict region in the country’s capital Brazzaville on April 4. Clashes took place between police and unknown gunmen that…

Comments to zanjifang@bjreview.com College graduates across the country are once again on the hunt for jobs. Job seekers flocked to a job fair held at the China International Science and Technology Convention Center on February 20-21. In the early hours of the morning, thousands of college students holding well-designed resumes rushed into the job fair center to seek employment opportunities. According to the fair organizers, more than 160 companies and public institutions attended the event, recruiting for about 4,000 positions, most of which were related to the Internet. While fairs are filled to the brim with job seekers, another type of employment opportunity is flourishing among graduates. In order to relieve pressure on the labor market, the Chinese Government announced a string of policies over the past year encouraging people…

Comments to liuyunyun@bjreview.com When Syrian government troops retook the ancient city of Palmyra on March 27 from the so-called “Islamic State” extremist group (ISIS), much of the credit for weakening the terrorist group was given to an unlikely party—Russia. Having just withdrawn its forces from Syria 12 days prior, its involvement was seen as a game changer on the ground, even if many of its firepower came—some say indiscriminately— from the air. Russia’s interests in fighting terrorism in Syria coincided with American interests writ large, and were recognized in a visit to Moscow by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on March 24, his third in 10 months. According to Russian state media, the head of the nation’s Foreign Affairs Committee Alexei Pushkov tweeted at the conclusion of the visit:…

Comments to yushujun@bjreview.com A slew of positive economic indicator results in March suggested China’s economic stimulus may be having its desired impact. The manufacturing activity rebounded in March for the first time in nine months, industrial companies’ profits grew at their fastest rate in more than 18 months, and the service sector also saw healthy growth. The central bank—the People’s Bank of China (PBOC)—cut commercial banks’ reserve requirement ratio (RRR) by 50 basis points on March 1 to boost lending. The ratio dictates how much money banks must hold on to. The move will help push forward the country’s supply-side structural reform, according to a PBOC press release. It was the latest in a series of moves to cushion the country’s economic growth slowdown. China recorded an annual growth rate…

Recently, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) stopped two Chinese investments. In January, CFIUS blocked the $3.3-billion sale of Philips’ lighting unit to a Chinese consortium. In February, China’s Unisplendour Corp. Ltd. terminated a deal to acquire a 15-percent stake for $3.8 billion in Western Digital Corp. following a decision by CFIUS to conduct an investigation into the purchase. It is safe to say that CFIUS is the “No.1 killer” of Chinese investments in the United States. CFIUS is an inter-agency committee authorized to review foreign investment, chaired by the U.S. secretary of the treasury and consisting of members including secretaries of justice, homeland security, commerce, defense, state and energy, and U.S. trade representative. It is an organization that makes investigations in order to determine the…

Paying Tribute Local residents mourn victims of the Nanjing Massacre from December 1937 to January 1938 at a ceremony in the Memorial Hall of the Victims in the Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, on April 4. An estimated 13.4 million Chinese visited 150 major cemeteries across the country to honor their deceased relatives during the Tomb-Sweeping Day holiday on April 2-4. Organ Donation As of March 20, China had registered more than 66,000 voluntary organ donors, 6,624 of whom have already donated their organs, saving about 18,000 lives, People’s Daily reported on April 1. The country began a voluntary organ donation trial in 2010 and promoted the practice across the country in 2013. Now, it tops Asia for the number of organ donations per year, said…

Comments to baishi@bjreview.com The fourth and final Nuclear Security Summit (NSS) wrapped up in Washington, D.C. on April 1, where leaders and envoys from 52 countries and four international organizations reached a consensus on continuing international efforts to strengthen nuclear security. The two-day meeting was the last in the series of summits initiated by U.S. President Barack Obama in 2010. Yet attendees pledged that international efforts will not come to an end amid continued security challenges and terrorist threats. As Obama said in his much-lauded speech in Prague in 2009, delivered almost exactly seven years before the latest summit, nuclear terrorism is the most immediate and extreme threat to global security. After the first summit was held in Washington, D.C. in 2010, it was followed by the second in Seoul…

Comments to zanjifang@bjreview.com During this year’s Valentine’s Day, Zhang Rui, a 22-year-old woman living in Beijing, received a box of chocolates from a place that is akin to the whimsical setting of the movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The place—known locally as the Chocolate Town—is located in Jiashan, east China’s Zhejiang Province. “People say that it’s like Hershey’s Chocolate World, so I want to go there,” Zhang said. The Chocolate Town that Zhang longs to visit is one of the first batch of “specialty towns” in Zhejiang, which brought in 1.12 million visitors and produced over 20,000 tons of chocolate throughout 2015. On January 29, Zhejiang’s Provincial Government announced the list of the second batch of specialty towns, with 42 new additions. With the first batch of 37 such…

Comments to yanwei@bjreview.com As social media adoption rates continue to increase around the world, many young parents are keen on posting photos of their children— sometimes on a daily basis—on social networking platforms. In China, the most popular social media platforms are instant messaging app WeChat and Twitter-like Weibo, which are also common for seeing these types of posts. In fact, parents sharing cute faces of their children to relatives and friends online even has its own word: “sharenting.” “Sharing makes life more fun,” a Beijing woman surnamed Liu told Beijing Review. She is the mother of a 3-year-old boy. “I like to see my friends’ babies and would also like them to see mine,” she added. However, oversharing can be dangerous. Recently, the Belgian Federal Police suggested parents stop…