Economy

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At the end of 2014, total emissions of the four heavy metals, and of metalloid arsenic had fallen 20.8 percent from the 2007 level, so signifying 72.4 percent accomplishment of the comprehensive control and treatment of heavy metal contamination stipulated in the 12th Fiveyear Plan period.

Cars Outnumber Parking Spaces

Traffic management administration statistics show that at the end of 2014 there were 154 million automobiles in China, 105 million of them privately owned. Motor vehicles in 35 cities exceeded one million, and topped two million in 10 cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Chengdu.

As steadily more cars take to urban roads, parking space shrinks. The car-parking space ratio in big Chinese cities is 1:0.8, and 1:0.5 in medium-sized and small ones, as compared with 1:1.3 in developed countries, according to the National Development and Reform Commission. A conservative estimate puts the parking space shortfall in China at 50 million – 2.5 million in Beijing and 1.5 million in other metropolises like Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou. The problem is spreading to smaller cities.

Activity

Italian Little Choir of Antoniano New Year’s Concert

Date: January 1-2, 2016

Place: Shanghai Children’s Art Theater

Price: RMB 80/180/280/380/480

The Little Choir of Antoniano, established in October 1963, is the most famous children’s choir in Italy, and has been appointed a goodwill ambassador by UNICEF. In the past five decades, the choir has recorded 1,000 or more songs. It makes tours of Italy and the world each year making dozens of performances.

National Ballet of China’s Triple Bill

Date: January 12-13, 2016

Place: National Center for the Performing Arts

Price: RMB 100/160/220/350/400/450/500/600

The National Ballet of China was founded in 1959. In its early days, Russian ballet masters such as Pyotr Gusev laid a solid foundation for the troupe’s performance via the school of Russian classical ballet. In the past 56 years, the National Ballet of China has absorbed techniques from both classical and modern ballet. It also attaches great importance to integrating Western ballet with Chinese culture, and has created ballets imbued with Chinese characteristics.

IMF Approves RMB in SDR Basket

The executive board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) approved on November 30, 2015, the inclusion of China’s currency, the RMB, in its Special Drawing Rights (SDR) basket as an international reserve currency.

Effective from October 1, 2016, the RMB will be included as a fifth currency in the SDR basket along with the U.S. dollar, the Euro, the Japanese yen, and the British pound sterling. The RMB will have a 10.92 percent weighting in the new SDR basket; that of other currencies are 41.73 percent for the U.S. dollar, 30.93 percent for the Euro, 8.33 percent for the Japanese yen and 8.09 percent for the British pound sterling.

The IMF board, representing the fund’s 188 member countries, said in a statement after completing the regular five-year review of the SDR basket that the RMB “met all existing criteria.”

Christine Lagarde, managing director of the IMF, said that the board’s decision was“an important milestone in the integration of the Chinese economy into the global financial system.” She added that it also constitutes recognition of the progress the Chinese government has made over the past years in reforming China’s monetary and financial systems.

The inclusion of the RMB will help to expand the representation and attraction of the SDR, improve the international monetary system, and safeguard global financial stability.

The SDR is an international reserve asset that the IMF created in 1969 to supplement its member countries’ official reserves. The IMF allocates SDRs to countries, but they are not for the use of private parties. SDRs can be exchanged by the governments of IMF member countries for freely usable currencies. The IMF reviews the currencies in the SDR basket every five years.

China’s Courier Services Expand Overseas

With the rapid development of China’s e-commerce, courier companies have shifted up a gear to pursue overseas expansion. “In the next two to three years, China’s courier companies will expand overseas, benefiting both Chinese and international customers,” said Yu Weijiao, board chairman of Shanghai-based YT Express, which last September ordered 15 Boeing 737 jets from the United States to hone its competitiveness.

Chen Dejun, chairman of Shanghaibased STO Express, said that STO had set up in the United States 12 transit centers and more than 100 branches over the past two years.

The annual business volume of Chinese courier services is already the biggest globally. The development of cross-border e-commerce companies will further enlarge the industry’s overseas business. Statistics show that China’s courier companies delivered 14 billion packages in 2014 – a world number one. The first 10 months of 2015 saw delivery of 15.6 billion packages, a 46 percent year-on-year increase.

Ma Junsheng, director of the State Post Bureau, said that courier firms, as service providers and promoters of economic upgrading, are changing China’s mode of economic development.

Customs at China’s pilot cross-border online business cities dealt with 55.42 million e-commerce related packages –68-fold that of 2014, worth RMB 8.402 billion – 38-fold that of 2014, during the first three quarters of 2015, according to General Administration of Customs official Bai Xiaodong.

Industry insiders believe that Chinese courier services are more efficient and customer-oriented than their foreign counterparts.

However, certain industrial experts have pinpointed deficiencies in Chinese courier enterprises. They urge these firms to take advantage of information technology such as mobile Internet, the Internet of Things, big data, and cloud computing, to broaden their business scope.

RMB 5.1635 Trillion

Tesla’s Public Charging Stations Connect Southern & Northern China

Upon completion of the two super charging stations in Nanchang of Jiangxi Province and Hefei of Anhui Province, Tesla will have connected southern and northern China, making it possible to drive an electric car across the country, the company’s China branch announced at the end of last November.

The public charging station network that connects 100-odd cities in the country will enable Tesla electric auto drivers to travel all the way from Shenzhen, southern China’s economic hub, to the northeastern industrial city of Harbin, passing through major cities such as Shanghai and Beijing.

China is a vital overseas market for Tesla, which has set up stores and service centers in Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Shenzhen. The U.S. firm has established 320 “super chargers” in China which, after a 20-minute recharge, can power a Tesla car for another 300 kilometers. There are also more than 1,500 “destination chargers” in the country, installed in supermarkets, hotels, office buildings, and other public areas.

China encourages the use of electric cars to combat air pollution. They are subsidized in such cities as Beijing and Shanghai, and not subject to policies like that applied in the capital whereby drivers must leave their cars at home and use public transport one day of each working week.

WeChat Payments Open to Overseas Purchases

Chinese Internet giant Tencent announced recently that it will open the mobile payment service offered on its social messaging app WeChat to overseas transactions.

The service will make it easier to buy from foreign shops, as Chinese buyers can pay in RMB and the payment system will automatically settle with retailers in the local currency, Tencent said.

The system will support settlements in the British pounds sterling, the Hong Kong dollar, the U.S. dollar, the Japanese yen, the Canadian dollar, the Australian dollar, the Euro, the New Zealand dollar and the Korean won.

At present, payments can be completed only after retailers scan a QR code generated by the app installed in the consumers’ cell phone. The company promises more payment options in the future.

The service will cover more than 20 regions and countries. Dozens of financial institutions, such as Hua Nan Bank and RoyalPay Treadwell Partner, will join the payment system.

New Zealand, Chinese Scientists Seek Joint Health Breakthroughs

A pioneering new agreement between a New Zealand university and the south China province of Guangdong will lead to innovative health treatments, New Zealand researchers said on December 9, 2015.

The scientific collaboration between the University of Auckland and the Guangdong Provincial Science and Technology Department is the first of its kind in China with a New Zealand university.

It will focus on advanced research into biomedicine, engineering sciences, and systems to support innovation and commercialization.

The research covered under a memorandum of understanding will include stem cell therapy and regenerative medicine, metabolic disease, immune therapy for cancer, and drug discovery, director of the university’s Maurice Wilkins Centre for molecular science Professor Rod Dunbar said.

“A key focus under the partnership with Guangdong is innovation that will lead to new therapies for human disease,” Dunbar said in a statement.

Part of the agreement is to jointly develop therapies, so enabling both countries to benefit from accelerated progress from the laboratory to the clinic.

The new collaborative framework builds on the Strategic Research Alliance, established in 2013 by the New Zealand and Chinese governments.

The university will use the relationship between these two institutes as a model to expand collaboration with scientists in Guangdong Province in other fields, such as engineering sciences.

140

China now has 140-plus satellites stably operating in orbit, a number second only to that of the U.S.

China to Build World’s First Salt Lake Data Center

Northwest China’s Qinghai Province plans to build the world’s first salt lake data center to serve domestic resource planning and provide technical support to other countries.

Construction of the center in Xining, the provincial capital, will take eight years to complete, with a total investment of RMB 90 million, said Wang Jianping, head of the project under the Salt Lakes Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The first-phase construction, from 2016 to 2018, will adopt big data and cloudcomputing technology to process data on salt lakes, Ms. Wang said. The center will also launch a salt lake tourism website.

“The national data center will lay the foundations for important breakthroughs in salt lake research,” Ms. Wang said.

China has more than 1,000 salt lakes, located mainly in Qinghai and the autonomous regions of Xinjiang, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia.

China Makes Bullet Train Fit for Frigid Weather

Chinese train maker the CRRC Corporation Limited announced last November a new model of bullet train that can operate under temperatures as low as minus 40 degrees Celsius. Research and development for this train took about three years, according to the CRRC’s Qingdao Sifang Locomotive and Rolling Stock Co., Ltd. (Qingdao Sifang).

The CRH2G bullet train can adapt to extreme cold and high altitudes, Qingdao Sifang senior engineer Cheng Jianfeng said.

“Development of the CRH2G provides trains better adapted to the deserts and plateaus in China’s bullet train networks. The train has been operating on the Lanzhou-Xinjiang High-speed Railway since the end of 2015,” Cheng said.

The CRH2G train can reach speeds of up to 250 kilometers per hour. It is also sand resistant and designed to operate at altitudes as high as 3,600 meters.

China Makes Li-Fi Technology Breakthrough with Speed of 50 Gbps

A new Chinese breakthrough in visible light communication (VLC) technology may enable people to download an HD Hollywood movie in around 0.2 seconds, solely by lamp light. A test conducted by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology confirmed that the real-time traffic rate of a Chinese VLC system has reached 50 gigabytes per second (Gbps), the ministry announced last November.

This real-time speed is the highest China has so far achieved. According to media reports, a group of Mexican scientists used similar technology to transmit data in August 2014, at speeds of up to 10 Gbps. IT expert and academic Wu Jiangxing said it will be possible to establish a huge VLC network based on the billions of bulbs and LED lighting facilities already in use around the globe.

“Every bulb can serve as a highspeed Internet access point (similar to a WIFI hotspot) when VLC technology becomes widely applied in the future,”Wu said, but was unable to give a specific time frame. “Imagine downloading several movies while you are waiting for a green light at an intersection, or surfing the Internet on planes and highspeed trains via these lights.”

The technology is green. It consumes far less energy and secures information more efficiently than by radio, which has flaws such as signal disturbances, leaks, and interceptions, according to the ministry. The VLC system was developed by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Information Engineering University and has entered a phase of “integration and micromation in design.” The university successfully developed a wireless broadcasting system based on VLC in 2013.

China’s National Social Security Fund

in 2014 RMB 4.0439 trillion in revenues and expended RMB 3.3681 trillion. Its accumulative surplus at year end stood at RMB 5.1635 trillion.