At least 26 people were injured when a school bus hit two other buses Friday morning near the tunnel of Wan Chai in Hong Kong, according to Hong Kong police.
The accident happened when the school bus, going to Wan Chai, hit another bus while trying to evade a taxi. The bus, which was pulling into station, was pushed forward and hit another bus during the accident.
All injured have been sent to hospital and cause of the accident is under further investigation.
China’s port and shipping facilities are to be upgraded to include two major new regions, the Ministry of Communications has announced.
Five port”clusters,” rather than the existing three surrounding Shanghai, Shenzhen and Tianjin, will become the new priorities as part of a new port development plan.
The outline of the plan to revise Chinese port facilities was made by Communications Minister Li Shenglin.
The minister said the two additional port groups are located on the mainland side of the Taiwan Straits in southern Fujian; and in Hainan and southern Guangdong.
The plan is part of an effort to match the national 2006-10 social and economic development programme, Li said.
Li said China’s sea ports and their relative easy access to containers and industrial materials had been a major factor in transforming the nation’s economy.
For the residents of some ancient Chinese cities like Beijing， Nanjing and Xi’an， which are in the throes of redevelopment， memories of their past are fading rapidly.
Hutongs， or narrow alleys lined with traditional Beijing courtyard houses， and place names are being replaced by modern buildings.
Nowadays， it’s almost impossible for a Beijing local to remember that the city once boasted more than 3，679 hutongs in the 1980s， a number that has been cut down by 40 percent to give way to urban roads and skyscrapers.
As a result， old place names have been fading from maps and memories.
At an old central community of Beijing’s Xuanwu district， the walls of several rows of courtyards are etched with the Chinese character of “Chai”， meaning “to be dismantled”.
“The hutongs have been winding around here for hundreds of years， but they will disappear in weeks now，” said a sad local.
In East China’s Nanjing， once the capital of six ancient dynasties， more than 180 old places names have disappeared in the past 15 years and the number of new place names has grown at a speed of 200 per year since 2001， according to an earlier report by the People’s Daily.
Some place names have been reduced， changed and even eliminated in an arbitrary way despite the historical touches contained within them， said the paper.
In North China’s Hebei province， the name of the Wanxian county， with “wan” meaning “perfect rivers and mountains” in ancient Chinese， was changed into “Shunping (county)” in 1993， simply because some overseas businessmen said the pronunciation of “wan” in modern oral Chinese may be understood as “got finished”.
“Place names are an important part of China’s national cultural heritage，” said Liu Baoquan， head of the Place Name Research Center under the Ministry of Civil Affairs. “An old place name usually tells an unique story.”
For China， he said， every place name bears a special link with history. “With the disappearance of the old place names， there will come a day that we can’t trace our culture and history.”
For most old Chinese， old place names serve as lively records of the ups and downs of the dynasties during China’s 5，000-year-long history.
According to official statistics， China has more than 700 counties， more than 1，000 towns and more than 300 cities with a standing of more than 1，000 years as well as more than 100，000 ancient villages that even their own residents can’t tell how old they are.
“Most of them bear a name that reflects the features of a special period of the Chinese civilization，” said Liu. “They can be called ‘living fossils’ of the traditional Chinese culture.”
To combat the serious situation， the Chinese government has started a national program to prevent old place names from being scrapped at will. The program will work to find， sort out and analyze the remaining old place names on the basis of field work and thus form an assessment system to classify them according to their importance， said Liu.
“Civil affairs authorities at different levels will review the application for place name changes in more strict ways and experts’ suggestions will be taken as the key basis，” said Liu.
As part of the program， an expert group has set out a series of standards for the appraisal of “ancient cities”. By late 2005， 15 counties and cities in Hebei province had been approved as China’s first batch of cities with the title of “Thousand-Year-Old Cities”.
Foreign and privately-owned firms are playing a bigger role in China’s foreign trade, which is shifting from light industrial products to high technologies, new research shows.
Chai Haitao, head of the research institute in the Department of Foreign Economic Cooperation of the Ministry of Commerce, said, “The changes show China is playing a major role in the restructuring of global industry chain as well as the transfer of manufacturing.”
Since China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, product profile has undergone a great change, said Chai at the ongoing Summit Forum of China’s Top 200 Exporters-Importers.
“Both imports and exports of high and new technology products, mainly in the IT industry, are growing rapidly with the export value amounting to 30 percent of the country’s total exports in 2005,” Chai said.
Export and import products had been upgraded rapidly with exports of traditional technology products, such as small-screen colour televisions, VCD players, clocks and watches, shrinking dramatically by more than 30 percent in the recent two years, while exports of high-tech products, such as laptop computers, mobile phones, and liquid crystal display items, are rising by up to 260 percent.
China’s foreign trade growth was mainly driven by light industrial products and textiles in the 1980s and by traditional electromechanical products in the 1990s.
Trading forms were changing with processing trade volume growing rapidly to 50 percent of the total trade volume in 2005.
Official figures show the country’s processing trade increased to 404.8 billion U.S. dollars in 2003, 47.6 percent of the total trade volume, from 2.5 billion U.S. dollars in 1981, just 5.7 percent of the total.
Chai said foreign and privately-owned companies were playing a more important role in China’s foreign trade with the former accounting for 58 percent of the total trade volume and the latter 21 percent.
The State Electricity Regulatory Commission (SERC) plans to sell off electricity generation assets valued at more than 10 billion yuan by next spring at the latest.
The sale involves an aggregated generating capacity of 9.2 million kilowatts in 38 electric power plants, and covers seven listed companies and three joint ventures scattered in 21 provinces.
The stock is held by the State Grid Corporation and China Southern Power Grid, the Beijing Times reported here on Wednesday. In 2002, they were commissioned by the Chinese government to manage and sell the assets to finance the ongoing reform of the power industry.
A special work team has been established with members from the SERC, the State Development and Reform Commission and the Commission for Supervision and Management of State-owned Properties under the State Council.
Preparation work has now been completed and intermediary agencies responsible for accounting, legal affairs, asset evaluation and auditing have been appointed. The sale is the next move, said the newspaper.
But the work team refused to disclose the intermediaries or potential purchasers involved, saying that they had to protect business secrets.
Both domestic and foreign investors are authorized to make offers. The Ministry of Finance will use revenue from the sale to reform the industry.
China began reforming its electricity industry in 2002. The road map involves splitting the state-owned assets into three kinds of separate business entity - electricity generation, transmission and distribution - then privatizing them and finally ushering in market competition and breaking down monopolies.
A major breakthrough in the reform occurred in 2002 when two power grid corporations, five power generating groups and four subsidiary consulting and engineering group were established.
SERC Chairman Chai Songyue pointed out that China’s installed generation capacity and electric power production have grown at an unprecedented average annual rate of 9.2 percent and 13.8 percent respectively since the reform.
Despite surging electricity demand in recent years, China has eliminated nationwide power shortages and managed to provide the electricity needed for economic and social development, he said.
China’s Liu Hong survived a yellow-card warning to claim the women’s 10,000m race walk title at the IAAF World Junior Championships here on Saturday.
The 19-year-old clocked a personal best time of 45 minutes and 12.84 seconds under sweltering conditions, while compatriot Chai Xue finished sixth in 48:09.51.
Russia’s Tatyana Shemyakina was edged to the second position in45:34.41, while Romanian Anamaria Greceanu finished the podium after clocking a distant 46:45.67.
Liu, who has been mainly practicing the 20 km, attributed her victory to her tactics.
“I was too anxious and the yellow card alerted me. I tried to relax after that and raced better,” Liu told a post-match press conference.
“We’ve prepared well for this race and were confident about clinching the title.
“The result proved that our tactics were quite right,” she added.
Liu guessed that Chai ran out of energy so that she could not stay in the leading pack.
“It’s a pity that Chai did not catch up with me in the final stage. She might be too tired,” Liu said.
Chinese scientists have been seeking ways to prolong the life of a 950-year-old wooden pagoda in northern Shanxi Province by another millennium, but they are still baffled over how to do it.
The Sakyamuni Pagoda with unique architectural, religious and historical values is located at the Fogong (Buddha’s Palace) Temple in Shanxi’s Yingxian County, 380 km southwest of Beijing. It was built in 1056 during the Liao Dynasty, which ruled North China from 916 to 1125. China will celebrate the 950th anniversary of the pagoda on Sept. 5.
The Sakyamuni Pagoda was made entirely of wooden parts joined by innumerable mortises and tenons in a complicated structure of brackets, without using any nails. It measures 67.31 meters in height and 30.27 meters in diameter at the base, or the height of a 20-story building today.
It is an octagonal structure of nine stories, with five visible from outside and four hidden inside. The Buddhist statues in each story and paintings on the inner walls of the first story are all works of the Liao Dynasty.
During a renovation of the pagoda in 1974, a number of sutras were found, some hand-written and others block printed. They are important materials for the study of religion and printing technology of the Liao Dynasty, as well as the political, economic and cultural developments of the dynasty.
The pagoda has undergone numerous tests in the past centuries, including earthquakes, storms, lightening strikes and wars, and remained intact.
But experts warned the pagoda might succumb to another violent quake or storm, as the tower is tilting.
There have been an obvious tilt between the first and second floors and cracks in the interior wooden columns, said Chai Zejun, former director of the Shanxi Provincial Ancient Architecture Institute.
There are also 300 places in the pagoda that need repair, he said. “We are worried about the ancient pagoda’s safety.”
As a matter of fact, China started mulling over fixing the pagoda 17 years ago, when senior official Li Ruihuan saw the damaged condition of the pagoda and called for better protection of it. A group of renowned experts on ancient architecture, including Chai and Luo Zhewen of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, have been conducting investigation, research and discussions on how to fix it.
But years of efforts have not turned out a solution, as all the proposed plans have pros and cons and each plan met with objections.
Experts have proposed three options: dismantle it and rebuild it with the original timber parts and technology; elevate the top three stories to fix the two bottom stories and then place the top three back to position; reinforce the damaged and twisted parts with steel structures, said Fu Xi’nian, a research fellow with the Institute of Architectural History under the Beijing-based China Architecture Design and Research Group.
“The first option will give us a new pagoda built by ourselves instead of our ancestors 950 years ago, and its historical information and value will get lost; the second one will turn out a pagoda with two new bottom stories, and what is more, can we place the top three stories exactly back to the original position? In the third option, the bottom two stories will not be as spacious and bright as today when steel structures are installed inside,” he said.
“Experts haven’t reached consensus, and I myself firmly oppose the first option,” said Fu, who is an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering.
But 82-year-old Luo Zhewen, who has visited the pagoda dozens of times since 1952, is a strong supporter of the first plan.
“The most simple way is to dismantle it for rebuilding, which has been a common practice for thousands of years,” he said.
Ma Bingjian, director of the Beijing Municipal Institute of Ancient Architecture Design, another advocate of the first plan, said, “To keep the pagoda is to keep the primary historical information.”
In fact, the second option won the approval of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage in December 2002 when it organized a group of experts to decide on the three plans by voting, because this option was believed to cause less “disturbances” to the pagoda and be able to “preserve more historical information,” according to Ma.
After that, the administration assigned the task of preparing an engineering plan respectively to Taiyuan University of Technology in Shanxi and Southeast University in east China’s Jiangsu Province.
But both plans by the two universities were turned down by an experts panel who met in April this year in Shuozhou City, which administers Yingxian County.
Both plans called for huge steel structures — Southeast University’s needs 1,300 tons and Taiyuan University of Technology’s needs 4,000 tons — to be set up around the pagoda, which will inevitably cause “severe disturbances” to the pagoda and produce “unpredictable consequences,” Ma said.
In addition, the plans would take as much as 90 million yuan (11.25 million U.S. dollars), and about six to 10 years to repair the pagoda, he said. “That is really terrifying.”
The repair project seemed to come to a dead end, but Zhou Ganzhi, former vice minister of construction, didn’t think so.
“As far as I know, the research has not stopped, neither has the work of reinforcement and protection of the pagoda,” said Zhou, also an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering.
“The proposed plans are not absolutely independent of each other, and some parts of them may be combined,” he said.
China’s capital will invest an estimated 470 billion yuan (59.5 billion U.S. dollars) in infrastructure in the 2006-2010 period.
The money will be spent on 2,400 construction and upgrading projects, according to a master plan unveiled on Sunday by the city’s development and reform commission.
Projects to ease city traffic, improve energy and water supply and better the city environment will be completed before 2008 when Beijing hosts the Olympics, said Chai Xiaozhong, deputy head of the commission.
By 2008, Beijing will have a hyper-modern international air service hub. Upgrading of the current international airport will be completed and work will have begun on the city’s second international airport. The Capital Airport hub will be able to process 60 million passengers a year, according to the plan.
In the next five years, Beijing will upgrade subway lines 1 and2, and build lines 5 and 10, as well as a special subway leading to the Olympic village and gymnasiums. A light-rail track will also be laid to the airport. Intervals between subway train services will be shortened to 150 seconds. The total length of the city’s subway and light rail network will reach 270 kilometers, and high-grade highways in the city center will stretch 280 kilometers. It will take 50 minutes at most to commute to areas within the city’s fifth ring road.
Beijing will also expand parking lots to ensure a parking place for each motor vehicle in the five-year period.
Official statistics show that Beijing now has approximately 2.8million motor vehicles but only 1.4-1.5 million parking places.
By 2008, the Taiyanggong gas-firing thermal power plant will have been built and heating pipes laid for the Olympic gymnasiums and surrounding areas. Electricity transmission projects for the areas will be completed, and construction will be revved up on the Beijing section of the south-to-north water diversion program. At the end of 2007, the section will be ready for water supply.
Beijing will clean up its rivers and lakes and improve water quality. Two water recycling plants will also be built. In 2010, annual consumption of natural gas in the capital will reach seven billion cubic meters.
China’s first ever regulation on the protection of the Great Wall, which bans graffiti and driving on the wall, came into effect on Friday.
Individuals who break the regulations can be fined between 10,000 and 50,000 yuan (1,275 to 6,377 U.S. dollars) while institutions can be fined 50,000 yuan to 500,000 yuan (6,377 to 63,775 dollars).
Dong Yaohui, vice president of the China Great Wall Society, said in an interview with Xinhua that the Chinese government is highly attentive to the protection of the wall and the regulation further demonstrates the government’s determination.
The Great Wall stretches over 6,700 kilometers from west to northeast China. Its construction dates back to the Warring States Period (475-221 B.C.), when separate sections were built in scattered strategic areas to defend China against invasion by northern nomadic tribes.
Experts have warned that the Great Wall has suffered extensive natural and human damage in recent years. Only 30 percent of the walls built during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) are still standing.
The regulation, promulgated by the State Council, forbids taking soil or bricks from the Great Wall, planting trees, carving on the wall or building anything that does not protect it.
It also bans the use of motor vehicles on the wall and the organization of activities not open to tourists.
Meanwhile, it encourages all citizens, legal entities and organizations to shoulder legal obligations to protect the Great Wall. Those making outstanding contributions to the protection of the Great Wall will be awarded.
Dong said he believed the regulation will have significant impact on the protection of the Great Wall as it provides a legal basis for punishment of those who deface the ancient wonder.
China’s State Administration of Cultural Heritage and its State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping have launched a massive geographical survey of the wall.
The survey will be completed by 2007 and the basic statistics of the Great Wall, including its exact length and layout, will be released in 2008.
Chai Xiaoming, deputy director of the cultural heritage protection of State Administration of Cultural Heritage, said the lessons learned from the promulgation and implementation of the regulation will help China issue more regulations on the protection of other ancient relics, including the Silk Road.
With over 2,000 years history, the Great Wall was listed as a world cultural heritage site by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in 1987.
Beijing’s per capita gross domestic product (GDP) exceeded 6,000 U.S. dollars in 2006, according to statistics released by the capital’s development and reform meeting on January 5.
Chai Xiaozhong, deputy director of the Beijing Municipal Development and Reform Commission, said that the city’s GDP rose 11 percent in 2006, the eighth straight year Beijing has had double-digit economic growth.
Despite the good performance of Beijing’s economy, Chai said the city faces many challenges, particularly the widening income gap between the city’s urban and rural residents.
The per capita annual disposable income of urban residents is estimated to be more than 20,000 yuan, an increase of 12 percent over last year, while the per capita net income of farmers living in the outskirts of Beijing was 8,560 yuan, up eight percent.
Chai said the city’s growing population, which now exceeds 15 million permanent residents and some 4 million temporary residents, is also putting intense pressure on the city’s natural resources and environment.