Peter Harmsen
Guest Author
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/ 21 October 2005

How large is China’s defence budget?

While everyone knows China is a rising power, they can only guess at how strong its armed forces are, or how much it is spending to build its military might. The issue of the size of China’s defence budget reemerged this week as United States Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld visited Beijing.

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/ 17 October 2005

Chinese astronauts make safe return to Earth

Two Chinese astronauts returned safely to Earth on Monday, touching down to a hero’s welcome as China’s second-ever manned space mission marked another step in its drive to becoming a space power. Astronauts Fei Junlong and Nie Haisheng came back from a five-day flight, parachuting softly onto a field in Inner Mongolia in the the capsule of their <i>Shenzhou VI</i> spacecraft.

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/ 12 October 2005

Orchestrated jubilation on China’s space frontier

Waving banners and banging drums, thousands of primary school children on Wednesday paraded through the northwest Chinese city of Jiuquan, celebrating the nation’s second manned foray into space. ”Shenzhou VI successfully launched,” they chanted in not entirely perfect unison, one hour after China’s most ambitious space mission yet blasted off from a secretive launch site in the desert three hours’ drive away.

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/ 21 October 2004

Nearly 150 feared dead in coal-mine blast

An underground gas explosion has ripped through a mine in central China, killing at least 56 workers and leaving nearly 100 missing in one of the worst mining disasters in recent memory, officials said on Thursday. The shafts of the Daping coal mine near Xinmi in Henan province were packed with about 450 workers when disaster struck.