Xing Houyuan’s advice to investors who seek her out is patient and practical: do due diligence on any potential partner, clarify its ties to the government and make sure you control any joint venture. Her words would have sounded familiar to any firm trying to enter China in the 1980s and 1990s. But the nervous-looking man who had just shown Xing his proposal was Chinese, and he was looking to do business in Africa.
China has announced new rules to control the explosion of audio-visual content on the internet, in a move seen as an effort to transfer the government’s television- and radio-censorship model to websites. Only state-controlled entities will have the right to operate websites that post audio-visual material under the new regulations.
The names of three banks and the word "stocks" beat "sex" to become four of the most Googled words in China last year, according to a Google China list seen on Thursday. China Merchants Bank, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and China Construction Bank ranked second, third and sixth, according to a list supplied by Google China on its website.
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/ 31 December 2007
The wife of a top sports anchor on Chinese state television has created a buzz in the blogosphere by crashing an Olympic media event — to publicly accuse her husband of adultery. A video clip of Zhang Bin’s wife, Hu Ziwei, commandeering a microphone at a presentation of its coverage plans was easily one of the most viewed items on a Chinese video site on Monday.
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/ 19 December 2007
The hardest part is yet to come for Beijing Olympic organisers, heading into 2008 with all plans in place but potential pitfalls aplenty in the run-up to the event in August. Traffic congestion, closely linked to air quality, food security, media freedom and human rights as well as boycott calls are issues likely to flare up again over the coming months.
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/ 18 December 2007
China, widely criticised for cruelty to animals bred for consumption, is drafting new standards on animal slaughter to make the practice more humane, Xinhua news agency said on Tuesday. The central province of Henan has already adopted the measures, which include stunning the animals before killing them.
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/ 18 December 2007
The World Bank is planning projects in Africa with China’s Export-Import Bank to address concerns that Beijing is taking more than it gives as it scours the continent for oil and minerals. World Bank president Robert Zoellick said the pros and cons of the country’s push into Africa had been an important topic during his talks with senior officials.
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/ 13 December 2007
A restaurant fire in southern China killed has killed 10 people, state media reported on Thursday, hours after an apartment fire killed 21 in the eastern part of the country. Xinhua News Agency said the fire at a restaurant in the booming manufacturing city of Dongguan in Guangdong province also injured nine.
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/ 8 December 2007
The father of China’s latest bird-flu victim also has the disease, officials said on Friday, prompting World Health Organisation fears of possible human-to-human transmission. A Health Ministry statement said a 52-year-old man named Lu in the eastern city of Nanjing had the H5N1 strain, which killed his son on Sunday.
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/ 7 December 2007
The death toll from China’s latest major coal mine disaster rose to 105 on Friday, official media said, as hope for survivors ebbed and anger mounted over a litany of mistakes that compounded the tragedy. Twenty-six more bodies were recovered on Friday morning following a gas explosion at the mine in northern China’s Shanxi province.
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/ 6 December 2007
Ninety-six miners were feared dead after a coal-mine gas blast in northern China on Thursday, a grim toll likely caused by illegal mining and possibly made worse by delays reporting the accident, the Xinhua news agency said. Rescuers had found 70 bodies in the village-run mine by early evening and were searching for at least 26 more.
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/ 6 December 2007
At least 40 people were killed and 74 others trapped underground after an explosion at a coal mine in northern China on Thursday, with a group of rescuers among the missing, officials said. The gas blast occurred just after midnight at a mine in Linfen city, a coal-rich area in Shanxi province, the state administration of mine safety said.
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/ 5 December 2007
The Chinese military has added mobile showers to its ever more sophisticated arsenal, state media reported on Wednesday. The camouflaged vehicle can be set up in five minutes and allows 20 men to shower simultaneously within a narrow 10-square-metre space, the Xinhua news agency said.
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/ 4 December 2007
Food prices may climb for years because of expansion of farming for fuel, climate changes, and demand from richer consumers in fast-growing developing nations, a report said on Tuesday. Biofuel expansions alone could push maize prices up over two-thirds by 2020 and increase oilseed costs by nearly half.
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/ 26 November 2007
Chinese leaders hailed images sent back from from the country’s first lunar satellite on Monday, saying they showed their nation had thrust itself into the front ranks of global technological powers. Premier Wen Jiabao, visiting the scientists who have guided the probe Chang’e 1 into space and around the moon, proclaimed the mission a complete success.
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/ 24 November 2007
The bodies of 31 victims of a landslide in central China are so badly crushed that DNA samples may be needed to identify them, state media reported on Saturday. A long-distance bus was buried under an avalanche of boulders, earth and mud at the entrance to a railway tunnel being built in Hubei province near China’s massive Three Gorges Dam.
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/ 21 November 2007
China has committed to sending an engineering unit of peacekeepers to Darfur at the end of the week, the top United Nations peacekeeping official said on Wednesday. China has about 1 800 peacekeepers deployed abroad, making it the second-largest contributor after France.
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/ 20 November 2007
One of the most popular tourist destinations in China is waging a week-long campaign to hunt down wild pigs that have been frightening visitors to its famed West Lake, state media said on Tuesday. Professional hunting teams from the West Lake district of Hangzhou, the capital of the coastal province of Zhejiang, were under orders to shoot to kill the animals.
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/ 20 November 2007
Armed with backpacks, sleeping bags, budget travel guides and hunger for a wider world long beyond their reach, backpackers from China are likely to be heading to a youth hostel near you. Loosened travel restrictions and a booming economy mean that growing numbers of young Chinese have visas and cash to travel abroad as never before.
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/ 15 November 2007
The death toll from a building site accident in eastern China when an elevator plunged more than 20 storeys has reached 11 after five of the injured died in hospital, state media said on Thursday. The accident happened at a nearly completed block of flats in Wuxi City in Jiangsu province.
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/ 12 November 2007
China’s muzzled press and burgeoning internet have given citizen reporters an audience and an opportunity to spread news quicker than censors can control it. But the ability of bloggers to dodge censors and provide a voice for China’s poor and disadvantaged by covering news events Beijing would rather be left unreported.
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/ 5 November 2007
China’s maiden lunar probe successfully entered the moon’s orbit on Monday, officials said, a critical step in its year-long mission to photograph and map the surface of the celestial body. Chang’e I blasted off on October 24, signalling China’s rising space ambitions and Beijing’s participation in a renewed race to explore the moon.
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/ 31 October 2007
Beijing Olympics organisers apologised on Wednesday after suspending ticket sales following a booking system meltdown, their first major blunder in preparations for next year’s Games. About 1,8-million event tickets were supposed to go on sale on Tuesday on a first-come-first-served basis for people living in China.
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/ 31 October 2007
A Chinese mountaineering official will have the unenviable task of trying to prevent robberies on the roof of the world after a spate of equipment thefts, officials said on Wednesday. The official will be deployed at a breathtaking altitude of 6 600m after a record season this year saw 520 people reaching Mount Everest’s 8 848m summit but also complaints of stealing.
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/ 24 October 2007
Asia’s space race heated up on Wednesday as China launched its first lunar orbiter, an event hailed in the world’s most populous nation as a milestone event in its global rise. China’s year-long expedition kicks off a programme that aims to land an unmanned rover on the moon’s surface by 2012 and put a man on the moon by about 2020.
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/ 22 October 2007
A fire erupted at a shoe factory in south-east China, killing 37 people in the latest industrial accident to hit the world’s fourth-largest economy, officials and state media said on Monday. The blaze at the Feida workshop, located near the city of Putian in coastal Fujian province, broke out at 9.50pm local time on Sunday and was extinguished an hour later.
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/ 16 October 2007
Two men widely tipped as future leaders of China gave glimpses of their agenda on Tuesday, promising gentler, more environmentally sound growth. But Shanghai Communist Party boss Xi Jinping and his counterpart in Liaoning province, Li Keqiang, fended off or avoided questions about their own political futures.
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/ 12 October 2007
A South China tiger has been caught on camera by a hunter-turned-farmer, the first confirmed sighting for 30 years of a subspecies experts had feared was extinct in the wild, the Xinhua news agency said on Friday. Zhou Zhenglong took more than 70 snaps of the young tiger lying in the grass near a cliff.
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/ 11 October 2007
China is to relocate at least four million more people from the Three Gorges Dam reservoir area in the next 10 to 15 years to protect its ”ecological safety”. Senior officials who have defended the project as an engineering wonder now warn that areas around the dam are paying a heavy environmental cost.
Typhoon Krosa crashed into the Chinese coast on Sunday, forcing the evacuation of 1,4-million people, after killing five in Taiwan as it lashed the island with heavy rain and high winds. The typhoon made landfall near the borders of densely populated Zhejiang and Fujian provinces in south-east China at about 7.30am GMT, packing winds of up to 126kph, before weakening.
North Korea has agreed to disable its Yongbyon reactor and other nuclear facilities by the end of the year, throwing the ball into the hermit country’s court to turn its promises into action. In an agreement which won praise from United States President George Bush, the isolated state will in return get aid equivalent to one million tonnes of heavy fuel oil
A suspended bus company manager may have sparked a fierce bus blaze that killed 27 and put another 11 passengers in hospital, the official Xinhua agency said late on Tuesday. The bus, with 38 people on board, was heading downtown when the fire erupted just after 5pm local time.