Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez was set to arrive in China Tuesday on a visit likely to deepen already strong ties that focus on oil.
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/ 4 December 2008
United States Treasury chief Henry Paulson led a high-powered delegation for bilateral talks that opened in Beijing on Thursday.
Thousands of terrified survivors of China’s earthquake huddled in the open with their meagre belongings on Tuesday as an aftershock struck and the government warned of more powerful ones to come. The panic, which reportedly gripped a vast area, came as China entered its second day of official mourning over the quake.
China’s biggest earthquake for a generation left tens of thousands dead, missing or buried under the rubble of crushed communities on Tuesday, plunging the nation into an all-out aid effort. Rescue teams struggled by air, land and water to reach the areas of south-western China stricken by the huge quake that demolished schools, homes and factories.
China has called on its 31 provinces to rein in their economies, state media said on Sunday, in a sign the central government has yet to persuade local bureaucrats that red-hot growth is bad. Vice-Premier Zeng Peiyan emphasised that investment in factories, residential buildings and other fixed assets must be cooled down, according to the Xinhua news agency.
Chinese authorities were warned against cover-ups on Saturday after the death toll from Tropical Storm Bilis more than doubled overnight. A week after Bilis made landfall, the official number of people killed in gales and floods was given at 518, nearly 300 more than the 228 previously reported, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency.
China’s Three Gorges Dam across the Yangtze River, the world’s largest hydropower project, shows the nation at its most powerful, but also makes it vulnerable in entirely new ways. For the past nearly two decades, during design and construction of the dam, planners have engaged in a low-key effort to make sure it is protected from hostile forces.
Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing on Tuesday called on Japan’s leaders to stop visiting a controversial Tokyo war shrine, comparing their actions to the worship of Germany’s Nazis after World War II. Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has made five visits to the Yasukuni Shrine since taking office in 2001.
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/ 8 February 2006
With vibrant economies and more than a billion people each, China and India might seem obvious candidates for the Group of Eight (G8), but analysts say the road to membership will be long. Russia is now heading the G8 for the first time, inevitably triggering questions about why the two Asian giants have not joined long ago.
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/ 15 February 2005
At least 203 workers were killed after a gas explosion at a coal mine in north-east China in the worst mining disaster in the country’s recent history, mining officials and state media said on Tuesday. China’s coal industry, the most dangerous in the world, saw 6 027 workers die in accidents in 2004, official figures show.