Merged threads-China news

[ttwjr32]

BEIJING (Reuters) – China has to pursue political reform to safeguard its economic health, Premier Wen Jiabao said during a visit to the booming town of Shenzhen, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

Wen's call for political reform lacked specifics. But his comments reflect broader worries that unless the Party embraces at least limited reforms to make officials more answerable, then corruption and abuses may erode the country's economic prospects.

"Without the safeguarding of political restructuring, China may lose what it has already achieved through economic restructuring and the targets of its modernization drive might not be reached," Wen was quoted by Xinhua as saying.

"People's democratic rights and legitimate rights must be guaranteed. People should be mobilized and organized to deal with, in accordance with the law, state, economic, social and cultural affairs," Wen added.

Wen also wants to "create conditions" to allow the people to criticize and supervise the government as a way to address "the problem of over-concentration of power with ineffective supervision."

Wen has developed a reputation as the member of China's ruling Communist Party leadership most sympathetic to relaxing some of the country's top-down controls.

Wen will retire as premier in early 2013. He has used recent speeches and comments to indicate that he wants to spend his final years in office focused on improving social welfare, promoting more balanced and equitable economic growth, and addressing public discontent with government.

In Shenzhen, a small village that exploded into a city of 14 million people in the last three decade, Wen said the Shenzhen story showed that reforming and opening up to the outside world "is the only road to achieving national prosperity and the people's happiness."

"Regression and stagnation will not only end the achievements of the three-decade old reform and opening-up drive and the rare opportunity of development, but also suffocate the vitality of China's socialist cause with her own characteristics," the premier added.

(Reporting by Chris Buckley, editing by Miral Fahmy)

[ttwjr32]

a freind in the USA sent me this article

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Louisa Lim
Foreign Correspondent, Beijing
 
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129386304
 
As China's economy overtakes Japan to become the world's second biggest, it's mostly written about in superlatives: the world's biggest consumer of energy, the biggest car market, even the biggest producer of beer.
But in fact, China's economy is in slowdown: Economic growth has dropped from almost 12 percent in the first quarter to 10.3 percent in the second and is slowing further still.
The dog days of summer are especially sluggish at a real estate agency in Tiantongyuan, a massive suburb of Beijing, once famous for its low-cost housing. But today, there are no takers. Real estate transactions dropped 70 percent after the government moved to slow the market in April. Prices have dropped by about a quarter in this part of town. Still, nobody is buying amid warnings the slump could be just beginning.
Ghost Cities
In real estate agent Meng Jianguo's company, which has 30 employees, the mood is quiet desperation. "From the end of April till now, this whole shop has only sold two flats," Meng said. "You see we're definitely losing money. Lots of other shops have closed down in this street."
Out on the street, it's not just vacant shops people are worrying about. China's electricity company recently estimated there were enough vacant apartments to house 200 million people. The government has denied these figures, but the phenomenon of ghost apartments — and even ghost cities — does exist because of real estate speculation.
The crackdown on that led to a slowdown in construction, and, says Wang Tao from UBS, that has had a knock-on effect on China's trade partners.
"When China slows, then its imports from other countries — and to a lesser extent, the U.S. — will slow, too," he said. "The slowdown of China's growth, the biggest impact of that, is going to be on commodity exporters: the Australias and Brazils and so on."
Woes In The Automotive Sector
China's massive stimulus package two years ago was accompanied by a record lending spree of $1.4 trillion. Now, stimulus incentives are being wound back, and once-favored sectors are coming back to earth with a bump.
In one dealership selling Chinese-made Chery cars, the four employees are playing cards. That's how slow it is. Growth in the auto market is slowing sharply. Shop manager Luo Cixi says sales have halved since last year.
"This year, profits are down a long way, since there are fewer customers," Luo says. "Last year, cars with small engines sold very well after the sales tax was halved. But after the tax was reimposed this year, it's been bad."
Chinese Consumers Not Spending Enough?
All of this suggests Chinese consumers aren't really stepping up to the plate. Domestic consumption is at 35 percent of gross domestic product, the lowest of any major economy. But minimum wages have gone up across China, mostly by more than 20 percent. That will raise prices for manufacturers.
Economists are not necessarily concerned, however.
"Most economists when they look at the slowdown that's taken place over the last couple of months, they're actually more relieved than concerned," says Patrick Chovanec from Tsinghua University.
Chovanec says China must now learn lessons from Japan's experience.
"Japan hit this point in the 1980s, when it became the second-largest economy in the world and the largest exporter in the world. And because it didn't adapt to the fact that it had outgrown its export-driven growth model, it lost its way," he says. "If China wants to continue to grow, it will have to transition from being an export-driven economy to an economy that drives itself."
That would be in China's long-term interests, but it would cause short-term pain. The same is true if Beijing frees up its currency, which it's accused of keeping artificially cheap. China has made symbolic moves to allow it to trade more freely, but it has been reluctant to let it rise too far for fear of a global double-dip recession. It's not yet clear whether China's policymakers have the stomach for that much short-term pain.



 

 

 

[ttwjr32]

BEIJING – A Chinese passenger jet broke apart as it approached a fog-shrouded runway in the country's northeast and burst into flames as it hit the ground Tuesday, killing 43 people and injuring 53 others, state media said.

The Henan Airlines plane with 91 passengers and five crew crashed in a grassy area near the Lindu airport on the outskirts of Yichun, a city of about 1 million people in Heilongjiang province, the official Xinhua News Agency said.

Xinhua quoted Hua Jingwei, an Yichun publicity official, as saying that some passengers were thrown from the cabin before the broken plane hit the ground.

The Brazilian-made Embraer E-190 jet had taken off from Heilongjiang's capital of Harbin shortly before 9 p.m. (1300 GMT) and crashed a little more than an hour later, Xinhua said.

A middle-aged man who survived the crash told China Central Television there was bad turbulence as the plane descended, then several big jolts that caused the luggage to come crashing down from the overhead bins.

"After we stopped, the people in the back were panicking and rushed to the front," the unidentified man, who had no visible injuries, said in an interview from a hospital bed. "We were trying to open the (emergency exits) but they wouldn't open. Then the smoke came in ... within two or three minutes or even a minute, we couldn't breathe. I knew something bad was going to happen."

It was not clear from his account at what point the plane broke apart. The man said he and a few others escaped from a hole in the wall of the cabin near the first row of seats, then ran from the burning wreckage.

Click image to see photos of the wreckage


Reuters/Xinhua/Li Guangfu
CCTV showed firefighters dousing the burning plane with hoses and later digging through the wreckage of the jet.

Xinhua said 43 bodies were recovered within hours of the disaster and 53 people were hospitalized, most with broken bones. Wang Xuemei, vice mayor of Yichun, told CCTV that three survivors were in critical condition but gave no details.

CCTV earlier said that 91 people were on board, and gave a lower death and injured toll, but the report appears to not have included the five crew on the plane.

Henan Airlines is based in the central Chinese province of the same name and flies smaller regional jets, mainly on routes in north and northeast China. Previously known as Kunpeng Airlines, the carrier was relaunched as Henan Airlines earlier this year.

Henan Airlines and many other regional Chinese airlines flying shorter routes have struggled in the past few years, losing passengers to high-speed railroad lines that China has aggressively expanded.

An American company, Phoenix-based Mesa Air Group Inc., was an original investor in Henan's predecessor company, Kunpeng, but divested its stake last year. Mesa operates regional services in the U.S. for Delta Air Lines, United Airlines and other carriers and is undergoing bankruptcy reorganization.

Full-tilt expansion of Chinese air traffic in the 1990s led to a series of crashes that gave China the reputation of being unsafe. The poor record prompted the government to improve safety drastically, from airlines to new air traffic management systems at airports.

The last major passenger jet crash in China was in November 2004, when an China Eastern airplane plunged into a lake in northern China shortly, killing all 53 on board and two on the ground.

An MD-11 cargo plane operated by Zimbabwe-based Avient Aviation crashed during takeoff from Shanghai's main airport last November. Three American crew members died while four others on board were injured.

__

[ttwjr32]

pics from the crash

[Willy The Londoner]

Ted I prefer to see the news on CCTV9 at least Ling has tits.  Come to think of it she is not alone there!!!!!  Keep on reporting.

Willy