BEIJING, Dec. 3 (Greenpost) — The State Council, China’s cabinet, on Thursday publicized a plan for a pilot ecological damage compensation system that will eventually go national.
The Chinese government will pilot the trial in several selected provinces and municipalities from 2015 to 2017, and popularize it throughout the whole country in 2018, according to the plan.
The plan said China will strive to establish a comprehensive damage compensation system by 2020 with high efficiency, to protect and improve the nation’s eco-system.
The trial provinces are not yet finalized.
The plan shall mainly deal with cases of significant impact or environmental damage cases occurred in areas where development is banned or restricted by national or provincial governments. Enditem
NEW YORK, Dec. 2 (Greenpost) — Chinese companies clinched three spots in the Boston Consulting Group’s 10th annual global survey of the 50 most innovative companies released on Wednesday.
The group published a ranking of 50 most innovative companies in the world based on the survey of 1,500 executives. Apple, Google, and Tesla Motors are top three on the list.
Chinese online media company Tencent is at 12, and Huawei and Lenovo are at 45 and 50, respectively. This is an increase from a decade ago, when there were no Chinese companies on the list, the report’s co-author Andrew Taylor said.
A global group is comprised of the list: 29 companies from the United States, 11 from Europe, and 10 from Asia. Emerging markets also make their presence felt: there are three companies from China and one from India.
Innovation gained an increasing importance in corporate success. In the annual global survey, 79 percent of respondents ranked innovation as either the top-most priority or a top-three priority at their company, the highest percentage since the question was asked in 2005.
Meanwhile, science and technology continue to be seen as increasingly important underpinnings of innovation, enabling four attributes that many executives identify as critical: an emphasis on speed, well-run R&D processes, the use of technological platforms, and the systematic exploration of adjacent markets.
Given the strong impact of technological developments such as mobile technology and social media in the last decade, one might expect technology companies to have shoved aside their more traditional counterparts.
“Yet we still see plenty of traditional companies on the list. They, too, have used technological advances to their own innovative ends. Five of the top ten companies in 2015 are non-tech. On the larger list of the 50 most innovative companies, 38 (76 percent) are non-tech companies,” the report said. Enditem
WASHINGTON, Dec. 1 (Greenpost) — China will continue to push forward financial reforms after the International Monetary Fund (IMF) decided to include the Chinese currency, the RMB or Chinese yuan, into its Special Drawing Rights (SDR) basket of currencies, a senior Chinese official said here Tuesday.
The IMF executive board on Monday approved the inclusion of the RMB into its SDR basket as a fifth currency, along with the U.S. dollar, the euro, the Japanese yen and the British pound, marking a milestone in the RMB’s global march.
“(The) Chinese yuan joining the SDR does not mean (the) end of reform of the financial sector in China,” Chinese Vice Finance Minister Zhu Guangyao said at the Washington-D.C.-based Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE).
“(Chinese) President Xi (Jinping) said to the whole nation (that) reform is an ongoing process … We must continue reforms,” Zhu said after delivering a speech on China’s 13th Five-Year Plan, the country’s development blueprint for the next five years (2016-2020).
Zhu said it is in China’s interest to continue pushing forward reforms and the government has been following the financial reform agenda laid out at the Third Plenary Session of the 18th Communist Party of China Central Committee in late 2013. “That’s our guidance. We follow that exactly.”
Zhu said the IMF board’s decision to include the RMB in its SDR basket of currencies really reflects “global consensus” on the RMB’s eligibility of joining the currency basket, and it will make the SDR “more representative and attractive,” benefiting both China and the world.
Nicholas Lardy, a senior fellow at the PIIE and a leading expert on China’s economy, also described the decision as “a win-win for the global economy,” dismissing the speculative view of competition between the RMB and the U.S. dollar.
Lardy said the RMB-denominated assets now account for roughly 1 percent of global reserves held by central banks and the transition to more holdings of RMB-denominated assets will be very gradual.
“It should not be thought of in competitive terms, you know, the Chinese are gaining their share at the expense of the U.S., I think that’s a misreading,” he said.
PIIE President Adam Posen echoed Lardy’s view, saying that “there have been long periods in modern economic history when you have more than one so-called reserve currency.”
“Having a more balanced basket, not just in the SDR but in world portfolios” will help reduce the burden of global imbalances, he said. “I think that’s something the U.S. and China both want.”
Zhu also said the 13th Five-Year Plan is very important for China to complete the building of a moderately prosperous society and overcome the so-called “middle income trap,” as the country is making efforts to restructure the economy and shift to an innovation-driven mode.
He said that the average annual growth rate must be at least 6.5 percent during the next five years for China to double the 2010 GDP and the per capita income of both urban and rural residents by 2020.
Zhu said the main purpose of his trip to Washington this week was to discuss the agenda of the 2016 Group of Twenty (G20) summit with U.S. officials as China formally took over the presidency of the G20 on Tuesday.
Chinese President Xi Jinping and his U.S. counterpart, Barack Obama, gave instructions to working teams of both sides to strengthen coordination in the G20 during their bilateral meeting in Paris one day ago, he said, noting that the two countries displayed “really good policy coordination” in the past ten G20 summits. Enditem
BEIJING, Nov. 30 (Greenpost) — China is eying high-level talents to accelerate its national strategy of mass entrepreneurship and innovation.
In a meeting with representatives of Chinese postdoctoral researchers on Monday, Premier Li Keqiang encouraged them to concentrate on innovative studies to make technological breakthroughs and focus on market demand to actively transform research achievements into productivity.
Li said Chinese researchers should also strengthen international exchanges and cooperation and participate in global competition.
His words came in as China celebrated the 30th anniversary of its postdoctoral system, which has covered all disciplines and major fields of economic and social development.
“Postdoctoral researchers have made their own contribution in economic and social development, scientific research and industrial upgrade,” Li said.
He urged more efforts to build a better postdoctoral system that values talents and facilitates innovation. Enditem
PARIS, Nov. 30 (Greenpost) — Chinese President Xi Jinping said here Monday that his country has confidence and resolve to fulfill its climate change commitments.
Xi made the remarks when delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of a United Nations climate change conference, officially called the 21st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
As a developing country, China has taken bold actions to reduce carbon emissions while setting ambitious climate goals.
In his speech, Xi reiterated China’s pledge made in June to cut its carbon emissions per unit of GDP by 60-65 percent from 2005 levels by 2030, and increase non-fossil fuel sources in primary energy consumption to about 20 percent and peak its carbon emissions by the same date.
These pledges represent a big step further from the world’s second largest economy’s previous emission control targets.
“This requires strenuous efforts but we have confidence and resolve to fulfill our commitments,” Xi said.
China has been actively engaged in the global campaign on climate change, now topping the world in terms of energy conservation, and utilization of new and renewable energies, Xi said.
China’s Five-Year Plan from 2016 to 2020, aiming at a more sustainable and balanced way of development, seeks to promote clean industrial production, low-carbon development and energy conservation to ensure sustainable growth in the next five years.
On the basis of technological and institutional innovation, China will adopt new policy measures to improve industrial mix, build low-carbon system, develop green building and low-carbon transportation and establish a nationwide carbon-emission trading market, the president said.
To act on climate change is not only driven by China’s domestic needs for sustainable development in ensuring its economic, energy and food security, but also driven by its sense of responsibility to fully engage in global governance and to forge a community of shared destiny for humankind, according to an action plan China submitted to the Secretariat of the UN Framework Convention on climate change late June.
The highly-anticipated Paris climate conference, opened by leaders from over 150 countries, aims to yield a new international agreement to reduce greenhouse gases beyond 2020 when the 1997 Kyoto Protocol expires.
Such an accord is seen as crucial for keeping the rise in global temperatures within 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times, a goal scientists say should be met to avoid risky changes in the climate. Enditem
BEIJING, Nov. 29 (Greenpost) — The head of Morgan Stanley maintained his positive outlook on the Chinese economy despite a continued slowdown amid lackluster domestic demand and rising external uncertainties.
James P. Gorman, chairman and CEO of the leading global investment bank, said during a lecture in Peking University that the growth rate is down but the increase is still enormous and China’s contribution to global economy remains the highest of any countries in the world.
The economy expanded at 6.9 percent year on year in the first three quarters of 2015, down from 7 percent in the first half and marking the lowest reading since the second quarter of 2009.
The lingering slowdown has triggered market worries about the economic outlook.
However, Gorman dismissed the concerns. “The market gets obsessed by percentages. Is China growing at six, seven, eight or ten percent?” He pointed out the economic transition is more significant than growth pace.
A pioneer in exploring the Chinese market, the global leading investment bank still regards China as a major impetus for its international business.
It celebrated its 20th anniversary in China in 2014 with more than 1,000 local employees, and held its first China Summit in Beijing in May, which brought together more than 1,100 global investors looking for new opportunities in the country.
A latest Morgan Stanley report said China’s reforms and opening up policies, especially those in tertiary sector, will generate more business opportunities in health care, Internet and technologies.
The bank maintained its annual GDP growth forecast for the full year at 7 percent and expects mild improvement in the next several months thanks to pro-growth measures including fiscal and monetary easing. Enditem
Stockholm, Dec. (Greenpost)–The awaiting Nobel Prize awarding ceremony is scheduled to take place in Stockholm Concert Hall at 16:30 Stockholm local time .
Tu Youyou and her counterparts in medicine and two physics laureates, three chemistry laureates and one laureate in literature as well as on laureate in economics will receive their Nobel Prize from the hands of the Swedish King Carl XVI Gustaf.
A grand banquet will be held at 19:00 in the Stockholm City Hall.
During the week, Chinese Nobel winner in Medicine Tu Youyou has attended a press conference to answer the journalists questions, given Nobel lectures and today she will attend the awarding ceremony and the banquet.
Tu Youyou gave Nobel Lecture in Chinese at Karolinska Institute.
Left, Jan Andersson. middle, Tu Youyou and right, interpretor.
Photo by Xuefei Chen Axelsson from live screen on Dec. 7, 2015.
Stockholm, Oct. 5(Greenpost)– Greenpost has interviewed Jan Andersson, Nobel Assembly Member and Professor at Infectious Disease Department of Karolinska Institute in Huddinge. The following is the text of the interview:
Filmed by Anneli Larsson on Oct. 5, 2015 at Nobel Forum.
Hello I am Xuefei Chen Axelsson, I am in the Nobel Forum and we just had the press conference about this year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine, and Chinese Tu Youyou won the prize, so here we have the expert(Nobel Assembly Member Jan Andersson) explain this.
Xuefei Chen Axelsson: So can you tell us why Tu Youyou wins this prize?
Jan Andersson: So Youyou Tu got half of this Nobel Prize for her discovery of Arteminsinen. And she did that from a herb, so she was the one who identified that Artemisinin annua herb, the Chinese Artemisinin branch contains compound Artemisinin that actually has the best effect against Malaria Parasite that has ever been found. So she discovered a way to elute out the active compound from the herb. She also discovered how to elute away the toxic compartments from the herb, so actually it could be developed a safe and very efficacy drug Artemisinin for the treatment of severe Malaria.
Chen Axelsson: How do you comment the contribution of this discovery?
Jan Andersson: Her component to identify how to elute out the biological activity or type of compound that was, how to purify it and then make it crystals and identification of molecular formulation for that, she set the stage for this whole development. It was a team effort, but she did the paradigm shift, the shift that open the doors for other scientist to go about, to contribute to the further development. She went in this process. It was a national process, when there were some success, but there were also failures, and they were wondering which way to go. There was a part of the projects that look for all types of traditional Chinese medicine, to see whether you can find something there.
And she went in then with knowledge of chemistry and pharmacy in how to elude out things, how to isolate things and how to test them for biological activity, and that was really a paradigm shift. She made the change to our knowledge. Then after she had identified this biological compound, and it was safe, and has got rid of the toxicity, then there was a lot of other groups in China who took this further on, to try it in different animal models, and then try it more on human infected with malaria, and then eventually there was companies that took on large scale production. But you know there is always someone to lead, and we were very happy when we saw who that was and we could identify down to Youyou Tu in specific moments in her career when she did it.
Chen Axelsson: And can we say that if without this medicine, we would have millions millions of people lost their lives.
Jan Andersson: Yes, we can say that because there was clinical trials done later on with pure substance of Artemisinin. The pure substance of Artemisinin was tested against conventional chimin Mefluquin, and it was demonstrated significant reduce mortality….30 percent reduction of mortality in children below age of five with severe malaria. So we can say that at least a hundred thousand lives are saved every year by that. We can also say that the total morbidity illness goes down because there is completely new medicinic action so that Artemisinin involves much earlier on in the life cycle of the disease.
Chen Axelsson: It’s like vaccination?
Jan Andersson: No, you cannot say it’s vaccination, it is a cure. And we do not use it for prevention. We keep it for the cure of the infected ill people.
Chen Axelsson: Maybe briefly talk about the other half of the prize?
Jan Andersson: Yes, the other half goes to scientist in Japan, Satoshi Ömura and then his collabrator in the United States, William Campbell, together, they collectively discovered a new compound for treatment of roundworm infections, calling them in Latin Namatom infections, they infect a third of the human population, and generate chronic worm infections. There are two examples of that, quite well-known, river blindness and elephantiasis, those affected 25 million who get river blindness infection and you get 120 million who have elephantiasis, they are called filariasis. And they discovered the compound that by single yearly doze cure if you repeat in a number of years because it kills the microfilaria, the small children or the adult filaria extremely effective with single doses in 12 months.
This are predominantly affecting Africa, but there are also in Americas and South East Asia, Asia like Yemen that has problems for that. Predominantly in Sub-Sahara Africa. River Blindness in 31 nations, and elephantiasis in 81 nations affected by this disease.
Campbell was born in Ireland and lived in America. Ömora screened the bacteria, he screened 45 thousand bacteria, and then he selected 50 that he gave to Campbell. And Campbell has specific means eluting out biological activity against numbers of different microbs. And he discovered the novel theraphy against infections caused by roundworm parasites.
