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China has issued a management regulation for people working at after-school tutoring institutions to better regulate the institutions.

The regulation, jointly issued Tuesday by the Ministry of Education and Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, said tutors for academic subjects should have teaching credentials, while those for non-academic subjects should have relevant professional qualifications.

No teachers at kindergartens and primary and secondary schools should work at tutoring institutions, the regulation said.

The number of full-time tutors and researchers should account for more than 50 percent of all people employed by the institutions, it said.

Tutoring institution employees should support the Party’s leadership and socialism with Chinese characteristics, abide by laws and regulations, and have good morality and professional ethics, the regulation stipulated.

The regulation also included “red lines” for the employees, including violating Party’s policies, disseminating wrong information and views in classes or online, engaging in inappropriate relationships with students, discriminating against or abusing students, using drugs or engaging in other criminal activities, it said.

People violating the regulation should be fired by tutoring institutions and those with serious misconduct will be included in the national blacklists for tutors, it added.

BEIJING, Sept. 14 (Xinhua) — After going virtual on three occasions due to the impact of COVID-19, China’s renowned Canton Fair is returning to the physical world with a resumption of offline activities.

Scheduled for next month in south China’s Guangdong Province, the 130th session of the China Import and Export Fair will be held both online and offline, Vice Minister of Commerce Ren Hongbin told a press conference Tuesday.

The upcoming session will be a milestone, as it marks the return of offline exhibitions at all major expos across the country, signaling new progress in China’s efforts to coordinate epidemic control with economic and social development, said Chu Shijia, head of the China Foreign Trade Center, one of the fair’s organizers.

Amid routine measures to block the spread of the virus, China has been actively promoting large-scale international trade fairs as platforms to propel trade growth and support businesses around the world.

The 2021 China International Fair for Trade in Services (CIFTIS), which just concluded in Beijing, attracted representatives from 153 countries and regions, with more than 1,000 deals secured.

The event also saw the announcement of the country’s new opening-up measures in the services sector, including implementing a negative list for cross-border services trade and exploring the development of national demonstration zones for the innovative development of trade in services.

The CIFTIS is China’s solution for connecting with the international market and engaging in international cooperation, which is of great significance to the rebounding of trade in services and the recovery of the world economy, said Li Jun, director with the Institute of International Trade in Services under the Ministry of Commerce.

The country is also making solid preparations for the import-themed expo in Shanghai, which has been held successfully on three previous occasions and became a channel for global brands to tap the gigantic consumer market in China.

The Canton Fair, with a history dating back to 1957, has long been seen as a barometer of China’s foreign trade. Last year, when the pandemic disrupted global trade activities, the fair played an especially important role in shoring up trade growth and supporting the worst-hit small businesses around the world.

The online form was proven efficient, with a record number of products on display during the last session of the fair in April.

The upcoming session will continue to give full play to the low-cost and high-efficiency nature of online exhibitions, while resuming the offline displays to help global buyers and vendors to better connect with each other, Ren said.

The event will last five days and feature only one phase, as opposed to the three phases of previous sessions, in view of the current epidemic control situation. The offline exhibition will cover an area of 400,000 square meters, while 60,000 online booths will be set up for the virtual event, he added.

The latest data from the General Administration of Customs shows that China’s foreign trade sustained growth momentum in the first eight months of the year, with exports surging 23.2 percent and imports jumping 24.4 percent year on year.

The country is confident of achieving the target of maintaining stable trade growth while enhancing trade quality for the year 2021, Ren said, cautioning that small and medium-sized trade firms in the country still face challenges from rising costs, an issue that will be addressed with targeted policies.

On September 10, The 5th Industrial robot Technology Application Skills Competition of Anhui Province, which lasted for three days,  came to an end in Wuhu. Wang Dengming, deputy director and member of the Provincial Department of Economy and Information Technology, Yao Kai, deputy mayor, Zheng Lanrong, deputy secretary of the Anhui Provincial Committee of the Communist Youth League, Cai Xiaoli, member of the Party Leadership Group and vice chairman of the Provincial Women’s Federation, Wang Jian, second-level inspector of the Provincial Federation of Trade Unions, Gao Wu,deputy secretary of the party committee and principal of Wuhu Vocational and Technical College, attended the closing ceremony.

The competition is divided into three groups, includin staff, teachers and students. More than 180 contestants from the whole province signed up, and the number of contestants reached a record high. After theoretical examination and practical operation, 9 first prize winners, 12 second prize winners and 15 third prize winners were determined. 13 excellent organization prizes were awarded in the competition.

This competition fully implements the spirit of the relevant documents of the provincial government on supporting the construction of a strong manufacturing province, the construction of a large technical and industrial province, and the development of the robotics industry. It is an important platform for the “investment attraction and talent introduction” work of the high-end equipment manufacturing industry.

Translated by Yuan Mengwen from Foreign Affairs Office of Wuhu Municipal People’s Government

Recently, results of the eighth patent award selection in Anhui Province were announced, with a total of 45 patents in Wuhu, ranking the second in the province. Among them, Wuhu Midea Kitchen Appliance Manufacturing Co., LTD., Efort Intelligent Equipment Co., LTD., Chery Automobile Co., LTD., State-owned Wuhu Machinery Factory, Anhui San ‘an Photoelectric Co., Ltd. won gold medals.

In recent years, Wuhu has continuously optimized the policy system, strengthened the guidance services for enterprises, revised and improved the subsidy and reward policies for patents and trademarks, increased patent protection, strengthened the application of achievements, and significant progress has been made in protecting the creation and use of intellectual property rights. According to the statistics, in the first half of this year, the number of invention patents authorized in Wuhu was 1,598, with a year-on-year increase of 31.8%, and the number of PCT applications was 23, with a year-on-year increase of 64.2%. The number of effective invention patents owned by every 10,000 people reached 47.2, continuing to remain the first in the province. There were 16,379 trademark applications in Wuhu and 2,324 registered trademarks owned by market entities per 10,000 households, ranking first in the province.

Translated by Yuan Mengwen from Foreign Affairs Office of Wuhu Municipal People’s Government

The business logistics sector has undergone tremendous growth in China in recent years, and its rapid development has made lives easier while effectively boosting economic growth.

However, there are still obstacles hampering the sector’s development. Many businesses, particularly in small cities, are seeking more incentives to help facilitate logistics in areas such as cross-border trading, and bring down their costs.

Wang Weidong, an official in charge of cross-border e-commerce in Shushan district of Hefei, capital of Anhui province, said that the volume of such business in the city has grown significantly in recent years.

However, Hefei’s international air cargo capacity is not sufficient. In fact, the only international cargo flight available in the provincial capital is one that operates twice a week to Chicago in the United States.

There is no air cargo agency in Hefei and this complicates matters for local companies who need to get their goods on the outbound flights to Chicago, which originate in Shanghai. By the time they arrive in Hefei, there’s little cargo space left.

To get around this problem, some companies send their goods to Shanghai to get them on the flights before they arrive in Hefei, but doing so adds to operational costs.

Zheng Haitao, owner of an e-commerce business in Shushan, said that the lack of air cargo space is a sore point in Hefei.

“The space for goods on the flights is extremely limited, and the pricing is not transparent,” he said.

Wang said the government is working hard to tackle the issue and enhance the provincial capital’s international cargo capacity.

“Without solid infrastructure, it will be harder to formulate market competitiveness for these logistics businesses,” he said.

A new national action plan announced in a guideline earlier this month promotes efforts to facilitate international logistics. The plan made it clear that efficiency will be improved by improving global logistics channels and easing customs clearance for cross-border trade, highlighting the vital role that business logistics plays in connecting domestic and global markets.

Some local businesses are also striving to make the process more intelligent, a direction included in the new action plan.

In 2013, Wang Jun started Wuhu Jiuheng Packaging Technology, a pallet production business in the province’s Wuhu city.

The company originally started off making ordinary wood pallets. Now, the pallets are equipped with chips, which enable businesses across the entire logistics chain to track the status of shipped goods.

Wang Yong, a professor at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, said that although the development of logistics infrastructure and networks in China remains uneven, the process is becoming increasingly intelligent.

While the demand for business logistics is expanding rapidly, the country still lacks modern businesses with a competitive edge, he said, adding that the sector needs to become more environmental friendly.

Aerial photo taken on March 24, 2020 shows farmers harvesting oranges in Liangqing District of Nanning, capital of south China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.(Xinhua/Zhou Hua)

BEIJING, Aug. 23 (Xinhua) — While embarking on the journey of comprehensively building a modern socialist country, China has envisioned a future where prosperity is shared by everyone in the country.

The term “common prosperity” has been brought up several times in key official documents recently. After listing progress in common prosperity in its 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025), the country’s leadership stressed the need to pursue it and expounded on the term in a meeting last week, bringing it under the spotlight.

What is common prosperity? Why does China emphasize it? How will the country achieve it? Here are some explanations.

— What is common prosperity?

Common prosperity refers to affluence shared by everyone both in material and cultural terms, and should be advanced step by step, said the meeting on financial and economic affairs.

In particular, it emphasized that such prosperity does not cover only a few people or parts of the country.

Rather than being egalitarian at the expense of efficiency, common prosperity should be attained through hard work and innovation, with chances for more people to become wealthy.

— Why does China emphasize common prosperity?

Common prosperity is an essential requirement of socialism and a key feature of Chinese-style modernization, according to the meeting.

Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 2012, the country has gradually put common prosperity in a more prominent position. Now, with victory in the anti-poverty fight and the completion of the building of a moderately prosperous society in all respects, China has favorable conditions for promoting common prosperity.

The goal is also vital to improving people’s well-being. As China marches toward its second centenary goal, the focus of promoting people’s well-being entails boosting common prosperity, said the meeting.

— How will the country achieve it?

To achieve the goal, China vows to establish a scientific public policy system and a reasonable distribution system that benefits everyone. There is a focus on primary and inclusive projects that facilitate people’s well-being and guarantee their basic needs.

Highlighting the importance of appropriately dealing with the relationship between efficiency and fairness, the country plans to make basic institutional arrangements on income distribution. It also plans to expand the size of the middle-income group and adjust excessive incomes to promote social fairness and justice.

Other planned measures include protecting property rights and intellectual property rights, the healthy development of different types of capital, and the advancement of common prosperity among farmers and in rural areas, the meeting said.

Actions are already underway. According to a guideline unveiled in June, Zhejiang Province, an economic powerhouse, has been designated as a demonstration zone for promoting common prosperity.

Under the guideline, the province will strive to grow its per capita gross domestic product (GDP) to the level of moderately developed economies by 2025 and basically achieve common prosperity by 2035, with its per capita GDP and the income of urban and rural residents reaching the standard for developed countries.

BEIJING — China’s economy maintained its recovery streak in July, despite challenges posed by the resurgence of COVID-19, extreme weather and external uncertainties.

China’s industrial production continued its expansion, with the value-added industrial output, which measures factory activities, rising 6.4 percent year-on-year in July, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).

The figure was up 11.5 percent from July 2019, bringing the average growth for the past two years to 5.6 percent, NBS data shows.

During the January-July period, China’s fixed-asset investment increased 10.3 percent year-on-year, with the average growth rate over the last two years at 4.3 percent.

The country’s retail sales of consumer goods climbed 8.5 percent year-on-year in July, resulting in an average growth of 3.6 percent over the past two years.

Floods and the resurgence of COVID-19 restrained industrial production to a certain extent, while the resumption of quarantine measures in some regions affected the recovery of consumption related to tourism, catering and other services, said Wen Bin, chief analyst at China Minsheng Bank.

In general, the cumulative growth rate of major macroeconomic indicators remained at a reasonable level, although growth in some areas of the consumption and services sectors slowed last month due to high temperatures, heavy rainfalls and sporadic COVID-19 outbreaks, said NBS spokesperson Fu Linghui.

China’s job market also remained generally stable last month thanks to increasing demand for labor and flexible job opportunities, as well as favorable policies that stabilize employment and assist college graduates and migrant workers, said Fu.

In July, the surveyed unemployment rate in urban areas was 5.1 percent, up 0.1 percentage points from June, but lower than the rates registered in the same period in 2020 and 2019.

In the first seven months of 2021, China created a total of 8.22 million new urban jobs, achieving 74.7 percent of its annual target, NBS data shows.

Fu expects China’s economy to continue its steady recovery in the second half of the year, with major macro indicators remaining within a reasonable range and the quality of development further improved.

Fu is optimistic about the country’s future consumption. The expansion of vaccination campaigns and targeted COVID-19 prevention and control measures will stabilize the market, while the increased job opportunities and household incomes will drive up consumption, he said.

In terms of industrial production, Fu highlighted the fast expansion of China’s high-tech manufacturing sector against the backdrop of the country’s increasing resilience in innovation-driven development.

In July, the sector’s output expanded 15.6 percent from the same period last year, resulting in an average growth of 12.7 percent over the last two years.

Cautioning that there are increased uncertainties in global economic resumption and challenges to domestic economic recovery, Fu said that measures will be taken to implement the cross-cycle adjustment of macro policies, tap into the potential of the domestic market, and keep the economy operating within an appropriate range.

More efforts should be made to boost domestic demand further, improve the role of infrastructure investment in stabilizing investment and growth, and ramp up support for manufacturing, micro-, small- and middle-sized enterprises, as well as inclusive and green finance, Wen said.

The Implementation of the Three-year Action Plan for SOE Reform in Wuhu (2020-2022) was officially issued recently, which provided policy guidance for further improving the performance of state capital and state-owned enterprises (SOEs ).

The implementation plan includes 8 parts and outlines 36 measures for SOE reform, mainly aiming at improving the modern corporate structure of SOEs with Chinese characteristics, stepping up improved distribution and structural adjustment in the state-owned sector, intensifying mixed ownership reform, establishing sound market-oriented operating mechanisms and the system of state assets regulation focusing on capital management, comprehensively strengthening the Party’s leadership and Party building in SOEs. In addition, the plan stresses the importance of organizational leadership of SOE reform, pressing forward with implementation, performance assessment, etc.

According to an official in charge of State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of Wuhu Municipal People’s Government, since 2020, we have actively implemented the key tasks of the three-year action plan for SOE reform, and explored the establishment of a mixed ownership reform fund for SOEs to accelerate the reform. We have encouraged SOEs in the city to actively participate in industrial investment and promoted the injection of state-owned capital in major industries and key sectors related to people’s livelihood. We have also accelerated the standardization of the board of directors of enterprises in the city and supported the restructuring and listing of enterprises.

In addition, efforts should be made to improve the system of state assets regulation focusing on capital management and accelerate the reform of the authorized management system of state-owned capital at the municipal level. We have encouraged municipal SOEs to actively carry out pilot reform of employee stock ownership, and supported qualified enterprises to provide various medium and long-term incentives, improving the quality and efficiency of state capital and SOEs. According to statistics, as of June 30th this year, the total assets and net assets of enterprises supervised by State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of Wuhu Municipal People’s Government reached 249.4 billion yuan and 105.6 billion yuan, up 8.49% and 10.29% year on year respectively.

Translated by Wang Mengxiao from Foreign Affairs Office of Wuhu Municipal People’s Government

On August 5th, a cooperation agreement was signed by the administrative committee of Anhui Free Trade Pilot Zone Wuhu Area and  Wuhu Fuchun Dyeing and Weaving Co., LTD. Investment Cooperation and the ceremony was held at the comprehensive center of Free Trade Zone Wuhu Area. Zhang Feng, chairman of Wuhu Municipal Committee of CPPCC and He Peifu, president of Wuhu Fuchun Dyeing and Weaving Co., LTD attended the signing ceremony.

According to the agreement, Wuhu Fuchun Dyeing and Weaving Co., Ltd. will use the relevant import management policies of Wuhu Comprehensive Bonded Zone to build an international advanced intelligent precision spinning production line and realize the high integration of industrialization and information. After completion of the project, it is expected to create about 600 new jobs, with an annual output of about 86,000 tons of cotton yarns and an output value of about 2.8 billion yuan.

Since the beginning of this year, according to the “double recruitment and double introduction” work deployment conducted by Wuhu Municipal Party Committee and Municipal Government, the administrative committee of Anhui Free Trade Pilot Zone Wuhu Area cooperated closely with Jiujiang District Government and remarkable achievements have been made in investment promotion. As of July 31, 157 investment projects have been completed in the area, with a total amount of 178.811 billion yuan. Focusing on Wuhu Comprehensive Bonded Zone, there are 35 projects with fixed asset investment of about 4 billion yuan and annual import and export value of about 500 million US dollars.

Translated by Yuan Mengwen from Foreign Affairs Office of Wuhu Municipal People’s Government

China urged to fill loopholes in hospitals, airports

As 31 provincial-level regions across China on Monday warned residents against unnecessary travel in light of the outbreaks fueled by the rampaging Delta variant, Chinese officials and health experts stressed the strong infectivity and transmissibility of the mutated variant and urged the country to learn lessons from the latest outbreaks to fill the loopholes of anti-epidemic work – especially in hospitals and airports where infection risks are high.

The new surge of the outbreak triggered by the Delta variant first occurred in Nanjing, East China’s Jiangsu Province, and it has since spread to 18 provinces and cities.

Residential communities – where more than 10,000 residents live – around the Guoxing community in Beijing’s Haidian district have been locked down with public places in the area being closed. Nucleic acid testing has also kicked off and 4,500 samples have been collected, Beijing health officials said at a press conference on Monday. The capital city has reported several local confirmed cases associated with infected people returning from outside.

Wuhan, capital of Central China’s Hubei Province, also reported seven local COVID-19 cases on Monday. The city hadn’t reported any local infections since June 2020.

The outbreak, which is rapidly sweeping through the nation, has exposed loopholes in Chinese cities’ daily anti-epidemic work, which sounded an alarm to the country. Chinese experts said it showed staff members at airports and designated hospitals did not conduct strict surveillance and testing of cargo and objects. They stressed that China must fix the loopholes; otherwise the country would be hit by more new mutations, as long as the overseas epidemic is not over.

Wang Guangfa, a respiratory expert at Peking University First Hospital, said airports or ports should increase the frequency of daily testing and strengthen their scrutiny of people whose work involves close connections with imported cases.

A flight from Russia was identified as the source of the infections in Nanjing. Airport cleaning staff members were infected when cleaning the cabin.

Controlling the infection source and cutting off the infection channel are the two main means to prevent and control any epidemic resurgence in China. If the people involved fail to do a good job in daily health monitoring and protection, they will become infection sources, Wang said.

Echoing Wang, Yang Zhanqiu, deputy director of the pathogen biology department at Wuhan University, said that “the outbreak in Nanjing showed that the local authorities failed to properly handle the feces of coronavirus-infected patients or trash left on planes that carried confirmed cases. This reflected significant loopholes in the management of those places.”

Other health experts also noted that Nanjing has been comparatively slow in taking action and epidemiological investigations, but fortunately the city is still in the early stage of the outbreak.

As for the infection chain in Zhengzhou, Wang Songqiang, director of the Zhengzhou Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a press conference on Saturday that the majority of the infections were related to the Sixth People’s Hospital of Zhengzhou, a designated hospital for imported COVID-19 infections. The infections involve cleaning workers, medical staffers and in-patients. It exposed the loopholes of hospitals in the implementation of infection control.

Zhengzhou reported 13 confirmed cases and 50 asymptomatic carriers as of 6 pm on Monday. The first two patients were found to be related to the patient who returned from Myanmar and they were all infected with the Delta variant, authorities from Zhengzhou said at Monday’s press conference.

In face of the Delta variant, in addition to strict epidemic control measures, experts also pointed out that faster mass vaccination is another promising move, not only in China but also in the US.

In China, the Delta variant was first identified in southern Guangdong in June, and also in Southwest China’s Yunnan. However, the experiences of dealing with the local outbreaks showed that vaccinated individuals will show comparatively milder symptoms and have a lower chance of deterioration.

Advancing mass vaccinations to reach herd immunity is also a promising method in China as Delta variant cases surge, given the vaccination rate is still not enough high.

China’s top epidemiologist Zhong Nanshan said during a speech in Guangzhou on Saturday that China needs to vaccinate about 83 percent of its population to achieve herd immunity. He also revealed that all the 13 severe cases infected with the Delta variant in Guangzhou COVID-19 outbreak in May did not get inoculated.