ORDER RETURNS: Residents of Urumqi, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region’s capital city, shop at a Carrefour supermarket on July 23. The store reopened 17 days after the July 5 riot

China's Central Military Commission (CMC) conferred the rank of general on three senior military officers on July 20, bringing the total number of generals to 174.

CMC Chairman Hu Jintao awarded the officers certificates of command at the promotion ceremony. The senior officers are Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) Ma Xiaotian, Political Commissar of the PLA's Academy of Military Sciences Liu Yuan, and Political Commissar of the Chengdu Military Area Command Zhang Haiyang.

China began to confer military ranks to military and police officers in 1955, when Chairman Mao Zedong promoted 10 senior officers to the rank of marshal, a rank that was later abolished.

No Tobacco Publicity

Organizers of the 2010 Shanghai World Expo are to return a 200-million-yuan ($29.4 million) donation from a tobacco company after health experts raised objections to the sponsorship.

Xu Wei, spokesman of the Shanghai World Expo Coordination Bureau, told Xinhua News Agency on July 22 that the agency annulled the sponsorship contract with the tobacco company and would return the money, although the timing and payment details had yet to be decided.

Xu would not name the company. Asked if it was the Shanghai Tobacco (Group) Corp., the only known tobacco sponsor of the Expo, Xu declined to comment.

Slow Population Growth

China, with its 1.3 billion people, is expected to achieve a zero population growth rate by 2030, an expert predicted on July 21.

"Zero growth could be realized when the country's population hits a peak of 1.465 billion people by 2030," Tian Xueyuan, former President of the Institute of Population and Labor Economics under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said at a forum in Beijing. China's current task is to stabilize the low growth rate and achieve a rate of zero growth, he said.

China's family-planning policy, which was formulated in the early 1970s, encourages late marriages, late childbearing and limits most urban couples to one child and most rural couples to two children. It's estimated that without the policy the country's population would be 400 million more than the current 1.3 billion people.

Vital Vaccines

Two Chinese pharmaceutical firms kicked off two-month clinical tests for the country's A/H1N1 influenza vaccine on July 22.

More than 2,000 volunteers recruited in Taizhou, Jiangsu Province, are taking part in the trials carried out by Hualan Biological Engineering Inc., said Fan Bei, Deputy General Manager of the company.

The tests came exactly one month after Hualan produced the vaccines, which manufactured the country's first batch on June 22. The batch contains 90,000 doses in all.

The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and its Beijing bureau also began clinical tests on the vaccines produced by the Sinovac Biotech Ltd. on July 22.