Youngest Vice Governor

(CFP)

Tan Zuojun, former General Manager of China State Shipbuilding Corp., was recently appointed vice governor of northeast China's Liaoning Province, becoming the youngest vice provincial governor in China.

Tan, 44, graduated from Wuhan University with a bachelor's degree in international law in 1990 and gained his master's degree from Touro Law in New York in 1997. After graduation, Tan began work in the shipyard business, starting with China State Shipbuilding Corp. in June 2002. He became general manager in July 2008.

Due to his experience in the shipbuilding sector, Tan was ranked 30th in the list of 100 most influential leaders in the international shipping industry in 2010 by Trade Winds magazine, a top industry publication.

Anti-Piracy Campaign

The Chinese Government has launched a new campaign targeting rampant online piracy through enhanced supervision and inter-agency coordination, according to a statement from four ministry-level departments on July 4.

The four departments are National Copyright Administration, Ministry of Public Security, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and State Internet Information Office.

The four-month campaign will highlight supervision over content providers, storage services, search engines and e-commerce platforms, said the statement.

Local authorities are required to conduct special investigations and boost routine inspections over online publications. The statement also proposed supervisory guidelines for e-commerce platforms under which service providers are obliged to create specific rules for copyright protection and internal penalties for violations.

New Drug List

China will revise its national essential drug list this year to better meet people's pharmaceutical demands, a health official said on July 3.

Vice Minister of Health Yin Li told a national meeting that the number of drugs in the current list was relatively small and its structure was "unreasonable."

Yin admitted that the comprehensive evaluation for drug purchasing in China lacked unified standards, and vicious competition had led to shortages of some low-priced drugs. "There is also a shortage of pharmaceutical professionals at the primary level and the drugs' reimbursement rate is relatively low," he said.

The World Health Organization's essential drugs list has 358 categories, whereas China's latest version, updated in 2009, has only 205.

Overseas Adoption

More than 100,000 Chinese-born orphans and children with physical disabilities have been adopted by overseas parents over the last 30 years, a senior government official said on July 4.

Overseas adoption has become an important channel through which orphaned and disabled children find homes, said Minister of Civil Affairs Li Liguo at a ceremony held for 130 U.S. families and 200 adopted children who came back to China to "seek their roots."

Li said the adoption system has improved constantly in recent years, with an increasingly mature legal system and expanding social impact.

China has cemented adoption agreements with 138 government bodies and children's organizations in 17 countries.

Heritage Additions

Two more properties in China were approved to join the World Heritage List at the 36th World Heritage Conference held in St. Petersburg, Russia, on June 24-July 6, namely the Chengjiang Fossil site in southwest China's Yunnan Province and Xanadu in China's northern Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.

So far, 43 Chinese sites, including 30 cultural ones, have been recorded on the list.

Discovered in 1984, the Chengjiang Fossil site contains the remains of 200 species of marine creatures up to 530 million years old. That makes it one of the most striking discoveries of ancient life in the 20th century. The fossil site is considered to be the best window to date into the marine life and ecological systems of the Cambrian period.

Xanadu encompasses the remains of Kublai Khan's capital city established in 1256. It was the base from where Kublai Khan established the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) that ruled China for over a century and extended its boundaries across Asia. The site features the remains of the city, including temples, palaces, tombs, nomadic encampments and some water works.

Phones for the Internet

The number of people accessing the Internet via cellphones will exceed the number doing so via personal computers in China in the coming two or three years, experts predicted on July 3.

Experts at a conference organized by the Beijing Communication Industry Association said that mobile Internet will also popularize the Internet in the world's most populous nation.

China's Internet users stood at 513 million at the end of last year, with 356 million logging in with cellphones, up 17.5 percent year on year, according to data from the China Internet Network Information Center.

More Trains to Lhasa

China has increased passenger train services from major cities to Lhasa, capital of west China's Tibetan Autonomous Region, to cope with a travel surge that has rippled across the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau since a landmark railway opened six years ago.

Trains started traveling daily between Guangzhou, capital of south China's Guangdong Province, and Lhasa from July 9. Chengdu- Lhasa trains will soon follow the same schedule.

Seven major Chinese cities currently have Lhasa-bound trains. All are expected to operate on a daily basis in the future. Among them, Beijing, Shanghai and Xining already have daily trains to Lhasa.

The Qinghai-Tibet Railway, spanning 1,956 km from Xining, capital of northwestern Qinghai Province, to Lhasa, has transported 52.76 million passengers since it went into operation on July 1, 2006, said Bao Chuxiong, General Manager of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway Co. The number of Qinghai-Tibet Railway travelers has grown by about 10 percent annually and in 2011, it reached 10.6 million, up 65.6 percent from 2006.

Wider Pension Coverage

China launched a campaign aiming to provide pension insurance to all rural residents and unemployed citizens in order to help cope with its aging population on July 1.

More than 380 million Chinese have been insured by the urban-rural residents social pension insurance system over the past three years, with about 100 million elderly people claiming basic pensions granted by the state every month, according to official figures.

Some 123 million Chinese were older than 65 by the end of 2011, accounting for 9.1 percent of the total population, according to official data.

New Electricity Pricing

China implemented a new multi-tier electricity pricing system on July 1 to tackle the increasing pressure of supplying power to the world's most populous country.

Under the new system, the residential electricity rate increases as the electricity consumption base amount increases.

Beijing has set three price brackets for residential users and will keep the current electricity rate unchanged for residents consuming less than 240 kwh of electricity a month.

The current electricity rate for Beijing households remains at 48.83 yuan ($7.75) for every 100 kwh of consumption.

Different provinces have set up their own price brackets. The new pricing system has been designed to have minimal impact on the poor. Households consuming less than 480 kwh per month can save at least 16 yuan ($2.54) a month, according to a calculation by the Zhejiang Provincial Price Bureau.

China has been pushing for reform in its pricing of resources and energy as part of efforts to better reflect market demand and save energy as power shortages are reported almost every summer.