Compared with the mature commodity market, the Chinese futures market is much weaker and offers only a few types of contracts. Futures trading of pork, steel, crude oil, silver and lead is expected to be introduced to the market in the future, said Yu Junli, research director of Green Futures Inc., a consulting firm that specializes in futures. Yu said in an interview with Xinhua News Agency that his firm also expected to see the introduction of stock index futures this year.

Too Many Hotels

The Chinese hotel industry has an excessive supply of rooms.

SAO Hotel Solution Consulting Ltd. said at a hotel industry conference in Tianjin on June 26 that the number of star-rated hotels in the country had risen to 14,327 by the end of last year, up 100 percent from the amount in 2000.

But occupation rates were going down. The occupation rate of five-star hotels in Shanghai dropped to 68 percent in 2007 from 72.33 percent in 2005. Beijing's five-star hotel occupation rate also dropped 3 percent during the same period.

Many hotels were built specifically to accommodate an anticipated influx of visitors during the Beijing Olympic Games on August 8-24. Experts have warned about a possible industry recession after the end of the Olympics as well as a general economic slowdown.

Forging a Homegrown Coffee Brand

Dehong Hougu Coffee Ltd., Asia's largest coffee bean supplier to Nestle SA, said it would promote its own brand throughout China and gradually stop providing coffee beans to Nestle. Hougu has supplied beans to the Swiss food giant for more than a decade.

Xiong Xiangru, Chairman of Hougu, told a recent news conference that his company sent a notice that said: "Hougu coffee will no longer remain a raw material supplier and will be committed to creating its own brand, so that someday Hougu coffee can get ahead of Nestle and other major coffee brands."

China has supplied beans to foreign coffee giants such as Nestle and Starbucks Coffee Co. for decades, but local coffee bean growers have been hampered by their lack of knowledge and technology in processing the beans.

Hougu will provide good quality yet inexpensive coffee to the public for 1 yuan ($0.14) per cup. "In our country, coffee is positioned as a fashionable high-end consumption," Xiong said. "But it is actually common and cheap in other countries in Europe and America."

Xiong said Hougu planned to become the first listed coffee company on the mainland stock market in about 2010.

Nestle believes Hougu's move will not have a major impact on its business, because it has more than 80,000 coffee bean suppliers and farm households in Yunnan Province to guarantee its supplies.