The first high-speed railway in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region was opened on Thursday.

An attendant serves a passenger on a high-speed train at Hohhot East Train Station in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region on Thursday morning.[Photo/China Daily]

According to China Railway Corp, the national railway operator, the new line has reduced the fastest rail journey between Ulanqab and Hohhot, the capital, from 56 minutes to 39 minutes. The cheapest ticket costs 44 yuan ($6.7).

The bullet train runs at 250 kilometers per hour. Ten bullet train services are scheduled daily.

The new 126-km line will be part of a 286.8-km high-speed railway that will connect Hohhot with Zhangjiakou, co-host of the 2022 Olympic Winter Games, in Hebei province.

The finished railway, with a designed speed of 250 km/h, will be a major artery in North China upon its completion.

It is expected to be finished and put into service next year. At that time, the Zhangjiakou-Hohhot high-speed rail will be connected to the Beijing-Zhangjiakou railway, which is currently under construction. Travel time from Hohhot to Beijing will be reduced from an average nine hours to less than three hours.

Last year, China’s high-speed network reached 22,000 km, accounting for 65 percent of the world’s total high-speed rail.

According to a plan released by the National Development and Reform Commission in July last year, China will expand high-speed rail to 30,000 km by 2020, linking 80 percent of its major cities. By 2030, the network is planned to link all cities with populations of more than 500,000.

Commuters at Dongzhimen subway station in downtown Beijing made a joint push of a train and free a passenger sandwiched between a carriage and the platform in a dramatic rescue on Thursday night.

Beijing: pushing train to rescue trapped subway passenger

When the person got stuck at around 8 pm, subway staff tried to push the train on their own but failed. Commuters volunteered en masse to help, shouting “One, two, three” to time their efforts.

The incident ended with a round of applause at 8:12 pm when the passenger was rescued.

Construction started on Thursday on what is to be the world’s second-largest hydropower project, the Baihetan hydropower station, which is expected to enter operation by 2022.

A ceremony is held to mark the start of the construction of Baihetan hydropower station in Liangshan Yi autonomous prefecture, Southwest China’s Sihcuan province, Aug 3, 2017.

It will be second only to the Three Gorges dam in terms of total installed capacity, weighing in at 16 gigawatts of capacity and an average annual output of more than 62 billion kilowatt-hours, according to China Three Gorges Corp, the dam’s builder.

After six years of preliminary construction, the site is ready for the main project work, including building the dam and excavating underground tunnels, the builder said on Thursday.

Experts think the operation of the Baihetan dam, on the Jinsha River, an upstream branch of the Yangtze River, will substantially boost the share of hydropower in the country’s energy mix while upgrading the power structure of the country’s power grid.

China is rich in hydropower resources, and the Baihetan hydropower station will represent a good utilization of those resources while reducing greenhouse gas emissions caused by coal burning, according to Wang Hao, academician with the Chinese Academy of Engineering.

“While China is currently still relying on fossil energy, clean energy and renewable energy utilization will be an important direction for China’s energy consumption in the future,” Wang said.

“Hydropower development in the upper reaches of Yangtze River still has a lot of potential to be further tapped.”

As a major west-to-east electricity transmission project and an important move to develop China’s resource-rich but otherwise poor western region, the Baihetan hydropower station, spanning Yunnan and Sichuan provinces, will meet the demand for power in both provinces, while supplying power to the East China Power Grid, Central China Power Grid and China Southern Power Grid, corporation officials said.

The station, located in Ningnan county in Sichuan and Qiaojia county in Yunnan, will replace thermal power generating capacity of more than 62.44 billion kWh and 19.68 million metric tons of coal each year. It also will reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 51.6 million tons, sulfur dioxide by 170,000 tons, nitrogen oxide by 150,000 tons and dust by 220,000 tons each year, officials said.

The dam is built on the main stream of the lower reaches of the Jinsha River, and while it is designed mainly for power generation, other functions include flood control, improvement of downstream navigation and development of transportation via water in the reservoir area.

To meet China’s goals on energy conservation and emission reductions, the country intends to reach an installed capacity for hydropower of 380 gigawatts by 2020 as it seeks cheaper and cleaner alternatives to coal and weans itself off polluting fossil fuels.

A Chinese geneticist is to retract a paper on a new gene editing technology that was published last year after other scientists said they had been unable to reproduce his results.

Han Chunyu and his co-authors applied for retraction of the paper from the May 2, 2016 edition of Nature Biotechnology and said they would like to analyze why the results were not reproduced, according to a brief statement on the website of Hebei University of Science and Technology.

Han’s team agreed to have a third-party laboratory carry out an experiment to verify the findings on NgAgo-gDNA, said the statement.

NgAgo-gDNA is a new genome editing technology that could be an alternative to the mainstream CRISPR/Cas9 technique.

With China currently in eager pursuit of heavyweight scientific achievements, Han became an overnight sensation.

He was widely praised for pursuing groundbreaking research at a university with very little standing in the field of genetic sciences.

But doubts immediately emerged, with other researchers saying that the results could not be replicated. They included Dr Gaetan Burgio of the Australian National University.

“A third-party laboratory will perform the experiment with the support of fellow scientists and disclose the results in response to public concerns,” said the statement.

A Chinese official has invited overseas media to cover the upcoming 19th Communist Party of China (CPC) National Congress.

Jiang Jianguo, head of the State Council Information Office, made the announcement Thursday during an informal meeting with representatives of overseas media outlets in Beijing.

The national congresses, normally held every five years, are major events for the CPC and China with increasing international influence, said Jiang.

The 70th anniversary of the CPC as the ruling party is in 2019 and the CPC’s centenary is just four years away.

Jiang spoke about CPC Central Committee General Secretary Xi Jinping’s speech at a workshop for provincial and ministerial officials last Wednesday. The workshop was held to lay the ideological, theoretical and political foundations for the 19th CPC National Congress, said Jiang.

“Xi has earned the utmost trust and respect from Party members and the Chinese people,” said Jiang.

This year’s congress is expected to seek solutions to a series of issues concerning the short-term and long-term development of the country, according to Jiang.

Attendees of the meeting include representatives of AFP, AP, Asahi Shimbun, Bloomberg, Kyodo, Reuters, TASS and the Wall Street Journal.