President Xi Jinping and other Chinese leaders have visited their predecessors with seasons greetings ahead of the Spring Festival.

Former leaders including Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao got personal visits either from the current leaders or from their representatives, according to a statement from the General Office of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee on Wednesday.

The visitors wished their hosts a happy Spring Festival, good health and long lives, the statement said.

The leaders of the older generation fully endorsed the outstanding achievements the country has made since the 18th CPC National Congress under the leadership of the CPC Central Committee with comrade Xi Jinping as the core, and expressed hope that Chinese people would unite to achieve the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.

Spring Festival, or the Chinese Lunar New Year, falls on Jan. 28 this year.

Shanghai railway police arrested two men illegally carrying more than 50 ivory products, bought in Zimbabwe, as they were about to board a train.

A thin man, who appeared to have a disproportionally large stomach, raised the suspicions of security staff at Shanghai Railway station Tuesday night.

Inspectors found a long cloth bag, wrapped around his midriff, contained 10 ivory products and a further three strings of ivory products in his backpack.

Meanwhile, police captured the man’s companion, who attempted to flee, finding more than 30 ivory products in his suitcase.

The pair, from Taihe County, eastern China’s Anhui Province, flew to Shanghai from Zimbabwe where they worked for the last year, and planned to return to their hometown by train.

The thin man, surnamed Li, said he had made the cloth bag to hide the ivory products on his body, hoping to avoid police checks.

Zoologists with the local wildlife conservation association said that the products were made from African elephant ivory.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang has urged faster progress in poverty relief, saying that innovative mechanisms are needed and more funds should be collected to fight poverty.

He made the remarks during an inspection tour of southwest China’s Yunnan Province from Monday to Wednesday.

China International Travel Service Limited announced on Wednesday that it will end all business relations with a Japanese hotel chain which refused to remove books from its guest rooms denying the Nanjing Massacre took place.

The official statement released by CITS, a State-owned enterprise, said that APA Hotels’ actions had outraged all Chinese.

“After the news came out, we immediately removed APA Hotels from our website so that no tourists could book that hotel through us,” said the statement.

“We have also asked our head office and all subsidiaries to check whether they have business relations with the group. Any such business has to be stopped immediately. We will not suggest the hotel group to our clients and we will not run any of its advertisements either.”

At a news conference on Tuesday, Zhang Lizhong, spokesman for the China National Tourism Administration, said APA Hotels’ actions were a blatant provocation to Chinese tourists and had violated professional ethics.

Zhang said the administration has asked the whole industry to stop doing business with APA Hotels, adding that they hope all Chinese tourists boycott the chain.

On Dec 13, 1937, during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1937-45), the Japanese invaders captured Nanjing. Over the following six weeks, they conducted a massacre where an estimated 300,000 people, including children, were tortured, raped and murdered.

The Beijing municipal government will have 198 key tasks in 2017, and each task will be supervised by at least one government leader, the executive meeting of the municipal government has approved.

The 198 tasks are put into eight categories. They are as follows:

1. To set forth main goals for social and economic development.

2. To relocate Beijing’s non-capital functions and advance the coordinated development of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region.

3. To promote the supply-side structural reform, and improve Beijing’s economy both in quality and in efficiency.

4. To strive to address “big city problems” and expand the city’s capacity for sustainable development.

5. To deepen the innovation-driven development strategy, and build Beijing as the national sci-tech innovation center

6. To adhere to the path of the advanced socialist culture, and build Beijing as the national cultural center.

7. To uphold the people-first principle, and safeguard and improve people’s livelihood.

8. To strengthen the construction of the government itself.

Among these specific categories, to address “big city problems” and to improve people’s livelihood are given priority with tasks under these two categories totaling 85; tasks of removing Beijing’s non-capital functions number 26. Each of the 198 key tasks will be overseen at least by one municipal government leader.

As per the requirement of the city’s 2017 government work report, breakthroughs should be made in three key areas. They are as follows:

1. To complete the construction of Beijing-Qinhuangdao Highway; to continue with the construction of Pinggu Rail Transit Line; to promote traffic integration in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region.

2. To plant 100,000 mu (1 hectare equals 15 mu) of ecological water resource protection forest in Beijing and Hebei, and 40,000 mu of forest for environmental protection in Beijing and Tianjin; to advance environmental remediation and ecological repair of the Yongding River, the Chaobai River and the north section of the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal, among other inter-provincial rivers.

3. To properly link up industries; to guide certain industrial projects to relocate and cluster in areas such as Caofeidian demonstration zone; to promote the development of the Tianjin Binhai – Zhongguancun service platform for innovation; to support the green industrial development in Zhangjiakou – Chengde ecological function area.

The construction of the sub-center will focus on the building of the administration and ancillary facilities in 2017. According to the government’s work plan, four municipal authorities, along with government-affiliated administrative departments, will start relocation at the end of this year.

The sub-center building also includes the road-system construction, improvement of the environment, landscape showcase work of cultural resources highlighted by the Grand Canal.

With regard to advancing the supply-side structural reform and improving the quality and efficiency of Beijing’s economy, active moves will be made to phase out companies stuck in deficit. More than 50 “zombie enterprises” will be eliminated from the market. Health, senior care, culture and sports, recreation and tourism industries will be given to boost.