Tag Archives: China

A five-episode political documentary focusing on an effective anti-graft measure taken by the Communist Party of China began airing on Thursday, with many details of corrupt officials revealed for the first time.

A screenshot shows the documentary Sharp Sword of Inspection.[Photo/CGTN]

The documentary, named “Sharp Sword of Inspection”, highlighted President Xi Jinping’s strategy of using inspections as tools to boost clean governance amid the country’s unprecedented campaign of fighting corruption.

It was jointly filmed by the CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the country’s top anti-corruption watchdog, and China Central Television. It is being aired by CCTV with one episode each day.

According to the documentary, Yu Haiyan, former vice-governor of Gansu province, cut up all his photos taken with bosses who bribed him and flushed the pieces down the toilet to destroy evidence for graft charges. It said he also dipped his cellphone in vinegar and then threw it into the Yellow River to erase his phone records with the bosses.

Nearly 20 corrupt senior officials, including Wu Changshun, former police chief of Tianjin, and Wang Min, former Party chief of Liaoning province, were interviewed in the TV series. They expressed their regrets and confessions over their misdeeds. All of the corrupt officials who appeared in the documentary were investigated after they were inspected.

“I was afraid of the inspection team, and I drained my brains to learn the activities of the inspection team,” Wang said in the documentary. He was sentenced to life imprisonment last month for receiving 146 million yuan ($22.5 million) in bribes.

Inspection, or xunshi, proves to be an effective tool for fighting corruption. Among the corruption cases probed by the top anti-graft watchdog, about 60 percent of the indicators of corruption were collected by the inspection teams.

The discipline inspection commission has launched 12 rounds of inspections at 277 Party and government departments, State-owned enterprises, institutes and universities since the 18th CPC National Congress in 2012.

On Aug 30, 17 organizations inspected in the 12th round, including the government of the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, Peking University and the Cyberspace Administration of China, publicized their measures for correcting problems found by the inspection team.

The inspection team found that the promotion of some officials at Peking University had violated rules. The university said in its rectification report that it had removed the posts of those officials as a measure to implement the inspection report.

Xi has highlighted the importance of inspections numerous times in the five years since he initiated the anti-graft campaign.

In May, Xi presided over a meeting of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, during which senior officials were asked to set themselves as examples by exercising self-restraint in the use of their power, accepting supervision and acting in line with rules.

The inspection work should focus on sticking to the Party’s leadership, strengthening the Party’s buildup and comprehensively enhancing Party discipline, according to a statement released after the meeting.

Yang Xiaodu, minister of supervision and deputy head of the discipline inspection commission, said last month that 256,000 graft cases were filed for probe from January to June, compared with 193,000 during the same period a year earlier.

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This is the quietest tourist site in China — no phones, cameras and cars are allowed inside. Even planes have been rerouted to avoid disturbance, but still, it draws thousands of tourists.

The 500-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Since it began operation in September last year, the world’s largest radio telescope, located in southwestern province of Guizhou, has received 240,000 tourists, according to local authorities.

The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) is a single-dish telescope, with a diameter of half a kilometer. It was built in Dawodang depression, a natural karst basin in Pingtang County, an impoverished area in mountainous Guizhou.

The telescope is used to probe space for the faintest signs of life and is sensitive to any electromagnetic interference.

Nearly 10,000 residents living in the core zone, within five kilometers of the telescope, have been relocated.

“All phones and cameras must be handed in if visitors want to enter the core area,” said Liu Xingwu, a local tour operator.

“Vehicle engine ignitions also produce electromagnetic waves, so all sightseeing vehicles which enter the core zone have been modified to remove magnetic interference,” said Liu.

With a total investment of 1.2 billion yuan (about $188 million), the telescope has also created a boom in tourism for the county, which is home to around 330,000 people.

An astronomical and cultural park is being extended. New theaters and exhibition centers will open ahead of the National Day holiday in October, said Shi Bangze, director of the county tourism bureau.

Shi said that any increase in tourist numbers must not interfere with scientific studies underway at FAST.

“Scientist are using FAST to probe space, and they do not want any disturbances, so tourism can only be developed on the condition that the research functions are not impeded,” he said.

The county has instigated a daily cap of 2,000 visitors within the core area.

“Most travellers come on weekends and holidays. We use manual film cameras rather than digital ones to take photos of the visitors. The cameras have been tested for interference,” Shi said.

“Once the daily limit is reached, we divert tourists to other scenic areas further away from the telescope,” he said.

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[unable to retrieve full-text content]The State Council, China’s cabinet, Wednesday moved to improve voluntary services with socialist core values. read more

Beijing Capital International Airport, the busiest in China, will increase ground resources and reduce the number of flights to improve flight punctuality, the airport president said on Wednesday.

Improvements are planned to the airport’s operation resources, such as improving the runway and taxiway system, increasing the number of spaces on the ground for aircraft and enhancing shuttle efficiency. On the other hand, the airport will optimize flight slots and improve availability during its peak hours of operation, the airport’s president, Han Zhiliang, said at the Beijing Global Friend Airports CEO Forum, a conference of the civil aviation industry.

Many Chinese airports have on-time performance issues. In July, the national flight punctuality rate was 50.76 percent, the Civil Aviation Administration of China said. Nearly half of all flights were delayed or canceled.

As China’s busiest airport, Beijing Capital International strives for significant improvement to its on-time performance, Han said.

It’s slot scheduling is overused. “The utilization rate of slots capacity has reached 98 percent at the airport … while data show that a reasonable slots capacity percentage for a large-scale hub airport is 80 percent,” Han said.

“The heavy slot arrangement at a busy airport lowers the ability to respond to extreme weather and emergencies, increasing the possibility of causing large-scale and lengthy delays,” he said.

“Once extreme weather or an emergency happens at the hub airport, punctuality will fall like dominoes, causing delays. … At the Beijing International schedule screen, it is rare to see a blank slot from morning to night. Nearly all slots have been allocated to airliners,” he said.

He said 103 flights depart and land in an hour at the airport during peak hours, while the capacity standard is 88 flights per hour.

Ouyang Jie, a professor of airport research at Civil Aviation University of China, said, “The move aims to cut regional routes, such as the number of direct flights to third-tier small cities, and detour those regional routes to nearby Tianjin and Shijiazhuang airports”. He said passengers can take high-speed rail between nearby airports and Beijing.

It takes about 30 minutes to travel between Tianjin and Beijing by high-speed rail, and 90 minutes between Shijiazhuang and Beijing.

Beijing Capital International Airport will increase the volume of international flights.

The airport handled 94 million passengers in 2016, making it the second busiest in the world for the seventh consecutive year, but it is designed to handle 82 million.

To ease the heavy pressure, Beijing is constructing a second airport.

Liu Xuesong, president of Capital Airports Holding Co, said on Wednesday that the capital will build both the current and the new airport into large-scale international hubs.

According to Liu, construction of the second airport is proceeding well. The main structure of the terminal building was topped off last month, he said.

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Gyaca county is only about 300 kilometers from Lhasa, Tibet. But a journey between them once took more than a day. The mud road studded with rocks was a big headache－not to mention the road winding around Kamba La Mountain, with cliffs above and below at an altitude of around 5,000 meters.

“It wasn’t unusual to see accidents when crossing the mountain. In my worst experience, I spent 13 hours there. Even though I hadn’t eaten, I didn’t feel hungry at all because I had to concentrate on driving to avoid danger,” said Tashi, 39, a Lhasa resident who has been driving for a living since 2005.

With paved roads, the journey now takes about six hours and is much safer and more comfortable, Tashi said.

Improvements to the road from Lhasa to Gyaca mirror the change in the traffic conditions in almost all of the Tibet autonomous region, and more changes are coming with increasing financial support from the central government.

More than 4,200 kilometers of highways have been built each year since 2012, increasing the current total mileage of highways in Tibet to more than 82,000 kilometers, according to Chen Chao, deputy head of Tibet’s transport authority.

The investment in transportation in Tibet has increased by more than 40 percent each year from 2012 and reached more than 40 billion yuan ($6.1 billion) in 2016. The number is expected to reach 56 billion yuan this year, Chen said.

The highway in Medog county, the last Chinese county to be connected with highways, opened to traffic in 2013. All townships in Tibet are expected to be accessible by car before the end of this year.

There is less traffic in Tibet than in many other provincial regions in China. So, rather than build expressways, Tibet developed many high-grade highways－which are similar to expressways but much cheaper and with narrower emergency lanes. The total length of high-grade highways increased sixfold to 304 kilometers between 2012 and 2016, Chen said.

The huge investment and the improved traffic flow have contributed a lot to the economic growth of Tibet. In the past five years, the region’s GDP grew by an average 11 percent. It also outperformed all other provincial regions in the first half of this year with year-on-year growth of 10.8 percent.

By 2020, Tibet’s highways will reach 110,000 kilometers. It will take less than three hours for people to travel from Lhasa to four other major cities, Chen said.

“Once transport barriers are removed, there will be more commercial activities like logistics and tourism, thus improving local people’s livelihoods.”

Highways were not built at the expense of the environment. In many areas in Tibet, the construction of highways may actually help protect, rather than damage, the environment, he said.

Without highways, drivers often choose to drive on the smoothest places they can find－even on grassland, which damages it, he said.

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