Text of report in English by official Chinese news agency Xinhua (New China News Agency)
Beijing, 6 September: Beijing Mayor Liu Qi said Thursday [6 September] that this host city of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games will be turned into a garden-like metropolis in seven years.
Beijing will be a green city with a blue sky and clean water, the mayor told a forum on forest and environmental protection.
"With green vegetation and flowers everywhere, Beijing will be a place pleasing to both the eye and mind."
To reach that goal, the mayor said the municipal government is drafting, among others, an action plan to build a 10,000 sq.km. green ecological shelter belt in the mountainous areas in the suburbs.
A green shelter belt totalling 125 sq.km. will be built inside the city, while 1,230 sq.km. of areas along its five major rivers and 10 highways and expressways will be planted with trees in the coming seven years, he said.
By 2008, the forest coverage rate for hilly areas in rural Beijing will reach 70 per cent while the vegetation rate for the urban area will be 45 per cent, he said.
The Chinese government has decided to turn green 7.8m ha of land in 75 counties in Beijing and its neighbouring Tianjin, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and Shanxi province in a bid to erect a shelter belt for the capital city.
To reduce industrial pollution, Beijing has earmarked 5bn US dollars for environmental projects during the 1998-2002 period, and the investment will reach a record-breaking 6.6bn US dollars in the five years before 2008.
The figure represents four to five per cent of the city's gross domestic product for the same period. The mayor said the second Shaanxi-Beijing natural gas pipeline will be laid to pump gas into Beijing, which will increase the supply of natural gas for Beijing to 5bn cubic meters by 2008.
"Clean energy will then account for 80 per cent of the total energy consumed, similar to that of developed countries."
Beijing will introduce the exhaust gas emission standards European II and III by 2004 and 2007, respectively, so that the amount of exhaust gas emissions from new cars running in Beijing will be cut by 60 per cent, he said.
Liu said 90 per cent of the buses and 70 per cent of taxis in Beijing will be fuelled by natural gas by 2008.
The city's subway and light railway systems under construction, which total 100 km in length, will be operational by the time the games starts.
The city plans to double the transportation capacity of its buses, trolley-buses, and subway systems by 2008, which stand at 9. 86m and 2.66m, respectively.
The mayor said the city will continue to improve its industrial mix, relocate polluting firms from within the city proper, as they have in the several past years, in a bid to cut industrial pollution in the coming years.
Beijing's Capital Iron and Steel Group Co has been ordered to cut its iron and steel production by 2m tons in the coming year.
Beijing plans to build 12 more waster water treatment plants before 2008, increasing its treatment capacity to 2.8m tons per day, or 90 per cent of the total, the mayor said.
By that time, half of the waste water will be recycled, he added.
Source: Xinhua news agency, Beijing, in English 1533 gmt 6 Sep 01
/BBC Monitoring/ © BBC.
NewsMax.com WiresWASHINGTON (UPI) - A U.S. surveillance plane flying near China´s coast four years ago picked up secret communications on a meeting between a senior Chinese Communist official and an Irish leftist linked by U.S. intelligence to counterfeit U.S. currency, the Washington Times reported Thursday.
Friday, May 11, 2001
The Air Force RC-135 reconnaissance flight in late May 1997 revealed the meeting between Sean Garland, president of the Dublin-based Workers´ Party, a communist political party, and Cao Xiaobing, the Times said, citing a classified National Security Agency report.
"Garland is suspected of being involved with counterfeiting U.S. currency, specifically, the Supernote, a high-quality counterfeit $100 bill," the report said.
Cao was described in the report as bureau director of the International Liaison Department of the Chinese Communist Party, Beijing´s official office for supporting foreign communist parties.
The classified report did not say what was discussed at the meeting, but a spokesman for the Workers´ Party told the newspaper the discussions were "political" in nature.
According to the London Sunday Times, Garland was a leading member of the Irish Republican Army in the 1960s and early 1970s.
A 1986 Russian document made public by dissident writer Vladimir Bukovsky stated that Garland wrote a "Dear Comrade" letter to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev asking Moscow for the equivalent of $1.42 million to fund Workers´ Party activities.
Intelligence officials said the report highlights China´s support for foreign communist parties, a role once played by the now-defunct Soviet Union, the Washington Times said.
In addition to Ireland´s communists, Beijing is also backing Japan´s Communist Party and other parties once supported by Moscow, said officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Copyright 2001 by United Press International.
All rights reserved.
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/5/10/151457.shtml
||||| ||||| ||||| ||||| 2001-08-29 06:37:05 Nortel Networks signs 8 mln usd network upgrade deal with China Telecom HONG KONG (AFX-ASIA) - Nortel Networks Corp said it has signed an 8 mln usd agreement with China Telecommunications Corp to upgrade the latter's multiservice backbone networks in Yunnan and Heilongjiang provinces and Tianjin and Chongqing municipalities.
In a statement, the company said the upgraded networks will enable China Telecom to offer advanced ATM, frame relay, internet protocol, virtual private networks and other end-to-end data services from a single, high capacity platform.
China Telecom plans to replace its existing backbone switching equipment in its networks with Nortel Networks solutions, it said.
ra/rc
MMMM
World Reporter All Material Subject to Copyright