Category: Society

(Peoples Daily Online)11:24, December 03, 2020

A staff member demonstrates a VR device supported by the 5G network at the booth of telecom giant China Mobile during the 22nd China Hi-Tech Fair in Shenzhen, south Chinas Guangdong Province, Nov. 12, 2020. (Xinhua/Mao Siqian)

It is estimated that Chinas 5G communications industry will reach a value of 503.6 billion yuan (about 76.75 billion dollars) in 2020, an increase of 128 percent over the same period last year.

Chinas 5G communications industry reached a value of 225 billion yuan in 2019, an increase of 133.2 percent over the same period last year, according to a White Paper recently released by China Center for Information Industry Development (CCID).

The White Paper predicts that by 2030, the number of 5G base stations in China will reach 15 million, the cumulative direct investment in 5G infrastructure will reach 4 trillion yuan, and the cumulative GDP driven by 5G infrastructure construction will reach 1.7 trillion yuan.

According to data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, it is expected that by the end of 2020, the total number of 5G base stations in China will exceed 600,000. It is estimated that Chinas 5G communications industry will reach a value of 503.6 billion yuan in 2020, an increase of 128 percent over the same period last year.

(Peoples Daily Online)11:16, December 07, 2020

Qian Yutian selects books at a waste recycling station. (chinanews.com/Sun Tingting)

Over the past 10 years, Qian Yutian, 76, has purchased more than 30,000 books from waste recycling stations, donating more than 10,000 of them to children or people in need.

Sharing that he enjoys collecting historical materials, Qian frequents waste recycling stations.

I used to frequent three recycling stations every day, and I was able to pick up more than 50 jin (25kg) of books, he said, adding that that there is a standard for his choice of books: at least 80 percent of them should be new, there should be no graffiti, and the content of books should be positive.

The number of books I can purchase each time is not certain. I usually donate 60 or 70 books at a time every 7 to 10 days, Qian noted.

Qian Yutian shows his personal collection. (chinanews.com/Sun Tingting)

In Qian鈥檚 view, many books can be recycled to avoid waste. Through his practical actions, he wants to allow more children to have access to books and form the good habit of thrifting. Qian said that he will always insist on going to the waste recycling stations to buy and donate books.

I will continue to donate 1,000 books a year, and I will just keep going, Qian revealed.

(Xinhua)10:41, December 08, 2020

TIANJIN, Dec. 7 (Xinhua) — North Chinas Tianjin Municipality will prohibit businesses and institutes from collecting personal bioinformation starting next year, amid heightened public concerns over the uncontrolled use of facial recognition, now employed in mobile payment, test-taking, and even public toilets.

According to a regulation passed by the citys legislature on Dec. 1, market credit information providers will be banned from collecting information needed for biorecognition and other personal data, including religion, blood type, and medical history.

Personal income, savings, and tax records are also protected from information harvesting unless the collectors sought the permission of clients, according to the legislation. It will target credit service agents, industry associations, as well as enterprises, and public institutes.

Tianjin is among the Chinese cities that have moved to regulate the overwhelming applications for facial recognition, which have increasingly sparked controversies in Chinese society and raised fears of personal data leaks.

In October, the city of Hangzhou, east Chinas Zhejiang Province, issued a regulation stipulating that the gathering of bioinformation, like fingerprints and facial recognition data, shall not be required to enter residential communities.

In what was known as the countrys first legal case on facial recognition, a court in Hangzhou last month ruled that a local zoo compensate a customer and delete his facial information. The customer filed a lawsuit against the zoo after the latter demanded facial recognition as an entry requirement for all its annual cardholders.

On Oct. 1, China released a new version of the national standards on personal information protection, requiring that before the collection of personal bioinformation, the individual whose personal information is being collected should be separately notified of the purpose, method, and use, as well as the collection scope and storage time.

(Xinhua)10:43, December 08, 2020

SHANGHAI, Dec. 7 (Xinhua) — The Shanghai Municipality has strengthened port, airport, and cold-chain transport control to fight against COVID-19, authorities said on Monday.

Apart from a series of documents issued for the prevention and control of the epidemic, the citys commission of transport released a guideline on Nov. 26 to prevent infections caused by personnel as well as goods at the Shanghai Port, Liu Bin, deputy director of the commission, said at a press conference.

During port operations, crew members should be under special management for epidemic control. Port workers should regularly undergo nucleic acid testing, disinfect the working environment and receive closed-off management, Liu said.

An airport regulation for COVID-19 control was also released, which requires full coverage of prevention and control measures in both cargo and passenger transport sectors.

Liu said cargo terminals would have qualified third-party companies for disinfection, subject to related procedures.

The control of cold-chain transportation also improved, said Liu.

According to Liu, the city has a total of 2,184 companies engaged in cold-chain transport.

Sun Xiaodong, deputy director of the Shanghai Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said among the six locally-transmitted COVID-19 cases diagnosed between Nov. 20 and 23, four worked at two logistics companies at the Shanghai Pudong International Airport, and the other two were the wives of two of them.

Epidemiological surveys showed two of the workers had been exposed to the cabin environment or the crew members of cargo flights from overseas, and the others were all their close contacts.

According to the press conference, a residential community in Zhuqiao Township of Pudong New Area, where no new COVID-19 cases have been reported for 14 days, will be adjusted as a low-risk area on Tuesday. It will bring the number of medium-risk areas of the city to zero.

(Xinhua)13:25, December 08, 2020

HONG KONG, Dec. 8 (Xinhua) — Carrie Lam, Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), said on Tuesday that in view of the worsening COVID-19 epidemic situation in Hong Kong, social distancing measures will be further tightened including the banning of dine-in services in restaurants after 6 p.m..

Lam said to the media before attending the Executive Council meeting on Tuesday that the recent epidemic has been worrying, with 661 new cases of COVID-19 reported over the past week. Patients in critical and serious conditions involved not only the elderly but also the younger people.

The situation is more complicated than the last wave as infections scattered across Hong Kong and a number of clusters were involved, Lam said, adding that the number of untraceable cases has been rising which indicated that there is a lot of silent transmission in the community.

The HKSAR government will adopt more stringent measures to reduce people flow in public places to contain the spread of the virus. Dine-in services in restaurants will be banned after 6 p.m., and work from home arrangements among civil servants will be strengthened. Business premises including fitness centers, beauty parlors, massage establishments need to be closed, according to Lam.

To prevent importation of cases, visitors who arrived in Hong Kong are subject to a 14-day compulsory quarantine in designated hotels and they need to do another COVID-19 test five days after finishing the quarantine, Lam said.

Hong Kong reported 78 additional confirmed cases of COVID-19 on Monday, taking its total tally to 6,975. As of Monday, 1,122 COVID-19 patients are being treated in public hospitals and the community treatment facility at AsiaWorld-Expo, and a total of 36 patients are in critical condition.

(Xinhua)13:37, December 08, 2020

CHENGDU, Dec. 8 (Xinhua) — Chengdu, capital of southwest Chinas Sichuan Province, reported three new domestically transmitted COVID-19 cases on Tuesday, local authorities said.

The cases were reported between midnight Monday and 6 a.m. Tuesday, according to the Chengdu municipal health commission.

One of the three cases, a 20-year-old woman surnamed Zhao, is the granddaughter of two confirmed patients reported on Monday.

The other two cases, a 71-year-old woman surnamed Li and a 68-year-old woman surnamed Zhang, lived in the same village with the two confirmed patients.

All 46 close contacts in Chengdu have been traced and placed under medical observation. The places they visited in the past 14 days have also been disinfected.

As of 6 a.m. Tuesday, swab samples of 24,598 people in the city have been collected for nucleic acid tests. A total of 468 environmental and food samples have also been collected.

(Xinhua)14:32, December 08, 2020

KUNMING, Dec. 8 (Xinhua) — More than 3.18 million laborers have left southwest Chinas Yunnan province to work in other regions, a poverty-reduction move supported by the government.

A labor transfer policy was initiated in 2015 to help poor households shake off poverty by obtaining employment in other regions, Wang Yubo, acting governor of Yunnan, told a press conference Tuesday in the provincial capital of Kunming.

Wang said that considering the inconvenience caused by the COVID-19 epidemic, the province even arranged buses and charter flights to help the labor forces reach their places of employment.

Yunnan announced on Nov. 14 that the province had eradicated absolute poverty, with the remaining nine counties removed from the list of poverty-stricken counties.

(Peoples Daily Online)10:40, December 02, 2020

Huang Wei, left, better known as Viya, sells dried persimmons during a livestreaming session in Shanxi province to help increase local farm incomes. (Photo/China Daily)

Along with the development of 5G, AI and mobile Internet technology, online videos, short videos, live-streaming and immersive experiences have been fully integrated into Chinese peoples daily lives; China has accelerated the rate of entering an era of video socialization,鈥?according to a recent report.

The report entitled Chinas Video Socialization Trend Report (2020), which was released by China Brand Development Institute of Peoples Daily on November 25, shows that with the further development of 5G, AI and mobile Internet technology, network videos, short videos, live-streaming and immersive experiences have been fully integrated into Chinese peoples daily lives, affecting the way they connect, communicate and integrate in the world.

The report points out that videos have been involved in the development of various industries in the form of factors of production, and have become a key driving force in the era of digital economy.

In the first half of 2020, there were more than 10 million live-streaming shows across the country, with more than 400,000 active live streamers, more than 50 billion views and more than 20 million commodities on the shows. E-commerce live streaming is taking practical actions to promote the new development of the real economy, said a relevant person in charge of Ali Research Institute.

The innovation and popularization of network communication technology and information transmission technology have reshaped the form of content production from the bottom up, thus infiltrating into the whole chain of content production and redefining the video industry and its boundaries, Zheng Wen, deputy dean of the School of Journalism of Fudan University, pointed out.

Videos have been widely used in education, health care, commerce and other fields; meanwhile, they have been interfaced with the industries so as to promote the industrial upgrading.

For instance, after being applied to the education field, the interaction between teachers and students and the sharing of educational resources can be realized, and after being applied to office work, the operation efficiency of enterprises can be greatly improved.

Videos can also be adopted in poverty alleviation work. On the one hand, videos help promote the investment of resources in poor areas and bridge the economic gap between urban and rural areas; on the other hand, they are able to facilitate the popularization of knowledge and help users in poor areas improve their working capacity through online courses.

(Xinhua)13:23, December 06, 2020

The Altay-Fuyun section of the Afuzhun (Altay-Fuyun-Zhundong) railway line in northwest Chinas Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region began operations Sunday.

Both passenger and cargo trains will ply on the newly unveiled 148-km-long railway line, according to China Railway Urumqi Group Co., Ltd. The Fuyun-Zhundong section became operational in late 2019.

Spanning 419 km, the Afuzhun railway is connected with another railway, and together they form part of a circular railway network in the northern part of Xinjiang.

(Xinhua)13:57, December 06, 2020

Twelve COVID-19 patients were discharged from hospitals after recovery across the Chinese mainland on Saturday, the National Health Commission said in a daily report Sunday.

There were 279 confirmed cases still being treated, including six in severe conditions, the report read.

As of Saturday, the Chinese mainland had reported a total of 86,619 confirmed COVID-19 cases, among whom 81,706 had been discharged from hospitals after recovery and 4,634 died of the disease.