April 2006 China News

The rock greats will play Shanghai's Grand Stage, an 8,000-seat converted indoor stadium, on April 8, according to an announcement from Emma Entertainment.

"The Rolling Stones first-ever concert in China, do not miss it," the Beijing-based company said on its Web site. Tickets range from $38-$375, the site said.

The Stones had been slated to play Shanghai and Beijing in 2003, but the shows were canceled amid the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome.

The April concert couldn't immediately be confirmed with the band's management, and wasn't listed on its Web site among the stops on its current "A Bigger Bang" tour, which has so far raked in well over $3 million in ticket sales.

The band is scheduled to play in Nagoya, Japan on April 4 and Sydney, Australia on April 11, according to the Rolling Stones official Web site.

China's wealthiest and most cosmopolitan city, Shanghai has drawn a growing number of major international acts from Elton John to Mariah Carey and British hard rockers Deep Purple.

The Rolling Stones are among the better known Western rock bands in China, with pirated versions of their greatest hits collection "Forty Licks" widely available in shops and on the streets.

Beijing is launching a campaign to stamp out widespread public spitting in an effort to clean up its image for the 2008 Olympics.

The government has concluded that spitting is the city's "most serious bad habit," Zhang Huiguang, director of Beijing's Capital Ethics Development Office, said Wednesday.

"This year we will intensify our law enforcement efforts in this field," Zhang told a news conference. "We will require law enforcement officials to step up the frequency of fines."

Tourists visiting Beijing often are startled at how many people spit or blow their noses onto sidewalks.

The crackdown is part of efforts to raise "ethical and cultural" standards in advance of the 2008 Summer Games, a major prestige project for the communist government.

Zhang said officials will launch an advertising campaign on radio, television, the Internet and mobile phones to "teach people the right way to spit."

"For example, you have to spit into a tissue or a bag, then place it in a dustbin to complete the process," she said.

Those without a bag handy needn't worry. Zhang said her office has organized a small army of volunteers who are already hitting Beijing's streets, handing out small "spitting bags" and wearing bright orange uniforms with the Chinese character "tan" -- "mucus" -- printed in yellow on the back.

She said enforcement will also be ramped up against littering -- the second-worst habit her office faces -- and pets fouling the streets, the No. 3 scourge.

China slaps a tax on chopsticks

China will slap a tax on chopsticks and a range of goods ranging from yachts to petrol in a bid to save trees and protect the environment.

Plans to impose a 5 percent consumption tax on both disposable wooden chopsticks and wooden floor panels would help curb the plundering of timber resources and efforts to protect the environment, the Ministry of Finance said.

Disposable chopsticks used up 1.3 million cubic metes of timber each year, depleting the country's forests, the ministry said.

From April 1, China will make its biggest adjustments to consumption taxes in 12 years, with its newly stressed national goals of slashing energy consumption and stemming environmental degradation in mind.

The move was aimed at "promoting environmental protection and economizing on resources while better guiding the production and consumption of certain products," the ministry said on its Web site.

Among the most significant changes will be adjustments to car taxes, with levies poised to rise as high as 20 percent for highly polluting vehicles with larger engines.

China would also broaden the scope of oil products subject to consumption levies to include fuel oil, jet fuel and naphtha and lubricants, as the government leans more on pricing mechanisms to curb the country's rampant use of energy.

Adjustments were also made to level new consumption taxes on golf balls and equipment, yachts and luxury watches and to scrap charges on skin care and shampoo products, once seen as the privilege of the wealthy, but which have become commonplace as incomes have risen.

China's most common hard alcohol, known as baijiu, would be taxed at a flat level of 20 percent for the first time, it said.

The Finance Ministry did not say how the move would impact Chinese efforts to spur domestic consumption as a bigger driver of growth alongside exports and investment.

Source

China's space quest gathers speed

China has mapped out an ambitious space program for the next decade that includes a space walk in 2008, a lunar robot lander by 2012 and a possible space station after that, according to state-run media.

China already has completed two piloted space flights -- the Shenzhou-5 launch in October 2003 and Shenzhou-6 in October 2005 -- that demonstrated its ability to put one or more astronauts into space and bring them home safely.

The first flight, with Yang Liwei aboard, lasted less than a day before the capsule, slung beneath a parachute, landed on Inner Mongolia's grasslands. The 21-hour flight transformed the 38-year-old former air force pilot into an instant hero for millions of Chinese.

Two years later, two astronauts, Fei Junlong and Nie Haisheng, stayed aloft for five days, giving a further enormous boost to China's national pride. Their capsule safely parachuted to earth in the same area of Inner Mongolia as Yang's flight.

Those achievements lifted China into an elite group. Only the former Soviet Union and the United States previously had successfully put men and women into space, beginning with Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's first Earth orbit in 1961 aboard Vostok-1, and John Glenn's Mercury-6 orbital mission the following year for the U.S.

Now, according to state-run Xinhua news agency, the China Manned Space Flight Engineering Office says its next piloted space flight, Shenzhou-7, scheduled for 2008, will feature a space walk.

"Our initial plans are to have one or two astronauts walk in space for about half an hour," office director Wang Zhougui was quoted as saying recently by Xinhua.

Shenzhou-8, with a mission that includes a space dock, will be launched around 2009-2011, according to Wang, Xinhua reported.

Along with the Shenzhou piloted space program, China is pushing ahead with its Chang'e (named for the Chinese Moon goddess) series of pilotless missions. These envisage a lunar orbiter in 2007 (Chang'e-1), a lunar landing by 2012 and a robotic rover that will land, sample the Moon's surface and return to Earth by 2020.

China's space program, which dates back to the founding of the first rocket research institute in October 1956, has been held up by the Chinese leadership as a shining example of the country's technological prowess.

After Soviet assistance was withdrawn in the late 1950s, China set to work on applying the technology it had acquired. It launched its first self-developed liquid propulsion rocket in February 1962, and by April 1970 was able to launch its first satellite, Dongfanghong-1, aboard a Long March rocket. The satellite remained in orbit for 26 days transmitting the revolutionary song "The East Is Red."

The Long March rockets became the mainstay of the country's commercial satellite launch business in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but China's reputation slipped in the mid-1990s following a series of embarrassing rocket failures.

In 1992, China's leadership had given the go-ahead for Project 921 -- the mission to put a man in space.

The Russian Space Agency helped train the Chinese astronauts, and by 1999 China had launched its first Shenzhou rocket and was on track for the successful missions of 2003 and 2005.

Now, China's space goal is similar to the motto of the athletes who will compete in the Beijing 2008 Olympics: swifter, higher, stronger.

Source

The Rolling Stones will hold their first-ever concert in China in April, three years after canceling a pair of shows on the mainland because of the SARS outbreak.