shanghai call center: thunder 24/33°c brokerages urged to
TRANSCRIPT
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Vol.016 No.5121
Monday 13 July 2015
Thunder 24/33°C
Shanghai Call Center:(86-21) 962288
Regulator clamping down on illegal practice of single investor controlling multiple accounts
BROKERAGES URGED TO ENFORCE RULES
CHINA’S securities regulator yesterday in-structed brokerages to review trades and enforce rules that require the use of real names and national identification num-bers, the latest move by the government aimed at stabilizing stock prices following a devastating market rout over the past month.
Chinese authorities have tightened con-trols on trading while partly blaming illegal behavior for a 30 percent drop that has wiped out trillions of dollars worth of mar-ket value in just three weeks.
The latest warning by the China Securi-ties Regulatory Commission is meant to clamp down on a trick whereby a single investor controls multiple accounts — often registered under other people’s ID numbers — to bid the price of a stock up or down.
“Some institutional or individual inves-tors hold ‘virtual’ securities accounts or trade with borrowed accounts. As real-name registration is required by the law, this illicit conduct may damage other
investors’ legitimate interests,” the CSRC said. It asked local authorities to verify the authenticity of securities accounts and be more strict when supervising them, Xinhua news agency reported.
Institutional and individual investors will be prohibited from lending their ac-counts to each other, it said.
The CSRC said it will clamp down on any illicit conduct in accordance with the law, and will transfer violators to the police.
Regulators recently unfurled a series of other measures, such as banning listed companies’ big shareholders from selling shares or limiting shorting activities in stocks and futures, while vowing to crack down on illegal trading activity with the help of China’s public security apparatus.
Xinhua news agency reported yesterday that an investigation personally led by Meng Qingfeng, China’s vice minister of public security, found certain brokerages suspected of manipulating futures prices and other “malicious” trading.
Xinhua said the investigation team vis-ited the head office of the CSRC in Beijing last Thursday to investigate what it called “malicious short-selling of stocks and stock indexes,” an example of the dodgy practices many believe were part of the recent stock falls over the past few weeks.
The team arrived in Shanghai on Friday to search for further clues to such illegal practices, Xinhua added.
Among the government’s other measures has been the arrangement of a curb on new share issues and the orchestration of bro-kerages and fund managers to promise to buy at least 120 billion yuan (US$19 billion) of stocks with backing from the central bank.
The moves appeared to work by the end of last week, with the CSI300 index of the largest listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen racing higher to close up 6.4 percent on Friday, while the Shanghai Composite Index rose 5.8 percent.
(Reuters/Shanghai Daily)
Sun-kissed on the Bund• METRO/A5
A foreign couple kisses on a sunny day on the Bund yesterday as a small boy looks. The threat of Typhoon Chan-Hom led to the
evacuation of some 163,000 people, according to the city’s flood control authority, and 3,000 ships were recalled to harbor on
Saturday as the city experienced rainstorms of up to 114.6 mm and strong gales of over 30 meters per second. The typhoon felled
more than 3,000 trees in Shanghai and forced the suspension of some Metro services. More than 1,000 flights were canceled at the
city’s two airports. The weather will remain mostly cloudy this week, with temperatures in the city set to soar. — Wang Rongjiang
Suspects held over ‘paid protests’ PAGE TWO
Monday 13 July 2015 Shanghai DailyA2 PAGE TWO
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Suspects detained over ‘paid-for protests’POLICE have published details of a series of so-called “rights protection” incidents, in which detainees are suspected of illegally organizing paid protests, hyping public senti-ment and fabricating rumors on the Internet to sway court decisions.
According to a statement by the Ministry of Public Security on Saturday, the suspects con-sist of lawyers as the core organizers and social media celebrities and petitioners, who are in charge of planning and implementation.
The ministry accused the group, led by the Fengrui Law Firm, of disrupting public order and seeking profits by illegally hiring protest-ers and swaying court decisions in the name of “defending justice and public interests.”
Since July 2012, the group had organized more than 40 controversial incidents and se-verely disrupted public order, it claimed.
In one high-profile case, a police shooting at a railway station in Heilongjiang Province was flaunted as a murder conspiracy, it said.
Zhai Yanmin, one of the organizers of the group, said it was first the lawyers’ job to hype up an incident, the ministry said.
One instance came after police officer Li Lebin shot dead Xu Chunhe on May 2 at Qing’an County Railway Station. Xu is said
40The number of controversial incidents said
to have disrupted social order since 2012.
to have attacked Li several times and was shot after multiple warnings. Lawyers spread rumors that “Li opened fire at Xu under the order of an official because Xu was a peti-tioner.” They also raised placards at Qing’an Railway Station and kept pressuring local officials.
Then the job shifted to social media ce-lebrities and petitioners. Wu Gan, known for stirring controversial incidents, posted mes-sages on his social media account, offering 100,000 yuan (US$16,100) for any video clips that caught the “truth” of the incident.
Zhai then hired “petitioners” to shout slo-gans or sit quietly and raise signs in support of the lawyers, the ministry said. According to one suspect surnamed Li, she was paid 600 yuan for carrying a sign onsite.
The ministry said there were others
responsible for filming scenes of “mass in-cidents” and posting them on some overseas websites to manipulate public opinion.
“They have been following the protocol in hyping up such incidents since 2013, when I first entered the business,” said Zhai, adding that many of his peers were resentful of the Party and the government and took pride in being detained by the police.
The suspects had turned common matters into hot issues and controversial incidents into political ones, the ministry said.
According to the ministry, Zhou Shifeng, director of the Fengrui Law Firm, elevated the firm’s popularity while the lawyers earned more commission fees. Internet celebrities such as Wu made more money. The petition-ers got more attention from the government officials on their cases, sometimes securing more favorable public opinion.
The suspects, Zhai, Wu, Huang Liqun and Liu Xing have reflected on their alleged crimes and realized their harmful impact, the ministry said.
Zhou and his colleagues at the firm, Liu Sixin, Huang, Wang Yu and Wang Quanzhang, have been detained pending an investigation.
(Xinhua)
METRODonations DoctorSeveral years ago, Chen Xi-
aosong, an intensive care unit
doctor at Shanghai’s Renji Hos-
pital, turned down an offer to
become the coordinator for an
organ donation program. But
he later relented, not knowing
what was in store for him and
his team. A4
NATIONOldest PandaThe oldest giant panda in
captivity is set to challenge the
world record for longevity. Jia
Jia will turn 37 this summer,
matching the Guinness World
Records title for the oldest
panda in captivity. A6
WORLD SPORTSMarquez MagicTwo-time defending MotoGP
world champion Marc Marquez’
extraordinary record at the
Sachsenring continues as the
Spaniard, riding a Honda, wins
the German Grand Prix, ahead
of teammate Dani Pedrosa and
Yamaha’s Italian championship
leader Valentino Rossi. A15
AUTOTALKCar Sales CoolCar sales in China drift further
from double-digit growth. In the
first half of this year, sales grow
1.4 percent, 6.38 percentage
points down from the same
period of last year, says the As-
sociation of China Automobile
Manufacturers. B1
Drug Lord EscapesNotorious Mexican drug lord
Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman
escapes from a high security
prison, his second jailbreak in
15 years and a major embar-
rassment for President Enrique
Pena Nieto. Guzman, also
wanted by US prosecutors, was
once on a Forbes rich list. A8
Shanghai Daily Monday 13 July 2015 TOP NEWS A3
Immigrants sent back to China ‘on way to join jihad’A TOTAL of 109 illegal immigrants who were repatriated from Thai-land to China last Thursday had been on their way to Turkey, Syria or Iraq to join jihad, according to the Ministry of Public Security.
Several recruitment gangs were uncovered in Turkey by a Chinese police investigation, which also discovered that Turkish diplomats in some Southeast Asian countries had facilitated the illegal move-ment of people.
A large number of radicalized Chinese and the heads of organized gangs, known as snakeheads, have been deported from Southeast Asia this year, the ministry said.
Of the 109 individuals returned to China last week, 13 had fled China after being implicated in terrorist activities, and another two had escaped detention, the ministry said.
According to their accounts, many had been radicalized by ma-terial released by the World Uygur Congress and the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, it said.
The recruitment gangs had used religious extremism to encourage people to go to Syria and Iraq to participate in jihad.
Some snakeheads, including Me-hmut Obulela, one of the people repatriated, told police the gangs were well established and had a clear hierarchy. They organized people to travel over land or sea through countries including Viet-nam, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand to enter Turkey.
After arriving in Turkey, many, led by the ETIM terrorist group, went on to Syria to join the fight-ing. Even those who did not get as far as Syria were involved in jiha-dist activities wherever they had stopped, they said.
A terrorist attack on a railway station in Kunming, capital of southwest China’s Yunnan Prov-ince, on March 1 last year was the work of terrorists who had failed to illegally leave China. The attack resulted in the deaths of 31 people and injuries to 141 others.
Police also found that some radi-calized people, instructed by the ETIM, were trained in Syria or Iraq and then returned to China to ex-pand their terrorist network.
These individuals were also
implicated in terrorist activities. Police arrested many of these re-turnees and uncovered several terrorist plots this year, the min-istry said.
Each illegal immigrant had to pay several thousand dollars to snakeheads. Most of the funds were finally remitted to bank ac-counts opened by ETIM terrorists, according to police.
Investigations showed that the illegal immigration was organized by people in Turkey.
‘Helping out’ a suspectChinese police said they had de-
tained 22 Turkish suspects since October last year who had admit-ted being directed and assisted by organizers in Turkey.
Police also said Turkish diplo-mats to a Southeast Asian country had directly participated in “help-ing out” a suspect, Eli Ahmad, in September last year.
The Chinese suspect was a mem-ber of an illegal migration gang, but Turkish diplomats claimed he was a Turkish citizen and pressed local authorities to release him. Eli Ahmad was finally transported to Turkey and is still at large.
Last month, Chinese police cooperated with counterparts in Southeast Asia to seize 653 fab-ricated Turkish passports at a suspect’s residence.
Some subordinate organiza-tions of the Turkey-based World Uygur Congress frequently sent their members to Southeast Asian countries to mastermind illegal mi-gration, police said.
They also colluded with some Turkish politicians and forces to assist the illegal migration and “rescue” those detained.
A Ministry of Public Security of-ficial said the Chinese government has always been cracking down on illegal migration and violent ter-rorist crimes.
Those repatriated to China would be treated according to the law. Those suspected of crimes would be dealt with following legal procedures while the others would receive appropriate treatment after being educated, the official said.
He praised the Thai police for repatriating illegal immigrants.
(Xinhua)
Anger at US statement on repatriations from Thailand
China has strongly opposed a US State Department statement that
condemns Thailand’s repatriation of illegal immigrants to China.
“The US statement has ignored facts and is full of political bias, and
it serves as a connivance in illegal immigration and smuggling and a
violation of relevant international treaties and laws,” foreign ministry
spokeswoman Hua Chunying said. China has lodged solemn represen-
tations with the United States regarding the issue, she said.
“We urge the US to have a correct view of China’s efforts in address-
ing illegal emigration, stop making wrong comments and safeguard the
healthy and stable growth of China-US relations,” Hua said.
(Xinhua)
IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde (left) listens as Greek Finance Minister Euclid
Tsakalotos makes a point during a finance ministers meeting in Brussels — Reuters
Germany, France divided over Greek bailout deal
Top court official in corruption probeMa Yue
THE vice president of China’s highest court is under investigation by the Party’s anti-corruption agency, becoming the most senior member of the judiciary to be named in the country’s ongoing anti-graft campaign.
Xi Xiaoming, 61, who joined the Supreme People’s Court in 1982, is suspected of “se-rious disciplinary violations and breaking the law,” the Central Commission for Dis-cipline Inspection said yesterday. It did not elaborate.
Xi joined the court as a clerk after serving as a police officer in Shenyang, capital of northeast China’s Liaoning Province.
He later became a judge at the Economics Court and presiding judge of the No. 2 Civil Affairs Court of the SPC, and was named vice president of the SPC in 2004.
He is also a member of the SPC’s judicial committee and China Judges Association vice president.
Xi, a Party member since 1975, became an SPC judge in 1985 while taking postgraduate and PhD courses at Peking University.
Some reports said the investigation might be related to one involving Zhang Xinming, head of the Shanxi Jinye Coal Coking Group. He was taken away by police last August dur-ing an investigation into alleged mafia-type activities and money laundering.
DIVIDED eurozone leaders clashed over the fate of Greece yesterday with a catastrophic exit from the single currency looming large as they struggled to reach a bailout deal with debt-hit Athens.
Germany’s fiscal hawks faced off against doves led by France at a summit of the 19 eurozone leaders in Brussels, with Athens facing demands to push through new reform laws.
Despite the fact that Greece’s banks could soon run dry, an emergency summit of all 28 EU leaders billed as the last chance to keep the country in the euro was called off due to slow progress.
Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras in-sisted a deal was possible last night “if all parties want it”, adding that he was ready for an “honest compromise.”
But German Chancellor Angela Merkel took a tough line, echoing her usual posi-tion and that of several mainly newer eastern European euro members.
“There will be no agreement at any price,” Merkel told reporters, complaining of a loss of trust in Athens and warning of “tough negotiations” ahead.
French President Francois Hollande, whose country has been the most supportive of Athens during the six-month standoff, mean-while said that Paris would do “everything” to keep Greece in the euro.
In a sign of the growing tensions between the eurozone’s two biggest economies and political forces, Hollande also ruled out a German proposal for a “temporary Grexit” from the single currency.
The meeting came after the Eurogroup of eurozone finance ministers finished two days of intense talks on Greece’s proposals for reforms in exchange for a three-year bail-out worth 80 billion euros (US$89 billion).
They agreed Greece would have to push through new laws by Wednesday under the conditions agreed by the eurozone minis-ters, Finnish Finance Minister Alex Stubb said afterward.
Athens would also have to introduce tough conditions on labour reform and pensions, VAT and taxes, and measures on privatiza-tion, he said.
“We have come a long way but a couple of big issues are still open,” Eurogroup chief Jeroen Dijsselbloem said. “We are going to put those to the leaders so it’s up to them.”
Greece and its creditors have been at odds since Tsipras was elected in January on a vow to end five years of bitter austerity under two bailouts since 2010 worth 240 billion euros.
Tension turned to anger last month after Tsipras called a referendum on the bailout terms, in which Greeks overwhelmingly re-jected creditors’ demands.
Greece’s parliament approved fresh pro-posals by the government in Athens in the early hours of Saturday, despite the fact they were largely similar to many of those re-jected in the referendum.
The European Central Bank is providing emergency liquidity to keep Greek banks afloat but has frozen the limit, with fears that failure to reach a deal could cause it to shut off the taps completely.
(AFP)
Monday 13 July 2015 Shanghai DailyA4 METRO
Doctor striving to change hearts and minds Cai Wenjun and Nancy You
WHEN Chen Xiaosong, an in-tensive care unit doctor, at Shanghai’s Renji Hospital, was asked several years ago to be-come the coordinator for an organ donation program, he turned down the offer.
“Who would want that job?” he said.
“It’s very hard to communi-cate with the families, and the success rate is extremely low.”
But in the summer of 2013, Chen relented. He scaled back his duties in the intensive care unit at Renji Hospital and moved into organ-donation work. At the time, he hadn’t a clue what was in store for him and his team.
Organ donation is a hard con-cept to sell in China because so many families cling to the traditional belief that a body should be buried whole.
The need for organs for trans-plants increased dramatically this year after the government banned the harvesting of or-gans from executed prisoners, which had accounted for about half of the supply.
Donor shortage is a global problem, but it’s especially critical in China, which has one of the lowest donor rates in the world.
According to former Health Minister Huang Jiefu, the na-tion has one donor for every 2 million citizens. By compari-son, Spain, which has one of the best rates in the world, has 37 donors per million.
The shortfall means that many people who need organ transplants don’t get them. There are an estimated 300,000 people in the nation waiting for transplants every year, but only 10,000 get them.
Progress in changing public attitudes about organ donation is slow but steady. Last year the number of donors in Shanghai rose to 55 from five a year ear-lier. The figure is expected to reach 100 by the end of this year.
China has set up a national organ donation system run by
Dr Huang Xiaowu discusses a case with Dong Xiaoyan, his colleague on the organ procurement
team at Zhongshan Hospital. A Red Cross program to encourage organ donation was launched in
Shanghai in 2013, but traditional Chinese beliefs and a lack of education mean that the concept
continues to face considerable resistance from large sections of the public. — Wang Rongjiang
Lisa Hutten-
locher, 26,
Student, Germany
I think it’s gen-
erally a bad idea
to raise ticket
prices because
public transport is really important
and I think it should be affordable
for people. So I think they have
to work on a better system and
maybe have more trains.
Have a question you
would like to see us ask
people on the streets of
Shanghai? E-mail metro@
shanghaidaily.com.
WORD ON THE STREET
Q: The city’s transport commission said on Thursday on a study
tour in a metro training center that it was considering raising the
price of a subway ticket during rush hour periods (and lower-
ing it at other times) in a bid to ease passenger congestion. We asked the
people of Shanghai what they thought about the proposal.
He Xianzhi,
31, Clothes shop owner, Shanghai
I don’t think
the price
increase will
do anything
to affect the number of people
taking the metro. Although I
often get on a metro train during
off peak periods, I still think it’s
better not to raise the price.
Lu Yuqing,
13, Schoolgirl, Shanghai
I hope the
price will never
increase and in
my opinion, the
price increase
could only occur when less people
choose to take the metro. But it’s
reasonable that authorities do
something to alleviate the burden
and I’m happy to take a bus.
Huang
Bingchen, 25,
Finance pro-fessional, Beijing
I have just re-
turned to China
from Germany
and the metro ticket price there
is very low. As a means of public
transport, the metro should serve
the public rather than seeking
profit from the public.
Bernard
Romy, 19,
Student, Cuba
In the peak
hour, instead
of the change
in price, I think
people have to
be organized to get on the metro.
I find the security in metro is very
good but we have to organize our-
selves because everyone is going
like, you know, fighting to get in.
So if they can go in order, they can
get in more easily.
the Red Cross Society of China. It started as a pilot project in March 2010 and was expanded to nationwide operation in Feb-ruary 2013.
Provincial Red Cross branches are in charge of the operation of the system in their regions.
The Shanghai program began in early 2013. To date, 11 local hospitals are licensed to do organ transplants and eight offices have been set up for organ procurement and for li-aison with families of potential donors.
“Organ procurement in coun-tries like the United States is handled by independent orga-nizations, but our offices are affiliated with hospitals,” said Dr Huang Xiaowu, a surgeon at Shanghai’s Zhongshan Hospital who is involved with the organ procurement effort.
“The organ donation system is still young in China, so it helps to work inside big hospitals, where experienced profession-als are at hand,” he said.
Coordination is important, he said. “If a patient donates
two kidneys in one hospital in the district covered by our procurement office, Zhongshan can take one of the organs and the other can go to another hospital that might have a pa-tient waiting for a transplant,” Huang said.
For Dr Chen, getting the pub-lic interested in organ donation is a job with a steep learning curve.
“Before this, I was always busy saving lives,” he said.
“If we couldn’t save some-one’s life, we told the families, but now, if we can’t save a life, we ask the families to consider donating the patient’s organs to help someone else. For doc-tors, this change in thinking is huge.”
The pressure has been telling on Chen. In the first 15 cases he handled, he spent sleepless nights wondering about the morality of trying to secure permission for a patient’s or-gans even before a patient’s heart had stopped.
His team is often involved in cases with patients declared
brain dead. Families often re-fuse to accept that diagnosis and are even less happy being asked about organ donation while the patient is still breath-ing though comatose.
According to Chen, only 20 to 30 percent of families are willing to meet with coordina-tors to discuss the possibility of organ donation. Sometimes staff don’t help the situation. Two-thirds of nurses polled at Renji Hospital said they object to organ donation.
Chen recalled the case of a child who was declared brain dead after three unsuccessful surgeries.
When the organ donation team arrived on the scene, the patient’s doctor was reluctant to introduce them to the fam-ily. When the team finally made contact, the family members were outraged and threatened to call the police.
For some families, social pressure overwhelms chari-table feelings.
Chen cited the case of a man who was declared brain dead.
His son, a forensic patholo-gist, accepted the situation and, with his mother, agreed that the man’s organs could be donated. But extended family relatives who then arrived on the scene quickly quashed the idea.
In China, consent for organ donation can be registered by a healthy person in advance, or it can be given by the parents, adult children or spouse of a patient who is gravely ill or has just died.
“Many people don’t fully ap-preciate the life-giving aspects of organ donation. They don’t see it as a charitable act,” Chen said.
“They are suspicious that someone is trying to take ad-vantage of them.”
Chen said he takes heart from the fact that the younger generation seems more open and understanding of the need for organ donations.
“We had only a 29 percent success rate with families we approached last year, but this year, it has been 50 percent,” said Dr Huang.
“Many people don’t fully appreciate the life-giving aspect of organ donation. They don’t see it as a charitable act.
Chen XiaosongOrgan donation coordinator at Renji Hospital
Shanghai Daily Monday 13 July 2015 METRO A5
IT was a double bill of good news on the weather front yesterday as meteo-rologists withdrew a typhoon alert and announced the end of the plum rain season.
Shanghai, and the east coast of China in general, took less of a battering than feared after Super Typhoon Chan-Hom changed course and lost much of its strength shortly after making landfall close to the city late on Saturday.
National and local meteorologists feared the typhoon would be the most powerful to hit China in decades. But while neighboring Zhejiang Province was hit by winds of up to 162kph, Shanghai escaped almost unscathed as the typhoon veered back out to sea and toward the Korean peninsula.
Jinshan District saw the heaviest rains, recording 116.2 millimeters between 8pm on Friday and 8am yes-terday, compared with 94.8mm at the benchmark Xujiahui weather station, according to the Shanghai Meteorologi-cal Bureau.
The highest winds, of up to 108kph, were recorded at Dishuihu Lake and Yangshan Port in the Pudong New Area, Wusong Port in Baoshan District and suburban Fengxian District.
The city’s forecasters lifted their typhoon alert at 6am yesterday, the same day as the national meteorologi-cal office downgraded Chan-Hom to a tropical storm.
After more than 1,000 flights were canceled on Saturday, business was back almost to normal yesterday at the city’s two airports. However, as of 4pm, more than 40 flights had been delayed for two hours or more as authorities tackled the backlog.
It was a similar story on the Metro, as Line 16, which was suspended at 1pm on Saturday, resumed normal op-erations yesterday, and Line 2 trains between Guanglan Road and Pudong International Airport stations got
back up to top gear after running at reduced speeds due to the threat of high winds.
Following the meteorological trend, it appears that this year’s plum rain season has also decided to give up the ghost.
Forecasters said yesterday that the “season” would officially come to an end today after 28 days of intermit-tent rains, ranging in dampness from drizzle to downpour.
While there was talk in some quarters of this year’s season possibly challeng-ing for the “longest in recorded history” title — currently held by 1954 with 58 days — the precipitation petered out after a measly 28 days, albeit it five more than the annual average.
In consolation, readings taken at the Xujiahui monitoring facility showed that a total of 441.8mm of rain fell over the course of this year’s season, almost twice the annual mean.
The prevalence of precipitation also pushed down the average temperature for “early July” to 22.8 degrees Celsius from a norm of 27.5 degrees, the me-teorological bureau said.
With Chan-Hom and the plum rains now things of the past, the people of Shanghai can look forward to a few days of hot — though not necessarily dry — conditions as the latest weather front wanders into town.
Sanfu, or the “hot season” on the an-cient Chinese calendar, officially starts today and is forecast to last for 40 days, though nothing is guaranteed in the world of weather.
The mercury could reach 33 degrees today, but there is also the chance of thundershowers in some areas in the afternoon, the forecasters said.
Tomorrow and Wednesday will re-main cloudy and hot, with the daily high temperature set to remain in the low 30s.
(Shanghai Daily/Agencies)
Get ready to get hot as high winds, plum rains take final bow
EXPLORE MORE AT WWW.SHANGHAIDAILY.COM/METRO
Northbound section of East Yan’an Tunnel to open soonONE lane of the westbound section of the Yan’an Road E. Tunnel, which is un-dergoing a major renovation program, is set to reopen sooner than expected, the Shanghai Road & Bridge Co said yesterday.
The section has been closed since March 14 and was set to remain so until the end of August, the company said. However, the fire-safety and ventilation systems have already been completed, and work on the lighting and surveil-lance networks is progressing well. All works should be completed by the end of the month, which means the one of the two lanes should reopen ahead of schedule. After that, an estimated four-month renovation program will begin on the other lane of the westbound section, the company said.
Hospital to get new R&D unitRUIJIN Hospital is planning to open a new biomedical research facility that it hopes will speed up the discovery of new diagnostic tools and treatments. Teams at the “translational” center will focus their research on cancers, cardiovascular diseases and metabolic disorders, officials told a press confer-ence yesterday on the sidelines of the 9th Sino-US symposium on medicine.
Confucius back in school
DIRECTORS of Confucius Institutes from around the world arrived at East China Normal University yesterday for the start of a nine-day conference on Chinese culture and the sharing of ex-periences. There are currently 475 such nonprofit institutions in 126 countries and regions, all of which are funded by the central government to promote Chi-nese language and culture, and facilitate exchanges.
Safety fi rst at nursing homes
NEW fire-prevention systems will soon be installed in 25 nursing homes in Zha-bei District as part of a citywide safety campaign, officials said yesterday. Each of the centers will be fitted with alarms, sprinklers and extinguishers, the local fire department said at the launch of the promotion.
Family loses payout appeal
A court has rejected a compensation law-suit filed by the relatives of a migrant worker who died suddenly in his rented room. The family claimed that the build-ing’s landlord should have checked on his tenants regularly, in which case the relative’s condition would have been spotted in time to save him. The Qingpu People’s Court rejected the appeal.
Workers assess the damage after a tree on Duolun Road collapsed due to high
winds on Saturday, pulling down a telegraph pole and damaging power lines as
it went. About 20 homes in the surrounding area were left in the dark due to the
accident, but the electricity supply was restored yesterday afternoon. — CFP
Monday 13 July 2015 Shanghai DailyA6 NATION
Jia Jia set to break a world record
Watchdog’s frozen meat alert
Officials to move from center of Beijing
Japanese honor caring Chinese•
CHINA’S food safety watchdog is warning local authorities to be on the lookout for smuggled frozen meat after a large quan-tity, some of which had been frozen for up to five years, was seized by customs last month.
The China Food and Drug Administration also urged meat processors, storage busi-nesses and catering companies not to buy or sell meat of un-known origin in a statement
it published on its website yesterday.
Enterprises should notify the authorities if they have handled such meat since July last year, it said.
According to the statement, all the seized meat — pork, beef and chicken wings — has been destroyed and an investi-gation is ongoing.
Around 800 tons of frozen meat worth about 10 mil-lion yuan (US$1.61 million)
was seized in central China’s Hunan Province in June and 20 people were detained.
The administration also urged media outlets to “objec-tively” report food safety issues after a journalist expressed doubts about the authenticity of the frozen meat news.
Experts say smuggled meat products are usually not in-spected and contain large amounts of bacteria.
(Xinhua)
THE oldest giant panda living in captivity is set to challenge the world record for the animals’ longevity.
Jia Jia, whose name means “good,” will turn 37 this sum-mer at Ocean Park in Hong Kong, matching the Guinness World Records title for the old-est panda in captivity — Du Du, who died in 1999 aged 37.
“It is rare for pandas to live to this age,” said Grant Abel, the park’s animal care director. “It’s probably equivalent to a human who would be over 100 years old.”
Jia Jia’s carers say they are considering sending an applica-tion to Guinness World Records after celebrating her birthday this summer, although the exact date of her birth is not known as she was captured in the wild.
Born in China in 1978, Jia Jia was gifted to Hong Kong in
1999, along with another panda, to mark the second anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to China’s sovereignty.
She weighs 80 kilograms and is considered to be in re-markably good health for her age, even though her vision is severely impaired and her hearing has deteriorated, said Paolo Martelli, the park’s chief veterinarian.
Jia Jia takes medicine for high blood pressure and arthritis. She walks slowly and avoids the exhibition area of her en-closure, preferring to stay at the back and feast on bamboo shoots and leaves, fruit and high-fiber bread.
“The first thing I thought when I saw Jia Jia was ‘Oh my God, she’s so old, I’m going to be the one to bury her,” Mar-telli said. “But actually it’s been 10 years now. She’s had a few ups and downs, but she always
Woman, 37, dies aftercontracting bird fl uA WOMAN has died in south-west China’s Yunnan Province after contracting H5N6 avian flu.
The 37-year-old from the city of Shangri-La developed symp-toms last Monday and died on Friday, health authorities said. Experts believe it be an isolated case, and said nobody in close contact with the patient had reported symptoms. In May last year, a man from Yunnan’s neighboring Sichuan Province died after contracting H5N6 in the world’s first known human infection with the strain. The virus had previously been iso-lated to waterfowl and wild ducks, experts said.
7 perish in Wuhan fi reSEVEN people died and 12 others were injured when fire broke out at a residential build-ing in Wuhan, capital of central China’s Hubei Province. The fire was believed to have been the result of a fault in an electrical cable, the city government said yesterday, but police, firefight-ers and safety regulators are still investigating.
Fireworks blast kills 15AT least 15 people died yester-day after an illegal firecracker warehouse exploded in north China’s Hebei Province, the local government said. More than dozen others were injured in the incident in Ningjin Coun-ty. The blast shattered nearly all the glass windows at a resi-dential building close by while windows were also broken at a flour factory situated about a kilometer away. An investiga-tion has been launched.
Beijing heating upBEIJING issued this summer’s first heat alert yesterday as the maximum temperature in the Chinese capital soared above 40 degrees Celsius. Under the orange alert, the second high-est, workers who are exposed to high temperatures must reduce their working hours. Beijing Me-teorological Service attributed the heat to the lack of rain but said that temperatures are ex-pected to drop significantly on Wednesday.
Deadly knife attackA MAN stabbed a woman to death and hurt 12 people in the southern city of Shenzhen on Saturday. Police said the injured were all in a stable condition. The attack by a 32-year-old man appeared to have been provoked by a marital dispute, said the Southern Metropolitan Daily newspaper.
BEIJING’S city government is planning to move some ad-ministrative functions out of the city center as part of a plan to better integrate the capital with its surrounding areas.
A meeting of the municipal government’s Party commit-tee also agreed to stick to its target of limiting Beijing’s population to 23 million, according to an entry on the city’s information office microblog.
At the end of last year the Chinese capital’s population stood at 21.5 million.
A “subsidiary adminis-trative center” will be in Tongzhou, a district in Bei-jing’s eastern suburbs about a 40-minute drive from downtown, and is set to take shape by 2017.
The new center is part of a plan to integrate Beijing with neighboring Hebei, an industrial province that is the source of much of the capital’s pollution, and the port city of Tianjin.
Officials said they want to develop high-quality re-sources such as hospitals and universities in the whole area, rather than have them concentrated in downtown Beijing.
Moving part of the mu-nicipal government and its services out of central Beijing and to neighboring regions will help ease traffic conges-tion and population growth, according to city officials.
(AP)
Giant panda
Jia Jia is
soon to
celebrate
her 37th
birthday at
Ocean Park
in Hong
Kong. The
oldest giant
panda in
captivity
could set a
new record
for longevity.
— Reuters
managed to bounce back and look surprisingly good for years after that,” he said.
Pandas are endangered be-cause most of their natural habitat has been destroyed for timber, farming and construc-tion, according to conservation group the World Wildlife Fund.
A Chinese government
survey in 2014 estimated that there are 1,864 pandas living in the wild, up 17 percent from 2003.
They also have an exception-ally short breeding season, with females fertile for just 24 to 36 hours a year, according to Pandas International.
(Reuters)
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AILY.COM/NATION
Ikeda Sumie, the director general of a Tokyo-based support group for Japanese returning from
China, bows before Chinese foster parents at a ceremony in Harbin, capital of northeast China’s
Heilongjiang Province, yesterday. A delegation of 54 Japanese war orphans were visiting the city
on a tour to pay tribute to their Chinese adoptive parents who took them in at the end of World
War II. Thousands of Japanese children were left behind in China in 1945 when the war was
about to end. The children were then taken in and brought up by Chinese families. Most of them
returned to Japan after China and Japan normalized relations in 1972. — Xinhua
Shanghai Daily Monday 13 July 2015 OPINION A7
Confucianism pays off as better treatment of customers and staff out of genuine kindness will be reciprocated with not just profits, but likely trust and loyalty as well.“ Mao ZhongqunChief executive of Fotile, a domestic kitchenware maker
Woodpecker at work
Oriental wisdom has a place in boardroomNi Tao
CHINESE VIEWS
PETER Drucker or Dale Carnegie are probably the first names that come to mind if one is asked to name a few man-agement gurus.
Indeed, few Oriental management thinkers can be mentioned in the same breath as these two personalities.
But the reality is, East Asia’s history is filled with examples of businesses thriv-ing on the basis of Oriental thought.
For instance, the teachings of Inamori Kazuo, founder of the Japanese elec-tronics and solar panel maker Kyocera, continue to inspire Asian companies’ spectacular rise to global prominence.
And as Chinese companies have come to represent an ever larger share of the Fortune 500 list, the role Oriental wis-dom plays in their ascent is of increasing significance to the world.
That role was examined in a recent seminar held by Fudan University’s School of Management, with a bearing also on the interplay between Oriental and Western schools of management philosophies.
“For a long time, there was an academic fixation on Western management knowl-edge because of the West’s economic dominance,” said Su Yong, director of the Institute of Oriental Management, a research entity affiliated with the school. Although Western management science is a well-developed system of
jargon, theories and case studies, it is no panacea for all kinds of problems that arise in corporate governance, Su told the audience.
In his opinion, the 2008 financial cri-sis was a rude awakening that exposed the ineffectualness of Western manage-ment philosophy in dealing with some of the worst fallout of the crisis.
Limits of Western knowledgeThis calls for a reflection on the lim-
its of Western knowledge, especially on its compatibility with Chinese circum-stances. Since the discipline is primarily a Western invention, it is possibly ill-suited to the Oriental cultural context in which it is taught, Su argued.
Perhaps to balance the overwhelm-ingly Western content with a dose of Chineseness, ancient classics have been introduced to courses taught at Chinese management schools. Western skeptics, however, question the relevance of these seemingly metaphysical musings in terms of doing business.
Take Confucianism, a fixture in Chi-nese management books. Regarded often as a useful tool of statecraft or a set of principles guiding ethical behavior, it is curious how this value system stressing propriety and moral decency can survive the first encounter with fierce and some-times hostile market competition.
Speaking from his own experience as a former EMBA student, Mao Zhongqun, chief executive of Fotile, a domestic
kitchenware maker, said that Western publications on leadership are mostly about how to implement incentives to motivate employees and convince them to follow leaders.
While these methods are indeed im-portant in their own right, they prove less straightforward than ways endorsed in Confucian learning, said Mao.
He went on to explain that Western management science suggests a cha-meleon-like approach to dealing with employees on an individual-specific basis.
In contrast, disciples of Confucianism, goes his view, need not to bother with these constant adjustments. Instead, they need only to focus on elevating themselves to a higher spiritual plane, and leading by moral example, and staff will automatically rally behind them.
Obsession with profitsMao also railed against the obsession
with maximizing profits — a core tenet of Western economic and management theories — which he believes will lead ac-olytes astray. Confucian classics exhort people to think beyond the narrow con-fines of profits, to conduct themselves in a way that is sensitive to others and brings wider harmony. This pays off as better treatment of customers and staff out of genuine kindness will be recip-rocated with not just profits, but likely trust and loyalty as well, Mao noted.
All this hype about Chinese philosophy
is not to denigrate the value of Western management science. What speakers like Mao advocate, in fact, is the modification of Western theories and practices in a way that makes them more tailored to Chinese conditions.
Su went even further. He said he is already seeing so much “borrowing” and “mixing” in the management cur-riculum, that the Western and Oriental schools are effectively influencing each other, although not all the influence should be considered positive.
An example of this is that old inac-curate stereotypes about Western and Oriental management styles are still bandied about.
For instance, it is believed that West-ern companies are ruthless in laying off staff, dispensing with ceremony, while Oriental firms are more aware of the need to preserve “face.”
Nothing is less true, according to Su, who said Asian bosses are sometimes worse employers than their Western counterparts. “While the law entitles Chinese company employees to paid leave, many in fact don’t enjoy the right, or dare not even ask for it (for fear of upsetting their boss),” Su said.
In a similar vein, stereotypes about Westerners being more likely to honor their contractual obligations than Asians are also false.
The value of contracts is taken serious-ly in both worlds, except that this may vary in forms and subtlety, Su argued.
China’s leading the way in green manufacturing Nigel Johnston
FOREIGN VIEWS
IN northern China, air pollution is responsible for shortening people’s lives by five and a half years. Nine percent of China’s gross national income is lost to environmental problems.
None of this is surprising to a Westerner, because perhaps no aspect of China is more notable to those of us in the West than its environmental issues.
Here’s what is surprising: China is the world leader in green manufacturing. It’s true, and I am not alone in believing that China will continue to lengthen its lead in green manufacturing over the next quarter century.
In a report for the World Wildlife Fund, Roland Berger Strategy Consultants write that “China is the largest clean-tech country in absolute terms,” with 30 percent year-on-year sales growth.
China’s industrial firms have earned almost 105,000 ISO 14001 certificates, which map out effective environmental
management systems. The country whose businesses have the next closest number of certificates (Italy) has only 24,662. The US and Germany have fewer than 8,000 each.
For China, green manufacturing is also viewed as a way to catapult its manufacturing sector ahead of global rivals, such as the US and Germany, in both sophistication and profitability. This will help China continue to grow and create new jobs for years into the future.
Going green is not only a solution to environmental degradation, it can also extend China’s spectacular run of economic growth.
Climate change, for example, is not just a source of worry. It’s also a source of opportunity, as one official document puts it, “to speed up economic restructuring as well as the transformation of China’s mode of development and hasten forth a new industrial revolution.”
I, for one, am confident that China
will manage the full-fledged transition to green development. On QualityTrade.com, a global wholesale e-commerce website that ranks companies by quality standards — including environmental ones, we already see many of these green manufacturing companies successfully marketing themselves to customers worldwide.
China’s 12th Five-year Plan doubles down on seven important green industries: environmental protection and energy efficiency, new energy, next generation information technology, biotechnology, high-end manufacturing, clean-energy vehicles and high-tech materials.
But here’s the critical point: These aren’t just green industries. They are high-growth and high-value, too. And they have huge export potential.
The Middle Kingdom is already seeing the fruits of its green industry focus. Already six of the world’s top 10 solar panel producers are Chinese, led by Trina Solar, which has more than 14,000
employees in 14 countries around the world.
Green manufacturing also includes less sophisticated moves, such as improving the energy efficiency of factories in more traditional sectors.
Concord Ceramics has factories in Shanghai, Dongguan and Shenzhen. Facing higher labor costs and thinner margins, General Manager Kevin Chang turned to energy efficiency to improve his bottom line.
Chang’s production line requires intensive air conditioning. The electricity to run those ACs ate up 15 percent of his operating costs.
To reduce expenses, Chang installed a higher volume AC system. Now, he says, his electricity bills are 40 percent smaller. And he’s on the hunt for more — and greener — savings.
Nigel Johnston is the founder and CEO
of QualityTrade.com, a global wholesale
e-commerce platform that ranks companies
by quality standards — including
environmental ones.
Mexico on hunt for drug lord after escape from high-security prison
Super-hot boyband singer sick on plane
Bali airport reopens as volcanic ash disperses
Monday 13 July 2015 Shanghai DailyA8 WORLD
A BRITISH boyband singer col-lapsed with heat exhaustion during a flight while wearing 12 layers of clothing in a bid to beat the excess luggage fee, he said on Saturday.
James McElvar, 19, from the Scottish group Rewind, was about to board an easyJet flight from London Stansted to Glas-gow on Wednesday when he was told he had one carry-on bag too many.
Staff said he was allowed to
take only one bag on board, so would have to pay an excess charge of 45 pounds (US$70) or bin his second bag.
With his bandmates already aboard and just minutes to spare, he made a snap deci-sion, emptied his rucksack and donned its entire contents.
McElvar was wearing six T-shirts, four jumpers, two jackets, a pair of shorts, three pairs of jeans, two pairs of jog-ging bottoms and two hats.
“There was a lot of clothes,” he said on the band’s Twitter feed.
“It was very difficult to walk onto the plane. I managed to sit in the seat for a minute or two. But I just couldn’t take the heat.”
Barely able to move, he could not even get the seatbelt round him.
“I was sweating and they kept asking me to put the belt on but I couldn’t sort it,” he said.
“It was just a nightmare I was having.”
As he was drenched in sweat and feeling sick, cabin crew laid him out, stripped down, on an empty row of seats, where he was violently sick and then fainted.
The singer has no memory of the rest of the flight and was taken off the plane at Glasgow Airport to a waiting ambulance.
(AFP)
THE airport on the Indonesian resort island of Bali reopened yesterday after an erupting vol-cano forced its closure for the second time in four days and caused fresh travel misery for stranded holidaymakers.
Mount Raung on Indonesia’s main island of Java has been erupting for weeks, and on Thursday a cloud of drifting ash forced the closure of Bali airport, and four others, during the peak holiday season.
The airport reopened on Sat-urday as the ash drifted away, allowing some flights to leave and others to land.
However, the cloud returned yesterday morning, forcing authorities to shut the airport again. But the new closure lasted just a few hours and the airport was reopened in the afternoon as the ash shifted.
“Full, normal operations have resumed, however planes are to fly in and out from a westerly direction to avoid the ash,” said transport ministry spokesman JA Barata.
Tourists strandedThousands of tourists who
were visiting the tropical is-land famed for its palm-fringed beaches found themselves wait-ing for days at Bali’s Ngurah Rai airport, near the island’s capital Denpasar, anxiously watching departure boards, sitting and sleeping on the floor.
The second closure added to the sense of chaos as many holidaymakers had headed to the airport to catch flights that had been delayed by the first shutdown.
The disruption came at a bad time, with many Australians stuck in Bali after heading there for the school break and millions of Indonesian tourists setting off on holiday ahead of the Muslim celebration of Eid next week.
Another airport on Java serv-ing domestic routes remained shut yesterday, Barata said.
The other three originally closed Thursday, including the international airport on popu-lar Lombok island, east of Bali, had reopened earlier.
After Bali airport reopened yesterday, Indonesian flag car-rier Garuda said flights diverted due to the ash cloud would head back, while budget airline AirAsia said it was resuming services from the island.
Australian carriers Jetstar and Virgin earlier said they were canceling all flights in and out of Bali yesterday.
About 300 flights to and from Bali were canceled after the first closure, but airport officials could not give a figure for the number affected by yesterday’s closure.
(AFP)
Police officers stand guard yesterday on the perimeter of the Altiplano Federal Penitentiary in Almoloya de Juarez on the outskirts
of Mexico City, from which drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman escaped on Saturday. Guzman tunneled out of the maximum
security jail from the shower unit of his cell, the government said. — Reuters. Inset: Guzman is arrested last year. — AFP
IN a scheme befitting a caper novel, Mexico’s most powerful drug lord, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, escaped from a maxi-mum security prison through a 1.5-kilometer tunnel that opened into the shower area of his cell, the country’s top secu-rity official said yesterday.
The elaborate, ventilated escape hatch built allegedly without the detection of au-thorities allowed Guzman to do what Mexican officials promised would never happen after his re-capture last year — slip out of the country’s most secure penitentiary for the sec-ond time.
Eighteen employees from various part of the Altiplano prison 90 kilometers west of Mexico City have been taken in for questioning, Security Com-missioner Monte Alejandro Rubido told a news conference without answering questions.
A manhunt for the head of the powerful Sinaloa Cartel,
which has an international reach and is believed to con-trol most of the major crossing points for drugs at the United States border with Mexico, was launched late on Saturday.
Roads near the Altiplano were being heavily patrolled by Federal Police with numerous checkpoints and a Blackhawk helicopter flying overhead.
Flights were also suspended at Toluca airport near the peni-tentiary in the state of Mexico, and civil aviation hangars were being searched.
Guzman was last seen about 9pm on Saturday in the shower area of his cell, according to a statement from the National Security Commission issued early yesterday.
After a time, he was lost by the prison’s security camera surveil-lance network. Upon checking his cell, authorities found it empty and a 50-by-50 centime-ter hole near the shower.
Guzman’s escape is a major
embarrassment to the admin-istration of President Enrique Pena Nieto, which had received plaudits for its aggressive ap-proach to top drug lords.
Since the government took office in late 2012, Mexican authorities have nabbed or killed six of them, including Guzman.
Most wantedGuzman faces multiple feder-
al drug trafficking indictments in the US as well as Mexico, and was on the US Drug Enforce-ment Administration’s most wanted list.
After Guzman was arrested in February last year, the US said it would file an extradition request, though it’s not clear if that happened.
The Mexican government at the time vehemently denied the need to extradite Guzman, even as many expressed fears he would escape as he did in
2001 while serving a 20-year sentence in another maximum-security prison, Puente Grande, in the western state of Jalisco.
Former Mexican Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam said earlier this year that the US would get Guzman in “about 300 or 400 years” after he served time for all his crimes in Mexico. Murillo Karam said sending Guzman to the US would save Mexico a lot of money, but keeping him was a question of national sovereignty.
He dismissed concerns that Guzman could escape a second time. That risk “does not exist,” Murillo Karam said.
It was difficult to believe that such an elaborate structure could have been built without the detection of authorities. Ac-cording to Rubido, the tunnel terminated in a house under construction in a neighbor-hood near the prison.
(AP)
Shanghai Daily Monday 13 July 2015 WORLD A9
Flooding kills 10 endangered lions in India
Israel arrests Jewish suspects over arson incident on shrine
Historic Pluto flyby for NASA craft tomorrow
Serbia PM under attack at ceremony•
Bodyguards protect Serbia’s Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic during an unrest at a ceremony
marking the 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, in Potocari, near Srebrenica, Bosnia and
Herzegovina on Saturday. Vucic was forced to flee the ceremony, when mourners hurled stones and
bottles at him in what his government later described as an attempted assassination. — Reuters
TEN endangered Asiatic lions, 1,670 blue bulls and 87 spotted deer were amongst hundreds of wild animals killed in the recent floods to hit west India’s Gujarat, a government report said yesterday.
The flash floods that hit Sau-rashtra region of the state in late June also killed at least 55 people with thousands evacuat-ing their homes for safer areas after heavy rains.
“Till July 2 this year, carcass-es of ten lions were recovered,” Press Trust of India said,
quoting from a report prepared by Gujarat’s Principal Chief Conservator of Forests (PCCF).
Gujarat is home to about 500 Asiatic lions in their last re-maining sanctuary globally.
“Besides, carcasses of 1,670 blue bulls, 87 spotted deer, nine black bucks and six wild boars were also recovered,” it added.
In some of the worst affected parts of the region the water lev-els rose by almost 2.8 meters in a short span of time.
The forest department of-ficials and local activists who
began the process of assessing damage to habitat and wild-life after the floods had come across lions in “weak health and shocked condition,” the PCCF told PTI.
Besides immediate concern for the wellbeing of the af-fected wildlife, the flash floods have also reignited the ongoing debate about relocating lions outside their only habitat in India.
Several wildlife experts have questioned the govern-ment’s reluctance to allow the
endangered species to move outside its current west India habitat to other suitable sanctu-aries across the country.
“There is no way to predict the occurrence of catastro-phes, which is why it is crucial to establish at least one more free-ranging population of lions before such risks mani-fest again,” wildlife expert Ravi Chellam, who has studied animals in the region for years, said earlier.
The issue of relocating lions outside Gujarat has been caught
in a heated legal and political battle for years.
In 2013 India’s Supreme Court ruled that some of them should be relocated to a sanctuary in a neighboring state.
Even experts have argued that restricting the lions to just one area puts them at risk of inbreeding, disease and extinction.
But the Gujarat government has consistently resisted any move from the state, where the lions are a source of pride.
(AFP)
THERE’S a near-perfect heart shape on Pluto’s rusty red sur-face. The dwarf planet is dotted with bright points which may be ice caps, and a mysterious dark shape nicknamed “The Whale.”
Scientists are seeing all this for the first time as a piano-sized NASA spacecraft, New Horizons, hurtles toward the distant celestial body on its way toward a historic flyby tomorrow.
“We’re at the ‘man in the moon’ stage of viewing Pluto,” said John Spencer of the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado.
“It’s easy to imagine you’re seeing familiar shapes in this bizarre collection of light and dark features. However, it’s too early to know what these features really are.”
But scientists expect those mysteries to be solved in coming days as the space-craft closes in on Pluto, once considered the farthest plan-et in the solar system before it was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006.
That same year, the New Ho-rizons mission launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida on a journey of nearly 10 years and three billion miles, becoming the first spacecraft to explore this far-away frontier.
“We are coming up on the culmination of all this effort, all this planning,” said Joe Peterson, a science operations leader for the New Horizons mission. “Very soon we are going to go by Pluto and get the actual goods.”
The closest flyby is set for to-morrow at 7:50am, when New Horizons passes within 9,977 kilometers of Pluto. Moving at a speed of 49,570 kilometers per hour, it is the fastest space-craft ever launched.
The US$700 million un-manned spacecraft has seven sophisticated science instru-ments and cameras that are collecting data daily and sending it back to Earth. They include three optical instruments, two plasma in-struments, a dust sensor and a radio science receiver.
(AFP)
Mourners carry the coffin of Egyptian actor Omar Sharif in a
procession at the Field Marshal Mohammed Hussein Tantawi
Mosque in Cairo yesterday. Sharif, best known for his portrayal
of Doctor Zhivago in the hit 1966 film and for his work in
“Lawrence of Arabia,” died of a heart attack aged 83 on Friday
in Cairo after a struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. — Reuters
Omar Sharif’s final journey • ISRAELI police said yesterday they have arrested several Jewish suspects over an arson attack last month at a shrine where Christians believe Jesus performed the miracle of loaves and fishes.
The arson had sparked wide-spread condemnation and concern from Christians global-ly, with the site visited by some 5,000 people daily, while also drawing renewed attention to religiously linked hate crimes in Israel.
“Several Jewish suspects have been arrested for the burning of the church and the Nazareth court has decided to extend their detention for the purpos-es of the investigation,” police spokeswoman Luba Samri said in a statement of the overnight arrests.
Police did not provide a
number or further details on their identities, but an ultra-nationalist organization said three young Jewish men had been arrested.
Another police spokesman said the arrests followed an undercover investigation also involving the Shin Bet internal security agency.
The Church of the Multi-plication at Tabgha, on the northwestern shore of the Sea of Galilee, is at the site where many Christians believe Jesus fed the 5,000 in the miracle of the five loaves and two fish.
One of the buildings within the compound was completely destroyed in the blaze but the church itself was not damaged.
Hebrew graffiti was found on another building within the complex, reading “Idols will
be cast out” or destroyed. The text is part of a common Jewish prayer.
A modern church now sits at the site, incorporating remains of a 5th-century Byzantine church and its mosaics. The first building constructed there, a small chapel, is believed to have been built in the 4th century.
Versions of what Christians believe was Jesus’s miracle are recounted in all four of the gos-pels of the New Testament of the Bible. The site is now owned by the German Roman Catholic Church.
Father Gregory Collins, head of the Saint Benedictine Order in Israel, which oversees the church, last month called the arson “an attack on Israeli de-mocracy, not just on a religious group.”
(AFP)
Monday 13 July 2015 Shanghai DailyA10 BUSINESS
MACRO-ECONOMY
CHINA’S GDP growth likely slowed further in the second quarter, an AFP survey has found, as a slowdown in investment and trade weighed on the world’s second-largest economy.
The median forecast in a poll of 14 economists indicates gross domestic product expanded 6.9 percent in the April-June quarter, marginally down from 7 percent in the first three months of this year.
That would be the worst quarterly result since the first three months of 2009, in the depths of the global finan-cial crisis, when China’s economy grew by 6.6 percent.
The National Bureau of Statistics will release the official GDP figures for the first quarter of 2015 on Wednesday.
China’s volatile stock markets have grabbed headlines this month after the Shanghai Composite Index fell more than 30 percent in less than four weeks, before reversing course in the last two trading days.
But economists are focused on more fundamental issues when assessing its overall health.
“According to the figures we have now, economic activities remained very slug-gish, particularly fixed-asset investment, which grew 11.4 percent in May, a multi-year low,” Liu Li Gang, Hong Kong-based ANZ economist, said of the second-quar-ter performance. “Exports were weak and imports were even more so.”
Chinese authorities want investment to slow as part of their plan to diversify economic growth away from big-ticket projects to increasingly wealthy con-sumers. But too fast a deceleration can be harmful.
“The economy is still under quite big downward pressure,” said Li Ruoyu, an analyst at the State Information Center, a government think tank in Beijing, also citing weak investment.
New restrictions on local government debt and finance vehicles have limited lower-level authorities’ ability to fund infrastructure projects, she said.
“The implicit guarantees of the local governments are gone, hurting their bor-rowing abilities.”
The stock market turmoil could also create new risks in China’s financial
BIZ INSIGHT
MONEY was already tight for single mother Nicola Marshall and looks set to get tighter in a new austerity drive in Britain that will affect millions of low-paid workers.
“There’s going to be people out there who simply don’t have money to spare,” said the 37-year-old part-time office worker, who relies on tax credits to top up her 11,000-pound (US$17,000) a year salary.
Britain is slashing the credits, which currently help 4.5 million households, in a drive to reduce welfare depen-dency that has prompted warnings the cuts would hit the poor — and could be counterproductive.
The measures form the core of 12 billion pounds of welfare savings over the next five years as Prime Min-ister David Cameron’s newly elected Conservative government seeks to eliminate a budget deficit.
Reducing tax credits and restricting them to two children will cut 6 bil-lion pounds from a system that costs 30 billion pounds a year, something finance minister George Osborne said was “simply not sustainable.”
Unveiling his budget on Wednesday, Osborne told the House of Commons that tax credits were “subsidizing lower wages.”
To offset the change, he announced the introduction of a higher minimum wage for the over 25s and income tax cuts for the lowest earners, promising to “make work pay.”
Analysts warned, however, that these measures would not mitigate the benefit cuts, prompting charities to warn the poorest could see their incomes slashed.
“In practical terms it means fami-lies forced to choose between paying the bills or missing meals,” said Nick Bryer, head of UK policy and cam-paigns for Oxfam.
Britain ‘has lost compassion’ The changes were hailed by
Conservative lawmakers, and the mass-selling Daily Mail tabloid said it was a bold assault on Britain’s “bloated” welfare system.
“It was nothing less than a blueprint for transforming Britain into a better, more prosperous country — of self-reliant families, rescued from welfare dependency to enjoy the dignity and rewards of work,” it said.
But others cautioned that the changes could hit exactly the work-ing families the Conservatives claim to champion.
Three million families will lose about 1,000 pounds a year under the tax credit cuts, which would reduce the incentive to work for people al-ready receiving benefits, said Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
The government has insisted aus-terity is necessary to avoid the plight of crisis-hit Greece.
But Marshall fears that poor people are being increasingly vilified, and worries that “this country has lost its compassion.”
(AFP)
UK’s austerity drive set to hit millions of poor people
A man (center) shares his personal views on the financial future as hundreds of
people gather on Guangdong Road near the intersection with Xizang Road M. in
downtown Shanghai yesterday. The venue is a traditional place for the locals to
exchange their experiences, information and opinions about the stock market at
weekends. The al fresco saloon has become more popular amid the recent volatile
stock market. A major topic would be a likely slowdown in China’s GDP growth
in the second quarter, as indicated by an AFP survey, with investment and trade
figures weighing on the world’s second-largest economy. — Wang Rongjiang
Slowdown in investment, trade weighs on China’s GDP growth
system, which faces numerous other challenges such as high corporate debt and an opaque “shadow banking” sector.
But the swings in equities are largely seen as having little effect on the real economy — a key driver of global growth — and unlikely to prove a major detri-ment to private spending.
“Given that the stock market didn’t provide any noticeable boost to spend-ing on the way up, there is no reason to expect it to be a drag on the way down,” Julian Evans-Pritchard, China economist at Capital Economics, wrote in a report.
“With only a small and relatively wealthy portion of Chinese households exposed to the stock market, we aren’t particularly concerned about the impact of recent big falls in equity prices on consumption.”
For this year as a whole, the AFP survey predicts growth at a median 7 percent, more optimistic than a forecast of 6.8 percent in a similar poll in April and in
line with the government’s official target of “about 7 percent.”
China last year posted its slowest annual growth since 1990, rising 7.4 per-cent, down from 7.7 percent in 2013.
The International Monetary Fund low-ered its 2015 global economic growth forecast on Thursday, citing a quarterly contraction early this year in the US, the world’s biggest economy.
But the Washington-based institution left its forecasts for the eurozone and China intact, brushing off worries over the crisis in Greece and Shanghai share volatility.
“The puncture of what had clearly be-come a stock market bubble may have some limited effect on spending,” the IMF’s chief economist Olivier Blanchard said on Thursday.
“There is no particular reason to have lost confidence” in China’s economy, he added. The IMF sees China’s GDP grow-ing at 6.8 percent this year.
(AFP)
Slow economy tames global inflationGLOBAL inflation appears tamer than many had thought it would be by now, still held back by a modest outlook for economic growth, meaning central banks look likely to leave rates lower for longer — or even ease policy further.
With a few exceptions such as Bra-zil, many major economies are still generating low or no consumer price in-flation but instead higher asset prices, particularly stocks, and in many coun-tries, a renewed pickup in house price inflation.
For those watching the world economy, China, not Greece, has for a while re-mained the No. 1 concern. The slowing world’s second-largest economy is gener-ating just 1.4 percent inflation.
Jeremy Lawson, chief economist at Standard Life Investments, writes: “The long-term glide path is still down
and most of the risks remain to the downside.
“Slow growth and moderating inflation explains why many emerging economies have been loosening monetary policy in recent months ... (but) there is a danger in taking things too far.”
The inflation outlook for the United States also remains remarkably tame, particularly given how quickly the un-employment rate has fallen but still with no convincing evidence that has translated into significantly higher wage deals.
While some large investment banks remain upbeat about prospects for US growth in coming months, forecasting a much stronger second half for the world’s largest economy has become boilerplate since the financial crisis began to ease. Federal Reserve policy-makers were clear
in minutes of a June policy meeting that they had a close eye on economic growth abroad, particularly in China and other emerging markets.
Traders and investors in financial markets, who had pushed to September from June expectations for the first US interest rate rise in nearly a decade, now talk about December or even 2016.
Testimony from Fed chief Janet Yellen to Congress on Wednesday and Thursday could provide more clarity on how close the Federal Open Market Committee is to raising rates from a record low of 0-0.25 percent, but few expect strong signals.
“We still believe the FOMC majority is anxious to lift policy off the zero bound when the opportunity arises, preferably before year end,” wrote economists at Credit Suisse.
(Reuters)
Shanghai Daily Monday 13 July 2015 BUSINESS A11
EXPLORE MORE AT WWW.SHANGHAIDAILY.COM/BUSINESS/CALENDARLIST.ASPX
Yan’an Road
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oad
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International Machine Tool, Robotics and Smart
Factory Exhibition
Date: Tuesday to Friday (July 14-17)
MWC Shanghai
Date: Wednesday to Friday (July 15-17)
It’s an exhibition of mobile technology.
ProPak China
Date: Wednesday to Friday (July 15-17)
It’s a trade exhibition of processing and packaging technologies.
Shanghai International Information Consumption Expo
Date: Wednesday to Friday (July 15-17)
Scan to check business
events online
BIZ INSIGHT
Realtors in Australia, Britain and Canada are bracing for a surge of new interest in their already hot property markets, with early
signs that wealthy Chinese investors are seeking a safe haven from the turmoil in China’s equity markets.
Sydney realtor Michael Pallier said in the past week alone he has sold two new apartments and shown a A$13.8 million (US$10.3 million) house in the harbor-side city to Chinese buyers looking for an alternative to stocks.
“A lot of high net worth individuals had already taken money out of the stock market because it was getting just too hot,” said Pallier, the principal of Sydney Sotheby’s International Realty. “There’s a huge amount of cash sitting in China, and I think you’ll find a lot of that comes to the Australian property market.”
Around 20 percent has been knocked off the value of Chinese shares since mid-June, although attempts by authori-ties to stem the bleeding are having some effect.
Many wealthy Chinese investors had already cashed out. Major shareholders sold 360 billion yuan (US$58 billion) in the first five months of 2015 alone, compared with 190 billion yuan in all of 2014 and an average of 100 billion yuan in prior years, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
Gain in property salesWhile much of that money may ini-
tially be parked in more liquid assets like US Treasury bonds and safe-haven currencies such as the Swiss franc, there is growing evidence that foreign prop-erty sales may receive a boost.
“There is anecdotal evidence that Chinese buyers have intensified their interest in ‘safe-haven’ global property markets, including London, as a result of the recent stock market volatility,” said Tom Bill, head of London residential research at Knight Frank.
Ed Mead, executive director of realtor Douglas & Gordon in London, said his firm had seen two buyers from China looking to buy whole blocks of flats.
“It is unusual to see the Chinese block buying, it implies that this is a capital movement rather than just individuals looking to park money.”
Since 2000, China has had the world’s largest outflow of high net worth in-dividuals. Around 91,000 wealthy Chinese sought second citizenship between 2000 and 2014, according to a report by residence investment bro-ker Lio Global, a factor that is fueling
Rising Chinese interest in safe-haven realty
Shanghai New Interna-Shanghai New Interna-tional Expo Centertional Expo Center
Add: 2345 Longyang RoadAdd: 2345 Longyang Road
Tel: 2890-6666Tel: 2890-6666
demand to buy foreign property.Most of these individuals, defined as
those with net assets of US$1 million or more excluding their primary resi-dences, are moving to the United States, Singapore and Britain.
Brian Ward, president of capital mar-kets and investment services for the Americas at commercial property com-pany Colliers International, said Chinese investors had already sunk around US$5 billion into US real estate in the first six months of 2015, more than the US$4 bil-lion they invested in the whole of 2014.
In London, Alex Newall, managing director of super prime residential real-tor Hanover Private Office estate agents said he had seen an increase in interest from Chinese investors at the top of the market, although no transactions yet.
“They’re wanting to try and park large sums of money — I’m talking from 25 million pounds (US$38.5 million) to 150 million pounds,” Newell said.
“They’re looking to park that capital into London homes.”
Australia and Canada are also increas-ing in popularity, gaining an edge from their weakening currencies.
“Property prices are still cheap in RMB (yuan) terms,” said Timothy Cheung, a principal of Morphic Asset Management in Sydney.
Backing outThe rush by Chinese investors into
foreign property has not been without criticism, with some in London, Sydney and Vancouver blaming them for push-ing up already spiraling prices.
The Australian government has moved to look tough on the issue, introducing new fees and jail terms for those found flouting foreign investment rules. The Chinese owner of a A$39 million Sydney mansion was forced to sell up earlier this year after it was revealed the property
had been bought illegally through a string of shell companies.
Others are concerned that Chinese investors who didn’t bail out of stocks quickly enough will be a drag on global property markets, particularly after Bei-jing on Thursday banned shareholders with large stakes in listed firms from selling for six months.
In London, Naomi Heaton, CEO of Lon-don Central Portfolio, said she had heard of investors pulling out of purchases because they no longer had the capital.
It was a similar story for Vancouver realtor Andrew Hasman, who focuses on the city’s affluent westside area.
“I had a call last week from another agent wanting to know if a seller of a transaction we just did would allow the buyer to back out, because they had just recently lost a huge amount of money in the Chinese stock market correction,” he said.
(Reuters)
The Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge can be seen as real estate agent Lulu Sun (right) escorts Bao Fang, a potential
buyer from Shanghai, during an inspection of a property for sale in the Sydney suburb of Vaucluse on Saturday. Realtors in
Australia, Britain and Canada are bracing for a surge of new interest in their already hot property markets, with early signs
that wealthy Chinese investors are seeking a safe haven from the turmoil in China’s equity markets. — Reuters
12 HANGZHOU SPECIAL
WEST LAKE EXPO / CULTURE / TOURISM / SOCIAL
www.hicenter.cn
Monday 13 July 2015 Shanghai Daily
New highway AN expressway linking Hangzhou with Shaoxing and Taizhou is under construction and is scheduled to open to traffic in 2019.
The 166.2-kilometer Hangzhou-Taizhou Expressway will cost 38.43 billion yuan (US$6.19 billion), 48 per-cent more than the previous budget.
The new highway will pass through Shengzhou, Xinchang, Pan’an and Lin-hai and is listed as a key infrastructure project in Zhejiang Province’s 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015).
The section between Hangzhou and Shaoxing will have six lanes and the rest of the highway will have four with a speed limit of 100km per hour.
Construction has already started on the Jianhu section in Shaoxing be-cause of its complicated design and geographic conditions. It is 7.06km long with two tunnels and a bridge.
Meanwhile, a plan for Hangzhou-Wenzhou High-speed Railway has been submitted to the central govern-ment for approval, according to Fang Yongjun, director of the Wenzhou De-velopment and Reform Commission.
The 270km railway can shorten the trip from Hangzhou to Wenzhou to just 55 minutes, compared with three hours now and four hours by expressway.
If approved, the new railway will cut across Xiaoshan, Zhuji, Dongyang, Pan’an, Xianju and Yongjia before reaching Wenzhou on the southeast coast of Zhejiang. Construction is ex-pected to start in 2020 and finish in 2025.
Money returned A HANGZHOU woman studying in Adelaide, Australia, has become a star overnight after she returned A$200,000 (US$150,167) that was mistakenly sent to her account by a local bank.
The girl surnamed Dong said she was in a shop when she received a call from the National Australia Bank on June 30, asking her to check the trans-fer of A$200,000 to her account.
“I thought the woman on the other end of the line was a cheater and was trying to steal money from my ac-count as these kinds of tricks often happen in China,” Dong said in a phone interview.
She checked her account via online
banking and was surprised to find A$200,000 in it. She contacted the bank immediately and returned the money.
An Adelaide newspaper, The Adver-tiser, interviewed Dong and published her story with a photo on July 2.
‘Beautiful’ Hangzhou HANGZHOU was named the “Most Beautiful City of China” in the 2015 ranking of Chinese cities published recently by the China Institute of City Competitiveness.
The city ranked second in the happi-ness category and was among the top 10 in innovation, international influence
Barges with nowhere to go•
Barges are stuck in the Grand Canal after heavy rain fell in Hangzhou last week. Navigation was stopped on the
Qiantang River as part of the local government’s anti-flooding measures for the fourth time since the annual plum rain
season began on June 7. — Xinhua
and cultural competitiveness.Tonglu County of Hangzhou ranked
first in the happiness chart for Chi-nese counties and second in the scenery chart.
The ranking is based on a dozen indexes. The happiness ranking, for example, is made with reference to indexes such as people’s satisfaction, quality of living, environment, ethical standards, and social welfare.
Founded in Hong Kong in 1998, the China Institute of City Competitive-ness is an independent research and survey organization that provides urban planning and management so-lutions to city leaders.
Soccer in schoolsTHE Hangzhou Education Bureau plans to include soccer in school cur-riculums to build up their fitness.
“We want to make soccer a part of our life and a lesson for students,” Bian Hong, chief of the bureau’s high-er education department, said at the Hangzhou Mayor’s Cup Campus Soccer Tournament last week.
Hangzhou is one of the cities select-ed to experiment soccer education at schools. It has held the tournament for five years. This year 2,471 students from 93 primary and middle schools and eight kindergartens played 952 matches in the tournament.
Top US government and military
scramble to prevent World War 3
from happening amidst the chaos
of a geopolitical crisis.
11pm All Is Lost
9:45am Romeo Must Die
11:40am Hollywood on Set 604
12:10pm Con Air
2:05pm The Avengers
3:30pm Hollywood on Set 600
4pm Ace High
6pm Hollywood on Set 604
6:25pm Gattaca
8:15pm After Earth
Starring: Jaden Smith, David
Denman and Will Smith
A crash landing leaves Kitai Raige
and his father Cypher stranded on
Earth, a millennium after events
forced humanity’s escape. With
Cypher injured, Kitai must embark
on a perilous journey to signal for
help.
10pm Django Unchained
8am Talk to Lei
8:30am Travel Front
9am Culture Matters
10am High Drama
11:45am A Fistful of Kung Fu
12pm Pop Big Shot
12:10pm City Beat
12:45pm You Are the Chef
1pm The Funniest Home Video
1:30pm Real Fun
2:30pm High Docu
3:30pm ICS Show
4:30pm Fun Club
5pm On the Red Carpet
5:30pm Docu View
6pm The Funniest Home Video
6:30pm You Are the Chef
6:45pm Pop Big Shot
7pm Real Fun
8pm Docu View
8:30pm Talk to Lei
9pm Shanghai Live
9:45pm A Fistful of Kung Fu
10pm High Drama
10am Ballers
10:30am The Brink
11:00am Winter’s Tale
12:55pm Malavita
2:45pm Little Man
4:20pm Dinosaur
5:40pm Turtle Power: The Defi ni-
tive History of the Teenage Mutant
Ninja Turtles
7:15pm Jack Ryan: Shadow
Recruit
9pm True Detective
10pm Ballers
10:30pm The Brink
Starring: Jack Black, Tim Rob-
bins and Pablo Schreiber
Our Sepcials
Li Yundi & US OrchestraLi Yundi, the fi rst Chinese to win
the Chopin International Piano
Competition at the age of 18, will
show his remarkable piano skills in
Shanghai. He will cooperate with
the US National Youth Orchestra
under the baton of Charles Dutoit.
Dutoit is one of the world’s best
conductors who has directed all
major orchestras in cities from
London to Paris, Berlin, Munich,
Moscow, Sydney, Beijing, Hong
Kong and Shanghai. Li and the
orchestra will play the works of
Beethoven, Berlioz and Chinese
composer Tan Dun. The National
Youth Orchestra is founded by
Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Insti-
tute. Its members are between 16
and 19 years old. They will also
perform in Beijing, Xi’an, Suzhou,
Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Hong
Kong on this tour.
Date: July 17, 7:30pm
Venue: Shanghai Oriental Art
Center
Address: 425 Dingxiang Rd,
Pudong New Area
The Bubblelandia JourneyThe story, based on the classic
fairy tale book “Alice in Wonder-
land,” is set in the modern society
and tells the story of Mr B, an or-
dinary person. After a regular long
day, Mr B fi nds himself transported
as if by magic in a special, colorful,
happy place called Bubblelandia.
The “inhabitants” of Bubblelandia
— seahorses, dragon fi sh, starfi sh,
mermaids, clown fi sh and others
— carry Mr B along his adventur-
ous journey in this underwater
mystery world where fantasy
becomes reality. This musical pro-
duction combines drama, mime,
dance, puppetry, juggling, sand
art and magic, with various stage
effects adopting the latest laser
technologies, snow cannons, soap
bubble tornadoes, theatrical fog,
gigantic smoke rings, smoke-fi lled
soap bubble machines and optical
illusions.
Date: August 7-9, 7:15pm
Tickets: 180-1,000 yuan
Venue: Shanghai Culture Square
Address: 597 Fuxing Rd M.
‘Van Gogh Alive’This multi-sensory traveling exhibi-
tion is dedicated to the life and
work of the Dutch artist Vincent
van Gogh. It features more than
3,000 images and promises in an
“Art Castle” erected on Taiping
Lake in the Xintiandi area to “im-
merse visitors in the artists’ world.”
WHAT’S ON A13
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Shanghai Daily Monday 13 July 2015
PICK OF THE DAY
idealshanghai.com/offers/tickets/
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Exhibition
Nordic CoolArtworks by Icelandic artist Sig-
urdur Gudmundsson is bringing a
touch of Nordic cool to Shanghai.
Titled “Untitled Meaning,” the exhi-
bition features pieces produced by
the artist over the past 14 years,
including sculptures, photographs,
videos and installations.
Date: Through August 31
(Mondays-Fridays), 10am-5:30pm
Venue: Levant Art Gallery
Address: 107 Huqiu Rd
‘The Art of Luo Zhongli’A selection of some 40 artworks
by Luo Zhongli are on a tour exhi-
bition at the art space of Christie’s
in Shanghai, the fi rst time the
auction house has ever held in the
city for an Asian artist. The exhibi-
tion features Luo’s signature oil on
alive or transform into fantastical
creatures.
Date: August 14-16, 7:15pm
Tickets: 80-580 yuan
Tel: 400-650-5050,
5108-5050
Venue: Shanghai Oriental Art
Center
Address: 425 Dingxiang Rd,
Pudong New Area
Flamenco DanceThe Spanish Ballet of Murcia
will present local audience two
classic fl amenco dance dramas.
“Carmen” is a tragic tale of love,
jealousy and death. “Salome,” also
known as “the dance of the seven
veils,” is about a young woman
whose love is turned down by
John the Baptist. She dances for
Herod and demands the head
of the Baptist in exchange for
her most beautiful and sensu-
ous dancing. The show features
stunning visual effects, compli-
cated dance moves and emotional
melodies.
Date: September 18-20, 22-24,
28-29, 7:30pm
Tickets: 80-880 yuan
Tel: 400-650-5050, 5108-5050
Venue: Shanghai Oriental Art
Center
Address: 425 Dingxiang Rd,
Pudong New Area
Bringing sound of the Zulus to city
Nicholas Ng
SOUTH African male cho-ral group Ladysmith Black Mambazo makes its debut in Shanghai next month, prom-ising to wow local fans with a stunning and passionate performance.
The group is known for per-forming in the isicathamiya and mbube vocal styles, both native to South Africa.
It came to the world’s
attention in 1986 after sing-ing with Paul Simon on his album “Graceland,” and has won multiple awards, includ-ing four Grammys.
Ladysmith Black Mambazo was founded by Joseph Sha-balala in 1960 after he heard certain isicathamiya harmo-nies — a traditional music of the Zulu people — in his dreams.
The first album “Amabutho” was released in 1973, and the
group has gone on to become one of South Africa’s most prolific, notching up gold and platinum album sales.
Ladysmith Black Mambazo says it seeks to teach about South Africa and its culture.
Date: August 9, 7:30pm
Tickets: 50-380 yuan
Venue: Shanghai Daning Theater
Address: 1222 Pingxingguan Rd
It’s part of the Shanghai Interna-
tional Arts Festival.
Date: Through August 30,
10am-9:30pm, (10am-7pm on
Thursdays)
Tickets: 100-360 yuan
Venue: Taiping Lake in the
Xintiandi area
canvas pieces such as “Night Talk
of Ba Mountain.” Born in 1958 in
Chongqing, Luo graduated from
the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts
in 1981. Now he serves as dean
of the academy. He rose to fame
for his portrait “Father,” which
depicts the weather-beaten face of
a Chinese old peasant. The artist
switched from realistic style in the
1980s to folk mannerist style in
the 90s, and now he combines
canvas with sculptures.
Date: Through July 15,
10am-4pm
Address: 97 Yuanmingyuan Rd
Stage
‘Murmurs’The timeless charms of Charlie
Chaplin are brought to life in the
fantasy stage-show “Murmurs” —
also known as “What the Walls are
Saying” — a work created by the
famed silent actor’s granddaugh-
ter, talented dancer and acrobat
Aurelia Thierree. The humorous
and sentimental show has been
described as a modern-day “Alice
in Wonderland” by critics. Thierree
plays a curious woman who wan-
ders through a world of illusion,
where rooms fi lled with various
ordinary objects magically come
Ladysmith Black MambazoLadysmith Black Mambazo
Monday 13 July 2015 Shanghai DailyA14 COMICS/GAMES
SUDOKUFill the grid with the numbers 1 to 9 so that each row, column and 3x3 block contains the numbers 1-9.
CROSSWORD
HOROSCOPES
Puzzle answer
GARFIELD
POOCH CAFÉ
STONE SOUP
NON SEQUITUR
ACROSS
1 Plays a round6 Crooked 11 Blueprint 14 Circa 15 Columbus’ home port 16 Suffix with “elect”
17 Mystery to evolutionists 19 Gabriel, for one 20 Pampered to a fault, to a Brit 21 It makes ink pink 23 Get in the game
26 Help out 27 In a melodic style 28 Systematize, as laws 30 Widespread 31 Consumed 32 Priestly garb 35 That thing’s 36 Lost,
Egyptian goddess 41 Sneaky 43 Lennon’s wife 44 Bothers 45 Bark-covering plants 46 Not quite vertical 47 Famed Greek
physician 48 Cockeyed 50 Between ports 51 Russian ruler of old 54 Anger 55 Nave bench 56 “Adolescent” lead-in 57 “— be an honor”
according to this theme 38 Bygone bird 39 Choose not to prevent 40 Animals with backpacks 41 Trawler’s haul 42 Sweetened, in a way 44 Charm 46 Operatives 48 Big fans 49 Ban 50 Maximally 52 Branch of the U.N. 53 River for this puzzle’s theme 58 Grassland 59 Bailiwicks 60 Chris of tennis 61 Blasting stuff 62 Approaches 63 Hemmed, but didn’t haw
DOWN
1 Group of whales2 One getting waisted in Tokyo?3 — Altos, Calif.4 Hard-to- please type5 Mushroom
stems6 Texas A&M athlete7 Unload, as stock8 Wrinkle, as one’s brow9 Many, many years 10 It occurs each morning 11 Fail to come close 12 Be of use 13 Pasta choice 18 Part of a melody 22 Big galoot 23 Engage in quibbling 24 Give a keynote address 25 Be wrong 26 Garden in the Bible 28 Checked out for nefarious purposes 29 Big name in elevators 31 To be, to Caesar 33 Winner’s victim 34 Thai money 36 Kind of talk 37 Horned
Happy Birthday: Easy come, easy go. Your year will be filled with ups and downs. It’s how you handle emotional situations concerning both home and work that will determine your gains and your losses. Take control of your emotions and apply practical solutions to whatever you face. Simplicity and moderation will help you come out on top. Your numbers are 4, 8, 14, 26, 32, 40, 48.
CANCER (June 21-July 22)Someone will have a change of heart. Ask questions and make your position clear to avoid breaking a promise. It’s up to you to track down any problems that are brewing and find solutions if you want your day to run smoothly.
LEO (July 23-Aug 22)Your adaptable attitude and generosity will attract plenty of attention. Don’t be too willing to share personal information with anyone who might wish to tamper with your success. An unusual financial or legal matter will arise that will need your undivided attention.
VIRGO (Aug 23-Sep 22) Your involvement in worthy causes or political organizations will give you a say in what happens in your community. A personal change will enable you to cut your overhead. A work-related situation is extremely sensitive.
LIBRA (Sep 23-Oct 22)Problems will arise if you are too vocal. Keep your opinions to yourself and try to get along with everyone around you. The benefits from being a good listener will help you bring about changes that position you well for future prospects.
SCORPIO (Oct 23-Nov 21)Financial ventures will have underlying circumstances that will cause stress. Don’t get emotional about finances or try to buy love. Put your efforts into learning all you can and using alternative means to outsmart any opponent you encounter.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov 22-Dec 21)Don’t let the last-minute changes others make get to you. Concentrate on your own personal interests and
making alterations that will improve your attitude, skills or appearance. Love is in the stars, and commitment will lead to a cost-efficient lifestyle.
CAPRICORN (Dec 22-Jan 19)Take a back seat and listen carefully. Once you understand what others are proposing, you will have a better idea of what will work for you. Don’t feel obligated to make a promise before you feel comfortable moving forward.
AQUARIUS (Jan 20-Feb 18)Socialize with people you want to do business with. Partnerships will form and a positive change in professional direction will give you a chance to use your skills in a more diverse and trendy manner. Romance is encouraged.
PISCES (Feb 19-Mar 20)If you make changes at home, be sure to get the approval of anyone who may be compelled to disagree or counter your plans. A short trip will help you find the information you require to cut costs and get your way.
ARIES (Mar 21-Apr 19)Complete unfinished business. Reply to emails and contact people you want to do business with. If you mix business with pleasure, you will enhance your chances to advance. Make plans to celebrate your achievements with someone you love.
TAURUS (Apr 20-May 20)Hold on to your money. Impulsive purchases will empty your wallet. A costly partnership is best handled responsibly. Don’t let anyone take advantage of what you’ve worked so hard to acquire. Make a last-minute change if it will benefit you.
GEMINI (May 21-Jun 20)Emotional matters will escalate if someone isn’t being honest about what’s expected of them. Stick close to home and make personal changes that will lift your spirits or improve your surroundings. Romance is encouraged.
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Shanghai Daily Monday 13 July 2015 SPORTS A15
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Guo’an, SIPG win to stay on trackMa Yue
SOCCER
BEIJING Guo’an and Shanghai SIPG both won in the 18th round of the Chinese Super League yesterday to maintain their one-two position in the league standings.
SIPG edged Guangzhou R&F 3-2 in a roller-coaster match at Guangzhou Yuexiushan Sta-dium. Dario Conca’s powerful shot from outside of the box gave Shanghai the lead in the 12th minute. Guangzhou goalie Liu Dianzuo, standing in the near corner of the goal, seemed a bit unprepared for the at-tempt. Each side then missed a chance in the first half.
The hosts came back strong-ly in the second half, with two foreign players Jang Hyun-soo and Jeremy Bokila scoring
within three minutes to help R&F grab the lead.
Conca then proved his worth to his team, scoring the equal-izer in the 78th thanks to good work with Wu Lei and Evrard Kouassi. It was the Argentine’s seventh goal for the team.
Emboldened by the equalizer, SIPG started putting pressure on the hosts, and was awarded with a free kick in front of the box in the closing minutes of the game. Conca’s shot hit the defenders’ wall but it was Wang Jiajie who reacted the quickest, stabbing home the winner.
The victory kept SIPG in sec-ond spot, on 38 points, a point less than Guo’an. The competi-tion in the top half of the table remains fierce with Guangzhou Evergrande third on 37 and Shandong Luneng next on 36.
O n S a t u r d a y, T i m
Cahill scored again for Shang-hai Greenland Shenhua in its 1-1 draw at Tianjin Teda. It was the Australian veteran’s fourth goal in five games.
Partnering Cahill in attack was Shenhua’s new big-name signing Demba Ba, who was making his CSL debut in Tian-jin. The Senegal international came close to scoring his first goal for his new club, hitting the bar with a header in the 27th. He was substituted in the 82nd.
The visitors’ goal came in the 60th when Shenhua was given a free-kick and organized a quick attack.
Lu Zheng sent a pass towards Cahill in the box, and the latter headed the ball into the top cor-ner of the Teda goal. The former Everton striker celebrated with his trademark boxing punches in front of the corner flag.
Tianjin equalized in the 75th from a corner with Argentine striker Hernan Barcos scoring.
Greenland Shenhua’s French head coach Francis Gillot was happy with Cahill’s perfor-mance, telling the post-match press conference: “I have to emphasize that Cahill has been playing well since the very beginning of the season. I’m very honored to be able to work together with such a player. His hard work and self-discipline have helped him to his achievements.”
Cahill also took over the cap-tain’s armband from Wang Yun when the latter was substituted in the 83rd.
Greenland Shenhua remained seventh in the CSL standings with 23 points. It next plays leader Beijing Guo’an at Hong-kou Stadium on Wednesday.
Quiet Galaxy debut for Gerrard•
Steven Gerrard of the Los Angeles Galaxy tumbles over Rubens Sambueza of Mexico’s Club
America in the opening game of the International Champions Cup at StubHub Center in Los
Angeles on Saturday. The former Liverpool captain had one scoring chance in his debut for
Galaxy but otherwise had little influence on the match that was sealed 2-1 by the Major League
Soccer side with goals either side of half-time by Robbie Keane and Alan Gordon. — AFP
‘C’est fini’, says tearful Casillas to RealSOCCER
“C’EST fini”.With those few words in
French a tearful Iker Casillas brought to an end his farewell statement yesterday to the Real Madrid fans he has served as first-team goalkeeper and cap-tain for 16 seasons.
Dressed in a dark blue shirt and sitting alone in front of the assembled media at the San-tiago Bernabeu Stadium press room, the 34-year-old, who is leaving for Portuguese side Porto, choked up several times as he thanked Real for “giving me everything”.
“This club also moulded me as a person and helped me to grow,” said Casillas, who joined the Real academy at the age of nine and debuted for the first team at 18. “Beyond remember-ing me as a good goalkeeper or a bad goalkeeper I just hope that people remember me for being a good person.”
Casillas was speaking after Spanish daily newspaper El Mundo published an interview with his parents yesterday in which they said their son had been forced out of the club by president Florentino Perez.
Casillas had been the victim of an orchestrated campaign
of “vilification” in recent years which eventually prompted his decision to quit, they added.
Real did not immediately respond to a request for com-ment and Casillas did not take questions after making his statement, in which he did not mention Perez by name.
The impression remains that the Spain captain is leav-ing under a cloud after he was whistled by some fans at the Bernabeu last season, when Real failed to win major silverware.
It was telling that no Real officials appeared with him yes-terday, in huge contrast to his close friend and former Spain
Departing Real Madrid
goalkeeper Iker Casillas cries
as he tries to read a statement
in Madrid yesterday. — Reuters
teammate Xavi Hernandez.Xavi, 35, left Barcelona for
Qatari side al-Sadd at the end of last season and was given a series of rousing sendoffs by fans, officials and teammates at the Nou Camp.
(Reuters)
German GP for MarquezMOTORCYCLING
SPAIN’S MotoGP world cham-pion Marc Marquez won the German Grand Prix from pole position yesterday for his sixth win in a row at the Sachsenring in a Honda one-two with compa-triot Dani Pedrosa.
Italy’s Valentino Rossi finished third for Yamaha to extend his championship lead over Spanish teammate Jorge Lorenzo, who was fourth, to 13 points.
Rossi, a nine-time champion in all categories, has 179 points to Lorenzo’s 166 after nine of 18 races. Marquez is fourth overall with 114.
The victory, at a circuit he has dominated since his 125cc days, was Marquez’s second of the season and Honda’s first one-two of the year. “From the beginning I felt good and then when I had the gap I tried to manage it,” said the Spaniard, who was passed at the start by Lorenzo but retook the lead after four laps and pulled away.
“I’m happy because during this weekend we were com-pletely first and it’s been a long time since I did that.”
With Marquez on his own, the battle for second provided most of the excitement.
Rossi went wheel-to-wheel with Lorenzo and passed after seven laps, with Marquez 1.8 seconds ahead, but any hopes the Italian had of closing the gap soon vanished. Pedrosa overtook Lorenzo and reeled in Rossi before regaining second place — his grid position — with 14 of 30 laps remaining.
“It was a very difficult race, es-pecially the beginning, for me,” Pedrosa said. “I had some issues at the beginning with the setting but towards the middle of the race the tank became emptier and I felt more comfortable.”
(Reuters)
England unchanged for second Ashes testCRICKET
ENGLAND has named an un-changed 13-man squad for the second Ashes test at Lord’s next week having thrashed Australia by 169 runs in Cardiff on Sat-urday to take a 1-0 series lead, the England and Wales Cricket Board said yesterday.
England won the opening test inside four days having bowled Australia out for 242, which was chasing a daunting 412 to win, and banished memories of the humiliating 0-5 Ashes white-wash in the previous series down under. Joe Root scored a masterful hundred in the first innings and a fifty in the second while there were also pressure-easing half centuries from Gary Ballance and Ian Bell. Should the same 11 take the field at Lord’s on Thursday, Middlesex pace bowler Steven Finn, without a test cap since July 2013, and Yorkshire’s uncapped spinner Adil Rashid will miss out.
Chagaev defends title BOXING
RUSLAN Chagaev of Uzbekistan defended his WBA heavyweight belt with a first-round technical knockout of Francesco Pianeta in Magdeburg, Germany, on Saturday. The Hamburg-based Chagaev improved to 34-2-1 (21 KOs) with his first defense of the belt he won for the second time by beating American Fres Oquendo for the vacant title in Grozny, Russia, on July 6 last year. Pianeta drops to 31-2-1 (17 KOs). Both fighters previ-ously lost to Ukraine’s Wladimir Klitschko, Chagaev in June 2009 and Pianeta in May 2013.
SPORTSMonday 13 July 2015 Shanghai Daily
A16
Hingis relives glory years MARTINA Hingis is a Wimbledon champion once again, 17 years — exactly half her life — after the last time.
Already a member of the International Tennis Hall of Fame on the merits of her “first” career in the sport, Hingis teamed with Sania Mirza to win the women’s dou-bles final at the All England Club by beating Ekaterina Makarova and Elena Vesnina 5-7, 7-6 (4), 7-5 on Saturday night.
The 34-year-old Hingis added to her collection of Wimbledon trophies that in-cludes the singles title from 1997, plus the women’s doubles titles from 1996 and 1998. The latter was her last appearance in a final at Wimbledon.
“It feels like it was in another life,” Hingis said. “Usually, you’re lucky to win it once or happy to be out here and play on the Wimble-don grounds. It’s above my expectations.”
She’ll get a chance to earn yet another trophy, when she and Leander Paes were
taking on Timea Babos and Alexander Peya in the mixed doubles final yesterday.
And to think: A few years ago, Hingis was taking part in the “Legends” tournament for former players.
“I wouldn’t have thought (then) that I’ll be back, playing the finals here,” she said.
The No. 1-seeded Hingis and Mirza trailed 2-5 in the final set before taking the last five games against the second-seeded Makarova and Vesnina, who won last year’s US Open.
Play was halted at 5-5 because it was getting too dark; after a break, action resumed with the Centre Court roof closed and artificial lights on. “When we came out at 5-all, we had goosebumps. The energy on the court — we were getting a standing ovation — it was un-believable,” said Mirza, the first woman from India to be ranked No. 1 in singles or doubles. “We both came out, and I said, ‘This is what we play for. This is what we work for’.”
Hingis, who reached No. 1 in the rankings
Martina Hingis of Switzerland and Sania
Mirza of India pose with their trophies after
winning the Wimbledon women’s doubles
final in London on Saturday. — Reuters
and won five grand slam singles titles in the 1990s, initially quit tennis in 2002 because of foot and leg injuries, then rejoined the circuit full-time in 2006. She announced her retirement again in 2007, when she was given a two-year suspension for test-ing positive for cocaine at Wimbledon. At the time, she denied taking the drug but did not appeal the ruling.
(AP)
Froome in control but BMC wins time trialCYCLING
CHRIS Froome stayed firmly on track for the Tour de France title when he retained the overall leader’s yellow jersey after the ninth stage, a 28-kilometer team time trial won by the slimmest of margins by BMC Racing yesterday.
Heading into today’s rest day, Froome has the edge over his main rivals, who were hoping to take advantage of the Briton’s supposed weak-nesses in the tricky opening block of racing.
The 2013 champion will now be keen to all but wrap up the race as it goes into the mountains — the Pyrenees in the second week and the Alps in the third.
Yesterday, BMC Racing clocked 32 minutes 15 sec-onds to beat Sky by one second and Froome now leads American Tejay van Garderen by 12 seconds overall.
“We knew we were on a good one, on a perfect day we would have taken yellow too, but still a great win,” said BMC Racing leader Van Garderen.
“In a perfect world I would have taken the jersey,” added Van Garderen, who was hoping to become the first American since the dis-graced Floyd Landis in 2006 to be Tour overall leader.
Movistar took third place, four seconds behind, as Colombian climber Nairo Quintana limited the dam-age caused by Froome and Van Garderen, even gaining ground on Spain’s Alberto Contador and struggling de-fending champion Vincenzo Nibali of Italy.
Contador’s Tinkoff-Saxo team was fourth, 28 seconds adrift, and Nibali’s Astana outfit ended up fifth, 35 seconds off the pace after a demanding time trial that ended up the Cote de Cadou-dal, a brutal 1.7-km ascent at an average gradient of 6.2 percent.
Contador, looking to achieve a rare Giro d’Italia/Tour double, is fifth overall 1:03 behind Froome, while Quintana, regarded as the Briton’s toughest opponent in the climbs, is ninth and 1:59 off the pace.
Sky had a five-second edge at the foot of the final climb to the finish in Plumelec but Ire-land’s Nicolas Roche cracked under the pace set by Welsh-man Geraint Thomas and his teammates had to slow down to wait for him.
(Agencies)
Novak Djokovic of Serbia celebrates after winning the Wimbledon men’s singles final against Roger
Federer of Switzerland at the All England Club in southwest London yesterday. The top seed beat
the second seed and seven-time champion 7-6 (1), 6-7 (10), 6-4, 6-3. — Reuters
Djokovic shatters Federer’s dream to claim third crown at WimbledonTENNIS
DEFENDING champion Novak Djokovic won a third Wimble-don title and a ninth grand slam crown yesterday, shatter-ing Roger Federer’s bid for a record eighth All England Club triumph.
World No. 1 Djokovic won 7-6 (1), 6-7 (10), 6-4, 6-3 add-ing the Wimbledon title to the Australian Open he captured in January.
A forehand crosscourt winner after two hours and 56 min-utes handed Djokovic victory and drew him level on three Wimbledon titles with his coach Boris Becker.
For 33-year-old Federer, it was a bitter end to his bid to become the oldest Wimbledon champion of the Open Era.
The 17-time major winner has now gone three years since his last grand slam triumph.
He remains even with Pete Sampras and 1880s player Wil-liam Renshaw, who also have seven.
Last year, Djokovic beat Federer in five sets.
The opening two sets yester-day were decided by tiebreaks with Djokovic running away with the first and Federer coming through a marathon second.
Djokovic then broke early in the third and served out com-fortably after the players were forced off court following a brief rain delay.
Federer landed the first punch in the first set, breaking the Djokovic serve to love for a 4-2 lead when the world No. 1 netted a straightforward mid-court backhand.
But the second-seeded Swiss’s serve, which had been func-tioning with laser precision throughout the tournament,
then faltered allowing Djokovic to break back immediately.
Both players stayed strong to force the tiebreak in which Serb Djokovic raced into a 6-1 lead and closed it out when Federer served his first double fault of the match.
The more Federer tried to get on to the front foot the more Djokovic returned the ball with interest, preventing the Swiss playing the attacking game that had caused Scot Andy Murray headaches in their semifinal.
Federer had two break points
in the fifth game of the second set, but the top seed’s ability to produce big serves on crucial points kept the Swiss at bay.
Federer’s unforced error count continued to mount and another double fault in the 10th game gave Djokovic the first of a series of set points.
The rest came in a tense tie-break in which Federer hung on bravely before Djokovic wafted a forehand into the net to give the Swiss set point at 11-10 on his own serve and he wrapped it up with a volley.
The third set began with a flurry of break points, Federer saving two in the first game and Djokovic holding from 30-40 in the second before the Serb broke for a 2-1 lead when Federer fired a wild forehand long.
The predicted rain arrived and the players filed off court with Djokovic leading 3-2, returning 15 minutes later to re-sume battle with neither player troubling the other’s serve and the top seed closing out the set with a smash.
(Agencies)
Monday
13 July
2015
BAUTO
TALK
THE BIG SHIFTINTO SLOW GEARGrowth in China car sales continues to decelerate, forcing
changes from the factory floor to the showroom. Is the car-
buying spree that fed an industry boom gone for good?
B2
Illustration by CFP
Monday 13 July 2015 Shanghai DailyB2 COVER STORY
A chill settles over car sales, with no letup in sight
Passenger car sales by brand origin
Sales Y-O-Y
Passenger car 10,095,600 4.8%
Commercial car 1,754,700 14.4%
Total 11,850,300 1.4%
JAN-JUNE sales
Best sellers
1 VW Lavida 182,700
2 VW Santana 154,300
3 VW Jetta 150,100
4 Nissan Sylphy 142,800
5 Ford Focus 136,700
6 VW Sagitar 134,500
7 Hyundai Elantra 132,700
8 VW Passat 120,100
9 Chevrolet Cruze 119,200
10 Toyota Corrola 113,600
1 China 4,184,600
2 Germany 1,988,300
3 Japan 1,507,800
4 USA 1,217,500
5 South Korea 813,400
6 France 365,500
Total sales Y-o-y
5,789,300 5.9%
SEDAN
Top 10 brands
account for 24% of
the total car sales
Anna Lu
This year, China is experiencing one of its chilliest summers on re-cord. And things aren’t
looking much warmer in the car industry as sales further drift from double-digit growth.
In the first half of this year, China’s car sales grew 1.4 percent, 6.38 percentage points down from the same period of last year according to As-sociation of China Automobile Manufacturers.
It is such an unexpeced dramatic cool-down from the 16.6 percent compound average annual growth over the past decade.
As a typical cyclical industry, China’s carmaking business, is feeling the pinch of the so-called “new normal” — a phrase Premier Li Keqiang uses to define the move to more sus-tainable economic growth. Read that to mean slower growth, or even temporary downward correction as seen in the com-mercial vehicle segment, whose sales plunged 14.4 percent in the January-June period.
A stable transition would be like this: consulting firm Alix-Partners predicted 5.2 percent annual growth in China’s car sales through 2018, with the rate dropping to 4.1 percent from then until 2022.
When the growth rate falls below 6 percent, that is certain to raise a few eyebrows, espe-cially among those who thought the boom in sales would last far longer than it has.
On the heels of the explosion in private vehicle ownership marking the start of this centu-ry, annual car sales exceeded 23 million last year. However, room for expansion in demand is much smaller than 10 years ago. Cities now finding themselves mired in traffic congestion and vehicle exhaust pollution are rethinking their love affair with cars.
Although fears of more draconian vehicle registration restrictions have eased, there are still reasons why fewer people may be interested in buying cars.
Demand in lower-tier cities Sitting in snail-pace rush hour
commute traffic day after day may give some would-be buyers reason to think public mass transit isn’t so bad after all. Parking gets tighter and tighter.
About the only places with silver linings in the car market are lower-tier cities, where there is still untapped demand, and the SUV segment, which is still enjoying something of a heyday. In the first half of this year, SUV sales surged 45 percent, exceed-ing all other segments.
For the Chinese, an SUV had come to be equated with a family car. The versatility and cost-effectiveness of using an SUV both as a passenger vehicle
and also as a commercial ve-hicle for hauling goods makes it popular on urban fringes, said Hou Yankun, head of Asia Autos Research at UBS Securities.
It might be too early yet to mark 2015 as the beginning of a rural car-shopping spree, but that prospect is starting to redefine the industry.
As the SUV craze starts to spread to places where people are more interested in price than brand, domestic carmak-ers stand to become the biggest beneficiaries.
Over the past six months, they led the passenger car market with a 14.6 percent growth, fueled by strong mid- to low-end SUV line-ups. The domestic SUV makers are making up market share they previously lost to foreign players.
But domestic makers run risks if they put all their eggs in one basket. They cannot count on a single segment as their sav-ior, warned Mei Songling, vice president and managing direc-tor of auto consulting firm J.D. Power’s China operations.
The only true savior is a timely adjustment in business strategy.
Starting from April, a series of official car-price reductions has sent shock waves from the factory to the showroom.
It began with Volkswagen and soon spread to almost all the heavyweights in the market, even to leaders in SUV sales.
Last month, China’s domestic SUV supremo Great Wall cut the price of its all-time best-selling H6 Sport series by 6,000 yuan, or around 4 percent . At the beginning of this month, Land Rover’s joint venture with Chery made a surprising announcement of discounts of up to 50,000 yuan, or 11 per-cent, on its China-made Range Rover Evoque line-up that was launched only five months ear-lier. That was a big comedown from several years ago, when imported Evoques were often priced at more than 100,000 yuan above the recommended retail price because of over-whelming demand in the luxury SUV segment.
From unofficial overcharg-ing to official price-cutting, the same reversal of fortunes struck Tiguan. Made by Shang-hai Volkswagen, the vehicle has been one of the hottest-selling SUVs in China. It also is the only localized SUV card Volkswagen can play in China for its name-sake brand.
What it lacks in product port-folio, Volkswagen group makes up for in rapid adjustment to market headwinds.
By mid-April, the stark reality began to sink in that 2 percent first-quarter sales growth wasn’t going to deliver the carmaker’s 10 percent growth target for 2015 in China.
“They were thinking, at that time, that it was prudent to jump-start price reductions while the market was still in
pretty good shape,” Hou said. “But when everyone else follows suit to counter a slowdown, discounts lose their magic. That’s the ‘prisoner’ dilemma in every competitive market. You are always a captive of your own sales target.”
So far, the headwinds have remained as cold as summer temperatures. June and July are traditionally the low season for car shopping, so official price cuts aren’t that appealing to those who have been watching the market closely.
“The deal consumers can get at the retail end now is pretty much the same as earlier this year,” said Ye Sheng, auto research director at market research firm Ipsos.
In effect, carmakers are bear-ing the brunt of the price war to buy cash-strapped dealerships more time to ease their inven-tory backlogs. It is a softening in the previously adversarial relationship between carmakers and dealerships in China. The long-standing tensions were best exemplified by BMW’s dis-pute last year with an alliance of its dealerships over delayed sales rebates. The standoff was eventually settled with commis-sion payouts of 5.1 billion yuan.
Be friendly with dealersThis year, BMW is taking a
more friendly approach to its dealerships in what must be a lesson in management relations.
At the beginning of this month, BMW introduced an incentive package of up to 2 billion yuan in rewards for second-quarter sales achieved by dealerships. That was on top of a 15 percent cut in sales quotas.
In the last week of June, the wholesale passenger car market surprisingly flattened, showing no growth an annual basis. By contrast, that market surged 22 percent in the same period last year.
Performance in the first half of the year traditionally kicks off an upbeat final sprint to-ward annual sales targets. This year, apparently not.
Autos, like most consumer retail sectors, have suffered from a crash on China’s stock market that began in mid-June. With many individual inves-tors losing all or part of their savings, income to buy cars has been seriously eroded, accord-ing to the China Passenger Car Association.
With everyone waiting to see just how far the stock market rout will extend and with car prices on their way down, consumers are nervously taking a wait-and-see attitude. It’s faint consolation that auto sales, as well as the overall stock market, have managed to hold on to positive territory since the start of the year.
Either way it goes, a chill has set in that may be very hard to shake off quickly.
JAN-JUNE
Shanghai Daily Monday 13 July 2015 COVER STORY B3
Market punishes the traditional and the concept spinners alike
Sitting in spinning teacups
Riding roller coasters
SAIC
Chang’an
Great Wall
JAC
BYD
Jinggu
Longji
Letv
Tesla
“No matter how the market plays out in the second half of this year, many an investor will think this expensive amusement park too interesting to ignore — where you can ride a roller coaster or sit in spinning teacups.
Lu Nengneng
The recent nosedive in China’s stock market erased the fine line be-tween carmakers that rely
on traditional product marketing and those that rely on hype and concept stories.
In the end, all their shares collapsed.
Mainstream domestic blue-chip carmakers have never been con-sidered high fliers in the market. Their price-to-earning ratios, at around 10, are second lowest after banks. Their prices surged about 40 percent this year before the crash, less than half the bull market’s average gain.
The irony is that these under-performing companies have delivered pretty good sales figures this year.
SAIC sold 2.86 million vehicles in the first half of this year. That was flat growth, but it managed to keep the company its market dominance. Chang’an delivered 1.46 million units, up 11 percent from a year earlier, while Great Wall sales rose 28.5 percent on highly profitable SUV models. JAC made further inroads in the SUV segment, with a more than fivefold increase in sales driving its total car deliveries up 78.8 percent.
These companies even offer relatively high dividends.
But nothing is enough to as-suage investors who feel they have been burned. One angry SAIC investor confronted com-pany Chairman Chen Hong at the annual shareholders’ meeting last month, calling the company’s stock “junk.”
“If it is really a junk stock, then sell it,” said Chen.
The company paid out the larg-est dividends in its history last year and is promising a payout of 13 yuan per 10 shares this year. That’s equivalent to about half of SAIC’s annual net profit.
In China, talking about value when a market is down is preach-ing to deaf ears. Most investors focus on share gains rather than dividend payments.
As the era of high growth in China’s car sales draws to an end, the stock market has found another reason to give the carmaking industry the cold shoulder. It lacks the “thrill” of more flamboyant segments of the market in boom mode.
The only auto companies that seem to arouse much interest from investors worldwide these days are those selling the big picture.
Tesla, for example, saw its share price shoot up more than 20-fold in two years after successfully peddling its vision of melding electric carmaking with the Silicon Valley way of thinking. But the love affair with investors has been volatile. Last week, shares in the profitless, twelve-year-old start-up had their biggest one-day
drop in five months. In China, there is equally grand
ambition to steer the nation to-ward electric cars. That supports the high valuation of industry leader BYD, whose PE ratio is more than 200 times, even after the crash.
The same high valuation is given to Internet entertainment operator Letv, whose Super Elec-tric Automotive Eco-System, or SEE project, helped its stock price surge fivefold from the end of last year to an historic high in May.
Even more than a decade after the dotcom crash, the word “Internet” still has a Midas touch, and the Internet is where many carmakers are headed.
All auto industry analysts remain bullish on the “Internet Plus” concept, at least for the foreseeable future. The open and fast-changing online world really tickles the fancy of a traditional industry.
Online-to-offline, one-stop ser-vice is one of the much-vaunted possibilities. Though online car shopping is yet to become just a mouse click away because of its high complexity, aftermarket products have found moderate success in the cyber realm.
Leading this concept are Zheji-ang Jinggu and Shandong Longji Machinery, with PEs of 278 and 62, respectively.
Their stock prices shot up this year before the market rout wiped out about half of their market capitalization.
Investing in concept-driven companies has proven to be a wild roller-coaster ride. By comparison, sticking with traditional and stable carmakers is like sitting in spinning teacups.
No matter how the market plays out in the second half of this year, many an investor will think this expensive amusement park too interesting to ignore.
Total sales Y-o-y
1,016,300 15.3%
MPV
Best sellers
1Wuling Hong Guang
313,300
2 Baojun 730 158,000
3 Changan Honor 89,000
4BAIC WeiWang M20
57,200
5Dongfeng Fengxing Lingzhi
56,500
6Dongfeng Xiaokang
46,700
7 Buick GL8 42,100
8 Dongfeng Joyear 31,800
9 JAC Refine 30,500
10 Changan Eulove 26,700
SUV
Total sales Y-o-y
2,661,200 45%
Best sellers
1Great Wall Hover H6
172,000
2 VW Tiguan 131,600
3 JAC Refine S3 91,900
4 Changan CS35 88,800
5 Changan CS75 86,900
6 BAIC Huansu 84,200
7 Chery Tiggo 83,100
8Great Wall Hover H2
77,200
9 Nissan X-Trail 70,300
10 Ford Kuga 68,400
JAN-JUNE
JAN-JUNE
result in accidents or injuries? It always takes time to build con-
sumer confidence. Thirty years ago, the industry cut the brake line and put a hydraulic mechanical electronic unit in between, creating the anti-lock braking system, or ABS. It’s now a standard feature in every car, Cra-mer noted, but at the start, everyone agonized over the same question: Who would be responsible for any failure?
“In China, automatic driving may come sooner rather than later, or sooner than we expect,” he said.
According to surveys, up to 65 percent of people in China are positive about the idea of autonomous driving, a percentage higher than in Japan, Germany or the US.
Though surprised by the findings at first, Cramer said he can now understand the confidence, given the popularity of the smartphone and the emerging Internet of Things. Autono-mous driving technology could sweep the industry faster than the ABS did.
Information technology and Internet-related industries, with their dazzling speed of innovation, are seeking to participate in this new trend but have yet to play a defining role.
“Most of them will never build cars,” Degenhart said. “Their interest is the safe usage of the Internet in the
vehicle, which is currently a white spot, and then the development of the driver into a source of valuable data. Autonomous driving is a pre-condition for achieving all these.”
He said he doesn’t believe that IT or Internet companies have what it takes to be the new breed of auto specialists, despite their advantages in the soft-ware area.
The way to validate functionality and test technologies in a car is more sophisticated than the approach used for consumer electronics or Internet user experiences. After all, a car has very low tolerance for error.
Then, too, the hardware is not easy. In the future, the electronics cluster in a vehicle will go down in numbers to simplify the architectural structure and cater to expanding computing power, which in turn will encourage more implementation of sensors.
Still, the Internet Plus car is a big project that neither the auto nor the IT industries can take on by themselves. The race for data ownership is already on in Europe, where discussions have been intensifying to the point of being overdone, said Degenhart.
For eHorizon, Continental feels com-fortable incorporating data systems as long as they don’t compromise the privacy of car owners’ personal information.
Monday 13 July 2015 Shanghai DailyB4 LEADING EDGE
Anna Lu
With a history dating back to 1871, Germany-based Continental AG is a time-honored player in
traditional manufacturing, but the company maintains a young, adven-turous heart.
While supplying chassis, power-train, interiors, and tires for global carmakers, Continental is also actively exploring new business opportunities in the “big data” age, particularly in China.
This country’s up to 600 million smartphone users, its integration with the mobile Internet, its cloud comput-ing and its Internet of Things have shown an ability to create a ruckus in the development of any industry.
The Internet Plus strategy announced by Chinese Premier Li Keq-iang earlier this year reinforces the country’s big vision of using the Inter-net to reshape modern manufacturing.
For Continental, the opportunities go far beyond the realm of e-com-merce, according to Elmar Degenhart, chief executive officer of Continental, and Ralf Cramer, president and CEO of Continental China. Both men sat down to an exclusive interview with Shang-hai Daily this month.
The future is promising for an intelligent transportation system that utilizes the value data, they said.
“In the past, a vehicle was an iso-lated shell,” said Degenhart. “In the future, it will be part of the Internet. A vehicle today comes with up to 100 electronics, which collect data we can use to make driving more intel-ligent, safer, more efficient and more comfortable.”
More than half of Continental’s sales nowadays are related to electronics. To handle the high data volume required in a vehicle, the company is work-ing with IBM and Cisco to establish a cloud back-up. Around the corner is Continental’s dynamic eHorizon, a cloud-based content service platform that can provide relevant information to drivers, such as traffic conditions, weather advisories, tips for driving ef-ficiency and warnings about accidents.
There are more than 1 million fatali-ties on the world’s roads every year. The grand ambition of Continental’s Vision Zero goal is to relegate acci-dents to museums one day.
Autonomous drivingThe company’s driver assistance
system, based on sensors, radar and cameras, has laid the technological foundation for its study of autono-mous driving, the ultimate stage of data-driven intelligent transportation.
Its agenda is to achieve autonomous freeway driving over long distances by around 2020.
However, in cities with more complicated driving scenarios, the commercial potential for such tech-nologies is higher. Drivers would no doubt appreciate some help when passing through construction zones, navigating merging lanes and truck traffic, or creeping along in traffic jams, bored to tears.
A bigger complexity lies in ac-countability. From an insurance point of view, who will accept re-sponsibility for system failures that
Continental prepares for ‘intelligent driving’ era
““In the past, a vehicle was an isolated shell. In the future, it will be part of the Internet.
Elmar DegenhartCEO of Continental AG
““In China, automatic driving may come sooner rather than later, or sooner than we expect.
Ralf CramerPresident and CEO of Continental China
The Internet Plus strategy announced by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang earlier
this year reinforces China’s big vision of using the Internet to reshape modern
manufacturing. For Continental, the opportunities go far beyond the realm of
e-commerce. The future is promising for an intelligent transportation system
that utilizes the value data, like the company’s dynamic eHorizon shown in the
picture above.
Shanghai Daily Monday 13 July 2015 COMPANY NEWS B5
Volvo’s electric bus project eyes global influence
Recasting the whole concept of luxury driving
Zi Chen
Volvo Group, which is run-ning a trial on emission-free sustainable mobility in its headquarters in Gothenburg,
hopes to gradually expand the public transport program to more regions, possibly including China, with an aim to set global industry standards for electric bus operations.
“There is certainly possible that we can expand the trial to more regions as long as we secure local partners who are willing to contribute to the project together with us,” said Hakan Agnevall, president of Volvo Buses, the bus operations of Volvo Group. “We hope the project could come to China one day, but we have to sort out several issues before we move in.”
Volvo is joining hands with partners including government agencies and re-search institutes in Sweden to develop an ElectriCity program in Gothenburg, which is a collaboration that develops, tests and demonstrates new, attractive sustainable collective transport for the future.
Under the ElectriCity initiative, Gothenburg launched its first route for electric buses on June 15. The three completely electrically driven buses and seven electric hybrid buses all come from Volvo Buses. The buses run on batteries that are quickly recharged with renewable electricity at the termi-nal stops.
The buses are silent and emission-free and run on electricity from wind power and hydropower. Among other things, passengers can recharge their
phones onboard and enter and exit the bus from indoors.
According to Volvo, energy consump-tion of the electric bus is about 80 percent lower than that of correspond-ing diesel buses. Series production of all-electric Volvo buses is scheduled for 2017.
Currently, Volvo has a bus manu-facturing joint venture, Shanghai Sunwin Bus Corp, with SAIC Motor Co in Shanghai.
Sunwin has already developed a type of overnight-charging electric bus, according to Agnevall. But bringing the
ElectriCity project to China may need extra efforts, he said.
“As far as I am concerned, the Chinese authorities still prefer the overnight-charging system for electric buses,” said Agnevall. “In the Elec-triCity project, we use ‘opportunity charging’ as buses are charged at terminal stops during short intervals. If we can see a shift in the charging mode in China and all parties are will-ing to contribute to the project, we are very happy to carry it on.”
Agnevall added that Volvo is satis-fied with its cooperation with SAIC in
A Volvo electric bus is tested at the company’s workshop. Volvo is teaming up with
partners to develop an ElectriCity program in Gothenburg, Sweden.— Ti Gong
A small engine like the 2.0-liter four-cylinder Drive-E T6 could be a double-edge
sword for marketing Volvo’s latest flagship SUV, the new XC90. — Ti Gong
What Volvo wants to introduce is a way to feel rich inside, said Fu.
The XC90 has indeed a lot to brag about despite the brand’s reputation for understated luxury.
It is the first mass-production model to be equipped with highly automated driving functions, a true step closer to the autonomous driving of the future. At speeds lower than 50 kilometers an hour, the car can follow a lane, keep proper distance and steer by itself at the command of Pilot Assist.
With some of the driving chores reduced, a motorist can play with what is hailed as the most intuitive human-machine interface in a car. Speech recognition comes with a large table-like central touchscreen, whose unconventional vertical placement is designed to reduce scrolling.
Or drivers can indulge themselves with music from a Bowers & Wilkins system that promises the same sound quality as the Gothenburg Concert Hall in Sweden.
Given its specs, XC90 is competitive-ly priced, Fu said. However, it could be a hard story for dealerships to sell.
“We need to spend more time telling people what luxury is,” said Fu, who didn’t express much concern about how the new model will be received by consumers. “Volvo always has an appeal for the intellectual elites, the knowledgeable rich group that is the richest of the rich,” he said.
China and doesn’t have an immediate plan to seek other Chinese partners for electric bus businesses in the world’s second-largest economy.
Talking about the challenges to move the electric-bus infrastructure to other regions, Agnevall said that the dif-ficulty lies more in the management of facilities than technical issues.
“It takes much time to decide on a totally new mechanism on where to build charging facilities, how to secure the source of power and how to man-age the operations in every single city,” said Agnevall.
“We hope to provide an integrated solution to simplify the procedures. We team up with global partners such as Siemens and ABB to set infrastructure in place to reduce the pressure on operators,” he added.
Agnevall said that Volvo also hopes to beef up its cooperation with research institutes on sustainable mobility. In China, it has close part-nerships with Tongji University in Shanghai and Tsinghua University in Beijing.
“The Volvo Group aims to be the world leader in sustainable transport solutions. A unique collaborationin Gothenburg enables us to launch the electric bus route here and remain a leader in the development of future public transport,” said Niklas Gustafs-son, chief sustainability officer, Volvo Group.
It is hoped that the ElectriCityproject will encourage use of public transport and prepare the way for more attrac-tive public transport solutions in the VastraGotaland region.
Anna Lu
WITH the launch of its new flagship SUV XC90 last week, Volvo is shifting its image from that of a staid carmaker whose products may be reliable but aren’t necessarily the talk of the town.
The XC90’s carries a price range of between 798,000 yuan (US$128,557) and 1,017,800 yuan, about twice Volvo’s usual sticker range. In product, too, Volvo is plowing new ground by chal-lenging Chinese consumers to rethink their definition of luxury driving.
Its trump card is an advanced 2.0-liter, four-cylinder engine called Drive-E T6. Running on turbo as well as a supercharger, it can match the performance of six-cylinder engines with a maximum output of 235kW and a torque of 400 Nm. It also boasts of the highest power per liter in the segment at 117.5 kilowatts per liter, and the lowest fuel consumption at 8.5l liters per 100 kilometers.
Still, it seems quite a wild card to be playing in a market that is supposed to be moving toward large displacement engines.
“In the past, consumers thought the level of luxury went up with the number of cylinders and liters,” said Fu Qiang, president and CEO of Volvo Cars’ sales company in China. “But smaller and lighter is the direction of engine technologies,”
It may take time for consumers to
buy into this trend, but Volvo wants to be fully prepared for the turning point. Drive-E T6 is one of eight options in a big, intelligent engine family called Drive-E. As a power source for the whole Volvo line-up going forward, it covers all the mainstream fuel-effi-ciency solutions, like direct-injection, turbocharging, supercharging and electrification.
The market segment where XC90 is designed to compete is not a key focus of industry growth at present. The momentum in China’s SUV boom is
being driven by much smaller offers. But this car obviously means a lot to Volvo, more at the brand level than in the sense of volume sales.
Volvo’s Scandinavian heritage and design strategy well capture the philos-ophy of less is more, which seemingly contradicts the idea of luxury. Even in a top-ranging car like XC90, the interior design has the kind of simple Scandinavian style that made Ikea furniture so popular.
Luxury has long been based, to some extent, on overstated superficiality.
Monday 13 July 2015 Shanghai DailyB6 COMPANY NEWS
Chery hopes to expand production in BrazilCHINA’S automaker Chery hopes to produce 10,000 vehicles in its Brazilian factory this year, and soon expand its production and presence in the coun-try, a top Chery executive said.
Peng Jian, Chery’s president for Bra-zil, said Chery is working hard to offer new options for Brazilian consumers. Although Chinese manufacturers have been operating in Brazil for some years, consumers remain relatively unaccustomed to Chinese vehicles, and much more used to the four big players in Brazil: Volkswagen, GM, Ford and Fiat.
At a time when the automotive in-dustry in Brazil is facing a crisis, with both production and sales down, and other car manufacturers are laying off hundreds of qualified workers, Chery is investing in the expansion of its operations, which puts the company in the spotlight of the auto sector.
It was announced earlier this month that vehicle sales in the country dropped 23.9 percent in the first half of the year and are expected to fall 23 percent in 2015.
Chery started operating in Brazil in 2009, importing the QQ, Tiggo and Celer models. Soon after, the company announced its intention to open a local factory, with investments of US$500 million.
The chosen location was Jacarei,
a town of some 200,000 inhabitants located in Sao Paulo State, which boasts the majority of car factories in Brazil, and also a good share of qualified personnel for the sector.
The factory was inaugurated in August 2014 and started producing the Celer model, the first vehicle made by a Chinese manufacturer in Brazil.
The model made some changes from the imported version, such as the
shifting gear, indicating Chery’s will-ingness to adjust to the local market and build a stronger presence in the country.
According to Peng, current produc-tion is focused on the two versions of the Celer (hatch and sedan), but the Jacarei unit will start producing new versions of the QQ and Tiggo models as well. That means Chery will com-pete in several categories in Brazil:
compact cars, sedans and SUVs.Besides Brazil, Chery will also sell
its vehicles to other South American nations like Uruguay and Argentina.
During Chinese Premier Li Keqiang’s visit to Brazil in May, Chery announced a bold move and major investment in the country: the construction of a giant industrial park around the Jacarei factory.
The 4.5-million-square-meter area will feature 25 businesses, such as warehouses, logistics companies, maintenance, services and components companies, Peng said. Investments were estimated at 700 million dollars.
The park will help make Chery’s cars more affordable to Brazilian consum-ers, as more components will be produced locally and the company will make use of nearby warehouses and other facilities.
The companies in the park will serve not only Chery, but other businesses as well, which will boost the local economy and create jobs.
Chery is not the only Chinese manu-facturer interested in producing cars in Brazil. JAC, for example, another Chinese car maker, sells several mod-els imported abroad in the country, and is building a factory in Camacari, Bahia State, which is expected to be operational next year.
(Xinhua)
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At a time when the auto industry in Brazil is facing a crisis, Chery is investing in
the expansion of its operations, which puts the company in the spotlight.
Shanghai Daily Monday 13 July 2015 INSIGHT B7
Car dashboard technology raises safety issues
When it comes to dashboard displays that are more like smart phones, two things are clear: Customers want
them, and automakers are intent on supplying them.
But are they really a good idea?Car companies answer with an
emphatic yes. They say outsized dashboard displays that behave more like smart phones will boost revenue and attract buyers. And they also insist the new screens will make driving less dangerous, because of well-integrated voice controls and large touch screens that will keep drivers from fumbling with more dangerous mobile phones.
But the increasingly elaborate screens have also sparked a broad debate about how much technology is appropriate in a car.
“I think they (the screens) raise serious public safety questions,” said Joe Simitian, the former California lawmaker who spearheaded the state’s laws on phone use while driving. “From a legislative standpoint, this is going to be something legislators struggle with for years to come.”
“You can’t be looking at a screen and be looking at the road at the same time,” said David Strayer, a professor of cognition and neural science at the University of Utah, who has written several studies on distracted driving. The screens “are enabling activities that take your eyes off the road for lon-ger than most safety advocates would say is safe.”
His research shows that reading the average text message — a function some of the screens support — takes four seconds, far longer than what he considers safe.
But for automakers and their cus-tomers, the souped-up screens are proving irresistible.
In an Audi A3, for example, drivers who sync their phones with their cars can check for mentions of themselves on Twitter and see those tweets on their dashboards-although not their full Twitter streams. They can upload photos taken on smart phones and request mapping to the place the photo was taken. Text messages pop up on the dashboard, in addition to being read out loud.
“If you don’t provide something that is useful, people will just use their smartphones, and we all know that’s the biggest driver distraction there is,” said Mark Dahncke, a spokesman for Audi.
Up to now, dashboard technology hasn’t factored highly into most car buying decisions, but carmakers expect it to become increasingly important over the next three to five years.
A recent study by the market re-search company J.D. Power found that about 15 percent of consumers rule out buying a car if it lacks the latest technology, compared with just 4 percent a year ago.
Little regulationCurrently, dashboard displays are
only lightly regulated. Many states forbid the airing of non-navigational videos by drivers while cars are in mo-tion, except for safety video systems designed to help with backing up and other tasks.
Federal motor vehicle standards stipulate only a few rules, including
that the brightness on displays be adjustable.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the US has issued driver-distraction guidelines for dashboard displays in moving cars. They advise against displays that include photographs or moving images unrelated to driving, and suggest that drivers shouldn’t need to tap a button or key more than six times to complete a task. But so far, the guidelines are voluntary, with automakers under no obligation to comply.
The auto industry has issued volun-tary guidelines of its own. But in many cases, industry standards fall short of the government’s. For example, the industry guidelines say that drivers should be able to complete tasks on the displays in a series of single glances that generally take no more than 2 seconds each, for a total of 20 seconds. But the government guidelines advise that drivers should be able to complete tasks in a series of 1.5 or 2 second glances, for a total of no more than 12 seconds.
Some critics find even that standard too lax.
“It should be set up so people can do it in just four glances,” said Henry Jasny, vice president of the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, a Wash-ington, D.C.-based group funded by insurers and others. His group has asked for the government guidelines to become law, figuring that even imperfect mandatory rules would be better than no requirements, and that during the rulemaking process, the
organization can fight for more strin-gent regulation.
Auto manufacturers are incorporat-ing popular smartphone features into displays in different ways.
Some, such as Hyundai, are simply making their displays compatible with Android and iOS, the smartphone software from Google and Apple, so drivers can see a bare-bones version of their phone on the screen. Other companies, including Tesla, are creat-ing elaborate systems that don’t rely on syncing with phones, but replicate many of the things consumers might use their phones to do, such as check-ing for nearby restaurants.
Making the in-dash displays as responsive as possible with minimal glances away from the road is a major goal, said Danny Shapiro, senior director of automotive for Nvidia, a company that makes hardware and software for displays featured in Audis and Teslas.
“What we’re doing is developing graphics that are intuitive, so you can gesture or swipe or zoom,” he said. “Something that responds like that, and is big, is much safer than a smartphone.”
So far, insurers haven’t taken a stand on the new souped-up displays. A large, interactive display on the dashboard would neither increase nor decrease policy rates, said a spokes-woman for the Insurance Information Institute, unless it was considered valuable enough to increase the risk of theft.
(Reuters)
Automakers say outsized dashboard displays that behave more like smart phones will boost revenue and attract buyers. And
they also insist the new screens will make driving less dangerous, because of well-integrated voice controls and large touch
screens that will keep drivers from fumbling with more dangerous mobile phones.
If you don’t provide something that is useful, people will just use their smartphones, and we all know that’s the biggest driver distraction there is.
Mark DahnckeAn Audi spokesman
Monday 13 July 2015 Shanghai DailyB8 COLUMN
The precarious spin of the wheels of fortuneAnna Lu
Driving with tempo-rary license plates is what many new car owners, like me, have
to endure in Shanghai as we bide our time, hoping to strike it lucky in the government’s car-plate auction system.
Aiming to control traffic congestion, Shanghai limits its monthly auctions to no more than 8,000 plates. Last month, there was a record number of 170,000 bidders and a success rate of 4.3 percent. I may need to wait for two years to get a real shot.
Five months after I bought my first car, a Mazda Axela, I am driving in a state of limbo. Shanghai issues temporary plates for only a period of three months. Having run out of my time, I started to look for sneaky non-local temporary licenses on the un-derground market this month.
My current status unsettles my by-the-book family, who want me to suspend driving until I get a proper license plate.
“Imagine all the fun of car life we would miss if we chose to wait to get a car plate first,” I tell my parents. “This is about living for the moment.”
My stubbornness and sense of adventure help me stay pos-itive when I am overwhelmed by such a hopeless spin of my wheel of fortune. The Shanghai car plate auction is an utter and brutal challenge to beat the odds: the highest bidder wins — or maybe not.
This trap of ambiguity well describes the municipality’s conflicting needs of keeping the price at a “reasonably” high level despite soaring demand while letting “market” forces bear the brunt of blame for price controls. The public is indeed hard to please.
During a crackdown on car plate speculation two years ago, a cleverly designed price-ceiling mechanism was introduced to keep every bidder in line, allowing a very limited price increase based on real-time average bids. The timing of making a calculated guess is now the key to win-ning, rather than how much money one is willing to pay.
“I should have bid 100 yuan less,” my friend Alex grum-bled, after his final bet was rejected as too high in the last 10 seconds of last month’s auc-tion. I wasn’t even fast-handed enough to submit a bid.
Anna [email protected]
By June, Alex had failed in three consecutive auctions. For me, it was three quarters in a row. For the 100-yuan auc-tion entrance fee we each pay every month, all we get is the dubious thrill of role-playing as traders.
Bidders who were lucky last month paid an average 80,020 yuan (US$12,891) for a piece of metal to attach to their cars. That would be more than enough to buy a decent small car or even to upgrade my Mazda Axela hatchback to a Mazda Atenza midsize sedan with top specs.
“This is crazy,” a foreign friend told me, marveling at my threshold of despair. “Not the price, but the fact you guys
keep relentlessly trying.” Some frustrated drivers
eventually choose to put up with a cheap license plate from some jurisdiction outside of Shanghai, though that means they will be subject to some traffic restrictions when driving in the city. I broached that idea to my family but was met with a brisk rejection.
The idea of being treated like a second-class driver in your own hometown is unbearable. And the policy uncertainty over non-local car plates makes that alternative a bit of a gamble.
The hours when cars with non-local plates are barred from driving on Shanghai’s elevated ring roads have just
been extended. What if Shang-hai goes the way of Beijing one day and bans out-of-town cars from all downtown areas?
It pains me to do all these risk calculations just so I can drive my car. The biggest risk is policy uncertainty itself.
As a further break on bur-geoning car traffic, Shanghai authorities are said to be con-sidering a change that would scrap the current lifetime license plate in favor of one requiring periodic renewals.
Rumors about car restric-tions in China always spark panic buying. Seeing the scramble for license plates and the soaring prices, I can feel a prevailing sense of insecurity behind the speculative mood.
Last year, when Hangzhou and Shenzhen became the seventh and eighth Chinese cities to cap local vehicle reg-istrations, the new restrictions suddenly came into effect overnight.
If only there were an over-night solution to the problem.
The traffic control co-nundrum of the vehicle population explosion in China is just one of many examples of a country overstretching itself in leapfrog development to make up for lost years. Our system is not ready to take in all modern amenities, but our appetite is insatiable.
“If driving like a snail in a traffic jam becomes too annoying, people will get off the streets,” said my colleague Dong Zhen, who is an aficio-nado of market forces making everything all right. “But a laissez-faire approach risks the city plunging into chaos for a while.”
We both agree that there is no math model for mass psychology.
Rigid rules can trigger a rebellious spirit. A former col-league of mine, who is deeply frustrated with the lottery-style, car plate auctions, has been driving illegally on an expired temporary license for half a year.
One could get his driver’s license suspended and his car sequestered by the police for a month because of that. The same penalties apply to driving a car with a knock-off license.
My tolerance for risks overrode my doubts about the temporary non-local plate I bought this month. It is regis-tered in Hunan Province, the birthplace of the late Chair-man Mao.
The Great Leader’s theory of the “people’s protracted war” still lives on today. In my endless battle to suc-ceed in Shanghai’s car plate auction, I have to maintain a certain guerilla-warfare determination.
“There are so many prov-inces where you can take turns sheltering your car and playing naughty,” Alex said, trying to keep my spirits up.
Placed against the wind-shields, temporary licenses are hard to get detected by cameras looking for traffic violations.
For a newbie driver like me, mistakes are part of the mo-toring game. But deep down, I know it’s all temporary.
Illustration by Zhou Tao/Shanghai Daily