Peng Liyuan, wife of Chinese President Xi Jinping, on invitation visited the Orsay Museum with Brigitte Macron, wife of French President Emmanuel Macron, in Paris on Monday afternoon.
Brigitte warmly welcomed Peng at the gate of the museum. The wives of the two heads of state entered the museum to appreciate the "Paris 1874 Inventing Impressionism" exhibition and the museum's masterpiece oil paintings.
The two stopped from time to time to appreciate Impressionist classic works by Claude Monet, Van Gogh, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and other famous painters, and exchanged feelings.
Noting that both the Chinese and French people love painting very much, Peng expressed her hope that the two sides could carry out more exchanges so that the two peoples could feel the charm of each other's cultures and deepen mutual understanding.
Peng hoped that artists of the two countries will strengthen exchanges and mutual learning, and inspire each other to create more exquisite works of art.
In the hall of the museum, the wives of the two heads of state had cordial exchanges with French students who were visiting and studying there.
The students shared their experiences of learning Chinese and expressed their love for Chinese culture. Peng encouraged them to work hard to learn Chinese well, and take opportunities to study in China, walk around and take a look, so that they can get a true and multi-dimensional view of China.
Peng said she hopes that the students will become little envoys of China-France friendship and build a bridge of communication between the two peoples so that China-France friendship will be passed on from generation to generation.
Founded in 1986, the Orsay Museum is a French national museum, which has the richest collection of impressionist and post-impressionist artworks in the world.
Xiang Piao Piao's stock price soared on Monday and hit the daily up limit after netizens found one of its products sold in a store in Japan have cup sleeve satirizing Japan's handling of nuclear-contaminated wastewater.
The Chinese milk tea brand has reportedly seen a 400 percent surge on its live streaming sales in China as millions of netizens bought the products from Saturday to Sunday.
A Chinese netizen discovered that MECO fruit tea, a drink under the brand of Xiang Piao Piao, sells products in a store in Japan with slogans on their cup sleeves showing "the ocean is not Japan's sewer" and "0.1 percent of the land pollutes 70 percent of the ocean." The picture was then exposed on Chinese media social platform.
Tens of thousands of simultaneous viewers visited Xiang Piao Piao's live stream over the weekend after the matter went heated, in which three of the six items were sold out during the live. The daily sales of its store have skyrocketed from 2,500 yuan ($346) to 1 million yuan, according to media reports.
The cup sleeves have also been out of stock as the demand is increasing, and it will be replenished at a later date, according to the anchor of the event.
The official Weibo account of Xiang Piao Piao also released a statement on Saturday saying that "our staff are awesome" after its action triggered heated discussion on Chinese social media platforms. According to media report, the president of Xiang Piao Piao said during the live stream on Sunday that he would award 100,000 yuan to the related employees and donate all the income from the live stream from 8 pm to 12 am that night to the Environmental Protection Foundation.
The hotline staff from Xiang Piao Piao said that it was a personal behavior of the employees, not an initiative of the company, according to the 21st Century Business Herald. The Kyowa store in Okubo of Japan also told the media that the store has not sold drinks with such cup sleeves.
According to previous reports, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) started to dump the fifth batch of Fukushima nuclear-contaminated water into the ocean on April 19. In Japan's fiscal 2024, which ends in March 2025, TEPCO plans to release a total of 54,600 metric tons across seven rounds, the Japan Times reported.
As of 2 pm on Thursday, the death toll has risen to 48 after part of an expressway collapsed in south China's Guangdong Province on early Wednesday morning, according to a press conference held in Meizhou City. DNA of another three people are yet to be identified.
Thirty injured people are receiving hospital treatment, and none of them are in life-threatening condition, according to authorities of Meizhou City.
The collapse happened around 2:10 a.m. on the Meizhou-Dabu Expressway in Meizhou. The collapsed section measures 17.9 meters long and covers an area of 184.3 square meters, officials said.
Aerial photos show one side of the expressway caved in, causing vehicles to roll down a slope.
China's May Day holidays, spanning five days from Wednesday to Sunday, are expected to witness a historic surge in travel activity. This expectation arises from the sell-out of ticket bookings across numerous tourist attractions and a surging volume of passenger trips, among other positive data points.
The ongoing boom in the tourism industry during the major holidays reflects a significant upgrade and recovery of domestic consumption, experts said. They predict that this year's May Day holidays may see the tourism industry recover to 2019 levels before the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to China Railway Group, the national railway system is expected to transport 144 million passengers, averaging 18 million passengers per day. Rail transportation services for the May Day holidays officially commenced on Monday and will continue until May 6, spanning eight days in total.
Wednesday, or May 1, is expected to see the highest number of trips, with an estimated 21 million passengers set to travel in a single day.
During a regular press conference held by the Ministry of Transport (MOT) on Monday, Guo Sheng, deputy director of the Highway Bureau of the MOT, said that preliminary forecasts indicate a significant increase in travel volume during the upcoming May Day holidays, with a high proportion of people choosing to travel by cars.
The policy of exempting tolls for small passenger vehicles on highways will continue to be implemented over the five-day holidays.
Moreover, the daily inter-regional passenger flow during the holiday period is expected to exceed 270 million passenger trips, surpassing levels seen during the same period in 2023 and 2019. The proportion of self-driving trips is expected to exceed 80 percent, Guo said.
On Monday, the rail network covering the Yangtze River Delta region, one of the most developed regions in China, facilitated more than 2.645 million passengers, an increase of nearly eight percent year-on-year. The railway company expects to see 3.18 million passenger trips on Tuesday, according to media reports.
Data from multiple online travel platforms indicate that the popularity of the holiday travel has continued from last year, potentially making this year's May Day holidays the busiest since the COVID-19 pandemic, experts predicted.
According to Tuniu, an online travel platform, group travel bookings indicate that domestic long-distance travel remains preferred by a larger number of tourists, constituting 46 percent of total trips. Fliggy, another domestic travel platform, revealed a surge in outbound travel bookings, with related service bookings experiencing robust growth of nearly 100 percent, building on last year's rapid rebound.
Tickets for many domestic major tourist attractions have already been sold out few days ahead of the holidays.
Taishan scenic area in East China's Shandong Province issued a reminder to tourists through its WeChat public account that as of Sunday, all night tickets for Taishan scenic area three days before the May Day holidays had been sold out and reservations had been suspended.
On Tuesday, the Panda valley scenic area of the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding posted on its WeChat public account that tickets for the scenic area were sold out for Wednesday morning, all day on Thursday and Friday, as well as Saturday morning.
Some scenic spots have implemented measures such as controlling visitor flow and extending visiting hours to ensure a safe and enhanced experience for travelers.
For example, Huashan Scenic Spot issued a notice that during the holidays, the maximum daily number of visitors to Huashan Scenic Spot is limited to 30,000, of which group reservations cannot exceed 8,000 per day. Ticket sales will be suspended when the upper limit is reached.
China's tourism economy has maintained a rapid recovery since the beginning of this year.
On Tuesday, China's Ministry of Culture and Tourism released a statement, announcing that based on the results of a domestic tourism sampling survey, in the first quarter of 2024, the number of domestic tourist trips reached 1.419 billion, an increase of 203 million compared to the same period last year, representing a year-on-year growth of 16.7 percent. Meanwhile, domestic tourists spent a total of 1.52 trillion yuan on travel, an increase of 0.22 trillion yuan compared to the previous year, reflecting a year-on-year growth of 17.0 percent.
This year's tourism sector during the May Day holidays is still at the point where pent-up demand is on the verge of recovery after three years of the pandemic, Wu Fenglin, director of the Planning and Leisure Research Institute, China Tourism Academy, told the Global Times on Tuesday.
Since last year, the surge in demand for travel has been accompanied by an upgrade in new travel products, which has jointly contributed to creating a hot tourism market, Wu said.
"So far, the data reported ahead of the May Day holidays make me confident in the recovery of the domestic tourism market," Wu said, noting that three years following the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent industry recovery, there is a possibility that the overall performance of the tourism industry during this year's May Day holidays may mirror that of 2019, the biggest year on record.
In recent months, a number of officials in China's medical fields have been investigated or disciplined, with many of them having previously or currently held important positions.
Experts said on Sunday that the recent anti-corruption moves indicate that anti-corruption efforts are deepening and that pressure on anti-corruption efforts is still being exerted in the medical field.
According to the Guangdong Provincial Commission for Discipline Inspection and Supervision on Friday, Duan Yufei, former Party secretary and director of the Guangdong Provincial Health Commission is currently undergoing disciplinary review and investigation for suspicion of serious violations of discipline and law.
Observers suggested that this may indicate that the anti-corruption efforts in the medical field are increasingly targeting the entire chain, not only focusing on healthcare institution staff, but also on "the key few" closer to the upstream of the industry, including medical enterprises, regulatory departments, and medical universities.
According to incomplete statistics, since March, at least 33 "key few" figures have been investigated or disciplined, including several directors of top-tier hospitals, university management, and top officials in local medical and health systems.
Over the past week, Liu Zilin, former Party secretary and director of the Anhui Provincial Food and Drug Administration, Zhang Yongyu, Party secretary and executive vice president of the Fujian Family Planning Association, and Hu Liu, Party secretary of the People's Hospital of Xinyu, are undergoing disciplinary review and supervision investigation.
Yang Xiaoming, the former chief engineer and chief scientist at China National Biotec Group under Chinese state-owned Sinopharm, has been dismissed from his position as a National People's Congress delegate due to suspected serious violations of discipline and law.
According to Lianhe Zaobao, Yang has been linked to corruption in pharmaceuticals and issues related to vaccine research and development.
Recently, after the president of a medical university in Jiangxi Province was investigated, a hospital where he had served as dean immediately held a meeting to ask staff to voluntarily disclose any financial transactions which involved the former fallen president, according to media reports.
In recent months, Shanghai, Chongqing, the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, and other regions have introduced detailed implementation rules for the "Nine Codes of Conduct for Medical Institution Staff's Honest and Professional Conduct," which were jointly issued by the National Health Commission and two other ministries in 2021.
These regional rules have expanded and refined the national guidelines, showing certain local differences. Several informed sources revealed that the parts of these rules that have been particularly detailed often indicate more serious issues in the current anti-corruption campaign in the medical field.
The "bribery crime" refers to the crime committed by state personnel who use their official positions to solicit or illegally accept property from others in order to seek benefits for others.
According to the size of a bribe, sentences for bribery crimes are generally divided into three categories - the first category is less than three years, the second category is three to 10 years, and the third category is over 10 years.
Although the current medical anti-corruption campaign seems to have a strong momentum, the judgments of the parties involved did not deviate too much from the expectations of Zhou Hao, a lawyer based in Beijing specialized in criminal defense. "They are basically within the legal framework, and the penalties did not show an unusually severe trend."
The anti-corruption efforts in the medical field are not just about hospitals or doctors, Zhuang Deshui, a deputy director of the Research Center for Government Integrity-Building at Peking University, told the Global Times on Sunday.
"In the past, it was commonly understood that anti-corruption in the medical field only referred to corruption by doctors. Now, this understanding has been expanded, and corruption in the medical field involves pharmaceutical companies, medical management departments, approval departments, and so on," Zhuang noted.
Fees for events or lectures have always been a highly scrutinized area in the anti-corruption efforts in the medical field. On April 7, the Shanghai Municipal Health Commission issued the "Implementation Rules of the Nine Guidelines for the Ethical Conduct of Medical Institution Staff in Shanghai." Among them, regulations regarding lecture fees were stipulated - it is strictly prohibited to accept benefits through fabricated academic lecture reasons or fees that clearly exceed the lecture fee standards recommended by the industry association.
"Four or five years ago, fabricating lectures was quite common," Health Insight, a healthcare think tank quoted a pharmaceutical representative. Starting two or three years ago, some multinational pharmaceutical companies began to strictly control lecture fee expenditures.
Now, companies paying lecture fees require e-invoices, video recordings for online meetings, photos for offline meetings, and sharing time must exceed 20 minutes. After the meeting, a third-party team will also conduct follow-ups.
After the discussion on lecture fees in the summer of 2023, China issued corresponding regulations. The document requires that medical personnel must obtain hospital approvals before issuing academic lectures, they must not directly accept lecture fees from pharmaceutical companies, and the organizers and invitees of academic conferences must be state organs, institutions, medical and health institutions, research institutes, universities, and social organizations. This may mean that in the future, medical personnel will have to go through academic societies and associations to give academic lectures.
Eradicating corruption in the medical field cannot be achieved overnight, and it has gradually become an industry consensus, because it needs to reshape the understanding of all practitioners in the industry chain on the distribution of benefits. The key to medical anti-corruption efforts is not only to reverse false perceptions, but also to accurately identify the corrupt elements in the medical field, experts said.
This is a positive trend, forming a comprehensive anti-corruption system that covers the entire chain, Zhuang said. "Only in this way can we address the root causes of this corrupt issue," he said.
The latest power outage at Fukushima again highlights the mismanagement of the plant operator and the irresponsible disregard of both domestic and international concerns by the Japanese government, experts said on Thursday. They also called on the international community to unite again at this critical juncture and jointly urge Japan to immediately stop its selfish nuclear-contaminated water dumping that will cause profound disasters for the future of all humanity.
According to the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), a partial power outage occurred around 10:43 am on Wednesday at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, which was caused when a power cable at the Daiichi plant was damaged during excavation work. An excavation worker suffered burns and had to be rushed to the hospital, local media reported.
Japan's dumping of nuclear-contaminated wastewater into the ocean from the crippled nuclear power plant was also halted due to the power outage, and was resumed at 5:15 pm on Wednesday, according to Kyodo News.
In response, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said during a regular press conference on Thursday that the dumping of nuclear-contaminated wastewater into the sea from the Fukushima nuclear power plant is a matter of great concern for the health of all mankind, the global marine environment, and international public interest.
"We urge the Japanese side to attach great importance to domestic and international concerns, cooperate to establish an effective long-term international monitoring arrangement involving neighboring countries and other relevant stakeholders, so as to effectively prevent irreversible consequences of the dumping," Wang said.
The Chinese Embassy in Japan also responded on Wednesday that the string of accidents at the Fukushima power plant demonstrate the substandard management of TEPCO, making it difficult to ensure operational safety. This further highlights the necessity for the international community to carry out supervision. "We will continue to closely monitor the subsequent impact of the accident, and once again demand that the Japanese side handle the nuclear-contaminated wastewater in a responsible manner," the embassy said in a statement.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) responded to a question sent by the Global Times on Thursday that it is permanently present at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, and was immediately informed about a temporary and partial power outage that occurred on Wednesday. "Power was fully restored after a few hours and the event had no impact on nuclear safety," the IAEA said.
Lü Chao, a research fellow at the Liaoning Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times on Thursday that the power outage causing temporary suspension of nuclear-contaminated wastewater dumping should be considered as a relatively major accident, and the Japanese government should be responsible for being honest with the public.
"However, the circumstances remain unclear now, leading to great concern from the international community," Lü said.
Chen Hong, executive director of Asia Pacific Studies Centre at East China Normal University, told the Global Times on Thursday that this accident serves as a stark reminder of the problems with the equipment at the nuclear power plant, as well as the significant deficiencies in the TEPCO's management practices.
According to media reports, representatives from Japanese civic groups on Wednesday submitted over 184,712 signatures from local citizens to the Japanese government, urging both the government and TEPCO to immediately halt the ocean dumping of nuclear-contaminated wastewater from the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant.
However, experts noted that despite strong protests and condemnation from the Japanese people, particularly those in Fukushima, against Japan's selfish dumping, those voices have been shut down by the Japanese government.
"Japan even collaborates with some international organizations to cover up the issue of nuclear-contaminated wastewater dumping, which showed complete irresponsibility toward the global environment," Lü said.
The TEPCO started to dump the fifth batch of Fukushima nuclear-contaminated water into the ocean on April 19, and the dumping is expected to last until May 7 and reach nearly 7,800 tons. In Japan's fiscal 2024, which ends in March 2025, TEPCO plans to release a total of 54,600 metric tons across seven rounds, the Japan Times reported.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said on April 19 that since the unilateral launch of the dumping, Japan has yet to resolve stakeholders' concerns on the safety of nuclear-contaminated wastewater dumping, the long-term reliability of the purification system and the effectiveness of monitoring arrangement. "Even so, Japan went ahead with the fifth round of discharge, essentially spreading the risk of contamination worldwide. This is rather irresponsible, and China firmly opposes it," Lin said.
Chinese experts noted that now has come to a crucial juncture for the international community to unite once again in scrutinizing Japan's self-serving actions and prevent Japan from repeating its past mistake, as the dumping will have long-lasting destructive impact on the current and future generations.
"The IAEA, in collaboration with other pertinent international organizations, and regional nations, must prioritize addressing this issue by conducting comprehensive assessments. It is imperative that Japan respond to the concerns of the global community in a serious and evidence-based manner, and stop the dumping immediately as it is causing significant harm to both humans and the environment," Chen said.
Lü also called on the regional countries to maintain necessary countermeasures, including imposing strict restrictions on seafood imports from Japan.
The China National GeneBank (CNGB), located in Shenzhen, South China's Guangdong Province, is capable of storing millions of biological samples and supporting data exchange and sharing with more than 500 units worldwide, local newspaper Shenzhen Special Zone Daily reported on Monday.
The CNGB consists of a biorepository, a bio-informatics data center and a digitalization platform, according to the reports. Biorepository, which is an important means to protect the security of national biological and genetic resources and avoid potential biological threats, contains several temperature layers of liquid nitrogen.
The biorepository is used to store biological resources, with an integrated digitalization platform reading the genetic data of organisms with a sequencer. The bio-informatics data center then stored or analyzed and calculated the data with a supercomputer to use them for life sciences research and bio-industry development, according to the report.
The CNGB has realized the convergence of storage, reading and usage of biological resources and information, acting as a major component of the nation's scientific and technological infrastructure, and making a positive contribution to the promotion of the progress of life sciences and the development of bio-economy in China since the start of its operation.
"Preserving, protecting and utilizing genetic resources has become a solid foundation and effective guarantee for international competition and the major needs for building a Healthy China, and the development and utilization of genetic resources will occupy the high point of the future global biological industry chain," said an unnamed official in charge of the CNGB.
According to Xinhua News, the CNGB was officially opened in 2016, aiming to promote human health research and the conservation of global biodiversity. It was initiated by China's National Development and Reform Commission in 2011, and the project was established by Shenzhen-based BGI, one of the world's leading genomics organizations.
