From our archives

September 16, 1983

Shanghai beating pollution

Shanghai has waged a campaign to fight pollution and improve the environment, according to the city's Environmental Protection Bureau.

It has built central heating systems to replace those tens of thousands of inefficient small boilers in factories, in areas where they are concentrated, and thus cut the monthly amount of dust per sq km by 0.4 tons of last year.

Other achievements of introduction of advanced technologies included a 25 percent cut in the discharge of smoke by iron and steel plants and a 95 percent drop in waste.

Special care given to minorities' economy

The Statae has paid out a total of 1.23 billion yuan in special subsidies to minority areas over the past five years, said Wu Jinghua, who is vice-minister of the State Nationalities Affairs Commission and a member of the Yi ethnic group.

Flexible economic policies and measures have been carried out to lighten the burden on these minorities, who make up 6 percent of the total population but are scattered on more than half of the country's land.

Some 1,178 economic and technical co-operation programs have been contracted between developed and minority areas in the past four years, and 381 of them have been completed, Wu said.

Seminar held on China's rural roads

China has constructed more than 900,000 km of highway in the past 30 years, but the "amount is small and the utilization low", said an international seminar on rural roads construction and maintenance that opened yesterday in Beijing.

The three-day seminar, which was co-sponsored by the Chinese Communications Ministry and the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, is expected to offer an exchange of views and experiences about China's low-cost road construction.

(China Daily 09/16/2008 page9)