What's the buzz

Huang Yanru, a member of the Guangdong Provincial Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, has proposed shortening the current 12-year elementary, middle, and high school education to 9 years, to allow young people to begin their work and plan their life earlier. Do you support this and why? China Daily's mobile phone news readers share their views:

Letters

Cool economic ties with Japan

US looks for nonexistent threat

Uncle Sam uses China's hypersonic missile test to bolster its Asia-Pacific strategy and build more sophisticated weapons

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A hitchhiker's guide to good blogging

I started to blog in 2004 while I was a graduate student at Syracuse University. In the decade that has followed, my blog has fetched more than 20 million page hits. The exposure has also brought invitations to write columns for various newspapers and magazines, including China Daily and Southern Metropolis Daily, as well as the Chinese versions of The New York Times, Financial Times and Holland Online. I have published three collections of essays based largely on blog posts, too.

Twilight years dogged by medical woes

My family life plunged into chaos a month ago when my father suddenly collapsed and went into a coma on the day he and my mother came to visit us in Beijing.

Later retirement, better life

China will raise the retirement age in gradual steps, as proposed by the communique issued by the Third Plenum of the 18th Communist Party of China Central Committee, ending the debate on whether raising the retirement age is good for the country's labor market.

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Japanese germ-war atrocities undeniable

A large number of files discovered by the Jilin provincial archives administration recently reveal the grim world of helplessness and suffering that Japanese troops unleashed on China through their large-scale human experimentation, which was carried out by the notorious Unit 731.

Local legislators to the fore

The scrutiny of the proposed ordinance on air pollution prevention by Beijing municipal people's congress is hardly newsy, because the deteriorating air quality in the city deserves to be a legislative priority and, more importantly, a legislative response to the issue of outstanding public concern is overdue.

Ban on extravagance

More than 30,000 government officials have been punished for corruption and other malpractices since December 2012, when the country's new leadership issued a document to eliminate corruption and extravagance. Thanks to strengthened supervision, many officials have stopped dining in fancy restaurants while some others are busy hiding their luxury cars or moving out of their over-decorated offices. In fact, more than 90 percent government officials who responded to a recent survey said: "Life is becoming tough".

West unfair on Sochi security

As the 2014 winter Olympics, which are scheduled to be held in Sochi, Russia, from Feb 6 to 23, draw near, super strict security measures are being implemented to ensure the Games are safe.