China Economy Forum

[bolo]

China to boost production-oriented service industries
Ren Zhongxi 丨Xinhua

BEIJING, May 14 (Xinhua) -- China will accelerate the development of production-oriented service industries in a bid to step up industrial restructuring and prop up economic growth.

Priorities will be given to the development of research and design, commercial services, marketing and after-sales services, and will be driven by the market and innovation, according to an executive meeting of the State Council chaired by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang on Wednesday.

The move is expected to stimulate domestic demand, boost social employment and improve people's livelihoods, as well as stabilize economic growth, the meeting said.

It will also help the sector to move up the value chain, and prompt integrative development of the country's tertiary, agriculture and industry sectors.

According to the meeting, design and application of new materials, products and techniques will be strengthened. Improvements will be made in information technology and energy saving services, as well as logistics services for manufacturers.

Financial services for the manufacturing of construction equipment, delivery vehicles and production line will be promoted, while the country will encourage service outsourcing and the nurturing of high-end talents.

The central government will ease market access to attract social capital to the industries, encouraging Chinese enterprises of the sectors to invest overseas and lifting access restrictions gradually for foreign companies on architectural design, accounting audit and commercial logistics.

Enterprises of research and design, inspection and certification, and energy saving will be allowed tax breaks that have been enjoyed by high-tech companies.

The meeting said value-added tax will be promoted to the entire tertiary sector and promised favorable policies to build a sound environment for companies in production-oriented service industries.

In addition, the country will continue to develop service industries concerning daily life, such as health, elderly care and information consumption, improving people's well-being and building a new engine for healthy economic and social development.

The meeting approved a draft of the Food Safety Law, which requires full supervision, stricter punishment, accountability, increased risk monitoring and improved food safety standards.

The draft is still subject to deliberation of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, the meeting said.

Chinese manufacturing is only comparable to the usa manufacturing of 1925 right now.

 

[TaiShang]

Chinese manufacturing is only comparable to the usa manufacturing of 1925 right now.

Then China has a 50-year of room to grow.

 

[bolo]

Then China has a 50-year of room to grow.

That's what i'm saying, its too early to implement reforms to kickstart service sectors because service sectors tend not to be high tech. Until China can manufacture big passenger planes like Boeing or airbus, service industries should not be pushed too quickly.

 

[TaiShang]

That's what i'm saying, its too early to implement reforms to kickstart service sectors because service sectors tend not to be high tech. Until China can manufacture big passenger planes like Boeing or airbus, service industries should not be pushed too quickly.

I think what China projects to do is not to undermine the manufacturing sector; but decrease the reliance on export for national growth and ensure that growth, at least a big chunk of it, comes from indigenous consumption -- which would be possible only if the services sector is propped up. Manufacturing creates job, surely, but, I think, services create more consumption than manufacturing.

Obviously, it is a delicate line.

China may want to climb up the production chain and sell the world high-end high-value product while at the same time not allow foreign services to conquer China's massive market. Because, if China ignores services, others will come in. It is better to ensure that China's economic sovereignty, both services and manufacturing, is protected.

 

[bolo]

Priorities will be given to the development of research and design

I think what China projects to do is not to undermine the manufacturing sector; but decrease the reliance on export for national growth and ensure that growth, at least a big chunk of it, comes from indigenous consumption -- which would be possible only if the services sector is propped up. Manufacturing creates job, surely, but, I think, services create more consumption than manufacturing.

Obviously, it is a delicate line.

China may want to climb up the production chain and sell the world high-end high-value product while at the same time not allow foreign services to conquer China's massive market. Because, if China ignores services, others will come in. It is better to ensure that China's economic sovereignty, both services and manufacturing, is protected.

Hope you are right. But I did like the article mentioning ' development of research and design...'

 

[BoQ77]

the minor problem. inside all good considered items, almost key components are Japanese, German, sweden...

 

[TaiShang]

Asia-Pacific FTA high on agenda

China hopes that proposing a feasibility study of the Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific (FTAAP) will help deal with the fragmentation of global trade, a senior official said on Thursday.

Chinese senior official for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Tan Jian made the comment at a press briefing after the APEC 2014 second senior officials' meeting.

Senior officials from APEC member economies gathered in east China's port city of Qingdao from Wednesday to Thursday to discuss cooperation initiatives ahead of the APEC leaders' meeting in November in Beijing.

Officials deliberated the next step towards the realization of the FTAAP. This involved improving information sharing between participants in free trade and regional trade agreements.

Global trade is increasingly fragmented and the "spaghetti bowl" effect of having so many differing agreements causes difficulties for businesses when it comes to terms of investment, Tan said.

"APEC, which focuses on liberalizing and facilitating trade and investment, has to face up to severe problems. Therefore, it is necessary to discuss whether the FTAAP process can be started," Tan said.

The FTAAP was proposed in 2004 and written into the declaration of the leaders' meeting in 2006. China raised the feasibility study proposal in the first senior officials' meeting in February this year.

"APEC members have shown a positive attitude towards the Chinese initiative and we have reached some consensus," Tan said.

But he also acknowledged problems and misunderstandings that needed to be remedied. "What's the relationship between FTAAP and Bogor Goals, TPP and RCEP? Is there a timeframe? Will it be coherent or a non-binding trade arrangement?" Tan asked.

He ruled out contradictions between the FTAAP, TPP and RCEP, as the latter two are pathways to realize the FTAAP.

Also, the FTAAP will help to achieve the Bogor Goals by 2020.

Robert Wang, U.S. senior official for APEC, noted China has put forward the proposal to move towards the realization of FTAAP and that the United States supports it.

The participants agreed to ensure member economies would be ready with their regulations and policies to move towards the FTAAP, Wang said.

However, he declined to say when all the economies would be ready, given their different circumstances, interests and standards, and the lack of a clear definition what the FTAAP will be.

Take TPP as an example, 12 members decided to move forward, nine others said they did not want to or signed other kinds of agreements.

"So they are making their own decisions," he said, "People keep on doing the FTAs/RTAs....Obviously they find some benefit in that as well. If they find it's only negative, they would not do it."

Iman Pambagyo, Director General for International Trade Cooperation of Ministry of Trade in Indonesia, said Asia-Pacific continues to deepen integration. TPP and RCEP have their own life and dynamics. Perhaps at some point in the future, APEC should think how they could be converged. The ultimate aim should be creating a multilateral trade system that is fair, provides room for developing countries to catch up with developed countries, Pambagyo said.

"The FTAAP will be an ideal format for Asia-Pacific integration. We are yet to discuss what the format and process will be," Pambagyo said.

Russia said it welcomes regional economic integration in the Asia-Pacific region, and considers it a major task of APEC to agree on how to combine all integration processes into one, which will be eventually the FTAAP, said Valery Sorokin, senior official of Russia for APEC.

"We are a part of the discussions on the FTAAP, and keen to be actively and constructively involved in this process," Sorokin said.

 

[TaiShang]

GSK probe reveals bribes and lies

The bribery investigation of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) China has been completed and the case handed over to prosecutors, Changsha police said on Wednesday.

Prosecutors have started their examination of the case that involves a total of 46 suspects, with Mark Reilly, a British national and manager of GSK China, among them. After ten months of investigation, police found that Reilly had ordered his subordinates to offer bribes.

Reilly allegedly pressed his sales teams to bribe hospitals, doctors, other medical institutions and organizations through various means and gained illegal revenue of billions.

Reilly was promoted to general manager of GSK China in November 2012. Two other executives, Zhang Guowei and Zhao Hongyan, are also suspected of bribing officials in Beijing and Shanghai to escape investigation.

Bigger bribes bring better sales

To boost sales and squeeze out rival companies, GSK China allegedly bribed doctors to prescribe their drugs. Li, one of the suspects and a doctor at a Hunan hospital, told Xinhua that in March 2012, a GSK sales representative offered him 20 yuan (3 US dollars) for every box of Heptodin he prescribed and 100 yuan for every new patient who started using the drug. Heptodin is used to treat Hepatitis B.

Li normally prescribed 150 to 200 boxes of Heptodin and recruited five to eight new patients each month, which brought him about 4,800 yuan of extra income. GSK China's sales rep Tan would register the expense as payment for Li lecturing in the company's training programs.

"I paid him every month but in fact he just gave lectures once or twice," said Tan.

Another way to bribe doctors is to cover the expenses of attending "medical seminars".

Zhang Guowei, a key suspect who was vice president and human resources director of GSK China, told Xinhua that the focus on sales growth led directly to the bribery.

"Global headquarters imposed high sales growth targets. When Reilly took over the post, the company's strategy shifted from profit-oriented to sales-oriented. The sales target in China was raised every year to compensate the reduction in U.S. and European markets," Zhang said.

According to Guo Jianhua, a human resources manager also involved in the case, the company's sales force increased from about 1,000 in 2008 to 5,500 today.

Police found that company policy obliged the sales team to bribe doctors to meet their soaring targets. Liang Hong, who was the company's vice president and operations manager, confirmed that those who met targets received big bonuses, promotions and overseas vacations while those who failed were demoted or fired.

In a statement to police, Liang said every representative was allowed to spend 3,000 to 5,000 yuan on kickbacks to doctors every month. "If this was not enough, they could apply for more. For hepatitis medicines, the kickback can account for five to eight percent of the drug's price," he said.

He estimated that money used for bribery accounted for 30 percent of the value of medicine, totalling hundreds of millions yuan each year.

GSK China's revenue in China increased from about 3.9 billion yuan in 2009 to 6.98 billion yuan in 2012.

According to police, Reilly and his colleagues disguised illegal revenue in the Chinese market by forging transactions between GSK China and several foreign arms of GSK, making the revenue look like funds used to purchase raw materials in China. They made every effort to cover up the illegal practice during regular checks by regulatory authorities. In terms of sales of prescription drugs and vaccines, police found that all pharmaceutical factories and departments of GSK China nationwide had been involved in commercial bribery.

Last July, police detained four senior executives of GSK China on suspicion of commercial bribery. Reilly was not among them.

Drug price inflation

The investigation exposed how GSK inflated drug prices to accommodate bribery expenses and high profits. According to the police, in the most extreme case, the price on the Chinese market was seven times that in other countries.

A company document obtained by Xinhua showed that a box of Heptodin is priced 142 yuan by GSK China but only 18 yuan in South Korea, about 26 yuan in Canada and 30 yuan in the United Kingdom.

Police statement said GSK China intentionally inflated prices on the Chinese market by making false declarations to Chinese customs. Chen Hongbo, former vice president of GSK China, told the police that the price was further inflated when drugs were imported into China and packed in GSK's factories here. When a drug was sold to China, the factory price has already included profits and commissions. To avoid paying taxes in China, the company would divide production among GSK branches in different countries and pack them in China as the last step, according to Chen.

The actual cost of a box of Heptodin is 15.7 yuan. It is declared as 73 yuan at customs and priced at 142 yuan as factory price. The highest retail price is 207 yuan in China.

Through such practices, the company disguised profits as costs. Although revenue soared from 2009 to 2012, booked profits remained small. In 2012, it recorded a loss of 188 million yuan on a main business revenue of 6.98 billion yuan.

To sell such expensive drugs, high kickbacks to hospitals and doctors became a necessity.

 

[cirr]

China Targets 70 Gigawatts of Solar Power to Cut Coal Reliance

China, the world’s biggest carbon emitter, plans to speed up solar power development, targeting a more than tripling of installed capacity to 70 gigawatts by 2017 to cut its reliance on coal.

The goal would be double a previous target set for 2015, according to a statement posted today on the National Development and Reform Commission’s website. China also plans to have 150 gigawatts of installed wind power capacity by 2017, 11 gigawatts of biomass power and 330 gigawatts of hydro power.

The plans come as the nation strives to get 13 percent of the energy it consumes from non-fossil fuels.Deadly pollution has forced the government to declare war on smog.

“This suggests the trend that China will develop alternative energy is stable,” Wang Xiaoting, a Hong Kong-based analyst from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, said today by phone. “The new solar target set for 2017 will be easily attained if China keeps the current development pace.”

As part of its goal, China also aims to operate 40 gigawatts of nuclear plants by 2015 and 50 gigawatts by 2017.

China had almost 20 gigawatts of installed solar capacity at the end of last year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Of all the electricity carried by grids supplying the cities of Beijing, Tianjin and Tangshan, the commission says 10 percent should come from wind by 2015 and 15 percent by 2017. Wind energy generated 2 percent of the nation’s electricity in 2012, according to data from China’s State Electricity Regulatory Commission.

The government will also increase natural gas output and speed up the development of coal-bed gas and shale gas, according to the statement. China targets natural gas supply capacity of 250 billion cubic meters in 2015 and 330 billion cubic meters in 2017.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-0...-reliance.html

 

[qwerrty]

Man Behind the ‘Google Brain’ Joins Chinese Search Giant Baidu
http://www.wired.com/2014/05/andrew-ng-baidu/

Andrew Ng. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Andrew Ng is the man who helped launch Google’s wildly ambitious effort to recreate the human brain with computer hardware and software. And now, he will oversee a similar project at Baidu, often called “the Google of China.”

Last year, in Cupertino, California, not far from Apple headquarters, Baidu quietly opened a research outpost dedicated to “deep learning”–a subfield of artificial intelligence that seeks to vastly improve computing tasks by mimicking the way the human brain operates–and in the months since, this operation has expanded in significant ways. Today, the Chinese search giant will announce that the lab has graduated to a much larger space in Sunnyvale and that Ng, a Stanford University professor, will oversee a new Baidu artificial intelligence research group that spans this lab and an operation in China.

“Andrew is one of the intellectual leaders in machine learning, and deep learning in particular,” says Bruno Olshausen, the director of the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley. “I expect he will continue to lead in this way at Baidu.”

‘Andrew is one of the intellectual leaders in machine learning’
Deep learning–something that seeks to improve everything from natural language processing to voice and image recognition–is a technology that gestated in academia for decades, driven by small group of maverick researchers, including Geoff Hinton of the University of Toronto and Yann LeCun, of NYU. But in recent years, it has quickly spread to the giants of the internet.

Ng, a disciple of Hinton and LeCun, helped launch Google’s efforts in this field, with a project called “the Google Brain,” and after Google acquired his deep learning company, Hinton now works at least part-time at the search giant. Meanwhile, Facebook recently hired LeCun, and many other big names are exploring this technology, including Microsoft and IBM. Even Netflix is getting into the act.

At Baidu, Ng will run both the company’s Sunnyvale lab and an R&D center based in Beijing, which will deal in deep learning and “big data” — i.e. efforts to analyze large amounts of information. Baidu is set to invest about $300 million in this international project over the next five years.

Ng, who starts in his new job today, is stepping away from the day-to-day operations at Coursera, the online-education startup he co-founded. He will still be involved in some projects at Coursera, he says, and will remain the chairman of the board and the public face of the company. But his main focus will be on building up Baidu’s AI chops and its Silicon Valley presence. He’ll spend most of his time in Sunnyvale. “I’m really excited about the opportunity to build an international research organization from scratch,” Ng says. “I’ve been super excited about AI for a long time, and this is an opportunity for me to return to that.”

The Road Back
Since taking a leave of absence from Stanford to start Coursera in 2012, Ng had been splitting his time between running the company and doing AI research. Coursera was growing steadily, having secured another $20 million in funding in November, but Baidu’s Kai Yu, a longtime friend of Ng’s who helped found the Chinese search company’s deep learning labs, urged him to focus on artificial intelligence. “He was doing amazing things in online education, but this is not AI,” Yu says.

During his last visit from Beijing last March, Yu approached Ng about joining Baidu. The pair talked several times at a Sheraton in Palo Alto–first over a pool-side breakfast and later that same day at dinner. Yu then introduced him to two of Baidu’s vice presidents, Jing Wang and Alex Zheng. Later, Ng would fly to Beijing to meet with Baidu CEO Robin Li. Over a three-hour lunch, the two men mapped out their visions for what Baidu’s research arm might look like and the types of problems it would tackle.

The 38-year-old seems a good fit for the company. Like Li, Ng has close ties to both the U.S. and Asia, having grown up in Hong Kong and Singapore. That means he may be in a good position to help merge Baidu’s Asia and California operations well. “I am a product of both of these cultures,” Ng says. “Diversity leads to great creativity and having some of the best ideas from Beijing and Silicon Valley will allow us to innovate faster and come up with more surprising things.”

The Hunt for Autonomous AI
Under Ng’s leadership, Baidu will grow its Silicon Valley office to roughly 200 people by the end of 2015, most of whom will be deep-learning researchers and computer systems engineers. The systems geeks will focus on things like building clusters of low-cost graphical processing units–or GPUs– to crunch through the massive amounts of data that deep learning thrives on. GPUs let data scientists work through billions of calculations more quickly and cheaply than using traditional CPUs. Google, IBM, and others have also leveraged GPUs for deep learning.

Meanwhile, Baidu’s deep-learning researchers will focus on developing algorithms that are better at learning from unlabeled data, through what’s called unsupervised learning–a concept Ng, together with Google’s Geoff Hinton, has been pushing for years. ”Andrew Ng and me believe strongly in unsupervised learning,” Hinton told WIRED during a conversation at the Google Plex last summer. “Andrew, in particular, pushed on the idea that if we could just use unsupervised learning, then we could go quite a long way.”

That’s because, right now, AI researchers have to do a lot of hand-holding when teaching computers to identify things like words and images. The true promise of AI will be realized, experts say, when computers can teach themselves–when they’re able to absorb and understand data without always being told explicitly what it is. That process, Ng says, is closer to how humans learn and represents a still under-explored avenue for improving AI’s capabilities.

Other deep-learning heavy-hitters agree. “We want to have machines that can take advantage of all of the data out there, and that requires better unsupervised learning,” says the University of Montreal’s Yoshua Bengio, whose work focuses largely on unsupervised learning. Most of the world’s data, you see, is unlabeled, and tagging all of it would be incredibly expensive. Figuring out better ways to get machines learning on their own could improve the economics of AI and lead to better applications for consumers. That’s why Ng is joining Baidu.

Man Behind the ‘Google Brain’ Joins Chinese Search Giant Baidu | Enterprise | WIRED

 

[Irajgholi]

i really enjoyed his course on machine learning.

 

[Lux de Veritas]

This guy is born in Hong Kong and spent his formative years in Singapore.

Professor Ng 吳恩達, 36, who is British, lived in Singapore from the time he was in Primary 2 till the end of his junior college education. He enrolled in Anglo-Chinese School (Primary), Raffles Institution and Raffles Junior College.

Raffles Institution and Raffles Junior College are the number 1 junior and senior high school in Singapore.

Professor Ng surname is spelled out cantonese pronunciation, in mandarin it will be Wu.

He then went to USA for college. He started a company call coursera in USA, today the leading remote learning website.

 

[GDan]

This guy is born in Hong Kong and spent his formative years in Singapore.

He was actually born in the UK. He did spend most of his early years in Hong Kong and Singapore, however.

 

[NiceGuy]

He will create a color revolution on China internet

 

[Brainsucker]

i really enjoyed his course on machine learning.

Are you work in AI too?