| Controversial Director
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(CFP) |
The new TV version of Journey to the West directed by China's renowed director and producer Zhang Jizhong started on January 5.
The TV series is based on the classic Chinese novel with the same name, one of the four great classical novels of Chinese literature. Before the TV series was aired, stills of the series were posted on the Internet, resulting in disputes and hot debates among netizens for their distance from people's imagination about the roles in the novel.
Land sales in 130 major Chinese cities dropped 13 percent year on year in 2011, according to the China Index Academy.
Land premiums, which are major sources of financial revenues for many local governments, reached 1.86 trillion yuan ($295.2 billion) in 130 Chinese cities last year, the private real estate research agency said in a report on January 2.
The declines were attributed to squeezed liquidity conditions of developers and a bleak market in the midst of the government's tightening measures, including prohibiting purchases of third homes and raising down payment requirements.
SAIC Motor Corp. Ltd., China's largest listed automaker, said in a statement that it sold 4.01 million vehicles this year, up 11.9 percent from a year ago.
The growth was much higher than the average 3 percent growth for the whole industry in China, the largest auto market in the world.
Top three best selling cars in 2011—Excelle, Lavida and Cruze—were all made by SAIC.
It is expected to unveil a plug-in hybrid car and electric car next year.
The Shanghai-based company has set up R&D centers in Shanghai, Nanjing of Jiangsu Province and Britain's Birmingham with a 2,000-member-strong R&D team.
CNOOC Ltd., China's largest offshore oil explorer, said its Lufeng 13-2 oil field in the South China Sea has begun operation.
The field is located in the Pearl River Estuary basin, with an average water depth of 132 meters. The project currently has three wells and the company plans to build five more to bring the project's production capacity to 33,000 barrels per day in the second half of 2012, said the CNOOC.
The project's operations will help cut the company's production costs as neighboring oil fields can share production facilities, said Chen Bi, Executive Vice President of CNOOC.
China's crude steel output stood at 49.88 million tones in November 2011, the first year-on-year decline of 0.6 percent, according to the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC).
The NDRC projected China's crude steel output would be around 680 million tons in 2011, and will continue to be the world's top steel producer.
As steel prices remained low amid weak demand, it is unlikely for crude steel output to rebound sharply in the short run, said the NDRC.
Textile enterprises with annual sales revenue of more than 20 million yuan ($3.17 million) posted a combined industrial output value of 4.95 trillion yuan ($785.6 billion) in the first 11 months of 2011, up 27.5 percent year on year, according to the NDRC.
The growth rate of the period was 2.5 percentage points lower than that in the first half of last year.
Profits of those textile enterprises totaled 215.56 billion yuan ($32.91 billion) in the first 10 months of 2011, up 29 percent year on year, which was 12.3 percentage points lower than those in the first half of 2011, according to the NDRC.
The whole textile industry had an average profit margin of 5 percent during 10 months.
The output of China's forestry industry rose 24.1 percent year on year to 2.83 trillion yuan ($448.09 billion), the State Forestry Administration said on January 4.
The country produced 165 million cubic meters of wood-based panels and 490 million square meters of wood and bamboo flooring this year, up 7.7 percent and 2.2 percent year on year, respectively.
China's forestry imports and exports stood at $116 billion in 2011, up 23.6 percent from a year earlier.
The output value of forest tourism increased over 10 percent year on year to 240 billion yuan ($36.64 billion). | 
