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Taiwan Commitment
The Chinese mainland will continue its efforts to promote the peaceful development of relations across the Taiwan Straits, said a spokesperson of the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council after the Taiwan leadership election on January 14.
Kuomintang Chairman Ma Ying-jeou was re-elected as Taiwan's leader and pledged to work to improve cross-Straits ties during his four-year tenure.
"We are willing to join hands with Taiwan in all walks of life on the basis of continuing to oppose the 'Taiwan independence' and sticking to the '1992 Consensus,' to break new ground for the peaceful development of cross-Straits relations and make common efforts for the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation," the spokesperson said.
China has approved a hepatitis E vaccine, which it claims is the first effective vaccine for the virus.
The vaccine received the certificate for medicine production in December 2011, according to the State Food and Drug Administration.
A team of researchers from Xiamen University and Xiamen Innovax Biotech Co. Ltd. in southeast China's Fujian Province worked for 14 years to develop the vaccine, and the 863 program, a government-funded hi-tech industry development initiative, began to sponsor the research in 2005, said a statement released by the Ministry of Science and Technology.
The country would offer the vaccine to high-risk members of the population and work with international organizations to introduce it to other countries, the statement said.
The hepatitis E virus is spread by fecal matter via tainted water and food. According to the World Health Organization, one third of the global population is estimated to be at risk of infection by the virus and countries in South and East Asia report about 6.5 million infection cases every year.
In China, incidences of hepatitis E have increased significantly and it has become the most common of all the strains of hepatitis infection reported among adults.
China's national food safety risk assessment center has acquired over 800,000 sets of statistics since its establishment in October 2011, said Vice Minister of Health Chen Xiaohong on January 13.
So far, the center has released six "blacklists," including 64 illegal food additives and 22 abuse-prone food additives, following food safety risk assessments.
According to Chen, China's food safety risk monitoring network has covered 244 cities and 716 counties, targeting food contaminants and food-related diseases. There have also been nearly 20,000 drinking water-monitoring sites instituted across the country.
Chinese and Japanese scientists have announced the discovery of a new dinosaur species, 13 years after the prehistoric creature's skeleton was unearthed during highway construction in east China's Zhejiang Province.
The dinosaur is a new species of Ornithischians, also known as "bird-hipped" dinosaurs because of their bird-like hip structure. They lived in the Cretaceous period about 100 million years ago.
Scientists have named the new species "Yueosaurus Tiantaiensis."
The new species is the southernmost specimen of a basal ornithopod dinosaur found in Asia, and it is also the first one from southeast China, according to a paper published by British magazine Cretaceous Research.
Before Yueosaurus, only four Ornithopod species had been found in Asia–in northeast China's Liaoning and Jilin provinces, the Republic of Korea and Mongolia.
The number of Internet users in China, already the largest in the world, is estimated to have reached 505 million as of November 2011, up from 485 million at the end of June, said the China Internet Network Information Center.
The Internet penetration rate rose to 37.7 percent in November, up 3.4 percentage points from the end of 2010.
The value of China's e-commerce market surged 72.7 percent year on year to 71.6 billion yuan ($11.3 billion) in the third quarter of 2011, according to statistics from the Shanghai-based Internet consulting firm iResearch.
Coal mine accidents killed 1,973 miners in China in 2011, down 19 percent year on year, while the number of coal mine accidents dropped 14.4 percent to 1,201, said Luo Lin, Minister of the State Administration of Work Safety, at a national work safety conference on January 14.
Last year, more than 75,000 people were killed across China due to accidents, a 5-percent year-on-year drop. A total of 4,799 people were held responsible for fatal accidents last year, of whom 808 people were investigated for criminal liability.
The country aims to reduce its accident-related death toll by no less than 2.1 percent in 2012, the target for coal mine accidents is a reduction of no less than 2.6 percent, Luo said. | 
