Charity Pioneer

(CNSPHOTO)

An online campaign to provide free lunches to impoverished students was selected the Most Influential Charity Program at the Seventh China Charity Award. Deng Fei, a reporter from Phoenix Weekly magazine, is one of the founders of the program.

Deng, 34, graduated from Hunan University with a major in journalism in 2000. Since then Deng has written over 100 investigative reports, uncovering the dark side of society and winning countless awards as a reporter. He is also actively engaged in social welfare work.

The free lunch program had managed to provide free lunches for about 15,000 children across China from April to December in 2011. Launched on the Internet, the program was joined by more than 500 reporters in China and had received about 18 million yuan ($2.86 million) in donations by the end of 2011. It is now operated under the China Social Welfare Foundation.

The program has used an unusual fundraising method, running an online shop on China's most popular online shopping site Taobao. People can easily donate by buying a virtual charity product for 3 yuan ($0.48) or actual T-shirts or pins produced by the program. With these funds, the program distributed money to 129 schools to provide free lunches to needy students. In a bid to improve transparency, each school sponsored by the program is asked to set up a micro-blog to publicize the funds it receives and how the money is spent, while a volunteer is assigned to monitor the micro-blog records of a school.

Boosting Green Cars

The State Council said on April 18 that the country will move faster to develop its energysaving and new-energy vehicle industry to ease pressure on resources and the environment.

Prioritizing pure electricity-driven vehicles will be the major strategic route for China to transform the automobile industry. And the current focus is to promote the industrialization of pure electric cars and plug in hybrid electric vehicles.

China's accumulative output of pure electric and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles is expected to be 500,000 by 2015 and 5 million by 2020.

The country will try to lower average fuel consumption of automobiles produced in 2015 to 0.069 liters per km and those produced in 2020 will see average consumption drop to 0.05 liters per km.

Home Prices Down

New home prices declined in most Chinese cities surveyed in March, said the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).

In March, 46 of the statistical pool of 70 major cities saw drops in new home prices from February, while new home prices in 16 cities remained unchanged.

Eight cities, up from four in February, saw gains of less than 0.2 percent in new home prices.

On a year-on-year basis, 38 cities saw new home price declines in March, up from 27 in February.

Price declines were mainly because cashstrapped property developers chose to lower prices to work off their overloaded inventories and some commercial banks lowered mortgage rates for first-home buyers to boost sales, said Ma Xiaoming, a statistician from the NBS.

Prices of second-hand homes stopped growing in 54 cities in March, compared with 59 cities in February.

Surging ODI

China's non-financial outbound direct investment (ODI) surged 94.5 percent year on year to $16.55 billion in the first quarter, the Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) announced on April 17.

Of the total, $6.2 billion of investment took the form of mergers and acquisitions, said Shen Danyang, MOFCOM spokesman.

As of the end of March, China's nonfinancial ODI had expanded to $338.5 billion.

Shen said that a lack of liquidity and rising financing costs in European markets may give rise to a new round of global mergers and acquisitions.

Meanwhile, Chinese firms are increasingly motivated to internationalize their businesses due to pressures stemming from the rising costs of raw materials and labor at home, said Shen.

Shen said that China's non-financial ODI is highly likely to see a rapid growth rate this year, but he expected the full-year growth rate to rest below the 94.5-percent rate in the first quarter.

Active Chinese investments abroad came amid falling foreign direct investments (FDI) to China.

The country received $29.48 billion of FDI in the first quarter, down 2.8 percent from a year earlier.

Loosening Rural Lending

The People's Bank of China, the central bank, cut the reserve requirement ratio for some county-level financial institutions by 1 percentage point, sources familiar with the matter said on April 13.

The favorable ratios, effective on April 1, will end on March 31, 2013.

The financial institutions were rewarded with the 1-percentage-point lower reserve requirements because they managed to lend a certain percentage of loans to local businesses last year.

The central bank has been implementing a differentiated reserve requirement policy for county-level lenders to help boost lending, support local economies and improve rural financial services.

The reserve requirement is the amount commercial banks must keep with the central bank.

Anti-Dumping Probe

The MOFCOM started to review the anti-dumping investigation concerning electrolytic capacitor paper imported from Japan on April 18.

The decision came following the Chinese electrolytic capacitor industry's request to continue to implement the five-year antidumping duties that expire on April 18.

The renewed investigation will decide whether to extend the existing anti-dumping duties on electrolytic capacitor paper imported from Japan due to damage inflicted on China's domestic paper industry.

Steelmaking Loss

Waning demand and rising production costs have brought China's steelmaking industry to face a quarterly profit loss for the first time in a decade, said China Iron and Steel Association (CISA).

Major large and medium-sized steelmakers saw a total loss of 1.034 billion yuan ($164.1 million) in the first quarter, marking the first time they have seen a profit loss since 2000, said Zhang Changfu, Deputy Director of the CISA.

But Zhang said their monthly profits were picking up as they gained 2.08 billion yuan ($330.16 million) in March. The industry is struggling to return to a profitable level in the first half, he said.