Brave Girl

(CFP)

Xiang Xinyuan, a senior middle school student, won nationwide praise because she bravely saved a drowning boy in freezing winter.

Xiang, 16, is a grade three student in a senior middle school in Guiyang, capital of Guizhou Province. On January 31, 2012, while walking alongside a river, she found that a little boy was drowning. Without even taking off her coat and boots, Xiang dashed into the river and swam toward the boy. After saving the boy, Xiang left silently without leaving her name.

After media reports, Xiang became famous on the Internet and she was dubbed "the most beautiful girl in Guiyang" by netizens.

"I just did what I thought was right. I never thought of becoming famous," said Xiang.

Centenarian Scholar

(FILE)

Yang Jingnian, a 104-year-old renowned economist, educator and translator, has become something of a legend.

Yang was born in 1908 to a poor family in Hunan Province. He went to Britain to study with government funds in 1945 and obtained a doctoral degree from Oxford University. After graduation, Yang came back to China and has been a teacher at Nankai University in Tianjin Municipality since 1948.

Yang is one of the founders of development economics in China and published several books on development economics. Yang also translated many foreign works on economics. In 1998, the then 90- year-old translated Adam Smith's masterpiece The Wealth of Nations within 11 months. In 2007, Yang wrote an autobiography as he was turning 100 years old.

Job Creation

China's State Council, or cabinet, on February 8 issued a plan to boost employment by creating 45 million jobs in cities by 2015. The government aims to keep the registered urban unemployment rate at no more than 5 percent. The country also plans to create jobs for 40 million people in the countryside in the fiveyear period.

From 2006 to 2010, 57.71 million new jobs were created in urban areas and 45 million people from the countryside were able to find new jobs, according to official data.

At the end of 2011, China's urban unemployment rate stood at 4.1 percent, unchanged from a year earlier.

The government also pledged to maintain an average 13 percent growth annually in the nation's minimum wage standards in 2011-15, to keep the standard in most regions higher than 40 percent of the average wage of local urban employees.

China has managed to raise its minimum wage standards by an average of 12.5 percent year on year during the 2006-10 period.

New Water Source

The local government of Liuzhou, a city in southwest China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, announced on February 6 a plan to find an alternative source of drinking water after a toxic cadmium spill contaminated a local river in January.

Cadmium pollution was first detected in the Longjiang River on January 15 in Hechi, and it then spread to the downstream Liujiang River, threatening water supplies in Liuzhou, a city with 1.5 million permanent residents.

The city will also build a reservoir with a storage capacity of 100 million cubic meters on the nearby Guchang River.

The reservoir is designed to help meet the city's water needs for two months in the summer and three months in the winter.

Anti-gun Campaign

China will launch a new police campaign to crack down on crimes involving guns and explosives, according to the Ministry of Public Security.

The police will be targeting major cases, tracking criminal dens and eradicating arms sales networks during the campaign that will last until November.

Police authorities have also been ordered to direct their efforts against contaminated food, counterfeit medicine, telecom fraud, the abduction of women and children as well as economic crimes.

Real-name Micro-blogging

Beijing authorities said on February 7 that users of Twitter-like micro-blogging services names by March 16 will be banned from posting on those websites.

The ultimatum came nearly two months after the city introduced guidelines mandating real-name registration for microbloggers.

After Beijing's initiative, several other Chinese cities, including Guangzhou and Shenzhen in Guangdong Province and Shanghai, have adopted similar rules, as authorities believe micro-blogs help spread rumors and vulgarities.

Legal Aid

More underrepresented citizens have received legal assistance, said the Ministry of Justice on February 8.

About 946,000 people sought free legal assistance in 2011, a year-on-year increasem of 15.4 percent. China now has about 3,573 government-sponsored legal aid centers with a total staff of 13,800, while practicing lawyers also take legal aid cases.

In 2011, the central budget for legal aid centers increased from 100 million yuan ($15.88 million) in 2010 to 200 million yuan ($31.76 million), according to a ministry statement.

Part of the revenue from national lottery ticket sales also went to legal aid.

Fire Accountability

China will hold the country's municipalor provincial-level officials accountable for severe fire-related accidents, according to a State Council circular on February 6.

"When major fire accidents occur, responsible leaders in, or heads of, the local government will be held accountable. If an accident has grave consequences or a nasty social impact, responsible leaders in the government will be held accountable," according to the circular.

The circular also specified conditions for when leaders of community-level governments, public security authorities and fire departments, as well as other organizations, will be held accountable.

Along with rapid social and economic development, chances of fire accidents have increased and prevention has been made more difficult, according to the circular.

Livelihood Subsidies

Southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region has earmarked more than 8 billion yuan ($1.3 billion) this year to improve the living conditions of farmers and herdsmen in the region.

The fund, 68.4 percent bigger than last year's, will be used for rural infrastructure construction and as agricultural subsidies, according to a statement released by the region's Finance Department on February 4.

Some of the money will also be used to encourage farmers to modernize and industrialize their work, and to develop Tibetanfeatured industries, said the statement.

According to the region's financial data, the net income per capita of its farmers and herdsmen last year surged 13.6 percent to 4,700 yuan.

Tibet Autonomous Region has a population of 3 million, over 80 percent of whom are farmers and herdsmen.