HU WELCOMES YOUNG VISITORS

Chinese President Hu Jintao meets with the visiting scholars of Yale University in Beijing on May 16.

The 100-member delegation, made up of students and faculty members, was led

by President Richard Levin of Yale University. Their China tour was in response to an invitation offered by President Hu during his visit to the American university last April.

Hu expects more exchanges between the young people of China and the United States, which he said is helpful to strengthen mutual understanding and bilateral

relations.

The delegation visited a number of prestigious Chinese universities in Beijing, Shanghai and Xi’an on May 15-25, where they interacted with local families and

students.

SOCIETY

Hukou Reform

China's decades-long household registration system, which divides the population into urban and rural residents, may be reformed.

The Central Government is considering a proposal from the Ministry of Public Security to scrap the two-tiered "hukou" registration system and allow freer migration between cities and the countryside, China Business News reported on May 23.

Under the current system set up in 1958 to control citizens' movements, rural dwellers have little chance to change their registered residence regardless of how long they may have lived or worked in a city. The government's concern when the system was set up was that limited public service resources like education and health care in cities could become strained and even crushed by a massive migration of farmers.

Olympic Closedown

Beijing Shougang Group, one of the capital's worst polluters, will close a key production plant early next year in time for the Olympics, said a company source on May 19.

Shougang, started in 1919, is just 17 km west of the city-heart Tiananmen Square. The steel company started to relocate production in 2005 to Caofeidian, a port in neighboring Hebei Province.

No.3 Steel Plant, which came on stream in 1992 and has an annual production capacity of 3 million tons, will be the first group plant to completely halt production, said a senior company official.

The steel company will finish moving all its production facilities to Caofeidian by 2010. The company had already started to reduce production in Beijing, closing a 2 million-ton production facility and a furnace with a capacity of 700,000 tons.

More Subsidy for Farmers

China's direct subsidy to its hundreds of millions of farmers will rise 63 percent from a year earlier to 42.7 billion yuan this year, the Ministry of Finance announced May 21.

The subsidy includes 15.1 billion yuan earmarked for grain planting and 27.6 billion yuan for farming materials like fertilizers and pesticides.

The ministry said the huge increase in direct subsidy to farmers will help raise their incomes and grain output, and the money should fall into the pockets of the farmers before the end of June.

Following the cancellation of the 2,000-year-old rural tax system in 2006, China started to offer farmers direct subsidies amid efforts to boost their incomes as price hikes for fertilizer and other farming materials ate into their benefits.

Crackdown on Wireless Porn

Since Beijing launched a campaign in April to curb the spread of online pornography, and purify the Internet and mobile communication, police have closed 1,450 websites and deleted more than 30,000 allegedly obscene messages up to May 18.

In a recent case, nine people have been arrested for posting downloadable pornographic pictures and texts on a mobile phone website, making it the largest case involving wireless transmission of illegal pornography.

The website of the Beijing-based telecom technology company, where the nine people worked, had attracted 8.6 million clicks and the materials had been downloaded 1.3 million times since 2005.

According to Chinese law, if an obscene website receives more than 250,000 clicks, the operators face jail terms ranging from 10 years to life imprisonment.

Depression Sufferers in the Dark

Ninety percent of the 30 million people in China suffering from depression fail to get proper treatment due to worries about discrimination and a lack of professional psychiatrists, according to the Chinese Psychiatrist Association (CPA).

But for the 10 percent that do receive medical assistance, the results appear to be encouraging. The clinical cure rate among depression sufferers who seek hospitalization has hit a new high of 35 percent, according to the CPA.

Some patients refuse to take medication as they believe mental anguish can only be relieved by encouragement and support. Others are reluctant to see psychiatrists for fear of being discriminated against by their peers.

Chinese experts said the number of depression sufferers is on the rise in China due to fierce social competition and pressure.