PLAY TIME Xia Yujie, a 21-year-old volunteer (center), plays a game with students at a school in Mianzhu, Sichuan Province, on December 16. The school has some 300 students from areas hit by the May-12 earthquake (CHEN XIAOWEI )

Anniversary Celebration

China held a grand ceremony in Beijing on December 18 to mark the 30th anniversary of its reform and opening-up drive, which has turned the once poverty-stricken country into one of the world's largest economies.

On December 18, 1978, the Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China opened in Beijing, which made the important decision to restructure the national economy and open up to the outside world.

The date has since been considered as a watershed in China's post-1949 history.

Speaking at the ceremony, President Hu Jintao said China will continue on its path of socialism with Chinese characteristics for further development.

Rising Unemployment

The global financial chill is freezing the job market for Chinese college graduates, a think tank survey has found.

By the end of this year, 1.5 million graduates are likely to have failed to find jobs, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) estimated, according to China Securities Journal.

Chen Guangjin, Vice Director of the CASS Sociological Research Center, said the bleak state of the job market has three causes. First, the financial crisis is squeezing employment; second, there were more graduates every year; and third, many 2007 graduates are still looking for work.

There were 4.95 million graduates in 2007, and the number this year stood at 5.6 million. Among the 2007 graduates, there were 1.44 million still seeking jobs as of the end of last September.

The country could see an ever-tougher employment situation in 2009, as there will be 500,000 more new graduates than this year, or about 6.1 million in all, seeking jobs.

Tax Smokers?

About 13.7 million Chinese smokers would probably quit if tobacco taxes were higher, according to a report from the Chinese Association on Tobacco Control (CATC).

The CATC study, reported in Tuesday's edition of the The Beijing News, suggested increasing the tax rate by about 11 percentage points, to 51 percent of the retail price.

Internationally, the average cigarette tax rate is 65-70 percent of the retail price, according to the report jointly produced by experts from China's State Administration of Taxation and the University of California, Berkeley.

The move would help save 3.4 million lives, the report added. Higher taxes would also mean the government could collect about 64.9 billion yuan (about $9.5 billion) additional tax revenue, it said.

About 350 million people smoke in China, or almost 36 percent of the population aged above 15, and about one million die of smoking-related ailments annually, according to the report.

New Power

A new nuclear power plant expected to generate 45 billion kw of electricity annually was put into construction in Dongping Town, Yangjiang City, in south China's Guangdong Province, on December 16.

Yangjiang Nuclear Power Plant in Dongping is being built by China Guangdong Nuclear Power Group with an investment of 70 billion yuan ($10.1 billion).

The plant will have six 1,000-megawatt units with the first unit to begin operation in 2013. All the units will be built by 2017.

The plant will save 16 million tons of coal and reduce carbon dioxide emissions, the most prominent greenhouse gas, by 36 million tons, according to Zhang Guobao, Vice Minister of the National Development and Reform Commission.