The Beijing Hour
Morning Edition
Paul James with you on this Thursday , October 3rd, 2013.
Welcome to the abbreviated edition of the Beijing Hour as part of this National Day holiday, coming to you live from the Chinese capital.
Coming up on our program this morning...
Chinese President Xi Jinping has met with his Indonesian counterpart, with the two sides agreeing to upgrade their official bilateral status.
The UN Security Council has passed a new decree, calling for better humanitarian access to Syria.
Italy's Prime Minister has survived a confidence vote, which is a major setback for former PM Silvio Berlusconi.
Guangzhou Evergrande has become the first Chinese football team in over 2-decades to advance to the finals of the Asian Club tournament.
Business
First, let's check on what's happening on the weather front...
Weather
Beijing will be sunny today, with a high of 23 degree Celsius in the daytime, and it will be clear tonight with a low of 12.
In Shanghai, it will be cloudy today, 24 the high, and it will be clear tonight, the low of 18 degrees Celsius.
Lhasa will see slight rain in the daytime the temperature's at 18, and tonight will also more rain with a low of 6 degree Celsius.
Elsewhere in the world, staying in Asia
Islamabad, sunny, 32.
Kabul, sunny, with a high of 28.
And in North America
New York, overcast, with a high of 28 degrees.
Washington, sunny, highs of 24
Houston, thundershowers, 31.
Honolulu, overcast, 30.
Toronto, sunny, 22.
Finally, on to South America,
Buenos Aires, overcast, 18.
And Rio de Janeiro will have moderate rain with highs of 25 degrees Celsius.
There are several ways to keep in touch with us on the BJH
We are on Weibo that's weibo.com/beijinghour
You can also send us an email to [email protected]
Please do keep in touch we always like to hear your comments and feedback on the show.
TIMECHECK
Top News
Chinese, Indonesian presidents agree to lift ties to comprehensive strategic partnership
Anchor
The Chinese and Indonesian governments have agreed to increase their bilateral relationship to a comprehensive strategic partnership.
The agreement has been made during talks between Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Indonesian counterpart Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in Jakarta.
CRI's Jordan Lee has more.
During the talks, Xi Jinping says both China and Indonesia are major developing countries and important market economies with both regional and global influence.
The Chinese president says the Chinese side considers Indonesia a priority in its diplomacy with neighboring countries.
Xi Jinping goes on to say China stands ready to deepen bilateral cooperation to try to help both countries realize common development for the benefit of both peoples.
For his part, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono says Indonesia-China ties have been developing rapidly since the two countries forged a strategic partnership in 2005.
Yudhoyono says he hopes to seize the opportunity to further boost cooperation between the two countries.
Also as part their talks, Xi Jinping has also talks about his proposal to establish an Asian infrastructure investment bank.
The bank is being designed to try to advance interconnectivity and economic integration in the region.
After the talks, the two leaders also oversaw the signing of an intergovernmental five-year plan on economic and trade cooperation.
They have also vowed to extend their current 16-billion US dollar bilateral currency swap agreement, and have left open the possibility of expanding it.
Meanwhile, Xi Jingping's wife, Peng Liyuan has spent her time at a local public-interest organization dedicated to preserving and promoting traditional Indonesian culture.
Her time in Indonesia is creating a lot of buzz on the internet here in China.
China's First Lady was arguably more famous than her husband was before he took office, as Peng Liyuan is a well-known singer for the People's Liberation Army.
Chinese President Xi Jinping is now due to make an official visit to Malaysia before traveling to the Indonesian resort island of Bali for an informal meeting among members of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation grouping.
For CRI, I am Jordan Lee.
Chinese companies shoulder social responsibilities in Indonesia
Anchor
A growing number of Chinese companies are now choosing to set up operations in Indonesia.
As CRI's Wang Xiao reports, there are already over a thousand Chinese companies with operations in that country.
Reporter
As a leading global information and communications technology solutions provider, Huawei Technologies entered the Indonesian market 13 years ago.
Right now it has cooperation agreements with 10 local communication carrier operators.
Huawei sales volumes through last year exceeded 1.2 billion US dollars.
Recently Huawei Indonesia has been promoting LTE service, China's locally-developed fourth-generation telecommunications technology, as an option to help build up Indonesia's communications technology landscape.
Huawei is also sole vendor trialing the LTE network at this year's APEC Summit in Bali.
Talking about the achievements the company has made in the past 13-years, Huawei Indonesia Country Manager Sheng Kai says one of the major reasons is localization.
"There are more than 3 thousand employees in our company, 80% of which are local people. Some of them are promoted to department managers. We also established strategic partnership with 220 local companies, and the amount of purchases from local market exceeds 400 million US dollars. Meanwhile 40% of LTE and other advanced technology products have realized local production. That's to say, we have created many job opportunities and transferred the technology to the local enterprises."
Sri Wulaningsih is a veteran among all the local employees.
She joined Huawei Indonesia in 2000 when the company arrived.
She has since risen to become a Senior Corporate Affairs Manager.
"My feeling is, actually there is no burden working in Huawei. One thing is very important is that Huawei also gives opportunities to local employees who want to improve. Huawei encourages its local employees to do whatever they want as long as we follow the company's internal policy."
Indonesia and China have enjoyed flourishing relations, particularly after the signing of a strategic partnership accord in 2005.
Two-way trade last year reached over 66-billion US dollars, which is up from 26.6 billion in 2009.
More than a thousand Chinese companies run operations in Indonesia.
The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China in Indonesia is also a good example of a Chinese company contributing to the local economy and social development.
ICBC Indonesia entered the local market by purchasing the local Halim bank.
Yuan Bin is the general manager of ICBC Indonesia.
He says the company functions as a bridge between the two countries.
"The Chinese companies who invest in Indonesia are our customers. We provide financial services to iron and steel enterprises, electric and power companies from china. We also provide information to Indonesian companies who want to invest in China. We try our best to act as a bridge for the two countries in the fields of finance, economy and culture."
Yuan says Chinese companies in Indonesia are paying close attention to president Xi Jinping's visit.
Sheng Kai, the country manager of Huawei Indonesia, is suggesting more attention needs to be paid to youth exchanges.
For CRI, I'm Wang Xiao from Jakarta.
UN Security Council calls on Syria to facilitate humanitarian access
The UN Security Council has issued a new call for all parties in Syria to take "immediate steps" to open up the country to humanitarian access.
The statement also specifically calls for an increase of international and non-government humanitarian organizations access to Syria.
U.N. humanitarian chief Valerie Amos.
"This consensus statement clearly calls on all parties to do their utmost to end the violence and stop targeting civilians. It also reminds them that they must facilitate the swift provision of vital humanitarian aid and there are serious consequences for violating international humanitarian and human rights law. Our task now is to turn these strong words in to meaningful action for the children, women, and men who are the victims of the continued brutality and violence."
Well-over 4-million people in Syria are said to be internally-displaced.
Over 2-million others have either fled the country or are waiting for refugee status in other countries in the region.
The latest move by the UN Security Council follows its first legally binding resolution since the Syrian conflict began over 2.5-years ago, which calls for the elimination of the country's chemical weapons stockpiles.
The conflict inside Syria has already left over 100-thousand people dead.
Obama meeting with Congressional leaders amid shutdown, debt ceiling looms
US President is meeting with Congressional lawmakers from both the Republican and Democrat side to try to find a solution to the current US Federal Government shutdown.
The US government is currently in the 2nd day of its shutdown, after lawmakers failed to hammer out a new federal budget before the October 1st deadline.
This has left some 700-thousand US Federal government employees off the job.
At the same time, the US is poised to reach the debt ceiling on or around October 17th.
US President Barack Obama, speaking before this current meeting with lawmakers, says he is - quote - "exasparated."
"Until we make sure that Congress allows Treasury to pay for things that Congress itself already authorized, we are not going to engage in a series of negotiations."
House Republicans have been trying to defund Obama's landmark legislation, the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare.
Obama and his Democrats are refusing to allow the program to become defunded.
U.S. private sector adds fewer jobs in September
A new survey is suggesting private companies in the US added fewer jobs in September than projected.
The joint report by ADP and Moody's is suggesting private US companies employed around 166-thousand workers last month.
Economists had been projecting that figure to come in around 180-thousand.
The analysis is suggesting this could be a sign of the labor market beginning to sputter a bit.
Private firms in the US back in June added 190-thousand jobs.
The US Labor Department had been scheduled to release its September jobs report this coming Friday.
However, it's believed the current shutdown of the US Federal Government may delay the release of that report.
Senate announces Letta wins confidence vote against Berlusconi
Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta has survived a confidence vote in the Italian Senate.
Letta's victory is being seen as a major setback for former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
Berlusconi and his coalition had pushed for the confidence vote against Letta's government.
However, around 25 his allies chose to support Letta's hybrid coalition after a number of Berlusconi ministers refused to leave the cabinet.
Franco Pavoncello is a political science professor at John Cabot University in Rome.
"There was a growing movement within Berlusconi's party, by Mr (Angelino) Alfano, who is the secretary of the party and the other ministers, decided not to follow the road of making the government fall. And when it became clear that they were much more willing to split the party rather than making the government fall, I think that Berlusconi in a way was sort of checkmated."
A successful confidence vote would have toppled the Italian government and would have precipitated new elections.
Many center-left lawmakers have accused Berlusconi of orchestrating the move to try to deflect from his legal woes.
Russian embassy in Tripoli attacked
The Russian embassy in Libya has come under attack by unknown militants.
Reports from the ground say the embassy in Tripoli was hit by gunfire from an unknown number of militants.
Initial reports have also suggested the attackers stripped down the Russian flag from the embassy compound before eventually being fought off.
There have been no reports of injuries to any Russian embassy staff.
It's believed the Russian ambassador was not inside at the time.
Some are suggesting the assault on the Russian embassy could be retribution for the killing of a Libyan military officer, allegedly by a Russian woman earlier this week.
Insurgents increase attacks on Pakistani forces in quake-hit areas
The Pakistani military says insurgents are increasing their attacks on military forces trying to carry out relief efforts the recent earthquake hit area in the southwest of the country.
In one of the latest attacks, a bomb blast has gone off, leaving two soliders dead and several others wounded.
Around 2-thousand soliders are involved in the relief efforts in the remote area around the epicenter of the quake, which is in the restive province of Balochistan.
The 7.6-magnitude quake itself hit late last month, leaving over 350 people dead.
It also toppled around 20-thousand homes in the rugged mountainous region around the epicenter.
Pakistani authorities are pleading with insurgents to put their attacks on-hold, noting the relief efforts can only work if Pakistani military personnel are involved.
Chinese retailer promotes new online shopping mode
Anchor
A new report is suggesting online spending by Chinese consumers is soon set to surpass that of Americans.
As such, traditional Chinese retailers are now upgrading of their online services to try to keep up.
CRI's Lucy Du has more.
Reporter
China's retail tycoon Suning, which has a history of 23 years, proposed Cloud Shopping scheme this year. It wants to integrate online and offline retailing businesses, to create new values for consumers and the industry.
Sun Weimin, the vice-president of Suning describes the new mode of shopping as "brick and mortar stores + e-commerce + retailers".
"Suning's Could Shopping consists of two parts: first, we will combine online and offline channels and networks together. Next, we will progress from the old combinations of services and products to the combination of prices. Through these measures, our online and offline services will be officially combined. That is to say, we will have built a new Online-to-Offline or O2O compounded platform. This is the first stage in the development of Cloud Shopping."
Sun Weimin notes that Cloud Shopping is an open resource platform for everyone in the industry.
"Suning's Cloud Shopping is building an open platform with online and offline channels. We want this platform to open in both ways. Hence we say O2O plus openness. This is the basis of Cloud Shopping. So what is this open platform? We use our resources: brick-and-mortar stores and online stores to gather consumer data to support this platform with logistics and money. We then share all these resources with our partners who include manufacturers, dealers and retailers; they can all sell on this platform. We will provide consumer flows, logistics, money and data and then realize our own values."
The Chinese government also favours such complementary advantages.
Wang Desheng, a senior official from the Ministry of Commerce says the combination of online and offline retailing is mutually beneficial for e-commerce and the traditional retail market.
"The combination of online and offline retailing complements each other's advantages. Traditional retailers are speeding up their online services. Some build websites themselves. More prefer to combine online and offline services to gain new strengths. For online retailers, they will improve their public image and user experiences on the basis of their original strengths."
Suning is also advancing in the international market.
It merged with Japanese appliances chain Laox in 2009, making it the first Chinese company ever to do so. It also merged with Hong Kong's electronics chain Citicall in the same year.
Sun Weimin says that international development is good for building experiences as well as promoting Chinese products.
"China has the fastest growing market with the most potential in the world. Our focus remains in China. We entered Japan and Hong Kong in 2009, as a trial for our international expansion, especially with respect to Japan. We want to learn from Japan's developed retail market and at the same time, consolidate our domestic business with Japanese design, branding and management experiences. We are also using the platform in Japan to promote Chinese products to the world."
According to Suning's plan, it will explore the market in Southeast Asia this year and European and American markets in 2015. Its O2O platform may be able to break past the traditional boundaries of geographic restrictions.
For CRI, this is Lucy Du.
The 5th Asian BP Debate Championship Kicks off in China
Anchor
The Asian British Parliamentary Debate Competition has opened here in Beijing.
This is the first time the annual debate tournament has come to China.
CRI's Wu You has more.
Reporter
Students taking part are from more than eight Asian countries including Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, India and Thailand, bringing together a total of over 200 foreign Universities.
In the opening ceremony, Li Junfeng, President advisor of Beihang University, points out the significance of holding such tournament for the students.
"Parliamentary debate in Beihang and across Asia has enlightened many students to embrace creative and critical thought, coupled with mastering the English language. We want to cultivate future leaders in politics, academics, businesses,and industries who are equipped with comprehensive skill of the greater thinking, cross culture,communication, the leadership, teamworker spirit and global vision."
The competition includes nine round matches and five elimination tournaments.
It is two debaters per team.
Daryl Isla, the Adjudicator Core of this year's Championship.
He appluauded the Chinese students' efforts and devotion to the debate.
"Learning about debate is a constant struggle to be better than your last round, and they will make sure they'll get better after each round, they will purposely go up to you whether you are their opponent, their judge, and ask you how their speech was, what feed back to give. That's the kind of hunger for growth they want in China, and grate the speed of how hungry they are, and grate the abilities and resources for us to get those trainers, we think that it wouldn't be very long that we could realize that entry of a Chinese Champion. "
In the hallway, Li Nan, one of the Chinese debaters, is busy and excited preparing for the tournament.
"We are required to use those principles and when you use these principles you must have the abilities to link those principles into the motion into the real life, that needs strong logic. When we have logic and many examples and facts to support that logic and that will be fun, and that is what I'm expecting from this debate. "
One contestant, Shafiq Bazari, an Indian Law school Master, was also a judge in last years tournament.
This time he has especially come to China to be a debater.
"Fortunately this time I have the opportunity to debate,so I'll be debating with my team mate Masoora, and we are excited because the tournament has grown, there are many prominent teams so we will keep the focus and we will do our best and see how it turns out to be."
This year's Asian BP Championship run until the 7th October.
This year's Championship, has some of the largest numbers of debaters and participants as well as the most diverse nationalities.
For CRI, I'm Wuyou.
Guangzhou Evergrande is the first Chinese club to book ticket in the AFC Champions League final
Guangzhou Evergrande has become the first Chinese club to reach the final of the AFC Champions League after crushing Japanese side Kashiwa Reysol 4-nil in their 2nd semifinal match last night.
Marcello Lippi's side scored 3 in the second half, including two late-minute goals by Brazilian striker Muriqui, to secure the easy 8-1 victory on aggregate.
Guangzhou Evergrande are now set to take on FC Seoul in the final.
This, after Seoul ran to a 2-2 draw last night against Iranian side Esteghlal to take that semi-final 4-2 on aggregate.
Guangzhou's trip to the final marks the first time in 23 years a Chinese club has entered into Asia's club team tournament finals.
Liaoning won it all in 1990 when the tournament was known then as the Asian Club Championships.
The first leg of the final is slated for October 25th in Seoul.
The all-important return leg of the AFC final is due be held at Tianhe Stadium in Guangzhou on November 8th.
The winner moves on to this year's FIFA club World Cup which will take place in Morocco in December.
Li Na and Rafael Nadal advance to final eight at the China Open
Chinese ace Li Na is through to the quarterfinals at the China Open here in Beijing.
The world number-5 defeated Germany's Sabine Lisicki 7-5, 6-4 last night.
I'm really happy with my playing condition. Actually all this year, I've been very satisfied with how my body and spirit have held up. I told Carlos and my team that the game is like a bonus, and I can just enjoy the experience."
Li Na now has a quarterfinal clash with 9th-seeded Petra Kvitova.
Last night also saw Serbia's Jelena Jankovic and third seed Agnieszka Radwanska both advancing into the 3rd round.
On the men's side,
Current world number-2 Rafael Nadal is a step closer to potentially taking over the world number one ranking after a second round victory over Germany's Philipp Kohlschreiber, 6-4, 7-6.
Current world number-1 Novak Djokovic is set to take on Spain's Fernando Verdasco later on today.
If Djokovic were to falter here in China, and Nadal were to go onto victory, it could help propel the Spainyard into the world number-1 position.
Best-selling U.S. novelist Tom Clancy dies at 66
American author Tom Clancy has died.
It's being reported the writer died on Tuesday in hospital in his hometown of Baltimore, Maryland.
The cause of death has not been revealed.
Clancy is best known for penning numerous military-based thrillers, including his breakout hit book in 1984 titled "The Hunt for Red October."
The book was later turned into a very popular movie of the same name in 1990 staring Alec Baldwin and Sean Connery.
Clancy's most popular books follow the character of CIA analyst Jack Ryan.
Tom Clancy's literary career spanned over 3-decades, and included 17 books which made the New York Times Bestseller list.
His next book, titled "Command Authority" is still scheduled to be published posthumosly in early December.
Tom Clancy was 66.
That's all we have time for on the show as well.
Recapping our top headlines....
Chinese President Xi Jinping has met with his Indonesian counterpart, with the two sides agreeing to upgrade their official bilateral status.
The UN Security Council has passed a new decree, calling for better humanitarian access to Syria.
Italy's Prime Minister has survived a confidence vote, which is a major setback for former PM Silvio Berlusconi.
Guangzhou Evergrande has become the first Chinese football team in over 2-decades to advance to the finals of the Asian Club tournament finals.
---stay with us for an edition of Biz China coming up after the break.
On behalf of the Beijing Hour team, I'm in Beijing, hoping you'll join us for our next edition of the Beijing Hour to open a window to the world together! |