XI CALLS FOR VIGILANCE TO COMBAT VIRUS

President Xi Jinping instructed local governments on Thursday to keep alert on disease prevention and control to avoid a resurgence of the novel coronavirus outbreak.

Xi made the remark at a meeting of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee. The meeting was presided over by Xi, who is also general secretary of the CPC Central Committee.

The current situation of disease prevention and control is generally good in China, but the situation remains complex abroad and the country still faces arduous tasks in preventing a resurgence of the disease, Xi said.

He warned the country's officials about slackness and required them to continue to closely monitor disease prevention efforts to ensure that the previous achievements are secured.

He instructed the governments of Heilongjiang and Jilin provinces, where infection clusters have been reported recently, to strengthen prevention measures.

The authorities in Hubei province and its capital, Wuhan, should continue to strengthen and improve prevention measures and carry forward testing for the virus, Xi said.

He pointed out that Beijing should strengthen disease prevention during the upcoming two sessions, the annual sessions of the nation's top legislative and political advisory bodies, due to open next week.

The government should guide schools to improve their plans for disease prevention to better safeguard students, Xi said.

Prevention measures in medical institutions should be strengthened to avoid infections in hospitals, and medical treatment services should be resumed in an orderly manner, he added.

Local governments nationwide are required to learn from the lessons of recent cases caused by gatherings of people, and they are urged to plug loopholes in disease prevention.

Officials who fail to implement the CPC Central Committee's decisions will be punished seriously, and prevention measures should be improved, according to the meeting.

Given the overseas situation, related departments should make further efforts to care for Chinese citizens living abroad, improve health services, quarantine arrangements and medical treatment in border regions, and continue to deepen international cooperation on disease prevention and control, according to the meeting.

The meeting also highlighted the importance of deepening supply-side structural reform, making full use of China's domestic demand, and building a new growth model with the mutual development of the domestic and international markets.

According to the meeting, the authorities should make efforts to encourage businesses to resume work and production and return shopping malls, markets and service businesses to their normal level of activity.

The meeting also called for the enhancing of international coordination to jointly maintain the security and stability of international industrial and supply chains.

NBS: CHINA'S ECONOMY RECOVERS IN APRIL

The vitality of the Chinese economy continued to recover from the COVID-19 impact last month, with major economic indicators improving, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Friday.

To deal with challenges in the future economic recovery, the country will comprehensively implement policies to ensure the six priorities, expand domestic demand and address difficulties for enterprises, the bureau said in a statement.

Industrial output expanded by 3.9 percent year-on-year last month, versus a 1.1 percent contraction for the previous month, the NBS reported.

Retail sales dropped by 7.5 percent year-on-year in April, compared with a 15.8 percent decline in March.

Fixed-asset investment in the first four months contracted by 10.3 percent, recovering from a 16.1 percent plunge in the first quarter.

The surveyed urban unemployment rate edged up to 6.0 percent in April from 5.9 percent in March.

Online shopping in China exceeded 3 trillion yuan in the first 4 months of 2020, the bureau added.

TAIWAN BID AT WHO FIRMLY DENOUNCED

China is firmly opposed to the proposal submitted to the World Health Organization of "inviting Taiwan to participate as an observer" at this year's World Health Assembly, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Thursday.

The issue of Taiwan's participation in the assembly must be handled according to the one-China principle, spokesman Zhao Lijian said at a daily news conference. The assembly is the WHO's top decision-making body.

According to the consensus reached by the WHO Executive Board, this year's assembly, to be held on Monday and Tuesday, will discuss only necessary issues such as COVID-19 and the election of board members, Zhao said.

"This shows that a majority of the WHO members hope to focus on international cooperation to tackle the pandemic at this assembly," he said.

The international community, including China, firmly objects to individual countries' insistence on discussing the proposal, which was submitted by countries including Eswatini (formerly known as Swaziland) and Nicaragua, Zhao said.

They insist on doing so "only to seriously disrupt the process of the assembly and undermine international cooperation to fight the pandemic", the spokesman said.

China's central government has made proper arrangements for the Taiwan region to take part in global health issues and made sure that the region can deal with public health emergencies in a timely and effective manner, Zhao said.

Taiwan attended the annual World Health Assembly as an observer from 2009 to 2016.

Zhao said no legal, legitimate basis is found in the WHO Constitution or the WHA Rules of Procedure for a region of a sovereign state to join the assembly as an observer. He said the island's attendance was a result of a special arrangement by China's central government.

The arrangement was made after consultations across the Taiwan Straits and based on both sides across the Straits adhering to the 1992 Consensus, which embodies the one-China principle, Zhao said.

None of the WHO's member states disagreed with that arrangement, and the organization's then director-general invited the island to take part in the assembly as an observer, Zhao said, adding that such invitations did not constitute a precedent.

Since taking office, Taiwan's Democratic Progressive Party has been sticking stubbornly to a "Taiwan independence" position, refusing to recognize that both sides across the Straits belong to one China, thus leading to the disappearance of the political basis for the island to take part in the World Health Assembly, he said.

"The basis was abandoned unilaterally by the Democratic Progressive Party, and the Taiwan region's failure to attend the assembly (as an observer) was caused by the Democratic Progressive Party's authorities," the spokesman said.

"There is only one China in the world. The Taiwan region is an inseparable part of China's territory," Zhao said.

The one-China principle is a common aspiration in the international community, and the WHO should stick strictly to the principle when dealing with Taiwan-related issues, he said.

LATEST 40 CHINESE BUSINESS ELITES UNDER-40 RELEASED

Fortune (Chinese version) released the latest 40 Chinese Business Elites under-40 on Thursday.

Zhang Yiming, founder and CEO of ByteDance, Xu Li, co-founder and CEO of image recognition startup SenseTime and Didi Chuxing CEO Cheng Wei, have positions on the list.

The 40 on the list come from different industries including recreation media, artificial intelligence, transportation, logistics, food, e-commerce, drug and agriculture, but many of which are related to the internet.

As many as 38 of the 40 were born in 1980s. Nine of the 40 are less than 35 years old including two who were born in 1990s.

Fortune said the 40 Chinese business leaders not only achieved in business but also tried every means in dealing with public issues to realize a win-win progress in terms of both enterprises and the society during the COVID-19 outbreak.

WUHAN BEGINS MASS TESTING FOR COVID-19

The authorities in Wuhan, Hubei province, have rolled out a new round of mass testing covering the city's entire population after a recent cluster of novel coronavirus infections.

On Thursday, residents from a number of districts in the city, the hardest hit in China by the outbreak, were seen lining up at designated areas−each standing meters apart−to receive nucleic acid tests.

In Dongxihu district, where six locally transmitted infections were reported over the weekend, government employees began setting up testing facilities early on Wednesday and were guiding residents to take tests in the afternoon, the district's urban management commission said on Thursday.

In Qiaokou district's Liujiao community, 1,000 residents took tests on Wednesday.

"Our residents are very supportive. We aim at leaving nobody out of the screening," Wang Kaiqi, the community's Party secretary, told Hubei Television.

Yao Hanhua, Party secretary of Qiaokou's Shuichang community, said the mass campaign will enable officials to understand the true scale of undetected infections in each area. "The results will help us take more targeted epidemic control measures," he told Hubei Television.

Wuhan added one new domestic case involving an 89-year-old man on Saturday, the first such case in 35 days. On Sunday, his wife and four other residents of the same neighborhood were found to be infected.

Health experts said the source of new infections came from "past community transmission", according to the city's health commission.

No new confirmed cases have been reported in Wuhan since then, but the city has continued to register new asymptomatic cases.

On Monday, the city's epidemic prevention and control command center released a notice requiring the mass testing campaign be completed within 10 days, and to prioritize key populations and areas, and focus on old or densely populated neighborhoods and those with large mobile populations.

The magnitude of the campaign is unprecedented. During the outbreak's peak, Wuhan rolled out two campaigns to screen the entire city for confirmed and suspected cases, people with fever and close contacts.

After outbound travel restrictions were lifted on April 8, Wuhan completed 275,400 nucleic acid tests within a week, targeting people who intended to resume work or leave the city, and 182 of them were found to be asymptomatic.

Wuhan also rolled out an epidemiologic survey that conducted nucleic acid and antibody tests on 11,000 residents in mid-April. The survey was part of a nationwide effort to evaluate the scale of infections in nine provincial-level regions.

LASER INDUSTRY LIGHTS UP HIGH-TECH ECONOMY IN CHINA

Laser industry lights up high-tech economy in Suqian, East China's Jiangsu province.

Since its inception in 2016, a laser industrial park in Suqian has accommodated about 50 companies of the industry, including laser cutting, laser marking and laser medical treatment.

A complete industrial chain, including laser R&D, equipment manufacturing and processing application, has been established with improving supporting facilities of the park.

The laser industrial park in Suqian has played an important role in lightening up high-tech economy in China.

SCIENTIFIC ACHIEVEMENTS ARE STEADILY MAKING IT TO MARKET

China has seen a continuous increase of commercialization and transformation of scientific achievements, with trading contracts reaching a record high last year, a recent report shows.

The report, published by the National Center for Science and Technology Evaluation and the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China, summarized the data of 3,200 universities and research institutes across the country and analyzed their progress and experience in commercializing scientific results.

The report shows that in 2018, the 3,200 institutes signed 11,302 contracts worth 17.7 billion yuan ($2.5 billion), a year-on-year increase of 52.2 percent.

The average value of the contracts also rose significantly to 1.57 million yuan with an increase of 42.6 percent year-on-year, meaning the quality of scientific achievements has much improved. More than 30 institutes have reached deals of over 100 million yuan, rising by 14.3 percent year-on-year.

Further, the report indicates researchers have received more cash and product equity from the commercialization, with 68,000 researchers taking in $6.76 billion, an increase of 44.9 percent.

Cooperation between enterprises, universities and research institutes has also deepened, largely driving development of the innovations. In 2018, the total value of contracts signed by the 3,200 institutions for technology transfer, technology development and technical consulting and services increased by 16.6 percent to 93.1 billion yuan.

Li Zhimin, a professor at Tsinghua University, said the growth of scientific commercialization was largely stimulated by a series of policies the central government has issued in recent years to accelerate technology transfers and to boost innovation and economic quality.

For example, the guideline to implement the law regarding the transformation of scientific and technological achievements, which was released by the State Council in 2016, clarified the interests of researchers, giving great incentives to foster more commercialized applications.

However, the report also suggests room for improvement, as statistics show that of the 3,200 institutions, only 687 have set up specialized departments for technology transfer, and 306 said they think technology transfer companies play an important role in commercializing scientific achievements.

Li said he believes there remains huge potential in transferring scientific results into tangible applications if research institutes and universities can come up with more detailed policies to encourage researchers to transfer their achievements and ensure their rewards.

"Affected by traditional thoughts, many managers of research institutions tend to focus more on studies but find commercialization unimportant. We now have national policies in place, but intermediate departments and leaders should also raise their awareness and better implement the policies," Li said.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly. - Mae West