BRUSSELS, Aug. 31 (Xinhua) — The European Union (EU) is seeking to share its experience and promote cooperation with China in competition policy, the bloc’s antitrust chief said in an interview with Xinhua on Friday, one day after China adopted a new anti-monopoly law.

    Neelie Kroes, the EU Competition Commissioner who will pay her first official visit to China next week, said it was a coincidence that her trip was welcomed by the adoption of the new legislation.

    ”The main purpose is to congratulate the Chinese people and the government for the adoption of the first comprehensive anti-monopoly law. That is really a historical fact that we are facing,” she said, adding the implementation of a transparent and non-discriminatory competition regime will benefit the Chinese economy and Chinese consumers.

    The Standing Committee of the Chinese National People’s Congress on Thursday passed the country’s first anti-monopoly law, which will come into effect on Aug. 1, 2008. It marked the end of a key legislative process lasting more than 13 years.

    Kroes said the new law will surely become a major subject when she has high-level ministerial meetings in Beijing with her Chinese counterparts on competition policy and on enhancing cooperation.

    ”It is an opportunity to get in touch with Chinese officials,” Kroes said, “We are proud we can be of help. We sincerely hope that our cooperation will continue and will be as fruitful as it is now.”

    The European Commission said Kroes’ visit takes place in the framework of the EU-China Competition Policy Dialogue, a policy exchange mechanism established in 2003 whose primary objective is to establish a permanent forum for consultation and transparency between the two sides, and to enhance the EU’s technical and capacity-building assistance to China regarding competition law.

    ”We were quite close in our cooperation, and we are prepared to give a hand and to offer our experience with our competition policy and regulations” to China, Kroes said.

    Kroes said that, as the new law was passed, she is now especially interested in how it will be implemented and hopes to explore ways during her trip to strengthen bilateral relations with different bodies which will enforce the law in China.

    ”It (the Chinese anti-monopoly law) was adopted. It is a fact. Now it has to be implemented, so it is very interesting to discuss also how to implement it. That is of course the next step. We have a bit of experience in dealing with competition policy after fifty years in Europe,” she said.

    ”I am highly interested in what is planned in the next period and in creating more reciprocal trade and investment opportunities for both the EU and Chinese operators,” she added.

    After visiting Beijing, Kroes will travel to Dalian, a seashore resort in northeast China, to attend a World Economic Forum. She is also expected to address a group of business people on the EU competition policy.

    FUZHOU, Aug. 31 (Xinhua) — A killing spree suspect was nabbed in southeast China’s Fujian Province, said local police on Friday.

    Chen Jinchun, 37, was caught on a hill near Raoba village of Jianyang city in north Fujian at 6:30 p.m. Friday. He was accused of slaying two people in 2000 and stabbing four others to death, including two children, and injuring one in the nearby Shaowu city’s Nakou town on August 13.

    Police posted a reward of 50,000 yuan (6,578.9 U.S. dollars) to capture Chen.

    More than a hundred villagers volunteered to search the hill where Chen was supposed to hide himself.

    Chen was caught when he was trying to run down the hill and flee away.

    BEIJING, Aug. 31 (Xinhua) — Lightning strikes killed 109 Chinese people and injured 43 in August, the China Meteorological Administration (CMA) announced on Friday.

    China was more frequently hit by extreme weather conditions this year, said a CMA official.

    According to the official, China’s temperature averaged 21.6 degrees Celsius in August, the second highest for the same period of the year since 1951. The northwestern Qinghai Province experienced a 56-year high average temperature this summer.

    Meanwhile, typhoons and tropical storms were comparatively less frequently along the coastal regions, he said.

    The meteorological disasters this year were of “various types, wide reaching, scattered and very intense”, said CMA head Zheng Guoguang earlier this month.

    Zheng had pointed out that global warming increased the possibility of extreme weathers, adding that the lack of awareness contributed to the high death toll.

    The China Association for Science and Technology and the CMA jointly launched a program this month to raise awareness of weather dangers.

    In early July, the Ministry of Education, the State Meteorological Administration (SMA) and the emergency office of the State Council jointly started a campaign to provide free materials on how to avoid lightning strikes to more than 420,000 high schools and primary schools nationwide.

    The materials include DVDs of stories and cartoons and illustrations, showing how lightning forms and tips on how to avoid it.

    The SMA has also initiated a two-month training program and more than 5,000 people have registered.

    The program is designed to train practitioners in local meteorological units using the Internet and DVDs.

    Figures from the CMA show that 19,982 accidents involving lightning strikes occurred in 2006 across the country, claiming 717 lives and injuring 640 people.

    BEIJING, Aug. 31 (Xinhua) — The Complete Works of Wu Guanzhong, one of the best-known Chinese artists, has been published by the Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House, as one of the country’s key culture publishing projects during the 11th Five-Year Plan period (2006-2010).

    Wu, now 88, is a native of Yixing, Jiangsu Province, east China. In 1946, Wu went to France to study the Western painting at a college, and in 1949, the founding year of the People’s Republic of China, he returned to the homeland.

    Over the past decades, Wu has been engaged in integrating the Chinese ink and wash with the Western painting. He is now widely recognized at home and abroad as the father of the modern Chinese painting different from traditional Chinese painting.

    The Complete Works of Wu Guanzhong is composed of nine volumes of his paintings and literal works.

    BEIJING, Aug. 31 (Xinhua) — China’s State Council reiterated its call for intensified efforts to ensure safe production to prevent fatal accidents in a circular released on Friday.

    Despite a decline in the total number of accidents since the year’s beginning, the situation of safe production is still grim, with frequent occurrence of big accidents in the areas of coal mining, metallurgy, construction and transport, the circular said.

    Local governments and authorities are required to appoint senior officials to be responsible for safe production and to lead inspections into key areas and enterprises.

    The circular told local governments to keep close watch on climate changes and establish effective warning systems to forecast natural disasters.

    ”Local governments should carry out regular inspections to find hidden trouble in work places and punish severely illegal production,” the circular said.

    The circular required local governments to intensify traffic controls and launch safety inspections in schools before the autumn semester.

    Local authorities should encourage people to report illegal production activities, severely punish people who are held responsible for accidents and publicize the results of investigations in time.

    Governments at all levels are required to report to the State Council the results of their implementation of the circular before Sept. 20, according to the circular.

    Several fatal mass accidents happened in August, including a bridge collapse in central China’s Hunan Province which killed 64 people.

Backgrounder: Chronology of China-ASEAN Ties

By Xue Yongxing, Huang Haimin and Bai Bing

    HANOI, Aug. 31 (Xinhua) — The relationship of China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has entered the best period in history, said a Vietnamese scholar in a recent interview with Xinhua.

    Since the establishment of a dialogue partnership in 1996, China and the ASEAN have expanded and deepen their relations through the cooperative mechanism like ASEAN+3 leaders meetings, East Asia Summit, and APEC meetings, said Do Tien Sam, director of Vietnam’s Institute for Chinese Studies.

    Do said that China’s activeness in beefing up relations with the bloc is indispensable to the current good relationship.

    He noted that after the Asian financial crisis, China took the responsibility of keeping its currency undepreciated, which contributed to the stabilization and development of regional economy.

    In 2003, China joined the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia as first outsider of the grouping.

    China-ASEAN relations are based on their enhanced political trust which has laid foundation for their cooperation in economy and other fields, Do said.

    As a result, bilateral trade between China and ASEAN has increased rapidly. In the past 15 years, bilateral trade increased by 15 times, or 20 percent annually. In 2006, the two-way trade reached 160.8 billion U.S. dollars and the figure is expected to reach 190 billion dollars in 2007.

    By July 2006, ASEAN countries’ investment in China had totaled 39.95 billion dollars. In the meantime, China’s investment in ASEAN countries also increased rapidly. Currently, China is the largest investor in Cambodia and Laos.

    The building of the China-ASEAN Free Trade Area (FTA) has also gained substantial results via such projects as the Early Harvest Program. Since July 2005, tariffs on more than 7,000 categories of commodities made in ASEAN countries have been cut when they were exported to China.

    China and ASEAN have defined 10 major fields, including agriculture, manpower development, the Mekong River exploitation, transport, energy, culture and tourism, as the direction for future cooperation, he said.

    Do said that the China-ASEAN FTA, covering a population of 1.8 billion and enjoying gross domestic product of 2 trillion U.S. dollars, is the largest FTA built by developing countries. The two parts should take the advantage of the development opportunity and deepen their economic cooperation to contribute to the peace, stabilization and prosperity of the region.

    Founded 40 years ago, ASEAN now groups Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.