BEIJING, Jan. 31 (Xinhua) — Southwest China’s Zigong city has been criticized for keeping a sea of lanterns, first put up for the International Dinosaur Lantern Festival since Jan. 16, which lit despite large-scale electricity shortages triggered by heavy snowfalls.

    The city, famed for its dinosaur fossils, has sought a new title - “the southern city of lights”, and it wants to keep the lanterns lit for at least 150 days.

    However, the city has faced serious electricity shortage due to continuous heavy snow which has already hampered electricity supplies and paralyzed transport in half of the country.

    Netizens have suggested priority should be given to household consumption, and that the lantern festival should be suspended. However, the organizers said that the festival will not be affected by the electricity shortage.

    The Sichuan province has undergone extreme cold weather, rarely seen in the past two decades, with the average temperature at zero degree centigrade, almost 5 degrees centigrade below the usual temperature for this time of year.

    The province has also experienced sporadic blackouts since the snowfall disaster. Officials with the provincial power company said that if action is not taken, the provincial power grids will face serious blackout threat.

    As a result, Zigong city was told to cut its electricity supply. The “Zigong Daily” reported Thursday that the city is short of 2.3 million kwh electricity daily, 30 percent of its minimum daily consumption. Some factories have been rationed for electricity for nearly 15 days.

    The city government started its contingency plan for possible blackouts on Jan. 14, stating that the government will guarantee electricity for household use first.

    The city government has yet to change its mind about the lantern festival, said an official with the city government, speaking under conditions of anonymity.

    BEIJING, Jan. 31 (Xinhua) — China banned 359 drugs from entering the market last year for illegal adverts, said the country’s pharmaceutical watchdog here on Thursday.

    According to the State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA), in the first 10 months of last year, it found 50,823 occurrences of illegal adverts for drugs, medical equipment and health supplements.

    In 2007, the country approved 16,365 medical ads, among which 122 were recalled for illicit content, such as being false or exaggerated information or by their guarantees from celebrities and experts.

    In addition, the administration has recently completed a one-month supervision on satellite TV stations nationwide for illegal medical ads.

    Earlier this year, the country’s authorities ordered the closure of 51 websites found to be carrying illegal drug adverts, the Ministry of Information Industry said.

    Since July, China has run an advertising campaign against illegal drug ads to tighten its supervision. The State Administration for Industry and Commerce is responsible for punishing violators and the SFDA is in charge of approving drug ads.

    According to the amended Measures for the Examination of Drug Advertisements which took effect last May, drug supervising departments have the right to take administrative compulsive measures to ban drugs for illegal ads.

    BEIJING, Jan. 31 (Xinhua) — Taiwan, Nansha Islands and adjacent waters are all inseparable parts of Chinese territory, a foreign ministry spokesman said here Tuesday.

    Liu Jianchao made the remarks at a regular press conference when asked to comment on Taiwan “leader” Chen Shui-bian’s planned trip Saturday to Taiping Island, the largest among Nansha islands.

    Liu reiterated that China possesses indisputable sovereignty over Nansha Islands and adjacent waters.

    ”We have confidence as well as capability to safeguard the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity”, Liu said, adding China remains committed to maintaining peace and stability in the South China Sea.

    SHENYANG, Jan. 31 (Xinhua) — The year 2007 was a good year for farmer Li Lin as his 20 tons of rice sold at a relatively high price amid the rise of prices of many other commodities in the country.

    But Li, in Moshifang village in Zhuanghe County northeast China’s Liaoning Province, said rising prices of farming labor and fertilizer ate up a great deal of his grain income.

    ”The labor cost for planting one mu of rice seedlings has risen from 50 yuan a few years ago to 80 yuan last year,” said the 46-year-old farmer. The mu is a Chinese unit of area which equals 6.6 percent of a hectare.

    Li said more subsidies were needed to improve farmers’ conditions.

    China’s grain output exceeded 500 million tons in 2007. But the increasingly high agricultural costs also forced grain prices up.

    The prices of major agricultural products had been at low levels since the mid-1990s, whereas those of fertilizers and other means of production have risen substantially, said Wang Yiming, a National Development and Reform Commission expert.

    Wang said the prices of carbamide, a major fertilizer Chinese farmers like to use, diesel and plastic sheeting had all risen by 26 percent to 64 percent over the past five years.

    A type of compound fertilizer used for rice also soared from 110 yuan to 190 yuan per bag early this year in the area where Li lives.

    Last year, the country’s consumer price index (CPI) rose 4.8 percent last year, with the inflation indicator hitting an 11-year-high of 6.9 percent in November, well above the government target of three percent.

    In particular, the average pork price nationwide rocketed 48.3 percent in 2007 from a year earlier, mainly due to supply shortages of pigs resulting from little profits in raising them and an outbreak of an infectious pig disease.

    Since food has a weighting of 32.74 percent in the CPI, the stable supply of such commodities, farm produce in particular, will be a decisive factor behind China’s efforts to beat inflationary pressures.

    China has been subsidizing farmers in recent years in order to boost grain output to feed the country’s 1.3 billion population. Li gets 15 yuan for each mu of his rented paddy field. Farmers who plant on their own farmland can get around 40 yuan of government subsidy per mu each year.

    ”If not for government subsidies and the exemption of agricultural taxes, farmers would make little money from planting crops given the high costs,” said Yu Yongqing, head of Li’s village.

    The village official worried if farmers did not benefit more from planting crops, they may move to cities to find jobs for more money, posing a threat to the labor source for grain output.

    On Wednesday, the country issued its first document this year, calling for greater efforts to increase grain output supply as part of the efforts to combat mounting inflationary pressures.

    The document stressed that increased spending on agriculture this year should be a greater percentage than last year, the increase in fixed-asset investment in rural areas should exceed the year-earlier level and farm subsidies should be raised.

    BEIJING, Jan. 31 (Xinhua) — China will continue to discuss with Sudan on the issue of Darfur, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said here Thursday.

    China will also make necessary negotiation and cooperation with world community on issues relating to Darfur, Liu added.

    Liu said China’s position on Darfur issue is very clear, and its starting point is to push forward the reconciliation process in the region so as to ease the humanitarian crisis and restore stability and development in the region and help people there to get rid of the difficulties in their life.

    BEIJING, Jan. 31 (Xinhua) — Approximately 11.91 million telecom users, or 60 percent of the total who had suffered suspension in communication links because of snow damage in China, had the service restored by Wednesday, sources with the Ministry of Industry Information (MII) said on Thursday.

    Heavy snow and icy rain falling since Jan. 10 in China’s eastern, central and southern regions have caused deaths, structural collapses, blackouts, highway closures and crop destruction.

    The MII sources said owing to the extreme weather, more than 16,000 mobile telecommunication base stations for relay line had so far discontinued services, 46,000 electrical wire poles had collapsed and 9,678.2 kilometers of telecom links had been devastated. All these affected 19.28 million telecom users and caused direct economic loss of nearly 150 million yuan (20.8 million U.S. dollars).

    Those areas suffering the worst breakdowns in telecom links included Guizhou, Hunan and Jiangxi provinces.

    The sources added that to maintain operation of telecom equipment, oil and eletricity were now badly needed.

    In a related development, storage of coal used for electricity generating has declined to 21.29 million tons, less than half of the normal amount, according to the State Electricity Regulatory Commission.

    China’s 17 provincial-level regions adopted power-rationing measures as coal shortages cut power generation. Continuous freezing and snowy weather across large areas of China sharply raised electricity demand, but also hindered coal transportation, which exacerbated power shortages.

    Power plants that produced seven percent of the country’s thermal power were shut down because of a lack of coal, the latest figures from the State Electricity Regulatory Commission showed.

    Media report said north China’s coal-rich provinces are beefing up production and shipping coal to the blizzard-plagued southern regions.

    About 4.5 million tons of coal is expected to arrive in Guangzhou ports from north China’s ports in Bohai Bay on a fleet of 125 cargo ships, some of which had canceled international missions to assist in coal shipping from north to south, the Guangzhou Daily reported on Wednesday.