A top housing official in China was planning to take part in a rare online chat with Internet users around the country yesterday to discuss the government’s moves to rein in soaring property prices.
The discussion with Housing and Urban-Rural Development Vice Minister Qi Ji (齊驥) was scheduled for 3pm, the government said on its Web site, and highlights growing fears in China that the property market is overheating.
Beijing has introduced a series of measures in recent weeks to cool the red-hot real estate market amid growing complaints that property prices are out of the reach of many Chinese people.
Prices in major cities rose 11.7 percent year-on-year in March, the fastest pace since a nationwide survey was widened to 70 cities in July 2005, official data showed.
At the Beijing Real Estate Expo last month, the average price of a new apartment in the Chinese capital was 21,164 yuan (US$3,100) per square meter, double that of last year, state media said.
That means a 90m² apartment in Beijing would cost 1.9 million yuan, compared with the average per capita income of 17,175 yuan last year.
It is rare for Chinese government officials to chat directly with Web users.
In February, Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) took part in an online discussion ahead of the country’s annual parliamentary session in March — only the second time he had ever done so.
China has the world’s largest online population with at least 404 million users, according to state media. The Internet in China is also regarded as one of the most heavily censored in the world, with the communist authorities seeking to block a wide range of issues they believe may threaten their rule.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema