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.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency
RSS