CHINA US Focus - Perspectives shaping the world's most important bilateral relationship

Increasing discharge of pollutants and booming offshore human activity, such as oilexploration, are worsening China's fragile marine environment, according to an annual reportreleased by the country’s ocean watchdog.   The severely polluted sea area surged to 44,000 square kilometers in China in 2011 from25,000 sq km in 2003, according to China's 2011 marine environment report [...]

A senior Chinese official on Monday called for the country to speed up mass production of shale gas with its own technologies to ensure adequate energy supply. Efforts must be made to achieve early breakthroughs in the appraisal, exploration and development of shale gas resources, as well as to come up with measures to ensure [...]

The sex ratio at birth has been rising in the past 30 years. The sex ratio at birth is also known as newborn infant sex ratio. Under natural circumstances, the ratio of every 100 newborn girls to 103 to 107 newborn boys is normal. As the death rate of boys is higher than that of [...]

The fight against narcotics faces increasing challenges amid a bumper poppy harvest in Myanmar and a rise in Afghan drug trafficking, a police official said. The poppy growing area in northern Myanmar has increased to 44,867 hectares this year, up 41 percent year-on-year, according to figures from the Ministry of Public Security. Apart from producing [...]

More than one-third of China's provincial-level governments have released wage growth targets for workers this year, with most of them trimming salary increases as companies face decreasing profits amid a slowing economy. Of the 12 local governments that have released wage plans, most have targeted 14-percent wage growth this year, the Economic Information Daily reported [...]

(Wenzhou) – The amount and ratio of non-performing loans (NPLs) in the banking sector are increasing after steadily dropping for years as major state-owned banks finished share ownership reform and went public in the early 2000s. By late 2011, the NPL ratio for the entire banking industry stood at less than 1 percent, and while [...]