Expert Forum 1 China Succeeded in the First Human Trial of an AIDs Vaccine The Chinese government said its first human trial of an AIDs vaccine showed it was effective in protecting against the HIV-1 virus and didn't produce any serious side effects among 49 volunteers to whom it was administered. The first human trial was launched in Nanning , capital of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, on March 12 last year. The volunteers, 33 men and 16 women aged between 18 and 50, received the vaccine by Oct. 20, 2005. The SFDA of China posted a statement on its website on August 16, 2006, which said that all participants showed signs they had ˇ°become immune against the HIV-1 virusˇ± after it has been administered for 15 days. However, the regulator said they need to push forward with more clinical trials in order to make sure that this vaccine can be used widely. The vaccine has been under development since 2003 and was part of
China 's national science "863 Project." Second phase trials
may involve as many as 300 volunteers, while 500 people may take part
in the third phase. During the long-term war, the only thing that ordinary people can do is just leading a healthy life style, keeping drugs away, and refusing promiscuity. Expert Forum 2 China Works Hard to Resolve Energy Problems The soaring economy does create difficult puzzles one after another to the Chinese government. At the moment, energy saving is one of the difficult tests. From 1980 to 2000, China successfully controlled its growth rate of energy consumption within 1/2 of its economic growth, which means, when GDP doubled twice, the energy consumption only doubled. However, from 2001 onwards, this positive trend has changed. As a result of China entering a new growth platform after it escaped the shadow of the Asian financial crisis; its growth rate of energy demand exceeded the growth rate of GDP, reaching 1.5 times of it. The current round of growth resulted from a massive investment initiated by positive fiscal policy. A lot of money has been put into infrastructure and heavy industry, thus stimulating a large consumption of energy and raw materials. In the first half of 2006, China 's GDP growth reached 10.9%. The growth rate of fixed asset investment soared. The Chinese economy is still moving fast along the track of urbanization and industrialization. Although there is no necessary direct link between the high economic growth and energy cost, it is not easy to find effective channels and methods to lower down the energy cost for the time being when China 's economic restructuring is far from complete and the growth pattern has just started to change. The Chinese government has attached more and more importance to sustainable development and has accelerated in building an energy-and-environmental-friendly society. In the "11th Five-year Plan" Outline, the government set up a binding target for a 20% of decrease in unit GDP energy consumption. This year, the government proposed to reduce the unit GDP energy consumption by another 4% as its annual goal. However, despite the serious attitude of the government by announcing binding indicators, the implementation of the outline is not satisfactory. According to the report on energy consumption, the actual energy consumption in the first half of the year actually increased. This grim reality not only exerted pressure on the energy-saving tasks for the second half of the year, but also made people more worried about whether the target of the "11th Five-year Plan" can be achieved. The severe reality forced the government to take extraordinary measures. The central government has introduced a dozen guidance documents in a row for restructuring those industries with excessive investment. Quite a few of these industries are high energy-consumption industries. Recently, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) signed contracts of job responsibility with local and central enterprises, by which means distributing energy consumption quota and pressure to different levels. It has been an effective means for the government to fulfill the targets through implementing administrative measures. Of course, this tradition is also facing challenges. Different from the central government, local governments have shown continuous enthusiasm in investment and projects. It seems that they have much higher motivation in achieving GDP growth rather than fulfilling the energy-saving goals. Although the effectiveness of this measure is unknown, the central government will certainly go further than responsibility pledges. Experts suggested that in order to achieve energy efficiency goals, the most important thing for the moment is to increase the intensity of policy, strengthen supervision, implement strict accountability regulation and give sanctions to the areas and enterprises that fail to reach the standard. Reportedly, the NDRC, together with related departments, is strengthening formulating specific measures to assess the target for unit GDP energy consumption reduction and including energy indicators into local economic and social development evaluation and annual performance assessment system. Moreover, the government is also speeding up energy prices reform. Relevant departments are working hard to improve the market adjustment mechanism for energy saving through reasonable adjustment in electricity prices, oil prices and gas prices. The Chinese government addressed energy efficiency as an important option to solve the energy shortage problem. Government leaders have repeatedly emphasized the issue and relevant departments have introduced intensive policies. All this evidence has proved that the Chinese government is determined to resolve this problem. The reason is simple: the sustainable development of energy is closely related to the overall situation of China 's economic and social sustainable development. Expert Forum 3 Energy-saving Buildings Needed The government is expected to strictly supervise energy consumption in the construction industry. It is estimated recently that about 95 percent of the country's construction industry consumes excessive amounts of energy. This sector accounts for 75 percent of the national energy consumption. Two or three times of energy is consumed to generate the same amount of heating with the same climatic conditions in China compared to that in developed countries. The Ministry of Construction issued a Management Regulation of Civil Construction Energy Conservation in 2000 and revised it in 2005. That year also saw the publication of the Design Standard of Public Construction Energy Conservation. According to the Management Regulation of Civil Construction Energy Conservation, enterprises that fail to implement energy conservation standards in terms of development, design and construction should be punished. But no such punishment has been meted out to real estate developers in recent years. The reason is that governments at all levels have failed to adequately supervise construction energy conservation for quite some time. Energy-saving standards remain on paper in the construction industry. When such supervision is absent, construction developers will not take the initiative to pursue energy-saving construction. They will only consider how to reduce the immediate one-off basic construction investments but not the energy to be consumed later in the use of the construction. Architectural designers are unwilling to devote the extra time to energy-saving designs, as they will get no extra pay. Expert Forum 4 Some Advices about Fine Phosphorus Chemical Industry in China At present, Chinese fine phosphorus chemical industry has some problems such as laggard production technology, unreasonable products structure, few product standard and production capacity. Some measures are supposed to be taken for the development of domestic fine phosphorus chemical industry. • Playing a key on basic phosphate products China is a blessed state for the development of phosphate products due to its abundant phosphorus resources and electricity resources. But in China phosphate production have some disadvantages such as small production scale, inferiors quality and high cost, so most of phosphate products still reply on imports in China . Chinese producers should play a key role in basic phosphate production, which will benefit the development of chemical industry. • Reinforcing marketing strategy of fine phosphorus chemical products In China , fine phosphorus chemical industry is dog-eat-dog one, and those gaining the market will get an important position. But at present some producers rollback against each other to get very small profit, which causes the decrease of product price and anti-dumping from foreign companies. In addition, this also does harm to producers' advantage and is disadvantageous for the development of fine phosphorus chemical industry. So China should standardize the market order and build an ordered marketing strategy. • Reinforcing technical renovation At present, fine phosphorus chemical industry in China is laggard in production technology and it causes some problems such as energyintensive, high cost of production, environment pollution and deficiency in economic performance. So domestic producers should reinforce technical renovation in fine phosphorus chemical industry and emphasize industrial applicability of products, and produce some high-technology products which meet the demand of consumers. If you have any queries to specific data or information, please feel free to Contact Us.
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