Workers are busy at a factory of Shanxi High-Tech Huaye Electronic Group in Changzhi, Shanxi province. [Provided To China Daily] Companies threatened by price slump thrive after charging into new, emerging markets For many people, the name Changzhi is synonymous with coal. The city in northern China's Shanxi province has 90.6 billion metric tons of coal reserves, and the black stuff can be found under 61 percent of its land area. Every year, it produces 100 million tons of coal. Yet as the nation celebrates the 40th anniversary of reform and opening-up, people are seeing Changzhi in a new light. The city's efforts to become a home for enterprises that offer high added value and cutting-edge technology appear to be yielding encouraging results. Shanxi Lubao Coking Group was established in 1994 in Dianshang township and is today Shanxi's largest private enterprise, employing about 20,000 people. While many companies were going bankrupt due to a slump in the coke market between 2008 and 2015 - more than 30 went bust in Dianshang alone - Lubao shifted focus and began manufacturing coke-related chemicals, the prices of which were rising. It not only survived but thrived, making the company more determined to expand its industry chain and produce high-value-added products, according to its Party secretary, Yang Xiuyuan. He said Lubao continued its transformation with local government support, largely in helping arrange bank loans at a time when most financial institutions had stopped lending to coking companies because of the sluggish market. The company established Lubao Xinghai New Material Co and, with total investment of 3.1 billion yuan ($448 million), built a production line with an annual output of 100,000 tons of caprolactam - a compound used in nylon, fiber and plastics - that went into operation in July 2017. Yang said the company wants to go further and has invested 1.5 billion yuan to construct facilities that allow Xinghai to produce caprolactam that is closer to the finished product. The subsidiary made 946 million yuan in revenue in 2017, and that is expected to rise to 6 billion yuan after the new facilities go into operation, he said. Other Changzhi companies have also diversified, like Nanye Industry Group, which used to focus on coal mining and sales but has now entered the LED industry. It set up Shanxi High-Tech Huaye Electronic Group in 2013 to make LED screens and displays. With an investment of 5.3 billion yuan, Huaye established a complete industry chain, including LED lamp beads packaging and lighting equipment, its deputy Party secretary, Yuan Xinhua, said. Nanye's transformation was born from its need to develop and has been carried out under guidance from the government, Yuan said. City authorities drafted a development plan for the LED industry early in 2008 when the coal market was still booming, he said. When the market stagnated in 2013, the provincial authorities arranged for coal company employees to visit LED manufacturers to learn about the industry. As of last month, Huaye had produced goods worth almost 1.5 billion yuan this year, recording about 1.1 billion yuan in sales, according to data from the company. Lu'an Group, a Fortune Global 500 company, has also been working on the world's first mass production line for deep-ultraviolet LED chips. Shanxi Lu'an Photovoltaics Technology Co, a subsidiary launched in 2016, is cooperating on the project with the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Semiconductors and has initially invested 600 million yuan. The company said the Changzhi government has offered 150 million yuan in financial support. Deng Ming, president of the photovoltaics company, said the production line's annual output capacity will be 30 million chips. Workers began to debug the facility late last month, and the first chip is expected to roll off the assembly line in November. Deep-ultraviolet LED chip technology has the potential to disrupt several markets, according to Deng. For example, he said, it may make refrigerators a thing of the past, as light from the chips could provide a continuous sterilized environment that would prevent food from going bad. China is now neck and neck with Japan and the United States in deep-ultraviolet LEDs, he added. The Changzhi government has vowed to keep the city's industrial transformation going and has drafted a series of ambitious plans. In addition to promoting development of modern coal-related chemicals, high-end manufacturing, new energy vehicles, new materials and new-generation information technology, the city also aims to foster five new industries, including photovoltaics manufacturing, general aviation and medical health. Changzhi's commission for economy and information technology said in a statement that one target is to take the total value of goods produced by its new-materials industry to more than 10 billion yuan by 2020. The figure was 8.3 billion yuan in 2016. The city government also wants the output value of its energy conservation and environmental protection industry to reach 15 billion yuan within the same time frame, double the value recorded in 2016, the commission said. According to the city's development and reform commission, its economic planner, 1,190 projects were launched in Changzhi in the first seven months of 2018, with 819 - almost 70 percent - related to industrial transformation. Changzhi has been gradually transitioning its development mode from one that relies on consuming resources and materials to one that is more high-end and depends on technological innovation, talent, and a continuous and cyclical use of resources, the reform commission said in a statement. blue silicone braceletcustom watch braceletcustom made bracelets for hercoloured wristbands for eventssilicone wristbands
A researcher operates a microscope in Suzhou, Jiangsu province on Dec 26, 2018. [Photo/IC] The news back in November that Chinese scientist He Jiankui had illegally edited the genomes of twin girls led to international uproar. Both in China and the wider world, experts condemned the announcement, calling it a worrying assault on the ethical fabric of society. The twin girls, which He claimed are now HIV-resistant, were involuntary subjects in an experiment in the most volatile interpretation of the word. The twin girls, nicknamed Lulu and Nana, were effectively used as guinea pigs for a very primitive and unproven form of gene editing. China denounced the experiment and proposed stricter new gene-editing laws, which were outlined in late February. This new legislation will act as a welcome safety belt for the genetics industry, which,while still in its infancy, is progressing around the world at a startling pace. Gene editing is still at a hit and miss stage, and refinement is needed. The DNA editing tool CRISPR, which was only invented in 2012, is still associated with the possibility of unintentional and accidental mutations. These could easily cause problems in later life, with especially high chances of cancer potentially developing. The worry is that a lack of regulation in this field could both lead to an epidemic of socially and ethically disruptive designer babies, and also widespread healthcare disasters internationally. China's new legislation is not taking any chances. To help prevent such risks, the proposed rules require all life science clinical trials (gene editing or not), to be classified as high or low risk, with explicit government permission mandatory before even the first step in the lab is taken. Any researchers and institutions, including hospitals, which violate this will be subject to a strict lifetime ban from research work and criminal investigations. Given that this area of science is touching on playing god, such deterrents will come as welcome relief to both ethical think tanks and human rights watch dogs around the world. These regulations, however, will prove to be a bit of a double-edged sword. Keh Kooi Kee, a researcher at Tsinghua University, told the Associated Press that, since the He Jiankui incident, researchers such as himself have faced additional difficulty in getting research approved. Instead, a huge mountain of paperwork and red tape will now slow the process down. However, the seriousness of the issue warrants such caution. A dystopian future, in which people can alter the most personal and deterministic things in others at the snap of a finger, should be treated with caution at the highest level.The ease with which such power could fall into the wrong hands cannot be understated. Way back in 2017, fears were raised that the DNA editing tool CRISPR was accessible and easy. Mail order CRISPR kits cost just $130, and can be used to hack the DNA of bacteria to produce potentially dangerous mutants. Users of the kit do not need a PhD to make it work, they only need to be able to follow a basic set of instructions and use plastic tubes and pipettes. Granted, modifying bacteria is not the same thing as editing a human, but the basic principle remains the same and we share the same DNA templates. After Nana and Lulu, we cannot stay in denial and must admit the intention to push boundaries extra-judicially does exist. The Chinese authorities have reacted fast to this incident with proposed legislation that might ordinarily have taken years to draft. It is a welcome example of the kind of action the rest of the world should also take.
