February 5, 2008
The “two meetings”—the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference—will be held in March, reads the red headline at the top of today’s New Culture View. The CPPCC session will begin on 3 March, the NPC will open on the 5th.
Chinese stocks rebounded yesterday, with both the Shanghai and Shenzhen index posting one-day record gains. The paper’s headline notes that this is good news right before the holidays: “Retaliatory rebound brings red envelopes to investors.”
The main front-page story continues to focus on the winter weather that has paralyzed much of the country over the past week. In the photo, a rescuer in Jiangxi carries an 80-year-old woman out of her ice-encrusted house. In the accompanying article, a truck driver describes the 1,000-km detour he had to take to bring his load of vegetables from Guangdong to Changchun. At the close of the article is the news that many other papers ran as their top headline: the Beijing-Zhuhai highway has reopened to traffic along its entire length.
In other headlines, the courts upheld the death sentence handed down to Wang Zhendong, chairman of Yingkou Donghua, for running an ant-breeding scam in 2005. The Shaanxi Forestry Department apologized for publicizing the South China Tiger photos without properly authenticating them (the photo is of a spoof calendar featuring celebrated photographer Zhou Zhenglong). And an eight-year-old penguin at a winter park in Changchun has laid an egg; bird and egg will be returned to Dalian on the 15th.