SHANGHAI: China’s banking regulator has asked banks to be cautious on their lending strategies this year, as Beijing seeks to avoid high

inflation and overheating the world’s third-largest economy.

In a statement issued late on Friday, China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC) said banks should ensure that banking credit is entering the real economy and to control lending to high-polluting industries and industries with overcapacity.

It also called on banks to monitor the property sector.

“Banks should pay high attention to the changes in the property market and strictly implement relevant credit policies to enhance supervision and window guidance of property loans,” CBRC said in a statement posted on their website.

Banks were also told to control risks with “greater efforts”.

Last week, China took its strongest step towards tightening monetary policy by increasing the banks’ reserve requirement ratios (RRR) by 50 basis points as of Jan 18.

The move was the first time the central bank had adjusted the ratio since a cut in December 2008, when it was loosening policy to cushion the economy from the global financial crisis.

source: TOI

Kaziranga (Assam), Dec 22 (IANS) Two endangered one-horned rhinos were killed by poacher gangs at the famed Kaziranga National Park in Assam, taking the toll of the giant pachyderms slaughtered so far this year to 14, officials said Tuesday.

A wildlife official said the latest killings were reported Monday from inside the sanctuary, 220 km east of Assam’s main city of Guwahati.

“The two rhinos were killed using automatic weapons in separate locations and their horns gouged out. It could be the same poacher gang involved in both the attacks,” a park ranger told IANS.

Both killed were adult rhinos – a male and a female.

“We are indeed worried by the spurt in incidents of rhino poaching inside Kaziranga,” the park official said, requesting anonymity.

Last year, 18 rhinos were killed by poachers, the first time in a decade that the number of rhinos killed in a year in the park touched a double digit figure.

Between 1980 and 1997, some 550 rhinos were killed by poachers in Kaziranga – the highest being 48 in 1992.

As per latest figures, some 1,855 of the world’s estimated 2,700 one-horned rhinos lumber around the wilds of Kaziranga – their concentration here ironically making the giant mammals a favourite target of poachers.

Forest rangers complain about poor infrastructure and obsolete weapons compared to the poachers armed with sophisticated assault rifles.

“First of all the number of forest guards in Kaziranga is far less than what is actually required to protect the wildlife, then you have World War II weapons compared to AK series rifles and carbines used by the poachers,” a senior forest guard working in Kaziranga for more than 15 years, said.

Poachers kill rhinos for their horns, which many believe contain aphrodisiac qualities, besides being used as medicines for curing fever, stomach ailments and other diseases in parts of Asia.

Rhino horn is also much fancied by buyers from the Middle East who turn them into handles of ornamental daggers, while elephant ivory tusks are primarily used for making ornaments and decorative items.

Profits in the illegal rhino horn trade are staggering – rhino horn sells for up to Rs.1.5 million per kilogram in the international market after they are smuggled to China or sold in other clandestine Asian markets.

Once extracted, the rhino horn is routed to agents in places like Dimapur in Nagaland, Imphal in Manipur and Siliguri in West Bengal.

The route for rhino horn smuggling is an interesting one – a possible route is to Kathmandu via Siliguri and then from Nepal to China and the Middle East. The other possible route is from Imphal to Moreh on the Manipur border with Myanmar and then via Myanmar to countries like Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore and China.

Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband had singled out China for vetoing an agreement on limiting emissions.

Beijing said his comments were part of a political scheme to “provoke discord among developing countries”.

The Copenhagen summit ended without the 192 countries present reaching a firm agreement on climate change.

The delegates simply committed to “taking note” of a deal recognising the need to limit temperature rises to 2C.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu did not mention Mr Miliband by name, but in comments reported by the Xinhua state news agency, she said statements from “certain British politicians” were “plainly a political scheme”.

The aim, she said, was “to shirk responsibilities that should be assumed towards developing countries, and to provoke discord among developing countries”.

“This scheme will come to nothing,” said Ms Jiang.

‘New beginning’

Writing in Britain’s Guardian newspaper on Sunday, Mr Miliband said the vast majority of countries wanted a legally-binding treaty to protect the planet but it appeared four or five countries at the summit had been keen to “shelve the accord”.
He said China had vetoed two proposed agreements on emissions cuts, “despite the support of a coalition of developed and the vast majority of developing countries”.

Ms Jiang said Mr Milband and others behind the editorial should “correct their mistakes, fulfil their obligations to developing countries in an earnest way, and stay away from activities that hinder the international community’s cooperation in coping with climate change”.

The BBC’s Michael Bristow in Beijing says China believes it went to the talks in good faith and offering significant proposals, so does not want to be seen to be the cause of the failure to reach a more solid agreement.

On Monday, China’s Foreign Minister, Yang Jiechi, praised the summit, saying it had been “not a destination but a new beginning”.

The final accord was reached between the US, China, India, Brazil and South Africa, but is not legally binding.

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon says the agreement must be made legally binding next year.

WASHINGTON/BEIJING (Reuters) – Although U.S. President Barack Obama has never set foot there, China cast a long shadow in the Pacific region where he grew up.

Obama, who will visit Shanghai and Beijing for the first time on November 15-18, spent much of his childhood in Hawaii, five time zones away from Washington, D.C.; and beginning in 1967, when he was six years old, he lived in Jakarta for four years.

At the time, China was in the throes of Chairman Mao Zedong’s bloody Cultural Revolution. Abroad, the nation was less interested in selling widgets than in promoting Mao’s brand of radical communism — a force the U.S. saw behind communist movements and political upheaval in Vietnam, Indonesia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

In 1979, Obama’s senior year at Punahou school in Honolulu, China and the United States normalized diplomatic relations, launching a three-decade period in which ties between the two grew inexorably tighter and deeper — and complicated.

“Think of what China was in 1979: It was an autarkic, insular, inward-looking country that was preoccupied with its own internal things,” said a senior U.S. official. “Even 10 years ago … there was still a sort of sense of ‘We’re not a part of these global rules, we’re not doing this stuff.’ Now they see themselves as sitting at the table.”

If there were any doubts that China would have a seat at the table from now on, Obama dispelled those when he sent Secretary of State Hillary Clinton there on her first official trip abroad — not Pakistan, Afghanistan or any other foreign policy hot spot.

“That the first major visit (was) to China, and to Asia as well, is symbolic of where the locus of international economic activity — and to some degree the locus of international activity, period — is going to be in the coming years,” said economist and author Zachary Karabell, whose new book “Superfusion” posits that the U.S. and Chinese economies have effectively merged.

Beijing, once considered a wallflower on global affairs, is in turn warming to its more prominent role, though it’s unclear that will translate into greater cooperation with Washington on issues like climate change and the nuclear disputes with Iran and North Korea — not to mention human rights differences.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg highlighted the tension at the heart of the relationship in a speech in September. “Given China’s growing capabilities and influence, we have an especially compelling need to work with China to meet global challenges,” he said.

But Steinberg added that there was a tacit bargain in which the United States expects China to reassure the rest of the world that its growing role “will not come at the expense of security and wellbeing of others.”

That of course includes America’s.

“The big challenge there is going to be to maintain a competitive U.S. economy, and at the same time to maintain a high degree of stability and equanimity in the U.S.-China relationship,” said Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Economic Strategy Institute think tank.

Indeed, even as the United States and China have grown closer diplomatically, their economic and trade ties have deepened to the point of mutual dependence. Not only does China depend on the U.S. export market to fuel its highflying economic growth rates, the United States relies on China’s vast savings to help finance its burgeoning budget deficits.

“It is clearly unsustainable. This relationship helped give rise to global economic imbalances,” said Ben Simpfendorfer, an economist with Royal Bank of Scotland in Hong Kong. “If we are ever going to free ourselves of these imbalances, we need to reverse this relationship, get China to buy things in the U.S. and the U.S. to invest in China.”