BEIJING, Sept 6 (Reuters) – China’s yuan will inevitably
become a global reserve currency, Nigeria’s central bank
governor said, adding his country’s need to diversify reserves
grew more urgent after one credit agency stripped the United
States of its top-notch debt rating.

A day after Nigeria said it would diversify a tenth of its
$33 billion foreign exchange reserves into the yuan, Lamido
Sanusi said Beijing would allow the Nigerian government to use
yuan to buy yuan-denominated bonds in Hong Kong and Shanghai.

BEIJING (Reuters) – The black Audi parked at Beijing’s best-regarded hospital bears a license plate of a province about 1,000 miles away — testimony to the willingness of Chinese to go the extra mile to get top-notch healthcare.

But the cure sometimes seems as painful as the disease — even for the rich — as the healthcare system is riddled with crowded hospitals, too much bureaucracy and too few nurses.

BEIJING (Reuters) – China hopes that Europe will take steps to protect China’s investments there, Chinese President Hu Jintao told the French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Thursday, nonetheless voicing confidence in the euro and vowing to keep investing in it.

Sarkozy, making a brief visit to Beijing, in turn pressed Hu for China’s support for his G20 agenda.

BEIJING (Reuters) – China should sit tight on its U.S. Treasuries investment and adopt a “no buy, no sell” strategy, former top Chinese parliamentary official Cheng Siwei said on Monday as Asian stocks tumbled on a historic downgrade of U.S. debt rating.

Taking aim at how China should invest its $3.2 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, the world’s largest, Cheng said China should use future reserves to buy other bonds and to make foreign direct investments.

ONBOARD THE BEIJING-SHANGHAI EXPRESS, June 27 (Reuters) -
With its fully reclining airline-style business class seats, a
strict no-smoking policy and designed top speed of 350 km (220
miles) per hour, the new Beijing-Shanghai express embodies
China’s race to the future.

The new line’s launch is coordinated with the 90th
anniversary of the ruling Communist Party to highlight the
“scientific development” slogan dear to the heart of Chinese
president and party secretary Hu Jintao.

BEIJING (Reuters) – Burly, bearded and blunt, artist Ai Weiwei is one of China’s loudest and most colourful challengers of Communist Party controls, whose art spans porcelain sunflower seeds to names of earthquake victims scrolling on a computer screen.

But his recent detention signals the 53-year-old’s busy career as an artistic and political provocateur may have run into a wall of Party score-settling.

BEIJING, March 14 (Reuters) – Japan’s nuclear disaster will
make the new generation of reactors safer, according to China’s
energy chief and to a leading builder, but neither suggested
there would be any change to the timetable for building new
plants.

China is relying on nuclear power as a major part of its
plans to cut dependence on coal over the next decade, with a
target to start building 40 gigawatts of new capacity by 2015 –
almost as much as Japan’s entire nuclear power sector.

BEIJING, March 7 (Reuters) – Owning a home is central to the
Chinese dream, but for Beijing residents like 30-year-old Zhang
Xinyuan, just getting an apartment seems like a dream that may
never become reality.

A teacher at a prominent university in Beijing, Zhang is a
member of the country’s growing middle class. But her salary of
80,000 yuan ($12,179) a year has not kept up with the pace of
rising property prices.

BEIJING/SHANGHAI (Reuters) – China is now the world’s second largest economy, but hundreds of millions of its people still rely on fouled water that will cost billions of

dollars to clean.

Growing cities, overuse of fertilisers, and factories that heedlessly dump wastewater have degraded China’s water supplies to the extent that half the nation’s rivers and lakes are severely polluted.

BEIJING/SHANGHAI (Reuters) – China is now the world’s second largest economy, but hundreds of millions of its people still rely on fouled water that will cost billions of dollars to clean.

Growing cities, overuse of fertilizers, and factories that heedlessly dump wastewater have degraded China’s water supplies to the extent that half the nation’s rivers and lakes are severely polluted.