1 million people sit China civil service exam
From Xinhua News November 30th 2009
Almost 1 million people Sunday sat China's national examination for 2010 admissions to the civil service.
Applicants attend the public servant recruitment exam at a college in Nanjing, capital of east China's Jiangsu Province Nov. 29, 2009. About 65,000 applicants in Jiangsu Province joined the annually nationwide exam on Sunday. [Xinhua]
The exam, comprising tests of professional ability and language, was held in 44 cities throughout the country.
The authorities adopted strict measures to prevent irregularities, such as the use of wireless equipment or the Internet to cheat.
The results will be published on the official websites of the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security and the State Administration of Civil Service in mid-January, and those who passed will be interviewed.
May Day Holiday Sees Travel Peak |
| Updated May 07 2007 18:08:20 Beijing Time |
Source: www.chinaview.cn
A ticket office is crowded with passengers queuing up to book tickets at Suzhou Railway Station, east China's Jiangsu province, May 6, 2007. According to the Ministry of Railways, a record 5.16 million people travelled on trains on last Monday alone, and from April 28 to May 7, some 45 million people will take trains, up 8 percent year-on-year.(Xinhua Photo/Wang Jiankang)
A ticket office is crowded with passengers queuing up to book tickets at Suzhou Railway Station, east China's Jiangsu province, May 6, 2007.(Xinhua Photo/Wang Jiankang)
Passengers board a train at a railway station in Nanjing, capital of east China's Jiangsu province May 6, 2007. According to the Ministry of Railways, a record 5.16 million people travelled on trains on last Monday alone, and from April 28 to May 7, some 45 million people will take trains, up 8 percent year-on-year. (Xinhua/Reuters Photo)
Passengers board a train at a railway station in Nanjing, capital of east China's Jiangsu province May 6, 2007. According to the Ministry of Railways, a record 5.16 million people travelled on trains on last Monday alone, and from April 28 to May 7, some 45 million people will take trains, up 8 percent year-on-year. (Xinhua/Reuters Photo)
China works to limit snow-inflicted chaos ahead of Spring Festival
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www.chinaview.cn  2008-01-28 18:48:53 |   Print |
BEIJING, Jan. 28 (Xinhua) -- Chinese authorities have spared no effort in combating snow-inflicted woes and reducing the negative impact to the least extent as volatile weather continued to rage in a dozen Chinese regions on Monday.
DEALING WITH TRAFFIC HAVOC
The Chinese Ministry of Railways mobilized 35 extra trains on Sunday night to help disperse about 500,000 passengers who were stranded in Guangzhou, capital of the southern Guangdong Province, because of snow, the Guangzhou Railways Company Group said. Millions of travelers are currently struggling to make their annual trip home as the Spring Festival, the most important Chinese holiday, is only nine days away. Passenger build-up in Guangzhou has been especially heavy because the southern end of the Beijing-Guangzhou rail line, a north-south trunk railroad, has been paralyzed because of heavy snow in the central Hunan Province where power transmission facilities have been knocked out. Adding to the woes, seven of the eight highways connecting Guangdong and Hunan provinces have been cut off. Prior to Sunday night the Ministry of Railways had already dispatched 25 trains to Guangzhou to transport passengers by circumventing the Beijing-Guangzhou railway. Guangzhou has set up simple facilities in a few venues such as big stadiums and conference and exhibition centers, to provide temporary shelter for stranded passengers. "About 60,000 passengers have been relocated to these venues, and it is estimated 200,000 people will need to be accommodated when more passengers arrive in Guangzhou to take trains back home," said Yu Desheng, a local transportation official. Meanwhile, free bus services were provided to take migrant workers back to their work sites if they choose not to travel home for the holiday. Guangzhou stopped selling railway tickets and announced that tickets previously purchased could be returned without a service charge. However, most passengers have been reluctant to return their tickets, hoping that railway operations would resume soon. Traffic on the Beijing-Guangzhou line likely won't be normalized within the next three to five days as snow is persisting in central China, Guangdong railway authorities said.
China's eastern business hub Shanghai also halted rail ticket sales on Monday, after 58 trains serving the municipality were delayed during a 12-hour period, stranding about 30,000 passengers. Trains from Shanghai to the southwestern Sichuan, Yunnan and Guizhou provinces were cancelled. The Shanghai railway bureau earmarked 4 million yuan (551,700 U.S. dollars) for passengers who were returning tickets. The disruptions also affected Beijing and Wuhan. In Wuhan, a city in the central section of the artery, more than 10 trains made re-routed trips via the rail line linking Beijing and Shenzhen, a city bordering Hong Kong, to reach Guangdong. Airports in at least 10 cities, such as Wuhan, Nanjing, Guiyangand Changzhou, were closed temporarily on Monday. At Shanghai Pudong International Airport, 96 international flights were canceled or delayed on Sunday and Monday. The authorities reminded passengers to check flight information before heading to the airport. Huanghua Airport in Changsha, Hunan's capital, has been closed for four consecutive days and more than 10,000 stranded passengers have been temporarily accommodated in nearby hotels. According to Chen Huiyi, a member of the airport staff, about 100 passengers have insisted on staying at the airport itself and they have been given water and bedding. Ice-clearing vehicles sent from eastern Shandong Province were being used to clear the airport. "We will try our best to get passengers to their destinations as soon as possible," Chen said. About 11,000 vehicles were piled up on the highways in eastern Anhui Province, where half of the state and provincial highways were crippled by the snow. More than 8,000 traffic police were dispatched to keep order on the 40-kilometer congested section. |
China works to limit snow-inflicted chaos ahead of Spring Festival
MAINTAINING SOCIAL ORDER
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Firemen tried to rescue the trapped people out of the collapsed market house in Chaohu, east China's Anhui Province. A 3000-square-meter market of farm products was weighed down by heavy snow Saturday, leaving 8 people trapped in ruins. All of stucked victims were rescued several hours later. (Xinhua Photo)Photo Gallery>>>
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The snow, the heaviest in a decade in many places, has been falling in east, central and south China since Jan. 12, causing deaths, structural collapses, power blackouts, highway closures and crop destruction.
Hunan Province and the western Guizhou Province have been the worst hit by the unprecedented spell of severe weather.
The Public Security Bureau of Hunan has sent daily text warnings to the province's more than 1 million drivers and information on road conditions was being broadcast around the clock.
In Nanjing, capital of eastern Jiangsu Province, the accumulated snow reached a record 36 centimeters. About 250,000 people went out to clear the snow on Monday, answering a government call made on Sunday.
In the industrial city of Wuhan, in central China, 56 energy-intensive enterprises were required to cut power consumption. It is expected that 240,000 kw of electricity would be saved in that way to meet the power demand of 120,000 households. Further power control measures could be imposed if necessary.
In Shanghai, extra buses were sent to major traffic hubs to deal with a surge of passengers as more people left their cars at home. Anti-skid devices were installed on buses in Nanjing.
In Changsha, Wuhan and other hard-hit cities, vegetable prices have more than doubled. To help keep prices down, the Wuhan government has ordered all highways and expressways not to charge tolls to trucks carrying vegetables to the city.
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Firemen tried to rescue the trapped people out of the collapsed market house in Chaohu, east China's Anhui Province. A 3000-square-meter market of farm products was weighed down by heavy snow Saturday, leaving 8 people trapped in ruins. All of stucked victims were rescued several hours later. (Xinhua Photo)Photo Gallery>>>
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Eastern Jiangsu Province has seen 1,597 houses collapse due to the snow and 4,370 others have been damaged.
In the agricultural province of Jiangxi, where 13 people have died in snow-related accidents, 220,000 were forced to evacuate and 8.18 million were affected in one way or another. About 2,700 houses were toppled and 56,400 hectares of crops were ruined by the snow.
The local government has allocated 8 million yuan to the 38 hardest-hit counties, cities and districts to ensure that residents have enough food, clean water, warm clothes, safe housing and timely medical care ahead of the Spring Festival.
China’s online railway ticket sales go berserk; a rural migrant’s letter to railways officials
from Ministry of Tofu 豆腐部
China’s Ministry of Railways has rolled out an ambitious plan to sell highly sought-after train tickets online for the upcoming Spring Festival Rush in an effort to ease the burden of securing a ticket. However, most people that tried to use the official online system experienced great difficulty and frustration while placing the order, and many were even charged for tickets that would not be issued to them.
A post on the microblogging site Sina Weibo with screenshots has vividly illustrated the pain in the neck.According to the post author “Yuandian Yinxiang”, who currently lives in Beijing and desires to go back to his hometown Ganzhou, Jiangxi province for the Chinese New Year, he kept refreshing the web pages onwww.12306.cn, the booking website, and getting error messages, while the number of tickets available was, as the search results showed, decreasing. After nine hours of trial and error, he finally placed his order.
Previously, the only legit ways to purchase a train ticket in China are wait in line at a train station or purchase at a ticket agent office. During Spring Festival Rush, or chunyun, nicknamed after the huge flow of traffic before and after the Chinese New Year when an estimated number of two billion trips are made for family reunion, getting a train ticket home often involves ridiculously long waits, huge crowds and heightened anxiety. That is why soon after the online system was introduced, an unprecedented number of visitors flocked to the website, which was ill-equipped to meet the bandwidth demand, and caused unprecedented traffic snarl-up.
A cartoonist who goes by the name Xiao Mao satirized the ticket booking website’s inaccessibility in his work: a Chinese user, after trying to visit Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and getting error messages for each one of them, thinks to himself, “Ai, if the foreign ones don’t work, let me try a domestic one,” and keys in ‘12306.cn,’ the official ticket booking site. He is amused by the result.
Online booking makes going home even harder, a migrant worker’s complaint
Speaking of Spring Festival, family reunion, friends gathering, firework, fire-crackers, lucky money, big feast, brand new clothes, new year scrolls etc will pop up into people’s mind. For Chinese people, Spring Festival is the time after a whole year’s hard work, you get to take a considerably long break to go home and rest; it is the time when you can share your harvest of the year to your family and/or show off to your hometown fellows; it is the time for happiness and celebration.
Aside from celebration, another hottest topic of each year’s Spring Festival is the transport rush. With more than 229 million migrant workers (as of 2009) scattering in different cities, majority of which is in the southern and eastern part of the country, China’s transportation system face enormous challenge every year, especially railway system. Migrant workers often have to wait in line for days to get a train ticket home.
This year, the Ministry of Railway launches an official ticket booking website to diverge the burden of ticket windows. However, many migrant workers find themselves almost impossible to get a ticket. Here is a letter addresses to the Ministry of Railway by a migrant worker. It went viral on the Internet soon after being published by Wenzhou City News, and even attracts CCTV’s attention.
Passenger number augment obviously at railway stations all over the country
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