Chinese New Year   

February 7th, Chinese New Year, will bring about the longest holiday in a year for Mainland China. Like before, the operation rates at most chemical firms will hence go down and business actions will be dilute except for vehicle transport and daily consuming goods. Some workers may consider new jobs. Company owners start to make new plans and will be busy in visiting their VIP clients during the holidays. Managers of large scale state-owned chemical firms will at first visit their bosses for guaranteeing their current positions or getting a good move on, while they are also busy in dispatching production targets and profit growth targets to branch departments or subsidiaries. Anyhow the output of chemicals in the month including CNY is always the lowest one among twelve months.
   What are chemical firm managers worried about when the spring begins, energy deficit, RMB revaluation, possible cutback of American economy, cost in purchasing raw materials, environmental pressure or oversupply in their concerned sector?  Although bright mind thinks the same way, every one will has his solutions when facing the same problems and challenges. Anyway, governments will certainly try to find the most suitable solutions to balance all aspects.   
   According to Xie Fuzhan, official of the National Bureau of Statistics of China, the 2007 GDP is RMB24661.9 billion, a yearly growth of 11.4% comparing with 11.1% in 2006. The yearly growth of CPI was 4.8% in 2007, compared with 1.5% in 2006. Citizens feel the CPI digit is far lower than actual one because prices of house, fuels and daily foods have been nearly doubled.     
   PBC increased the deposit reserve rate by 0.5 percent point to 15%, a historical high. Central government continues to control heavy investment and fluid money.
   As the largest trading partner of China, Europe Union has been strengthening cooperation with China. With the active bilateral trades on chemicals between China and EU, the social responsibilities regarding to health, safety and environment are becoming the same concerns both in China and EU, in particular in the industries like chemical, petrochemical, chemical fiber, rubber, plastics, textile, dyestuffs/paints and others. EU has REACH, China has also registration regulations on new chemicals and dangerous chemicals to be imported. So how can chemical firms manage their chemicals to meet such regulations and actually help the earth? Will the bilateral trade on chemicals be negatively impacted? What kinds of responsibilities and obligations are the chemical makers going to undertake? The similar topics will be widely and deeply discussed on the Symposium on Registration of Chemical Product in Sino-Europe that will be held on March 17th-21st, 2008 in Beijing and Shanghai respectively.
   Due to a long public holiday, CCR No. 4 (February 6th) and No.5 (February 16th) are published as a combined issue.

Zhong Weike
January 30th, 2008