Extracts. China Strongly Opposes Junking of Kyoto Protocol China on Sunday voiced its strong opposition to any attempt to junk the Kyoto Protocol on global climate change, vowing to "work untiringly" for the early enforcement of the document. "China strongly opposes any attempt to abandon the Kyoto Protocol and start all over again," Li Xiuhua, an official from the Chinese Foreign Ministry, told the ongoing 40th annual session of the Asian-African Legal Consultative Organization (AALCO) Sunday in New Delhi. With 45 member states, the AALCO is a key inter-governmental forum for discussing from the legal perspective issues of common concerns in the region. Some 120 officials and international law experts from 34 countries, including a 6-member Chinese delegation, participated in the current session, which covered a wide range of topics including environment and development. Focusing on the challenge of climate change, Li said that the international community had "achieved great successes" in addressing this issue by adopting the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol. However, while the international community is making efforts to bring the Protocol into force, "some developed country" has refused to ratify it on the excuse that the developing countries have not undertaken the emission reduction commitments, Li noted. "This position obviously runs counter to the basic principles of the U.N. Convention, and will definitely ruin the international efforts to address climate change," she asserted. Urging all countries to "follow firmly the principles and objectives established by the UN Convention", Li promised that China would "continue to work untiringly" with the rest of the world for the early entry into force of the Kyoto Protocol. The Chinese official went on to say that since the UN Convention came into force, developing countries including China had taken various measures within their capacity to check climate change and had made great contributions to the cause. However, she added that "we have noticed with concern that the gap, in terms of both wealth and science and technology, between South and North is becoming even wider, which seriously restricts the capacity of developing countries to respond to climate change". Therefore, she said, it was imperative for the developed countries to carry out "sincere cooperation" with developing countries, take "concrete action" in funding and technology transfer to assist the latter, and fulfill their duties written in the UN Convention. **** CPC Strengthens Party Building at Grass-roots Level At the suggestion of the Party branch in Dabeixing Village, the village committee bought two buses recently to carry children of the village to the township middle-school, which is 5 kilometers away. The move has made it possible for some 200 children no longer to trudge the distance any more, and villagers could not but praise the branch of the Communist Party of China (CPC) for its attentive consideration to people's real needs. Dabeixing, an obscure village in Shandong Province, east China, has a population of 2,650, and among them over 80 are CPC members. "It is the Party's principle to serve people heart and soul," said Gao Yucheng, Party branch secretary in the village. "The Party branch is the core of our village. We will lose people's trust if we do not serve them well," he added. This is just one example of China's 1.35 million rural grass- roots CPC organizations. Official statistics show that by the end of 2000, the CPC had had 3.5 million basic-level Party organizations across the country, including Party committees, general Party branches and Party branches. Widely spread in rural areas, enterprises, universities, governmental institutions and residential communities and various walks of life, the CPC's primary-level organizations shoulder important responsibilities for building the Party, such as popularizing and implementing the Party's policies and strengthening inner Party education in situation awareness and duty and function of Party members. Party organizations at the grass-roots level are the foundation of the CPC's overall work and fighting capacity, Jiang Zemin, general secretary of the Communist Party of China has said. The three generations of China's collective leadership have attached great importance to building grass-roots Party organizations, and the CPC Central Committee has convened special conferences for the purpose, aiming to construct a sound and powerful reigning base. China has dispatched more than 3 million officials, from all kinds of departments, to rural areas since 1994 to rectify local Party institutions. Over 356,000 slack and stagnant rural Party organizations at the grass-roots level have been revived. Moreover, education and training programs have equipped nearly 20 million rural members and leaders in basic-level Party units with one or two practical agricultural skill. Their awareness and capability of mobilizing rural people to develop local economy have also been improved. As the backbone of China's national economy, State-owned enterprises' (SOEs) healthy development is, to a large extent, based upon the leadership of the Communist Party of China. In recent years, a large number of SOEs have introduced various measures to consolidate the construction of their primary-level Party organizations while furthering the progress of SOE reform. Their efforts in inventing lively and attractive methods for promulgating the ideological work and implementing political tasks have helped unite workers more closely and improve the enterprises' competitiveness. On the other hand, the market economy and the SOE reform, both advancing at a fast speed in China, have in recent years jointly induced new trends, and even problems, in terms of CPC's self- building. The increasing number of non-public economic organizations, as well as laid-off CPC and migrant Party members, who do not have immediate superior administrative units to care their normal links with relevant Party organizations, are among the current difficulties that challenge the CPC's stable organizational mechanism. In recent years, as a result of the dramatic social changes, including the fact that the residential or street committees have now shouldered the tasks and functions of former enterprises and governmental set-ups, the quality of Party building in such communities, considered as the fundamental organs of a city, will directly influence the CPC's leadership in urban areas. The Shanghai Municipality, the birth place of the CPC 80 years ago, may set an example in handling such issues. A service center in the Caoyang Xincun residential committee has accepted a lot of Party members who are either laid-off or do not have specific Party units to be affiliated with. The Shanghai Human Resources Service Center has also established a "New Economic Organizations Party Committee", accommodating over 4,100 Party members from 1,650 enterprises and companies in the city. Bao Fumin, an independent telefilm producer, could not forget the feeling of isolation and perplexity when he resigned from his original studio. "I feet at home now I am a member of the Party Committee," Bao said, "and I'm supported all the time by the power of the Party." "It has been repeatedly proved by history that the Party's leadership is indispensable," Gao Yucheng, a veteran Party member said. "We must strengthen the building of CPC organizations at the grass-root level to give free rein to the role of each Party members in the new situation." **** Iran Opposes US Military Presence in Persian Gulf Iran has strongly denounced the current full military readiness alert of the U.S. naval fleet in the Gulf, the official IRNA news agency reported on Sunday. "Even though this particular readiness is unrelated to Iran, our standing policy has always been against the presence of foreign military forces in the Persian Gulf," Iran's Deputy Foreign Minister for Euro-American Affairs Ali Ahani was quoted as saying. The U.S. has said that its military forces have remain stationed in the Gulf "to maintain security in the region, which is still threatened by Iraq". Its naval fleet in the Gulf has recently been in full alert " perhaps due to the threats received by several American embassies in the region from Osama Bin Laden", a Saudi millionaire who has been accused of masterminding the bomb blasts at the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in August 1999, which claimed the more than 200 lives. In an interview with a local English newspaper, Ahani warned that "the continued presence of these forces is detrimental to the stability of the region and the national interests of the Persian Gulf countries." Ahani said that Iranian armed forces are ready to defend their country's territorial integrity and national sovereignty in case of any provocation by U.S. forces or any other foreign powers. He warned the U.S. think twice before instigating and undertaking any further military provocation and action. Iran and the U.S. severed relations in 1980 after the seizure, by some Muslim students, of the U.S. embassy in Tehran following the 1979 Islamic Revolution. By accusing Iran of sponsoring terrorism, seeking to sabotage Arab-Israeli peace efforts and committing human rights abuses, Washington has imposed a hostile policy towards Iran. _________________________________________________ KOMINFORM P.O. Box 66 00841 Helsinki Phone +358-40-7177941 Fax +358-9-7591081 http://www.kominf.pp.fi General class struggle news: [EMAIL PROTECTED] subscribe mails to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Geopolitical news: [EMAIL PROTECTED] subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] __________________________________________________
