This is Beijing-Beijing English blog

It will be the New Year Holiday for us tomorrow. And the Holiday plan in 2009 in China is as below:

一、New Year Holiday：Jan 1st-3rd, 3 days.

二、Spring Festival：Jan 25th-31th, 7 days.

三、Qingming Festival：Apr 4th-6th, 3days.

四、Labour Day Festival：May 1st-3rd, 3 days.

五、Dragon Boat Festival：May 28th-30th, 3days.

六、National Day and Mid Autumn Day: Oct 1st-8th, 8 days.

When i read news from the internet, i found the the report that the Google PR rank would be  updated . And this time most Chinese website PR rank went down.

I checked my blog PR rank, i found that the PR rank was 3. It is a good news to me. I run this blog just want to provide some information about Beijing to the people who are interested in Beijing. And i am very interested in the WordPress. So “this is beijing” based on WordPress appeared.

Before last update time in Oct, my blog PR rank is just 1 and after the update, there is no change.  But lots of  Chinese website’ PR rank rise last time.

[#3: Edit Options>MightyAdsense>Adsense Code]

China’s capital will spend 1 billion yuan (about US$147 million) to build new tourist attractions over the next two years, Deng Minshan, chief of the economic and trade section of the municipal development and reform commission, said on Monday.

Existing tourist zones, including those based on traditional culture, modern entertainment and nature, will be upgraded, he said.

Tourism generates 7 percent of the city’s gross domestic product.

The city now has 826 star-rated hotels, ranking first in China.

From 2001 to 2007, overseas tourist arrivals rose a cumulative 52 percent. Beijing hosted 4.36 million overseas tourists last year, from whom it took in US$4.58 billion.

During that period, the city saw gains of 30 percent and 98 percent in domestic tourist arrivals and related revenue, respectively. It hosted 143 million domestic tourists and netted 175.4 billion yuan last year.

The city hopes for 400 billion yuan in total tourism revenue in 2012, which would be almost double its revenue for 2007. Beijing also aims for average growth of 7 percent for overseas tourism and 5 percent for domestic tourism in the next four years.

By 2012, overseas tourist arrivals could total 6.1 million, and they are projected to spend US$7.5 billion. Domestic tourist arrivals will amount to 183 million, generating 350 billion yuan.

Now the Chinese domain is growing fastly in China. As the Chinese domain can provide a more efficient communicaton and can expand company’s businesses through the Internet. And statistics from the CNNIC (China Internet Network In Information Center) show that as of the end of last year, the number of Chinese Internet users was over 253 million. However, more than 1 billion Chinese people have no access to the Internet at all. By the first half of next year, Chinese will follow English as the language of the universal domain labeling system.

However, what will be the specific changes created by the upcoming Chinese domain names? For the universal international domain name system (“. com”, “. net” and “. org”), it will add new Chinese domain names before the top-level domain label – such as “Chinese name . com”.

ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) will be in charge of the registration and administration for these domain names.

For China’s domain name system (“.cn”), there will be three kind of new Chinese domain names:

First, it will change the top-level domain names with Chinese characters – such as “.Zhongguo (means China)”.

Second, it will change the second-level domain names with Chinese characters – such as “Chinese name. cn”.

Finally, it will change both the top-level and second-level domain names with Chinese characters – such as “Chinese name.Zhongguo”.

CNNIC will be responsible for its registration and administration.

So far, China’s government specifies four Chinese character domain names as the first candidates which are “.Zhongguo (means China)”, “.Gongsi (means company)”, “.Wangluo (means Internet) and “.CN”, which is the original domain name in China’s domain name system.

By the first half of 2009, when the Chinese domain names are involved in the international top-level domain name system, Chinese literate people around the world will also be able to surf the Internet with all these new Chinese domain names.

And once they successfully register a Chinese domain name, customers will own an email account with the same Chinese name.

According  to the report of the Beijing Times about the  2008 Scientific and Comprehensive Rating Report on Chinese Cities,  Beijing is ranked fourth, behind Shanghai, Hangzhou and Wuxi.

According to some official person,  Beijing ranks first in terms of living standards, but its economic and social development are relatively low. Its final composite index is 0.6798, lagging behind first-place Shanghai’s score of 0.6922 with a difference of 0.0124.

The top 10 cities are Shanghai, Hangzhou, Wuxi, Beijing, Dongguan, Tianjin, Shenzhen, Suzhou, Jinhua and Ningbo.

The year of 2008 will be passed and the 2009 is coming.  As the business of our company not bad, our boss arrange the annual party for the company. Though we know that some company face lots of diffculty during the financial crisis. Some of the employee face the risk of unemployment.

So we are lucky!

The day before yesterday, some college students formed ” free hug team”. They gave free hug to the passengers. At first, the passengers were ill at ease. But after some time, some young people began to hug with the students initiatively.

One of the students said that they wanted to let people feel closer through this activity.