China

reuters.com - January 20th 2015 - Kevin Yao and Pete Sweeney

China's economy grew at its slowest pace in 24 years in 2014 as property prices cooled and companies and local governments struggled under heavy debt burdens, keeping pressure on Beijing to take aggressive steps to avoid a sharper downturn.

European and Asian shares in fact rose on relief that the news was not worse; the Shanghai Composite index gained 1.85 percent, Japan's Nikkei 225 index saw its biggest one-day gain in a month and European markets rallied.

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REUTERS                                              Oct. 31, 2014
By Megha Rajagopalan

BEIJING, -- China will dispatch an elite unit of the People's Liberation Army to help Ebola-hit Liberia, the Foreign Ministry said on Friday, responding to U.N. calls for a greater global effort to fight the deadly virus in West Africa.

Washington has led the international drive to stop the spread of the disease...sending thousands of troops and committing about $1 billion, but Beijing has faced criticism for not doing enough although it is Africa's largest trading partner.

The PLA squad, which has experience from a 2002 outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), will build a 100-bed treatment center in Liberia, the first such facility in the three countries most impacted by Ebola to be constructed and run by a foreign country, said Lin Songtian, director general of the ministry's Department of African Affairs.

The center will be open for operation in a month's time, he told a briefing in Beijing. China will also dispatch 480 PLA medical staff to treat Ebola patients, he said.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/31/china-ebola-liberia_n_6080396.html

earth-policy.org - by J. Matthew Roney - July 8, 2014

China installed a world record amount of solar photovoltaics (PV) capacity in 2013. While this was the first time the country was the number one installer, China has led all countries in making PV for the better part of a decade. China now accounts for 64 percent of global solar panel production—churning out 25,600 megawatts of the nearly 40,000 megawatts of PV made worldwide in 2013—according to data from GTM Research. . .

. . . As demand for increasingly affordable solar power continues to climb around the world, GTM Research projects that China’s annual solar panel output will double to 51,000 megawatts by 2017, representing close to 70 percent of global production at that time.

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