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Housing price in 70 major Chinese cities jumped by 10.5 percent in November, according to an official with the country’s top economic planning body.

The growth rate was the largest monthly rise since July 2005 when China started to cover more cities in its monthly housing price survey.

From January to November, housing price grew by 7.3 percent year-on-year, with price of new homes jumping 7.9 percent, Cao Changqing, director of the pricing department under the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), said in an online interview on Thursday.

The skyrocketing housing price, driven up by speculation and growing demand, has become a major concern of common Chinese citizens.

“Despite falling sales, housing prices in parts of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen still remain high,” he said.

Housing price is expected to remain stable as the macro-control policies are starting to yield results, Cao said.

In recent years, the Chinese government introduced a string of policies to cool off the red-hot real estate market, including raising the down payments for second-house to 40 percent from 20 percent.

A RALLY across the board pushed the Shanghai index higher in the early session today with technology stocks leading the way and industrial shares driven by profit reports.

The Shanghai Composite Index, which tracks yuan-denominated A shares and hard-currency B shares, added one percent, or 52.53 points, to 5,285.88 at 11:30am today.

Winners in the Shanghai market outnumbered losers 537 to 213 and 96 were unchanged.

The Shenzhen Composite Index, which covers the smaller mainland stock market, gained 1.34 percent, or 19.26 points, to 1,452.32.

China United, which controls the nation’s second-largest cell-phone operator, jumped 8.11 percent, or 0.92 yuan (13 US cents), to 12.27 yuan.

China’s government has supported the development of TD-SCDMA mobile phone technology to compete with W-CDMA and CDMA2000. It is poised to award licenses for networks to offer so-called 3G phone services during the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.

The technology represents “a major thrust in the future of China’s information technology,” China’s State Council said in a statement yesterday, without giving details.

“The implementation of the technology raises the competitiveness and innovation of China’s wireless communication industry.”

Meanwhile, industrial stocks also contributed to the rally this morning after the National Statistics Bureau said Chinese industrial companies’ profits rose 36.7 percent in the first 11 months, outpacing the gain a year earlier.

Datang Power, China’s second-biggest electricity producer by market value, surged 6.01 percent, or 1.13 yuan, to 19.92 yuan, extending a seven-day rise. The company jumped 8.55 percent yesterday.

Aluminum Corp of China Ltd, known as Chalco and the nation’s biggest maker of the lightweight metal, advanced 2.40 percent, or 0.96 yuan, to 40.94 yuan. Parent Aluminum Corp of China will probably post a record profit of more than 20 billion yuan this year, China Nonferrous Metals News reported, citing company data.

The statistics bureau said today that combined industrial net income climbed to 2.3 trillion yuan. That’s more than the almost 31 percent increase through November 2006. Sales jumped 27.6 percent to 35.5 trillion yuan.

China, the world’s fourth-biggest economy, is trying to cool spending on factories to curb environmental damage and also the risk of industrial overcapacity and bad loans should demand for exports slow.

The government this month raised borrowing costs to a nine-year high and ordered the biggest increase in four years in the proportion of deposits that banks must set aside as reserves.

Meanwhile, Airlines recovered from yesterday’s loss and climbed this morning after the yuan rose the most since China ended a fixed exchange rate to the US dollar in 2005 as the central bank sought to curb inflation.

Air China, the world’s biggest airline by market value, edged up 0.79 percent, or 0.21 yuan, to 26.73 yuan. China Southern inched up 0.67 percent, or 0.18 yuan, to 26.87 yuan.

The yuan climbed 0.38 percent to 7.3162 to the US dollar at 9:55am in Shanghai, according to the China Foreign Exchange Trade System. It rose as much as 0.43 percent.

After booming in recent years, China’s real estate market is finally beginning to feel the pinch from sagging demand and tighter controls.

One of China’s biggest real estate agencies, Chuanghui Real Estate, has shuttered dozens of outlets in Shanghai and other cities, leaving behind angry customers and employees, following an ill-timed expansion just as the market was peaking.

Several other agencies around the country also have closed down or scaled back.

So far, the retrenchment appears to be mainly limited to property brokers - the businesses first to feel the pinch when people stop buying new homes, for whatever the reason. But the moves could herald the beginning of a broader slowdown in one of Asia’s hottest real estate markets.

The government has been wrestling to get control of the property sector, worried that rising prices for housing are pushing poorer Chinese out of the market at a time when overall inflation is surging.

Regulators stepped up curbs on the property market last year, alarmed that “bubbles” in property prices could collapse and trigger a financial crisis.

Those efforts are starting to take effect. While urban housing prices in December rose 10.5 percent from a year earlier, a sharp slowdown in sales transactions in recent weeks suggests a new trend.

In the first week of 2008, home sales in Beijing fell 20 percent compared with the previous week, the newspaper China Securities News reported. Sales were off 38 percent in Shenzhen and 52 percent in east China’s Nanjing, it said.

“At the peak, the sales volume was several hundred, even a thousand a day,” said a salesman for property broker Centaline China in the southern city of Shenzhen, who gave only his surname, Wang. “Nowadays, volume is very low, with only a couple of apartments changing hands each day.”

Realtors say the slowdown started in the autumn. But for reasons such as land supply and property hoarding by developers, the impact hasn’t been seen yet in prices.

So far, there are no signs of a mortgage meltdown in China similar to that seen in the US, and experts don’t foresee property prices falling substantially. Strong economic growth and surging demand from upwardly mobile families are supporting demand, especially for newly built housing.

But business is slowing, especially for the so-called “second-hand” apartments that are the lifeblood of local realtors in this newly commercialized market.

“In 2008, we think property developers will face some liquidity problems and financing issues,” Matthew Kong of ratings agency Fitch Asia Corporates said in a teleconference briefing Friday.

In November, Shenzhen-based Zhongtian Real Estate closed down amid reports its CEO had gone into hiding. Last month, Shenzhen-based Changhe Real Estate and Beijing-based Xinyitian closed dozens of branches.

Until a decade ago, China’s housing was mainly owned by the government and by state companies, and leased to workers at nominal rates. Since then, the state has sold most of those apartments to their occupants at subsidized rates, privatizing the market and creating a new class of home owners.

The property market took off after 2000. For more than three years, authorities have been trying to cool the market by raising taxes and tightening restrictions on sales of residential property.

“They don’t want the bubble to suddenly go bust,” said Fitch’s Kong. “The government is determined to stop that trend.”

The main target has been speculative property trading, or flipping, mainly by well-off locals and outside investors from other provinces including Taiwan.

The crackdown also may be aimed at curbing rampant fraud in housing lending, reports suggest.

China Central Television’s “Economic Half-Hour” program recently featured the story of a man named Fu Yongde whose identity was allegedly stolen by a property development company in order to obtain a fraudulent $138,000 loan for nonexistent property.

Still, huge inflows of investment kept the market lively until late last year.

Since then, trading volumes have dropped by nearly three-quarters compared with a year earlier, said Zhang Min, head of corporate planning at Chuanghui’s headquarters in Shenzhen.

“The government’s credit tightening has really affected the real estate market,” Zhang said. “The entire industry is in crisis.”

Zhang said his company had cut the number of outlets by 1,100 to 700 after an expansion that its chairman, Lin Fenghui, described in an online interview on Sohu.com as “too fast and too big.”

Zhang said Chuanghui was selling some branches to help weather its “temporary financial difficulty,” but denied it is facing bankruptcy.

“We are taking effective measures to solve the problem,” Zhang said. “The money customers left with us will be safe.”

China’s energy saving effort succeeded in meeting their basic goals last year, but the nation still has a long way ahead in ensuring a sustainable energy supply, a senior energy official said Wednesday.

Xu Dingming, vice director of the Office of National Energy Leading Group (NELG), made the remarks Wednesday at the Coal-Gen Sustainability China forum in Beijing.

He quoted primary statistics as saying that last year, China was expected to consume 2.65 billion tons of standard coal equivalent, up 7.8 percent from 2006. But consumption growth slowed by 1.81 percent year-on-year. Energy consumption per unit of GDP was 1.1663 tons of standard coal equivalent, down 3.27 percent from 2006. That decline was 1.94 percent faster than the year before. In 2007, the country saved a notable 89.77 million tons of standard coal equivalent in energy.

According to China’s 11th Five-Year Plan, it aims to cut energy consumption per unit of GDP by 20 percent from 2005 before 2010 by improving resources, utilizing efficient technology, and saving energy.

Meanwhile, the nation’s energy policy moved forward last year, according to Xu.

Last December, the NELG released a draft of the first Energy Law and solicited public opinion on its website. The draft was received warmly.

“Since then, the government has listened to advice from energy experts both at home and abroad,” Xu said. “Taking these opinions seriously, the NELG is now making adjustments to the draft, and will soon submit it to the State Council.”

However, he warned that the energy industry should remain cool at all times and think in the long term as far as the nation’s energy development strategy and energy security.

Crude oil futures at the New York market hit a fresh record high Tuesday, as the light crude contract for April delivery settled at over $100 a barrel again. Analysts said to continue to expect three digit prices, and energy prices will attract more attention worldwide.

Moreover, this month’s snowstorms in southern provinces also tested the nation’s energy supply system, triggering more thoughts about the consequences of massive power strain.

In China’s first energy white paper last December, the government pledged to develop the coal industry in an orderly way, while exploring more renewable energy sources such as hydro, nuclear, solar and wind energy to meet the growing needs of the nation’s booming economy.

However, renewable energy doesn’t mean frugality can be neglected, according to Xu. Energy saving is not only a responsibility of the government, but is also a symbol of social progress and the progress of mankind in general.

He suggested that people begin to save energy in details, such as driving less and refraining from too much air-conditioning. “Good consumption habits did contribute a lot to energy saving,” said Xu.

Convened by the Allied Resource Allocator (ARA), an international management service organization, the forum is part of its Asia energy dialogue series aiming to boost exchanges on sustainable energy development among power companies, experts and officials. The meeting is scheduled to last until Friday.

America’s jet stream is heading north and getting weaker, which may mean less rain in the drought-stricken South and Southwest and more storms in the North, new research reveals.

The northern jet stream “is the dominant thing that creates weather systems for the United States,” said study co-author Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Stanford, California. “Basically look south of where you are and that’s probably a good guess of what your weather may be like in a few decades.”

The data could also translate into more and stronger hurricanes since the jet stream suppresses their formation. The study’s authors said they have to do more research to pinpoint specific consequences.

From 1979 to 2001, the Northern Hemisphere’s jet stream moved northward on average at a rate of about 1.25 miles a year, according to the paper published Friday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The authors suspect global warming is the cause, but have yet to prove it.

The jet stream is a high-speed, constantly shifting current of air about 30,000 feet above the ground that guides storm systems and cool air around the globe. And when it moves away from a region, high pressure and clear skies predominate.

Two other jet streams in the Southern Hemisphere are also shifting poleward, the study found.

The study looked at the average location of the constantly moving jet stream and found that when looked at over decades, it has shifted northward. The study’s authors and other scientists suggest that the widening of the Earth’s tropical belt ?w a development documented last year ?w is pushing the three jet streams toward the poles.

Dian Seidel, a research meteorologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who wrote a study about the widening tropical belt last year, said she was surprised that Caldeira found such a small shift. Her study documented that the tropical belt was bulging at a much faster rate. Caldeira said his figures represent the minimum amount of movement.

A tiny star only a third of the sun’s mass and 1 percent as bright, recently released what is considered the brightest burst of light ever seen from a normal star other than the sun, astronomers announced Monday.

On April 25, the red dwarf star, known as EV Lacertae, unleashed a mega-flare, packing the power of thousands of solar flares. The flare was first seen by the Russian-built Konus instrument on NASA’s Wind satellite in the early morning hours of April 25. Two minutes later, Swift’s X-ray Telescope caught the flare. The star remained bright in X-rays for eight hours before settling back to normal.

It would have been visible to the naked eye if the star had been easily observable in the night sky at the time. EV Lacertae’s constellation, Lacerta, is visible in the spring for only a few hours each night in the Northern Hemisphere.

“Here’s a small, cool star that shot off a monster flare,” said Rachel Osten, a Hubble Fellow at the University of Maryland, College Park and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “Flares like this would deplete the atmospheres of life-bearing planets, sterilizing their surfaces.”

The star, with an estimated age of a few hundred million years, has a history of flares, though none as bright as the most recent one.

The giant flares are powered by energy stored in EV Lacertae’s magnetic field, say NASA scientists involved in the recent discovery. The star rotates once every four days, much faster than the sun’s four-week rotation. The star’s quick rotation generates strong localized magnetic fields, about 100 times as powerful as the sun’s.

Since EV Lacertae is 15 times younger than the sun, it provides a window into our solar system’s early history, scientists say. Younger stars rotate faster and generate more powerful flares. So in its first billion years, the sun must have let loose millions of energetic flares that would have profoundly affected Earth and the other planets.

China has taken a series of increasingly aggressive measures in the past several months to blunt the impact of so-called “hot money,” amid the explosive growth of its foreign exchange reserves, which have soared beyond what can be explained by trade and investment flows.

The inflows have been so massive as to raise alarms over the country’s financial security.

According to the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE), as of the end of May, forex reserves stood at 1.797 trillion U.S. dollars.

During the first five months of 2008, forex reserves increased by 18.7 percent year-on-year, or 268.7 billion U.S. dollars, SAFE figures showed.

Where is all that money coming from, and where is it going?

What caught the attention of analysts was that forex reserves jumped at the same time as the current-account surplus and foreign direct investment (FDI) into the fixed-asset field declined year-on-year.

Set against the increased forex reserves in the first five months of this year, there was the 78.02 billion U.S. dollars represented by the trade surplus, which was down 8.6 percent year-on-year.

Another 42.78 billion U.S. dollars was connected with FDI in the first five months, which soared nearly 55 percent year-on-year. But FDI going into fixed assets (longer-term investment), actually fell 3.5 percent in the same period.

Jiang Zheng, a macro-economist at a Beijing-based securities firm, has closely tracked these figures and analyzed the data.

Deducting the trade surplus and the FDI, there was an unexplained 147.9 billion U.S. dollars in the forex reserve increase figure, which Jiang and numerous other analysts consider to be “hot money”, which is usually defined as short-term global speculative funds moving among financial markets in search of the highest short-term return.

The government doesn’t release official figures on this category of funds; in fact, it doesn’t even use the term “hot money”. So analysts can only make estimates.

Jiang said the “hot money” figures deduced by analysts might even be underestimates. “There is a tricky decline among the FDI figures, i.e. the drop of fixed-asset investment,” he explained.

“Foreign direct investment in the first five months soared about 55 percent. But strangely, fixed-asset FDI in the first five months fell 3.5 percent from last year’s figure,” Jiang said.

Jiang said it appeared that some speculative money had managed to move into China in the guise of FDI.

But there are many other channels for “hot money” to flow into China. These include falsified international trade with over-invoiced exports and underground private banks, according to Jiang.

Jiang and other analysts maintained that as much as 600 billion U.S. dollars in “hot money” had surged into the country, most of it after 2005.

Jiang said he was somewhat surprised at the scale of “hot money” inflows in the first five months of this year. The monthly inflow of “hot money” from January-May was estimated at 35 billion U.S. dollars, more than double the 15 billion U.S. dollar figure for the same period last year, Jiang said.

In April alone, deduction showed that a record 50.2 billion U.S. dollars of “hot money” poured into China, he said.

Many will ask why such huge sums of “hot money” have been continuing to flood into China and where it is going.

Li Yang, head of the Financial Research Institution at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the disparity between Chinese and U.S. interest rates, the appreciation of the Chinese currency (the yuan) since 2005 and the profits from the Chinese capital and real estate markets were the main causes of the unstoppable “hot money” inflows.

Since the start of the global financial crisis, which surfaced last summer with problems in the U.S. subprime mortgage market, the U.S. Federal Reserve has since September cut interest rates seven times to stimulate economic growth. The Fed funds target rate has fallen from 5.25 percent to the current 2 percent.

In contrast, the People’s Bank of China (PBOC, the central bank), hiked interest rates six times between March and December 2007 to cool economic growth, with the one-year deposit rate rising from 2.52 percent to the 4.14 percent.

These opposing actions created a disparity that helped to lure global speculative money to into China at an accelerated pace this year.

The women’s doubles has improved rapidly and the Chinese women’s players need to do their best to defend the title they had won four years ago, said China’s tennis head coach Jiang Hongwei on Monday.

Chinese tennis moved into a fast lane since Li Ting/Sun Tiantian’s epic women’s doubles triumph at the Athens Games, notably Zheng Jie making the last four in this year’s Wimbledon and claiming two Grand Slam doubles titles with long-time partner Yan Zi in 2006.

“Women’s doubles changed a lot since and the WTA has raised the ranking points and the prize money for the event, so more and more players get involved and the rivalry has become tight,” said Jiang at the Olympic Green Tennis Centre where the Olympic tennis event will be held during Aug. 10-17.

The Chinese women’s team went to North China’s Tianjin for final assault towards the Beijing Games since the players finished the Wimbledon competition.

The three-week-long camp was completely behind-door as the Chinese team needed to get away from the media hype. “When we came back from the Wimbledon, we were just stunned by the noisy media at the airport. The players need to calm down ahead of the Games,” Jiang said. “Keep a cool mind helps shrug off the pressure.”

China’s tennis girls suffered a major setback in 2007 when Zheng’s left ankle was badly injured in the French Open while former top 20 player Li Na was hurt in the rib.

The two players were rested for almost half a year before they tested their form early this season.

Li claimed the Gold Coast title in January while Zheng joined Yan again to make two consecutive finals ahead of the Australian Open and claimed the Sydney title, their 11th of their career.

“We posed challenge towards other duos four years ago, but now the situation is reversed. Zheng/Yan is under the spotlight while other players are lurking around, so the competition will be a hard-fought one.”

Zheng and Yan are looked at as the heaviest favorites of China in tennis event and the host country also need them to fuel the medal drive to charge the top of the medal tables.

Chuang Chia-Jung and Chan Yung-Jan from Chinese Taipei, ranked seventh and eighth separately in the doubles, are the most consistent duo in the top 20 doubles players. The Taipei duet, who kept a 3-0 record over Zheng and Yan in 2007, will be expected to cause trouble for the Chinese contingent.

“It was not only the Chinese Taipei team, many other teams are hard to beat. It’s possible for anybody to win the doubles title.”

The doubles event has a 32-team field with America’s Williams sisters and Lindsay Davenport/Liezel Huber, Russia’s Svetlana Kuznetsova/Dinara Safina and Elena Vesnina/Vera Zvonareva, and Spain’s Medina Garrigues/Ruano Pascual also eyeing the medals.

Chinese electronic music pioneer Neebing teamed up with sculptor Zhong Song for this designer club. Its wood interior layers like rice terraces creating the ultimate restaurant/club for the Beijing’s art, design and music cliques. With delicious food, impeccable cocktails and awesome music, Song is the nexus of Beijing cool.

The central government is closely monitoring the property market after 18 cities including Shanghai launched various measures to arrest falling property sales, a senior official said Thursday.

Speaking on the sidelines of a press conference in Beijing, Du Ying, vice-minister of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), said: “Real estate is a major sector in our fixed-asset investment, so the government is closely watching its development.”

His comments came after the Shanghai municipal government raised by one fifth the mortgage ceiling of the housing accumulation fund, into which employees deposit money every month in return for lower interest rates. The measure took effect on Wednesday.

“New measures by other cities are exciting news for us,” Shanghai Vice-Mayor Yang Xiong said at the same press conference.

“We will continue to study necessary and controllable policies based on changes in the economy and property market. We aim to keep the property market stable.”

Rescue policies aiding the real estate market have been announced in 18 cities.

Favorable offers include raising government funding for homebuyers and extending the time limit for developers to use their acquired land.

The country’s property market began to cool in the fourth quarter of last year, with transactions remaining low.

But analysts are reserved on what these moves mean.

Qin Xiaomei, research chief at CB Richard Ellis’ Beijing branch, said: “It’s hard to say that now is the time the government has to save the real estate market, as there is still room for property prices to fall.”

Although property prices in most cities have fallen month-on-month recently, the year-on-year indexes are still going up, Qin said.

According to figures from the NDRC, prices in 70 major cities have climbed 5.3 percent year-on-year, but the growth rate was 1.7 percentage points lower than that for July.

“Meanwhile, developers who grabbed land parcels in 2005 or 2006 are still enjoying good profit margins despite the current price drop. And they should now cut prices to meet consumers’ wallets,” Qin said.

Many buyers, however, are waiting for prices to fall.

Yin Lijin, a resident of Shanghai’s Pudong new district, where the average monthly salary is about 6,000 yuan, said Thursday: “Apartments in my favorite areas still cost more than 20,000 yuan ($2,900) per sq m.

“I’ll have to wait until they fall to about 10,000 yuan.”

Qian Wei, who together with her fiance in Beijing’s Haidan district make 15,000 yuan a month, said: “Friends who are familiar with the market told us the price may be lower early next year.”

But agents have disagreed.

“Secondhand apartments haven’t dropped much. Owners still want high bids,” a salesperson with real estate broker 5i5j said.