As reported, the past 50 years have seen a swift development of the businesses of country credit cooperatives (hereinafter referred to as "cooperatives"). By the end of last April, the total deposit balance of "cooperatives" hit 1.58 trillion yuan, accounting for 12 percent of that of all the financial institutions, while the gross loan balance of them reached 1.05 trillion yuan, taking up 10 percent of China's total, with 65.5 percent gone to agriculture.

Dai Xianglong noted that "cooperatives" should regard the solution of difficulties in loans to farmers as the current central task and efforts should be concentrated on successfully solving the problem. He stressed that "cooperatives" should strengthen management, increase income and cut expenditure, and by 2005, the rate of bad loans should be kept below 20 percent and most of them should have by and large turned deficit into profit. A management system of "cooperatives" adaptable to the rural economic development should be established. During the "10th Five-year Plan" period, most "cooperatives" will be transformed into cooperative financial organizations serving cooperative members who hold shares and exercise democratic management, said Dai.

He also disclosed that "cooperatives" of China would soon launch an activity to rectify rural financial market order. A series of strict prohibitions will be enforced, such as designating shopping units, deducting interest while granting loans, providing goods as loans, and granting loans to local governments for advance payment of salary or outlay.

China Clones Scores of Plants, Pigs, Sheep, Rabbits, Cows
China has already developed 47 transgenic plant species, cloned goats and transplanted genes into pigs, rabbits, sheep and cows, according to an official report released Tuesday.

According to the report released by the Ministry of Science and Technology at a press conference in Beijing, that by the end of 1996, the transgenic plant species on which China had been researching reached 47, concerning 103 kinds of genes.

The report said that China has been successful to clone goats by adopting the fetus somatic cell of the transgenic goat and adult somatic cell. "The rate of success is 10-20 times as many as Sheep Doly," the report said.

China has also bred pigs, rabbits and sheep of growth hormone (GH) transfer. According to the report, the general rate of external source gene introduction into the animals was 2.1 percent, reaching the world's advanced level. "China has obtained remarkable achievement in animal cloning and transgenic animals," said the report, entitled "Present Status of the Chinese Hi-Tech Agriculture and Its Goal during the Tenth Five-Year Plan (2001-2005). "

The report said that through efforts in the past decade, China has made remarkable achievements in pest and disease resistance, quality improvement, herbicide resistance and security control in genetic engineering of plants.

According to the report, China has reached the world's advanced level in the research field of improving crops with radiation and of the application of nucleon tracing technique to agricultural chemicals. Among the mutation breeds which have been cultivated, ten have won national invention awards.

(People's Daily 05/30/2001)