Cooperation zones Central authorities have issued a general plan for building a Guangdong-Macao in-depth cooperation zone in Hengqin. The plan, issued by the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the State Council, was made public on Sunday. It said building the zone is a major arrangement to enrich the practice of “one country, two systems” and will be an important driving force for Macao’s long-term development. On Monday, China’s central authorities issued another new plan for further developing a cooperation zone for the southern metropolis of Shenzhen and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. According to the plan, the reform and opening up of the Qianhai Shenzhen-Hong Kong Modern Service Industry Cooperation Zone will be comprehensively deepened. Big data research center China established an International Research Center of Big Data for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Beijing on Monday. It is the world’s first international scientific research institution using big data to facilitate the implementation of the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development — a blueprint adopted by all U.N. member states in 2015 with 17 SDGs and 169 targets at the core for peace and prosperity. New stock exchange President Xi Jinping on Thursday said the country will set up a stock exchange in Beijing to serve small and medium-sized (SME) companies. “We will continue to support the innovation-driven development of small and medium-sized enterprises by ... setting up the Beijing Stock Exchange as the primary platform serving innovation-oriented SMEs,” Xi said in a video address at the Global Trade in Services Summit of the 2021 China International Fair for Trade in Services via video. China will build digital trade demonstration zones, explore the building of national demonstration zones to promote the innovative development of service trade, and support Beijing and other localities in piloting the alignment of domestic rules with the ones in high-standard international free trade agreements. COVID origin The cluster of COVID-19 infections at a seafood market in Wuhan, Hubei Province, in late 2019 was likely triggered by cold chain imports contaminated by the novel coronavirus, researchers from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention said. They found that dozens of foreign regions that had shipped cold food products to Wuhan, including the Huanan seafood market, overlapped with areas that reported very early traces of the virus, adding that more extensive testing is needed to establish a definitive association between the early circulation of the virus overseas and its entry into the market. (SD-Agencies) | 