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As we dumped our backpacks on the platform at Beijing West Railway Station and looked at the train, my friend remarked: “It looks so romantic.” The dark-green train was gently lit by a dim autumn light and smartly dressed guards standing next to the carriages gave it a sophisticated edge. Dressed only in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, I felt a little under-dressed for the 30-hour journey to the Mongolian capital of Ulan Bator.

There was already a lot of activity on the station and more and more passengers were beginning to crowd on to the platform. In front of us, one stern-faced female guard checked passenger tickets as a vendor sold last-minute items like fruit, nuts and water from a wooden cart nearby. The train blew its whistle.

My friend and I had been planning a train journey from Beijing to St Petersburg for many years. We had chosen to travel now because I was moving to London and wanted to approach England overland through Asia and my friend was a PhD student looking for a study break. We had traveled separately before but were now in the mood for a proper adventure and a railway journey seemed ideal.

As we stood on the platform looking at the train, I admit that the scene did look cinematic. However, while train journeys are deliciously slow, invite contemplation and are about sharing vodka with fabulous strangers in the dining car, they are also smelly, cramped and hot and should never be called romantic.

The first leg of our journey was across the breath of Asia on the trans-Mongolian railway. After leaving Beijing the railway travels north through China, then cuts across Mongolia and the Gobi desert. It then winds through Siberia, the historic city of Irkutsk and Lake Baikal, the deepest and largest freshwater lake in the world.

At Ulan-Ude on Lake Baikal’s eastern shore, the trans-Mongolian railway meets the historic trans-Siberian railway, which connects the Russian cities of Vladivostok and Moscow. The line then continues on to St Petersburg.

The journey from Beijing to St Petersburg is more than 8,000 km and we chose to break up the journey over 21 days. We traveled on four different trains, with the longest journey being a 77-hour trip from Irkutsk to Moscow and perhaps the greatest exercise in patience that I have ever endured.

On the train to Ulan Bator, my friend and I were surprised at how quickly you settle into train life. It is very easy to sit for hours and be mesmerized by the endlessly barren landscape.

One of the highlights is the 5-hour stop as the train bogies are changed at the Mongolian and Chinese borders. Mongolia and Russia have a different gauge railway network to China and Europe.

After exploring the curious city of Ulan Bator - which has an expensive monument to the Beatles in the middle of the city - we traveled by bus across the grasslands to spend two nights in a traditional Mongolian tent or “ger”. We were repeatedly bombarded with images of Ghengis Khan, who is intimately linked to Mongolia’s sense of national identity, and whose name is used to sell everything from vodka to hotel rooms.

Afterwards, it’s back on the train for our journey toward the Russian border, Lake Baikal, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and Irkutsk, known as the “Paris of Siberia”.

By now that gentle chill that required a light jacket at Beijing West Railway Station has developed into frost and snow. It looks like poorly applied cake icing as the train whizzes through the endless nothingness.

Meanwhile, inside the carriage, the characters are as bright as a Tokyo night.

The entire rail network is set on Moscow time and the train dcor becomes more pink and kitsch the closer that you get to the Russian capital. The guards are well known for their abrupt, head-mistress attitude and it becomes a game to get anything more from them than a grunt.

The woman in charge of our carriage resembled many of the other female guards. Her make-up was thick, the perfume was strong and her large stature made it appear as through she would have no problem throwing vodka-fuelled passengers from the train. She insisted on keeping the window blinds closed all the time and refused to turn the temperature gauge below 30 C.

Sometimes for a change of scenery we would head to the dining car where passengers had similar experiences with guards in their own carriages. We laughed and shared vodka and stories about our evil guards, who were probably just fed up with the passengers. After stumbling back through several carriages to the cabins, the train gently rocked you to sleep.

The border crossings are tedious and can take up to 12 hours, sometimes in the middle of the night. The luggage of Chinese and Mongolia traders and of foreign travelers is checked more carefully than others. You learn early in the journey that the toilets are locked for 20 minutes before and after you reach each stop.

From Irkutsk, the train passes through industrial cities and the Ural mountains before arriving in Moscow where you can explore the Kremlin, Red Square and St Basil’s Cathedral.

As the train travels further into Russia you encounter more of the young Russian soldiers returning from Vladivostok and more Babuskas who sell dumplings and other delights on the platforms. Vodka is the common language on the train and the long journeys provide plenty of opportunity to make new friends over a drink. We learned too late in the journey that it is also a great way to get a smile out of the train guards.

There is food for sale in the dining car, which also offers more room than your cabin for reading or simply watching the scenery. Unfortunately I found the car offered little of the culinary delights I had come to expect from central Asia and Eastern Europe. Meals costs about 25-30 yuan and are delivered with the same affection displayed by the train guards.

Our fourth and final train took us to St Petersburg, one of the most beautiful cities in the world, to experience the opulence of the Hermitage Museum and the Summer Palace.

Train travel is an achingly, beautifully slow journey filled with eating, sleeping and reading. It is about patience and appreciation and it is also a very raw way to travel. It is not for those who want cocktails and long baths, but it definitely offers adventure.

“It felt like a big elephant on my chest,” is how Malaysia’s first astronaut described the feeling of gravitational force during his return to Earth on Tuesday after a computer glitch made his re-entry from space in a Russian capsule steeper than planned.

Dr. Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor, an orthopedic surgeon and university lecturer from Kuala Lumpur, touched down in Kazakhstan with two Russian cosmonauts on Sunday, about 200 km (120 miles) off course after a so-called “ballistic” descent.

That meant the capsule followed a much steeper and shorter trajectory to earth, creating more spin, a bumpier ride and much greater gravitational strain on its occupants.

Shukor was returning to Earth from an 11-day trip to the International Space Station (ISS), accompanied by outgoing station commander Fyodor Yurichkin and flight engineer Oleg Kotov, who both completed 197 days in space.

“It felt like a big elephant on my chest, I just couldn’t breathe,” said Shukor at his first news conference since returning from space.

Russian space agency officials said the ballistic descent was unplanned but not an emergency, and that all three men were in good health following preliminary medical tests.

Shukor said his yearlong training course had prepared him for such an event, and the eight seconds of physical discomfort were far outweighed by the joy of his space flight.

“I got a chance to see Malaysia from space, and it was the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in my life,” said Shukor at Russia’s space training base east of Moscow, where cosmonauts are debriefed after flights. “I’ve been living in a dream, a dream of all Malaysian people. I hope to be the eyes and ears of all Malaysian people and share my experiences.”

U.S. President Barack Obama said that he would like to see the United States play a leadership role on the issue of climate change when he met with German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the White House on Friday.

Meanwhile, the U.S. House of Representatives narrowly passed a climate bill — the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES Act) — by a vote of 219-212 after hours of heated debate.

The bill required U.S. companies to reduce from 2005 levels emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by 17 percent by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050.

The new move marks a major step for the U.S. government to cap and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, yet the United States still fell short of taking on its due responsibility as a developed country, much less its self-claimed “leading role” in tackling climate change.

The United States has been under wide criticism since the Bush administration withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol, which is aimed to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The initiative by Obama to readjust the U.S. policy on saving energy and cutting greenhouse gas emissions has served to improve U.S. image on the issue. But on the key issue of emission reduction commitment, Washington failed to give the international community a satisfactory answer.

The new U.S. bill, though containing some clauses on reducing fossil fuel use, makes no mention of the country’s responsibility to the world on the issue.

Moreover, by using 2005 as its baseline, the United States only needs to cut emissions by 4 percent from the 1990 levels, an internationally recognized basis.

Compared with the European Union’s commitment of a 20-percent reduction below 1990 levels by 2020, what the United States is doing in fact is only a play of numbers.

Some U.S. legislators went so far as to propose levying CO2 emission taxes on foreign products shipped into the United States. Experts noted that the consumers of the products rather than their manufacturers should pay CO2 tax. Such an attempt by U.S. legislators has nothing to do with “leadership role,” but only smacks of dodging U.S. responsibility in emissions reduction.

As the world’s biggest economy with the highest per capita carbon dioxide emissions, the United States has a direct bearing on global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Therefore, any substantive progress at the Copenhagen climate change talks scheduled for December this year will hinge, to a large extent, on whether Washington agrees to set mandatory emissions targets.

As France noted in a memorandum at the EU Environment Ministers’ Meeting on Thursday, the U.S. emission reduction commitment is far below the reasonable levels of a developed country. It urged the United States to follow suit and promise to slash its emissions by at least 20 percent from 1990 levels by 2020.

However, the call might well fall on deaf ears as the United States finds even the current commitment much too high. The narrow passage of the ACES Act revealed deep rifts between Democrats and Republicans over its possible impact on the U.S. economy. It remains to be seen whether the bill can survive the Senate vote at the end of this year.

The fate of the bill may well test the U.S. determination to play a leading role in the world to fight climate change.

The Year of the Rat has been a rough one for China’s richest, with fortunes being dragged down amid a 60% plunge in mainland stocks and a 50% drop in Hong Kong shares in 2008. The combined net worth of the 400 richest dropped to $173 billion from $288 billion. The top 40 lost $68 billion, or 57%. The minimum net worth slipped $20 million to $180 million.

We found 24 billionaires, down from a record 66 in 2007. These losses would have been greater had it not been for the renminbi’s 10% appreciation against the dollar.

Last year’s wealthiest person, real estate heiress Yang Huiyan, is this year’s biggest loser. Her net worth dropped $14 billion to $2.2 billion, still enough to rank third. There were plenty of other notable losers. The head of Nine Dragons Paper, Yan Cheung, who was China’s richest person in March 2007 and one of just 10 self-made billionaire women in the world, is now worth $265 million.

Meanwhile, Larry Yung, a member of one of the country’s most celebrated business families (his late father Rong Yiren was the nation’s vice president), lost more than half a billion dollars in one day recently after his Citic Pacific conglomerate announced $2 billion in losses from unauthorized currency bets.

Cheung Chung Kiu, the boss of C.C. Land, a developer focused on Chongqing, has lost 98% of his fortune. Ranked No. 26 last year, he is off our list of the richest Chinese entirely.

“You can’t really believe it,” says fellow property developer Zhang Xin of the upheaval. Zhang, who runs Soho China, is ranked 19th this year, worth $1.2 billion, one-third as much as she was in 2007.

Property has led the downturn as the government tightens credit to counter a bubble and prices have started to fall. But it is not the only sector hurting. The U.S. slowdown, combined with the appreciation of the renminbi and a draconian, socialist-style labor law that took effect this year, have further taken the wind out of manufacturing, especially in export hubs such as Guangdong and Zhejiang provinces.

“Exports are going to be hurt badly, and the economy will be lucky to grow by 4% to 5% next year at most,” perhaps the worst year since reforms started three decades ago, according to Horst Geicke, who manages $6 billion at Vina Capital in Hong Kong.

The consumer stimulus pledged by Premier Wen Jiabao won’t be enough to offset the overall export downturn, Geicke says, thus testing a generation of entrepreneurs who have known only boom times. Merrill Lynch predicted that China’s growth in 2009 will decline 8.5% to 9%, representing “the fastest slowdown that China has seen since the early 1990s.”

Despite the gloom and doom, a few tycoons managed to buck the downward trend. Liu Yongxing, whose agricultural feed business has fared well lately, returns to the top of our list, worth $3 billion. The biggest gainer was Zhou Chengjian, who climbed 351 ranks to the fifth spot, worth $2 billion, after he successfully listed his trendy apparel company, Shanghai Metersbonwe Fashion & Accessories, in August.

The stock of William Ding’s online gaming outfit, Netease, is up a third in the past 12 months, helping boost his fortune by $250 million, and the company recently signed a three-year contract with U.S. game developer Blizzard Entertainment to distribute StarCraft II and Battle.net in mainland China.

A look back two years at the 2006 list of the richest Chinese also puts the past year’s losses into perspective. Back then, the minimum net worth was $80 million less than it is today, and there were nine fewer billionaires. China’s wealthiest are also well positioned to take advantage of the downturn.

“The very lack of access to cash for smaller companies right now is going to help the bigger ones over time,” says Wang Chaoyang, who from Beijing manages about $300 million invested in Chinese stocks.

For her part, property tycoon Zhang declines to predict when the current down cycle will turn, but promises, “We’ll ride with the next wave.”

Methodology

To compile these rankings, a team of a dozen reporters interviewed members of the list, employees, competitors, investors, fund managers, real estate agents and securities analysts. We also sifted through documents and databases to determine value and ownership of assets.

For people with publicly traded fortunes, net worths were calculated using Oct. 17 stock prices and exchange rates. One exception: We knocked Citic Pacific’s Larry Yung’s net worth down by $550 million to reflect the company’s dramatic 55% stock drop the following week. For members whose companies are listed in both mainland China and Hong Kong, we mostly valued their holdings using prices from Hong Kong’s relatively open market.

Privately held fortunes were valued at book value or by coupling estimates of revenues, profits or book value to prevailing ratios for similarly publicly traded companies.

Unlike our annual billionaires list, the ranking has been broadened to include some family fortunes. In order to facilitate comparisons of success among businesspeople with similar backgrounds, we include a few entrepreneurs born in mainland China whose current citizenship is not with the People’s Republic of China but whose main source of wealth and/or residence is the mainland.

South Korean president-elect Lee Myung-bak said Thursday that his incoming administration will launch new policy in the country when he took office on Feb. 25 next year.

“Change in our times is the oxygen of our ear. Without change, it is impossible to become a fully developed economy or to construct a New Development economy. It is imperative to foster change that uplifts our nation’s destiny,” Lee said at a news conference with local and foreign media earlier Thursday.

EMPHASIS ON ECONOMIC GROWTH

“The Lee Myung-bak Administration promises to develop new engines of growth based on creativity. I will also create an environment where business can invest freely and without hindrance,” said Lee, who was elected president in Wednesday’s presidential polls.

Lee, a former Hyundai Engineering and Construction Co. CEO, is expected to adjust the current policy on taxation, restriction on investment of large conglomerates and real estates in a bid to shift the economic emphasis from the wealth distribution to growth.

He promised to achieve an annual economic growth rate of 7 percent, which allow 600,000 new jobs created, and double the country’s current per capita GDP of 20,000 U.S. dollars within 10 years, leading South Korea to the list of top 7 economies in the world.

CLOSER TIES WITH U.S., JAPAN

Lee set the restoration of the S. Korea-U.S. alliance based on the established friendship as one of the major goals of his administration.

Following a landslide victory in the elections on Wednesday, Lee of the conservative Grand National Party on Thursday visited the U.S. and Japanese ambassadors to South Korea to express his will to develop closer ties between South Korea and the two allies.

During the meeting with Alexander Vershbow, U.S. ambassador to South Korea, Lee pledged that his administration will work to reshape the South Korea-U.S. relationship.

Alexander confirmed that U.S. President George W. Bush was expected to call Lee later in the day to congratulate him on his election victory.

In a separate meeting with Japanese Ambassador to Seoul Toshinori Shigeie, Lee said he will work to improve Seoul’s ties with Tokyo, which have recently deteriorated due to territorial and historical disputes.

“I believe not only the relationship between the two nations but the overall relationship between nations in Northeast Asia must be improved,” Lee said.

SMALLER GOVERNMENT

Lee promised to establish a “smaller but efficient government” during his election campaign by reducing central administrative organizations and restricting the hiring of civil servants.

In a bid to cut government spending by 10 percent, he pledged to freeze the number of public servants at the current level and whittle down the current 56 ministries and smaller central government branches and restructure 416 government-affiliated committees.

WELFARE POLICY

Lee said on Thursday that the incoming administration will make efforts to help all those who reside in South Korea to live in happy.

“From birth to old age and every step in between, all of us deserve a quality life,” he promised.

He suggested earlier the provision of welfare services including “welfare-to-work” packages to reduce the widening income gap between the wealthy and poor families.

Lee said that economic prosperity and an overall improvement in the standard of living can both be achieved if conditions are met.

“Finding an alternative engine for growth, creating jobs through stimulating investment and putting a working welfare system in place are the three core elements for balanced growth,” he added.

INTER-KOREAN RELATIONS

Lee said his administration will persuade the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) to denuclearize within the framework of the six-party talks and boost the U.S.-DPRK dialogue.

“Through denuclearization on the Korean Peninsula, the South (Korea) and the North (DPRK) can foster a new era of cooperation,” he said. “The road towards peaceful unification is one that can be guaranteed by peace through co-existence.”

China’s fledgling semiconductor industry is withering amid a global economic downturn that has slashed consumer demand for televisions, computers and other electronics products that use chips.

“It’s a tough time,” said David Chang, chief executive of Semiconductor Manufacture International Corp, the biggest chip maker in China. “I believe the domestic industry will rebound before its overseas counterparts but, first, you have to survive until then.”

China’s integrated circuit industry is at risk of losing its footing after little more than a decade in operation.

Semiconductor Manufacturing, popularly known as SMIC, lost 124 million U.S. dollars in the fourth quarter of 2008, compared with a loss of 21 million U.S. dollars a year earlier. Plant utilization in December dropped 15 percentage points to 75 percent.

SMIC shares, listed in Hong Kong, closed at 0.30 HK dollars (0.04 U.S. dollars) on Wednesday, compared with 0.60 HK dollars a year ago.

SMIC was not alone in the industry’s winter of discontent. Many smaller chip makers and designers have gone belly-up or merged.

“It’s the most difficult year in the history of the industry,” research firm CCID Consulting said in a recent report.

The industry’s problems are mirrored in export data. In the first two months of this year, China’s electronics exports fell by about a quarter to 53.6 billion U.S. dollars, while overall shipments abroad slid about a fifth, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said last week.

Computer exports fell 21.1 percent and TVs were down 17.4 percent, according to the ministry.

In 2009, technology spending globally is forecast to drop 3.8 percent to 323 million U.S. dollars, the lowest since 2001 when the Internet bubble burst, according to Gartner Inc, a US-based IT consulting firm. Computer sales are expected to be the hardest hit, forecast to tumble almost 10 percent.

Chips are widely used in electronics, from TVs, computers and music players to game consoles, mobile phones and even automobiles. Chips, which control systems, store data and do calculations, are often called the brains within electronic gadgets.

Global decline

In 2008, China earned revenue of 610.17 billion yuan (89.7 billion U.S. dollars) from sales of integrated circuits. That is expected to grow 5 percent in 2009, the first single-digit growth in a decade, according to CCID.

The domestic market for chips is forecast to expand only 3 percent while the global market is expected to decrease 10 percent this year, said SMIC’s Chang.

Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing, a smaller Shanghai-based semiconductor manufacturer, posted a loss of 237 million yuan last year. Shanghai Belling, which is owned by the government, has sold its semiconductor arm to its parent Huahong Group to refocus on chip design.

State-owned Huahong, in turn, will merge with Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp to build a 12-inch wafer plant, incorporating the most advanced technology in the Chinese mainland.

Huahong and Grace declined to comment on the merger. Fu Wenbiao, former director of the Shanghai Economy and Information Technology Development Commission, has been appointed Grace’s chairman.

More than 100 Chinese chip design firms, 20 percent of the total, are expected to disappear within the next two years, according to iSuppli, a US-based IT consulting firm.

“They are struggling in the global economic crisis,” said Vincent Gu, a Shanghai-based analyst at iSuppli. “China’s young fabless (chip design) industry faces rigorous challenges such as reduced customer demand, poor cash flow and a flight of venture capital.”

Commit, a Shanghai-based 3G chip designer, closed it doors in April last year, citing a shortage of capital and the reluctance of investors to supply more funds.

In 2008, the semiconductor industry attracted investment of 16.9 billion U.S. dollars, almost half as much as a year earlier, according to Gartner.

The government is not turning a deaf ear to the industry’s plight.

In its 4 trillion yuan economic stimulus package, the government has earmarked funds to support technology industries, including semiconductors, flat-panel displays and next-generation mobile phones, according to Xiao Hua, an official with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

The government is also encouraging consolidation in the industry to form larger companies more resilient to the economic slump.

The growing third-generation phone market and a government scheme to provide subsidies for rural households to buy home and electronic appliances will help boost the chip market, industry insiders said.

Indeed, SMIC’s Chang said most of his company’s recent orders are related to products that will benefit under the rural stimulus plan.

Expansion in the mobile phone market, underwritten by a government investment of 280 billion yuan, may also help underpin information technology sectors, including chip makers and designers.

The president is no socialist. If anything, he’s an oligarch.
The tax protests are over and folks aren’t picketing the homes of AIG traders anymore. Barack Obama’s approval ratings remain high at 60.8% as measured by the Real Clear Politics average. Still, all the major polls tracked by Real Clear have majorities saying that the country is headed in the wrong direction, and Obama’s opposition is hardening around the question of the president’s socialist tendencies.

Are America’s most productive citizens being asked to care for the dispossessed? Are the winners forced to part with the spoils so that the society’s losers can coast through the recession? Is work being punished, are achievements scorned? Do we all have to revert into precocious high-schoolers and go back to underlining and dog-earing Ayn Rand novels and annoying our ex-hippie mothers?

No, no we don’t. Obama’s no socialist. An observer from Mars would think the man’s a downright oligarch. While the “angry white men” movement assembles into tea parties, the real anger should be felt by those on the left who have so far watched the president continue to follow an economic rescue plan that was outlined by George Bush and Hank Paulson. The only thing that Obama has socialized are the losses incurred by Wall Street’s major banks like Citigroup and Bank of America and, through the government’s continued willingness to write checks to AIG, foreign financial firms like SociétéGénérale and Deutsche Bank.

The yet to be launched Public Private Investment Partnership program, by which large institutional investors will use non-recourse loans from the U.S. taxpayer in order to buy toxic mortgage assets from struggling banks, is just another example of the oligarchy wrought by our so-called socialist president. Bill Gross, fund manager at PIMCO, helped design the darned program just months after PIMCO announced, in August 2008, that it was raising a $5 billion fund to buy mortgage securities.

But a few months later, Gross came up with a better idea–use public money to protect PIMCO against losses while reaping the spoils of investments that go well. Why are we giving PIMCO, a subsidiary of German life insurance company Allianz, a break? Maybe Angela Merkel should get Germany’s taxpayers to pay for this money manager welfare scheme.

The inspector general of the Treasury has concluded that the Public Private Partnerships could cost $2 trillion with most of the risk falling on the taxpayer, not the private investors. The private investors will turn out to be some of the largest asset managers in the world, including PIMCO and likely BlackRock and Colony Capital, and perhaps D.E. Shaw, the hedge fund firm that once employed Obama economic adviser Lawrence Summers.

If the plan works as Timothy Geithner intends and everyone makes money, the Treasury will get its loans back and some small return, but the private investors will make fortunes. Those money managers will, of course, be investing on behalf of clients. We have no idea who those parties will be yet, but likely candidates will be the world’s sovereign wealth funds. The returns from U.S. taxpayer-supported investments in devalued mortgage securities will flow to funds managed on behalf of governments in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. This isn’t socialism–it’s crony capitalism for the globalization era.

Ignore Obama’s critics who throw the “socialism” word around. Obama is a thoroughly middle of the road Democrat with an exceedingly mainstream view of business and economics. He believes in using economic policy to stimulate functioning markets. He only moved to regulate the pay packages of TARP recipients after a huge public outcry. He was blamed for fanning populist flames, but the flames were there before he opened his mouth. It’s more like he inhaled the smoke and coughed.

If Obama’s recovery plan works, the winners will be the executives at the richest and most powerful financial institutions in the world. There’s so much ire about the idea that one taxpayer might be asked to subsidize the failing mortgage of another but, in truth (and in the best case scenario) all taxpayers should look back at Obama’s actions in a few years and realize that what they really subsidized were the profits and ambitions of a radically wealthy elite. New Orleans hasn’t been rebuilt, but the government is hard at work on Greenwich, Conn., and Abu Dhabi.

Chinese leader Hu Jintao says China will extend a $10 billion loan to a regional group that also includes Russia and four Central Asian states.

The move adds muscle to China’s role in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

Hu spoke at a summit of the grouping in Russia. He said the loan is intended to shore up the struggling economies of its members amid the global financial crisis.

The Shanghai group includes impoverished Tajikistan. Kyrgyzstan, which borders China.

The bilateral events of the Year of China and of Russia are of historic significance and will lay the groundwork for the growth of bilateral relations in the new century, a leading China scholar in Russia said.

“China has really grown by leaps and bounds. Looking at the buildings from aboard an airplane, one would find Beijing and Shanghai second to none among the major cities in the world,” Mikhail Titarenko, director of the Far East Institute at the Russian Academy of Sciences, told Xinhua in an interview.

The 73-year-old academic made his first trip to China in the 1950s to study Chinese at Beijing University and has since visited China numerous times.

Titarenko also chairs the Russia-China Friendship Association. His office in Moscow is decorated with Chinese cultural ornaments, and a Chinese calligraphic scroll hung on the wall says: “China-Russia friendship is of long standing.”

“In the past half century, the two countries have witnessed brotherly ties but also had bitter memories. Now, Russia and China have established a new, unprecedented relationship, which is based on similar or identical standpoints on international issues, national security needs and the agreement of strategic interests and objectives of the two countries,” Titarenko said.

The Russian scholar said Russia and China respect each other, interact as equals and enjoy good relations.

“In recent years, Russians have been increasingly keen on learning about China,” he said, adding that the Chinese language, martial arts and paintings are popular among Russians.

“Of course, some people in Russia still have doubts over the firmness of Russia-China friendship, due to a lack of understanding and the lingering perceptions of the downturn in bilateral ties in history,” Titarenko said.

He said it was “correct” and “wise” for the leaders of the two countries to organize the Year of China and the Year of Russia.

The Year of Russia provided a chance for millions of Chinese to see a changing Russia, and the Year of China will help the notion of China being a friendly neighbor take root in Russia, Titarenko said.

During the Year of Russia last year, a total of 300 festivities were held in China, covering such areas as politics, economy, science, culture and education. Over 500,000 Chinese were directly involved in the festivities, which drew a total audience of hundreds of millions more.

This year will see nearly 200 “Year of China” events in Russia that include a Chinese national exhibition, a cultural festival, a business forum and an investment conference.

“Russia and China live as neighbors, which determines the irreversible trend in bilateral ties. History has proven that only by living in concord and joining forces can we overcome the difficulties that may rise,” Titarenko said.

Chinese archaeologists have discovered over 290 tombs, some of which date back 1,800 years, in Yanqing County, in the northern outskirts of Beijing.

Most of the tombs were built in the Han Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD)or Tang Dynasty (618-907),. Others are believed to belong to the Jin (317-581), Yuan (1271-1368), Ming (1368-1644) and Qing dynasties (1644-1911).

All the tombs, covering an area of 44,000 square meters, had underground chambers built of brick but the shape of their ceilings were unique to their dynasties.

The excavation was conducted by the Beijing Archaeological Research Institute from July to October in order to preserve the ancient relics in the area, where construction of living quarters is to start by the end of 2007.

The archaeologists also unearthed 870 historical artifacts, including pottery utensils, china objects, bronze basins, iron items, stone articles and jade ornaments, said Zhang Shiqun, an expert with the institute.

The unearthed funeral objects will be taken to display at museums and the grave area will be circled in a protection zone outside the construction project, Zhang said.

The most valuable discovery is that chamber walls of the Tang tombs were decorated with carved bricks that pattern windows, doors, pillars, lanterns and even a colored fresco representing a beautiful woman, according to Zhang.

The delicate brick carving shows that the Tang tomb owners were members of noble families, he said.

The artifacts will provide valuable clues for the study of how people lived as well as funeral customs of the different eras, the expert added. Research is continuing on the tombs and artifacts and there are no plans at present to display them to the public.