Bush to visit China next month to boost trade ties
From Max Lee
The Daily Mail’s
Special Correspondent in Beijing

BEIJING—US President George W. Bush will visit China in November as part of a trip to a region of increasing economic significance and strategic concern to the United States.
The White House said that before attending the November 18-19 Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in South Korea, Bush would visit Kyoto, Japan, on November 15 and meet with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi on November 16.
After the APEC meetings, Bush will go to Beijing on November 19, followed by Mongolia on November 21.
Bush, who previously visited Beijing in 2001 and 2002, is going to China at the invitation of Chinese President Hu Jintao, who has worked with the United States, South Korea, Japan and Russia to persuade North Korea to halt its nuclear weapons programs.
The trip coincides with simmering US concern over the rise of China on the global diplomatic stage and China’s growing economic and military clout.
Senior U.S. officials have expressed deep concern about China’s drive to lock up oil and raw material supplies from around the world, including from countries, like Iran, with which the United States is in conflict. Booming China is the third-largest importer of oil.
Hu had been scheduled to visit the White House in September for his first trip since taking the helm of the Communist Party in November 2002 but that visit was canceled so that Bush could focus on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
The two leaders, however, met on the sidelines of the United Nations summit in September when Hu said China was willing to work with Washington to ease a growing trade imbalance in China’s favor.
Bush will meet with South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun in Gyeongju on November 17, and hold bilateral meetings with other leaders at the APEC summit in Pusan, South Korea, the White House said.
“The president will continue his dialogue with APEC leaders on ways to promote free trade and economic growth, and deepen regional security cooperation,” White House spokesman Scott McClellan said in a statement.

World Heritage Forum blasts off
From Max Lee

BEIJING—China's latest step into the future, Shenzhou VI, has been called on by the President of the International Council on Monuments and Sites(ICOMOS), as an example of how his organization's work relates to the modern day.
"Our efforts here will be conducive to the preservation of the Shenzhou VI manned spaceship as a monument to human civilization," Michael Petzet, president of ICOMOS said, at a meeting ahead of the group's main conference.
The 15th Assembly of ICOMOS opened yesterday, a few hours after the successful landing of China's second manned spaceship Shenzhou VI.
Commenting on the achievements his Chinese colleagues have made in protecting the nation's heritage, Petzet said the convening of the ICOMOS assembly in Xi'an would help spread Chinese experience and knowledge worldwide.
"Here in Xi'an, we see the combination of ancient resplendence and modern dynamics," said Petzet, adding that this is what ICOMOS and its members have long been pursuing.
Established in 1965, ICOMOS is the only international non-government organization focused on protecting heritage. It is the main consultative organ of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization(UNESCO) in judging world heritage candidates.
Speaking at the assembly's opening ceremony, Sun Jiazheng, Chinese minister of culture, claimed the Chinese Government had spared no efforts in protecting heritage and the environment through laws, regulations and investment.
The ICOMOS meeting is billed as a chance for the nation to rethink the basic principles, measures and tools of practical conservation.
The theme of the ICOMOS assembly and the accompanying scientific symposium is "Monuments and Sites in their setting: Conserving cultural heritage in changing townscapes and landscapes”.
More than 1,000 delegates from around the world are participating in the ICOMOS assembly, submitting more than 500 papers about heritage protection.

Shanghai mega-building swaps design

SHANGHAI (China)—The Japanese builders of a Shanghai skyscraper that is to be one of the world’s tallest have scrapped plans for a round hole through its upper floors after Chinese complaints that it looked like Japan’s “rising sun” flag.
The newest design for the 101-story, 1,614-foot-tall Shanghai World Financial Center shown to journalists on Tuesday showed the circular hole replaced by a four-sided slot. Its developer, the Mori Building Co. of Tokyo, acknowledged receiving complaints but said the change was made for technical reasons.
“There was sensitivity,” said A. Eugene Kohn, chairman of the tower’s designer, Kohn Pederson Fox Associates. The developer’s president Minor Mori explained the change by saying that during lengthy planning delays in the 11-year-old project, he began to think the original design had “lost its freshness”.
Construction of the slender, wedge-shaped building began in the mid-1990s and is due for completion in 2008. The original design called for a 164-foot-high circular hole through the tower’s peak to reduce wind pressure on the structure and give it a distinctive profile.
But Chinese critics said the hole resembled Japan’s “rising sun” flag, an image associated in China with Tokyo’s brutal conquest of much of China during the 1930s and ‘40s. Anti-Japanese sentiment runs deep in China. This spring mobs in Shanghai and other cities threw rocks and bottles at Japanese diplomatic installations, overturned Japanese cars and smashed Japanese businesses.
Kohn said the round hole was not based on any Japanese image but on the moon gate — a circular gateway used in traditional Chinese gardens. The building — and its hole — had been praised by other architects.
The redesign is the latest chapter in an 11-year journey to completion for the skyscraper, being built at a cost of $910 million. It ran into trouble when the Asian financial crisis virtually obliterated demand for new office space.
Shelved for six years, the project was revived in 2003, but criticism of the design soon surfaced in Shanghai and elsewhere, especially on Internet forums.
Another design proposed in the late ‘90s would have broken up the circular hole by putting an observation deck across the bottom of the space. Kohn’s new slot was “more beautiful, functional, less costly and easier to design,” Mori said.
In 2003, Taiwan completed building the world’s tallest skyscraper, a 1,676-foot-tall building that is about 165 feet higher than the former highest office building, the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The highest freestanding tower remains the CN Tower, a 1,815-foot communications structure and outlook point in Toronto.—Agencies