Delta Air Lines will launch its first flights to China with a daily route between Shanghai and Atlanta beginning March 30.

A Boeing 777 will fly between Shanghai’s Pudong International Airport and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, according to the company’s website.

The flights will begin March 30, U.S. time, but due to the time difference flights from Shanghai begin March 31.

The route, Delta’s first direct route to China, is one of several opened up to American carriers during China-U.S. air traffic negotiations last year.

“The route will serve as a bridge between Shanghai and 65 million residents in the southeastern U.S. who have active trade communications with China,” the official Xinhua News Agency quoted Delta Executive Vice President Lee Macenczak as saying.

China will keep its controversial one-child policy unchanged for at least 10 years, the country’s family planning chief was quoted as saying Monday, amid a government debate over easing the controls.

Any changes to strict family planning laws would only come after an expected peak in the number of births in the next decade, Zhang Weiqing, minister of the State Population and Family Planning Commission told the state-run China Daily.

“The current family planning policy, formed as a result of gradual changes in the past two decades, has proved compatible with national conditions,” the English language daily quoted him as saying.

“So it has to be kept unchanged at this time to ensure stable and balanced population growth.”

Nearly 200 million Chinese will enter childbearing age in the next 10 years, the report said.

“Given such a large population base, there would be major fluctuations in population growth if we abandoned the one-child rule now,” Zhang added.

“It would cause serious problems and add extra pressure on social and economic development.”

Zhang’s firm line was the latest rebuttal from central government authorities to officials who appeared to raise the possibility of changes ahead of the annual meeting of China’s parliament, which started last week.

Zhao Baige, vice minister of the National Population and Family Planning Commission, was one of those voices, saying ahead of the parliament that the policy had “become a big issue among decision-makers.”

Premier Wen Jiabao used his annual policy address to the opening of parliament to outline in general terms that China would stick with its family planning rules.

Zhang’s comments went further, outlining a timeframe for the policy to remain unchanged, and the reasons why.

China’s family planning policy began in the late 1970s as a way to prevent the world’s largest population—now at around 1.3 billion people—from exceeding the country’s capacity to feed it.

Generally, urban families can have one child and rural families can have two if the first is a girl.

The policy has averted about 400 million births, the government says, although it has created a large gender imbalance in favour of males.

It has also been heavily criticised for the abuses that have taken place in order to enforce it, such as forced sterilisations and late-term abortions.

China, worried about an ageing population, is studying scrapping its controversial one-child policy but will not do away with family-planning policies altogether, a senior official said on Thursday.

With the world’s biggest population straining scarce land, water and energy resources, China has enforced rules to restrict family size since the 1970s. Rules vary but usually limit families to one child, or two in the countryside.

“We want incrementally to have this change,” Vice Minister of the National Population and Family Planning Commission Zhao Baige told reporters in Beijing.

“I cannot answer at what time or how, but this has become a big issue among decision makers,” Zhao said. She added that the current plan was to study the issue seriously and responsibly, but avoid sudden changes that might cause a spike in births.

“Minority groups already have two children, even three, and in the cities like Shanghai and Beijing, a lot of only children are already released (to have two), but the most important is those in the middle like in Henan… nearly a hundred million people, but strongly influenced by the classical way, they want a son, and they are already very fragile environmentally.”

Teams studying the issue would have to consider the strain of China’s huge population on its scarce resources, popular attitudes, and how much of a social net China can afford to provide without the traditional reliance on large families to care for the aged, she said.

Surveys show that 60 percent of Chinese younger than 30 want a maximum of two children, and only a “very small” number want more than three, Zhao said.

The average number of children that would be born to a woman over her lifetime has decreased to 1.8 in China today, from 5.8 in the 1970s, and below the replacement rate of 2.1.

RELAXATION

In recent years, China has sought to soften its draconian and often controversial family control policies, which have included forced abortions and other punitive measures.

But local officials remain under intense pressure to keep numbers down, leading to skewed statistics and sometimes brutality.

The country is now relying more on education, especially about contraception, said Zhao, in charge of international cooperation, education and communication at the ministry.

China says its policies have prevented several hundred million births and boosted prosperity, but experts have warned of a looming social time-bomb from an ageing population and widening gender disparity stemming from a traditional preference for boys.

Normally, between 103 and 107 boys are born for every 100 girl infants, but in China, 118 boys are born for every 100 girls, Zhao said. Experimental policies include trying to improve women’s welfare and girls’ access to schooling.

Still, the government has previously expressed concern that too many people are flouting the rules.

State media said in December that China’s population would grow to 1.5 billion people by 2033, with birth rates set to soar over the next five years.

Officials have also cautioned that population controls are being unraveled by the increased mobility of China’s 150 million-odd migrant workers, who travel from poor rural areas to work in more affluent eastern cities.

China has vowed to slap heavier fines on wealthy citizens who flout family planning laws, in response to the emergence of an upper class willing to pay standard fines to have more children.

Confucius, or more precisely his descendants, are alive and kicking in China, as well as the rest of the world. And his updated family tree is set to triple the size of his descendants.

The work of registering new members to the family tree of the revered Chinese thinker and educator was finished last year, and now they number more than 2 million.

But the actual number of Confucius descendants living across the world is more than 3 million, 2.5 million of which are on the Chinese mainland.

The updated list will be published next year, to coincide with the 2,560th birth anniversary of Confucius (551-479 BC), says the Confucius Genealogy Compilation Committee (CGCC).

The new list, for the first time, will include overseas and female descendants of the great philosopher.

“We have more than 1.3 million new entries and have stopped soliciting new ones,” says Kong Dewei, a Confucius descendant who is directing the updating work.

The 1.3 million new members of the family of Confucius have paid the official registration fee of 5 yuan (70 cents). The deceased members will be included free if their descendants can prove a collateral family tree that conforms to the Confucius genealogy, he says.

The registration work began in 1998 by Kong Deyong, a 77th-generation descendant, and the founder and chairman of the CGCC. Today, the Hong Kong-based committee has more than 450 branches across the world to assist in the work.

Confucius’ family tree has been revised four times. The last revision was completed in the 1930s, when the tree had 600,000 members.

More than 40,000 overseas descendants will be added to the fifth edition of the Confucius genealogy, with 34,000 of them from the Republic of Korea. The descendants flourished on the Korean Peninsula after a 54th-generation descendant reached there at the end of the Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368).

The workers have succeeded in finding 900 Confucius descendants in Taiwan and two branches that had been lost for more than 1,000 years in Shanxi and Henan provinces, Kong says.

But the Confucius family tree doesn’t include all of Confucius’ offspring because links with some branches have been lost, he says.

Railway service inched back to normal Sunday in southern China, a day after one person died in a stampede by frustrated train passengers who were stranded for days because of snow ahead of an important holiday.

More than 10,000 vehicles were backed up on an icy section of a highway in central China’s Hunan province, the official Xinhua News Agency said. The vehicles were backed up for nearly 45 miles, even though workers were removing ice from the roads Sunday, it said.

The freakish weather is now in its fourth week, throttling the country’s densely populated central and eastern regions as tens of millions of travelers scramble to board trains and buses to return home for this month’s Lunar New Year holiday.

The weather has ripped down power lines and disrupted trains and road transport. Damage has been estimated at $7.5 billion and at least 60 people have been killed, mostly in traffic accidents.

On Saturday, frustration boiled over among passengers stranded at the Guangzhou train station where a stampede to get on a train crushed Li Hongxia, a watch factory worker who was trying to get home to the central province of Hubei, Xinhua reported.

Parts of Hunan province already have been without electricity for days and people have been stranded at snow and wind-swept train stations. The provincial weather bureau has forecast more snow for Monday and Tuesday.

Hunan, like many temperate parts of China, has little experience of snow. Houses are poorly insulated and many communities lack snowplows and other winter equipment.

While central parts of the country were struggling to cope with the weather, Xinhua said rail service in Guangzhou, the capital of southern Guangdong province, began to return to normal, with 100 trains scheduled to leave Sunday carrying 300,000 passengers.

The trains also are needed to move vast amounts of coal, which provides much of China’s electricity.

Normally coal mines use the weeklong holiday that starts Wednesday to cut production so equipment repairs can be carried out and their workers can go home, but this year more than 80 percent of the state-owned mines will run full blast, the State Administration of Working Safety said.

The China Meteorological Administration (CMA) early Monday issued a red alert for severe snowstorms forecast for central and eastern China.

Heavy snow is set to blanket northern Hunan, eastern Hubei, southeastern Henan, northwestern Zhejiang as well as most areas of Anhui and Jiangsu provinces on Monday, while some of these areas will expect snowstorms, according to the CMA.

Meanwhile, freezing rain will pound some parts of Guizhou, Hunan, Jiangxi, Guangxi, Anhui and Zhejiang.

The CMA warned local governments and departments to prepare for the coming bad weather, and transportation, railway, electricity and communication departments were advised to prepare post-snow clean-ups.

CMA also suggested that citizens in these areas should reduce their unnecessary outdoor activities.

The CMA’s weather warnings fall into four levels in accordance with their severity and status of emergency, with red being the most severe.

The snow, the worst in a decade in many places, has hit most of China since January 12, leaving homes collapsed, power blackouts, highways closed and crops destroyed.

Large tracts of the country have been battling transport havoc caused by heavy snowfall, as forecasters on Sunday issued a red alert - the highest on a scale of five - warning of more snow and sleet in the coming days.

The snow, the most in 50 years in many areas, has been sweeping the central, eastern and southwestern parts of the country in recent days, paralyzing air, rail and highway traffic and stranding tens of thousands of passengers amid a pre-holiday travel peak.

Almost 150,000 passengers were stuck at Guangzhou railway station by Saturday night after a power failure caused by snow, ice and sleet stopped more than 136 electric trains in Hunan province on the trunk line between Beijing and Guangzhou.

Though the power supply resumed at 4 pm on Saturday, 50 trains remain stranded between Hengyang in Hunan and Guangzhou.

A Guangzhou railway official warned yesterday that the number of stranded passengers in Guangzhou could hit 600,000 today.

“Last night, 100,000 passengers packed the square in front of the railway station; another 50,000 found shelter inside the building or under nearby flyovers,” said an official in Guangzhou.

In cold and drizzly weather, Chen Zhenyu had spent more than 12 hours on the railway station square before she could board her train home last night.

“I dared not sleep because I did not know when my train would leave,” the migrant worker from Hubei province told China Daily before she boarded the train more than 10 hours behind schedule.

“But I feel lucky because I can finally board the train to go home to spend the Lunar New Year with my family,” said the woman in her 20s.

She said some of her coworkers, after waiting a dozen hours, had returned to their factories because they did not know when their trains would depart.

The Ministry of Railways has dispatched about 100 diesel locomotives to move the electric trains and ordered 63 trains to bypass the non-operational section and take different routes via the Beijing-Kowloon line or the Shanghai-Kunming line.

The ministry also sent 35 trains from Beijing, Wuhan and Nanchang to help the stranded passengers.

Road traffic between Hunan and Guangdong provinces has also ground to a halt. Traffic was at a standstill yesterday on the southern section of the expressway linking Beijing with Zhuhai in Guangdong, where 60,000 people were stuck in 20,000 vehicles.

Several regional airports were shut by the weather, including the one at Nanjing, capital of Jiangsu province.

Hunan’s Huanghua Airport has been closed since Friday in the worst cold snap in a decade

Snow has affected the lives of 25.22 million people across the province, killing seven, including three power company workers who died while removing ice from a 50-meter tall tower that collapsed on Saturday afternoon.

The Central Meteorological Station said the extreme weather was likely to continue for a week, especially in the southern, northwestern and central regions.

“There hasn’t been any rise in temperatures or any room for optimism,” said Yang Guiming, the chief weatherman.

The government yesterday ordered urgent steps to tackle transport chaos and energy and food supply strains caused by brutal winter weather.

Premier Wen Jiabao said the weather was threatening lives and disrupting supplies of fresh food, coal, oil and electricity ahead of the Lunar New Year, which starts on Feb 7.

Wen and other top officials announced steps aimed at softening the economic blow from the bad weather and energy shortages.

Provinces were ordered not to hoard coal and electricity, and officials said they would waive some transport charges for farm goods and monitor price hikes. Trains must cope with tens of millions of passengers surging home for the holidays, while more coal must be shipped to power plants.

Wen said energy strains could worsen as power plants’ coal reserves ran dangerously low. “The most difficult phase has not passed,” he said.

The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) released a book on the 129 languages spoken by Chinese here on Friday.

The book, “China’s Languages,” features 129 languages and gives an introduction to each in English, according to CASS.

Sun Hongkai, chief editor of the seven-chapter book, said the content was based on an investigation of Chinese languages started in the 1950s.

“During our investigation, we found some of the languages were already on the verge of extinction.” He stressed “some were only used by senior citizens and have lost its communication ability”.

“We hope the book will be useful in protecting the culture of various ethnic groups and the harmonious existence of various cultures within the China boundary,” he said.

“Although China only has 56 official ethnic groups, some ethnic groups use two or more languages. This is the reason why we have collected so many languages.”

China is home to 56 ethnic groups. Han people, the largest group, make up about 92 percent of the country’s population. The rest, the 55 ethnic minorities, share China’s vast land and maintain their own traditions and customs.

American airliner US Airways was awarded a license to inaugurate its first US-China air service last week, becoming the sixth US carrier to be granted the permit.

The US Department of Transportation announced last Friday that it had granted the Arizona-headquartered US Airways a permit for US-China passenger flights.

Six American airlines already operate China-bound air services - the other five are American, Continental, Northwest, United and Delta Airlines.

The US Department of Transportation also awarded US-China passenger flights to three other US carriers serving the China routes: American Airlines, Continental Airlines and Northwest Airlines.

US Airways will fly between Philadelphia and Beijing, while American, Continental and Northwest each will use their new rights to add a daily flight to their existing US-China services.

American Airlines will begin a Chicago-Beijing service, while Continental will operate a new flight between Newark/New York and Shanghai, and Northwest will fly between Detroit and Shanghai.

All services must begin on or around March 25, 2009, according to the agreement.

Under an earlier agreement, signed between General Administration of Civil Aviation of China (CAAC) and US Department of Transportation last July, the number of daily flights between United States and China will double over the next five years.

US airlines, which are eager to tap the fast-growing Chinese aviation market, will have more than doubled the number of passenger flights to China to 23 a day by 2012.

China is the fastest-growing aviation market in the world after passenger traffic hit 160 million in 2006, up 15 percent on the previous year.

CAAC estimates that passenger volumes will maintain double-digit growth up to 2010.

A Chinese city has beaten the Grinch at his own game, banning Christmas trees from shopping malls, restaurants and other public places because they pose a fire hazard, a newspaper reported on Thursday.

Chen Ying, deputy mayor of Zhuhai, a city of 1.3 million people in southern China, said restaurants, malls, grocery stores and other entertainment venues had to remove trees and other “flammable decorations” immediately.

“Those that fail to rectify the situation will be subject to legal measures like suspension or closure,” the Southern Metropolis Daily quoted Chen on its web site as saying on Wednesday.

The crackdown on Christmas trees was part of a three-month campaign to boost fire-prevention standards that started this week in Zhuhai, directly across from the Chinese gambling haven of Macau.

The Zhuhai ban came the same day that President Hu Jintao “reached out” to religious believers in China where commercial Christmas trappings have become increasingly ostentatious in recent years.

The manager of a Zhuhai karaoke bar ordered a Christmas tree last week and was not happy with the new regulation.

“I paid 3,000 yuan (about $400), so who can I sue for damages now?” the newspaper quoted him as saying.

As the book business goes, Amity Printing is not unusually prolific. In the last 20 years it has printed some 50 million books; some publishers churn out that many in a year. But Amity focuses on one title — the Bible — and primarily one market, China. It is the largest printer of Christian literature in the officially atheist country, where freedom of religion remains weak; up until 1979, when Deng Xiaoping began undoing the social strictures of the Mao Zedong era, the mere possession of a Bible could get a person into serious trouble.

Amity has churned out 41 million Bibles for Chinese believers at its plant outside the southern city of Nanjing, including more than 3 million copies last year. (About nine million copies have been exported to Africa, other parts of Asia and Central Europe.) For a country whose religious oppression tends to make more international headlines than its exhibitions of tolerance, that stands as a significant achievement. But it also highlights the gap between China’s officially sanctioned churches and the illegal “house” churches that exist outside the limited sphere of religious freedom in China.

Amity Printing, a joint venture between the Amity Foundation, a Chinese Christian charity, and the United Bible Societies, a Reading, England-based group dedicated to providing access to Christian scripture, is acting entirely within the law. Its chief customer is the China Christian Council, the supervisory body for the country’s state-controlled Protestant churches. “You can build on trust or it can be broken, depending on how you act,” says Peter Dean, a New Zealander and the resident consultant for the United Bible Society at Amity’s Nanjing plant. “In the case of Bibles, the government took a step in 1979 and extended trust toward the church to assemble, worship and print its own materials. I think it’s important to make full use of the trust that was extended. That helps build the future that everybody wants.”

About 80% of the Bibles Amity produces are for domestic use, with the remainder going to Christians in Africa, Central Europe and other Asian nations. A poll early this year by East China Normal University in Shanghai of 4,500 Chinese found that 31.4% considered themselves religious, a proportion that suggests 300 million Chinese believers; of the religious respondents, Christians represented 12%, or 40 million nationwide. Demand has grown to the point that the foundation plans to open a new, 515,000-square-foot (48,000 sq. m.) printing plant next year, which will allow Amity to turn out more than a million books a month. It’s thought to be one of the largest Bible production facilities in the world.

But in the face of China’s larger restrictions on religion, some overseas aid groups say, a boom in Bible production doesn’t mean much. “It reflects the rapid growth of the number of Christians in China,” says Bob Fu, who runs the U.S.-based China Aid Association, an advocacy group for mainland Christians. “But I don’t see that can be a sign of increasing religious freedom.” Several Chinese have recently been arrested for illegally bringing Bibles into the country, Fu points out. On Nov. 28, police raided the house of Beijing bookstore owner Shi Weihan, confiscating Bibles and other religious publications and placing him under detention. And Zhou Heng, a businessman and leader of an underground church in China’s western Xinjiang region, was arrested in August for receiving three tons of Bibles from South Korea.

Daniel Bays, head of the Asian Studies program at Calvin College in Michigan, argues that China’s restrictions on Christianity aren’t necessarily a fear of religion, but of the possible threat to the Party’s leadership that comes from any organized group. “On the whole the authorities don’t really care what people believe,” he says. “What they are afraid of [is people] getting together and meeting in secret and not registering [with the government]. It doesn’t bother them that people believe in Jesus. It bothers them that they don’t want to register and they don’t know who [the] leaders are.”

Under Chinese law, the Bibles Amity prints can only be distributed through officially sanctioned churches. But in recent years it has become easier for house churches to procure Bibles, often buying them through registered churches. Some Bibles are even appearing in bookstores, despite lacking the registration numbers required of any printed work. Jean-Paul Wiest, an expert on Chinese Catholicism who teaches at the Beijing Center, says his students have no problems getting religious materials. “Bibles are very widely available,” he says.

But Amity’s millions of Bibles could still be insufficient for China’s growing ranks of Christians — depending on how many there are. The number of China’s believers is “a hotly contested issue,” says Bays. The state-sanctioned Protestant church has 17 million members; Bays believes that membership in unregistered churches is twice that, which would put the total number of Protestants in China at around 50 million — roughly close to the number of Bibles printed. “But of course some people say there are 150 million Christians,” Bays says. “Then there aren’t enough Bibles.”