New data from German market research institute GkF has revealed that online users in China read the most amount of books daily.

The data, released in March, came from the company surveying more than 22,000 people aged 15 years and above in 17 countries.

China recorded the highest percentage, with 36 percent of the online users surveyed reading books on a daily basis. The nation’s result was six percentage points higher than the average of all the surveyed countries.

The survey showed that among different age groups, teenagers aged 15 to 19 read the most. About half of those read almost every day, compared to 23 percent of online users aged 40 to 49.

The survey also revealed that higher income earners – the top 25 percent of earners within the market – were more likely to read, with 40 percent of whom reading almost daily. In comparison, only 27 percent of the bottom quarter of income earners read everyday.

Women were also more likely to read books, with 38 percent of those surveyed reading almost every day, compared to 34 percent of their male counterparts.

Xu Qin was appointed vice governor and acting governor of north China’s Hebei province on Friday.

The decision was announced at a morning session of the standing committee of the provincial legislature, which also accepted the resignation of governor Zhang Qingwei.

Xu, who was born in 1961, graduated from the Beijing Institute of Technology with a major in optoelectronics, according to an introduction from the official website of the Hebei provincial government.

He had worked with the National Development and Reform Commission and earned a doctorate from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University before moving to south China’s Shenzhen in 2008, where he served as the mayor from June 2010 to March 2017.

Of China’s more than 30 provincial localities, 27 have completed discipline inspections on the agencies they directly administer, the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) disciplinary agency announced Friday.

CPC organizations and departments directly administered by the provincial level authorities were inspected, according to a report posted on the CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) website.

The inspections focused on the implementation of central authority rules and regulations.

Inspectors in Hubei Province, central China, were despatched to 300 Party organizations and found 12,567 pieces of evidence that led to the investigation of 4,362 officials.

In Jilin Province, northeast China, inspectors reviewed the work of 242 Party organizations and found supporting evidence that linked 1,565 officials to violations.

The current CPC Central Committee will finish inspecting agencies directly under its administration before the end of the first half of the year.

All central and provincial level CPC committees are required to conduct inspections within their tenure of five years.

The remaining provincial regions are expected to complete their inspections before new provincial Party committees are elected, according to the CCDI.

Comparing it to “a physical examination” of the Party, the CCDI said inspection was a powerful weapon in the fight to resolve internal CPC problems.

Finding problems is both a major task and the appraisal standard for inspections, the CCDI said, adding that the inspection was by no means “a gust of wind.”

A dormitory building in Taifu Town Middle School [Photo/Shanghai Daily]

An autopsy is being conducted on a middle school student alleged to have fallen to his death on Saturday, with no evidence having been found so far to suggest he was physically abused, officials in Luzhou, Sichuan province, said at a news conference on Thursday.

He Shaopeng, deputy mayor and public security bureau director of Luzhou, said the chest and belly of the student’s body had been cut open and lacerations were found in his liver and spleen.

The publicity department of Luxian－a county under the administration of Luzhou－said on Wednesday that a 14-year-old male student of Taifu Middle School in Taifu town was found dead outside his dormitory building at about 6 a.m. on Saturday.

The department stated that local police did not think the boy had been murdered after initial investigations, but this caused public outcry, with many people suspecting that the boy was beaten to death by five other students who are children of local officials.

Mao Handong, a police officer with Luzhou public security bureau, said at the conference that none of the officials’ children were proved to have been classmates with, or to have known of, the deceased student.

Lyu Yugang, director of the Ministry of Education’s basic education department, said at a conference in Beijing on Thursday that he felt sorry for the death of the student and had requested education departments in Sichuan to assist local authorities in discovering the cause of the student’s death and reporting to the ministry in a timely manner.

A video obtained by Lyu Qingfu, a reporter at Xinhua News Agency, showed the mother of the deceased student visiting a crematory and cutting clothes off her son’s body to expose a large purple area on his back and wounds on both hands and elbows, suggesting that the boy might have been beaten to death.

People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of China, said in an opinion piece on its WeChat account on Wednesday that local governments should release information in a timely and accurately manner in emergency situations.

“Timely and accurate information, as well as an authoritative and convincing autopsy report, will help clarify facts and dispel rumors,” it said.

Beijing will put a new medical care reform plan into effect on Saturday, which will bring an end to medicine price markups, according to local officials.

More than 3,600 medical institutions are involved in the reform and all of them will abolish the medicine price markups, according to Fang Laiying, head of the Beijing Municipal Commission of Health and Family Planning.

It is estimated that the cost of treatment per outpatient will be reduced by about 5 percent on average thanks to cuts in medicine prices, while there will be an average cost increase of 2.5 percent for inpatient treatment due to the growth of certain service charges, according to Fang.

Community hospitals and medical institutions will be given the same access to the medicines usually prescribed in higher-level hospitals, so that patients will have more choices, Fang said.

Marking up medicine prices is a practice that has been adopted by most public hospitals in China since the 1950s. It allows hospitals to sell drugs with markups usually at a rate of 15 percent above the drugs’ tag prices.

Its purpose was to make up for the shortage in healthcare funding from the government, and it became part of doctors’ salaries, creating incentive for doctors to over-prescribe.

In 2015, incomes from checkups, tests and medical treatment materials accounted for about 66 percent of the city’s medical services revenue, while the incomes from the intelligence and labor of medical personnel, such as diagnosis, surgery, treatment and nursing, which are closely related to the quality of medical services, only accounted for 34 percent, according to Fang.

“The core of this new reform is to separate the functions of medical services and drug sales so as to shut down the markup mechanism in public medical institutions in Beijing,” Fang said.

“The separation will cut off the channel for making money through over-prescription and help medical practitioners provide better treatments and other services,” Fang said.

“The reform will effectively motivate the medical staff to pay more attention to the medical service they are providing, and further improve the doctor-patient relationship,” said Li Ruifeng, a medical reform expert from Beijing University of Chinese Medicine.