Major celebrations of China’s Space Day will start on April 24 in Xi’an, capital city of northwest China’s Shaanxi Province.

This year’s celebrations will focus on the applications of space technology in economic and social development, said Tian Yulong, chief engineer of the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence.

Chinese astronauts and scientists will give talks during the celebrations, and exhibitions will be held in Northwestern Polytechnical University, said Tian.

The exhibitions will showcase the achievements of China’s lunar probe and the BeiDou satellite navigation system.

China designated April 24 as Space Day last year to mark the anniversary of the country’s first satellite launch Dongfanghong-1 in 1970.

Xi’an is home to more than 200 aerospace research centers and enterprises.

Also, there will be over 200 events in other cities in China to celebrate the Space Day.

China has begun a series of changes to the rules regarding permanent residence for foreigners, according to a plan issued by the Ministry of Public Security (MPS).

The “foreigner’s permanent residence card” will be renamed as the “foreigner’s permanent residence identity card.”

Similar to the identity cards used by Chinese citizens, foreigners’ identity information will be embedded in the chips on the machine-readable cards, to be shared by railways, airlines, insurance agencies, hotels and banks.

The old version cannot be recognized by machines, and foreigners often face difficulties in identity authentication, said an official at the MPS.

“The card makes everything easier,” said Jonathan, an American who has been in China for over 20 years and received his Chinese green card three years ago.

“What’s inconvenient is that so few foreigners have them, and people don’t know how to deal with it,” he admitted. “I hope that staff at both government departments and service sectors will be more familiar with its functions.”

Foreigners can apply for the new version of permanent residence identity card at the original registration authority, while people can still use the old version until the expiration date.

Approved by the Central Leading Group for Deepening Overall Reform, the reform plan serves the nation’s talent development strategy, which is to attract more innovative and entrepreneurial talent, and responds to social concerns, said the MPS official.

The reform will also provide foreigners with easier access to public services.

The related technical work is expected to be finished by June, and then foreigners can apply for new cards.

In 2016, 1,576 foreigners became permanent residents in China, an increase of 163 percent over the previous year, according to the MPS.

China has made huge progress in easing its residence and entry policies for foreigners since September 2015, which has helped attract more talent from overseas and boosted international exchanges.

Students who commit violent acts on campus will be severely punished, according to the central government, which introduced a number of measures to ensure safety in schools at the most recent executive meeting of the State Council, China’s Cabinet.

Ensuring safety in primary and middle schools and kindergartens should be a public security priority, according to a statement released after the meeting, presided over by Premier Li Keqiang.

“Campus safety concerns the healthy development of millions of students and the happiness of their families. Schools must be solidly built, like those in areas of post-earthquake reconstruction, and they should also be the most secure places when it comes to safety,” Li told the meeting.

The statement said principals are responsible for campus safety, while students should be taught to value life and the rights of their classmates. It added that schools must employ the “necessary personnel” and use closed-circuit TV to keep a close watch on potential dangers and safeguard students’ safety.

School buildings must comply with national safety and quality standards, while builders, designers and supervisors will hold lifelong liability for any failures, it added.

In addition to classes related to safety, schools will be required to conduct drills to alleviate the dangers posed by earthquakes, fire and stampedes, and more police officers should be deployed near schools.

Security risks on campus must be closely scrutinized, and the education and health authorities have been ordered to monitor and check sanitation, disease prevention and food safety in educational establishments for younger students.

A number of incidents of campus violence and bullying have put school safety firmly in the spotlight. The latest occurred on April 1 in Luzhou, Sichuan province, when a student surnamed Zhao killed himself by jumping from the top of a building at Taifu Middle School. Despite an official announcement to that effect, the incident aroused suspicions among members of the public that the boy had been beaten to death by five other students, who were believed to have bullied him.

The incident led to heated online debate about an investigation into the cause of death conducted by the local police and the untimely disclosure of information by the authorities.

At the State Council meeting, Li called for an effective mechanism to be established to curb bullying, especially acts of violence, by disclosure, intervention and prevention. He added that the relevant departments should respond to public concerns by disclosing the results of investigations in a timely manner.

In the Government Work Report he delivered in March last year, Li added “safety” to the chapter about education, and stressed “families, schools, the government and society should help to cultivate a secure and healthy environment in which children can grow up and make a contribution to the country”.

The meeting sent a warning to “naughty children”, who either bully their peers or take advantage of children who are less developed physically or come from deprived families, said Zheng Zonggen, a teacher at Wenfeng High School in Huoshan county, Anhui province.

Surveillance equipment is necessary because teachers cannot watch students 24 hours a day, he said, adding that a punishment mechanism should be established to discipline bullies and allow students to understand the consequences of beating or mistreating their peers, he added.

Xiong Bingqi, vice-president of the 21st Century Education Research Institute, said that in addition to the equipment outlined at the meeting, more money should be spent to help schools eliminate risks, such as bullying and unsafe food.

Bullying and campus safety require more effective implementation of the law, and violators should be subject to police action, rather than punishments handed out by their principals or teachers, he said.

Teachers and schools often conduct investigations into bullying but many perpetrators escape punishment, setting a bad example and giving the impression that violators can escape severe penalties, which further encourages bullying, he added.

Zheng said: “Lessons will be learned to reduce the likelihood of these incidents occurring. Anyone who bullies their peers will be punished in accordance with the law.”

Governance and freedom on the internet go hand in hand rather than being incompatible elements, an expert reiterated ahead of the one-year anniversary of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s speech during a symposium on cyber security and informatization in Beijing on April 19, 2016.

At the symposium, President Xi, who also heads the Central Internet Security and Informatization Leading Group, called for comprehensive development of the internet and ensuring it could be harnessed for the benefit of the country and the people.

Xi made the call as cybersecurity security has become so vital that all countries agree better governance of cyberspace is essential for a prosperous shared future for all.

Most countries applauded President Xi’s proposal for building a community of shared future in cyberspace.

“The proposal features the greatest common divisor. It is inclusive enough so that no one stands out to oppose it,” said Prof. Shen Yi, director of the Research Center of Cyberspace Governance at Fudan University in Shanghai, adding that many countries hoped that “community of shared future” be more tangible and practical.

“In his speech, President Xi Jinping outlined the framework for cyber security and informatization development, which in essence is to shape a new order in cyberspace based on respecting the principle of cyberspace sovereign equality as the core,” he said. “China has been contributing to the promotion of this new order. Xi’s speech was one of the cases in point.”

He explained that the freedom in cyberspace, in a broader sense, refers to the aspect that all countries, big or small, have equal rights to enjoy resources in cyberspace to serve their own development, to implement independent policies on internet management and to participate in the formulation of a new order for global cyberspace.

Cyberspace should be governed in line with the concept of a three-level structure, stressed Shen. He noted that the three levels were physical facility, logic codes and digital personality, all requiring good management.

On the bottom level is the physical facility, including access devices, wires and physical storage space. “These facilities surely have property attributes and are naturally under the jurisdiction of a government,” said Shen. “You can’t tamper with the servers of others or copy data from them without authorization.”

Regarding the middle level of logic codes, the relevant national watchdog should monitor the flow of codes and detect malware. “Malware isn’t necessarily computer viruses. The damages they are capable of causing range from the theft of personal financial information to the breach of a country’s network security,” said Shen.

The “emailgate” controversy affecting Hillary Clinton during the 2016 U.S. presidential elections showed that even the United States, a superpower in cyberspace, was not exempted from cyberattack. “As for another conclusion, a responsible country should prohibit such activities [hacking another country’s network] in cyberspace,” said Shen.

Digital personality, the top level, refers to how individuals act on the internet. At the 2016 symposium, Xi required officials to welcome well-meant criticism raised on the internet, “be it gentle or harsh-sounding.”

However, disciplining people’s online behavior does not contradict President Xi’s demand for more tolerance and patience to internet users. Shen stressed that internet users’ behavior should also be subjected to supervision, the same as people’s offline behavior.

He was confident that Chinese leaders have the courage and political responsibility to innovate the approach to cyberspace governance.

“The best way to clarify online rumors is to line them up with the true facts and let people reach their own conclusions,” he said. “However, for professional rumormongers, those who spread unfounded, false rumors for profit, we should crack down because they are destroying society’s trust and their gains are at the cost of society’s injury.”

Ten people died and five others were injured when a bus plunged into a river in Southwest China’s Guizhou Province Monday, local authorities said.

The accident happened at around 8:30 a.m. in Kaiyang, an outer county of the provincial capital Guiyang, the county government said in a statement.

The 19-seat bus, en route from Kaiyang to Weng’an county in Bouyei-Miao autonomous prefecture of Qiannan, veered off a road bridge on provincial highway S305 and fell into the river, it said. Four people were reported missing in the accident.

Rescue work was continuing as of 12 p.m.

The local government has launched an investigation.