Society

Outbound tourists this year will top 51 million, up 7 percent year-on-year, the director of China's National Tourism Administration said yesterday.

The World Expo will attract 3.5 million overseas visitors to Shanghai, Shao Qiwei said.

Property owners' rights will soon receive better protection under revisions to the controversial regulations for demolishing urban housing, a senior legislative official said yesterday.

"We will soon publish the draft revision to solicit public opinion and will further explain the changes," Gao Fengtao, deputy director of the State Council Legislative Affairs Office, the agency that issued the existing regulation, told China Daily.

The office invited eight experts to give opinions on the draft version on Wednesday. According to Shen Kui, a law professor from Peking University and one of the eight experts, the revision emphasized that confiscation of houses and relocation of residents could only be done in the public interest.

"The new draft version will include a detailed regulation on confiscation for non-public interest, which is more complicated," said Shen. "When the developer and the property owners are involved in confiscation and compensation, the government is also involved as the change of land use needs permission from the government."

China created 11.02 million new jobs in urban areas in 2009, topping the government goal of 9 million, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security said Friday.

This figure was about 22.4 percent higher than the government's whole year target set in March last year, Yin Chengji, spokesman of the ministry told a press conference.

Around 5.14 million laid-off workers were re-employed last year, exceeding the preset goal of 5 million.

Urban unemployment rate stood at 4.3 percent, with 9.21 million people being registered to be unemployed.

Tomorrow the search giant Google is expected to take the wraps off a healthy set of quarterly figures at its California HQ. But the numbers themselves will no doubt be overshadowed by events being played out on the other side of the world.

While analysts and the money men smile over the expected sharp jump in fourth quarter earnings, it will be interesting to note their comments and questions over the company's decision to consider pulling out of China.

Google said the move was prompted by a "highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property.

While attacks on companies like Google are routine, industry experts have in the last few days said the scope of this one was fairly unprecedented in recent years.

"I believe this is the largest and most sophisticated cyber-attack we have seen in years targeted at specific corporations," said George Kurtz, chief technology officer of security vendor Mcafee which has been investigating the attacks they have dubbed Aurora.