Chinese Premier Li Qiang on Wednesday presided over a State Council executive meeting to study measures in boosting the development of venture capital.
China will bolster support for qualified technology companies to list on domestic and overseas markets, and develop the market for equity transfers, and mergers and acquisitions, according to the meeting.
The role of venture capital in supporting innovation, industrial upgrading and high-quality development was also highlighted at the meeting, which noted the need to improve measures related to the flow of state capital.
Efforts to ensure a strong autumn grain production, and to elevate disaster prevention and mitigation to secure a bumper harvest were also stressed at the meeting.
The meeting also reviewed and adopted a revised draft of regulations on the honoring of martyrs and a draft of regulations on export control of dual-use items.
Chinese premier stresses development of venture capital
With the beginning of the cotton harvest season, northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region is anticipating higher yields from advancements in agricultural technology and mechanization.
Xinjiang is the largest production area of high-quality commodity cotton in China. The 2.47-million-hectare cotton growing area in the region has produced more than 5 million tons of cotton for six consecutive years.
The northern and southern parts of the vast autonomous region have different climates, different cotton varieties and also different growing periods. Currently, cotton picking started two weeks ago in northern Xinjiang, while the harvesting has just begun in the southern areas.
In Tumxuk City, located in southern Xinjiang, cotton farmers are using all-in-one harvesters to help them pick cotton, separate the flowers from the stalks and pack them into bundles.
"In the past, we picked the cotton manually. It took us more than a month to pick 100 mu (6.67 hectares) of cotton, and the cost reached 1,000 yuan per mu (about 2,106 U.S. dollars per hectare). Now, we use domestically produced cotton pickers to gather them, which have high efficiency and low cost. It now takes less than a day to harvest my 100 mu of cotton, with a cost less than 200 yuan per mu," said Turaxun Samat, a local farmer.
This year, Xinjiang has vigorously promoted the new cotton planting technology of drip irrigation under the mulching film at the appropriate emergence temperature, replacing the old method of irrigating before sowing. The technology can greatly improve the emergence rate while also saving water resources.
In addition, the precision sowing supported by BeiDou Navigation Satellite System and remote sensing monitoring by the agricultural big data platform have also been widely adopted across Xinjiang, contributing to the growth of cotton output.
"This year, a total of 1,057,800 mu (about 70,520 hectares) of cotton have been planted in Tumxuk City, and the unginned cotton yield is estimated at 451.4 kilograms per mu, an average increase of 11.7 kilograms per mu over the previous year," said Chen Yongsen, a member of the leadership of the city's Bureau of Agriculture and Rural Affairs.
The cotton harvesting in Xinjiang is expected to end in early November.
Xinjiang enters cotton harvest season with higher yield expected
