The Danish minister for climate, energy and buildings, Martin Lidegaard, has been in Beijing to meet his counterpart Chinese ministers and energy-sector executives. Denmark has a collaboration with China in renewable energy, energy-efficient construction projects and R&D.

"With China's extreme growth rates, it's crucial that the consumption of resources is as limited as possible," Lidegaard said. "It is in China's own interest, and in the long run it has significance for the entire world's climate, since reducing buildings' energy consumption is one of the most effective ways to reduce CO2 emissions."

In May, China announced a new goal for 2020 ensuring that 30 percent of the country's new construction projects produce energy-efficient buildings.

German Ambassador Michael Schaefer has presented 500,000 yuan to representatives of several Beijing charities: Little Flower Projects, China Dolls, Beijing Sun Village, Love & Hope Center (Beijing) for Culture & Development, Hope Foster Home, Stars & Rain Institute for Autism, Beijing Huiling, Beijing Hongdandan Education & Culture Exchange Center. The donation represented the net proceeds of the annual holiday charity bazaar that the embassy hosted on Dec. 2.

China's Assistant Foreign Minister Le Yucheng has met with Yamina Benguigui, French minister delegate for Francophonie, who was in China to attend the closing ceremony of the "Year of the French Language in China", which she chaired with Hao Ping, China's vice-minister of education. At the ceremony Benguigui met members of the French and Francophone community in Beijing, and she presented the annual Fu Lei awards for the best translators of works of French literature in Chinese. The minister then went to Shanghai for a seminar on the use of French as the language of business, held at the Alliance Francaise, where she also met Chinese students in a French branch of Medicine Shanghai Jiaotong University. Later, Benguigui inaugurated the exhibition Surrealism and Beyond, presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Shanghai with Alain Seban, president of the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

The Europe China Clean Energy Centre annual high-level conference was held in Beijing last week, "in the spirit of the EU-China Joint-Declaration on Energy Security, one of the three joint declarations signed in Brussels in May," said the EU delegation in China.

Former US president Jimmy Carter recently spoke at a workshop on risk management abroad and implications for China's foreign policy, supported by the British embassy in Beijing.

As China's economic interests increasingly go global, the demand to protect a growing number of Chinese working overseas and the need to manage risks to investments and trade routes becomes more acute, the embassy said. "The evacuation of over 35,000 Chinese citizens from Libya, kidnappings in Egypt and Southern Kordofan earlier this year, and the threat from piracy in the Gulf of Aden attest to this. The array of challenges China's foreign policy establishment faces is immense, and immediate. Often we must work together if we are to address them."

The conference brought together Chinese academics and business leaders, African experts, the Carter Center, the European Council on Foreign Relations, and British embassy officials to explore these issues.

Send embassy news to michaelpeters@chinadaily.com.cn.

(China Daily 12/28/2012 page31)