The Porcelain House in Tianjin is to be auctioned on August 8 to pay off its landlord's debt. [Photo/VCG] A court in Tianjin has decided to auction a house decorated with ceramic chips on August 8 to pay off its landlord's debt. The People's Court of Dongli District in Tianjin previously planned to do the public sale on July 22, but it was postponed for 17 days. The building's initial bidding price would be more than 140 million yuan ($20.8 million), the Beijing News reported. The Porcelain House, located in Chifeng street, Heping district, is a four-story art museum owned by Zhang Lianzhi. Zhang has to sell the house due to an economic dispute, but he claimed the ceramic building was worth nearly 9.79 billion yuan ($1.5 billion), citing an assessment report from an evaluation company he commissioned. Why the huge price difference? The Porcelain House was originally a French style building dating back to the 1920s. It was the former residence of Huang Rongliang, a Chinese diplomat in the Republic of China era (1912 - 1949). Zhang bought it for 30 million yuan from Tianjin commercial authorities in 2000, according to Huang Xiaoyan, Zhang's assistant. Zhang, a porcelain collector, began renovating the house in 2000. It took him 10 years to complete the decoration, which involved covering the inside and outside of the building with hundreds of thousands of porcelain pieces, a staff worker in the house said. The house opened to the public as a museum in 2007. More than 700 million fragments of ancient porcelain, 13,000 ancient porcelain vases and bowls, and many other antiques were used in his decoration, as well as hundreds of pieces of furniture dating to Ming (1368 - 1644) and Qing (1644 - 1911) dynasties, claimed Zhang. However, the court's evaluation excluded those porcelain pieces. Zhang and the building's bid winner can decide for themselves about the porcelain pieces after the deal is finished, a judge surnamed Zheng working at the Dongli district court told Tianjin media. On the contrary, Zhang's assessment involved two parts: the house property that's worth 330 million yuan and the porcelain, 946 million yuan. medical bracelets ukpersonalized silicone braceletscustom rubber wristbandsballer bandsbracelet maker onlinecustom fidgetslap wristbands
Frank Pitzer, general manager of Roche Diagnostics' factory in Suzhou, Jiangsu province When Frank Pitzer first visited China, in 2000, he could tell the country was developing rapidly by looking at the infrastructure being built. Two years ago, when he officially relocated to the country as general manager of Swiss healthcare giant Roche Diagnostics' new factory in Suzhou, Jiangsu province, development was still the theme, but with tremendous changes due to a new focus on research and development. Pitzer joined in the Suzhou project in October 2013. He flew regularly to China for preparatory work in 2015 and moved to the city in early 2016 to break ground on the project. He said the new position was exciting, because very few people have the privilege to build a factory from scratch. Roche Diagnostics Suzhou, the company's first production base in the Asia-Pacific region, is scheduled to roll out its first products for sale in Asia this year. The investment in the new factory, covering some 48,000 square meters in the 24-year-old China-Singapore Suzhou Industrial Park, was about 450 million Swiss francs ($472 million). When completed, it is expected to employ about 400 local people. In the long-run, production of 102 products for the Asian market, targeting metabolic, cardiovascular and hepatic diseases, among others, will be transferred from Germany to the Suzhou factory. Pitzer has established a five-person R&D team in Suzhou that is likely to expand. The facility is already cooperating with local universities and professors in other parts of the world in the hope of building up Roche's R&D strength in China. We want to make sure that the interests of Chinese patients will be better reflected within the global development framework, Pitzer said. He said he had noticed a significant improvement in the quality of Chinese academic studies and the output of China's universities over the past three years, laying a solid foundation for good R&D work. However, while innovation was happening in China, it was doing so in a spotty, uncoordinated manner, Pitzer said. But things will change given all the investments that China has made in universities and institutions, and in industries such as healthcare and life science. Former science and technology minister Wan Gang said early this year that China's investment in R&D last year rose 14 percent year-on-year to 1.76 trillion yuan ($279 billion) - which was 2.1 percent of the country's GDP. According to World Bank statistics, spending on R&D in the United States in 2015 equaled 2.8 percent of that country's GDP, compared with 2.9 percent in Germany and 3.3 percent in Japan. China should become one of the leading countries in terms of innovation, and grow into a major technology driving force worldwide by 2050, Wan said. While China may have begun focusing on innovation later than some other countries, Pitzer said there is no significant gap between China and those countries in terms of infrastructure and critical thinking. For science practitioners, critical thinking is vital, he said. I do see that among the employees in our facility. They can make their own decisions and apply knowledge when necessary. China is doing everything right. A lot of innovation will come from the country in the future. It won't take long.
