PRESS DIGEST - China - Dec 24

BEIJING/SHANGHAI, Dec 24 (Reuters) - Chinese newspapers available in Beijing and Shanghai carried the following stories on Monday. Reuters has not checked the stories and does not vouch for their accuracy.

CHINA SECURITIES JOURNAL

-- A central government meeting set the target for prices of agricultural products "neither to rise nor to fall sharply" in 2008.

-- A group of small and medium-sized high technology firms has been authorised to jointly issue 305 million yuan ($41 million) in corporate bonds through the Shenzhen Stock Exchange to become the first such bonds issued in China.

-- Despite a bull run in domestic stocks this year, 40 percent of stock investors made losses, with only less than 10 percent of investors making money outperforming the market, according to an online survey of 11,000 investors.

-- Senior foreign exchange regulator Wei Benhua said China would gradually expand the scale for Qualified Domestic Institutional Investors to invest in overseas markets.

FINANCIAL NEWS

-- China should not be constrained by the interest rate gap between the yuan and the U.S. dollar when adjusting the yuan's interest rate. Most speculative capital inflows are betting on China's surging asset prices, which are fanned somewhat by China's negative inflation-adjusted real interest rate, said Lin Yifu, a prominent government economist.

He also said that a suitable pace for yuan appreciation was 3 to 5 percent a year.

-- China Reinsurance (Group) Corp is advertising to recruit a president. The company got a $4 billion state capital injection this year and is eyeing bringing in strategic investors before a public listing which it hopes to carry out next year.

-- China will let more companies and financial institutions invest abroad in 2008 as part of a move to ease its worsening international payments imbalance, said Wei Benhua, vice head of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, the currency regulator.

CHINA DAILY (www.chinadaily.com.cn)

-- The State Environmental Protection Administration is attempting to force Chinese companies, both listed firms and those waiting to be listed, to regularly reveal environmental information to the public.

SHANGHAI SECURITIES NEWS

-- China's national pension fund made a profit of more than 100 billion yuan in the country's booming stock market in 2007, the fund's head Xiang Huaicheng said.

-- Research reports by several major Chinese securities brokerages forecast China's stock market to continue a bull run in 2008, although at a pace less strong than in 2007, with Shanghai Securities forecasting the benchmark index .SSEC to reach as high as 8,000 points.

-- An issue of 6.3 billion yuan of convertible bonds with detachable warrants by SAIC Motor Corp (600104.SS), China's biggest car maker, attracted 840 billion yuan in subscriptions -- a record for such a bond.

SECURITIES TIMES

-- Chang Jiang Shipping Group Phoenix Co 000520.SZ said it would sign contracts worth a total of 1.64 billion yuan with Chinese shipping yards to book 36 bulk cargo carriers in order to boost its maritime transport capacity.

-- State-owned water supplier Beijing Capital (600008.SS) said it had signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the southern Chinese province of Hunan to help build sewage processing plants in the province.

CHINA BUSINESS NEWS

-- China's first large offshore wind power station, the Donghai Bright project, kicked off construction officially in Shanghai.

-- China's top legislature began deliberations on its first state-owned assets law, which is designed to protect state-owned assets from being illegally seized and to maintain the country's basic economic system.

SHANGHAI DAILY

-- China promised to give farmers subsidies for purchasing household electric appliances in a bid to stimulate sluggish rural consumption and reduce the rising trade surplus. A pilot programme will initially be launched in the three major agricultural provinces of Shandong, Henan and Sichuan.

PEOPLE'S DAILY

-- China held an annual central rural work conference on Sunday pledging to enhance rural infrastructure construction, promote stable development of agriculture and facilitate sustained income growth for farmers next year.

-- China should move to further increase the prices of land, labour and environment protection in 2008 so as to curb excessive and wasteful investment, said Hu Shaowei, a senior economist from the State Information Centre, a key government think-thank.