Death toll from the shoe factory fire in East China's Fujian has risen to 28, Xinhua reported. The blaze broke out around noon on Thursday, causing major casualties.
A total of 183 firefighters and 35 fire engines were sent to the scene. As of now, the open flames have now been extinguished, and the exact cause is still under investigation. Firefighters said that a large amount of clutter had been piled up in the factory building's stairwells, severely hampering firefighting efforts and hindering rescue operations, according to China Central Television (CCTV) News in its latest coverage of the development.
Earlier, firefighters rushed to the factory of the Huiteng Shoe Industry Co., Ltd in Chendai town shortly after the fire, but as of 3:20 pm on Thursday, rescuers were still unable to enter the burning building as operations to extinguish the blaze and locate missing individuals continued, Xinhua reported.
According to a report from CCTV News, the fire has resulted in casualties. And following the incident, China's Ministry of Emergency Management has demanded that all resources be mobilized to extinguish the fire, immediately verify the casualty situation, and make effort to rescue those still trapped while providing urgent medical treatment to the injured.
Jinjiang is one of China's leading footwear manufacturing hubs and the world's production base for sports shoes. According to official records, Jinjiang's footwear and apparel industry generated an annual output value exceeding 250 billion yuan ($36.74 billion) in 2024, with annual sports shoe production surpassing 1.2 billion pairs — accounting for 20 percent of global output.
The city is home to more than 7,000 footwear manufacturers and upstream and downstream supporting enterprises, forming a complete industrial chain and production ecosystem.
Laojun Mountain scenic spot in Luoyang, Central China's Henan Province, is recruiting a sea-of-clouds spotter with a monthly salary of 60,000 yuan ($8,813). Candidates are required to live at the mountain summit for 30 days, track daily everyday changes of the clouds, and post at least one short video each day, the notice said.
Laojun Mountain scenic spot released the recruitment via its official WeChat account on Wednesday. The notice said that the scenic spot is accepting applications for sea-of-clouds spotter position nationwide as July and August each year bring the most frequent and spectacular sea-of-clouds views. The spot seeks to better document changes in sea of clouds and share its spectacular views with online audiences.
The application window lasts one week. Applicants are required to post original short videos on Chinese social media platform Douyin with designated hashtags related to the Laojun Mountain sea-of-clouds spotter recruitment.
Scenic spot staff will use the number of video likes as the primary judging criterion, alongside comprehensive assessment of video content quality, communication reach, and account compliance status, read the notice.
The selected candidate will reside at the summit of Laojun Mountain for one month with free accommodation, tasked with daily monitoring of cloud-sea variations and producing and posting at least one short video of the cloud formations each day.
The recruitment has sparked widespread buzz among netizens, with many expressing their eagerness to apply. A netizen named Linshenjianlu commented that the recruitment not only allows photography enthusiasts nationwide to join in and earn a salary, but also helps boost the scenic spot's popularity, calling it "a win-win deal."
This year marks the 105th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC). Over the past century, the Party has led China through profound transformations: from national peril to national rejuvenation, from bare subsistence to moderate prosperity, from technological catch-up to independent innovation, and from isolation and underdevelopment to greater educational equity. Generation after generation of CPC members, through their unwavering commitment, have written an epic of uplifting the destiny of the Chinese nation, the well-being of its people, and the course of national development.
July 1 marks the CPC's founding anniversary. On this occasion, the Global Times is launching a special series, "105 Years of Uplift," to explore the deeper answer to the question of why the CPC has succeeded. The first installment focuses on how the Party has uplifted the destiny of the Chinese nation, turning the attention to the Memorial Hall of the First National Congress of the CPC - the birthplace of the Party - where a grassroots Party history researcher, through her work, looks back on how the Party pioneers a century ago lit the flame of faith and led the nation from crisis and hardship toward the great rejuvenation.
White light falls across rows of iron-clad bookshelves, where the air hangs thick with the mingled scent of ink and passing years. Zhang Yuhan runs her fingertips along the spines of books chronicling the history and development of the Communist Party of China (CPC), pulls one out, and slowly turns its pages. Between the lines, a century of arduous struggle and historic breakthroughs unfurls in quiet majesty.
This is the working area of the Memorial Hall of the First National Congress of the CPC in Shanghai. Outside the window, the trees along the city downtown's Xingye Road sway in the wind, their shadows strewn across the red-brick walls of the traditional shikumen-style buildings. On a summer day, 105 years ago in 1921, 13 young people, with an average age of 28, gathered secretly in a room on this very road. Their meeting, later interrupted by a raid and moved onto a boat on Nanhu Lake in nearby city Jiaxing, would set in motion a historic turning point: the birth of the CPC.
More than a century later, the Party, which at its founding had just over 50 members, has grown into the world's largest ruling party with more than 100 million members. It has led the Chinese nation out of danger and hardship, step by step, onto the broad road of national rejuvenation and the rise of a great power.
To Zhang, director of the coordination office and a research curator at the memorial, this dramatic transformation is an epic "uplift": generation after generation of CPC members, through faith, sacrifice and hard work, have steadily lifted the fate of the nation and the well-being of its people to unprecedented heights.
"The generations of the Party members," she told the Global Times at the memorial, "are the weightiest backbone of the Party's century-long endeavor of uplifting a nation."
Admirable choices
In 2002, Zhang began working at the memorial after graduating. One of her first major assignments was to sort through all domestic and international scholarship since 1949 on the history of the CPC's founding. Through numerous historical materials, Zhang gradually understands more deeply the weight of the choice made by a group of young people a century ago - the choice to give up personal stability and go forward to save the nation.
One of Zhang's most vivid memories in those years was the 2004 preparations for a symposium on Wang Jinmei.
Wang, a delegate to the first national congress of the CPC from East China's Shandong Province, had once been admitted to a teachers' college on the strength of excellent academic performance. For him, a stable life as a schoolteacher, earning a modest living and supporting a family, would have been an easy and ordinary path. But witnessing a China beset by internal turmoil and foreign aggression, with the people struggling in hunger and cold, Wang embraced Marxism and resolutely set aside his private life, traveling across several cities to mobilize workers' movements.
After years on the road, Wang developed a lung disease and died in Qingdao at just 27. On his deathbed, he left behind a testament: All comrades must work hard, and struggle to the very end for the liberation of the proletariat and all humanity, and for the complete realization of communism!
Decades later, Zhang traveled to Shandong to visit a number of revolutionary sites once associated with Wang. Standing on the ground where that generation had once marched and labored, she was deeply moved. "Growing up in poverty, Wang could have chosen a stable life and easily supported his family, but instead he devoted everything to finding a way forward for the nation," Zhang said. "Against the backdrop of that era, such a choice was extraordinarily rare."
Wang Jinmei was not alone. In those difficult years, countless pioneers like him carried the fate of a nation in peril on their shoulders.
Zhang also shared with the Global Times a family letter written by Chen Tanqiu, another representative to the first national congress of the CPC. At the time, underground Party work was extremely dangerous. Chen and his wife, Xu Quanzhi, who was pregnant at the time, were unable to raise their child, so they made the heartbreaking decision to entrust the baby to relatives in their hometown.
"I have always been a wanderer, with no fixed place to stay," Chen wrote in a letter to his brother, asking him to take in and raise his child. Soon after their child was born, in early 1934, Xu was arrested and later killed, as was Chen in 1943 by reactionary forces.
"These Party members were also parents and children. They loved their own children and families, but in order to secure a better future for more families, they chose to sacrifice their own," Zhang told the Global Times. "That kind of choice made them truly brave and selfless." Exhibits witness
In 2021, the new venue of the memorial opened to the public to mark the 100th anniversary of the founding of the CPC. Today, visitors continue to arrive in an unbroken stream, lingering in this shikumen-style building as they try to get closer to that momentous chapter of history.
The memorial houses a collection of nearly 130,000 relics and artifacts. Among the many exhibits, the first complete Chinese language translation of the Communist Manifesto, along with the first Party program and the first Resolution on the Present Task, stand as iconic witnesses to the Party's early years, Zhang said.
"The Communist Manifesto represented the Party's choice of Marxism," Zhang told the Global Times. She said that in that era, many progressive intellectuals repeatedly compared different ideas, before finally concluding that Marxism was the truth that could save the nation and the people.
If the Communist Manifesto was a "navigation chart," then the program and the resolution adopted at the First CPC National Congress were the "blueprint for construction," said Zhang. "Faith alone was not enough; a rigorous organization was also necessary. With such a party in place, people could think as one and work toward the same goal, helping to lay the foundation for uplifting a new China," she said.
For a century, the CPC's path of uplifting the destiny of the Chinese nation has been soaked in the blood of sacrifice. In 2025, the memorial held a special exhibition on archaeological findings related to martyrs of the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1931-1945). Among the exhibits were the remains of some martyrs, on whose bones rusted nails and traces of bullet holes were still clearly visible. These silent marks seemed to speak of the hail of bullets and shells they had endured while resisting invasion.
In the memorial hall's permanent exhibition, the tools used by martyr Li Ba to repair radio equipment and the radio once used by martyr Qin Hongjun rest quietly in display cases. On May 7, 1949, just some 20 days before the liberation of Shanghai and less than five months before the founding of New China, the two CPC members, who had worked in secret radio operations, were secretly killed by enemy agents.
"Whether faced with domestic turmoil or foreign aggression, CPC members have never given up their mission to carry the nation forward," Zhang told the Global Times. "Some fell on the front lines of battle, and some died in the shadows of the underground struggle, but the Party kept moving forward through setbacks."
A glorious path forward
Over the past two decades, Zhang has not only devoted her life to researching historical archives and designing exhibitions. She has also taken the stories of the Party's history into universities and out to the general public, spoken with ordinary visitors, foreign dignitaries and young students, and forged deep friendships with many descendants of the Party's revolutionary pioneers.
Zhang recalled one occasion when a descendant of Lin Boqu, one of the Party's early members, spoke of Lin's final all-night farewell with his old friend He Shuheng, a delegate of the first national congress of the CPC, before the Long March of the Red Army led by the CPC (1934-36). That night, He took off the sweater he was wearing and gave it to Lin. The sweater, made by He's daughter, later helped shield Lin from the bitter cold along the Long March.
He Shuheng later died after leaping from a cliff during a breakout attempt, and the sweater became a final testament to their parting. Decades later, when Lin's descendant spoke of that sweater, tears welled in her eyes.
Now on display at the memorial, the sweater carries not only the memory of a priceless wartime comradeship, but also the resolve of CPC members in those days: an unshakable conviction and dauntless devotion to sacrifice their lives at any moment, Zhang said.
Zhang believes that today the great founding spirit of the Party still resides in the ordinary yet steadfast choices people make, and the original aspiration of CPC members has never changed. "Just as the pioneers a hundred years ago set aside their own families to pursue a greater cause, Party members today continue to stand firm at their posts, day after day, turning the people's hopes into reality, continue to uplift the nation inch by inch."
In Zhang's view, "uplift" is never an abstract or grandiose word. It is something tangible, rooted in the everyday comforts of ordinary people's lives. "A warm meal on the stove, a home that shelters one from wind and rain, a school where children can study in safety, convenient transportation, security in old age… these are the most concrete expressions of how the Party and the country have uplifted this nation," she told the Global Times.
At the final section of the memorial's permanent exhibition, the scene is warm and bright: men, women and children gather before the camera, their faces lit with genuine smiles that fill an entire wall of display panels. The images stand in striking contrast to the sorrowful old photographs of ordinary people in earlier sections of this exhibition, creating a vivid visual span across a century.
Zhang paused there, gazing at those smiles, her eyes full of tenderness. "These radiant smiles are what all CPC revolutionaries devoted their lives to pursuing," she said. "The sacrifices made by countless people in those years were for one purpose: to ensure that the Chinese people would no longer struggle in misery, but could laugh freely from the heart."
"A century ago, the Party's pioneers uplifted the nation out of peril and survival crises; today, the Party continues to lead us in uplifting the people toward a better life," she said. "This glorious path has carried on, unbroken and unwavering."
Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, on Tuesday chaired a meeting of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee to study and arrange work related to flood control and drought relief.
China is expected to see more extreme weather and climate events than usual in its main flood season this year, with droughts and floods occurring at the same time, according to the meeting. It urged all regions and relevant departments to take solid measures to ensure effective flood control, drought relief, emergency response and disaster mitigation.
Stressing that protecting people's lives remains the top priority, the meeting called for measures to strengthen flood control on major rivers and lakes, and highlighted the need to attach great importance to the risk of drought-flood abrupt alternation, and strengthen the unified management and dispatching of water sources.
It also underscored the need to ensure the safety of key infrastructure and ongoing construction projects during the flood season, and to step up protection of agricultural infrastructure.
Emergency rescue and disaster relief must be swift and efficient, and preparations of emergency response forces, equipment and supplies must be stepped up, the meeting noted, calling for efforts to strengthen grassroots capacity for flood prevention, mitigation and relief.
Officials at all levels must firmly establish and practice a correct understanding of what it means to perform well, according to the meeting. Grassroots Party organizations, Party members and officials must strive to effectively protect people's lives and property and uphold overall social stability, it said.
The coast guard of east China's Fujian Province on Monday conducted routine law enforcement patrols in accordance with the law in the waters near Kinmen, said a spokesperson for a regional branch of China Coast Guard (CCG).
Since the beginning of June, the Fujian coast guard has dispatched task groups to strengthen control and management over relevant waters, said Zhu Anqing, spokesperson of the CCG Donghai Branch.
Zhu added that this is an effective step to protect the legitimate rights and interests, as well as the lives and property of fishermen on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, and to ensure orderly navigation and activities in the waters between Xiamen and Kinmen.
After spending one month aboard China's Tiangong space station, the Shenzhou-23 crew has continued a range of space science experiments, including collecting ultrasound data from different parts of their bodies, while also enjoying freshly baked pumpkin in orbit, according to the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA).
A video published by the CMSA on Sunday shows that taikonauts placed sweet pumpkin chunks into the space oven, bringing a touch of home-cooked warmth to life aboard the orbital outpost. Over the past week, the three crew members have maintained a busy and productive schedule.
In the field of space medicine, the crew used an ultrasound diagnostic device to perform ultrasound scans on one another's necks, wrists and abdomens. The data collected will support research on pan-vascular blood flow spectroscopy, spatiotemporal blood flow mapping, and the remodeling of muscle groups that are particularly sensitive to microgravity.
The Shenzhou-23 crew also interacted with the space robot Xiaohang, conducting touch-based interaction tests to collect data that will help optimize motion planning for robots operating in orbit. Having served aboard the Tiangong space station for more than a year, Xiaohang has now worked alongside four taikonaut crews.
Research into in-orbit electroencephalogram (EEG) testing has also progressed smoothly. The three taikonauts used EEG acquisition equipment to carry out a series of experiments, including tests on visual-motor processing and behavioral responses to different lighting conditions. Scientists on the ground will use the data transmitted from the space station for further research, according to CMSA.
In the field of microgravity physical science, the crew completed the installation of multiple experimental modules and units. They also carried out routine maintenance, including replacing samples in the containerless experiment chamber, servicing electrodes in the levitation system and cleaning observation window lenses.
As part of their health management program, the taikonauts used a traditional Chinese medicine diagnostic device to collect physiological data, providing researchers with information to support long-term health monitoring during extended space missions. They also used specialized equipment to help counter bone loss and maintained a regular exercise regimen in orbit. In addition, the crew carried out routine tasks such as organizing supplies aboard the space station.
China launched the Shenzhou-23 crewed spaceship on May 24. The mission is notable for including a one-year in-orbit stay experiment, which will provide crucial data for future long-duration space exploration, per Xinhua News Agency.
China supports the mediation efforts made by Pakistan, Qatar and other parties, and hopes that both Iran and the US will sustain the momentum of negotiations, continue to work towards each other, and strive for positive progress in the talks, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said on Monday, in response to an inquiry that mediated by Pakistan and Qatar, Iran and the US reached a consensus on Monday to establish communication line to safeguard shipping through Hormuz Strait and de-escalating the conflict in Lebanon.
Against the backdrop of cooled bilateral ties, travel insiders in China confirmed to the Global Times on Tuesday a further decline in both bookings and inquiries for trips to Japan, with Japanese media reports also citing government data showing six consecutive months of declining Chinese tourist arrivals.
The downward trend also comes as the government decided to raise visa fees for foreign nationals fivefold starting from July, according to media reports. Chinese experts stated that resurgent militarism in Japan has strained bilateral exchanges, while higher entry barriers risk further eroding its share of the regional tourism market, ultimately undermining Tokyo's own interests.
Japanese government data showed that the number of tourists from China fell for six consecutive months, plunging 60.4 percent over the year to 313,000, according to a previous report by Mainichi Shimbun in June. The report also noted that the number of foreign visitors to Japan in May fell 3.6 percent from a year earlier to 3.56 million due to a drop in travelers from China.
Since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi made erroneous remarks on Taiwan, the number of Chinese mainland tourists traveling to Japan has continued to decline, putting pressure on Japan's retail, accommodation and catering sectors, the Xinhua News Agency reported.
A staff member from CYTS told the Global Times on Tuesday that the gradual drop began since late last year. Although its agency service for Japanese tourist visas remains in normal operation, inquiries in May were half the figure recorded in the same period last year.
Another industry insider, Xu Fengwei, a staff member from the marketing department of Tongcheng Travel, also told the Global Times on Tuesday that both bookings and inquiries for group tours to Japan have dropped markedly year-on-year, with weak demand for Japanese travel becoming a dominant trend among Chinese consumers.
Among tourists who previously enquired about trips to Japan, destinations including Thailand, Spain and Brazil have emerged as alternatives, Xu added. Flight bookings to Thailand surged over 30 percent year-on-year for the same period in May. Demand also saw substantial growth for long-haul hotspots including Central Asia, Brazil, Spain and Portugal.
The continued decline in Chinese tourist arrivals to Japan is primarily attributed to the current state of China-Japan relations, with strained bilateral ties sharply reducing travel demand from China. Domestic social instability in Japan has also weighed on visitor numbers, further undermining its appeal as a travel destination, Lü Chao, an expert at the Liaoning Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times.
In recent months, the Chinese Embassy in Japan has issued a series of safety advisories reminding Chinese nationals to safeguard personal security, citing multiple incidents where Chinese visitors suffered harassment or physical assaults.
The Chinese Embassy in Japan issued a statement on its official WeChat account in April, citing a series of recent incidents involving Chinese nationals. These include a case in which an active-duty member of Japan's Self-Defense Forces scaled a wall and broke into the Chinese embassy while carrying a knife, as well as reports of right-wing individuals harassing Chinese spectators at a marathon event. In addition, Chinese students were targeted in "bumping assault" on the streets in Tokyo, while a Hong Kong tourist was assaulted at a restaurant in Hokkaido.
The embassy noted that these cases reflect a growing presence of rampant right-wing activities in Japan, a noticeable increase in discriminatory incidents targeting Chinese nationals, and a continuously rising safety risk for Chinese citizens in Japan, Xinhua reported.
More broadly, resurgent militarism in Japan, along with provocative actions toward China, has contributed to a deterioration in bilateral people-to-people and economic exchanges, and the moves resulted in significant losses for Japan itself, Lü said.
The decline also coincided with a government decision to raise the fees for visas for foreign nationals by revising a related Cabinet order, according to the Japan Times on Saturday. The decision, made at a Cabinet meeting, marks the first revision of the visa fees in 48 years, since 1978.
The fee will be increased from the current 3,000 yen ($18.5) to 15,000 yen for a single-entry visa and from 6,000 yen to 30,000 yen for a multiple-entry visa. The new fees will apply to applications submitted on or after July 1, per the report.
Japanese Foreign Minister Motegi Toshimitsu told reporters that the current visa fees were reviewed in response to rising prices and changes in foreign exchange rates, according to the report by NHK.
Higher visa fees are likely to deter price-sensitive and short-stay visitors, with smaller regional cities and rural areas—those most reliant on inbound tourism—expected to be the first to feel the impact. These destinations risk losing a key source of visitors as a result of a short-sighted approach, Sun Shengnan, associate professor at Shanghai University of Political Science and Law, told the Global Times.
At the same time, in an increasingly competitive global tourism market, neighboring countries such as South Korea and Thailand are well positioned to absorb diverted demand, Sun said, adding that by raising barriers to entry, Japan risks ceding a significant share of the regional tourism market.
Sun added that this policy move by Japan's government may provide a short-term boost to government revenues, yet sacrifices the country's open international reputation and dynamism of regional industries in the process.
When asked to comment on reports that Taiwan region's military is carrying out the so-called "Immediate Combat Readiness Exercises" and claiming that the drills aim to verify the emergency response capacity and joint combat capabilities of all operational zones in the event that Chinese mainland takes action, Zhang Han, a spokesperson for the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council, said on Wednesday that these so-called drills lay bare the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) authorities' sinister attempt to seek independence through military buildup. This also fully exposes them as the fundamental source stoking cross-Straits confrontation and triggering tensions and turbulence across the Straits, Zhang added.
Faced with the powerful Chinese People's Liberation Army, the DPP authorities' hollow saber-rattling is completely futile, Zhang said, adding that their reckless moves will only bring disaster and ruin to Taiwan and lead to their own self-destruction.
