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Thread: China, the 1st stop for Bill Gates after retirement this summer

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[quote=MARRIE,299092]Beijing has pledged a "smoke-free Olympics," banning smoking from most indoor public spaces, workplaces and spectator areas of open-air stadiums during the summer games in August. But sharing cigarettes is entrenched in the culture.

"It will be interesting to see on tobacco how much they cooperate on that," Gates said. "The U.S. was at a much, much higher level of wealth before it did anything about tobacco, so China has a chance to act well before the equivalent time that the U.S. did."

Gates can observe the results himself. He said he plans to attend the Olympics.

The Gates Foundation is also making grants for hepatitis B vaccination in China, where the disease affects about 10 percent of the population.

And in agriculture, the foundation is developing programs to take expertise from China to Africa to help raise crop yields.

The world's two leading centers for rice research are in the Philippines and China.

The Gates Foundation is working with Asian rice researchers to focus on the needs of Africa for more varieties of rice and traits like drought resistance.

"In some cases they've just cooperated with us without us funding any activity," Gates said. "In some cases, we fund them to pay particular attention to the problems in the case of that crop out of Africa."

To begin tackling the HIV/AIDS problem in China, the Gates Foundation opened an office in Beijing last year and hired Ray Yip, a former China director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, to head the program. It has committed an initial $50 million for the effort.

China's government is wary of foreign nonprofit organizations working on sensitive issues. Many nongovernmental organizations are mistrusted, and the country's top AIDS activists are routinely put under house arrest.

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