Jewelry business has been expanding rapidly in China in the past two decades and the country had possessed more than 500 designated state-run jewelry making enterprises and over 1,000 overseas-financed jewelry processing companies by 2000.
Sources from a recent national jewelry exhibition said that more than 10,000 companies are engaged in retailing of jewelry, and the jewelry industry has offered jobs to over 800,000 people.
The annual retail sales of jewelry exceeds 80 billion yuan (about US$9.64 billion), said the sources.
At the exhibition, China Precious and Semi-Precious Stones Association announced a list of 16 famous brands in the country's jewelry industry and another list of ten candidate semi-precious stones which are put for a competition in a nationwide selection of China's national stone.
The ten candidate semi-precious stones include jade from Xiuyan of northeast China's Liaoning Province, jade from Hotan of northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, turquoise from central China's Hubei Province, bloodstone from Changhua of east China's Zhejiang Province, and red corals from Taiwan.
(People's Daily 09/03/2001)
