You're listening to NEWS Plus Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
China aims to cover all of its urban and rural areas with 4G network by 2018. That's according to an action plan published recently by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
The three-year action plan entitled "Internet Plus" reveals that the country also plans to install fiber optics in more than 80 percent of its villages.
With regard to the upgrading of network infrastructure, the ministry set the target of "basically completing a broadband-based, integrated, ubiquitous and secure next-generation national information infrastructure".
To achieve this, China will channel more energy into the promotion of 4G, and boost research and development of 5G.
The action plan will integrate mobile Internet, cloud computing, big data and the Internet of Things with modern manufacturing to encourage the healthy development of e-commerce, industrial networks, and Internet banking, and to help Internet companies increase their international presence.
This is NEWS Plus Special English.
A hospital in southwest China's Chongqing Municipality successfully performed tumor surgery on a patient with pancreatic cancer with the assistance of a robot.
The hospital claimed the surgery as the world's first artificial blood vessel reconstruction involving the robotic device after searching through a widely-used global medical database.
During the surgery, the robot, controlled by the doctor, found the portal vein connected to the pancreas, which was also cancerous and needed to be removed.
The most difficult stage of the surgery was replacing the portal vein with an artificial vessel without causing a massive hemorrhage.
After an instant and precise calculation by the robot, the doctor inserted one robotic arm through a small hole on the 57-year-old patient to hold the artificial vessel steady while operating another arm to stitch it using a surgical needle.
According to Bie Ping, who performed the operation, in the past, the patient's abdomen would have been opened for such an operation, but the robot only left a few needle holes, which is more conducive to recovery.