"It was a packed hall, and there were a lot of hostile questions directed to China from (participants from) Asia and the United States, " said Dupont, director of the Centre for International Security Studies at the University of Sydney.

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According to Zheng Bingwen of the Centre for International Social Security Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, individual accounts held assets worth only 270 billion yuan at the end of 2011, even though 2.5 trillion yuan had been paid into them.

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