BizChina

The telecom equipment maker Alcatel-Lucent said on Wednesday that it has signed a research memorandum with China's biggest telecom carrier, China Mobile Communications Corp, in areas such as the next generation mobile networks and cloud computing.

The partnership will help the French-American telecom gear vendor to be in a better position to profit from the world's most populous mobile telecom market.

Ben Verwaayen, chief executive of Alcatel-Lucent, said the partnership will have a fundamental impact on the company as the focus of the world's telecom market is changing from networks to applications and services.

"The network is becoming more intelligent, not just access and transition but also applications," said Verwaayen in an interview on Wednesday.

China's power consumption rose 13.41 percent year on year in March to 388.8 billion kilowatt hours (kwh), the National Energy Administration (NEA) said Thursday.

Combined electricity use in the first quarter totalled 1.09 trillion kwh, up 12.72 percent from a year earlier, the administration said.

In the first quarter, power use by the primary, or agricultural, industry rose 3.16 percent to 19.5 billion kwh year on year. The use of power by the secondary, or industrial, industry rose 12.31 percent to 802.5 billion kwh. The tertiary, or service, sector consumed 123.6 billion kwh of electricity, up 15.51 percent.

China's power demand could increase by 12 percent to 4.7 trillion kwh this year, said the research institute of the State Grid Corp. of China on Wednesday. The forecast is higher than the NEA's January estimate which said demand could rise 9 percent to 4.5 trillion kwh this year.

Xinjiang's capital of Urumqi will be built into a "core city" in west China and an "international trade center" of central and west Asia by 2020, local authorities have announced.

The goal was set in an urban development blueprint for Urumqi during the 2011-2020 period, unveiled Tuesday after three years of study.

To achieve this goal, local authorities will build faster and more convenient transportation networks to strengthen links between Urumqi and inland Chinese regions as well as areas in central and west Asia, according to the blueprint.

Local authorities will build a new railway line linking Urumqi with Lanzhou, enlarge the current Urumqi railway station, and build a new airport terminal during the next 10 years, the blueprint said.

Chinese search giant Baidu said it has successfully removed 2.8 million files from its document-sharing website, Baidu Wenku, after getting slammed by Chinese authors who accused the company of encouraging copyright infringement and demanded compensation.

The controversy prompted at least dozens of writers to publish criticisms of Baidu CEO Robin Li, a billionaire and one of China’s most prominent entrepreneurs, over the past week. The criticisms included a satirical mock-interview titled “F— You Too, Robin Li” (in Chinese, English translation from ESWN here) that portrays Mr. Li as a corrupt executive who describes rights as “something to be violated,” and a blog post by famous Chinese novelist and blogger Han Han (in Chinese, English translation from Han Han Digest here) suggesting Mr. Li had built his considerable wealth on the back of others’ work.

The company responded by apologizing to writers and promising to remove infringing content by Tuesday, and saying it would shut down Wenku, known as Baidu Libary in English, if problems persisted.

Company spokesman Kaiser Kuo said that Baidu removed most of the files suspected of being unlicensed — largely found in its “literary works” category — as of 3 p.m. Tuesday, and is in the process of arranging a new discussion with representatives from the publishing industry. He said he couldn’t guarantee that 100% of the pirated content on Baidu Library is gone, but “I very much hope that they [the authors] see this was a good faith effort on our part and that it will form the foundation for future talks.”