Beijing will adopt five new measures to boost travel between the mainland and Taiwan, the South China Morning Post reported. The measures were announced by Wang Yi, head of the Taiwan Affairs office at a forum in Xiamen on Sunday. Among the measures is one that would greatly simplify travel permits for Taiwanese to the mainland, which would be one step closer to granting identity cards. Others include allowing mainlanders to travel to Taiwan via Taiwan-controlled ferry services, and adding six mainland cities to the list of cities that can handle Taiwan travel permits.

China's foreign minister arrived in India on Sunday for talks with high ranking officials on a long-standing border dispute that triggered a short war in 1962, AFP reported. Yang Jiechi arrived in Kolkata where he will inaugurate a new consulate and meet his Indian counterpart Pranab Mukerjee and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today. Indian officials have said the two countries will discuss ways to boost trade and review continuing negotiations related to the border dispute. India claims China occupies 38,000 square kilometers of its territory in the Himalayas, while China claims the 90,000 square kilometer northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh to be its own. The two countries have held 11 rounds of talks to resolve this dispute.

China's central bank has built up stakes worth up to US$16 billion in leading British companies, including household names such as Unilever and Tesco, the Sunday Telegraph reported. The People's Bank of China and the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) have bought stakes in at least half of the companies that constitute the FTSE 100, Britain's index of leading blue-chip companies. The paper analyzed shareholder registers of about half of the companies in the FTSE 100 and found that almost all of them include China's central bank as a shareholder. The investigation revealed that SAFE had invested at least US$6.2 billion in British companies, though the number is possibly much higher.

CITIC Resources Holdings, a unit of state-owned CITIC Group, will spin off its manganese unit, the South China Morning Post reported. The company has submitted an application to the Hong Kong stock exchange to list CITIC Dameng Holdings on the main board. CITIC Resources owns 80% of CITIC Dameng. CITIC Group owns the remaining 20%. The listing would allow CITIC Resources to raise new funds, broaden Dameng's capital base and build a separate management team for Dameng, the paper said. CITIC Resources did not offer a size of the potential listing or say when it might take place. Previous reports had estimated that a listing could raise as much as US$800 million and take place by the end of the year.

China's regulators have shortened the lock up period on post-IPO share sales, a move that could slow the rise in share prices after a company lists, the Wall Street Journal reported. The Shenzhen and Shanghai bourses, in separate announcements on Thursday and Friday respectively, said that investors owning shares in a company prior to its listing would be able to sell their shares one year after an IPO, compared to a previous lockup period of three years. Shortening the lockup period could reduce demand from first-day investors, thus diluting share prices, analysts told the paper. The Shanghai Composite Index dropped 3.3% on Friday to end at 2,202.45. The index is down 58% this year and 64% from its high recorded last October.

Mobile phone maker Nokia will have phones operating on China's homegrown standard TD-SCDMA available when the service is launched, the firm's vice president of Greater China sales, David Tang, told the South China Morning Post in an interview. Nokia at this point has lagged behind its competitors in developing TD-SCDMA phones, but Tang was optimistic that the Finnish company could catch up. But Frederick Wong, a technology analyst with BNP Paribas, said it might take Nokia 12-18 months to catch up with its competitors ZTE and Huawei Technologies, who have already launched TD-SCDMA products. A trio of 3G technologies are competing for share of China's 3G market - WCDMA, CDMA2000 and homegrown TD-SCDMA, widely seen as the least-mature standard. China has yet to issue 3G licenses.

China Eastern Airlines's (CEA) president Cao Jinxiong said on Sunday that government shareholders in his company and Shanghai Airlines (SA) are discussing a merger of the two carriers, the Wall Street Journal reported. He said that the government plans to inject capital into CEA before merging it with SA, at which point the combined entity would consider a possible stake sale to Singapore Airlines. "Both [deals], with Shanghai Airlines and Singapore Airlines are possible. But for sure the merger with Shanghai Airlines will take place before a possible stake sale with Singapore Airlines," Cao was quoted as saying. CEA last year agreed to sell a 24% stake to Singapore Airlines and Temasek Holdings, but the deal fell through.