Society

When Mireille Gingras made her first trip to China six years ago, Xian Ping Lu was exactly the sort of person she was hoping to meet, and the company he had founded -- Chipscreen Biosciences -- just the sort she wanted to do business with. She just hadn't been sure they existed.

The Montreal-born neurobiologist had started her own San Diego consulting firm, HUYA Bioscience, which tried to help Big Pharma and biotech firms latch on to promising early-stage drug developments across the globe.

China hadn't been on her radar back then. For the pharmaceutical and biotech industries -- just like toys or consumer electronics -- China was (and to a large extent still is) a source of inexpensive products that can be sold, as Wal-Mart (WMT) might put it, "for everyday low prices." China has been an increasing source of generic drug development for pharma, but not the kind of research-intensive, expensive-to-develop medicines that are the stuff of patents and high profit margins. "People didn't think there was anything happening there back then," Gingras says.

Strong demand for Chinese shares among global investors has helped to fuel a record number of new offerings from the country this year.

Yesterday, the company, a Shanghai property developer, said in new statement at the Hong Kong Stock Exchange that it wouldn’t go ahead with the originally planned timetable for the offering in “light of the continued policy uncertainty surrounding the PRC property sector,” and “with the investors’ best interests in mind.”

CJ Land “will continue to review the market situation and further announcement(s) will be made at such time as a decision regarding a relaunch is reached,” it said.

Here’s a summary of CJ Land’s new announcement:

A battle over alleged unfair business practices between Tencent, operator of the popular instant-messaging software QQ, and Qihoo 360, China’s biggest antivirus service provider, escalated this week when Tencent stopped service to QQ users whose computers are installed with Qihoo 360’s software.

Users are complaining in online forums and microblogs that the companies’ conflict, one of the most recent and extreme examples of how competition between companies in China can sometimes snowball into public mudslinging, is now affecting innocent bystanders, and are calling the incident “small gang vs. mafia,” with Tencent, one of the world’s largest Internet companies by market capitalization, earning the latter, more powerful label.

Harvard Business School is expanding its executive education offerings in China to meet growing demand for management instruction there, says David Yoffie, senior associate dean of executive education at Harvard.

The school has rapidly expanded overseas in the last four years, focusing on China, India and Europe with programs that teach everything from venture capital to strategy execution. China has seen the quickest growth.

But Harvard has had a trickier time in India. It found strong demand at low price levels, but companies have resisted paying the same prices Harvard charges in the U.S.