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Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi gave few details of the nuclear deal with China.

Pakistan said Saturday that China will help it build two more nuclear power plants, offsetting Pakistani frustration over a recent nuclear deal between archrival India and the United States.

The agreement with China was among 12 accords signed during Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari's recent visit to Beijing, said Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi.

While Qureshi gave few details, the accord deepens Pakistan's long-standing ties with China at a time when its relations with Washington are strained over the war against terrorism.

U.S. officials including Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher, who arrived in Islamabad on Saturday for talks, have rejected Pakistani calls for equal treatment with India on nuclear power.

Chinese leaders "do recognize Pakistan's need, and China is one country that at international forums has clearly spoken against the discriminatory nature of that understanding" between Washington and New Delhi, Qureshi said.

Zardari met with China's top leaders during his first official trip to Beijing since replacing stalwart U.S. ally Pervez Musharraf as president in September.

China, a major investor and arms supplier for Pakistan, has already helped it build a nuclear power plant at Chashma, about 125 miles southwest of the capital, Islamabad. Work on a second nuclear plant is in progress and is expected to be completed in 2011.

Qureshi said the Chashma III and Chashma IV reactors would provide Pakistan with an additional 680 megawatts of generating capacity.

He didn't say when they would be built or what assistance China would provide.

Nor did he discuss any measures to prevent nuclear materials from the new plants from being diverted to Pakistan's atomic weapons program. Pakistan has placed several other civilian reactors under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards.

China's Foreign Ministry had no immediate comment on Qureshi's remarks.

However, ministry spokesman Qin Gang said Thursday that China was willing to continue its cooperation with Pakistan on peaceful nuclear programs supervised by the IAEA.

Pakistan's nuclear program remains a sore topic with Washington because of its past record of proliferation.

International sanctions were slapped on Pakistan after it detonated its first nuclear charges in 1998 in response to similar tests by India.

The sanctions were eased after Musharraf agreed to help Washington hunt down al Qaeda terrorists responsible for the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.

But the revelation in 2004 that the architect of Islamabad's nuclear program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, had passed nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea set back Pakistan's hopes of becoming a trusted member of the world's exclusive nuclear club.

The U.S.-India deal allows American businesses to sell nuclear fuel, technology and reactors to India in exchange for safeguards and U.N. inspections of India's civilian -- but not military -- nuclear installations.

Boucher told reporters earlier this month that the pact with India was "unique" and that a similar agreement with Pakistan was "just not on the table."

He said Washington would help Pakistan -- where chronic power shortages are contributing to a gathering economic crisis -- develop its huge coal reserves, expand hydroelectric power generation and build wind farms on its Arabian Sea coast.

Pakistan, the Islamic world's only known nuclear weapons state, began operating its first nuclear power station with Canadian assistance near the southern port city of Karachi in 1972.

Fox News Corporation Founder Rupert Murdoch and wife Wendi Deng and a splash screen from MySpace.cn


As MySpace continues to struggle in China, a country with 250 million Internet users, major changes are in store for the company

Rupert Murdoch hasn't enjoyed much success in China. Quotas on foreign films hinder the efforts of Murdoch's Twentieth Century Fox to make inroads in Chinese cinemas. Government control of the TV industry has largely kept News Corp. (ticker: NWS.A) subsidiary Star TV, the Hong Kong-based Asia satellite TV operator, on the sidelines of the world's largest country. And rampant piracy and illegal Internet downloading mean News Corp. can do little to cash in on the popularity of shows such as Prison Break.

That's why expectations were so high for the launch of MySpace in China. Unlike the movie and TV industries, the Chinese Internet business is open to foreign investment. China has the world's largest online population, with more than 250 million using the Net; many of them are students or people in their 20s, prime users of MySpace in other countries. Murdoch's wife, Wendi, was born and grew up in China and took an active role in launching a local version of News Corp,'s social networking service (SNS), MySpace.cn, (BusinessWeek, 6/26/07) in the country in April 2007.

Murdoch's bad China luck isn't changing, though. MySpace China, a joint venture among News Corp., venture capital firm IDG-Accel (a partnership between Boston-based IDG and Accel Partners from Silicon Valley), and local investment firm China Broadband Capital Partners, doesn't have much to show for its effort. "MySpace.cn has not become a Tier 1 SNS site in China," said Beijing-based market researcher BDA China in an August report. The company is an also-ran in the Chinese SNS scene, dominated by local names such as Qzone, Xiaonei, and 51.com, and was hit last month by reports in the local and international media of a management shakeup, including the departure of Luo Chuan, who had left Microsoft (MSFT) China to be MySpace China's CEO.

Rethinking the Business Model

While denying Luo has departed, an executive at one of MySpace China's shareholders confirms that some major changes are in store. Zhou Quan, managing director and general partner at IDG Accel, which owns 10% of MySpace China, says executives are in the midst of rethinking the business model. Luo, he says, continues to work at MySpace China "almost full-time" and is taking an active role in discussions regarding the company's future direction. "There will be a total plan, not just a change in CEO," says Zhou. "They will come up with a new strategy."

Other people involved with MySpace China declined to comment. China Broadband did not respond to requests for an interview. A U.S.-based spokesman for MySpace referred questions from BusinessWeek to the China operation. "We are not in a position to comment on the reports regarding our CEO," said MySpace China spokesman Yitian Zou in an e-mail. "The company and business are doing well."

There's certainly a big gap between MySpace China and its Chinese rivals, though. According to BDA, MySpace China hopes to have 10 million registered users by the end of the year. In contrast, market leader Qzone, owned by Shenzhen-based instant-messaging giant Tencent Holdings, already has 105 million registered users. Another Chinese SNS operator, 51.com, has 95 million.

BEIJING, Oct 12 (Reuters) - China's Communist Party vowed on Sunday to double the income of the country's hundreds of millions of farmers by 2020 and boost their spending, as it looks to home markets as a bulwark against the global financial crisis.

The country's leaders gathered for a four-day conclave focused on the farmers who pioneered China's economic reforms 30 years ago but have since been left behind by booming cities.

China hopes that boosting rural growth will help counter wilting export demand as the global financial crisis forces foreign consumers to tighten their belts.

Rural discontent about expensive education, shoddy health care and corrupt local government is also fuelling unrest that has Beijing's stability-obsessed cadres worried.

"We must give a new impetus to rural development, in order to give a new, increased vitality to the entire economy and society," the official Xinhua agency said in a report on the meeting, strictly closed to foreign media.

The report gave no details on the new rural regulations agreed at the conclave, but state media have flagged that they will include land reforms and rural spending initiatives.

State media are already acclaiming the farm changes as a breakthrough parallel to reforms pioneered under Deng Xiaoping almost 30 years ago, when the huge communes that were the jewels of Mao Zedong's communism began to crumble.

Farmers are hopeful but wary.

Yu Bin, a villager in Anhui province who has protested against the confiscation of local farmland for development, welcomed the promises but said enforcing well-intentioned announcements was not always easy.

"Policy enforcement is always a problem at the grassroots," Yu told Reuters by telephone.

"The key is to give farmers more protection of what rights they are promised. Only if we can get that will farmers' lives improve. I hope this will be the start of some real improvement."

FOOD SECURITY

Since 1978, farmers' incomes have soared from 134 yuan per year on average to 4140 yuan ($605.8). The number of people living in poverty has shrunk from 250 million to just 15 million.

But urban residents' incomes are much higher and until this year were rising faster than farmers', an imbalance Beijing is now keen to address.

The leaders plan to entirely eliminate absolute poverty and also ensure China can feed its vast and growing population, said the official summary of the meeting.

State media also suggested the world financial crisis might give extra impetus to efforts to boost domestic development.

"The global credit crisis freezing up the world's finances may be a blessing in disguise for China as it aims to modify its economic structure," Xinhua said in a commentary on Sunday.

"The government turned to the vast rural market, which has 55 percent of the nation's consumers," the report added, before mentioning the leadership meeting and the reforms it passed. (Additional reporting by Chris Buckley)

Copyright 2008 Reuters, Click for Restriction