The Chinese like emerging markets because, for a change, they don’t have to start way behind established American companies. By moving into Brazil aggressively, Chinese PC maker Lenovo Group Ltd. and Internet-search company Baidu Inc. hope to gain an edge over companies like Hewlett-Packard Co. and Google Inc. In addition, some U.S. companies that are leaders at home and in Europe have a smaller footprint here because of Brazil’s long history of protectionism and red tape and its high cost of labor, particularly compared with Asia.

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“We don’t have any experience. We don’t know how to organize,” Jack Ma said in an interview.

The pace of growth threatens to overwhelm Alibaba, which Mr. Ma, a former English teacher, started in his apartment 13 years ago. Today, Hangzhou-based Alibaba has more than 23,000 employees. Taobao and Tmall, the company’s shopping Web sites, are expected to host a trillion yuan ($157 billion) in transactions this year, up 150 percent from 400 billion yuan in 2010. Taobao and Tmall are each less than 10 years old.

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The Internet search giant unveiled on its Chinese search site this week a new mechanism that identifies political and other sensitive terms that are censored by Chinese authorities. For example, when users search for keywords like “carrot” — which contains the character for Chinese President Hu Jintao’s surname — a yellow dropdown message says: “We’ve observed that searching for ‘hu’ in mainland China may temporarily break your connection to Google. This interruption is outside Google’s control.”

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The deal marks the unraveling of one of the most celebrated tie-ups between Western and Chinese Internet companies, which gave a boost to Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma in the partnership’s early days but became strained in recent years.

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Lenovo, the world’s second-largest PC maker, said in a written statement on Monday that the five-billion-yuan facility, in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, will have several thousand employees, mainly focused on smartphones, tablet computers and other mobile devices for China and global markets.

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According to the report, social networking is becoming a more important means of communication and information gathering in China, where 36% of PC users said social media sites are their favorite source of content. Chinese users spend an average of 46 minutes per day on social media sites, the report says, while users in the U.S. and Japan spend 37 minutes and seven minutes on the sites per day, respectively.

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The popular Twitter-like microblogging service Sina Weibo on Tuesday deleted the accounts of several users, including that of Li Delin, a senior editor of the Chinese business magazine Capital Week, whose March 19 post helped fuel rumors of a coup in Beijing. The service announced the move to many of its more than 300 million user accounts, thereby turning it into a public lesson in the consequences of rumor mongering.

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The moves are among the most dramatic censorship efforts undertaken by Beijing since the rise over the past two years of the popular microblogging services, known in China as weibo. They allow the fast dissemination of information, challenging the central government’s traditional control of the media.

They also show the continuing tensions in China following the March sacking of Bo Xilai, a former Chinese Communist Party star whose ouster as Party chief of the megacity of Chongqing showed cracks in Beijing’s veneer of political unity.

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Apple and one of its top suppliers, Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., agreed to a set of recommendations by the Fair Labor Association following an audit of Hon Hai’s Chinese factories to reduce work hours and change other employment policies.

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A spokeswoman said Mr. Cook — who is on his first trip to China since becoming chief executive of the Cupertino, Calif., company — “had great meetings with Chinese officials today.”

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Apple spokeswoman Carolyn Wu said Proview International Holding Ltd. and its subsidiaries tricked Apple into signing a 2009 agreement in such a way that opens ownership of the Chinese trademarks to questions. She said Proview, which is based in Hong Kong, now is trying unfairly to extract more money for the same transaction.

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Under the terms of the agreement, Youku shareholders and ADS holders will own approximately 71.5 percent of a newly combined entity, Youku Tudou Inc., and Tudou shareholders and ADS holders will own 28.5 percent. Together, the companies would control more than a third of China’s online video advertising market.

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The announcement, published on the official blog of the microblog operator, said Twitter is now able to withhold content from users in a specific country while keeping it available to the rest of the world.

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A state-media anti-Internet rumor blitz appears to be the latest development in Beijing’s campaign against harmful information on the Internet, with the Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily and the state-run Xinhua news agency running multiple pieces that draw colorful parallels between rumors and drugs.

People on the Internet can “irresponsibly and unscrupulously produce and spread rumors,” the People’s Daily in a commentary published late last week (in Chinese). “Such ‘Internet psychological drugs’ are very easily addictive, and make people want to know more and learn more while reading,” it said, adding that it is as harmful as “Internet pornography, gambling and drugs.”

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AT&T already offers its clients services in China, including virtual private networks, which enable secure connections between different geographies, by partnering with China Telecom to use its local network infrastructure, made up of fibers and switches. But the new deal deepens ties between the two companies, which have had a joint venture with Shanghai Information Investment Co. called Shanghai Symphony Telecommunications Co. since 2000, giving AT&T more access to China Telecom’s infrastructure, and vice versa.

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Huawei Technologies Co. now dominates Iran’s government-controlled mobile-phone industry. In doing so, it plays a role in enabling Iran’s state security network.

Huawei recently signed a contract to install equipment for a system at Iran’s largest mobile-phone operator that allows police to track people based on the locations of their cellphones, according to interviews with telecom employees both in Iran and abroad, and corporate bidding documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. It also has provided support for similar services at Iran’s second-largest mobile-phone provider. Huawei notes that nearly all countries require police access to cell networks, including the U.S.

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U.S. companies such as Apple Inc., Google Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Facebook Inc. are driving the tectonic change from personal computers to mobile ones, chiefly in the shape of smartphones and tablets. But Asian companies are in the forefront of innovation, designing and building the devices and many of their key components, from chips to screens.

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The company, Beijing Jingdong Century Trading Co., runs 360buy.com, a fast-growing online-shopping site that sells a broad range of goods, mostly direct to consumers, much like Amazon.com Inc. This business-to-consumer part of China’s online shopping market is expected to expand more than fivefold to 650 billion yuan ($100 billion) over the next three years, according to Beijing-based research firm Analysys International.

Jingdong hopes to raise as much as $4 billion to $5 billion from an initial public offering in the first half of 2012, people familiar with the situation said last week. If it succeeds, it would overtake Google Inc., whose $1.9 billion IPO in 2004 makes it the current record holder for Internet companies.

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The Paris-based company’s CEO Dan Serfaty has moved to Beijing with plans to help Tianji establish a new subscription revenue model. The Chinese website currently earns the bulk of its revenue from recruiting tools, but is free to regular users. Globally, Viadeo earns 30 percent of revenue from recruiting, 20 percent from advertising, and 50 percent from subscription fees paid by users.

The company plans to explore various models, including small, incremental payments (like those online game and instant messaging operator Tencent charges users for virtual goods) and subscriptions. Viadeo will also soon be launching a platform for third-party applications on its website, which is expected to earn some revenue as well.

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Online dating is “quite fun,” said Nick Yuan, a 34-year-old computer technician from Shaoxing, China, who signed up for Jiayuan.com International Ltd. to meet new people after his divorce. During his first few months on the site, Mr. Yuan received about 30 messages a day.

“‘IT technician’ seemed to be an appealing job,” he said. Most of the women who contacted him asked about his salary and whether he owns a home.

Mr. Yuan is among roughly a million users a month who pay to exchange messages on Jiayuan—signaling a shift for some Chinese Internet companies toward generating revenue from user fees and subscriptions rather than from typical, and highly competitive, advertising.

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Welcome to the modern era of copying in China, in which sophisticated proprietors of knockoff stores and chains are targeting increasingly sophisticated Chinese consumers with store experiences and customer service extremely similar to the real thing, down to the helpful store maps, coupons, shopping bags and employee uniforms.

The imitation retailers and restaurants go beyond the simple fakes of consumer goods that have long been abundant in China.

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As noted earlier on China Real Time, the fake Apple Store, located in the southwestern Chinese city of Kunming, was spotted by an expatriate blogger in the city who uses the handle BirdAbroad. It has since gotten widespread international attention for the remarkable lengths to which its proprietors seem to have gone to mimic the look and feel of a real Apple Store.

Trying to reach the store’s owners has been tough. Repeated calls to the manager on Thursday went unanswered. But a store employee reached by phone confirmed that the store is not an authorized Apple reseller.

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The deal ends a years-long struggle between China’s most popular website and the three big labels over a popular Baidu MP3 search service used to find links to music files around the Web, many of which were unlicensed. The music industry and the U.S. government have complained that the Baidu site was among the world’s most widely used platforms for unlicensed music downloads, with the U.S. Trade Representative listing Baidu as a “notorious” market for piracy.

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The system, being built in the city of Chongqing over the next two to three years, is among the largest and most sophisticated video surveillance projects of its kind in China and perhaps the world. Dubbed “Peaceful Chongqing,” it is planned to cover a half-million intersections, neighborhoods and parks over nearly 400 square miles, an area more than 25 percent larger than New York City.

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The unnamed official was quoted Thursday in a report from China’s state-run Xinhua news agency that clarified the role of the new agency amid China’s already crowded Internet regulatory landscape, saying the new State Internet Information Office will coordinate and streamline oversight and enforcement and will be run by officials from agencies already involved with Internet regulation.

The official said “untenable” remarks made by critics are intended to “tarnish the image of China,” according to Xinhua, adding that China’s policies are meant to safeguard information security and the development of the Chinese Internet amid an industry boom. “A small group of people have made irresponsible remarks about China’s Internet regulations, disregarding basic fact,” the official said.

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