The third company penalized was Hong Kong-listed Biostime International Holdings.

All three said they would pay the fines, the first to be publicly announced in the wake of the antitrust review by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), which coincides with separate pricing investigations into the pharmaceutical sector as well as gold trading.

Foreign infant formula is highly coveted in China, where public trust was damaged by a 2008 scandal in which six infants died and thousands of others were sickened after drinking milk tainted with the toxic industrial compound melamine.

Foreign brands account for about half of total sales in China and can sell for more than double the price of local formula.

Mead Johnson, the maker of Enfamil formula, said it would pay a penalty of about $33 million. The company, based in Glenview, Illinois, gave no details on what the NDRC said it had done wrong.

Fonterra, the world’s biggest dairy exporter, said it had been fined NZ$900,000 ($710,700). It also did not say why it had been penalized but added it would give additional training to sales staff and review its distributor contracts.

“We believe the investigation leaves us with a much clearer understanding of expectations around implementing pricing policies,” Kelvin Wickham, president of Fonterra Greater China and India, said in a statement.

Fonterra is embroiled in a separate milk powder contamination scare that has led to product recalls in China, Hong Kong and elsewhere in Asia.

Infant milk producer Biostime, which imports most of its products, said it had been fined 162.9 million yuan ($26.6 million) for price-fixing.

Other companies being investigated include French food group Danone, Nestle and Abbott Laboratories. An Abbott spokeswoman said the firm had cooperated with the NDRC but declined to comment further. Danone and Nestle officials were not immediately available for comment.

In the wake of the NDRC probe, Mead Johnson, Danone, Nestle and others cut prices on their baby formulas by up to 20 percent in China, where the infant milk market is set to grow to $25 billion by 2017.

WASHINGTON: Top U.S. and Chinese officials are wrapping up annual strategic and economic talks that have yielded greater cooperation on reducing greenhouse gases but again exposed Washington’s frustration over cyber theft it says is emanating from the emerging Asian power.

Secretary of State John Kerry, who came to Washington for the start of the two-day talks Wednesday, was returning to his wife’s hospital bedside in Boston as she recovers from a seizure-like episode. His deputy, William Burns, will take his place at Thursday’s discussions.

The gathering is taking a place a month after the U.S. and Chinese presidents’ summit in California, which tried to set a positive tone in relations between the two world powers. Officials are looking at ways to build cooperation, even as they hash out deep-seated differences.

They are discussing barriers to trade and investment, the nuclear program of Chinese ally North Korea and other matters, including Iran and Syria’s civil war.

Thursday’s agenda starts with a round table of Chinese and U.S. officials and business leaders at the Treasury Department. Washington wants Beijing to expedite economic reforms and reduce state involvement in the economy; China has its own concerns about screening of its companies that want to invest in the U.S.

The most tangible outcome of Wednesday’s talks was an announcement of new initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution. The two sides agreed to cooperate on cutting emissions from vehicles and coal combustion, and to promote more efficient use of energy in buildings, transport and industry. Implementation plans will be ready by October, the State Department said.

That builds on an agreement between President Barack Obama and President Xi Jinping in June to work together on reducing hydrofluorocarbons, a potent greenhouse gas used in refrigerators, air conditioners and industrial applications.

The two sides have also discussed cybersecurity — now a prominent U.S. concern in its relations with China.

Vice President Joe Biden said Wednesday that cyber theft against U.S. companies is “out of bounds and needs to stop.” Chinese State Councilor Yang Jiechi only said that cybersecurity is among the global challenges the U.S. and China should work together on.

U.S. officials are resisting China’s attempts to compare their concerns over U.S. surveillance for intelligence gathering — as revealed by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden — with American concerns about theft of intellectual property and proprietary business information.

BEIJING: An American boss detained nearly a week by his company’s Chinese workers left the Beijing factory Thursday after he and a labor representative said the two sides reached agreement in a pay dispute.

Chip Starnes, who said he was “saddened” by the experience, told The Associated Press a deal was reached overnight to pay the scores of workers who had demanded severance packages similar to ones given to laid-off co-workers in a phased-out division, even though the company said the remaining workers weren’t being laid off.

Remaining workers at the medical supply plant in Huairou district, on the outskirts of Beijing, had said they believed the entire factory was shutting down, that the company owed unpaid salary and that they saw equipment being packed and itemized for shipping to India.

Starnes said the workers’ demands were unjustified. Neither he nor district labor official Chu Lixiang gave details of the agreed compensation. Chu said all the workers would be terminated, andStarnes said some of them would be rehired later.

“It has been resolved to each side’s satisfaction,” Chu told reporters at a conference room at the plant in late morning. She said they had been sorting out paperwork until 5 a.m. and that 97 workers had signed settlement agreements.

Starnes, a co-owner of Florida-based Specialty Medical Supplies, had quietly departed the factory grounds by the time Chu spoke, returning to his hotel in Beijing.

“Yes!! Out and back at hotel,” Starnes wrote in a text message. “Showered… 9 pounds lost during the ordeal!!!!!!”

Police in Huairou district had made no moves to halt the labor action but guarded the plant and said they were guaranteeing Starnes’ safety while local labor officials brokered negotiations.

It is not rare in China for managers to be held by workers demanding back pay or other benefits, often from their Chinese owners. Police are reluctant to intervene, as they consider it a business dispute, and local officials typically are eager to see the matter resolved in the way least likely to fuel unrest.

The labor action reflected growing uneasiness among workers about their jobs amid China’s slowing economic growth and the sense that growing labor costs make the country less attractive for some foreign-owned factories.

About 80 workers had started blocking all exits starting last Friday, and Starnes had spoken to reporters in recent days through the barred window of his factory office.

Earlier Thursday, he said in a telephone interview that he had been forced to give in to what he considered unjustified demands. He summed up the past several days as “humiliating, embarrassing.” At the beginning of his captivity, workers had deprived him of sleep by shining bright lights and banging on windows of his office, he said.

“We have transferred our funds from the U.S.,” he said. “I am basically free to go when the funds hit the account here of the company.”

Starnes told the AP he planned to get back to business, and even rehire some of the workers who had been holding him. “We’re going to take Thursday off to let the dust settle, and we’re going to be rehiring a lot of the previous workers on new contracts as of Friday,” he said.

Starnes previously said the company had been winding down its plastics division, with plans to move it to Mumbai. When he arrived in Beijing last week to lay off the last 30 people, workers in other divisions started demanding similar severance packages.

BEIJING: Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng, who was allowed to travel to the U.S. after escaping from house arrest, said Monday that New York University is forcing him and his family to leave at the end of this month because of pressure from the Chinese government. The university denied Chen’s allegations.

Chen said in a statement that China’s Communist Party had been applying “great, unrelenting pressure” on NYU to ask him to leave, though he did not provide details or evidence to back his claim. Chen said Beijing’s authoritarian government has more influence on the American academic community than is perceived.

“The work of the Chinese Communists within academic circles in the United States is far greater than what people imagine, and some scholars have no option but to hold themselves back,” he said. “Academic independence and academic freedom in the United States are being greatly threatened by a totalitarian regime.”

NYU officials called Chen’s account puzzling, saying that his fellowship was meant to be a one-year position and had simply concluded as planned, and that school officials have been talking with him for months about what his next step might be.

Chen sparked a diplomatic crisis between China and the U.S. last year when he fled to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing from house arrest. Since last May, he’d been a special student at NYU’s U.S.-Asia Law institute. He has been working on a book due out later this year.

NYU spokesman John Beckman said in a statement Monday that the conclusion of Chen’s fellowship had nothing to do with the Chinese government.

“We are very discouraged to learn of Mr. Chen’s statement, which contains a number of speculations about the role of the Chinese government in NYU’s decision-making that are both false and contradicted by the well-established facts,” Beckman said.

Beckman said that even before Chen’s family’s arrival in the States the fellowship he was to take at the university was discussed as a one-year position.

“NYU believes it has been generous in supporting this family, and we are puzzled and saddened to see these false claims directed at us,” Beckman said.

The dissident said that as early as last August and September, three to four months after his family had arrived in the United States, NYU was already discussing their departure.

Beckman responded that the university began talking to the Chens “not because of some fictional ‘pressure’ from China, but so that they could use the months to make their transition a smooth one.”

NYU said Chen has two offers for new institutional affiliations. Earlier, a spokesman for New York-based Fordham University confirmed that Chen was negotiating with Fordham Law School’s Leitner Center but said he didn’t know what kind of position was being discussed.

The incident has highlighted the potential public relations benefits and risks that American universities face in engaging Chinese dissidents at a time when many are trying to expand in Chinaand Chinese students are an increasingly important source of tuition income for colleges.

Chinese students form the largest population of foreign students at American universities, with nearly 200,000 this year, up 25 percent since last year — and they often pay full tuition.

NYU raised its profile and earned itself goodwill by offering a fellowship to Chen as a solution to last year’s diplomatic crisis. Beckman said the university provided housing, food, health care and insurance, special law tutorials, translation services, English lessons and connections to a publisher. To help him pursue his advocacy, Chen was also invited to speak at many events facilitated by the school, Beckman said.

However, the university’s association with such a prominent dissident has brought greater scrutiny of the university’s engagement with China. A U.S. newspaper, the New York Post, had earlier reported that NYU’s decision was related to the university’s development of a campus in Shanghai, though the university rejected the claim.

NYU has said that its new campus in China’s financial capital will be a degree-granting, liberal arts and science college, with classes scheduled to begin this fall. Its partners are a Chinese university, the Shanghai city education commission and the government of the city’s Pudong district.

Alleged NSA leaker Edward Snowden claimed today to have evidence that the U.S. government has been hacking into Chinese computer networks since at least 2009 – an effort he said is part of the tens of thousands of hacking operations American cyber spies have launched around the world, according to a Hong Kong newspaper.

The newspaper, the South China Morning Post, reported it had conducted a lengthy interview with the 29-year-old former NSA contractor, who is hiding out in Hong Kong after revealing himself to be the source of a series of headline-grabbing stories about the National Security Agency’s secret, vast surveillance programs. After their unveiling, those programs were acknowledged and defended by top Obama administration officials.

The Post said Snowden provided documents, which the paper described as “unverified,” that he said showed U.S. cyber operations targeting a Hong Kong university, public officials and students in the Chinese city. The paper said the documents also indicate hacking attacks targeting mainland Chinese targets, but did not reveal information about Chinese military systems.

Snowden, a civilian contractor who worked at an NSA facility in Hawaii before his flight to Hong Kong, said he believed that overall the NSA had launched more than 61,000 hacking operations globally, including attempts to spy on hundreds of targets in Hong Kong and in mainland China.

“We hack network backbones — like huge internet routers, basically — that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one,” Snowden said, according to the paper. “Last week the American government happily operated in the shadows with no respect for the consent of the governed, but no longer.”

Snowden told the paper he was releasing the new information to show the “hypocrisy of the U.S. government when it claims that it does not target civilian infrastructure, unlike its adversaries.”

As U.S. officials said the Justice Department is preparing to bring charges against Snowden for the NSA leaks, Snowden said he has no plans to leave Hong Kong even though that country has an extradition treaty with the U.S.

“People who think I made a mistake in picking Hong Kong as a location misunderstand my intentions,” he said. “I am not here to hide from justice; I am here to reveal criminality… My intention is to ask the courts and people of Hong Kong to decide my fate.”

As the South China Morning Post published its reports on Snowden, America’s top cyber officials appeared before a Congressional committee to discuss American offensive and defensive cyber operations, including those recently revealed by The Guardian and The Washington Post apparently based on information from Snowden.

Previously, top U.S. officials have blamed the Chinese government for being behind “persistent” — and somewhat successful — attempts to hack into American government and private networks. In return, Chinese officials recently said their government has “mountains of data” pointing to the U.S. hacking them.

Last week, President Obama signed a directive calling for government cyber tools to be “integrated with the full array of national security tools we have at our disposal,” according to The Associated Press. That statement was made after British newspaper The Guardian revealed the directive — allegedly one of many tips that came from Snowden before he stepped from the shadows.

RANCHO MIRAGE, Calif.: President Barack Obama used an unusually lengthy and informal desert summit to present Chinese President Xi Jinping with detailed evidence of intellectual property theft emanating from his country, as a top U.S. official declared Saturday that cybersecurity is now at the “center of the relationship” between the world’s largest economies.

While there were few clear policy breakthroughs on cybersecurity, U.S. officials said Obama and Xi were in broad agreement over the need for North Korea to be denuclearized. And both countries expressed optimism that the closer personal ties forged between the two leaders during the California summit could stem the mistrust between the world powers.

Still, Obama’s national security adviser Tom Donilon said resolving cybersecurity issues would be “key to the future” of the relationship.

Obama told Xi that “if it’s not addressed, if it continues to be this direct theft of United States property, that this was going to be very difficult problem in the economic relationship and was going to be an inhibitor to the relationship really reaching its full potential,” Donilon said during a briefing with reporters following the summit.

In their own recap of the meetings, Chinese officials said Xi opposed all forms of cyberspying, but claimed no responsibility for attacks against the U.S.

“Cybersecurity should not become the root cause of mutual suspicion and frictions between our two countries. Rather, it should be a new bright spot in our cooperation,” said Yang Jiechi, Xi’s senior foreign policy adviser.

Yang said the two leaders “blazed a new trail” away from the two nations’ past differences and “talked about cooperation and did not shy away from differences.”

Obama and Xi met for about eight hours over the course of two days at the sweeping Sunnylands estate, marking a significant and unusual investment of time for both presidents. Their talks included a working dinner of lobster tamales, Porterhouse steak and cherry pie prepared by celebrity chef Bobby Flay, and a morning walk through the manicured gardens of the 200-acre estate on the edge of the Mojave Desert.

During their walk, the leaders stopped to sit on a custom-designed park bench made of California redwood that Obama presented to Xi as a gift.

The U.S. president told reporters that the talks were “terrific” as he and Xi walked side by side, both having ditched jackets and ties in a nod to the summit’s informal atmosphere. The leaders closed the summit in low-key style, with no formal statements to the press, just a private tea with Xi’s wife.

Obama and Xi did take a significant step toward tackling climate change, announcing that their countries had agreed for the first time to partner on reducing hydrofluorocarbons, a potent greenhouse gas used in refrigerators, air conditioners, and industrial applications.

BEIJING: U.S. National Security Adviser Tom Donilonpushed Tuesday for stronger military relations with China, on the final day of a visit to Beijing to set the stage for a summit next month between President Barack Obama and China’s Xi Jinping.

Nontraditional military activities such as peacekeeping, disaster relief and anti-piracy operations offer opportunities to boost cooperation and “contribute to greater mutual confidence and understanding,” Donilon told Gen. Fan Changlong, a vice chairman of the commission overseeing China’s armed forces.

A “healthy, stable, and reliable military-to-military relationship” is an essential part of overall China-U.S. ties, Donilon said at the start of the meeting at China’s hulking Defense Ministry building in central Beijing.

Donilon met with a range of Chinese officials over two days to hammer out plans for the June 7-8 summit, the first face-to-face meeting between the presidents since Obama’s re-election and Xi’s promotion to Communist Party chief last November.

Their informal summit at the private Sunnylands estate of the late publishing tycoon Walter Annenberg in southern California will come months before the two leaders had been originally scheduled to meet, underscoring concerns that the U.S-China relationship was drifting.

Xi told Donilon on Monday that relations were at a critical juncture, and that the sides must now “build on past successes and open up new dimensions for the future.”

Building trust between their militaries is one of the main challenges the sides face in seeking to stop a drift in relations, troubled by issues from trade disputes to allegations of Chinese cyberspying.

Although Washington and Beijing have talked about boosting military cooperation for more than a decade, distrust runs high and disagreements over Taiwan, North Korea and China’s assertive claims to disputed territories in the East and South China seas remain potential flashpoints.

The U.S. has repeatedly questioned the purpose of China’s heavy military buildup over the past two decades, while Beijing is deeply suspicious of Washington’s new focus on military alliances in Asia and plans to redeploy more weaponry and troops to the Asia-Pacific region.

Steps to increase benign interactions between their militaries have been modest so far, including joint anti-piracy drills in the Gulf of Aden and a classroom natural disaster response simulation. The U.S. has also invited China to take part in large U.S.-led multinational naval exercises, though China has not said if it would participate.

Apart from purely military issues, distrust has deepened as the U.S. feels its world leadership challenged and China, its power growing, demands greater deference to its interests and a larger say over global rule-setting. Chinese officials and state media regularly say Washington is thwarting China’s rise by hemming Beijing in through its Asian alliances and discouraging Chinese investment in the U.S. on grounds of national security.

BEIJING: China’s new leader Xi Jinping will confer with President Barack Obama next month in California, months earlier than their expected first meeting, as both sides seek to stem a drift in relations, troubled by issues from cyberspying to North Korea.

The June 7-8 meeting at a retreat southeast of Los Angeles, announced Monday by the White House, underlines the importance of the relationship between the countries as they work out ways for the U.S.-led world order to make room for a China that is fast accruing global influence and military power.

Xi has said that China wants its rise to be peaceful, but that Beijing will not compromise on issues of sovereignty — a stance that has aggravated disputes over contested East and South China Seas islands with U.S. allies Japan and the Philippines and friend Vietnam.

Among the other pressing items on their agenda: the spotty global economic recovery, U.S. allegations of persistent Chinese cyber-attacks and espionage and Washington’s desire for China to do more in international efforts to curb North Korea’s nuclear program.

The issues are so many that the agenda was becoming crowded for any Obama and Xi meeting. The two leaders have spoken by telephone since Obama was re-elected and Xi elevated to Communist Party chief in November. But their first face-to-face meeting was not expected to be held until September on the sidelines of the summit of the Group of 20 large economies in Russia.

“They needed more than 20 minutes on the sidelines of another meeting,” said Bonnie Glaser of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “If they want to see U.S.-China relations on a solid footing, to manage the differences and find issues to cooperate on — North Korea, Iran, climate change — it has to start at the top. U.S. China relations are not managed from the bottom up but from the top down.”

The White House, in its statement, said the two presidents will “discuss ways to enhance cooperation, while constructively managing our differences, in the years ahead.”

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said that “this meeting is important to the long-term, sound and steady development of China-US relations as well as regional and international peace, stability and prosperity.”

The decision to hold a working visit instead of a pomp-filled state summit also underscores the government’s decision to put protocol aside to focus on substance. Xi will make the stop-off in California after traveling to Trinidad and Tobago, Costa Rica and Mexico.

“The engagement has become more flexible, and that helps keep the contact at the highest levels, which is conducive to understanding each other’s viewpoints and taking more effective measures,” Zhu Feng, deputy director of the Center for International and Strategic Studies at Peking University.

U.S. diplomats have said that Chinese officials had wanted Obama to come to Beijing late this year or early next. His last visit was in 2009. Since then, Xi went to Washington in early 2012 as vice president, and his predecessor as president, Hu Jintao, was given a formal White House welcome a year earlier.

To prepare for the California meeting, Obama’s national security adviser, Tom Donilon, will go to Beijing on May 26-28, White House press secretary Jay Carney said.

BEIJING: China on Wednesday accused the United States of sowing discord between China and its neighbors after the Pentagon said Beijing is using espionage to fuel its military modernization, branding Washington the “real hacking empire”.

The latest salvo came a day after China’s foreign ministry dismissed as groundless a Pentagon report which accused China for the first time of trying to break into U.S. defense computer networks.

The Pentagon also cited progress in Beijing’s effort to develop advanced-technology stealth aircraft and build an aircraft carrier fleet to project power further offshore.

The People’s Liberation Army Daily called the report a “gross interference in China’s internal affairs”.

“Promoting the ‘China military threat theory’ can sow discord between China and other countries, especially its relationship with its neighboring countries, to contain China and profit from it,” the newspaper said in a commentary that was carried on China’s Defense Ministry’s website.

The United States is “trumpeting China’s military threat to promote its domestic interests groups and arms dealers”, the newspaper said, adding that it expects “U.S. arms manufacturers are gearing up to start counting their money”.

Liu was allowed to leave the Beijing apartment where she has been held for two-and-a-half years to attend the trial of her brother on fraud charges that his lawyers said are trumped up to punish the family. Taken by car into the court in Beijing’s suburbs, she sat through the morning-long proceedings, and when she came out accompanied by her lawyer, she shouted from an open window at diplomats and reporters.

“I’m not free. When they tell you I’m free, tell them I’m not,” she said.

The brief exchange is one of the few instances when Liu has broken the security cordon that has surrounded her. A poet and activist in her own right, Liu became an exponent for democracy and freedom of expression after her husband was jailed in late 2008 for authoring and disseminating a program for political reform called Charter ’08.

Liu Xiaobo was later sentenced to 11 years in prison, his fourth prison term in 20 years of political activism. Since he was awarded the Nobel in 2010, authorities have tried to turn Liu Xia into a non-entity to prevent her from becoming a rallying point for Chinese seeking democratic change.

Authorities in China routinely put pressure on family members of political activists and government critics to cow them into falling in line.

Twice in recent months outsiders have managed to slip past police to visit Liu Xia in her apartment, a group of Associated Press reporters in December and then five political activists several weeks later.

Lawyers and family members said the charges against her brother, Liu Hui, appear to be in retaliation for those visits. The charges relate to a real estate deal in which prosecutors said Liu and a partner pocketed 3 million yuan ($500,000) that was claimed by another party to the transaction.

His attorneys said the funds have been returned and the dispute does not rise to the level of crime.