The Ministry of Finance (MOF) sold 30 billion yuan ($4.8 billion) in 10-year book-entry treasury bonds from May 23 to 27. The issuance is the MOF's 11th batch of book-entry treasury bonds this year.

The interest rate for the bonds is fixed at 3.38 percent. Interest will be paid every half year, with the last interest and the principal paid upon maturity on May 23, 2023.

The bonds will become tradable on exchange markets starting on May 29, according to the MOF.

Service Outsourcing Up

Chinese companies took service outsourcing orders of $11.7 billion in the first quarter of the year, up 43.6 percent year on year, said an official from the Ministry of Commerce at a forum held in Fuzhou, capital of southeast China's Fujian Province.

The country's offshore service outsourcing businesses reached $8.1 billion in the first three months, up 42 percent year on year, said the official.

As of March, China's service outsourcing industry had 4.46 million employees. Some 67.7 percent of them had college education backgrounds.

The orders of offshore service outsourcing by Chinese enterprises increased to $33.6 billion in 2012, compared with $4.69 billion in 2008.

Talks Collapse

First-round negotiations designed to ease the current solar panel trade spat between China and the European Union (EU) have failed, Chinese trade body sources involved in the talks said on May 22.

China and the EU had agreed that talks on such "price undertaking" would be held between representatives of the Chinese solar sector and the EU, said Wang Guiqing, deputy head of the China Chamber of Commerce for Import and Export of Machinery and Electronic Products.

At the EU's invitation, the chamber sent a negotiation team and put forward pragmatic price undertaking plans, but the EU side turned them down flat, refusing to answer questions from the Chinese side, he said.

The EU backed a proposal in early May to impose punitive import duties on solar panels from China in order to prevent what it called the "dumping" of Chinese panel products in the European market.