Its joint venture there, GaoPeng, has had to fire around 400 people and close 10 offices, and it lags seven other competitors in web traffic, including one called Groupon.cn.

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The China Daily reported on Thursday that Ratcliffe is one of four US interns at China.org.cn, a government run news and information site.

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One media report says that Alibaba will try to migrate former yahoo.cn email users to its own Aliyun email service.

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