China has fined five knock-off Disney hotels for infringing on the iconic U.S. entertainment company's trademarks, state-run Xinhua news agency said in the run-up to the opening of a Walt Disney Co theme park in Shanghai.

CITIC Securities Co, China's biggest brokerage, overstated some of its financial derivatives by more than 1 trillion yuan ($166 billion) in monthly reports from April to September, the country's securities association said.

Chinese police have busted an underground banking network that handled $4.5 billion worth of illegal transactions at Agricultural Bank of China Ltd alone, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

SCMP Group Ltd, publisher of Hong Kong's South China Morning Post, said it has been approached by a third party that is potentially interested in acquiring its media assets, days after reports that Alibaba's Jack Ma was in talks to buy a stake.

Chinese property developer Evergrande Real Estate Group Ltd will pay $617 million for a 50 percent stake in a joint-venture life insurer, it said in a stock exchange filing.

Chinese authorities have uncovered the country's biggest underground banking case involving transactions totaling more than 410 billion yuan ($64 billion), official media reported, part of a drive to combat illegal capital outflows.

Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent and other luxury brands suing Alibaba Group Holding Ltd for promoting the sale of counterfeit goods will resort to mediation, backing away from a threat to withdraw from the process after Alibaba founder Jack Ma said that he would rather lose the case than settle.

China is considering bringing together its banking, insurance and securities regulators into a single super-commission, sources told Reuters, following the summer's stock market crash that was blamed in part on poor inter-agency coordination.

China's markets regulator has started probing mutual funds for illegal activity, an unnamed source told the respected China Business News.

Draft rules to curb high-speed trading blamed for China's summer stock market crash could kill off billions of dollars of investment into China, global banks and investors have told Chinese regulators in a letter.