Inside China’s censorship machine

In a new book, excerpted below, former CNN correspondent Rebecca MacKinnon explains how Beijing, and its loyal corporate minions, scrub ‘disharmonious’ material from the Chinese Web: 

In fall 2009, I sat in a large auditorium festooned with red banners and watched as Robin Li, CEO of Baidu, China’s dominant search engine, paraded onstage with executives from 19 other companies to receive the “China Internet Self-Discipline Award.”
Officials from the governmental Internet Society of China praised them for fostering “harmonious and healthy Internet development.”
In the Chinese regulatory context, “healthy” is a euphemism for “porn-free” and “crime-free.”
“Harmonious” implies prevention of activity that would provoke social or political disharmony.
China’s censorship system is complex and multilayered.
The outer layer is generally known as the “great firewall” of China, through which hundreds of thousands of websites are blocked from view on the Chinese Internet.
What this system means in practice is that when one goes online from an ordinary commercial Internet connection inside China and tries to visit a website such as hrw.org, the website belonging to Human Rights Watch, the web browser shows an error message saying, “This page cannot be found.”
This blocking is easily accomplished because the global Internet connects to the Chinese Internet through only eight “gateways,” which are easily “filtered.”
At each gateway, as well as among all the different Internet service providers within China, Internet routers — the devices that move the data back and forth between different computer networks — are all configured to block long lists of website addresses and politically sensitive keywords.
These blocks can be circumvented by people who know how to use anti-censorship software tools.
It is impossible to conduct accurate usage surveys, but it is believed likely that hundreds of thousands of Chinese Internet users deploy these tools to access Twitter and Facebook every day.
Yet researchers estimate that out of China’s 500 million Internet users, only about 1% or so (a number somewhere in the single-digit millions — still a large number of people but not enough percentage-wise to shape majority public opinion) use these tools to get around censorship, either because most do not know how or because they lack sufficient interest in, or awareness of, what exists on the other side of the “great firewall.”
Fortunately for the government, there are plenty of social networking platforms and other delightfully entertaining and useful services on the Chinese Internet to keep people occupied, without much need to access sites and services based overseas — assuming they have no interest in politics, religion or human rights issues.
Baidu, the homegrown search engine, enables people to locate all the content on the Chinese-language Internet that their government permits.
The social networking platforms RenRen and Kaixinwang substitute for Facebook.
People can blog on platforms run by Chinese companies like Sohu and Sina, which also runs a wildly popular Twitter-like microblogging service, Weibo.
QQ, run by the company Tencent, offers instant messaging, gaming and all kinds of interactive services that work seamlessly across both PCs and mobile phones.
These companies have all benefited from substantial Silicon Valley investment over the past decade, and many are listed on U.S. stock exchanges or others outside of China.
Thanks to the many Americans who find China’s rapidly growing Internet market to be an irresistible investment opportunity, these companies are well funded to provide highly entertaining and useful — albeit censored and heavily monitored — content and services.
These domestic companies are the stewards and handmaidens, the tools and enforcers, of China’s inner layer of Internet censorship.
Why simply block content when you can delete it from the Internet for good?
Why hire government employees to carry out censorship and surveillance when companies can be compelled to do it?
The government requires companies operating inside China to use a combination of computer algorithms as well as human editors to identify objectionable material and remove it from the Internet completely. Companies that fail to obey government orders face different grades of punishment: from warnings or stiff fines to temporary shutdowns or revocation of the company’s business license.
Many thousands of Chinese websites and dozens of companies have been shuttered because they failed to control their content adequately.
This requirement of corporate self-censorship applies to all Chinese websites, from small online communities to the largest commercial sites, like Baidu.
It also applies to all foreign Internet companies with operations inside China — including Google.cn before Google decided to pull out.
Google’s experience with Chinese censorship helps illustrate how these different layers work.
Before it entered China in 2006, Google operated outside the “great firewall,” which means that it was subject to blocking by the Chinese network.
For example, if one were on the Internet in China and typed the Chinese characters for something politically uncontroversial, say, “automobile,” into the search box on Google.com, everything would work fine.
But if you tried to search for anything politically sensitive — such as the Chinese phrase for “Tiananmen Square massacre” or something related to politically sensitive breaking news, like the name of a city where a riot had just occurred — the page would be blocked.
The page existed on a server overseas, but it could not be viewed in China.
In other words, the search was blocked not by Google but by Chinese network engineers.
Then in 2006, Google decided that subjecting users to the inconvenience and frustration of such increasingly frequent blockages was not the best way to attract Chinese Internet users to its search engine.
So they launched Google.cn inside China, agreeing to abide by the Chinese government’s censorship requirements.
To gain permission to operate from within the firewall, Google had to agree to adjust its search algorithms so that results on Google.cn would not include websites blacklisted by the Chinese government.
Rather than get a blank page when searching for the Chinese name of a city where a riot had recently been put down by police, users of Google.cn would get a sanitized set of search results about that city, minus web pages containing reports from human rights and dissident websites.
After Google announced in January 2010 it was reconsidering its business in China, then pulled its search engine out of China in March, the government imposed strict media controls on the story.
As a first line of defence, the “great firewall” blocked overseas Chinese-language news reports about Google’s decision to remove its search engine.
The government also deployed a range of offensive tactics: All blog-hosting services, microblog platforms and social networking services operating inside China were required to censor what Chinese Internet users said about Google.
Authorities issued specific instructions to spin and manipulate the domestic media, in an aggressive effort to shape public opinion about what had happened.
Not that people could not say anything: they were free to show Google in a negative light, and there were plenty of Chinese Internet users happy to trash Google, as there are all over the world.
But Chinese bloggers and social network users who expressed sympathy for Google’s situation quickly found their postings deleted and blocked by all Internet companies — domestic and foreign — operating inside China.
Writings by liberal-leaning people who argued that the free flow of information would be better for China’s economy and that censorship only makes it harder for the Chinese government and people to resolve problems were also deleted.
The government’s State Council Information Office issued a direct and detailed order on the subject to all websites and news organizations.
A Chinese blogger obtained the full text and posted it online.
Here is a portion of that text, translated by the California-based website China Digital Times, run by the exiled activist Xiao Qiang:
1. It is not permitted to hold discussions or investigations on the Google topic.
2. Interactive sections do not recommend this topic, do not place this topic and related comments at the top.
3. All websites please clean up text, images and sound and videos which attack the Party, State, government agencies, Internet policies with the excuse of this event.
4. All websites please clean up text, images and sound and videos which support Google, dedicate flowers to Google, ask Google to stay, cheer for Google and others have a different tune from government policy.
5. On topics related to Google, carefully manage the information in exchanges, comments and other interactive sessions.
6. Chief managers in different regions please assign specific manpower to monitor Google-related information; if there is information about mass incidents [the Chinese euphemism for “protests”], please report it in a timely manner.
Such directives are common, forcing Internet companies to maintain entire departments full of people whose job it is to respond to them.
In late December 2010, Wang Chen, deputy head of the Communist Party’s propaganda department and chief of the State Council Information Office — two of several party and government bodies in charge of Internet censorship policies — boasted in a speech that 350 million pieces of “harmful content” had been deleted from the Chinese Internet over the course of one year.
Earlier that year, in a presentation to top government leaders, Wang gave a detailed description of an Internet “management system that integrates legal regulation, administrative supervision, industry self-regulation and technological safeguards.”
Some sections of his speech (the full text of which was leaked to the New York-based group Human Rights in China) were deleted from the publicly released version.
One of these deleted sections, which the government did not intend to share with the public, said: “We are following the overall thinking of combining Internet content management with industry management and security supervision; combining prior review and approval with supervision afterwards; combining technological blocking with public opinion guidance; combining hierarchical management with local management; combining government management with industry self-regulation; and combining online monitoring with offline management.”
In such an environment where search engines and social networking services are so heavily censored, most people are not even aware of the existence of many facts, incidents or ideas unless somebody they know who is technically savvy enough to access uncensored online spaces happens to email a link to them.
People who use domestic email services and social networking platforms to disseminate such information, of course, are subject to monitoring and potential arrest.
Data-mining software and “deep packet inspection” technologies make it easy to automate surveillance through the Internet service providers and mobile carriers of all unencrypted Internet traffic no matter what service is being used or where it is based.
In 2011, the government moved to extend these censorship and surveillance mechanisms, as well as to improve their coordination.
In March 2011, spooked by the Arab Spring, the central government established a new overarching government agency responsible for controlling all Internet platforms and services.
The number of censored foreign websites, social networking platforms, and even data-hosting and “cloud computing” services expanded dramatically.
Surveillance systems were upgraded to more aggressively track and identify Chinese citizens who managed to circumvent the blockages to use tools like Twitter.
It became commonplace for Twitter users to be questioned about their postings, and at least one person was arrested for no other reason than a tweet she had sent out.
Reprinted from Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle For Internet Freedom, by Rebecca MacKinnon.

Five myths about China’s power

By Minxin Pei

Terminal 3 at Beijing Capital International Airport, which opened shortly before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, was built by an army of 50,000 workers. It is 1.8 miles long and has floor space larger that is 17 percent larger than the entire London Heathrow airport. 

As China gains on the world’s most advanced economies, the country excites fascination as well as fear — particularly in the United States, where many worry that China will supplant America as the 21st century’s superpower. 

Many ask how China has grown so much so fast, whether the Communist Party can stay in power and what Beijing’s expanding global influence means for the rest of us. 

But to understand China’s new role on the world stage, it helps to rethink several misconceptions that dominate Western thinking.

  1. China’s rise is marginalizing American influence in Asia. 
Just the opposite.
Certainly, China’s power in Asia is growing; its economy is now the biggest in the region, and China is the largest trading partner for every Asian nation.
And its military modernization has made the People’s Liberation Army a more lethal fighting force.
But instead of marginalizing or supplanting U.S. influence, China’s expanding power is pushing most Asian countries closer to Washington — and elevating America’s status.
Uncle Sam’s presence is still welcome because it prevents a regional power from dominating its neighbors and promotes strategic balance.
Today, the more power China gains, the more critical the U.S. commitment to the region becomes, and the greater influence Washington exercises.
No surprise, then, that when the Obama administration recently announced a strategic pivot toward Asia, China bristled, while most countries in the region felt reassured and applauded quietly.
Today, U.S. security ties with key Asian nations — India, Australia, Japan, Korea and even Vietnam — are better than ever.


2. China’s massive foreign exchange reserves give it huge clout. 
China owns roughly $2 trillion in U.S. Treasury and mortgage-backed debt and $800 billion in European bonds.
These massive holdings may cause anxiety in the West and give Beijing a lot of prestige and bragging rights — but they haven’t afforded China a lot of diplomatic sway.
The much-feared scenario of China dumping U.S. sovereign debt on world markets to bend Washington to its will has not materialized — and probably won’t.
China’s sovereign wealth fund, which invests part of those reserves, has favored low-risk assets (such as a recent minority stake in a British water utility) and has sought to avoid geopolitical controversy.
And in the European debt crisis, China has been conspicuously absent.
China’s hard currency hoard adds little punch to its geopolitical power because its stockpile results from a growth strategy that relies on an undervalued currency to keep exports competitive.
If China threatens to reduce its investment in U.S. debt, it will either have to find alternative investments (not an easy task these days) or export less to the United States (not a good idea for Chinese manufacturers). Moreover, with so much invested in Western debt, China would suffer disastrous capital losses if it spooked financial markets.


3. The Communist Party controls China’s Internet. 
In spite of its huge investments in technology and manpower, the Communist Party is having a hard time taming China’s vibrant cyberspace.
While China’s Internet-filtering technology is more sophisticated and its regulations more onerous than those of other authoritarian regimes, the growth of the nation’s online population (now surpassing 500 million) and technological advances (such as Twitter-style microblogs) have made censorship largely ineffective.
The government constantly plays catch-up; its latest effort is to force microbloggers to register with real names.
Such regulations often prove too costly to enforce, even for a one-party regime.
At most, the party can selectively censor what it deems “sensitive” after the fact.
Whenever there is breaking news — a corruption scandal, a serious public safety incident or a big anti-government demonstration — the Internet is quickly filled with coverage and searing criticisms of the government.
By the time the censors restore some control, the political damage is done.


4. China’s regime has bought off the middle class. 
Hardly.
Three decades of double-digit economic growth has elevated about 250 to 300 million Chinese — mainly urban residents — to middle-class status.
Since the regime crushed the Tiananmen democracy movement in 1989, the middle class has been busy pursuing wealth, not demanding political freedoms.
But this does not mean this group has thrown its support behind the ruling party.
There is a world of difference between political apathy and enduring loyalty.
At most, the Chinese middle class tolerates the status quo because it is a vast improvement over the totalitarian rule of the past — and because there is no practical or immediate alternative.
But as the Arab Spring shows, a single event or a misstep by authoritarian rulers can transform apathetic middle-class citizens into radical revolutionaries.
That can happen even without a precipitating economic crisis.
Today, China’s middle class is becoming more dissatisfied with inequality, corruption, unaffordable housing, pollution and poor services.
In Shanghai a few years ago, thousands of middle-class citizens staged a “collective walk” and stopped a planned train extension, a project that threatened their home values.
A similar demonstration last year in Dalian resulted in the shutdown of a polluting petrochemical plant.
The party knows it cannot bank on middle-class support.
Such insecurity lies behind its continuing harshness toward political dissent.


5. China’s rapid economic growth shows no signs of slowing. 
The pace of growth is already cooling somewhat — from above 10.3 percent in 2010 to 9.2 percent last year — and the downward shift will accelerate in future years.
Like South Korea and Taiwan, which achieved stellar growth for three decades but have slowed gradually since the 1990s, the Chinese economy will encounter strong headwinds.
The population is aging; citizens 60 and older accounted for 12.5 percent of the population in 2010 and are projected to reach 17 percent in 2020.
This will reduce savings and the supply of workers, and raise the costs of pensions and health care.
If China wants to keep its high growth rate, it must graduate to making Chinese-designed high-tech and high-value-added products.
It will need more innovation, which demands less government control and more intellectual freedom.
Most critically, the investment-driven and state-led economic model responsible for China’s rapid growth must give way to a more efficient, consumption-driven, market-oriented model.
Such a shift will not be possible without downsizing the state and making the party accountable to the Chinese people.

Unrest in China: A dangerous year

Economic conditions and social media are making protests more common in China—at a delicate time for the country’s rulers 
The Economist

IN AN industrial zone near Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in south-west China, a sign colourfully proclaims the sprawl of factories to be a “delightful, harmonious and happy district”.
Angry steelworkers must have winced as they marched past the slogan in their thousands in early January, demanding higher wages.
Their three-day strike was unusually large for an enterprise owned by the central government.
But, as China’s economy begins to grow more sedately, more such unrest is looming. 
China’s state-controlled media kept quiet about the protest that began on January 4th in Qingbaijiang District, a 40-minute drive north-east of Chengdu on an expressway that crosses a patchwork of vegetable fields and bamboo thickets.
But news of the strike quickly broke on the internet.
Photographs circulated on microblogs of a large crowd of workers from Pangang Group Chengdu Steel and Vanadium being kept away from a slip road to the expressway by a phalanx of police.
Word spread that police had tried to disperse the workers with tear gas.
In the end, as they tend to—and undoubtedly acting on government orders—factory officials backed down, partially at least.
The workers got a raise, albeit a smaller one than they wanted.
Managers’ wages were frozen.
Strikes have become increasingly frequent at privately owned factories in recent years, often involving workers demanding higher wages or better conditions.
Private firms, like state ones, are usually strong-armed by officials into buying off strikers.
The thinking is that capitulating keeps a lid on news coverage and helps to prevent unrest from spreading. Yet the explosive growth in the use of home-grown versions of Twitter has made it easy for protesters to convey instant reports and images to huge audiences.
The Communist Party’s capacity to stop ripples of unease from widening is waning—just as economic conditions are making trouble more likely.

Anger at the bottom 
At a cheap restaurant in Qingbaijiang, opposite a dormitory compound for Pangang employees, grimy steelworkers complain that the government’s promise of an extra 260 yuan ($41) a month is hardly enough. Many of the lowest-paid earn as little as $190 monthly.
But the workers know that the steel industry is struggling—and that vengeance on persistent troublemakers can be fierce.
A police notice warns of legal action, including imprisonment, against any strikers who continue “disrupting public order”.
Security agents follow your correspondent in an unmarked car.
All this is partly a result of the curb on China’s stimulus spending and carefree (reckless, many would say) bank lending in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008.
There are fewer new construction projects; demand for steel has flattened.
Pangang’s plant in Qingbaijiang is running at a loss.
The number of steel firms in the red rose from nine in September to 25 a month later.
Even though the government is less worried about inflation now than it was a few months ago, and is releasing the economic brakes a little, the steel industry is expecting a lean period.
Some firms might have to close.
Overall economic growth is still looking robust.
In the final three months of 2011 China’s economy grew by 8.9% compared with the same period a year earlier—enviable by almost anyone else’s standards, though still the slowest since the second quarter of 2009.
The slowdown has so far been gentle, and in line with government efforts to prevent overheating.
But this does not stop officials worrying that the coming year could be unusually difficult.
Europe is the biggest buyer of Chinese products—and the euro zone’s travails have plunged many manufacturers into despair.
Depressed demand in both Europe and America has taken its toll on factories.
The steelworkers’ strike was one of many in recent months, most of them in China’s export-manufacturing heartlands near the coast.
Chinese exporters do not face as big a shock now as they did in late 2008, when the financial crisis caused a sudden collapse in demand and the loss of as many as 20m migrant-labour jobs.
But that time China’s recovery was rapid, helped by stimulus spending of 4 trillion yuan (more than $630 billion at today’s exchange rate), as well as developed economies’ own stimulus projects.
The impact on migrant workers was further mitigated by the coincidence of the worst of the downturn with the lunar new-year holiday, when most migrants go home for lengthy periods.
This time exporters face protracted slow growth in developed economies, and the risk that the euro zone’s difficulties might worsen.
China’s policymakers do not want another lending spree that might burden the financial system with more bad debt, on top of the borrowing accumulated during the previous binge.
The country’s relatively low budget deficit (about 2.5% of GDP in 2010) gives it room to spend more on social housing, social security, tax cuts for small firms and consumer subsidies.
These could help promote private consumption—eventually.


Nerves at the top 
The long-term plan is for China to wean itself off its reliance on exports and investment projects such as roads, railways and overpriced property developments, and for domestic consumption of goods and services to play a much bigger role in fuelling growth.
But this rebalancing will be a long, hard slog.
Officials do not want shock therapy because it could threaten the jobs of many of the 160m migrants who come from the countryside to provide the cheap labour behind China’s exports.
This economic quandary has become more acute at what is a delicate political moment for the Communist Party.
Later this year (probably in October or November), the party will hold its five-yearly Congress, the 18th since its founding in 1921, at which sweeping changes in the country’s top leadership will begin to unfold.
The Congress will “elect” a new 300-member central committee (in fact it will be hand-picked by senior leaders).
This will immediately meet to rubber-stamp the appointment of a new Politburo, a body that currently has 25 members.
All but two of the Politburo’s nine-member inner circle, the Politburo Standing Committee, will be replaced. Two appointments are all but certain: Vice-president Xi Jinping to take over from President Hu Jintao (as party chief after the Congress and as president next March); and Li Keqiang to replace his boss, the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, also next March.
There will be much jockeying for the other slots.
It is a decade since China experienced a leadership changeover on this scale—and the first time since the late 1980s that the advent of a new generation of leaders has coincided with such a troubled patch for the economy.
The previous time, in 1988, an outbreak of inflation threw Deng Xiaoping’s succession plans into disarray, giving conservatives ammunition with which to attack his liberal protégés.
The party’s strife erupted into the open the following year as students demanding greater freedom gathered in Tiananmen Square.
The threats to the party today are very different, but fear of large-scale unrest still haunts the leadership.
The past decade has seen the emergence of a big middle class—nearly 40% of the urban population, as some Chinese scholars define it—and a huge migration from the countryside into the cities.
The party takes no chances.
Large numbers of plainclothes police are on permanent watch in and around Tiananmen Square. (Since 2008, visitors to the vast plaza have had to undergo airport-type scanning and searches.)
Early last year, when anonymous calls began circulating on the internet for citizens to gather in central Beijing in sympathy with the uprisings that were breaking out in the Arab world, the location specified was not Tiananmen but Wangfujing, a shopping street nearby.
The police responded by flooding that area with officers too.
In the Pearl River Delta, which produces about a third of China’s exports, there are plenty of signs of malaise.
Outside a Taiwanese-owned factory in Dongguan, a dozen or so police officers wearing helmets and carrying clubs watch a small group of angry workers complain that the owner has run away.
The factory (which makes massage seats) is unable to pay its debts.
They are afraid that, this time, after the lunar new year break they will have no jobs to come back to.
A plainclothes policeman tries to silence them.
Then a uniformed officer moves in with a video camera, and most of the workers retreat, keeping a prudent silence.
Others in the delta have been less reticent.
In November thousands of employees at a Taiwanese shoe factory in Dongguan took to the streets in protest against salary cuts and sackings, purportedly caused by declining orders.
Protesters overturned cars and clashed with police.
Photographs of bloodied workers circulated on the internet.
There have been further protests in recent weeks.
Guangdong province also saw a wave of strikes in 2010.
At that time workers—mainly in factories supplying the car industry—were demanding only higher pay and improved conditions.
Most of those disputes were quickly and peacefully settled, and rarely involved action on the streets.
The latest spate of confrontations looks different.
The steelworkers at the state-owned factory near Chengdu wanted a raise; but, these days, rather than bidding to improve their lots, workers are mostly complaining about wages and jobs being cut.
The strikers seem more militant.
A report published this month by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) says that, compared with those in 2010, the strikes of 2011 were better organised, more confrontational and more likely to trigger copycat action.
“Workers are not willing this time to accept that they have to make sacrifices for the national good because firstly they have already made enough sacrifices, and secondly, fewer are willing to just pack up and go home,” says Geoff Crothall of China Labour Bulletin, an NGO in nearby Hong Kong. 

Where the heart is
The government hopes that jobless migrants will return to their home villages, where they or their families still enjoy a tiny land entitlement on which they can subsist, or find work closer to their hometowns.
Many will: job opportunities in the interior have grown in the past few years, thanks to a surge of government investment in central and western areas, aimed at evening out economic growth.
Last year Chongqing, a region in south-west China which had long exported large numbers of workers to the coast, for the first time employed more of its surplus rural workforce locally than it sent to other areas. Chongqing’s party chief, Bo Xilai, is believed to be a contender for the Politburo Standing Committee.
He has been trying to turn Chongqing into a model for the absorption of rural labour into cities, a project that has involved vast spending on low-cost housing to accommodate the region’s migrants.
But rising numbers of migrant workers in big cities—more than 60% according to the National Bureau of Statistics in 2010—are themselves the offspring of migrants and have no experience of agricultural life.
They regard themselves as urbanites, even if they are excluded from many of the welfare benefits to which city-dwellers are entitled.
They are better educated than their parents’ generation, and more assertive.
A riot by migrants last June in Dadun, another factory town in Guangdong where many of the country’s jeans are produced, hinted at the problems China could face if second-generation migrants lose hope.
The manhandling of a pregnant woman by security guards prompted two days of violence, with thousands of migrants setting fire to vehicles and government buildings.
Strikes in coastal factories now mainly involve second-generation migrants, according to the report by CASS.
Such unrest is not about to topple the party.
As Chinese officials nervously digest the implications of unrest in the Arab world, demonstrations in Russia and an easing of repression in Myanmar, they draw comfort from the consistency of Chinese opinion polls. These appear to show high levels of trust in the central leadership and of optimism about the future under party rule.
Many ordinary Chinese are contemptuous of local authorities, but still believe that leaders in Beijing are benign.


The power of weibo 

But according to Victor Yuan of Horizon, a polling company in Beijing, citizens’ satisfaction with their own lives and confidence in the government, though high, experienced a “big drop” in 2010 and didn’t recover last year.
Confidence in the government has fallen by about 10 percentage points, to around 60%.
Mr Yuan says the rapid spread of microblogs has contributed to this decline.
By the end of last year, weibo, as Chinese versions of Twitter (itself blocked in China) are known, were used by nearly half of the 513m Chinese who had accessed the internet in the previous six months (see chart).
This was slightly more than the number who used e-mail and a rise of nearly fourfold over the year before, according to the government-affiliated China Internet Network Information Centre.
Li Chunling of CASS estimates that 90% of urban internet users under 30 are microbloggers.
Weibo have transformed public discourse in China.
News that three or four years ago would have been relatively easy for local officials to suppress, downplay or ignore is now instantly transmitted across the nation.
Local protests or scandals to which few would once have paid attention are now avidly discussed by weibo users.
The government tries hard, but largely ineffectively, to control this debate by blocking key words and cancelling the accounts of muckraking users.
Circumventions are easily found.
Since December the government has been rolling out a new rule that people must use their real names to open accounts.
So far, users seem undeterred.
In the build-up to the 18th Congress, China’s leaders will become especially anxious to prevent embarrassment to the party.
Weibo are likely to make their lives a lot more difficult—at least that was the lesson from a ten-day stand-off in December between police and residents of the coastal village of Wukan in Guangdong.

The villagers’ protest was typical of thousands that roil the Chinese countryside every year: a complaint about the seizure of agricultural land by local officials for private redevelopment.
Unusually, however, in Wukan citizens took control of their village and drove out party hacks and police. Officials were alarmed by images that circulated on weibo of triumphant residents rallying in the centre of their village, like students in Tiananmen Square 22 years ago (see the picture above).
They tried, unsuccessfully, to stop news spreading by ordering a block on the village’s name and location. The villagers gave up their protest on December 21st after a rare, high-profile intervention by the Guangdong party leadership, which promised to look into their complaints.
Remarkably, on January 15th the protest leader, Lin Zuluan, was appointed as the village’s new party chief (the previous one having disappeared, it is thought into custody).
Even the party’s main mouthpiece in Beijing broke its silence on the issue, saying it showed that local officials should stop treating citizens as adversaries.
Wang Yang, Guangdong’s party chief, who is believed to be a contender for a senior Politburo position this year, said the incident demonstrated how people’s “democratic consciousness” was getting stronger.
He called on officials not to ignore citizens’ concerns.
Few regard the Wukan episode as a turning point for the party.
At least one protester on Tiananmen Square has since been seen being dragged away by police in the usual fashion.
But it has stirred debate, online at least, about how the party should respond to protests and other forms of public pressure.
And villagers in Wukan warn that they will not be satisfied until they have reclaimed their land.
One protest leader says there could be another, “even bigger” uprising.
The new leadership that will take over after the upcoming Congress will quickly face tests of its ability to handle social unrest.
Even if the country does not appear on the brink of an Arab-style upheaval, many Chinese academics say the next few years could see burgeoning instability, exacerbated by slower economic growth and a widening gap between rich and poor.
China’s outgoing leaders have tried to suppress debate about ways of reforming the political system to allow the public to voice their grievances more freely.
But many analysts believe there is a pressing need for such reform.
Today’s “China model”, as some in China and abroad were tempted to call it after Western economies fell into disarray three years ago, appears increasingly unsustainable.


Chinese roulette 
An intriguing glimpse of how at least some in the party elite might see things was offered last April when Zhang Musheng, a prominent intellectual, published a book calling for a revival of the one-time Maoist goal of building a “new democracy”.
General Liu Yuan, the son of Liu Shaoqi who was China’s president during the Mao era, openly backed the idea.
Mr Zhang (himself the son of a late senior official, as are several of the new leaders-to-be) said a new democracy would involve continued party rule but with much greater freedom.
Few of China’s liberals believe there is much chance of any leader pursuing this idea in the near future.
But Mr Zhang’s description of China today has struck a chord (and has been circulated widely by weibo users).
A well-known economist, Wu Jinglian, picked up a phrase of Mr Zhang’s in an essay in Caijing, a Beijing magazine, in which he attacked the notion of a “China model” and called for political reform.
The phrase of Mr Zhang’s that made an impression was one describing China as “playing pass the parcel with a time bomb.”

Unhappy tidings in China-India ties

By Rupakjyoti Borah

As two of the fastest growing countries in the world, China and India have not only been hogging the headlines in Asia but across the world.
However, Sino-Indian ties have seen a rollercoaster ride in recent years with tensions on the political front and remarkable progress on the economic front.
In the recent months, there has been a series of incidents which have highlighted the rifts between the two Asian behemoths.
In one of these incidents, two Indian traders, Deepak Raheja and Shyamsundar Agarwal, were taken hostage by Chinese businessmen on Dec. 14 in the Chinese city of Yiwu, a trading hub.
The locals wanted the Indian duo to pay what was owed to them by their firm but in reality the owner of the company had already fled by then and these two Indians were only employees.
After a long and tense stand-off, the two Indians were escorted away from Yiwu on Jan. 4 to Shanghai.
In the meantime, on Dec. 31, an Indian diplomat fainted in a Chinese court while trying to secure the release of the detained Indian businessmen.
The authorities had to intervene in the matter and had to summon the deputy chief of the Chinese mission in New Delhi after the Indian traders were allowed to be taken to Shanghai.
Another row broke out when the visit of an Indian defense delegation to China was almost cancelled following the denial of a Chinese visa to one of its members, Group Captain M. Panging from the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh.
China claims the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh and has in the past denied Chinese visas to Indian citizens from there.
The defense exchanges between the two neighbours had been suspended for almost a year after China had refused to issue a visa to the then General Officer Commanding of Indian Army’s Northern Command Lt. Gen. B. S. Jaswal as he had served in the Indian border province of Jammu and Kashmir (abutting China). Finally, the Indian government decided to go ahead with the visit but sent a pared-down 15-member delegation from the original 30.
On the other hand, on Dec. 19, the first India-Japan-U.S. trilateral dialogue was held in Washington, D.C. While the American delegation was led by Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Kurt Campbell and Assistant Secretary for South and Central Asian Affairs Bob Blake, Koji Tsuruoka, deputy vice minister for foreign policy, represented Japan and India was represented by two high officials in the Ministry of External Affairs, Joint Secretary (Americas Division) Jawed Ashraf and Joint Secretary (East Asia Division) Gautam Bambawale.
The three nations have shared interests in the safety and security of Afghanistan, in ensuring stability and freedom of navigation in the Asia-Pacific region, the East Asia Summit and lately in Myanmar (where India as a neighboring country has immense influence).
Meanwhile, relations between India and Japan have seen remarkable progress in the last few years.
The Japanese prime minister paid a visit to India in late December for the annual summit.
Among the many major outcomes of the meeting, the joint production and exploration of rare-earth metals merits special mention.
At present, China is the world’s largest producer of rare-earth metals which find application in electronics items, lasers, wind turbines, automobile motors besides in the defense industry like in missile-guidance systems.
China and Japan have had tensions over the Senkaku Islands and in the aftermath of the incident of a Chinese fishing trawler ramming into Japanese Coast Guard vessels in September 2010, China unofficially stopped the export of these rare-earth metals to Japan, where they are in high-demand by Japanese companies.
Though India and China have had some major run-ins in the recent past, trade relations between the two have developed at a tremendous pace.
India-China trade stood at over $67 billion as of November 2011 and China has been India’s largest trading partner in goods for many years now.
China and India have taken similar stands at many international forums, most notably at the Copenhagen climate change summit in 2009.
The political side of the relationship is a different story altogether.
The boundary issue has still not been resolved while China has also been issuing stapled-visas to Indian citizens from the province of Jammu and Kashmir which has had the Indian government up in arms.
On the other hand, earlier in November last year, China asked India to cancel a Buddhist conference in the Indian capital of New Delhi which was to be addressed by the Dalai Lama, but India refused.
China then cancelled the boundary talks between Chinese State Councillor Dai Bingguo and India’s National Security Adviser Shiv Shankar Menon.
As India and China get ready to play a bigger role in Asia and the global arena, tensions between the two Asian giants is inevitable.
However it seems highly unlikely that either India or China will allow the tensions to completely derail their relationship.

China threatens to punish Philippines over US offer

Manila said Friday it planned to hold more joint exercises and to let more US troops rotate through the Philippines
BEIJING (AFP) — China should impose "sanctions" against the Philippines after it offered to allow more US troops on its soil, state media said Sunday, amid growing tensions over disputed waters in the South China Sea. Manila said Friday it planned to hold more joint exercises and to let more US troops rotate through the Southeast Asian country -- an offer welcomed by the United States as it seeks to expand its military power in Asia.
China has not yet officially responded to the announcement, which was made during the country's week-long holiday for the Lunar New Year.
The foreign ministry on Sunday did not immediately respond to AFP requests for comment.
But an editorial in the Global Times, known for its nationalistic stance, said Beijing "must respond" to the move by using its "leverage to cut economic activities" between the Philippines and other Southeast Asian countries.
China also should consider "cooling down" business links with its smaller neighbour, according to the editorial published in the Chinese and English versions of the newspaper.
"It should show China's neighbouring areas that balancing China by siding with the US is not a good choice," it said.
"Well-measured sanctions against the Philippines will make it ponder the choice of losing a friend such as China and being a vain partner with the US."
China and the Philippines, along with Vietnam, have rival claims to parts of the South China Sea, home to some of the world's most important shipping lanes and believed to hold vast deposits of fossil fuels.
Brunei and Malaysia also have claims in the South China Sea.
Manila and Hanoi complained repeatedly last year of what they said were increasingly aggressive acts by China in the decades-long rift.
These acts, which included a Chinese naval ship reportedly firing warning shots at Filipino fishermen, fuelled fears among some nations in the region about China as its military and political strength grows.
The US has been looking to increase its military presence across the Asia Pacific in a strategic shift that has angered China.
US President Barack Obama said in November the United States would deploy up to 2,500 Marines to northern Australia.
The following month a US admiral wrote that the US expected to station several combat ships in Singapore.

Tibetans live in fear as China cracks down on protests

By Sebastien Blanc

Police arrests of innocent people were adding to the climate of fear in China's Tibetan-inhabited regions  

A series of self-immolations in the restive province had prompted an increase in repression  

CHENGDU, China — Sitting in a teahouse in Chengdu's Tibetan quarter, a nervous young monk spoke of how police arrests of innocent people were adding to the climate of fear in China's Tibetan-inhabited regions.
The Lama temple where the monk lives is a 15-hour drive away, high up on the Tibetan plateau in the southwestern province of Sichuan where rights groups say police have fired on demonstrators three times in the past week, killing at least three and leaving dozens wounded.
The 28-year-old, whose name is being withheld to protect him, was not in the areas where the killings took place and told AFP he learned of the shootings through friends.
But drinking milky Tibetan tea and fingering his prayer beads in the teahouse in Sichuan's capital Chengdu, his nervousness betrayed the tense atmosphere in the restive province where a series of self-immolations had already prompted an increase in security.
"They have arrested many people who have done nothing. This has only increased the discontent," he said. According to Tibetan exiles living in India, at least 136 Tibetans have been arrested or disappeared into police custody this month in Sichuan, which borders Tibet.
"We love peace and we hope for peace," the monk said, adding that mandatory "re-education" classes, often dominated by political and patriotic indoctrination, have been forced on his monastery.
The government has said two Tibetans were killed in clashes in the towns of Seda and Luhuo, with one shot dead by police who responded after a violent mob attacked them.
Another Tibeten protester was shot dead in Rangtang county, rights groups said Friday, but a local government official denied there had been a protest.
The unrest comes at a time of growing tensions in Tibetan-inhabited areas, where at least 16 people in less than a year -- four this month alone -- have set themselves on fire to protest against China's rule.
Outside the teahouse, dozens of uniformed and plain clothes police were out on the streets, seeking to stop any conversations with locals.
Chinese authorities have stopped foreign journalists from going to the affected areas, making independent attempts to verify the situation there nearly impossible.
Several hours earlier, police detained two AFP journalists while trying to enter a town in Aba prefecture, where much of the recent anti-Chinese unrest has occurred.
"The region is inaccessible due to the mudslides," police told the journalists before escorting them on the six-hour drive back to Chengdu.
The day before, the two journalists were stopped on another road leading into Tibetan-inhabited areas and forced to turn back "because of snow".
In Chengdu, a huge modern city in the throes of an economic boom, Tibetans are a small minority among the population of 14 million, most of whom are ethnic Han Chinese.
But relations between the two communities are not openly discordant.
Suo Lang Wa Zhang, a 19-year-old Tibetan who lives in Chengdu, said she has many Han Chinese friends and does not rule out the possibility she could one day marry a non-Tibetan.
"Tibetans in rural areas do not have the same perspective on life that Tibetans in the cities have," the young woman, who moved from Tibet, said.
She said she never wanted to see a repeat of the violent anti-Chinese riots that started in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa in 2008 and spread to other regions.
Her friend San Dong Jin Mei, 20, a student in a business school, who unlike many older Tibetans speaks fluent Mandarin, appeared equally integrated.
"I hope to live a happy life and improve my standard of living," she said.
The two women hope to one day return to Lhasa, a two-day train ride away.
But in Lhasa the police presence has also been stepped up in recent days, according to Free Tibet, a rights group that regularly denounces "cultural genocide" and suppression of civil liberties in China's Tibetan-inhabited regions.
"Chinese authorities are using intimidation and surveillance of ordinary Tibetans to instill a culture of fear and stop people from speaking out," said the group's director, Stephanie Brigden.
Communist authorities in Beijing routinely deny such accusations, insisting that Tibetans enjoy religious freedom, while enormous efforts have been made to improve their well-being.
They blame the Dalai Lama -- Tibet's spiritual leader who fled China for India in 1959 after a failed uprising against Chinese rule -- for fomenting the unrest and trying to split Tibet from the rest of China, a claim he denies.

China’s Geostrategic Designs on Latin America

By Christopher Sabatini

In the last 5 years China’s military activities in Latin America and the Caribbean have grown at an unprecedented rate.
Beijing now regularly hosts officers from Colombia, Chile, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay in its military academies, has expanded arms sales and technology transfers to countries like Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Venezuela, and in October last year even sent a navy ship to the Caribbean.
Is China—now Brazil and Chile’s number-one trade partner—buttressing its economic interests in the Western Hemisphere with military ties and alliances?
Is this the Middle Kingdom’s equivalent of President Barack Obama’s Pacific pivot to balance China’s saber rattling in Asia?
There’s no doubt that China’s torrid economic growth rate and its arrival as an emerging—if not already emerged—global economic superpower has shifted the international system and brought a more muscular Chinese foreign policy.
That policy—part of what the Chinese labeled its “Going Out” strategy—has come with a growing Chinese diplomatic, economic and even military presence in many of its closest trade partners.
Given China’s need for raw materials to feed its manufacturing growth and urbanization—gobbling up everything from iron, to oil, to soybeans and frozen chicken—the country’s rise has been felt most obviously (at times with alarm) in the developing world, including Latin America.
First the economics.
From 2000 to 2010 Latin America’s exports to China shot up 1,500% from 2000 to 2010.
With increased commerce has come investment.
In 2010, Chinese companies—most of them state-owned enterprises—invested $10.5 billion.
While not a large amount relative to China’s other investments globally, it was a 180% jump from just two years earlier.
In both cases, though, the focus has been on raw materials.
Over 60% of Chinese imports from Latin America are primary products; for Argentina and Venezuela that percentage increases to 88% and 97% respectively.
And China’s largest investment deals in the region have been from China’s state-owned enterprises snapping up energy and mining ventures, in Brazil, Argentina and Ecuador.
With China’s economic attention have come loans and grants.
Recently the Financial Times estimated that in 2009-2010 the Chinese provided more loans globally (over $110 billion) than the World Bank (around $103 billion) in 2009–10.
This included generous long-term concessionary loans to President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and President Rafael Correa of Ecuador guaranteed by both with cheap oil exports to China.
Unfortunately, no one really knows the real amount or the conditions under which these deals were made. According to Martin Vieiro in a recent Americas Quarterly article, these “estimates were based on public statements of Chinese officials, banks and borrowers, which likely underestimate the actual amounts,” and the deals were often conducted behind closed doors, far from public scrutiny.
In fact, beyond the risk of resource dependence that China’s lopsided trade balance may bring to Latin America is the problem of corruption.
As Ariel Armony argues in this issue of Americas Quarterly, Chinese practices of informal networking and deal making have a certain affinity with the Latin American traditions of clientelism and nepotism.
In Latin America in the last two decades the rise of democratic governments and demands for greater transparency have helped to peel away these noxious traditions and practices.
Except now, many governments are finding a partner in China who is playing on some of their worst vices. No wonder that Presidents such as Chávez and Correa—both throwbacks to the autocratic caudillos of the past—have been such willing clients of Chinese aid.
Arguably, this temptation may represent China’s greatest threat to the United States.
Many of the military initiatives cited above do not amount to a clear and present threat.
Chinese weapons sales and technology to Latin America are only a fraction of the region’s purchases and connections globally.
Military exchanges are still also limited and intermittent.
And that Navy ship?
Named the” Peace Ark,” it was a hospital ship on a tour (called Harmonious Mission 2011) to provide medical attention to citizens in its ports of call.
That is not to say that this increased military attention by China is insignificant.
China’s growing economic, diplomatic and military presence and even assertiveness in the developing world is recasting the global stage.
Chinese leaders repeated use of feel-good phrases like “win-win,” and “cooperation,” “complementary patterns of development” and, yes, even Peace Ark and Harmonious Mission 2011 mask a broader effort to serve as a bridge between the developing and developed world, as a way to leverage and even expand its own power.
Acknowledging that fact is not alarmist nor should it prove a paranoid overreaction.
Instead, it is simply the nature of modern, global politics and a reflection of the growing importance of the economics of U.S. relations in the hemisphere.
A large part of that should involve continuing and promoting the transparency and accountability of trade and investment that have for the last two decades marked the United States’ political and economic relations with its neighbors.
Doing so will not only play to the region’s better political angels to consolidate the democratic and development gains made in recent years, it will also ensure the relevance and leadership of the United States in the hemisphere.

Chinese reverse merger promoter raided

By Kara Scannell in Houston

US authorities have raided the New York office and home of Benjamin Wey, a promoter of controversial Chinese reverse mergers, according to law enforcement officials.
Agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation executed search warrants at Mr Wey’s home and New York Global Group, the company where Mr Wey is president, the agency confirmed.
The FBI and Securities and Exchange Commission have been investigating companies involved in reverse mergers.
In these reverse mergers, a non-US company acquired a US shell company to gain a listing on a US stock exchange, bypassing the regulatory scrutiny involved in a traditional initial public offering.
The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, which overseas US auditors, raised concerns about such companies in 2010.
PCAOB and SEC officials have been negotiating with their Chinese counterparts to gain access to auditing papers for companies based in China but have not reached an agreement.
James Doty, chairman of the PCAOB, said, “While I remain hopeful that we will be able to reach a negotiated settlement with the Chinese, the PCAOB cannot, and will not, wait indefinitely. If we cannot reach a resolution in the near term, the PCAOB, in consultation with the SEC, will take further appropriate action to protect investors.”
Reverse mergers are legal, but authorities have been concerned that the process has been abused by companies without legitimate operations.
US officials have limited ability to investigate in China so much of their focus has been on the US promoters, auditors, and agents that facilitate the deals.
China-based companies have been particularly active in seeking to list through reverse mergers.
Mr Wey is one of the most active promoters in China.
He has not been accused of any wrongdoing.
A message left at his New York office was not immediately returned.
According to the company’s website, “New York Global Group has a single focus: acting as a liaison between the international capital markets and Asian-based clients.”
His firm has more than 200 China-related transactions under its belt.
In 2005, without admitting or denying the findings, Mr Wey agreed to be censured by the Oklahoma Department of Securities for allegedly advising a retired person to invest in a penny stock without revealing that he was a paid consultant to the company.
Longtop Financial, a China-based software provider, said in August it may face civil action from the SEC for failing to provide current financial statements to investors.
In September, the SEC sued Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu for failing to produce documents related to its investigation into possible fraud by Longtop.

Activists Crack China’s Wall of Denial About Air Pollution

By SHARON LaFRANIERE

BEIJING — Weary of waiting for the authorities to alert residents to the city’s most pernicious air pollutant, citizen activists last May took matters here into their own hands: they bought their own $4,000 air-quality monitor and posted its daily readings on the Internet.
That began a chain reaction.
Volunteers in Shanghai and Guangzhou purchased monitors in December, followed by citizens in Wenzhou, who are selling oranges to finance their device.
Wenzhou donated $50 to volunteers in Wuhan, 140 miles inland. Officials have claimed for years that the air quality in fast-growing China is constantly improving.
Beijing, for example, was said to have experienced a record 274 “blue sky” days in 2011, a statistic belied by the heavy smog smothering the city for much of the year.
But faced with an Internet-led brush fire of criticism, the edifice of environmental propaganda is collapsing.
The government recently reversed course and began to track the most pernicious measure of urban air pollution — particulates 2.5 microns in diameter or less, or PM 2.5.
It decreed that about 30 major cities must begin monitoring the particulates this year, followed by about 80 more next year.
The Ministry of Environmental Protection also promised to set health standards for such fine particulates “as soon as possible.” Last week, after years of concealing its data on such pollutants, Beijing began publishing hourly readings from one monitoring station.

Chinese parents with children suffering from respiratory ailments, possibly caused by air pollution, flock to the Capital Institute of Pediatrics in Beijing.  

Smog darkened the sky over Beijing on a recent afternoon. Popular criticism has forced the government to acknowledge the problem and health risks.  

A pedestrian with a protective mask in Beijing in January.

Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, a Beijing nonprofit group, credits the Chinese public for the breakthroughs. 

“At the beginning of last year, we had almost lost hope that the PM 2.5 would be integrated into the standards,” Mr. Ma said. 

“But at the end of the day, the people spoke so loudly that they made their voice heard.” 

The fine particulates, caused by dust or emissions from vehicles, coal combustion, factories and construction sites, are among the most hazardous because they easily penetrate lungs and enter the bloodstream. 

Chronic exposure increases the risk of cardiovascular ailments, respiratory disease and lung cancer. 

The Chinese government has monitored exposure levels in 20 cities and 14 other sites, reportedly for as long as five years, but has kept the data secret. 

It sought 18 months ago to silence the American Embassy in Beijing as well, arguing that American officials had insulted the Chinese government by posting readings from the PM 2.5 monitor atop the embassy on Twitter. 

A Foreign Ministry official warned that the embassy’s data could lead to “social consequences” in China and asked the embassy to restrict access to it. 

The embassy refused, and Chinese citizens now translate and disseminate the readings widely. 

While China has made gains on some other airborne toxins, the PM 2.5 data is far from reassuring in a country that annually has hundreds of thousands of premature deaths related to air pollution. 

In an unreleased December report relying on government data, the World Bank said average annual PM 2.5 concentrations in northern Chinese cities exceeded American limits by five to six times as much, and two to four times as much in southern Chinese cities. 

Nine of 13 major cities failed more than half the time to meet even the initial annual mean target for developing countries set by the World Health Organization. 

Environmental advocates here expect China to adopt that target as its PM 2.5 standard. 

Wang Yuesi, the chief air-pollution scientist at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, estimated this month that Beijing needed at least 20 years to reach that goal. 

The embassy’s monitor showed that fine particulate concentrations over the past two years averaged nearly three times that level, and 10 times the World Health Organization’s guideline, said Steven Q. Andrews, an environmental consultant based in Beijing. 

In fact, Mr. Wang told Outlook Weekly, a magazine owned by China’s official news agency, Xinhua, that Beijing’s PM 2.5 concentrations have been increasing by 3 to 4 percent annually since 1998. 

He said the finer particulates absorbed more light, explaining why Beijing so often is enveloped in a haze thick enough to obscure even nearby buildings. 

Air pollution in the city and in nearby Tianjin is so severe that “something must be done to control it,” he wrote on his blog. 

Such sentiments are increasingly common on weibos, the Chinese version of microblogs like Twitter, especially among elites. 

International schools here are doming their athletic fields because pollution so often requires that students stay indoors. 

In November, Pan Shiyi, a Beijing real estate tycoon, asked his seven million microblog followers whether China should employ a stricter air-quality standard. 

Shi Yigong, a molecular biologist who left Princeton University in 2008 to lead Tsinghua University’s life sciences department, complained in a December blog post that air pollution was the single “most upsetting and painful thing” about life in China. 

Some Chinese citizens remain stoic or unaware. 

One afternoon last week when smog cloaked Beijing and the American Embassy monitor edged toward the top of the chart, parents flocked to the Capital Institute of Pediatrics, a children’s hospital in downtown Beijing, towing children with respiratory ailments. 

One mother of a 6-year-old awaiting treatment for her child’s chronic cough said: “I think it’s good for the child’s immune system to be exposed to tough weather like today’s. It will make them tougher.” 

Chinese statistics indicate that urban air quality has improved over the past decade as cities have relocated factories, reduced coal burning and adopted stricter vehicle emission standards. 

The World Bank’s analysis of the government’s data found that average concentrations of particulates measuring 10 microns or less — a group that includes both fine and coarser particulates — fell 31 percent from 2003 to 2009 in 113 major cities. 

Still, only a few cities managed to meet China’s own toughest standard, which is twice as loose as the World Health Organization guideline. 

Mr. Wang, the researcher, contends that while Beijing’s PM 10 level fell nearly a third from 2006 to 2009 — for the most part, in the years leading up to the Beijing Olympic of 2008 — it has been edging up ever since. 

Whether government statistics are reliable is another matter. 

While some argue that the release of ever more detailed data makes fudging ever harder, Mr. Andrews, the environmental researcher, contends that the government systematically manipulated data and standards to create more “blue sky” days. 

Although attention focuses on Beijing, at least 16 other cities are more polluted, the World Bank says. 

Their efforts to clean up the air are partly offset by rising populations, an avalanche of vehicles and never-ending construction. 

Some experts contend that the government shies away from epidemiological studies on pollution’s health impact. 

“They are really unwilling to match it to the health data because that would be much more alarming,” said one specialist who spoke anonymously for fear of angering Chinese officials. 

“They want to get the counts down first.”

The World Health Organization estimated in 2007 that 656,000 Chinese died prematurely each year from ailments caused by indoor and outdoor air pollution. 

The World Bank placed deaths related to outdoor pollution at 350,000 to 400,000, but excised those figures from a 2007 report under government pressure. 

Zhong Nanshan, a respiratory expert at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, told China Daily last month that without intervention, PM 2.5 particulates would replace smoking as China’s top cause of lung cancer. Beijing health experts told the newspaper that while smoking rates were flat, the city’s lung-cancer rate had risen 60 percent in the past decade, probably as a result of air pollution. 

Feng Yongfeng, a Beijing father of a 3-year-old who founded a nonprofit environmental group called Green Beagle in 2009, argues that the Chinese should protect themselves by investigating their surroundings. 

“If the data is real, officials keep it to themselves,” said Mr. Feng, whose organization began this July to lend two PM 2.5 monitors to anyone who completes an online application. 

“You should not wait for the ministry to tell you the truth. You can find it out for yourself.”

Only 30 people accepted the offer in the first five months.

But Wang Quixia, the project manager, said interest had skyrocketed since publicity made PM 2.5 a household phrase in Beijing. 

Now there is a two-month waiting list.

China crackdowns breed heightened violence in Tibet

By Associated Press

In this photo taken Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2012, Tibetan Buddhist monks hold pictures of Tibetans shot by Chinese security forces earlier this week, during a candlelight vigil in Dharamsala, India. 
BEIJING — A young man posts his photo with a leaflet demanding freedom for Tibet and telling Chinese police, come and get me.
Protesters rise up to defend him, and demonstrations break out in two other Tibetan areas of western China to support the same cause.
Each time, police respond with bullets.
The three clashes, all in the past week, killed several Tibetans and injured dozens.
They mark an escalation of a protest movement that for months expressed itself mainly through scattered individual self-immolations.
It’s the result of growing desperation among Tibetans and a harsh crackdown by security forces that scholars and pro-Tibet activists contend only breeds more rage and despair.
That leaves authorities with the stark choice of either cracking down even harder or meeting Tibetan demands for greater freedom and a return of their Buddhist spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama — something Beijing has shown zero willingness to do.
“By not responding constructively when it was faced with peaceful one-person protests, the (Communist) party has created the conditions for violent, large-scale protests,” said Robbie Barnett, head of modern Tibetan studies at New York’s Columbia University.
This is the region’s most violent period since 2008, when deadly rioting in Tibet’s capital Lhasa spread to Tibetan areas in adjoining provinces.
China responded by flooding the area with troops and closing Tibetan regions entirely to foreigners for about a year.
Special permission is still required for non-Chinese visitors to Tibet, and the Himalayan region remains closed off entirely for the weeks surrounding the March 14 anniversary of the riots that left 22 people dead. Video smuggled out by activists shows paramilitary troops equipped with assault rifles and armored cars making pre-dawn arrests.
Huge convoys of heavily armored troops are seen driving along mountain roads and monks accused of sedition being frog-marched to waiting trucks.
For the past year, self-immolations have become a striking form of protest in the region.
At least 16 monks, nuns and former clergy set themselves on fire after chanting for Tibetan freedom and the return of the Dalai Lama, who fled to India amid an abortive uprising against Chinese rule in 1959.
China, fiercely critical of the Dalai Lama, says Tibet has been under its rule for centuries, but many Tibetans say the region was functionally independent for most of that time.
In a change from the individual protests, several thousand Tibetans marched to government offices Monday in Ganzi prefecture in Sichuan province.
Police opened fire into the crowd, killing up to three people, witnesses and activist groups said.
On Tuesday, security forces opened fire on a crowd of protesters in another area of Ganzi, killing two Tibetans and wounding several more, according to the group Free Tibet.
On Thursday in southwestern Sichuan province’s Aba prefecture, a youth named Tarpa posted a leaflet saying that self-immolations wouldn’t stop until Tibet is free, the London-based International Campaign for Tibet said.
He wrote his name on the leaflet and included a photo of himself, saying that Chinese authorities could come and arrest him if they wished, group spokeswoman Kate Saunders said in an email.
Security forces did so about two hours later.
Area residents blocked their way, shouting slogans and warning of bigger protests if Tarpa wasn’t released, Saunders said.
Police then fired into the crowd, killing a a 20-year-old friend of Tarpa’s, a student named Urgen, and wounding several others.
The incident, as with most reported clashes in Tibetan areas, could not be independently verified and exact numbers of casualties were unclear because of the heavy security presence and lack of access.
The topic is so sensitive that even government-backed scholars claim ignorance of it and refuse to comment. The government, however, acknowledged Tuesday’s unrest, saying that a “mob” charged a police station and injured 14 officers, forcing police to open fire on them.
The official Xinhua News Agency said police killed one rioter and injured another.
“The Chinese government will, as always, fight all crimes and be resolute in maintaining social order,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said in comments on the incident.
The harsh response points to a deep anxiety about the self-immolations, said Youdon Aukatsang, a New Delhi-based member of the Tibetan parliament-in-exile.
“They’re worried that there is an underground movement in Tibet that is coming to the surface,” she said. Tibetan desperation has been fed both by the harsh crackdown — security agents reportedly outnumber monks in some monasteries — along with a deep fear that the Dalai Lama, probably the most potent symbol of Tibet’s separate identity, will never return.
The 76-year-old Nobel Peace Prize laureate handed his political powers to an elected assembly last year. That was intended to ensure the Tibetan cause would live on after him, but was met with considerable anxiety among many Tibetans who saw it as a sign he was giving up his role as leader of their struggle. Dibyesh Anand, a Tibet expert at London’s University of Westminster, said resistance to Chinese rule is likely to grow more fierce.
“Protests will get more radicalized since the Tibetans in the region see no concession, no offer of compromise, no flexibility coming from the government,” he said.

Chinese Police Fire on Tibetan Protesters Again

By KEITH BRADSHER
HONG KONG — The police in western China’s Sichuan Province fired on Tibetan protesters for the third time this week, killing at least one and injuring several, overseas Tibetan activist groups said on Friday.
The shootings, which appear to be the worst outbreak of violence in the heavily Tibetan-populated region of Sichuan in nearly four years, came as the Chinese authorities tightened security in the region as well as in neighboring Tibet to suppress any further unrest.
Foreign journalists in Sichuan who tried to drive to the affected region were turned back at security checkpoints that were erected more than 60 miles away.
One overseas activist group, Free Tibet, said its informants in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, had reported a heavy increase in Chinese security forces there as well.
The latest shooting episode occurred on Thursday when the police detained a young man for putting up posters that described a series of recent self-immolations as acts aimed at winning freedom for Tibetans, according to Free Tibet, which is based in London, and another activist group, the International Campaign for Tibet, based in Washington.
A crowd formed and tried to prevent officers from taking the youth away, and the police responded by opening fire, both groups said.
The shooting took place in a village in Rangtang County, known in Tibetan as Dzamtang.
It is located in Aba Prefecture, which was also the site of the first episode this year in which activists said the police had opened fire on Tibetan protesters.
Initial reports suggested one person may have died during that shooting, on Jan. 14, but overseas activist groups have struggled to confirm that.
The police also fired into crowds this week, on Monday in Luhuo and on Tuesday in Serthar, two communities in Sichuan Province and very close to the province’s border with Tibet.
All of the shootings, each of which killed at least one person and might have killed several, according to activists, have taken place in heavily Tibetan areas.
According to the International Campaign for Tibet, thousands of people were converging on Rangtang on Friday to hold a larger protest.
No information was immediately available on the fate of the young man who was putting up the posters.
The western region of Sichuan was an epicenter of protests that roiled Tibetan communities of China in early 2008, just five months before the Olympic Games in Beijing.
China has blamed Tibetan unrest on outside agitators and agents of Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibet’s government-in-exile in India, where he fled in the 1950s after the Chinese military occupied Tibet, a former Himalayan kingdom.

Geithner: China's System 'Damaging' to Trade Partners

By AARON BACK

DAVOS, Switzerland — U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner sharply criticized China's state-led economic system on Friday, the latest salvo in an escalating trade conflict between the two countries.
"China does present a really unique challenge to the global trading system, because the structure of its economy, even though it has more of a market economy now, is overwhelmingly dominated by the state," he said at a public forum in Davos, Switzerland, during the World Economic Forum.
Chinese policies, including subsidized prices for energy and land and preferential access to capital, have been "very damaging" to trade partners, he said.
"That's why it's very important that we get China to move comprehensively not just on the exchange rate but on dialing back its subsidies and distortions."
China's state-led capitalist system emerged as a hot topic at the World Economic Forum this week, as participants pondered the country's economic success in contrast to recent challenges faced by more free-market systems in the U.S. and Europe.
Even within China, there has been rising debate over how fast to move ahead with liberalizing reforms and what kind of economic model the country ultimately aims for.
On the issue of the Chinese currency, Mr. Geithner argued that though the yuan has appreciated, it remains undervalued and is "still below almost all measures of fundamentals."
The yuan should rise not just against the U.S. dollar but also against the euro and the yen, he added.
In 2011, the yuan rose nearly 5% against the U.S. dollar, and around 6% against the euro.
Mr. Geithner's remarks fit the Obama administration's broader effort to be more assertive with China this election year, at a time when U.S. economic growth remains tepid and unemployment high.
Still, the tone was milder than that struck this week by President Barack Obama.
In his State of the Union address, the president said this administration has brought trade cases against China at nearly twice the rate as the last administration, and added, "But we need to do more. It's not right when another country lets our movies, music and software be pirated. It's not fair when foreign manufacturers have a leg upon ours only because they're heavily subsidized."
Mr. Obama then announced plans to create a U.S. government task force designed to monitor China for possible trade and other commercial violations.
The White House plans to get tougher with Beijing on issues of currency, market access and intellectual property rights—all topics expected to be raised when China's Vice President Xi Jinping visits Washington next month.
The administration's moves are no surprise to Beijing.
Mr. Geithner discussed the administration's plans with China's leaders during a trip there earlier this month. And Mr. Obama telegraphed his plans to challenge China more during his trip through Asia in November. Members of Congress have increasingly pressured the White House to get tougher with China, and doing so has bipartisan appeal.
Lawmakers of both parties, as well as union leaders and business owners, blame China for U.S. job losses and complain that China has unfair economic advantages.
At an earlier Davos panel on Friday hosted by the pro-reform Chinese magazine Caixin, editor-in-chief Hu Shuli identified delayed economic reform as one of the key risks for the Chinese economy, along with weakening exports in the wake the of the euro-zone crisis.
Reform efforts have stalled in China since the outbreak of the global financial crisis in 2008, which to many Chinese severely discredited the Western free-market model.
Key reforms that would open up the country's financial sector such as the liberalization of interest rates and the opening of the capital account have been put on the back burner, and the timeline for their realization is uncertain.
The stall in liberalization has led to increasing public frustration on the part of some pro-reform intellectuals in China.
"What we need is reform-minded leaders and grassroots entrepreneurs, not a loose monetary policy and low interest rates," Zhang Weiying, a professor of economics at the elite Peking University, said at the Caixin forum in Davos.
Xu Xiaonian, an economics professor at the China-Europe International Business School, was even more strident in his remarks, saying China's state-capitalist model was in fact pioneered by Otto Von Bismarck, the 19th-century statesman credited with uniting Germany.
"When Bismarck invented this idea in 1870 it gave Germany impressive performance over the main superpower of the time, Great Britain," he said.
But the state-capitalist system, he argued, ultimately played a role in precipitating two world wars and Nazism.

Chinese Blockbuster 'Flowers of War' Leaves U.S. Audiences Cold

The film is 145 minutes long, features a cast of mostly unknown actors and is a pro-China propaganda film

By Kurt Orzeck 

Christian Bale couldn't entice U.S. moviegoers to go see "Flowers of War," the most expensive movie in Chinese history, last weekend.
Nor could director Zhang Yimou of "Hero" fame. 
"The Flowers of War," a dark and violent Chinese-language movie that cost more than $90 million to produce, grossed an anemic $48,558 in 30 U.S. locations last weekend.
Its per-location average: A mere $1,619.
"The Flowers of War" belly flop -- and the problems it has faced on the way to the U.S. market -- underscores the challenges Chinese movies can face in America.
When it comes to attracting Stateside audiences, some Chinese movies, no matter how lavishly produced, get lost in translation.
Set in China during the 1930s, "The Flowers of War" revolves around a mortician (Bale) who protects convent girls and prostitutes from the invading Japanese army.
It has grossed nearly $100 million in China, making it one of the highest-grossing films in the country's history.
That might sound impressive, but producer and China film-industry expert Rob Cain called it underwhelming for a movie with a production budget of that size.
His company, Pacific Bridge Pictures, estimates the movie's China gross at $95 million, a few million short of "Aftershock."
"They're going to need the picture to do $150 million in China to recoup that in China, and there's no way they're going to get that, so they need it to be a real international hit," he said.
Yimou disagreed.
"As long as the distribution work is done well, you can always make the money back in China," he told TheWrap through a translator.
"China will be the largest market besides the U.S. in the next five years, so for me, I have the confidence to know that the market is going to be in play for my movie."
Jay Cohen, who is putting together a film finance fund with basketball star Yao Ming points out that the Chinese market is different than Hollywood, where the focus is firmly fixed on the bottom line.
"They make movies for specific reasons," Cohen, head of independent film for Gersh, told TheWrap. "Sometimes, it's to introduce the culture of China to other markets, sometimes for cultural history. No one is going to lose money, but sometimes they do it for a sense of funny cultural pride."
The U.S. rollout for "Flowers of War" has been marred by false stops and starts, not to mention negative reviews.
Domestic distributor Wrekin Hill moved up the movie's U.S. theatrical release date from early March to last Friday, in the second U.S. date change for the film, which was China's Oscar entry for foreign language film and was a Golden Globe nominee.
Heading into last weekend's 30-theater release, Wrekin Hill President and CEO Chris Ball insisted to TheWrap that date change had less to do with box office and Oscar prospects, but more about demand for the film.
"It's absolutely nothing to do with the Academy or otherwise, it's just that we have a film people want to see," he said.
As announced earlier this week, the film did not receive a nomination.
But Ball did concede that the company had Oscar ambitions.
He said Wrekin Hill originally wanted to give "The Flowers of War" a wide release in March "to allow a little more breathing space between the initial release, perhaps get some nominations and go from there after the Christmas rush."
But then "The Flowers of War" grossed $90,000 when it was released in three U.S. cities in December for a qualifying run.
The release-date conundrum was just the latest in a series of hang-ups for "The Flowers of War."
In late November, New Pictures Film requested that the minimum ticket price be raised, prompting Chinese cinema circuits to threaten to boycott the movie.
At the order of the film bureau of China's government-controlled State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television, a compromise was eventually reached.
The following month, the Los Angeles Times published an interview with Bale in which the actor said he participated in the film because he wanted to collaborate with Yimou -- not that he specifically wanted to work in China.
Bale's promotional efforts backfired when he visited China in December.
After attempting to visit activist Chen Guangcheng, who was under house arrest, Bale was roughed up by police and scolded by the Chinese government.
"If anyone should be embarrassed [by the incident], it's the relevant actor, not the Chinese side," a Foreign Ministry spokesman said.
The movie faced the obvious challenge of trying to market a movie that features dialogue mostly spoken in Mandarin.
The film is 145 minutes long, features a cast of mostly unknown actors and is a pro-China propaganda film.
New Pictures Film took steps to position the film for success in the U.S.
Originally titled "Nanjing Heroes" and "13 Flowers of Nanjing," the film's name was changed in an effort to appeal to U.S. audiences.
Also, a substantial portion of the script is in English -- 40 percent, according to the filmmakers.
The original Wrekin Hill goal was to expand "The Flowers of War" into theaters located close to Chinese communities, after first trying to appeal to the arthouse crowd.
Anna Chi, a Chinese writer/director who has written scripts for Miramax and John Woo, acknowledged the challenges.
Although "Zhang has certain followers who will go see his movie regardless," she said, "for general audiences, I think it might be challenging, because of the length and the subject matter. It's a pretty hard movie to watch -- and I actually knew the story."
For his part, Bale did not.
"I had heard of the Rape of Nanking, but I didn't know much about it," he told TheWrap. 
"I knew Yimou's work, so they sent me the script and asked if I had an interest. And Yimou... came over to visit, and we sat together, and I decided to do it."
Regardless of "Flowers of War's" ultimate take in America, Chinese filmmakers and American companies will continue trying to make crossover films.
After all, Cohen notes, there are 1.3 billion people in China.
"And they enjoy movies about their Chinese history," he said.
"They enjoy looking at how insiders look at Chinese culture."

China's Threat: Manila Negotiates Broader Military Ties With U.S.

By JOHN H. CUSHMAN Jr. and FLOYD WHALEY

A Philippine sailor looked toward the American Navy's U.S.S. Carl Vinson off Manila Bay on May 15, 2011. 
WASHINGTON — The United States and the Philippines are exploring increased joint military exercises and other military cooperation that would not entail a major buildup or a reopening of permanent bases, officials in both capitals said Thursday.
Foreign affairs and defense officials from the Philippines are visiting Washington for preliminary talks, and in Manila last week, leaders told a visiting American Senate delegation that the government would welcome closer military ties.
The United States has about 600 troops in the Philippines, many of them trainers assisting in countering terrorist groups in the south.
American military interest in the Philippines is a touchy subject, and both sides appeared to be moving carefully.
The American presence in the Philippines began with the capture of the islands from Spain in 1898, introducing decades of near-colonial rule.
The Philippines gained independence in 1946, with the vast American presence often proving an irritant in the country’s uneasy relations with the United States.
Resentments sharpened after the ouster of President Ferdinand E. Marcos in a popular uprising in 1986, and within a few years, major American air and naval bases were closed, notably at Subic Bay, long the American hub in Asia.
In Manila, the Philippine defense secretary, Voltaire Gazmin, said the talks in Washington would cover intensifying joint military exercises within the limits of a 1999 accord that lets ships and American troops visit temporarily.
“That agreement will prevail,” The Associated Press quoted him as saying.
Mr. Gazmin’s acting chief of staff, Peter Galvez, said by telephone that higher-level discussions would follow in March.
“We always welcome the broadening of relations with our allies, but this is a sensitive area of negotiations because we are constrained by our Constitution from certain agreements,” Mr. Galvez said.
“U.S. bases in the Philippines would be out of the question.”
Pentagon officials confirmed that the discussions with the Philippines covered more joint military exercises and more frequent American naval visits to Philippine ports.
“This is not about looking for U.S. bases in the Philippines,” said Capt. John Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman.
“This is simply about trying to move our relationship with the Philippine military forward.”
The talks, which were first reported by The Washington Post on Thursday, are the latest attempt to bolster the American presence in the Asia-Pacific region to counter a rising China.
President Obama toured the region in November, announcing in Australia that he would deploy thousands of Marines to a base there.
During Mr. Obama’s Asia tour, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton visited the Philippines to reaffirm the military relationship.
The Philippines and China both have territorial claims to islands in the South China Sea, or, as it is called in Manila, the West Philippine Sea — a term that Mrs. Clinton pointedly used.
The delegation of four American senators visiting Manila last week included Joseph I. Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, who saluted what he called “the dawn of a new era in the relationship between the United States and the Philippines.”
The two countries maintain a mutual defense treaty, signed in 1951, and negotiated an agreement in 1998 that allowed the American military to visit and conduct joint operations in the Philippines.
The United States provided the Philippines a coast guard cutter in May, and the two countries have been holding joint military exercises near the islands at the center of the territorial dispute with China.
Subic Bay is now a civilian special economic zone.
Although American ships can visit the area, it is unclear how the United States can operate there under the limits imposed by the Philippine Constitution.
“That is what is being discussed right now,” Mr. Galvez said.
The delegation in Washington is led by Pio Lorenzo F. Batino, the Philippine Defense Department’s under secretary for legal and legislative affairs and strategic concerns.
Philippine groups that fought to have American military bases ejected in the early 1990s have been monitoring the developments with concern.
“The United States military is violating our sovereignty and intruding on our internal affairs,” said Lana Linaban, secretary general of the women’s rights organization Gabriela.
She said American bases had created many problems, like increased prostitution, that still erupt after the port calls and joint military exercises.
“We should defend our country with our own military,” she said.
But a Philippine senator, Richard J. Gordon, who administered Subic Bay after the departure of the Americans, said in a recent interview that greater American military engagement had become vital for the Philippines and for the United States.
“The United States has been losing ground in this region,” he said.
“You have a China that is beginning to flex its muscles, and it is pushing us around. I don’t like that. Its record with its neighbors is not very good. We need to have a fireman nearby.”

Philippines studying U.S. offer to deploy spy planes 
By Manuel Mogato
The  Philippines is considering a U.S. proposal to deploy surveillance aircraft on a temporary, rotating basis to enhance its ability to guard disputed areas in the South China Sea, the Philippine defense minister said on Friday.
Ongoing talks in Washington on security ties between the two allies include plans to deploy more littoral combat ships and spy aircraft, said Defense Secretary Voltaire Gazmin.
An expanded U.S. military presence in the region should raise the Philippines' capability to deter border intrusions, he said.
"I would rather look at it from the positive point of view that there would be stability in the region, that we would have enough deterrent," Gazmin told reporters.
"Without a deterrent force, we can be easily pushed around, our territories will be violated. Now that we have a good neighbor on the block, we can no longer be bullied," he said, referring to the United States. U.S. and Philippine officials are discussing the expansion of military cooperation as the Philippines grapples with the growing assertiveness of China.
The talks with the Philippines, a U.S. ally which voted to remove huge American naval and air bases 20 years ago, follow Washington's announcement of plans to set up a Marine base in northern Australia and possibly station warships in Singapore.
The Obama administration describes the moves as part of a "pivot" toward economically dynamic Asia designed to reassure allies who felt neglected during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
But China sees the deployments as part of a broader U.S. attempt to encircle it as it grows into a major power.
The South China Sea could be a flash point.
China claims the entire sea, while the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam all have claims to parts of the area believed to have rich deposits of oil and gas.


PROTEST 
Gazmin confirmed a U.S. offer to deploy surveillance aircraft in the Philippines but he said there was no plan for any new U.S. bases.
The Philippines has a constitutional ban on foreign military bases on its soil. Gazmin said there would be more exercises with U.S. forces and a rotating presence through port visits for exercises, repairs and resupply.
Since 2002, about 600 U.S. commandos have been stationed in the south of the Philippines to help train and advise Philippine troops in fighting a small Islamist militant group with ties to al Qaeda.
A Philippine military source told Reuters the head of the U.S. Pacific Command had proposed last August the deployment of P-3C Orion surveillance aircraft.
More talks are due in Washington in March.
Left-wing Philippine groups are planning to hold protests outside the U.S. embassy in Manila on Saturday to denounce what they describe as the "treacherous" negotiations with the United States.
The Philippines hosted major U.S. military facilities with tens of thousands of airmen and sailors for nearly a century until 1992 when U.S. forces pulled out after a vote in the Philippine Senate to terminate the bases treaty.
In 1998, the Philippines and the United States signed a Visiting Forces Agreement that allows U.S. troops to visit for exercises and rest and recreation.
Presidential spokesman Edwin Lacierda also said the talks would not include the creation of any new U.S. bases.