Clocks square off in China's far west

 A merchant sells clocks in Kashgar, where Muslim Uighurs and Han Chinese live together uneasily. The Uighurs set timepieces two hours earlier than the Chinese, who observe Beijing time, vast China’s only official one.

In Xinjiang province, the Muslim Uighur minority makes a point of observing its own time, not that of local Han Chinese, who adhere to Beijing's imposition of a single time for all of China.

By Barbara Demick
Reporting from Kashgar, China — The clock in the lobby of the International Hotel shows it is almost 11 p.m., too late for dinner and bad news for two hungry travelers.
Not to worry. Take an underpass to cross the wide main street of China's westernmost city, turn down a dusty alley of crumbling ocher storefronts that opens up into a lively public square behind a mosque. 

Families with children are watching television at an open-air restaurant. The scent of cumin wafts from a grill where lamb sizzles on skewers. Next door, a chef makes noodles strung between his hands like a game of cat's cradle.
Over here, it's not quite 9 p.m.
Kashgar, a city of 350,000 built around an oasis along the old Silk Road, has two time zones, two hours apart. How you set your watch depends not only on the neighborhood, but on your profession and ethnicity, religion and loyalty. 

People living on both sides of the time divide say there is little confusion because they have as little to do with each other as possible.
When communist China was formed in 1949, Mao Tse-tung decreed that everybody should follow a single time zone, no matter that the country is as wide as the continental United States.
But Uighurs, the dominant minority in China's northwestern Xinjiang province, balked at running their lives on Beijing time, which would have them getting up in the pitch dark and going to sleep at sunset.
"It is as ridiculous as having Los Angeles following New York time," said Alim Seytoff, who left Xinjiang in 1996 and is now secretary-general of the Uyghur American Assn. in Washington.
"That is the totalitarian nature of the Chinese government that they try to impose one time zone."
So the Uighurs follow their own unofficial time, which is two hours earlier -- in effect following the dictates of the sun rather than of Beijing, about 2,000 miles away.
The separate time zones are in fact a metaphor for the chasm between the Uighurs and Han Chinese living in uneasy proximity in Xinjiang. 

Since 1949, the ethnic Chinese have grown from 9% to more than 40% of the province's population, and Uighurs accuse the Chinese government of suppressing their culture and faith.
The Uighurs are a Muslim people who look more European than Chinese and use a Turkic language sprinkled with Arabic.
There is only minimal socializing between Uighurs and Chinese. Uighur men say they don't go out at night with Chinese colleagues because they don't share the habits of drinking and smoking. Intermarriage is rare. 

Few Chinese in Xinjiang bother to learn the local language and they avoid Uighur neighborhoods. ("Don't go eat over there at night!" a Chinese employee at the hotel warns guests. "It's full of Muslim people.")
Schools, government offices, post offices all use Beijing time. So do the airports and railroad stations. Some bus lines use Xinjiang time and others Beijing time.
Local people have strangely adjusted.
"Confusing? Not confusing at all! You can ask anybody how easy it is to convert between Beijing time and the local time," insisted a Chinese woman working at the Kashgar inter-city bus station, which is running on local time until April 1 and then switching over. 

"We use Beijing time in every aspect of our lives. It is only our comrades, the ethnic minorities, who use their local time."
Ali Tash, a 28-year-old tour guide, said it's really quite simple. Pointing at empty sofas in a hotel lobby, he explained how he would set up a hypothetical meeting with a Chinese friend and a Uighur friend. "So I say to the Chinese guy, come at 4 o'clock, and to the Uighur guy, come at 2 o'clock, and then everybody will be there the same time. No problem."
Modern time zones dividing the world into 15-degree-wide slices of longitude are a relatively recent invention, designed to stamp uniformity on the globe and make railroad travel more efficient. Until the late 19th century, the standard practice had been for each town to set its clocks to noon when the sun reached its zenith.
China is big enough to span five time zones but is the largest country in the world to insist on a single one. In contrast, Russia has 11.
"The reason goes back to a long Chinese imperial tradition in which the emperor is in control of time because it has a cosmological significance," said James Millward, a Xinjiang scholar at Georgetown University.
Millward calls the Uighurs' insistence on using their own time a "classic weapon of the weak."
"These are the kind of things that people do in authoritarian societies. Like telling a joke with a twist, it is a way of expressing independence that is subtle enough that you don't get into trouble," Millward said.
Uighurs appear proud of keeping their own time. A Uighur boy of about 8 playfully grabbed the wrist of a foreign visitor in the market to look at her watch. Seeing that it was set to local time, he gave a big grin.
The Chinese government has not always been so tolerant of chronological deviation.
In 1968, Long Shujin, a hard-liner who was soon to be named Communist Party secretary for Xinjiang, issued a decree ordering Uighurs to stop using their own time, according to Gardner Bovingdon, a Xinjiang expert at Indiana University who recently completed a paper on the separate time zone.
But the Chinese government was not able to enforce the law and in 1986 published a small notice acknowledging that the unofficial time could be used.
'If they really had forced people to synchronize their workdays with Beijing, it would have produced howls of protest because people would be getting up in the pitch dark," Bovingdon said.
Indeed, at 9 a.m. Beijing time on a Monday morning, when one might expect people to be bustling with the urgency of the week ahead, the city was still yawning itself awake. The statue of Mao looming over People's Square in the center of town was barely visible through a shroud of morning haze. Cars on the main road had their headlights on.
Kashgar is almost due north of New Delhi and about the same latitude as New York. Its problems with timekeeping are worse in midwinter, when the sun doesn't rise according to a Beijing-oriented clock until past 10 a.m., and during the summer solstice, when sunset is close to 11 p.m.
Unofficially, the Chinese themselves have skewed their working hours, so most schools and many businesses don't actually open until 10 a.m. Beijing time.
Jiang Lin, a student at Kashgar Teachers College, said: "Most people are using Beijing time; only local Uighurs use Xinjiang time. But our class starts two hours later than usual time. It's quite easy to adapt to it, just as when you are in Rome, do as the Romans do."
Still, Xinjiang time remains strictly unofficial. In the lobby of the Chinese-run International Hotel there are five clocks showing the time in Moscow, London, New York, Tokyo and Beijing. 

Asked why there was no clock indicating Xinjiang time, the concierge replied with irritation: "There's no need. They know what time it is."
Abdul Hakim, a Uighur watchmaker in the Kashgar market, said he used to stock a watch that displayed two different times, but nobody bought it.
"People use one time or the other, not both. The Chinese use Beijing time. The Uighurs use our time," he said. "But if somebody buys a watch from me, I'll set it however they like."

Tibetan monk beaten to death in China

BEIJING (AP) — A Tibetan monk was beaten to death by police in southwestern China after urging Tibetans to boycott farming to protest a massive security clampdown, a U.S.-funded radio station reported Tuesday.
Radio Free Asia said Phuntsok Rabten, a 27-year-old monk from Draggo monastery in the predominantly Tibetan Ganzi prefecture of Sichuan province, died last Wednesday after trying to escape police by motorcycle and on foot.

There was no way of independently verifying the report, which cited a former area resident now living in India. 

Calls to local police at the county and township levels rang unanswered while a man who answered the phone at the county's Communist Party branch would not comment.

A monk who answered the phone at the Draggo monastery said that a monk there died last Friday, adding he did not know how. But subsequent calls to the same number were answered by others who said it was not the monastery.

Security forces poured into China's Tibetan areas following anti-Beijing demonstrations last year, and their presence has been stepped up again in recent weeks. 

March marked several sensitive anniversaries for Tibetans, including one year since the anti-government riots in Lhasa, Tibet's regional capital, and 50 years since the Dalai Lama escaped into exile.

Police tried to stop Phuntsok Rabten from distributing flyers urging Tibetans not to till their fields to protest Beijing's crackdown on demonstrators last March and to mourn Tibetans who died in the violence, the report said.

The monk was eventually cornered by county police, said the report, citing Konchog Norbu, the former resident who now lives in southern India but remains in contact with sources in the region.

"He was severely beaten by the Chinese security force and died at the scene," Konchog Norbu was quoted as saying. "His body was tossed over a cliff in order to cover up the death."

The radio station said police also detained two monks from another monastery in the same county, also last Wednesday, for holding a protest in the area and calling on Tibetans to boycott farming.

A rugged, deeply Buddhist region filled with monasteries and nunneries, Ganzi is known for its strong Tibetan identity and has been at the center of dissent for years. It saw some of the most violent protests last spring.

China cyber attack: NIC most affected, 9 embassies hit

 NIC, which hosts all govt websites, was infected by mysterious GhostNet at least 12 times in past 2 years

By Shubhajit Roy

New Delhi: Computers of nine key Indian embassies, including offices in the US, UK and Germany, were infected by the mysterious GhostNet, a Chinese cyber espionage network that has been uncovered by a Canada-based research organisation.

More worryingly, the cyber investigation says that India’s premier National Informatics Centre (NIC), which governs and hosts all Government websites, was infected by the mysterious GhostNet at least 12 times in the past two years.

While cyber spying attempts are not new, what has surprised experts this time is the sophistication of the network. 

The GhostNet can not only download data from infected computers but also use them as virtual spies by remotely activating their cameras and voice recording software.

The Canadian report is being studied by India but experts have drawn similarities with the ‘spyware’ infection that gripped over 600 computers of the Ministry of External Affairs earlier this year. 

As reported by 'The Indian Express' on February 15, the Ministry of External Affairs discovered that its computers were being controlled remotely after being affected and preliminary investigations pointed to a Chinese link.

The latest report by the Munk Center for International Studies at the University of Toronto, that took the internet world by storm after it was released on Sunday, names computers at nine Indian embassies — UK, US, Germany, Serbia, Cyprus, Belgium, Italy Kuwait and Zimbabwe — that were infected by GhostNet. 

In all, the network consists of 1,295 infected computers in 103 countries.

Significantly, all the computers are located in countries where China has a special interest. 

The investigation has pointed to several hackers in China’s Hainan province where the Lingshui Signals Intelligence facility is located.

The Canadian team, which includes an Indian researcher Shishir Nagaraja, hit on the GhostNet while investigating cyber security loopholes in the Dalai Lama’s office in Dharamshala. 

“Our investigation reveals that GhostNet is capable of taking full control of infected computers, including searching and downloading specific files, and covertly operating attached devices, including microphones and web cameras,” the report says.

The MEA says that this is not a one-off event and defensive measures are being put into place. Calling the attack as a “reality of the cyber world”, Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon said that there have been a series of attacks in the past and “defensive measures” are in place.

While all nine embassies have been infected by the GhostNet a few times over the past two years, the report says that computers at the NIC have logged 12 infections. This has raised concern as the NIC hosts and manages all government websites, including the Ministry of Defence and the MEA.

But NIC officials say that this is an ongoing game and systems are regularly updated to deal with such infections. Several measures, including disconnecting computers with sensitive information from the internet have been put into place.

“We are keeping a tight vigil. Cyber security is a dynamic game and it goes on. What it (the report) is trying to show is that the Chinese are doing an organised attempt. We are fully aware of it,” NIC Director General B K Gairola said. 

China accused in spy network

Computers hijacked around the globe, say researchers
By Kim Covert
A 10-month investigation by a team of researchers at the University of Toronto uncovered a broad Chinese espionage scheme that reached into foreign embassies, news services and the office of the Dalai Lama.

The researchers says the system -- called GhostNet -- sent e-mails that introduced malware into host computers, which in turn fed information back to servers located on the Chinese mainland.

"The GhostNet system directs infected computers to download a Trojan (horse) known as ghOst RAT that allows attackers to gain complete, real-time control," the authors write in Tracking GhostNet: Investigating a Cyber Espionage Network.

"Our investigation reveals that GhostNet is capable of taking full control of infected computers, including searching and downloading specific files, and covertly operating attached devices, including microphones and web cameras."

What began as a case study of allegations of Chinese spying, centering on Tibetan institutions, turned up a network of nearly 1,300 "infected hosts" in 103 countries, including the Dalai Lama's private office and the Tibetan Government in Exile.

Compromised files on the infected computers could then be used to spread the virus, but researchers say it could be simply coincidence that so many "high-value" targets were identified, the report says.

The researchers say their findings should serve as a wake-up call to policy makers, as they "demonstrate the relative ease with which a technically unsophisticated approach can quickly be harnessed to create a very effective spynet."

Dalai Lama Urges China to Open Tibet to Journalists, Observers

By James Rupert
March 31 (Bloomberg) -- The Dalai Lama appealed to China to let journalists and international observers into Tibet, a day after the Chinese government said it would permit tourists to visit.

At a press conference in New Delhi on the 50th anniversary of his arrival in India as a refugee, Tibet’s Buddhist spiritual leader accused China of covering up violent oppression of its 6 million Tibetans. 

He criticized its suppression of a video this month that his government in exile says shows Chinese policemen beating a Tibetan, who died last year from his injuries.

China accused the exile government of fabricating the video and blocked the YouTube Web site, which posted it. 

The Dalai Lama, whose aides reaffirmed the video’s authenticity, said family members of the dead man, a China Mobile Limited employee named Tendar, have disappeared.

China’s official news agency, Xinhua, has said Tendar was beaten after attacking a policeman with a knife and died of an unidentified disease, rather than his injuries.

“If conditions in Tibet are really good, there is no reason to expel all the foreigners, all the tourists, all the media people,” the Dalai Lama said. 

China has barred or detained at least 10 reporters for foreign news organizations who tried to visit ethnic Tibetan regions, the Foreign Correspondents Club of China said this month.

China annexed Tibet in 1951, and in the past year has sent extra troops and police to crack down on Tibetan protesters demanding autonomy for the region. The government accuses the Tibetans of trying to seek independence and divide China.

Latest Tensions

Tibet has been tense since March last year, when protesting Tibetans fought police after the anniversary of a 1959 anti-Chinese uprising in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa. The uprising led the Dalai Lama to flee to India.

The Dalai Lama, 73, marked the anniversary of his escape by thanking Indians for hosting more than 100,000 Tibetans who have joined him in exile. 

He visited the capital, New Delhi, to offer prayers for India at Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim and other places of worship.

China web users turn keen eye back on government

By Ian Ransom
BEIJING (Reuters) - Already under pressure to create jobs and growth while clinging to absolute power, China's Communist Party faces a growing headache from Internet users keen to expose its members' sometimes questionable habits.

A pair of receipts from an upscale karaoke club sparked the latest Internet-led furor over government corruption earlier this month, ending the career of a mid-level bureaucrat from Liuyang, in southern Hunan province.

Scanned and uploaded by a nameless surfer, the dockets listed 47,000 yuan (nearly $7,000) worth of dining, massage and other services, prompting Internet users to ask how a public servant in a local media watchdog could stretch his meager government salary so far.

The Liuyang scandal followed a string of similar media storms in recent months, triggered by the Internet exposures of officials enjoying luxury overseas holidays in the name of "study" trips, or photographed wearing expensive-looking watches.

With China's state-controlled media often reluctant to report, and Party-appointed watchdogs sometimes embroiled in scandal themselves, China's Internet users have taken it upon themselves to ferret out official corruption.

"There is a sense that the central government has lost control over the county and city level officials in many places," said Rebecca McKinnon, an Internet expert at Hong Kong University.

"We've got the financial crisis and a lot of people concerned about corruption and how the nation's finances are managed."

Graft is hardly new in China, where the ruling Communist Party has warned it could prove their downfall.

But the latest scandals come amid demands for more transparency in the central government's 4 trillion yuan ($585 billion) stimulus plan to pump up the flagging economy.

"This year is clearly a very sensitive year politically... We've got all kinds of reasons why the government would feel nervous," said McKinnon.

Fall-out from the global financial crisis has seen China's once-booming export machine falter and some 20 million workers lose their jobs, fanning fears of social unrest.

Another 1.2 million university graduates are out of work, weeks before Beijing passes the 20th anniversary of a bloody crackdown on student-led demonstrations centered on Tiananmen Square in June.

As always, the government has attempted to stifle calls for political reform, launching an Internet crackdown in January ostensibly targeting pornography, but also shutting down blogging websites hosting debate deemed too edgy.

The ham-fisted suppression campaign, accompanied by the detention of dissidents calling for democratic reforms in a widely circulated online petition, has failed to silence critical Internet chatter.

Surfers have delighted in the "grass-mud horse," an Internet fad of videos and cartoons which uses a vulgar pun to mock the government's "harmonious society" slogan and protest online controls.

The corruption cases keep appearing online, then appearing in the papers, while edgy political discussions remain no less visible.

A LOSING BATTLE?

With an estimated 3,000 new websites created daily and more than six million new users coming online every month, the government is fighting a losing battle to stifle undesirable content, according to analysts.

"Scale is the killer here as far as control goes," said a Beijing-based IT manager who declined to be named.

"They can only be selective and surgical about unwanted content. They can look for unwanted signals and then when the signals are picked up, they can redirect the cavalry to the hotspot and get into it," the manager said.

While China's Internet surveillance remains highly pervasive, the surging tide of new subscribers is gradually forcing a change of tack in the way the government deals with the country's 300 million Internet users.

Before the country's annual parliament earlier this month, Premier Wen Jiabao held an online chat with Internet users, answering moderated questions about the global financial crisis, house prices, health care and checks on government power.

Officials in southwest Yunnan province invited Internet users to participate in a probe into a death of a young man in custody last month, which police at the detention center initially blamed on a game of hide-and-seek gone awry.

Internet users have been invited to become delegates in local people's congresses, alongside more traditionally tokenistic representatives for farmers and "model workers."

"I was surprised... The government had noticed what I had done online," said Wang Xiaoli, a 46-year-old freelance photographer who was chosen as a member of parliament in Luoyang, a city in central Henan province.

Chinese leaders' engagement with Internet users and encouragement of their supervision of government functions is a positive development, if not wholly heart-felt, according to Hu Xingdou, a free media advocate and economics professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology.

"The attitude of government contains two aspects: they will continue to crack down on dissidents more and more severely, but they will tolerate the common people's voices that crowd the Internet," Hu said.

Few in China have any illusions that the Internet-triggered scandals that catch minor officials with their pants down could embroil a big fish with ties to Beijing.

"It is by no means certain that the dialogue will lead to changes to the system," said Wang Xixin, a law school professor at Peking University. "But it gives us space to imagine and expect."

Chinese-Australian woman denies spy claims

 Joel Fitzgibbon with Helen Liu (right) in China.

SYDNEY (AFP) — A Chinese-Australian businesswoman at the centre of a spy scandal has denied she is a security threat, saying in an interview published Tuesday she is "broken-hearted" at the suggestion.
Beijing-born Helen Liu, whose links to Australia's defence minister sparked a political row now dogging Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on a visit to London, said she was a good citizen of her adopted country.

"I feel very broken-hearted about Australia," she told the Herald-Sun newspaper in her first interview since the scandal broke last week.

In a phone call from her home province of Shandong, the 48-year-old with limited English said through a friend: "I am an Australian citizen and I participate in all activities, not just political.

"I am a very good Australian businesswoman. It is unfair to me what people have said. I know people have said I am a national security threat," she was quoted as saying.

Liu broke her silence after an initial leak about her friendship with Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon snowballed into a row over the government's close ties with Beijing and secret visits by top Chinese officials.

Fitzgibbon was forced to admit he had failed to declare on a parliamentary register that he had two free trips to China sponsored by Liu when he was a member of the opposition.

He said it was an innocent mistake, and the national spy agency announced that it had no security concerns about Liu.

But the opposition called for Fitzgibbon to be sacked and launched an assault on the government's close relations with Beijing.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, a Chinese-speaking Sinophile, was accused of acting like a "roving ambassador" for Beijing by pressing for China to be given a bigger role in the International Monetary Fund.

Then, newspapers discovered that two senior Chinese government officials had travelled to Australia for secret talks with Rudd without local reporters being informed of the meetings.

The visits -- by security and intelligence chief Zhou Yongkang last year and by propaganda chief Li Changchun last week -- were covered by Chinese media but no information was provided locally.

The scandal has followed Rudd on a visit to London for the G20 summit this week, forcing him to defend his close ties with Beijing.

The Asian giant is Australia's biggest trading partner and Rudd told a news conference: "It is absolutely necessary for any Australian prime minister to ensure that we maximise our interests by developing the relationship".

Rudd also had to defend a curious request by an aide that he be moved from a seat next to China's ambassador to Britain during a BBC television interview this week.

The move was seen by some critics as excessive sensitivity to the attacks on his ties to China and an attempt to distance himself physically from Beijing's representative, Fu Ying.

But Rudd told reporters he simply wanted to sit next to Britain's Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who is a friend.

"I actually stayed the weekend with the British foreign secretary David Miliband, who is a friend of mine," he said.

"We were both on the set together. It's actually a natural thing that you wouldn't mind parking yourself next to each other, so I think people should put all that into a bit of context."

Behind the political sparring lies the question of whether Australia is ceding control of its vast natural reserves by allowing state-owned Chinese firms to pump billions of dollars into mining companies.

Fitzgibbon met Chinese generals with Liu on trip

By Richard Baker, Philip Dorling and John Garnaut 

DEFENCE Minister Joel Fitzgibbon mixed with some of China's most powerful military generals and Communist Party leaders on a 2002 trip to China paid for by wealthy businesswoman Helen Liu.

Cutting short Christmas celebrations with his wife and family, Mr Fitzgibbon attended a Chinese military art exhibition with Ms Liu in Beijing on Boxing Day 2002 with six three-star generals, 60 lower-ranking generals and 700 Chinese VIPs.

But late yesterday, a spokesman for Mr Fitzgibbon said he could not recall the reason for attending the Chinese military function, other than it was probably part of the "cultural experience" of the trip.

Mr Fitzgibbon's spokesman said the function was "one of many" that the Labor MP was "wheeled into and wheeled out of" by Ms Liu. He said Mr Fitzgibbon could not recall Ms Liu's connection with the event.

At the function, held to commemorate chairman Mao Zedong's birthday, Mr Fitzgibbon circulated with Li Jing, commander of China's naval air force, Zhou Kegu, deputy chief of the People's Liberation Army political department, Li Jingsong, president of China's military science academy, and Zhou Tienong, vice-chairman of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. 

Ms Liu played a key role in the event and was photographed at the centre of four document-signing ceremonies, including one with the director of the Hunan province tourism bureau. 

Mr Fitzgibbon was presented as her guest of honour.

At the function Mr Fitzgibbon was presented with a large painting by artist Li Chengxiu, but the minister's spokesman last night said he did not bring the artwork back to Australia with him. 

Mr Fitzgibbon did not declare the painting as a gift received in the Federal Parliament's register of members of interests.

At the time, Mr Fitzgibbon was opposition resources and tourism spokesman. He became shadow defence minister in late 2006.

Despite Mr Fitzgibbon's difficulty in recalling the details of the event, a translation of a report on the 2002 military art event on the website of the World Federation of Overseas Chinese Associations, refers to him being "so excited" by the occasion. 

Ms Liu is vice-chairwoman of the Hong Kong-based association that boasts 10,000 members.

"Joel Fitzgibbon, an Australian member of Parliament, who was in Beijing especially to attend the ceremony, was so excited at the scale and the hot atmosphere of the opening ceremony," the report stated.

Last week, Mr Fitzgibbon was reprimanded by acting Prime Minister Julia Gillard after failing to declare trips to China in 2002 and 2005 paid for by Ms Liu. Asked if Ms Liu had paid for any travel, Mr Fitzgibbon initially said they had only ever exchanged small gifts.

The intense scrutiny over Mr Fitzgibbon's relationship with Ms Liu arose last week after The Age revealed Defence officials had conducted a covert probe into their minister's dealings with the Chinese-born businesswoman.

The officials from Defence's security and intelligence areas alleged Mr Fitzgibbon's relationship with Ms Liu could pose a security risk because of her political and business connections in China.

Having been friends for 16 years, Mr Fitzgibbon rents a Canberra residence from Ms Liu. The 48-year-old, who has significant property interests in Sydney and China, reportedly contributed $20,000 to Mr Fitzgibbon's personal 1996 election campaign. Her companies have given a further $70,000 to the NSW ALP over the past decade.

Defence Department secretary Nick Warner last week said that no "element" of his department had probed into Mr Fitzgibbon's relationship with Ms Liu.

Mr Warner — whose tenure as Defence Department Secretary is also under scrutiny because of controversy over Ms Liu and other tensions with the minister — said neither he nor chief of the Defence Force, Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, had received any information suggesting Ms Liu posed a security risk.

However yesterday, together with Air Chief Marshal Houston, he issued an appeal to all Defence Department personnel to help hunt down the officers who have conducted an unauthorised covert investigation into Mr Fitzgibbon's personal affairs.

"If you have any knowledge of anyone in Defence accessing the minister's IT accounts, or in any other way attempting to collect information about the minister or his activities, I urge you to contact the Defence Security Authority to arrange to speak to an investigator," Mr Warner said in an email.

Row grows over Australia-China links

 A row over Australia's relations with China grew more heated Monday

SYDNEY (AFP) — A row over Australia's relations with China grew more heated Monday as the opposition rejected accusations it was playing the race card and reviving fears of the "yellow peril".

Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull, who heads the conservative Liberal Party, dismissed the claim that he was trying to stir up anti-China sentiment as "contemptible".

Turnbull had accused Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, a Chinese-speaking avowed Sinophile, of acting like a "roving ambassador" for Beijing by pressing for China to be given a bigger role in the International Monetary Fund.

The opposition leader also attacked Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon's failure to declare two trips to China paid for by a Beijing-born businesswoman.

In response, Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner accused Turnbull of "trying to stir up some more yellow peril sentiments, frankly."

Yellow peril was a racist term commonly used in the early 1900s, when many Australians feared Asia's large population coveted their country's wide open spaces and was intent on invading.

Turnbull responded Monday by accusing Tanner of avoiding the central issue of the national interest and raising "spectres of racism and casting back to bygone eras".

Tanner's remarks "suggest we should just fall into line with whatever China wants," Turnbull told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

The debate has been fuelled by newspaper reports that two senior Chinese government officials have travelled to Australia for secret talks with Rudd without local media being informed of the meetings.

The visits -- by security and intelligence chief Zhou Yongkang last year and by propaganda chief Li Changchun last week -- were reported by Chinese media but no information was provided locally, the Sydney Morning Herald said.

In China, job seekers are resorting to plastic surgery

 Dr. He Jinlong speaks with a female patient about facial contouring at Shanghai Time Plastic Surgery Hospital. Many Chinese employers make no bones about what they’re looking for in a candidate’s yibiao, or appearance.

 Business began to increase last November and in recent weeks has been running 40% higher than a year ago, says Dr. Liao Yuhua, president of the Shanghai hospital.

The cosmetic surgery business is booming in China as a hyper-competitive labor market has job hunters altering their looks to get an edge with potential employers.

By Don Lee
Reporting from Shanghai — In this crummy job market, Stephanie Yang figures any little advantage will help. Even double eyelids.
So on a cold January morning, the 21-year-old college senior walked into one of dozens of plastic surgery clinics here and plopped down $730, the equivalent of one year's tuition. An hour later she came out with two big bandages over her eyes.
When she removed the dressing the next day, Yang was aghast at her red, puffy eyelids. But now she looks out with her round eyes, a sharp crease across the upper lids, ready for the next interview.
"They may not say it openly, but during the process they will pick the prettier one," she says. 
Judging by the boom in plastic surgeries lately, a lot of young Chinese would agree.
In the U.S., the recession has led to a steep drop in cosmetic surgeries, which generally aren't paid for by health insurers. Nose jobs aren't covered in China either, but that's not stopping consumers here. Job hunters know that a pleasing face helps to get a foot in the door.
"I've been surprised how busy it is," says Dr. Liao Yuhua, president of Shanghai Time Plastic Surgery Hospital, one of the largest in the city. 

Business began to increase last November, she says, and in recent weeks has been running 40% higher than a year ago. At its busiest in January, Liao says, her team of 10 surgeons was doing as many as 100 procedures a day, raising noses, cutting eyelids and chiseling angular faces into the shape of smooth goose eggs.
Just about the only thing Shanghai Time doesn't do are leg-lengthening surgeries, an expensive and painful procedure that illustrates just how far some Chinese are willing to go to boost their employment prospects.
When the hospital surveyed patients, it learned that about 50% of the cases were job-related. Of them, one group is college students about ready to graduate, Liao says. The other: "White-collar employees after being laid off are having surgery so they are more attractive for the job search," says the retired pediatrician. Most patients are women.
Overall statistics on cosmetic surgeries aren't available, but nearly a dozen leading Chinese hospitals reported similarly strong business since late last fall, about the period when the global financial crisis began to take its toll on China's economy and the labor market. 
That's also around the time that many college seniors in China start sending out resumes and hunting for jobs for the day they graduate. 
But this year is turning out to be particularly tough. Government officials estimate that 6.1 million students will graduate from vocational schools, colleges and universities, up 9% from 2008. Researchers predict one-fourth of them will still be looking for work by year's end, adding to the unemployment rolls that have swelled with millions of migrant workers cut from factories. 
China's latest official urban jobless rate is 4.2%, but the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences says the actual figure is more than double that. 
He Wei, a campus recruiter for Zhaopin.com, a large personnel services firm, says he's seeing 25% fewer positions offered to fresh graduates now than a year ago. What's more, companies such as China Telecom and China Mobile are no longer settling for those with just bachelor's degrees, he says, and graduates across the board can expect to be offered significantly lower pay.
Chinese labor laws forbid employers from hiring based on race, ethnicity, sex and religion. But "as to other employment discrimination such as appearance, there aren't yet any laws clearly prohibiting them," says Ye Jingyi, a law professor at Peking University.
Many employers make no bones about what they're looking for in a candidate's looks. In Zhaopin's online job listings, more than 2,250 recruitment ads mention height, weight and other physical requirements. 
Beijing Modern Women's Hospital is looking for a nurse: Applicants must be taller than 5 feet, 2.5 inches and have "acceptable facial features," it says. Shanghai Jibei Electronics Co. has a similar height requirement for its assistant manager position, and it also wants someone who likes to smoke and drink wine -- apparently so the new hire will be able to get along better at business gatherings.
"I agree that there are lots of great people who are not tall, for example Napoleon," says Li Li, Shanghai Jibei's director of human resources. "It's just the social environment and cultural preference in China," he says. "People would feel that workers lower than a certain height aren't so healthy, too weak to stand in a gust of wind and can't take a heavy workload."
No wonder some Chinese pay thousands of dollars to have doctors break their legs and have steel pins inserted in their bones; these surgeries typically add 3 inches to a person's height but are considered very dangerous. 
More commonly, young Chinese looking to boost their job prospects want double eyelids, higher or sharper noses, rounder cheekbones and other changes that will give a face smoother lines, softer curves and symmetrical features. The Chinese call it san ting wu yan, or three equal parts and five eyes. From the chin to the bottom of the nose to the top of the eyebrow should be equidistant, while the space from one temple to the other should be five equal parts, each the width of an eye.
"In general, Chinese prefer lighter skin color... because Chinese people feel that white skin looks more delicate and smooth," says Dr. Zhao Jun, a plastic surgeon at Renai Hospital in Shanghai, adding that he's noticed a surge in students in his caseload.
Even for government jobs, applicants are graded for yibiao, or appearance. In one extreme example, Hunan province in central China required that its civil servants have "symmetrical breasts." The policy was scrapped after applicants protested a few years ago.
"Students are under a lot of pressure, that's why they choose to have plastic surgery," says Wang Xing, director of Vocational School & College Graduates Placement Administration in Wuhan, in central China.
Crystal Yao, a 22-year-old senior majoring in journalism at Shanghai Institute of Foreign Trade, scoffs at the idea of putting a knife to her face to improve her job outlook. 
"It's totally unnecessary and absurd," she says.
Yet the young woman also laments the hyper-competitive labor market. Yao says she was one of about 10,000 people who applied for 20 flight attendant openings at Japan Airlines last November. She got as far as the final round of 96.
"It's understandable if some girls want to do it," she says.
Surgery patient Stephanie Yang, who also asked that her English name be used to protect her privacy, has done everything imaginable to boost her odds of landing a job. 
In her senior year majoring in medical technology, Yang is interning 40 hours a week without pay at a health testing institute. She says she sent out her resume to 100 employers. She has made cold calls to managers so she could show off her excellent English. She's tapped her family connections to try to get a leg up.
Before she got the eyelid surgery, the ponytailed woman had four interviews. All of them were with men, she says.
"I think it's ridiculous, but I can't do anything about it," she says of the attention paid to looks. Yang doesn't expect her new eyes to outshine her other qualifications. 
Then again, she says, "you really don't know what might be the crucial factor... Any advantage helps."

Anti-China tensions on the rise in Australia

By Rob Taylor
CANBERRA, March 30 (Reuters) - Australia's Sinophile Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is fighting perceptions he has become a "running dog" for Beijing as anti-China sentiment mounts at home, threatening billions of dollars worth of Chinese investment.

With Rudd urging a greater IMF role for China at a meeting this week of major economies in London, Australia's conservative Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull accused Rudd of having become a "roving ambassador for the People's Republic of China".

Even a shock decision last Friday to refuse a bid by Chinese state-owned Minmetals to buy Australian miner OZ Minerals on national security grounds appears to have backfired, with media accusing the government of belated chest-beating. 

"The government has thrown up a series of arbitrary investment barriers apparently to look like it is 'standing up to China'", the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper said on Monday.

"It has sent a message to the Australian public that Chinese money is inherently dangerous. The result is red peril hysteria."

The Mandarin-speaking Rudd, elected in late 2007, was expected to take Australia's relations with China to a new high with his expert understanding of the country, learned in Beijing as a junior diplomat.

But Chinese investment bids now before Australia's foreign investment watchdog, including a $19.5 billion tie-up between Chinese state-owned metals firm Chinalco and Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto Ltd, have sparked public unease. 

Conservative opposition politicians and an influential upper house swing vote independent senator plan television advertisements with more than a whiff of nationalism, demanding the centre-left government not sell the farm to Beijing.

At the same time, Rudd's Labor has given inadvertent credence to populist attacks, although a poll on Monday showed its popularity remains strong with voters. 

Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon is fighting for his job after failing to declare two free trips given to him by a Chinese-born friend, while Rudd has endured a media storm over secret meetings with China's security and intelligence chief Zhou Yongkang, as well as propaganda tzar Li Changchun.

Opponents had all but tarred Rudd as "Beijing's running dog", newspapers said, with perceptions rising of the popular prime minister as a "Chinese lickspittle" or "Manchurian candidate".

A cartoon in the mass-selling Daily Telegraph newspaper on Monday depicted spies and military chiefs covertly eavesdropping on Rudd as he ordered wonton soup at a Chinese restaurant in London.

HARDER LINE

Those suspicions could yet influence Rudd's Labor to take a harder line against billions of dollars worth of China investment, although historically, Australian governments have been loath to refuse dollars flowing in from overseas.

A security expert who asked not be named said on Monday foreign investment bureaucrats had privately canvassed resource firms about investment options other than China.

"It would be ironic if Kevin Rudd ends up as the first prime minister since (1971) to derail the China relationship, at the moment when Australia and the world needs China most," the Herald said.

Rudd's deputy and Acting Prime Minister Julia Gillard accused opponents of trying to stir "yellow peril sentiments" and said the government had the right level of relationship with Asia's emerging superpower.

Two-way trade with China totalled A$58 billion ($40 billion) in 2008, rivalling Japan as Canberra's largest export partner.

Labor's China love-in

By Rowan Callick

JOEL Fitzgibbon's China connections, which are causing him so much grief, are no aberration.

His procedural oversight and friendship with businesswoman Helen Liu are purely his. But building warm ties with China places him firmly in the Labor Party mainstream.

The Party has for decades enjoyed a romance with China. But middle Australia may be less comfortable about the country being a deputy mandarin than it was about being a deputy sheriff under John Howard.

The Soviet Union was for long a palpable enemy. But in the People's Republic of China, Labor found a nation of the Left with which it could enthusiastically identify, reinforced by the antipathy of most Labor supporters towards the Vietnam War. 

The romance was established well before China opened its economy to the world. But once this happened, the relationship intensified as China became the focus of new thinking on the Left as the place where old-style, failed socialism was being transformed into dynamic enterprise.

Thus it evolved into the ideal locus for the Left, where idealism was being successfully realised in prosperity. And there was the expectation -- articulated by Bob Hawke, among others -- that the country would further evolve towards liberal democracy.

But Hawke opposed as morally repugnant Western and especially British efforts to establish a form of democracy in Hong Kong on the eve of the handover to China in 1997. This, he said, meant "trying to shove down other people's throats" rights that it took an "enormous period" to establish in the West.

Part of the romance was with Asia in general, as Australians began to realise, following World War II, that the country's future lay more with the region of which it is a part than with the Atlantic world.

And the ALP's feelings have at times been reciprocated. 

Certainly, the party has received more in donations from Chinese sources -- most notably, recently, from casino magnate Stanley Ho, as well as from Fitzgibbon's friend Liu -- than the Liberals and other Australian parties.

This romance was expected to bloom under Kevin Rudd, the Western world's first Mandarin-speaking leader. But he has also injected an element of realism alongside that romanticism, because he knows China better.

In his speech to Beijing University students a year ago, he provoked a later ticking-off from President Hu Jintao by saying: "It is necessary to recognise there are significant human rights problems in Tibet."

Rudd -- who is extraordinarily well known in China, where his biography has sold many thousands of copies in translation -- said: "A true friend is one who can be a zhengyou, that is a partner who sees beyond immediate benefit to the broader and firm basis forcontinuing, profound and sincere friendship."

But since becoming Prime Minister, he has mostly preferred to confine his views on China to Chinese audiences, perhaps out of concern about being viewed in Australia as a Manchurian candidate. This despite the intense and growing debate about investments sought by Chinese state-owned companies in Australian resources.

When Rudd visited Beijing for the Olympic Games last August, he made only cursory contact with Australian journalists, but gave a lengthy interview to Hu Shuli, editor-in-chief of Chinese business magazine Caijing.

And the visit to the Lodge in Canberra a week ago of Li Changchun, China's fifth most senior leader, was announced only to Chinese media.

Rudd has recently talked little about China's role within Australia, but has at the same time amplified his longstanding interest in China's broader global role.

He helped develop the concept of China's becoming a "responsible international stakeholder" and has sought to link this to Hu Jintao's Confucian catchphrase of a "harmonious world".

He has urged support for China taking a leading role in a recast International Monetary Fund. 

In this context, People's Bank of China governor Zhou Xiaochuan last week urged consideration of replacing the US dollar as the global reserve currency with special drawing rights aligned with a basket of currencies.

When Rudd was elected, ALP spin doctor Bruce Hawker enthused in the South China Morning Post that this "heralds a new era in Sino-Australian relations. It will be a dynamic period, full of opportunity and promise on many fronts, with a bolder acknowledgment of the need for ever-closer relations between Canberra and Beijing."

China's response was more cautious. 

After all, it had developed a workable relationship with the Howard government, which had delivered it a 25-year natural gas contract at below the market price.

It was during a visit to Beijing in November 2006 that Rudd finalised his successful campaign to wrench the Labor leadership from Kim Beazley.

As foreign affairs spokesman he led a team to mark the 20th anniversary of the first visit to China by an ALP delegation. 

Its members included former party leader Simon Crean, who in 2002 established more formal links with the Chinese Communist Party, including annual exchange visits; federal party secretary Tim Gartrell; NSW branch president Bernie Riordan; and Victorian senator Kim Carr.

Rudd said then: "While the CCP now has dialogue relations with the Australian Liberals and Nationals and about 400 parties around the world, our dialogue goes back a long, long time." 

But the formal relationship had languished somewhat until Crean suggested annual exchanges.

The ALP delegation in 2006 was ushered into the Xinjiang Room at the Great Hall of the People for an hour-long chat with Liu Yunshan, then head of the party's propaganda department. 

Rudd introduced his colleagues in Chinese, on which Liu commended him, adding that he knew Rudd was "an expert on China".

Zhang Zhijun, deputy head of the international section of the party, attended the ALP conference in Sydney in 2004.

When that first Labor delegation had arrived in Beijing all those years ago, Rudd had accompanied it to its initial meeting with the CCP in his capacity as first secretary at the Australian embassy.

Crean said in his speech welcoming President Hu in 2003 that four years earlier, his predecessor Jiang Zemin had paid tribute to the pioneers of the relationship between our two great peoples, citing the saying: "When you go to the well to draw water, remember who dug the well."

Crean noted the presence of one such digger, Gough Whitlam, and added that his father, Frank Crean, had accompanied Whitlam as his treasurer on the first visit by an Australian prime minister to China, in 1973.

His father, he said, had described the then premier, Zhou Enlai, as "a man of natural dignity and obvious strength of character, a man of reason and cultivation". Those, said Crean, are the "qualities of leadership that we must emulate".

He went on to praise "the sense of purpose driving China and its leadership today, the greatness of your people, and their contribution to world civilisation".

Rudd noted, in a speech praising fellow Queensland Labor leader Tom Burns, that he worked tirelessly to strengthen Australia-China relations, visiting China more than 50 times. 

Another pioneer in the relationship was Mick Young, the feisty shearer and Hawke government minister.

During a speech in Beijing last June, Treasurer Wayne Swan paid tribute to Young's role in his own "deep and continuing interest in this great country".

It was Whitlam who is most famously associated with China, however. In July 1971, he visited Beijing several days before US national security adviser Henry Kissinger arrived to prepare for the historic encounter between Richard Nixon and Mao.

Whitlam had been calling for the recognition of the People's Republic, instead of the Republic of China in Taiwan, as China, since he entered parliament. On his visit he met Zhou, who told him: "What you've said tonight is just words. Now you've got to go back and be elected and turn it into deeds."

The then prime minister, Bill McMahon, said Zhou had played Whitlam as a "fisherman plays a trout" and that Australia under Labor would become a "pawn of the giant communist power".

But then Nixon flew to Beijing and in December 1972 the Whitlam government recognised the People's Republic. 

Whitlam again visited China the following year, when his party was escorted to the Great Wall by Deng Xiaoping.

That being the 10th anniversary of president John Kennedy's assassination, he asked Mao what would have happened if Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had been shot instead of Kennedy.

Mao, according to Whitlam, replied: "I don't think Mr Onassis would have married Mrs Khrushchev." 

But that has always seemed more like a classic Whitlam line.

Rudd attested to the seminal influence of that 1973 trip: "I watched with wide eyes on the flickering tube Gough and Margaret embark on their triumphal march to China in 1973. I read every word about who Gough met and what was said. So some years later, consistent with the instructions I had received from Australia's chief socialist, I fled Queensland and gained entry to the Australian National University in Canberra, where I studied Chinese language and history."

The admiration for Mao wasn't restricted to Labor. 

After Mao's death in 1976, it was Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser who moved a condolence motion that "expresses to the people of China profound regret and tenders its deep sympathy to his family in its bereavement".

Labor's Tom Uren told parliament that Mao held a different view of the nature of man from that of capitalist Australians. "To Mao, people were not fundamentally selfish and self-seeking.

"China has undertaken a process in which material incentives are being steadily abandoned in favour of moral incentives."

When Labor returned to power, Hawke soon accelerated Australia's Asian engagement. 

In the first month of the government, China's premier Zhao Ziyang, a leading pioneer of China's economic reforms, visited Australia and Hawke spent substantial time talking with him.

The conversations continued in both countries until Zhao was sacked in 1989 when he refused to support Deng Xiaoping's declaration of martial law that led to the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Zhao was then put under house arrest, where he died in 2005.

This sense of the betrayal of the reforms of his friend Zhao, as well as the brutality of the crackdown, led Hawke to conduct a tearful memorial event for those killed in 1989, when he spontaneously announced that all Chinese students then in Australia could stay.

After leaving parliament, both Hawke and Paul Keating have worked as go-betweens in China, at one stage being pitted against each other in the race for an Australian insurance licence in Shanghai.

And as Australia and China become closer and the economic and political stakes grow larger, so the pressures become greater and those in the middle, once revealed, are exposed to ever brighter lights, as Fitzgibbon and Liu are finding out.

'Unhappy China' claims Beijing should 'lead the world'

A new book claiming that China is a victim of Western bullying and "should rise up and lead the world" has soared to the top of the country's bestseller list.
By Malcolm Moore in Shanghai 
On the eve of the G20 summit in London, "Unhappy China" has stirred debate about whether China should have a greater role on the world stage. 

Although the country will soon overtake Japan as the world's second-largest economy, China is not included in the G8 and is a second tier member of the G20. Beijing has little influence in the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund and is highly vulnerable to changes in the value of the dollar.

"We still feel suppressed because we are sometimes condemned or criticised by the western world," said Zhang Xiaobo, the book's publisher. 
The five authors of the book advocate a tougher line against China's enemies, including punishment for President Nicholas Sarkozy of France, who met the Dalai Lama last year. 

The book takes a robust view of Western criticism of China's behaviour in Tibet. 

"You can start a war if you have the guts, otherwise shut up!" it says.

Another passage reads: "If China stood as the world's top country, it would not act like the United States, which has been irresponsible, lazy and greedy and engaged in robbery and cheating. They have brought economic recession to the whole world."

The book is the latest sign of growing Chinese nationalism, a trend that became highly visible during the riots in Tibet last March.

Spurred on by the government, Chinese nationalists vented their anger at the depiction of Tibet in the West and at the protests over the Olympic torch passing through Paris and London.

Meanwhile, the recent confrontation between America and China over the harassment of a US surveillance ship in the South China sea and Beijing's proposal that the dollar should be replaced as the global reserve currency, have shown China's potential for greater military and economic power.

"Unhappy China" is already into its second print run, while China's major web portals and social networking sites have their own "Unhappy China" forums.

The Chinese economy has weakened since last year, with exports dropping by more than a quarter in February. Nevertheless, its leaders and intellectuals believe the financial crisis presents an opportunity for Beijing to extend its power. 

Jing Ulrich, a managing director at JP Morgan, said there is a feeling of economic optimism in China "that you do not find anywhere else at the moment".

Chinese Financial Nationalism Contained

China Unlikely to Get More IMF Voting Power, EU Says

By IAN JOHNSON
BEIJING--Despite China's stated willingness to increase funding for the International Monetary Fund, it is unlikely to get a commensurate increase in voting power at an upcoming summit, the European Union's commissioner for external relations said Monday.

Speaking ahead of Thursday's Group of 20 summit of the world's largest economies, Benita Ferrero-Waldner also said that Chinese officials she spoke to were not specific in steps they would like the world to take to pull itself out of the global economic crisis.

"Their comments were more general, I must say, than my comments," Ms. Ferrero-Waldner said. "But they are looking for a way forward."

China has recently called for a new global reserve currency by using the IMF's Special Drawing Rights. It also has expressed a willingness to contribute more money for the IMF, but asked that China be given a larger portion of the vote.

Ms. Ferrero-Waldner said such fundamental restructuring would not be decided at Thursday's meeting of the G20, a group of industrial countries. Such talk, she said, was "premature" and would likely require one to two years of complex diplomatic negotiations.

"I personally think it's not the right moment," Ms. Ferrero-Waldner said. "Everybody is of course open but… it's about the practical solutions steps that have to be taken" to revive the world economy.

Ms. Ferrero-Waldner yesterday met Chinese Vice Premier Li Keqiang and Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi. She said the two were vague on calls for greater regulation of global finance. 

"Maybe from our side and the US side we want to see regulations," she said, but Chinese leaders were "imprecise."

Chinese cyberspy network targets governments

 The network was discovered after computers at the Dalai Lama's office were hacked, researchers say.

LONDON, England (CNN) -- Nearly 1,300 computers in more than 100 countries have been attacked and have become part of an computer espionage network based in China, security experts alleged in two reports Sunday.

Computers -- including machines at NATO, governments and embassies -- are infected with software that lets attackers gain complete control of them, according to the reports. One was issued by the University of Toronto's Munk Centre for International Studies in conjunction with the Ottawa, Canada-based think tank The SecDev Group; the second came from the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory.

Researchers have dubbed the network GhostNet. The network can not only search a computer but see and hear the people using it, according to the Canadian report.

"GhostNet is capable of taking full control of infected computers, including searching and downloading specific files, and covertly operating attached devices, including microphones and web cameras," the report says.

The discovery of GhostNet grew out of suspicions that the office of the Dalai Lama had been hacked.

His staff sent a foreign diplomat an e-mail invitation to meet the Tibetan spiritual leader, but before the Dalai Lama's people could follow up with a phone call, "the diplomat's office was contacted by the Chinese government and warned not to go ahead with the meeting," according to the Cambridge report.

An investigation resulted in both reports. Both found links to computers in China, but the researchers did not conclude who they thought was behind the "malware," or malicious software.

They point out that China is among a handful of countries, including the United States, Israel and United Kingdom, that are "assumed" to have considerable computer espionage capabilities.

Attempts by CNN to contact the Chinese government in Beijing and its American embassy and consulate offices were unsuccessful on Sunday, as the offices were closed.

Hackers gained access to computers in the Dalai Lama's office by tricking computer users into downloading e-mail attachments that had been carefully engineered to appear safe, according to the authors of the Cambridge report, titled, "The Snooping Dragon: Social-malware Surveillance of the Tibetan Movement."

"The attackers took the trouble to write e-mails that appeared to come from fellow Tibetans and indeed from co-workers," according to the report, authored by Shishir Nagaraja and Ross Anderson. Once the attackers gained an initial foothold, "they also stole mail in transit and replaced the attachments with toxic ones," the report adds.

The Dalai Lama investigation led to the discovery of hundreds more infected machines in locations from The Associated Press in Britain and Deloitte and Touche in New York, to the ministries of foreign affairs in Indonesia, Iran and the Philippines. The office of the prime minister of Laos was also snared, as was a single non-secure computer at NATO, according to the Canadian report. Infected computers "checked in" with control servers as early as May 2007 and as recently as March 12 of this year, the report adds.

The attack has broader implications, Nagaraja and Anderson warn, since a single person could carry out a similar one.

"Even a capable motivated individual could have carried out the attacks we describe here," they say.

The computer systems of businesses are almost certain to be hacked by similar means, if they have not been already, the experts claim.

"Social malware will be used for fraud, and the typical company really has no defense against it," since it is so expensive and inconvenient, for example, to keep sensitive information or processes on computers with no Internet access. "We expect that many crooks will get rich before effective countermeasures are widely deployed."

The Information Warfare Monitor Web site, where the Canadian report was released, was down Sunday afternoon.

Spy chiefs fear Chinese cyber attack

Huawei and the next Sino-British wars

By Michael Smith
INTELLIGENCE chiefs have warned that China may have gained the capability to shut down Britain by crippling its telecoms and utilities.

They have told ministers of their fears that equipment installed by Huawei, the Chinese telecoms giant, in BT’s new communications network could be used to halt critical services such as power, food and water supplies.

The warnings coincide with growing cyberwarfare attacks on Britain by foreign governments, particularly Russia and China.

A confidential document circulating in Whitehall says that while BT has taken steps to reduce the risk of attacks by hackers or organised crime, “we believe that the mitigating measures are not effective against deliberate attack by China”.

It is understood that Alex Allan, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), briefed members of the ministerial committee on national security about the threat from China at a top-secret Whitehall meeting in January.

According to Whitehall sources, the meeting, led by Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, heard that ministers had “not paid sufficient attention to the threat in the past”, despite repeated warnings from the intelligence services. 

These included warnings from the security arm of GCHQ, which expressed concern because government departments, the intelligence services and the military will all use the new BT network.

A Whitehall report is understood to warn that, although there is at present a “low” risk of China exploiting its capability, “the impact would be very high”.

Huawei was founded with significant funding from the Chinese state. Its head is Ren Zhengfei, a former director of the telecoms research arm of the 3m-strong People’s Liberation Army.

The company is providing key components for BT’s new £10 billion network, which will update the UK’s telecoms with the use of internet technology. 

The report says the potential threat from Huawei “has been demonstrated elsewhere in the world”.

The multi-million-pound deal, signed in 2005, has led to a string of risk warnings from the intelligence and security services, with officials complaining of the failure of ministers to take them seriously.

It is unclear whether Patricia Hewitt, then trade and industry secretary, was warned of the problems when the deal was agreed in April 2005. However, the British company Marconi, which failed to win the contract in the face of a far cheaper offer from Huawei, did ask her to intervene to protect British jobs.

Hewitt, now a nonexecutive director of BT, declined to intervene, saying it was “a competitive tender between two commercial companies”. 

The most recent warnings about the cyberthreat to Britain’s security came in the JIC report on UK cybersecurity circulated in January and a Cabinet Office briefing paper that is understood to have emphasised Huawei’s links to the Chinese military.

Despite Allan’s warnings, and repeated warnings in the past, ministers remain reluctant to fund any move to remove the threat, officials say.

Yvette Cooper, chief secretary to the Treasury, is understood to have cautioned that it would be difficult to find the necessary funds in the current downturn. 

Ministers expressed concern that replacing the Chinese components with British parts would clash with government policy on competition.

According to the sources, the ministerial committee on national security was told at the January meeting that Huawei components that form key parts of BT’s new network might already contain malicious elements waiting to be activated by China.

Working through Huawei, China was already equipped to make “covert modifications” or to “compromise equipment in ways that are very hard to detect” and that might later “remotely disrupt or even permanently disable the network”, the meeting was told.

This would be likely to have a “significant impact on critical services” such as power and water supplies, food distribution, the financial system and transport, which were dependent on computers to operate.

While technical modifications suggested to BT reduced the threat from hackers, organised criminals and most “hostile adversaries”, they were “not effective against deliberate attack from China”. 

The current friendly relations between Britain and China meant there was no immediate threat of this happening but there was still a very real threat that “covert functionality” within the components was already being used to gather intelligence.

Intelligence chiefs are believed to have warned that it was impossible to say if such information-gathering had already been introduced, since they had “only limited understanding of our adversaries’ attack capability”.

Whitehall departments were reportedly targeted by the Chinese in 2007, and a few months later Jonathan Evans, the MI5 director-general, wrote to 300 chief executives warning them that the Chinese were hacking into their systems and stealing confidential information.

An attempt by Huawei to merge with the US company 3Com, which provides computer security systems for the Pentagon, was blocked last year after US intelligence warned that it would not be in US national security interests. 

In a new-year e-mail, Sun Yafang, Huawei’s chairwoman, told the company’s 85,000 employees that the global economic situation offered “both challenges and opportunities”. Four weeks later she was inside Downing Street as Gordon Brown welcomed Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier.

Both Wen and Sun were keen to promote Huawei, which in little more than 20 years has grown into one of the world’s most powerful companies, with projected sales this year of £21 billion. Last year its sales jumped 46%. Its tentacles have reached most of the world’s telecoms companies.

Four days before Brown met Sun, intelligence chiefs had warned ministers of fears that Huawei’s role in the new system might have given China the ability to shut down Britain. 

Nor was it the first warning. 

Members of the ministerial committee on national security were told that “ministers had not paid sufficient attention to the threat from Huawei”.

John Tindle, professor in telecommunications engineering at Sunderland University, said software or hardware could sit hidden in a network, waiting to be activated. 

“If an unauthorised person were able to gain control of the equipment, its mode of operation could be changed,” he said. “The ability to move traffic across the network could be switched off. Traffic could be re-routed to another node controlled by the attacker.”

Huawei was selected to provide key components for the BT network in April 2005 despite allegations that it was bank-rolled by the Chinese government. 

The firm has previously shown itself to be opportunistic. 

The US company Cisco, one of Huawei’s main rivals, sued the Chinese company for alleged theft of its intellectual property rights in 2003. The case was settled out of court.

It is Huawei’s links to the Chinese military that cause most concern. 

Ren set up the company in 1988 after an edict from Deng Xiaoping, then China’s leader, that the country’s defence industry turn itself into profitable companies able to acquire modern technology.

A Pentagon report last week cited Huawei as a key part of the cyberthreat from China, noting that it retained “close ties” with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). 

Huawei denies any continuing links to the PLA. A spokeswoman at the company’s UK headquarters dismissed the alleged links as “rumour and speculation”.

Cyberspace targets: Chinese hackers have repeatedly targeted western networks

-Computers at the Foreign Office and other Whitehall departments were attacked from China in 2007. In the same year, Jonathan Evans, the MI5 director-general, warned 300 British businesses that they were under Chinese cyber-attack

-The People’s Liberation Army is reputed to hold an annual competition to recruit the country’s best hackers

-Two years ago, Chinese Trojan horse spyware was found in the offices of Angela Merkel, the German chancellor.

Britain could be shut down by hackers from China

 Computer systems which utilise Chinese technology are believed to be at risk 

Thanks to Huawei, China has the ability to shut down Britain's vital services, including food or power supplies, because its companies are involved in upgrading telecommunications systems
By Alastair Jamieson 
Ministers have been warned that a new £10bn communications network being developed by BT is vulnerable to a potential attack from within the Communist state because it uses equipment supplied by Chinese telecoms firm Huawei.

Although the risk of anyone in China exploiting the capability is currently low, intelligence experts believe the impact of any such attack would be very high. 

Computers at the Foreign Office and other Whitehall departments were attacked from China in 2007 and the threat from foreign governments and big companies is believed to be greater than that posed by terrorists.
Alex Allan, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), it thought to have briefed members of the ministerial committee on national security about the threat from China at a Whitehall meeting in January. 

Ministers were told steps to curb the potential threat have made little difference.

Huawei is China's biggest phone company and a major world supplier. 

Under a multi-million pound deal signed in 2005, it is providing key components for BT's new '21CN' network which will use internet technology to speed up communications on behalf of thousands of public agencies and businesses.

Among those who will be relying on the new network are the government's own intelligence agency GCHQ, Whitehall departments and the military.

BT would not comment on the issue and a Cabinet Office spokesman would only say that government was working on ways to improve the security of Britain's key systems. 

Huawei, whose UK division is based in Basingstoke, Hants, was unavailable for comment.

Ministers have been reluctant to replace Huawei with a British supplier, citing the cost and the government's policy on competitive tendering for contracts.

The Whitehall meeting heard that Huawei components that form key parts of BT's new network might already contain malicious elements that could be activated by China and which could "remotely disrupt or even permanently disable the network", according to a report. 

Such action would have a "significant impact on critical services" such as power and water supplies, food distribution, the financial system and transport, which were dependent on computers using the communications network to operate.

An attempt by Huawei to merge with United States company 3Com, which provides computer security systems for the Pentagon, was blocked last year after US intelligence officials warned that it would not be in national security interests. 

The Pentagon is reported to believe Huawei is a key part of the potential threat from China and has close ties with the People's Liberation Army.

However, a telecom industry source said: "There must be millions of systems containing Chinese technology all over the world. The BT network wouldn't be more or less vulnerable than any other."

Red-peril hysteria fills the vacuum left by Rudd

John Garnaut 
It would be ironic if Kevin Rudd ends up as the first prime minister since Billy McMahon to derail the China relationship, at the moment when Australia and the world needs China most.

His shock rejection of Chinese capital to rescue OZ Minerals -- and the comical "national security" excuse -- might be the first instalment of a large economic price Australia pays if Rudd cannot shake the tag of "a roving ambassador for the People's Republic of China", as the Opposition Leader, Malcolm Turnbull, insinuated on Friday.

China remains controlled by a communist party that is obsessed with propaganda and security and which treats the domestic concerns of small countries like Australia with the sensitivity that emperors once showed their vassal states.

It is not easy for Australian leaders to explain why it is necessary to closely engage with a government that organises 10,000 patriots, waving red flags, to march on Canberra to defend an Olympic torch.

But the China debate has gone off the planet since last week's Joel Fitzgibbon "spy" scandal, in part, because Rudd's personal fear of being painted as "the Manchurian candidate" has become self-fulfilling.

Rudd has appeared embarrassed about his deep and clear-eyed knowledge of China and has shied away from leading intelligent domestic discussion. The vacuum has now been filled by vested interests, maverick senators and ageing cold-war commentators.

The result is red peril hysteria.

Since Chinalco's initial Rio Tinto investment the Government has thrown up a series of arbitrary investment barriers apparently to look like it is "standing up to China" -- a stance the Howard government never felt necessary to take. 

It has sent a message to the Australian public that Chinese money is inherently dangerous.

Predictably, the bad investment signals have raised huge angst in China. By the middle of last year they had already become the most pressing concern of Chinese corporate leaders and a serious diplomatic problem.

Just ask Gary Quinlan, Rudd's foreign affairs adviser and soon-to-be ambassador to the United Nations, about the behind-the-scenes exertion needed to keep the relationship on track.

Since the middle of last year China's ambassador to Australia, Zhang Juncai, appears to have been given licence to bombard Quinlan with phone calls, usually about some urgent problem related to the Foreign Investment Review Board.

People close to the foreign policy process say it is unprecedented for an ambassador to have such privileged access to an Australian Prime Minister's office.

"Can you imagine [Australian ambassador] Geoff Raby calling [President] Hu Jintao's office every day?" one source says.

"I don't know if we've even got the number."

Many of Zhang's calls are apparently referred to the Foreign Minister, Stephen Smith, although a spokeswoman said it was ridiculous to suggest that in some weeks Smith had met Zhang three times.

And then there is Rudd's clumsy secret meeting with its propaganda chief, Li Changchun.

Foreign policy advisers say they are puzzled at Rudd's sudden bout of media shyness.

Would Australian reporters have bothered to report Li's visit if they had been notified? 

Probably not, judging by Smith's November 5 meeting with the scariest man in China's nine-member standing committee, Zhou Yongkang. Zhou commands the country's vast intelligence and security apparatus. 

The West Australian newspaper reported the meeting in passing but did not mention Zhou's job description (it wrongly dubbed him China's likely next president). The meditation sect Falun Gong filed a writ against Zhou in the NSW Supreme Court for "torture" but still could not get any national or east coast newspaper to take any notice at the time.

In Beijing on Friday Smith again met Zhou. This time he went out of his way on three occasions to publicly mention their previous acquaintance.

If only Rudd himself had been so prudent. 

The PM's office last night confirmed that Rudd had also met with Zhou in November. But not a word of it appeared in any Australian publication, with echoes of his secret meeting with Li Chang Chun.

Rudd has allowed his status as the world's most China-literate leader to become a serious political liability.