By Byron Acohido
Much has been written and broadcast over the past 24- hour news cycle about the diplomatic fallout of the latest WikiLeaks caper.
Today, some news outlets are focusing on a subset of the leaked cables that point to China's Politburo as the orchestrator of last January's Operation Aurora, the systematic hacking of the internal networks of at least 30 high-profile corporations, especially Google.
That revelation underscores the notion that nation-state cyberspying goes beyond snooping for military advantage, says Mandeep Khera, a senior executive at web security firm Cenzic.
Cyberspies are "also targeting corporations and influential individuals in an attempt to unravel the infrastructure of the targeted country," says Khera.
"Whether it is trade secrets, intellectual property, or government secrets, foreign perpetrators will continue to cause chaos for the U.S. cybersecurity infrastructure, unless we can anticipate these attacks."
Operation Aurora came to light last January after Google went public about it, intimating that the Chinese government played a role in hacking into its databases as part of a campaign to persecute political dissidents. The incident set off an international furor, as we reported in this cover story, and Google ultimately shut down its Beijing operations.
Among the 250,000 U.S. Embassy cables released by WikiLeaks are exchanges between a Chinese contact and the U.S. embassy in Beijing; one dispatch describes a Chinese source informing the U.S. Embassy that China's Politburo sanctioned the attack on Google.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Obama has to tell Beijing some hard truths
By Fred Bergsten
With policymakers failing to make progress on the critical issue of global imbalances, America has no alternative but to put China on notice.
Privately but promptly, Washington has to inform Beijing it will label it as a currency manipulator, back legislation treating the manipulation as an export subsidy, and take it to the World Trade Organisation if it does not let the renminbi rise significantly.
The renewed increases in the external imbalances of the two main economies pose major risks.
China’s surplus is again climbing while it tightens monetary policy because of concerns over overheating.
It thus maintains its rapid expansion partly at the expense of other countries and damps global growth.
It should instead let its currency rise and limit the cutback in domestic demand.
That would help contain inflation and offset the resulting decline in its trade surplus.
US output growth has been cut in half in the past six months by the renewed sharp expansion of its current account deficit.
The Federal Reserve’s second round of quantitative easing and the likely extension of some form of the Bush tax cuts are efforts to provide offsetting boosts to domestic demand – but they may not succeed.
So, the rebalancing strategy is moving in the wrong direction.
The huge US budget deficit and the Fed’s easing have replaced the US private sector as “consumer of last resort” and trade is impeding rather than leading the recovery.
China’s reserve hoard grew faster in the latest quarter than ever before.
Its global trade surplus for the past six months is more than 50 per cent above last year’s.
The trade imbalance between the two countries has recently hit record levels.
In the medium run, this pattern will lead to further retreat from open trade and free financial flows.
In the longer term, the enlarged imbalances will sow the seeds of renewed crises.
The huge capital flows from surplus to deficit countries, Germany to the eurozone periphery as well as China to America, helped create the loose monetary conditions that encouraged the irresponsible lending that brought on the Great Recession.
The most effective way for President Barack Obama to break the impasse is to start adopting a serious strategy for US budget reform as proposed by the co-chairs of his Fiscal Commission, who rightly urge an ambitious programme of deficit reduction.
Only such an initiative will convince other countries the US is serious about rebalancing its own economy and so persuade them to rebalance theirs.
This would regain the moral high ground for America.
The policy conflict with China now plays out on three fronts.
The House of Representatives has passed a bill authorising countervailing import duties against the export subsidies created by undervalued exchange rates as with China.
The Senate needs merely to attach this language to “must” legislation, such as extension of the tax cuts, and it will land on Mr Obama’s desk for almost certain signature.
Another response would be to forge a broad coalition to take China to the WTO under its rule that prohibits countries from “taking exchange action that frustrates the intent of the agreement”.
A second front is the next Treasury report on foreign exchange practices, delayed from its due date of October 15 pending further evidence of China’s exchange rate intentions and the Group of 20 summit.
The Seoul outcome was minimal and the average value of the renminbi has weakened since China announced “greater flexibility” in June.
So the Treasury must designate China (and a few others) as a manipulator, as Mr Obama came close to doing publicly after Seoul.
Then there is the visit of Hu Jintao, China’s president, to Washington in January – although it is hard to see what they can agree that they were unable to do at the G20 summit.
The G20 stalemate has intensified the feud over currencies and trade rather than helped to resolve it.
Mr Obama has to notify China privately that his administration will designate it as a “manipulator”, support new legislation and take China to the WTO unless it lets the renminbi rise substantially before the Hu visit.
The Chinese say they will never move under foreign pressure but have revealed they will do so only under such pressure.
The world economy will fare much better under the proposed strategy.
With policymakers failing to make progress on the critical issue of global imbalances, America has no alternative but to put China on notice.
Privately but promptly, Washington has to inform Beijing it will label it as a currency manipulator, back legislation treating the manipulation as an export subsidy, and take it to the World Trade Organisation if it does not let the renminbi rise significantly.
The renewed increases in the external imbalances of the two main economies pose major risks.
China’s surplus is again climbing while it tightens monetary policy because of concerns over overheating.
It thus maintains its rapid expansion partly at the expense of other countries and damps global growth.
It should instead let its currency rise and limit the cutback in domestic demand.
That would help contain inflation and offset the resulting decline in its trade surplus.
US output growth has been cut in half in the past six months by the renewed sharp expansion of its current account deficit.
The Federal Reserve’s second round of quantitative easing and the likely extension of some form of the Bush tax cuts are efforts to provide offsetting boosts to domestic demand – but they may not succeed.
So, the rebalancing strategy is moving in the wrong direction.
The huge US budget deficit and the Fed’s easing have replaced the US private sector as “consumer of last resort” and trade is impeding rather than leading the recovery.
China’s reserve hoard grew faster in the latest quarter than ever before.
Its global trade surplus for the past six months is more than 50 per cent above last year’s.
The trade imbalance between the two countries has recently hit record levels.
In the medium run, this pattern will lead to further retreat from open trade and free financial flows.
In the longer term, the enlarged imbalances will sow the seeds of renewed crises.
The huge capital flows from surplus to deficit countries, Germany to the eurozone periphery as well as China to America, helped create the loose monetary conditions that encouraged the irresponsible lending that brought on the Great Recession.
The most effective way for President Barack Obama to break the impasse is to start adopting a serious strategy for US budget reform as proposed by the co-chairs of his Fiscal Commission, who rightly urge an ambitious programme of deficit reduction.
Only such an initiative will convince other countries the US is serious about rebalancing its own economy and so persuade them to rebalance theirs.
This would regain the moral high ground for America.
The policy conflict with China now plays out on three fronts.
The House of Representatives has passed a bill authorising countervailing import duties against the export subsidies created by undervalued exchange rates as with China.
The Senate needs merely to attach this language to “must” legislation, such as extension of the tax cuts, and it will land on Mr Obama’s desk for almost certain signature.
Another response would be to forge a broad coalition to take China to the WTO under its rule that prohibits countries from “taking exchange action that frustrates the intent of the agreement”.
A second front is the next Treasury report on foreign exchange practices, delayed from its due date of October 15 pending further evidence of China’s exchange rate intentions and the Group of 20 summit.
The Seoul outcome was minimal and the average value of the renminbi has weakened since China announced “greater flexibility” in June.
So the Treasury must designate China (and a few others) as a manipulator, as Mr Obama came close to doing publicly after Seoul.
Then there is the visit of Hu Jintao, China’s president, to Washington in January – although it is hard to see what they can agree that they were unable to do at the G20 summit.
The G20 stalemate has intensified the feud over currencies and trade rather than helped to resolve it.
Mr Obama has to notify China privately that his administration will designate it as a “manipulator”, support new legislation and take China to the WTO unless it lets the renminbi rise substantially before the Hu visit.
The Chinese say they will never move under foreign pressure but have revealed they will do so only under such pressure.
The world economy will fare much better under the proposed strategy.
Dalai Lama raises profile in India
By James Lamont in New Delhi
Before the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, stepped up to receive an honorary doctorate from Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia university last week, the vice-chancellor had sought permission from India’s foreign ministry for fear of upsetting the delicate trans-Himalayan diplomatic balance.
With permission granted, Najeeb Jung exhorted the 3,500 students receiving degrees at the same time “to soak in the presence of His Holiness and the values he shares with our ancient land”.
The contrast with China could not be more sharp.
The Beijing authorities have consistently tried to isolate the Dalai Lama, a potent symbol of Tibet’s nationhood, putting pressure on world leaders not to meet him.
But now, only days before Wen Jiabao, China’s premier, is to visit New Delhi – his first for eight years – the Dalai Lama has considerably raised his profile in the Indian capital.
His numerous public appearances in Delhi – the most extensive for years – have coincided with efforts by India and China to resolve a border dispute about what India calls its state of Arunachal Pradesh and China claims as South Tibet.
Calling himself the “son of India”, the Dalai Lama has given India’s leaders plenty of opportunity to reflect on the strong links between the world’s largest democracy and Chinese-controlled Tibet.
Early in November, he spoke at one of Delhi’s most prestigious annual conferences, the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit.
Other speakers included Manmohan Singh, India’s prime minister, Al Gore, the former US vice-president, and Gordon Brown, the UK’s former prime minister.
His public celebration by India’s political and business elite did not go unremarked by Beijing.
Senior editors of the Hindustan Times, a daily newspaper, said Chinese diplomats had made concerted efforts to prevent the Dalai Lama from headlining their blue-riband event.
“India has two things that China cares about: democracy and the Dalai Lama,” said one.
The Dalai Lama’s appearances last week in Delhi underscored his fight against isolation amid a backdrop of stalled peace talks with Beijing.
He emphasised links between Tibet and India, the country that gave him sanctuary after China annexed his homeland in the 1950s.
“We learnt a lot from Indian scholars,” he said.
“I always introduce myself to western audiences as a scholar of Indian thought.”
The 76-year old was also confident about his succession.
He said Beijing was preoccupied with the issue in the hope Tibetan nationalism would die with its current leader.
The Dalai Lama, by contrast, emphasises the increasing role of the Tibetan government elected in exile, based in the northern Indian hill station of Dharamsala.
As he sees it, the key to Tibet’s future lies with the democratic leadership rather than with the 400-year-old institution of the reincarnated Buddhist spiritual leadership.
He said his reincarnation would probably take place within the freedom movement outside Chinese-controlled Tibet: “If my death occurs while we remained outside [Tibet], then logically the very purpose of the new reincarnation is to succeed the works started by previous life,” he said.
“So, reincarnation should be something to carry continuously my sort of struggle... Logically reincarnation will be outside Tibet.”
Interviewed by one of India’s foremost broadcast journalists, he told Karan Thapar he wanted to reduce his public commitments and could go into retirement within six months.
But the Dalai Lama’s vigorous Delhi programme, showed he is far from stepping back.
Some analysts believe China has bigger worries in the region than the Dalai Lama and regard New Delhi’s perceived rivalry with Beijing as exaggerated in India.
“China's biggest concern is the supply of lines of energy coming from the Middle East,” said Kenneth Lieberthal, a China expert and senior fellow at Brookings Institution in Washington.
“I do wonder if the national security perspective does overwhelm the other aspects of the relationship [between India and China],” said Richard Rigby, head of the China Institute at the Australian National University.
“Today the broad discussion about China and India is not always as balanced as it should be.”
Before the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, stepped up to receive an honorary doctorate from Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia university last week, the vice-chancellor had sought permission from India’s foreign ministry for fear of upsetting the delicate trans-Himalayan diplomatic balance.
With permission granted, Najeeb Jung exhorted the 3,500 students receiving degrees at the same time “to soak in the presence of His Holiness and the values he shares with our ancient land”.
The contrast with China could not be more sharp.
The Beijing authorities have consistently tried to isolate the Dalai Lama, a potent symbol of Tibet’s nationhood, putting pressure on world leaders not to meet him.
But now, only days before Wen Jiabao, China’s premier, is to visit New Delhi – his first for eight years – the Dalai Lama has considerably raised his profile in the Indian capital.
His numerous public appearances in Delhi – the most extensive for years – have coincided with efforts by India and China to resolve a border dispute about what India calls its state of Arunachal Pradesh and China claims as South Tibet.
Calling himself the “son of India”, the Dalai Lama has given India’s leaders plenty of opportunity to reflect on the strong links between the world’s largest democracy and Chinese-controlled Tibet.
Early in November, he spoke at one of Delhi’s most prestigious annual conferences, the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit.
Other speakers included Manmohan Singh, India’s prime minister, Al Gore, the former US vice-president, and Gordon Brown, the UK’s former prime minister.
His public celebration by India’s political and business elite did not go unremarked by Beijing.
Senior editors of the Hindustan Times, a daily newspaper, said Chinese diplomats had made concerted efforts to prevent the Dalai Lama from headlining their blue-riband event.
“India has two things that China cares about: democracy and the Dalai Lama,” said one.
The Dalai Lama’s appearances last week in Delhi underscored his fight against isolation amid a backdrop of stalled peace talks with Beijing.
He emphasised links between Tibet and India, the country that gave him sanctuary after China annexed his homeland in the 1950s.
“We learnt a lot from Indian scholars,” he said.
“I always introduce myself to western audiences as a scholar of Indian thought.”
The 76-year old was also confident about his succession.
He said Beijing was preoccupied with the issue in the hope Tibetan nationalism would die with its current leader.
The Dalai Lama, by contrast, emphasises the increasing role of the Tibetan government elected in exile, based in the northern Indian hill station of Dharamsala.
As he sees it, the key to Tibet’s future lies with the democratic leadership rather than with the 400-year-old institution of the reincarnated Buddhist spiritual leadership.
He said his reincarnation would probably take place within the freedom movement outside Chinese-controlled Tibet: “If my death occurs while we remained outside [Tibet], then logically the very purpose of the new reincarnation is to succeed the works started by previous life,” he said.
“So, reincarnation should be something to carry continuously my sort of struggle... Logically reincarnation will be outside Tibet.”
Interviewed by one of India’s foremost broadcast journalists, he told Karan Thapar he wanted to reduce his public commitments and could go into retirement within six months.
But the Dalai Lama’s vigorous Delhi programme, showed he is far from stepping back.
Some analysts believe China has bigger worries in the region than the Dalai Lama and regard New Delhi’s perceived rivalry with Beijing as exaggerated in India.
“China's biggest concern is the supply of lines of energy coming from the Middle East,” said Kenneth Lieberthal, a China expert and senior fellow at Brookings Institution in Washington.
“I do wonder if the national security perspective does overwhelm the other aspects of the relationship [between India and China],” said Richard Rigby, head of the China Institute at the Australian National University.
“Today the broad discussion about China and India is not always as balanced as it should be.”
Air pollution engulfs China's Shanghai after expo
By Farah Master
A general view from the Shanghai World Financial Centre building shows the skyscrapers on a hazy day November 29, 2010.
A view from the Shanghai World Financial Centre building shows the Oriental Pearl TV Tower on a hazy day November 29, 2010.
SHANGHAI -- A month after China's commercial hub of Shanghai finished its World Expo, with a theme of "better city, better life," the city is setting records for air pollution that some warn could scare off investors.
The city suspended work at factories and construction sites and kept vehicles off the streets to ensure clean air for the six-month, multi-billion dollar expo, at which Shanghai presented itself to the world as China's most developed city.
But since the expo ended on October 31, a blanket of brown haze has settled over the city and pollution is more than triple levels of a few weeks earlier.
Media, including the state-owned China Daily, have reported that air pollution in November has been the worst for five years.
"During the Expo, the government was very conscious about our air quality and wanting to give foreign visitors a good impression," said Lisa Jin, a student at East China Normal University in Shanghai.
"But after the Expo they have become lax and do not seem to care about the air quality."
Recent foul smelling air in part of the city, caused by a gas leak at a nearby oil refinery, according to the Shanghai Daily, has compounded the pollution woes.
The problem could threaten to scupper the hopes of city officials and residents who proudly see their city as a fast-growing global financial center.
"After the expo, pollution levels have increased phenomenally. This really could be a major limitation in Shanghai's plan to be a global financial hub and attract key business people," said business consultant Nigel Shroff.
Shanghai's environmental protection agency, in a statement to Reuters, blamed the pollution on cold weather from the north and said the months of November and December always bring bad air.
While an increase in coal burning during the winter, and winter weather patterns, contribute to pollution, industry experts say the resumption of factory work after the expo and the increase in vehicle emissions are the biggest culprits.
"The extreme measures the government takes are temporary measures aimed at a particular event for a short period of time. They are not realistically sustainable," said Mike Murphy, chief executive of clean technology firm IQAir China.
"I don't believe that in the near term that the air pollution in Shanghai is going to be reduced by any measurable amount. Even as older factories are shut down or relocated, there is still a large number of vehicles entering the road every day," he said.
Many residents look back wistfully at the clean air this year and wonder if they'll see it again.
"Will we see the blue skies days again in the near future? I seriously doubt it," Marc van der Chijs, co-founder of China's No.2 online video website Tudou, said recently on his blog.
"I might really start missing the expo."
A general view from the Shanghai World Financial Centre building shows the skyscrapers on a hazy day November 29, 2010.
A view from the Shanghai World Financial Centre building shows the Oriental Pearl TV Tower on a hazy day November 29, 2010.
SHANGHAI -- A month after China's commercial hub of Shanghai finished its World Expo, with a theme of "better city, better life," the city is setting records for air pollution that some warn could scare off investors.
The city suspended work at factories and construction sites and kept vehicles off the streets to ensure clean air for the six-month, multi-billion dollar expo, at which Shanghai presented itself to the world as China's most developed city.
But since the expo ended on October 31, a blanket of brown haze has settled over the city and pollution is more than triple levels of a few weeks earlier.
Media, including the state-owned China Daily, have reported that air pollution in November has been the worst for five years.
"During the Expo, the government was very conscious about our air quality and wanting to give foreign visitors a good impression," said Lisa Jin, a student at East China Normal University in Shanghai.
"But after the Expo they have become lax and do not seem to care about the air quality."
Recent foul smelling air in part of the city, caused by a gas leak at a nearby oil refinery, according to the Shanghai Daily, has compounded the pollution woes.
The problem could threaten to scupper the hopes of city officials and residents who proudly see their city as a fast-growing global financial center.
"After the expo, pollution levels have increased phenomenally. This really could be a major limitation in Shanghai's plan to be a global financial hub and attract key business people," said business consultant Nigel Shroff.
Shanghai's environmental protection agency, in a statement to Reuters, blamed the pollution on cold weather from the north and said the months of November and December always bring bad air.
While an increase in coal burning during the winter, and winter weather patterns, contribute to pollution, industry experts say the resumption of factory work after the expo and the increase in vehicle emissions are the biggest culprits.
"The extreme measures the government takes are temporary measures aimed at a particular event for a short period of time. They are not realistically sustainable," said Mike Murphy, chief executive of clean technology firm IQAir China.
"I don't believe that in the near term that the air pollution in Shanghai is going to be reduced by any measurable amount. Even as older factories are shut down or relocated, there is still a large number of vehicles entering the road every day," he said.
Many residents look back wistfully at the clean air this year and wonder if they'll see it again.
"Will we see the blue skies days again in the near future? I seriously doubt it," Marc van der Chijs, co-founder of China's No.2 online video website Tudou, said recently on his blog.
"I might really start missing the expo."
WikiLeaks reveals China, N. Korea tensions
By Jaime FlorCruz
Beijing, China -- The leaked documents published by WikiLeaks reveal tensions festering between China and its close ally and neighbor, North Korea.
A diplomatic cable sent by the U.S. embassy in Beijing to the State Department in Washington revealed a Chinese vice minister of foreign affairs privately complaining about North Korea's behavior -- that it was behaving like a "spoiled child" in order to get the attention of an "adult," referring to the United States.
The Chinese diplomat said North Korea was most interested in talking with the United States directly.
The context of that conversation was April 2009, when North Korea set off a three-stage rocket over Japan into the Pacific.
Referring to their North Korean allies, the Chinese vice minister was quoted as saying: "We may not like them, but they are our neighbors."
This is an interesting revelation but it is hardly new information, at least not among Korea- and China-watchers.
We have heard of similar characterizations of the Chinese mindset in recent months from Western diplomats, describing Chinese frustrations with their North Korea allies.
This document simply confirms that.
China's frustrations have come out in the open a few times.
When North Korea conducted a nuclear test in 2009, China broke ranks with North Korea and voted in the U.N. Security Council in favor of imposing sanctions on its North Korean allies.
In the past, China, which wields a veto vote as a permanent member of the Security Council, would have simply abstained and let the resolution pass.
With these revelations, Chinese officials probably may now find it awkward in their dealings with North Korea.
But these revelations may not be new or shocking to the North Koreans.
Presumably, the Chinese have privately expressed their frustrations to the North Koreans.
At the same time, the Chinese may not mind that the rest of the world knows that they are not blind to North Korea's behavior and are in fact just as frustrated as many other parties seeking to resolve the Korean crisis.
These revelations come at a time when there is tension in the Korean peninsula: One week ago, North Korea shelled a South Korea island with artillery fire, killing four people, including two civilians.
Both sides are threatening military action, and China has been under pressure to use its leverage on North Korea and change its behavior.
China has refrained from singling out or condemning North Korea in public.
Instead, Beijing has called for an "emergency" meeting in December of heads of delegations of the six-party talks with North Korea over that country's nuclear aspirations.
But in one of the leaked documents, an unidentified senior Chinese official was quoted as saying that China's influence with the North Koreans was frequently overestimated.
- WikiLeaks revelations not new news to Korea- and China-watchers
- China's frustrations have come out in the open a few times
- Revelations come amid tensions in the Korean peninsula
- Top Chinese official says their influence with N. Korea often overestimated
Beijing, China -- The leaked documents published by WikiLeaks reveal tensions festering between China and its close ally and neighbor, North Korea.
A diplomatic cable sent by the U.S. embassy in Beijing to the State Department in Washington revealed a Chinese vice minister of foreign affairs privately complaining about North Korea's behavior -- that it was behaving like a "spoiled child" in order to get the attention of an "adult," referring to the United States.
The Chinese diplomat said North Korea was most interested in talking with the United States directly.
The context of that conversation was April 2009, when North Korea set off a three-stage rocket over Japan into the Pacific.
Referring to their North Korean allies, the Chinese vice minister was quoted as saying: "We may not like them, but they are our neighbors."
This is an interesting revelation but it is hardly new information, at least not among Korea- and China-watchers.
We have heard of similar characterizations of the Chinese mindset in recent months from Western diplomats, describing Chinese frustrations with their North Korea allies.
This document simply confirms that.
China's frustrations have come out in the open a few times.
When North Korea conducted a nuclear test in 2009, China broke ranks with North Korea and voted in the U.N. Security Council in favor of imposing sanctions on its North Korean allies.
In the past, China, which wields a veto vote as a permanent member of the Security Council, would have simply abstained and let the resolution pass.
With these revelations, Chinese officials probably may now find it awkward in their dealings with North Korea.
But these revelations may not be new or shocking to the North Koreans.
Presumably, the Chinese have privately expressed their frustrations to the North Koreans.
At the same time, the Chinese may not mind that the rest of the world knows that they are not blind to North Korea's behavior and are in fact just as frustrated as many other parties seeking to resolve the Korean crisis.
These revelations come at a time when there is tension in the Korean peninsula: One week ago, North Korea shelled a South Korea island with artillery fire, killing four people, including two civilians.
Both sides are threatening military action, and China has been under pressure to use its leverage on North Korea and change its behavior.
China has refrained from singling out or condemning North Korea in public.
Instead, Beijing has called for an "emergency" meeting in December of heads of delegations of the six-party talks with North Korea over that country's nuclear aspirations.
But in one of the leaked documents, an unidentified senior Chinese official was quoted as saying that China's influence with the North Koreans was frequently overestimated.
And China's secrets?
By Anne Applebaum
I am sure the Russian people will be shocked -- shocked! -- to discover that U.S. diplomats think the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, "plays Robin to Putin's Batman."
Italians will be equally horrified to learn that their prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, is considered "feckless, vain and ineffective as a modern European leader," just as the French will be stunned to hear President Nicolas Sarkozy called "thin-skinned and authoritarian."
As for the Afghans, they will be appalled to read that their president, Hamid Karzai, has been described as "an extremely weak man who did not listen to facts."
And anyone perusing the semi-secret diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks this week will find more of the same.
Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe is a "crazy old man."
Moammar Gaddafi of Libya travels with a "voluptuous blonde" whom he describes as his "senior Ukrainian nurse."
In the coming days, there will be many things to say about the details of these newly public documents.
But before we get into all of that, let's not lose the main point: Above all, this leak contains a treasure trove of things people regularly say off the record.
These aren't records of human rights abuses, they are accounts of conversations.
And -- just like July's WikiLeaks revelations about Afghanistan -- this one confirms much that was publicly known, openly discussed and even written about before.
The cables "reveal," among other things, that the United States is (surprise!) lobbying others to organize sanctions against Iran; that South Korean diplomats have discussed what would happen if North Korea collapses; that U.S. diplomats have been bribing other countries to accept ex-prisoners from Guantanamo Bay. (I suppose it is "news" that the United States spies on the United Nations, but forgive me if I am not as horrified as I should be.)
Germany's Der Spiegel concludes, furiously, that the United States "seeks to safeguard its influence around the world."
I'd be a lot more worried if the opposite were true.
What is truly novel is not the information, much of which has been reported before, but the language. Normally poker-faced diplomats are quoted making unflattering and occasionally amusing assessments of their interlocutors.
Not all of them are Americans: The Saudi king thinks the Pakistani president is "rotten."
France's top diplomat thinks Iran is a "fascist state."
Britain's national bank chairman thinks his prime minister is "shallow" and so on.
This is certainly embarrassing for those who made the remarks.
I am less sure whether their revelation gets us anywhere: On the contrary, it seems that, in the name of "free speech," another blow has been struck against frank speech.
Yet more ammunition has been given to those who favor greater circumspection, greater political correctness and greater hypocrisy.
Don't expect better government from these revelations; expect deeper secrets.
Will the U.S. ambassador to Country X give Washington a frank assessment of the president of X if he knows that it could appear in tomorrow's newspaper?
Not very likely.
Will a foreign leader tell any U.S. diplomat what he really thinks about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad if he knows that it might show up on WikiLeaks, too?
I doubt it.
Diplomatic cables will presumably now go the way of snail mail: Oral communication will replace writing, as even off-the-record chats now have to take place outdoors, in the presence of heavy traffic, just in case anyone is listening.
In the modern world -- at least the sloppy, open, hackable Western world -- any other form of frank discussion will soon be impossible.
The State Department isn't the first to learn this: No American general will ever again give a journalist full access as did the hapless Gen. Stanley McChrystal.
Because he revealed that -- like every other general in history -- he sometimes disagrees with the politicians back home, and because his interlocutor chose to publish his grumbling, he had to resign.
The result: Very soon, only authoritarian leaders will be able to speak frankly with one another.
A Russian official can keep a politically incorrect statement out of the newspapers.
A Chinese general would never speak to a journalist anyway.
Low-level officials in Iran don't leak sensitive information to WikiLeaks because the regime would kill them and torture their families.
By contrast, the low-level U.S. official who apparently leaked this week's diplomatic cables will probably live to a ripe old age.
In fact, the world's real secrets -- the secrets of regimes where there is no free speech and tight control on all information -- have yet to be revealed.
This stuff is awkward and embarrassing, but it doesn't fundamentally change very much.
How about a leak of Chinese diplomatic documents?
Or Russian military cables?
How about some stuff we don't actually know, such as Iranian discussion of Iranian nuclear weapons or North Korean plans for invasion of the south?
If the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, is serious about his pursuit of "Internet openness" -- and if his goal isn't, in fact, embarrassing the United States -- that's where he'll look next.
Somehow, I won't be surprised if he doesn't.
I am sure the Russian people will be shocked -- shocked! -- to discover that U.S. diplomats think the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, "plays Robin to Putin's Batman."
Italians will be equally horrified to learn that their prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, is considered "feckless, vain and ineffective as a modern European leader," just as the French will be stunned to hear President Nicolas Sarkozy called "thin-skinned and authoritarian."
As for the Afghans, they will be appalled to read that their president, Hamid Karzai, has been described as "an extremely weak man who did not listen to facts."
And anyone perusing the semi-secret diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks this week will find more of the same.
Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe is a "crazy old man."
Moammar Gaddafi of Libya travels with a "voluptuous blonde" whom he describes as his "senior Ukrainian nurse."
In the coming days, there will be many things to say about the details of these newly public documents.
But before we get into all of that, let's not lose the main point: Above all, this leak contains a treasure trove of things people regularly say off the record.
These aren't records of human rights abuses, they are accounts of conversations.
And -- just like July's WikiLeaks revelations about Afghanistan -- this one confirms much that was publicly known, openly discussed and even written about before.
The cables "reveal," among other things, that the United States is (surprise!) lobbying others to organize sanctions against Iran; that South Korean diplomats have discussed what would happen if North Korea collapses; that U.S. diplomats have been bribing other countries to accept ex-prisoners from Guantanamo Bay. (I suppose it is "news" that the United States spies on the United Nations, but forgive me if I am not as horrified as I should be.)
Germany's Der Spiegel concludes, furiously, that the United States "seeks to safeguard its influence around the world."
I'd be a lot more worried if the opposite were true.
What is truly novel is not the information, much of which has been reported before, but the language. Normally poker-faced diplomats are quoted making unflattering and occasionally amusing assessments of their interlocutors.
Not all of them are Americans: The Saudi king thinks the Pakistani president is "rotten."
France's top diplomat thinks Iran is a "fascist state."
Britain's national bank chairman thinks his prime minister is "shallow" and so on.
This is certainly embarrassing for those who made the remarks.
I am less sure whether their revelation gets us anywhere: On the contrary, it seems that, in the name of "free speech," another blow has been struck against frank speech.
Yet more ammunition has been given to those who favor greater circumspection, greater political correctness and greater hypocrisy.
Don't expect better government from these revelations; expect deeper secrets.
Will the U.S. ambassador to Country X give Washington a frank assessment of the president of X if he knows that it could appear in tomorrow's newspaper?
Not very likely.
Will a foreign leader tell any U.S. diplomat what he really thinks about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad if he knows that it might show up on WikiLeaks, too?
I doubt it.
Diplomatic cables will presumably now go the way of snail mail: Oral communication will replace writing, as even off-the-record chats now have to take place outdoors, in the presence of heavy traffic, just in case anyone is listening.
In the modern world -- at least the sloppy, open, hackable Western world -- any other form of frank discussion will soon be impossible.
The State Department isn't the first to learn this: No American general will ever again give a journalist full access as did the hapless Gen. Stanley McChrystal.
Because he revealed that -- like every other general in history -- he sometimes disagrees with the politicians back home, and because his interlocutor chose to publish his grumbling, he had to resign.
The result: Very soon, only authoritarian leaders will be able to speak frankly with one another.
A Russian official can keep a politically incorrect statement out of the newspapers.
A Chinese general would never speak to a journalist anyway.
Low-level officials in Iran don't leak sensitive information to WikiLeaks because the regime would kill them and torture their families.
By contrast, the low-level U.S. official who apparently leaked this week's diplomatic cables will probably live to a ripe old age.
In fact, the world's real secrets -- the secrets of regimes where there is no free speech and tight control on all information -- have yet to be revealed.
This stuff is awkward and embarrassing, but it doesn't fundamentally change very much.
How about a leak of Chinese diplomatic documents?
Or Russian military cables?
How about some stuff we don't actually know, such as Iranian discussion of Iranian nuclear weapons or North Korean plans for invasion of the south?
If the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, is serious about his pursuit of "Internet openness" -- and if his goal isn't, in fact, embarrassing the United States -- that's where he'll look next.
Somehow, I won't be surprised if he doesn't.
China Urges U.S. To 'Properly Handle' WikiLeaks Issues
Radio Free Europe
According to leaked documents, China does not consider North Korea or its leader, Kim Jong Il, a useful ally.
China has called on the United States to "properly handle" issues related to the release of U.S. diplomatic cables through the WikiLeaks website.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said at a regular news briefing that China "did not want to see any disturbance to China-U.S.relations."
"China has taken note of the relevant reports and hopes that the U.S. side will appropriately resolve relevant issues. We will not comment on the content of the documents," Hong said.
According to the leaked documents, senior Chinese officials allegedly said that China did not regard North Korea as a useful ally and would not intervene if the communist-ruled state collapsed.
The officials also allegedly said that China would be willing to accept a reunited Korea.
The leaked cables also contained allegations that the top Chinese leadership was behind cyberattacks on the U.S. web search giant Google and U.S. targets.
U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton has called the release of the diplomatic cables "an attack on the international community."
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said the administration is considering several steps in response to the WikiLeaks release and has launched a criminal investigation into how the documents were made public.
According to leaked documents, China does not consider North Korea or its leader, Kim Jong Il, a useful ally.
China has called on the United States to "properly handle" issues related to the release of U.S. diplomatic cables through the WikiLeaks website.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said at a regular news briefing that China "did not want to see any disturbance to China-U.S.relations."
"China has taken note of the relevant reports and hopes that the U.S. side will appropriately resolve relevant issues. We will not comment on the content of the documents," Hong said.
According to the leaked documents, senior Chinese officials allegedly said that China did not regard North Korea as a useful ally and would not intervene if the communist-ruled state collapsed.
The officials also allegedly said that China would be willing to accept a reunited Korea.
The leaked cables also contained allegations that the top Chinese leadership was behind cyberattacks on the U.S. web search giant Google and U.S. targets.
U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton has called the release of the diplomatic cables "an attack on the international community."
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said the administration is considering several steps in response to the WikiLeaks release and has launched a criminal investigation into how the documents were made public.
China could accept Korean unification
By Christian Oliver in Seoul and Geoff Dyer in Beijing
A progressive new generation of Chinese officials is telling international counterparts that Beijing could ultimately accept the Korean peninsula unifying under Seoul’s control, according to leaked US diplomatic dispatches.
Reports published on the WikiLeaks website on Tuesday undermine suggestions that China would forever defend the status quo on the Korean peninsula, in spite of Beijing’s refusal to condemn Pyongyang for shelling of South Korean island last week and torpedoing one of Seoul’s warships in March.
In a diplomatic cable earlier this year, Chun Yung-woo, then South Korea’s vice-foreign minister, told the US ambassador to Seoul that Chinese officials had assured him that North Korea “now had little value to China as a buffer state”.
Many political analysts argue that Beijing supports the regime of Kim Jong-il in North Korea to prevent South Korea’s lively democracy reaching China’s border and triggering social unrest.
According to the dispatch, Mr Chun, now national security adviser to Lee Myung-bak, South Korea’s president, said China was less keen to keep Mr Kim as a buffer after he tested a nuclear warhead in 2006. The Chinese officials told Mr Chun they could accept a unified peninsula as long as US troops remained in what is currently South Korea.
However, Mr Chun’s remarks to the US ambassador also revealed doubts about whether such views from “sophisticated Chinese officials” were mainstream in Beijing.
Chinese foreign ministry officials are already perceived as critical of North Korea, while Kim Jong-il enjoys far greater favour in powerful Communist party and military camps.
Illustrating this point clearly, Mr Chun described Wu Dawei, China’s special representative on Korea affairs, as an “arrogant, Marx-spouting former Red Guard who knows nothing about North Korea, nothing about non-proliferation and is hard to communicate with because he doesn’t speak English”.
The divides are also increasingly seen in Chinese public life.
While some older Chinese remember the sense of joint endeavour and sacrifice of the 1950-1953 Korean war, many younger Chinese are embarassed by the ties with the sclerotic regime in Pyongyang, which for many is a reminder of China’s dark days under Mao Zedong.
Revealing something of South Korea’ strategic thinking, Mr Chun said he expected North Korea to survive two or three years beyond the death of the ailing Kim Jong-il.
China’s ambassador to Kazakhstan, Cheng Guoping, was quoted in another document saying that North Korea’s nuclear work was a “threat to the whole world’s security”.
The US ambassador quoted Mr Cheng saying China hoped for “peaceful reunification in the long-term, but he expects the two countries to remain separate in the short-term”.
China remained neutral over North Korea’s bombardment of South Korea last week, simply proposing emergency talks.
Japan, the US and Seoul are unenthusiastic, arguing North Korea should not be rewarded for violence and only deserves a negotiating place if it shows evidence of disarming.
A cable from the US consulate in the Chinese city of Shenyang, near the North Korean border, hints at another hidden layer of support for North Korea, from the “princelings” – children of high-ranking Chinese Communist party officials – who are developing business ties across the border.
On hearing of Chinese aid projects, the princelings will travel to North Korea to convince officials to use certain Chinese companies.
The young middlemen will pocket a “tidy sum”, the consulate wrote.
A progressive new generation of Chinese officials is telling international counterparts that Beijing could ultimately accept the Korean peninsula unifying under Seoul’s control, according to leaked US diplomatic dispatches.
Reports published on the WikiLeaks website on Tuesday undermine suggestions that China would forever defend the status quo on the Korean peninsula, in spite of Beijing’s refusal to condemn Pyongyang for shelling of South Korean island last week and torpedoing one of Seoul’s warships in March.
In a diplomatic cable earlier this year, Chun Yung-woo, then South Korea’s vice-foreign minister, told the US ambassador to Seoul that Chinese officials had assured him that North Korea “now had little value to China as a buffer state”.
Many political analysts argue that Beijing supports the regime of Kim Jong-il in North Korea to prevent South Korea’s lively democracy reaching China’s border and triggering social unrest.
According to the dispatch, Mr Chun, now national security adviser to Lee Myung-bak, South Korea’s president, said China was less keen to keep Mr Kim as a buffer after he tested a nuclear warhead in 2006. The Chinese officials told Mr Chun they could accept a unified peninsula as long as US troops remained in what is currently South Korea.
However, Mr Chun’s remarks to the US ambassador also revealed doubts about whether such views from “sophisticated Chinese officials” were mainstream in Beijing.
Chinese foreign ministry officials are already perceived as critical of North Korea, while Kim Jong-il enjoys far greater favour in powerful Communist party and military camps.
Illustrating this point clearly, Mr Chun described Wu Dawei, China’s special representative on Korea affairs, as an “arrogant, Marx-spouting former Red Guard who knows nothing about North Korea, nothing about non-proliferation and is hard to communicate with because he doesn’t speak English”.
The divides are also increasingly seen in Chinese public life.
While some older Chinese remember the sense of joint endeavour and sacrifice of the 1950-1953 Korean war, many younger Chinese are embarassed by the ties with the sclerotic regime in Pyongyang, which for many is a reminder of China’s dark days under Mao Zedong.
Revealing something of South Korea’ strategic thinking, Mr Chun said he expected North Korea to survive two or three years beyond the death of the ailing Kim Jong-il.
China’s ambassador to Kazakhstan, Cheng Guoping, was quoted in another document saying that North Korea’s nuclear work was a “threat to the whole world’s security”.
The US ambassador quoted Mr Cheng saying China hoped for “peaceful reunification in the long-term, but he expects the two countries to remain separate in the short-term”.
China remained neutral over North Korea’s bombardment of South Korea last week, simply proposing emergency talks.
Japan, the US and Seoul are unenthusiastic, arguing North Korea should not be rewarded for violence and only deserves a negotiating place if it shows evidence of disarming.
A cable from the US consulate in the Chinese city of Shenyang, near the North Korean border, hints at another hidden layer of support for North Korea, from the “princelings” – children of high-ranking Chinese Communist party officials – who are developing business ties across the border.
On hearing of Chinese aid projects, the princelings will travel to North Korea to convince officials to use certain Chinese companies.
The young middlemen will pocket a “tidy sum”, the consulate wrote.
Monday, November 29, 2010
China Trying to Plug Wikileak?
By Josh Chin
Chinese President Hu Jintao (C, front) meets with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (2nd L, front) and U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner (1st L, front) in Beijing May 25, 2010. Beijing has instructed Chinese news media not to report on a massive leak of cables sent from U.S. embassies, including the one in Beijing.
Can the world’s most elaborate censorship system put the clamps on the Internet’s most prolific source of confidential information?
A day after WikiLeaks began to release a quarter-million diplomatic cables sent from U.S. embassies, propaganda authorities in Beijing appear to be trying to control how much of the content of those cables leaks through to the Chinese public.
As of Monday evening in Beijing, the WikiLeaks “Cablegate” page was blocked by China’s Great Firewall—a rudimentary first-step on China’s censorship checklist.
More significantly, Chinese news media have received orders not to report on the Wikileaks dump, according to two people familiar with the situation at state broadcaster CCTV and online news portal Sohu.com.
That fits with rumors of a WikiLeak news block that circulated among China-based Twitter users earlier on Monday.
The government almost never publicly explains the reasoning behind news bans, so it’s unclear if censors object to specific material contained in the cables or are leery of the WikiLeaks concept more generally.
According to WikiLeaks’ calculations, China appears in more than 8,300 of the cables—good enough for fifth place, behind Israel and just ahead of Afghanistan.
The U.S. Embassy in Beijing accounts for 3,300 of the roughly 250,000 cables WikiLeaks claims to have in its possession.
Six of the Beijing embassy cables have been released on the site so far.
Contained in the cables are assertions that could make things awkward between China and the U.S., including suggestions that China ignored a U.S. request to stop transfers of ballistic missile technology Tehran and offered Kyrgyzstan $3 billion to close a U.S. airbase there.
Another cable, not yet released on the website but seen by the Guardian, quotes an unnamed source saying China’s Politburo—the powerful governing group within the Communist Party-–directed hacking attacks against Google after one of its members searched his own name on the U.S. company’s site and didn’t like what he saw.
But in a country where “dissemination of state secrets” is a serious crime, the news block might just be a sign of unease with the concept of a website dedicated to exposing government communications.
In 2005, Chinese journalist Shi Tao was sentenced to ten years in prison for allegedly using his Yahoo account to provide “top level state secrets” to foreign news organizations.
Last year, the government arrested four employees of Australian mining company Rio Tinto on state secrets charges, although they were later tried and convicted on the lesser charge of stealing commercial secrets.
The block may also just be prophylactic—a way for censors to temporarily quash a story until they decide what parts of it they want revealed.
So far, a rush of initial Chinese reports on the leak—including a special section dedicated to them on the popular NetEase news portal—remain available through searches on Baidu and Google, although none of the coverage appears to deal with the China-related cables.
If the conversation on Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like microblogging service, is any indication, some of the China-related information has still managed to slip through.
“WikiLeaks is so powerful,” one user wrote.
“I finally understand why the Chinese government needs to build so many ports and railways in those “xxstan” countries.”
“This times WikiLeaks not only embarrassed the U.S., but also China,” wrote another.
“Whether the Iran issue or the Kyrgyzstan thing, it’s all a lesson that China should be a responsible power and not just sit around watching other countries make fools of themselves.”
Chinese President Hu Jintao (C, front) meets with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (2nd L, front) and U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner (1st L, front) in Beijing May 25, 2010. Beijing has instructed Chinese news media not to report on a massive leak of cables sent from U.S. embassies, including the one in Beijing.
Can the world’s most elaborate censorship system put the clamps on the Internet’s most prolific source of confidential information?
A day after WikiLeaks began to release a quarter-million diplomatic cables sent from U.S. embassies, propaganda authorities in Beijing appear to be trying to control how much of the content of those cables leaks through to the Chinese public.
As of Monday evening in Beijing, the WikiLeaks “Cablegate” page was blocked by China’s Great Firewall—a rudimentary first-step on China’s censorship checklist.
More significantly, Chinese news media have received orders not to report on the Wikileaks dump, according to two people familiar with the situation at state broadcaster CCTV and online news portal Sohu.com.
That fits with rumors of a WikiLeak news block that circulated among China-based Twitter users earlier on Monday.
The government almost never publicly explains the reasoning behind news bans, so it’s unclear if censors object to specific material contained in the cables or are leery of the WikiLeaks concept more generally.
According to WikiLeaks’ calculations, China appears in more than 8,300 of the cables—good enough for fifth place, behind Israel and just ahead of Afghanistan.
The U.S. Embassy in Beijing accounts for 3,300 of the roughly 250,000 cables WikiLeaks claims to have in its possession.
Six of the Beijing embassy cables have been released on the site so far.
Contained in the cables are assertions that could make things awkward between China and the U.S., including suggestions that China ignored a U.S. request to stop transfers of ballistic missile technology Tehran and offered Kyrgyzstan $3 billion to close a U.S. airbase there.
Another cable, not yet released on the website but seen by the Guardian, quotes an unnamed source saying China’s Politburo—the powerful governing group within the Communist Party-–directed hacking attacks against Google after one of its members searched his own name on the U.S. company’s site and didn’t like what he saw.
But in a country where “dissemination of state secrets” is a serious crime, the news block might just be a sign of unease with the concept of a website dedicated to exposing government communications.
In 2005, Chinese journalist Shi Tao was sentenced to ten years in prison for allegedly using his Yahoo account to provide “top level state secrets” to foreign news organizations.
Last year, the government arrested four employees of Australian mining company Rio Tinto on state secrets charges, although they were later tried and convicted on the lesser charge of stealing commercial secrets.
The block may also just be prophylactic—a way for censors to temporarily quash a story until they decide what parts of it they want revealed.
So far, a rush of initial Chinese reports on the leak—including a special section dedicated to them on the popular NetEase news portal—remain available through searches on Baidu and Google, although none of the coverage appears to deal with the China-related cables.
If the conversation on Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like microblogging service, is any indication, some of the China-related information has still managed to slip through.
“WikiLeaks is so powerful,” one user wrote.
“I finally understand why the Chinese government needs to build so many ports and railways in those “xxstan” countries.”
“This times WikiLeaks not only embarrassed the U.S., but also China,” wrote another.
“Whether the Iran issue or the Kyrgyzstan thing, it’s all a lesson that China should be a responsible power and not just sit around watching other countries make fools of themselves.”
WikiLeaks files may put ideas in heads of Chinese hackers
For a country like China with some of the most sweeping official secrets laws in the world it is difficult to know who should be more embarrassed – China, or the US government that has managed to lose 250,000 of its private and confidential diplomatic cables.
By Peter Foster
On the subject of Tiananmen Square, the WikiLeaks catalogue does show four cables from June 3 1989 and one from June 5 1989 that may yet shed further light on an episode that is still officially banned from discussion in the Chinese media
Thus far, only a fraction the cables pertaining to China have been leaked but neither of the two main leaks so far is obviously damaging to US-China relations.
Perhaps of more concern to Beijing’s mandarins is not so much the content of the leaks, but the mere fact a leak on such a massive scale might put ideas into the heads of their own people or officials who chafe under draconian information restrictions.
The files contain 3297 cables from Beijing, 555 from Shanghai, 662 from Guangzhou, 260 from Chengdu, 120 from Shenyang and 950 from Hong Kong, and Beijing will be watching anxiously to see what they contain.
Many Chinese would like to see the files on a whole number of events from their own government’s archives which are tightly guarded since they contain information that could undermine the legitimacy of the Communist Party’s right to rule.
Episodes from the Great Leap Forward of 1959-62 and the famines of that followed that killed 20m-40m people, to the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76 as well as the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre remain highly politically sensitive in China.
There were reports this summer that a Politburo-level meeting had discussed just such an eventuality following the growing number of damaging memoirs being written by former senior officials.
Among these were the diary of Li Peng, the former Chinese premier who was intimately involved in the decision leading up to sending in the tanks into Tiananmen in 1989 but which was blocked from publication in China earlier this year.
Tantalisingly, on the subject of Tiananmen Square, the WikiLeaks catalogue does show four cables from June 3 1989 and one from June 5 1989 that may yet shed further light on an episode that is still officially banned from discussion in the Chinese media.
In the WikiLeaks files, the potentially most embarrassing disclosure to China is that the hack-attacks that led to Google pulling out of China were allegedly orchestrated at Politburo-level after a senior member found unflattering material about himself using the search engine.
The full cable itself has yet to be released, but the fact that it was reportedly sourced to a single “contact” in China is grounds to be very cautious about whether an already unlikely-sounding story of Politburo petty-mindedness is actually true.
Given that China keeps its secrets rather better than America, the world will probably never know, but it has marked similarities to an almost certainly apocryphal story involving of Jiang Mianheng, the son of the former Chinese President Jiang Zemin..
The story goes that on a visit to inspect new Chinese high-speed internet equipment, an engineer typed “Jiang Zemin” into the Google search box only for it to return an entry headlined “Evil Jiang Zemin”, whereupon Jiang promptly ordered the site to be blocked.
Much of the remainder of the material released so far demonstrates the mundane nature of many meetings between foreign diplomats and China’s ministry of foreign affairs, during which China seems to have mostly stated its already well-telegraphed positions on Iran and North Korea.
The documents do record the rising frustration of US officials in 2007 at China’s apparently laggardly response to requests to stop and search North Korean flights transiting to Beijing on the way to Iran carrying missile jet vanes, according to US intelligence.
The cables don’t however, detail whether or not China acted on these requests, although given their repeated nature, it is perhaps possible to deduce that the US was not satisfied that China was doing everything possible to make Beijing a “less hospitable” transfer point for banned technologies.
Similarly, a pair of cables from December last year request action to stop a Chinese company exporting Russian-made gyroscopes to Iran, but give no indication whether the Chinese responded favourably.
Another cable, dated May 2009, offers a summary of a routine meeting of ambassadors to Beijing from the G5 countries – the US, Germany, UK, Japan and France.
We learn that the Chinese asked Britain not to allow the Dalai Lama to transit through London or, failing that, at least not to meet the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader if he did so.
And that Chinese officials harassed some British officials and journalists during a trip to Gansu Province by the then environment secretary Ed Miliband.
The Germans say they were threatened with consequences to bilateral relations if they accepted any Uighurs from Guantanamo Bay but, surprisingly, haven’t received similar threats over the Dalai Lama to the French and the British, evidence perhaps of how Beijing likes to play one country off against another.
Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier might be interested to learn that the then Japanese prime minister thought he was looking “tired and under a lot of pressure” from dealing with the financial crisis, while the Chinese president Hu Jintao will no doubt be flattered to read that he came across as “relaxed and confident”.
By Peter Foster
On the subject of Tiananmen Square, the WikiLeaks catalogue does show four cables from June 3 1989 and one from June 5 1989 that may yet shed further light on an episode that is still officially banned from discussion in the Chinese media
Thus far, only a fraction the cables pertaining to China have been leaked but neither of the two main leaks so far is obviously damaging to US-China relations.
Perhaps of more concern to Beijing’s mandarins is not so much the content of the leaks, but the mere fact a leak on such a massive scale might put ideas into the heads of their own people or officials who chafe under draconian information restrictions.
The files contain 3297 cables from Beijing, 555 from Shanghai, 662 from Guangzhou, 260 from Chengdu, 120 from Shenyang and 950 from Hong Kong, and Beijing will be watching anxiously to see what they contain.
Many Chinese would like to see the files on a whole number of events from their own government’s archives which are tightly guarded since they contain information that could undermine the legitimacy of the Communist Party’s right to rule.
Episodes from the Great Leap Forward of 1959-62 and the famines of that followed that killed 20m-40m people, to the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76 as well as the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre remain highly politically sensitive in China.
There were reports this summer that a Politburo-level meeting had discussed just such an eventuality following the growing number of damaging memoirs being written by former senior officials.
Among these were the diary of Li Peng, the former Chinese premier who was intimately involved in the decision leading up to sending in the tanks into Tiananmen in 1989 but which was blocked from publication in China earlier this year.
Tantalisingly, on the subject of Tiananmen Square, the WikiLeaks catalogue does show four cables from June 3 1989 and one from June 5 1989 that may yet shed further light on an episode that is still officially banned from discussion in the Chinese media.
In the WikiLeaks files, the potentially most embarrassing disclosure to China is that the hack-attacks that led to Google pulling out of China were allegedly orchestrated at Politburo-level after a senior member found unflattering material about himself using the search engine.
The full cable itself has yet to be released, but the fact that it was reportedly sourced to a single “contact” in China is grounds to be very cautious about whether an already unlikely-sounding story of Politburo petty-mindedness is actually true.
Given that China keeps its secrets rather better than America, the world will probably never know, but it has marked similarities to an almost certainly apocryphal story involving of Jiang Mianheng, the son of the former Chinese President Jiang Zemin..
The story goes that on a visit to inspect new Chinese high-speed internet equipment, an engineer typed “Jiang Zemin” into the Google search box only for it to return an entry headlined “Evil Jiang Zemin”, whereupon Jiang promptly ordered the site to be blocked.
Much of the remainder of the material released so far demonstrates the mundane nature of many meetings between foreign diplomats and China’s ministry of foreign affairs, during which China seems to have mostly stated its already well-telegraphed positions on Iran and North Korea.
The documents do record the rising frustration of US officials in 2007 at China’s apparently laggardly response to requests to stop and search North Korean flights transiting to Beijing on the way to Iran carrying missile jet vanes, according to US intelligence.
The cables don’t however, detail whether or not China acted on these requests, although given their repeated nature, it is perhaps possible to deduce that the US was not satisfied that China was doing everything possible to make Beijing a “less hospitable” transfer point for banned technologies.
Similarly, a pair of cables from December last year request action to stop a Chinese company exporting Russian-made gyroscopes to Iran, but give no indication whether the Chinese responded favourably.
Another cable, dated May 2009, offers a summary of a routine meeting of ambassadors to Beijing from the G5 countries – the US, Germany, UK, Japan and France.
We learn that the Chinese asked Britain not to allow the Dalai Lama to transit through London or, failing that, at least not to meet the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader if he did so.
And that Chinese officials harassed some British officials and journalists during a trip to Gansu Province by the then environment secretary Ed Miliband.
The Germans say they were threatened with consequences to bilateral relations if they accepted any Uighurs from Guantanamo Bay but, surprisingly, haven’t received similar threats over the Dalai Lama to the French and the British, evidence perhaps of how Beijing likes to play one country off against another.
Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier might be interested to learn that the then Japanese prime minister thought he was looking “tired and under a lot of pressure” from dealing with the financial crisis, while the Chinese president Hu Jintao will no doubt be flattered to read that he came across as “relaxed and confident”.
Worker Shortages Seen in Chinese Export Centers
By EDWARD WONG
BEIJING — Two of China’s main export manufacturing areas are suffering from an acute shortage of migrant workers, giving laborers more leverage over wages and curtailing the expansion plans of some companies, according to a report published Monday in China Daily, an official English-language newspaper.
The shortfall of workers is especially severe in the service and manufacturing industries.
The regions most affected are the Pearl River Delta, which is in the southern boom province of Guangdong, and in the Yangtze River Delta, near Shanghai.
The Pearl River Delta could be short by as many as 900,000 workers, China Daily reported, citing a recent survey by the human resources department of Guangdong.
The article cited experts saying that rising living costs along the coast coupled with low wages had led to an increasing number of workers deciding to stay in the interior of China, where living costs are much lower.
Some companies have moved factories inland, to provinces where many migrant workers have traditionally come, the newspaper reported.
Transportation costs for goods being shipped out of China are higher in those regions, but lower labor costs appear to help offset that in some cases.
Earlier this year, a series of work stoppages at factories thrust the issue of wages for migrant workers into the national spotlight.
The workers taking part in the protests demanded more pay and better work conditions, and in some cases wanted a legitimate union to represent their interests rather than relying on just the official government-run union, which often supports management.
The continuing labor shortage and wage pressure could eventually raise the costs of Chinese-made exports, which have been a main driver of China’s impressive economic growth.
Foreign economists and some Chinese economists have been saying that China needs to move away from its heavy reliance on exports and spur greater domestic consumption.
Higher wages would help in that rebalancing, as would the strengthening of the renminbi, which foreign economists and the Obama administration say the Chinese government keeps severely undervalued.
But China can point to the labor shortage in the export hubs as one reason not to let the renminbi’s value rise, since companies are already grappling with the possibility that higher wages could make their goods less competitive.
A significant currency appreciation could therefore help cause a wave of business failures and bankruptcies, Chinese officials say.
There has also been an explosion in the number of labor disputes going to arbitration or the courts. Awareness of rights among workers has grown after the passage of recent labor laws, and workers laid off during a wave of factory shutdowns that took place when the global financial crisis first hit China have been demanding the compensation due to them.
Last year, there were 318,600 labor cases brought to court, according to an official news report in September.
The labor shortage in the Pearl River Delta is coming during the busiest time of the year for factories there, when Western companies order more goods for their holiday season.
Some factories have had to turn down orders because of a lack of trained labor, China Daily reported Monday.
Many migrant workers are expected to visit their hometowns in early 2011, during the Lunar New Year holiday, and some may decide to stay in the interior, putting more wage pressure on the coastal factories.
BEIJING — Two of China’s main export manufacturing areas are suffering from an acute shortage of migrant workers, giving laborers more leverage over wages and curtailing the expansion plans of some companies, according to a report published Monday in China Daily, an official English-language newspaper.
The shortfall of workers is especially severe in the service and manufacturing industries.
The regions most affected are the Pearl River Delta, which is in the southern boom province of Guangdong, and in the Yangtze River Delta, near Shanghai.
The Pearl River Delta could be short by as many as 900,000 workers, China Daily reported, citing a recent survey by the human resources department of Guangdong.
The article cited experts saying that rising living costs along the coast coupled with low wages had led to an increasing number of workers deciding to stay in the interior of China, where living costs are much lower.
Some companies have moved factories inland, to provinces where many migrant workers have traditionally come, the newspaper reported.
Transportation costs for goods being shipped out of China are higher in those regions, but lower labor costs appear to help offset that in some cases.
Earlier this year, a series of work stoppages at factories thrust the issue of wages for migrant workers into the national spotlight.
The workers taking part in the protests demanded more pay and better work conditions, and in some cases wanted a legitimate union to represent their interests rather than relying on just the official government-run union, which often supports management.
The continuing labor shortage and wage pressure could eventually raise the costs of Chinese-made exports, which have been a main driver of China’s impressive economic growth.
Foreign economists and some Chinese economists have been saying that China needs to move away from its heavy reliance on exports and spur greater domestic consumption.
Higher wages would help in that rebalancing, as would the strengthening of the renminbi, which foreign economists and the Obama administration say the Chinese government keeps severely undervalued.
But China can point to the labor shortage in the export hubs as one reason not to let the renminbi’s value rise, since companies are already grappling with the possibility that higher wages could make their goods less competitive.
A significant currency appreciation could therefore help cause a wave of business failures and bankruptcies, Chinese officials say.
There has also been an explosion in the number of labor disputes going to arbitration or the courts. Awareness of rights among workers has grown after the passage of recent labor laws, and workers laid off during a wave of factory shutdowns that took place when the global financial crisis first hit China have been demanding the compensation due to them.
Last year, there were 318,600 labor cases brought to court, according to an official news report in September.
The labor shortage in the Pearl River Delta is coming during the busiest time of the year for factories there, when Western companies order more goods for their holiday season.
Some factories have had to turn down orders because of a lack of trained labor, China Daily reported Monday.
Many migrant workers are expected to visit their hometowns in early 2011, during the Lunar New Year holiday, and some may decide to stay in the interior, putting more wage pressure on the coastal factories.
China in the hot seat
Joongang Daily
The Korean Peninsula is at crossroads between war and peace.
If North Korea attempts another belligerent attack and South Korea responds with equal force, we may not be able to avoid a war.
The U.S.S. George Washington -- a symbol of U.S. military power -- has already joined in naval drills in the Yellow Sea in the aftermath of the North’s attack on Yeonpyeong Island last Tuesday.
The island’s remaining residents have been ordered to evacuate.
The international community is closely watching the naval exercise and the response from North Korea. Chinese State Councilor Dai Bingguo, a senior foreign policy adviser, flew into Seoul on Sunday for a tete-a-tete with President Lee Myung-bak.
With tensions escalating to their highest level in years, Beijing has finally moved in to mediate.
The current situation puts China on the hot seat.
The Yeonpyeong attack was inarguably a military one by the North.
If it does not step in, China, too, risks regional instability that could damage its national interests.
The standoff may be between the two Koreas, but in a broader context this is between two hegemonies -- the United States and China.
The contest comes as Washington challenges Beijing’s ascent on the global stage.
The U.S. was forced to move a joint naval exercise away from the Chinese coast after the sinking of the Cheonan naval ship because of protests from Beijing.
But this time North Korea has audaciously crossed the line, which justifies the presence of a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Yellow Sea.
The Chinese mainland is now equally under the threat of satellite radar and the operation of U.S. warships. Such quick and resolute action from Washington must have hastened the diplomatic initiatives coming from China.
Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Wu Dawei delivered Beijing’s suggestion that envoys to the six-party talks on North Korean denuclearization should meet in early December.
But President Lee rejected the proposal, saying it wasn’t the right time.
Committing to six-party talks while North Korea continues its belligerent campaign may reflect negatively on the South Korean government, which is already under heavy fire for responding feebly to North Korean attack.
For China, North Korea is a double-edged sword.
The country may be helpful as leverage against the U.S., but it is also a time bomb for Beijing.
China must do all it can to prevent further provocations from the North, including instituting measures to cease food and oil aid.
The Korean Peninsula is at crossroads between war and peace.
If North Korea attempts another belligerent attack and South Korea responds with equal force, we may not be able to avoid a war.
The U.S.S. George Washington -- a symbol of U.S. military power -- has already joined in naval drills in the Yellow Sea in the aftermath of the North’s attack on Yeonpyeong Island last Tuesday.
The island’s remaining residents have been ordered to evacuate.
The international community is closely watching the naval exercise and the response from North Korea. Chinese State Councilor Dai Bingguo, a senior foreign policy adviser, flew into Seoul on Sunday for a tete-a-tete with President Lee Myung-bak.
With tensions escalating to their highest level in years, Beijing has finally moved in to mediate.
The current situation puts China on the hot seat.
The Yeonpyeong attack was inarguably a military one by the North.
If it does not step in, China, too, risks regional instability that could damage its national interests.
The standoff may be between the two Koreas, but in a broader context this is between two hegemonies -- the United States and China.
The contest comes as Washington challenges Beijing’s ascent on the global stage.
The U.S. was forced to move a joint naval exercise away from the Chinese coast after the sinking of the Cheonan naval ship because of protests from Beijing.
But this time North Korea has audaciously crossed the line, which justifies the presence of a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Yellow Sea.
The Chinese mainland is now equally under the threat of satellite radar and the operation of U.S. warships. Such quick and resolute action from Washington must have hastened the diplomatic initiatives coming from China.
Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Wu Dawei delivered Beijing’s suggestion that envoys to the six-party talks on North Korean denuclearization should meet in early December.
But President Lee rejected the proposal, saying it wasn’t the right time.
Committing to six-party talks while North Korea continues its belligerent campaign may reflect negatively on the South Korean government, which is already under heavy fire for responding feebly to North Korean attack.
For China, North Korea is a double-edged sword.
The country may be helpful as leverage against the U.S., but it is also a time bomb for Beijing.
China must do all it can to prevent further provocations from the North, including instituting measures to cease food and oil aid.
Leaked U.S. Cables Expose Tensions With China
By JEREMY PAGE
![[wikichina1129]](http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-LB699_wikich_D_20101129035217.jpg)
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
BEIJING—China repeatedly failed to act on U.S. requests for it to stop shipments of ballistic missile components from North Korea to Iran via Beijing airport in 2007, according to one of more than a quarter-million U.S. diplomatic cables made public Sunday.
Another of the cables, which were gathered by the website WikiLeaks, showed that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asked China in February to act on intelligence that Iran was trying to buy gyroscopes and carbon fiber for its ballistic missiles from Chinese companies.
Mrs. Clinton also expressed concern in May that Chinese companies were supplying Iran with precursors for chemical weapons in contravention of U.N. sanctions, according to one more of the cables.
The cables reflect continuing U.S. concern that China isn't doing enough to prevent proliferation of missile and chemical weapons technology despite Beijing's introduction of export controls in 2002.
Their publication comes at a sensitive time in China-U.S. ties, as Beijing faces mounting pressure from Washington to rein in an increasingly belligerent North Korea ahead of a visit to the U.S. by President Hu Jintao in January.
The cables also highlight U.S. concerns about China's computer warfare capability, and its influence in Central Asia.
And they give potentially embarrassing blow-by-blow accounts of meetings between U.S. and Chinese officials.
China's Foreign Ministry didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on the cables.
The U.S. State Department has called the leaks of the cables illegal and has sought to limit the diplomatic fallout through phone calls to dozens of foreign governments, according to U.S. officials.
Mrs. Clinton spoke about the anticipated leaks by telephone with her Chinese counterpart, Yang Jiechi, on Friday, according to the State Department.
Five news organizations were given access to the documents ahead of their release: the New York Times, the Guardian of the U.K., Germany's Der Spiegel, France's Le Monde and Spain's El Pais.
One cable from the U.S. embassy in Beijing quoted an unidentified Chinese contact alleging in January this year that the Politburo, the powerful 25-person governing group in the Communist Party, ordered a cyberattack on Google Inc. as well as U.S. government computer systems.
A Google spokeswoman said: "We have conclusive evidence that the attack came from China."
She declined to comment further, but Google said in January that cyberattacks on its corporate infrastructure originated from inside China.
China's government has repeatedly denied any involvement in those or other attacks.
Another cable described how the U.S. ambassador in Kyrgyzstan confronted her Chinese counterpart, Zhang Yannian, over information obtained from Kyrgyz officials that China was offering the former Soviet republic $3 billion in aid in exchange for its closing a U.S. airbase there.
"Visibly flustered, Zhang temporarily lost the ability to speak Russian and began spluttering in Chinese to the silent aide diligently taking notes right behind him," said the cable.
Mr. Zhang later composed himself, and "ridiculed" the idea without categorically denying it, the cable said.
Mr. Zhang, now China's ambassador to Azerbaijan, couldn't immediately be reached for comment.
The most serious revelation in the cables is that China repeatedly turned a blind eye to shipments of ballistic missile components from North Korea to Iran on commercial flights through Beijing airport.
A cable dated Nov. 3, 2007, and signed by then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, said that a cargo of jet vanes—designed to stabilize missiles in flight—was set to be shipped from North Korea to Iran via Beijing on an Air Iran flight.
"The [State] department is seeking both immediate action… and a strategic approach with regards to this critical issue," the cable said.
"We now have information that the goods will be shipped on 4 November and insist on a substantive response from China," it said.
"We assess that the best way to prevent these shipments in the future is for Chinese authorities to take action…that will make the Beijing airport a less hospitable transfer point."
Ms. Rice told the U.S. ambassador in Beijing to raise the issue "at the earliest opportunity" and "at the highest level possible" to persuade the Chinese authorities to halt the delivery, according to the cable.
She also told him to remind China that U.S. President George W. Bush had raised the issue with his Chinese counterpart, Mr. Hu, at an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Sydney in September 2007.
It is unclear whether China stopped that shipment, but the cable complained that at least 10 similar deliveries had been allowed to proceed despite U.S. requests for them to be halted.
"Though Chinese officials informed Embassy Beijing that China's investigations have found no evidence of these transfers, it appears that these shipments did occur and are continuing to transit via Beijing," it said.
China pledged in 2000 not to assist any country to develop ballistic missiles that can be used to deliver nuclear weapons.
China also introduced stricter export controls in 2002 and has applied to join the 34-country Missile Technology Control Regime.
But an analysis of the Iranian missile threat last month by Arms Control Today, which is published by the independent Arms Control Association in Washington, suggested U.S. pressure on Beijing has produced only mixed results.
Three cables sent by Mrs. Clinton in February this year show that the U.S. still has concerns about Iran obtaining missile technology from China.
One instructed U.S. diplomats to ask Chinese officials to act on intelligence that Iran was trying to buy Russian gyroscopes, which can help to stabilize and guide ballistic missiles, from a Chinese company.
"We are bringing this matter to your attention to support your export control efforts as we are concerned this equipment potentially could be diverted to missile-related end-users in Iran," it said.
"We hope you will use this information to investigate this activity and take all appropriate measures..."
A second cable said Iran was trying to buy the same gyroscopes from China through a Malaysian company, and a third said Tehran was seeking to purchase five tons of carbon fiber—which could be used to make nozzles and casing for its missiles—from a Chinese company.
Another cable from Mrs. Clinton in May said the U.S. was concerned that exports by named Chinese companies "could be used for or diverted to a CW [chemical weapons] program."
Mrs. Clinton asked if these transfers were approved by the Chinese government and warned that sanctions may be imposed.
"We request that the Chinese government take all steps necessary to investigate this matter and to prevent Iran from acquiring dual-use equipment and technology that could be used in its CW program," the cable said.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
BEIJING—China repeatedly failed to act on U.S. requests for it to stop shipments of ballistic missile components from North Korea to Iran via Beijing airport in 2007, according to one of more than a quarter-million U.S. diplomatic cables made public Sunday.
Another of the cables, which were gathered by the website WikiLeaks, showed that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asked China in February to act on intelligence that Iran was trying to buy gyroscopes and carbon fiber for its ballistic missiles from Chinese companies.
Mrs. Clinton also expressed concern in May that Chinese companies were supplying Iran with precursors for chemical weapons in contravention of U.N. sanctions, according to one more of the cables.
The cables reflect continuing U.S. concern that China isn't doing enough to prevent proliferation of missile and chemical weapons technology despite Beijing's introduction of export controls in 2002.
Their publication comes at a sensitive time in China-U.S. ties, as Beijing faces mounting pressure from Washington to rein in an increasingly belligerent North Korea ahead of a visit to the U.S. by President Hu Jintao in January.
The cables also highlight U.S. concerns about China's computer warfare capability, and its influence in Central Asia.
And they give potentially embarrassing blow-by-blow accounts of meetings between U.S. and Chinese officials.
China's Foreign Ministry didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on the cables.
The U.S. State Department has called the leaks of the cables illegal and has sought to limit the diplomatic fallout through phone calls to dozens of foreign governments, according to U.S. officials.
Mrs. Clinton spoke about the anticipated leaks by telephone with her Chinese counterpart, Yang Jiechi, on Friday, according to the State Department.
Five news organizations were given access to the documents ahead of their release: the New York Times, the Guardian of the U.K., Germany's Der Spiegel, France's Le Monde and Spain's El Pais.
One cable from the U.S. embassy in Beijing quoted an unidentified Chinese contact alleging in January this year that the Politburo, the powerful 25-person governing group in the Communist Party, ordered a cyberattack on Google Inc. as well as U.S. government computer systems.
A Google spokeswoman said: "We have conclusive evidence that the attack came from China."
She declined to comment further, but Google said in January that cyberattacks on its corporate infrastructure originated from inside China.
China's government has repeatedly denied any involvement in those or other attacks.
Another cable described how the U.S. ambassador in Kyrgyzstan confronted her Chinese counterpart, Zhang Yannian, over information obtained from Kyrgyz officials that China was offering the former Soviet republic $3 billion in aid in exchange for its closing a U.S. airbase there.
"Visibly flustered, Zhang temporarily lost the ability to speak Russian and began spluttering in Chinese to the silent aide diligently taking notes right behind him," said the cable.
Mr. Zhang later composed himself, and "ridiculed" the idea without categorically denying it, the cable said.
Mr. Zhang, now China's ambassador to Azerbaijan, couldn't immediately be reached for comment.
The most serious revelation in the cables is that China repeatedly turned a blind eye to shipments of ballistic missile components from North Korea to Iran on commercial flights through Beijing airport.
A cable dated Nov. 3, 2007, and signed by then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, said that a cargo of jet vanes—designed to stabilize missiles in flight—was set to be shipped from North Korea to Iran via Beijing on an Air Iran flight.
"The [State] department is seeking both immediate action… and a strategic approach with regards to this critical issue," the cable said.
"We now have information that the goods will be shipped on 4 November and insist on a substantive response from China," it said.
"We assess that the best way to prevent these shipments in the future is for Chinese authorities to take action…that will make the Beijing airport a less hospitable transfer point."
Ms. Rice told the U.S. ambassador in Beijing to raise the issue "at the earliest opportunity" and "at the highest level possible" to persuade the Chinese authorities to halt the delivery, according to the cable.
She also told him to remind China that U.S. President George W. Bush had raised the issue with his Chinese counterpart, Mr. Hu, at an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Sydney in September 2007.
It is unclear whether China stopped that shipment, but the cable complained that at least 10 similar deliveries had been allowed to proceed despite U.S. requests for them to be halted.
"Though Chinese officials informed Embassy Beijing that China's investigations have found no evidence of these transfers, it appears that these shipments did occur and are continuing to transit via Beijing," it said.
China pledged in 2000 not to assist any country to develop ballistic missiles that can be used to deliver nuclear weapons.
China also introduced stricter export controls in 2002 and has applied to join the 34-country Missile Technology Control Regime.
But an analysis of the Iranian missile threat last month by Arms Control Today, which is published by the independent Arms Control Association in Washington, suggested U.S. pressure on Beijing has produced only mixed results.
Three cables sent by Mrs. Clinton in February this year show that the U.S. still has concerns about Iran obtaining missile technology from China.
One instructed U.S. diplomats to ask Chinese officials to act on intelligence that Iran was trying to buy Russian gyroscopes, which can help to stabilize and guide ballistic missiles, from a Chinese company.
"We are bringing this matter to your attention to support your export control efforts as we are concerned this equipment potentially could be diverted to missile-related end-users in Iran," it said.
"We hope you will use this information to investigate this activity and take all appropriate measures..."
A second cable said Iran was trying to buy the same gyroscopes from China through a Malaysian company, and a third said Tehran was seeking to purchase five tons of carbon fiber—which could be used to make nozzles and casing for its missiles—from a Chinese company.
Another cable from Mrs. Clinton in May said the U.S. was concerned that exports by named Chinese companies "could be used for or diverted to a CW [chemical weapons] program."
Mrs. Clinton asked if these transfers were approved by the Chinese government and warned that sanctions may be imposed.
"We request that the Chinese government take all steps necessary to investigate this matter and to prevent Iran from acquiring dual-use equipment and technology that could be used in its CW program," the cable said.
Fall guys in Beijing need better PR
By Sunny Lee
South Korean soldiers in winter training
BEIJING - China is on the spot.
Whenever North Korea creates a problem, Beijing is implicated. That's the pattern.
The latest incident of North Korea's shelling of the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong and the ensuing tension on the Korean Peninsula is not an exception.
The finger was quickly pointed at China, which is widely seen as turning a blind eye to North Korean provocation.
On Sunday, during a meeting with a senior Chinese envoy sent by President Hu Jintao, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak pressed China to take "a more objective, responsible" stance in handling inter-Korean affairs and warned further North Korean provocation would not be tolerated with the usual restraint from the Seoul side -- a message he reiterated on Monday as he vowed retaliation over last week's "inhumane" attacks.
The US has also repeatedly complained that China, Pyongyang's long-time enabler, is not doing enough to contain North Korean aggression.
Senator John McCain weighed in over the weekend, "China is not behaving as a responsible world power," in an interview with CNN's State of the Union.
In the court of international public opinion, China is in the same basket as North Korea, seen as propping up the Kim Jong-il regime as its major ideological ally and economic benefactor.
Whenever North Korea creates a problem, it becomes China's responsibility.
When North Korea is criticized, China can expect the international community to hold China to account, calling for it to act with a responsibly commensurate with its rising global status, and to stop backing North Korean aggression.
This picture is too simplistic, according to Chinese scholars who say the international media's angle on North Korea in general and the Yeonpyeong incident in particular does not adequately reflect both sides of the story.
"This may sound advocating North Korea, but the incident should be seen in context. It didn't happen out of the blue," said Jin Jingyi, a North Korea expert at Peking University in Beijing.
Brian Myers, an American professor of international studies at Dongseo University in the South Korean city of Busan, said that China was contributing to the crisis with its vain hope of propping up North Korea indefinitely and by fundamentally misreading the Pyongyang regime.
"What China doesn't understand is that North Korea is going to keep behaving like this [acting aggressively],'' Myers said.
''North Korea is ideologically programmed to continue to escalate tensions. It doesn't matter whether South Korea or the US is taking a soft-line policy toward North Korea or a hardline policy toward North Korea. Pyongyang constantly needs to score military successes in order to keep public support at home."
In a show of solidarity of the Seoul-Washington alliance, the US has decided to include the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS George Washington in a joint military drill in the West Sea that started on Sunday, the largest-ever such exercise between the allies.
North Korea has warned of a "dear price" for the move.
Its state television warned that North Korea would retaliate "not in words, but in actions".
Experts have different views on the prospects of introducing the powerful navy asset into the Yellow Sea.
"It's a symbolic gesture. As long as the aircraft carrier stays away from the disputed sea border, I don't' anticipate any clash. Of course, China doesn't welcome the move, but understands that the US is obligated to do so as an ally to South Korea," said Shen.
Jin differed.
"Is it a necessary move? The goal is to cower North Korea and to prevent future North Korean provocations. But there is no guarantee for that. It rather escalates the regional tension."
Some see similarities between the tension on the Korean Peninsula and the period in 1949 when frequent inter-border arms conflicts led to full-scale war the following year.
The Sejong Institute's Cheong worries that the tension is likely to escalate, while Myers also anticipates a conflict in the Korean Peninsula, yet urges China to take the "right" side now as a responsible stakeholder in global affairs.
"There is going to be a conflict [between North Korea] with South Korea and the US, I would say, in the near future,'' said Myers.
''And North Korea is going to lose and collapse. China is going to have a unified Korea on its border anyway. China needs to realize the fact and needs to allow North Korea to collapse sooner, rather than later. Because the later North Korea collapses the greater the conflict is going to be, the greater the damage is going to be in the entire region. So, China really needs to be turning off the aid to North Korea."
South Korean soldiers in winter training
BEIJING - China is on the spot.
Whenever North Korea creates a problem, Beijing is implicated. That's the pattern.
The latest incident of North Korea's shelling of the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong and the ensuing tension on the Korean Peninsula is not an exception.
The finger was quickly pointed at China, which is widely seen as turning a blind eye to North Korean provocation.
On Sunday, during a meeting with a senior Chinese envoy sent by President Hu Jintao, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak pressed China to take "a more objective, responsible" stance in handling inter-Korean affairs and warned further North Korean provocation would not be tolerated with the usual restraint from the Seoul side -- a message he reiterated on Monday as he vowed retaliation over last week's "inhumane" attacks.
The US has also repeatedly complained that China, Pyongyang's long-time enabler, is not doing enough to contain North Korean aggression.
Senator John McCain weighed in over the weekend, "China is not behaving as a responsible world power," in an interview with CNN's State of the Union.
In the court of international public opinion, China is in the same basket as North Korea, seen as propping up the Kim Jong-il regime as its major ideological ally and economic benefactor.
Whenever North Korea creates a problem, it becomes China's responsibility.
When North Korea is criticized, China can expect the international community to hold China to account, calling for it to act with a responsibly commensurate with its rising global status, and to stop backing North Korean aggression.
This picture is too simplistic, according to Chinese scholars who say the international media's angle on North Korea in general and the Yeonpyeong incident in particular does not adequately reflect both sides of the story.
"This may sound advocating North Korea, but the incident should be seen in context. It didn't happen out of the blue," said Jin Jingyi, a North Korea expert at Peking University in Beijing.
Brian Myers, an American professor of international studies at Dongseo University in the South Korean city of Busan, said that China was contributing to the crisis with its vain hope of propping up North Korea indefinitely and by fundamentally misreading the Pyongyang regime.
"What China doesn't understand is that North Korea is going to keep behaving like this [acting aggressively],'' Myers said.
''North Korea is ideologically programmed to continue to escalate tensions. It doesn't matter whether South Korea or the US is taking a soft-line policy toward North Korea or a hardline policy toward North Korea. Pyongyang constantly needs to score military successes in order to keep public support at home."
In a show of solidarity of the Seoul-Washington alliance, the US has decided to include the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS George Washington in a joint military drill in the West Sea that started on Sunday, the largest-ever such exercise between the allies.
North Korea has warned of a "dear price" for the move.
Its state television warned that North Korea would retaliate "not in words, but in actions".
Experts have different views on the prospects of introducing the powerful navy asset into the Yellow Sea.
"It's a symbolic gesture. As long as the aircraft carrier stays away from the disputed sea border, I don't' anticipate any clash. Of course, China doesn't welcome the move, but understands that the US is obligated to do so as an ally to South Korea," said Shen.
Jin differed.
"Is it a necessary move? The goal is to cower North Korea and to prevent future North Korean provocations. But there is no guarantee for that. It rather escalates the regional tension."
Some see similarities between the tension on the Korean Peninsula and the period in 1949 when frequent inter-border arms conflicts led to full-scale war the following year.
The Sejong Institute's Cheong worries that the tension is likely to escalate, while Myers also anticipates a conflict in the Korean Peninsula, yet urges China to take the "right" side now as a responsible stakeholder in global affairs.
"There is going to be a conflict [between North Korea] with South Korea and the US, I would say, in the near future,'' said Myers.
''And North Korea is going to lose and collapse. China is going to have a unified Korea on its border anyway. China needs to realize the fact and needs to allow North Korea to collapse sooner, rather than later. Because the later North Korea collapses the greater the conflict is going to be, the greater the damage is going to be in the entire region. So, China really needs to be turning off the aid to North Korea."
For China’s Women, More Opportunities, More Pitfalls
By DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW
Angel Feng, a 26 year-old graduate of a business school in France, in the lobby of the office building in Beijing where she works
Shi Zaihong, 41, came to Beijing to work as a nanny in 1987. Today, she works 10 cleaning and child-minding jobs, earning 7,000 renminbi a month.
BEIJING — The question that dashed Angel Feng’s job prospects always came last.
Fluent in Chinese, English, French and Japanese, the 26-year-old graduate of a business school in France interviewed between January and April with half a dozen companies in Beijing, hoping for her first job in the private sector, where salaries are highest.
“The boss would ask several questions about my qualifications, then he’d say: ‘I see you just got married. When will you have a baby?’ It was always the last question. I’d say not for five years, at least, but they didn’t believe me,” Ms. Feng said.
Three decades after China embarked on dazzling economic reforms, much has changed for women.
Unlike their mothers, whose working — and, often, private — lives were determined by the state, women today can largely choose their paths.
Rural women are no longer tethered to communes; urban women no longer are assigned jobs for life or need permission from work units to marry, although all women must apply for permission to have a child.
Yet along with freedom has come risk, as socialist-era structures are dismantled and powerful cultural traditions that value men over women, long held in abeyance by official Communist support for women’s rights, return in force.
Many employers are choosing not to hire women in an economy where there is an oversupply of labor and women are perceived as bringing additional expense in the form of maternity leave and childbirth costs.
The law stipulates that employers must help cover those costs, and feminists are seeking a system of state-supported childbirth insurance to lessen discrimination.
The result is that even highly qualified candidates like Ms. Feng can struggle to find a footing.
Practical concerns about coping in a highly competitive world are feeding into a powerful identity crisis among China’s women.
“The main issue we face is confusion, about who we are and what we should be,” said Qin Liwen, a magazine columnist.
“Should I be a ‘strong woman’ and make money and have a career, maybe grow rich, but risk not finding a husband or having a child? Or should I marry and be a stay-at-home housewife, support my husband and educate my child? Or, should I be a ‘fox’ — the kind of woman who marries a rich man, drives around in a BMW but has to put up with his concubines?”
Ms. Feng found a job at a company that promoted Chinese brands.
“It was a really bad place,” she said.
Employees were fired immediately after promotional drives to slash costs.
Working hours were long.
A colleague who suffered a late miscarriage was ordered back to work within three days.
Ms. Feng’s monthly salary was 5,000 renminbi, or about $745, without benefits.
In July, she quit — for the security of a “semi-state” organization run by the Ministry of Education.
The pay is lower, about $625 a month, but lunch in the ministry canteen is free, and she gets benefits that hark back to socialist days, including a housing allowance.
Hours are fixed, 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., five days a week.
Most important, her employer, the China Education Association for International Exchange, does not object to employees’ having babies and provides at least 90 days’ maternity leave at full pay.
The job may be “a bit boring,” but for now, she, like others, has made her choice.
“The state sector is quite popular with women because their rights are better protected there,” said Feng Yuan, head of the Center for Women’s Studies at Shantou University.
Guo Jianmei, director of the Beijing Zhongze Women’s Legal Counseling and Service Center, insists that, over all, women today are in a better position than they were three decades ago.
“They know so much more about their rights,” she said.
“They are better educated. For those with a competitive spirit, there’s a world of opportunity here now, whether they are businesswomen, scientists, farmers or even political leaders. There really have been huge changes.”
Women’s rights are well protected, at least on paper.
In 2005, the government amended the landmark 1992 Law on the Protection of Women’s Rights and Interests, known as the Women’s Constitution, to make gender equality an explicit state policy.
It also outlawed, for the first time, sexual harassment.
Yet gender discrimination is widespread.
Only a few women dare to sue employers for unfair hiring practices, dismissal on grounds of pregnancy or maternity leave, or sexual harassment, experts say.
Employers commonly specify gender, age and physical appearance in job offers.
There are gaps in the law.
A major problem, said Feng Yuan (not related to Angel Feng), is that it does not define gender discrimination. The law also sticks to the longstanding requirement that women retire five years earlier than men at the same jobs, thereby reducing earnings and pensions.
In 2008, 67.5 percent of Chinese women over 15 were employed, according to Yang Juhua of Renmin University of China’s Center for Population and Development Studies, citing World Bank statistics.
That was a drop from the most recent Chinese government data, from 2000, showing that 71.52 percent of women from 16 through 54 were employed, compared with 82.47 percent of men from 16 through 59.
Ms. Yang has calculated that women earn 63.5 percent of men’s salaries, a drop from 64.8 in 2000.
And yet there are many stories of individual success, built on hard work — and some luck.
Shi Zaihong’s is one.
Born into a poor rural family in the central province of Anhui, Ms. Shi, now 41, came to Beijing to work as a nanny in 1987.
She earned 40 renminbi a month.
Today, she works 10 cleaning and child-minding jobs, earning 7,000 renminbi a month.
With her husband, who runs a small business putting up advertisements, she bought an apartment just outside Beijing for 500,000 renminbi — an astonishing achievement for a migrant worker with just five years’ education.
Ms. Shi’s eyes shine as she talks about her steady accumulation of wealth, far outstripping what her mother was able to save in farming.
“I have taken advantage of every opportunity that I had, and I have always worked hard,” she said.
“Things are good. Very good.”
The mother of a 16-year-old son and a 3-year-old daughter, she can now apply for her children to legally join her because buying property confers this right, she said.
The children have always lived in her mountain village of 300, with her parents.
“Having to leave your children behind is the hardest thing about being a migrant,” she said.
Liu Yan, 42, comes from quite a different background.
The daughter of an actor and an opera singer from Sichuan Province in the southwest, she worked at China’s first private tour operator and is now a successful business consultant.
Sophisticated and well connected, she specializes in putting people together to make a project “go.”
She is divorced, with a 10-year-old daughter.
“I’ve been quite free and straightforward all my life,” she said.
But “my family often calls me stupid for it. It’s not really the way you’re supposed to act here.”
The upshot is that she feels her prospects of remarriage are dim.
“Tradition has come back strongly, but it’s not always a good thing,” she said.
“With Chinese men, there is a line you cannot cross. They have ‘face’ that you have to respect. Anyway, most of them don’t find me feminine. They like young girls. They think a woman is beautiful when she’s ‘sweet.”’
China’s more well-to-do women, she said, are expected to tolerate a husband’s multiple mistresses. Concubinage, outlawed by the Communists after they took power in 1949, has re-emerged.
“Most women just assume that sooner or later it will happen,” she said.
“Men have power. Women are weak, and they have too much to lose. But I want to be happy. I could not accept that.”
Angel Feng, a 26 year-old graduate of a business school in France, in the lobby of the office building in Beijing where she works
Shi Zaihong, 41, came to Beijing to work as a nanny in 1987. Today, she works 10 cleaning and child-minding jobs, earning 7,000 renminbi a month.
BEIJING — The question that dashed Angel Feng’s job prospects always came last.
Fluent in Chinese, English, French and Japanese, the 26-year-old graduate of a business school in France interviewed between January and April with half a dozen companies in Beijing, hoping for her first job in the private sector, where salaries are highest.
“The boss would ask several questions about my qualifications, then he’d say: ‘I see you just got married. When will you have a baby?’ It was always the last question. I’d say not for five years, at least, but they didn’t believe me,” Ms. Feng said.
Three decades after China embarked on dazzling economic reforms, much has changed for women.
Unlike their mothers, whose working — and, often, private — lives were determined by the state, women today can largely choose their paths.
Rural women are no longer tethered to communes; urban women no longer are assigned jobs for life or need permission from work units to marry, although all women must apply for permission to have a child.
Yet along with freedom has come risk, as socialist-era structures are dismantled and powerful cultural traditions that value men over women, long held in abeyance by official Communist support for women’s rights, return in force.
Many employers are choosing not to hire women in an economy where there is an oversupply of labor and women are perceived as bringing additional expense in the form of maternity leave and childbirth costs.
The law stipulates that employers must help cover those costs, and feminists are seeking a system of state-supported childbirth insurance to lessen discrimination.
The result is that even highly qualified candidates like Ms. Feng can struggle to find a footing.
Practical concerns about coping in a highly competitive world are feeding into a powerful identity crisis among China’s women.
“The main issue we face is confusion, about who we are and what we should be,” said Qin Liwen, a magazine columnist.
“Should I be a ‘strong woman’ and make money and have a career, maybe grow rich, but risk not finding a husband or having a child? Or should I marry and be a stay-at-home housewife, support my husband and educate my child? Or, should I be a ‘fox’ — the kind of woman who marries a rich man, drives around in a BMW but has to put up with his concubines?”
Ms. Feng found a job at a company that promoted Chinese brands.
“It was a really bad place,” she said.
Employees were fired immediately after promotional drives to slash costs.
Working hours were long.
A colleague who suffered a late miscarriage was ordered back to work within three days.
Ms. Feng’s monthly salary was 5,000 renminbi, or about $745, without benefits.
In July, she quit — for the security of a “semi-state” organization run by the Ministry of Education.
The pay is lower, about $625 a month, but lunch in the ministry canteen is free, and she gets benefits that hark back to socialist days, including a housing allowance.
Hours are fixed, 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., five days a week.
Most important, her employer, the China Education Association for International Exchange, does not object to employees’ having babies and provides at least 90 days’ maternity leave at full pay.
The job may be “a bit boring,” but for now, she, like others, has made her choice.
“The state sector is quite popular with women because their rights are better protected there,” said Feng Yuan, head of the Center for Women’s Studies at Shantou University.
Guo Jianmei, director of the Beijing Zhongze Women’s Legal Counseling and Service Center, insists that, over all, women today are in a better position than they were three decades ago.
“They know so much more about their rights,” she said.
“They are better educated. For those with a competitive spirit, there’s a world of opportunity here now, whether they are businesswomen, scientists, farmers or even political leaders. There really have been huge changes.”
Women’s rights are well protected, at least on paper.
In 2005, the government amended the landmark 1992 Law on the Protection of Women’s Rights and Interests, known as the Women’s Constitution, to make gender equality an explicit state policy.
It also outlawed, for the first time, sexual harassment.
Yet gender discrimination is widespread.
Only a few women dare to sue employers for unfair hiring practices, dismissal on grounds of pregnancy or maternity leave, or sexual harassment, experts say.
Employers commonly specify gender, age and physical appearance in job offers.
There are gaps in the law.
A major problem, said Feng Yuan (not related to Angel Feng), is that it does not define gender discrimination. The law also sticks to the longstanding requirement that women retire five years earlier than men at the same jobs, thereby reducing earnings and pensions.
In 2008, 67.5 percent of Chinese women over 15 were employed, according to Yang Juhua of Renmin University of China’s Center for Population and Development Studies, citing World Bank statistics.
That was a drop from the most recent Chinese government data, from 2000, showing that 71.52 percent of women from 16 through 54 were employed, compared with 82.47 percent of men from 16 through 59.
Ms. Yang has calculated that women earn 63.5 percent of men’s salaries, a drop from 64.8 in 2000.
And yet there are many stories of individual success, built on hard work — and some luck.
Shi Zaihong’s is one.
Born into a poor rural family in the central province of Anhui, Ms. Shi, now 41, came to Beijing to work as a nanny in 1987.
She earned 40 renminbi a month.
Today, she works 10 cleaning and child-minding jobs, earning 7,000 renminbi a month.
With her husband, who runs a small business putting up advertisements, she bought an apartment just outside Beijing for 500,000 renminbi — an astonishing achievement for a migrant worker with just five years’ education.
Ms. Shi’s eyes shine as she talks about her steady accumulation of wealth, far outstripping what her mother was able to save in farming.
“I have taken advantage of every opportunity that I had, and I have always worked hard,” she said.
“Things are good. Very good.”
The mother of a 16-year-old son and a 3-year-old daughter, she can now apply for her children to legally join her because buying property confers this right, she said.
The children have always lived in her mountain village of 300, with her parents.
“Having to leave your children behind is the hardest thing about being a migrant,” she said.
Liu Yan, 42, comes from quite a different background.
The daughter of an actor and an opera singer from Sichuan Province in the southwest, she worked at China’s first private tour operator and is now a successful business consultant.
Sophisticated and well connected, she specializes in putting people together to make a project “go.”
She is divorced, with a 10-year-old daughter.
“I’ve been quite free and straightforward all my life,” she said.
But “my family often calls me stupid for it. It’s not really the way you’re supposed to act here.”
The upshot is that she feels her prospects of remarriage are dim.
“Tradition has come back strongly, but it’s not always a good thing,” she said.
“With Chinese men, there is a line you cannot cross. They have ‘face’ that you have to respect. Anyway, most of them don’t find me feminine. They like young girls. They think a woman is beautiful when she’s ‘sweet.”’
China’s more well-to-do women, she said, are expected to tolerate a husband’s multiple mistresses. Concubinage, outlawed by the Communists after they took power in 1949, has re-emerged.
“Most women just assume that sooner or later it will happen,” she said.
“Men have power. Women are weak, and they have too much to lose. But I want to be happy. I could not accept that.”
Sunday, November 28, 2010
China directed Google hacking: leaked US documents
AFP
The United States believes that Chinese authorities orchestrated a hacking campaign into computers of Google and Western governments, according to leaked documents cited Sunday by The New York Times.
The secret cables released by whistleblower site WikiLeaks included one in which the US embassy in Beijing cited "a Chinese contact" who pointed to a government role in the hacking, the newspaper said.
"The Google hacking was part of a coordinated campaign of computer sabotage carried out by government operatives, private security experts and Internet outlaws recruited by the Chinese government," the newspaper said, citing the cable.
Chinese operatives are also believed to have broken into computers of US and Western allies along with those of Tibet's exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, it said.
Google announced in March that it would no longer follow the communist government's instructions to filter searches for sensitive material after what it said were coordinated cyberattacks against the Internet company.
The hacking included infiltration of the Gmail accounts of Chinese dissidents.
Hacking campaigns originating from China have been reported before, including in a recent study by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission.
But US officials have stopped short of publicly accusing Beijing of cyber warfare, saying that the hacking could be the work of Chinese not linked to authorities.
WikiLeaks on Sunday unleashed a torrent of sensitive US cables, despite pleas from US officials that the release would jeopardize diplomatic efforts.
The United States believes that Chinese authorities orchestrated a hacking campaign into computers of Google and Western governments, according to leaked documents cited Sunday by The New York Times.
The secret cables released by whistleblower site WikiLeaks included one in which the US embassy in Beijing cited "a Chinese contact" who pointed to a government role in the hacking, the newspaper said.
"The Google hacking was part of a coordinated campaign of computer sabotage carried out by government operatives, private security experts and Internet outlaws recruited by the Chinese government," the newspaper said, citing the cable.
Chinese operatives are also believed to have broken into computers of US and Western allies along with those of Tibet's exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, it said.
Google announced in March that it would no longer follow the communist government's instructions to filter searches for sensitive material after what it said were coordinated cyberattacks against the Internet company.
The hacking included infiltration of the Gmail accounts of Chinese dissidents.
Hacking campaigns originating from China have been reported before, including in a recent study by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission.
But US officials have stopped short of publicly accusing Beijing of cyber warfare, saying that the hacking could be the work of Chinese not linked to authorities.
WikiLeaks on Sunday unleashed a torrent of sensitive US cables, despite pleas from US officials that the release would jeopardize diplomatic efforts.
China pressed over Iran and North Korea's nuclear trade
Embassy cables show US urging Beijing to stop shipments amid claims Chinese firms were supplying materials
By Simon Tisdall
A test in Iran during 2006 of the Shahab-3 missile, built with North Korean technology.
The US insisted that China act "urgently" to halt a transshipment of ballistic missile components from North Korea to Iran via Beijing and complained that at least 10 similar missile-related deliveries had been allowed to proceed unhindered.
The US also accused Chinese firms in May this year of supplying Iran with a key chemical weapons precursor and assistance with operating a chemical manufacturing plant.
An internal cable dated 3 November 2007 and signed by Condoleezza Rice, the then US secretary of state, says a North Korean cargo of missile jet vanes destined for the Shahid Bagheri Industrial Group, which runs Iran's solid-fuelled ballistic missile programme, was due to be shipped to Iran from Beijing on the following day aboard a scheduled Iran Air flight.
In what is termed an "urgent action request", Rice instructed the US ambassador to raise the issue "at the earliest opportunity" and "at the highest level possible" to persuade the Chinese authorities to halt the delivery. Rice told the envoy to remind the Chinese that George Bush had personally raised the shipment with the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, at a recent meeting – an indication of the importance Washington attached to the issue.
"The [state] department is seeking both immediate action... and a strategic approach with regards to this critical issue," Rice's cable states.
"We now have information that the goods will be shipped on 4 November and insist on a substantive response from China... We assess that the best way to prevent these shipments in the future is for Chinese authorities to take action... that will make the Beijing airport a less hospitable transfer point."
Washington's worries about Iran's conventionally armed short- and medium-range ballistic missiles are linked to suspicions that the missiles could be used to deliver a nuclear warhead should Iran develop the capability.
It is not known whether the US demarche induced the Chinese to halt the 4 November 2007 delivery, but regardless of that Iran's missile programme is making rapid advances.
In May last year Iran successfully tested the Sejjil-2 two-stage solid fuel missile.
Its range of up to 2,500km means it could reach Israel, Arab countries and parts of Europe.
Both the Sejjil and the liquid-fuelled Shahab-3 missile, derived from a North Korean design, are theoretically nuclear capable.
Although North Korea continues to resist international anti-proliferation efforts, the US has put pressure on China to curtail its missile-related collaboration with Iran, which dates from the 1980s.
The cable refers specifically to Iran's attempts to obtain tungsten-copper alloy plates from China's Dalian Sunny Industries.
In another cable, sent by secretary of state Hillary Clinton in May, the US said it was concerned that exports by named Chinese firms "could be used for or diverted to a CW [chemical weapons] programme". Clinton asks whether the suspect transfers were approved by the Chinese government and warns that sanctions may be imposed.
"We request that the Chinese government take all steps necessary to investigate this matter and to prevent Iran from acquiring dual-use equipment and technology that could be used in its CW program."
Analysis of the Iranian missile threat last month by Arms Control Today suggested US pressure on Beijing has produced mixed results.
"In a November 2000 commitment to the US, China pledged that it would not assist 'in any way, any country in the development of ballistic missiles that can be used to deliver nuclear weapons' ... Nonetheless the US state department assesses that Chinese companies have continued to assist Iran's ballistic missile programme," it said.
In an almost desperate bid to get Beijing's attention the cable contains a so-called non-paper – an unofficial, non-binding message – for presentation to the Chinese.
With American frustration barely concealed, the non-paper notes the US has raised its concerns with Chinese officials on numerous occasions and lists at least 10 instances in which it claims North Korean shipments of ballistic missiles parts to Iran passed unimpeded through Beijing.
"We believe that this trade will continue to utilise regularly scheduled commercial passenger flights... We urge you to prevent such shipments via whatever action you deem appropriate," it says.
By Simon Tisdall
A test in Iran during 2006 of the Shahab-3 missile, built with North Korean technology.
The US insisted that China act "urgently" to halt a transshipment of ballistic missile components from North Korea to Iran via Beijing and complained that at least 10 similar missile-related deliveries had been allowed to proceed unhindered.
The US also accused Chinese firms in May this year of supplying Iran with a key chemical weapons precursor and assistance with operating a chemical manufacturing plant.
An internal cable dated 3 November 2007 and signed by Condoleezza Rice, the then US secretary of state, says a North Korean cargo of missile jet vanes destined for the Shahid Bagheri Industrial Group, which runs Iran's solid-fuelled ballistic missile programme, was due to be shipped to Iran from Beijing on the following day aboard a scheduled Iran Air flight.
In what is termed an "urgent action request", Rice instructed the US ambassador to raise the issue "at the earliest opportunity" and "at the highest level possible" to persuade the Chinese authorities to halt the delivery. Rice told the envoy to remind the Chinese that George Bush had personally raised the shipment with the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, at a recent meeting – an indication of the importance Washington attached to the issue.
"The [state] department is seeking both immediate action... and a strategic approach with regards to this critical issue," Rice's cable states.
"We now have information that the goods will be shipped on 4 November and insist on a substantive response from China... We assess that the best way to prevent these shipments in the future is for Chinese authorities to take action... that will make the Beijing airport a less hospitable transfer point."
Washington's worries about Iran's conventionally armed short- and medium-range ballistic missiles are linked to suspicions that the missiles could be used to deliver a nuclear warhead should Iran develop the capability.
It is not known whether the US demarche induced the Chinese to halt the 4 November 2007 delivery, but regardless of that Iran's missile programme is making rapid advances.
In May last year Iran successfully tested the Sejjil-2 two-stage solid fuel missile.
Its range of up to 2,500km means it could reach Israel, Arab countries and parts of Europe.
Both the Sejjil and the liquid-fuelled Shahab-3 missile, derived from a North Korean design, are theoretically nuclear capable.
Although North Korea continues to resist international anti-proliferation efforts, the US has put pressure on China to curtail its missile-related collaboration with Iran, which dates from the 1980s.
The cable refers specifically to Iran's attempts to obtain tungsten-copper alloy plates from China's Dalian Sunny Industries.
In another cable, sent by secretary of state Hillary Clinton in May, the US said it was concerned that exports by named Chinese firms "could be used for or diverted to a CW [chemical weapons] programme". Clinton asks whether the suspect transfers were approved by the Chinese government and warns that sanctions may be imposed.
"We request that the Chinese government take all steps necessary to investigate this matter and to prevent Iran from acquiring dual-use equipment and technology that could be used in its CW program."
Analysis of the Iranian missile threat last month by Arms Control Today suggested US pressure on Beijing has produced mixed results.
"In a November 2000 commitment to the US, China pledged that it would not assist 'in any way, any country in the development of ballistic missiles that can be used to deliver nuclear weapons' ... Nonetheless the US state department assesses that Chinese companies have continued to assist Iran's ballistic missile programme," it said.
In an almost desperate bid to get Beijing's attention the cable contains a so-called non-paper – an unofficial, non-binding message – for presentation to the Chinese.
With American frustration barely concealed, the non-paper notes the US has raised its concerns with Chinese officials on numerous occasions and lists at least 10 instances in which it claims North Korean shipments of ballistic missiles parts to Iran passed unimpeded through Beijing.
"We believe that this trade will continue to utilise regularly scheduled commercial passenger flights... We urge you to prevent such shipments via whatever action you deem appropriate," it says.
Asking China to Act Like the U.S.
By HELENE COOPER
COMRADES In October, China and North Korea recalled their Korean War alliance.
FLASHPOINT America wants China to restrain North Korea, but China fears toppling its leadership.
WASHINGTON — A fundamental tenet of foreign policy says that nations will seldom voluntarily act against what they have determined, for whatever reason, to be their own national interest.
Somebody needs to tell that to the United States when it comes to China, many foreign policy experts say.
A key part of America’s relationship with China now turns on a question that is, at its heart, an impossible conundrum: How to get Beijing to make moves that its leaders don’t think are good for their country?
From economics to climate change to currency to Iran and finally culminating with North Korea last week, America has sought to push, prod and cajole China, to little or no avail.
Beijing has resisted letting its currency rise because it depends on the cheap yuan to drive its export-heavy economy.
China has balked at stiff sanctions to rein in Iran’s nuclear ambitions because it needs access to Iran’s oil and gas fields to fuel its own growth.
Beijing doesn’t want to curb carbon emissions because its ability to lift hundreds of millions of people into the middle class over the coming years is directly linked to its increased use of energy.
And, finally, Beijing has recoiled at reining in its unruly neighbor to the east, as the Obama administration implored it to do last week, because it doesn’t want to destabilize North Korea’s secretive, hermit regime to an extent that could lead to the government’s collapse and the North’s eventual reunification with South Korea.
“China isn’t 100 percent on board with U.S. efforts,” said Andrew L. Oros, an Asia expert at Washington College, in Chestertown, Md., because Beijing is “concerned with the idea of a unified Korea with U.S. troops stationed there.”
That concern has left a succession of American governments attempting the impossible.
“Basically, the U.S. wants China to do what the U.S. wants it to do,” said Rodger Baker, vice president for strategic intelligence at Stratfor, a geopolitical risk analysis company.
“We want to make sure that the world stays as the United States would like to see the world. Which means making China subservient to us in some cases. In the case of North Korea, the Chinese see it as the United States pushing its policy on China and not allowing the Chinese to make their own policy, while removing from China one of the tools that it has decided it needs for its own interests.”
In this case, that tool would be a divided Korea, with a North Korea that is beholden to and wholly dependent on China serving as a buffer against American encroachment in China’s backyard.
But the conundrum extends far beyond last week’s double Korean-peninsula whammy, which involved not only North Korea’s deadly shelling of a South Korean military installation, but also the disclosure of a just-completed centrifuge plant that could one day enable North Korea to enrich uranium into nuclear fuel and add to its arsenal of 8 to 12 nuclear weapons.
All of that led to the broad effort from the Obama administration to enlist China to rein in Pyongyang.
So far, China is not biting, and will not bite, on either North Korea or the host of other issues, some experts say, until the United States changes not only its tactics, but the entire way that American governments view Beijing.
“We’re still struggling with a post-unilateralist hangover,” said David Rothkopf, author of “Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power.”
That hangover, he says, leads Americans to believe “that we’re the sole remaining superpower and the objective of our foreign policy is to get people to go along with that. To fall into step with our worldview. But the reality is, that’s not what the future holds.”
Rather, Mr. Rothkopf argues, the United States is heading into a future in which countries like China, with independent sources of power, are not reliant on or easily influenced by the United States, and so are pursuing their own national interests.
Some Obama administration officials say that they are aware of this shift, and have begun to adapt their strategy toward China accordingly.
Mr. Obama’s recent trip to India, in which he endorsed India’s bid for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, should be viewed not only in the context of America and India, a senior administration official said, but America and China as well.
“It’s part of a strategy in which China risks seeing the United States forming alliances in its neighborhood, which may not be to Beijing’s liking,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Likewise, Mr. Obama’s decision to accelerate the deployment of an American aircraft carrier group to the Yellow Sea for joint exercises with South Korea was meant in part to drive home a message to Beijing. Aware that China doesn’t like any kind of display of American military might in its backyard, Obama administration officials are hoping to change Beijing’s cost-benefit analysis until it decides that restraining North Korea is a lesser evil than seeing more American sailors playing war games outside its door.
“That’s not a threat,” the administration official said.
“It’s a reality.”
But in the past three weeks, the United States has seen, in rapid-fire succession, China’s own determination to push back against American demands.
At the Group of 20 leaders summit meeting in Seoul on Nov. 11, Mr. Obama tried to get the world to come down hard on China for its devalued currency, and saw Beijing turn the tables.
Instead of America leading the world in hectoring China, Beijing led the world in hectoring the United States for a recent “quantitative easing” move by the Federal Reserve that international critics said had artificially lowered the value of the American dollar.
Coming so soon after the G-20 debacle, the North Korea impasse demonstrates the limits of American attempts to bend Beijing to its will, and a new reality that is emerging: a Sino-American relationship that, foreign policy experts say, must be carefully calibrated to balance American demands against what Beijing can be realistically persuaded to do.
Some conservative critics of the Obama administration say that the United States can manage this new reality only if it is tougher in its demands of Beijing.
“I would turn up the pressure on China to reunite the Korean peninsula,” said John Bolton, who was the United States ambassador to the United Nations in the Bush administration.
“This division is unnatural, and they need to get on the right side of history. And in the meantime, I would strangle North Korea economically, ramping up the P.S.I. activities,” a reference to military maneuvers in the Yellow Sea.
“I’d cut off all food aid; that’s turning up the pressure,” Mr. Bolton said.
“What Obama’s doing right now is just rhetoric.”
Mr. Rothkopf, for his part, counters that it will take more than pressure to get Beijing to yield.
He says that the United States must first determine the areas where China won’t bend, and work with Beijing to find compromises so that America is not in the impossible situation of trying to tell China to act against its own national interests.
And the United States should work furiously to build up alliances with other countries in the region, he said.
“We have moved from the cold war era of bipolar reality through the brief bubble of sole superpower unilateral fantasy into a world of a new multipowered system which requires old-fashioned balance-of-power diplomacy,” Mr. Rothkopf said.
The result, he said, may be that “all of a sudden, the old cobweb-infested State Department is more important than it’s been in many, many years.”
COMRADES In October, China and North Korea recalled their Korean War alliance.
FLASHPOINT America wants China to restrain North Korea, but China fears toppling its leadership.
WASHINGTON — A fundamental tenet of foreign policy says that nations will seldom voluntarily act against what they have determined, for whatever reason, to be their own national interest.
Somebody needs to tell that to the United States when it comes to China, many foreign policy experts say.
A key part of America’s relationship with China now turns on a question that is, at its heart, an impossible conundrum: How to get Beijing to make moves that its leaders don’t think are good for their country?
From economics to climate change to currency to Iran and finally culminating with North Korea last week, America has sought to push, prod and cajole China, to little or no avail.
Beijing has resisted letting its currency rise because it depends on the cheap yuan to drive its export-heavy economy.
China has balked at stiff sanctions to rein in Iran’s nuclear ambitions because it needs access to Iran’s oil and gas fields to fuel its own growth.
Beijing doesn’t want to curb carbon emissions because its ability to lift hundreds of millions of people into the middle class over the coming years is directly linked to its increased use of energy.
And, finally, Beijing has recoiled at reining in its unruly neighbor to the east, as the Obama administration implored it to do last week, because it doesn’t want to destabilize North Korea’s secretive, hermit regime to an extent that could lead to the government’s collapse and the North’s eventual reunification with South Korea.
“China isn’t 100 percent on board with U.S. efforts,” said Andrew L. Oros, an Asia expert at Washington College, in Chestertown, Md., because Beijing is “concerned with the idea of a unified Korea with U.S. troops stationed there.”
That concern has left a succession of American governments attempting the impossible.
“Basically, the U.S. wants China to do what the U.S. wants it to do,” said Rodger Baker, vice president for strategic intelligence at Stratfor, a geopolitical risk analysis company.
“We want to make sure that the world stays as the United States would like to see the world. Which means making China subservient to us in some cases. In the case of North Korea, the Chinese see it as the United States pushing its policy on China and not allowing the Chinese to make their own policy, while removing from China one of the tools that it has decided it needs for its own interests.”
In this case, that tool would be a divided Korea, with a North Korea that is beholden to and wholly dependent on China serving as a buffer against American encroachment in China’s backyard.
But the conundrum extends far beyond last week’s double Korean-peninsula whammy, which involved not only North Korea’s deadly shelling of a South Korean military installation, but also the disclosure of a just-completed centrifuge plant that could one day enable North Korea to enrich uranium into nuclear fuel and add to its arsenal of 8 to 12 nuclear weapons.
All of that led to the broad effort from the Obama administration to enlist China to rein in Pyongyang.
So far, China is not biting, and will not bite, on either North Korea or the host of other issues, some experts say, until the United States changes not only its tactics, but the entire way that American governments view Beijing.
“We’re still struggling with a post-unilateralist hangover,” said David Rothkopf, author of “Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power.”
That hangover, he says, leads Americans to believe “that we’re the sole remaining superpower and the objective of our foreign policy is to get people to go along with that. To fall into step with our worldview. But the reality is, that’s not what the future holds.”
Rather, Mr. Rothkopf argues, the United States is heading into a future in which countries like China, with independent sources of power, are not reliant on or easily influenced by the United States, and so are pursuing their own national interests.
Some Obama administration officials say that they are aware of this shift, and have begun to adapt their strategy toward China accordingly.
Mr. Obama’s recent trip to India, in which he endorsed India’s bid for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, should be viewed not only in the context of America and India, a senior administration official said, but America and China as well.
“It’s part of a strategy in which China risks seeing the United States forming alliances in its neighborhood, which may not be to Beijing’s liking,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Likewise, Mr. Obama’s decision to accelerate the deployment of an American aircraft carrier group to the Yellow Sea for joint exercises with South Korea was meant in part to drive home a message to Beijing. Aware that China doesn’t like any kind of display of American military might in its backyard, Obama administration officials are hoping to change Beijing’s cost-benefit analysis until it decides that restraining North Korea is a lesser evil than seeing more American sailors playing war games outside its door.
“That’s not a threat,” the administration official said.
“It’s a reality.”
But in the past three weeks, the United States has seen, in rapid-fire succession, China’s own determination to push back against American demands.
At the Group of 20 leaders summit meeting in Seoul on Nov. 11, Mr. Obama tried to get the world to come down hard on China for its devalued currency, and saw Beijing turn the tables.
Instead of America leading the world in hectoring China, Beijing led the world in hectoring the United States for a recent “quantitative easing” move by the Federal Reserve that international critics said had artificially lowered the value of the American dollar.
Coming so soon after the G-20 debacle, the North Korea impasse demonstrates the limits of American attempts to bend Beijing to its will, and a new reality that is emerging: a Sino-American relationship that, foreign policy experts say, must be carefully calibrated to balance American demands against what Beijing can be realistically persuaded to do.
Some conservative critics of the Obama administration say that the United States can manage this new reality only if it is tougher in its demands of Beijing.
“I would turn up the pressure on China to reunite the Korean peninsula,” said John Bolton, who was the United States ambassador to the United Nations in the Bush administration.
“This division is unnatural, and they need to get on the right side of history. And in the meantime, I would strangle North Korea economically, ramping up the P.S.I. activities,” a reference to military maneuvers in the Yellow Sea.
“I’d cut off all food aid; that’s turning up the pressure,” Mr. Bolton said.
“What Obama’s doing right now is just rhetoric.”
Mr. Rothkopf, for his part, counters that it will take more than pressure to get Beijing to yield.
He says that the United States must first determine the areas where China won’t bend, and work with Beijing to find compromises so that America is not in the impossible situation of trying to tell China to act against its own national interests.
And the United States should work furiously to build up alliances with other countries in the region, he said.
“We have moved from the cold war era of bipolar reality through the brief bubble of sole superpower unilateral fantasy into a world of a new multipowered system which requires old-fashioned balance-of-power diplomacy,” Mr. Rothkopf said.
The result, he said, may be that “all of a sudden, the old cobweb-infested State Department is more important than it’s been in many, many years.”
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Empty chair for Liu at Nobel ceremony
By Shaun Tandon
Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese writer, was sentenced in December 2009 to 11 years in prison on subversion charges
WASHINGTON — An empty chair will represent jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo at his Nobel Peace Prize ceremony unless Beijing allows him or his wife to attend, according to a friend.
Yang Jianli, a prominent Chinese democracy activist who is coordinating between the Nobel committee and dissidents, said all sides would keep pressing China to free wife Liu Xia from house arrest and let her travel to Oslo.
But if not, the Nobel committee is prepared to make the unprecedented gesture of setting a single empty chair on the stage during the December 10 ceremony, Yang said.
"An empty seat for the laureate would serve as a reminder to the world that Liu Xiaobo is himself languishing in prison and, more broadly, that the human rights situation in China should be a concern to the international community," Yang told AFP.
Yang, a student activist during the crushed Tiananmen Square uprising of 1989, himself spent five years in prison and now lives in Boston.
He is close to both Liu Xiaobo and his wife.
Yang said that Liu told his wife in their sole encounter after the announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize that he wanted her to accept the award on his behalf.
"That is obviously his wish so we will not give up his efforts," Yang said.
A Norwegian actress would also read from Yang's writings at the ceremony, Yang said.
Liu, a writer, was sentenced in December 2009 to 11 years in prison on subversion charges after co-authoring "Charter 08," a manifesto that spread quickly on the Internet calling for political reform and greater rights in China.
China has accused Norway of undermining relations and encouraging a "criminal." China has also pressured nations not to attend the Nobel ceremony.
Six countries -- China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Cuba, Morocco and Iraq -- have told the Nobel Institute they would not take part.
However, the Nobel Institute said US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- the third highest official under the constitution -- would come to Oslo, in unusually high representation for a ceremony usually attended by ambassadors.
"Nancy Pelosi said yes," Nobel Institute director Geir Lundestad told AFP in Oslo.
"She will be the most prominent representative from the American side," he added.
Pelosi, whose congressional district includes San Francisco's Chinatown, has long been outspoken about human rights in China.
It will be one of the last functions for Pelosi before she leaves her post in January following the defeat of her and President Barack Obama's Democratic Party in November elections.
Liu Xia was originally allowed up to 30 guests at the ceremony.
But Yang expected more than 100 dissidents including himself to go to Oslo at their own initiative.
Wan Yanha, a Chinese AIDS activist who recently fled to the United States, told AFP separately that he will go to Oslo but rejected suggestions he could accept the prize for Liu.
Polish opposition icon Lech Walesa earlier said that he was ready to accept the award on Liu's behalf along with other former Nobel Peace Prize winners.
With neither Liu nor any of his close relatives able to attend, the Nobel Peace Prize will not be handed over during the ceremony for only the second time in its history.
The last time that happened was in 1936.
Radical German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky, awarded the Peace Prize in 1935, could not attend because he was interned in a Nazi concentration camp.
In obscure circumstances, a German lawyer showed up and pocketed his prize.
Von Ossietzky died three years later in a hospital under surveillance by authorities from health problems related to his incarceration.
Myanmar democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi was under house arrest when she won the prize in 1991 but her teenage sons, who are half British, accepted on her behalf.
The junta in Myanmar, also known as Burma, freed Aung San Suu Kyi earlier this month, leaving Liu as the only detained Nobel laureate.
Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese writer, was sentenced in December 2009 to 11 years in prison on subversion charges
WASHINGTON — An empty chair will represent jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo at his Nobel Peace Prize ceremony unless Beijing allows him or his wife to attend, according to a friend.
Yang Jianli, a prominent Chinese democracy activist who is coordinating between the Nobel committee and dissidents, said all sides would keep pressing China to free wife Liu Xia from house arrest and let her travel to Oslo.
But if not, the Nobel committee is prepared to make the unprecedented gesture of setting a single empty chair on the stage during the December 10 ceremony, Yang said.
"An empty seat for the laureate would serve as a reminder to the world that Liu Xiaobo is himself languishing in prison and, more broadly, that the human rights situation in China should be a concern to the international community," Yang told AFP.
Yang, a student activist during the crushed Tiananmen Square uprising of 1989, himself spent five years in prison and now lives in Boston.
He is close to both Liu Xiaobo and his wife.
Yang said that Liu told his wife in their sole encounter after the announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize that he wanted her to accept the award on his behalf.
"That is obviously his wish so we will not give up his efforts," Yang said.
A Norwegian actress would also read from Yang's writings at the ceremony, Yang said.
Liu, a writer, was sentenced in December 2009 to 11 years in prison on subversion charges after co-authoring "Charter 08," a manifesto that spread quickly on the Internet calling for political reform and greater rights in China.
China has accused Norway of undermining relations and encouraging a "criminal." China has also pressured nations not to attend the Nobel ceremony.
Six countries -- China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Cuba, Morocco and Iraq -- have told the Nobel Institute they would not take part.
However, the Nobel Institute said US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- the third highest official under the constitution -- would come to Oslo, in unusually high representation for a ceremony usually attended by ambassadors.
"Nancy Pelosi said yes," Nobel Institute director Geir Lundestad told AFP in Oslo.
"She will be the most prominent representative from the American side," he added.
Pelosi, whose congressional district includes San Francisco's Chinatown, has long been outspoken about human rights in China.
It will be one of the last functions for Pelosi before she leaves her post in January following the defeat of her and President Barack Obama's Democratic Party in November elections.
Liu Xia was originally allowed up to 30 guests at the ceremony.
But Yang expected more than 100 dissidents including himself to go to Oslo at their own initiative.
Wan Yanha, a Chinese AIDS activist who recently fled to the United States, told AFP separately that he will go to Oslo but rejected suggestions he could accept the prize for Liu.
Polish opposition icon Lech Walesa earlier said that he was ready to accept the award on Liu's behalf along with other former Nobel Peace Prize winners.
With neither Liu nor any of his close relatives able to attend, the Nobel Peace Prize will not be handed over during the ceremony for only the second time in its history.
The last time that happened was in 1936.
Radical German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky, awarded the Peace Prize in 1935, could not attend because he was interned in a Nazi concentration camp.
In obscure circumstances, a German lawyer showed up and pocketed his prize.
Von Ossietzky died three years later in a hospital under surveillance by authorities from health problems related to his incarceration.
Myanmar democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi was under house arrest when she won the prize in 1991 but her teenage sons, who are half British, accepted on her behalf.
The junta in Myanmar, also known as Burma, freed Aung San Suu Kyi earlier this month, leaving Liu as the only detained Nobel laureate.
Playing Chicken With China
By John Lott
The Federal Reserve has already injected hundreds of billions of new dollars into the economy since the recession started.
Normally, when the government prints up more money, dollars are worth less and that is what we call inflation.
But inflation has been surprisingly low.
One measure of the money supply, M1, which includes currency as well as checking accounts, soared by 26 percent between August 2008 and September this year.
The amount of currency more than doubled. But prices barely changed.
As Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke goes forward with plans to print up another $880 billion, someone has to ask why the past increases didn't produce the inflation that everyone thought they would.
So where did all that new money go?
Many blame businesses for hoarding cash.
Obama recently said: “corporate profits are doing just fine. [But] they're holding onto a whole bunch of cash -- they're kind of sitting on it.”
But that isn’t happening.
Companies don't just keep huge piles of cash lying around.
Even if they aren't spending the money, they are putting it in the bank or they buy bonds.
In either case the money is recirculated to others, not hoarded.
Companies are indeed wary of starting projects and with all the uncertainty they face.
And who can blame them?
Yet, they are not the ones making the money disappear.
It turns out that the culprit is not so close to home.
China is trying to keep the U.S. dollar more valuable than the Chinese currency, the yuan.
That sounds counter-intuitive, but a more valuable dollar means that it is relatively cheap for Americans to buy Chinese products – and that helps Chinese manufacturers’ sales.
The problem for the Chinese government is that when we print more dollars, the opposite happens.
So if the Chinese want to keep the dollar relatively expensive, what can they do?
They buy up the newly printed dollars that are causing the dollar to depreciate.
While the M1 money supply has soared by $364 billion since August 2008 and the new currency we have printed up grew by over a trillion dollars, China alone has accumulated almost $500 billion in U.S. currency reserves, about $200 billion after netting out changes in China’s U.S. Treasury bond holdings.
The exact increase in China's dollar reserves isn't precisely known by anyone outside of the Bank of China, but it is probably pretty close to the exact total.
Other countries have also increased their reserve holdings of dollars.
The problem is that holding on to all this cash is really very costly for the Chinese.
They can't turn around and spend the dollars, or all the additional dollars in circulation will again lower the value of the dollar -- defeating the very reason that the Chinese accumulated the dollars to begin with.
Yet, keeping a lot of cash around that doesn't even earn interest means that the Chinese are giving up a lot of money just to keep the price of their products relatively cheap.
They don't even spend it on buying American goods.
The more money that Federal Reserve puts into circulation, the more money that the Chinese have to buy up.
In a speech last week, Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, pointed to this huge increase in reserves by the Chinese.
"Foreign exchange reserves by selected major emerging market economies... have risen sharply since the crisis and now surpass $5 trillion -- about six times their level a decade ago," he said at a central bank conference in Frankfurt Germany.
"China holds about half of the total reserves of these selected economies, slightly more than $2.6 trillion."
It may seem like a pretty good deal for Americans.
We give the Chinese pieces of paper (or their equivalent) and they give us goods.
But no one, not even the Chinese, are going to be willing to do this forever.
It would be great for us if they would let this go on, but at some point just piling up dollars and giving us products is going to be too costly for them.
And when they dump all those dollars, the real problem starts.
All that pent up inflation is going to be released.
Indeed, the process may be starting.
Just this last Wednesday, the Chinese and Russians announced that they would quit using the dollar for trade between their two countries.
The U.S. is playing a high stakes game of chicken.
Will the Chinese want to hoard more dollars as the U.S. government prints up nearly a trillion more dollars? Money that will just sit around and not even earn interest?
The irony is that despite the Federal Reserve and the Obama administration attacking the Chinese propping up the value of the dollar, we must hope that they continue doing just that.
If the Chinese start dumping dollars, not only will the $880 billion come back, but so might all the other money that the Chinese have been absorbing over the years.
The Federal Reserve has already injected hundreds of billions of new dollars into the economy since the recession started.
Normally, when the government prints up more money, dollars are worth less and that is what we call inflation.
But inflation has been surprisingly low.
One measure of the money supply, M1, which includes currency as well as checking accounts, soared by 26 percent between August 2008 and September this year.
The amount of currency more than doubled. But prices barely changed.
As Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke goes forward with plans to print up another $880 billion, someone has to ask why the past increases didn't produce the inflation that everyone thought they would.
So where did all that new money go?
Many blame businesses for hoarding cash.
Obama recently said: “corporate profits are doing just fine. [But] they're holding onto a whole bunch of cash -- they're kind of sitting on it.”
But that isn’t happening.
Companies don't just keep huge piles of cash lying around.
Even if they aren't spending the money, they are putting it in the bank or they buy bonds.
In either case the money is recirculated to others, not hoarded.
Companies are indeed wary of starting projects and with all the uncertainty they face.
And who can blame them?
Yet, they are not the ones making the money disappear.
It turns out that the culprit is not so close to home.
China is trying to keep the U.S. dollar more valuable than the Chinese currency, the yuan.
That sounds counter-intuitive, but a more valuable dollar means that it is relatively cheap for Americans to buy Chinese products – and that helps Chinese manufacturers’ sales.
The problem for the Chinese government is that when we print more dollars, the opposite happens.
So if the Chinese want to keep the dollar relatively expensive, what can they do?
They buy up the newly printed dollars that are causing the dollar to depreciate.
While the M1 money supply has soared by $364 billion since August 2008 and the new currency we have printed up grew by over a trillion dollars, China alone has accumulated almost $500 billion in U.S. currency reserves, about $200 billion after netting out changes in China’s U.S. Treasury bond holdings.
The exact increase in China's dollar reserves isn't precisely known by anyone outside of the Bank of China, but it is probably pretty close to the exact total.
Other countries have also increased their reserve holdings of dollars.
The problem is that holding on to all this cash is really very costly for the Chinese.
They can't turn around and spend the dollars, or all the additional dollars in circulation will again lower the value of the dollar -- defeating the very reason that the Chinese accumulated the dollars to begin with.
Yet, keeping a lot of cash around that doesn't even earn interest means that the Chinese are giving up a lot of money just to keep the price of their products relatively cheap.
They don't even spend it on buying American goods.
The more money that Federal Reserve puts into circulation, the more money that the Chinese have to buy up.
In a speech last week, Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, pointed to this huge increase in reserves by the Chinese.
"Foreign exchange reserves by selected major emerging market economies... have risen sharply since the crisis and now surpass $5 trillion -- about six times their level a decade ago," he said at a central bank conference in Frankfurt Germany.
"China holds about half of the total reserves of these selected economies, slightly more than $2.6 trillion."
It may seem like a pretty good deal for Americans.
We give the Chinese pieces of paper (or their equivalent) and they give us goods.
But no one, not even the Chinese, are going to be willing to do this forever.
It would be great for us if they would let this go on, but at some point just piling up dollars and giving us products is going to be too costly for them.
And when they dump all those dollars, the real problem starts.
All that pent up inflation is going to be released.
Indeed, the process may be starting.
Just this last Wednesday, the Chinese and Russians announced that they would quit using the dollar for trade between their two countries.
The U.S. is playing a high stakes game of chicken.
Will the Chinese want to hoard more dollars as the U.S. government prints up nearly a trillion more dollars? Money that will just sit around and not even earn interest?
The irony is that despite the Federal Reserve and the Obama administration attacking the Chinese propping up the value of the dollar, we must hope that they continue doing just that.
If the Chinese start dumping dollars, not only will the $880 billion come back, but so might all the other money that the Chinese have been absorbing over the years.
China Addresses Rising Korean Tensions
By IAN JOHNSON and MARTIN FACKLER
Smoke is seen rising from North Korean territory on Friday, after an explosion was heard and seen from South Korea’s Yeonpyeong island.
A North Korean navy ship off a North Korean village on Friday, seen from South Korea.
BEIJING — China engaged in a flurry of diplomatic activity on Friday, three days after a North Korean artillery attack on South Korean civilians, but its most public message was directed at the United States, which is about to begin joint exercises with South Korea’s Navy.
In a statement from its Foreign Ministry, China warned against “any military acts in our exclusive economic zone without permission,” the state-run Xinhua news agency reported Friday.
But virtually all the waters to the west of the Korean Peninsula, where the United States said the exercises would take place, lie within that zone, and American naval traffic is far from uncommon there.
Adding yet more tension to the situation, the North’s state-run media also warned that the maneuvers could push the Korean Peninsula closer to “the brink of war.”
The West has hoped that China would use its leverage as the North’s traditional ally to press it to refrain from further attacks, but the Chinese statement on Friday failed even to criticize the North for its shelling on Tuesday of a garrison island that is also home to about 1,350 civilians, mainly fishermen.
The attack killed four people.
The Chinese foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, met with the North Korean ambassador on Friday and spoke by phone with his South Korean and American counterparts, but few details emerged about the content of their conversations.
A State Department spokesman said that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had called Mr. Yang.
Xinhua reported that Mr. Yang stressed that China was “very concerned” about the situation, saying, “The pressing task now is to put the situation under control and prevent a recurrence of similar incidents.”
In a statement about the joint naval exercises, which are scheduled to begin on Sunday, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hong Lei, said: “We hold a consistent and clear-cut stance on the issue. We oppose any party to take any military acts in our exclusive economic zone without permission.”
This introduced into the mix China’s decade-old efforts to equate economic waters, which usually extend about 200 nautical miles off a country’s coast, with territorial waters, which usually reach about 12 nautical miles off a coast.
In 2001, Chinese fighters intercepted and collided with a United States spy plane flying outside territorial waters but inside the economic zone, saying the American plane had violated China’s sovereignty.
A statement from the United States Navy’s Seventh Fleet, issued in apparent anticipation of Chinese complaints about the exercise, listed the number of times American aircraft carriers had operated in the waters west of the Korean Peninsula, including a mission in October 2009.
The statement also noted that American aircraft carriers frequently visited South Korea and conducted port visits, including the aircraft carrier George Washington earlier this year, the John C. Stennis in March 2009, and the Ronald Reagan, the Nimitz and the George Washington in 2008.
The United States, which had already sent the George Washington to the region in response to the North Korean attack, made another show of solidarity with the South on Friday; the commander of American forces in South Korea, Gen. Walter L. Sharp, visited Yeonpyeong Island to survey the damage from the hourlong bombardment on Tuesday, which killed two civilians and two South Korean marines.
But North Korea remained defiant, firing off artillery rounds right after the general’s visit.
The rounds did not fall on South Korean territory, but rattled ner-ves on the island nonetheless.
A spokesman for the South Korean Defense Ministry, Kwon Ki-hyeon, said the shots appeared to stay within North Korean territory, suggesting that they had been part of a drill or perhaps an effort to frighten the South Korean garrison on the island, which lies within sight of the North Korean mainland.
News flashes about the new artillery fire set off a brief wave of alarm in Seoul, where Tuesday’s attack has stirred anxiety and outrage.
Local television there has been inundated with images of the damage to the island’s once tranquil fishing town, where rows of homes had collapsed or been blackened by fire.
Most of the island’s 1,600 civilian residents have fled, leaving only a few dozen mostly elderly holdouts, some of whom were shown scurrying into bomb shelters when the artillery was heard Friday.
They told local TV stations that the barrage on Tuesday turned the town into a “sea of fire,” sending stunned and panicked residents running into the streets in confusion.
Video showed shattered furniture and scattered children’s toys amid the rubble, and deserted streets whose only sign of movement was a few stray dogs.
While much of the town was undamaged, the attack seemed aimed at important civilian structures like a supermarket and a post office, the reports said.
The scenes of civilian destruction and of the mothers of the dead civilians wailing at their funerals have driven home the threat posed by the North to a greater extent than previous provocations, like the sinking of a South Korean warship in March, which involved only military casualties.
Many of the rounds shot by the North during the hourlong attack struck Yeonpyeong’s garrison of 1,000 South Korean marines, who are dug in around the island in concrete bunkers and machine-gun nests.
Local TV showed photos taken during the barrage, in which fortified bunkers were engulfed in fireballs and pockmarked by exploding shrapnel.
The renewed shooting and stern warning by the North on Friday have raised concerns here that the North could respond violently to the naval exercises on Sunday.
American officials have been encouraging China to use its influence with North Korea to urge restraint.
On Friday, Mrs. Clinton called her Chinese counterpart, Mr. Yang, American officials said.
“Secretary Clinton urged China to send a clear message that the North’s behavior is unacceptable,” said the State Department’s spokesman, Philip J. Crowley.
Mr. Yang also met on Friday with the North Korean ambassador in Beijing and had telephone conversations with the South Korean foreign minister.
“The pressing task now is to put the situation under control and prevent a recurrence of similar incidents,” Mr. Yang said in a statement.
North Korea represents a difficult foreign policy challenge for China.
Among other things, China continues to stand by its neighbor for fear that its collapse would extend the boundaries of pro-Western South Korea to China’s borders.
“The record is very clear: China is not going to implement any measures that impose any costs on North Korea,” said Daniel Pinkston, North Asia analyst for the International Crisis Group.
“What else is there left for North Korea to do? Missile tests, a nuclear program and now an artillery attack.”
The South Korean government has come under intense criticism domestically for an inadequate retaliation for the attack on Tuesday.
South Korean officials said their forces were unable to fully respond because they had been trained and equipped to thwart an amphibious assault, not a prolonged artillery bombardment.
Only three of the garrison’s half-dozen 155-millimeter cannons were able to shoot back, officials said.
Stung by the criticism, the South Korean president, Lee Myung-bak, ordered reinforcements to Yeonpyeong and four nearby islands, as well as more heavy weapons, and has already replaced his defense minister.
The exercise was announced over the summer without a date’s being set; that announcement was expected around now.
But after North Korea shelled the island, President Obama announced the date, making it a sign of Washington’s resolve to support its ally in Seoul.
In its final form, the joint exercise will take the same shape as had been planned since the summer, according to military officers, and has not been altered by the North Korean attack.
Starting on Sunday, the George Washington, which makes its home port in Yokosuka, Japan, and sails with a complete wing of combat aircraft, will lead four other American surface warships in the exercise with the South Korean Navy.
Smoke is seen rising from North Korean territory on Friday, after an explosion was heard and seen from South Korea’s Yeonpyeong island.
A North Korean navy ship off a North Korean village on Friday, seen from South Korea.
BEIJING — China engaged in a flurry of diplomatic activity on Friday, three days after a North Korean artillery attack on South Korean civilians, but its most public message was directed at the United States, which is about to begin joint exercises with South Korea’s Navy.
In a statement from its Foreign Ministry, China warned against “any military acts in our exclusive economic zone without permission,” the state-run Xinhua news agency reported Friday.
But virtually all the waters to the west of the Korean Peninsula, where the United States said the exercises would take place, lie within that zone, and American naval traffic is far from uncommon there.
Adding yet more tension to the situation, the North’s state-run media also warned that the maneuvers could push the Korean Peninsula closer to “the brink of war.”
The West has hoped that China would use its leverage as the North’s traditional ally to press it to refrain from further attacks, but the Chinese statement on Friday failed even to criticize the North for its shelling on Tuesday of a garrison island that is also home to about 1,350 civilians, mainly fishermen.
The attack killed four people.
The Chinese foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, met with the North Korean ambassador on Friday and spoke by phone with his South Korean and American counterparts, but few details emerged about the content of their conversations.
A State Department spokesman said that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had called Mr. Yang.
Xinhua reported that Mr. Yang stressed that China was “very concerned” about the situation, saying, “The pressing task now is to put the situation under control and prevent a recurrence of similar incidents.”
In a statement about the joint naval exercises, which are scheduled to begin on Sunday, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hong Lei, said: “We hold a consistent and clear-cut stance on the issue. We oppose any party to take any military acts in our exclusive economic zone without permission.”
This introduced into the mix China’s decade-old efforts to equate economic waters, which usually extend about 200 nautical miles off a country’s coast, with territorial waters, which usually reach about 12 nautical miles off a coast.
In 2001, Chinese fighters intercepted and collided with a United States spy plane flying outside territorial waters but inside the economic zone, saying the American plane had violated China’s sovereignty.
A statement from the United States Navy’s Seventh Fleet, issued in apparent anticipation of Chinese complaints about the exercise, listed the number of times American aircraft carriers had operated in the waters west of the Korean Peninsula, including a mission in October 2009.
The statement also noted that American aircraft carriers frequently visited South Korea and conducted port visits, including the aircraft carrier George Washington earlier this year, the John C. Stennis in March 2009, and the Ronald Reagan, the Nimitz and the George Washington in 2008.
The United States, which had already sent the George Washington to the region in response to the North Korean attack, made another show of solidarity with the South on Friday; the commander of American forces in South Korea, Gen. Walter L. Sharp, visited Yeonpyeong Island to survey the damage from the hourlong bombardment on Tuesday, which killed two civilians and two South Korean marines.
But North Korea remained defiant, firing off artillery rounds right after the general’s visit.
The rounds did not fall on South Korean territory, but rattled ner-ves on the island nonetheless.
A spokesman for the South Korean Defense Ministry, Kwon Ki-hyeon, said the shots appeared to stay within North Korean territory, suggesting that they had been part of a drill or perhaps an effort to frighten the South Korean garrison on the island, which lies within sight of the North Korean mainland.
News flashes about the new artillery fire set off a brief wave of alarm in Seoul, where Tuesday’s attack has stirred anxiety and outrage.
Local television there has been inundated with images of the damage to the island’s once tranquil fishing town, where rows of homes had collapsed or been blackened by fire.
Most of the island’s 1,600 civilian residents have fled, leaving only a few dozen mostly elderly holdouts, some of whom were shown scurrying into bomb shelters when the artillery was heard Friday.
They told local TV stations that the barrage on Tuesday turned the town into a “sea of fire,” sending stunned and panicked residents running into the streets in confusion.
Video showed shattered furniture and scattered children’s toys amid the rubble, and deserted streets whose only sign of movement was a few stray dogs.
While much of the town was undamaged, the attack seemed aimed at important civilian structures like a supermarket and a post office, the reports said.
The scenes of civilian destruction and of the mothers of the dead civilians wailing at their funerals have driven home the threat posed by the North to a greater extent than previous provocations, like the sinking of a South Korean warship in March, which involved only military casualties.
Many of the rounds shot by the North during the hourlong attack struck Yeonpyeong’s garrison of 1,000 South Korean marines, who are dug in around the island in concrete bunkers and machine-gun nests.
Local TV showed photos taken during the barrage, in which fortified bunkers were engulfed in fireballs and pockmarked by exploding shrapnel.
The renewed shooting and stern warning by the North on Friday have raised concerns here that the North could respond violently to the naval exercises on Sunday.
American officials have been encouraging China to use its influence with North Korea to urge restraint.
On Friday, Mrs. Clinton called her Chinese counterpart, Mr. Yang, American officials said.
“Secretary Clinton urged China to send a clear message that the North’s behavior is unacceptable,” said the State Department’s spokesman, Philip J. Crowley.
Mr. Yang also met on Friday with the North Korean ambassador in Beijing and had telephone conversations with the South Korean foreign minister.
“The pressing task now is to put the situation under control and prevent a recurrence of similar incidents,” Mr. Yang said in a statement.
North Korea represents a difficult foreign policy challenge for China.
Among other things, China continues to stand by its neighbor for fear that its collapse would extend the boundaries of pro-Western South Korea to China’s borders.
“The record is very clear: China is not going to implement any measures that impose any costs on North Korea,” said Daniel Pinkston, North Asia analyst for the International Crisis Group.
“What else is there left for North Korea to do? Missile tests, a nuclear program and now an artillery attack.”
The South Korean government has come under intense criticism domestically for an inadequate retaliation for the attack on Tuesday.
South Korean officials said their forces were unable to fully respond because they had been trained and equipped to thwart an amphibious assault, not a prolonged artillery bombardment.
Only three of the garrison’s half-dozen 155-millimeter cannons were able to shoot back, officials said.
Stung by the criticism, the South Korean president, Lee Myung-bak, ordered reinforcements to Yeonpyeong and four nearby islands, as well as more heavy weapons, and has already replaced his defense minister.
The exercise was announced over the summer without a date’s being set; that announcement was expected around now.
But after North Korea shelled the island, President Obama announced the date, making it a sign of Washington’s resolve to support its ally in Seoul.
In its final form, the joint exercise will take the same shape as had been planned since the summer, according to military officers, and has not been altered by the North Korean attack.
Starting on Sunday, the George Washington, which makes its home port in Yokosuka, Japan, and sails with a complete wing of combat aircraft, will lead four other American surface warships in the exercise with the South Korean Navy.
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