China mulls impact of Mideast uprisings

By Andrew Higgins and Keith B. Richburg

HONG KONG - Could the popular revolt against authoritarian regimes of the Middle East ever spread to China, the world's most populous nation?
And if so, does the United States have a policy to deal with it?
The ticklish question has been hovering in the background since the "Jasmine Revolution" street uprising toppled the president of Tunisia two weeks ago.
It has only gained in urgency as the demonstrations spread to Yemen, Jordan and then Egypt -- threatening President Hosni Mubarak's near-30-year-grip on power.
A Chinese blogger first posed the query to President Obama's chief Asia expert during a videoconference from the White House Situation Room with eight Mainland bloggers.
"In my view, many Chinese netizens and intellectuals believe that China's future is Tunisia-ization," noted the Beijing-based blogger, 2Keqi, in the web chat with Jeffrey Bader, the National Security Council's senior director for Asian affairs.
"Does the American government make this same assessment and does it have a policy plan" in the event that China takes such a turbulent path?
Bader and another official, Ben Rhodes, deputy NSC adviser for strategic communications, declined to answer directly, instead repeating the administration's oft-stated position about the importance of human rights and the need to let people "realize their own aspirations."
The question came up again last Friday at the White House press briefing, posed to press secretary Robert Gibbs -- who similarly declined to engage.
But at a time when many Americans have come to view China -- with its double-digit economic growth and huge investments in infrastructure and energy technologies -- in terms of the challenges it poses to the United States' position as the world's pre-eminent economic power, many here see the country's closed political system as unsustainable and a key vulnerability restricting its leaders' grand ambition.
"America's understanding of China is very limited," the blogger, 2Keqi, told Bader and Rhodes.
Many Chinese, he added, find it "extremely difficult to accept the idea that the 21st century is China's century."
"I did not expect them to answer. They are professional diplomats," said the Beijing-based blogger Monday in a telephone interview.
He spoke on the condition that his real name not be published, saying he has been targeted in the past by those who disagree with his views.
"I just wanted to convey the message that there are a lot of Chinese netizens who care about this issue," the blogger said.
It is an issue the Chinese authorities clearly care about too.
Chinese Internet users have been largely barred from making comments about the ongoing popular revolt in Egypt, as Beijing's Communist rulers tread a fine line between allowing generally unfiltered news reports of the protests while also discouraging the idea that the uprising may bring democracy to the Arab world's largest country.
Online news sites typically allow readers to have comments and form discussion groups after articles are posted, but that service has been disabled since the Egyptian protests began.
Also, the search engines on some of the most popular micro-blogging sites turned up no results for the words "Egypt," "Cairo," "Tunisia," and "Jasmine Revolution."
Users instead received a message saying the search result could not be displayed "because of the relevant law, regulations and policy."
Even searches for the word "jasmine" turned up no results.
The main Chinese newspapers all carried front-page stories about the protests, including photographs, but largely without any analysis or editorial comment.
Much of the recent coverage has focused on the looting and the breakdown of order in Egyptian cities, without much explanation of the root causes of the unrest.
In the only official commentary on the uprising, the Chinese foreign minister spokesman, Hong Lei, said on Sunday, "Egypt is a friend of China and we hope Egypt will return to social stability and normal order as soon as possible."
One editor of an online news site said the Party's Propaganda Department, China's main censorship organ, asked his outlet only to use news from Egypt provided by Xinhua, the official government news agency.
The one paper that has been offering commentary is the Global Times, the tabloid daily owned by the Communist Party's main propaganda mouthpiece, People's Daily. 
In one editorial Sunday, headlined "Color revolutions will not bring about real democracy," the Global Times said the revolts sweeping the Middle East "are more controversial than those that happened in East Europe after the Cold War."
The paper said "real concerns exist about the potential rise of Islamic fundamentalism in case of a power vacuum in the Middle East."
The Global Times went even further on Monday, with another editorial today saying the revolts in the Middle East were more about Arabs and North Africans rejecting Western interference than embracing democracy.
"The clash between Western entanglement and indigenous identity triggered the demonstrations in Egypt and Tunisia," it said.
Still, some local micro-blogging sites -- the Chinese equivalent of Twitter -- have been following events in Egypt closely, often finding ways around the official controls.
"The Netizens are quite excited by what's happening in Egypt," said Zhang Lifan, a historian who has studied the history of the Chinese Communist Party.
Zhang said he was able to browse through photographs from Egypt and found "those scenes are very similar to what happened in Beijing 20 years ago" -- a reference to the Chinese army's crackdown on pro-democracy students and demonstrators at Tiananmen Square.
He said he was particularly struck by the image of a young Egyptian protestor standing in the street to block an armored vehicle, a pose similar to a Chinese protestor, Wang Weilin, whose dramatic stance in front of a tank became one of the iconic images from the Tiananmen crackdown.
"The waters of the Nile flow into the Yellow river," Zang said.
Still, while some drew parallels between the authoritarian government here in China and those of the Middle East, there remain obvious differences.
Most importantly, the Middle Eastern countries now facing popular unrest all share the same volatile mix of a swelling population of angry youth, widespread unemployment, and governments that lack credibility in the face of economic despair.
China's leaders, by contrast, have staked their legitimacy on the country's double-digit economic growth and three decades of improving living standards.
China's economy recently surpassed Japan's as the world's second largest, behind the United States.
And the Beijing leadership tries to engender patriotic pride and popular support through grandiose national projects, like hosting the 2008 Olympics and the 2010 Shanghai Expo, building high-speed trains, erecting towering skyscrapers and sending Chinese astronauts into space.
The blogger, 2Keqi, was asked in the telephone interview whether he believes China risks a Tunisia-style explosion.
"I will answer this from another perspective," he said.
"Tunisia and Egypt have now become sensitive words" in China.
"Does this not say something?"

China Steps Up Web Censorship

By JEREMY PAGE
BEIJING—Chinese authorities have blocked the word "Egypt" from searches on Twitter-like microblogging sites in an indication of concern among Communist Party leaders that the unrest there could encourage similar calls for political reform in China.
Internet censors also appeared Sunday to have deleted almost all of the comments posted beneath the few limited reports on the unrest—mostly from the state-run Xinhua news agency—which have been published on Chinese news sites in the last few days.
The strict online controls illustrate the party's concern that the Internet is providing China's citizens with a new means of information and organization that could challenge its monopoly on power in the same way as it has other authoritarian governments in recent years.
Chinese authorities also stepped up their efforts to control the Internet after the "color revolutions" in the former Soviet Union in 2003-2005, and the pro-democracy protests in Iran in 2009.
They completely shut down Internet access in the northwestern Chinese region of Xinjiang for several months after riots there in 2009.
They now appear to be tightening media and Internet restrictions in the run-up to once-a-decade leadership succession next year, when President Hu Jintao and six other top leaders are expected to retire from their party posts.
China—which has close diplomatic relations with Egypt and has sold it millions of dollars of weapons—also issued a warning to Chinese citizens there on Sunday, urging them to reconsider their travel plans or seek assistance from the Chinese government in Egypt.
China's state media have provided limited coverage of the unrest in Egypt, including the scores of reported deaths, the cutting of Internet and cellphone access, and President Hosni Mubarak's appointment of a vice president.
Most newspapers, television stations and news portals have stuck closely to the official Xinhua reports, which they haven't featured prominently, while refraining from independent reporting or commentary.
One of the only exceptions was the Global Times, a popular tabloid published by China's Communist Party, which said in a commentary in English and Chinese on Sunday that "color revolutions" couldn't achieve real democracy.
"In the West, democracy is not only a political system, but a way of life. Yet some emerging democracies in Asia and Africa are taking hit after hit from street-level clamor. Democracy is still far away for Tunisia and Egypt. The success of a democracy takes concrete foundations in economy, education and social issues," the commentary said.
"As a general concept, democracy has been accepted by most people. But when it comes to political systems, the Western model is only one of a few options. It takes time and effort to apply democracy to different countries, and to do so without the turmoil of revolution."
Internet censors, meanwhile, appear to have been working hard to ensure that China's army of 457 million Internet users don't provide any independent commentary on the events in Egypt—or comparisons to China.
Searches on Sunday for "Egypt" on microblog functions of Chinese web portals such as Sina.com and Sohu.com revealed only messages saying either that the results couldn't be found, or couldn't be displayed.
"In accordance with the relevant laws, regulations and policies, the search results could not be displayed," said the response on Sina.com's microblogging site, Sina Weibo.
Twitter, Facebook and other foreign social-networking sites are blocked in China, and Internet censors routinely prevent access to other sites they consider politically sensitive or illegal under Chinese law.
But Chinese microblogging services are rapidly becoming a popular alternative source of information, with the number of registered users hitting an estimated 75 million in 2010, up from eight million in 2009, according to a recent report by market-research firm Analysys International.
News portals mostly stuck to Xinhua reports, with at least 53 publishing one on Sunday that said that President Mubarak had appointed a new premier, and included a brief biography of the new appointment, but it made no mention of the unrest.
The Global Times' Chinese site was one of the few that published several brief reports from other sources, saying for example that Israel had boosted security on its borders, and that Mr Mubarak's two sons had arrived in Britain.
However, almost all of those reports had no comments at all beneath them—which is unusual for such a major world news story, unless censors have removed comments because they are deemed too politically sensitive.
China's authorities appear to have grown increasingly concerned about the spread of unauthorized news reporting and commentary through microblogging and other websites, especially those under the control of local, rather than national, authorities.
In November, China's propaganda czars launched a six-month campaign against "fake news," according to a report on Friday in the Press and Publications Report, a journal published by the General Administration of Press and Publication.
It quoted Zhai Huisheng, senior media official in charge of training journalists, saying the campaign involved teams of media officials holding conferences with journalists at provincial, prefectural and city levels.
In another example of tightening restrictions, state media reported this month that local police banned the photocopying of politically sensitive material on the campus of Peking University.
"Materials that express hate against the Party, the State or the social politics are forbidden," reads an order issued by local police to each of the campus's 29 photocopying rooms, according to the Global Times. 
"Do not photocopy. Call the police immediately after [the materials] are found."

China red-faced after footage of new fighter 'was from Top Gun'

China's military have been embarrassed by accusations that instead of filming genuine footage of their latest fighter plane, they used a scene from the film Top Gun.

Tom Cruise plays a maverick airman at an elite school for US Naval aviators.
By Andy Bloxham

The footage showcasing the J-10 fighter, which showed an air-to-air missile destroying another jet, was aired last week during the main evening broadcast of the state-sponsored channel China Central Television.
Bloggers on internet message boards quickly picked up the similarities and the footage was removed from the CCTV website but not before the clip had been copied.
The Wall Street Journal then published a video which compared the two film sequences, with uncanny similarities.
The explosion is so similar that the fireball appears to form the same shapes and near-identical chunks of debris spray from the detonation and travel across the screen in what looks like the same way.
No one from the state broadcaster has admitted to the fraud but, if true, such a famous film would seem a poor choice from which to cull such material.
Top Gun was released in 1986 and was a hit, making a global star of Tom Cruise as the cocky pilot with the nickname Maverick and a co-pilot known as Goose.
It won an Oscar and was nominated for three more and took around £223m at the box office.
However, the success of the film did not -- apparently -- make the promoters of the People's Liberation Army Air Force pause to think before the footage was shown on January 23.
If the footage is a genuine fake, it would not be the first time that subterfuge has been used by China to try to improve its image.
Some of the more spectacular footage of the Beijing Olympic Games' opening ceremony, featuring fireworks creating "footsteps" across the city, were later shown to have been created digitally, and the young singer who starred in it "live" was actually miming to another girl's voice.
In 2007, Xinhua, another Chinese state broadcaster, was accused of using an X-ray image of Homer Simpson, the cartoon character, to depict a genetic link to multiple sclerosis.
Yet China is not alone.
Among other examples, Iran was said to have used Photoshop, the picture editing software, to add extra missiles to publicity footage in 2008.

China could price itself out of all sorts of markets

By Merryn Somerset Webb

On the train a few weeks ago, I sat next to a burly garment supplier.
He spent the entire trip -- when not yelling at his ex-wife-to-be on the phone ("you made your bed love, you lie in it") -- calling clients and telling them that their prices were going up.
Those who asked questions were told that factory prices were rising in China and that they were taking the hit.
End of story.
I told this to a City audience a few days later during a debate with Matt Ridley on whether optimism or pessimism is the correct approach to the future -- only to hear a voice piping up from the floor telling me I knew nothing about inflation in China.
This interruption came from a young dress designer at the back.
She told us that the factories she uses would bump up their prices every couple of months: these days, if you don't take the price you are given on the spot, it goes up in 24 hours.
That's real inflation.
But the interesting bit was that the fast-moving prices have prompted her to do her sums again: she is moving her production back to Europe.
It won't cost less, but it certainly won't cost any more.
It will also allow her to keep an eye on quality -- which has apparently been falling as fast as prices are rising at those Chinese factories.
For more on how fast prices are rising, look at www.shanghaiscrap.com, where you can see pictures of packs of instant noodles in a Shanghai convenience store.
According to the blogger, the clerks aren't bothering to print new price labels for the noodles as prices rise; they simply "cross them out and write in the new [substantially higher] ones".
That's also real inflation.
This is anecdotal evidence but it suggests that, given the wage pressures building behind it, the consumer price index in China might, just might, be a tad higher than the official number of 4.6 per cent suggests.
It also chimes with news of minimum wage rises in Chinese cities: pay is about to rise 20 per cent in Beijing, 10 per cent in Shanghai and 19 per cent in Guangdong.
Shanghai's mayor says this is about "rational income distribution".
But odds are it has something to do with staff shortages (young Chinese workers are becoming more demanding) and the odd strike as well.
Either way, you could make a reasonable argument that 30 years into its 10 per cent a year GDP expansion, China is beginning to price itself out of the low-cost manufacturing market.
Leave out Malaysia and Thailand, says a note from Liberum Capital, and the average worker in China is now more expensive than the average worker in any other emerging Asian economy.
One thing all this should remind us about is the power of demographics.
Years of one-child policies have left the Chinese population nastily unbalanced.
Today, its dependency ratio hovers around 40 per cent.
That's good -- it means 60 per cent of the population is of working age.
But as the only children reach working age and their parents retire, this ratio changes fast: by 2040 it will be well over 50 per cent and by 2050, over 60 per cent.
If employers think young Chinese workers are stroppy now, they should wait until the poor things are trying to support two parents each, as well as their own children.
However, this shift from a nation of the youngish to a nation of the old won't just affect China's economy.
It will, if things work out as they have in the US, affect its stock market, too.
Société Générale has a neat chart that plots the growth rate of retirees in the US against the Shiller price/earnings ratio for the US equity market.
And guess what? It's a pretty good correlation.
When not many people are retiring, the stock market gets more expensive (more people are saving for retirement).
When lots are retiring, it gets cheaper (people take their money out).
The same goes for house prices: working people upsize, retirees downsize so the more retirees you have knocking around, the less likely it is that house prices will rise.
Anyone looking for corroboration of the argument need only look to Japan where the working age population as a percentage of the total population began to fall in the early 1990s -- a time that marked the start of a 20-year grind-down in domestic asset prices.
That doesn't bode well for US asset prices over the next couple of decades given that the working population as a percentage of the total population, having risen from 1990 through to 2008, is now set to fall until some time in the region of 2030.
It bodes really badly for the Chinese stock market where the ratio of working-age people to retirees will shift much faster -- starting in 2014, according to Standard Chartered.
By 2030, the median age in the US is forecast to be 40. In China it will be 41.
Just one more reason to stay out of the Chinese stock market.

China micro-blogging sites censor 'Egypt'

Egyptian police open fire on Cairo protestersBEIJING (AFP) — The word "Egypt" was censored Saturday by several micro-blogging sites in China, where the ruling Communist Party is wary of issues of political reform, demands for democracy and disturbances to public order, including overseas.
On the sina.com and sohu.com sites, the Chinese equivalents of Twitter, which is censored in China, a query with the word "Egypt" returned the response: "According to the laws in force, the results of your search cannot be given."
The Chinese official media, including Xinhua news agency and CCTV, however mentioned the deadly protests in Egypt against the regime of President Hosni Mubarak.
Thousands of demonstrators poured onto Cairo's streets Saturday, demanding Mubarak stand down the day after the veteran leader ordered the army to tackle the protests.
Censorship is widespread in China to prevent any criticism of the government or mention of the issue of human rights.
The web is purged of politically sensitive material and Beijing closely monitors the 450 million Chinese Internet users to avoid organised dissent and prevent them drawing inspiration from abroad.

Business elite waver on China as threat, savior

By ANGELA CHARLTON
DAVOS, Switzerland — The Western business elite can't seem to decide whether China is a savior or a threat.
Nearly everyone speaking at the World Economic Forum this week had something to say about the world's new No. 2 economy.
Some jockeyed for greater access to China's markets, some pleaded for China to let its currency rise and allow more political freedoms.
And Chinese participants said their country's just misunderstood.
"The alternatives should not be conflict or kowtow," Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd said Saturday at the forum in the Swiss Alpine resort of Davos.
He said the West needs to be "frank without being confrontational" with China for the challenging decade ahead.
Li Daokui, director of the Center for China in the World Economy, said the West needs a more realistic image of China and its immense challenges.
It's not just a nation of skyscrapers in Shanghai, but also hundreds of millions people with poor access to drinking water, masses of rural poor, enormous environmental problems, Li said.
He also urged more global patience with China's policy of holding down the value of its currency.
"I think our policy of exchange rate is right," he said.
"Let's wait five or 10 years" before seeing whether the Chinese strategy is right, he said.
"Chinese leaders... have a longer time horizon."
Lawrence Summers, Harvard University president and until last month President Barack Obama's top economic adviser, was unconvinced.
The U.S. business community's view of China "has deteriorated very substantially," and the country is increasingly seen as "representing a major economic threat," he said.
"There are real issues of substance," he said.
Among them, he named intellectual property rights — Obama has pressed China to crack down on the theft of U.S. technology — and China's assertive security stance in East Asia.
While the U.S. struggles with near-chronic unemployment and a continuing housing crisis, China was the first major economy to power out of the global downturn and recently passed Japan as the world's No. 2 economy.
China sent its biggest-ever delegation to Davos to plant its flag on a world stage previously dominated by U.S. and European companies.
"Thank God for China's growth. Thank God that China stimulated its economy during the global financial crisis," Rudd said.
But Rudd, a fluent Mandarin speaker, said the world has huge concerns about how China will deal with its inflation, and urged Beijing to "get the exchange rate right."
John Zhao, CEO of Chinese private equity firm Hony Capital, summed up the Davos elite's relations with China by saying that despite all the attention to Chinese participants, "We're not going to quickly fall in love with each other."

Chinese woman sentenced for U.S. military sales to China

BOSTON (Reuters) -- A Chinese woman who managed a Massachusetts electronics company was sentenced on Friday to three years in prison for conspiring over 10 years to export U.S. military equipment to China, U.S. authorities said.
Yufeng Wei, 46, of Belmont, Massachusetts, was convicted in 2010 of illegally exporting various goods to China, including parts on the U.S. munitions list and export-restricted technology and electronics, and for filing false shipping documents with the U.S. Department of Commerce.
The illegally exported parts were "precisely the [types of] items... that the People's Liberation Army actively seeks to acquire," according to the U.S. Department of Defense.
The Waltham, Massachusetts company Wei managed, Chitron Electronics Inc, known as Chitron-US, was fined $15.5 million.
On Wednesday, Chinese national Zhenzhou Wu, Chitron's owner and Wei's ex-husband, was sentenced to 97 months in prison for his role in the export conspiracy.
The defendants' enterprise involved the use of Chitron-US as a front company for its parent, Chitron Electronics Co Ltd, headquartered in Shenzhen, China, the U.S. Department of Justice said.
Wei procured export-restricted equipment from U.S. suppliers and exported them to China through Hong Kong.
The equipment is used in electronic warfare, military radar, fire control, military guidance and control equipment, missile systems, and satellite communications, the DOJ said.
Chitron marketed electronics to Chinese military factories and military research institutes.
The sentences for Wei and Wu follow two other security cases involving China, just days after the high-profile visit to the United States of Chinese President Hu Jintao.
On Jan. 21, Glenn Shriver of Michigan was sentenced to four years in prison for trying to get a job with the CIA so he could spy for China.
Separately, on Jan. 25, a former Northrup Grumman Corp engineer was sentenced to 32 years in prison for providing secret defense information to China, among other crimes.

CCTV Tries to Pass Off ‘Top Gun’ Clip as Military Drill

By Josh Chin
Beijing has lately stepped up its campaign against the country’s “fake news” scourge, with the General Administration of Press and Publications putting pressure on news organizations to dismiss journalists suspected of doctoring their stories.
Ironically, the latest example of alleged news fakery comes from China’s own state broadcaster, CCTV.
In a development that could further inflame Hollywood’s frustrations with unauthorized reproduction of its intellectual property in China, Chinese netizens are accusing CCTV of repurposing footage from the movie “Top Gun” for use in a news story about an air force training exercise.
As noted yesterday by the blog Ministry of Tofu, the alleged IPR violation, spotted by Internet user “Liu Yi,” took place during a November 23rd evening news broadcast.
CCTV has removed the clip in question from its website, but a copy of the broadcast posted on Chinese video sites does reveal some striking similarities:
CCTV typically posts the full evening news broadcast online, along with individual clips of each story, but a check today of the CCTV website for January 23 revealed only the individual clips.
The full broadcast is missing and there is no link to the air force training story.
This wouldn’t be the first time Chinese media have been caught appropriating fictional material from the U.S. for use in news.
In 2002, the popular Beijing Evening News tabloid translated and published as genuine a satirical news article by The Onion about U.S. Congress threatening to leave Washington D.C. unless the city built them a new building with a retractable roof.
Five years later, the state-run Xinhua news agency infamously used an x-ray image of Homer Simpson’s head to illustrate a story about the discovery of a genetic link to multiple sclerosis.
Contacted by China Real Time, a media relations representative in CCTV’s foreign affairs office, Yin Fan, said the broadcaster had no immediate comment on the accusations.

Facing more assertive China, US and Japan push back in Pacific power tussle

By Eric Talmadge
In this Dec. 10, 2010 photo, USS Cowpens (CG63), right, leads Japan Maritime Self Defense Force's vessels during "Keen Sword" U.S.-Japan joint military exercise over the Pacific Ocean, Friday, Dec. 10, 2010. Further U.S.-Japan drills are being held late January through early February in Japan. Even as American and Chinese leaders talked up the need for closer ties in two high-profile visits this month, the U.S. and its Asian allies are quietly boosting their defenses.
CAMP KENGUN, Japan — Here's the scenario: A southern Japanese island is under attack and American forces are coming to the rescue.
The potential enemy isn't identified on the maps flashing across computer screens, but the elephant in the room is obvious: It's "the big country to the west," says one U.S. military official.
China.
In keeping with the adage of hoping for the best while preparing for the worst, the U.S. and its Asian allies are boosting their defences, even after American and Chinese leaders talked up the need for closer ties in two high-profile visits this month.
In Washington, Chinese leader Hu Jintao received a pomp-filled welcome usually reserved for close allies. Just before, U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates was given similar treatment in Beijing, even getting a look inside China's nuclear warfare headquarters.
But largely outside public view, jockeying between the U.S. and China for strategic advantage in the Pacific is intensifying.
The U.S. has long been the dominant military power in the region, protecting Japan, South Korea and Taiwan and keeping vital shipping lanes open for trade.
China is now emerging as a rival, sending its ships farther out to sea as its military strength grows.
An unusual flurry of activity in the past two months reflects the concern over China's rise:
— As Gates began his tour, an American aircraft carrier, the USS Carl Vinson, and its battle group were taking part in exercises in the East China Sea, where a diplomatic skirmish broke out last fall between Tokyo and Beijing over contested islands.
— The exercises followed a major joint operation with Japan in December — with the USS George Washington carrier group and an amphibious assault ship — to simulate reclaiming a southwestern island and bottling up the Chinese navy.
— As Hu concluded his trip, Japan and the U.S. began the ongoing "Yama Sakura" exercises, a mock-up deployment to repel a full-scale invasion of Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan's four main islands. They end Feb. 3.
U.S. military officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, confirmed the general outlines of the two naval exercises.
The training serves two purposes, said Toshi Yoshihara, an associate professor at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island.
"First, it makes sense for the alliance to send a deterrent signal to China. Second, it is prudent for Washington to reassure Tokyo."
American officials studiously avoid calling China a threat and stress the importance of the recent political overtures.
They say the Kyushu exercises are not directed at any particular adversary.
"It's like a football scrimmage," Lt. Gen. Benjamin Mixon, the commander of the U.S. Army in the Pacific, said at the headquarters for the Kyushu exercises.
"Somebody's got to wear the red shirts."
But Aurelia George Mulgan, a Japan specialist at the Australian Defence Force Academy at the University of New South Wales, said the recent U.S-Japan activity "smacks of a new containment policy."
"It was designed to send a strong message to China that China, and particularly its military, are not going to have it all their own way in this region, and that the more aggressive they get, the stronger the response from Japan and the U.S.," she said.
China says it's not a threat, but its diplomatic and military stance has became increasingly muscular, most notably at sea.
It is developing a stealth fighter jet and an advanced missile that could hold an aircraft carrier battle group at bay.
It also hopes to deploy its first aircraft carriers over the next decade.
Its naval vessels are venturing more frequently into sea lanes around southern Japan.
A flotilla of 10 warships, including advanced submarines and destroyers, passed through the Miyako Strait last April in the biggest transit of its kind to date.
Experts saw it as an attempt by China to test Japan and demonstrate its open water capabilities.
Japan has said it will boost its monitoring of Chinese forces and increase its submarine fleet.
It is also deepening defence ties with not only the United States but also South Korea, Australia and India.
With its swelling trade, China is understandably concerned that it needs to protect its shipping lanes, said Eric Wertheim, editor of the Annapolis, Maryland-based U.S. Naval Institute's Guide to Combat Fleets of the World.
But he also expressed worries about the Chinese military's thinking.
"The Chinese military appears insecure and has a bit of an inferiority complex right now. China appears to have the strong perception that they have been bullied in the past and now that they are strong they can finally get their payback," he said in an email.
"Many in China seem very ready to pick fights over perceived slights."

Karmapa may be a Chinese plant

By MANJEET SEHGAL WARRIOR

Karmapa Ugyen Trinley Dorje

Dharamshala/Shimla -- Himachal Pradesh police today raided the 17th Karmapa’s home in Dharamshala and claimed to have seized six suitcases containing unexplained cash in Indian and foreign currencies that could amount to crores.
Karmapa Ugyen Trinley Dorje, now 25, is the spiritual head of the Karma Kagyu sect of Tibetan Buddhism and has been in Dharamshala since his headline-making escape to India in January 2000, aged 14.
Sources said the government had increasingly curbed the movements of the “Boy Karmapa” over the past few years under suspicion that Beijing had stage-managed his “escape” so he could keep an eye on the Dalai Lama’s activities.
Today’s raids on the Gyuto Tantric Monastic University, where the Karmapa lives, followed yesterday’s seizure of Rs 1.25 crore in Una town from a vehicle that was allegedly carrying some monks to Dharamshala.
“The monastery was raided around 1.30pm. Three currency-counting machines from three local banks have been pressed into service. The counting is still on. The police so far have counted Rs 5 lakh in Indian currency and a huge amount of foreign currency,” Kangra superintendent of police Diljeet Singh Thakur said.
Sources later said some 4,000 Euros had been counted and that the Indian currency could run up to more than Rs 10 crore.
The police are trying to ascertain the source of the cash and also whether the money seized yesterday belonged to the Karmapa.
A close aide of the Karmapa, Rabjaychojan alias Shakti Lama, has been arrested and questioned about the source of the money.
Some of the money is in the currencies of China, Japan, America, Britain, Australia and Thailand, police said.
The Karmapa was said to be inside the monastery during the raids but there was no word from him or any of his aides on the search or the seizures.
Two men, Asutosh and Sanjay, were arrested after yesterday’s seizure of cash, which sources said had been drawn from a private-sector bank in Delhi.
Dorje has been under the security agencies’ scanner since his arrival in India.
He lives in Sidhbari, 10km from the Dalai Lama’s residence.
The Centre has confined the Karmapa’s movements within 15km of his home for sometime, and does not allow him to visit the Dalai Lama too frequently.
“On July 25, 2009, the Karmapa was given only 30 minutes to meet the Dalai Lama. Earlier, three consecutive requests from him to see the spiritual leader were turned down,” a source close to the Dalai Lama said.
Since July 2008, the Centre has refused to let the Karmapa visit other monasteries in Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir that are located close to the China border.
Dorje has also been banned from travelling abroad.
He had toured the US in 2008, when he visited New York and San Francisco in an attempt to raise his international profile.
He is keen to visit America again but the government has not budged.
The Karmapa’s Z-plus security cover was withdrawn a couple of months ago; so he is now guarded by a single police constable instead of 24 security personnel.
Till 2006, he was always escorted by a group of four aides but that was stopped after the security agencies objected.
A month ago, when the Karmapa began building a multi-crore religious structure on a 75-acre site in Kotla, 42km from Dharamshala, the income tax department and security agencies questioned the source of funding. The foreign ministry later ordered the construction stopped.
Followers of the Karma Kagyu sect, one of the four main schools of Tibetan Buddhism, are believed to be the richest among Tibetans.
The Karmapa’s followers often controversially project him as the successor to the Dalai Lama, who heads the Gelug sect.
The Karmapa’s official seat is the Rumtek monastery in Sikkim, but Dorje cannot go there because of the emergence of a rival Karmapa.
If the government keeps refusing to allow him to travel abroad, Dorje will likely have to spend the rest of his life in Sidhbari, sources said.

Chinese satirical cartoon blocked by government

China's leaders are scrambling to contain public anger over issues including official abuses and rising costs

BEIJING (AFP) — A grisly cartoon that marks the upcoming Year of the Rabbit by portraying a bunny revolt against brutal tiger overlords has proven an online hit, with its thinly veiled stab at China's communist rulers.
The "South Park"-style video by animator Wang Bo, in which persecuted rabbits overthrow the ruling tigers, went viral on video-sharing sites in recent days thanks to its gruesome depiction of a number of recent scandals.
It was unavailable on websites in China Thursday, apparently deleted by skittish government censors.
Wang's cartoon begins with baby rabbits who die horribly from drinking "Sanlu" milk.
Sanlu is the now-defunct Chinese dairy giant that was at the centre of a huge scandal in 2008 over tainted milk.
The milk was blamed for killing six infants and making another 300,000 ill.
In the video, rabbit parents are then savagely beaten by tiger thugs when they complain, or are cruelly run over by cars and killed -- in a clear reference to two notorious recent cases.
In one, the son of a police official in northern China stood trial this week accused of striking and killing a pedestrian while driving drunk.
He reportedly tried to escape arrest by invoking his father's name.
In another, a village chief was last month crushed by a truck.
Villagers allege he was killed by local officials to silence his complaints about a land seizure by authorities.
The bunnies in the video are a reference to the Chinese Year of the Rabbit, which begins on February 3, while 2010 was the Year of the Tiger.
After an orgy of violence as the bunnies rise up, the video ends with a character saying: "It will really be an interesting year."
China operates a huge system of online censorship that deletes content considered a threat to the primacy of the ruling Communist Party.
But the video remains available abroad on YouTube -- which is blocked in China -- at www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnw5BvxSDmM&feature=player_embedded.
Fearful of social unrest China's leaders are scrambling to contain public anger over a range of hot-button issues including official abuses and rising costs of food and housing.
This week, Premier Wen Jiabao paid an unprecedented visit to an office in Beijing where members of the public can petition the government over their grievances.
Wen pledged the government would go all-out to address public concerns, but Human Rights Watch dismissed his appearance as a political charade.
China annually sees tens of thousands of sometimes violent protests by ordinary citizens, often related to illegal land seizures, evictions and home demolitions by officials and businesses seeking to redevelop land.
A scene in the online video depicts tigers knocking over rabbits' homes with bulldozers.

China's new missile capability raises tensions

BY YOICHI KATO

Adm. Robert F. Willard 

China has successfully developed new ballistic missiles that can destroy aircraft carriers, according to the commander of the U.S. Pacific Command.
Coupled with China's growing submarine fleet, it is the weapon system that the United States is most concerned about.
Combined, these two weapon systems could pose a serious threat to the freedom of movement of the U.S. Navy in the Western Pacific and even neutralize its power projection capabilities.
This is also a grave concern for Japan.
The U.S. Department of Defense explained in its annual report to Congress last year that China is developing an anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM) based on an existing medium-range ballistic missile known as the CSS-5, or DF-21.
It is mainly intended to deter and attack U.S. aircraft carriers from a great distance.
This ASBM is called DF-21D in the United States.
Adm. Robert F. Willard, commander, U.S. Pacific Command, said in a recent interview with The Asahi Shimbun, "An analogy using a Western term would be 'initial operational capability' (IOC)," explaining the status of the development of DF-21D.
According to Andrew Erickson, an associate professor at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, "IOC" means "it's already tested successfully and it's already deployed."
He went on to say: "At least one Chinese unit must have already received the DF-21D. While doubtless an area of continuous challenge and improvement, the DF-21D's C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, information, surveillance, and reconnaissance) infrastructure must be sufficient to support basic carrier strike group targeting capabilities. Based on previous deployment patterns, ever-better performing versions of the DF-21D will likely be deployed in 'waves' to different units until the majority of ASBMs reach a level of capability the People's Liberation Army (PLA) deems sufficient to meet its present deterrence objectives."
The DOD report says "the missile has a range in excess of 1,500 kilometers."
The first island chain, which runs from the Japanese archipelago through Taiwan and the Philippines down to the South China Sea, is within the range.
This island chain is one of the demarcation lines that China often refers to as its own defense perimeter.
While a regular ballistic missile flies in a constant parabolic orbit once it is launched, the ASBM can change its flight path using an on-board seeker to home in on the moving target.
It is also designed to disperse submunitions over the target to maximize the area of impact and damage.
If one hit the flight deck of an aircraft carrier, fighter jets and other aircraft would not be able to take off or land -- even if the ship survived the attack itself.
The enormous power projection capabilities of the aircraft carrier would be lost.
The ASBM is the main pillar of the weapon systems, along with submarines, which support China's "anti-access/area denial" (A2/AD) capabilities.
China decided to acquire such capabilities after it was forced to face up to the power of U.S. aircraft carriers during Taiwan's presidential election in 1996.
China staged a large-scale military exercise and fired missiles into the East China Sea off the coast of Taiwan, apparently to intimidate the candidate and his supporters, who were inclined toward independence from mainland China.
The Clinton administration dispatched two carrier strike groups to the vicinity of Taiwan to provide some sort of balance, thereby putting pressure on China and offering reassurance to the Taiwanese population.
China realized it lacked the military capability to prevent such intervention by the United States and started to develop its own A2/AD capabilities mainly against U.S. aircraft carriers.

U.S. response
China's growing A2/AD capabilities have already had a serious impact on the freedom of movement of the U.S. Navy.
Japanese government sources said they heard U.S. government officials say that the United States would not be able to conduct "the same kind of operations it did back in 1996" because it would involve too much risk now.
Aircraft carriers symbolize U.S. power projection capabilities and deterrence.
If one of those carriers were to be attacked, much less sunk, the magnitude of the shock would be immense. For U.S. friends and allies like Japan, the credibility of U.S. military capability would be shaken at its foundations.
The offsetting strategy that the United States has come up with is called "joint air-sea battle concept."
It was first introduced in the Quadrennial Defense Review, which was released in February last year. According to this strategic document, "The concept will address how air and naval forces will integrate capabilities across all operational domains -- air, sea, land, space, and cyberspace -- to counter growing challenges to U.S. freedom of action."
A Japanese government source explains how this concept could be translated into an actual scenario of defense of Japan.
If the deterrence broke down and China launched missile attacks on Japan, high value U.S. units would move or stay beyond the enemy's threat ranges.
After the reorganization of the units, both air and naval forces would jointly launch counterattacks.
The report to Congress of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, released last November, points out that the PLA has the capability to stage an attack with conventional missiles and close down five of six main U.S. air bases in East Asia.
The five facilities are the Misawa, Yokota and Kadena air bases in Japan and Osan and Kunsan in South Korea.
The only U.S. Air Force base that is currently free from theater ballistic missile threats is Andersen in Guam.
Toshi Yoshihara, an associate professor at the U.S. Naval War College, says: "Most people are beginning to agree that we've lost our sanctuary in the Ryukyu Island chain. Some would argue that the high volume of precision strike capabilities that the Chinese could bring to bear in terms of ballistic and cruise missiles, could render American access to Kadena obsolete."
He went on: "That is why the air-sea battle concept has come into currency in the United States. Part of it is a response to the presumption that the United States will have difficult access to these bases that were long considered sanctuaries. The United States, in conjunction with Japan, would have to fight back and regain command of the commons and access to these bases."

Japan's response
Last December, Japan released its new 10-year defense plan, or National Defense Program Guidelines (NDPG).
The document does not, however, offer any assessment of China's enhanced A2/AD capabilities in the Western Pacific.
Nor does it provide any reference to the air-sea battle concept.
One Ministry of Defense official offered the following explanation: "The U.S. concept is not yet worked out in detail."
Some people in the Japanese government even express skepticism as to if and when the concept will actually be materialized into policy and plan by the United States.
Another government source points out a gap between the U.S. air-sea battle concept and Japan's "dynamic defense" concept, which made its debut in the revised NDPG.
While the U.S. concept premises a high-end war, "dynamic defense" is devised to deal with mainly what officials call a "gray zone conflict" which is neither a full-blown war nor perfect peace.
China's recent provocative actions in the South China Sea and North Korea's shelling of an island off South Korea are cases in point.
Even though the United States emphasizes the importance of Japan's active participation in this new strategy, it does not seem to have a clear view on how to coordinate with Japan's new defense strategy or what kind of role Japan is expected to play.
When asked about Japan's role right after he gave a speech at Keio University in Tokyo earlier this month, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates only answered: "Our expectation of Japan is, first of all, they will do what is necessary in terms of their own interests, to defend Japan. But, we also welcome their broader interpretation of Japan's international responsibilities as well."
The policy of Japan's Defense Ministry is in line with the view espoused by Gates.
The policy focus of Japan is in the following three areas: ballistic missile defense, anti-submarine warfare and a hardening of bases against possible attacks.
The Defense Ministry does not believe it is effective or necessary to design an artificial bridge over the conceptual gap between the strategic plans of two countries, because as Japan makes progress on these three focus areas, Tokyo automatically can meet the expectations of the United States.
Jim Thomas, former deputy assistant secretary of defense and currently vice president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) in Washington, D.C., says Japan can make two major contributions in complementing the U.S. air-sea battle plan.
"First," he said, "Japan could develop its own A2/AD defensive barrier to preclude hostile forces from threatening its southwestern islands, for example by stationing Ground Self-Defense Force anti-ship missiles on the islands to create a 'no go zone' for hostile naval ships.
Second, he went on, "Japan can improve its ability to receive and support reinforcing U.S. forces in crisis, for example by 'hardening' more airbases, improving its defenses against missiles and hostile aircraft, and establishing stockpiles of precision munitions, jet fuel and other needed materials in secure underground caches."
The situation is beginning to echo the Cold War era, when Japan could make substantial contributions to U.S. strategy of containing Soviet Union by just working on a "three straits blockade" for Japan's own defense.

Indian gets 32 years in jail for selling defense designs to China

CNN

A former B-2 Bomber engineer has been sentenced to 32 years in prison for selling secret defense designs to China.
Noshir Gowadia, 66, of Maui, Hawaii, was sentenced late Monday for sharing classified defense information with China, illegally exporting military technical data, money laundering, filing false tax returns and other offenses.
"Mr. Gowadia provided some of our country's most sensitive weapons-related designs to the Chinese government for money," said David Kris, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's National Security Division.

U.S. Doubts ’99 Jet Debris Gave China Stealth Edge

By ELISABETH BUMILLER

An American F-117 aircraft was shot down over Serbia in 1999.
WASHINGTON — Pentagon officials said Tuesday that they were unsure if some of the technology in China’s prototype stealth fighter jet had come from the wreckage of a first-generation American stealth fighter shot down over Serbia in 1999, but they expressed doubt that much could have been gleaned from the debris of a plane developed in the 1970s.
Pentagon officials did say they believe that the Chinese picked up pieces of the plane, an F-117 Nighthawk, which had been strewn over a wide area of farmland some 30 miles west of Belgrade, in the NATO bombing campaign during the Kosovo war.
“But at this point, it’s hard to imagine that a great deal of applicable and useful information could have been culled from the site,” said an Air Force official, who asked for anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about military intelligence.
At the same time, Chinese defense officials and military analysts told the Chinese state-run newspaper, Global Times, that China had developed the new stealth fighter, called the J-20, which was unveiled and flight-tested this month, by adopting “technological innovations.”
They said the jet was not copied from American fighter planes.
The Chinese government made no official statement on the origins or capabilities of the J-20.
The Pentagon was reacting to comments from Balkan military officials, who were quoted by The Associated Press on Sunday as saying that the Chinese had in all probability gleaned some of their technology for the J-20 from the downed F-117.
“We believe the Chinese used those materials to gain an insight into secret stealth technologies,” Adm. Davor Domazet-Loso, Croatia’s military chief of staff during the Kosovo war, told The A.P.
Nighthawks, first put into service in 1983, were the world’s first radar-evading stealth fighters, and their radar-absorbent coating theoretically should have made them difficult for the Serbians to detect.
But Air Force investigators believed that Yugoslavia jury-rigged its system of radars and communications and used a Soviet-built SA-3 surface-to-air missile to shoot down the plane.
It was the first one of the Nighthawks to be hit; its pilot ejected and was rescued.
Admiral Domazet-Loso also told The A.P. that Serbian intelligence had reported that Chinese agents had crisscrossed the crash site and had bought up pieces of the Nighthawk collected as souvenirs by local farmers.
In a development that further fueled suspicions about China, on Monday a federal judge in Hawaii sentenced a former American stealth bomber engineer, Noshir Gowadia, to 32 years in prison for selling stealth missile technology to China.
China’s military buildup has increasingly worried the Pentagon, although officials in both the United States and China say the Chinese are a generation or two behind the American military.
The J-20 caused an uproar two weeks ago when the Chinese sent it on its first test flight, 15 minutes long, a few hours before Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates met in Beijing with President Hu Jintao of China.
On a visit meant to smooth over rocky relations between the American and Chinese armed forces, the flight was seen as an unusually bold show of force.
Pentagon officials would not address speculation that the J-20 looked similar to the American F-22 Raptor, the world’s most advanced stealth fighter.
Col. Dave Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman, also questioned what China’s 15-minute flight proved.
“The fact that it flew doesn’t have anything to do with stealth,” he said.

China Plans To Create The World’s Largest City

By Jetpacker

With a population of more than 1.3 billion the Chinese aren’t really known for doing things on a small scale.
 So it should come as no surprise that China plans to create world’s largest city.
What is a surprise, however, is just how big.
This new megalopolis will cover over 16,000 square miles.
 That makes it 26 times bigger than the Greater London metropolitan area and twice the size of the entire country of Wales.
It will be home to 42 million people, which means if this city was its own country, it would effectively replace Argentina as the 32nd largest country in the world.
Sounds like an ambitious plan, but we’re only six years away from seeing it realized. 
That’s because this mega-city already exists… sort of.
The idea is to merge all nine cities around the Pearl River Delta (under the aptly-named plan, “Turn The Pearl River Delta Into One”) and connect them via power and water, telecommunications networks and 29 new rail lines.
That includes the cities of Guangzhou and Shenzhen, which are the second and third largest cities in China, with populations of 11.7 million and 8.9 million, respectively.
This new city hasn’t been named yet, but we think Kung Wow That’s A Lot Of People is fitting.

A musical insult

New York Post

Chinese pianist Lang Lang painted the ivories red in the White House at last week's state dinner, playing an anti-American song for President Obama.
Lang chose a tune from a propaganda flick about the Korean War, in which heroic and outnumbered Chinese troops mow down the American "jackal."
The selection, "My Motherland," includes idyllic lines about China and the violent couplet: "But if the jackal comes/ What greets it is the hunting rifle."
Good grief.
And that's just what their pianists are saying.
But Lang isn't alone: Communist mandarins have been working overtime to humiliate the US.
They're pulling it off, too.
When Obama traveled to Copenhagen in 2009 to seal a climate pact, Chinese leaders abjectly humiliated him before sinking the deal.
More pointedly, Chinese officials waited until Defense Secretary Robert Gates' visit to the country this month to unveil a stealth fighter jet -- as obnoxious a snub as can be imagined.
Except, of course, for Lang Lang's White House diss.
The song, he said afterward, showed world leaders that "our China is formidable, that our Chinese people are united."
Though he assured fans he chose the song himself, it's unthinkable he would have performed it without Beijing's explicit approval.
So China has embarrassed Obama abroad and hit him at home, taking their struggle to Steinway & Sons.
This time they came into our house -- literally Obama's home, and metaphorically the seat of American power.
What is most astonishing is that Obama has turned the other cheek so often he's spinning like a top.
If he thinks US-Chinese relations are well-served by such obsequiousness, he's wrong.
Just as he's wrong if he thinks the rest of the world isn't paying attention to this accretion of humiliations.
He needs to push back.

A State Insult with Chinese Characteristics

By Nicholas Eberstadt
A state banquet was scene to a triumph of sorts for a newly assertive, and more nakedly anti-American, strain in Chinese foreign policy.

How to evaluate the results of last week’s China-U.S. summit in Washington?
Improbably, the key for the entire event may lie in what is usually the least memorable portion of these carefully choreographed occasions: the cultural program at the concluding state banquet.
During the dinner’s musical interlude and following a duet with American jazz musician Herbie Hancock, Chinese pianist Lang Lang treated the assembled dignitaries to a solo of what he described as “a Chinese song: ‘My Motherland.’”
The Chinese delegation was clearly delighted: Chinese President and Communist Party chief Hu Jintao, stone-faced for many of his other photo ops in Washington, beamed with pleasure upon hearing the melody and embraced Lang Lang at the song’s conclusion.
President Obama, for his part, amiably praised Lang Lang for his performance and described the event as "an extraordinary evening."
But what, exactly, is this “gorgeous” and “beautiful” (Hu’s words) tune that so entranced China’s visiting leadership?
“My Motherland” is not a “Chinese song” in any ordinary meaning of the term.
Instead, it is a Mao-era propaganda classic: the theme from "Triangle Hill" (Shangganling), a film in which heroic Chinese forces fight, kill, and eventually beat Americans in pitched battle during the Korean War.
“My Motherland” epitomizes the “Resist America, Aid [North] Korea” campaign that Beijing embraced during and after the Korean War.
It celebrates Sino-American enmity.
The gist of the tune can be seen in its lyrics:

When friends are here, there is fine wine

But if the wolves come

What greets it is the hunting gun.

(Two guesses who “the wolves” are.)
“My Motherland” is still famous in China; indeed, it is well-known to practically every Chinese adult to this very day.
Unfortunately, this political anthem and its significance were evidently unknown to the many members of the administration’s China team—the secretary and deputy secretary of State, the assistant secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific, and the National Security Council’s top two Asia experts—who were on hand at the state dinner and heard this serenade.
Clueless about the nature of the insult, they did not know to warn the president that he would embarrass himself and his country by not only sitting through the song, but by congratulating Lang Lang for it afterward.
Although Americans are often tone-deaf to cadences of symbolism in international relations, the Chinese are not.
And for Chinese audiences, the symbolism of performing “My Motherland” to a host of uncomprehending barbarians in the White House itself hardly required explanation.
This was a triumph of sorts for a newly assertive, and more nakedly anti-American, strain in Chinese foreign policy.
The episode has reportedly already gone viral over the Chinese Internet, where the buzz on this crude and deliberate snub is overwhelmingly and enthusiastically positive.
Hu can thus return home confident his visit to America will widely be regarded as a success domestically— for reasons his American counterparts do not yet seem to comprehend.
The “My Motherland” incident, for its part, may only be a foretaste of what lies ahead in U.S.-China relations. Note, for example, this week’s New York Times front-page story “China Grooming Deft Politician as Next Leader,” announcing Xi Jinping, the Chinese vice president and politburo member, as heir presumptive to Hu Jintao.
Xi is lauded as “a brilliant politician” who “came to hate ideological struggles” and is known for “his conciliatory leadership style.”
This is the same urbane pragmatist who delivered a speech in Beijing last October commemorating China’s role in the Korean War, a war Xi described as “imposed by the imperialist aggressors,” while Chinese and North Korean troops were waging “a war of justice to defend peace.”
Xi even trotted out the long-discredited Communist lie that Americans used germ warfare in the Korean conflict.
This Orwellian rendition of the origins and conduct of the Korean War augurs ill for U.S.-China relations on many counts (not the least of these being the prospect of cooperation on denuclearization in North Korea—in Xi’s telling, the supposed victim of a U.S. surprise attack in 1950).
Xi's diatribe reveals a lingering and deep-seated animosity toward the United States, and suggests that China’s rising generation of rulers will be less shy about advertising (and perhaps acting upon) such sentiments than their predecessors.
If American policy makers are to avoid unpleasant surprises in their dealings with China in the years ahead, they must pay far more attention to official Chinese pronouncements, commentary, and doctrine.
All too often, American security specialists—and even China watchers—are inclined to disregard official Chinese speechifying as so much boring palaver.
The problem is that in a controlled society, official words matter.
Sometimes, even songs do.

Praise in China for Lang Lang's chauvinist White House tune

BEIJING (AFP) — Chinese web users are acclaiming pianist Lang Lang's choice of tune for a White House state dinner given in honour of President Hu Jintao -- a patriotic theme song from an anti-US war film.
The 28-year-old Chinese virtuoso, who divides his time between China and the United States, has given no indication that he was aware of the nationalistic tinge to his choice at last Wednesday's dinner entertainment.
But web users in China hailed Lang Lang as a true patriot for playing "My Motherland", the theme of a famous 1956 Chinese film called "Battle on Shangganling Mountain" set during the Korean War.
The movie of the Battle of Triangle Hill, as it became known, features Chinese troops enduring huge hardship before reinforcements arrive and rout their American enemies.
"It's deeply meaningful to play this in the United States, but I don't know if the Americans can understand? Ha ha," one web user said on leading portal sina.com.
"You really voiced our thoughts," another wrote.
"We do not want to see war, but we are really not afraid of war, and to defend our homeland, we are really not afraid of any great powers."
Others wondered if the pianist was aware of the song's history.
"Congratulations!" one said.
"On a separate issue, before picking 'My Motherland', did you know it was the theme tune for 'Battle on Shangganling Mountain'?"
On his blog, Lang Lang gushed about his black-tie evening at the White House in the company of Hu and President Barack Obama.
He played the piece solo after a piano four-hands with US jazz legend Herbie Hancock.
He wrote that playing "My Motherland" in front of so many dignitaries "seemed like I was telling them about the power of China and the unity of the Chinese".
"I felt deeply honoured and proud," he said, without revealing any awareness that his choice might have been a political snub to his US hosts.

Chinese pianist performs anti-American anthem at White House dinner in front of Obama

By Daniel Bates In New York

US President Barack Obama hosts a State Dinner in honour of China's President Hu Jintao at the White House in Washington on January 19

Royal Australian Regiment at night during the Korean War in August 1952
A Chinese pianist struck a sour note at a White House state dinner with a rendition of a well-known anti-American anthem.
With the Chinese and U.S. presidents among the dozens of dignitaries watching, Lang Lang belted out ‘My Motherland’, the theme tune to the Chinese-made Korean War film ‘Battle on Shangangling Mountain’.
The song has been a propaganda tool in China for decades and includes a disparaging reference to Americans as ‘jackals’ who will be shot with hunting rifles.
It is likely that Chinese President Hu Jintao and his delegation would have picked up on the reference, even if Barack Obama and the rest of the Americans did not at the time.
Speaking afterwards Lang Lang made no apology for his choice.
‘Playing this song praising China to heads of state from around the world seems to tell them that our China is formidable, that our Chinese people are united; I feel deeply honored and proud,’ he said.
Lang Lang’s performance came at the state dinner for President Hu during his recent official visit to the US.
It referred to a 1952 battle during the Korean War in which Chinese forces fought off repeated American and Korean attacks on Triangle Hill in Kimhwa, North Korea.
Four years later the events were turned into a Chinese-made film called ‘Battle on Shangangling Mountain’ which portrays a group of Chinese troops keeping the enemy at bay until reinforcements arrive.
The main song is ‘My Motherland’ which is sung by a young woman to injured troops includes a number of controversial lyrics including: ‘When friends are here, there is fine wine / But if the jackal comes / What greets it is the hunting rifle.’
The ‘jackal’ in the song is the United States.
The unabashed show of patriotism brought a strong reaction from some Chinese.
‘Those American folks very much enjoyed it and were totally infatuated with the melody! The US is truly stupid!!’ wrote one China-based blogger.
Yang Jingduan, a Chinese psychiatrist now living in Philadelphia, added: ‘’My Motherland’ having been played at the White House will be seen as a propaganda triumph in China.
‘In the eyes of all Chinese, this will not be seen as anything other than a big insult to the U.S.
‘It’s like insulting you in your face and you don’t know it, it’s humiliating."
But another Chinese blogger said: ‘Suppose for a moment that Obama was invited to a banquet in China, and he invited an American artist who had performed in China for many years to play an American war song against China, what kind of reaction do you think the Chinese government and people would have?’
It is not clear if Lang Lang’s choice was indeed his own selection, although it is unlikely the Chinese ruling CCP party would have been unaware.
In interviews he claimed he was motivated by nothing more than national pride.
‘I thought to play ‘My Motherland’ because I think playing the tune at the White House banquet can help us, as Chinese people, feel extremely proud of ourselves and express our feelings through the song. I think it’s especially good,’ he said.
‘Also, I like the tune in and of itself, every time I hear it I feel extremely moved.’
The White House declined to comment on the choice of the song.

MY MOTHERLAND: THE LYRICS

Large billowing waves on this big river, Wind blowing the fragrant paddies of both banks, There is my house on the bank,

Where I can hear the usual boatman's song As the boat with white sail passes by.

This is my beautiful Motherland, The land of my birth.

On this vast expanse of land, Everywhere is beautiful scenery.

A damsel is like a flower, That refreshes youthful mind, Scaling heaven and earth, Waking the slumbering mountain, As the river changes the scenery.

This heroine Motherland Is where I was brought up, In this ancient land of youthful strength.

Good mountain, water and place, That radiate tranquillity and happiness.

There are good wines for friends who come, And if there be wolves and jackals, We greet them with hunting rifle.

This is my big and powerful Motherland The land of my birth.

On this vast land peace radiates!

Heroic Naturalists or Imperialist Dogs?

By RICHARD CONNIFF
A male snub-nosed golden monkey.









The French missionary and naturalist Père Armand David, as himself, and in disguise, right.
What does it mean to discover a species?
Who should get the credit for it?
Why did early naturalists think it worth risking their lives, and often losing them, to ship home the first specimens of a previously unknown butterfly or bat?
These turn out to be tangled questions, and it is easy to get stuck on the thorns.
Not long ago, for instance, I wrote that a 19th-century French missionary and naturalist in China, Père Armand David, had “discovered” the snub-nosed golden monkey.
A reader sent me this somewhat testy comment: “The answer to the question ‘who discovered it’ is actually the Chinese.”
Père David had merely “observed it and introduced it (and many other animals) to the West and into the Western zoological system.”
My irritated reader had a point, of a misguided sort.
It’s common these days to dismiss the scientific classification and naming of “new” species as just one more Western appropriation of other peoples’ natural resources, and the golden monkey can seem like a particularly egregious instance. Europeans first saw the species in the form of images in Chinese paintings and porcelains.
But it looked so odd, with a fringe of flame red hair around its bluish-white face, that they mistook it for a figment of the Chinese imagination.
David himself may never actually have seen these mountain-dwelling monkeys in the wild.
Instead, his Chinese hunters brought him six specimens in the course of a long and productive expedition into western Sichuan province.
David shipped the specimens back to Paris, along with more than 100 other mammal species.
There, in an act of blithe cultural hodgepodgery, a French naturalist described the golden monkey in a scientific journal and gave it the species name roxellana to commemorate the Ukrainian wife of an Ottoman Turkish sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, because monkey and wife both had distinctive up-turned noses. You can see how this might leave people in China feeling a little left out.
Nor were they alone.
The truth is that many of the species discovered by early naturalists had already been known to local people, sometimes in great detail, long before outsiders arrived to describe them scientifically.
Moreover, the naturalists often depended on knowledgeable locals to show them what was there, and seldom gave proper credit for the help.
But to call this local knowledge “discovery” is like saying Newton didn’t discover gravity, because people already knew that things have a way of falling down.
The key to scientific discovery is making knowledge available to people everywhere, usually by publishing a detailed description in a scientific journal.
It means saying exactly how the proposed species resembles other related species, and how it’s different, thereby assigning it to a place in a universal system of classification. (Even highly-trained scientists can sometimes gawp at a species for a century or two before they notice the differences. Thus scientists have only lately confirmed that the African elephant is actually two distinct species, the savanna elephant and the forest elephant. Technically speaking, the latter species was only discovered in 2010.)
Discovery also means giving your find a name, by genus and species.
The Latinate construction of these names can sometimes sound as if they are meant to exclude rather than inform. (The soldier fly Parastratiosphecomyia stratiosphecomyioides comes stumbling to mind).
But before this system of species names came into existence, people could hardly communicate about the plants and animals in their own backyards — one town’s “dandelion” was another’s “pissabed” — much less from one country to another.
After, they could start to see and talk about connections among species at opposite ends of the Earth.
The Chinese meanwhile had abundant local knowledge of their plants and animals, and Western explorers gladly took advantage of it, according to Fa-Ti Fan, a historian at Binghamton University and author of “British Naturalists in Qing China.”
But, Fan writes, the Chinese “did not have a discipline, a system of knowledge, or even a coherent scholarly tradition equivalent to Western notions of ‘natural history,’ ‘botany,’ or ‘zoology.’ ”
And in that context, Père Armand David’s discoveries — unencumbered by asterisks or quotation marks — were crucial.
He certainly displayed plenty of colonial arrogance, flouting local lords and their rules. (He had come to China “pursued with the thought of dying while working at the saving of infidels,” and there was a certain unholy insouciance about the way he drew his gun on would-be bandits.)
But long before the Chinese themselves noticed, he warned that the plundering of their forests would wipe out “hundreds of thousands of animals and plants given to us by God,” leaving behind a landscape of horses, pigs, wheat and potatoes.
If David had not brought them to the attention of the outside world, many of his new species — among them the giant panda — would in fact now be lost.
One of his least heroic discoveries, now known as Père David’s deer, or Elaphurus davidianus, was described on the basis of skins he probably obtained illegally, from the imperial hunting grounds south of Beijing.
That find led European diplomats to press for live specimens to be shipped back to Europe for breeding. When Chinese soldiers bivouacking on the imperial hunting grounds later shot and ate the last remaining deer there, the species was extinct in China.
But because of reintroductions from Europe — and the work of Père David — these deer in fact now number about a thousand in their native habitat.
Discoveries by another early naturalist in China, Patrick “Mosquito” Manson, later enabled the government there to wipe out the hideously debilitating disease called elephantiasis.
His work also led to the eradication or control of malaria in countries around the world.
Likewise, work by early discoverers recently enabled researchers in China to pin down the source of SARS to four species of horseshoe bat in the genus Rhinolophus.
A simple-minded story line about imperialists appropriating natural resources — with great white hunters playing out their heroic exploits at the expense of local cultures — may have its revisionist appeal.
But it’s at least equally important to recognize that the work of early naturalists continues to save lives and protect resources today.
The best evidence of its value is that every country from China to Gabon to Colombia now employs this scientific system of discovery and classification as a better way to understand not just our world, but theirs.

China and India could not go to war: Lee Kuan Yew

By P. S. Suryanarayana

Singapore's elder-statesman Lee Kuan Yew does “not think there will be a conflict between China and India” and between China and the United States at any time in the foreseeable future.
In a series of interviews to a group of journalists from The Straits Times here, released by Mr. Lee himself in the form of a book, he addressed, among a variety of subjects, serious issues concerning China, India, and the U.S., collectively characterised as “giants”.
The book, Lee Kuan Yew Hard Truths to Keep Singapore Going, was released late last week.
“China and India cannot fight a big war because they both have nuclear weapons,” said Mr. Lee, noting that even the long Himalayan border between the two countries was not worth a fight.
And, “what are the Americans going to fight China over?”
At the same time, the Chinese, in his view, “need not fight” the U.S. for “control” over East Asia.
“Slowly and gradually [the Chinese] will expand their economic ties with [the other countries] in East Asia and offer them their market of 1.3 billion consumers.”
Cautioning against the tendency to “talk about India and China in the same breath”, he said New Delhi “is a bigger player”, nonetheless, “than the whole of Asean [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] put together”. India “is growing at about two-thirds the rate of China”.
Despite this, “they [the Indians] are a counterweight [to China] in the Indian Ocean”.
In this overall context, he would want India to be “part of the Southeast Asia balance of forces”.
On the rising profile of ethnic Indians in Singapore, Mr. Lee said: “We are now getting high-quality Indians [as new citizens of the City-State]... It is stupid to reject them — IT specialists, banking specialists. And, they are going to have bright kids. They [the ethnic Indians] might be nine per cent [of Singapore's population today]. They used to be seven per cent... My feeling is the trend [of new influx] will last many years because the Indian cities will not catch up with Singapore for a long time.”

Senators accuse China of violating sanctions against Iran

By Josh Rogin

Just before Chinese President Hu Jintao's arrival in Washington, two leading senators accused China of violating sanctions against Iran and warned President Obama that Congress will go after Chinese companies if the abuses don't stop.
"We appreciate China's decision to support U.N. Security Council Resolution 1929, as well as China's backing of prior U.N. sanctions against Iran. However, we believe that China's record on sanctions enforcement and nonproliferation is inadequate and disappointing," Sens. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) wrote on Jan. 14 in a previously unreported letter.
The senators cited numerous reports that China is supplying crucial materials to aid Iran's nuclear and missile programs and alleged that Beijing continues to give monetary and material support to Iran's energy sectors, including the delivery of refined petroleum products, which could provoke penalties under U.S. law.
The senators named the state-owned China National Petroleum Corp. and the China Petroleum and Chemical Corp. as firms that could face U.S. penalties.
"We urge you to warn President Hu that the U.S. will be forced to sanction these companies if they do not quickly suspend their ties with Iran," the senators wrote.
Rep. Howard L. Berman (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, also called on Obama to press China to enforce energy sanctions against Iran.

China must fulfill international responsibilities

The Yomiuri Shimbun

China, which is on the way to superpower status with its economic wealth and military strength, has become increasingly assertive.
Moves by this rising nation have the potential to bring structural changes to the balance of power in the Asia-Pacific region.
While calling on Beijing for self-restraint, Japan must join hands with neighboring countries and show a resolute stance against China if it takes any actions aimed at achieving hegemony.
In early January, the Chinese government announced a policy of quickly enacting maritime laws to strengthen the policing of its waters.
Meanwhile, Beijing last spring expanded its claimed area of "core interests," which had been limited to Taiwan and Tibet, to the South China Sea.

Freedom of seas paramount
Concerning this development, U.S. President Barack Obama stressed in front of Chinese President Hu Jintao at a joint press conference, held Wednesday after U.S.-China summit talks, that the United States has a fundamental interest in "maintaining freedom of navigation" in East Asia.
The South China Sea is an important area where the interests of Japan, Southeast Asian countries and the United States coincide.
Beijing's stance of treating the area as if it were China's own territory cannot be tolerated.
China's defense spending has seen double-digit increases every year for 21 years through 2009.
Its navy and air force now have greatly enhanced hardware at their command.
China is said to be pursuing a long-term maritime strategy.
Its initial aim is to gain command of the seas and airspace inside the so-called "first island chain," a strategic defense line that runs from the Japanese archipelago to the South China Sea via Okinawa Prefecture and Taiwan.
To achieve this goal, Beijing has developed an antiship ballistic missile dubbed an "aircraft carrier killer" and is building a few aircraft carriers of its own.
It also has carried out trial flights of a next-generation stealth fighter.
The country also wants to expand its military control to the "second island chain" that runs from the Ogasawara Islands down to Guam, beyond the East China Sea.
This is to keep U.S. forces at bay in the western Pacific, with the eventual absorption of Taiwan in mind.
Japan's Senkaku Islands are located in an area within the "first island chain" where China is developing oil fields beneath the seabed.

Strong response appropriate
Since a Chinese fishing boat rammed two Japan Coast Guard patrol ships in waters off the Senkaku Islands in September, China has frequently dispatched fisheries patrol boats to the area, apparently based on its maritime strategy.
It was appropriate that the government decided to enhance the defense of the Nansei Islands and the other islands in the new National Defense Program Outline adopted at the end of last year.
It is also reasonable that the Japan Coast Guard is seeking revisions, including enhancement of maritime police authority, to relevant laws to strengthen its patrol and warning systems in response to the incident off the Senkaku Islands.
Through diplomatic channels, the government must also demand that China honor Article 1 of the Japan-China Peace and Friendship Treaty, which says that each country shall respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the other.
Meanwhile, for the sake of regional security including the safety of sea lanes, Tokyo must further deepen its partnerships with Australia, India, South Korea, the United States and other countries that share its concerns over China's military buildup.
China recently has started taking a harder stance because it has changed its diplomatic policy.
Beijing has recently emerged from 20 years of following a policy, advocated by late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, of keeping a low profile without showing its true colors.
The policy aimed to avoid friction with other countries and concentrate the nation's resources on domestic development as socialism ebbed away with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
However, the Hu administration changed this policy in the summer of 2009 to a diplomatic stance of voicing its national interests more loudly.
The biggest reason for this change was China's accumulation of economic power, with a gross domestic product that was set to overtake that of Japan for the rank of second-largest in the world.
With its wealth of foreign currency reserves, China has become the largest purchaser of U.S. Treasury bonds. Also, the country has recently been purchasing government bonds of some European countries in fiscal crisis.

China faces domestic unease
Members of China's current leadership under Hu, chief of the Chinese Communist Party as well as president of the country, are likely to retire at the party congress to be held in autumn 2012.
Xi Jinping, vice president of the country, is likely to succeed to the post of general secretary.
In China, a small number of businesspeople, along with government and party bureaucrats, monopolize wealth and power, while some of the public continues to suffer from dire poverty.
Frustration within Chinese society over widespread corruption, oppression of ethnic minorities such as Tibetans and Uighurs, and other issues is said to be approaching its limit.
If China neglects political reform, puts priority only on economic development and continues a high-handed approach to its international relationships, it could become a destabilizing factor for East Asia.
The international community must patiently keep urging China to respect universal values such as democracy and human rights and to fulfill responsibilities commensurate with its national power.
Japan needs to construct a new strategy against China based on a comprehensive vision including diplomatic, security and economic considerations.

The world should take China's risks seriously

By Gerard Lyons

A stopped clock is right twice a day.
But it is of no use for telling the time.
This is worth bearing in mind when looking at the Chinese economy this year.
For much of the last decade there have been some who have predicted imminent doom and gloom for China. Like a stopped clock, they have said the same thing for some time.
Meanwhile, China has continued to go from strength to strength.
Its economy has soared.
Its influence has grown.
Asia has benefited.
The question that needs to be asked is whether this is the year that problems in China will emerge.
Is now the time when the stopped clock is right?
China's risks are different from those in the West, where debt problems persist.
Across Asia, inflationary pressures are rising and policy needs to be tightened.
The challenge for China is that in recent years it has tied itself too closely to US monetary policy.
In doing so, it has kept interest rates lower than necessary and its currency weak.
Resolving these issues is vital and is now underway.
The United States and China both need to set monetary and fiscal policies to suit their domestic needs.
The United States is doing this.
Last year's second round of quantitative easing, or QE2, was justified, despite the criticism it received outside America.
Although the stimulus has reignited fears about US government debt, the reality is the United States had no choice.
A staggering 43 million Americans now receive food stamps, a clear indication of the scale of poverty. Chances are US policy will work in terms of ensuring growth, if not in solving all the country's problems.
All of this highlights the need for Asian policymakers to follow the United States.
Not by copying US policy, but by setting monetary policy to suit their own domestic needs.
The challenge is especially daunting for China.
The longer it takes China to tighten policy, the greater its eventual problem.
Last year saw the authorities impose a loan quota.
But concerns about growth prevented them from tightening enough.
This year there is no reason to hold back as growth looks set to be strong, boosted by the 12th Five-Year Plan.

Controlling the economy
Although China's policy tools worked well during the global crisis there are now risks.
First, the growing size of the economy and of the private sector makes it harder to control the economy from Beijing.
Second, there is a need to rebalance the economy away from investment, towards consumption.
While investment always sounds good, it is now so high in relation to GDP that not all of it may be worthwhile.
Third, China's vulnerability arises from its under-developed financial sector.
China needs to avoid the lethal combination of cheap money, one-way expectations and leverage.
A few years ago the talk in the United States was about the ‘Greenspan put', that interest rates were kept low to support the equity market.
China can't fall into the same trap with property.
All this raises the risk of a near-term setback in China.
Rising food prices and wages add to the sense of urgency.
Either the authorities don't address problems sufficiently, delaying the day of reckoning.
Or, more likely, they tighten policy sharply.
This tightening will entail further loan quotas, rising reserve ratios, sharply higher interest rates, property taxes in some regions, and possibly steeper currency appreciation than the market expects.
The authorities would not want to derail the economy.
But if there was any setback where growth suffered, it would have global ramifications, hitting commodities and trade, among others.
Of course, if there was a growth setback, the stopped clockers would say they were right, and there would probably be much speculation about China's growth being a bubble.
That would be wrong.
Any slowdown in growth would probably be temporary.
It would show the business cycle exists in China, and that, while the economic trend is up, there will be setbacks along the way.
These would provide a buying opportunity and not a reason to doubt the economy's rise.
China's growth is for real.
It is not a bubble economy, but it is an economy prone to bubbles.
There is a big difference.
Still, it is vital for the world, for Asia, as well as for China that it addresses its inflation challenges now.
This is no time to wait.