Vietnam, India Boost Naval Ties to Counter China

By Saurav Jha


Even as Vietnam and China continue to conduct tit-for-tat naval maneuvers in the South China Sea, Hanoi has started making direct calls for foreign involvement in the two nations' maritime territorial dispute.

While many commentators saw this as a thinly veiled invitation to the United States, it could also be a precursor to India establishing a permanent presence in Vietnamese waters. 

India has apparently responded favorably to Vietnam's offer of permanent berthing rights in Nha Trang port. The move would not only add military heft to India's "Look East" policy, but is also emblematic of a larger Indian effort to counter China's activities in South Asia.Although Vietnam more than held its own in its 1979 border war with China, its record against the latter at sea is less impressive, as incidents in both 1974 and 1988 show.
Even in 1979, Chinese naval action against Vietnam was only checked by the presence of Soviet ships.
Since then the asymmetry in naval power between China and Vietnam has grown exponentially in the former's favor, while Hanoi has lost its Soviet-era security guarantees.
Although Vietnam's decision to hold live naval drills in the wake of the cable-cutting incident in mid-June was seen as a show of resolve, it did little to temper ongoing Chinese surveys in disputed areas.
Clearly Vietnam requires a more credible naval power to intercede on its behalf to prevent the Chinese from upping the ante any further.
That power could be India.
In a move that had been in the offing for some time, India appears to have finally greenlighted long-term basing for it ships at Nha Trang, just south of China's new naval base at Sanya on Hainan Island.
The offer on Nha Trang was reiterated by the Vietnamese Chief of Naval Staff Vice Adm. Nguyen Van Hien on his recent visit to India.
Nguyen visited two key Indian shipyards and conducted meetings on securing Indian help for augmenting the size and capabilities of the Vietnamese navy.
While Indian public shipyards are actually at full capacity owing to domestic orders, newly established private shipyards will probably be awarded contracts to supply Vietnam with offshore patrol vessels and fast attack craft.
In any case, India will continue to train Vietnamese naval personnel and help maintain any equipment that Vietnam sources from Russia.

India's Brahmos supersonic anti-ship missile
New Delhi has also agreed in principle to sell Vietnam the Brahmos supersonic anti-ship missile and possibly Prithvi surface-to-surface missiles.
Less visible, but no less critical, is the Indian IT industry's involvement in devising network-centric solutions for the Vietnamese armed forces.
Criticized in the past for not putting enough heft in its Look East policy, the current tensions in the South China Sea have provided India an opportunity to display to Southeast Asia its willingness to help maintain the Asian balance of power.
A permanent presence in Nha Trang will essentially be the other bookend of India's efforts to counter a possible "third Chinese island chain" in the Indian and Pacific oceans.
The Indian Ocean end is brought up by the Andaman and Nicobar tri-service Command, which is being progressively beefed up with more assets and facilities.
Nha Trang would allow India to monitor the South China Sea side of the Straits of Malacca as well, effectively securing India's energy and commercial shipping originating in the Far East, while putting a greater swathe of China's sea lines of communication (SLOCs) within the Indian navy's reach.
Indian planners see the ability to threaten Chinese SLOCs as the ultimate counter to Chinese pressure from across the Himalayas.
China has recently moved away from the position of neutrality in Indo-Pakistani affairs it officially held since the 1990s.
Not only is the PRC's recent rhetoric inimical to India's position in Kashmir, the entry of Chinese troops into Pakistani-controlled Gilgit-Baltistan raises the specter of a two-front war for Indian military strategists.
The very public Pakistani offer of basing facilities in Gwadar for the Chinese navy may have been the last straw.
By entering the South China Sea in this manner, India is essentially signaling that Asian politics can no longer be compartmentalized into U.S. State Department classifications.
Interestingly enough, the move comes at a time when other major powers are calling for a greater Indian role in Asian affairs.
Tokyo seems to have set things in motion when it kicked off a trilateral dialogue between Japan, the U.S. and India in April.
This was followed by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's declaration on her recent visit to India that New Delhi should be more assertive in Asian affairs.
The sentiment was echoed by the Australian defense minister in a speech at the Brookings Institution.
It seems that Beijing, through its recent actions, has managed to resuscitate the so-called quadrilateral initiative involving India, Japan, Australia and the U.S.
That grouping came apart after conducting just one joint naval exercise in 2007, when a torrent of protest by China about a bloc being built against it in Asia caused Australia to back out.
The Chinese are seemingly cognizant of the hardening of India's stance and the backing that it is receiving from various quarters.
For the first time in many months, China has signaled its support of a greater role for India in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
In bilateral meetings with visiting Indian politicians, the Chinese have apparently also expressed their willingness to back India for a permanent seat in the U.N. Security Council, provided that India delinks its own bid from that of Japan.
However, India is unlikely do so because it needs further Japanese investment and technology, even as economic ties between the two Asian powers continue to deepen.
Their burgeoning relationship also means that India has a very direct stake in keeping the waterway that connects it with Japan -- as well as with South Korea -- an "international" rather than a Chinese affair.
The mantra in South Bloc at the moment seems to be that if the Indian Ocean is not India's ocean, then the South China Sea is not China's south sea.

China Imposes Blackout on Train Wreck Coverage

By SHARON LaFRANIERE
BEIJING — After days of growing public fury over last month’s high-speed train crash and the government’s reaction, Chinese authorities have enacted a virtual news blackout on the disaster except for positive stories or information officially released by the government.
The sudden order from the Communist Party’s publicity department, handed down late Friday, forced newspaper editors to frantically tear up pages of their Saturday editions, replacing investigative articles and commentaries about the accident that killed 40 people in eastern China with cartoons or unrelated features.
Major Internet portals removed links to news reports or videos related to the crash in Wenzhou in Zhejiang Province, in which 192 people were also injured.
Authorities even postponed the publication of an article prepared by Xinhua, the government’s news agency, according to one editor who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions.
That report focused on the Railway Ministry’s failure to answer a series of questions about the crash.
The government’s decision to muzzle the media followed a remarkable outpouring of online criticism of the government after the July 23 accident.
For many in China, the train wreck has become a symbol of concerns about whether the government is sacrificing people’s lives and safety in pursuit of breakneck development and cloaking its failures in secrecy or propaganda.
Tens of millions of Chinese have posted messages on the Chinese equivalents of Twitter, questioning why the two high-speed trains collided, whether the rescue effort was bungled and why images from the site showed wrecked train cars being buried in pits even before investigators began work.
Outraged by the order to silence themselves, dozens of journalists this weekend joined the online outcry.
The directives of propaganda authorities, they wrote in various postings, were almost impossible to swallow given the many troubling questions that remain.
The government has placed huge importance on construction of high speed rail, mounting the world’s largest public works project.
“Tonight, hundreds of papers are replacing their pages; thousands of reporters are having their stories retracted; tens of thousands of ghosts can not rest in peace; hundreds of millions of truths are being covered up,” one editor wrote Friday.
“This country is being humiliated by numerous evil hands.”
“My story will not go to print today and looks like I will have to write something else,” wrote another journalist.
“I’d rather leave the page blank with one word — ‘speechless.’ ”
One prominent publication, the Beijing-based Economic Observer, ignored the directive, rolling out nine pages of coverage of the accident in its Saturday edition.
The report described the Railway Ministry as a runaway operation; reconstructed the events in Wenzhou from the viewpoint of dozens of survivors; and examined the failure of the official, state-operated media to report the accident when it occurred.
A commentary carried the headline: “We are all passengers in this high-speed train.”
One of the Observer’s journalists said the pages were already printed when the orders came.
But many others paid heed: editors said the 21st Century Business Herald and China Business Journal each tore up eight pages of articles while the Beijing Times jettisoned four pages.
One discarded article, based on the account of the wife of one victim, was titled: “There was no miracle for them.”
The headline was a pointed reference to a case that has been relentlessly trumpeted by officials and the state-run press — the rescue of a toddler 21 hours after the collision, after rescuers had given up all hope and been told to quit.
“There were three calls,” one editor in Beijing said.
“The first came around 9 p.m., ordering us to ‘cool down’ coverage of the Wenzhou accident as much as possible.”
An hour later, the newspaper was instructed “to print only Xinhua’s wire and not to print anything we had gotten ourselves. No comments, no analysis,” the editor said.
A third call at midnight ordered the accident coverage off the front page.
On its Web site, the Hong Kong Journalists Association protested, noting that only Thursday, Premier Wen Jiabao, speaking at a press conference in Wenzhou, had insisted that the “investigation into the accident should be open, transparent and monitored by the public.”
After initially playing down the accident, the state-run news media had grown more assertive in recent days. They were invigorated in part by the so-called netizens who all week staged an end run around the mainstream press with 140-character word updates on china’s Twitter equivalents.
But some may have paid a price: the producer of one news program on CCTV, china’s state owned television network, was reportedly reprimanded after program.
A colleague said rumors the producer was fired were false, but declined to describe the repercussions.
In a segment two days after the accident, the host of that program asked: “If nobody can be safe, do we still want this speed? Can we drink a glass of milk that’s safe? Can we stay in an apartment that will not collapse?”
“China, please slow down,” the host said.
“If you’re too fast, you may leave the souls of your people behind.”

Chinese aircraft carrier has region spooked

By Michael Sainsbury

CHINA'S first aircraft carrier could be ready to sail by next month, amid growing concerns over Beijing's aggressive military action in the East and South China Seas.
Beijing ended speculation over when the vessel would appear, releasing pictures this week of the Russian-built craft, which was purchased from Ukraine and is being refitted in China.
"Building an aircraft carrier is extremely complex and at present we are using a scrapped aircraft carrier platform to carry out refurbishment for the purposes of technological research, experiments and training," said Senior Colonel Geng Yansheng.
The launch will allow China to join India and Thailand as the only Asian countries with an aircraft carrier. China's multi-billion-dollar military build-up, along with its territorial claim over the entire South China Sea, has the region spooked.
Last week, Taiwanese media reported that two Chinese fighter jets attempted to scare off an American U2 reconnaissance plane that was collecting intelligence on China while flying along the Taiwan Strait late last month.
This follows recent complaints by The Philippines of Chinese planes buzzing its territory and a continuing strategy of China picking up Vietnamese fishing vessels.

China will implode if it doesn't change its authoritarian ways

A knowledge economy operating at the frontiers of technology is incompatible with a one-party state
By Will Hutton

'If nobody can be safe, do we want this speed? Can we live in apartments that do not fall down? Can the roads we drive on in our cities not collapse? Can we travel in safe trains? And if there is a major accident can we not be in a hurry to bury the trains? Can we afford the people a basic sense of security?"
When a news anchor on China's state TV feels he can say that on a broadcaster which has become the world gold standard for censorship and propaganda, you know that something profound is afoot.
But it is not just the crash last weekend outside Wenzhou, involving two high speed trains that cost 39 lives and some 190 injured, that has appalled the country.
It has been the Communist party's attempt once again to try to close down the whole affair that has aroused passionate protest.
The official directive from the propaganda bureau was that journalists should not "investigate the causes of the accident" or "question" the official account – that it was caused by lightning.
Wreckage was buried to avoid any inspection; compensation claims were initially refused.
After all, the party's legitimacy depends on its capacity to deliver growth, jobs and modernity and the high-speed train network is one of the linchpins on which its claims depend.
It was crucial that the crash did not challenge any of this carefully constructed story.
The directive was ignored.
For what Qiu Qiming said on CCTV has been said with more fury on the country's blogs, social networking sites and its two major Twitter-like microblogs, the "weibos".
The tweets began from the crashed train itself, complaining about the chaos, and then spread.
"Interest groups and local authorities have placed their desires above society," tweeted Zhao Chu.
"If this continues, there is only one result – rampant terror and blood on the streets."
Another tweeted: "The whole railway ministry should be closed down. It is a nest of corruption."
In a blog, Zou Yonhua wrote: "How could anyone who is mentally normal believe that China's rubbish scientific development and research on high-speed rail is Number One in the world? No ordinary people believe that. It is a pity that the party itself swallows the line."
This is just a tiny sample of the avalanche of such comment – 26 million posts and rising fast – since last Saturday's disaster.
It is jaw-dropping stuff.
Although generally the writers are careful to stop short of criticising the party outright – everyone knows about the imprisonments of the Nobel peace prize winner Liu Xiaobo and the human rights activist Ai Weiwei – anyone who goes this far is taking enormous risks with their career and their freedom.
But when the People's Daily, the party's mouthpiece, declares that China can no longer generate "blood-smeared" GDP, a rubicon has been crossed.
Every party faction knows that the party got its first reaction wrong and belatedly knows that its legitimacy now depends on presenting itself as being on the people's side as fast as it can.
Suddenly, compensation claims are being accepted, and generously paid.
To crack down on commentary would be to compound the error, so the blogs and weibos have seized the opening, even though their authors know the risks.
They have even dared to mock Premier "Grandpa" Wen Jiabao as China's best actor for claiming that he could not go as quickly to the rail crash site as he did to the earthquake disaster in 2008 because he was ill. There are pictures of him welcoming a Japanese trade delegation in apparent rude good health 24 hours after the news of the crash broke.
The internet is proving an instrument that not even the authoritarian Chinese can control.
China, as I once was memorably told by a group of lawyers in Beijing, is a volcano waiting to explode.
It is difficult for those not familiar with the country to comprehend the scale of corruption, the waste of capital, the sheer inefficiency, the ubiquity of the party and the obeisance to hierarchy that is today's China.
The mass of Chinese are proud and pleased with what has been achieved since Deng Xiaoping began the era of the "socialist market economy".
But there is a widespread and growing recognition that the authoritarian model has to change, a fact that every disaster dramatises.
The railway ministry is a classic example.
It is a state within a state, making its own rules and with its own well-honed, corrupt hierarchy commanding unquestioning obedience.
Charged with building 9,000 miles of high-speed rail by 2020, as well as developing an allegedly indigenous high-speed rail capability better than Japan's or Europe's, it has pulled all the familiar levers to achieve its task. Huge loans from state-owned banks, directed to lend to the ministry in effect for free, have been thrown at the project.
Technology has been purloined and stolen from abroad.
Productivity, efficiency and safety are secondary to two overwhelming needs: to complete the network fast, so creating crucially needed jobs, and to be able to boast that China's capability is cheaper than anybody else's.
To win the lush contracts, officials' palms have to be liberally greased.
Rail minister Liu Zhijun, architect of the high-speed rail plan, was suspended pending a corruption investigation in February.
Nor is there is any open system to see whether the technologies actually function properly.
There is no back-up for any systems failures, because there is no structure of accountability or any penalties if there are mistakes.
The only excuse has been that until now the system has delivered.
But Japan's bullet train has been operating for nearly 50 years without a single death.
Now China has 39 on its hands with a system only four years old.
It also has 10,000 kms of high-speed rail already built whose economics depends on the trains being full.
But nobody trusts the technology or the integrity of the officials running the system.
The government promises a full inquiry, but nobody has any faith it will be anything else than a fix.
China is discovering that a sophisticated knowledge economy operating at the frontiers of technology is incompatible with an authoritarian one-party state.
China, we are endlessly told by its apologists, is different.
The values of the European Enlightenment – tolerance, the health of dissent, the rule of law, freedom of expression, pluralism – are not needed here.
Wenzhou is one more bitter reminder; human pain and human instincts for accountability are universal. Moreover, they are the essential underpinnings of the good economy and society.
There will be a Chinese Spring.
And sooner than anyone expects.

On the Party Circuit, and Upsetting the Party

By IAN JOHNSON

BEIJING -- IN the midst of an unusually sweeping government campaign against artistic dissent, he has published a novel that predicts an Orwellian future for China in just two years.

The novel, needless to say, has been banned. 

Imported copies have been seized at the border. 

Booksellers who manage to secure some copies for sale have been shut down.

And yet Chan Koonchung is not packing his bags to return to his native Hong Kong.

Instead, he is hunkered down for the long haul, convinced that Beijing is the only place in China worth living.

Writer Chan Koonchung sits for a portrait at a bookstore in Beijing.
“You never use the word ‘lovely’ to describe Beijing,” Mr. Chan said in an upscale restaurant not far from his high-end apartment.
“But I need to be in Beijing because of the people.”
For much of his career, that would have meant the beautiful people.
The 59-year-old Mr. Chan is best known for founding a lifestyle magazine in Hong Kong, City Magazine, and starting up a “lite fare” cable television station in Taiwan, Super TV, which he sold to Sony Entertainment in the 1990s.
More recently, he has made a name for himself writing cultural essays on Chinese cities.
“He’s very much circulating on the party circuit,” said Huang Hung, a Beijing publisher and social commentator.
“That’s why this work comes as a little bit of a surprise, but it’s a terribly nice surprise.”
The work is a dystopian novel of China in the near future.
After the world’s second financial crisis in 2013, the government clings to power only after it sends troops into the streets for a month of bloody killing.
Finally, the government laces the water with a chemical that makes people feel happy and eager to spend money.
With China’s consumers finally unleashed from their age-old habit of saving, the country’s economy booms and it leaps past the United States and other Western countries.
A golden age dawns.
Mostly, though, it is a book about living in an authoritarian state.
In what is probably the most damning part of the novel, the month of killing is forgotten, not through drugs but an act of collective amnesia.
The book’s nominal heroes, the country’s Westernized elite, finally figure out what has happened (by kidnapping a Politburo member and forcing him to tell all).
But they end up agreeing with the government’s measures.
“This is one of the major untalked-about issues,” said Ms. Hung, who has championed the book on her popular microblog.
“They want to drink the Chinese government’s Kool-Aid.”
The book is known in Chinese as “Shengshi Zhongguo 2013,” which can be translated as “China’s Golden Age 2013.”
It has just been published in the United Kingdom as “The Fat Years” and is due out in the United States early next year.
Mr. Chan says forgetfulness is a fact of life in China; the government pushes certain historical memories to legitimize its rule, but quashes other traumas.
“We’re still talking about the Opium War, but we forgot about the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution,” he said.
He decided to write the novel in 2008, when he noticed a shift among the elite.
China’s rise seemed to be crowned by Beijing hosting the Olympics, while the West’s problems, which many in China now view as a permanent decline, were highlighted by the financial crisis.
“A lot of people realized that China did something right and they want to express it,” Mr. Chan said.
He wrote the book in 2009 and it was published in Hong Kong and Taiwan at the end of that year.
Chinese publishers declined to publish it.
“Some were interested and I told them to read it first. They did and never came back,” he said.
But by 2010 it was circulating on the Internet, something like the old samizdat system of passing along bootleg copies in the Soviet Union.
China uses a simplified writing system compared to the traditional system used in Hong Kong and Taiwan, but some people retyped the book in simplified form.
Mr. Chan said he noticed that these copies had many errors.
So he fixed them and made his version available online, essentially pirating his own book.
Over the past year, it has become a sensation, probably the most widely discussed book in China’s big cities.
BUT it is very much an underground phenomenon.
After banning its import and taking steps to punish book dealers who try to sell it, the authorities have now blocked all sites that offer free downloads of the book, including Mr. Chan’s authorized site.
Mr. Chan, however, remains a convinced Beijingophile, a rarity for people from Hong Kong, the Cantonese-speaking former British colony that remains wealthier and freer than the mainland.
“Coming from Hong Kong, I had a Shanghai complex: Shanghai movies, Shanghai fashion,” he said.
He also loved living in Taipei.
He quickly realized, however, that if he wanted to be in touch with what was going on in China he had to be in Beijing.
“At dinner people talk about serious things,” Mr. Chan said.
“They want to make sense of China.”
Mr. Chan has become a fixture of Beijing’s social scene.
He is tall and thin, his shoulder-length hair and chic rectangular glasses making him look younger than his 59 years.
He dresses ascetically but with flair: tight trousers, a dress shirt buttoned up and a narrow-lapelled jacket.
The look is almost designed to say: I am not from here.
But he does fit into the city rather well.
By Hong Kong standards, Mr. Chan’s Mandarin Chinese is remarkably good, something he attributes to having been born in the coastal city of Ningbo, even if he did move to Hong Kong when he was just 4 years old.
He still travels widely abroad, but is intensely interested in the thick political gossip that swirls through China. “I like to know what’s going on, or at least what people think is going on,” he said.
That led him to start an e-mail discussion group on civil society in China that helps him stay in touch with people involved in the law and protecting the environment, among other fields that often attract scrutiny from the authorities.
All this means he wants to stay in the capital, despite the risks.
OVER the past few months, the artist Ai Weiwei has been silenced after being arrested and then placed under house arrest.
The author Liao Yiwu has fled into exile, declaring it too risky to continue publishing his books on society’s marginal figures.
Mr. Chan, however, says he does not feel at risk.
He has a Hong Kong passport, which he thinks might help.
Against many predictions, China has treated Hong Kong leniently since taking it over in 1997 and tolerates dissent there that never would be allowed in the rest of the country.
Or it could be that he simply has not yet gotten on a blacklist.
Once on, he says, and every crackdown results in harassment or detention.
“In China, whether you’re a dissident or not is up to the state,” he said.
“You are on the receiving end; it is imposed on you. But I’ve never been labeled a dissident.”
In any case, he says being a dissident does not mean being the outlier of times past.
“Their values are shared by many people now. More people now will say ‘I have rights.’ That wouldn’t have happened 30 years ago.”
Mr. Chan is somewhat fatalistic about the prospects for trouble.
“It is like playing with a cat. You never know when its claws will come out.”
So for now, he says, he remains committed to Beijing and writing a new novel.
The source of his material?
“I go to a lot of dinners.”

Shallow agreement in the South China Sea

By Brian McCartan

SINGAPORE - Hot-button security issues in the South China Sea were at the top of the agenda at a series of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) meetings held last week with its top dialogue partners, including the United States and China.
Although the 10-country grouping and China agreed to a new set of guidelines for dealing with disputes in the contested maritime area, the agreement is non-binding and further reflects the weakness of ASEAN's preferred consensus-based approach to handling regional security issues.
ASEAN and China reached an agreement on July 21 on a set of guidelines to implement the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea, which was first signed between the grouping and China in 2002.
The guidelines are intended to develop a binding code of conduct for dispute resolution in the South China Sea.
ASEAN secretary general Surin Pitsuwan hailed the agreement as an important diplomatic achievement, opining that the application of the guidelines would create a process through which dialogue can be developed and mutual trust established to address outstanding conflicting territorial claims that have boiled over in recent months, particularly between China and the Philippines.
Others, however, are less sanguine about the agreement's ability to manage future crises.
One major concern is its inability to deal directly with conflicting territorial claims.
China, Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam all stake claim to areas around the Spratly Islands, which are believed to be rich in oil-and-gas deposits.
Instead, last week's agreement deals largely with non-traditional security issues such as environmental protection, marine research, fisheries and transnational crime.
Additionally, it lacks a deadline for implementation of a legal accord to resolve the increasingly volatile territorial disputes.
Additionally, the guidelines do not create a proper code of conduct for naval units of the nations involved in the disputes.
There are also no provisions to govern the behavior of opposing naval units or establish communication channels between militaries to avoid potential confrontations at sea.
By skirting hard security issues involving potential maritime conflict, the new agreement will likely have little impact on preventing or resolving incidents.
Several recent incidents indicate a pressing need for better communications between opposing forces and more robust dispute resolution mechanisms.
In March, Chinese vessels chased away a survey ship working for UK-based energy firm Forum Energy Plc off the coast of the Philippines.
Tensions between China and Vietnam rose after Chinese vessels cut the cables of a Vietnamese survey vessel on May 26.
Chinese ships again cut the cables of a Vietnamese ship on June 9, only days after Chinese officials emphasized the peaceful resolution of disputes at the Shangri La Dialogue in Singapore.
Significantly, the incidents come at the same time that ASEAN and China are promoting greater economic integration.
China is currently ASEAN's largest trade partner; this April ASEAN replaced Japan as China's third largest trading partner.
Total ASEAN-China trade grew to US$293 billion last year and in the last five months was up 26% year on year to $141 billion.
Agreement on the new guidelines came just two days before the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) conference held in Bali on July 23.
This may have been an effort to avoid discussion of the issue in a more international forum involving the US. By avoiding wider discussion on the South China Sea at the ARF, the would-be security grouping was relegated to making statements of support without offering ways to find durable solutions to the South China Sea's security problems.
Significantly, it took eight years to gather enough consensus to agree to the non-binding guidelines.
The real work – establishing binding conflict resolution mechanisms -- lies ahead while ASEAN's and the ARF's track record at devising enforceable solutions is not promising.
This past year ASEAN has struggled mightily to develop a binding solution to the border conflict between Thailand and Cambodia.
In another indication of ASEAN's mediating impotence, Philippine president Benigno Aquino has indicated his government's intention to bring its security complaint against China issue to the United Nations' International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea.
Indeed, the attractiveness for many regional nations to join the ARF is that they can talk about issues without having to commit to action.
Rather than confront issues openly, they are instead often dealt with in meetings on the larger event's sidelines.
As a test of the ARF's ability to manage maritime or other security issues, last week's meetings should thus be viewed as yet another inconclusive outcome.
Although the new guidelines were established amid much multilateral fanfare, each individual country will decide whether or not to adhere to them.
China has repeatedly rejected the involvement of the international community in settling disputes involving the South China Sea.
Beijing has even generally avoided discussing the issue with ASEAN, preferring instead to deal with related issues bilaterally with individual claimants.
On July 22, Chinese foreign minister Yang Jiechi told reporters that China is committed to maintaining freedom of navigation and security in the South China Sea.
China is especially anxious to avoid US involvement in the issue.
In the past year, the US has stepped up joint military exercises with several Southeast Asian claimants, including Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia.
China has referred to the ramped up exercises as "inappropriate".
Beijing took particular umbrage to US secretary of state Hillary Clinton's remarks at last year's ARF meeting in Hanoi where she said that resolution of the disputes was an American national security interest, due to Washington's desire to ensure freedom of navigation and maritime security in the South China Sea.
The US has been notably less confrontational this year.
At this year's ARF meeting, Clinton noted that the issue is complex and that the US would not take sides in the dispute.
Instead she urged China and ASEAN member states to show restraint in the South China Sea and settle differences according to international law through the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
She also proposed that each country base its claims on undisputed territory they already possess instead of arbitrary lines drawn on maps.
Many Southeast Asian nations are concerned about a Chinese map with borders marked by nine dashes that effectively claims most of the South China Sea for Beijing.
However, the US stance on the issue is somewhat weakened by its failure to ratify the UNCLOS.
A subtext to American statements is concern over China's growing blue water navy capabilities.
Beijing's growing emphasis on naval power is also a matter of concern among its Southeast Asian neighbors. While China argues its expanding navy is geared strictly for defense, many in Southeast Asia believe that it could be deployed to project Chinese hegemony over the South China Sea as defined by its nine-dash map.
The encompassed territory is believed to contain potentially extensive oil and gas fields whose output could be crucial to China's burgeoning economy and mitigate its dependence on fuel imports from the Middle East. Security analysts note that in a potential conflict between the US and China, US warships could move to block China's fuel shipments through the narrow Malacca Straits.
After last week's ARF meeting, Clinton called the deal on guidelines an "important first step" but noted it was only that.
She went on to condemn acts of "intimidation" in the South China Sea and called for urgent follow-on negotiations between China and ASEAN to establish a specific code to settle disputes in the area and avoid conflict in the vital maritime trade lanes.
"There needs to be a lot of dialogue between [ASEAN] and China," Clinton said.
"And the rest of the world needs to weigh in because all of us have a stake in ensuring that these disputes don't get out of control."
Yet there are already signs that the guidelines may not be enough to mitigate future conflicts.
This week the Philippines announced it will go ahead with exploration for oil in its claimed portion of the South China Sea, where 15 exploration blocks were put up for tender last month.
Two of those are within China's claimed zone of control.
Manila has said that all of the area is within its sovereign exclusive economic zone as defined by international maritime law.
Over 100 energy companies, including Chevron Corporation and Total SA, expressed interest in bidding on the blocks during a June 11 road show in Singapore attended by Philippine energy officials.
But without established conflict resolution mechanisms, the security of those contracts can not be guaranteed.

In Baring Facts of Train Crash, Blogs Erode China Censorship

By MICHAEL WINES and SHARON LaFRANIERE

An Internet cafe in China. A high-speed train accident last week generated millions of messages on the Chinese version of Twitter.
BEIJING — “After all the wind and storm, what’s going on with the high-speed train?” read the prophetic message posted last Saturday evening on the Chinese microblog Sina Weibo.
“It’s crawling slower than a snail. I hope nothing happens to it.”
They were a few short sentences, typed by a young girl with the online handle Smm Miao.
But five days later, the torrent that followed them was still flooding this nation’s Internet, and lapping at the feet of government bureaucrats, censors and the state-controlled press.
The train the girl saw, on a track outside Wenzhou in coastal Zhejiang Province, was rammed from behind minutes later, killing 40 people and injuring 191.
Since then, China’s two major Twitter-like microblogs — called weibo here — have posted an astounding 26 million messages on the tragedy, including some that have forced embarrassed officials to reverse themselves.
The messages are a potent amalgam of contempt for railway authorities, suspicion of government explanations and shoe-leather journalism by citizens and professionals alike.
The swift and comprehensive blogs on the train accident stood this week in stark contrast to the stonewalling of the Railways Ministry, already stained by a bribery scandal.
And they are a humbling example for the Communist Party news outlets and state television, whose blinkered coverage of rescued babies only belatedly gave way to careful reports on the public’s discontent.
While the blogs have exposed wrongdoers and broken news before, this week’s performance may signal the arrival of weibo as a social force to be reckoned with, even in the face of government efforts to rein in the Internet’s influence.
The government censors assigned to monitor public opinion have let most, though hardly all of the weibo posts stream onto the Web unimpeded.
But many experts say they are riding a tiger.
For the very nature of weibo posts, which spread faster than censors can react, makes weibo beyond easy control.
And their mushrooming popularity makes controlling them a delicate matter.
Saturday’s train disaster is a telling example — an event that resonated with China’s growing middle class, computer-savvy, able to afford travel by high-speed rail, already deeply skeptical of official propaganda.
As state television devoted Saturday evening to reports of mass murder in Norway, Sina Weibo weighed in four minutes after the train accident with a post from the crash scene, by a passenger reporting a power blackout and “two strong collisions.”
Nine minutes later, another passenger posted a call for help, reposted 100,000 times: “Children are crying all over the train car! Not a single attendant here!”
Two hours later, a call for blood quickly clogged local hospitals with donors.
Then the reaction began to pour in.
“Such a major accident, how could it be attributed to weather and technical reasons?” blogged Cai Qi, a senior Zhejiang Province official.
“Who should take the responsibility? The railway department should think hard in this time of pain and learn a good lesson from this.”
From a Hubei Province blogger: “I just watched the news on the train crash in Wenzhou, but I feel like I still don’t even know what happened. Nothing is reliable anymore. I feel like I can’t even believe the weather forecast. Is there anything that we can still trust?”
There is no clearer sign of the rising influence of microblogs than their impact on government itself.
Last weekend, Wenzhou bureaucrats ordered local lawyers not to accept cases from families of victims without their permission.
After weibo exposed them, they withdrew the order and apologized.
Railway workers had quickly buried the first car of the oncoming train at the site of the accident.
On Monday, after an online outcry charging a cover-up, they unearthed it and took it to Wenzhou for analysis.
China Daily, the state-controlled English-language newspaper, noted that they had met the request of “many netizens.”
“I call it the microblogging revolution,” Zhan Jiang, a professor of international journalism and communications at Beijing Foreign Studies University, said in an interview on Thursday.
“In the last year, microbloggers, especially Sina and Tencent, have played more and more a major role in coverage, especially breaking news.”
The few newspapers and magazines here that consistently push back at censors with investigative journalism are not just printing the results of their digging into the train wreck, but posting them on weibo for millions to see.
So were hundreds of more traditional state-controlled news outlets.
Even the Communist Party organ People’s Daily maintains a weibo.
But the field is dominated by two players.
Sina Holdings Ltd.’s Sina Weibo (pronounced SEE-nah WAY-bo) counts 140 million users, generally better-educated and more interested in current events than those at competitors.
Tencent Inc.’s weibo hosts 200 million generally younger users who are more interested in socializing.
In some ways, the Chinese weibo replicate their Western counterparts: they limit posts to 140 characters (though in Chinese, where many characters are words by themselves, much more can be said).
Posts can be re-tweeted, too, although in China, tweeting is called knitting, because the word “weibo” sounds like the word for scarf.
There are also differences.
Bloggers can comment on others’ posts, turning a message into a conversation.
Users also can include photographs and other files with their posts, to telling effect: on Thursday, fact-checking bloggers posted photos of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s recent official activities to counter his assertion at a Wenzhou news conference that illness had kept him from visiting the disaster site earlier.
While Western social networks like Twitter and Facebook are blocked here, their Chinese counterparts thrive, largely because their owners consent to government monitoring and censorship — and perhaps because the government fears the reaction should it shut them down.
The outpouring over the rail tragedy appears to have enjoyed at least some official approval; many analysts believe the government sees microblogs as a virtual steam valve through which citizens can safely vent complaints.
If needed, the weibo have literally dozens of electronic levers they can press to dilute, hide or delete offending posts, according to one Tencent Web editor who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of dismissal in disclosing that information.
Yet the weibo also play cat and mouse with the censors.
“If we did not have any free speech then this company would not have any influence, so the company must act proactively to safeguard our space,” he said.
“So that’s why they must go through this process of bargaining with the government departments.”
And even dedicated censors find the weibo hard to restrain.
Government minders can electronically delete posts with offending keywords like “human rights” and “protest.”
But like Twitter, the ability to instantly forward posts to dozens of fellow users means that messages can spread, well before censorship orders can be implemented.
And there are always screenshots to preserve posts that are deleted, such as this one by Ge You, one of China’s most distinguished actors: “If a higher-level leader died,” he wrote, “there would be countless wreaths; however, when many ordinary people died, there was only endless harmony” — a euphemism for censorship.
“If a higher-level leader died, there would be nationwide mourning; however, when many ordinary people died, there was not a single word of apology. If a higher-level leader died, there would be high-end funerals; however, when many ordinary people died, there were only cold numbers.”

China vs. U.S.: The cyber war is raging

By David Goldman

Missiles are only useful if you can launch them. When foreign countries hack our defenses, that could prove difficult.

NEW YORK -- On April 8, 2010, traffic to about 15% of the world's websites was rerouted to China.
State-owned Internet company China Telecom tricked relays from around the world into routing traffic through its servers for about 18 minutes.
It isn't publicly known what happened to that traffic when it passed through China.
But a report filed late last year by Congress' U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission said the hijacked traffic could easily have been captured, censored, or even replaced with other data without anyone's knowledge.
Those scenarios were especially worrying to the U.S. government since the incident affected traffic to and from ".gov" and ".mil" sites, including those for the Senate, Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, Defense Department, NASA, and Commerce Department.
Websites for Dell, Yahoo, Microsoft and IBM were also affected.
It wasn't the first time -- or the last -- that suspicious cyber activity has been traced back to China.
In 2008, the FBI launched "Operation Cisco Raider," seizing 3,500 fake networking devices that originated in China, including counterfeit Cisco routers purchased by U.S. government agencies.
In late 2009, Google, Adobe Systems, Juniper Networks and a dozen other technology companies were hit with a targeted attack that emanated from China.


The cyber Mafia has already hacked you
A white paper issued by security firm McAfee found that the attack could yield "complete access to internal systems," with the ability to collect and manipulate the companies' core assets, including source code.
Google went public about the attack, said that some of its intellectual property had been stolen, and pulled its search engine servers out of China soon after.
Last month, hundreds of personal Gmail accounts, including those of some senior U.S. government officials, were hacked as a result of a massive phishing scheme originating from China.
Security experts and government officials have been quick to link these and similar attacks to the Chinese government.
"It's no secret that government agencies are under attack from China," said Prescott Winter, public sector chief technology officer of ArcSight, a security company owned by Hewlett-Packard, and former CTO for the National Security Agency.
"It's a significant problem, and the government has been aware of it for the past 10 to 15 years."
China has repeatedly and vehemently denied any connection to the attacks, and proving that Beijing was behind specific hacks is difficult.
But even if we can't trace individual attacks back to the Chinese government, experts say mounting evidence signals that the Chinese government is sponsoring wide-ranging cyberattacks against the U.S. government and corporations.
"A review of the scale, focus, and complexity of the overall campaign directed against the United States... strongly suggest that these operations are state-sponsored or supported," a Northrop Grumman white paper on the capabilities of the Chinese government to conduct cyber warfare concluded.
"China is likely using its maturing computer network exploitation capability to support intelligence collection against the U.S. government and industry by conducting a long term, sophisticated, computer network exploitation campaign."


What China is capable of
By 2007, the NSA said that China had accumulated between 10 to 20 terabytes of data stolen from U.S. government agencies and corporation -- about a tenth of the information volume of all the books held by the Library of Congress.
U.S. military networks were attacked 6 million times in 2006, according to the National Security Agency.
By 2010, there were 6 million attacks per day.
Government officials this month acknowledged that 24,000 Pentagon files had been stolen in March during an organized cyber attack.
Experts agree China has at the very least stolen critical information about the U.S. government's defense industry, space program, China-related policy and military intelligence.
LulzSec and Anonymous are the least of your hacker worries
As much as China spies on our government's infrastructure, it also spies on U.S. corporations.
A great number of U.S. corporations do business in China, which controls the infrastructure the companies must use to send information back and forth.
Many experts believe the Chinese government actively spies on U.S. corporations working in the country -- just as China does to its own citizens' Internet communications.
"Corporations can't protect themselves against that," said Dave Aitel, president of security firm Immunity Inc. and a former NSA computer scientist.
"It's the equivalent of breaking in and installing bugs. Companies are now realizing the true cost of outsourcing. That's why Google left: Google said you can't do trusted business and run a company there."
"I don't want to tell businesses not to go to China because it's unsafe," said Jose Granado, leader of Ernst & Young's information security practice.
"At the same time, risk management is necessary. It's important to operate with your eyes wide open there. China isn't Iowa."
So what could China do with all the information it collects?
At best, experts say China will be able to able quickly advance its defense capabilities and save on years of research and development for its military and state-owned technology companies.
At worst, the threat becomes military.
In a war, that information could be enough to "delay U.S. deployments and impact combat effectiveness of troops," Northrop Grumman said in its assessment.
"It's easier to go to war if you disable a country's rocket launchers first," said Bill Pennington, CEO of WhiteHat Security, a website security company.
That's not a far-fetched scenario.
In September 2007, Israeli F15s and F16s bombed a nuclear reactor construction site in Syria, but Syrian radars never picked up the planes crossing the border.
That's because Israel had hacked Syria's radar software.
And then, of course, there's Stuxnet, a bug so sophisticated that it significantly delayed Iran's nuclear program. The worm, which was likely loaded into the system on a thumb drive, ordered the centrifuges in an Iranian nuclear facility to spin out of control, ultimately destroying it.
While that was happening, Stuxnet made all the meters tell Iranian engineers that everything was normal.


How the United States can respond
Experts say much more needs to be done by the government and corporations to ensure our national security.
"The problem is we have this thicket of 20th century rules that don't work in the 21st century," said Michael Chertoff, former Secretary of Homeland Security, in a talk last month hosted by analytics company Opera Solutions.
"The concept of a 'person' as the only threat has lost its meaning. It may be a server; we can be at war with a network."
In other words, protecting land, sea and air borders won't save you if your attackers are seconds away no matter where they are.
For all the improvements that the government needs to make, the private sector lags further behind.
A recent wave of cyberthreats began to scare corporations into beefing up their security, but companies have still been reluctant to spend.
"Most big corporations are only beginning to realize what's going on and are learning how to respond," ArcSight's Winter noted.
Still, experts say the nightmare scenario -- China disabling our defenses and attacking the country -- remains unlikely.
"The U.S. government operates on the premise that most government systems and networks have been compromised by various classes of attackers," said Jeffrey Bernstein, executive vice president of security contractor Critical Defence, who estimated that more than 150 countries have developed cyberattack capabilities.
"Still, the U.S. is the 10,000-lb. gorilla in the world. We're the leader in these capabilities."
It may surprise some that the U.S. Air Force's mission statement is "To fly, fight and win in air, space and cyber space."
And the Obama administration has taken a very proactive approach to cybersecurity.
"We are very well defended these days," Winter said.
"Our agencies are not totally bulletproof, because nothing is, but they're much better off than they were before."
"It's like the Cold War," said Larry Ponemon, chairman of the Ponemon Institute, a cybersecurity research organization.
"We have the ability to bring you down, you have the ability to bring us down, so no one is doing anything."

China's military flexes its muscle

By Tom Vanden Brook and Calum MacLeod,

China is pumping ever-increasing amounts of money into its People's Liberation Army.
BEIJING — Taxi driver Jin Yinjian has some advice for those alarmed by China's increasingly muscular military, including its first ever aircraft carrier: Get used to the flexing.
"I am proud we will have our first aircraft carrier," Jin says.
"It's a sign of China's growing strength, as all great countries should have aircraft carriers."
As the Pentagon plans for U.S. forces to exit Iraq and Afghanistan, it is keeping one eye trained on the rising threat in the East.
For two decades China has been adding large numbers of warships, submarines, fighter jets and — more significantly — developing offensive missiles capable of knocking out U.S. stealth aircraft and the biggest U.S. naval ships including aircraft carriers.
At the same time, China has announced that its territorial waters extend hundreds of miles beyond its shores, well into what its neighbors and the United States consider international waters.
It has installed more than 1,000 ballistic missiles aimed at Taiwan, a democratic island nation and U.S. ally. Vietnam, the Philippines and Japan all have complained to the United States about confrontations on the high seas with China.
China says it is simply developing defensive weapons and protecting its interests.
But military analysts say the United States appears to be taking a different view, citing the Pentagon's development of a new class of bombers that can fly for long periods outside of the reach of radar.
The Long Range Strike Bomber "is a deterrent to those who would seek to deny our access," says Air Force Maj. Gen. Noel Jones, director of operational capability requirements for the Air Force.
Jones doesn't mention China as the potential adversary for the bomber.
He doesn't have to, says Roger Cliff, an independent defense researcher, specialist on China and former Pentagon official.
"China is one of the countries that they certainly have in mind for this bomber," Cliff says.
"China's offensive capability will be steadily growing for the next decade. By the end of this decade, we really can't just count on fending off the blows. They will be able to deliver ballistic and cruise missile attacks."
China has seen phenomenal growth in wealth since it turned away from Marxist economic policies in the 1980s and toward capitalism.
Ever increasing portions of that money, obtained in part from Western consumers, has gone to the People's Liberation Army, the Pentagon says.
Since 1989, China's defense spending has increased by nearly 13% annually, according to the Department of Defense 2010 Annual Report to Congress.
In March it announced its annual budget would be $78.6 million.
U.S. defense spending dwarfs that figure.
The fiscal 2012 Pentagon budget request is $676 billion.
However, the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank focusing on the military, has said the U.S. military is underfunded and cannot counter China's threat to U.S. allies in East Asia with declining defense spending, as some in Congress are seeking as part of a deal to raise the ceiling on the national debt.
Although the USA spends more, it suggests China's real defense spending approaches $300 billion.
And all of that spending is concentrated in one region, East Asia, while the U.S. spending is spread out over many regions of the world.
The previous peak in U.S. defense spending was an inflation-adjusted $517 billion in 1985.
It then fell in real terms the next 15 years but jumped after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, growing an average 4.4% annually.
Fifty years ago, defense spending accounted for 47% of total federal spending.
Today, it accounts for 19%, according to the White House Office of Management and Budget.
The United States has far more ships and warplanes worldwide, but in just two decades China has created the largest force of submarines and amphibious warfare ships in Asia.
Its air force has added hundreds of fighter jets comparable to U.S. F-15s and F-16s.
This year China's military announced it had successfully tested a military fighter jet — the J-20 — that based on video appears to have radar-evading stealth characteristics.
China also announced it is about to launch its first aircraft carrier and is developing an anti-ship missile that can strike from 900 miles away, according to the Pentagon report.
As its military might increases, China has been ramping up confrontations with U.S. allies in the South China Sea and even against U.S. ships in the Yellow Sea.
The South China Sea is a vast area of more than 1 million square miles that may contain sizable amounts of oil and natural gas.
Twice since May, Chinese military boats have cut cables used by Vietnamese ships to conduct seismic tests of the sea bottom.
In March, two Chinese ships threatened a Philippine ship exploring for gas.
Vietnam and the Philippines say energy-hungry China is harassing their efforts to explore for oil and gas.
Last fall a Chinese trawler collided with two Japanese patrol boats near islands in the East China Sea claimed by both countries.
And Taiwan has complained to the State Department of veiled threats of invasion as well as China's firing of ballistic missiles over the Taiwan Strait.
The world has taken notice of China's new military posture, according to a poll released July 14 by the Pew Research Center's Global Attitudes Project.
The poll found that 15 of 22 nations say China either will replace or already has replaced the United States as the world's leading superpower.
Majorities or pluralities in all but four of the nations surveyed say China's increasing military might is a bad thing.
China's Vice Foreign Minister Cui Tiankai warned recently that the accusing nations are "playing with fire" and said he hoped the United States stays out of the fray.
China has called for negotiations to resolve the disputes that would not include the United States.
Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has expressed concern over China's actions.
In a trip earlier this month to Beijing, he said China must respect freedom of navigation.
"We are very anxious to see that… the sea lanes stay open," he said.
"The U.S. is not going away."


Shifting power in the Pacific?
China is acting as if it wants the United States to go away, analysts say.
Andrew Krepinevich, president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, an independent policy research institute, says China does not want war with the United States.
"What China does want, apparently, is to shift the military balance in the Western Pacific so that the United States will not be able to provide credible military support to longtime security partners such as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan," according to Krepinevich, who had a 21-year career in the Army.
All three nations provide vital ports and bases in the Pacific to the United States, preventing China from pressuring these democratic allies to accommodate the communist dictatorship's foreign policy aims worldwide out of fear of attack, Krepinevich said.
The Soviet Union tried the same thing in Western Europe, he said.
He called the situation a "cloud" on the national security horizon that incoming Defense Secretary Leon Panetta cannot ignore.
So what to do about it?
Some analysts say the U.S. military should be most concerned about China's development of weapons that would block the U.S. military from the region.
These can be long-range missiles that could destroy an aircraft carrier at sea, or be used to target bases on islands, such as the one operated by the United States on Guam.
"The anti-access… approach is one of forcing U.S. forces to attack from much longer distances," says Jan van Tol, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and a retired U.S. Navy captain.
"The greatest attention has been paid to the anti-ship ballistic missile that, if it were to become operationally effective, would give China a long-range weapon against the Navy's aircraft carriers."
Carriers are the backbone of U.S. military power abroad, allowing attack jets to operate off virtually any coast in the world.
China's buildup would allow it to essentially fence off a portion of the Pacific from U.S. forces and allow it to act with a freer hand against American allies in the region.
"There's a lot of stuff that China seems to be acquiring for no obvious reasons," van Tol says.
China "never intends to threaten any nation," Defense Minister Liang Guanglie told fellow Asian defense ministers at a recent "Shangri-La Dialogue" on security in Singapore.
Not everyone in China's neighborhood buys that, says Arthur Ding, a China military affairs expert at Taiwan's National Chengchi University, who attended the forum.
As China continues its large and comprehensive military modernization, "China just cannot convince the neighboring countries" of its peaceful intentions, he says.
One clue to China's strategic intentions will be where Beijing deploys its first aircraft carrier as early as the end of 2011, Ding says.
"If it is in the South China Sea, off the Guangdong coast, then the so-called 'China threat' will rise again," he says, because Asian nations and the USA will see it as an aggressive message to them.
However, state news agency Xinhua reported that a defense ministry spokesman said Wednesday the carrier will be used for training and research.
Beijing has long threatened Taiwan with invasion if it formally declares independence.
Some analysts say China's buildup is largely in preparation for the conquest of Taiwan, which has never been under Communist rule, and only military intervention by the USA could stop it if China made such a move.
China's growing presence in the South China Sea worries Ding but he does not see an invasion.
"It's probably unlikely, but the possibility is that (Taiwan's) oil route might be somewhat threatened" by Beijing, he says.
Meanwhile, the USA is moving forward on developing long-range, stealthy U.S. aircraft capable of penetrating modern air defense, including those in China.
The Air Force plans to spend $197 million this year to design a new, radar-evading bomber.
It may be flown by pilots, or remote control, allowing it to stay aloft for long periods without refueling.
The Air Force hopes to have it flying missions by the mid-2020s.
With mid-air refueling, the warplane could circle outside the reach of Chinese air defense, positioned to strike.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy also is testing an unmanned, radar-cloaked attack plane that can be launched from an aircraft carrier.
The Navy refers to the plane as the Unmanned Carrier Launched Surveillance and Strike system, or UCLASS.
Carriers capable of launching unmanned bombers could operate outside the range of the anti-access missiles China is developing, van Tol says.
Those bombers could be launched in safe water and refueled before attacking, he says.
"All of a sudden, carriers are back in play," he says.

China's High-Speed Politics

By DAVID BANDURSKI

HONG KONG — In the wake of a deadly train collision in China that claimed at least 39 lives, a single photograph has for many Chinese become emblematic of a callous, unresponsive political culture that prioritizes instant results over public well-being and accountability.
The news photograph shows a high-speed train zipping along a viaduct in Wenzhou, the site of the accident last Saturday, less than a day after rescue work was halted, some say far too soon.
The wreckage of the crash is piled carelessly on the barren ground below, a tragedy swept rashly into the past.
From the outset, China’s government did its utmost to keep public doubts from gathering speed.
The Central Propaganda Department instructed media across the country to avoid hard questions and focus instead on “stories that are extremely moving, like people donating blood and taxi drivers refusing to accept fares.”
The overarching theme, it said, should be “great love in the face of great tragedy.”
Meanwhile, China’s rail ministry cited lightning as the cause of the accident, sidestepping questions of human error and institutional failure.
When journalists asked pointedly how a young girl had been found alive after officials called an end to the rescue effort, the ministry again favored emotion over candor, calling the discovery a “miracle.”
Over the last several days, however, Chinese have insistently pushed the Wenzhou tragedy front and center, refusing to accept the government’s rationalizations and distractions.
Using Twitter-like platforms on an unprecedented scale, people have clamored for answers to a hornet’s nest of questions.
How was the accident caused by lightning?
Why was the train behind not aware there was a train in front?
Why was the rescue effort halted so soon?
Why was the wreckage piled up into shallow pits before there had been a proper investigation into the accident’s cause?
Why has a list of victims not been made public?
Magazines and newspapers have followed suit, reporting boldly on the facts and pressing for answers.
At the very heart of all of these questions — and indeed of the tragedy itself — is a government that refuses to be held accountable for its decisions, and that admits no criticism when criticism might make the difference between bold vision and monstrous folly.
Questions about the rapid development of China’s high-speed rail network have simmered under the surface for years but were never given a proper hearing.
Led by the former railway minister Liu Zhijun, who was jailed for corruption in February, a handful of government officials were entrusted with vast resources while being exempted from public scrutiny. (The general budget estimate for the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railroad alone surpasses the entire budget for the Three Gorges Dam Project.)
China’s railroads were Liu’s private fiefdom, and he was rewarded politically for pushing ahead with big plans through unilateral decision-making, earning the nickname “Great Leap Liu.”
Dominating resources of both power and money, Liu monopolized the debate among would-be experts. Dissenting voices, like that of Zhao Jian, a professor at the Economy Management Institute of Beijing Transportation University, were elbowed aside.
In an interview published on the eve of the Wenzhou tragedy, Zhao told a magazine in southern China that his university president had discouraged him from criticizing high-speed rail development because it might hinder the school’s ability to secure research grants.
Until this month, Chinese media were almost entirely complicit, trumpeting high-speed rail as a glorious enterprise reflecting the prestige of the Chinese Communist Party.
No matter that the cost of tickets placed it out of reach for the vast majority of Chinese.
Last December, the party’s flagship People’s Daily newspaper ran a front-page story valorizing an ordinary train driver who had been given a “dead order” from superiors back in 2008 to master a new high-speed train in just 10 days, against the judgment of a German trainer who said trainees needed at least two months.
With all the high foolishness of state propaganda, the article relished the fact that the odds were stacked against the trainees and the fact that there was “no room for error.”
The “great leap” culture that Liu Zhijun epitomized is the way things operate across China, from county towns bursting with development all the way up to the top.
Party and government officials are accountable only to superiors with whom they hope to score expedient political points.
The legitimate concerns of citizens are routinely ignored.
Chinese people have pleaded with their leaders to slow down and prioritize the quality of development. “China, please slow your soaring steps forward,” one social media user wrote.
“Wait for your people ... wait for your conscience! We don’t want derailed trains, or collapsing bridges, or roads that slide into pits. We don’t want our homes to become death traps. Move more slowly. Let every life have freedom and dignity.”
China’s leaders must recognize that the political culture of expediency and secrecy is the root cause of this and other tragedies, from food and mine safety to violent property demolition.
Political reform is needed to empower Chinese citizens to monitor the government and eliminate corruption and mismanagement.
Reform is the only way to enable real and sustained accountability.
In the face of mounting public anger, the government is now dealing more seriously with the crisis.
Prime Minister Wen Jiabao has visited the crash site, pledging to hold those responsible to account, and the government has ordered an “urgent overhaul” of the national railway system.
But this urgency must not, yet again, become mere expediency, another high-speed solution to a crisis of public opinion.

Lawmaker vows look at China trade abuses

By Doug Palmer

U.S. Rep. Dave Camp, R-Midland
WASHINGTON -- A top Republican lawmaker Wednesday said he planned to turn up the pressure on China over a long list of trade "abuses" after Congress returns from its upcoming August recess.
"China... flagrantly disregards its international obligations and seeks to impede fair commerce at every opportunity," House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp said in a speech.
Camp told reporters he was concerned about Beijing's currency practices, which many U.S. lawmakers and economists believe gives Chinese companies an unfair advantage.
But he said Congress had made a mistake in the past by focusing exclusively on that issue when there were "far larger" concerns.
He promised a broad hearing on China trade concerns before deciding if legislation was needed.
"China blatantly steals the intellectual property of American businesses and grossly subsidizes domestic industries -- and its list of trade abuses goes on and on," he said.
Shortly after Camp's speech, the Senate unanimously approved outgoing Commerce Secretary Gary Locke to be the next U.S. ambassador to China.
Locke, a former Washington state governor, has pledged to press China to open its market to more U.S. goods and services, move to a more flexible currency exchange rate and increase action against counterfeiting of American products.
The U.S.-China Business Council, which represents roughly 240 American companies that do business in China, said it looked forward to working with Locke to increase sales to the fast-growing China market.
But the group, which fought efforts last year in the House to pass legislation aimed at Beijing's currency practice, also noted China is already the United States's third-largest export market, with sales projected to top $100 billion this year.
"Add in our exports to Hong Kong and sales of products and services made by American companies with operations on the ground, China is probably getting close to a $200 billion market for U.S. companies. Those are numbers that matter to American jobs and economic growth," the group said.
Camp also criticized the White House for delaying work on a Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT) with China because administration officials "can't decide how to treat labor issues" that would arise in the talks.
The administration of former President George W. Bush, a Republican, began negotiations with China on a BIT. But those have been on hold since shortly after Obama, a Democrat, took office in January 2009 to review concerns raised by the AFL-CIO labor federation and other groups that criticized Bush's approach.
As a result, "we are sitting on the sidelines while our trading partners are aggressively moving forward," Camp said.
Many have already signed investment agreements with China that give their investors more rights in China than U.S. investors have, while others like the European Union have announced plans to begin talks with Beijing, he said.

Southeast Asia’s navy chiefs meet as tensions simmer with China over South China Sea

By Associated Press

Philippines Navy PF-11 at Balikatan
HANOI, Vietnam — Malaysia’s naval chief urged Beijing on Wednesday to respect the sovereignty of other claimants in disputed South China Sea waters as he and other Southeast Asian navy commanders discussed security after recent run-ins with China.
The gathering in Vietnam comes a week after a regional security meeting, where the Association of Southeast Asian Nations agreed to a preliminary plan with China to peacefully resolve disputes over contested territory claimed all or in part by several Asian nations.
Vietnam’s navy chief Nguyen Van Hien said during the opening remarks that the meeting comes as “security in the East Sea is extremely complicated,” referring to the South China Sea by its Vietnamese name.
Vietnam and the Philippines have recently sparred with China, accusing it of interfering with their oil exploration activities in disputed waters. Beijing denies the allegations.
China says it has historical claims to the entire, potentially resource-rich sea, home to vital shipping lanes.
In the past, Beijing has pushed to handle disputes with its neighbors individually, but ASEAN has been trying to gain more leverage by getting the powerful Asian neighbor to address issues with all 10 members of the bloc. Malaysia and Brunei have also laid claim to overlapping areas in the South China Sea.
“China is free to do anything,” Malaysia’s navy chief Tan Sri Abdul Aziz said on the meeting’s sidelines.
“But I would urge China to respect the sovereignty and integrity of the littoral states.”
During the regional security meeting last week in Indonesia, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton laid out specific guidelines for the peaceful settlement of competing territorial claims in the South China Sea.
She said the recent spats with China are threatening the security that has driven the region’s economic growth.

US to continue spy flights after jets 'pursued' by China over Taiwan

Washington on Tuesday insisted it would continue spy flights over the Taiwan Strait after Chinese jets reportedly chased a US reconnaissance plane into Taiwanese airspace.
By Malcolm Moore, Shanghai and Alex Spillius in Washington

Taiwan's defence ministry said it sent two F-16 fighters to intercept the Chinese Sukhoi-27 jets near the central line across the 113-mile wide Strait in late June, the first such incursion for 12 years.
The ministry said that the two Chinese jets quickly turned around.
A spokesman added that he believed the incident was "an accident" and that Taiwan had been "in full control" of the situation.
China has long objected to US reconnaissance of its coastline, especially since a US spy plane and a People's Liberation Army jet collided in 2001 near Hainan island, killing the Chinese pilot.
The crew of the US plane was detained for 11 days in a major diplomatic row.
Adm Mike Mullen, the top US military official, said: "We won't be deterred from flying in international airspace. The Chinese would see us move out of there. We're not going to do that, from my perspective. These reconnaissance flights are important."
But in an article for the New York Times chairman of the joint chiefs of staff stressed that the Pentagon wants to build bridges with Beijing.
Following his visit to China and his counterpart Gen Chen Bingde earlier this month, Adm Mullen said the US was considering an exchange of more junior defence officials.
"General Chen and I are considering more frequent discussions, more exercises, more personnel exchanges," he wrote.
"We both believe that the younger generation of military officers is ready for closer contact, and that upon their shoulders rests the best hope for deeper, more meaningful trust."
The relationship between China and the US should be based on "candid and forthright" talks rather than suspicion, he added.
He said that the time had come in the US to end reflexive suspicion of China, but admonished Beijing for cutting off ties whenever it didn't like "something we do".
"That can't be the model anymore. Nor can we, for our part, swing between engagement and overreaction," he wrote.
Though there are simmering fears in the region about China's increased military might, relations between China and Taiwan have eased lately as Taiwan's President Ma Ying-jeou has abandoned his predecessor's pro-independence stance and boosted ties with the world's fastest-growing major economy.
China still claims sovereignty over Taiwan, which the Kuomintang claimed sovereignty over in 1949 after losing control of the mainland during the communist revolution.
Though Washington has dropped official recognition of Taiwan, the US is still obliged by law to defend the country against Chinese aggression.
In January last year President Barack Obama authorised the sale of $6.4 billion (£3.9bn) in arms, including missile systems and helicopters to Taipei, prompting Beijing to suspend military contacts for a year.
The US administration is close to a final decision on whether or not to sell 66 new F-16 fighter jets to Taiwan by Oct 1.

Chinese train lines suffer further setback

By Simon Rabinovitch in Beijing

In this photo released by China's Xinhua News Agency, a bullet train passes a viaduct from which carriages fell after Saturday's crash near Wenzhou, east China's Zhejiang Province, Monday, July 25, 2011. Doubts about China's breakneck plans to expand high-speed rail across the country have been underscored by a bullet train wreck that killed dozens of people. 
China’s high-speed rail network was hit with fresh problems on Tuesday when 20 bullet trains on the new line between Beijing and Shanghai were delayed for more than three hours because of a power outage, just days after power problems caused a deadly crash.
It was at least the fifth such failure since the line opened a month ago, and a stark reminder of the quality concerns now surrounding China’s rush to build the world’s biggest high-speed rail system.
The Chinese government ordered a two-month safety check of railways nationwide following the collision that killed at least 39 people, when one train smashed into the back of another that had lost power after being struck by lightning, near the eastern city of Wenzhou.
Sheng Guangzu, China’s railways minister, said in a statement that the inspections would focus on bullet trains and try to solve equipment problems as quickly as possible.
The People’s Daily reported on Tuesday that Sheng had expressed his “heartfelt sympathy” to those injured in the crash and to the families of victims, and that he wanted to convey his “deepest apology” to all travellers.
China’s bullet trains began running in 2007 and, in a burst of spending, the government has built nearly 10,000km of high-speed rail tracks.
That is roughly four-times the length of Japan’s Shinkansen lines, which have been operating for 47 years without a single passenger death due to collision or derailment.
Shen Minggao, chief China economist with Citi, said he hoped the accident would prompt a slowing down not just of the country’s railway construction, but also of the broader Chinese economy, which grew 9.6 per cent in the first half even as other major countries languished in sluggish recoveries.
“High-speed rail in some sense represents China’s fast growth,” Mr Shen said.
“When you care so much about speed, you sometimes pay less attention to the quality of growth.”
As is common in China with sensitive issues, the government ordered domestic journalists to refrain from asking tough questions about the train crash.
The theme of reporting should be “in the face of great tragedy, there is great love”, the central propaganda department said in a directive that spread online.
Within 24 hours of the accident, Beijing sacked three senior railway officials who had oversight of the section of track near Wenzhou where the collision occurred.
With criticism still rampant on news websites and on Sina Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, the official Xinhua news agency said the government had given one victim’s family Rmb500,000 ($77,600) as compensation, which is more than three times the maximum legislated for train accident deaths.
Both trains in the crash were made by China South Locomotive & Rolling Stock (CSR).
A CSR spokesman denied there was anything defective with the trains, placing blame on a signalling problem. The team investigating the accident had travelled to Beijing to present their findings to the top leadership and will hold a news conference on Wednesday, state media reported.
Seiji Abe, a professor at Kansai University and an expert on railway safety management, said Japan’s bullet rail system had a fail-safe brake system that prevented two trains from getting too close to each other.
Regardless of the outcome of the investigation, the overseas ambitions of China’s rail companies appear to have been dealt a serious blow.
Just a few weeks ago, firms such as Japan’s Kawasaki Heavy Industries and France’s Alstom faced a formidable threat from Chinese rivals who had learnt from their technology and claimed to have developed cheaper alternatives.
Concerns that Chinese train manufacturers will now struggle to gain a foothold abroad and may even find weaker demand at home weighed on their share prices for a second straight day.
CSR dropped 3.8 per cent on the Shanghai stock exchange, adding to its 8.9 per cent fall on Monday.

IN CHINA, MAKING MONEY CAN MEAN LOSING FRIENDS

As China’s economy opens up, wealth is accumulating in the hands of a new generation of “very rich.” For the new owner class, money means more power and influence – but it can also breed resentment.
By Brice Pedroletti

Wealth divide in the parking lot
BEIJING – Chinese people may be fascinated by the very rich.
But they don’t much like them.
Chinese gripes with other people's wealth are popping up everywhere.
In early May, information surfaced accusing the public company that runs the former Chinese imperial palace of quietly turning one of the Forbidden City’s apartments into a private club for billionaires.
The news hit China’s Internet community like a bombshell, which reacted with outrage to the corruption scandal.
Wealthy young drivers who consider themselves above the law are another favorite target.
In 2010, the son of a local police chief in the city of Baoding struck and killed a female student on the Hebei University campus.
What caused a scandal wasn’t the accident itself, but the young driver’s arrogant behavior.
When the police tried to arrest him, the young man – expecting special treatment – cried: “My father is Li Gang!”
For Chinese Internet users, the now-famous phrase became a symbol of impunity.
In 2011, the public was treated to another grizzly story involving a young man and an automobile.
After hitting a young woman with his car, Yao Jiaxin, a student, finished the victim off by stabbing her several times.
Observers were quick to describe this tragic incident as a sign that money-obsessed China is losing its moral bearings.
Yao Jiaxin explained his actions by saying he thought the girl, were she to live, would try to extort money from him.
Yao Jiaxin was sentenced to death and executed last June.
In Chinese it’s called chou fu – hatred towards rich people.
Signs of it are everywhere.
According to some analysts, it is the result of a gradual, 30-year-long process of opening the economy and allowing wealth to accumulate in the hands of select individuals.
In the past, Chinese inheritance laws prevented wealth from being passed along to the next generation.
That has now changed.


Second-generation wealth
“When a reckless young man drives a BMW, he is considered a member of the ‘rich second generation,’ If he is caught, it increases tenfold the anger people feel,” says Yang Yiyin, from the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences (CASS).
According to Yiyin, Chinese people do not object to wealth in and of itself.
“They all want to be rich! Particularly when considering that most of the people who became rich these last 30 years were poor before,” he says.
Nowadays, however, people “are convinced that it has become far more difficult for them to rise socially than in the 1980s,” adds Yiyin.
“When they think about the reasons why these people were able to become rich, they can’t help thinking that they must have done it illegally in some way. The Chinese consumer-citizen feels powerless.”
Guo Yuhua, a sociologist at the University of Tsinghua, in Beijing, puts it a slightly different way: “People don’t hate the rich. They hate the fact that power knows no control. Those who have power do what they want. They can exchange their favors for an apartment, a car, or even their professional status!”
Because of the recent speculation bubble, the race to buy real estate has split the population in two: owners and non-owners.
The privatization of urban real estate over the past 20 years in China has helped the urban middle class gain wealth.
But it did nothing for the rural lower-class, which still lives on collective lands.
For the growing number of wealthy Chinese, resentment from others, may help account for rising rates of emigration.
A recent study by the management consulting firm Bain & Company found that 60% of “high return investment individuals” – people with at least $1.5 million to invest – have already moved abroad or consider doing so.
And among the “super rich,” people with more than $15.4 million, roughly a quarter decided to change their nationality.
Still, links between the different social classes exist: in big cities, many former migrant workers are now entrepreneurs operating small businesses.
According to researchers Gilles Guiheux and Pierre-Paul Zalio at the French Centre for Research on Contemporary China, young people come from out of town to work in the service sector as “white-collar migrants.”
They work in less than ideal conditions, but sometimes the job pays well.
Is the Chinese dream turning sour?
In Guo Yuhua’s opinion, today’s expressions such as “rich second generation,” “second generation executives” and “second generation migrants” all reflect “opportunities closing.”
Power, he explains, is passed down from generation to generation.
But so is poverty.
In addition, many Chinese who would be part of the middle class in other countries – civil servants, small business owners, teachers and executives – refuse to be considered as such in China.
Why?
Because, according to Guo Yuhua, they have no sense of professional or economic security.
“Your flat can be demolished overnight. You can be evicted. There’s no guarantee of any stability,” he says.
To protect themselves, Chinese people want to become rich, very rich… even if it means that they will be despised.

China's New Dictionary: Agricultural Cooperative Is Out, Hair Gel Is In

By Johnny Erling

BEIJING — When saying goodbye, people in China often say "Bye Bye."
But until this July there was no Chinese way of writing that.
There is now: Beijing's guardians of the language have deemed "Bai Bai" the correct written form, and it has been included in the new edition of China's best-known dictionary.
Actually the linguists took the matter a step further. There are four tones in spoken Mandarin, and the character "Bai" is spoken in the fourth, which has a very hard ring to it.
To soften that, the linguists came up with a tailor-made, second tone "Bai."
This is just one example of how flexible Chinese linguists are integrating new expressions and terms in a country growing increasingly international.
A dozen linguists from the Academy of Social Sciences and editors from the Beijing-based company, the Commercial Press, which publishes the dictionary, worked for eight years to produce the new (and eleventh) edition of the "Xinhua Zidian", or "Dictionary of the New China."
The first print run of the most influential Chinese dictionary counts 4 million copies.
Since the founding of the People's Republic, every school child has been familiar with the pocket publication, the present edition of which runs more than 700 pages.
With a total number of copies exceeding 400 million (behind the bible) the dictionary is one of the four best-selling books in the world.
From the very first edition in 1953, it has mirrored social, political and economic changes in Chinese society and government.
In this new edition, all terms that have anything to do with class struggle, and hence do not correspond to China today, have been deleted or somehow revisited.
To take the example of the pronoun "Zanmen" (all together): in the 2004 edition, the sample given for its meaning was: "All together, we the poor have revolutionized our village."
Seven years later that has been replaced by: "All together, we have become rich in our village."
The word for slave (Nu) has also been given a new modern usage, one that has long been in use in spoken Chinese.
The terms "Fang Nu" and "Che Nu" are used to mean slaves to one's home or car, in the sense that someone is a slave to the debt they have incurred to acquire a home or vehicle.
Terms that are no longer applicable to modern life, like "Meiyou" (oil for petroleum lamps) or "Hezuoshe" (agricultural cooperative), have been removed from the 2011 edition.
New terms include "harmony," "media," "good of the people," and "migrant worker."


"Hair gel" in Chinese
For the very first time, the notion of animal welfare enters the Chinese dictionary.
The information formerly given with regard to endangered species — e.g. that they are useful to humans for meat, skin, fur, ivory has been suppressed.
This applies to whales, foxes, rhinoceroses and elephants.
There are new words or terms commonly used in the spoken language before that are now taken up in the dictionary: "Di Shi" for taxis, "Zhe Li" for hair gel, and "Xiu" for TV shows.
In a country where some half a billion people have Internet access, many new terms are Internet-related.
Still, the dictionary has trouble keeping up, and many terms routinely used in daily life like "Weibo" (micro-blog) and "Xiazai" (download) will have to wait until the next edition.
Words like firewall and proxy server are taboo, however, for reasons having to do with Internet censorship.
The new edition of the "Xinhua Zidian" takes into account that Taiwan and Hong Kong have retained more traditional forms of writing Chinese, which were radically simplified on mainland China in 1949.
The new dictionary contains 13,000 terms, and 1,500 characters also written in the old way have been included in this edition.
The Xinhua Zhou Hongbo press agency, to which the dictionary publisher Commercial Press belongs, states in a press release that the inclusion of traditional signs is to "help with cultural exchange."
There are only a few illustrations in the dictionary.
One however has stayed the same since 1953, in all 11 editions of the "Xinhua Zidian."
Under the key word "Yifu" (clothing) is a picture of the pants and jacket known the world over as a Mao suit. Needless to say, virtually no one wears the old-fashioned uniform any more.