Chính's news

New China landing vessels point to Pacific rivalry

2012-02-15T21:12:00.002+01:00

By David Lague

HONG KONG -- As looming budget cuts force the Pentagon to plan for a smaller U.S. navy, China is accelerating the launch of new, increasingly capable warships as part of a sustained drive to become a major maritime power.
Shanghai's Hudong Zhonghua Shipbuilding Company late last month launched the fourth of China's new 071 amphibious landing ships according to reports carried by Chinese military web sites and the state-controlled media.
While most attention has been drawn to the ongoing sea trials of China's first aircraft carrier, military analysts say the expanding fleet of 20,000 tonne landing ships, the biggest domestically designed and built vessels in the Chinese navy, delivers a far more immediate boost to Beijing's global influence.
"Having a significant fleet of large amphibious assault vessels clearly suggests a desire for power projection," says Christian Le Miere, a maritime security researcher at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
"If you want the surgical insertion of forces, for a range of reasons, then you need amphibious response ships."

MILITARY RIVALRY
China's naval buildup comes amid mounting maritime tensions in the Asia-Pacific region, which is likely to be one of the main geopolitical stress points in the coming decade.
Military planners previously had focused mainly on a potential conflict in the Taiwan strait.
More recently, however, Japan and China have locked horns over islands each claims in the East China Sea; Vietnam, the Philippines and other nations are disputing territorial claims with China over parts of the South China Sea thought to be rich in oil and gas.
The U.S. Navy has announced it will deploy its own new amphibious assault vessels, the Littoral Combat Ships, to the "maritime crossroads" of the Asia-Pacific theater, stationing them in Singapore and perhaps the Philippines.
Xi Jinping, the man destined to become China's new president later this year, called for enhanced military cooperation between the Pacific powers during a meeting with U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on Monday in Washington.
Xi, the son of a famous guerrilla commander from the 1930s, also met with President Barack Obama and was treated to a rare show of honors at the Pentagon, including on a 19-gun salute.
But Panetta, alluding to the strains in the relationship, called for more transparency from Beijing about its military build-up.

LARGEST SHIPBUILDER
The Chinese navy is expected to deploy up to eight of the type 071 ships that can carry up to 800 troops, hovercraft, armored vehicles and medium lift helicopters.
The first of the class launched in 2006, the Kunlunshan, has already deployed with Chinese naval forces to the Indian Ocean and the pace of construction appears to have quickened with the third and fourth vessels completed within the last five months.
And, military commentators and retired Chinese naval officers say, early design work has already started on a bigger, more capable landing ship.
For the Chinese navy, the country's thriving commercial shipbuilding industry is providing a springboard for further improvements in the size and sophistication of new classes of warships, military experts say.
China in 2010 overtook South Korea to become the world's biggest shipbuilder and industry experts say the leading state-owned shipyards are steadily improving skills and technology with the launch of bigger and more complex oil tankers, container ships and other, more specialized vessels.
Along with more than two decades of rapid growth in military spending, this shipbuilding expertise has transformed the Chinese navy from an obsolete, coastal defense force to a blue water fleet that is expanding its influence into the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
China's best warships and submarines are now armed with advanced air defense weapons and long range, anti-ship missiles.
In its annual report to Congress on the Chinese military, the Pentagon last year said the People's Liberation Army (PLA) navy now has about 75 major warships, more than 60 submarines, 55 medium and heavy amphibious ships and about 85 smaller, missile-armed fast attack craft.
As a major trading power with a growing dependence on imported energy and raw materials, this naval expansion is crucial for the country's security, according to Chinese military planners.
"The safety of China's personnel, assets and shipping lanes is very important for its economy," wrote Senior Captain Wang Xiaoxuan, the director of the PLA's Naval Research Institute, in the official China Daily newspaper last month.
"To guarantee this, it needs a strong navy."

SHRINKING US NAVY
Military strategists dismiss crude comparisons between navies based on the number of ships alone and most experts agree that the U.S. navy with its 285-strong fleet including 11 aircraft carriers, more than 70 nuclear powered submarines and 22 cruisers remains the world's overwhelmingly, dominant navy.
In size, firepower, integration with other important weapons systems and battle experience, the best U.S. warships enjoy a clear advantage over those of China and most combatants from other navies.
However, it is also clear that under the Obama administration's plan to shave almost $487 billion from the Pentagon budget over the coming decade, the U.S. navy will shrink as China's fleet continues to grow in size and quality.
To meet its budget target, the U.S. navy proposes to retire seven cruisers and two amphibious vessels, delay work on new ships and submarines and scrap some programs which could see the fleet shrink to less than 250 ships, according to senior Pentagon officials.
These cuts come as the Obama administration mounts a "pivot" to Asia following the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and anticipated exit from Afghanistan.
As part of this effort to boost defense cooperation in Asia, the U.S. military is now holding its annual Cobra Gold joint exercises which run until February 17 in Thailand with troops from the host country, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea and Japan.
It will hold joint naval exercises next month with the Philippines near the disputed Spratly islands.

SECOND-RANKED SPENDER
This shift of military firepower to Asia and renewed emphasis on building closer ties with traditional, regional allies is partly aimed at countering the rapid growth of Chinese military muscle.
After more than two decades of double digit growth, the annual expansion of China's official military outlays dropped to 7.5 per cent in 2010 in the aftermath of the global financial crisis but spending bounced back last year with a 12.7 per cent increase to $91.5 billion.
Most foreign analysts believe China understates its defense budget.
The Pentagon estimates total Chinese military outlays in 2010 were more than $160 billion which would easily make it the second ranked defense spender behind the US.
The Obama administration is proposing to spend $525 billion on the military in 2013.
For the expanding Chinese navy, the widely publicized deployment of the refurbished, former Ukrainian aircraft carrier, the Varyag, on its sea trials last year was seen as an important milestone in China's bid to become a major sea power.
However, most Chinese and foreign experts believe it will be years before the carrier will be operationally ready with aircraft, weapons and supporting vessels.

PROTECTING OVERSEAS NATIONALS
In contrast, military analysts say the amphibious landing ships already provide Beijing the option of deploying troops and their equipment in wartime or in response to less serious peacetime contingencies, including operations to protect the more than 800,000 Chinese nationals working overseas.
"In non-combat roles, they are more meaningful than an aircraft carrier," says Gabe Collins, an Ann Arbor, Michigan-based specialist on maritime affairs for the China SignPost research group.
"They are geared to using choppers, troops, hovercraft and even armored vehicles. Now they can say: 'We've just had three people kidnapped here, let's go and do something about it'."
More ominously for smaller regional powers, these ships could also be used to land Chinese troops on disputed territory in the South China Sea, analysts say.
However, it is in so-called "soft power" that the amphibious landing vessels could make their initial contribution as China attempts to reassure regional nations that its growing military might poses no threat.The Chinese military clearly recognized that the U.S. was able to gain substantial goodwill from its effective response to the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami with its aircraft carriers and amphibious assault ships ferrying supplies, medical teams and rescue crews ashore, according to Chinese and Western commentators.
Some analysts believe this experience was a factor in Beijing's decision to launch its first, large, military hospital ship that could be deployed to assist other nations in times of crisis as well as support Chinese amphibious forces in combat.
The hospital ship, launched in 2007, was late last year deployed on a humanitarian medical mission to Latin America and the Caribbean.

American Recounts Beating by Chinese Agents Suspicious of Social Media

2012-02-15T20:36:00.004+01:00

By ANDREW JACOBS
BEIJING — The Chinese Communist Party has long felt threatened by overseas Web sites and social media outlets, but the recent detention of a California physicist who says he was beaten by Chinese security agents seeking the password for his Twitter account suggests how far the government will go in its battle against a freewheeling Internet available only beyond its borders.
The man, Ge Xun, 53, a naturalized American citizen who moved to the United States from China in 1986, said he was abducted from a street in Beijing this month and was roughly questioned by public security officers at a secret location.
During 21 hours of interrogation, Mr. Ge said, the agents peppered him with questions about his blogging activity, his membership in an organization that promotes dialogue between Tibetans and Chinese and his role in maintaining a Web site that supports a blind lawyer living under house arrest in China’s rural northeast.
But Mr. Ge’s greatest sin, it appears, was his zealous embrace of Twitter, which has long been blocked in China along with Facebook, YouTube and tens of thousands of other Web sites that the government deems a threat to its hold on power.
In a phone interview on Monday from his home in Fremont, Calif., Mr. Ge described how the agents, infuriated by his assertion that bloggers in the United States were volunteers and not government-sponsored agitators, demanded that he turn over his Twitter password.
When he refused, two of them unleashed a torrent of kicks and punches that lasted 30 minutes, he said. “The more they beat me, the less I felt like cooperating,” he said.
In the end, Mr. Ge and his captors came up with a compromise: he did not reveal his password but logged on to Twitter and allowed them to peek inside his account.
“The truth is I have nothing to hide,” he said.
Although Mr. Ge was released and promptly deported on Feb. 2, the incident highlights the risks faced by foreign passport holders of Chinese origin when ensnared by China’s nebulous, omnipotent public security apparatus.
A number of American citizens remain in Chinese prisons on questionable charges, including Xue Feng, a geologist serving eight years for industrial espionage.
Another naturalized American, Hu Zhicheng, has been blocked from leaving the country while he battles accusations of commercial espionage lodged by a former business associate.
Mr. Hu spent a year and a half in jail but was released after Chinese prosecutors acknowledged that the case had no merit.
“Having an American or an Australian passport and having Chinese blood puts you at a disadvantage to those who are white,” said Wang Songlian, a researcher at Chinese Human Rights Defenders.
A State Department official declined to comment on Mr. Ge’s detention but said the plights of Mr. Xue and Mr. Hu would be raised during the visit to the United States by Vice President Xi Jinping, who arrived in Washington from Beijing on Monday afternoon.
The incident involving Mr. Ge was unusual because many native Chinese who hold foreign passports and publicly criticize the Communist Party are denied visas to return home.
Mr. Ge, who applied and received an emergency visa to attend the funeral of his mother, said he had returned to China numerous times over the years.
During a visit in 1997, he said, public security agents briefly and politely questioned him about his lapsed membership in an organization of Chinese students seeking leniency for those arrested during the 1989 crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests.
“The thing I really care about is basic human rights,” said Mr. Ge, who studied experimental physics at Texas A&M University and works as a technician for Mercedes-Benz.
“I’ve never called for the overthrow of the government, and I don’t advocate violence.”
Mr. Ge was shocked, he said, when three plainclothes officers accosted him outside the home of Ding Zilin, a retired philosophy professor who has spent two decades seeking justice for those killed during the violent suppression of Tiananmen protesters.
Ms. Ding’s 17-year-old son was killed by a bullet to his heart that June.
The officers not only knew Mr. Ge’s name but also had a photograph of him that they had downloaded from the Internet.
After dragging him into a waiting Honda Accord, they refused to explain what they were after and then confiscated his cellphone, he said.
Once inside a guesthouse called “The Old Cadres Activity Center,” he said, they stripped him of his other possessions, including a camera, money and a hand-held recorder.
Then they began questioning him about his activities in the United States and suggested that he had come to China to make trouble on behalf of antigovernment forces abroad.
He said they simply could not believe that the Web site advocating freedom for the blind lawyer, Chen Guangcheng, was run by volunteers.
“That’s not possible,” Mr. Ge quoted one of the them as saying.
“How can a Web site not belong to an organization, have no leader and not spend any money?”
It was when Mr. Ge explained the role of Twitter in spreading word about the site that they demanded his password, he said.
Not long after his pummeling, Mr. Ge said, they gave him a sheet of paper and dictated demands that he wrote down with his bruised and wobbly hand.
They included a promise not to meet with “sensitive people,” not to speak to the news media and not to do anything to harm China’s image.
He stuck his finger into a jar of red ink and left an imprint signifying his assent.
A few hours later, en route to the airport, he said, he endured another brief beating after refusing to hand over his laptop for one final inspection.
Once at the terminal, they returned his camera and recording device, although the contents had been erased. They also handed back the bouquet of flowers he had planned to give to Ms. Ding.
As Mr. Ge limped away in pain, he said, the lead interrogator, Wang Jie, reminded him that the entire episode was a “national secret.”
The agent also scribbled down an e-mail address and told him to send a note the next time he came to town. (An e-mail sent to the address seeking comment was not answered on Monday.)
Mr. Ge laughed when asked if he might return to China in the near future.
“Sure, why not?” he said.
“My visa is good for a full year.”

Chinese Hackers And The Nortel Breach

2012-02-15T20:00:00.000+01:00

Chinese government-affiliated hackers are the world's most "active and persistent" perpetrators of industrial spying
By SIOBHAN GORMAN

Brian Shields, pictured, said Chinese hackers 'had access to everything.'

Nortel's then-CEO, Mike Zafirovski, said people 'did not believe it was a real issue.'

For nearly a decade, hackers enjoyed widespread access to the corporate computer network of Nortel Networks Ltd., a once-giant telecommunications firm now fallen on hard times.

Using seven passwords stolen from top Nortel executives, including the chief executive, the hackers—who were working in China—penetrated Nortel's computers at least as far back as 2000 and over the years downloaded technical papers, research-and-development reports, business plans, employee emails and other documents, according to Brian Shields, a former 19-year Nortel veteran who led an internal investigation.

The hackers also hid spying software so deeply within some employees' computers that it took investigators years to realize the pervasiveness of the problem, according to Mr. Shields and Nortel documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

They "had access to everything," Mr. Shields said of the hackers.

"They had plenty of time. All they had to do was figure out what they wanted."

According to an internal report, Nortel "did nothing from a security standpoint" to keep out the hackers, other than resetting the seven passwords.

Nortel's breach offers a rare level of detail about a type of international corporate espionage that is of growing concern to U.S. officials.

A U.S. intelligence report released in November concluded that government-affiliated hackers operating from China are the world's most "active and persistent" perpetrators of industrial spying.

The report cited a number of Chinese attacks, including one targeting Google; the theft of data from global energy companies; and theft of proprietary data such as client lists and acquisition plans at other companies.The Nortel revelations come as China's vice president, Xi Jinping, arrived in the U.S. for a visit in which China is seeking to promote greater trust between the two countries.

Mr. Xi, who arrived Monday afternoon, will press the U.S. to expand Chinese access to U.S. high-tech markets at a time when U.S. intelligence officials have expressed increasing alarm about what they say is government-sponsored cyberspying on U.S. and Western companies, particularly in China.

China's government has denied allegations of cyberspying.

When asked about Nortel specifically, the Chinese embassy in Washington issued a statement saying in part that "cyber attacks are transnational and anonymous" and shouldn't be assumed to originate in China.

Nortel didn't respond to requests for comment.

The Canadian company is in the final stages of selling itself off in pieces as part of a 2009 bankruptcy filing.Nortel was a pioneering maker of the computerized switches and telecom gear that powers much of the world's phone and Internet networks.

Nortel equipment (now part of a business owned by Genband Corp.) makes up 45% to 50% of the U.S. telephone switch marketplace, according to Akshay Sharma of research firm Gartner Inc.

As part of its internal investigation, Nortel made no effort to determine if its products were also compromised by hackers, according to several former employees including Mr. Shields, who was a senior adviser for systems security at Nortel.

The investigation lasted about six months, and for some of that time involved three staffers, Mr. Shields said, before it fizzled out due to a lack of leads.

Mr. Shields and several former colleagues said the company didn't fix the hacking problem before starting to sell its assets, and didn't disclose the hacking to prospective buyers.

Nortel assets have been purchased by Avaya Inc., Ciena Corp., Telefon AB L.M. Ericsson and Genband.It is possible for companies to inherit spyware or hacker infiltrations via acquisitions, said Sean McGurk, who until recently ran the U.S. government's cybersecurity intelligence center.

"When you're buying those files or that intellectual property, you're also buying that 'rootkit,'" he said, using a term that refers to embedded spy software.

Nortel's experience exposes the uncertainties in reporting requirements for company officials who discover that their networks are infiltrated.

Companies aren't obligated to disclose a breach to another company as part of an acquisition deal, said Jacob Olcott of Good Harbor Consulting, a firm that advises companies on national-security issues.

It is up to the acquiring company to ask, he said.

Since Nortel's stock traded publicly in the U.S., it was required by the Securities and Exchange Commission to disclose "material" risks and events to investors.

Many companies are just now becoming aware that cyber attacks must be reported if considered material, said Mr. Olcott, a former Capitol Hill aide who led a committee investigation into public disclosure of incidents like these.

As a result of that investigation, late last year the SEC issued a formal guidance memo saying cyber attacks can be "material."

It also said companies are expected to investigate a breach to determine whether it is material.

A Ciena spokesman said, "Ciena was not made aware, whether during diligence or any other part of the bankruptcy-sale process, of any possible prior infiltration of the Nortel network by third parties."

A spokesman for Avaya, which learned of the breach after its acquisition, said: "We are aware of this issue, reviewed it when brought to our attention and disposed of it to our satisfaction."

A Genband official declined to discuss security matters or to say whether Nortel disclosed the breach before the acquisition.

An Ericsson spokeswoman said Ericsson's own network "has a robust security protocol and is constantly monitored."

She said Nortel wasn't required to disclose the hacking because Ericsson purchased only selected Nortel assets, not the whole company or its internal network.

Two of Nortel's three former CEOs during the period of the hacking didn't respond to a request for comment.

The third, Mike Zafirovski, said, "People who looked at [the hacking] did not believe it was a real issue. This never came up like, 'We have a real issue and we need to disclose to potential buyers of businesses.'"Mr. Zafirovski said he didn't believe the infiltrations could be passed on to acquiring companies.

"That's a real, real stretch," he said.

In interviews, three former Nortel information-technology employees disputed Mr. Zafirovski's position, pointing out that a significant number of people continued to use Nortel laptops and desktop computers after moving to Avaya and Genband and connected them to those companies' networks.

One of the three said he knew with certainty that his machine wasn't tested for possible infiltration before it was connected to Avaya's network; he estimated the total number of similar machines to be "in the high hundreds."

Both companies declined to comment on Nortel machines being connected to their networks.

Mr. Shields said he believes Nortel's silence put the acquiring companies at risk.

"It's despicable that Nortel didn't say anything," he said.

Nortel discovered the hacking in 2004, when an employee noticed that a senior executive appeared to be downloading an unusual set of documents, according to the internal report.

When asked about it, the executive said he hadn't downloaded the documents.

Mr. Shields and a handful of the firm's computer-security officers soon learned that hackers had apparently obtained the passwords of seven top officials, including a previous CEO.

The hackers had been infiltrating Nortel's network, from China-based Internet addresses, at least as early as 2000, Mr. Shields and his colleagues determined.

Hackers had almost complete access to the company's systems, Mr. Shields said, because the internal structure of Nortel's network posed few barriers.

"Once you were on the inside of the network, it was soft and gooey," he said.

About six months later, Mr. Shields said, he saw signs that hackers were still in the system.

Every month or so, a few computers on the network were sending small bursts of data to one of the same Internet addresses in Shanghai involved in the password-hacking episodes.

Unexpected transmissions like these—where one computer sends a quick "ping" to another—often suggests the presence of spyware, security experts say.

"That's the really deep covert presence," said one person familiar with Nortel's investigation.

"There is something on those computers that's doing that, and finding it is very difficult."

Mr. Shields said he suggested further steps to secure the network, but Nortel chose not to take the recommendations.

"Our own internal process choked us all the time," he said.

In 2008, Mr. Shields said, he learned of a new kind of test, called a memory dump, he could run on PCs suspected of being infected.

By this time, however, Nortel was in deep financial trouble.

Cost-cutting layoffs had begun, the stock was tanking and top executives were desperately trying to pilot the company through a rapidly changing telecom industry.

In January 2009, Nortel filed for bankruptcy protection.

In March of that year, Mr. Shields got approval to examine two of the 50 or so computers he had noticed occasionally communicating with the Shanghai Internet address.

But within a couple of weeks, Mr. Shields himself was laid off—caught in the latest round of cost-cutting convulsing Nortel at the time. (Former supervisors confirm his layoff wasn't related to job performance.)

The day after he left Nortel, Mr. Shields said, he received the test results for the two computers, which had previously gotten a clean bill of health from Nortel's antivirus experts.

Hackers had installed spyware on the computers and could control them remotely.

The hackers were also monitoring employee email, Mr. Shields said.

The spyware unearthed in 2009 was a sophisticated mix.

On both computers, researchers found a particularly malicious and hard-to-spot spying tool, namely "rootkit" software that can give a hacker full control over a computer and enables them to conceal their spying campaign, according to two people familiar with the investigation.

On one computer, hackers had set up an encrypted communications channel to an Internet address near Beijing.

On the other computer, the investigators found a program that hackers were likely using to sniff out other security weaknesses within Nortel's networks.

The hackers had created a "reliable back door," according to one person familiar with the investigation, allowing them to come and go as they pleased in Nortel's network.

Five former Nortel employees familiar with the investigation said the company did nothing with the new information Mr. Shields had collected.

"It was blown off," one said.

Soon after, Mr. Shields was hired back as a consultant to another part of the company.

In June 2009, he sent a 15-page report, detailing the infiltrations spanning nearly a decade, to Mr. Zafirovski, the then-CEO.

"The Chinese are still in your network, we never really rid them out," Mr. Shields wrote.

"I personally would not trust anything you do on your computer as it is extremely likely it is being monitored."Mr. Zafirovski said he didn't recall the report.

He said some security managers have told him Mr. Shields had a reputation as someone who was smart, but would also "cry wolf."

At that point, Nortel's focus was on selling assets, not assessing possible hacker damage, former employees said.

In July 2009, Nortel began inking deals that ultimately totaled $1.4 billion in sales of a range of wireless businesses to Ericsson, the Swedish telecom company.

In December, in a $900 million deal with U.S.-based Avaya, Nortel sold off a business that included much of its work with the U.S. government.

In February 2010, Nortel sold its Internet-phone business and other assets to U.S.-based Genband.

The following month, it sold its high-end communications-networking business to U.S.-based Ciena for $769 million, according to Gartner data.

After Avaya's acquisition of Nortel businesses, Mr. Shields shared his report on the infiltrations with a security official at Avaya.

This was the first time the company learned of Nortel's intrusion, according to a person familiar with the matter.

A top U.S. intelligence official said Nortel's hacking experience is representative of the types of incidents he sees.

"That is consistent with what we've seen in long-term, multipronged attacks," he said.

"If I'm looking to get a jump on my R&D, that's a good way to do it."

As Myanmar opens, China alliance starts to fray

2012-02-15T19:29:00.002+01:00

MANDALAY, Myanmar (Reuters) -- When officials first turned up demanding Chen Ching-feng remove the Chinese sign above her clothing shop in Myanmar's biggest northern city, she ignored them.
"When they came back a few days later and asked why the Chinese was still there, I said I had been busy," the ethnic Chinese resident of Mandalay said, speaking in Mandarin.
"They made me take them down immediately and sign an undertaking not to put them back."
Other ethnic Chinese shop-owners report similar requests, though enforcement is patchy.
Government officials in Myanmar's capital, Naypyitaw, say there is no official ban on Chinese advertisements, but demands to pull them down in Mandalay, a city dominated by Chinese merchants, illustrate mounting unease over Beijing's expanding influence.
As Myanmar pursues dramatic reforms, its relationship with China -- the Southeast Asian nation's biggest investor and second-biggest trade partner -- is changing.
In some cases, long-festering resentment is flaring into the open.
During decades of isolation, the former Burma relied on China as its closest diplomatic and military ally. Wide-reaching Western sanctions put in place after a bloody crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations in 1988 forced Myanmar to deepen economic ties with China.
But as Myanmar embarks on the road back to democracy, a once-muffled debate about China's role is growing louder.
The reforms are also taking place as the geopolitical rivalry between the United States and China has sharpened since the Obama administration's "pivot" toward Asia after preoccupation with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan the past decade.

HISTORICAL FRICTIONS
China's expanding economic influence was never that popular anyway in a country historically suspicious of foreign powers -- memories linger of Beijing's alleged support for the Communist Party of Burma in the 1960s and '70s.
China has its grievances, too.
Clashes between Myanmar soldiers and various insurgent groups dotting the border with China have killed some Chinese and sent refugees streaming across the frontier.
"The government has tried to ban foreign influences before. It seems to be happening again," said Hu Chieh-chi, a restaurateur in Mandalay, who is an ethnic Chinese and a Myanmar citizen, just like clothes store owner Chen.
A two-hour drive away, a grass-roots campaign is forming to halt China's most strategic investment in Myanmar: twin pipelines that will stretch from the Bay of Bengal to China's energy-hungry western provinces, bringing oil and natural gas to one of China's most undeveloped regions.
In interviews with Reuters, the activists say they were emboldened by Myanmar's surprise decision on September 30 to shelve the $3.6 billion Chinese-funded Myitsone dam under public pressure.
U.S. officials told Reuters that responsiveness to a public demand was a crucial factor in Washington's historic rapprochement with Myanmar late last year.
Much is at stake.
Myanmar provides populous and landlocked southwestern China a crucial outlet to the sea.
A friendly Myanmar helps reassure Beijing, which is increasingly worried about being "encircled" by the United States and its allies, from Japan to Australia and India.

TALE OF TWO PIPELINES
From his home overlooking a colonial-era golf course, Kyaw Thiha is clear about what he sees holding back reforms: China.
"This is a democracy. The Chinese ordering us around is not democratic," said the former political prisoner who will contest an April 1 parliamentary by-election as a candidate for the opposition National League for Democracy, the party of Nobel Peace Prize-winner Aung San Suu Kyi.
The soft-spoken university history tutor, jailed during the failed 1988 uprising, wants the government to stop the 790-km (490-mile) pipeline project that will cut across the country, including near his town in the old British hill station of Pyin Oo Lwin.
Human rights groups say the pipelines will displace thousands, damage livelihoods of farmers and fishermen, and benefit China more than Myanmar, where power outages are chronic.
To Beijing, the pipelines are a vital energy security asset that will reduce its reliance on shipping through the narrow choke-point of the Malacca Strait.
Thousands of Chinese workers have been enlisted to build them.
"We want parliament to stop the pipeline. It was not given permission by the people," Kyaw Thiha said in an interview.
A year ago, such talk was dangerous in a country whose critics were regularly locked up by generals who had ruled since a 1962 coup.
But reforms led by a year-old nominally civilian government have begun to unwind years of authoritarianism and self-imposed isolation.
The government has relaxed some media censorship, allowed trade unions, begun peace talks with ethnic rebels, freed hundreds of dissidents and showed signs of pulling back from the powerful economic and political orbit of China.
It was rewarded in December when Hillary Clinton made the first visit to the country by a U.S. secretary of state since 1955.

GRIEVANCES ON THE INTERNET
Myanmar Energy Minister Than Htay acknowledged public concerns over the pipelines but said they would be completed on schedule next year.
"We solved each and every problem along that pipeline route, and we give compensation for land use much more than previously," he said in a recent interview.
"I consider all the potential issues that will be raised by the anti-government groups. I see every day on the Internet many groups raise the problems and the issues to disturb our project."
For many in Myanmar, the pipelines embody all that is rotten about China's influence: environmental destruction, land grabs, cronyism and accusations of corruption.
Thant Lwin is one of many farmers who simmer with resentment when asked about them.
Chinese bulldozers have sliced his rice-paddy field in half to make way for the pipeline and service road in his small village.
"We are facing real hardship because of the Chinese," he said from his farm in the countryside near Pyin Oo Lwin, known in colonial times as Maymyo.
"I would be extremely happy if the pipeline gets canceled. But I don't think that will happen," he said.
"It is not a matter of hating China. I can only accept the situation. I have no power. Most people are scared to talk out against the project as it is a government project."
Venerable Candobhasa, a Buddhist monk whose land was bisected by one pipeline outside of Pyin Oo Lwin, scoffed at claims that the project, led by China National Petroleum Corp, parent of PetroChina Co Ltd, would bring much-needed money and development to affected villages.
"These are our natural resources. We should keep it for ourselves to help us develop, not sell it to China. We don't have enough power," he said, sitting cross-legged on a sparse floor in his monastery.
"The government does not share the money from the pipeline with us. We want to know where it has gone."Others appear to be almost chafing for a confrontation with China.
"China is going to be shocked as we alone among the Southeast Asia countries are going to stand up to them," said Khon Ja, a human rights campaigner from northern Myanmar who likes showing visitors a map on her computer outlining exactly why Myanmar is coveted by China, detailing potential road and rail links that could connect southwestern China to the world.
"We have lots of natural resources, are in a very strategic location, and have a long border with China, more than 2,000 km," she said in a Yangon café.

MYANMAR NEEDS CHINA, TOO
China's pervasive influence will not be easy to roll back.
Though rich in natural resources, Myanmar is one of Asia's poorest countries.
Its new entrepreneurs need the booming border trade and China's investment money.
And the army needs China's help in ending the unrest along their shared border.
China and its companies pledged more than $14 billion of investment in Myanmar's 2010/11 (April-March) fiscal year, taking total foreign direct investment pledges to $20 billion from $300 million a year before, according to official data.
"Myanmar really cannot afford to damage its good relations with China," said Lin Xixing, a Myanmar expert at Guangzhou's Jinan University.
Ethnic Chinese are not the only ones who have prospered from China's largesse.
In Lashio, a town four hours by car from the Chinese border, the matriarch of a large Indian family beamed with pride as she showed a reporter her large, well-appointed house, and then presented a faded picture of a thatched shack where they lived a decade ago.
She explains the change with a single word: "China."
"They give us very good business," she said of her auto repair shop.
"Lots of trucks go to trade with China. We repair them. Business is very good."
Lashio's markets heave with Chinese-made goods, and Chinese is the dominant language of commerce thanks to decades of Chinese immigration, mostly from neighbouring Yunnan province.
With almost no industry of its own, even the most basic goods are usually imported in Myanmar from China or Thailand -- from laundry powder to soy sauce.
Competing local products are often more expensive.
A large bottle of China's Dali brand beer costs 500-600 kyat in Lashio, for instance, more than half the price of a similar bottle of Myanmar brew.
China's massive economy of scale and well-oiled logistics mean its products can easily overwhelm their local rivals.

CHINA'S SUPPLY TRAINS
On Lashio's main road to China, trucks rumble by all day.
Those from China are packed with refrigerators, televisions, and other consumer goods.
Those leaving are clogged with timber, bags of cheap coal and other resources.
Smugglers run drugs, jade, and gems into China and beyond.
Many wonder whether this will change if Western sanctions are lifted.
Could trade with Europe and the United States elbow out China?
That's unlikely, said Aung Zaw Win, who builds machinery in Mandalay and who does most of his business with China and Chinese people.
"China will remain an important market for us. China has well-established supply chains and infrastructure. We cannot substitute for them within the space of only a few years," he said from his office in central Mandalay.
But he is making preparations just in case.
An American diplomat stopped by recently to ask Zaw Win about the impact of sanctions on his business.
A Japanese company inquired about doing business together.
"I am ready for the sanctions to go. I am building a new factory to export to the United States and Europe. I cannot buy directly some U.S.-made components. I have to go to China and get them from street vendors."His friend, Sein Win, believes the market will decide who is better for business in Myanmar: China, Europe or the United States.
"Everyone knows that U.S. and European products are expensive compared with those made in China. Market forces will talk and we will still trade with China as Chinese goods are cheap," he said in pitch-perfect Mandarin.
Manoj Vohra, an Asia analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) in Singapore, agrees that easing sanctions won't make much of a difference initially.
"We're not going to see an huge flow of investments by American and European companies immediately, so Myanmar's dependence on China as a regional ally for economic development and investment will continue."However, shoddy treatment of local workers by Chinese companies has caused "huge resentment and discontent," said Vohra, who thought stiffer competition from Western countries would eventually encourage China to "make the deal sweeter" when doing business on Myanmar.
Post-Myitsone, he added, the message to Chinese investors had changed slightly: "Yes, we welcome you -- but you have to do more."

WAVES OF IMMIGRANTS
Chinese have been a formidable presence in Myanmar for centuries.
Immigration swelled during British colonial rule from 1842 to 1948.
The end of China's civil war in 1949 brought another wave of migrants.
When Chinese Communists expelled the Kuomintang, many fled to Myanmar and Thailand, and then fought with the Burmese government before settling in Taiwan.
Those who stayed behind faced brutal discrimination under the rule of General Ne Win who barred ethnic Chinese and other foreigners from owning land, banned Chinese-language education and stoked anti-Chinese violence.
In Myanmar's commercial capital Yangon, memories are still vivid of bloody anti-Chinese riots in 1967. Deadly flames engulfed a school.
Chinese shops were looted.
"It was a terrible time. Everything changed for us after then," said shop owner Wu Yan-shun, whose father arrived in Yangon in 1949.
Wu fears the recent political changes could weaken the government's ties with China, making him and other Chinese vulnerable.
"You can't rule out that some of the anger people feel against the Chinese will be turned on us again. Relations with China are not so bad now. That could change as Myanmar opens up and there is more debate about ties with China and its influence here."
Backlashes against Chinese have flared before in Southeast Asia, most notably in Malaysia in 1969 and in Indonesia in 1998 before the fall of former President Suharto.
Perhaps with this in mind, the Chinese community in Yangon seems strangely un-Chinese, especially when compared with other Southeast Asian cities.
Its "Chinatown" has almost no Chinese restaurants, no Chinese pop music blaring from shops, few Chinese bookstores and limited use of the Chinese script.
There are no government-approved Chinese schools, unlike in Malaysia or Thailand.
The city has a few privately run "bu xi ban," a Taiwanese expression meaning "cram" school, but are actually just language academies.
Teacher Lin Lee, 30, born in northern Myanmar to Chinese parents, said it was hard just to get text books."The government is very strict about imports of Chinese text books," she said from her classroom above an old shop-house.
"We have to use photocopies. We ask people who are going to China to try and sneak back in a few copies of new books."
Many feel deeply attached to Myanmar.
"I have made great efforts to get on with my neighbours," said Tsai Tun-heng, the owner of a cluttered convenience store.
"If anyone comes to burn down my store I want them to know that they will also be destroying the Burmese-owned businesses all around me."
In Mandalay, the ban on Chinese advertising also revived memories of anti-Chinese violence during the Ne Win-era.
It also recalls a similar ban on Chinese signage and publications in Indonesia that remained in effect for years after an abortive 1965 coup blamed on the China-backed Indonesian Communist Party.
Myanmar's new government has sent officials to Indonesia to study its road to democracy.
"What can you do about it? It's their country," said café owner Liu Kui-you, a Myanmar citizen who can trace his ancestry to Yunnan province.
Bein Nei Tha, a Burmese motorbike dealership worker, laughed when asked why his company also comes under the ban, despite having no Chinese ownership and had previously used just a few small Chinese characters next to an otherwise English-only sign.
"It seems a little silly," he said.
"I suppose the government wants to limit foreign influence, but then why leave the English?"

China’s soft power

2012-02-13T18:31:00.000+01:00

China rejects the universal values such as democracy and human rights, but has nothing to replace them with other than appeal to reactionary Confucian values
By Frank Ching

At a time when the rest of the world dreads China’s rise, Beijing perceives a serious weakness in its own armour: the lack of soft power.
For all its economic woes, the West still possesses ample soft power as evidenced by its cultural domination.Behind China’s worries also lurk fears about regime stability.
“The overall strength of Chinese culture and its international influence is not commensurate with China’s international status,” President Hu Jintao wrote in a January article.
“The international culture of the West is strong while we are weak.”
China is taking this cultural war seriously, on both domestic and international fronts.
Beginning January 1, two-thirds of entertainment programmes on China’s 34 satellite channels, including game shows, dating shows and celebrity talk shows, were deemed “vulgar” and cut, making way for programmes that “promote traditional virtues and socialist core values.”
Externally, China has set up more than 300 Confucius Institutes and more than 350 classrooms in 96 nations, many linked with universities, to teach Chinese language and culture.
In 2010, China produced a promotional film, featuring such celebrities as basketball star Yao Ming and Hong Kong businessman Li Ka-shing, to polish its image.
China is spending billions to extend its reach to all corners of the world, primarily through the state-controlled Xinhua news agency — and its CNC World television news network since 2010 — as well as China Central Television (CCTV), which started broadcasting from its Washington hub this week.
China’s approach only highlights the contradiction.
Soft power almost by definition results from civil society.
American culture, for example, is reflected by such products as Hollywood movies, Coca-Cola and blue jeans, none of which are government creations.
The Chinese government is trying to create soft power while repressing major segments of civil society.
Moreover, China is out of sync with much of the rest of the world.
It rejects the universal values such as democracy and human rights, but has nothing to replace them with other than appeal to reactionary Confucian values.
The Communist party in October issued a lengthy document on deepening cultural structural reform and acknowledged the need to “move forward the construction of a socialist core value system.”
However, aside from slogans like “the spirit of rejuvenating the country” and “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” it offered nothing concrete.
China’s reputation for heavy-handed censorship is likely to hamper the growth of its overseas media organisations since few audiences tolerate propaganda.
The contradiction between China’s desire to enhance its influence while refusing to allow its own people rights and freedoms taken for granted elsewhere affects China’s position even in its own backyard.
Since 1997, Hong Kong — handed back to China by Britain after a century and a half of colonial rule — has been a special administrative region, ostensibly enjoying a high degree of autonomy.
Beijing has worked hard to win the hearts and minds of Hong Kong’s seven million people.
For example, in 2003, after Yang Liwei, the first Chinese astronaut, returned from space, he was sent on a tour of the country.
The first city he visited was Hong Kong.
In 2007, marking the 10th anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty, Beijing gave a pair of pandas to Hong Kong though the city already had two.
And in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, equestrian events were held in Hong Kong.
Despite such wooing, people in Hong Kong still do not welcome the association with China.
In fact, a recent survey conducted by the University of Hong Kong found that twice as many people favoured the Hong Kong identity over being Chinese.
To strengthen patriotic sentiment in Hong Kong, Beijing has urged the introduction of “national education” into the curriculum.
Hao, the Chinese official, blandly accepted that this was tantamount to brainwashing, but said it was something that all countries do.
Of course, Beijing is Hong Kong’s sovereign, in a position to throw its weight around when carrots like pandas and astronauts don’t do the trick.
But if China wants to enhance its influence internationally through soft power, it must be sure that the velvet glove hides the iron fist inside.

Traveling Light in a Time of Digital Thievery

2012-02-12T23:11:00.001+01:00

"Everybody knows that if you are doing business in China, in the 21st century, you don’t bring anything with you".
By Nicole Perlroth

Mike McConnell, former director of national intelligence, said some of the government's computer systems had been infected.
When Kenneth G. Lieberthal, a China expert at the Brookings Institution, travels to that country, he follows a routine that seems straight from a spy film.

He leaves his cellphone and laptop at home and instead brings “loaner” devices, which he erases before he leaves the United States and wipes clean the minute he returns.

In China, he disables Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, never lets his phone out of his sight and, in meetings, not only turns off his phone but also removes the battery, for fear his microphone could be turned on remotely.

He connects to the Internet only through an encrypted, password-protected channel, and copies and pastes his password from a USB thumb drive.

He never types in a password directly, because, he said, “the Chinese are very good at installing key-logging software on your laptop.”

What might have once sounded like the behavior of a paranoid is now standard operating procedure for officials at American government agencies, research groups and companies that do business in China — like Google, the State Department and the Internet security giant McAfee.

Digital espionage in China, security experts say, is a real and growing threat — whether in pursuit of confidential government information or corporate trade secrets.

“If a company has significant intellectual property that the Chinese are interested in, and you go over there with mobile devices, your devices will get penetrated,” said Joel F. Brenner, formerly the top counterintelligence official in the office of the director of national intelligence.

Theft of trade secrets was long the work of insiders — corporate moles or disgruntled employees.

But it has become easier to steal information remotely because of the Internet, the proliferation of smartphones and the inclination of employees to plug their personal devices into workplace networks and cart proprietary information around.

Hackers’ preferred modus operandi, security experts say, is to break into employees’ portable devices and leapfrog into employers’ networks — stealing secrets while leaving nary a trace.

Targets of hack attacks are reluctant to discuss them and statistics are scarce.

Most breaches go unreported, security experts say, because corporate victims fear what disclosure might mean for their stock price, or because those affected never knew they were hacked in the first place.

But the scope of the problem is illustrated by an incident at the United States Chamber of Commerce in 2010.

The chamber did not learn that it — and its member organizations — were the victims of a cybertheft that had lasted for months until the Federal Bureau of Investigation told the group that servers in China were stealing information from four of its Asia policy experts, who frequent China.

By the time the chamber secured its network, hackers had pilfered at least six weeks worth of e-mails with its member organizations, which include most of the nation’s largest corporations.

Later still, the chamber discovered that its office printer and even a thermostat in one of its corporate apartments were still communicating with an Internet address in China.

The chamber did not disclose how hackers had infiltrated its systems, but its first step after the attack was to bar employees from taking devices with them to China, a spokesman said.

The implication, said Jacob Olcott, a cybersecurity expert at Good Harbor Consulting, was that devices brought into China were hacked.

“Everybody knows that if you are doing business in China, in the 21st century, you don’t bring anything with you. That’s ‘Business 101’ — at least it should be.”

Neither the Chinese nor Russian embassies in Washington responded to several requests for comment.

But after Google accused Chinese hackers of breaking into its systems in 2010, Chinese officials gave this statement: “China is committed to protecting the legitimate rights and interests of foreign companies in our country.”

Still, United States security experts and government officials say they are increasingly concerned about breaches from within these countries into corporate networks — whether through mobile devices or other means.

Last week, James R. Clapper, the director of national intelligence, warned in testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee about theft of trade secrets by “entities” within China.

And Mike McConnell, a former director of national intelligence, and now a private consultant, said in an interview, “In looking at computer systems of consequence — in government, Congress, at the Department of Defense, aerospace, companies with valuable trade secrets — we’ve not examined one yet that has not been infected by an advanced persistent threat.”

Both China and Russia prohibit travelers from entering the country with encrypted devices unless they have government permission.

When officials from those countries visit the United States, they take extra precautions to prevent the hacking of their portable devices, according to security experts.

Now, United States companies, government agencies and organizations are doing the same by imposing do-not-carry rules.

Representative Mike Rogers, the Michigan Republican who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said its members could bring only “clean” devices to China and were forbidden from connecting to the government’s network while abroad.

As for himself, he said he traveled “electronically naked.”

At the State Department, employees get specific instruction on how to secure their devices in China, and are briefed annually on general principles of security.

At the Brookings Institution, Mr. Lieberthal advises companies that do business in China.

He said that there was no formal policy mandating that employees leave their devices at home, “but they certainly educate employees who travel to China to do so.”

McAfee, the security company, said that if any employee’s device was inspected at the Chinese border, it could never be plugged into McAfee’s network again. Ever.

“We just wouldn’t take the risk,” said Simon Hunt, a vice president.

At AirPatrol, a company based in Columbia, Md., that specializes in wireless security systems, employees take only loaner devices to China, never enable Bluetooth and always switch off the microphone and camera.

“We operate under the assumption that we will inevitably be compromised,” said Tom Kellermann, the company’s chief technology officer and a member of President Obama’s commission on cybersecurity.Google said it would not comment on its internal travel policies, but employees who spoke on condition of anonymity said the company prohibited them from bringing sensitive data to China, required they bring only loaner laptops or have their devices inspected upon their return.

Federal lawmakers are considering bills aimed at thwarting cybertheft of trade secrets, although it is unclear whether this legislation would directly address problems that arise from business trips overseas.

In the meantime, companies are leaking critical information, often without realizing it.

“The Chinese are very good at covering their tracks,” said Scott Aken, a former F.B.I. agent who specialized in counterintelligence and computer intrusion.

“In most cases, companies don’t realize they’ve been burned until years later when a foreign competitor puts out their very same product — only they’re making it 30 percent cheaper.”

“We’ve already lost our manufacturing base,” he said.

“Now we’re losing our R.&D. base. If we lose that, what do we fall back on?”

China getting wary of allies: Chinese media

2012-02-12T22:45:00.003+01:00

PTI
BEIJING -- As US made forays into Asia-Pacific region consolidating ties with countries like India and Japan, China is getting wary of its allies -- North Korea, Pakistan and Myanmar -- which are also swayed by western influence, an article in state-run media said.
"At present, China's relations with Japan, India and ASEAN countries are slightly tense. At the same time, former close allies like the North Korea, Myanmar and Pakistan are opening up to the West," an article in the official china.org. cn said today.
Notably China describes all the three countries as former close allies.
"The North Korea is the country which China assists the most. However, it no longer treats China as a close friend. Instead, it wants to build direct relations with the US," the article in the official portal said.
Compared with China, no other big country spends so much on its allies but gains so little reward or respect, it said.
"As Kim Jong-Un becomes the country's new leader, how much the DPRK will respect China is yet to be seen," it said.
The big surprise for Beijing, appears to be Myanmar where China has invested billions of dollars to create infrastructure for its oil pipelines under the previous military regime, the article said.
"A former staunch ally to China, Myanmar has also changed its attitude towards US Last year," it said pointing out the rapid pace at which Naypyidaw opened up to US after Secretary Hillary Clinton's visit.
"It's a natural move for Myanmar and the US to approach each other. Before that, Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi was released in November last year... Later, the Myanmar government stopped China from investing in its Myitsone hydropower project," it said.
"If this trend continues, Myanmar will finally sink into the West's arms and become an important pawn for the US' deployment to China's borders. China has been pursuing opportunities to build railways, gas and oil pipes in Myanmar".
"If Myanmar cosies up to the US, it will be a setback for China's energy strategy. Energy development in Myanmar remains the best solution for China to avoid conflict with the US in Malacca," it said.
There were apprehensions about all weather friend Pakistan too.
There's no doubt that Pakistan is China's best friend.
For this reason, Pakistan has also become a focal point for the US defence strategy, the article said.
"Last December, NATO aircraft and helicopter gunships attacked two Pakistani border posts. Some believe the attack served as warning to China's neighbour countries to remind them who they should be friends with," it added.
Nowadays, Asian countries have neither respect for Chinese culture nor recognition of Chinese values. Previously, they have engaged China mainly to look for trade opportunities.
"Once China's economic development slows, its attraction will disappear unless China is able to successfully win hearts through the purveyance of soft power," it said.
"The US is never going to leave Asia. China and the US must learn to live with each other at peace in the region," it added.
Meanwhile, China needs to find more ways to attract neighbouring countries rather than simply trying to persuade its neighbours to weaken their ties to the US, the article noted.

The Battle for China's Soul

2012-02-12T22:22:00.002+01:00

By JEFFREY WASSERSTROM

Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom
By Stephen Platt
Knopf, 470 pages, $30

Painting of Chinese government forces attacking a Taiping stronghold at Tientsin (now Tianjin) in northern China.
In the early 1860s, a violent fight raged to determine the fate of a vast country.
An insurrection had split it in two, leaving much of the southern half governed by men who claimed to be the leaders of a new state but were dismissed by their foes as illegitimate "rebels," outlaws who had given themselves fancy titles.
The conflict involved legendary generals with names that schoolchildren still memorize, and it had not just local but international significance: In far-off London, debates raged over whether the British Empire should back the rebels, with whom some Britons felt a sympathetic bond.
American readers might naturally assume that this description refers to our Civil War.
In fact, I had in mind an Asian conflict, which may be little known to Americans today but which was far bloodier than the struggle that pitted Grant against Lee (tens of millions dead, compared with under a million).
The insurgents with fancy titles in this case were the self-proclaimed "Kings" of the Taiping Uprising, a movement that at its apogee held sway over a territory roughly the size of Italy.
Hong Xiuquan (1814-64), the "Heavenly King" who was the movement's supreme leader, strove to transform China by fulfilling a quasi-Christian millenarian prophecy.
A frustrated scholar who had been exposed to a missionary tract while preparing to take the all-important civil-service examination that would secure him a post in the official bureaucracy, Hong went into a trance after failing the grueling test and awoke convinced that he was Christ's younger brother, selected by God to save China from rule by barbarian "demons," his term for the Manchu members of the Qing royal family.Stephen Platt's "Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom" is an impressive, gracefully written account of the war that ensued.
Like many historians of our War Between the States, Mr. Platt presents stirring accounts of battles and finely etched portraits of military commanders.
On the insurgent side, the commanders included figures like Chen Yucheng (aka the "Brave King"), who started his life in poverty and ended it near the top of the Taiping hierarchy.
Ranged against Chen were men such as Li Hongzhang, a famous military modernizer, and Li's mentor, Zeng Guofan.
A shrewd strategist torn by competing loyalties—to his family, his home province of Hunan and the dynasty he served—Zeng did more than anyone else to topple Hong's Taiping Kingdom.
Mr. Platt's richly textured portrait of this complex, conflicted official is one of the strengths of the book.
At strategic points, Mr. Platt underscores the historical links between the American and Chinese conflagrations, reminding the reader of intersections between a pair of conflicts that have typically been treated separately.
We learn of gunboats bound for America that change direction to head toward Asia and of international trade being affected by the simultaneous disruption of the flow of cotton from the South and the flow of tea from China.
Many observers of the time saw the wars as analogous: To the Scottish member of Parliament Alexander Dunlop, Mr. Platt writes, "the parallels between the Confederacy and the Taiping were as plain as day."
He also quotes Dunlop arguing that "the Taepings had waged war successfully with the Emperor of China for a long time and were as much entitled to be recognized as belligerents as the Secession States of America."Those parallels should not be taken too far, however.
The Chinese conflict, which began in the early 1850s, lasted roughly three times as long as the American one.
While Abraham Lincoln was confronted with a single military challenge, the Qing had to contend with several.
As Mr. Platt notes, the Second Opium War (1858-60), which culminated in British and French forces winning important diplomatic concessions from the dynasty, took place alongside the Taiping Uprising.
In addition, the period saw more than one major insurrection, a point to which Mr. Platt might have given more attention.
By the mid-1860s Qing officials sometimes felt that the Muslim Rebellion on China's western frontier posed as great a threat to the dynasty's survival as the Taiping Uprising.
Perhaps the biggest contrast between the civil wars in America and China has to do with aims and ideology. The Confederate leaders sought to preserve the South's status quo ante, but Hong believed he had a holy mission to depose the Manchu, to return China to governance by ethnic Chinese and to usher in an era of "Taiping" (Great Peace).
By the early 1860s, Hong Xiuquan was behaving much like a traditional emperor, enjoying a lavish lifestyle and living in a palace.
At its start, though, his movement had an egalitarian streak, with Taiping leaders making much of the need to divide all wealth equally among all true believers.
This helps explain why, a century later, Mao would hail Hong as a "revolutionary" leader who, despite eccentric beliefs, had precociously progressive, proto-socialist ideals.
By contrast, Mao's rival, Chiang Kai-shek, who insisted that the Communists were "bandits" beholden to a strange and decidedly un-Chinese ideology, claimed that the true hero of the 1860s was not the fanatic Hong but Zeng, the restorer of Confucian order.
The Taiping Uprising has inspired an enormous literature in Chinese and a much smaller but still significant amount of writing in English.
Some authors focus on the movement's leader—a case in point being Jonathan Spence's learned yet accessible "God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan" (1996).
Others have concentrated on the movement's beliefs and goals, as Vincent Shih did in "The Taiping Ideology" (1973) and Rudolf Wagner did in "Reenacting the Heavenly Vision: The Role of Religion in the Taiping Rebellion" (1982).
Works like Philip Kuhn's "Rebellion and Its Enemies in Late Imperial China" (1970) place the story in the context of China's long history of struggles between dynasties and those seeking to topple them, while Jen Yu-wen's "The Taiping Revolutionary Movement" (1973) goes further, insisting that Hong's movement had more in common with the revolutions that followed it than rebellions of earlier times.
Much recent scholarship on the Taiping Uprising, however, has shown the value in approaching the 1860s as a time when China was wracked by a civil war not completely unlike the one taking place on the other side of the Pacific.
Now, with "Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom," Mr. Platt presents the first book-length foray in this direction, providing a compelling alternative account of much-studied events that feels both a bit old-fashioned (in its panoramic view of battles and leaders) yet also very much in step with recent scholarship, placing national stories into global frameworks.
I only wish Mr. Platt had brought in one final Civil War-related connection, which has special meaning as the 40th anniversary of Richard Nixon's China trip draws near.
In the 1970s, Nixon became the first sitting American president to visit that country, but in the 1870s Ulysses S. Grant was the first former occupant of the White House to do so.
One official that Grant met in China was Li Hongzhang, by then a viceroy.
According to a letter published in the New York Herald, before meeting the famous American he had long admired, the viceroy noted how "funny" it was to have a surname so like that of "General Grant's opponent." This fact notwithstanding, Grant and Li became friends, which perhaps should not surprise us, given something important they had in common.
"General Grant and I," the viceroy reportedly said at one point during Grant's visit to China, "have suppressed the two greatest rebellions known in history."

China and US create less pacific ocean

2012-02-12T22:06:00.000+01:00

The naval build-up by Beijing and a Pentagon shift in seaborne firepower towards Asia are creating an arena for rivalries
By Geoff Dyer in Washington

Xi Jinping, the man destined to become China’s leader later this year, is steeped in the country’s military.
The son of a famous communist guerrilla leader from the 1930s, his first job was as personal assistant to the defence minister and he proudly wore military uniform to the office every day.
So when Mr Xi arrives in Washington on Monday for an official visit, he will doubtless pay particular attention to the historic shift in military strategy that the US is putting in place in Asia.
With the troops already out of Iraq and the war in Afghanistan winding down, the administration of President Barack Obama has called for a significant transfer in resources and strategy towards the Asia-Pacific region – even at a time when the country’s finances are under huge pressure.

“We will be strengthening our presence in the Asia-Pacific,” Mr Obama declared last month, “and budget reductions will not come at the expense of that critical region.”
The reason is China.
As Mr Xi will be asked to discuss when he visits the Pentagon on Tuesday, China has invested heavily in recent years in weapons that may be able to challenge American primacy in the Pacific, including radar-evading stealth fighters and anti-ship ballistic missiles.
Those investments have now very much captured the attention of American policymakers.
Even before the US started to develop its new strategy, military rivalry in the western Pacificwas already becoming one of the main geopolitical stress-points of the coming decades.
That process is now accelerating.
Yet Mr Xi’s visit will bring to the fore the important questions that this change in strategy has generated.
In an era of austerity, can the US afford the greater presence in Asia?
And how can Washington prevent this push from turning China into a resentful adversary, in the process sparking an arms race?
For much of the past two decades, American officials say, the strategy towards China has been a mixture of hedging and engagement – the alliance with Japan being the main form of hedging and China’s entry to the World Trade Organisation an example of engagement.
But in the past two years there has been a lot more hedging.
It started when Hillary Clinton, secretary of state, infuriated Beijing in 2010 by saying the US could act as a mediator in the territorial disputes between China and some of its neighbours in the South China Sea.
Since then Washington has agreed to open a base in northern Australia, which will provide a training platform for US, Australian and possibly Japanese marines.
The US, which was kicked out of its bases at Clark and Subic Bay in the Philippines in 1992, is now in negotiations with Manila about allowing more of its warplanes and ships to refuel in the country.
While American officials tend to be coy about talking about the threat in public, the strategy unveiled in January was not so shy about naming China as the reason for the “pivot” to Asia.
Indeed, at one stage the review mentions China in the same sentence as Iran as the two principal looming military threats – hardly reassuring for Beijing, given the current level of rhetoric directed at Tehran.
Deep in the bowels of the Pentagon, a group of officials is devising a military fighting concept called AirSea Battle that has China very much in its sites.
Planners use seemingly bland military jargon to describe the project – they say they are trying to develop strategies to counter other countries’ capability for “anti-access/anti-denial”, or A2/AD for short. “Sometimes the biggest fight is getting to the fight,” as one of the Pentagon officials puts it.
But the title of the new doctrine is suggestive – it is a reference to the cold war strategy of AirLand Battle, developed to cope with the massed ranks of Warsaw Pact soldiers in Europe.
Pentagon planners also make no secret of the fact that, apart from in limited circumstances near Iran, China is the one country developing the weapons, ships and technologies that could block American access to strategic waterways.
The Pentagon has been forced to cut $485bn out of the budget that it was planning to spend over the next decade, leading to delays or cancellations in 60 different projects.
On the face of it, however, the main planks of the shift to Asia appear to have been preserved.
Air and naval power are the keys in Asia, and it is the army that is bearing the brunt of the cuts.
“This budget protects, and in some cases increases, investments that are critical to our ability to project power in Asia,” Leon Panetta, defence secretary, said last month.
The navy will retain all 11 of its aircraft carriers – the principal platforms for projecting power over the vast distances of the Pacific region.
It will also invest in “littoral combat” vessels, high-speed ships made for operating close to shore, some of which may be based in Singapore.
The project to develop a new long-range bomber has been maintained – another system deemed crucial by many for Asia’s large distances and China’s emerging capabilities.
The Pentagon plan also calls for expanded investment of the Virginia-class attack submarines.
Yet critics have also pointed to plenty of holes.
Not only is the tactical fighter programme being scaled back but the navy is also having to streamline its overall fleet.
According to Lieutenant General Chip Gregson, formerly the Pentagon’s senior official for Asia, the navy is likely to end up with 246 ships, well short of the 346 that a bipartisan expert panel recommended in 2010. “This is important because no matter how capable the ship, it can only be in one place at a time,” he says. “And power projection that stays is about ships.”
Notably, one of the very few specific foreign policy commitments that Mitt Romney has made during the Republican presidential primaries has been to raise the rate of naval shipbuilding from nine to 15 keels a year.
For some observers, the real cost pressures will come not from budget cuts but because the US appears intent on maintaining dominance of the seas in the western Pacific.
As China continues to invest in its own military in the coming decades, that will force heavy US investments in anti-submarine warfare, and in the weapons and technologies needed to counter China’s anti-ship missiles.“If the objective is just to prevent territorial expansion, then the US strategy could work,” says Raoul Heinrichs at Australia’s Lowy Institute.
“But what the US is saying is that it wants to deny China the ability to control even its own maritime approaches, which is much more expensive. They have set themselves a very high bar.”
Whether Washington can afford its new push is only one of the questions this raises.
The other pressing issue is how China reacts.

Even before Washington started to place more emphasis on Asia, it was commonplace in Chinese politics and society to hear that America was bent on encircling China.
With the moves the Obama administration has made over the past couple of years, that paranoia about an American policy of containment has only become stronger.
The US and China have a “trust deficit”, as Cui Tiankai, Chinese vice foreign minister, politely phrased it in a speech last week.
Some believe that the growing rivalry has already sparked an arms race, with investments in weapons and technology by one side sparking spending by others.
“We are seeing the interactive pattern of military procurements that have all the hallmarks of the early part of an arms race,” says Mr Heinrichs.
“The long-term trend is for more friction, tension and tests of resolve. The idea among Chinese that they are being encircled has only become stronger.”
In Washington, some fear that the new attention on China could become an excuse to maintain levels of military spending that would otherwise be cut as the Iraq and Afghanistan wars fade.
Against these mounting concerns, however, Ernest Bower, an Asia expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says it is important not to overstate the extent of the military shift towards Asia.
“The communications on this have not been great,” he says.
“But the military footprint is designed to be nimble and light. There will be no new huge American bases across Asia.”
US officials and scholars stress that the recent push did not happen in a vacuum but was a response to Chinese actions.
Indeed, as China’s diplomacy became more assertive in recent years in the South China Sea and the East China Sea, several governments in the region urged the US to increase its military presence in Asia.
The US did not force Australia to give it a base: it was invited.
Washington needs to make sure that “China sees that the US reacted to Asia’s own response to China’s actions”, says Richard Bush, a former diplomat now at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think-tank. “Our goal is to encourage China to use diplomacy, not coercion.”
Washington also insists that its new focus is not part of zero-sum military rivalry with China.
Instead, it is part of an agenda for pushing for greater multilateral co-operation in the region.
After remaining on the sidelines for much of the past decade, the US last year joined the East Asia Summit, a main regional forum for economic, political and security issues (China is also a member).
The Obama administration has also revived its trade agenda in the region, throwing its weight behind the trans-Pacific Partnership, a free-trade agreement being negotiated by nine countries.
“If China presents its own ideas, its own plans for expanded multilateralism in Asia, then that is fine, it is part of the process,” says one senior administration official.
Washington and Beijing also talk frequently, including at the annual Strategic and Economic Dialogue, which brings together most of the US cabinet and large swaths of the senior Chinese leadership.
Yet American officials say there are two missing pieces.
The militaries of both countries are barely on speaking terms.
And at the very top, leaders need to have franker conversations about their countries’ long-term interests and intentions.
Hu Jintao, China’s strait-laced current leader, is said by US officials to give little away even in private.
That is why all eyes will be on the avuncular Mr Xi in Washington this week.

Chinese response: From riled to reflective
“Completely baseless accusations.”
That was the official response from Beijing when the Pentagon unveiled its new defence strategy in January, which singled out China as one of the principal military challenges facing the US, write Kathrin Hille and Geoff Dyer.
Senior Colonel Geng Yansheng, spokesman for China’s defence ministry, called on the US to “follow the trend of the era and deal with China and the Chinese military in an objective and rational way” and warned Washington to “be careful in its words and actions”.
Chinese officials have also decried the recent strengthening of US military alliances in Asia as “cold war thinking” and warned that such moves could destabilise the region.
Yet beyond that, the Chinese government and military have both sought to avoid direct criticism of AirSea Battle, the military doctrine that Pentagon planners are developing to deal with China’s growing capabilities.While the perception that the US is looking to contain China is one with deep roots among the Chinese military and officialdom, there has also been a period of reflection in Beijing about the way that opinion in the region has moved against China so strongly over the past couple of years.
Lin Zhiyuan, an expert on the US at the Academy of Military Science, the top research institution of the Chinese armed forces, said recently in Liberation Daily, the main military newspaper, that the US was simply resuming a move of its strategic focus to the east that it had begun after the end of the cold war but which had been disrupted by its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“The US’s interference in some hotspots creates an even more complicated environment for China’s strategy of a peaceful rise,” he said, adding that China needed to respond by trying to improve relations with its neighbours to allay their concerns about its ascendancy.
Bonnie Glaser, a China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says the administration of President Barack Obama has gone to considerable lengths to try to assuage Chinese concerns about its new military posture in Asia.
Hillary Clinton, secretary of state, and Tom Donilon, national security adviser, conducted a long briefing with Dai Bingguo, China’s senior foreign policy official, she adds.

Tibetan nun dies after self-immolation

2012-02-12T21:33:00.002+01:00

BEIJING, Feb 12 (Reuters) – An 18-year-old Tibetan nun died after setting herself on fire in protest at Chinese rule in Tibet, activists said on Sunday, adding to a fast-growing list of self-immolations in ethnically Tibetan areas of China.
Chinese army troops moved in after Tenzin Choedon set herself alight at the Mamae convent in China’s south-western Sichuan province, said Kanyag Tsering, a monk in Dharamsala, India, where the Tibetan government in exile is based.
“Soldiers surrounded the nunnery and sealed it off, and nothing more is known of the situation inside,” he said.Activist group Free Tibet also reported the burning, saying in an email that the nun died after being taken away by Chinese security forces on Saturday night.
No other details were immediately available and the report could not be independently verified.
A member of staff with local police said “we do not have any information about this” when contacted by telephone.
The nun’s convent in Aba county, east of Tibet, has been at the centre of pro-Tibetan protests in recent months.
She is the 22nd Tibetan in less than a year, and the sixth this week, to set themselves on fire, Free Tibet director Stephanie Brigden said.
“We know many more Tibetans are willing to give their lives and Tibetans are protesting in the streets,” she said.
The self-immolations are a small but potentially destabilising challenge to China’s regional policies, and the government has branded those who set themselves alight as terrorists.
Activists say China violently stamps out Tibetan religious freedom and culture in Tibet, the mountainous region of western China which has been under Chinese control since 1950.
Protests by self-immolation have become more common in Tibet and in restive, ethnically Tibetan regions of China and at least 14 Tibetans are believed to have died from their injuries.
Exiled Tibetan leaders say they fear a crackdown in the region to coincide with the Tibetan new year on February 22.
“We have reports that hundreds of convoys carrying Chinese military personnel with automatic machineguns are moving towards Tibet,” Lobsang Sangay, prime minister of the government in exile, said last week.

Why there is a ‘trust deficit’ with China

2012-02-12T21:27:00.000+01:00

The Washington Post

“IT’S TIME, people of China! It’s time. The square belongs to everyone.”
Thus begins the poem we reprinted on the opposite page last week by Zhu Yufu, a veteran Chinese democracy advocate.
On Friday, just four days before China’s next top leader is due to meet President Obama at the White House, Mr. Zhu was sentenced to seven years in prison for “inciting subversion.”
Beijing used to lay the groundwork for important U.S.-China meetings by releasing dissidents.
Now it does the opposite.
In the past seven weeks four pro-democracy activists have been handed lengthy jail sentences, and a fifth has been driven into exile.
Chinese security forces meanwhile are conducting an offensive in Tibet and nearby areas, where at least six peaceful protesters have reportedly been shot in recent weeks.
Mr. Zhu’s sentencing was probably not a deliberate provocation to the United States before the Washington debut of Xi Jinping.
Instead the Chinese leadership appears to be preoccupied with eliminating any possibility of a popular “Jasmine revolution” during a year in which Mr. Xi is due to succeed Hu Jintao as Communist Party general secretary.Nevertheless, Mr. Xi and his comrades clearly have calculated that locking away peaceful opponents will have no impact on the new leader’s reception at the White House, State Department and Pentagon — all of which he is due to visit.
Mr. Obama has encouraged this conclusion by failing to speak up about Chinese repression at past summits. After meeting Mr. Hu in Washington a year ago, Mr. Obama appeared to excuse Beijing’s repression and affirmed that it “doesn’t prevent us from cooperating in other critical areas.”
The president has an opportunity to shift that misguided approach as he begins a relationship with Mr. Xi. During Mr. Hu’s decade-long tenure China has become steadily less free politically.
While a popular revolution may not be imminent, that trend is not sustainable in a country with a rapidly growing middle class and a growing appetite for free expression on the Internet.
Meaningful political reform will be essential if Mr. Xi is to keep China on a stable course during his tenure.
That means it is also an important interest of the United States, one that ought to be at the center, not the margin, of the bilateral relationship.
At a briefing in Beijing for journalists ahead of Mr. Xi’s trip, Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Cui Tiankai complained that “a trust deficit” was holding up “the further expansion of our bilateral relationship.”
That means the leadership expects Mr. Obama to do something to appease Mr. Xi, such as curtailing plans for an expanded U.S. military presence in East Asia.
What the president ought to do instead is explain to the new leader why, for the United States, China is untrustworthy: because it continues to imprison courageous people like Zhu Yufu.

Chinese at North Dakota School Got Unearned Degrees

2012-02-11T16:39:00.002+01:00

Bloomberg

Dickinson State University in North Dakota granted hundreds of degrees to Chinese transfer students who didn’t complete the required class work, according to a state report.
The school’s international agreements “are seriously lacking controls and oversight,” according to a review by the North Dakota University System released yesterday.
The six violations of university and state policies could jeopardize the school’s accreditation and result in sanctions by the U.S. Education Department and State Department, the report said.
Dickinson’s practices may fuel the growing debate about the recruiting and exploitation of Chinese students increasingly sought by U.S. colleges.
About 57,000 Chinese undergraduates attended American colleges in 2010-2011, six times as many as in 2005-2006, according to the Institute of International Education.
At public universities, they pay two or three times as much in tuition as in-state students.
Dickinson State auditors analyzed the files of 816 international transfer students since 2003, almost all from China, according to the report.
Of the 594 that received a degree, 584 didn’t complete the required course work.
The school, in Dickinson, North Dakota, has 15 transfer agreements with international universities, and “only three articulation agreements appear to be valid,” according to the report.
Officials at Dickinson State and the North Dakota State University system didn’t respond to requests for comment.

New President
The review was requested by Dickinson State President D.C. Coston, who was notified of the improprieties by the school’s office of multicultural affairs.
Coston was named president in January after his predecessor, Richard McCallum, was fired last year for offenses including inflating enrollment figures.
Students from China pay $12,978 per year in tuition and fees at Dickinson, more than double the $5,608 paid by state residents.
The scope of unqualified students at Dickinson grew worse after 2008, when the university said several entrance requirements were waived and “the language ability declined.”
The college also used recruiting agents in China.
While the agents were employed by recruiting firms, they posed as Dickinson State employees, according to the report.
Colleges often rely on agents in China, who are paid on commission and collect fees from the families as well.A Bloomberg News series last year documented that some agents use incomplete or false information to lure Chinese students to American high schools and colleges.

Transcripts Falsified
The National Association for College Admission Counseling in Arlington, Virginia, announced last July that it would appoint a commission on international-student recruiting to examine issues such as whether agents should be paid based on the number of students they recruit.
The commission will hold its inaugural meeting on March 5 in Washington.
Other issues included students falsifying their transcripts using stamps from Chinese universities bought online, transferring from institutions in China not recognized as universities and failing to meet the minimum grade-point average.

Detained China artist unaware of New York success

2012-02-11T16:27:00.004+01:00

By Tim Witcher

This Tuesday, Feb. 7 2012 photo shows a photograph by Chinese artist Liu Xia during a preview of "The Silent Strength of Liu Xia" exhibit at The Italian Academy in New York. The photos were spirited out of China just before Liu was placed under house arrest after her husband, Liu Xiaobo, imprisoned in 2009 for urging democratic reform, won the Nobel. Her works are censored in her native country. The exhibition opens Thursday, Feb. 9, 2012.

The 25 photos in "The Silent Strength of Liu Xia" will be displayed at New York's Columbia University until March 1
NEW YORK — Dark, bare photos of modern Chinese society by Liu Xia, detained wife of China's best known dissident, went on show in New York without her knowledge after they were spirited out of her country.
The photos were brought out of China under the noses of the authorities by French academic, writer and economist Guy Sorman, a friend of the artist and her Nobel Peace prize-winning husband Liu Xiaobo.
Liu Xia, who is under house arrest in Beijing while her husband serves an 11-year jail term for propagating democracy, made it a condition of the deal that the exhibitions were kept a secret from her, Sorman said."She does not know. She does not want to know," Sorman told AFP ahead of the the opening on Thursday of the exhibition he curated.
"She gave me permission to show them. But she did not want to know where or when. As she is a woman who would never lie, if she is questioned by police she can say that she does not know, and she really doesn't know."
The 25 photos in "The Silent Strength of Liu Xia" will be displayed at Columbia University in New York until March 1 before going to Madrid and what could be a politically-charged exhibition in Hong Kong later in the year.
They were shown at Boulogne-Billancourt, just outside of Paris, last year.
Sorman has known the Liu family for 15 years but only convinced Liu Xia to display her work just before she was put under house arrest in 2010.
Convincing her was more difficult than getting the images -- in which dolls are used to show the suffering of the Chinese people -- out of the strictly policed country, Sorman said.
"It was a bit complicated, I am not going to say how. I would just say that it was not illegal," he said.
Though Liu Xia has been restricted to her home for more than a year, she has never been charged with any illegal act.
"When the exhibition was held in France, the Chinese ambassador protested -- half-heartedly because he knew he had no grounds to protest," Sorman said.
Sorman, who now communicates only with the artist's mother, said the photos were taken out of China individually.
"It took me several months to persuade a number of people. Each one carried one photo. If we had taken them out together it would probably have been difficult. The whole thing took a year," he said.
Liu Xia could never stage an exhibition in China because she is the wife of the country's best known dissident.
Sorman insists, however, that she is not involved in political activities.
"Artists are always dissidents," said Sorman.
"But Liu Xia is an artist and I am presenting her here as an artist."
The French academic stresses that the world is now discovering an "important" Chinese artist.
"This is no an anti-Chinese exhibition. On the contrary, this shows that there is a renaissance of Chinese culture, following modern forms of expression. This is not folk art."
The black and white images show dolls in different positions in the Liu family's apartment in Beijing -- one shows a pained Liu Xiaobo holding a doll on his shoulder.
Another doll is tied up, and another is wrapped in plastic.
Many show tears.
All present a grim outlook.
"They represent an aspect of Chinese society which we don't speak a lot about. The Chinese propaganda machine always shows a celebration of Chinese successes," Sorman said.
"With this exhibition, you can see there is also oppression, poverty, distress, darkness. It is impossible to express yourself."
"So there are two messages: one, that there is a cultural renaissance, but secondly, the suffocating society. A society which cannot breath."
Sorman said Hong Kong's PEN Club is scheduled to show the pictures in the Chinese territory at the end of April as part of a tribute to the Lius.
"This will be artistic because it will be in a museum. I insist on this. But there will clearly be a stronger political dimension in Hong Kong."

China’s Dangerous Tofu Projects

2012-02-11T16:09:00.003+01:00

Corruption and graft have created a significant problem with many Chinese construction projects.
By Eve Cary

The term “tofu project” was first coined by Premier Zhu Rongji in 1998, who said on a tour of flood dykes on the Yangtze River that they were as flimsy and porous as tofu dregs, the leftover bits in the tofu-making process.
The term – and the problem – gained national traction after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, where 20,000 of the almost 70,000 victims were schoolchildren who died in collapsed school buildings, which were later proven to be hastily and shoddily built.
Four years later, the problem of “tofu projects” remains.
In July 2010, anger over shoddy construction erupted in an area hit hard by the Sichuan earthquake when a building intended to be a new home for earthquake victims collapsed (or was demolished, according to state sources) just a few weeks before completion.
In November 2010, 53 people were killed in a high-rise apartment building fire caused by an unlicensed welder.
And last month, a car accident in Jiangsu Province revealed that a dam built atop of a Yangtze River tributary was filled with reeds instead of steel beams.
Such “tofu projects” are likely to remain critical problems for preexisting and structural reasons.
For a start, projects are often rushed for impending state anniversaries.
For example, ahead of the 90th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party on July 1, 2011, a number of construction projects opened, including the Jiaozhou Bay Bridge.
However, a CCTV report just days after the bridge opened showed missing and unsecured bolts and gaps in the guard rail.
In 2007, a bridge in Hunan Province, intended to open in time for the 50th anniversary of the founding of the local prefecture, collapsed during construction, killing 64 people.
These projects, known as “tribute projects,” have gained a great deal of negative attention in China.
Why is the quality of some of these structures so poor?
Corruption and graft undoubtedly play a role when project money is skimmed off the top for and by officials, leaving less funding for quality materials, qualified staff, and acceptable workmanship.
Additionally, projects are often granted to companies that have more political ties than qualifications.
In January, the Beijing Municipal People’s Procuratorate disclosed that bribery and corruption cases increased in 2010, with urban development and rural election issues involved in the majority of cases.
From January to August 2011, the Communist Party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection announced that 6,800 officials had been prosecuted for corruption in infrastructure projects.
Local governments, meanwhile, have massive incentives to promote rapid and unfettered growth, and often turn a blind eye to construction standards.
For one, local governments rely on the revenues arising from construction, including land sales and transfer fees.
In 2010, total land transfer revenues totaled 3,000 billion RMB ($464 billion), which was more than 70 percent of local government revenues.
For another, local officials are promoted based on the growth rates of their jurisdictions.
But there’s a reason the “tofu project” conversation should be restarted: new measures to combat this problem have recently emerged.
After a State Council meeting on January 12 of this year, the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection, and Quarantine announced that they would establish a “blacklist” of businesses reported for quality issues and “shoddy practices.”
This followed a move last year by Shanghai’s government, which issued new regulations intended to strengthen construction supervision, including the registration of construction managers and workers.
Indeed, in 2009, Shanghai also launched a major crackdown on construction fraud, netting nearly 2,000 people for construction-related offenses from December 2010 through March 2011.
There have also been some interesting developments in legal reform.
The Tort Liability Law became effective on July 1, 2010, and places strict civil liability for construction collapses on contractors and developers.
Ostensibly, this would allow affected parties to sue contractors and/or developers, and would provide an incentive for contractors to insure that their buildings are safe.
Ultimately aside from the danger to human life, “tofu projects” create credibility issues for the government, undermining citizens’ belief in the reliability of government to create safe infrastructure.
And the issue also offers an interesting case study of center-local relations, since many of these issues arise at the local level.
At this point, there are far too many counterincentives for rapid construction (mostly at the local level) for there to be an effective central response – officials are rewarded for growth, and large infrastructure projects give local governments status.
Sadly it will therefore probably take more accidents like those I described to create sufficient political will to clean up and prevent so many of these projects happening in the future.

China probes "bouncing" boiled eggs

2012-02-11T12:14:00.002+01:00

BEIJING -- Chinese authorities are investigating eggs which bounce after being boiled and may make men sterile, state media reported Friday, in the latest food safety scare to hit the country.
The eggs, being referred to in Chinese media and on the internet as "rubber eggs" or "ping pong eggs," are too hard to eat, raising suspicion they are fake, after appearing in "small numbers" in markets nationwide, Xinhua news agency said.
"The investigation is designed to appease consumers' concerns, after some suspected they bought artificial eggs made by unconscientious traders seeking profits," it reported.
However, the eggs' hardness could be a natural occurrence, caused by hens consuming large amounts of food enriched with a compound called gossypol, which binds to protein in egg yolks, Xinhua said.
"While gossypol normally exists in the residue of cotton seeds added to chicken feed as an extra protein source, large doses of the compound will suppress sperm activity as gossypol has been tested to be used in male contraceptive pills," it added.
Food safety worries are nothing new to China, where tales of fake cooking oil, tainted milk and watermelons which explode from being fed too much fertilizer regularly appear in the news.
In 2008, at least six children died and nearly 300,000 became ill from powdered milk laced with melamine, an industrial chemical added to low quality or diluted milk to fool inspectors by giving misleadingly high readings for protein levels.

China's threat: Vietnam seen courting Western arms deals

2012-02-11T12:03:00.002+01:00

By Tim Hepher and Peter Apps
SINGAPORE/LONDON -- Vietnam is opening up to Western defence firms as tensions in the South China Sea trigger subdued yet growing warnings of a regional arms race, defence executives and security analysts said on Friday.
The Communist-ruled country is one of several Southeast Asian nations seeking to expand surveillance and maritime patrol capabilities, sparking fierce competition for regional deals estimated to be worth up to several hundred million dollars.
"Vietnam is opening to Western suppliers, which was not the case two or three years ago," said Marie-Laure Bourgeois, vice-president for South and Southeast Asia at France's Thales, Europe's largest defence electronics supplier.
"There has been a revival of tensions recently in the South China Sea and this is increasing demand for surveillance systems. Countries in the region want to ensure they have enough awareness of what is happening at sea and in the air."
Vietnam is locked in a complex set of territorial disputes with China and other parties -- Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines -- over waters giving access to untapped oil and gas reserves and valuable fishing grounds.
China's claims, the broadest, cover all of the Spratly and Paracel islands and most of the South China Sea.Concern over an accidental confrontation or even hostilities spiked in May when Vietnam and China exchanged fresh accusations of sovereignty violations.
The issue has come off the boil but the region is bustling with deals from sonars to submarines.
"(Southeast Asian) states are boosting their military capabilities because they can afford to and as part of a hedging strategy both against China and each other," said Nigel Inkster, former deputy chief of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI6.
"Though Southeast Asians don't like to hear it, there is an arms race going on in the region," said Inkster, now head of trans-national threats and political risk at London's International Institute for Strategic Studies.

PURCHASING TALKS
Half the globe's oil tanker traffic passes through the disputed area, underpinning demand for surveillance systems expected to be on display at next week's Singapore Air Show.
Vietnam has traditionally bought Russian hardware including a recent purchase of six Kilo-class submarines but is emerging as a market for other suppliers "as insurance against China", said James Hardy, Asia-Pacific Editor for Jane's Defence Weekly.
Israel is seen as front-runner to win the Vietnam contract Thales was bidding for, but other possible deals lie ahead.
"There are discussions with the Vietnam authorities which are no longer just buying Russian equipment. We have participated in discussions on radar and are still in some discussions," Bourgeois said on the eve of the February 14-19 air show.
Israel and Vietnam have stepped up bilateral contacts of late, but any defence deals are months away, a source at Israel Aerospace Industries told Reuters, when asked about the comments.
On Thursday, the Israeli company announced a $150 million contract to supply radar to an unidentified Asian country.
Assistant U.S. Secretary of State Kurt Campbell said in Hanoi last week Vietnam needed to improve its human rights record before moving ahead with closer military ties.
"Growing tensions coupled with the wealth of Southeast Asia make it a very attractive market for defence companies, especially where the U.S. precludes itself," said defence consultant Alexandra Ashbourne-Walmsley.
In late December, China's Vice President Xi Jinping, widely expected to take over as top leader from late 2012, called for better relations with Vietnam, saying the two countries should properly handle their differences and do more to build trust.
Still, Western diplomats and defence executives said ahead of the air show that uncertainty and overlapping disputes had pushed up defence budgets and buying interest across the region.
The lessons of Iran's threat to close the Hormuz Strait are also not lost on a region hosting similar trade choke points.
"Vietnam would like to improve its links with the USA and other Western powers and is investing a lot in the development of some high-quality diplomatic resources," Inkster said.
"Whether the situation in Southeast Asia amounts to a new Cold War is not clear; but there are plenty of tensions which could boil over."

China Is Ripe for a Revolution

2012-02-11T11:09:00.001+01:00

“The Arab Spring is coming to China”
By STEPHEN R. PLATT

Amherst, Mass.-- ONE HUNDRED years ago, on Feb. 12, 1912, the 6-year-old child emperor of the Qing Dynasty abdicated, ending more than 2,000 years of imperial rule in China.
But this watershed moment for modern China will not be widely celebrated in the People’s Republic.
The political climate in Beijing is tense as the ruling Communist Party prepares for a secretive transition to the next generation of leaders, with the untested vice president, Xi Jinping, expected to become president. Reminders of past regime change and the end of dynasties are not welcome.
Of course, the current government has little to fear from the example of 1912.
The Qing Dynasty, founded in 1644 by Manchu tribesmen who conquered China from the north, was brought down by a highly organized revolutionary movement with overseas arms and financing and a coherent governing ideology based on republican nationalism.
The Communist Party today faces nothing like that.
What it does face, however, is enormous, inchoate rural unrest.
The dark side of China’s economic rise has been a shocking widening of the gulf between the prosperous coast and the poverty-stricken interior, a flourishing of corruption among local officials and, by such data as we can gather, widespread anger and discontent.
The government has acknowledged tens of thousands of yearly “mass incidents,” which can range anywhere from a handful of elderly widows protesting a corrupt real estate grab to communities in open revolt (like the southern village of Wukan) to murderous ethnic rioting, as occurred in the last few years among Tibetans and in western Xinjiang Province and Inner Mongolia.
In that sense, it is instead the Taiping Rebellion, which nearly toppled the Qing Dynasty 50 years earlier, that bears the strongest warnings for the current government.
The revolt, which claimed at least 20 million lives before it was quelled, making it the bloodiest civil war in history, suggests caution for those who hope for al popular uprising — a Chinese Spring — today.
The Taiping Rebellion exploded out of southern China during the early 1850s in a period marked, as now, by economic dislocation, corruption and a moral vacuum.
Rural poverty abounded; local officials were wildly corrupt; the Beijing government was so distant as to barely seem to exist.
The uprising was set off by bloody ethnic feuds between Cantonese-speaking Chinese and the minority Hakkas over land rights.
Many Hakkas had joined a growing religious cult built around a visionary named Hong Xiuquan, who believed himself to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ.
When local Qing officials took the side of the Chinese farmers, they provoked the Hakkas — and their religious sect — to take up arms and turn against the government.
What was so remarkable, and so troubling, about the Taiping Rebellion was that it spread with such swiftness and spontaneity.
It did not depend on years of preliminary “revolutionary” groundwork (as did the revolution that toppled the monarchy in 1912 or the 1949 revolution that brought the Communists to power).
And while Hong’s religious followers formed its core, once the sect broke out of its imperial cordon and marched north, it swept up hundreds of thousands of other peasants along the way — multitudes who had their own separate miseries and grievances and saw nothing to lose by joining the revolt.
Out-of-work miners, poor farmers, criminal gangs and all manner of other malcontents folded into the larger army, which by 1853 numbered half a million recruits and conscripts.
The Taiping captured the city of Nanjing that year, massacred its entire Manchu population and held the city as their capital and base for 11 years until the civil war ended.
SCHOOLCHILDREN in China in the 1950s and ’60s were taught that the Taiping were the precursors of the Communist Party, with Hong as Mao’s spiritual ancestor.
That analogy has now fallen by the wayside, for China’s government is no longer in any sense revolutionary. So it makes sense that in recent years, the Taiping have often been depicted negatively, as perpetrators of superstition and sectarian violence and a threat to social order.
The Chinese general who suppressed them, Zeng Guofan, was for generations reviled as a traitor to his race for supporting the Manchus but has now been redeemed.
Today he is one of China’s most popular historical figures, a model of steadfast Confucian loyalty and self-discipline.
Conveniently for the state, his primary contribution to China’s history was the merciless crushing of violent dissent.
Beijing has learned its lessons from the past.
We see this in the swift and ruthless suppression of Falun Gong and other religious sects that resemble the Taiping before they became militarized.
We can see it in the numbers of today’s “mass incidents.”
One estimate, 180,000 in 2010, sounds ominous indeed, but in fact the sheer number shows that the dissent is not organized and has not (yet) coalesced into something that can threaten the state.
The Chinese Communist Party would far rather be faced with tens or even hundreds of thousands of separate small-scale incidents than one unified and momentum-gathering insurgency.
The greatest fear of the government is not that violent dissent should exist; the fear is that it should coalesce.
The rebellion holds lessons for the West, too.
China’s rulers in the 19th century were, as they are today, generally loathed abroad.
The Manchus were seen as arrogant and venal despots who obstructed trade and hated foreigners.
All romance was on the side of the Taiping rebels, who at the onset were heralded abroad as the liberators of the Chinese people.
As one American missionary in Shanghai put it at the time, “Americans are too firmly attached to the principles on which their government was founded and has flourished to refuse sympathy for a heroic people battling against foreign thralldom.”
As Mr. Xi prepares to visit the United States on Tuesday, a similar sympathy shapes our view of China’s current unrest.
Just last weekend, Senator John McCain warned China’s vice foreign minister that “the Arab Spring is coming to China.”
The dominant tenor of Western press coverage is that the Communist Party is finally receiving its comeuppance — for its corruption, for its misrule in the countryside, for its indifference to human rights and democracy.
And below the surface, usually unspoken, lurks a deeply felt sense of schadenfreude — a desire to see the Communist Party toppled from power by its own people.
But we should be careful about what we wish for.
For all of the West’s contempt for China’s government in the 19th century, when the Taiping Rebellion actually drove it to the brink of destruction, it was Britain that intervened to keep it in power.
Britain’s economy depended so heavily on the China market at the time (especially after the loss of the United States market to the American Civil War in 1861) that it simply could not bear the risk of what might come from a rebel victory.
With American encouragement, the British supplied arms, gunships and military officers to the Manchu government and ultimately helped tip the balance of the war in its favor.
We may not be so far removed.
Given the precarious state of our economy today, and America’s nearly existential reliance on our trade with China in particular, one wonders: for all of our principled condemnation of China’s government on political and human rights grounds, if it were actually faced with a revolution from within — even one led by a coalition calling for greater democracy — how likely is it that we, too, wouldn’t, in the end, find ourselves hoping for that revolution to fail?

Human Rights Icons Admonish China for Tibetan Crackdown

2012-02-10T18:55:00.002+01:00

By Kurt Achin | New Delhi

Tibetan spiritual leader Dalai Lama (L) and South African Archbishop and Nobel Laureate Desmond Tutu walk visiting a Tibetan temple in Dharamsala, India, February 10, 2012.

Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, hosted South Africa's Archbishop Desmond Tutu in the northern Indian city of Dharamsala, where Tutu made an impassioned plea to China to change its policies in Tibet. The Dalai Lama on Thursday asked his fellow Nobel Peace Laureate, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, to keep Tibetans in his prayers.
"We Tibetans are passing through a difficult period," he said.
"And our compassionate nature of Tibetan culture are really facing a lot of difficulties."
The Tibetan spiritual leader was referring to a months-long crackdown by Chinese forces, during which Tibetan exiles say at least six peaceful protesters have been shot in recent weeks.
The Chinese government has acknowledged killing one Tibetan it called a “rioter,” and says the protests are being carefully planned by specially trained “mobs” who have used violence against police.
Tibetans say China pursues a policy of systematically overwhelming Tibet with non-Tibetan Chinese migrants who often discriminate against them.
Images of the Dalai Lama are forbidden, and many monks say they are threatened with punishment if they do not undergo nationalistic “re-education programs” that distance them from their traditional culture.
Tutu called on China to relax its grip on Tibet.
“Please, you leaders in Beijing. We beg you: allow Tibet to be what the constitution of the People's Republic [of China] permits. Autonomy.”
Tutu, a former anti-apartheid activist often described as “South Africa's moral conscience,” referred to the Dalai Lama as the “most peace-loving person on this earth.”
And he urged China to allow the Tibetan spiritual leader to return to his homeland.
“God hasten the day when we will enter a free Tibet,” Tutu said.
The Dalai Lama crossed into India in 1959 after a failed uprising against China, and he was followed by tens of thousands of Tibetan supporters.
Lobsang Sangay, prime minister of the elected Tibetan Exile Administration based in Dharamsala, said he fears China's crackdown may still escalate.
“We have reports that hundreds of convoys of Chinese personnel with automatic machine guns are moving towards Tibet. With Tibetan New Year on February 22, there will be many gatherings. We fear many Tibetans might face unfortunate experiences.”
Lobsang spoke at a candlelight vigil this week, held to mourn at least 19 Tibetans who have reportedly lit themselves on fire in the past year to protest Chinese policies.

The Tibet issue

The Dalai Lama's director of information, Thubten Samphel, outlines the Tibetan government-in-exile's stance on the China-Tibet issue.
Is Tibet part of China?
"It is beyond dispute at various periods of its long history that Tibet came under differing degrees of foreign influence: the Mongols, the Gurkhas of Nepal, the Manchu emperors of China and the British rulers of India all played their parts.
At other periods in the plateau's history, it was Tibet which exercised power and influence over its neighbours -- including China.
It would be hard to find any state in the world today that has not been subjected to foreign domination or influence at some era in its history.
In Tibet's case the degree and duration of foreign influence and interference was relatively limited".
What was Tibet like before the Communists established control in 1951?
"Traditional Tibetan society -- like most of its Asian contemporaries -- was backward and badly in need of reforms.
However, it is completely wrong to use the word "feudal" from the perspective of medieval Europe to describe traditional Tibetan society.
Tibet before the Chinese invasion, in fact, was far more egalitarian than most Asian countries of that time. Hugh Richardson, who spent a total of nine years in Tibet as Britain's last and independent India's first representative, wrote: "Even communist writers have had to admit there was no great difference between rich and poor in [pre-1949] Tibet."
What has happened since then?
"An internal Chinese military document states that from 1952 to 1958, the People's Liberation Army crushed 996 rebellions and killed over 10,000 Tibetans in the north-eastern region of Kanlho.
Golog, another Amdo area, saw its population halved from an estimated 140,000 in 1956 to about 70,000 in 1964.
Referring to this area, the late Panchen Lama [the second most important figure in Tibetan Buddhism after the Dalai Lama] told Beijing's leaders: "If there was a film made on all the atrocities perpetrated in Qinghai Province, it would shock the viewers. In Golog area, many people were killed and their dead bodies rolled down the hill into a big ditch. The soldiers told the family members and relatives of the dead people that they should celebrate since the rebels had been wiped out. They were even forced to dance on the dead bodies."
Who was behind a failed uprising against Chinese rule in 1959, after which the Dalai Lama fled to India?
"The '59 uprising against Chinese rule was a people's movement to resist all the changes the Chinese Communist Party were introducing in Tibet.
In the 17 Point Agreement signed between Tibet and China in 1951, the Chinese Communist Party promised that in return for Tibet coming to the fold of motherland, China would not change Tibet's traditional social system or tamper with the powers of the Dalai Lama.
Both these promises were not kept, and the introduction of collectivisation and other aspects of the social system in Tibet forced the Tibetans to rise up."
Who was responsible for the 2008 unrest in Tibet?
"In the early 1980s, a liberal policy was introduced in Tibet.
This policy dismantled collectivisation and there were plans to withdraw 85% of the Chinese cadres working in the Tibet Autonomous Region.
This policy was aimed at letting Tibetans govern themselves.
However, in 1994, all these liberal measures were withdrawn and a new policy called "grasping with both hands" was implemented in Tibet.
This policy continued Tibet's economic development while reimposing political repression targeted at undermining Tibetan culture and Tibetan Buddhism.
The widespread protests in Tibet are Tibetans' resistance to this hardline policy."

Hong Kong asserts identity to Beijing's dismay

2012-02-10T18:44:00.000+01:00

HONG KONG (AP) — The argument began over the seemingly minor offense of eating on the subway, which is banned in Hong Kong.
A local commuter was outraged that a girl in a tour group from mainland China spilled noodles onto the floor.
In video clips that have gone viral, the commuter summons authorities and expresses his indignation — "Hey! This is Hong Kong!" — and the incident ends with the two sides screaming at each other in mutually unintelligable dialects of Chinese.
The quarrel isn't just about manners.
It also illustrates how — 15 years after this former British colony was handed back to China — Hong Kongers feel less Chinese and more an island unto themselves than ever as they face a growing influx of visitors from the mainland.
And that's a headache for the political masters in Beijing, who are concerned about the threat of disloyalty in the semiautonomous territory and are lashing out against the notion of a separate Hong Kong identity.
Other events also have highlighted the split between Hong Kongers and mainland visitors, who are frequently derided as "locusts" for their voracious buying of everything from apartments to luxury goods to baby formula.
A regular poll found the sense of Hong Kong identity surging.
A flood of pregnant mainland women crossing into the city solely to give birth has strained tensions.
Even the U.S. consul general has been dragged into the debate after praising Hong Kong for sticking to the "one country, two systems" principle.
A well-known Beijing scholar turned up the heat by calling Hong Kongers "dogs" and "bastards."
Hong Kong, which returned to Chinese control in 1997 after more than 150 years as a British colony, is still a global financial center.
It's also a special administrative region with Western-style rights and freedoms not seen in mainland China, most notably freedom of speech and the rule of law.
Local councillors and half the legislature are elected by voters while a pro-Beijing committee chooses Hong Kong's leader, though direct elections have been promised as early as 2017.
Beijing's fear is that if Hong Kong continues to have an excessively vibrant culture of its own, it could prompt residents to press for a faster pace of democratization that could lead to a non-pro-Beijing figure elected as the city's leader.
"All this is anathema to the Chinese Communist Party," said Willy Lam, a professor at Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Lam said China's rulers have been obsessed about maintaining control in Hong Kong since July 2003, when more than half a million people took to the streets — in a massive rally that took Beijing by surprise — to protest against proposed anti-subversion legislation.
Chinese officials and pro-Beijing papers have even lashed out at the top U.S. diplomat in Hong Kong as they fret about subversion.
The papers accused U.S. Consul-general Stephen Young of supporting groups trying to break Hong Kong away from China.
They point to his previous posting in Kyrgyzstan in 2005 during a pro-democracy uprising there and also accuse him of supporting Taiwan's independence during a posting to the island.
And a Beijing official based in the territory dismissed a Hong Kong University poll in December as "illogical" after it found that the number of people identifying themselves as being Hong Kong citizens had hit a 10-year high while those identifying themselves as Chinese citizens slumped to a 12-year low.
The attacks are signs Beijing is trying to stop Hong Kongers from clinging to their cultural, political and linguistic differences, Lam said.
"Beijing is confident that since it controls the Hong Kong economy — and the loyalty of the great majority of Hong Kong business owners — it can afford to use apparently draconian measures to suppress what it regards as the inordinate expansion of Hong Kong identity," he said.
Those measures include attempts to introduce Chinese patriotism lessons in schools, preventing dissidents from entering the city and using Hong Kong's pro-Beijing press to attack people or groups it deems unfriendly.
While Hong Kongers and mainlanders are both ethnically Chinese, people in the city on the southern edge of China tend to look down on their mainland brethren as uncouth and uncultured.
What's new is that many of the mainlanders flooding into Hong Kong nowadays are now much wealthier — and their influence much greater — thanks to the country's emergence as the world's second-biggest economy.
Italian fashion house Dolce & Gabbana stirred local anger after reports it was banning Hong Kongers from taking photos of one of its boutiques while allowing wealthy mainland shoppers to snap away.
D&G later apologized.
"I don't have a problem with mainlanders per se, but in the past year they've been coming to Hong Kong to give birth and then leaving without paying their fees. They're taking our resources but they're not paying Hong Kong back," griped Sun Wong, an 18-year-old student.
"It offends me."
Nearly 33,500 children were born in Hong Kong last year to parents who both live on the mainland, up from 620 in 2001.
Many are trying to escape China's one-child policy but Hong Kongers complain they also take up hospital beds that should go to locals.
Kong Qingdong, a Peking University professor, stirred the pot by lambasting Hong Kong residents, calling them "dogs" and other insults during a six-minute, obscenity-laden rant on an Internet chat show.
"To this day, even though Hong Kong has been returned, its heart hasn't returned completely and there are still many running dogs," said Kong, a 73rd-generation descendant of Confucius.
He blasted Hong Kongers as traitors to China with low morals and said the city would be in trouble if China stopped supplying food and drinking water.
"Can you find your English daddy?" he sneered.
Members of a popular Internet forum raised more than HK$100,000 ($12,900) to take out a full-page newspaper ad last week urging the Hong Kong government to change rules so that children born to parents who are both mainland residents — known as "double negatives" — don't automatically get right of abode. The ad featured a giant locust overlooking the city.
Wong, the student, joined a handful of mostly young people in a recent flash-mob style protest by walking down a high-end shopping street popular with mainland tourists and singing Cantonese pop songs with lyrics rewritten with references to locusts.
As they lined up to get into the glitzy Gucci and Louis Vuitton boutiques, the shoppers — who speak the Mandarin Chinese common in the rest of the country— took little notice.

China jails Zhu Yufu ahead of vice president's U.S. trip

2012-02-10T12:20:00.002+01:00

By Chris Buckley

BEIJING -- A Chinese court jailed a veteran dissident to seven years in jail Friday, his son said, in the latest blow to challengers of the Communist Party's rule before its next leader, Xi Jinping, visits the White House.
Zhu Yufu 朱虞夫 was jailed for "inciting subversion of state power" by a court in Hangzhou, a city in east China, after a trial hearing on January 31 when prosecutors cited a poem and messages he sent on the Internet, his son Zhu Ang told Reuters by telephone.
"The court verdict said this was a serious crime that deserved stern punishment," said Zhu Ang, who was allowed to attend the court hearing with his mother."Now my mother is terribly upset, even if we saw this coming," said Zhu Ang, 31.
He said the verdict cited his father's online calls for mobilization in the name of democracy.
"Basically, the only chance that my father had to say anything was when he was being taken out after the hearing, and he stopped and said, 'I want to appeal'."
Tensions over human rights are likely to come up when Xi visits the United States next week.
Vice President Joe Biden, who will host Xi, met advocates to discuss the "deterioration" of rights in China, the White House said Thursday, signaling the issue is likely to figure in talks.
Xi, who is nearly certain to succeed Hu Jintao as Communist Party chief in late 2012 and as state president in early 2013, leaves Monday for Washington.
Xi (pronounced like "shee") is likely to face U.S. criticism over China's clampdown in restive Tibetan areas after a series of self-immolation protests.
At a briefing about Xi's trip, a senior Chinese diplomat, Cui Tiankai, indicated his government would not welcome being publicly criticized by the Obama administration over rights.
"The problem now is that internationally there are some people who always grab hold of the human rights banner when they want to speak ill of China," said Cui, a vice foreign minister.
"I think that this is abusing the notion of human rights."
China's leaders are steeling for a generational leadership handover late this year, a politically sensitive time that is likely to harden their resolve to quell dissent.
The sentencing of Zhu, who turns 59 this month, followed the jailing of two other Chinese dissidents in December who received prison terms of 9 and 10 years on subversion charges.
Zhu was jailed for two years in 2007, following a seven year jail term that started in 1999 for his outspoken activism.
He was arrested again in April.
At his trial prosecutors cited his poem, "It's time," as well as text messages that he sent using the Skype online chat service, his lawyer, Li Dunyong, told Reuters at the time.
There was no suggestion that Skype helped police to collect evidence, said Li.
"It's time, Chinese people! It's time. The Square belongs to all," said the poem.
References to a "square" might evoke memories among many Chinese people of Tiananmen Square in Beijing, the epicenter of pro-democracy protests in 1989 that were quelled by armed troops.
But the poem did not mention that.
Repeated calls to the Hangzhou Intermediate People's Court, which tried and sentenced Zhu, were not answered.

China lock-down seals off Tibetan unrest

2012-02-10T12:05:00.000+01:00

By Michael Bristow

Sichuan province, China -- From the air, the snow-capped mountains of China's Sichuan province push through the clouds in dramatic formations.
But it is not easy to see them from the ground: most are in Tibetan areas that are now being closely monitored following unrest.
On the road to Kangding -- a gateway to this Tibetan world -- China's public security bureau has set up at least one 24-hour roadblock.
Officers wearing protective clothing stop and search vehicles for "dangerous" items, and check the papers of those wanting to travel beyond.
Foreigners -- particularly journalists -- are not allowed through.
Many of Sichuan's Tibetan areas are in ferment.
Monks have set themselves alight and citizens have staged protests against Chinese rule.
Beijing's national leaders blame outside forces -- particularly the Tibetans' exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama -- for stirring up trouble.
But it is difficult to find out exactly what is going on.
On a journey into Tibetan areas the BBC was turned back, detained and hassled by China's security forces.

'Mob' protest
China's leaders and the Tibetans they govern have had a strained relationship over recent decades.
It dates back to at least 1950 when Chinese troops marched into the Himalayan region and re-established Beijing's control over an area that had been largely left to govern itself until then.
There were riots and protests across Tibet -- and in other provinces where Tibetans live -- four years ago.One area that saw violence in that outbreak was western Sichuan, a mountainous area with a large Tibetan population.
Trouble flared here again early last year when monks began to set fire to themselves as a form of protest against what they see as political and religious represssion.
A total of 19 Tibetans -- most of them monks and nuns -- are thought to have self-immolated since then.Two weeks ago, during the Chinese New Year holiday, angry Tibetans -- the Chinese government called them a "mob" -- staged protests in several towns.
At least two Tibetans were killed.
There is now an extensive security operation in western Sichuan.
At the roadblock on the way to Kangding, just outside the city of Ya'an, dozens of security personnel carry out thorough checks.
Officers board buses and force car passengers out of their vehicles while they check glove compartments and boots for dangerous items.

Millions of visitors
A BBC team was stopped and held at the roadblock.
"Foreigners are not allowed into Tibetan areas," said one security man.
We were then escorted back into Ya'an, where we were questioned at government offices by an official, surnamed Ma, who veered from friendly to threatening.
"You need to make a confession and sign a statement saying you will not go back into Tibetan areas," he barked at one point.
We refused and were eventually released -- nine hours after first being detained.
Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, is also on alert.
Armed police officers patrol the area to the south of Wuhou Temple, a network of streets that serves as the city's Tibetan quarter.
Police vehicles, with their blue lights flashing, are parked on street corners.
Chengdu travel agents say foreigners are not allowed to buy tickets for many destinations in western Sichuan.
Only a single Tibetan area remained open to non-Chinese people, said one tour operator -- a mountainous area to the north that contains a famous tourist spot, Jiuzhaigou national park.
Tibetan villages dot the valleys and hillsides of this beautiful area, which receives millions of visitors every year.
Tibetans here are richer than elsewhere, partly because of the money brought in by visitors.
Many work in the tourist industry.

Forced denunciation
One of them is Liu Xiaobing -- half Tibetan, half Han Chinese -- who drives a taxi.
His wife still carries out a traditional occupation, herding yaks and goats.
Mr Liu and his family have just moved into a new spacious home in a valley -- their old one was up a mountain -- near the entrance to the national park.
"It's harmonious here. We want peace -- just like everyone does," he said.
But it is not harmonious over the mountains to the west of Jiuzhaigou.
In recent demonstrations against Chinese rule in Seda county, the authorities admitted that they had opened fire on protesters.
A few days ago, three Tibetans set themselves alight in the same area, continuing the recent tradition of gruesome personal protests.
Robert Barnett, of New York's Columbia University, said this region of western Sichuan, historically known to Tibetans as Kham, was relatively peaceful until a few years ago.
"We are talking about an area where China had a working relationship with Tibetans," said Mr Barnett.
But he said trust started to disappear just over a decade ago when the central government began introducing hardline policies that were already in place in Tibet proper.
One of those requires Tibetan monks and nuns to complete a period of "patriotic education", at the end of which they are forced to denounce the Dalai Lama.
"The Dalai Lama told them they should do it, that it didn't matter -- but of course is does matter if you're religious," said Mr Barnett.
Many Tibetans complain that their culture, language and way of life are being eroded by policies initiated in Beijing.
By contrast, China's leaders believe they are bringing development and modernisation to backward Tibetan areas.
"The Tibetans here earn more than I do," said one senior Jiuzhaigou official, surnamed Zhou.
His claim might be true, but Mr Zhou did not want the BBC checking it out by actually speaking to any Tibetans.
We were followed, and once more detained for questioning.
Across Tibetan areas of western Sichuan, China has poured in security forces, cut communications with the outside world and tried to prevent foreigners from getting in.
That does not seem like the actions of a government that is confident about how it administers its Tibetan areas.

Police chief spent day in US consulate amid asylum bid speculation

2012-02-10T10:43:00.000+01:00

By Associated Press

Former Chongqing police chief Wang Lijun
BEIJING — Beijing says a celebrity police chief linked to one of the country’s rising political stars spent a day in a U.S. consulate in southwestern China amid speculation that he sought political asylum.
The U.S. State Department confirmed that former Chongqing police chief Wang Lijun visited the consulate in the city of Chengdu, but gave no details.
The Foreign Ministry spokesman’s office said that Wang entered the consulate on Monday and “remained there for one day.”
The statement, carried by the official Xinhua News Agency, said the incident was being investigated.
Dozens of newspapers carried the Xinhua report prominently on Friday without additional reporting, a sign that official censors were trying to limit potentially embarrassing coverage.
Wang was the top police officer in Chongqing until he was mysteriously removed last week.
He stayed on as a deputy mayor and was reassigned to duties involving the local economy and education. As the city’s top cop, he had helped carry out a widespread crackdown on organized crime groups seen as part of a campaign to promote Bo Xilai, the city’s Communist Party secretary and one of the country’s most prominent political figures.
Bo has been seen as maneuvering for a seat on the ruling Communist Party’s Politburo Standing Committee, which will appoint new members later this year.
Wang’s whereabouts is unknown.
There were several unconfirmed reports online, including one that showed a photo of Wang’s name on a plane ticket from Chengdu to Beijing.
The report said he had been brought to the capital for questioning by anti-corruption officials, a claim repeated by the usually reliable independent Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy in Hong Kong.
State media ran photos Friday showing Bo visiting the southwestern province of Yunnan on Wednesday and Thursday with no mention of Wang.
The U.S. State Department confirmed earlier this week that Wang sought and had a meeting at the consulate but offered no details.
He later left “of his own volition,” the State Department said.
Wang had been one of China’s most celebrated policemen, inspiring a drama on state TV lauding his personal bravery in assaulting gangs in Chongqing and the northeastern province of Liaoning where he previously served.
The uncertainty has fueled speculation over a falling-out between Wang and Bo, who has been one of China’s most high-profile politicians.
Bo sits on the ruling Communist Party’s 25-member Politburo, responsible for key decisions guiding the world’s most populous nation and second largest economy.
Bo appointed Wang to clean up Chongqing’s corrupt police force and take on organized crime in a campaign that drew national attention.
Bo garnered huge publicity for the anti-crime campaign and an accompanying drive to revive communist songs and poems from the 1950s and 1960s, spurring talk that he was seeking a promotion.
Those campaigns have since fizzled, leading analysts to pull back on speculation that he might be elevated to higher office when the party begins a generational change in leadership later this year.

Beijing Joins Team Anti-America

2012-02-09T22:42:00.003+01:00

China's tone-deaf Syria veto in the U.N. Security Council isn't about noninterference.
By WILLY LAM

China votes with Russia and against the West. Beijing has suffered a huge defeat in its longstanding effort to win hearts and minds in the Middle East and Africa with its U.N. Security Council veto of a resolution condemning a government crackdown in Syria. Arab League Chief Nabil Elaraby said China "has lost diplomatic credit in the Arab world" following the move.

Leaders of several Middle East countries which are major oil exporters to China have also expressed dismay.

And it's not just the elites who are angry.

Libyans pelted the Chinese Embassy in Tripoli with stones to show their displeasure with China's ongoing resistance to the Arab Spring.

China doesn't exactly have a reputation for supporting human-rights causes at the U.N., but even so this veto marks surprisingly bad judgment in light of the public-relations costs.

How did the Chinese Communist Party, which has thousands of diplomats, intelligence officials and state businessmen based in the Middle East and Africa, get it so wrong?

One might have thought someone in Beijing would have learned the lesson of Libya, where they failed to gain the good will of the new government by refusing to cut their links with the Gadhafi regime.

Potential contracts in oil and infrastructure worth billions of dollars have now gone to the Europeans and Americans.

Unlike Russia, China does not have close military or economic ties with Syria's current regime to worry about.

Beijing's normal rationale for such moves—its precept of "noninterference in the internal affairs of other countries"—doesn't fully explain this veto.

In the face of overwhelming international condemnation of Syria, Beijing could have upheld this principle simply by abstaining, allowing the resolution to proceed without China's support.

Instead, Beijing felt compelled to offer an additional fig leaf to justify the veto.

The People's Daily quoted leading foreign affairs expert Ruan Zongze as saying that "China and Russia's decision to veto created a 'window of opportunity' for a soft landing to the problem, which should not be wasted."

This willingness to act in a way so far counter to what would appear to be its normal interest is an important signal.

Beijing is sending a message about its evolving attitude toward the U.S.

The veto is Beijing's way of thumbing its nose at Washington, which it believes is masterminding a series of "color revolutions" to undermine nondemocratic regimes around the world.

Anti-American sentiments seem to have surged within the CCP establishment, particularly after President Obama's recent "pivot to Asia" policy.

This is interpreted—not entirely wrongly—by Beijing as an exacerbation of what China calls Washington's "anti-China containment policy."

This U.S. pivot comes at an especially delicate time for Beijing.

The upcoming leadership transition means Beijing is keen to protect the façade of stability in China, even in the face of an estimated 150,000 cases of riots and disturbances every year.

Unrest is spreading in Xinjiang and the Greater Tibetan Region.

While only a small number among these groups harbor separatist tendencies, most members of these ethnic groups fume at Beijing's draconian measures to suppress their cultural, religious and linguistic freedoms.

So when U.S. Senator John McCain suggested in an international forum in Munich last weekend that "the Arab Spring is coming to China as well," Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister Zhang Zhijun angrily responded by saying that this was no more than a "fantasy" of the West.

But Mr. McCain may have tapped into the fears of some in Beijing.

As the Global Times newspaper, a commercial offshoot of the People's Daily, pointed out in an editorial earlier this week, "the 'Arab Spring' has pushed the 'color revolutions' in [countries] in the former Soviet Federation to a climax... The U.S. and EU will continue to foster 'revolutions' in other parts of the world until China is overwhelmed."

Such concerns are shared by the Russian regime.

Recent months have seen protests in Moscow and St. Petersburg against Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's rule after allegations of vote-rigging in elections.

Mr. Putin blames the West for fomenting the demonstrations.

Beijing and Moscow have in the past year or so tightened joint efforts at not only blunting the advance of "Western" values but also combating the forces of separatism among ethnic minorities in the two neighboring countries.

Their U.N. veto on Syria could mark the beginning of an enhanced phase of cooperation between the two erstwhile Communist allies to fight "Western infiltration."

Beijing's U.N. veto could be a not-so-subtle way of telling Tibetans and Uighurs that the People's Liberation Army might soon up the ante in cracking down on dissent.

All this suggests Beijing is likely to grow more aggressive in challenging the West.

Yet the reaction to its Syria veto raises questions about whether it will succeed.

The CCP seems oblivious to the fact that many of "the West's" global ideas and principles such as democratic governance are catching on at breakneck speed throughout the Middle East and Africa.

This marks a curious reversal for China.

In the 1950s, Maoist China spearheaded a somewhat quixotic campaign to become leader of the Third World by fomenting a Marxist-style international revolution.

Thanks partly to the radical chic of Maoism, the Great Helmsmen won quite a number of converts among Africa and the Middle East.

Now Mao's heirs have become reactionaries, remaining tone deaf to the democratic aspirations of millions upon millions in the developing world.

Beijing might think its Syria vote was a realpolitik win and in the short term that might be true.

Over the longer term, though, it may be turn out to be a Pyrrhic victory.

China’s Achilles’ Heel

2012-02-09T12:32:00.000+01:00

With little in the way of force projection, China’s dependence on natural resources in unstable parts of the world could undercut its economic ambitions. There are limits to free riding.
By Minxin Pei

The seizure of 29 Chinese workers by Sudanese rebels in the southern part of Sudan last week exposed one of the most vulnerable links in China’s ambitious plan for extending its economic influence abroad.
To be sure, this isn’t the first time workers sent by China to dangerous regions were kidnapped or harmed. Five years ago, three Chinese engineers were murdered by a militant group in Pakistan.
When civil war broke out in Libya nearly a year ago, Beijing had to dispatch a fleet of ships and airplanes to evacuate more than 30,000 Chinese workers from the country.
Despite the release of the workers this week, such incidents – and there will be many similar ones in the future – raise several important questions about China’s strategy of “going out” in general, and its quest for natural resources in particular.
The motivations for Beijing to expand its economic reach across the globe are easy to understand.
The Chinese economy is resource-intensive and depends on secure access to energy, minerals, and other commodities to sustain its growth.
Unfortunately, the geopolitics and economics of natural resources are tricky.
Most of them are located in unstable or war-torn countries, with poor infrastructure, corrupt governments, and intractable ethnic conflict.
The global markets for natural resources are notoriously volatile and frequently go through boom-bust cycles.
Worse still, as a late-comer to the scene, the low-hanging fruits have already been picked by entrenched and powerful Western multinationals, such as Exxon, Shell, BP, Rio Tinto, BHP, and the likes, which have established seemingly unchallengeable advantages in technology, capital, and risk management.
Faced with such a strategic landscape in the competition for natural resources, China has long concluded that it will risk letting its economic security held hostage by the vagaries of the market and the entrenched Western giants if it doesn’t make a concerted all-out effort to gain direct access to strategic natural resources.
The policy and actions flowing from this strategic assessment in the past decade are easy to see: China has become the world’s most aggressive player in competing for access to natural resources.
It has tied its foreign aid program to gaining concessions on exploiting natural resources.
Its state-owned companies, supported by access to cheap (if not free) credit from Chinese banks, often outbid foreign competitors in securing contracts and exploration rights.
It is willing to take excessive financial and security risks and encourages its companies to venture into areas, such as Sudan, Zimbabwe, and Congo, where their Western rivals don’t dare to tread.
But in executing this strategy, the Chinese have found themselves facing a fundamental dilemma: it’s a rising power with global economic interests, but no global power projection capabilities to protect these interests.On most occasions, to be sure, China can free-ride on the security provided by the West, especially the United States.
For example, with the U.S. Navy patrolling the sea lanes and keeping a close watch on conflict-prone areas, China gains free protection.
One of the most illustrative cases is China’s $3 billion investment in an Afghan copper mine, which is protected by the U.S. Army.
Yet, free-riding has its limits.
There are areas where conditions are so unstable that even Uncle Sam doesn’t want to risk the lives of its soldiers.
Sudan is one such country.
If China insists on going it alone in its quest for resource security, its only option for protecting its sprawling interests is to develop commensurate power projection capabilities.
This will be both costly and, more worryingly, cause anxieties among its neighbors and Western countries since it will entail sustained and massive increases in China’s military spending.
This option, which will take years, if not decades, to implement, won’t meet the more immediate needs of providing security for Chinese economic interests in dangerous places anyway.
Without its own power projection capabilities, China will have to do one of two things.
First, it can simply do nothing and let itself be literally held hostage by the geopolitical and security risks prevalent in the regions where it has made valuable investments.
This is hardly an attractive option because China risks losing its investments and its government, which has been subject to fierce criticisms in the Chinese cyberspace after the kidnapping of Chinese workers in Sudan, will appear weak, incompetent, and helpless.
Second, China can alter its existing go-alone strategy and join the West in ensuring collective resource security.
This requires a fundamental change in Beijing’s mindset.
Instead of viewing the quest for resources as a zero-sum game, China will see that its interests are closely linked with those of the West, and that it can make its investments and operations in far-flung regions more secure by pooling its efforts with those of the West.
Such a cooperative strategy will likely yield more benefits than China’s cut-throat competitive strategy.
On the financial front, China won’t be wasting money trying to outbid its Western rivals (who will be partners).
Its development aid will be more aligned with the goals of seeking conflict resolution and improving governance, rather than with obtaining competitive advantages in securing contracts.
By partnering with the West in making resource-rich developing countries more stable, China will in fact reduce the risks of its investments and economic interests there.
Even in crises such as the ongoing hostage drama in Sudan, a China in close cooperation with the West may seek direct assistance from its partners that have the requisite military capabilities in these areas.
So for China, shifting its current strategy will be truly win-win.
To a Chinese leadership steeped in realpolitik and paranoia about the West, this proposal may sound naïve. But the alternatives are far worse.
If Beijing stays on its present course of seeking resource security at any cost, it will run into crises far worse than the one they have just encountered in southern Sudan.

Philippines seeks US help to counter China

2012-02-09T12:20:00.000+01:00

The United States and the Philippines will hold combat drills together to counter China's rising influence in the area.
By Marwaan Macan-Markar

China has behaved aggressively in the South China Sea, which is bordered by five other nations Bangkok -- The government of Philippines President Benigno Aquino may be wading into choppy diplomatic waters by turning to the United States to counter China's aggressiveness in the South China Sea, one of the world's busiest shipping lanes.
A protest outside the US embassy in Manila over the weekend by local leftwing and indigenous groups is an indication of what can be expected in the run-up to planned combat drills involving US and Filipino forces in the troubled waters of the South China Sea.
"The combat drills with US and Philippines marines have certainly worried many sectors here," noted Walden Bello, a first-term congressman from the Citizens' Action Party, which is part of the Aquino administration's coalition in the national legislature.
"The Philippines is unfortunately playing a dangerous game in entertaining a US military presence," he added in a telephone interview from Manila.
Giving Washington a military foothold will "convert a territorial dispute, where the Philippines has a stake, into a superpower conflict," Bello said.
"We should rely on regional and multilateral mechanisms."

Nationalist response
A verbal volley fired by an ultra-nationalist Chinese newspaper brings such warnings into relief.
The Philippines should be targeted with "countermeasures" and "punishment" for offering the US military an expanded role in the South China Sea, raged the English-language Global Times in a commentary last week.
"A reasonable yet powerful enough sanction can be considered," added the paper.
"It should show China's neighbouring area that balancing China by siding with the US is not a good choice." The planned military drills off the Philippines coast, scheduled for late March or early April, will be staged near an oil rig in the South China Sea.
This news, following a mid-January bilateral defence dialogue, came after the Philippines got another boost from US foreign policy heavyweights to contain China.
"What we're talking about is maritime security," US Senator Joseph Lieberman said at the end of a trip to the Philippines capital with three other senators last month.
"We simply cannot allow one nation, in this case China, to exercise disproportionate control over these waterways."
This body of water has increasingly become a flashpoint following China's strident assertion in 2009 that it had control over a stretch of ocean that has a spread of reefs, coral atolls and slivers of land that are hardly habitable.
Yet, what has raised stakes in the South China Sea, whose waters are shared by Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines, are reports that its bed contains huge deposits of oil and gas -- in addition to supplying nearly one-tenth of the world's seafood catch.

Energy issues
The Parcels Islands archipelago and the Spratly Islands have, consequently, become important for energy security.
China controls the Parcels, having edged out Vietnam in a 1974 battle that left 18 people dead.
And, Manila fell victim to Beijing's bullying when the Asian giant occupied the Mischief Reef in 1995, once part of the Philippines.
The dispute led to the 2002 Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (DoC), the first political agreement between China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) bloc that includes Burma, Cambodia, Thailand, Singapore, Laos, Indonesia and South China Sea littorals -- the Philippines, Vietnam, Brunei and Malaysia.
Neither the 10-year-old declaration, nor the diplomatic breakthrough in July last year to create "guidelines for implementing" the DoC, has done enough to ease the tension through 2011.
Both Vietnam and the Philippines accused China of asserting its territorial claims by sending fleets of vessels into disputed areas.
"The Philippines has become the most outspoken on this issue with the ASEAN members," says Kavi Chongkittavorn, a regional affairs commentator, in The Nation, an English daily in Thailand.
"It has been boosted by the defence treaty it has with the US."
But efforts by Manila to raise the diplomatic stakes against China "will not have wide support in ASEAN", Kavi said.
"ASEAN will not want to be dragged into a conflict with China."
The imminent diplomatic challenge Manila faces comes nearly a year after the Philippines government turned to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLoS) to resolve its territorial disputes.
"The Philippines has called on ASEAN to support the idea that the issue must be resolved on the basis of the rule of law, particularly UNCLoS," reveals Herman Kraft, associate professor of political science at the University of the Philippines.
"Using UNCLoS to advance its argument allows the Philippines to take the moral high ground and hopefully (win) the sympathy of the international public," he explained in an interview.
"(China's push to resolve the problem bilaterally) is a non-starter for a small state dealing with a larger and more powerful state."
There is an international treaty which can help "break the deadlock between China and other countries over territorial disputes in the South China Sea," says Kumar Chitty, a former senior UN official at the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, a Hamburg-based judicial body created to resolve disputes between countries about the oceans and their resources.
"This is how Australia and East Timor resolved their dispute," Chitty said.
But China is avoiding such an international judicial route, preferring the ASEAN-led DoC resolution.

Face à la Chine, l'axe Inde-Japon se renforce

2012-02-09T12:06:00.001+01:00

Edouard Pflimlin

Exercice naval conjoint des garde-côtes indiens et japonais, au large de Chennai, dans la baie du Bengale, le 29 janvier 2012.
"Votre voisin est votre ennemi naturel et le voisin de votre voisin est votre ami", dit le stratège indien Kautilya.
Cette maxime semble s'appliquer particulièrement bien aux relations indo-japonaises qui prennent de plus en plus d'ampleur, notamment lorsqu'il s'agit de faire front à "l'ascension pacifique" (selon Pékin) de l'empire du milieu.
Témoignent de ce partenariat stratégique, lui aussi ascendant, deux événements récents.
Le 29 janvier, un exercice naval commun mettant en action des vaisseaux et des hélicoptères des garde-côtes de l'Inde et du Japon (JCG, ou Japanese Coast Guard) au large des rives de la baie du Bengale, près de Chennai (ex-Madras), visait à démontrer et entraîner les capacités de lutte combinée de ces deux forces navales, notamment face à la piraterie maritime qui sévit dans l'océan Indien.
Ces manœuvres, dont le principe a été lancé en novembre 2006, et qui se déroulent une année sur deux au large d’un des deux pays, sont représentatives de la relation de coopération de plus en plus étroite entre Tokyo et New Delhi sur les questions stratégiques.

CONVERGENCE DE POINTS DE VUE ET D'INTÉRÊTS STRATÉGIQUES
Un autre événement récent, juste un mois auparavant, corrobore ce constat.
Le premier ministre japonais Yoshihiko Noda rencontrait fin décembre son homologue Manmohan Singh dans la capitale indienne.
Les deux hommes énonçaient dans une déclaration conjointe les domaines de coopération stratégique devant se développer, s’étendant des questions de sécurité aux relations économiques, financières et commerciales.
De tels liens ne sont pas le fruit du hasard, mais de la nécessité.
La menace croissante que fait peser le développement militaire chinois sur l'Inde et le Japon, l’instabilité générée par la piraterie internationale – les deux pays dépendent respectivement à 97 % et à 100 % du commerce maritime –, les menaces nord-coréennes (essais nucléaires, tirs de missiles balistiques, transferts de technologies sensibles au Pakistan, ennemi de l’Inde) ont entraîné une convergence des points de vue et des intérêts stratégiques.
Mais cette relation s'explique aussi par l'histoire.
Sans remonter au bouddhisme qui irrigue les deux cultures, les deux pays ont établi peu après la guerre de 1939-1945 des relations diplomatiques – c’était le 28 avril 1952.
L'Inde fut un des premiers pays à signer un traité de paix avec le Japon vaincu.

COOPÉRATION SÉCURITAIRE ET RENCONTRES ENTRE MINISTRES
Certes, pendant la guerre froide, l'Inde a privilégié l’allié russe, alors que le Japon s’abritait sous le parapluie nucléaire américain.
Cependant, la chute de l’URSS a ouvert une nouvelle ère dans les relations entre les deux géants, devenus les deuxième et troisième économies d'Asie.
Après les essais nucléaires indiens de 1998, qui avaient conduit au gel de l’aide japonaise à l’Inde, la relation prend un très grand essor au début des années 2000.
La visite du premier ministre japonais Mori, en août 2000, donne l'impulsion décisive pour la renforcer.
Elle est axée notamment sur la coopération sécuritaire et est suivie de rencontres annuelles entre premiers ministres des deux Etats.
Elles ont conduit à signer en octobre 2008 la Déclaration sur la coopération en matière de sécurité entre Inde et Japon.
C'est seulement le troisième pays, après les Etats-Unis et l'Australie, avec lequel Tokyo développe une telle relation.
Neuf domaines de coopération sécuritaire sont identifiés, que les deux pays doivent renforcer.
Il s'agit notamment d'organiser des rencontres régulières entre ministres de la défense, d'accroître les exercices militaires communs, d'étendre la coopération entre garde-côtes, ou encore de mieux gérer en commun les catastrophes naturelles.
Cette coopération continuait ensuite de se renforcer malgré le changement de majorité à la Diète (parlement japonais) : le Parti démocrate du Japon (PDJ) remportait les législatives en août 2009 face au Parti libéral-démocrate (PLD), qui régnait depuis près de cinquante ans quasiment sans discontinuité sur le parlement nippon.
En effet, pendant la visite du premier ministre japonais Hatoyama en Inde, en décembre 2009, les deux Etats publiaient une déclaration commune, "Nouvelle étape du partenariat stratégique et global Inde-Japon", qui donnait de nouveaux "outils" pour accroître ce partenariat, notamment l'accélération de la coopération sur les questions régionales et mondiales, comme le désarmement et la non-prolifération ou le contre-terrorisme.

Membres des garde-côtes indiens lors d'un exercice au large de Chennai, en baie du Bengale, simulant une attaque de pirates, le 29 janvier 2012.
La visite de M. Noda a, elle, été l’occasion, fin décembre 2011, de mettre l’accent sur la coopération maritime – notamment pour lutter contre la piraterie au large de la Somalie –, qui doit se renforcer en 2012 et au-delà, avec des exercices conjoints des garde-côtes et surtout des marines nationales (Indian Navy et Maritime Self Defense Forces ou Forces d'autodéfense maritimes) des deux Etats.
Mais la relation stratégique a aussi un très important volet économique.
Le commerce bilatéral connaît un essor rapide.
Un accord de libre-échange – appelé CEPA ou Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement – entre les deux Etats a été signé en février 2011 et est entré en vigueur en août de l'année dernière.
Il doit permettre un véritable décollage des échanges commerciaux.
MM. Noda et Singh ont annoncé le 28 décembre que l'objectif est d'atteindre des échanges bilatéraux de 25 milliards de dollars d'ici à 2014 (contre 4 milliards de dollars en 2002).
La visite de M. Noda a ouvert de nouveaux champs de coopération et d’investissement.
C’est ainsi que le Japon va investir dans de nombreux projets d'infrastructures en Inde, notamment 4,5 milliards de dollars d'ici à 2015 pour développer "un corridor industriel", selon les termes employés dans la déclaration commune de Singh et Noda, entre Delhi et Mumbai (Bombay), afin de stimuler l’économie et le tissu industriel du pays.

FONDS POUR SOUTENIR LA MONNAIE INDIENNE
Le Japon a également fourni après cette visite, via un accord de swap financier de 15 milliards de dollars, des fonds pour soutenir la monnaie indienne, la roupie.
La coopération dans le domaine nucléaire devrait aussi s’accroître, l’Inde s’intéresse à la technologie civile japonaise, même si l'accident nucléaire de la centrale de Fukushima a retardé la conclusion d'un accord.
Les perspectives du partenariat Inde-Japon sont "brillantes", selon certains experts.
Sur le plan du commerce bilatéral, le potentiel est énorme au regard de son niveau modeste – 15 milliards de dollars en 2011 contre environ 340 milliards de dollars pour le commerce sino-japonais !) et au regard de l'écart de niveau de vie – PIB par habitant de 1 371 dollars en Inde contre 4 382 dollars en Chine – et de la dynamique de l'économie et de la population indiennes.
Le domaine de la coopération nucléaire est un autre champ important et 2012 pourrait voir, selon certains experts, un accord en la matière, l'Inde ayant donné des assurances au Japon, qui s'inquiète du risque de prolifération.
Sur le plan militaire et sécuritaire, les enjeux sont multiples.
Il s'agit notamment de développer l'interopérabilité entre les forces navales des deux pays pour qu'elles soient, selon les termes de l'ancien premier japonais Abe Shinzo, "interconnectées de manière harmonieuse".Le deuxième enjeu est de développer des systèmes de défense et la coopération sur des technologies pour la sécurité commune.
De ce point de vue, la décision, fin décembre, du gouvernement japonais de lever une partie des restrictions aux exportations d'armement japonais pourrait se traduire par une coopération industrielle sur des projets d'armement.
La revue de défense Jane's Defence Weekly a calculé que la politique d'acquisition de l'Inde en matière de défense représenterait au total entre 2011 et 2015 la somme astronomique de 100 milliards de dollars.
Le champ des possibles se révèle donc très vaste.
Enfin, la coopération sécuritaire s'inscrit dans un cadre plus important, celui des relations stratégiques avec les Etats-Unis et leurs alliés.
Les Etats-Unis, l'Inde et la Chine ont d'ailleurs tenu le 20 décembre leur premier dialogue trilatéral à Washington et ont abordé des questions régionales et mondiales.
Les trois Etats ont réaffirmé "leurs valeurs communes" et sont convenus de se revoir à Tokyo en 2012.L'année 2012 est celle des soixante bougies de l'anniversaire des liens diplomatiques indo-japonais.
Celles-ci sont bien parties pour briller de tout leur éclat et augurent de belles perspectives.

Another Tibetan sets himself on fire in China

2012-02-09T11:49:00.003+01:00

By ALEXA OLESEN

BEIJING — Another Tibetan has set himself on fire in western China to protest government policies while thousands marched in another part of China to show support for their exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, a report said.
U.S.-funded Radio Free Asia said a man, apparently a monk, set himself on fire in Sichuan province's Aba prefecture on Wednesday and was taken away by soldiers and police.
His condition was not immediately clear.
It said the man shouted slogans before setting himself ablaze, citing a statement from Losang Yeshe and Kanyag Tsering, exiled Tibetan monks in India.
If confirmed, the incident would bring to at least 20 the number of monks, nuns and lay Tibetans who have set themselves on fire over the last year, mostly in traditionally Tibetan areas of Sichuan province.
Most have chanted for Tibetan freedom and the return of the Dalai Lama, who fled to India amid an abortive uprising against Chinese rule in 1959.
Beijing accuses the Dalai Lama and his supporters of encouraging the immolations.
Radio Free Asia also said Tibetan protests erupted Wednesday in two counties in Qinghai province in northwest China, with about 1,000 people marching in each.
Citing local sources and exiles with contacts in the region, it said security surrounded protesters but no violence occurred.
The broadcaster said protesters shouted slogans and carried banners calling for a "free Tibet," the release of all Tibetan political prisoners, and the return of the Dalai Lama.
A police officer reached Thursday by telephone in Nangqian, where one of the protests allegedly occurred, said he had no reports of any protests.
Like many Chinese officials, he refused to give his name.
Amateur video shot Wednesday and shared with The Associated Press by a person with contacts in China's Tibetan community showed hundreds of Tibetans gathered on the side of a main street in Nangqian, some sitting on the curb and others milling about.
A few men threw what appeared to be dry tsampa, a popular Tibetan food, into the air.
Throwing or eating dry tsampa during Tibetan rituals can symbolize despair.
The person who sent the video said the group later gathered at a stadium and chanted slogans before being surrounded by police and the demonstration broke up without incident after it became dark.
In recent protests in Sichuan, Tibetan activist groups said at least six Tibetans were killed when police fired on protesters.
The Chinese government says two rioters died and 24 police and firefighters were injured when rock-wielding Tibetan separatists attacked police stations.
This has been the region's most violent period since 2008, when deadly rioting in Tibet's capital, Lhasa, spread to Tibetan areas in adjoining provinces.
China responded then by flooding the area with troops and closing Tibetan regions entirely to foreigners for about a year.
Western media trying to visit areas where unrest has been reported in the last several weeks have been turned away by security forces.
Lobsang Sangay, the leader of Tibetans' self-declared exile government, said Wednesday that convoys of Chinese security forces have been seen moving toward Tibet in recent days, ahead of the Tibetan New Year on Feb. 22 and the March anniversary of the failed 1959 uprising.
"If the Chinese government think that the Tibet issue can be solved through violence, intimidation, then it's not going to happen, because the Tibetan spirit is strong," he said in Dharmsala, India.
China has vowed to crack down on the unrest and accuses overseas activist groups and the Dalai Lama of fomenting the violence.
Asked Thursday about the recent spread of instability in Tibetan areas, Deputy Foreign Minister Cui Tiankai told reporters that China has a responsibility to protect "lives and property and to curb violent criminal activities."
He also rebuffed the idea of the unrest as a human rights concern.
"The Chinese government has the responsibility to protect the safety of the vast majority of the general public and that is the most important human right," Cui said.
The official Tibet Daily on Thursday reported that Tibet's Communist Party secretary, Chen Quanguo, announced at a meeting Wednesday that four officials from the Chamdo region had been fired for leaving their posts and threatening stability.
All four were from Dingqing county.
It didn't provide specific details.
A regional government notice last week stressed the need for officials in Tibet to be on high alert for unrest and had warned that those who failed to carry out security work or maintain stability could be fired or face criminal prosecution.
China says Tibet has been under its rule for centuries, but Tibetans say the region was functionally independent for most of that time.
The Dalai Lama has called greater autonomy for Tibet and denies Beijing's claims that he is a separatist.

Hard-pressed documentary makers keep rolling

2012-02-09T11:37:00.005+01:00

By Calum MacLeod

Artist and film maker Zhang Bingjian stands before cheap portraits he commissioned of corrupt Chinese officials in his Beijing studio. BEIJING – Their subjects include people living at the margins of society, fighting property demolition, tracing the death of relatives persecuted under Chairman Mao, and even a government official discussing the corruption and bullying rife in his City Hall.

As China's Communist Party boosts efforts worldwide to soften its image, a determined and growing band of independent filmmakers documents the complex, often uncomfortable realities of China's past and present.

"The authorities believe these films, and the people who make them, are all problematic," says Zhang Qi, organizer of an independent film festival in a sprawling artists' village in east Beijing.

"Officials fear it's a big land mine that could explode at any time."

From running ads in New York City's Times Square to broadcasting in U.S. cable markets, China spends big money to get its views aired.

This week, propaganda-heavy China Central Television (CCTV) launched programming for American viewers produced out of a new office building steps away from the White House.

Among the producers of the English-language news broadcasts will be several U.S. journalists hired from Bloomberg TV, NBC and Fox News in bureaus throughout North and South America.

CCTV says its operations in the USA will have autonomy from the People's Republic of China.

At home, the PRC is tightening decades-long controls on the content of movies and TV programs to promote Chinese culture it prefers: safe, socialist and state-run.

Beijing police raided the opening ceremony of Zhang's independent film festival, and a strict censorship system blocks many films from being seen by mainstream Chinese.

Still, the independent documentaries reach a tiny audience within China, and their directors insist the stories are so good and important that they will keep on shooting.

"The political challenges are greater than the financial, so filmmakers must still be careful in choosing their topics," says Zhu Rikun, a veteran documentary producer and supporter.

Last May, authorities canceled a documentary film festival Zhu was directing and banned his Fanhall Films website, a forum for debate.

Despite the harassment, the number of independent documentary makers has passed 100 over the past two years, he says.

The digital age has slashed equipment costs, while the Internet and pirated films, commonplace in China, offer cheap inspiration to budding directors, Zhu says.

Foreign film festivals provide crucial support, he says.

State broadcaster CCTV launched a channel for documentaries last year, "but they are not independent, they are still propaganda," Zhu says.

Among the films Zhu doubts would ever be shown on CCTV is Xu Xin's Karamay, which tells the story of a fire in 1994 that killed 288 schoolchildren who were ordered to remain seated to allow officials to leave first.

"Such a film is like a hidden history, as nobody wants to talk about such topics in public," says Zhu, who reopened his website last month by switching to a server outside China.

"This film can make Chinese people rethink about life, our history and society."

In China, "the government has a complete stranglehold on culture," says David Bandurski, a Hong Kong-based film producer and China media analyst.

Chinese film directors face censorship "effective enough to shut them out of the mainstream scene, so they don't impact domestic public opinion," he says.

So many contemporary issues are considered sensitive that directors who seek official approval and thus the right to screen in movie theaters often set fictional films "in the romanticized, dynastic past," he says.

Instead of becoming a culturally strong nation as Beijing plans, China risks becoming "a nation of cultural relics," Bandurski says.

Gritty reality is in plain view in the films of director Xu Tong, whose "vagabonds" trilogy documents people at the bottom of Chinese society.

"I want to show the complexity of society," he says.

"These are real social situations. Even if I can't show the films in cinemas, or not many people can see them now, I don't care. I have the duty and desire to record their stories."Xu is proud of the independent film community's perseverance in the face of censorship.

Director Zhang Bingjian is still smiling even though police hassle him when he shoots, and censors block his films.

"China is such an exciting place now; it's too interesting a subject," says Zhang, 52, who spent a decade in the USA.

His film Ready Made follows two ordinary people, including a woman whose resemblance to Mao leads her to a double-life impersonating him for money at nightclubs and malls.

Films such as Ready Made, which offer plenty of laughs, show that "Chinese documentary" does not always mean bleak and political, says He Zhong, founder of Trainspotting, a film-themed restaurant in Beijing that shows independent, unapproved films.

Police have never interrupted a screening, which "shows more that I am careful, rather than that the authorities are tolerant," says He, who did not show sensitive films such as Karamay and Zhao Liang's Petition, which follows desperate citizens in their futile search for justice.

"We don't want confrontation," says film festival organizer Zhang Qi, "we just want to be able to express our own voice."

Chinese espionage cases touch DuPont, Motorola

2012-02-09T11:11:00.002+01:00

China is "the world's most active and persistent perpetrators of economic espionage."
By Dan Levine and James Kelleher
SAN FRANCISCO/CHICAGO -- U.S. prosecutors expanded a criminal case over the alleged theft of industrial secrets from chemical giant DuPont, securing an indictment against a Chinese company on economic espionage-related charges.
A Northern California grand jury indicted Pangang Group for conspiracy to commit economic espionage and other charges including conspiracy to steal trade secrets, according to court documents unsealed on Wednesday.
Pangang, a state-owned steel manufacturer in Sichuan province, allegedly worked with a California businessman and others to obtain several valuable trade secrets from DuPont, the indictment says.Separately, a former engineer for Motorola Inc was found guilty on Wednesday of stealing trade secrets from the company but cleared of economic espionage for China.
The latest developments in the two cases come as Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping is scheduled to visit the United States next week on a range of economic, trade, regional and global issues.
Xi, considered China's president-in-waiting, will meet President Barack Obama at the White House next Tuesday.
The U.S. visit will be a major step in signalling Xi's readiness to take over as China's next top leader and run Beijing's complex and sometimes vexed relationship with Washington.
The United States has identified industrial spying as a significant and growing threat to the nation's prosperity. In a government report released last November, authorities cited China as "the world's most active and persistent perpetrators of economic espionage."
California businessman Walter Liew has already been in custody for several months on witness tampering charges related to the DuPont allegations.
Liew and his wife, Christina, also face charges of conspiracy to commit economic espionage and other counts in the latest indictment.
Lawyers for Walter and Christina Liew could not be reached for comment.
Tom Nolan, a lawyer for Walter Liew, has previously maintained that his client only possessed publicly available information, not trade secrets from DuPont.
The Pangang Group, named in the Dupont case, is based in Panzhihua city in the far south of China's Sichuan province and is western China's largest steelmaker.
It was formally known as Panzhihua Iron and Steel (Group) Co Ltd.
Three of Pangang's subsidiaries are also named in the indictment, along with a Chinese citizen who worked for that company.
In 2010 authorities Pangang's merger with Angang Steel Co Ltd, which would make Angang the country's largest steel mill.
Phone calls to Pangang's headquarters on Thursday went unanswered, and company officials did not respond to faxed queries.
Liew, a U.S. citizen, allegedly paid former DuPont engineers for assistance in designing chloride-route titanium dioxide, also known as TiO2, according to the indictment.
DuPont is the world's largest producer of the white pigment used to make a range of white-tinted products, including paper, paint and plastics.
Two former DuPont engineers were also indicted on Wednesday.
DuPont general counsel Thomas Sager said the company is disappointed that former DuPont employees allegedly stole technology.
The company filed a civil suit against Liew and referred the theft to law enforcement, Sager said.
Separately, former Motorola employee Hanjuan Jin has been charged with illegally possessing thousands of the firm's trade secrets on her computer and in other forms of digital storage, and prosecutors said she intended to pass the information to the Chinese military.
Jin was found guilty by a Chicago federal judge on three counts of theft of trade secrets after a bench trial, and faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison on each count.

TARGETED
However, California businessman Liew's continued detention has angered one Chinese advocate.
Ling-Chi Wang, a professor at the University of California, said spying between countries and companies is a normal occurrence, and law enforcement should have allowed DuPont's civil suit to develop before arresting Liew.
Chinese targets might be more attractive in an election year, Wang said, due to concerns about being called soft on China.
"I just find that to be very, very troublesome," said Wang, who has previously spoken out against espionage-related prosecutions of ethnic Chinese scientists.
In a statement on Wednesday, San Francisco U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag said authorities will "aggressively pursue anyone, anywhere" who tries to steal from the United States.
Prosecutors detailed Liew's alleged links with the Chinese government in a court filing last week.
They named, as one of the Chinese representatives who once met with him, a high-ranking Communist Party official who later became a member of the Politburo.
In another development, Timothy Spitler, a former DuPont employee who consulted for Liew, took his own life last week, say multiple people familiar with the situation.
Spitler supplied material information to prosecutors in the investigation, these people say.
A lawyer for Spitler did not respond to inquiries on Wednesday.
The case is United States of America vs. Walter Liew, Christina Liew et al., U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, No. 11-cr-573.

Pete Hoekstra’s ad raises ire in China

2012-02-08T20:51:00.002+01:00

By Keith Richburg

The now-infamous Super Bowl ad by Michigan senate candidate Pete Hoekstra has attracted as much curiosity as outright criticism here in China, the intended “subject” of the ad.
However, a second feeling accompanied the anger: déjà vu.
Chinese in general have become largely used to China-bashing during U.S. election campaign season.
The last congressional cycle, in 2010, saw a torrent of ads accusing China of stealing American jobs and forcing U.S. factories to close.
The popular Web site Shanghaiist called the ad “creepy” and “racist.”
Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, played it straight with a news report about the controversy.
But the first sentence of the story referred to the commercial as “a racially charged political advertisement run by former U.S. Congressman Pete Hoekstra during the Super Bowl.”
Well-known blogger and Internet freedom campaigner Michael Anti weighed in on his Twitter account @mranti, saying, “I think the problem with the ad is that it’s racist. As a Chinese I should be amused by this ad, because it seems more like Southeast Asia. But Chinese in America are easily enraged by that sort of defamation of the image of a Chinese woman. Also, her English is not the Chinglish of a Mainland Chinese.”
On Sina Weibo, the most popular of China’s microblogging sites, one poster said, “The video makes me so angry.”
But as Anti noted, much of the curiosity was over the scene — a supposedly Chinese woman peddling a bicycle with what looks like a Vietnamese cone-shaped hat, in a lush green rice field that more resembled Vietnam’s Mekong Delta paddies than anything in modern China.
And, Hoekstra’s ad-makers apparently even got some of the Chinese characters wrong.
Also, the ad oddly uses traditional Chinese characters more typical in Taiwan, instead of the simplified characters in use in mainland China.
In the Republican primary debates, candidates have taken turns bashing China for manipulating its currency and engaging in unfair trade practices, and promising to get tough, with Mitt Romney being the toughest.

Surge in anti-China sentiment in Hong Kong

2012-02-08T20:40:00.001+01:00

By Juliana Liu

The full-page colour advertisement depicting a giant locust overlooking Hong Kong's skyline is a striking representation of the recent surge in anti-China feeling here.
A group of Hong Kong residents raised money online to fund the advert, which was published in the popular Apple Daily newspaper.
It depicted mainland visitors as locusts, amid growing tension over an influx of visitors.
Fifteen years after Hong Kong rejoined China, the gulf separating citizens in the former British colony and those on the mainland appears to be widening.
The two groups share a common written language and culture.
But differences in the spoken dialect, politics, economic standing and even personal hygiene have ignited a series of very public disagreements.
These have ranged from who gets preferential treatment at luxury shops to how to behave on the subway and who has the right to give birth in Hong Kong.
Xu Xi, a widely published author and writer-in-residence at the City University in Hong Kong, said recent confrontations were the result of long-simmering tensions.
"Hong Kong people welcomed the handover with open arms. But over time, we realised that we simply moved from one colonial master to another," she said.
"There is a great deal of misunderstanding on both sides. On a daily basis, I see it and I hear it."

'Bumpkins'
Hong Kong was a Crown colony for 150 years until 1997, when it was returned to China.
The city is governed under the "one country, two systems" policy.
It is largely free to run its own internal affairs, whilst Beijing sets foreign and defence policy.
Since the handover, the number of mainland visitors to Hong Kong has surged.
Last year, the city hosted 28 million tourists from mainland China.
That is four times the entire population of Hong Kong.
Many come primarily to shop.
Unlike the mainland, Hong Kong has no sales tax, so it is usually much cheaper to buy here, particularly when it comes to designer clothing, status handbags and high-end electronics.
In areas such as Tsim Sha Tsui, where Western luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton and Dolce & Gabbana have set up shop, the predominate dialect heard on the street is Mandarin, rather than the local Cantonese.The Dolce & Gabbana store was the site of protests in January after word spread online that security guards there allowed only mainland tourists to take photos.
The protests, which eventually shut the store and forced Dolce & Gabbana to apologise, highlighted feelings among Hong Kong residents that wealthy mainlanders were getting special treatment.
Gordon Mathews, an anthropologist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, says envy definitely plays a role.
"Thirty years ago, mainland people were 'achan' -- they were thought to be country bumpkins. And now the richest people in Hong Kong are tourists from the mainland, or investors from the mainland," he said.
"That's rather shocking and upsetting to many people in Hong Kong, and I think that is an underlying reason for these kinds of protests that we see."

Subway fight
On average, Hong Kong people are still much wealthier than their mainland cousins.
But the conspicuous consumption displayed by the sheer number of Chinese millionaires and billionaires shopping in Hong Kong has been upsetting locals for years.
There is also a feeling that, even as mainlanders get wealthier, their manners and etiquette leave room for improvement.
In January, a mobile phone video of a shouting match between mainlanders and locals on the Hong Kong subway went viral on the internet.
A young mainland girl visiting Hong Kong with her mother was caught eating dried noodles on the subway, where eating is not allowed.
Security was called and a very public row ensued.
Mainlanders accused locals of bullying, while Hong Kong residents insisted the visitors were rude and paid no heed to hygiene in a densely populated city.
Anthropologist Gordon Mathews says that as a white American he would have been forgiven for not knowing the rules.
Hong Kong bloggers say the real issue is that the passenger who politely asked the young girl to stop eating was ridiculed for speaking poor Mandarin.
After the video was widely shared, a professor at Peking University called Hong Kong people "British running dogs" for looking down on mainlanders, triggering a protest by about 100 residents at the Beijing liaison office.
Wang Yiting, a mainland student attending university in Hong Kong, says she understood the reasons behind the protest.
"It makes me feel very uncomfortable, but I can understand why Hong Kong people are so angry with us," she said.

Birth tourism
Hong Kong residents are also incensed about a surge in birth tourism, which they say is straining the medical system and putting lives at risk.
In the past 10 years the number of mainland women crossing the border to give birth has soared.
Almost half of all babies born in Hong Kong in 2010 were the children of mainland couples, according to government figures.
Babies born in Hong Kong automatically receive the right to live and work here, as well as the right to carry a Hong Kong passport, which makes international travel easier.
Some mainlanders also choose to give birth in Hong Kong to skirt the one-child policy, which can result in heavy fines for violators.
The Hong Kong government has already imposed quotas on the number of mainland mothers allowed to give birth in local hospitals, but residents say the quotas do not go far enough.
Bruce Lee, a 21-year-old university student, has roots in eastern China.
Still he considers himself a Hong Kong person first and foremost, and was one of the many donors who funded the "locust" advert.
"Some of these people come to Hong Kong in order to enjoy the benefits that this city offers without giving anything back," he said in between classes at the Hong Kong Baptist University.
"They are basically stealing from us, taking advantage of what locals have created through hard work."
Both Hong Kong and mainland officials are promising to crack down on birth tourism.
The head of Guangdong province's family planning department has told reporters that anyone caught going to Hong Kong to evade the one-child policy will be punished.
One lawmaker, Albert Chan of the People Power coalition, is even planning to introduce a new bill in the Legislative Council making it almost impossible for mainland women to give birth in Hong Kong.
"The situation is in such a terrible state," he said.
"Sooner or later, because there isn't enough medical staff to deal with so many women giving birth, local women may find their lives in danger."
The Hong Kong government is facing calls by other politicians to re-evaluate its immigration policy.
It is a sign that after 15 years, despite all the financial support Beijing offers Hong Kong, the city is not completely embracing a return to the motherland.

Verdict expected in Chicago corporate espionage trial of Chinese-born American

2012-02-08T20:23:00.002+01:00

By Associated Press

Hanjuan Jin, 41, spies for China
CHICAGO — A trial that highlights persistent fears about Chinese corporate espionage drew toward a close Wednesday, as a judge prepared to decide whether a Chinese-born American woman stole secrets from a U.S. cellphone company knowing they would likely end up in the hands of China’s military.
Hanjuan Jin, 41, was charged after she was found to be carrying a one-way ticket to China, $31,000 and about 1,000 Motorola Inc. documents, many stored digitally, during a random security search at O’Hare International Airport on Feb. 28, 2007.
Federal prosecutors say Jin, a University of Notre Dame graduate who rose through the Motorola ranks, began downloading the documents at her Chicago-area office after returning from an extended medical leave two days earlier.
Prosecutor Christopher Stetler told the court Jin “led a double life” as a seemingly loyal company worker who was actually plotting to steal her employer’s secrets.
Jin’s attorney, Beth Gaus, conceded that her client violated Motorola policy by removing the documents. But she said Jin harbored no ill intent and merely grabbed the files to refresh her technical knowledge after her long absence from work.
But prosecutors say Jin began cooperating with a tech company in China while on her leave and that she understood that stolen information could end up with the Chinese military.
Jin was charged with several counts of economic espionage and theft of trade secrets, and could be sentenced to more than a decade in federal prison, if convicted.
The conclusion of Jin’s bench trial at a federal courthouse in Chicago follows the recent release of a toughly worded U.S. intelligence report accusing China of systematically stealing American high-tech data to the detriment of the U.S. economy.
Before the November report from the U.S. Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, American officials responsible for tracking the theft of economic secrets hadn’t spoken as forcefully in public about their suspicions of China.
Beijing has consistently rejected such accusations as baseless.
Out of seven cases related to the U.S. Economic Espionage Act in 2010, six were linked to China, the report said.
It added that Chinese intelligence or companies bent on pilfering corporate secrets often seek out Chinese citizens or those with family ties to China.
During Jin’s trial, a key point of contention was the value of the documents she took.
Her lawyer, Gaus, told the judge the technology at issue, including a walkie-talkie type feature on Motorola cellphones, was far from cutting edge and would have been of little use to China’s military.
“It was at a developmental dead end,” Gaus said in her opening statement.
That, she added, meant the documents failed to meet the legal definition of trade secrets.
The defense also argued that Motorola did not take the kinds of precautions needed to secure the documents, and that this amounted to the company’s tacit admission that it didn’t regard them as vital.
The government’s attorney, however, said Motorola had imposed strict security measures, including setting computer passwords to strictly limit access to the documents.

'Soft' China caught by turning tide

2012-02-08T20:13:00.004+01:00

Core longstanding elements of China's foreign policy are coming under fire like never before as the Arab Spring starts to be adopted as the Arab mainstream.
BY ROWAN CALLICK
It can never be comfortable for the government of a proud country like China to suffer having its flag burned by demonstrators.
Especially by protesters in the developing world with which the People's Republic has identified itself since its inception.
The Chinese people have watched over the decades as angry people set fire to the US flag and chased Americans out of Third World nations.
But over the past few years China has had to organise evacuations for thousands of its citizens -- from Chad, East Timor, Egypt, Haiti, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Libya, Solomon Islands, Thailand and Tonga.
This new evacuation capacity will have to remain in place, with five million Chinese nationals working overseas.
Beijing could stay largely aloof as the Tunisian regime of Zine El Abedine Ben Ali began tottering at the end of 2010, but as demonstrators started flooding Tahrir Square in Cairo, and other dictators began to crumble, it faced the prospect of upsetting the changing leaderships of countries that provide it with oil and gas.
In terms of UN votes, it has long been the lot of the US to isolate itself by backing Israel in the face of widespread attacks.
But last weekend it was China and its former old comrade Russia that faced condemnation, for vetoing the UN attempt to facilitate a political transition from the Assad regime in Syria.
China's traditional foreign policy priority has been to champion the principle of non-interference in the affairs of other countries, reflecting its own intense antipathy towards outsiders.
But this has been a difficult course to maintain in every case, for instance when sovereignty is contested, and also when access to strategic resources is at stake.
Beijing has subtly shifted from this policy in increasingly challenging circumstances.
For instance, even while suppressing information about the Arab Spring and preventing the prospect of any response from demonstrators at home, it built relations with the rebels in Libya and kept contact with the Gaddafi regime.
China remains nervous not only about the capacity of cross-infection to trigger protests on a range of domestic themes, but also about the threat of Islamist extremism infecting its own 22 million Muslims.
It has also been deploying for long periods two destroyers and a supply ship to protect its ships sailing through the pirate-infested waters off Somalia.
James Dorsey at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore writes that Yemen may drive a fuller reversal of China's traditional policies, since a quarter of the country's exports travel through the strait that separates Yemen from Somalia.
And Yemen's threats include an al-Qa'ida-led insurgency.
Dorsey says: "China's status as an emerging economic superpower demands that it become a more muscular global actor to pursue its interests. Ultimately that will mean taking positions on domestic disputes that have a bearing on China's global national-security interests, the very opposite of the stance it adopted on Syria."The claimed solidarity of the BRICS concept was yet again betrayed in the UN vote on Syria.
India and South Africa -- along with Pakistan, usually perceived as a Chinese ally -- voted with Western countries.
And behind Syria looms the bigger challenge of handling Iran and its emerging nuclear capacity, with China now the top market for the country's struggling oil and gas exports.
Steve Tsang, the director of the China Policy Institute at Nottingham University, says: "By the use of the veto, the Chinese government has ensured the escalation in atrocities in Syria. Contrary to what it expects, this very action gravely damages its ambition to project soft power globally, and to its standing among most people in the Middle East."
Including with the oil-rich Gulf states that want Assad out.
Such a tough challenge to China's diplomatic orthodoxy could not come at a worse time, as the country prepares for leadership transition later this year -- for which it craves stability.