"Sinocism is the Presidential Daily Brief for China hands"- Evan Osnos, New Yorker Correspondent and National Book Award Winner
- DIA director: China preparing for space warfare | Washington Free Beacon – Army Lt. Gen. Ronald L. Burgess, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, disclosed new details of China’s space weapons programs last week, including information regarding China’s anti-satellite missiles and cyber warfare capabilities.
Burgess stated in little-noticed written testimony prepared for an appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee that Beijing is developing missiles, electronic jammers, and lasers for use against satellites.
- CCTV Africa: Chinese Media Into the African Continent | 八八吧 :: 88 Bar –
- Star Microbloggers Making Impact and Money on Sina Weibo | China Bubble Watch –
- Homeland Analysts Told to Monitor Policy Debates in Social Media – NYTimes.com – Analysts for a Department of Homeland Security program that monitors social networks like Twitter and Facebook have been instructed to produce reports on policy debates related to the department, a newly disclosed manual shows…
Mary Ellen Callahan, the department’s chief privacy director, testified that the program was interested only in events within the department’s mission — like disasters, attacks or continuing operational problems. As an example, she cited a situation in which people post to Twitter about an unusually long line at a particular airport checkpoint.
She also played down the use of keyword searches the program uses for articles and postings on social networks, portraying them as simply related to disasters — “you know, flood, tornado and things like that.”
The 2011 manual contains a fuller list. Many keywords are closely related to various disasters. But a handful are potentially more sweeping, like China, cops, hacking, illegal immigrants, Iran, Iraq, marijuana, organized crime, police, pork and radicals.
- Bank Lobby Widened Volcker Rule, Inciting Foreign Outrage – Bloomberg – U.S. banks pushed regulators to widen proposed restrictions on trading and hedge-fund ownership by foreign firms, then encouraged governments around the world to complain about the rule’s reach…
MIT’s Johnson said the lobbying strategy could backfire.
“It’s a miscalculation by the banks,” Johnson said. “The lobbyists have backed the regulators into a corner. They can’t give in when all these foreign governments are pressing them. It would look bad before elections to cave in to foreign demands when your public wants you to be tough on banks.” - Washingtonian Magazine article on Palantir Technologies – Palantir has also stepped up its lobbying efforts. Last year, when the company was trying to gain entrée to an important Army program in Afghanistan, at least a half dozen members of Congress intervened and tried to strong-arm the military into giving Palantir a chance. The Army resisted and gave a contract to its chief competitor instead. But the fact that Palantir could so effectively persuade lawmakers shows it has learned to play hardball in Washington.
Today, some current and former government officials say Palantir’s star has dimmed in the intelligence community. They complain that the software has a hard time analyzing extremely large databases and that it takes a lot of time on the front end to arrange information in a format Palantir can use.
Still, Palantir has built what it claims, and despite its shortcomings, the technology has made significant contributions to solving some of the country’s most important national-security challenges. “The contradiction we wanted to remove was between civil liberties and fighting terrorism,” Karp said at a recent Palantir conference. “Do we really want to live in a world where everyone sees everything without any kind of permissions? Solving this problem . . . that’s a really cool idea.”
Security and liberty are competitors now. That’s not a natural condition; it’s a product of our time, of the decisions that we have all made—or failed to make—over the past decade. Could a piece of software allay that uneasy tension? Perhaps. But as any good student of Tolkien knows, whether a palantir is used for good or for evil depends on who’s holding the stone
- Digital Strategy & Operations Director, China at Hewlett-Packard in Beijing – Job | LinkedIn –
- Nike’s game plan for Knicks’ Jeremy Lin – SportsWatch – MarketWatch – Athletic-shoe giant Nike Inc., which built its global franchise around the signature shoes and apparel of celebrity athletes including Michael Jordan, is discussing opportunities for the latest star in its stable, Jeremy Lin.
Reuters
Nike’s swoosh logo is barely visible as New York Knicks point guard Jeremy Lin drives to the basket Wednesday against Atlanta Hawks guard Jeff Teague. - South Sudan expels Chinese oil company boss in oil theft scandal: Shanghaiist –
- Inside the Ring – Washington Times – China’s strategic nuclear missile forces are expected to double in size by 2025, according to the Defense Intelligence Agency director.
Army Lt. Gen. Ronald L. Burgess Jr., said in recent Senate testimony the current long-range missile arsenal that could deliver a nuclear warhead to the United States is “fewer than 50 ICBMs.”
Gen. Burgess said the strategic missile force “will probably double that number by 2025.”
Estimating China’s strategic nuclear warhead stockpile has been difficult, but most analysts place the number of nuclear warheads in the Chinese arsenal from 300 to 400.
- Inside the Ring – Washington Times – Chinese cyberattacks and electronic intrusions into U.S. computer networks in peacetime are part of the preparations for a future high-technology war against the United States, according to the U.S. Pacific Command’s new commander.
China's military also plans to disrupt U.S. military and civilian computer networks by attacking satellites in space, as well as ground-based networks, according to Adm. Samuel J. Locklear III, who was confirmed by the Senate last week to be the next commander of the U.S. Pacific Command.
Adm. Locklear wrote in answers to questions from the Senate Armed Services Committee that cyberwarfare preparations by China’s People’s Liberation Army include “building capability to target U.S. military space-based assets and computer networks using network and electronic warfare.”
- Baidu Establishes Joint Research Lab with A*STAR, Sets Eyes on Southeast Asia | Tech in Asia –
- 俩女子醉酒开车接吻致连撞三车 各地醉驾丑态 – [拍客] 俩美女开车舌吻 酿车祸 – 视频 – 优酷视频 – 在线观看 –
- Shanghai Reiterates Property Curbs After Reports of Easing – Businessweek –
- More Suppliers Linked to Heparin Contamination – WSJ.com – The Food and Drug Administration said Wednesday it found 14 additional Chinese companies supplied contaminated raw material to make heparin, a widely used blood thinner.
The companies supplied the materials in 2008, when the FDA found a link between contaminated heparin marketed by Baxter International Inc. to some Chinese suppliers of the active ingredient used in heparin. The contamination was linked to 80 deaths in U.S. patients and hundreds of allergic reactions. The same contamination was found in heparin sold by other pharmaceutical companies in other countries.
The 14 companies were put on a so-called import alert list that allows the FDA to stop shipments at the U.S. border. The companies are being added to a list that already included eight other Chinese suppliers.
- New Push for Reform in China – WSJ.com – An exclusive preview of an economic report on China, prepared by the World Bank and government insiders considered to have the ear of the nation's leaders, offers a surprising prescription: China could face an economic crisis unless it implements deep reforms, including scaling back its vast state-owned enterprises and making them operate more like commercial firms.
"China 2030," a report set to be released Monday by the bank and a Chinese government think tank, addresses some of China's most politically sensitive economic issues, according to a half-dozen individuals involved in preparing and reviewing it.
- 百度布局东南亚市场：与新加波科研机构建实验室-搜狐IT –
- Chinese speakers think out of the box | SCMP.com – The brains of Chinese-language speakers work differently from those who speak western tongues, Chinese University scientists say – a finding that may have profound implications for those learning to read Chinese.
Led by Professor John Xuexin Zhang of the university's psychology department, the researchers discovered an electric brain wave – dubbed N200 – that allows readers of Chinese characters to process the information differently from how humans usually interpret pictures. - Guest post: return of capital is not a vote for the renminbi | beyondbrics | News and views on emerging markets from the Financial Times – FT.com – As such withdrawal of liquidity becomes common, the central bank may do well to increase the slack for the banks by more aggressively reducing reserve requirement ratios, much as it aggressively raised RRR in the years of plenty.
Victor Shih is associate professor of political science at Northwestern University. You can follow him on Twitter at @vshih2
- As Sure As Night Follows Day, Tencent Launches a Pinterest Clone | Tech in Asia –
- Michael Jordan Sues Chinese Sportswear for Name Use – Businessweek – Michael Jordan, the hall-of-fame basketball player who heads his own division at the world’s largest sporting-goods maker Nike Inc., sued a Chinese maker of sportswear and shoes for unauthorized use of his name.
Jordan, who won six National Basketball Association championships with the Chicago Bulls, filed the lawsuit with a Chinese court against Qiaodan Sports Co., according to a statement distributed by PR Newswire. The Chinese company, which is preparing to raise 1.06 billion yuan ($168 million) in a listing in Shanghai, is accused of using Jordan’s Chinese name and jersey number 23 without permission.
- IPad Battle Reveals Bank of China as Apple Opponent – Bloomberg – Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s legal fight for the iPad name in China doesn’t just pit the world’s most-valuable company against a failed Hong Kong display maker. Some of the nation’s biggest banks also are opposing the technology giant.
Apple is appealing a Chinese court ruling that the trademark belongs to a mainland unit of Proview International Holdings Ltd. (334) At the time Apple says it bought those rights, the Shenzhen subsidiary was controlled by creditors including Bank of China Ltd. (3988) and China Minsheng Banking Corp. (1988), according to Proview founder Rowell Yang. - VanderSloot Responds To Allegations Of Threatening Media – Local News Story – KIFI Idaho Falls – IDAHO FALLS, Idaho — Melaleuca CEO Frank VanderSloot is in the national spotlight amidst accusations that he threatens journalists to make negative reports about him go away.
The scrutiny comes alongside VanderSloot's role with the Mitt Romney campaign. He's co-chair of the GOP candidate's national finance committee and donated $1 million to the Romney Super-PAC. - China Financial Markets » When will China emerge from the global crisis? – Large-scale privatization, of course, is not the only, or even the main, “solution” to the problems that Guo identifies, but if done correctly it can be part of the solution by undermining entrenched power and adding flexibility to the country’s governance structure. What is especially interesting, at least to me, is that an increasing number of commentators within China are identifying the social and economic rigidities imposed by the state system as crucially important in constraining China’s future economic and political growth.
This is becoming a pretty contentious debate. Over the past several months, in fact, we have seen a noticeable surge in articles and reports like this one – often by very prominent academics and policy advisors – criticizing the power of special interests in China. Their main concern seems to be over the constraints these special interests impose on further Chinese development, with the entrenched interests that have benefitted over the last decade or two having become so powerful that they are making it increasingly difficult for China to adjust.
A lot of very smart people in China, in other words, seem to be worried that the country’s governance structure and its development model are no longer able to accommodate the needs of the economy and that it is vitally important to confront the entrenched interest that make change difficult. This is sometimes presented in the foreign press as the debate between the “Chongqing” model versus the “Guangdong” model.
I apologize for the rather abstract and dry description in this and the three previous paragraphs of what is actually a gripping and very interesting topic, but for perhaps obvious reasons this is something about which I am reluctant to say too much. Still, anyone trying to predict China’s economic outlook for the next few years should be very aware of this fierce debate.
- 十八大前党媒进言中共求“政改” 不改革有危机_多维新闻网 – 【多维新闻】2012年2月23日，《人民日报》发布评论部文章《宁要微词，不要危机》，称“改革就会招惹是非，改革就是“自找麻烦”，改革也很难十全十美"。“改革有风险，但不改革党就会有危险，纵观世界一些大党大国的衰落，一个根本原因就是只有修修补补的机巧，没有大刀阔斧的魄力，最终因改革停滞而走入死胡同”。
据悉这篇文章是《人民日报》评论部的系列评论《深化改革认识论》的第一篇，此后陆续还会有倡议改革的文章陆续推出。
- Romney as Director Saw Marriott Use Tax Shelters – Bloomberg – Romney at risk of bringing too much exposure to "Mormon Mafia" businesses?
- Robert McDowell: The U.N. Threat to Internet Freedom – WSJ.com – Top-down, international regulation is antithetical to the Net, which has flourished under its current governance model.
- “Friendship Prices”: Understanding Chinese-North Korean Energy Trade « SINO-NK – The deepening of ties between China and other parts of the developing world in recent years has been met a great deal of hyperbole. Just as many onlookers describe China’s growing stake in Africa as “neo-colonial,” Chinese investments in the DPRK have also accrued a predatory stigma. But as SinoNK.com Analyst Scott Bruce shows in this piece, market forces may simply be determining the outcomes of seemingly lopsided trade deals between China and Korea.
- 复星创投总裁陈水清涉嫌违法_互联网_DoNews-IT门户-移动互联网新闻-电子商务新闻-游戏新闻-风险投资新闻-IT社交网络社区 – senior Fosun VC/PE exec under investigation
- Revelations on NYPD Surveillance of Muslims Contradict Bloomberg Claims – ProPublica –
- Pentagon Says U.S. Citizens With Terrorism Ties Can Be Targeted in Strikes – NYTimes.com – WASHINGTON – The Obama administration’s top Pentagon lawyer on Wednesday said that American citizens who join Al Qaeda can be targeted for killing and that courts should have no role in reviewing executive branch decisions about whether someone has met such criteria.
“Belligerents who also happen to be U.S. citizens do not enjoy immunity where non-citizen belligerents are valid military objectives,” said Jeh C. Johnson, the Defense Department general counsel, in a speech at Yale Law School.
- Will Twitter’s 500 Millionth User be a Chinese gov spam bot? Thanks to Ai Weiwei @aiww @AWWNeverSorry | Kempton – ideas Revolutionary –
- 人民日报评论部：宁要微词，不要危机_新闻中心_新浪网 –
- Putin praises Cold War moles for stealing U.S. nuclear secrets –
- Business China | Finance, Economics, Business and Industry news from China – Wen Jiabao’s son Wen Yunsong as chairman, the company said in a statement on its official website.
He is the co-founder of private equity firm New Horizon Capital and former vice president of China Satcom.