"Sinocism is the Presidential Daily Brief for China hands"- Evan Osnos, New Yorker Correspondent and National Book Award Winner

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• China ‘Completely Rejects’ Iran’s Development of Nuclear Weapons, Wen Says – Bloomberg – China “completely rejects” Iran developing nuclear weapons and supports the so-called five-plus- one talks to find a solution to the issue, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said at a press conference in Doha, Qatar.
  The nation is implementing United Nations resolutions on Iran, and opposes any “extreme” actions in the Strait of Hormuz that would damage world interests, Wen said yesterday. Still, China’s oil trade with Iran is “normal” and doesn’t worry him, Wen said.
• The Hindu : News / International : China’s rail network to touch India’s border– China has announced it will accelerate plans to expand a railway network in Tibet to reach two towns near the border with India and will also consider building a railway line to Nepal, officials said this week.New railway lines from Lhasa to Xigaze (Shigatse in Tibetan) and the town of Nyingchi, which lies in a prefecture bordering Arunachal Pradesh, will be built as key projects under a five-year development plan (2011-15) for the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), which was announced on Wednesday.
• Suspicion grows China was behind hack of U.S. commission – Yahoo! News – WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Suspicion is growing that operatives in China, rather than India, were behind the hacking of emails of an official U.S. commission that monitors relations between the United States and China, U.S. officials said.
  News of the hacking of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission surfaced earlier this month when an amateur “hacktivist” group purporting to operate in India published what it said was a memo from an Indian Military Intelligence unit to which extracts from commission e-mails were attached.
  But U.S. officials who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity said the roundabout way the commission’s emails were obtained strongly suggests the intrusion originated in China, possibly by amateurs, and not from India’s spy service.
• Why China Is Weak on Soft Power – NYTimes.com-joseph nye – What China seems not to appreciate is that using culture and narrative to create soft power is not easy when they are inconsistent with domestic realities.
• AmEx Puts $125M In And Partners With Chinese Mobile Payments Company Lianlian To License Serve | TechCrunch –
• FBI Arrests Three In Insider Probe – WSJ.com – so far they have not touched prc related activities
• Chinese general to fight corruption– A RISING star of the People’s Liberation Army has promised a “do-or-die” fight against powerful corrupt generals, bringing military politics to the fore of China’s critical leadership transition.General Liu Yuan, son of the former Chinese president, Liu Shaoqi, warned corruption had grown so deep and widespread in the armed forces it threatened the existence of both the PLA and the Communist Party.

  ”I’d rather risk losing my position than refrain from fighting corruption to the end,” General Liu told about 600 officers in his recent Chinese New Year address.

• Canadian Naval Officer Accused of Sharing State Secrets – NYTimes.com– OTTAWA — A Canadian naval officer who worked in some of the country’s key military intelligence centers has been charged with breach of trust and passing along government secrets to a “foreign entity.” The officer, Sub-Lt. Jeffrey Paul Delisle, 40, remained in jail on Tuesday after his lawyer asked a court in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to delay a bail hearing to give him more time to study the government’s case.Neither the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the military nor the government offered much detail publicly about the charges, including the identity of the foreign power. But the Canadian television network CTV said it was Russia, without giving the source for that information.
• China Expands Microblog Identification Program – NYTimes.com –
• Beijing United Family Hospitals & Clinics – spent the day here, though had to go across town to new century international children’s hospital for the medicine they said my daughter needed
• Beijing New Century International Hospital for Children – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – New Century International Hospital for Children (Chinese: 北京新世纪国际儿童医院), NCICH is a private, joint-venture, institution affiliated with the Beijing Children’s Hospital at Beijing, next to the east gate of the Beijing Children’s Hospital. The International Children’s Hospital features a full and comprehensive array of services specifically designed for children and youth.
• Beijing New Century International Children’s Hospital – 北京新世纪国际儿童医院 JV with Beijing Children’s Hospital (北京儿童医院）, the best kids hospital in Beijing. New Century building in same complex, nice facilities, good doctors, monetizing children’s hospital for those with means. Been spending more time than I’d like there
• China slams US ambassador Gary Locke for human rights remarks: Shanghaiist –
• Billions Uncovered in Campaign Against ‘Covert Coffers’ – China Real Time Report – WSJ– seems low//As a central government campaign against what it calls covert coffers enters its fourth year, Communist Party officials said on Tuesday the total amount uncovered since a nationwide crackdown began in 2009 has topped $5 billion, or 31.59 billion yuan.

  Officials say the illegal and secret funds are often used by local officials for bribes. The state-run Xinhua news agency cited Wu Yuliang, deputy secretary of the party’s Commission for Discipline Inspection, as saying the crackdown had “purified the social atmosphere.”

• China to expand real-name registration of microbloggers | World news | The Guardian– “Currently, this type of registration is being tested in Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. We will extend it to other areas once the pilot programmes prove successful,” said Wang Chen, minister of the State Council Information Office.”We will focus on newly registering users and then extend it to existing microbloggers.”..
  Beijing-based internet analyst Bill Bishop said the move was no surprise.

  “They tried real-name registration with cell phones – that was harder because there were so many retailers. They tried it with online games, but that was more about protecting kids,” he said.

  “This is a whole different level. It is a much more serious thing and it is not that difficult for the government to enforce it; there are only two providers that matter.”

• SEC Edgar Baidu – Baillie Gifford & Co now has a 9.53% stake in baidu $bidu
• Analysis: China’s housing slowdown to cut a big hole in GDP – Yahoo! News – (Reuters) – China’s cooling property market could shave more than 2 percentage points off 2012 growth, forcing Beijing to decide just how badly it wants to keep the economy expanding at more than 8 percent a year.
• 国新办：网络实名制主要在微博客当中进行-《财经网》 –
• China: Part iPad, Part Little Red Book. Yep, It’s the Red Pad. – China Real Time Report – WSJ– The only reference material a loyal Chinese Communist Party member would need to do his job in the 1960s was Mao’s Little Red Book.Today, there’s the Red Pad (红派壹号).

  Or so claimed Chinese media last month, when the websites of state-run media ran articles about the availability of an iPad-like device for the ideologically pure Communist. Running a version of Google Inc.’s Android software and boasting a 9.7-inch screen, the Red Pad offered content specifically tailored to China’s Communist platforms such as the website of the party’s People’s Daily mouthpiece – as well as a budget-busting price of 9,999 yuan ($1,584), more than twice the price of a comparable tablet from Apple Inc.

• The China Beat · Digital Chinese Whispers: Death Threats and Rumors Inside China’s Online Marketplace of Ideas– to date, Anglophone literature on the Chinese internet has tended to celebrate its liberating, subversive potential. The focus here is on those brave dissent-bloggers (Ai Weiwei, Murong Xuecun, Pi San, Zola, and others) who dare to speak truth to power while cleverly poking holes in the “Great Firewall of China.” In recently published books and articles, one finds numerous examples of whimsical yet biting digital parodies (grass-mud horses, river crabs, and steamed buns), online environmental and community activism (the PX and Green Dam incidents), cyber-attacks on local corruption and vested interests (Li Gang Gate and human-flesh search engines), and even occasional open criticism of the Party and its leaders. These are examples of the “blog revolution” that Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at the University of California at Berkeley and its widely read China Digital Times (CDT) website, claims is sweeping China, and “shaking up the power balance between the people and the government of the world’s most populous nation.”In the latest issue of the Journal of Asian Studies, I put forward an alternative scenario (see “Blogging Alone” and Guobin Yang’s reply “Technology and Its Contents”). Without denying the significance of the above examples, I offer an outsider’s critique: an intervention informed by, but positioned outside, the burgeoning field of Chinese internet studies, and instead rooted in my own research on Han cyber-nationalism. In the article, I argue that the Sinophone internet is producing the same shallow infotainment, pernicious misinformation, and interest-based ghettos it has created elsewhere in the world, and these more prosaic elements need to be considered alongside the Chinese internet’s potential for creating new forms of civic activism and socio-political change.
• China’s New Strategic Target: Arctic Minerals – China Real Time Report – WSJ– As policymakers in Washington focus on China’s expanding presence in Africa and growing assertiveness in the South China Sea and Indian Ocean region, Danish diplomatic assistance is opening the gate for China to establish a strategic foothold in the Arctic.Denmark has made a strategic decision to prioritize its economic relationship with China and is now becoming the key gateway for Beijing’s commercial and strategic entrée into the Arctic. Denmark advocates giving China a seat at the Arctic policy table. Friis Arne Peterson, the Danish ambassador to China, stated in October that China has “natural and legitimate economic and scientific interests in the Arctic.” Copenhagen likewise supports giving China permanent membership on the Arctic Council, the eight-nation forum that includes the five Arctic Ocean coastal states (the U.S., Canada, Denmark, Norway and Russia) as well as Sweden, Iceland and Finland.
• Fidelity’s Bolton Reiterates Bullish Stance on China – China Real Time Report – WSJ –
• China’s Infamous `Good Samaritan’ Case Gets a New Ending: Adam Minter – Bloomberg – Or rather, it was until Jan. 16 — when, in what seems to be one of the great scoops in recent Chinese journalism, the state-owned news magazine Oriental Weekly rcevealed the content of some newly discovered and disclosed documents. According to the trove, Peng Yu not only confessed to knocking over that supposedly greedy granny in 2006, but he actively solicited the local news media and online forum moderators to promote him as a martyred Good Samaritan.
  On top of that, reports Oriental Weekly, he and Xu Shuolin secretly agreed on a modest financial settlement and had the decision sealed. So far as the two major players in China’s most notorious court decision were concerned, nobody ever had to know the truth of the matter.
• Watch: U.S. China Envoy Locke Says China Fears Arab Spring – China Real Time Report – WSJ– Curious about the television interview with U.S. China envoy Gary Locke that prompted a mini-tirade from China’s Foreign Ministry earlier this week?Here it is.

  In the interview, conducted by PBS’s Charlie Rose and broadcast Monday, Mr. Locke pulls no punches in describing China’s recent crackdown on dissent as a product of Arab Spring paranoia, saying leaders in Beijing “are very fearful of something similar happening within China.”

• Commerce Ministry Has Taobao’s Back – ZILA BLOG – Alizila – Taobao, China’s largest e-commerce website, is in the middle of a disagreement between China’s Ministry of Commerce and the United States Trade Representative (USTR). According to a Jan. 19 Reuters News story, Beijing is objecting to the USTR’s ongoing listing of Taobao as a notorious market for piracy.

  During a news conference in Beijing, Shen Danyang, a spokesman for the Minitry of Commerce, said that China is “greatly concerned and strongly opposed” to Taobao being singled out as a haven for Chinese vendors selling counterfeit products.

  “When referring to Chinese businesses, we noticed that the United States notorious market list would use terms like ‘alleged’ and ‘according to industry information,’ ” Shen said. “With ambiguous terms and no conclusive evidence or detailed analysis, this is very irresponsible and not objective,” Reuters quoted Shen as saying.

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