"Sinocism is the Presidential Daily Brief for China hands"- Evan Osnos, New Yorker Correspondent and National Book Award Winner
- 微博公告 新浪微博-随时随地分享身边的新鲜事儿 – notice of sina's 3 day halt on commenting $sina as punishment for allowing too many rumors. wonder if their weak real name implementation will be next
- 造谣“北京出事”六人被拘 – 新京报网 – $sina and tencent told to "rectify & reform 新浪腾讯将整改" over recent rumor spreading
针对新浪和腾讯微博客网站集中出现的谣言，违反国家有关法律法规，造成恶劣影响的问题，北京市和广东省互联网信息管理部门分别对两个网站提出严肃批评，做了相应惩处。两个网站表示要认真落实相关要求，采取整改措施，进一步加强管理。 - 人民日报评论员：牢牢把握稳中求进的总基调 – 新华时政 – 新华网 –
- 北京市公安机关依法查处网上编造传播谣言行为 – 新华法治 – 新华网 – 6 arrested 4 spreading rumors online about beijing coup last week
- Exclusive: China Communist Party scandal triggered by British man’s death: source | Reuters – The scandal shaking China's ruling Communist Party just as it readies for leadership change was triggered by claims that the wife of one ambitious candidate was involved in the death of a British businessman, said a source with close ties to key individuals involved.
The comments, corroborated by two other sources who also spoke on condition of anonymity, are the first direct account of events which eventually led to this month's downfall of Chongqing mega-city chief Bo Xilai who had very publicly bid for a place in the Party's inner circle later this year.The source, citing accounts coming from an unfinished central investigation, said it was unclear how much truth there was to the claim by Bo's former police chief, Wang Lijun, but he told Reuters he had "no doubt" that Wang had raised it with Bo.
Wang told Bo in late January that he believed Bo's wife, Gu Kailai, was involved in the death of British businessman Neil Heywood in the southwest Chinese city in mid-November, the source said.
- Easy Pickings for Abalone Smugglers – China Real Time Report – WSJ – Stuffed in cakes, sold in gilt gift boxes, and a feature of many expensive menus – giant sea snails, better known as abalone, are a centerpiece of haute cuisine in Hong Kong and a highly lucrative business for those who know where to find them.
The catch? The product isn’t always legal.
High demand for abalone is fueling overharvesting around the world, especially in South Africa, one of Hong Kong’s largest suppliers of the chewy, fishy delicacy. Another illegal batch was caught this week when Hong Kong officials returned a massive 2.6-ton shipment of dried abalone to South Africa, where they’d been poached over a year ago before being smuggled to Hong Kong last March.
- Shanghai Gets Rich As It Gets Old – China Real Time Report – WSJ – There’s an old saying: China will get old before it gets rich. Shanghai is turning that adage on its head: The city is both rich and old.
One-fourth of Shanghai’s residents were at least 60 years old last year, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency. The proportion of elderly in the population is 1.7-times the national average, the report said, citing local government statistics.
Such numbers don’t exactly square with Shanghai’s reputation as modern, frenzied metropolis – and a holiday destination for twenty-something billionaires.
- 【体制的罪过与无辜】中国移动反腐风暴_中国经济网——国家经济门户 –
- AIG’s past losses cost taxpayers now and into the future – The Washington Post – The Congressional Budget Office estimated in December that even without the special break, taxpayers will lose $25 billion on AIG. That’s more than the cost of two new-generation aircraft carriers (at $11.5 billion each). It is time for our country to put this chapter behind us — and past time for AIG to compete on a level playing field.
When a company accepts a taxpayer bailout to stay in business, it ought to follow the same tax laws followed by companies that aren’t bailed out. In its ongoing efforts to reform corporate tax law, Congress should close this egregious loophole and prevent AIG from continuing to receive a stealth bailout every time it files its taxes. This amounts to a bailout without oversight, without accountability and, quite likely, without most Americans even noticing.
- With Hu in Town, India Suspends Freedoms of Tibetans – China Real Time Report – WSJ – In an effort to shield Chinese President Hu Jintao from Tibetan protests, the Indian government placed extreme restrictions on exiled Tibetans, raising questions on the extent to which New Delhi is willing to compromise its democratic credentials for the sake of its ties with Beijing.
For the past several days, many Tibetans living in New Delhi have been denied basic democratic freedoms, including the right to assemble and to protest peacefully. Law enforcement authorities have prevented many of them from leaving their homes or neighborhoods for days, effectively placing them under house arrest.
- » Flemish Art Dealer Dies Under House Arrest In Beijing Beijing Cream – Yesterday, the news website FlandersNews.be — part of Flemish public broadcaster VRT – reported that Kurt De Raedemaeker, 48, died of a heart attack on an unspecified day while under house arrest in Beijing.
Kurt De Raedemaeker was originally sentenced to life imprisonment in Gansu province in 2006 after allegedly illegally exporting a sarcophagus three years earlier that Chinese authorities estimate to be worth 1.2 million euros ($1.6 million / 10 million yuan). According to AFP, the antique is now on display at the Guimet museum of Asian arts in Paris. De Raedemaeker was transferred to Beijing due to health problems in 2008 but barred from leaving the country.
- 作家六六微博斗小三 | 新浪微博-随时随地分享身边的新鲜事儿 – author of "woju" attacks her husband's mistress on weibo. having/being a mistress can be risky
- Divulging State Secrets: 3 Down, 3 to Go – The third person involved in a series of cases whereby classified state secrets were divulged to third party individuals has been tried and sentenced, the Economic Information reports.
Wu Zhiwen, general manager of the Beijing-based Kimay Asset Management Co., Ltd, has been found guilty of divulging 30 pieces of classified data 144 times via text message. He has been sentenced to 5 years and 6 months in jail by the People's Court in Xicheng District, Beijing.
- Witness: Chinese Lives Through a Tencent Photographer’s Lens – chinaSMACK –
- World War 3.0 | Culture | Vanity Fair – I. Time Bomb
In 1979 the Dubai World Trade Centre dominated the skyline of Dubai City, on the horn of the Arabian Peninsula. Today, the World Trade Centre looks quaint, like an old egg carton stuck into the ground amid a phantasmagoric forest of skyscrapers. But come December the World Trade Centre will once more be the most important place in Dubai City—and, for a couple of weeks, one of the more important places in the world. Diplomats from 193 countries will converge there to renegotiate a United Nations treaty called the International Telecommunications Regulations. The sprawling document, which governs telephone, television, and radio networks, may be extended to cover the Internet, raising questions about who should control it, and how. Arrayed on one side will be representatives from the United States and other major Western powers, advocating what many call “Internet freedom,” a plastic concept that has been defined by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as the right to use the Internet to “express one’s views,” to “peacefully assemble,” and to “seek or share” information. The U.S. and most of its allies basically want to keep Internet governance the way it is: run by a small group of technical nonprofit and volunteer organizations, most of them based in the United States.On the other side will be representatives from countries where governments want to place restrictions on how people use the Internet. These include Russia, China, Brazil, India, Iran, and a host of others. All of them have implemented or experimented with more intrusive monitoring of online activities than the U.S. is publicly known to practice. A number of countries have openly called for the creation of a “new global body” to oversee online policy. At the very least, they’d like to give the United Nations a great deal more control over the Internet.
Mediating these forces in Dubai will be a man named Hamadoun Touré. Charming and wily, he is a satellite engineer who was born in Mali, educated in the Soviet Union, and now lives in Geneva. He serves as secretary-general of the U.N.’s International Telecommunication Union (I.T.U.).
- How to Post to Sina Weibo Without Registering Your Real Name | Tech in Asia –
- Publications – A Pure and Remote View – Institute of East Asian Studies, UC Berkeley –
- Hacking in Asia Is Linked to Chinese Ex-Graduate Student – NYTimes.com – SAN FRANCISCO — A breach of computers belonging to companies in Japan and India and to Tibetan activists has been linked to a former graduate student at a Chinese university — putting a face on the persistent espionage by Chinese hackers against foreign companies and groups.
The attacks were connected to an online alias, according to a report to be released on Friday by Trend Micro, a computer security firm with headquarters in Tokyo.
The owner of the alias, according to online records, is Gu Kaiyuan, a former graduate student at Sichuan University, in Chengdu, China, which receives government financing for its research in computer network defense.Mr. Gu is now apparently an employee at Tencent, China’s leading Internet portal company, also according to online records. According to the report, he may have recruited students to work on the university’s research involving computer attacks and defense.
- China’s Leaders Seek Unity After Ouster of Bo Xilai – NYTimes.com – ansfield is the best china byline in new york times//
the ouster of Bo Xilai, the populist icon formerly in charge of the southwestern megacity of Chongqing, has spurred weeks of frenzied internal politicking and a rare dissenting vote within the Politburo Standing Committee, according to interviews with publishers, academics and analysts tied to the Communist Party’s upper echelons or its powerful families.
They say that the outward calm is tenuous and was achieved only after China’s leadership team of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao appealed to party elders for support and yielded important posts in Chongqing to representatives of other influential political blocs.
“They want everyone to believe that the top level has no problem — that there’s no split and no struggle,” said Jin Zhong, publisher of the influential China-watching magazine Open, in Hong Kong. “But this is a false impression.”
According to people briefed by central party officials, Mr. Bo is being confined to his house in Beijing, watched by the Central Guard Bureau, a unit of the People’s Liberation Army under control of the party’s General Office. He faces a disciplinary investigation over a range of allegations of corruption and abuse of power, these people say. His wife, a noted lawyer, is under more formal detention in connection with some of those allegations.
- Taiwan ‘agrees’ it’s part of China: ex-US diplomat – Taipei Times – resident Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has adopted a policy of “accommodating” Beijing, a former US official told a congressional hearing on Chinese military and economic aggression.
John Tkacik, a former US diplomat and expert on Chinese and Taiwanese affairs, testified that over the past few months, there had been “an entirely new change in the political posture of Taiwan.”
He said that under the Ma administration, Taiwan now “basically agrees” that it is part of China.
Tkacik, who served as the US Department of State’s chief China analyst, added that once Taiwan makes that choice, “you are looking at Taiwan moving out of the column of the community of democracies.”
Taiwan could become part of China’s security interests, he said.
Tkacik said that Taiwan still had a sophisticated basing structure, including phased array radar systems designed to scan China for ballistic missile launches, but in future the radar systems could be turned around to scan the Western Pacific and monitor US military activity. - 杜甫很忙被曝是某博物馆策划 杜甫草堂否认_互联网_科技时代_新浪网 –
- 军方指国防部网中国军网月均受境外攻击8万余次-搜狐IT –
- Surveillance spyware migrates from Windows to Mac OS X – Researchers have uncovered a malware-based espionage campaign that subjects Mac users to the same techniques that have been used for years to surreptitiously siphon confidential data out of Windows machines.
The recently discovered campaign targets Mac-using employees of several pro-Tibetan non-governmental organizations, and employs attacks exploiting already patched vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office and Oracle's Java framework, Jaime Blasco, a security researcher with AlienVault, told Ars. Over the past two weeks, he has identified two separate backdoor trojans that get installed when users open booby-trapped Word documents or website links included in e-mails sent to them. Once installed, the trojans send the computer, user, and domain name associated with the Mac to a server under the control of the attackers and then await further instructions.
- Navy ships out radar system ahead of North Korea launch – CNN Security Clearance – CNN.com Blogs – The Sea-Based X-Band Radar sits atop a floating platform and has the ability to search and track targets. In addition, the system can communicate with potential U.S. interceptor missiles at Fort Greely, Alaska, and Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, that could shoot down a target missile. But the North Koreans have said they plan to launch their missile in a southerly direction, which would mean it is highly doubtful the intercept capability would be needed or used.
The U.S. military will not officially say the radar is being deployed for the North Korean launch, but one senior U.S. official called the SBX-1 deployment "precautionary." Both officials declined to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the information.
- These Are The Major Apple Foxconn Worker Right Issues –
- Investigating the Chinese Threat | M. Taylor Fravel –
- Weibo Remains Popular Despite Name Registration Policy – NYTimes.com – If the government wants to act directly against popular online speculation, it has two choices: One, employ complex software and armies of censors to delete posts, which it already does, to middling effect. Two, use the real-name system to find rumor mongers and vanish them in the middle of the night. But where are you going to get all those secret police? And so the rumors fly as thick as ever: about a possible coup, about the real story behind the fall of Bo Xilai, about who crashed that red Ferrari in Beijing…
Chinese citizens remain uncowed. The sheer joy evident in the fabrication, dissemination and discussion of online rumor is all the proof anyone should need that China’s civil society has a bright future. Government officials would do well to take note of how many of those rumors concern themselves.
“We know who you are” is a threat that can cut both ways.