Chinese Global Imperialism: December 2010 Archives

By Andrew Jacobs | The New York Times
December 18, 2010

A human rights organization has called on the Chinese government to publicly account for the fate of 20 ethnic Uighurs who were deported to China from Cambodia one year ago as they awaited a determination on their asylum applications with the United Nations.

Until now Beijing has refused to provide any information about the Uighurs -- men, boys, a woman and two infants -- who were sent back to China on Dec. 19 [2009] over the objections of the United States, the European Union and United Nations officials. They were forcibly returned the day before Chinese Vice President Xi Jinpin arrived in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, for a visit that yielded a package of loans and grants worth $1.2 billion.

The Uighurs, who made their way to Cambodia with the help of Christian missionaries, said they were fleeing a crackdown that followed deadly ethnic rioting in the China's far western Xinjiang region in July 2009. Many of the 197 people dead were Han Chinese migrants killed during two days of violence in the regional capital, Urumqi. An unknown number of Uighurs were also killed or injured in a brief spasm of Han vigilante attacks that followed.

Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim people, have long complained about Han migration to the West that they say dilutes their numbers, culture and language. The Chinese government, in turn, often accuses Uighurs of engaging in "separatism" when pressing their demands for expanded religious freedom and political autonomy.

In its only statement to date about the fate of the deportees, the Chinese Foreign Ministry suggested in February that the Uighurs had been tried or were set to face trial. "China is a country ruled by law," Ma Zhaoxu, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, wrote in response to questions sent by The New York Times. "The judicial authorities deal with illegal criminal issues strictly according to law."

China has insisted the Uighurs were wanted in connection with the rioting, although they did not publicly provide any evidence of their involvement. In the months that followed the violence in Urumqi, hundreds of Uighurs were detained and at least nine were executed.

Human Rights Watch said they feared that those deported faced torture, long prison terms or worse. "Both China and Cambodia should be held accountable for their flagrant disregard of their obligations under international law," Sophie Richardson, Human Rights Watch's Asia advocacy director, said in a statement.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said 22 people initially applied for asylum in their Phnom Penh office but two disappeared before the group was handcuffed and forced onto a Chinese plane. In their statements, the applicants said they feared harsh punishment if returned to China.

"I can tell the world what is happening to Uighur people, and the Chinese authorities do not want this," one man, a 27-year-old teacher, wrote. "If returned, I am certain I would be sent to prison.' "

>> Original Report

By Associated Press | via UNCENSORED Yahoo!
December 14, 2010

SHANGHAI - State owned China Oilfield Services has announced a contract with Norway's Statoil for drilling in the North Sea, despite Beijing's hard feelings over the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to imprisoned dissident Liu Xiaobo.

The Dec. 9 deal, seen Tuesday on China Oilfield Services' website, calls for one of its drilling rigs to operate in the North Sea for up to five years. It says the newly commissioned rig is to begin drilling next summer.

The long-term impact of Beijing's ire over the prize, awarded to Liu last week in absentia, remains to be seen.

China reacted with fury, suspending trade talks with Norway in retaliation and pressuring foreign nations not to attend the awards ceremony. It has run daily tirades in state media berating the Norwegian Nobel Committee as misguided and inherently opposed to China's development.

Liu is serving an 11-year prison sentence for sedition, after co-authoring a bold appeal for human rights and multiparty democracy known as Charter 08. It is his fourth period of incarceration since 1989.

But business is business.

>> Complete Report

By Karl Taro Greenfeld | TIME Magazine issue of December 6, 2010

On that afternoon in 2003, Hong Kong looked like a scene from a zombie movie -- deserted streets, empty storefronts, even a bus seemingly abandoned in an intersection. I was the only shopper on the fourth floor of the Landmark, one of Hong Kong's most fashionable malls. The shop attendants, wearing surgical masks, leaned on the glass-topped counters and stared vacantly at racks of on-sale clothes; an employee at Kenzo told me the shop was averaging two customers a day. And she was counting me as one of them.

As the SARS virus exploded in early 2003 out of southern China, infecting thousands of people and killing hundreds, it was hard at first to piece together what was happening. We journalists focused on the biological and epidemiological aspects of the outbreak -- the symptoms, the number infected, the path of the epidemic, which we traced on maps with our fingers. Yet as we tried to understand, there always seemed to be an obfuscating layer: something or someone was working against comprehension.

There were powerful forces, it would turn out, that from the start were intent on hiding as much about the disease as possible. Those forces permeated the Chinese government, from local functionaries all the way to Beijing. At the time, China's reasons for dissembling about the emerging virus seemed relatively easy to understand: a leadership transition from Communist Party Secretary Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao was under way, bad news was seen as a threat to economic growth, and it was embarrassing to be seen as the source of a disease epidemic. The mistaken conclusion in the West, however, was that the global outcry over China's SARS cover-up would turn the Middle Kingdom into a more open society.

On the contrary. Rather than showing a country in transition, the SARS episode revealed one far more resistant to change than the West understood. In fact, China's response to SARS offered a virtual guidebook to all the elements of its closed nature, marked by its refusal to own up to domestic problems, acknowledge the human rights of its citizens or deal openly with the media. The ruling Communist Party elite acted in a manner that would become increasingly familiar as more and more global attention came to bear on the world's fastest-growing superpower. When this year's Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to imprisoned dissident Liu Xiaobo on Oct. 8, the Chinese government removed his name from all search engines operating in China and placed his family under house arrest.

It all seems clearer now, but at the time of the SARS outbreak in Hong Kong, we were struggling to understand a new phenomenon, how a modern city experiences an epidemic. In Hong Kong, we would go through all the stages of a typical outbreak response: denial, fear, panic and, finally, rational response. For those of us who stuck it out -- and thousands, including my family, fled -- the sight of the abandoned city became familiar, but the experience of it remained novel. For a while, you could get a table at any restaurant at any time you wanted -- until the restaurants started shutting down. Hong Kong residents stayed in, hoarded staples, hoped for the best and waited for the worst. We dared not clear our throats in the presence of others for fear we would be accused of harboring the virus, whose first symptom was a dry, hacking cough.

I was the editor of TIME Asia, and our initial story asked the most basic question: What is it? At first, we heard vague reports of shops up the Pearl River delta in China running out of vinegar as panicked villagers in the Guangzhou area sought to boil the liquid and breathe its vapor -- a home remedy for respiratory ailments -- while local mainland newspapers reported that the outbreak was only a rumor.

                                                           *************************

The False Opening
We were wrong. In that giddy post-SARS period, when it was a thrill to be able to dine in a restaurant again, we failed to recognize what had actually just occurred. We had seen the Chinese government fail to level with its people when it mattered most: when a killer was in their midst.

In the years since, the Chinese government's first response to any domestic crisis has been to hunker down behind the great firewall. In the aftermath of the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan, in which nearly 70,000 died and shoddy construction of school buildings caused the deaths of hundreds of children, parents and other citizens who accused corrupt officials of condoning the unsafe buildings were themselves arrested and threatened. The repeated coal-mining disasters of the past decade, which have killed about 50,000 workers, have often gone unreported in the Chinese media. Earlier this year, reporters in Shanxi covering a relatively successful rescue operation -- in which more than 100 miners were pulled to safety after a flood in a mine shaft -- were still unable to talk with officials or family members. Should there be miners trapped underground in China for months, as there were in Chile, it's entirely possible the world's media will not even hear about it. In 2005 a benzene spill and explosion up the Songhua River from Harbin, a city of 10 million, was initially covered up by the local government. Officials insisted the city's water was still safe to drink, dismissed the spill as "only a rumor" (sound familiar?) and ordered local reporters not to cover the incident. Only after thousands of residents fled the city did government officials admit the spill had polluted the river.

Or consider the lax consumer protections that allowed milk tainted with the toxic filler melamine to be widely sold in 2008, poisoning 300,000 children and killing six infants. Early reports that melamine had been mixed with milk were ignored by regulatory authorities. Even after public outrage forced the government to take measures, only middle-level employees were prosecuted. The initial cover-up prompted one Chinese author, Qin Geng, to say, "This was the interest of the ruling party above everything, even the safety of the people." In each similar case, the government's response was first to deny, then obfuscate and even imprison those who reported the truth. The same failure to regulate and disclose resulted in the export to the U.S. of poisonous toothpaste, deadly toys and toxic drywall.

Why hasn't China opened up, even as trade is booming? Because so much of its success has stemmed from its ability to pursue growth in spite of human collateral damage -- and because its ruling elite places its own preservation above all else. While the SARS virus has not significantly recurred, another crisis is likely to elicit a similar response. During SARS, we got a working glimpse of the new China, and it was very similar to the old China: bad news means there will be no news.

>> Please read ENTIRE report here

New York Magazine
December 10, 2010

Photo: Odd Andersen/AFP/Getty Images

Liu Xiaobo remained imprisoned in northeastern China today while the Nobel Prize committee awarded him the Peace Prize in Oslo for fighting to bring human rights and democracy to China. But the suppression didn't stop with the jailed dissident himself. His wife, Liu Xia, who has been under house arrest since he received the prize, continues to have her telephone and Internet connection shut down. Activists have been barred from meeting in public. Beijing blocked broadcasts on CNN and BBC and blocked some texts with the words Liu Xiaobo and Nobel Prize from being delivered. This is only the second time a winner or family member has not been able to accept the award. In this case, that meant the $1.4 million cash that comes with it also remained uncollected. The last time a laureate couldn't pick up their prize was in 1936, when Carl von Ossietzky, a German pacifist, was imprisoned during the Nazi regime.

Congratulations, China. Your oppressive instincts just made Liu Xiaobo's win even more historic -- and won you a Nazi comparison in the process. Comparing people to Nazis is a common political tactic, it's just that, usually, you're not trying to invite the comparison on yourself. China's response also managed to justify the committee's choice. In Oslo this morning, chairman Thorbjørn Jagland told the crowd, who all had this creepy feeling this Chinese dude was staring at them, that Liu was not permitted to leave his jail cell. "Nor can his wife or closest relatives be with us ... This fact alone shows that the award was necessary and appropriate." Jagland was probably a little relieved that unlike last year, criticism was directed at an oppressive regime, and not his choice for winner.

>> Original Source

By Radio Free Asia
December 09, 2010

Beijing protests a U.S. resolution in support of a jailed Chinese Nobel prize recipient.

By Bjoern H. Amland and Anita Chang, Associated Press | via UNCENSORED Yahoo! News
Decembeer 07, 2010

China and 18 other countries have declined to attend this year's Nobel Peace Prize ceremony honoring imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, Nobel officials said Tuesday as China unleashed a new barrage deriding the decision.

Chinese officials in Beijing called Liu's backers "clowns" in an anti-Chinese farce -- comments that came only three days before the Dec. 10 Nobel peace prize ceremony in Oslo.

Beijing considers Liu's recognition an attack on China's political and legal system, and says the country's policies will not be swayed by outside forces in what it calls "flagrant interference in China's sovereignty."

Liu, 54, is serving an 11-year sentence on subversion charges brought after he co-authored a bold call for sweeping changes to China's one-party communist political system known as Charter 08.

Countries that have turned down an invitation to Friday's ceremony include Chinese allies Pakistan, Venezuela and Cuba, Chinese neighbors such as Russia, the Philippines and Kazakhstan, and Chinese business partners such as Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Other countries not appearing at the Oslo City Hall ceremony include Ukraine, Colombia, Egypt, Sudan, Tunisia, Iraq, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Serbia and Morocco.

But at least 44 of the 65 embassies that were invited have accepted the invitation, the prize committee said.

In Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu accused the Nobel committee of "orchestrating an anti-China farce by themselves."

"We are not changing because of interference by a few clowns and we will not change our path," she said.

The tough talk came even as authorities were placing Liu's supporters, including his wife Liu Xia, under house arrest and stopping many others such as lawyers, academics and activists from leaving the country -- apparently to prevent them from traveling to Oslo for the ceremony.

So far, only one of about 140 Chinese activists invited by Liu's wife to attend the ceremony has said he'll be able to make it, according to organizers -- and he was not living in China.

Nobel committee secretary Geir Lundestad said countries gave various reasons for not attending but "some of them are obviously affected by China." He said the committee was pleased that two-thirds of embassies had resisted Chinese pressure and accepted the invitation.

"We are especially happy that important countries like India, Indonesia, Brazil and South Africa are coming," Lundestad said.

Nobel officials said the peace prize will not be handed out Friday because none of Liu's family members will be able to attend. The prestigious $1.4 million award can be collected only by the laureate or close family members.

China is not the first nation to be rankled by a Nobel Peace Prize -- but its clampdown means the Nobel medal and diploma won't be handed out for the first time since 1936, when Adolf Hitler prevented German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky from accepting the prize.

Even Cold War dissidents Russian Andrei Sakharov and Lech Walesa of Poland were able to have their wives collect the prizes for them. Myanmar democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi's award was accepted by her 18-year-old son in 1991.

Jiang's comments on Tuesday were the latest in a series of furious attacks against Liu, the Nobel committee and other supporters. Beijing was enraged by the awarding of the prize to the democracy campaigner and literary critic and has sought to dissuade foreign diplomats from attending the award ceremony.

Jiang maintained there were more than 100 countries and international organizations opposed to awarding the prize to Liu, but refused to provide a list to reporters.

China has also put ties with Norway on ice in retaliation for the prize, with Jiang saying Norway should take "total responsibility." A senior Chinese official has said Beijing believes Washington orchestrated the award, ostensibly to humiliate China.

Lundestad declined comment on the Chinese criticism but described this year's prize as "big and important" -- like previous awards in which laureates were prevented from coming.

"It reflects on the regimes," he said.

An empty chair will symbolize that both Liu and his family have been prevented by the Chinese regime from receiving the prize. "The empty chair will be the strongest argument for this year's prize," Lundestad said.

It is not unusual for some countries to skip the ceremony for various reasons. In 2008, when former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari was awarded the peace prize, 10 embassies did not attend.

>> Original Source

By James Glanz and John Markoff - The New York Times
December 04, 2010

As China ratcheted up the pressure on Google to censor its Internet searches last year, the American Embassy sent a secret cable to Washington detailing one reason top Chinese leaders had become so obsessed with the Internet search company: they were Googling themselves.

The May 18, 2009, cable, titled "Google China Paying Price for Resisting Censorship," quoted a well-placed source as saying that Li Changchun, a member of China's top ruling body, the Politburo Standing Committee, and the country's senior propaganda official, was taken aback to discover that he could conduct Chinese-language searches on Google's main international Web site. When Mr. Li typed his name into the search engine at  google.com, he found "results critical of him."

That cable from American diplomats was one of many made public by WikiLeaks that portray China's leadership as nearly obsessed with the threat posed by the Internet to their grip on power -- and, the reverse, by the opportunities it offered them, through hacking, to obtain secrets stored in computers of its rivals, especially the United States.

Extensive hacking operations suspected of originating in China, including one leveled at Google, are a central theme in the cables. The operations began earlier and were aimed at a wider array of American government and military data than generally known, including on the computers of United States diplomats involved in climate change talks with China.

One cable, dated early this year, quoted a Chinese person with family connections to the elite as saying that Mr. Li himself directed an attack on Google's servers in the United States, though that claim has been called into question. In an interview with The New York Times, the person cited in the cable said that Mr. Li personally oversaw a campaign against Google's operations in China but the person did not know who directed the hacking attack.

The cables catalog the heavy pressure that was placed on Google to comply with local censorship laws, as well as Google's willingness to comply -- up to a point. That coercion began building years before the company finally decided to pull its search engine out of China last spring in the wake of the successful hacking attack on its home servers, which yielded Chinese dissidents' e-mail accounts as well as Google's proprietary source code.

The demands on Google went well beyond removing material on subjects like the Dalai Lama or the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Chinese officials also put pressure on the United States government to censor the Google Earth satellite imaging service by lowering the resolution of images of Chinese government facilities, warning that Washington could be held responsible if terrorists used that information to attack government or military facilities, the cables show. An American diplomat replied that Google was a private company and that he would report the request to Washington but that he had no sense about how the government would act.

Yet despite the hints of paranoia that appear in some cables, there are also clear signs that Chinese leaders do not consider the Internet an unstoppable force for openness and democracy, as some Americans believe.

In fact, this spring, around the time of the Google pullout, China's State Council Information Office delivered a triumphant report to the leadership on its work to regulate traffic online, according to a crucial Chinese contact cited by the State Department in a cable in early 2010, when contacted directly by The Times.

The message delivered by the office, the person said, was that "in the past, a lot of officials worried that the Web could not be controlled."

"But through the Google incident and other increased controls and surveillance, like real-name registration, they reached a conclusion: the Web is fundamentally controllable," the person said.

That confidence may also reflect what the cables show are repeated and often successful hacking attacks from China on the United States government, private enterprises and Western allies that began by 2002, several years before such intrusions were widely reported in the United States.

At least one previously unreported attack in 2008, code-named Byzantine Candor by American investigators, yielded more than 50 megabytes of e-mails and a complete list of user names and passwords from an American government agency, a Nov. 3, 2008, cable revealed for the first time.

Precisely how these hacking attacks are coordinated is not clear. Many appear to rely on Chinese freelancers and an irregular army of "patriotic hackers" who operate with the support of civilian or military authorities, but not directly under their day-to-day control, the cables and interviews suggest.

But the cables also appear to contain some suppositions by Chinese and Americans passed along by diplomats. For example, the cable dated earlier this year referring to the hacking attack on Google said: "A well-placed contact claims that the Chinese government coordinated the recent intrusions of Google systems. According to our contact, the closely held operations were directed at the Politburo Standing Committee level."

The cable goes on to quote this person as saying that the hacking of Google "had been coordinated out of the State Council Information Office with the oversight" of Mr. Li and another Politburo member, Zhou Yongkang." Mr. Zhou is China's top security official.

But the person cited in the cable gave a divergent account. He detailed a campaign to press Google coordinated by the Propaganda Department's director, Liu Yunshan. Mr. Li and Mr. Zhou issued approvals in several instances, he said, but he had no direct knowledge linking them to the hacking attack aimed at securing commercial secrets or dissidents' e-mail accounts -- considered the purview of security officials.

Still, the cables provide a patchwork of detail about cyberattacks that American officials believe originated in China with either the assistance or knowledge of the Chinese military.

For example, in 2008 Chinese intruders based in Shanghai and linked to the People's Liberation Army used a computer document labeled "salary increase -- survey and forecast" as bait as part of the sophisticated intrusion scheme that yielded more than 50 megabytes of e-mails and a complete list of user names and passwords from a United States government agency that was not identified.

The cables indicate that the American government has been fighting a pitched battle with intruders who have been clearly identified as using Chinese-language keyboards and physically located in China. In most cases the intruders took great pains to conceal their identities, but occasionally they let their guard down. In one case described in the documents, investigators tracked one of the intruders who was surfing the Web in Taiwan "for personal use."

In June 2009 during climate change talks between the United States and China, the secretary of state's office sent a secret cable warning about e-mail "spear phishing" attacks directed at five State Department employees in the Division of Ocean Affairs of the Office of the Special Envoy for Climate Change.

The messages, which purport to come from a National Journal columnist, had the subject line "China and Climate Change." The e-mail contained a PDF file that was intended to install a malicious software program known as Poison Ivy, which was meant to give an intruder complete control of the victim's computer. That attack failed.

The cables also reveal that a surveillance system dubbed Ghostnet that stole information from the computers used by the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, and South Asian governments and was uncovered in 2009 was linked to a second broad series of break-ins into American government computers code-named Byzantine Hades. Government investigators were able to make a "tenuous connection" between those break-ins and the People's Liberation Army.

The documents also reveal that in 2008 German intelligence briefed American officials on similar attacks beginning in 2006 against the German government, including military, economic, science and technology, commercial, diplomatic, and research and development targets. The Germans described the attacks as preceding events like the German government's meetings with the Chinese government.

Even as such attacks were occurring, Google made a corporate decision in 2006, controversial even within the company, to establish a domestic Chinese version of its search engine, called google.cn. In doing so, it agreed to comply with China's censorship laws.

But despite that concession, Chinese officials were never comfortable with Google, the cables and interviews show.

The Chinese claimed that Google Earth, the company's satellite mapping software, offered detailed "images of China's military, nuclear, space, energy and other sensitive government agency installations" that would be an asset to terrorists. A cable sent on Nov. 7, 2006, reported that Liu Jieyi, an assistant minister of foreign affairs, warned the American Embassy in Beijing that there would be "grave consequences" if terrorists exploited the imagery.

A year later, another cable pointed out that Google searches for politically delicate terms would sometimes be automatically redirected to Baidu, the Chinese company that was Google's main competitor in China. Baidu is known for scrubbing its own search engine of results that might be unwelcome to government censors.

Google conducted numerous negotiations with officials in the State Council Information Office and other departments involved in censorship, propaganda and media licensing, the cables show. The May 18, 2009, cable that revealed pressure on the company by Mr. Li, the propaganda chief, said Google had taken some measures "to try and placate the government." The cable also noted that Google had asked the American government to intervene with China on its behalf.

But Chinese officials became alarmed that Google still did less than its Chinese rivals to remove material Chinese officials considered offensive. Such material included information about Chinese dissidents and human rights issues, but also about central and provincial Chinese leaders and their children -- considered an especially taboo topic, interviews with people quoted in the cables reveal.

Mr. Li, after apparently searching for information online on himself and his children, was reported to have stepped up pressure on Google. He also took steps to punish Google commercially, according to the May 18 cable.

The propaganda chief ordered three big state-owned Chinese telecommunications companies to stop doing business with Google. Mr. Li also demanded that Google executives remove any link between its sanitized Chinese Web site and its main international one, which he deemed "an illegal site," the cable said.

Google ultimately stopped complying with repeated censorship requests. It stopped offering a censored version of its search engine in China earlier this year, citing both the hacking attacks and its unwillingness to continue obeying censorship orders.

James Glanz reported from New York, and John Markoff from San Francisco. Andrew W. Lehren contributed reporting from New York.

>> Original Source