Internet: July 2009 Archives

By BBC World News
July 29, 2009

By RADIO FREE ASIA
July 24, 2009

Chinese Web sites tying the president's son to news of a corruption probe are shut down and later reopened with the related stories missing.

Chinese authorities shut down sections of two major Web portals in the wake of news reports that President Hu Jintao's son is linked to a Namibian graft probe, industry sources said.

The popular Web sites 163.com and Sina had their technology sections closed simultaneously Tuesday, with messages announcing that they did not exist.

State-run media ignored the reports.

"It was probably around 11:00 a.m. [on Tuesday] that we were unable to visit the technology sections of 163.com and Sina," a former employee at one of the portals said.

"This really is not normal. A quick keyword search confirmed that the report [about a graft probe involving President Hu's son, Hu Haifeng] had been posted on both of those technology sections, and that other Web sites were linking to it," he said.

The industry source said: "Both sections were back online at around 5:00 p.m. My sources had told me they expected the two sites to be closed for at least a day."

The report related to Hu Haifeng had been deleted from both Web sites when their technology sections came back online.

Allegations of graft

Namibia's Anti Corruption Commission (ACC) has called on Hu Haifeng, who headed state-controlled Chinese security equipment provider Nuctech until last year, to assist in the investigation into the disappearance of millions of U.S. dollars linked to a government supply contract in Namibia.

Two Namibians and a Chinese national were arrested last week in Namibia as part of a probe into bribery allegations involving Nuctech, a company headed until last year by Hu's 38-year-old son, Hu Haifeng, who is now Communist Party secretary of Nuctech's parent company.

Their arrest was followed swiftly by the suspension of the country's defense force chief amid allegations that he too was linked to the Nuctech case.

Namibian President Hifikepunye Pohamba said in a statement: "The decision to suspend Lieutenant General Martin Shalli stems from serious allegations of irregularities, which must be thoroughly investigated."

Namibian media reported on Thursday that Shalli was accused of allegedly having millions of Namibian dollars transferred to him, through a third party, by the Chinese company.

Nuctech representative Yang Fan and two Namibians, Teckla Lameck and Jerobeam Mokaxwa, were arrested after Namibia's ACC said they had taken money from a U.S. $12.8 million down payment on security scanning equipment, which Nuctech was supplying to the Namibian government, financed by a Chinese government loan.

The supply contract and loan were inked on Hu Jintao's 2007 trip to Namibia.

Likely to face sanctions

In China, another industry insider who declined to give his name said that both Sina and 163.com were likely to face official sanctions following the posting of a report titled "No sooner has Hu Jintao vowed to battle graft, than his son is in trouble."

"If the news story contained the name of one of China's leaders, and if it was posted by an editor after it had been deleted according to the rules, then that is a very big problem," he said.

Professor Joseph Cheng, of Hong Kong's City University, agreed.

"Even if there is a case of this kind, it can't be allowed to involve either Hu Jintao or his family members," Cheng said.

"Of course, some executive from the compan[ies] will take all the blame. Even the suspicion of involvement by family members will have a big effect on the image of China's leaders," he said.

Searches for information on the case and Hu Haifeng's connection to it on Chinese Web portals turned up error messages such as: "The search results may contain content not in line with relevant laws, regulations, and policies."

This message is commonly found when Internet users attempt to access forbidden material online.

China habitually adds information about the country's top leaders to its lists of banned keywords, prompting deletion and self-censorship by Web sites providing news.

Any attempt to search with the "forbidden words" returns a similar message.

US-based China Digital Times, which monitors Web usage in China, said propaganda officials had issued an order banning Internet searches related to the Nuctech case.

Neither company confirmed that the sites had been blocked by the authorities or that their blockage was linked to any content, however.

But a customer service executive at Sina.com said the site had experienced technical problems.

"The technical problems experienced by our technology section are believed to have originated with a server or network error, and our engineers are investigating the reason," he said.

Officials at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology press office declined to comment on the closures.

Foreign ministry officials have referred media inquiries to Nuctech.

Government pressure

Beijing-based journalist Gao Yu said Beijing wasn't showing much reaction to the case on the outside, but that top officials would be scrambling to put out fires behind the scenes..

"This is a really big story of the utmost urgency for them," said Gao, deputy chief editor of Economics Weekly.

"Of course they must try to play it down, and whatever happens, Prince Hu musn't be touched by it," she said, referring to Hu Haifeng.

Gao said she believed the Chinese government had already leaned heavily on Namibian authorities, resulting in the postponement of a bail hearing for the three suspects until next week.

"Of course there is Chinese involvement in the postponement of the hearing by Namibia," she said. "China will keep a poker face, trying to play it down to the outside world, and never admitting it inside China."

City University's Cheng agreed the case would evoke a negative response from within the country.

"Whenever the Chinese Communist Party leadership makes any plans to stamp out corruption, it's going to reduce public confidence," Cheng said.

"Most people believe that at the highest echelons of leadership, the Party won't do anything about corruption, and that if they do, it's not about corruption, but rather about a political power struggle," he said.

China is rapidly building strong economic and diplomatic ties among African countries, which will help ensure future energy security for its booming economy, markets for its goods, and a place to invest its capital, experts say.

Original reporting in Mandarin by Ding Xiao and in Cantonese by Grace Kei Lai-see. Mandarin service director: Jennifer Chou. Cantonese service director: Shiny Li. Translated and written for the Web in English by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.

>> Original source

By Michael Wines | The New York Times
July 22, 2009

To the likely consternation of diplomats in both Beijing and faraway Windhoek, a newly minted initiative by Namibia's government to root out official corruption has snared an early catch: three people who, Namibian prosecutors charge, helped win a lucrative contract for a Chinese company recently headed by the son of Hu Jintao, China's president.

The charges against the three, including one Chinese national, have yet to be heard in court. There is no public evidence that President Hu's 38-year-old son, Hu Haifeng, or other high officials of the company, Nuctech Company Limited, knew of the Namibian dealings.

But mere reports of the charges have already prompted Chinese government censors to block Internet surfers from searching for news about the younger Mr. Hu, Namibia or Nuctech, according to the California-based Internet site China Digitial Times.

Separately, the office of Namibia's prosecutor general, Martha Imalwa, said she had traveled to Beijing to request that Mr. Hu be interviewed in the case as a witness, but not as a suspect.

Until last year, Mr. Hu was president of Nuctech, a Beijing-based maker of advanced security scanners used in airports, customs warehouses and other traffic points. He has since been elevated to Communist Party secretary of Tsinghua Holdings, the state-controlled firm that runs Nuctech and about 30 other businesses.

Namibia prosecutors accuse Nuctech's Africa representative, 39-year-old Yang Fan, and two Namibians of joining in a bribery scheme that secured a $55.3 million contract in May 2008 to install Nuctech scanners at customs inspection points across Namibia.

Most of the cost was to be borne by a so-called soft loan -- usually a loan at below market rates or with other favorable terms -- that China's government granted Namibia on the condition that it purchase scanners from Nuctech.

Namibia's government paid about $12.8 million to Nuctech in February. But prosecutors allege that most of that money was quickly transferred to a Namibian company listed as a Nuctech consultant, and then split among Mr. Yang and the two Namibian defendants.

The case came to light because of a new money-laundering law that requires Namibian banks to routinely report large money transfers to investigators. Prosecutors said that the three defendants in the Nuctech case appear to have spent much of the money on what officials called an enormous spending spree.

Nuctech has offered to send officials to Namibia to aid in the investigation, but has not commented publicly. The three defendants were to appear in court in Windhoek, Namibia's capital, on Wednesday for a bail hearing.

Nuctech was created in 1997 as an offshoot of Tsinghua University, a Beijing campus with a heavy emphasis on technology where both President Hu and, later, his son were engineering graduates.

The company has risen rapidly to become one of the world's top providers of security scanning equipment, supplying about 50 nations, including the United States. In late 2006, the company won a contract to install advanced scanners at all 147 of China's airports to detect potentially dangerous liquids.

While the company's products have won praise from users in places as diverse as Australia and Norway, Nuctech's business practices have come under increasing scrutiny abroad.

The European Union is investigating whether the company has used soft loan deals from the Chinese government to effectively lower its prices and undercut competitors. South Africa's Mail & Guardian newspaper reported that Nuctech's agent in a $380 million scanner sale there was a company implicated in corrupt contracts involving the nation's scandal-plagued Parliament. In the Philippines, legislators charged that the government's customs agency overpaid in 2006 and 2007 when it reached a $150 million no-bid agreement, also financed by a soft loan, to install Nuctech scanners at transit points there.

Namibian critics also contend that their government grossly overpaid for the scanning equipment and that much of the excess payments ended up in private hands, including those of some Namibian politicians. Namibia's inquiry into the deal is ongoing.

John Grobler contributed reporting from Windhoek, Namibia.

>> Original source

By Brian Womack - Bloomberg.com
21 July 2009

The Chinese government restricted access to more social-networking sites in the past few days, escalating a clampdown that started about six months ago, said Xia Qiang, director of the Berkeley China Internet Project.

The sites that are inaccessible or aren't working properly include Fanfou, Digu, Zuosa and Jiwai, said Qiang, who is an adjunct professor at the University of California at Berkeley in California. Those sites work like Twitter, allowing users to post information quickly before editors can review their submissions, Qiang said.

"It turns out one of the very interesting functions of those sites is the news and opinions is getting circulated very quickly," Qiang said. That makes it much harder for authorities to keep control, he said.

Internet users in China had difficulty logging on to Facebook and other social-networking sites earlier this month following ethnic clashes in western China that left more than 150 people dead. Access to Google Inc.'s YouTube, a video- sharing site, and the Twitter messaging service also has been limited.

When accessed from San Francisco, the Digu and Zuosa Web sites said they were closed for maintenance today, according to postings on their home pages. Fanfou wasn't available as of 11 a.m. San Francisco time. The Web site of Jiwai appeared to be working.

Bing, Twitter

Twitter and Microsoft Corp.'s new Bing.com search engine were inaccessible in Beijing in June, around the time of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. Facebook, the most visited social-networking site, continues to receive reports of users having problems accessing the site in China, Debbie Frost, a spokeswoman for Palo Alto, California-based Facebook, said today.

>> Original report

By Radio Free Asia
08 July 2009

Authorities in the northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) have blocked access to certain key government Web sites around the region, which has been rocked in recent days by ethnic violence.

The Web sites of the regional government and all regional state-run media were inaccessible from outside Xinjiang on Wednesday.

Municipal Web sites and official radio, television stations, and newspapers in Urumqi, Kashgar, Ili, and Hotan cities were also offline. Shache and Aksu city governments and media were also unavailable.

China's net police have also blocked access by Chinese netizens to popular micro-blogging platform Twitter and similar sites, with limited success.

Foreign journalists on the ground in Urumqi said mobile phone networks had also been affected by the security clampdown, with some able to send updates only via Twitter using the Web, instead of by text message as is usually possible.

Exiled Uyghur leader Rebiya Kadeer said the government was trying to prevent further information about the recent unrest from spreading amid great tension.

YouTube blocked

"The Chinese government is now blocking information by shutting down all cell phone networks and radio stations," Kadeer said.

"The current situation is very dangerous."

Twitter and video-sharing site YouTube were blocked by Tuesday afternoon.

Posts on forums and bulletin boards about the riots were deleted immediately, although comments made on old posts related to Xinjiang lasted somewhat longer, netizens said.

Guangdong-based cyber commentator Bei Feng said he didn't think the government's measures would be entirely successful, especially in Xinjiang.

"From a technical point of view, Twitter is hard to block. Netizens can outwit the blockade by using the cyber technique called 'wall-scaling,'" Bei Feng said.

"In fact, online browsers can now obtain plenty of information from both domestic and foreign sources. For instance, the Associated Press reported the latest demonstration by about 300 people in the southern Xinjiang city of Kashgar. Chinese netizens got this information right away," he said.

Beijing-based Tibetan writer Woeser agreed, saying that many netizens in China could now access information more easily.

"In China, people can now use a skill online called 'wall-scaling,'" Woeser said. "Through proxy servers, we can see overseas Web sites. Bloggers on large Chinese Web sites carry instant opinions from the people," she said.

Original reporting in Mandarin by Tang Qiwei and He Ping, and by RFA's Uyghur and Cantonese services. Mandarin service director: Jennifer Chou. Uyghur service director: Dolkun Kamberi. Cantonese service director: Shiny Li. Translated by Chen Ping. Written for the Web in English by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.

>> Original source