Taiwan: April 2010 Archives

By Edward Wong | The New York Times
April 26, 2010

The Chinese military is seeking to project naval power well beyond the Chinese coast, from the oil ports of the Middle East to the shipping lanes of the Pacific, where the United States Navy has long reigned as the dominant force, military officials and analysts say.

China calls the new strategy "far sea defense," and the speed with which it is building long-range capabilities has surprised foreign military officials.

The strategy is a sharp break from the traditional, narrower doctrine of preparing for war over the self-governing island of Taiwan or defending the Chinese coast. Now, Chinese admirals say they want warships to escort commercial vessels that are crucial to the country's economy, from as far as the Persian Gulf to the Strait of Malacca, in Southeast Asia, and to help secure Chinese interests in the resource-rich South and East China Seas.

In late March, two Chinese warships docked in Abu Dhabi, the first time the modern Chinese Navy made a port visit in the Middle East.

The overall plan reflects China's growing sense of self-confidence and increasing willingness to assert its interests abroad. China's naval ambitions are being felt, too, in recent muscle flexing with the United States: in March, Chinese officials told senior American officials privately that China would brook no foreign interference in its territorial issues in the South China Sea, said a senior American official involved in China policy.

The naval expansion will not make China a serious rival to American naval hegemony in the near future, and there are few indications that China has aggressive intentions toward the United States or other countries.

But China, now the world's leading exporter and a giant buyer of oil and other natural resources, is also no longer content to trust the security of sea lanes to the Americans, and its definition of its own core interests has expanded along with its economic clout.

In late March, Adm. Robert F. Willard, the leader of the United States Pacific Command, said in Congressional testimony that recent Chinese military developments were "pretty dramatic." China has tested long-range ballistic missiles that could be used against aircraft carriers, he said. After years of denials, Chinese officials have confirmed that they intend to deploy an aircraft carrier group within a few years.

China is also developing a sophisticated submarine fleet that could try to prevent foreign naval vessels from entering its strategic waters if a conflict erupted in the region, said Admiral Willard and military analysts.

"Of particular concern is that elements of China's military modernization appear designed to challenge our freedom of action in the region," the admiral said.

Yalong Bay, on the southern coast of Hainan island in the South China Sea, is the site of five-star beach resorts just west of a new underground submarine base. The base allows submarines to reach deep water within 20 minutes and roam the South China Sea, which has some of the world's busiest shipping lanes and areas rich in oil and natural gas that are the focus of territorial disputes between China and other Asian nations.

That has caused concern not only among American commanders, but also among officials in Southeast Asian nations, which have been quietly acquiring more submarines, missiles and other weapons. "Regional officials have been surprised," said Huang Jing, a scholar of the Chinese military at the National University of Singapore. "We were in a blinded situation. We thought the Chinese military was 20 years behind us, but we suddenly realized China is catching up."

China is also pressing the United States to heed its claims in the region. In March, Chinese officials told two visiting senior Obama administration officials, Jeffrey A. Bader and James B. Steinberg, that China would not tolerate any interference in the South China Sea, now part of China's "core interest" of sovereignty, said an American official involved in China policy. It was the first time the Chinese labeled the South China Sea a core interest, on par with Taiwan and Tibet, the official said.

Another element of the Chinese Navy's new strategy is to extend its operational reach beyond the South China Sea and the Philippines to what is known as the "second island chain" -- rocks and atolls out in the Pacific, the official said. That zone significantly overlaps the United States Navy's area of supremacy.

Japan is anxious, too. Its defense minister, Toshimi Kitazawa, said in mid-April that two Chinese submarines and eight destroyers were spotted on April 10 heading between two Japanese islands en route to the Pacific, the first time such a large Chinese flotilla had been seen so close to Japan. When two Japanese destroyers began following the Chinese ships, a Chinese helicopter flew within 300 feet of one of the destroyers, the Japanese Defense Ministry said.

Since December 2008, China has maintained three ships in the Gulf of Aden to contribute to international antipiracy patrols, the first deployment of the Chinese Navy beyond the Pacific. The mission allows China to improve its navy's long-range capabilities, analysts say.

A 2009 Pentagon report estimated Chinese naval forces at 260 vessels, including 75 "principal combatants" -- major warships -- and more than 60 submarines. The report noted the building of an aircraft carrier, and said China "continues to show interest" in acquiring carrier-borne jet fighters from Russia. The United States Navy has 286 battle-force ships and 3,700 naval aircraft, though ship for ship the American Navy is considered qualitatively superior to the Chinese Navy.

The Pentagon does not classify China as an enemy force. But partly in reaction to China's growth, the United States has recently transferred submarines from the Atlantic to the Pacific so that most of its nuclear-powered attack submarines are now in the Pacific, said Bernard D. Cole, a former American naval officer and a professor at the National War College in Washington.

The United States has also begun rotating three to four submarines on deployments out of Guam, reviving a practice that had ended with the cold war, Mr. Cole said.

American vessels now frequently survey the submarine base at Hainan island, and that activity leads to occasional friction with Chinese ships. A survey mission last year by an American naval ship, the Impeccable, resulted in what Pentagon officials said was harassment by Chinese fishing vessels; the Chinese government said it had the right to block surveillance in those waters because they are an "exclusive economic zone" of China.

The United States and China have clashing definitions of such zones, defined by a United Nations convention as waters within 200 nautical miles of a coast. The United States says international law allows a coastal country to retain only special commercial rights in the zones, while China contends the country can control virtually any activity within them.

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By Andrew Jacobs | The New York Times
30 March 2010

In what appears to be a coordinated assault, the e-mail accounts of more than a dozen rights activists, academics and journalists who cover China have been compromised by unknown intruders. A Chinese human rights organization also said that hackers disabled its Web site for a fifth straight day.

The infiltrations, which involved Yahoo e-mail accounts, appeared to be aimed at people who write about China and Taiwan, rendering their accounts inaccessible, according to those who were affected. In the case of this reporter, hackers altered e-mail settings so that all correspondence was surreptitiously forwarded to another e-mail address.

The attacks, most of which began last Thursday, occurred the same week that Google angered the Chinese government by routing Internet search engine requests out of the mainland to a site in Hong Kong. Google said the move was prompted by its objections to censorship rules and by a spate of attacks on Google e-mail users that the company suggested had originated in China.

Those cyberattacks, which began as early as last April, affected dozens of American corporations, law firms and individuals, many of them rights advocates critical of China's authoritarian government.

The victims of the most recent intrusions included a law professor in the United States, a Uyghur exile in Sweden, an analyst who writes about China's security apparatus and several print journalists based in Beijing and Taipei, the capital of Taiwan.

"It's very unsettling," said Clifford Coonan, a correspondent for The Irish Times and Variety magazine whose e-mail account was rendered inaccessible last week after Yahoo detected that someone had gained access to it remotely. "You can't help but wonder why you've been targeted."

Dilxat Raxit, a spokesman for the World Uyghur Congress, an organization that seeks greater autonomy for China's Xinjiang region, said many of the e-mail messages in one of his two Yahoo accounts appeared to have been read when he logged on in recent weeks. The other account, he said, had been inaccessible for a month.

Mr. Raxit also said that he was unable to reach three Uighur friends in China with whom he previously corresponded frequently. ''I'm 100 percent I've been hacked,'' he said from Sweden. ''I'm angry at the Chinese, but I blame Yahoo for allowing this to happen.''

In an e-mail exchange, Dana Lengkeek, a Yahoo spokeswoman, declined to discuss the incidents, citing company policy. "We are committed to protecting user security and privacy and we take appropriate action in the event of any kind of breach," Ms. Lengkeek said.

Kathleen McLaughlin, an American freelance journalist in Beijing who sits on the board of the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China, said the group has confirmed that 10 journalists, including herself, had their accounts compromised.

Like the others, said she received a message from Yahoo on Thursday indicating that her account had been disabled because, according to an automated message, "we have detected an issue with your account."

She said she contacted Yahoo but has yet to receive an explanation of what happened. "Someone is clearly targeting journalists," she said. "It makes me feel very uncomfortable."

Yahoo, which in 2005 sold its China operations to the Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba, has faced criticism for cooperating with government security officials in the past. In 2004, Yahoo turned over data that officials used to help prosecute several dissidents. One, a journalist named Shi Tao, was later given a 10-year sentence for leaking a secret propaganda directive.

Although the company owns a 39 percent stake in Alibaba, Ms. Lengkeek, the Yahoo spokeswoman, stressed that Yahoo no longer has operational control over the China business.

Unlike services offered by Google and Microsoft, emails sent through Yahoo's Chinese domain, .cn, are stored on local servers and subject to Chinese law, a factor that has driven some privacy-conscious users away from Yahoo's e-mail services.

Computer security experts say infiltration of Yahoo's e-mail service once again highlights the challenges that Internet companies face in protecting their customers from hackers.

Paul Wood, a senior analyst at the Symantec Corporation, said a growing number of malignant viruses were tailored to specific recipients, with the goal of tricking them into opening attachments that would insert malware onto their computers. Mr. Wood said his company, which designs anti-virus software, now blocks about 60 such attacks each day, up from 1 or 2 a week in 2005. "They're very well crafted and extremely damaging," he said.

A report issued by Symantec on Monday found that nearly 30 percent of attacks originated from computers in China; about 20 percent of those came from Shaoxing, a relatively obscure city in Zhejiang Province previously known for winemaking.

Mr. Wood and other experts point out that attacks appearing to come from a certain location can just as easily be emanating from computers infected with botnets, a virus that allows them be controlled remotely by other computing systems.

It is this kind of rogue software that is probably responsible for crippling the Web site of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a group that has been an assertive critic of China's human rights violations. Since last Thursday, the group's Chinese-language site has been overwhelmed by hackers flooding it with junk requests, a tactic known as denial of service. Although the site has been attacked before, the attacks did not last more than a few hours.

Renee Xia, the international director for the human rights group, said the assault began the same day the American company that is host to its site, Go Daddy, announced that it would stop registering domain names in China. "Maybe it's a coincidence, but we don't think so," Ms. Xia said.

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