This is China! blog

Japan is not a happy neighbor. While extending a hand to China to bolster trade links and advantages with its out-sized neighbor, it is watching out one eye as the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy runs frigates and submarines ever closer to Okinawa. The latest episode happened just a couple days ago with ten Chinese warships and subs passing through international waters near Okinawa. Just a week before, according to the Financial Times, a ship-based Chinese helicopter came within 90 meters (!) of a Japanese destroyer. One can almost see the Chinese pilot thumbing his nose at apoplexic Japanese sailors, just itching to take out the mosquito of a craft.

The United States Navy’s “Sputnik”moment” came in November 2007 when a Chinese Song-class nuclear attack submarine surfaced 160 feet from the U.S. aircraft carrier U.S.S. Kittyhawk. Sputnik was the Soviet Union’s satellite program in the late 1950s that crystallized American fears of losing the race for outer space. The 1000-foot Kittyhawk, with 4,500 personnel on-board, was being escorted by at least a dozen other naval vessels and two submarines when the Chinese sub had apparently been tracking the carrier group for some time, running on super-quiet electric motors. The Chinese crew revealed its presence to the Americans in waterways near Okinawa. American naval leaders were apoplectic at the Cold War tactic, while the diplomatic corp lodged angry complaints with the Chinese government. Beijing offered it had been ignorant of the submarine maneuvers and suggested the encounter was a coincidence. American military leaders had not considered that any of the 13 Song class subs at the time were as advanced as they apparently were.  The surprise served as a rude awakening to American policy makers that the Pacific Ocean was no longer the pre-eminent domain of its navy.

Ultimately, what’s at stake here for Japan and China are untapped sources of energy and national pride. China’s central government, in other words, has a full mandate from its citizenry to force its collective will onto islands off China’s and Japan’s coast that both countries contend are their territory. At the center of contention are the Diaoyu (Senkaku, for the Japanese) islands, Tianwaitian (Kashi) and Chunxiao (Shirakaba), the latter two of which are characterized more as rock outcroppings than as masses of land that come anywhere close to becoming islands. Nonetheless, all lie nearly equidistant from the shores of both economic powers, which are willing to go the military distance to protect their territorial claims as well as potential oil resource riches.

Though in 2008 the two countries agreed to jointly develop gas fields in the disputed seas, China has signaled through military exercises around the outcroppings that it’s not much interested in detente. A dangerous trend indeed.

Further reading: Globe and Mail

A Bogey Man That Will Never Die

Warlords in Suzhou

New Prescription Needed: Blurring a Bi-polar World

The New York Times ran an excellent piece recently on a University of Toronto team that used its own stealthy methods to shadow a China based network of hackers who broke into the highest levels of the Indian government’s computer network system The Chengdu based group, which called itself the Shadow Network, pilfered highly classified information that the University Team also became privy to, and about which it notified the Indian Government:

“The researchers also found evidence that Indian Embassy computers in Kabul, Moscow and Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and at the High Commission of India in Abuja, Nigeria had been compromised.

Also compromised were computers used by the Indian Military Engineer Services in Bengdubi, Calcutta, Bangalore and Jalandhar; the 21 Mountain Artillery Brigade in Assam and three air force bases. Computers at two Indian military colleges were also taken over by the spy ring.

Beyond the Indian Government, infected targets included the Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses as well as computers at India Strategic Defense Magazine and Force Magazine. The researchers also found that computers at YKK India Private Limited, DLF Limited and TATA, as well as other companies were compromised.”

The Canadian team of researchers watched the hackers for eight months, and waseven able to identify a couple of the individuals in China responsible for the hacks. Of course, those of us who live in China have little doubt who was behind the hacker ring.

Which brings us to the question of the extent to which the computer systems of foreign companies based in China are vulnerable to intrusion by the local hackers and the powers that be. One of the revelations I drew from the NYT article was that the invasion of the Indian network provided entry into the secured networks of other countries, and into NATO as well. So, if Chinese hackers can do that abroad, what might their capabilities be like on their own turf, with companies they could care less about, but whose information might bring them riches and accolades from the right buyer?

Related posts:

Cyber-kerfuffle

Googleplexed

Publish and Be Deleted

Broken Web

If he was my employee I would have fired him on the spot. Of course, if I was Japanese, as was the factory worker’s boss, I would only have created an international incident, as one European friend reminded me (who’s own family once suffered under Nazi occupation – and who’s family got over it generations ago). The local Suzhou news service rushed to the scene of an unhappy twenty-something’s tearful brush with an unhappy boss who shouted at him in Japanese during the morning line-up Asian companies are so fond of organizing at the start of each work day. The line worker, a moon-faced post-adolescent still in his neatly pressed powder-blue work uniform and train-engineer’s cap, recalled the Japanese occupation of China – 70 years ago! – in the boss’es cross excortiation of the employee. Meanwhile, the news station spliced grainy black-and-white film footage of Japanese soldiers at war with headshots of the disgruntled operator.

Frankly, as many of us expat managers can relate with, Chinese employees have a habit at times of stretching the credulity – and the imagination – of their managers with their stunts. What surprised me as much as the report itself was the absolute religiousity with which one young Chinese with whom I’m acquainted took in what the boneless Chinese employee had to say; she believed the news release was warranted precisely because of the Japanese occupation of China.

Anyway, I suppose, if you can’t criticize the real bosses in your own society, always reach for a bogey man.

Related posts:

Are Your Employees Trustworthy?

Service with a Cheer

Return of the Poachers

There’s No Place Like Home: Worker Shortages

A recent Saturday night rocked with gasps and laughter in Suzhou as three Western journalists regaled the crowd with stories about getting – and serving – the scoops in China. The panel was part of the Suzhou Bookworm Literary Festival. Scott Tong, correspondent for National Public Radio; Duncan Hewitt, former BBC correspondent, and currently Shanghai Bureau Chief for Newsweek Magazine and author of Getting Rich First:Life in a Changing China; and Swedish journalist Ola Wong shed light on how foreign journalists work to make “the first draft of history.” Surprisingly, all agreed that a challenge they all encounter as great as any Chinese censor is dealing with their own headquarters in the home countries. In particular, editors want foreign journalists to send pieces that are sensationalistic, if not a bit dark; but not too dark. Stories that are either too complicated or paint foreign readership in a negative light are discouraged, daily, it seems. Though the Chinese and foreign journalists seldom interact, foreign journalists have found Chinese journalists in general helpful. The writers agreed they have to get out of their big cities and travel throughout China though, without prodding, to find stories the Chinese media has not already gotten at. Sometimes, though, those more nuanced stories that show the humanity of China are not always welcome back at home.

The offspring of China’s one-child policy are often noisome, rude, self-interested bundles of consumption: both material and emotional. Whilst a boon for retailers, Drew Thompson writes in the March/April issue of Foreign Policy magazine that they make for lousy soldiers in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The one-child soliers composing nearly half the 2.3 million Chinese troops in the PLA in 2006. In 1998 China reduced the amount of time the soldiers need to serve, to two years; so the young men in particular can aid their families make a living in the countryside. The army has become aware that many of its conscripts are a primary if not sole source of support for their parents. Though the one-child soldiers may have better computer skills and even communicate more effectively than comrades with siblings, “Only-child recruits are not as tough; they don’t like to go through the pain of intense training; they call in sick more frequently; and they struggle to perform some simple chores like doing their own laundry,” Thompson writes. Perhaps all they need is a little love.

Related posts:

“Straying Cows” Still Unable to Meet Bachelor Demands

One-Child Kerfuffle

Hukou: A License to Abort

The Global Times, the official English-language online newspaper of the Chinese government, recently published an expose about the arbitrariness closure of accounts on Chinese social networking sites and the wholesale shutdown of entire websites by authorities. The article, entitled” Publish and Be Deleted“, is as telling in its very existence as the content of its exhaustively interviewed article. Throughout the entire article bloggers and social networkers and even website managers talk about how arbitrarily applied censorship regulations are applied. Photos, poetry, commentary can all disappear from cyberspace in a matter of moments. The article also discusses the demise of the social networking phenomenon Fanfou, which authorities axed just after the Xinjiang riots, and Yeeyan, which translated internationalnews for Chinese domestic consumption. Yeeyan reopened after it simply stopped posting pieces on politics.

Further reading: WSJ

Previous posts:

Broken Web

Keeping Tabs on Netizens

When Big Brother Might Be Your Own Brother

How to be picked up by a Techno-chik in China

Foreign IT companies are feeling less welcome than ever in China as the national government feels the country’s own sector is muscular enough to go it alone. On May 1, 2010 foreign companies that want to tender for government contracts will have to release their source code and security keys to government agencies for scrutiny. Central government wants to make its own information infrastructure secure against foreign intrusion, possibly pilfer leading-edge technology, and lock up its own domestic market to the exclusion of foreign players.

John Neuffer, vice-president for global policy at the Information Technology Industry Council, a lobby group, said: “The looming choice for many of our companies is to create costly bifurcated product lines, one for China and one for the rest of the world, or to ponder less ambitious trade and investment choices in that market.”

As China continues its turn inward, it endangers its ability to share in the information exchanges that flow through countries boosting Innovation. Ming Dynasty emperors did very much the same thing in breaking up the great commercial fleet of Zheng He, the shipyards in which the ships were built, and restricting the flow of activity across the Silk Road. Six hundred years later we may be hearing history’s echo.

Further reading: FT

Previous posts:

The Clever, the Genius and the Just Plain Dumb

Elementary, Watson

China’s Innovation Blowback

I have this dark vision that one day in China I will attempt to log onto the web in China and it simply won’t be there. Only the People’s Daily appears, and perhaps handful of official mouthpieces as well. Every other website is down – foreign and domestic – and email no longer sends or receives messages.

I have an uncomfortable feeling that someone somewhere in Beijing has his finger on an “internet button” that will simply shut the entire super-network down here in China, just as they were able to in Xinjiang. Of course, you may be thinking, that would be madness. And it would be. But seldom have I ever seen or experienced a situation in which common sense trumped control – it’s usually the other way around, with Power self-destructing in a final, incindiary show of narcissim.

Xinjiang’s economy grew nearly a percentage point less than the country’s as whole, while its total trade volume was nearly twenty percent less than its provincial cousins. Still, central government keeps the electronic screws on the region, perhaps irreperably hurting the economy. It’s certainly affected Chinese investment in the region, as entrepreneurs throughout Xinjiang have been crippled as much as indigenous businesses.

Power disrupts; absolute power disrupts even itself.

Further reading: NYT

Previous posts:

Broken Web

Keeping Tabs on Netizens

When Big Brother Might Be Your Own Brother

How to be picked up by a Techno-chik in China

I recently listened to a wonderful podcast on BBC about the life of “China’s Forgotten Admiral”, Zheng He. Zheng He, a Muslim eunuch, matched up the navigation technologies of the Arabs with the ship-building prowess of the Ming Dynasty to create the largest commercial armada the world had ever seen. The fleet sailed from the east coast of China around southeast Asia and into the Indian Sea to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and even to the east coast of Africa.

It seems that with in the modern age the Chinese have made the trek again, much to India’s consternation. The Indians and Chinese are already in contention over such issues as melting Himalayan glaciers, the Dalai Lama and China’s poke-you-in-the-eye support of Pakistan. Now China is providing funds to Sri Lanka to rebuild its war-torn infrastructure,

Meanwhile, all India seems to be able to do given its vast domestic challenges and querrelous and highly fragmented form of democracy is announce its displeasure with its ancient neighbor.

Though China is not seeking tribute from the smaller nations as it had six hundred years ago, the ghost of Zheng He is alive and well.

Further reading: NYT

Past posts:

China Overseas Investment: No Big Deal

New Prescription Needed: Blurring a Bi-polar World

Crouching Dragon, Flailing Elephant

For All the Tea in China: A Wonderful Book

China effectively spoiled the West’s attempts at the Copenhagen Climate Conference  at getting well-defined emissions targets and inspections. China achieved this by cobbling together a group of developing countries whose governments have always felt aggrieved the West had been exploiting their economic weakness to diabolical ends, and muting their economic development to eliminate competition. China was quite happy with the outcome, if local media is any indication.

Now, Vietnam wants to do the same thing in the politically and militarily sensitive Spratly Islands, just off the coast of China and Vietnam and the Philipines and Malaysia and Brunei, all of which lay claim to the island chain. The outcroppings of rock and the surrounding waters have been found rich in oil and natural gas. China does not like other countries using the same strategy it used in Copenhagen.

China has already sent its naval vessels to patrol the area, much like a dog marks his territory, and has set up a “research” station on one of the islands. The Chinese navy has also captured scores of Vietnamese fishermen who ply the waters in the area and confiscated their boats.

China knows it needs to tread warily outside its borders, lest it find itself bound by its Lilliputian neighbors who are taking grave offense at Chinese adventures.

Further reading: NYT