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Today's news: Google smacks China

January 13th 2010 01:42

Google has accused China of hacking into Gmail accounts, and has threatened to walk out of China as a consequence.

Google has just issued a statement saying it has uncovered a "highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China". The email accounts targeted were those of human rights activists.

Google did not name the Chinese government, but it didn't have to. And it did say it was "no longer willing to continue censoring our results" on its Chinese search engine, as the government requires.

China may be the world's population leader and a global economic super-heavyweight, but this is a fight which it may want to back away from. Civil unrest is never far from the surface in any community ruled by a totalitarian regime, and the humiliation of a Google walk-out, and the focus it would bring on Beijing's heavy-handed approach to many social issues, will have it considering its response to Google's allegations very carefully.

Google is itself a super-heavyweight in the human conscious, and it will not have understaken this course of action lightly. In announcing the end of the co-operative search engine censorship agreement, Google has come out swinging. It decided to do more than put its hand up and complain. It decided to throw a swinging, stinging counter-punch.

That means the Chinese must react — to simply accept Google's smack on the bottom would be an enormous loss of face.

Google is playing hardball on this one, and the world awaits Beijing's reaction. But none more than a billion growingly affluent and cosmopolitan Chinese citizens who have hopes for a better world.
The New York Times

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Asia, China, Politics, Technology

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China's birthday party

September 29th 2009 23:13

The art of propaganda. Translation: 'Make art and propaganda one integrated part of the revolutionary mechanism. Use it as a powerful weapon to organise people, educate people, strike the enemy and eliminate the enemy!'

We would like to wish China's Communist Party a happy birthday. But we won't.

It is 60 years tomorrow since the party was formed, and if it has been in power ever since, it is largely because it has tended to delete rather than debate opposing ideas.

There are, of course, many positives. When Mao Tse Tung proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1, 1949, he began a transformation from a poor, strife-torn country, control of which was being raffled by international powers, to an economic juggernaut. Along the way, the population grew from 368 million to 1.4 billion.

Along the way, also, Mao and his party rewrote the style guide to totalitarianism. Say one thing, do another, and don't let anyone else have a say unless they agree with you, in which case they should sing your praises loudly.

Along the way, also, we had seemingly endless five-year plans; we had a Great Leap Forward which was a great leap backwards; we had a Cultural Revolution which was a brutal leap backwards; we saw in 1971 little, inoffensive Taiwan evicted from the UN in favour of big, offensive China, a nasty act of political pragmatism which was cemented a year later by a meeting of non-minds when Richard Nixon stepped into Beijing; and we saw time called on the world's most vibrant harbour city, which Britain had quietly borrowed for 156 years.

The celebrations this week in China will be long and vigorous and stage-managed. No-one will quite believe the speeches and their long lists of Chinese Communist Party achievements. But they will smile and nod, and hope they are being seen doing so.

Happy birthday China, they'll say, and look like they mean it. Except in Tibet and Mongolia and Xinjiang and ...

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: China, On this day ..., Politics

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Chinese embassy bombing

May 18th 1999 09:54

I lived in Hong Kong for 16 years until 2007. In 1998 and 1999 I wrote a series of political and social commentaries for a quirky institutional newsletter - quirky in that it was intended to be as much contentious, offbeat and humorous as it was informative. I was working as an editor, and I wrote the articles under the pseudonym Red Inque. I post them here for anyone interested in a look at life in Asia at the time, and in Hong Kong just after its return to Chinese sovereignty.

Major cities in China have seen their biggest and angriest demonstrations for years in response to the destruction by Nato bombs of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade with the loss of four lives. Hundreds of students chanting anti-American and anti-Nato slogans marched in Shanghai, Chengdu and Guanghzou. In Beijing about 100,000 people invaded the embassy district, massing on streets littered with rocks and broken bottles from earlier protests. -- British Broadcasting Corporation, May 9, 1999

After two days of varied official accounts, the least credible explanation for Friday night's NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade is that it was a pure accident. On Sunday, a US official in Washington told news agencies that the CIA had simply supplied inaccurate information, wrongly identifying the embassy as a Yugoslav weapons warehouse. It was the fourth version of events produced within several hours. -- www.wsws.org, May 10, 1999

Chinese protests Belgrade embassy bombing

A personal message for President Clinton in 1999 after the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade resulted in four dead

Picture: BBC

A few sage words for President Pickle

US President Bill Clinton called a top secret meeting in the White House steam room late last week where he told the assembled interns that he was gravely concerned at the recent lack of commentary from Red Inque.

Sorry about that, Bill. We’ve been very busy crying over the rise and rise of the stock market, which we missed, but we will now turn our attention to international affairs.

The leader of the world’s most powerful nation has got himself into a pickle. Again. Although it is not clear at this stage whether public opinion rates a mention in Oval Office dialogue, we would point out that just about nobody any longer has a good word to say about American cartography.

We’re sorry to have to break this to you, Bill, but the people here in China are pretty upset with you. Some of them weren’t quite convinced by your explanation, and pictures of you writing a letter of apology didn’t really compete with pictures of the Chinese embassy dead arriving back home.

Meanwhile, you‘ve thrown the worms amongst Pandora’s pigeons when it comes to China’s entry to the WTO. It’s almost funny really – there are powerful factions within China lobbying both for and against WTO membership, and America’s double-bogey bombing has given both of them ammunition, so to speak. The conservatives in Beijing have become increasingly strident in their claims that China is selling its interests short in pushing for early WTO entry. Their outbursts are more often than not directed at Moftec, the senior government trade organisation which has overall responsibility for WTO negotiations. It was perhaps therefore not surprising that Moftec was amongst the first to get stuck into Nato, scoring some patriotic brownie points and thereby easing the pressure of criticism.

We see you nodding. They might be burning your picture, Bill, but as a fellow professional we’re sure you respect a nifty bit of political dualism.

Try not to feel too guilty, but another consequence of your crappy mappies is that people around here are suddenly very nervous about China stocks. The biggest concern is the myriad companies which will receive no direct benefits from WTO entry but whose prices have risen recently on generally bullish WTO trading sentiment.

We are telling people, however, that these should not be confused with major players whose current share prices are well justified by their fundamentals, about which we remain positive and which represent good buying value on current weakness. These stocks include COSCO Pacific, China Merchants, Shanghai Industrial, Beijing Enterprises, Zhejiang Expressway and Shenzhen Expressway.

We suggest you target some of these, Bill. You can’t miss.

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Asia, China, History, Asia 1998-99, Politics

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