China Digital Times

SECTION: Sci-Tech

• China Says 1,041 Infants Still Hospitalized with Tainted Milk Problems

  

  Chinese babies are still suffering in the hospital from tainted milk. Xinhua reports:

  The Ministry of Health said on Thursday that 1,041 infants around China were still receiving hospital treatment for kidney damage caused by tainted powdered milk.

  One was in serious condition, the ministry said.

  [...] Another 50,741 infants have recovered and been discharged since mid-September, when a scandal erupted over milk containing a chemical, melamine.

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  • November 20, 2008 1:17 PM

• China’s Hackers Stealing US Defence Secrets, Says Congressional Panel

  

  Owen Bowcott reports in the Guardian:

  China is stealing sensitive information from American computer networks and stepping up its online espionage, according to a US congressional panel.

  Beijing’s investment in rocket technology is also accelerating the militarisation of outer space and lifting it into the “commanding heights” of modern warfare, the advisory group claims. The strident warning, which may have a chilling effect on relations between the two Pacific powers, comes in the annual report of the US-China economic and security review commission due today.

  A summary of the study, released in advance, alleges that networks and databases used by the US government and American defence contractors are regularly targeted by Chinese hackers. “China is stealing vast amounts of sensitive information from US computer networks,” says Larry Wortzel, chairman of the commission set up by Congress in 2000 to investigate US-China issues.

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  • November 20, 2008 11:39 AM

• China Hints at Aircraft Carrier Project

  

  The Financial Times reports that China may have plans to build an aircraft carrier:

  The comments from Major General Qian Lihua, director of the ministry’s Foreign Affairs Office, come amid heated speculation within China and abroad that the increasingly potent naval arm of the People’s Liberation Army has decided to develop and deploy its first aircraft carrier. Traditionally, a carrier would accompany and protect a battle group of smaller ships.

  The Pentagon said this year that China was actively engaged in aircraft carrier research and would be able to start building one by the end of this decade, while Jane’s Defence Weekly reported last month that the PLA was training 50 students to become naval pilots capable of operating fixed-wing aircraft from such a ship.

  Maj Gen Qian declined to comment directly on whether China had decided to build a carrier, but in the defence ministry’s most forthright statement yet on the issue he made clear that China had every right to do so.

  “The navy of any great power . . . has the dream to have one or more aircraft carriers,” he said in the interview, which aides said was the first arranged by the defence ministry on its own premises. “The question is not whether you have an aircraft carrier, but what you do with your aircraft carrier.”

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  • November 17, 2008 9:53 PM

• US Man Admits Illegal Space Data Exports to China

  

  U.S. citizen Shu Quan-Sheng has entered a guilty plea in the case charging him with selling rocket technology to China in violation of U.S. law. Reuters reports:

  Shu admitted that from 2003 through October of 2007 he violated the U.S. arms export control law by providing China with assistance in the design and development of a cryogenic fueling system for space launch vehicles.

  He admitted that in 2003 he violated the same law by exporting to China military technical data from a document about designing and making a liquid hydrogen tank and various pumps, valves, filters and instruments.

  Shu also pleaded guilty to offering bribes of nearly $190,000 to Chinese government officials to win the award last year of a $4 million contract for a hydrogen liquefier project for a French company Shu represented, the department said.

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  • November 17, 2008 7:28 PM

• Baidu’s Search Methodology Controversy Gets Heated Up as CCTV Steps In. (Updated with Videos)

  

  When the Sanlu scandal was first revealed two months ago, it was rumored that China’s search engine giant, Baidu accepted 3 million RMB from Sanlu to block out search results that consist negative images of the notorious milk company. Since then, Baidu has become a target of online criticisms. Recently, a sales plan leaked from the inside validifies the claim that Baidu does try to manipulate and censor search results for commercial purposes.  The company is now also facing an anti-monopoly lawsuit from Qmyyw.com, a website established by a Hebei medicine company.

  Originally published in tianya, a post reveals two screenshots of a sales plan ppt that Baidu offers to some car company. The screenshots show that Baidu provides value-added services that offer PR protections such as deletion of negative news, blockout of search links, and manipulation of topics in Baidu tieba (Baidu Post Bar).

  The original ppt can be founded here (part1) and here (part 2).

  Also from StreetInsider.com,

  Baidu.com (Nasdaq: BIDU) will face a RMB174.4 million lawsuit for manipulating its search results for medical information site www.qmyyw.com.

  Qmyyw.com’s suit claims that Baidu search results now exclude Qmyyw.com’s content following the company’s reduction in its payment for Baidu’s bid ranking service. Citing reports from the Southern Metropolis Weekly, the rumor points out that Qmyyw.com purchased a number 3 spot on Baidu’s site for RM89,000 in March, but after the site lowered its payment in July, its visits fell from over 88,000 hits to 18,340 hits in just a month.

  Baidu has now claimed that its “search results are not influenced by its bid ranking service”.

  The “ranking bid” search methodology has long been controversial.  According to Jiefang Daily (in Chinese), the Hebei provincial government once offered 5600 RMB “bidding fee” to Baidu to put the government website on the top of the search results page that comes out the keyword “zhengfu wangzhan (government website).” However, because netizens then started to criticize the credibility of the government website, the deal was eventually cancelled. Ranking bids are very common in Chinese search engines. As a result, the credibility of search results is highly challenged. According to Beijing Morning Post (in Chinese), a netizen complains that when she searches the keyword “Diabetes mellitus” in a Chinese search engine, two of the ten results on the first page link to websites selling fake drugs.

  Online Marketing in China. SEO. also has this earlier detailed analysis of how baidu’s paid search program differs from Google’s.

  1. The paid search and the organic results are not clearly divided. You will only notice the difference by the small gray underlined term next to the displayed URL. 推广 means it is paid search, 百度快照 means organic search result.

  2. All paid search results will be placed before the organic search results. That means, if 20 customers buy the same keyword, the first organic search result will be found on page three. The price is based on a bidding process. Not only the CPC but quality factors like landing page evaluation will influence the position as well.

  3. The ads in the right column are no CPC-based ads. They are fix-priced for one whole year. Position no. 1 to no.3 have the same price and rotate among each other. Position no. 4 to no.10 are cheaper than no.1 to no.3 and rotate as well. If the position is already booked, you have to reserve and wait respectively until it will become free. There is no possibility to get out of the contract before this one year ends.

  4. Once a while you might notice one or two ads with a blue banner on position one and/or two. It looks similar to Google’s blue banner, but in fact it has a totally different meaning: if you search for a keyword and there are no paid results for that keyword because no advertiser has booked it, Baidu will display ads that are similar to the keyword you entered. Example: you enter ‘keyword advertising’ but there are no paid results, so baidu will show two ads for the keyword ‘advertising’ with a blue background.

  The story is getting more interesting as CCTV just covered Baidu’s “ranking bid” methodology in its two recent “News 30 Minutes” programs.  In the first day’s program, CCTV covered how fake drug websites put their links on the top of corresponding Baidu search results pages through “bidding.”  In the second day’s program, CCTV’s reporter interviewed two selling representatives inside the company. A few points are worth mentioning.

  1. The more a website wishes to pay, the higher its ranking will be shown on Baidu’s search results pages. A typical bid for the keyword “性病 (venereal disease)” is 16.56 RMB per click to put a fake drug website No.5 on the search results ranking list.

  2. Baidu does not censor the credibility of its bidders seriously. A sales representative admits that in a case where a medicine company does not have a license for its drug product,  after the company photoshoped a fake license, its website then easily passed Baidu’s censorship.

  3. Baidu blocks out those websites who decline to apply for the “ranking bid” service.  Qmyyw.com would be a typical example.

  4. Baidu claims to cover 95% of Chinese netizens, and 80% of its revenue come from “ranking bids.”

  Comments translated from the blog of 郭建龙 Guo Jianlong, the reporter who first started the whole investigation of Baidu’s “ranking bid” methodology:

  Even though Baidu is being accused of the suspicion of monopoly, I still want to propose a question: which powerful state-owned corporation isn’t using its monopoly to exploit the living of our ordinary people?  However, our media’s circumstance is too bad; there is completely no freedom to say.  Who dares to say bad things about the government? Who dares to touch dragon’s squama?  Who dares to question those state-owned monopolies? You need to know that if you don’t handle your question well, you’ll be severely punished.  Caijing shibao (Financial Times) got shut down only because of one article on ABC. Just under such circumstance, media becomes to bully the weak and fear the strong. Since it does not dare to touch state-owned corporations, then it finds an easy target and puts all its criticisms toward Baidu. In fact, Baidu is far better then those corporations. Think about the time when China Mobile punished those service providers; who dares to fart? Take another recall that when the government proposed the 4 trillion stimulus, besides saying good, who dares to provide counterviews? With regard to anti-governmental monopolies, what our media basically do is: when the government leaves us a shit and says “eat it,” media then starts to discuss whether to fry it to eat or stir-fry it to eat; but noboday dares to discuss why and for what to eat.

  From my point of view, Baidu is far better than CCTV. Therefore, after CCTV, such a dirty monopoly, also participates to attack Baidu, I decide to temporarly give up.  By the way, just to add one more ingredient, CCTV’s report actually uses the same cases I used in my early articles, especially that dirty hospital case. Are they not even willing to find a case by their own?

  Who made Baidu’s blockout an advantage? In the first place when Google propagated to do no evil and refused to block out searches of prohibited keywords, the result was that Google got blocked out. Baidu said: “we submit; we, from the technological perspective, promise to not let what the government dislikes appear.” Then, it got favoured.  However, as the technology now becomes mature, if they can block out what the government dislikes, surely they can also block out what those other companies dislike. It is just that government at that time who fosters today’s controversy. Now, it shouts and says no to Baidu. It is like what is said in the Chengyu “the success or failure of the affair is all due to Xiao He” and just appears ridiculous to me.

  Also, one interesting piece of humor translated from cnBeta:

  the reporter: “the more I wish to pay, the higher my ranking will be?”

  Baidu: “yes!”

  the reporter: “I’m from CCTV!”

  Baidu: “no problem, as long as you pay more than Hunantv does.”

  (Hunantv, 湖南卫视, is a local satellite TV station in Hunan province, who has placed serious challenge to CCTV’s popularity in recent years.)

  For more on China’s search engine market, please see the CDT tag “search engines.”

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  • November 16, 2008 11:12 PM

• 4th Annual Blogger Conference in Guangzhou

  

  The fourth annual Chinese Bloggers Conference is now being held in Guangzhou, and is being well-documented in real time. Follow these links to read more:
  - Live blogging the conference on CNReviews
  - The official conference blog (in Chinese)
  - The conference Twitterfeed and Friendfeed
  - Conference coverage on tech.163.com (in Chinese)
  - flickr photos tagged with cnbloggercon
  - Other blog posts on the conference, in English and Chinese

  - Read coverage of the conference in 2005, 2006, and 2007 via CDT.

  The following video is taken during conference preparations.

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  • November 16, 2008 11:00 PM

• US Issues Alert Over Chinese Melamine

  

  The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has issued an alert after discovering melamine and cyanuric acid in Chinese food imports:

  The new alert from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) covers a range of Chinese products including drinks, sweets, baby and pet food.

  It also allows US inspectors to seize any Chinese products suspected of being contaminated.

  Any food items from China that contain milk will be stopped at the border and tested by U.S. authorities:

  Companies in the United States have recalled several products, including nondairy creamer and a type of candy, which are primarily sold in Asian markets, because of melamine concerns but to date the contamination here was not thought to be widespread.

  “We’re taking this action because it’s the right thing to do for the public health,” said Steven Solomon, an FDA deputy associate commissioner…

  The FDA routinely blocks imports of individual food products, but it is rare for the agency to block an entire category of foods from a particular country. Last year, the FDA blocked five types of farm-raised seafood as well as vegetable protein from China because of repeated instances of contamination from unapproved animal drugs and food additives.

  The Chinese government is still trying to repair domestic and international faith in Chinese food products.  Earlier this month, two milk inspectors for Mengniu, one of China’s largest dairy companies, were badly beaten during a safety check at one of their supplier’s:

  “According to an initial analysis, this incident was triggered by (Li’s) [the inspector's] decision that this truck’s milk was not in compliance,” it quoted an unnamed Mengniu official as saying.

  Li and another inspector, Zhang Liwei, were set on by a group of about five club-wielding men as they left work later that day.  Li was badly beaten, suffering numerous injuries over his body, including fractured vertebra, and was in a coma for “a long time”, [the China Youth Daily] said, without specifying Li’s current condition.  Neither victim could identify the milk supplier nor the attackers as both inspectors had only recently been rotated to Tangshan.

  Police were investigating, the paper said.

  An op-ed in the International Herald Tribune looks at China’s melamine crisis from the perspective of American agriculture:

  For all the outrage about Chinese melamine, what American consumers and government agencies have studiously failed to scrutinize is the place of melamine in America’s own food system. In casting stones, we’ve forgotten that our house has its own exposed glass.

  To be sure, in China some food manufacturers deliberately added melamine to products to increase profits. Makers of baby formula, for example, watered down their product, lowering the amount of protein and nutrients, then added melamine, which is cheap and fools tests measuring protein levels.

  But melamine is also integral to the material life of any industrialized society. It’s a common ingredient in cleaning products, waterproof plywood, plastic compounds, cement, ink and fire-retardant paint. Chemical plants throughout the United States produce millions of pounds of melamine a year.

  See past CDT posts for more information on the Sanlu milk scandal.

  [Image courtesy of the BBC.]

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  • November 16, 2008 9:13 PM

• “Guilt by Blog” And The Trouble With China’s Universities

  

  There is a new phrase circulating in China’s internet taken from China’s past to describe the repression of freedom of speech. China Media Project’s Emma Lupano reports:

  As the internet has grown rapidly in China in recent years, there has been an attendant upsurge in cases where ordinary citizens (公民), or “netizens” (网民), are arrested, jailed or otherwise punished for things they dared to write. The latest case to have Web users up in arms involves the alleged sacking of a substitute professor at Hubei University for Nationalities after the teacher wrote an entry on his personal weblog criticizing the school’s anniversary celebrations.

  The case, involving 50 year-old teacher Guo Guanglin (郭广林), has drawn a flurry of coverage in the commercial media over the last week, and it has once again resurrected that age-old term denoting the violent repression of speech — “to incur guilt by one’s words,” or wenziyu (文字狱).

  “To incur guilt by one’s words” is now an increasingly popular buzzword denoting official action taken against ordinary citizens who speak their minds in spaces — like blogs, chatrooms and SMS messages — where the line between the personal and the public is blurred. But the term can also be used to point generally to more egregious examples of censorship.

  A related and more direct phrase in Chinese is “incurring guilt by one’s words,” or yin yan huo zui (因言获罪).

  Read more about how netizens create their own language in the face of online censorship and netizens’ voices on CDT.

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  • November 16, 2008 3:31 AM

• China: Too Much Time Online? You’ve Got Psychosis.

  

  On a update of an earlier post on CDT, China has become the first country to list internet addiction as a mental disorder as stated by the Ministry of Health. According to one of the definitions in a manual by Chinese psychologists, anyone who spends over 6 hours on the computer with a mouse has the disorder, and a guideline is expected to head to hospitals soon. Global Voices Online reports:

  Symptoms of net addiction, as the manual introduces, include impulsive use of internet, irritation and unreasonable distress when offline, and the failure to concentrate.

  According to the leading expert Dr. Tao in the country’s first addiction treatment center, among the 253 million netizens in China, about 10% have been inflicted by the addiction, most of them male, aged from 18 to 30. His research on 3000 patients shows they might have strong psychological dependence on internet, which undermine their normal social activities and daily life. He points out that online games which now totally take up over 4800 million users in China, such as World of Warcraft, are a great problem that they weaken users’ ability to distinguish virtual world from the real.

  Also, internet may contribute to crime rate. 76% of juvenile offenses in the capital city of Beijing are related to the Internet, said Dr Tao.

  A selection of netizens’ responses can also be read on the report. This isn’t the first time that China has placed restrictions of online culture, such as crackdowns at internet cafes or deeming gaming a danger.

  The Telegraph reports on what the new treatment might entail, which Dr. Tao state will cure 80% of addicts in three months:

  Tao Ran, an expert at Beijing’s Military General Hospital, which drew up the diagnosis, said special psychiatric units in Chinese hospitals would be designated to treat addicts.

  The popularity of online gaming in Asia has led to the creation of enormous salons in which hundreds of users play games for several days in a row.

  China’s government has already tried to limit this practice by forcing each user to register their full name and identification number and by building software into the games which kicks players off after five hours.

  Gao Wenbin, a researcher with the psychology institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said Chinese youths were finding refuge online from the pressures of being only children. “Most children in China are the only ones in their families. They are told only to study hard, but no one really cares about their needs,” he said.

  See also CDT’s stories on China’s internet censorship and other forms of Internet control.

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  • November 16, 2008 12:38 AM

• Deaths Uncounted in China’s Tainted Milk Scandal

  

  AP tells the story of a nine-month-old baby who died after drinking tainted formula, yet is not included in official statistics of infant deaths from contaminated milk products, raising questions about how many other babies may have been killed:

  The stories of these uncounted babies suggest that China’s tainted milk scandal has exacted a higher human toll than the government has so far acknowledged. Without an official verdict on the deaths, families worry they will be unable to bring lawsuits and refused compensation.

  So far, nobody is suggesting large numbers of deaths are being concealed. But so many months passed before the scandal was exposed that it’s likely more babies fell sick or died than official figures reflect.

  Beijing’s apparent reluctance to admit a higher toll is reinforcing perceptions that the authoritarian government cares more about tamping down criticism than helping families. Lawyers, doctors and reporters have said privately that authorities pressured them to not play up the human cost or efforts to get compensation from the government or Sanlu, the formula maker.

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  • November 15, 2008 4:57 PM

• Is the Chinese Academy of Science the Culprit of the Melamine Poisoning?

  

  From the China’s Scientific & Academic Integrity Watch blog:

  The crisis of tainted food is still spreading deeper and wider in China. Melamine contamination is now found in milk, dairy products, candies, and chicken eggs. It has now become apparent that, for many years, the chemical melamine has been added to animal feed and milk to artificially inflate the reading of protein levels. This intentional act is responsible for the pet food scare a year and half ago and has now caused four infant deaths and thousands of children in hospitals suffering from kidney stones and other illnesses.

  Although the addition of melamine has been a wide-known secret in China, nobody really know how it got started. About a month ago, a netter posted in XYS an advertisement of technology transfer, dated July 30, 1999, from the Chinese Academy of Science. The ad promotes a new, cheap, and easy-to-make additive for animal feed that would boost the nitrogen content of the feed. It had a simple description of the raw materials (industrial organic chemicals and fertilizers) and equipments (boilers, mixers, and driers) involved and a price for the expertise and training. It did not, however, disclose the name or content of the additive.

  See also a previous CDT post: “Greed, Science, and Melamine,” from an Asia Times article.

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  • November 15, 2008 1:22 PM

• China’s Journey to the Dark Ages

  

  An new report from the United Nations Environment Programme gives an alarming picture of the effects of air pollution in China and South Asia. In China alone, air pollution has caused $82 billion in economic losses, the report says. From the Globe and Mail:

  The study says the toxic clouds - more than three kilometres thick - are contributing to a huge range of dangerous effects: extreme weather; damage to crops; melting of glaciers; the dimming of big cities; shifts in rainfall; massive economic losses; higher food prices; and a growing number of human deaths from respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.

  Up to 25 per cent of the sunlight has disappeared in Chinese cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, India’s New Delhi and Karachi, Pakistan, the study concluded. In India, the dimming of cities has more than doubled since 1980, it said.

  [...] Achim Steiner, the UNEP executive director, said he expects the phenomenon of toxic brown clouds to be “firmly on the international community’s radar” as a result of the latest study, which was released yesterday. The clouds need “urgent and detailed research,” he said.

  Read the full UNEP report here.

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  • November 14, 2008 11:27 AM

• Greed, Mad Science and Melamine

  

  Scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences have been linked to the use of melamine to boost protein content in food, according to this report from Asia Times:

  The trail of greed and negligence that allowed melamine - a toxic industrial chemical - to slip from modified animal fodder into the human food chain has now led to some of China’s top scientists - many of whom are widely regarded to have put personal profit over the public safety of billions.

  Recent reports have found that China’s top scientific research body - the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) - “discovered” as early as 1999 that adding melamine to food could boost its protein levels. In turn, the reports allege that rogue biologists cashed in on their chemical invention by promoting the sale of products containing melamine - even charging for training in how to use them - for years.

  As a result, China’s high-profile nationwide campaign to boost science and scientific research is being reconsidered with an eye to social responsibility, and the possible “economic adulteration” of all Chinese products.

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  • November 13, 2008 3:39 PM

• Under a Sooty Exterior, A Green China Emerges

  

  An analysis in Environment 360, a publication of Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, gives an optimistic picture of China’s environmental record and efforts to go green:

  So China is not responsible for where we are today on climate change. And I doubt that either its cumulative or its its per-capita emissions will ever approach those of the U.S. Why? Because, believe it or not, China is going green.

  We hear a lot about China building a new coal-fired power station every week. I checked the stats. It’s worse. It has recently been building two new 1000-megawatt plants each week. But last year, China also built more wind turbines than any other country. And its biogas and solar power industries are also growing fast.

  China’s green credentials are surprisingly good in many respects. China has long led the world in aquaculture. By raising most of its fish in artificial ponds it has done a huge good turn for the world’s ocean fisheries.

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  • November 13, 2008 11:18 AM

• Electronic Waste Processing Puts Chinese Children’s Health at Risk

  

  E-waste in China has been getting more attention in the Western media, with a report on last week’s 60 Minutes program. Chemistry World magazine also reports on new findings on elevated levels of lead and miscarriages in Guiyu, the country’s major e-waste processing center:

  Speaking at the annual meeting of the China Association for Science and Technology (CAST), Huo Xia, a professor of public health at Guangdong province-based Shantou University, said that, in 2006, there were twice as many children in Guiyu with dangerously high levels of lead (above 100 micrograms per litre) and cadmium (above 20 micrograms per litre) in their blood than in the control group, composed of children from Chendian, a town near the coastal city of Xiamen in Fujian Province [1].

  ‘The blood lead levels and blood cadmium levels in samples [from 289 newborns and 472 children in Guiyu] accumulated in 2004, 2006 and 2008 are also much higher than the control groups and national average levels,’ Huo said at the meeting, which was held between 17 and 19 September in Zhengzhou, Henan Province.

  According to her unpublished figures, the rates of premature births and miscarriages in Guiyu between 2003 and 2007 were much higher than in control groups.

  Watch the 60 Minutes report here:
  

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  • November 12, 2008 10:13 PM