This is the first time in the prize’s 32-year history that the ceremony will take place in China.

“We have held ceremonies in fourteen different countries, in venues ranging from the White House in Washington DC to Todai-ji Temple in Nara, Japan. The tradition of moving the event to world sites of architectural significance was established to emphasize that the prize is international, the laureates having been chosen from 16 different nations to date,” said Pritzker.

The Foundation has yet to disclose the recipient as well as what building the ceremony will be held in, but says it will most likely be a place of historical significance.

Read more about the Pritzker Prize.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: bad debt, credit crisis, information leak, wenzhou, Wikileaks
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At a news conference Monday in Beijing, prosecutors said the two men had profited by sharing confidential data, from the country’s economic growth rate to retail sales and inflation numbers.

The government said the leaks had allowed people in the securities industry to engage in a form of insider trading in Chinese stocks because they had had an unfair advantage over others in the market. But Chinese economic data could also have an effect on prices of stocks in Hong Kong and overseas markets.

Li Zhongcheng, a deputy director in the state prosecutor’s office, said at the news conference in Beijing that the leaks “disrupt fair market competition, affect the government’s credibility and cause huge losses to the interest of the country, society and the people.”

China has struggled to keep a lid on key data and protect the credibility of its stock market for years, and this summer it began to accelerate the reporting of statistics in an effort to reduce leaks. Today’s punishments represent the toughest action yet and, hopefully, a clear deterrent against future disclosures of secret information. From Bloomberg:

“It’s like killing the chicken to scare the monkeys,” he said, using a Chinese idiom. “It’s also aimed at those who dig for information and manipulate the stock market.”

The consumer-price index figure was accurately circulated in the market or in the press before the official release for at least five of the six months through April this year.

Such early disclosure has helped move markets in the world’s second-biggest economy.

After rumors circulated on the Internet in February that inflation for the previous month would be a lower-than-forecast 4.9 percent, China’s benchmark Shanghai Composite Index rose 2.5 percent, the most in two months, on speculation China wouldn’t need to raise interest rates further to cool rising prices. After the statistics bureau’s official release a day later, which matched the number, the market ended almost unchanged.

See also previous CDT coverage of Chinese state secrets, including the compromised confidentiality of its nuclear power industry and the detainment of a journalist for exposing the cover-up of a crime by local officials.

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Post tags: economic data, information leak, state secrets, stock market
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A standard, even boring, piece of Chinese military propaganda screened in mid-July included what must have been an unintended but nevertheless damaging revelation: shots from a computer screen showing a Chinese military university is engaged in cyberwarfare against entities in the United States.

The screenshots appear as B-roll footage in the documentary for six seconds—between 11:04 and 11:10 minutes—showing custom-built Chinese software apparently launching a cyber-attack against the main website of the Falun Gong spiritual practice, by using a compromised IP address belonging to a United States university. As of Aug. 22 at 1:30pm EDT, in addition to Youtube, the whole documentary is available on the CCTV website.

The documentary itself was otherwise meant as praise to the wisdom and judgment of Chinese military strategists, and a typical condemnation of the United States as an implacable aggressor in the cyber-realm. But the fleeting shots of an apparent China-based cyber-attack somehow made their way into the final cut.

Update: See also a Wall Street Journal report:

The brief footage—the relevant segment runs no more than 10 seconds—didn’t attract much domestic or international attention when it was first screened last month as part of a 20-minute report on cybersecurity broadcast on CCTV-7, which covers military affairs.

But it was highlighted Wednesday in a report published by Dr. Erickson, an associate professor at the U.S. Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute, and Mr. Collins, a commodities and security specialist focusing on Russia and China.

The footage, which could still be seen on CCTV’s website as of late Wednesday, features Senior Col. Du Wenlong, a researcher at the Chinese army’s Academy of Military Sciences, giving a detailed analysis of cybersecurity issues around the world.

At one point, as a narrator discusses various forms of cyberattack, a cursor is shown moving on a computer screen with a software application that is identified in Chinese characters as a “distributed denial-of-service” attack. Also known as DDOS, such attacks are relatively unsophisticated tools of cyberwarfare that involve bombarding websites with data to disable them.

The next screen says at the top, in Chinese, “Attack system..PLA Electronic Engineering Institute.” PLA stands for People’s Liberation Army.

© alicebirney for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: cyberwar, Falun Gong, information leak
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”In particular, crackdowns must be imposed on any aggression directed against the party and its leaders as well as against the promotion of other political systems and a free press.” Such is the essential message in an official and classified document from the Chinese Central Committee leaked to the Danish daily

On the first page of the document, it is stated that its contents has been approved by the Central Committee and sent out for implementation. The document is one of a number of papers leaked from the top Chinese echelon that directly contradict public statements by Chinese leaders. Among other things, the regime has insisted that it does not exercise any censorship. However, the official document outlines several instances of how the Chinese authorities should prevent people from getting in touch with ”politically sensitive information”. Such information must be either ”blocked”, ”destroyed” or ”cleansed” from the Internet, media and books, the order from the Central Committee to the lower levels of the state apparatus makes clear.

The document, which is the dated from the beginning of March, has been communicated to ”all provincial governments” and ”all headquarters of the People’s Liberation Army” with the message that they must ”work hard together in order to diligently execute the policy” that ”comrades in the Central Committee and leaders of the State Council have agreed upon”.

[...] The classified documents reveal that the Chinese government plays a double game with a large and growing gap between the self-portrait regime that Beijing itself wishes to project to outside world and the way it actually intends to rule. The communist regime’s propaganda apparatus is instructed to introduce China to other countries as peaceful, increasingly democratic and open to the outside world. But behind the facade, its grip on Chinese people and society should be tightened to new levels of harshness.

”Although it is no secret that there is an extensive censorship going on in China, the government denies that it is taking place, These documents undermine this denial by virtue of the the government’s own words,” says media analyst at Hong Kong University David Bandurski.

Update: On Twitter, Bandurski claims that the article misrepresented his views, and that he was never actually shown the documents in question.

[They] Shared paraphrases with me which I said sounded completely run-of-the-mill, so they’ve overplayed … →

Danish report totally out of context. David Bandurski doesn’t “believe they can be seen” as anything. I didn’t comment on THESE reports. →

On Dan. rep. I was asked to comment on such reports on censorship generally, without knowing what the reporter had in hand. I stressed that. →

Fond of all you journos, but a certain misleading Danish report might have me taping my own interviews from now on. →

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: censorship documents, central committee, information leak, Internet censorship, propaganda
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The report says that two worries dominated the secret meeting: one was the matter of how archives can be kept secure. What would happen, the officials wondered, if they were raided during “social disturbances” such as the recent riots in Guangzhou protesting the central government’s effort to end Cantonese-language broadcasts in Cantonese-speaking areas. (The number of such “disturbances” has grown steadily in recent years, to more than 230,000 in 2009.) Should emergency incineration equipment be supplied at all archive sites, just in case? What if archive staff realize that they can sell things for profit? Should the staff be paid more, to buy their loyalty?

The second major worry was the growing problem of retired party officials writing unauthorized memoirs. Recent examples of this genre include Zhao Ziyang’s 2009 memoir and the “June Fourth Diary” of Li Peng, the Chinese premier at the time of the Tiananmen Square protests. (Li’s diary was refused publication in China, leaked to Hong Kong, published there, and then leaked back to the mainland on the Web. Bloggers on the whole have excoriated Li, who doesn’t appear to have been involved in the Web publication, because his motive from the beginning was probably not to try to win public opinion but to show for history that Deng, not he, ordered the Tiananmen Square killings.) General Yang Baibing, perhaps still smarting from his purge in 1992, reportedly has penned memoirs as well, as has Tian Jiyun, a former politburo member and long-time critic of his hard-liner colleagues. Altogether, an unnamed “54 high-level officials” have requested to see archives for the purpose of writing memoirs, and many of these people are believed to be preparing two versions—one to submit for official approval and the other to keep separately.

Against this background, the Wikileaks story, which broke the day after the boxun leak, took on a special significance. In emails, tweets, and web postings, Chinese bloggers, both inside China and overseas, began listing key episodes in recent Chinese history that have remained shrouded in mystery and for which they would love to see archives opened.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: archives, CCP history, information leak, transparency, Wikileaks
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A criminal complaint unsealed in federal court in Virginia accuses James Fondren Jr. of conspiring to relay classified information to a foreign agent.

Authorities say Fondren was involved for years in what spy-hunters call a “false flag” operation — believing he was feeding information to one government, when in fact his handler was working for another country.

Court papers charge that Fondren, 62, provided information to a friend named Tai Shen Kuo, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Taiwan who lived primarily in Louisiana.

FBI investigators say that unbeknownst to Fondren, Kuo was taking orders from the Chinese government. Officials say Fondren believed the information was being sent to Taiwan.

© Paulina Hartono for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: information leak, pentagon
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Officials and scholars who had been convened last month to advise senior Chinese leaders disagreed sharply on how to advance economic and legal reforms, according to minutes of the private meeting that have been leaked on the Internet. They also expressed anxiety about what one official called “unprecedented controversy and dissent” among China’s elite.

The minutes offered a revealing glimpse into the policy debate among influential people who are considered core supporters of the Communist Party’s market-oriented economic reforms.

Many attendees emphasized that they were alarmed by the resurgence of socialist thinkers critical of the lurch toward capitalism. Some said the governing party would face growing social and political instability unless it established genuine rule of law.

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2006. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: information leak, party politics, political reform
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