When Chao Liu enlisted in the People’s Liberation Army in the dying years of China’s Cultural Revolution, he never imagined he would end up in Cyprus wearing a blue U.N. beret.

[…] “When I was at the military academy, we were told we would never do U.N. peacekeeping,” he told Reuters in his office at a largely abandoned former British aerodrome in the buffer zone.

“But the changes of the 1970s and 1980s opened up new opportunities. Being involved in peacekeeping allows us to learn from the outside world and also to show the outside world who the PLA are.”

[…] “People in uniform are similar but the system is quite different,” Liu says. “What I’ve learned in this mission is that every decision is based on discussion. In China, it is quite different … You just make a decision and you don’t expect to discuss it.”

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Post tags: peacekeepers, peacekeeping, People's Liberation Army, PLA, U.N., U.N. peacekeepers, United Nations
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The officials, including “flag officers” — those at the rank of admiral — told Kyodo it was an “emergency decision”, not a planned action, and was taken by the commander of the frigate, the report said.

[…] The Chinese officials told Kyodo that on January 30 the frigate and the Japanese destroyer were three kilometres (two miles) apart in international waters some 110 to 130 kilometres north of the outcrops, the report said.

The commander of the frigate directed his vessel’s weapons-targeting radar, based on the Chinese military’s rules of engagement, without seeking instructions from the fleet command or navy headquarters, Kyodo cited the Chinese officers as saying.

It was not known if the commander had been reprimanded, Kyodo said.

According to Kyodo, Japanese defense officials see the about-turn as a sign “that China is either playing mind games or is softening its stance toward Japan.” The latter interpretation would conform to recent suggestions that, from Beijing’s point of view, the Diaoyu stand-off was largely a tool to consolidate Xi Jinping’s new leadership.

Updated: China has dismissed the Kyodo report. From Zhang Yunbi at China Daily:

The Ministry of National Defense has rejected the Japanese media’s latest “hype” over the alleged naval “radar lock-on” incident and warned of a hidden agenda behind Tokyo’s recent reports.

In the latest chapter of the radar “drama”, the Tokyo-based Kyodo News Agency released an article on Sunday quoting unnamed Chinese officials who reportedly admitted to “locking radar on Japanese ships”.

Beijing previously dismissed the allegation as groundless, while the ministry denied the Kyodo report, reiterating on Monday that “the facts are clear”.

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Post tags: diaoyu islands, east china sea, Japan, Japan relations, military affairs, navy, PLA, Xi Jinping
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Peng, 50, is known for singing soaring patriotic songs in praise of the Communist Party, often while clad in glittering floor-length ball gowns and occasionally in Chinese ethnic minority costume (think Barbra Streisand in Native American garb). She was born in Shandong province, enrolled at Shandong University of Art and Design at age 14, and joined the People’s Liberation Army in 1980, at 18. In 1986 she married Xi Jinping. Her daughter, Xi Mingze, was born in 1992 and stays invisible too (she studies at Harvard under an assumed name).

[...] Fast-forward to now: the Financial Times just reported that Peng will not only accompany Xi to the BRICS summit in Durban, South Africa, this month, but will speak there. “She can help China build soft power,” said a source in the piece. Peng also became a Goodwill Ambassador for tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS—a controversial subject in China—for the World Health Organization last year and won a splashy $160,000 China Arts Award in December.

[...] Pressure is on for the CCP to burnish its image. Overly outsize stars within—or married to—the party can be reined in, but society at large is developing a celebrity culture, and that’s a threat too. More and more, people look up to leaders from business, pop culture, and the Internet. Alibaba founder Jack Ma inspires Steve Jobs–like reverence in China. Real-estate tycoon Zhang Xin is affiliated with the World Economic Forum and the Council on Foreign Relations and is becoming a thought leader. And the rabid following behind Li Yang, founder of Crazy English, is downright cultlike.

See also Is Xi’s Wife a New Kind of First Lady?, via CDT.

See more on Peng Liyuan via CDT.

© Mengyu Dong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: AIDS activism, leadership transition, Peng Liyuan, PLA, soft power, Xi Jinping
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“Hen na gaijin” raises the issue of the South China Sea. How likely is a clash over territorial disputes there or the East China Sea?

The danger is not of a strategic decision but of a mistake – a miscalculation, an error, a clash – and that danger gets larger as more vessels crowd into a confined space. Importantly, it can be said that Chinese leaders, even the more hawkish wing, do not actively seek a conflict simply because the Party’s operating principle is to control – and a conflict, by definition, has too many variables it cannot control. The Party knows that one of the few things more destabilizing than a conflict would be a conflict in which it loses.

At the Sydney Morning Herald, John Garnaut offers an explanation for Beijing’s willingness to risk such a conflict. According to sources said to be close to new president Xi Jinping, the stand-off has served as a means for Xi to consolidate his standing within the military, akin to Deng Xiaoping’s 1979 invasion of Vietnam.

“To sort the horses from the mules you need to walk them around the yard,” said the friend.

[…] A second associate of Mr Xi, a retired officer who is the son of one of the People’s Liberation Army’s top commanders, said pushing the PLA onto a war-footing – even an artificial one – was the first and most important stage in his consolidation of political power.

[…] The associates of Mr Xi say the dispute is moving into a less dangerous phase following his successful demonstration of military authority and his appointment as President on Thursday, which was the third and final of his formal leadership titles.

[…] Few believe a senior Chinese leader would deliberately trigger a war, as Deng did with Vietnam after securing a green light from Washington. But Mr Xi’s mobilisation of the military for war preparations may have served a similar purpose.

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Post tags: Deng Xiaoping, diaoyu islands, east china sea, leadership transition, People's Liberation Army, PLA, Sino-Vietnamese War, South China Sea, Xi Jinping
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The frigate, delivered in Shanghai yesterday, has stealth capabilities, will be responsible for patrol escort, and can carry out anti-submarine warfare, the PLA Daily said. Admiral Wu Shengli, a member of the Central Military Commission, attended the ceremony.

The frigate’s delivery is part of a wider military advance that’s seen China commission its first aircraft carrier and enhance its jet-fighter program. It comes after Chinese and Japanese vessels have tailed each other for months around the islands, raising tensions and straining a $340 billion trade relationship.

[…] China’s defense spending, the second highest in the world after the U.S., was set to grow 11.2 percent to 670 billion yuan ($106.4 billion) in 2012. The country will announce its 2013 figure just before the annual meeting of its legislature begins next week.

Elsewhere, the aircraft carrier Liaoning docked in its new home port of Qingdao this week, while the recent revelation that China contemplated a drone strike against wanted drug lord Naw Kham in Myanmar underlined the progress of its UAV and Beidou satellite navigation programs. Less glamorous but equally significant is the expansion of China’s sea and air military transport capacity. At Reuters, David Lague describes recent steps in this direction, and their strategic implications:

These transport workhorses are unlikely to arouse the same regional unease as the steady rollout of high performance fighters, long-range missiles or potent warships, but they are a crucial element of the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) three-decade military build-up, defense analysts say.

Over time, the air and sea support will give the world’s second-largest navy greater geographical reach and will enhance the PLA’s capacity to assist troops on distant battlefields, potentially including Taiwan if Beijing were to launch a military assault to take control of the self-governing island.

China’s state-owned shipyards last year launched two 23,000-tonne type 903 replenishment ships, according to reports and photographs published on Chinese military affairs websites and blogs, with further orders in the pipeline.

[…] China also confirmed last month that the PLA had conducted the first test flight of its Y-20 heavy lift aircraft from the Yanliang airbase near Xi’an in Shaanxi Province.

See more on the Y-20′s first flight via CDT.

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Post tags: aircraft, aircraft carriers, Central Military Commission, military expansion, military modernization, military spending, military technology, navy, PLA, planes
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When downloaded, the tainted versions would allow hackers to remotely control infected computers after users attempted to read the report which was released last week by U.S. IT security vendor, Mandiant.

A blog post by Symantec said hackers used the report as “bait”, embedding a malware called, Trojan.Pidief, into fake reports which displayed a blank PDF document when opened. Unbeknownst to users, the tainted report would trigger the exploit code for Adobe Acrobat and Reader Remote Code Execution Vulnerability.

Symantec highlighted an e-mail in Japanese purported to be from someone in the media industry which contained a PDF attachment of the fake Mandiant report.

Cybersecurity has become a wedge in Sino-U.S. relations in recent years, and lately the two sides have traded accusations of hacking. The New York Times’ David Sanger reported earlier this week that the Obama administration is more willing than ever to call out the Chinese directly over the hacking issue:

Defining “enemies” in this case is not always an easy task. China is not an outright foe of the United States, the way the Soviet Union once was; rather, China is both an economic competitor and a crucial supplier and customer. The two countries traded $425 billion in goods last year, and China remains, despite many diplomatic tensions, a critical financier of American debt. As Hillary Rodham Clinton put it to Australia’s prime minister in 2009 on her way to visit China for the first time as secretary of state, “How do you deal toughly with your banker?”

In the case of the evidence that the People’s Liberation Army is probably the force behind “Comment Crew,” the biggest of roughly 20 hacking groups that American intelligence agencies follow, the answer is that the United States is being highly circumspect. Administration officials were perfectly happy to have Mandiant, a private security firm, issue the report tracing the cyberattacks to the door of China’s cybercommand; American officials said privately that they had no problems with Mandiant’s conclusions, but they did not want to say so on the record.

…

In the next few months, American officials say, there will be many private warnings delivered by Washington to Chinese leaders, including Xi Jinping, who will soon assume China’s presidency. Both Tom Donilon, the national security adviser, and Mrs. Clinton’s successor, John Kerry, have trips to China in the offing. Those private conversations are expected to make a case that the sheer size and sophistication of the attacks over the past few years threaten to erode support for China among the country’s biggest allies in Washington, the American business community.

“America’s biggest global firms have been ballast in the relationship” with China, said Kurt M. Campbell, who recently resigned as assistant secretary of state for East Asia to start a consulting firm, the Asia Group, to manage the prickly commercial relationships. “And now they are the ones telling the Chinese that these pernicious attacks are undermining what has been built up over decades.”

Meanwhile, Ezra Klein of the Washington Post reports that Chinese hackers may be wrong to focus on the U.S. capital as much as they do:

The Chinese look at Washington, and they think there must be some document somewhere, some flowchart saved on a computer in the basement of some think tank, that lays it all out. Because in China, there would be. In China, someone would be in charge. There would be a plan somewhere. It would probably last for many years. It would be at least partially followed. But that’s not how it works in Washington.

What the Chinese hackers are looking for is the great myth of Washington, what I call the myth of scheming. You see it all over. If you’ve been watching the series “House of Cards” on Netflix, it’s all about the myth of scheming. Things happen because the Rep. Frank Underwood has planned for them to happen. And when they don’t happen, it’s because someone has counterplanned against him.

…

I almost feel bad for the Chinese hackers. Imagine the junior analysts tasked with picking through the terabytes of e-mails from every low-rent think tank in Washington, trying to figure out what matters and what doesn’t, trying to make everything fit a pattern. Imagine all the spurious connections they’re drawing, all the fundraising bluster they’re taking as fact, all the black humor they’re reading as straight description, all the mundane organizational chatter they’re reading.

They’re missing our real strength, the real reason Washington fails day-to-day but has worked over years: It’s because we don’t stick too rigidly to plans or rely on some grand design. That way, when it all falls apart, as it always does and always will, we’re okay.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Barack Obama, cyberattacks, cyberespionage, cybersecurity, hackers, hacking, Mandiant, People's Liberation Army, PLA, Washington
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[…] Mandiant has watched the group as it has stolen technology blueprints, manufacturing processes, clinical trial results, pricing documents, negotiation strategies and other proprietary information from more than 100 of its clients, mostly in the United States. Mandiant identified attacks on 20 industries, from military contractors to chemical plants, mining companies and satellite and telecommunications corporations.

[…] What most worries American investigators is that the latest set of attacks believed coming from Unit 61398 focus not just on stealing information, but obtaining the ability to manipulate American critical infrastructure: the power grids and other utilities.

[…] A few years ago, [U.S.] administration officials say, the theft of intellectual property was an annoyance, resulting in the loss of billions of dollars of revenue. But clearly something has changed. The mounting evidence of state sponsorship, the increasing boldness of Unit 61398, and the growing threat to American infrastructure are leading officials to conclude that a far stronger response is necessary.

“Right now there is no incentive for the Chinese to stop doing this,” said Mr. Rogers, the House intelligence chairman. “If we don’t create a high price, it’s only going to keep accelerating.”

The Mandiant report provides details of three “personas” believed to be part of APT1, “in an effort to underscore there are actual individuals behind the keyboard.” (See also Bloomberg Businessweek’s recent ‘A Chinese Hacker’s Identity Unmasked’, via CDT, on an alleged hacker identified as a teacher at a P.L.A. university.) The most dramatic of the released materials is a narrated video purportedly showing one of these hackers at work:

Searches for “Unit 61398″ were quickly blocked on Sina Weibo, while a BBC team filming near the unit’s headquarters was detained and had their footage confiscated. The Telegraph’s Tom Phillips also visited the area:

Large propaganda posters are pinned to walls around the base between Shanghai’s Datong and Tonggang roads. “Everyone has the duty to defend our country and our home!” reads one poster, featuring a group of young soldiers crawling through mud.

Another poster shows a line of PLA tanks and four fighter jets and is emblazoned with the slogan: “Security and peace protects hundreds of thousands of households!”

Opposite the building identified by Mandiant is a street of hardware shops and a salon carrying a bright pink sign with the name: “Slender Beauty.”

[…] On Tuesday afternoon, a woman who identified herself as a member of ‘Unit 61398’ but refused to produce any identification reprimanded the Daily Telegraph for taking notes on a nearby street corner.

Reuters was also there, and escaped with its video intact:

Mandiant has previously drawn criticism for declining to share information with others in the security community, according to a profile at Bloomberg Businessweek earlier this month. In the report, the authors explain the reasoning for releasing their findings this time(PDF).

The decision to publish a significant part of our intelligence about Unit 61398 was a painstaking one. What started as a “what if” discussion about our traditional non-disclosure policy quickly turned into the realization that the positive impact resulting from our decision to expose APT1 outweighed the risk to our ability to collect intelligence on this particular APT group. It is time to acknowledge the threat is originating in China, and we wanted to do our part to arm and prepare security professionals to combat that threat effectively. The issue of attribution has always been a missing link in publicly understanding the landscape of APT cyber espionage. Without establishing a solid connection to China, there will always be room for observers to dismiss APT actions as uncoordinated, solely criminal in nature, or peripheral to larger national security and global economic concerns. We hope that this report will lead to increased understanding and coordinated action in countering APT network breaches.

At the same time, there are downsides to publishing all of this information publicly. Many of the techniques and technologies described in this report are vastly more effective when attackers are not aware of them. Additionally, publishing certain kinds of indicators dramatically shortens their lifespan. When Unit 61398 changes their techniques after reading this report, they will undoubtedly force us to work harder to continue tracking them with such accuracy. It is our sincere hope, however, that this report can temporarily increase the costs of Unit 61398’s operations and impede their progress in a meaningful way.

We are acutely aware of the risk this report poses for us. We expect reprisals from China as well as an onslaught of criticism.

Criticism has already started to emerge. Security analyst Jeffrey Carr has written that the report contains “critical analytical flaws”: Mandiant, he argues, failed to prove that APT1 and Unit 61398 are one and the same, or to consider alternative explanations for their observations.

In summary, my problem with this report is not that I don’t believe that China engages in massive amounts of cyber espionage. I know that they do – especially when an executive that we worked with traveled to Beijing to meet with government officials with a clean laptop and came back with one that had been breached while he was asleep in his hotel room.

My problem is that Mandiant refuses to consider what everyone that I know in the Intelligence Community acknowledges – that there are multiple states engaging in this activity; not just China. And that if you’re going to make a claim for attribution, then you must be both fair and thorough in your analysis and, through the application of a scientific method like ACH, rule out competing hypotheses and then use estimative language in your finding. Mandiant simply did not succeed in proving that Unit 61398 is their designated APT1 aka Comment Crew.

When questioned about the report on Tuesday, a Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman issued a customary denial. From Ben Blanchard and Joseph Menn at Reuters:

“Hacking attacks are transnational and anonymous. Determining their origins are extremely difficult. We don’t know how the evidence in this so-called report can be tenable,” spokesman Hong Lei told a daily news briefing.

“Arbitrary criticism based on rudimentary data is irresponsible, unprofessional and not helpful in resolving the issue.”

Hong cited a Chinese study which pointed to the United States as being behind hacking in China.

“Of the above mentioned Internet hacking attacks, attacks originating from the United States rank first.”

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: cyberattacks, cyberespionage, cybersecurity, hackers, hacking, infrastructure, Mandiant, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, People's Liberation Army, PLA, Shanghai
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In one case that has unfolded over the past two years, however, a trail of reused email addresses and aliases led to the business website and personal QQ and Kaixin accounts of a teacher at the P.L.A.’s Information Engineering University. At Bloomberg Businessweek, Dune Lawrence and Michael Riley describe and build researchers Joe Stewart’s and Cyb3rsleuth’s investigations of suspected hacker Zhang Changhe.

Computer attacks from China occasionally cause a flurry of headlines, as did last month’s hack on the New York Times (NYT). An earlier wave of media attention crested in 2010, when Google (GOOG) and Intel (INTC) announced they’d been hacked. But these reports don’t convey the unrelenting nature of the attacks. It’s not a matter of isolated incidents; it’s a continuous invasion.

[…] Investigators at dozens of commercial security companies suspect many if not most of those hackers either are military or take their orders from some of China’s many intelligence or surveillance organizations. In general, they say the attacks are too organized and the scope too vast to be the work of freelancers. Secret diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks connected the well-publicized hack of Google to Politburo officials, and the U.S. government has long had classified intelligence tracing some of the attacks to hackers linked to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), according to former intelligence officials. None of that evidence is public, however, and China’s authorities have for years denied any involvement.

Up to now, private-sector researchers such as Stewart have had scant success putting faces to the hacks. There have been faint clues left behind—aliases used in domain registrations, old online profiles, or posts on discussion boards that give the odd glimpse of hackers at work—but rarely an identity. Occasionally, though, hackers mess up. Recently, one hacker’s mistakes led a reporter right to his door.

[…] Outing one person involved in the hacking teams won’t stop computer intrusions from China. Zhang’s a cog in a much larger machine and, given how large China’s operations have become, finding more Zhangs may get easier. Show enough of this evidence, Stewart figures, and eventually the Chinese government can’t deny its role. “It might take several more years of piling on reports like that to make that weight of evidence so strong that it’s laughable, and they say, ‘Oh, it was us,’ ” says Stewart. “I don’t know that they’ll stop, but I would like to make it a lot harder for them to get away with it.”

Meek confessions from China do seem a long way off for now, as Adam Segal of the Council on Foreign Relations wrote shortly after the Times hacking was revealed:

Several commentaries and an article in the People’s Daily all suggest that Beijing is not reacting to the public announcements with anything approaching shame. In fact, they all portray the claims as part of an effort to discredit China and distract from the offensive actions the United States is taking in cyberspace. The People’s Daily notes that while the United States is portraying itself as the “patron saint of the free Internet” it has plans to expand U.S. Cyber Command fivefold. He Hui, deputy director at the Communication University of China, argues that the claims about Chinese hacking are getting tiresome and in fact serve three alternate purposes: they raise suspicion about China’s rise in the United States and the rest of the world; help raise defense budgets, especially for cyber weapons; and justify protectionist trade measures against Chinese firms that are beginning to challenge the big American companies.

Other recent news may do little to dispel these views. The New York Times reported early this month, for example, that a secret legal review had authorized pre-emptive strikes in response to “credible evidence of a major digital attack looming from abroad”. From David E. Sanger and Thom Shanker:

One senior American official said that officials quickly determined that the cyberweapons were so powerful that — like nuclear weapons — they should be unleashed only on the direct orders of the commander in chief.

[…] “While this is all described in neutral terms — what are we going to do about cyberattacks — the underlying question is, ‘What are we going to do about China?’ ” said Richard Falkenrath, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “There’s a lot of signaling going on between the two countries on this subject.”

China is not alone in its wariness of U.S. policy. At The New Republic, Thomas Rid argued that the Obama administration’s “lousy” record on cyber security includes neglecting defensive in favor of offensive capabilities.

Indeed, the Obama administration has been so intent on responding to the cyber threat with martial aggression that it hasn’t paused to consider the true nature of the threat. And that has lead to two crucial mistakes: first, failing to realize (or choosing to ignore) that offensive capabilities in cyber security don’t translate easily into defensive capabilities. And second, failing to realize (or choosing to ignore) that it is far more urgent for the United States to concentrate on developing the latter, rather than the former.

[…] So amid all the activity, little has been done to address the country’s major vulnerabilities. The software that controls America’s most critical infrastructure—from pipeline valves to elevators to sluices, trains, and the electricity grid—is often highly insecure by design, as the work of groups like Digital Bond illustrates. Worse, these systems are often connected to the internet for maintenance reasons, which means they are always vulnerable to attack. Shodan, a search engine dubbed the Google for hackers, has already made these networked devices searchable. Recently a group of computer scientists at the Freie Universität in Berlin began to develop their own crawlers to geo-locate these vulnerable devices and display them on a map. Although the data are still incomplete and anonymized, parts of America’s most vulnerable infrastructure are now visible for anyone to see.

Defending these areas ought to be the government’s top priority, not the creation of a larger Cyber Command capable of going on the offense. Yet the White House has hardly complained that the piece of legislation that would have made some progress towards that goal, the Cybersecurity Act of 2012, has stalled indefinitely in the Senate.

On Tuesday, however, the Associated Press reported that fear of “America […] losing cyber war to China” might help drive legislation through an otherwise gridlocked Congress:

Declaring that America is losing an aggressive cyber-espionage campaign waged from China, administration officials and lawmakers on Wednesday agreed to push legislation that would make it easier for the government and industry to share information about who is getting hacked and what to do about it.

They say this new partnership, codified by law and buoyed by President Barack Obama’s new executive order, is critical to keeping countries like China, Russia and even Iran from rummaging in American computer networks and targeting proprietary data they can use to wreak havoc or compete against U.S. businesses.

[…] “Until Congress acts, President Obama will be fighting to defend this country with one hand tied behind his back,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., who promised Wednesday to advance a bipartisan proposal “as soon as possible.”

The threat from China has already proven lucrative for some in the private sector. Previously at Businessweek, Brad Stone and Michael Riley profiled security firm Mandiant, enlisted by both The New York Times and The Washington Post to exorcise suspected Chinese intrusions. The company’s $100 million business has been built in large part on the threat of attacks from China.

In one large central control room, dubbed the Bridge, a dozen security analysts peer quietly at their computer monitors, looking for anomalous activity on the computer networks of Mandiant’s hundreds of corporate clients around the world. A large computer display on the wall shows an image of the earth, seen from space, that highlights inbound and outbound network activity in each country. Mandiant monitors the entire planet, yet a printout taped to the desk of one analyst suggests that these days, the company has a more specific focus. “To accuse the Chinese military of launching cyberattacks without solid proof is unprofessional and baseless,” reads an excerpt from a recent Chinese government statement. Jennifer Ayers, who manages the Redwood City facility, removes the printout and folds it in half. “We’re not supposed to editorialize,” she says.

[…] For the first few years, [Mandia's] company remained small and relatively unknown outside computer security circles. But it was in the right place at the right time. In 2011, as anxieties about attacks by China spread, the company raised $70 million from venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and the investment arm of JPMorgan Chase (JPM). […]

See also a ChinaFile conversation on recent hackings between CDT founder Xiao Qiang, Orville Schell, James Fallows, Bill Bishop and others, and more on hacking and cyber security via CDT.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Barack Obama, congress, cyberattacks, cyberespionage, cybersecurity, cyberwar, Eric Schmidt, hackers, hacking, PLA, Rupert Murdoch
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With his five cellphones constantly ringing, it is not easy these days to get the undivided attention of Zhu Ruifeng, a self-styled citizen journalist whose freelance campaign against graft has earned him pop-star acclaim and sent a chill through Chinese officialdom.

[…] A former migrant worker with a high school education, Mr. Zhu has become an overnight celebrity in China in the two months since he posted online secretly recorded video of an 18-year-old woman having sex with a memorably unattractive 57-year-old official from the southwestern municipality of Chongqing. The official lost his job. Mr. Zhu gained a million or so new microblog followers.

The takedown was just the opening act, Mr. Zhu says. He promises to release six more sex videos that he predicts will make a number of other men run for cover. “I’m fighting a war,” he said with characteristic bombast, his voice a near-shriek. “Even if they beat me to death, I won’t give up my sources or the videos.”

[…] Mr. Zhu, who began his Web site in 2006, largely relies on whistle-blowers to funnel damning evidence to him. Through the years, he said, he has exposed 100 officials, bringing down more than a third of them. He has been threatened and beaten; more than once, he says, he has been offered huge sums of money to delete an incriminating post from his site, which is called People’s Supervision.

Zhu’s “characteristic bombast” may seem excessive, but is at least in part a matter of self-defense: by courting attention from traditional and social media, he hopes to deter attempts to silence him. That he credits Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption speeches, the Chinese Constitution and his own love of country with inspiring his activities may confer some measure of additional protection.

Nevertheless, his crusade has cost him. He has chosen to end his marriage, he says, rather than see his wife, a P.L.A. officer, suffer retaliation from his adversaries. “To be honest,” he told The Times’ Jonah Kessel, “I would like to tend to the big family in sacrifice of the small family.”

Kessel has also posted outtakes from their conversation on Vimeo, including an extended account of a recent police visit to Zhu’s Beijing home. Chongqing authorities appear determined to contain the sex tape scandal by acquiring Zhu’s remaining videos, but as in the recent New York Times hacking attacks, identifying sources seems to be their primary goal. From Tom Lasseter at McClatchy:

Powerful interests were searching for his sources, he explained over lunch last Friday [January 25th]. Police detained one contact in the southwestern city of Chongqing, where the scandal had erupted, Zhu said. They traced a second source to Henan province, hundreds of miles away, and had questioned that person at least twice.

Two days after that conversation, the police showed up at Zhu’s home in Beijing. They banged on his door Sunday night and demanded that he come with them. He refused but reported to a police station Monday morning, where he was held for more than seven hours. Police officers from Chongqing pressed him to hand over five sex recordings he hasn’t made public and to tell them the identities of his informants. They threatened that “if you don’t present evidence, you will be in violation of national law,” according to Zhu’s account.

The pressure on Zhu suggests that despite Communist Party rhetoric about an all out campaign against corruption, limits remain. The party’s leader, Xi Jinping, said shortly after being installed in November that failing to crack down on corruption would risk the downfall of the state. But while Beijing has dismissed some wayward officials and canceled extravagant banquets that stoked resentment among average Chinese, it so far seems set on keeping a tight grip to keep the process from spinning out of control.

Undaunted, Zhu has offered a cash reward to anyone who can verify the identity of a state-owned enterprise president allegedly caught on one of the videos. Meanwhile, the woman in the videos was formally charged with extortion last week, though she too has been hailed—perhaps less plausibly than in Zhu’s case—as an anti-corruption crusader. From Keith Zhai at the South China Morning Post:

“Zhao was officially arrested on December 31 for extortion,” Zhang said yesterday, adding that she had been “brainwashed” by a company she left in 2009 to secretly record herself having sex with officials to give the firm leverage. “After all, she was young and a victim herself.”

[…] Zhao has drawn support on social media, with internet users hailing her as a heroine for exposing corrupt officials.

Many have compared Zhao’s case with that of Deng Yujiao , a hotel waitress who in 2009 stabbed to death a local party official in Hubei and wounded another after they tried to force themselves on her.

Deng was charged with assault, rather than murder, but walked free on grounds of diminished responsibility after having received widespread support from the online community.

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Post tags: anti-corruption, Beijing, bloggers, Chongqing, citizen journalism, citizen journalist, constitution, corrupt officials, Deng Yujiao, extortion, journalistic ethics, lei zhengfu, migrant workers, muckraking, PLA, sex scandals, Xi Jinping, Zhu Ruifeng
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• P People News (P民报): A satirical netizen Weibo publication. In the past few days, it has been completely wiped from Weibo. CDT has featured the “front page” of P People News, rendered as Rabble News, here and here.
• Rabble News (屁民报): Alternate spelling of P People News.
• Scholarism (学民思潮): Hong Kong student organization which opposes the patriotic curriculum to be introduced to Hong Kong schools this month. More on the group from their website [zh].
• Zhang Lixia (章丽霞): The married woman allegedly found naked and dead in a parked car in Jiangsu Province. She and Gu Jiyang apparently died of carbon monoxide poisoning in the middle of sex.
• Gu Jiyang (顾纪祥): A lieutenant colonel in the PLA, allegedly found with Zhang Lixia.
• Bureau of Dicking Around (捅鸡局): Netizen nickname for the National Bureau of Statistics.
• dual designation (双规): Shuanggui, a form of extra-legel detention for Party officials involving torture. Bo Xilai is likely being detained in a shuanggui facility.
• Zhao Tianshao (赵天韶): Many speculate that Zhao Tianshao was Gu Kailai’s body double during Gu’s trial last month. There has been no verification of this rumor.

Re-tested terms relating to Hong Kong opposition to compulsory patriotic education:

• brainwashing (洗脑)
• Leung Chun-ying (梁振英): Chief Executive of Hong Kong. Many Hong Kong citizens see his sympathies lying with Beijing and not the city.

Note: All Chinese-language words are tested using simplified characters. The same terms in traditional characters occasionally return different results.

CDT Chinese runs a project that crowd-sources filtered keywords on Sina Weibo search.  CDT independently tests the keywords before posting them, but some searches later become accessible again. We welcome readers to contribute to this project so that we can include the most up-to-date information. To add words, check out the form at the bottom of CDT Chinese’s latest sensitive words post.

© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Bo Xilai, censorship, filtered keywords, Gu Jiyang, gu kailai, Hong Kong, Jiangsu, Leung Chun-ying, National Bureau of Statistics, netizen, netizens, patriotic education, PLA, propaganda, Rabble News, Scholarism, Sensitive Words Series, Shuanggui, sina weibo, weibo, Zhang Lixia, Zhao Tianshao
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U.S. defense officials say the United States is planning to expand its missile defenses in Asia, in response to threats from North Korea and aggressive moves by China.A spokeswoman for the State Department, Victoria Nuland, said Thursday that the United States is taking a phased approach to missile defense in Asia, as it is in Europe and in the Middle East. She emphasized that those are defense systems and will not be used unless “missiles have been fired.” But she did not comment on any specific plans.

China did not comment on the reports directly, but its defense ministry issued a statement Thursday saying that “China has always believed that anti-missile issues should be handled with great discretion, from the perspective of protecting global strategic stability and promoting strategic mutual trust among all countries.”

China has angered its neighbors with aggressive moves in a maritime area claimed by several governments, including Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan and others. China also has been boosting its military strength in recent years.

Want China Times, meanwhile, reports that the People’s Liberation Army has tested a new intercontinental ballistic missile:

An anonymous US official says a Chinese DF-41 ICBM with the range to strike any city in the United States was test-fired by the PLA’s Second Artillery Corps for the first time on Jul. 24, according to Jane’s Defence Weekly.

With many American observers believing the missile can carry multiple independently targetable warheads, the DF-41 is considered a serious threat to US national security. An analyst told Jane’s Defence Weekly that the ICBM can carry around 10 nuclear warheads to strike at multiple targets in the continental United States.

The United States is currently unable to intercept missiles which employ a MIRV system. “The DF-41′s multiple warheads are expected to include special simulated warheads called ‘penetration aids’ that are designed to counter US missile defense sensors,” said Larry Wortzel, a member of the congressional US-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

“The Chinese military’s Second Artillery Corps, which is in charge of both strategic and non-nuclear missiles, is working to integrate the DF-41 into its operational inventory,” said Mark Stokes, executive director of the Project 2049 Institute. “The system appears to incorporate a new, larger solid rocket motor than that used on the DF-31 series of delivery vehicles. Ground tests on the motor have been underway for a couple of years.”

Aside from the ICBM, the Pentagon is worried about the development of an anti-carrier ship missile, The Telegraph adds:

The Pentagon is also concerned about China’s development of a new “carrier-killer” anti-ship missile that can strike at the US Pacific fleet.

These missiles, which have a range of 930 miles, are designed to prevent US ships from approaching the South China Sea, a key sphere of Chinese influence.

Amid tensions between China and Japan over the Diaoyu Islands, CRIENGLISH reports the US is in discussions with Japan about expanding the missile shield in the region:

The United States is in discussion with Japan about expanding its missile shield in the Asia-Pacific region, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey said Thursday.

In a Pentagon press briefing with visiting Japanese Self Defense Forces Chief of the Joint Staff Shigeru Iwasaki, Dempsey said he discussed with Iwasaki about deploying another early-warning radar to Japan to bolster missile shield in Asia.

“On the issue of Missile Defense in general, we are very closely partnered with the Japanese partners,” said Dempsey, noting the U.S. side already has one X-band radar in northern Japan

According to the Wall Street Journal, this move is not only to contain North Korea, but also to counter the Chinese military:

It is part of the Obama administration’s new defense strategy to shift resources to an Asian-Pacific region critical to the U.S. economy after a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“The focus of our rhetoric is North Korea,” said Steven Hildreth, a missile-defense expert with the Congressional Research Service, an advisory arm of Congress. “The reality is that we’re also looking longer term at the elephant in the room, which is China.”

In a separate statement, China’s Foreign Ministry said it hopes the U.S. “will carefully handle this problem out of concern for maintaining the global and regional strategic balance and stability, and promoting the strategic mutual trust among all countries.”

The beefed-up U.S. presence will likely raise tensions with the Chinese, who have been sharp critics of U.S. ballistic missile defenses in the past. Beijing fears such a system, similar to one the U.S. is deploying in the Middle East and Europe to counter Iran, could diminish China’s strategic deterrent. Beijing objected to the U.S.’s first X-Band deployment in Japan in 2006. Moscow has voiced similar concerns about the system in Europe and the Middle East.

Despite reports that the expansion is to counter China’s military, the US State Department claimed the prospective plan is not directed towards China, from NPR:

The State Department, however, said the missile defense system is not directed against China.

Dempsey said no decisions have been reached on expanding the radar.”But it’s certainly a topic of conversation because missile defense is important to both of our nations,” Dempsey told reporters at the start of a meeting with his visiting Japanese counterpart, Gen. Shigeru Iwasaki, at the Pentagon.

“These are defensive systems. They don’t engage unless missiles have been fired,” department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told a news conference. “In the case of Asian systems, they are designed against a missile threat from North Korea. They are not directed at China.”

© Melissa M. Chan for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: ballistic missile, missile technology, missiles, North Korea, pentagon, People's Liberation Army, PLA, United States
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Protesters in Qidong.

Qidong Protests: Protests over the weekend lead to the cancellation of a planned pipeline for waste water from the Oji Paper plant. Production at the plant resumed yesterday. See also the July 29 list of sensitive words.

• Qidong (启冬): The second character in the city’s name, “east” (东), is replaced with the homophone “winter” (冬).
• QiWest (启西): QiSouth (启南) and QiNorth (启北) are still searchable.
• qiEast (qi东)
• Qidong (起东): The first character (启) is replaced with the homophone “rise” (起).
• Oji Paper (王子纸业)

Hong Kong Protests: Students and activists are demonstrating against compulsory patriotism classes to be introduced in the fall, denouncing the curriculum as “red brainwashing education” [zh].

• brainwashing (洗脑)

Other:

• country + army (国家+军队): Wang Yongsheng, an officer in the General Political Department of the PLA, asserted that “our army belongs to the Party” at a press conference yesterday.

Note: All Chinese-language words are tested using simplified characters. The same terms in traditional characters occasionally return different results.

CDT Chinese runs a project that crowd-sources filtered keywords on Sina Weibo search. CDT independently tests the keywords before posting them, but some searches later become accessible again. We welcome readers to contribute to this project so that we can include the most up-to-date information. To add words, check out the form at the bottom of CDT Chinese’s latest sensitive words post.

© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: army, education, education reform, environmental protests, Hong Kong, Hong Kong education, military, Oji Paper, patriotic education, patriotism, PLA, Qidong, Sensitive Words Series, Wang Yongsheng, water pollution
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The practice of buying promotions inside the military is now so widespread, Liu noted, that even outgoing President Hu Jintao, who also leads the military from his position atop the CMC, had vented his frustration. “When Chairman Hu severely criticised ‘buying and selling official posts,’ can we sit idle?”

Liu’s revelations are not necessarily good news for China’s would-be foes. Foreign government strategists are starting to worry that corruption and byzantine internal politics may amplify the known difficulties in communicating with the PLA and adroitly managing crisis situations. Despite the risks inherent in China’s growing arsenal, expanding ambitions and spasmodically aggressive rhetoric and actions, military cooperation between the United States and China is almost nonexistent. Diplomats say American officials are given less access to PLA officers than colleagues from other Western embassies, who themselves are kept largely in the dark. Senior Western government officials have told me that U.S. military leaders have less knowledge of command systems, and far fewer avenues of communication, than they had with their Soviet counterparts during the Cold War. Michael Swaine, a China security expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writes that the “fragmented and stove-piped structure” of the Chinese system means it has great trouble communicating even with itself, especially in crisis situations. He, like most other analysts, does not study corruption in the PLA because of the difficulty in measuring it.

In some ways, though, it’s hiding in plain sight. Outsiders can glimpse the enormous flow of military bribes and favours in luxury cars with military license plates on Changan Avenue, Beijing’s main east-west thoroughfare, and parked around upmarket night clubs near the Workers’ Stadium. Business people gravitate toward PLA officers because of the access and protection they bring. PLA veterans told me they are organising “rights protection” movements to protest their inadequate pensions, which they contrast with the luxury lifestyles they observe among serving officers. Retired officers have told me that promotions have become so valuable that it has become routine to pay the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to even be considered for many senior positions.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: corruption, Liu Shaoqi, military power, PLA
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China’s state media has said its new missile, called the DF-21D, was built to strike a moving ship up to about 1,700 miles away. U.S. defense analysts say the missile is designed to come in at an angle too high for U.S. defenses against sea-skimming cruise missiles and too low for defenses against other ballistic missiles.

Even if U.S. systems were able to shoot down one or two, some experts say, China could overwhelm the defenses by targeting a carrier with several missiles at the same time.

As such, the new missile—China says it isn’t currently deployed—could push U.S. carriers farther from Chinese shores, making it more difficult for American fighter jets to penetrate its airspace or to establish air superiority in a conflict near China’s borders.

In response, the Navy is developing pilotless, long-range drone aircraft that could take off from aircraft carriers far out at sea and remain aloft longer than a human pilot could do safely. In addition, the Air Force wants a fleet of pilotless bombers capable of cruising over vast stretches of the Pacific.

Rhetorical brinksmanship on both sides has heightened over the past year as China has sought to enhance its military capabilities amid American intentions to play a larger role in Asia. China acquired its first aircraft carrier and a Japanese patrol plane reported the first confirmed sighting of a Chinese secret drone last year, and in December President Hu Jintao instructed the Chinese navy to speed up its development and prepare for warfare. Bloomberg also reports that a Pentagon defense strategy review, scheduled to be released tomorrow, will urge the branches of the U.S. Armed Forces to combine resources to ensure that China cannot block America’s access to the South China Sea:

The military services must work more cooperatively to pool their intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities and cyber-security tools, as well as operational concepts, the review is expected to say, according to an administration official familiar with the review who asked not to be identified.

The U.S. should be able to deter any emerging anti-access capabilities such as the diesel attack submarines being developed by China and the anti-ship ballistic missiles deployed by China and Iran, and if necessary, defeat them, said the administration official.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: aircraft carrier, arms race, Hu Jintao, military modernization, missile technology, navy, pentagon, PLA, U.S. relations
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“The names of the military pilots selected in 2010 to form China’s second group of taikonauts — which have been a closely guarded secret for the last 18 months — appear to have been released [as the result of] a possible philatelic blunder,” said Tony Quine, an Isle of Man-based space memorabilia collector and contributing writer for the British Interplanetary Society’s “Spaceflight” magazine.

Quine worked with Russian space industry expert Igor Lissov to confirm the envelope’s autographs since finding it listed for sale on a German space dealer’s website two days ago. The two elicited the assistance of Chinese space enthusiasts to help verify the translation of the seven signatures.

See more on China’s space programme, via CDT.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: air force, PLA, space exploration, space program
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