The Wall Street Journal reports on the crackdown on the commenting function on microblogging sites in an effort to stop rumor-mongering:

The state-run Xinhua news agency called the measures a punishment for the companies for allowing the rumors to appear, “resulting in adverse impact.”

Xiao Qiang, a scholar of the Chinese Internet at the University of California, Berkeley, said the moves show online discussion is hitting closer to home for the Communist Party than in years past, when authorities used censorship to quash discussions about issues such as democracy or Tibetan independence. Now “it’s about internal politics,” he said. The crackdown is “a public acknowledgment of their insecurity about online public opinion.”

Separate Xinhua articles Friday and Saturday also announced the closure of 16 websites, the detention of six people for “fabricating or disseminating online rumors” particularly through microblogs, and the arrest of more than 1,000 other suspects since mid-February in a broader “Internet crime crackdown.”that Xinhua said focused on information related to firearms smuggling, drug smuggling and drug-related crimes and other offenses

The articles didn’t provide details on the arrests. The State Internet Information Office didn’t respond to requests to comment.

Tea Leaf Nation looks at the actual impact of the new rules on Sina Weibo and other microblogging services:

Something feels different: Fewer tweets, thinner commentary, and a greater profusion of movies, movie stars, TV shows, and other light fare on the trending topics board. To wit, current trending topic #2 on Sina Weibo: The Public Safety Department press office and Sina Weibo jointly present safe travel tips for Qing Ming Festival. Riveting!

It’s impossible to say when this chill will end. Sina and Tencent both maintain the comment suspension will cease promptly at eight o’clock on Tuesday morning, but one can easily envision a “trial extension” under thin pretexts. Huang Jinghao (@黄京皓), a close Weibo watcher, offers these predictions for a Weibo sans comments: “1. Official accounts won’t be greatly affected, and retweeting won’t be affected at all; 2. Celebrity accounts won’t be greatly affected, as fans will retweet their tweets no matter what; 3. The grassroots will be the most affected. Originally many friends would chat with you via ‘comments,’ now that is not possible.” He ends by asking, “Would you still use a Weibo … this boring, with only celebrities and official accounts?”

Some will simply say, “No thanks.” In targeting comments, censors may have found Weibo’s Achilles Heel (read: its best, most democratizing feature).

For more on this topic, see an earlier CDT post, “Weibo Comments Suspended in Coup Rumour Aftermath” and cartoons created by netizens in response to the order.

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Post tags: Internet censorship, online rumors, sina weibo
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In December, a Bain-run fund in which a Romney family blind trust has holdings purchased the video surveillance division of a Chinese company that claims to be the largest supplier to the government’s Safe Cities program, a highly advanced monitoring system that allows the authorities to watch over university campuses, hospitals, mosques and movie theaters from centralized command posts.

The Bain-owned company, Uniview Technologies, produces what it calls “infrared antiriot” cameras and software that enable police officials in different jurisdictions to share images in real time through the Internet. Previous projects have included an emergency command center in Tibet that “provides a solid foundation for the maintenance of social stability and the protection of people’s peaceful life,” according to Uniview’s Web site.

Such surveillance systems are often used to combat crime and the manufacturer has no control over whether they are used for other purposes. But human rights advocates say in China they are also used to intimidate and monitor political and religious dissidents. “There are video cameras all over our monastery, and their only purpose is to make us feel fear,” said Loksag, a Tibetan Buddhist monk in Gansu Province. He said the cameras helped the authorities identify and detain nearly 200 monks who participated in a protest at his monastery in 2008.

Update: The Los Angeles Times reports Romney’s response to the story:

“I’m not familiar with that report and so I really can’t respond to it,” Romney said when asked about the reports of Bain’s investments in Uniview Technologies. “Any investments that I make are managed by a blind trust. I don’t make investments in Bain or anywhere else. That’s done by a trustee who makes decisions that he thinks are correct.”

He suggested that the story — and the focus on Bain’s activities — were part of an effort by President Obama and the Democratic National Committee to draw attention away from the nation’s economic struggles. “They’ll try and find the most attenuated attacks they can come up with, but frankly the American people are tired of that. They want to have a leader that will actually get America working again, and I will,” he said.

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The man, identified as Tashi, aged 32, died in the explosion, succumbing to head injuries, in the incident in Rekpa village in Dege county on Saturday, the sources said.

“He died in the explosion that also damaged the building. The extent of damage on the government building is not clear,” an Indian-based friend of Tashi told RFA.

The government building was newly constructed to allow station officials to watch over residents of Rekpa and Wapa villages, angering the residents, according to Ngawang Sangpo, a Tibetan with contacts in the area.

The RFA report also has updates on the detentions of other Tibetan activists and artists in the ongoing crackdown following widespread protests and self-immolations in recent months.

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That this state-financed shrine to the Dalai Lama exists at all highlights Beijing’s complex and contradictory attitude toward a man it frequently describes as a terrorist, a separatist and “a wolf in monk’s robes.” Since relations between the exiled Tibetan leader and the Chinese government took a nose dive in the mid-1990s, even possession of the Dalai Lama’s picture is considered a crime.

The government’s official line is that the Dalai Lama is agitating for an independent Tibet, even as he insists that he is seeking only meaningful autonomy. In recent months, the government has sought to blame him for the self-immolations of about two dozen Tibetans, a ghastly act of protest against Chinese rule that he has condemned.

Hong’Ai, or Taktser as it is known in Tibetan, has long been on the receiving end of that official ambivalence. In the mid-1980s, when talks were proceeding reasonably well, the government rebuilt the Dalai Lama’s birthplace, which had been destroyed during the antireligious fervor of the Cultural Revolution.

In 2010, the local Communist Party poured 2.6 million renminbi, or about $410,000, into Hong’Ai, upgrading the town’s 54 residences, including the Dalai Lama’s homestead, with the aim of turning the place into a lucrative tourist attraction. The improvements included tall, white-tile gates for every home and a colorfully painted but imposing wall in front of the Dalai Lama’s home that prevents visitors from peering inside.

Read more about the Dalai Lama via CDT.

Update: The Financial Times (subscription only) reports that while tensions between Han officials and Tibetans in areas of Sichuan are at dangerous levels, the relationship between the two groups in Qinghai is much more peaceful, which may explain the tolerance of the Dalai Lama’s birthplace there:

Local Chinese, Tibetan leaders, experts and exile groups give credit to the relatively lenient governance style in much of Qinghai, which contrasts starkly with far more punitive policies elsewhere.

“We’ve heard about the troubles in other [Tibetan] areas, but our relations with the government are quite good,” said one senior monk at the Gartse lamasery.

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Tibetan activists identified the nun as Tenzin Choedon, who was quickly taken away by Chinese security forces. Her nunnery, located in Aba county, east of Tibet, was immediately sealed off.

The nun’s death brings the number of Tibetans who have died from self-immolation in the past year to more than one dozen.

The Guardian’s Jonathan Watts reports from Aba on the government’s efforts to block access to the region in the wake of the self-immolations and other protests:

At the nearby Kirti monastery, Chinese officers in fire trucks keep a close eye on pilgrims prostrating themselves, in case their devotion turns to immolation.

Outsiders are not supposed to see this. The Chinese authorities have gone to great lengths to block access to Aba, in north-western Sichuan, which is home to more than half the 23 monks, nuns and lay Buddhists who have set fire to themselves in acts of defiance aimed at the Chinese Communist party in the past two years.

The authorities have blocked internet and mobile phone signals. Checkpoints have been set up on surrounding roads to keep outside observers, particularly foreign journalists, away.

But after a 10-hour drive through mountain valleys and snow-covered plains, the Guardian was able to get into Aba and witness how the authorities are trying to quell dissent with security, propaganda and “re-education” campaigns. These tactics have had little success. Despite flooding Aba with security personnel, the protests continue.

See also the accompanying video report from the Guardian.

China Media Project reported that a Sina Weibo post linking to this Guardian story was quickly deleted.

The death of Tenzin Choedon follows reports of four more self-immolations last week. A letter written in 1965 by Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nath Hanh to Martin Luther King, Jr. provides a Buddhist perspective on self-immolation as an act of protest. Read more about the phenomenon of self-immolation by Tibetans via CDT.

Update: Shanghaiist reports that Xinhua has acknowledged the death of Tenzin Choedon by self-immolation.

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James Fallows opened fire at The Atlantic:

Let’s not even get into the logic of the ad — eg, the fact that China’s formula for creating jobs has involved more public spending and more public “guidance” of industry than America’s. Let’s skip to the bonus points for racial imagery in the ad, apart from the obvious.

1) The “Chinese” woman speaks in American-accented English, and I would bet she is actually an Asian-American. But the script has her make pidgin grammar errors, “Me likee!!”-style.

2) The ad’s words are about trade, budgets, and jobs, but its images are about — ‘Nam!! Of course some parts of southern China look the way this ad does, with rice paddies, palm trees, no big buildings, people wearing conical straw hats and bicycling along dike tops. But this is nothing like how the typical big-factory zone looks in China, or the huge cities that would exemplify Chinese wealth and the country’s rise — ie, the subjects of this ad. So why this rural setting? I think it’s because it offers a kind of visual dog-whistle, for those Americans who, either through experience or through Apocalypse Now-style imagery, associate smiling-but-deceptive Asians in a rice-paddy setting with previous American sorrow.

The accompanying website underlined the charges, hammering the point home with liberal use of takeaway-carton lettering. A brief post at Talking Points Memo noted that, in the page’s source code, images of the Asian woman are identified with the label “yellowgirl”: a possible reference to her shirt, but “probably just another level of the unfortunateness.” (See update below.)

Accusations soon arose that the Hoekstra campaign was deleting critical comments from its Facebook page. A spokesman, meanwhile, insisted that the ad was satirical, and that its use of broken English was intended to highlight China’s great achievements in language education. From Politico:

“You have a Chinese girl speaking English – I want to hit on the education system, essentially. The fact that a Chinese girl is speaking English is a testament to how they can compete with us, when an American boy of the same age speaking Mandarin is absolutely insane, or unthinkable right now,” Hoekstra spokesperson Paul Ciaramitaro told POLITICO. “It exhibits another way in which China is competing with us globally.”

America’s two million first-language Chinese speakers include a growing number who speak Mandarin, some of whom are presumably boys. In addition, there are some 60,000 elementary and secondary school students learning Chinese. These are not large figures compared with China’s 300 million English learners, but neither, perhaps, are they “absolutely insanely” or “unthinkably” small. Ciaramitaro continues:

“I think that China is our global competitor and the facts are what they are. They hold $1.1 trillion of our debt, their economy is booming, ours is not. It’s not a racial overtone to compare yourself to competitors on the global stage,” added Ciaramitaro. “I think the viewer of an ad is going to recognize satire. … I wouldn’t agree of the characterization [of the ad] as racial.”

FOX News’ Juan Williams suggested that the ad may have been a tactical error, with the controversy detracting from its intended message:

[Williams] sees the ad as a wasted opportunity for Hoekstra and not great publicity for the Republican party, “which is often accused of being insensitive toward immigrants.”

“Pete Hoekstra is a very bright guy, but what he is trying to get across here, his concerns about spending and debt, that’s now being obscured by charges of racism,” said Williams. “These charges of racism are resonating right now instead of his views on reigning in the national debt.”

While both Ciaramitaro and Hoekstra claimed that talk of race came from Democrats lacking a substantial response, criticism of the ad was refreshingly bipartisan. “Semi-defrocked senior GOP Political Consultant” Mike Murphy commented that it was “really, really dumb. I mean really“. While some Republicans attacked the ad’s tone or political wisdom, others accused Hoekstra of hypocrisy based on his own spending record. From The Associated Press:

GOP consultant Nick De Leeuw flat-out scolded the Holland Republican for the ad.

“Stabenow has got to go. But shame on Pete Hoekstra for that appalling new advertisement,” De Leeuw wrote on his Facebook page Sunday morning. “Racism and xenophobia aren’t any way to get things done ….”

“Saving America from the Washington, D.C., politicians who gave us this crippling debt and deficit crisis, Republican and Democrat alike, means Hoekstra and Stabenow should both get benched,” [Hoekstra's GOP Senate primary rival Gary] Glenn said in a release.

The Michigan Democrat Party has similarly focused on Hoekstra’s credentials as a crusader for low spending, playing up Republican and Tea Party accusations that he had supported big spending as a congressman and lobbyist.

As The Detroit Free Press’ Bob Campbell pointed out, the MDP has itself played the China card in the past, in a 2006 ad attacking GOP gubernatorial candidate Dick DeVos for exporting jobs. The factories to which they were relocated were, again, curiously absent from the China on screen:

Hoekstra’s ad has so far attracted little attention on the other side of the Pacific, however. From Isaac Stone Fish at Foreign Policy:

… There is scant chatter of it on Sina Weibo or Tencent Weibo, the two most popular Twitter-like microblogging services. The NFL, lacking the popularity that Yao Ming brought to the NBA, is rarely watched in China anyway, and the ads this year that drew any attention were mostly car commercials.

Only a handful of Twitter users wrote about it in simplified Mandarin (the way Chinese is written in Mainland China, unlike the traditional characters which the Debbiespenditnow website inexplicably employs). One who did so is a software engineer working in the Netherlands who tweets under the name lihlii. “I don’t think it’s racist,” he said in a phone interview. “It’s about America losing jobs ….”

Those who did object to the ad generally did so in an American context. Michael Anti, a popular blogger who has lived in the U.S. as a Nieman Fellow, wrote on Twitter:

“I think the problem with the ad is that it’s racist, not anti-Chinese. As a Chinese I should be amused by this ad, because it seems more like Southeast Asia. But Chinese in America are easily enraged by that sort of prejudicial defamation of the image of a Chinese woman. Also, her English is not the Chinglish of a Mainland Chinese.”

Update: James Fallows noted that the “yellowgirl” reference in the site’s code has now been changed to “yellowshirtgirl”. On MSNBC, Lawrence O’Donnell took aim at “yellowshirtgirl” herself. From Mediaite:

“I want to know exactly what she was thinking,” he noted, and then turned back the Hoekstra, in effect accusing him of hiding behind her image and suggesting one thing is for him to expound ideas and another “for him to hire an actor to do his dirty work for him.”

“It can be stopped right now, tonight, by a pledge of simple decency that all member of the Screen Actors’ Guild can make,” he noted, putting his right hand up as to make a promise: “I will not play dirty politics… that means that you will not play a character in political ads.” After his attack on the actor in the video, however, he explained that many actors engage in such things because of money problems, recounting the story of an actor he once “talked out of playing Hitler’s daughter” by asking if, in the worst case scenario that that was the last part she ever played, she would want to be remembered by it. “I have done things that I’m not proud of,” he concluded, “but I have not done anything I am ashamed of.”

While the Hoekstra campaign insists that talk of race is a desperate evasion by Democrats, the ad’s argument has also received a sound thrashing. From Asia Society:

Yunfan Sun, Program Officer at the Center on U.S.-China Relations [pointed] out glaring flaws in Hoekstra’s polarizing “Pete Spend-it-Not” position.

“It is precisely the ‘Spend-it-Not’ mentality in the United States that has been sending jobs overseas, where cheaper labor and materials, as well as tax breaks, lead to increases in the bottom lines of big corporations,” Sun said. “And the fact that the U.S. government can’t or won’t spend on infrastructure is precisely why Chinese companies get to build things like new subway lines in New York City.”

The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos pointed out other problems:

For all the xenophobia and mistakes, the thing that might really worry a voter is that a man can get this far in the U.S. political system without a basic grip on the mechanics of his government. “You borrow more and more,” the N.P.S.A. [Nondescript Presumably Scary Asian] says. But that is false, says the U.S. Treasury. Chinese holdings of U.S. treasury bonds, in fact, declined from November of 2010 to November 2011. “China has not been a major buyer of U.S. treasury notes on the margin for a couple of years now,” Victor Shih, an expert on Chinese economics and politics at Northwestern University, told me.

When Hoekstra’s point collides with fact, he calls in the help of a large font: he describes China as “the largest foreign holder of U.S. Treasury securities”—which is true—but then describes China’s holdings as increasing from 9.6 per cent in 2002 to twenty-six per cent in 2010. A voter might blanch at the idea of a foreign country holding over a quarter of U.S. Treasury debt, except that it’s not true. The twenty-six per cent is China’s holdings among foreign holders, not overall debt, and “the overall share of treasury held by foreign entities declined in the past couple of years,” Shih told me. (“One thing that Americans have to realize is that China may be a net lender internationally, but the Chinese government and state-owned enterprises borrow a huge amount of money domestically,” Shih added. “The racist caricature of those thrifty Chinese who take advantage of debt-loving Americans is widely off the mark because China is one of the most indebted countries in the world.”)

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: James Fallows, Michael Anti, racism, United States, US debt, Vietnam
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That day, I woke up at about 6.30am and knew what I had to do. I’d seen the news of the brothers and sisters inside Tibet burning themselves, and I knew that is what I needed to do to get the world’s attention.

[...]Before leaving home, I put a statement on Facebook and then I left. I was not frightened. I felt proud to be doing something for my nation. I was ready to die.

[...]I suffered bad burns and I still have some dressings on one leg. There will always be scars there, of course. But I did not die. All the same, I would be ready to do it again. That is how strongly I feel about the situation there in Tibet.

In a recent post on her personal blog, Mumbai based journalist Priyanka Borpujari mentions Sherab Tsedor and the importance of Facebook in keeping the Tibetan community in Mumbai connected:

[...]On November 4, 25-year-old Sherab Tsedor had set himself on fire outside the Chinese Embassy in New Delhi, in solidarity with the 11 monks who had immolated themselves. Alert cops managed to rush him to a hospital. Today, Tsedor updates his progress in healing on Facebook.

“Facebook is one of the best mediums for us in Mumbai to stay connected,” said Dolkar Tenzin. She created the ‘Tibetan Mumbaikars’ community page on Facebook, and updates it with news and events pertaining to Tibet.

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Chinese state media confirmed the incidents occurred in the traditionally Tibetan region of Sichuan.

London-based Free Tibet group said the men were protesting over Chinese rule.

A 22-year-old former monk was taken to hospital with serious burns after setting himself alight at a crossroads in Sichuan’s Aba prefecture, China’s Xinhua news agency said.

Another former monk died after burning himself to death in a hotel around the same time, Xinhua said.

AP has more details about the incident and its aftermath:

U.S. broadcaster Radio Free Asia said hundreds of angry Tibetans forced police to hand over the remains of the 42-year-old monk, named Sopa, then carried them through the streets in Dari county in Qinghai province.

It said the monk died Sunday morning after drinking and throwing kerosene over his body. Radio Free Asia quote a source as saying Sopa’s “body exploded in pieces” before police took it away.

Two other men set themselves on fire Friday in Sichuan province. At least 15 monks, nuns and former monks are now believed to have set themselves on fire in the past year. Most have chanted for Tibetan freedom and the return of their spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, who fled to India amid an abortive uprising against Chinese rule in 1959.

Radio Free Asia said police first refused to give up the body but relented after “the protesters smashed windows and doors of the local police station,” according to another source.

The Dalai Lama has blamed recent self-immolations on China’s policies toward Tibet, but researchers at the Sichuan Tibetology Research Center have claimed that the Dalai Lama enticed these men to commit the self-immolations. China Daily adds:

“The several self-immolation cases recently were committed by people who previously had got punished for their wrongdoings such as whoring, gambling and burglary, or deep in debt because of gambling,” said Gang Zheng, a Tibetology expert with the Sichuan Tibetology Research Center.

The Dalai Lama was trying to make this serve his political purposes, said Yi Fei, another Tibetology expert with the center.

The two most recent self-immolations were both former monks who had resumed a secular life. According to state media, these two former monks had been accused of being involved in the theft of a Buddha statue in Kirti Monastery. The Times of India reports:

The official media quoted a government-run think-tank as saying those indulging in self-immolation were former monks, who had been found to be involved in several cases of wrongdoing including stealing and whoring. The dead monk had stolen the statue of Buddha at the Kirti Monastery, it said.

This is a new form of accusation against monks, who had earlier been accused of anti-national and anti-social activities.

Investigations by local officials showed that the former monks, as the State-run Xinhua News Agency described them, had clashed with local authorities in recent months. It did not explain why they has lost their status as monks, but it is possible that pro-government forces in the Kirti Monastery in Aba Country, had removed them for anti-government behavior.
 

The Wall Street Journal looks at the epidemic of self-immolations and revisits the monasteries where a nun and a monk both set themselves on fire last year:

On Sunday, a separate Xinhua article, which made no mention of the self-immolations, said that senior Tibet officials pledged stepped-up efforts to strengthen the management of monasteries, saying that promoting harmony in Tibet is a priority because it concerns the stability of the nation.

In one incident in November, Palden Choetso, a 35-year-old nun at the Gaden Choeling nunnery, doused herself in gasoline, gulped several mouthfuls, and set herself ablaze, according to accounts by her fellow nuns.

Shortly afterward, friends of the Tibetan nun found a list of names pinned above her bed in the small wooden hut where she lived. Ms. Palden was compiling a tally of Tibetans who had set themselves on fire, all in the same corner of western Sichuan, in protest of China’s policies in the region—adjacent to the Tibet Autonomous Region and heavily populated by ethnic Tibetans. Among the names was Tsewang Norbu, 29, a monk at the local Nyitso monastery.

In Daofu, where Ms. Palden and Mr. Tsewang self-immolated, they have become martyrs to some. Their photographs are displayed in the town’s homes. A video circulating on the Internet shows Ms. Palden’s body engulfed in flames; as she struggles to stay upright, a woman runs toward her and casts a white scarf at her feet in a gesture of respect.

UPDATE (Jan. 9, 4:15 PST): The New York Times has more details about the weekend’s self-immolations:

Analysts who sympathize with ethnic Tibetans’ criticism of Beijing’s conduct say this month’s deaths underscore that the crackdown has failed to quell Tibetans’ demands for greater religious and political latitude. While most suicide victims were young monks, Sopa, who self-immolated on Sunday morning in Qinghai Province, was a 42-year-old senior clergyman. Like many Tibetans, he went by one name.

His death indicates that suicide is increasingly accepted as an expression of political opposition among Tibetans and that the government’s harsh response has only made it more popular, Nicholas Bequelin, a senior researcher in Hong Kong for Human Rights Watch, said in a telephone interview.

“We clearly see this form of protest is resonating within the Tibetan community,” he said. “The government is trying to prevent these incidents by strengthening control, but too much repression and control is what provokes these acts. So it is a vicious circle.”

Read more about the recent self-immolations via CDT.

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On the evening of December 14, yesterday, the Han students showed how awesome they are. 3,000 guys from male dormitories 1, 2, and 3, all wearing their school uniforms, surrounded the Tibetan students’ dormitory and attacked. In fighting that lasted all night, the Tibetan dormitory was destroyed, the doors and windows completely smashed. The Tibetan classrooms were also ruined. A bunch of Tibetan students were beaten badly enough to be sent to the hospital. The police came but couldn’t control the situation, so over 1,000 riot police were sent in. They dispersed the students with tear gas. The Han students didn’t hesitate to smash the police and teachers’ cars. The principal got on the loud speaker to beg the students to calm down and leave the scene, but no one gave a damn. The Han and Tibetan students at the Railroad Engineering School really hate each other. Those several hundred Tibetan students are so full of themselves. Last night was an important victory for the Han students, because the school picked up all of the Tibetan students, and of course there were a bunch of Tibetan students who got seriously beaten up. Our slogan last night was loud and clear: beat the Tibetans, get extra credit.

The outcome of last night’s battle was the destruction of the Tibetan students’ dormitory and classrooms, plus a lot of police vehicles and teachers’ cars. The school is under martial law now. You can get in but you can’t get out. Last night’s battle was seriously bloody.

Today at noon after the Han students ate lunch the Tibetan students came for their lunch. All of the sudden, someone yelled that there were Tibetans in the cafeteria. We fought again, trapping the Tibetans in the cafeteria. I predict that tonight will be another sleepless night of battle. The Han students are formidable!!! Beat the Tibetans, wear your school uniform, and get extra credit.

Update: See a report from RFA which interviews officials, students and others about the violence.

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Though there’s speculation that the structures could be dummy mockups of street grids, built for the purpose of weapons testing, we’d beg to differ.

Given how much China loves it Transformers, it wouldn’t come as a shock to find out the structures were related to either the building, housing or appeasing of giant sentient robot lifeforms, imbued with the ability to change into badass commercial vehicles.

That, or China was quite flattered by their portrayal in Roland Emmerich’s 2012, whereby they benevolently saved the world by building massive arks, while also employing well-behaved Tibetans at the same time.

An article in The Telegraph draws a parallel to the shapes (and assorted explanations of those shapes) that can be seen in satellite photos of Area 51 in the US Nevadan desert.

Tim Ripley, a defence expert from Jane’s Defence Weekly, compared the structures to similar grids in Area 51, the secret United States military test base in Nevada. “The picture of the circle looks very like a missile test range, with target and instrumentation set out to record weapon effects. The Americans have lots of these in Nevada – Area 51!” he said.

Conspiracy theorists believe that Area 51 is home to the remains of an alien spacecraft found at Roswell, and there was no shortage on Monday of similar hypotheses about the Chinese sites.

“It looks like our own Area 51,” said one commenter on Baidu, a Chinese website. “Can it be an alien base,” asked another. “It looks like solar energy facilities, with a walkway along the side,” said a third.

Leave it to science to kill a perfectly good conspiracy theory. An article from Fox News explains:

It turns out that they are almost definitely used to calibrate China’s spy satellites.

So says Jonathon Hill, a research technician and mission planner at the Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University, which operates many of the cameras used during NASA’s Mars missions. Hill works with images of the Martian surface taken by rovers and satellites, as well as data from Earth-orbiting NASA instruments.

[...]“I think we’re seeing some sort of military zone/test range, which explains the large amount of equipment and technology in an otherwise remote area,” he said. “Sometimes the truth can be just as interesting, if not more so, than the conspiracies that people come up with.”

Update: Experts cited by The New York Times disagreed with the calibration explanation, and backed the target practice theory:

“With calibration, you’re looking for precise measurement,” said Dwayne Day, a military space historian, in a telephone interview. “You have boxes that get smaller by a calculated amount. You don’t just throw stuff all over the place and then take a picture of it ….”

After an email inquiry by The Lede, the Union of Concerned Scientists, an industry watchdog and critic, said the China formations appeared to be conventional aerial and missile bombing targets. In the past, China has built large structures for bombing practice ….

“The thing that would make it really sexy is if there were fences around it — and I don’t see any,” Mr. Day, the historian, said, adding that a lack of security indicated a lack of strategic importance. “We don’t know what the heck it is, but there are probably two guys in China who could tell you what it is and you’d be bored silly.”

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