Blogs » Politics » ‘Second Generation Red’ Fall in Behind Xi Jinping

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• ‘Second Generation Red’ Fall in Behind Xi Jinping
• Photo: Lantern Festival brings Spring Festival to a close, by Michael Steverson
• PLA's Kitty Hawk General Turned Out a Chickenhawk
• In Praise of @BeijingAir
• Hollywood, China, and the Freedom to Blow Up Tiananmen
• Shanghai Dialect Makes Comeback Among Youth
• The Problem of Cyber Crimes Is More Serious Than Conspiracy Theories (War on Hackers)
• Chinese City Reports Second Bird Flu Fatality
• Some Good News, Some Bad News, and Some China Hearsay Housekeeping

‘Second Generation Red’ Fall in Behind Xi Jinping Posted: 24 Feb 2013 10:04 PM PST For The Age, John Garnaut reports that Party General Secretary Xi Jinping has consolidated the support of the offspring of the Communist revolutionaries, since he himself is a member of their group, unlike his predecessor, Hu Jintao: At the largest reunion, held on Saturday at the People's Liberation Army's August 1 film studio in West Beijing, children of revolutionary leaders lauded the Xi administration for "correcting" the Party's course at its "critical moment of life and death", when it was in danger of abandoning socialism altogether. "There is hope in the snake year now the Party leadership has shown us the content and direction of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics," Hu Muying, the daughter of former Politburo member Hu Qiaomu, told the gathering of about a thousand descendants of revolutionary veterans. "We shall prove by our own actions that we, the children of veterans, are indeed worthy of the name 'Second Generation Red'," said Ms Hu. "Let's strive together towards The China Dream," she said, endorsing Mr Xi's political motto. © Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: CCP 5th generation, CCP history, Hu Jintao, princelings, Xi Jinping Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Photo: Lantern Festival brings Spring Festival to a close, by Michael Steverson Posted: 24 Feb 2013 09:34 PM PST Lantern Festival brings Spring Festival to a close © Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: Michael Steverson Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

PLA's Kitty Hawk General Turned Out a Chickenhawk Posted: 24 Feb 2013 06:17 PM PST Major General Luo Yuan created an account on Sina's Weibo service last week. Within hours, he was found bleeding profusely after being attacked by a mob of posters. General Luo was found to have a billionaire brother living in the US. That he was elevated to senior post not because of experience and skills but because of his father, a senior Communist official. That he was suddenly extracted from a troop and sent back to PLA's headquarters in Beijing the night before it was sent to battlefield for the Sino-Vietnam border conflict. In his first hour on the popular social network service, the proud kitty hawk found himself defeathered to a chickenhawk. Frustrated General Luo then mobilized his cyberarmy to make comments at the popular microblog site, with the same phrase praising his knowledge and insight. Unfortunately, one soldier forgot to change his alias and used General Luo's official ID to write about Luo's qualification in a third person tone. It was immediately caught by the net mob, and it's obvious the entire Chinese Internet community was laughing at the general. As all good stories go, it would not peak at Act One. General Zhu's cyberarmy then used the official ID of an unrelated military agency to declare General Zhu's account had been compromised. Well, guess what, the declaration was traced back to now devastated General Luo. PLA Army Major General Luo Yuan, PLA Air Force Colonel Dai Xu and PLA Army Major General Zhu Chenghu are known as the Three Hawks in the Chinese military force. General Luo suggested bombing Tokyo over the dispute over Diaoyu Islands. Col. Dai is an advocate of unlimited warfare. General Zhu vowed a nuclear duel with the US, with a calculated tolerable cost of cities east of Xi'an (which include Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, or 80% of Chinese population). In the context when the US media and government are publicly campaigning the mighty cyber warfare capacity of the PLA, it's a black humor to see the real Internet proficiency of PLA hawks. The presumed PLA cyber warfare headquarter, Unit 61398, was uncovered by a western computer security firm because soldiers purportedly logged in Facebook and Twitter accounts from their own server without any mask. If any soldiers were set for court martial or careless endeavor, they should argue loudly that their top generals had been doing the same.

In Praise of @BeijingAir Posted: 24 Feb 2013 07:30 PM PST June 19, 2009 (left) and June 22, 2009 (right). Images courtesy of ChinaAirDaily - they need new photographers in Beijing and other cities! There's talk over at ChinaFile that the air quality issue has reached a tipping point as a public health crisis in China, and it's worth taking a moment to remember that the US Embassy played a major role in increasing awareness - possibly one of the State Department's most effective public diplomacy moves in years, albeit unintentionally. According to a 2009 State Department cable released by Wikileaks back in 2011: At the request of the Ministry of ForeignAffairs (MFA), ESTH Off and MED Off met on July 7 with Mr. WANG Shuai of MFA's Office of U.S. Affairs to respond to MFA's concerns about recent publicity in international and local press surrounding an air quality monitor installed on the Embassy compound. MFA registered complaints on behalf of the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau (EPB) and the Chinese Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP), saying that making this data (which in their view"conflicts" with "official" data posted by the Beijing EPB) available to the general public through an Embassy-operated Twitter site has caused "confusion" and undesirable "social consequences"among the Chinese public. MFA asked Post to consider either limiting access to the air quality data only to American citizens,or otherwise identify a suitable compromise. ... In August 2008 the Embassy began posting corresponding "real time" air quality index (AQI) numbers,which are generated according to definitions set by the U.S.Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), to an Embassy-managed Twitter site (http://twitter.com/beijingair) on an hourly basis. While the initiative originally was primarily geared toward informing the Embassy community about levels of pollution in immediate proximity to the compound, consular "no double standard" requirements prompted Post to create the Twitter site as a user-friendly platform so that private American citizens residing and traveling in Beijing are also able to access the data. ...local and international press coverage spiked after Time Magazine published a story online about the Embassy's air monitor on June 19. Since June 19, the site's number of "followers" has increased from approximately 400 to the current total of 2500+, with at least 75 percent of the new followers being Chinese (judging from the screen names used). Additional press articles have appeared in the South China Morning Post, China Daily, and other outlets, with major local online forums like Sina.com ablaze with Chinese "netizens"commenting on this issue. Twitter was blocked on June 1 2009 in the follow-up to the June 4 anniversary, then Liu Xiaobo was arrested on June 23 for releasing Charter 08 six months earlier, and then to top it all off the Urumqi Riots started on July 5. On July 7, China shut down local Twitter clone Fanfou as well as others. Sina Weibo launched in August 2009 after China put a lid on Xinjiang and cut off its Internet, giving it a big head start over its major rivals Sohu, Netease, and Tencent, who didn't launch microblogging until the following year. But @BeijingAir had enough Chinese followers and struck such a chord in a Chinese public afraid for the health and mistrustful of government data, and as soon as Sina launched the US embassy numbers were being hoisted over the firewall. China began promising to upgrade reporting to include PM2.5 nanoparticles, which it previously didn't measure. Chart courtesy of ChinaAirDaily.com, on the job since 2007. With the latest "air-pocalypse" in Beijing, it's not just expats but everyone talking about air purifiers the way that teen-age boys talk about cars. PM2.5 is basic vocabulary and a key fashion choice is whether to go with a knitted cloth mask (don't), 3M N90 disposable mask (reliable, cheap, ugly) or the Respro masks that make you look like Bane from Dark Knight Rises (Expensive, less data on effectiveness). Now you can buy Spaceballs-style cans of air! As recently as last June, government officials were complaining that @BeijingAir was unscientific and unlawful, which is not completely unfounded but no longer tenable. It's going take years to clean up the air, and @BeijingAir didn't create the issue so much as give people information in plain English (literally) that they could use to articulate what they already knew. But that's actually pretty cool. Bonus: Check out China.aqi.greatnumbers.org, courtesy of Frederic Blanc-Brude of the EDHEC-Risk Institute, offering a nifty chart and open data on AQI levels in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Chengdu. Related Posts I'll Be the Judge of the Air Quality in These Parts

Hollywood, China, and the Freedom to Blow Up Tiananmen Posted: 24 Feb 2013 02:51 PM PST While China may have finally scaled the highest pinnacle of international literary acclaim, no such triumph is on the cards atop tonight's glittering pile of Oscars. Didi Kirsten Tatlow at IHT Rendezvous wonders why, when Hollywood seems to be tripping over itself to build bridges with China, China has yet to establish a presence on the Academy Awards stage: As Oscar fever grows around the world with the 85th Academy Awards set to begin in Los Angeles just hours from now, excitement is building in China, even though it has no films in competition. There is also a sense of frustration here about why China's movies aren't nominated for the world's biggest awards? […] The most popular answer to the question, held by ordinary Chinese and film experts alike, is: "Too few good films. That's the real reason in recent years Chinese films have moved further and further away from the Oscars dream," wrote The International Herald Leader newspaper, in a story carried on the country's popular Tencent entertainment site. An article by The Economic Daily, carried on People's Daily Web site, gave another interpretation: "The Oscars have never been a communal forum, the films taken seriously have only the responsibility to portray the North American world view and the lives they're willing to see." The Oscars' presence in China is almost as thin as China's at the Oscars, according to The Los Angeles Times' Barbara Demick. Only one of this year's Best Picture nominee has so far reached Chinese theaters: Ang Lee's Life of Pi, which as a co-production with China enjoyed exemption from tight import quotas in exchange for compliance with the whims of the State Administration for Radio, Film and Television. As for Oscar viewing parties? Unimaginable. The ceremony, which begins at 9:30 a.m. Monday in China, will be broadcast only in much-redacted form hours later by state-owned CCTV. (Last year, it didn't air until 10:40 p.m. Monday.) […] […] "Nobody even has the live stream in China," complained Raymond Zhou, film critic for the English-language China Daily. "The government won't allow it. They are afraid somebody will say something against China." Chinese television used to broadcast the ceremony live, but stopped after Richard Gere, as a presenter in 1993, called on then-Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping to remove troops from Tibet. "The Chinese translators didn't know what to do, so they just tried to ignore the sentences. After that, they were afraid of the Oscars," said Wu Renchu, a Shanghai film critic. "It is regrettable. There are many Chinese movie fans, students and white-collar workers who really would like to watch the ceremonies." [Update: CCTV6's M1905.com (via Bill Bishop) is streaming the awards ceremony.] Gere's outspokenness earned him a twenty-year ban from the awards, ending tonight with a musical performance to mark Chicago's six-Oscar haul in 2003. "Apparently, I've been rehabilitated," he told HuffPost UK. "It seems if you stay around long enough, they forget they've banned you." Despite this punishment, Gere became a symbol of Hollywood's defiance of Chinese authoritarianism, before hunger for Chinese funding and market access made this a disposable luxury. From Damien Ma at Foreign Policy: In Hollywood in the 1990s, China was an oppressive place. Red Corner opens with Gere gazing up at security cameras in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, ground zero of the infamous bloodshed of early June, 1989, seared into many Americans' memories. Brad Pitt, too, had been blacklisted from China, ostensibly for starring in the 1997 feature Seven Years in Tibet, in which his character becomes friends with the young Dalai Lama. [… But t]he era in which China could still be a menacing villain and stir political passions from the Spielbergs and the Geres appears to be ending. Even Brangelina are reportedly studying Mandarin. And the political drama surrounding disgraced Chinese politician Bo Xilai, ripe for Hollywoodification, will never see the light of day. Too bad, because the Bo Ultimatum is the Chinese Godfather waiting to be made. As Hollywood gathers for its biggest awards night Sunday, the industry seems to be biting its tongue. After all, the future, as Jeff Daniels quips in Looper, is in China. From The New Yorker's Evan Osnos: [… T]hese days, Hollywood directors find themselves in the curious position of being more compliant than some of their Chinese counterparts. When censors ordered the Chinese director Lou Ye to make additional cuts to his movie "Mystery" just over a month before the film's release date, Lou took the unusual steps of publicly tweeting the censors' demands and then removing his name from the credits. Online, he explained his decision to break the taboo of discussing censorship in the hope that the system would "become more transparent and eventually be cancelled." He was not willing to comply in silence. "We are all responsible for this unreasonable movie-censorship program," he wrote. […] By comparison, Hollywood has been less vocal on the subject of censorship. When James Cameron released "Titanic" in 3-D last year—having agreed to censor Kate Winslet's breasts—the Times asked him about the compromises of working in China. He said, "As an artist, I'm always against censorship… [But] this is an important market for me. And so I'm going to do what's necessary to continue having this be an important market for my films. And I'm going to play by the rules that are internal to this market. Because you have to. You know, I can stomp my feet and hold my breath but I'm not going to change people's minds that way." Transparency might be a more constructive approach than either foot-stomping or meek compliance. While there may be no end in sight for Chinese film censorship, Osnos suggests that the industry could formally and publicly catalogue cuts made at SARFT's behest. Lou's defiance, meanwhile, together with changes recently imposed on imports such as Cloud Atlas and Skyfall, has prompted calls for a more codified and less capriciously restrictive system. From Kristie Lu Stout at CNN: […] Lu Chuan is calling for change in the censorship system, hoping that Chinese filmmakers can be governed less by guesswork and more by a transparent rating system. Lu says there must be change for the sake of his craft and also because his audience demands it. "In an American movie, you can blow up the White House. We cannot blow up (Tiananmen) Square. It's different. But the audience wants to see a lot of exciting visual things. So I think the leadership will think about that." He's asking for the freedom to film China's own "Independence Day," the freedom to blow up anything without fear of political blowback. © Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: Academy Awards, Dalai Lama, Evan Osnos, film censorship, film distribution, film industry, hollywood, Lou Ye, Lu Chuan, oscars, Richard Gere, SARFT, Tiananmen Square, Tibet, Titanic Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Shanghai Dialect Makes Comeback Among Youth Posted: 24 Feb 2013 10:22 AM PST While Shanghai strives to be an international city, locals are worried about the preservation of its cultural identity. After the 1990s, when Shanghai increased its efforts to become an international metropolis, the use of Shanghainese, the local dialect, decreased in favor of English or Putonghua. According to the South China Morning Post, the success of Shanghai comedian, Zhou Libo, and young people creating groups for the promotion of their local dialect reflects the  comeback of Shanghainese: A study by Shanghai's Academy of Social Sciences found that only 60 per cent of pupils in local primary and junior middle schools were able to speak the local dialect. Only a few were fluent and anecdotal evidence showed that some children of native parents were not able to speak a single word of Shanghainese. In 2011, a group of young people, mostly university students, launched a campaign to promote the local dialect. The group, called Hu Cares, gathers at the People's Square every week, calling on people to preserve the Shanghai dialect. The word Hu is the short form of Shanghai in Chinese. Their efforts attracted the attention of local education authorities, who introduced the dialect in music and art lessons in the September semester and provided students with new textbooks featuring poems and folk songs in Shanghainese. Unlike people in Guangdong, who insist on Cantonese's superiority because it has a richer linguistic history than Putonghua, educators in Shanghai suggest that outsiders learn Shanghainese because a command of the local dialect will make them more confident residents of the city. See also Zhou Yunpeng: We Want to Sing in Dialect, via CDT, which discusses the use of dialects in music as well as the tensions between dialects and Putonghua. © Melissa M. Chan for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: dialect, language, putonghua, Shanghai, Zhou Libo Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

The Problem of Cyber Crimes Is More Serious Than Conspiracy Theories (War on Hackers) Posted: 24 Feb 2013 11:05 AM PST In my previous post, http://blog.hiddenharmonies.org/2013/02/how-to-hack-a-human-brain-from-experts-of-hacking/, I discussed the many flaws in the Mandiant Report on hacker group designated APT1. Mandiant has responded to some of the criticisms, with the usual generalized responses of "we released our conclusion based on what we had." In other words, flaws are admittedly due to their jumping to conclusions. Indeed, the Report from Mandiant read like a simple Conspiracy Theory, in that the only evidence of the Conspiracy is in circumstantial evidence. By the same logic, virtually everyone can be found guilty of conspiracy of murder and theft, simply because there are murders and thefts near where they live. As a law professor once said in a class, "Every complaint should follow with a demand."  So it appears quickly what the actual Demand came from the Mandiant Report. In Obama's speech recently, the Demand came in the form of a near Declaration of War on Hackers.  In his speech, "hacktivists" are lumped into the category of "cyber criminals". On this position, I do not disagree with Obama's logic.  By hacking, "hacktivists" are knowingly committing crimes, and they shouldn't be excused merely for their self-professed noble political purposes.  Afterall, if one wishes to, virtually every crime can be boiled down to politics.  Is a petty thief doing it merely for the money, or as a form of protest against banks?  Who is to say?  Whose words to take? And if a government is behind some of the hacking, isn't that ultimately really for politics?  Does that mean governments themselves can be "hacktivists" too and be excused??  It's a slippery slope. (On the other hand, Hacktivists do have a point.  Afterall, most governments do hack and spy on people.  Why aren't the government officials being prosecuted for "hacking for politics"?) As they say in law, if you are going to do the crime, you should do the time.  But as the cynics would say, governments are criminals. So, where is Obama and the Western governments moving toward to?  What is this "War on Hackers"?  And why? The problem is ultimately not any particular country.  It is world wide.  I think deep down even US governments acknowledge that. If the Western governments can't even shut down their own hackers like Anonymous and Lulzsec, (not completely), then they can't expect China to put much of a dent into their hacker problem.  (If US and China start to trade a list of hackings traced to each country, what can US do in return for China's cooperation, or vice versa?) Another problem?  US doesn't even have much of an extradition treaty with China.  Which means, hackers of both sides will have plenty of legal loop holes to hide behind.  If China comes to US with a list of hackers wanted for hacking crimes, would US hand them over? US and Obama knew that, and have apparently started to go after the problem from the US side.  This may be generally a good thing, but there are some severe problems. (1) a general declaration of War on Hackers is simply too political.  There are already the failed War on Drugs, War on Terrorism.  Hackers may become another endless war. (2) Going after political hackers is too unpopular with the growing "hack chic" culture in the West that is sensitive to "privacy" issues.  Hacker groups have become culturally popular icons, like Anonymous, other countries have their own popular hackers. (3) Broad reaching laws to fight cyber crimes may be unpopular with even large corporations.  CEO's may not be very thrilled about the idea of government agencies getting total access to their emails to see if hackers have stolen any thing. Already CISPA is rumored to be brought back to life to become law. Mandiant may have blown some discretions with this report, and while it may have brought Mandiant some marketing in the Media, in the long run, the corporate clients may hesitate to deal with a company that exposed their privacy to the US government. And let's face it, American CEO's may not want China to read their emails, they certainly don't want Uncle Sam to rummage through them! And it really does come down to those who are screaming the loudest, really do have things to hide.  (Anonymous may hack for political reasons, but I bet they do end up with some Intellectual Properties.  They just usually end up releasing every thing to the public, which DESTROYS IP's.  Case in point:  They released emails of HBGary, containing some confidential reports of their clients.  This in part caused HBGary's financials to take a dive.)  So whether a company gets hacked for "politics" or not, by "state actors" or not, the damage would be similarly severe. And if a company let's US government to rummage through its files, that's not protection, that's equal to "cutting one's nose to spite one's face." What to do then about Cyber crimes? Unless you are willing to expose your own privacy, you are not going to be able to reveal the private information about hackers. That's the deal that you need to consider, when the Devil comes knocking. And when hackers are popular cultural icons, there will be more hackers. If you put your trust in government to handle the problem, then you may have even less control than before.  You will likely still get hacked, but you just can't control it any more.

Chinese City Reports Second Bird Flu Fatality Posted: 24 Feb 2013 10:34 AM PST Chinese State media report another patient has died after having contracted the H5N1 influenza virus, also known as Bird Flu. From Xinhua: The second of two people confirmed by the Ministry of Health to have contracted avian influenza H5N1 died in a hospital in Southwest China's Guizhou Province on Friday, according to health authorities. The patient, a 31-year-old man, died of multiple organ failure at Jinyang Hospital in Guizhou, the provincial capital, at 4:40 pm, sources with the provincial health department said. The man developed symptoms on February 3 and was hospitalized on February 8. Another patient, a 21-year-old woman, died of multiple organ failure on February 13. They both tested positive for the H5N1 virus on February 17. This most recent fatality comes a year after a bird flu death in the same province. The New York Times reports the two more recent victims were in close contact with birds: The flu, which is circulated in poultry and birds, has infected only 600 humans in the last decade, but has proven fatal in half the cases, so public health officials closely monitor its transmission. Scientists fear that the flu could mutate into a form that is highly contagious in humans. The news agency added that 110 people who had been exposed to the victims had been released from quarantine. Amid fears of the possible mutation of bird flu into a more contagious virus, according to Bloomberg, health authorities in the United States have outlined the conditions for funding research on the virus: The Department of Health and Human Services will only fund studies that meet seven criteria, officials including HHS chief- of-staff Sally Howard and National Institutes of Health director Francis S. Collins wrote in the journal Science today. The criteria include a requirement to demonstrate that a virus that scientists plan to create in a lab could evolve naturally, and that safety and security risks can be managed. The conditions are aimed at enabling research that would help the world prepare for a rapidly spreading form of H5N1. The virus has infected 620 people in 15 countries since 2003, killing 60 percent of them, according to the World Health Organization. Most victims have had direct contact with birds, and the virus has so far failed to acquire the ability to transmit easily between humans. "HHS must, out of necessity, support some scientific research that involves a certain level of inherent risk but that is nevertheless essential for our health and well-being," Howard and colleagues wrote. Scientists worldwide issued a voluntary moratorium on H5N1 research in January 2012 after two NIH-funded studies showed how to make the virus easier to transmit among ferrets, the mammals whose response to flu is most like that of humans. Read more about bird flu in China, via CDT. © Melissa M. Chan for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: bird flu, bird flu deaths, bird flu prevention, H5N1, public health Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Some Good News, Some Bad News, and Some China Hearsay Housekeeping Posted: 24 Feb 2013 04:10 AM PST You may have noticed a severe drop-off in posting in recent weeks. Quite a few reasons for this, significant among them being my transitioning out of the private law firm/outside counsel business to my new position (as of last week) as Asia Regional Counsel for an American software company. I'll probably throw some details on that up on LinkedIn at some point, if anyone is interested. For the moment, I'll be devoting quite a lot of my time to the new job, including a three-week stint at HQ in the U.S. beginning tomorrow. The "bad" news is that this will have a negative impact on the blog, although I hope not quite as bad as things have gotten in the past couple weeks. I'm thinking a few posts a week, something like that, at least in the short term. Anyway, China Hearsay isn't going anywhere, and I'll be back here in Beijing in a few weeks. In the meantime, I'll be enjoying a VPN-less existence, which will make the news-gathering part of the whole blogging experience that much easier. So I've got that going for me, which is nice. That's about it. Stay tuned, folks. © Stan for China Hearsay, 2013. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us Post tags:

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