| Flames Of Protest: The History Of Self-Immolation Posted: 21 Feb 2013 12:24 AM PST In the week since news emerged of the 100th Tibetan self-immolation within China's borders since 2009, four more cases have been reported. Most recently, according to Dharamsala-based Phayul.com, a pair of teenaged former schoolmates died from their burns after a protest on Tuesday: Two Tibetan teenagers set themselves on fire in Kyangtsa region of Zoege, eastern Tibet on February 19, protesting China's continued occupation and repressive policies in Tibet. Rinchen, 17 and Sonam Dhargey, 18 have succumbed to their burns. [… Kirti Monastery said in a release that] "The families of the two teenagers are in possession of their bodies and are hoping to carry out their final rites without any interference from the Chinese authorities." The 102nd self-immolation is said to have occurred on Sunday. From Phayul.com: Namlha Tsering, 49, carried out his fiery protest at around 5:40 pm (local time) in Sangchu region of Labrang. His current condition is not known although sources say chances of his survival are minimal. Photos received by Phayul show Namlha Tsering sitting cross-legged in the middle of a street even as high flames are rising from his body. In another photo he is seen fallen on his back with fire still leaping from his body. […] Chinese security personnel arrived at the scene of the protest, doused the flames and bundled him away. The 101st reportedly took place on the same symbolic date on which the hundredth was revealed after a 10-day delay. Another Tibetan also set fire to himself that day in Kathmandu, Nepal, and later died. From Phayul.com: A Tibetan father of three set himself on fire in Amchok region of eastern Tibet on February 13, a day observed by Tibetans as the centenary celebrations of His Holiness the 13th Dalai Lama's Proclamation of Tibetan Independence. Drugpa Khar, 26, set himself on fire in Amchok town in Sangchu region of Kanlho at around 1 pm (local time). He reportedly succumbed to his injuries. […] According to exile sources, Drugpa Khar is survived by his parents Tamding Tsering and Tamding Tso. His youngest child is one year old and the eldest is aged six. At least six other self-immolations have taken place beside these 104, including two in Nepal and four in India. Another two possible cases within China's borders are disputed on the grounds that they may have been accidental. Joshua Eaton has examined these and other reasons for discrepancies. On NPR's Talk of the Nation on Wednesday, Oxford University's Michael Biggs, Columbia University's Robert Barnett and the International Campaign for Tibet's Bhuchung Tsering discussed the protests with host Neal Conan. Their conversation covers the history and potency of self-immolation protests globally, and their causes and effects within Tibet. Asked whether suicide bombings might replace suicide protests, Biggs argued that these are fundamentally different phenomena rather than points on the same spectrum. Bhuchung Tsering, though, suggested that goading Tibetans into just such an escalation may be one of the Chinese authorities' aims, as it could be used to justify an even harsher crackdown. Perhaps the key question, however, is whether the protests might be having more of an effect than meets the eye. CONAN: Let me turn back to Robert Barnet. Bhuchung Tsering just said that he thinks behind the scenes the Chinese government is debating this issue. Is there any evidence of that? BARNETT: Well, I do have some evidence of that, actually. (Unintelligible) internal, you know, but we have sources, and they have been – you know, people have been sent to tell us about this. And I think it's probably true. I think there's been a major change in the Chinese view that whether these things are really caused by the Dalai Lama and the exiles, I think they now recognize they are caused by these mishandled, grossly mishandled religious policies and a whole raft of other policies over many years. But the problem is not whether that change has happened. I think Bhuchung's right. But I think the problem is whether the new leadership in China is able to push forward any change. It faces a very resistant bureaucracy. It faces a whole industry of people in security forces, in various offices, in local governments, whose whole careers depend on having a security threat, that they're the hard men who are sent there to control it, and they're going to go on pushing very hard for a tough policy. [… O]ne of the questions is we don't really know whether the new leadership is running these things yet. A lot of decisions are made at the local level. Some decisions are made by incumbents who are still there from the previous leadership. It doesn't, as you say, fully change until March. We don't yet know when this leadership can step forward and stamp its new ideas on the situation. Maybe it doesn't have any new ideas. Maybe it's going to be very careful. They can't bring them in for another couple of years. I think all the bets are off on this. China is a black box in terms of leadership thinking. At The Wall Street Journal, Brian Spegele and Deborah Kan also discussed the protests and the resulting crackdown:
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Post tags: central government, Dalai Lama, Dharamsala, Kirti monastery, local government, Robert Barnett, security crackdown, self-immolations, suicide bombing, Tibet
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| Netizens Gather Further Evidence of PLA Hacking Posted: 20 Feb 2013 09:33 PM PST After China's Ministry of National Defense denied allegations made by U.S. cyber security company Mandiant that People's Liberation Army Unit 61398 had been conducting hacking activities against targets within the U.S. and a host of other countries, evidence in support of Mandiant's claims quickly surfaced in the form of a 2004 PLA recruitment advertisement. Since then, netizens have continued to point out evidence from across the Chinese Internet–including this Xinhua article from August 2008 [zh] that states PLA Unit 61398 specifically installed flooring for use in high-security environments: Everyone knows that Anxin Flooring is a renowned brand in China's wooden flooring industry. They entered the large-scale realty project business very early on. Plus, at the very beginning, they specialized in working with clients that had very strict standards for their building materials, such as national organs and foreign embassies. The PLA General Political Department building, the General Staff Meteorological Bureau, the General Staff Surveying and Mapping Bureau, the Unit 61587 Commander Building, the General Staff Headquarters Satellite Positioning Center Residential Building, Unit 61398, the State Administration of Taxation, the Beijing Cultural Palace of Nationalities, CNPC Overseas Staff Dormitory, the Bulgarian Embassy office building, and the Wenzhou Municipal Government building were all early buyers of Anxin flooring for major projects.
How does Anxin Flooring relate to PLA-sponsored cyber attacks? One netizen explained the correlation on his Sina blog [zh]: Chinese netizen: Unit 61398 is most likely conducting IT-related work in their office building. There's still a report up on the web about Anxin Flooring. The report states "army units that require very strict guidelines for their building materials, the General Staff Headquarters Satellite Positioning Center Residential Building, and Unit 61398" all used their flooring. Anxin is an American wholly foreign-owned company, and its leading product–wooden flooring–is known to protect against static electricity. Anyone in the IT industry would know that without a computer room, there would be no need for this kind of anti-static flooring.
Of course, one could argue all office buildings house computers. However, not all office buildings house PLA international relations and intelligence experts, like Colonel Zhou Jianping. An announcement for a public lecture by Zhou Jianping [zh] displays his affiliation with Unit 61398: Public Announcement for the Pudong Forum Lecture Series [Source: Pudong News. Published December 15, 2010]
–The Situation on the Korean Peninsula and the Border Security Environment Topic: The Situation on the Korean Peninsula and the Border Security Environment
Lecturer: Director of the China Institute of International Relations and researcher at the Shanghai City Strategic Studies Association, Zhou Jianping.
Time: 1:30pm December 25, 2010.
Location: Pudong Library's 600-person lecture hall Zhou Jianping
Researcher of the People's Liberation Army General Staff Headquarters Unit #61398, rank of Colonel. Director of the China Institute of International Relations and researcher at the Shanghai Strategic Studies Association. From 1979-2001, he taught international relations at the People's Liberation Army Foreign Languages Institute. In 2001, he was redeployed to Shanghai to work in intelligence research. Professor Zhou worked long-term in the field of international relations education. He is especially knowledgeable in the fields of Chinese border security and hot button issues of international relations. He has published academic articles in these fields. In recent years, his research has centered mainly on border security and the Taiwan issue. He has also conducted deep research into the fields of Sino-American relations and U.S. political, diplomatic, and strategic military issues.
 An academic paper published in the Journal of PLA University of Science and Technology (Natural Science Edition) coauthored by a member Unit 61398, titled "Novel Method to Calculate Causal Correlation Belief Values of Network Alerts." Keywords: network security, alert correlation, attack time expense, and correlation belief. You can view the paper's cover page, which includes an English abstract, through this link. Chinese IT and Internet information portal Cecb2b.com reported on this paper [zh] in light of the New York Times piece: Cecb2b Net. On February 19, The New York times and numerous western media reported that a 60-page report released by U.S. cyber security company Mandiant linked recent cyber attacks experienced by many western media organizations with China's People's Liberation Army. Hackers were traced back to "the headquarters of People's Liberation Army Unit 61398, located in a 12-story building in Pudong, Shanghai." Using Baidu's literature search function, we found an article coauthored by Song Sigen of PLA Unit 61398 regarding the detection of intrusion by hackers, titled "Novel Method to Calculate Causal Correlation Belief Values of Network Alerts" (see images on Baidu Literature). The article was published in the June 2009 edition of the Journal of PLA University of Science and Technology (Natural Science Edition), volume 10 issue 3. 
Translated by Little Bluegill.
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Post tags: cyber attack, cyber espionage, hacking, new york times, People's Liberation Army, unit 61398
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| China Considered Drone Strike Against Drug Lord Posted: 20 Feb 2013 08:29 PM PST China mulled the use of drone-delivered explosives to kill a wanted drug lord, who was later captured and sentenced to death for the murder of 13 Chinese sailors on the Mekong river in 2011. The plan was revealed in a Chinese-language Global Times interview with Liu Yuejin, director of the Ministry of Public Security's anti-drug bureau. From Ernest Kao at the South China Morning Post: Naw Kham was the ring leader of a large drug trafficking outfit based in the Golden Triangle – a mountainous drug-producing region in Southeast Asia covering areas of Myanmar, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. "One plan was to use an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to carry 20kg of TNT to bomb the area, but the plan was rejected because we were ordered to catch him alive," Liu told the Global Times. It is a noteworthy revelation as senior Chinese officials rarely make public acknowledgents about the country's ability to project power overseas. The disclosure also highlights the level of technological sophistication in terms of China's ability to surveil targets in Southeast Asia. This will likely draw concern from the Asean neighbours wary of China's military capabilities. A report last year by the U.S. Defense Science Board described the pace of China's drone development as "worrisome" and "alarming", and suggested that Beijing might "easily match or outpace U.S. spending on unmanned systems, rapidly close the technology gaps and become a formidable global competitor in unmanned systems." China's drone programmes to date have focused on surveillance, however, particularly of its long coastline. A small Chinese UAV, or unmanned aerial vehicle, was spotted in the East China Sea by a Japanese destroyer in June 2011, and both China and Japan have indicated plans to deploy drones over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands. The Obama administration's opaque drone campaign in the Middle East, on the other hand, may have claimed as many as 4,700 lives, fuelling anger in the region and some opposition within the United States. Observers have long anticipated that other countries would eventually join in: in an October op-ed at The Washington Post, former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Kurt Volker warned that America was setting important precedents, and urged the adoption of clear standards and practices for drone warfare. Others, from European allies to Russia, China and Iran, are acquiring and beginning to use drones for surveillance — eventually, they will use them for killing as well. What would we say if others used drones to take out their opponents — whether within their own territory or internationally? Imagine China killing Tibetan separatists that it deemed terrorists or Russia launching drone strikes on Chechens. What would we say? What rules would we urge them to abide by? The drone strike plan also demonstrates the progress of China's Beidou satellite navigation system, whose availability expanded in December to commercial users across the Asia-Pacific. From Jane Perlez at The New York Times: China's global navigation system, Beidou, would have been used to guide the drones to the target, Mr. Liu said. China's goal is for the Beidou system to compete with the United States' Global Positioning System, Russia's Glonass and the European Union's Galileo, Chinese experts say. Mr. Liu's comments on the use of the Beidou system with the drones reflects the rapid advancement in that navigation system from its humble beginnings more than a decade ago. The experimental navigation system was started in 2000 and has since expanded to 16 navigation satellites over Asia and the Pacific Ocean, according to an article in Wednesday's China Daily, an English-language state-run newspaper. The Chinese military, particularly the navy, is now conducting patrols and training exercises using Beidou, the newspaper said.
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Post tags: Barack Obama, drones, drug trafficking, drugs, Global Times, Mekong river, military technology, Myanmar, United States
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| China Takes Over Strategic Port in Pakistan Posted: 20 Feb 2013 08:16 PM PST Chinese Overseas Port Holdings Limited took over management of the Pakistani port of Gwadar on Monday, amid suspicion of China's growing presence in the Indian Ocean. From Reuters: China financed more than 80 percent of the $248 million development cost of the port on the Arabian Sea, as part of a plan to open up an energy and trade corridor from the Gulf, across Pakistan to western China. When complete, the port could be used by the Chinese Navy, analysts say, and Indian Defence Minister A.K. Antony told reporters on February 6 that Chinese control of the port was "a matter of concern." Indian policy-makers are wary of a string of strategically located ports being built by Chinese companies in its neighborhood, as India beefs up its military clout to compete. China has also funded ports in Hambantota, Sri Lanka, and Chittagong in Bangladesh, both India's neighbors. China has repeatedly denied harboring any military intentions, however. A Global Times editorial, 'Gwadar move renews 'China Threat' cliché', argued on Monday that such fears were simply the latest expressions of a more general insecurity. Gwadar port is located in Pakistan's Balochistan Province. As it's close to the Strait of Hormuz and Pakistan's border with Iran, it is considered strategically important. The West believes that the port is the starting point of an energy corridor that will connect China to the Arabian Sea and the Strait of Hormuz and also a strategic branch for China to influence the situation in the Persian Gulf. Some even see it is part of a Chinese "string of pearls" strategy aimed at encircling India. Behind these analyses are worries and reservations over China's rise. Energy security plays a fundamental role in this rise. The West is alert to any overseas move by China related to energy. Any port has potential military value. There are growing suspicions that China will station fleets of warships in the Indian Ocean or other waters and establish naval bases worldwide. However, few Chinese support this. There are no benefits for China in encircling India, and strategists in both countries don't want to play such a game. […] Enclosing and colonizing land overseas and expanding powers are all strange concepts to Chinese. Chinese merchant ships can be seen all over the world nowadays, but we have no interest in "pirate civilization." China alone cannot convince the outside world, but regional prosperity promoted by China's operations at Gwadar port in the future will be strong evidence of this. Some outside China are also skeptical of the encirclement theory. From Daniel W. Drezner at Foreign Policy early this month: For the past few years, a low level theme that occasionally pops into my news feed is the idea of greater Sino-Pakistani cooperation. Now this has a certain amount of realpolitik sense to it. The United States and Pakistan are not exactly on the best of terms, China is a rising power, they share a comon interest in containing India, yadda, yadda yadda. As a result, there has been the occasional press story about closer ties, which begets the inevitable U.S.-based blog posts about China expanding its "string of pearls" strategy of more deepwater ports in the Asia/Pacific region. There's just one thing. The more closely one reads these stories, the less clear it is that China wants a string of pearls. Most of these stories talk about great Pakistani enthusiasm for more Chinese involvement. That enthusiasm is not really reciprocated by China, however. […] [… T]o sum up: despite Pakistan prostrating itself before China, Beijing has been extremely leery of getting too enmeshed in that country. It has rejected repeated requests for military basing, and only now has a commercial Chinese company agreed to manage a port that appears to be the Pakistani exemplar of "white elephant." So please, no "strong of pearls" posts from the national security blogosphere […]. These pearls are about as fake as you can get. Another strategic explanation for the Gwadar takeover is the prospect of a 'Chinese California': a borrowed west coast on the Indian Ocean, linked to China by a railway and oil pipeline to Xinjiang. This might lessen China's reliance on oil imports carried through the potentially vulnerable Strait of Malacca, from the Indian Ocean into the South China Sea. Similar plans have been mooted in the past for Myanmar, and though plans for the Gwadar railway predate Yangon's drift away from Beijing, that development may increase the appeal of the Pakistani route. But Gwadar's utility in energy security terms has also been disputed. From Xu Tianran at Global Times: The operation of the strategic port is also widely regarded as a key move by China to seek an alternative to the Strait of Malacca, through which over 80 percent of the country's imported oil passes. […] Under its 12th Five-Year Plan, China has vowed to accelerate the construction of railways and highways linking Gwadar Port and Kashi in Northwest China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. […] Zhou Dadi, former director-general of the Energy Research Institute under the National Development and Reform Commission, told the Global Times that the port's role in securing China's energy supply is being overstated, adding that the costs for building an oil pipeline and transporting oil via railways would be high. "The idea of using the route from Pakistan to China as an alternative energy line can be seen as a last resort at most," he said, adding that a situation in which the Strait of Malacca is blocked would result in a worldwide conflict, which is highly unlikely. The deal may be less about Gwadar's location than part of a broader pattern of Chinese port investments around the globe, as growth in China slows and struggling operators elsewhere sell cheaply. From Joanne Chiu at The Wall Street Journal: China Merchants, a unit of the China Merchants Group conglomerate, last month agreed to pay €400 million ($543 million) to buy a 49% stake in port operator Terminal Link SAS from French container-shipping company CMA CGM, which was reducing debt. Weeks earlier, China Merchants, the country's biggest port operator by container shipping volume, acquired a 23.5% stake in the Port of Djibouti. China Merchants in 2011 took control of a container port development in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and raised its stake to 85% last year. […] For China Merchants, the CMA CGM deal gives access to a diversified port portfolio of 15 terminals in eight countries, including Morocco, Belgium and the U.S. The deal also strengthens the Chinese company's relationship with the French shipping line. The companies signed a 12-year agreement in which CMA CGM's container ships will increase calls at China Merchants' ports. […] Growth in emerging markets is partly the result of a shift of some factory activity away from China. "Many manufacturers that produce low-end products, such as shoes and clothes, have been relocating their production bases from [China] to places like Cambodia, because of cheaper labor costs.…The trend is irreversible," says Lawrence Li, a regional shipping and ports analyst at brokerage firm UOB KayHian. Although featured on the back of Pakistan's five rupee note, Gwadar has not been a commercial success so far. From Declan Walsh at The New York Times: Commissioned by General Musharraf, the Gwadar port project initially set off a flurry of excited property speculation in what was once a quiet fishing village. Developers presented flashy plans for luxury apartment blocks amid talk the port could rival Dubai. […] But Pakistan has failed to build the port or transportation infrastructure needed to develop the port, the property bubble has burst and, according to the port management Web site, the last ship to dock there arrived in November. "The government never built the infrastructure that the port needed — roads, rail or storage depots," said Khurram Husain, a freelance business journalist. "Why would any shipping company come to the port if it has no service to offer?" According to reports in the Pakistani news media, the Port of Singapore Authority sought to withdraw from the management contract after the Pakistani government failed to hand over land needed to develop the facility.
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Post tags: energy security, India, India relations, Indian Ocean, Myanmar, oil, oil pipeline, Pakistan, Pakistan relations, port, railway
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| Wang Lijun Allegedly Sought British Asylum Posted: 20 Feb 2013 05:51 PM PST A forthcoming book by Chinese journalists Pin Ho and Wenguang Huang claims that Wang Lijun unsuccessfully sought asylum from the U.K. months before entering the U.S. consulate in Chengdu last year, adding yet more ingredients to the well-cooked story of Chongqing's former police chief and his superior, Bo Xilai. The book, A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel, is to be published in the U.K. in April. From Tom Phillips at The Telegraph: In November 2011, just days after Mr Heywood's body was discovered inside a Chongqing hotel room, Mr Wang allegedly disguised himself as an "old man" and "snuck" into the British Consulate-General in the city of Guangzhou. [...] A spokesperson for the British Embassy in Beijing said: "We don't have any record of any such meeting. We have no record of Wang Lijun visiting the consulate at that time." [...] Before fleeing to the US consulate in Chengdu on February 6 2012, Mr Wang "contacted officials at the consulates of the United Kingdom and Germany in Chongqing". British officials have confirmed that Mr Wang did set up a meeting at the UK consulate in Chongqing but say he failed to show up.
See more on Wang Lijun and Bo Xilai via CDT.
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Post tags: asylum, Bo Xilai, Britain, Chengdu, Chongqing, defection, Guangzhou, United Kingdom, Wang Lijun
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| Word of the Week: Expensive Country Posted: 20 Feb 2013 12:00 PM PST The Word of the Week comes from China Digital Space's Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon, a glossary of terms created by Chinese netizens and frequently encountered in online political discussions. These are the words of China's online "resistance discourse," used to mock and subvert the official language around censorship and political correctness.  贵国 (guì guó): expensive country
A sarcastic reference to China. This term was popularized because of discontent over high prices; gui guo is a country in which basic needs like housing, fuel, power, and healthcare are all too costly. Gui is also the honorific form of "your"; gui guo, literally "your honorable country," is often used in diplomatic speech. Using gui guo in reference to China separates the speaker from his country, in opposition to 我国 wǒ guó, "our country." Xiao Qiang and Perry Link explain that in this turn of phrase, netizens imply that "the state that belongs to you rulers, not to me."
© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: grass-mud horse lexicon, word of the week
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| Photo: The Hands of Huang Magang, by Michael Steverson Posted: 20 Feb 2013 11:00 AM PST |
| PLA Unit 61398 Recruitment Notice Found Posted: 20 Feb 2013 09:09 AM PST  This 12-story building on the outskirts of Shanghai is the headquarters of Unit 61398 of the People's Liberation Army. China's defense ministry has denied that it is responsible for initiating digital attacks. (New York Times) China's Ministry of National Defense quickly denied charges outlined in a widely circulated report from information security firm Mandiant that exposed a specific unit of the People's Liberation Army as responsible for hacking against the U.S. and other countries. Reuters reports a statement published on the Ministry's official website called into question the evidence put forth by The New York Times, saying, "The report, in only relying on linking IP address to reach a conclusion the hacking attacks originated from China, lacks technical proof." Well, thanks to the shrewd detective work of Chinese netizens, we now have further evidence–a 2004 notice, still viewable on the website of Zhejiang University (at the time of this article's publication), titled "China's People's Liberation Army Unit 61398 Recruiting Graduate Students" [zh]. The Graduate School has received notice that Unit 61398 of China's People's Liberation Army (located in Pudong District, Shanghai) seeks to recruit 2003-class computer science graduate students. Students who sign the service contract will receive a 5,000 yuan per year National Defense Scholarship. After graduation, students will work in the same field within the PLA. Interested Zhejiang University 2003-class graduate students should please contact Teacher Peng in the Graduate Division before May 20. (Cao Guangbiao room 108; phone: 87952168) Graduate Division
May 13, 2004
Via CDT Chinese. Translated by Little Bluegill.
© Little Bluegill for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: hacking, Ministry of Defense, People's Liberation Army, weibo
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