People’s Daily Journalists address provocative New York Times report [People’s Daily]

People’s Daily Online

April 21, 2014

“On April 15 the New York Times published a report headed “China’s Actions in Hunt for Jet Are Seen as Hurting as much as Helping”. The provocative report suggested that China’s efforts were serving only to distract and delay the search effort; it alleged that in the first week of the search China released satellite photographs that misdirected the search to the wrong area of the South China Sea, then stated that a false signal detected by the Chinese search vessel has wasted further time in the search for the missing plane.

Responding to the report, senior journalists Wen Xian and Ding Xiaosi of the People’s Daily North American office attempted to contact the New York Times…

Excerpted; full article link: http://english.people.com.cn/98649/8604329.html

Commentary: Better GDP growth beats “China Collapse” theory [Xinhua]

BEIJING, April 17 (Xinhua) — Official data show that China’s GDP grew 7.4 percent year on year in the first quarter, 0.3 percentage point lower than the pace in the previous three months.

No sooner did Chinese statistical authorities release the figures than some merchants of doom pointed at the slowdown and whipped up a new round of gloom-mongering over the future of the world’s second largest economy.

But their claims that China’s economic impetus is fizzling out and that the Asian giant is headed for an economic hard-landing [sic] are baseless and misleading.

For starters, despite heavy downward pressure, China’s growth pace in the first quarter still exceeds the 7.3-percent market estimation and belongs to the top echelon across the world.

Factoring in Beijing’s strong-willed and game-changing endeavors in economic restructuring, the 7.4-percent rate remains within the reasonable range.

After all, it is natural for an economy to decelerate during structural adjustment, and the results of a better-structured economy and a more balanced growth pattern will make the downtick worthwhile.

As a matter of fact, an overwhelming majority of economic observers and pundits worldwide remain sanguine in China’s economy. Their optimism is shrewd and well-founded.

China’s efforts to boost domestic consumption have begun to pay off. As a manifestation of the increasingly large role of consumption spending, the household final consumption expenditure accounted for 64.9 percent of GDP in the first quarter.

In another sign of the great growth potential of the Chinese economy, official figures show that in the first three months traditional industries such as steel and cement were outpaced by high-tech industries, which constitute a pillar of future growth with mounting significance.

Meanwhile, with business activity picking up, China’s endogenous power of economic growth has gradually recovered. Employment is also improving, and foreign trade is making a turn for the better as the recovery [sic] of European and U.S. economies takes root.

After more than three decades of rapid economic growth, the Chinese government and public have both realized that pursuing growth at all costs is not good at all.

What China really needs is not an economy expanding at a blistering pace but one that grows in a sustainable and healthy manner at a reasonable and steady speed. And China is getting just that…

-Edited by Zuo Shou-

Full article link: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/indepth/2014-04/17/c_133269741.htm

Also see related article: “China economy collapse theory fear-mongering: economist” [Xinhua] — http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2014-04/21/c_133279125.htm

Edward Snowden exposes NSA spying against Chinese telecom firm Huawei [World Socialist Website]

By Tom Carter
24 March 2014

Documents released by National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden and published in the New York Times over the weekend confirm that the US spy agency has been engaged for years in a campaign of industrial espionage against Huawei, the giant Chinese telecommunications firm. The documents expose a broad range of espionage activities, from spying on company executives to creating “back doors” into the company’s servers, routers and switches.

The documents, which date from 2010, reveal that a major spying operation against Huawei had been underway since at least 2007 under the codename “Shotgiant.” While the Times reported the existence of the program and published some of the PowerPoint slides provided by Snowden, the Times has “withheld technical details of the operation at the request of the Obama administration, which cited national security concerns.” The “newspaper of record” has once again bowed to the demands of the military-intelligence apparatus…

…Notes accompanying another slide include a list of “what we are trying to accomplish.” One of the items on this list is to “[d]etermine if Huawei is doing SIGINT [signals intelligence, spying] for PRC [China].” In other words, the NSA’s own internal documents make clear that the NSA does not have any evidence that Huawei is engaged in the conduct for which American political functionaries routinely denounce the company…

Full article link: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/03/24/huaw-m24.html

Commentary: China’s economy, to crash or just bashed? [Xinhua]

By Xinhua writer Chen Siwu

BEIJING, Feb. 27 (Xinhua) — China seems to have little to cheer about in recent weeks, from persistent toxic smog to an economic slowdown, according to recent reports by the Western media.

China has no excuse for the environmental crisis, but the hype about the country’s current economic slowdown requires reconsideration.

Among the gloomy reports by Western media is a film by Robert Peston, How China Fooled the World, carried by the British broadcaster BBC on its website.

Peston warns of a “serious risk of calamitous crash” of the Chinese economy, saying China could be in trouble and the third wave of the global financial crisis is looming large.

Such a conclusion is sensational, but not fresh.

Since China launched its reform and opening up drive, Western observers have foreseen the so-called “collapse” of China many times, but none have turned out to be genuine prophets.

The latest cry about China’s economy is like a fortune-teller in the street who talks nonsense, with predictions more resembling fictional thrillers than real-life previews.

What makes such predictions false is that they oversimplify China’s economy into one or a few numbers and then exaggerate them.

The number cited most by bearish analysts is 7.7 percent — last year’s growth, which tied with that of 2012 for the weakest since 1999.

So what?

Since China began posting GDP data in 1978, the country’s annual economic growth has dropped below 6 percent three times, below 8 percent nine times, below 9 percent 12 times, and below 10 percent 19 times.

To the woe of those passive observers, China’s economy never collapsed in previous slowdowns…

Excerpted; full article link: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2014-02/27/c_133148003.htm

See also related article — “Commentary: Doomsday prophets misread Chinese economy” [Xinhua] – http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/indepth/2014-02/26/c_133144690.htm

UN report on North Korea targets both Pyongyang and Beijing

By Peter Symonds
18 February 2014

The UN report on human rights in North Korea released yesterday marks an acceleration of the US-led campaign to destabilise and ultimately remove the Pyongyang regime. The [alleged] catalogue of horrors in North Korea is designed to stampede public opinion behind any US provocations directed against Pyongyang, but above all to intensify the pressure on North Korea’s ally, China.

The highly political character of the UN commission of inquiry was underlined by the comments of its chair, former Australian judge Michael Kirby, who declared that the repressive methods of the North Korean regime were “strikingly similar” to the crimes of Nazi Germany. He likened North Korean prisons to the Nazi concentration camps in which millions of Jews, gypsies and political prisoners were exterminated.

Kirby has already written to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, declaring that his commission is recommending that “the international criminal court render accountable all those, including possibly yourself, who may be responsible for the crimes against humanity.” In his comments yesterday, Kirby declared that the purpose of the commission’s report was to “galvanize action on the part of the international community.”

Kirby’s condemnation of the North Korean regime, picked up and amplified by the US and international media, recalls the demonisation of Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic as the “Serbian Hitler” prior to the 1999 NATO bombing campaign that rained death and destruction on that country’s population. Similarly, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was subjected to a campaign of vilification prior to the illegal 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq that devastated the country and killed hundreds of thousands of people.

North Korea is a small, impoverished and isolated country, not an imperialist power like Germany, which, under the Nazis, launched wars of aggression that ravaged Europe…the targeting of governments and individuals by the UN and its associated institutions is invariably highly selective, politically coloured and geared to the predatory interests of the imperialist powers, above all the United States.

No one is suggesting that a UN commission of inquiry be established into any of the crimes of US imperialism, such as waging wars of aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq — the crime for which the Nazi leaders were convicted at Nuremberg. Similarly, no UN investigations are under way into the crimes and human rights abuses of US allies such as Israel or Saudi Arabia.

The lengthy report is based largely on the testimony of North Korean refugees and exiles who provided [allegations] of their [prison] treatment…The commission of inquiry was barred from entering North Korea.

…the North Korean exile community, particularly in South Korea, is heavily influenced by anti-communist organisations, right-wing Christian groups and the state apparatus, particularly the South Korean National Intelligence Service. The UN commission of inquiry has now given its official seal to testimony from this layer.

It is no accident that the report itself echoes the propaganda that has emanated from Washington for years…

Those who should be held criminally responsible for starving the North Korean people are above all the successive US administrations that maintained an economic blockade of the country following the 1953 termination of the Korean War, in which the United States killed hundreds of thousands of Korean civilians and soldiers. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Washington systematically tightened the sanctions regime on North Korea in a calculated effort to bring about its collapse. Any humanitarian aid came with political strings attached. In the mid-1990s, economic sanctions compounded food shortages caused by a string of natural disasters, leading to widespread famine and deaths.

While the role of the US and its allies in systematically destabilising North Korea goes unmentioned, the UN commission report does single out China for special mention. It specifically criticises China for its return of asylum seekers to North Korea, suggesting that it is in breach of its obligations under international refugee laws.

China is not alone, however, in branding asylum seekers as so-called “economic refugees” and…repatriating them. Governments in Kirby’s own country, Australia, are notorious for the “refoulement” of refugees.

The real purpose of the accusation against China is to place it in the dock alongside North Korea, potentially opening up Chinese leaders to charges of complicity in “crimes against humanity.” The UN commission report feeds directly into the Obama administration’s escalating provocations and pressure against China throughout the Indo-Pacific region, as part of its “pivot to Asia.”

The US is targeting North Korea in particular because it is China’s only formal ally and acts as a buffer for China on its northern border. A change of regime in Pyongyang to one sympathetic to Washington would further tighten the noose of US alliances, bases and strategic partnerships around China.

Not surprisingly, the US State Department welcomed the UN report.. An editorial in the Wall Street Journal praised the report for “naming and shaming Pyongyang’s accomplices in Beijing.”

The editorial continued, “The report marks the first major mention of China by name in a UN assessment of North Korea,” and concluded by bluntly declaring, “The report’s findings underscore that Western policy should focus on squeezing the regime with a goal of toppling it.”

The trip to Asia by US Secretary of State John Kerry over the past week signaled that the Obama administration intends to step up the “squeeze” not only on North Korea, but China as well. North Korea topped the agenda in Kerry’s talks with Chinese leaders. He told the media that China had to use “every tool at their disposal, all of the means of persuasion that they have” to compel North Korea to denuclearise.

By extending the accusations against the North Korean regime to “crimes against humanity”, the US is effectively ruling out any compromise or deal with North Korea and setting course for a confrontation with Pyongyang and its ally in Beijing.

Edited / excerpted by Zuo Shou; full article here: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/02/18/kore-f18.html

China’s lunar rover “wakes up”: spokesman – Jade Rabbit not dead yet [Xinhua]

Prior to this, AFP already ran a story that went global that ‘Jade Rabbit’ is dead. Some Western media are so desperate, they pronounce early funerals for Chinese robots!!! – Zuo Shou

BEIJING, Feb. 13 (Xinhua) — China’s moon rover Yutu is awake after its troubled dormancy but experts are still trying to find out the cause of its abnormality, a spokesman with the country’s lunar probe program said on Thursday.

“Yutu has come back to life,” said Pei Zhaoyu, the spokesman.

Pei said the moon rover, named after the pet of a lunar goddess in ancient Chinese mythology, has now been restored to its normal signal reception function. But experts are still working to verify the cause of its mechanical control abnormality.

The problem emerged before Yutu entered its second dormancy on the moon on Jan. 25 as the lunar night fell.

“Yutu went to sleep under an abnormal status,” Pei said, adding that experts were concerned that it might not be able to survive the extremely low temperatures during the lunar night.

“The rover stands a chance of being saved now that it is still alive,” he said…

Full article link: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2014-02/13/c_133111955.htm

Chinese Internet shutdown linked to right-wing groups, US shell corporations [World Socialist Website]

I did not attempt to access the Internet here in China at the time of the reported shutdown, so this is news to me. The article includes considerable conjecture but still interesting for that. – Zuo Shou

By Kevin Reed
28 January 2014

Last Tuesday, the Internet in China was rendered virtually inoperable for eight hours. According to news reports, nearly all of China’s Internet users—600 million people—were unable to access web sites including the popular search engine Baidu and the social media site Sina Weibo.

At approximately 3:00 p.m. Beijing time on January 21, the domain name root servers in China began rerouting all Internet traffic within the country to the web servers of two Internet companies in the US, Sophidea and Dynamic Internet Technology (DIT). Web monitoring experts also said that .com, .net and .org Internet addresses failed to load in Chinese browsers during the outage.

The US media was quick to report unsubstantiated claims that the breakdown was caused by Chinese Internet censors who made a mistake and, instead of blocking access to the Sophidea and DIT web sites, accidentally redirected all of China’s Internet traffic to their servers. Aside from the fact that the theory that Chinese authorities mistakenly sent the entire Internet to two IP addresses in the US is on its face implausible, no information has yet been produced to prove this claim.

It is far more likely—based on information available in news reports — that the top-level Chinese Internet servers were hacked by right-wing opponents of the Chinese government and other cyber criminals operating within the US corporate-intelligence community…

…While speculation continues as to the specific cause of last Tuesday’s shutdown, it is not out of the question that the outage was the result of a sophisticated malware operation sponsored by the US government or one of its private contractors. As revealed by Edward Snowden in November, the NSA and its Office of Tailored Access Operations (TAO) are the number one purveyor of cyber crime and distributor of malware in the world. These operations rely upon IP address switching and domain name server tricks to lure users into unknowingly loading harmful software onto their systems.

In June, intelligence expert Matthew Aid reported that the NSA and TAO have been engaged for 15 years in a large-scale hacking operation aimed at Chinese computer and telecommunications networks…

Full article link: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/01/28/chin-j28.htm

US comments on Chinese spying have ulterior motives [People’s Daily]

December 26, 2013

Last week, U.S. Congressman Mike Rogers claimed to the European Parliament that Chinese cyber-espionage has already cost the U.S. economy 400 billion U.S. dollars. Rogers also told members of the European Parliament in Brussels that if the EU continued to muddy the waters of debate by focusing on U.S. snooping on European citizens and institutions, it might help China to spy on European and American companies.

Claims of this kind are without foundation – no more than an attempt to divert attention from International concerns regarding PRISM.

The truth is that, China is one of the victims of cyber espionage.

There have been media reports quoting Edward Snowden as saying that the U.S. government has been invading computers on the Chinese mainland and in Hong Kong since 2009, attacking hundreds of surveillance targets. This provides clear evidence that China has become one of the victims of America’s cyber attack strategy.

Rogers’ speech to the European Parliament was delivered with ulterior motives.

The PRISM spying scandal has caused a considerable amount of EU resentment against the U.S. The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has been conducting massive phone surveillance in France, Italy and Spain, and even on German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other European leaders. The range of surveillance is extraordinary. Although it is supposedly one of the EU’s most important allies, the U.S. has refused to apologize over the scandal and has even refused to make any commitment to refrain from surveillance in the future.

Rogers, as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, trying to ease EU-US tensions, but the attempt to divert the concerns of the international community is unprofessional and irresponsible.

In recent years, the U.S. has maintained a constant refrain of accusations blaming China for “cyber-espionage”. In January 2013, the “New York Times” and other media claimed their computers had been attacked by Chinese hackers; in February, U.S. network security company Mandy Hentges [sic] issued a report stating that “China’s military is involved in hacker attacks”; in May, the U.S. Department of Defense released a report accusing China of improving its military technology through “industrial and technological espionage”.

There is no reliable basis for these accusations. They are nothing more than an attempt to create a “presumption of guilt” which will lend credence to any future allegations.

It is well-known that the U.S. leads the world in military information technology, and it is the only country to have been forced to acknowledge in public that it is waging network warfare on other countries. The NSA PRISM scandal shows that the U.S. has been stealing the secrets of other countries through its information network. Meanwhile, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee ignored the reprehensible conduct of the NSA, while leveling irresponsible accusations against other countries…

(Editor：LiangJun、Huang Jin）

Article link: http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90883/8496587.html

See also: “Washington tries to shift spying blame to China” [People’s Daily / China Daily] — http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90883/8493374.html

“How to Counter America’s Digital Hegemony” – China’s vanguard measures to protect national cyberspace [Strategic Culture Foundation]

Boris KAZANTSEV | 23.11.2013

The digital world, or cyberspace, is at a crossroads in its development. And not with respect to specific technologies, but with respect to state policy concepts regarding cyberspace and how and to what extent the state should influence it. The revelations of Edward Snowden were a jolt that has caused an avalanche of thoughts [sic] in many countries. And at the center of these thoughts are a single problem: how to maintain state sovereignty in an era of total digital transparency where there are methods of collecting information that in the past no one had even dreamed of.

The American concept of cyberspace cannot but be imperialistic. This means that the security of the U.S. becomes the point of reference for the behavior of all other countries and international organizations, to which the imperial “Center” may show “favor” by granting access to part of its capabilities, while demanding full submission in return. While previously this submission was expressed in the adoption of the culture, economy and currency of the “Center”, now it is expressed in the requirement to acknowledge the dominance of American IT corporations on the domestic markets of other countries. Furthermore, it is implied that other countries are not to independently maintain their own cyber-resources, as the “supreme protector” has already taken care of everything. The idea of an “informational umbrella”, as it were.

For a long time Europe has agreed with such logic, almost completely abandoning the expansion of its own capabilities in the digital world. This was encouraged by the fact that the socialist orientation of the ideologists of the European information society’s architecture were eclectically overlaid on the overall neoliberal model of the European Union. However, the Snowden affair jerked the Europeans out of their sweet slumber and forced them to take a serious look around in search of adequate models for responding to American digital hegemony.

Surprisingly, it is becoming increasingly clear that the Chinese model, which the Europeans themselves have been ruthlessly criticizing for the past 20 years, is just such a model. Individual elements of its implementation in Europe could be seen as early as 2009-2010. At that time European governments openly confronted American IT corporations, in particular, Google and Microsoft. Each case was different (for example, for Germany and Greece it was connected with the Google Street View project, and for France, with attempts to digitize its library collections), but in each case the Europeans tried to create a barrier to the boundless U.S. presence on their territories. In 2011 a “virtual Schengen” [sic — see Wikipedia’s “Schengen Agreement”: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen_Agreement] obviously organized after the manner of China’s “Golden Shield”, was even discussed, but it didn’t go any farther than generalities.

Apparently China’s experience (in scholarly literature they call it “the East Asian experience of building an information society”) will be increasingly sought after in the future by those countries which want to be subjects of international politics and not obedient performers of the “Center’s” will.

The “Chinese model” is based first of all on the recognition that “universal values” are not all that universal. Over the millennia of its existence, each large civilization has developed its own inherent deep-seated codes which it is safe to call “national values” and which are always unique. For China, for example, these are Confucian values. However, the Chinese recognize the existence of various value systems and do not categorize countries whose value systems differ from their own as “barbarians”, like the preachers of “universal values” in the West.

A second aspect is reliance on national production, which promotes economic growth on the one hand, and state security on the other…

On the technical level, China has from the beginning taken a very careful approach to the development of the World Wide Web on its territory, rejecting the neoliberal paradigm “the market will adjust everything”. In 2003 there were no more than 10 large networks in China which operated under the steady monitoring of the state. The rapid growth of the number of Internet cafes in the mid to late ’90s meant that for several years (1999 to the early 2000s) this sphere was subjected to more serious state regulation.

Thanks to the consistent and thoughtful policy of supporting high-tech sectors of the economy, in China they have done what for a long time seemed impossible: they have forced American IT corporations out of the domestic market and now are actively buying them up (for example, Lenovo bought out IBM, and now it has its eye on Blackberry). Today such Chinese brands as ZTE or Huawei have become synonyms of success and power…

In its content production policy, China holds to two simple principles.

…[T]he first principle [is called] “block and clone”, which means “smart censorship”. Its main distinction from “dumb censorship” is that the state, when blocking access to a foreign platform, immediately provides the possibility to use one just like it, but national [i.e. sourced domestically].

This has proven to be true in relation to absolutely all popular mechanisms of the Internet, from search engines and video services to social networks and microblogs. But the number of users of the Chinese Internet (and this is over 600 million people) makes the very concept of a “global network” quite relative, as there exists a self-sufficient cluster which provides itself with everything it needs.

The second principle is to identify a set of key topics which, in the opinion of the Chinese leadership, could have a destabilizing effect on the country’s life…

Such topics include information which contradicts the principles enshrined in the Constitution; threatens national security; reveals state secrets; undermines confidence in the government; erodes the unity of the state; damages its honor and interests; provokes ethnic hatred or discrimination; erodes the solidarity of the nation; could have negative consequences for state policy in the sphere of religion; spreads the cult of violence, debauchery, pornography, gambling, murder or terrorism or provokes crime; spreads rumors; disturbs the public order; undermines social stability; or violates the human rights enshrined in the Constitution. No one is likely to say that these topics do not in fact deserve heightened attention from the state…

Edited by Zuo Shou

Full article link: http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2013/11/23/how-to-counter-americas-digital-hegemony.html

“How cryptography is a key weapon in the fight against empire states” by Julian Assange [Guardian]

Decent article, but contains certain exaggerated geo-political biases; e.g. near the end propagates the smear meme about China about having ulterior [cyber] motives in Africa, which it seems like the Guardian editors have further distorted. – Zuo Shou

9 July 2013

The original cypherpunks were mostly Californian libertarians…

Full article link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/09/cryptography-weapon-fight-empire-states-julian-assange

(c) Guardian News & Media Ltd