China Archives

Shock: China still communist despite olympics

By Charlie

Yes, I am shocked *shocked* that gambling is allowed at this bar:

China breaks Olympic promises on rights, media, pollution

With four days left before the start of the 2008 Summer Games, Chinese officials have not lived up to key promises they made to win the right to host the Olympics, including widening press freedoms, cleaning up their capital city's polluted air and respecting human rights.

Really? The communists lied? This has obviously never happened before, right?

When they applied to host the games, Beijing officials also had completed a Candidature File, in which they agreed to meet specific requirements. Although the International Olympic Committee said the file is a public document, Beijing Olympics officials didn't follow through Monday on a request by McClatchy to see the Candidature File they completed.

Reached by phone, the Beijing Olympic organizing committee's head of media operations, Sun Weijia, declined to comment.

Ahh, the openness and honesty of China, paragon of freedom and liberty throughout the world. Did we expect any difference?

August 5, 2008 04:41 PM Link China Comments (6) TrackBack (0)

Pro-China changes in Democratic Taiwan?

By Charlie

The opposition party in Taiwan, the KMT, just won in a landslide, which may warm relations with China.

During this election cycle in Taiwan, Beijing has taken a subtle approach. Last year Taiwan's President Chen announced plans for a referendum that would ask voters whether the island should seek to join the United Nations under the name "Taiwan." The island, which lost its U.N. representation in 1971 when its seat was switched to Beijing, has been blocked in several attempts to re-join the body under its formal name of "Republic of China." While the referendum will have little practical effect — the island doesn't have the support to enter the U.N. under any name — it was the sort of move that once would have sent Beijing into a frenzy. While the Chinese government has said it would not tolerate the referendum, it has toned down its rhetoric and instead relied on pressure from the U.S., Taiwan's biggest ally, to discourage the move. In December U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the move was "a provocative policy." The fate of two referendum issues in Saturday's ballot (both failed to garner enough votes — or voter interest — to be seriously considered) would also make the controversial U.N. referendum in March unlikely to pass.

Furthermore, China's ability to use military force to prevent Taiwan from declaring independence grows along with the budget for the People's Liberation Army, which has increased by more than 10% annually for the past 10 years. Chen says that there are now more than 1,300 missiles stationed on the Chinese mainland direct across the Taiwan Strait, up from the 200 when he became president in 2000. But these days Beijing has shown it can better influence events without firing them.

Meanwhile, it seems that the US military is also working to improve relations with the ChiComs after November's ship-docking incident:

WASHINGTON - US military officials are in China this week for their first high-level visit there since an international flap in November in which Beijing refused to allow US warships into a port for a long-planned Thanksgiving visit.

The incident baffled Washington and further complicated US relations with the Chinese military, the People's Liberation Army (PLA). But that's only one of many issues for military officials as they work to create clearer lines of communication between the two militaries – generally perceived to be a weaker relationship than the diplomatic or the economic ones.

Mr. Shinn, a China expert who was sworn in to his new post Thursday, told Congress last month he is as perplexed by China's military actions as anyone. "The problem that we have is divining their intent," he told the Senate Armed Services Committee. "That's one of the reasons for the great ... care and vigilance with which we have to deal with the Chinese military."

January 14, 2008 07:30 PM Link China Comments (2) TrackBack (0)

China… Cyberattack…Didn’t I Just Post on This?

By Charlie

China Link Suspected in Lab Hacking

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 8 — A cyber attack reported last week by one of the federal government’s nuclear weapons laboratories may have originated in China, according to a confidential memorandum distributed Wednesday to public and private security officials by the Department of Homeland Security.
Security researchers said the memorandum, which was obtained by The New York Times from an executive at a private company, included a list of Web and Internet addresses that were linked to locations in China. However, they noted that such links did not prove that the Chinese government or Chinese citizens were involved in the attacks. In the past, intruders have compromised computers in China and then used them to disguise their true location.

Officials at the lab, Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, said the attacks did not compromise classified information, though they acknowledged that they were still working to understand the full extent of the intrusion.

Two things here:

Legally, cyber-attacks are in the same category as electronic attack, which is the same as firing off a cruise missile. Just because cyber attacks have no causalities, they can still cause damage to critical systems.

Technically, we have to figure out how to “connect the dots” and figure out exactly where these attacks originated from.

December 10, 2007 07:17 AM Link China Comments (2) TrackBack (0)

China Identified as Source of World Cyber-Attacks

By Charlie

America has become an information society, and is dependent on a variety of networks to support day-to-day economic and social demands. Cell phone, internet, power, water, road, and flight networks are all essential to the economic engine that powers America. Many of these systems are dependent on information technology to operate, which places them in danger of being susceptible to cyber attack. Like a bomb on a bridge, malicious code uploaded to an infrastructure network could have the same disastrous effect: off-lining a critical system and causing millions of dollars of damage. Concerns over cyber terrorism have been around for years, but recently, the US and British governments identified a source of world-wide cyber attacks: China.
U.S., British officials target Chinese as source of cyberattacks

High-ranking officials in the United Kingdom and the United States have for the first time publicly identified the Chinese government as the source of cyberattacks, warning that China has penetrated both government and business networks with potentially disastrous consequences.
Jonathan Evans, director-general of MI5, the U.K.'s counterintelligence and security service, told British companies last week that they were under attack by "Chinese state organizations," The Times of London reported Saturday.

Marine Gen. James Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chefs of Staff, has portrayed the effects of large-scale Chinese-backed denial-of-service attacks against U.S systems and networks as potentially having an effect equal to "the magnitude of a weapon of mass destruction." The characterization came in a little-noticed report to Congress released by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission late last month.

Is it state supported terrorism? or an act of war?

Cartwright testified before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission in March, when he was still head of the U.S. Strategic Command, which has responsibility for information operations in the Defense Department. He told the commission that China currently has a larger capability to conduct denial-of-service attacks than any other country, and such attacks have "the potential to cause cataclysmic harm if conducted against the United States on a large scale."

He testified that the Chinese are making "plans to use this type of capability in a military context." He added, "I don't think the [United States] has gotten its head around this issue yet, but I think we should start to consider that the regret factors associated with a cyberattack could, in fact, be in the magnitude of a weapon of mass destruction."

China also is "actively engaging in cyber reconnaissance" by probing the computer networks of U.S. government agencies as well as private companies, Cartwright said. The data collected from these probes, he told the commission, could be used to identify weak points in U.S. networks, discover the communications patterns of government agencies and obtain valuable information stored throughout networks.

Cyberterrorism is defined as a type of terrorism, which is defined by the Department of Defense (Dir 200.1), as The calculated use of unlawful violence, or threat of unlawful violence used to inculcate fear and intended to coerce or intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological. Cyberterrorism describes a type of “unlawful violence” i.e., computer network attack (CNA) and computer network operations (CNO). Cyberterrorism denotes a use of Electronic Attack that represents an attempt to “inculcate fear and intended to coerce or intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological.”

In military terms an electronic attack (EA) is equal to shooting a weapon at the enemy, therefore, jamming enemy communications is an act of war. Cyber-attacks, or attacks using information systems to cause disruption, are rooted in two main areas, CNA and CNO. CNO is mainly reconnaissance and intelligence gathering, exploiting enemy systems to satisfy intelligence requirements or collect data that can facilitate CNA. Terrorists and criminals (state-supported or not) could use CNO to gather information on targets, arrival and departure times, or operational information that could aid their goals. CNA is actually executing a cyber-attack on an enemy network, such as a DOS (denial of service) attack, or uploading of malicious code. This could either disrupt, or off-line the enemy system. US government agencies and private companies must take cyber-attacks into account when planning defensive strategies against terrorism. Even though China was named in the above report as a major exporter of cyber-crime, it is unlikely that this will change in the future.

« Close It

December 7, 2007 05:39 AM Link China Comments (3) TrackBack (0)

ChiCom Spying Continues

By Charlie

SAN JOSE - A Cupertino man has been sentenced to two years in federal prison for illegally exporting night-vision technology to China that could be used for military purposes.
Philip Cheng, 60, was also ordered to pay a $50,000 fine in a hearing Monday before U.S. District Judge Ronald Whyte in San Jose. Cheng will begin serving his sentence Feb. 12.

Cheng, who operated a San Jose company called SPCTEK, pleaded guilty in October 2006 to brokering the sale of a thermal-imaging infrared camera called Panther I without the approval of the State Department. He pleaded guilty after a trial last year ended in a hung jury.

Isn’t there worse charge that spies, defectors, and traitors should receive for selling out their country, and giving sensitive defense technology to China, or any other country?

December 5, 2007 07:52 AM Link China Comments (2) TrackBack (0)