Roundup - 15/01/2010

• China's Ministry of Public Security has announced that its director of equipment and finance and deputy director of the international cooperation department are among eight Chinese missing inside the collapsed UN headquarters on Haiti. A total of four of the missing were officials from the ministry visiting the UN mission according to Xinhua. The other three men and one woman were police officers serving with the UN mission.
  
  UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said on Thursday that a total of 22 peace keepers had been confirm dead but that figure is likely to rise as around 150 are still missing including around 100 in the collapsed headquarters.
  
  A Chinese rescue team is said to be working 24 hrs a day in an attempt to save as many lives as possible within the crucial first 72 hours.
  
  
  
• The US has responded to the response to the attack on Google has been hindered by a lack of concrete evidence according to a report in the International Herald Tribune. The reports shows that while most hold the opinion that the attacks came from the Chinese state, concrete evidence of this is not available. The White House did not ask for the Chinese government to investigate the attacks and President Obama has declined to personally take on the issue in public. However, the report quotes a senior official as saying that there would be greater diplomatic action in the coming days.
  
  The attacks have now been shown to have affected at least 33 different institutions including a research institute closely link to Washington and the US defence contractor Northrop Grumman.
  
  Meanwhile, Microsoft has admitted that it was a weakness in its Internet Explorer that allowed the attack to happen.
  
  
  
• The China Internet Network Information Centre reports that China's online population has grown to 384 million. The figure increased almost 29% since the end of 2008 when China already had the worlds largest online population.
  
  
  
• China has chosen a new governor for Tibet after the resignation of Qiangba Puncog. Padma Choling is an ethnic Tibetan who has served 17 years in the People's Liberation Army before becoming a government official. Although the Tibetan governor is often an ethnic Tibetan. The most powerful official, Secretary of the CPC Tibet Committee Zhang Qingli, is Han Chinese.
  
  No reason has been given for the sudden resignation of Qiangba Puncog. He was 62, three years shy of the mandatory retirement age of 65.
  
  
  
• A court in Beijing has begun the trial of the most senior judicial official ever arrested. Huang Songyu was vice-president of the Supreme People's Court when he was dismissed after accusations of accepting bribes and embezzlement. Mr. Huang is now on trial for accepting more than 8 million RMB in bribes and embezzling 1 million RMB from a court in Guangdong. A Xinhua report also suggested that he was known for being 'sexually corrupt' with an interest in 'underage girls.'
  
  
  
• Kang Rixin, formerly head of the China National Nuclear Corporation, has been removed from the Central Committee and stripped of his Communist Party membership. Mr Kang was dismissed from his post at CNNC after suspicions of corruption. Although no charges have yet been brought he has been linked to bribes paid in return for construction contracts on China's nuclear infrastructure and also to an alleged multi-million dollar bribe from a leading French nuclear company.
  
  
  
• In economic news, China's FDI rose 103% year on year in December to reach US$12.1 billion. This brings FDI for 2009 to US$90.03 billion. A slight decrease of 2.6% compared with 2008.
  
  Meanwhile China's foreign exchange reserves grew 23.28% to nearly US$2.4 trillion.
  

Roundup - 13/01/2010

• Google has said it is no longer willing to collaborate in Chinese censorship and will shut down google.cn if it is not allowed to publish uncensored results. The announcement comes after Google claimed that an attack on its servers, and those of up to twenty other companies, were primarily designed to hack into the email accounts of Chinese human rights activists. According to Google only the inbox and subject line of emails was taken, no actual emails were compromised.
  
  Although Google made no specific allegations as to who is responsible for the attack, it has reacted strongly against the Chinese state. It says that it is willing to negotiate the presence of an uncensored version of google.cn but that if negotiations do not succeed it will simply pull out of China altogether. In an apparent attempt to put pressure on China censored images were recently found to be available on google.cn. For example, an iconic photo of a man standing in front of a column of tanks, taken in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, could be easily found on the search engine.
  
  Human rights activists have universally praised Google's decision. Arvind Ganesan of Human Right Watch said that Google's actions set 'a great example.' foreign internet companies in China have often been criticised for bowing to the Chinese state's wishes. Yahoo, for example, was willing to give private details of bloggers to China in exchange for access to the Chinese market.
  
  While Google's actions have been widely praised outside of China, its motives have been questioned. Google seemed to have no problem with censoring its results until now and has not linked the attacks specifically to the Chinese government. Some have suggested that this move is actually an attempt to head off future criticism. After all, Google's operations in China have managed to make little headway against China's Baidu search engine and China accounts for only US$300 million of Googles US$22 billion of annual revenue. Evgeny Morozov from Georgetown University said that it seemed as if Google was playing the 'innocence card.'
  
  
  
• 8 Chinese peacekeepers have been buried and are feared dead and another 10 are unaccounted for after Tuesday afternoons devastating earthquake in Haiti. The 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck at 16:53 local time and was Haiti's worst earthquake in two centuries. It is believed that the casualties may number in their thousands.
  
  On Wednesday China sent a rescue team of 50 earthquake experts, 3 dogs and machinery to aid in the crisis. China has 125 peacekeepers in Haiti as part of a several thousand strong UN presence. The UN headquarters is believed to be one of the buildings that was destroyed in the quake.
  
  
  
• China has raised the bank reserve ration by 0.5%. The ratio, the amount of money banks must keep in reserve compared to how much they lend out, has been increased in an effort to curb excess lending which could overheat the economy and lead to asset bubbles. China has already seen inflation begin to growth in recent months. China's stimulus package and lax lending policies led to a doubling in the the amount lent by banks in 2009 compared with 2008. Almost 600 billion RMB (US$87.7 billion) was lent in the first week of January. Many analysts had not expected such a move to come before the second quarter, however, it was expected to come eventually as China tries to rein in growth to sustainable levels. China has also raised the interest on one-year bills to 1.84% after raising that on three-month bills last week.
  
  
  
• China's restive province of Xinjiang is to up its security budget by almost 90% Xinhua reports. The budget proposal, to be decided on this week, suggests that spending on public security should be increased to 2.89 billion RMB (US$423 million) to combat the 'three forces' of terrorism, separatism, and extremism which the government says were behind the riots which left almost 200 dead last July.
  
  Xinjiang's regional government chairman, Nur Bekri, said that security forces should improve their response mechanisms to react quickly to 'mass incidents' and should find ways to prevent the use of new media, such as the internet and mobile phones, to coordinate these events.
  
  China denies that it is subjecting Xinjiang's 8 million Uighurs to religious and cultural oppression.
  
  
  
• In another sign of openness to homosexuality, China Daily's front page today bore a photo of China's first 'married' gay couple. Zeng Anquan and Pan Wenjie held a public ceremony at a gay bar in Chengdu. Although the marriage is not officially recognised by the state and there had been no official government response, Zeng and Pan hope that this is a first step in making same-sex partnerships a possibility. The couple have suffered a significant amount of predjudice since they announced their marriage. No family members attended the ceremony and Zeng's brother froze all the capital in Zeng's company when he heard the news.
  
  Discrimination against homosexuals is still extremely widespread in China. A survey by Zhang Beichuan of Qingdao University suggests that 8.7% of homosexuals are fired after revealing their sexuality, 4.7% feel their salary and chances of promotion are affected and 62% choose to keep their sexuality secret in the work place.
  

Roundup - 12/01/2010

• China has conducted a successful test of its missile interceptor technology, Xinhua says. China's HQ9 air defence system is designed to shoot down incoming missiles before they reach their targets in mainland china. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said that 'the test was defensive in nature and targeted at no country.' However, Al Jazeera quotes Shi Yinhong, Renmin Universities leading expert on Sino-US relations, as saying that there was a 'connection' between the test and the US decision to carry on with the sale of Patriot missile components to Taiwan. Taiwan says that there are approximately 1,500 missiles pointed at its territory and it relies on US arms imports to guarantee its security. Taiwanese media has suggested that President Ma Yingjiu will stop off in the US during a visit to Honduras this month in a move that is likely to provoke further anger from the mainland.
  
  
  
• China's leading internet search engine was down on Tuesday morning after being hacked by pro-Iran activists. Baidu's DNS was altered to redirect traffic to a page saying 'This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army.' Below was a sentence in Farsi saying 'in reaction to the US authorities' intervention in Iran's internal affairs. This is a warning.' The name 'Iranian Cyber Army' was used by hackers who shut down Twitter last month.
  
  
  
• Google has apologised to 8,000 Chinese writers for scanning and publishing their books online without their permission. Google offered to publish a list of all Chinese works it has scanned in recent years. It also said that it would work to reach an agreement with Chinese authors by the summer. Currently more than 50 Chinese publishers have agreed to allow around 60,000 books to be published, Google said.
  
  
  
• China plans to build the world's highest airport on the Tibetan plateau state media reports. The 'roof of the world' project will cost 1.8 billion RMB (US$263.62 million) to build an airport at 4,436 meters above sea level. This will be 102 meters higher than Tibet's Bamda airport, currently considered the worlds highest. The new airport will serve the region of Nagqu in the centre of the Qinghai-Tibet plateau. Nagqu currently has a mainly Tibetan population of 400,000 though this may change as it is further opened up.
  
  
  
• China has scrapped restrictions on the use of foreign parts in its wind turbines. The decision by the National Development and Reform Commission was taken last year according to China Business News, but has only just been announced. Previously, manufacturers of China's wind turbine had to source at least 70% of their turbines from domestic markets. However, it is hoped that this move will open up China's wind turbine producers to foreign technology. China's wind power capacity was forecast to reach 20 gigawatts by the end of 2009 making China the world's third biggest wind power producer behind the US and Spain.
  
  
  
• Beijing-based iResearch has reported that the growth of China's internet gaming industry slowed to a nevertheless formidable 30.2% a year reaching 27.1 billion RMB (US$3.97 billion).