Niall Ferguson has a pithy and provocative essay in the new Newsweek. He writes:

Back in early 2007, it seemed as if China and America were so intertwined they'd become one economy: I called it "Chimerica." The Chinese did the saving, the Americans the spending. The Chinese did the exporting, the Americans the importing. The Chinese did the lending, the Americans the borrowing.

This arrangement may be about to break down, however. For Ferguson continues:

The trouble is that the Chinese clearly feel they have enough U.S. government bonds. Their great anxiety is that the Obama administration's very lax fiscal policy, plus the Federal Reserve's policy of quantitative easing (in layman's terms, printing money), are going to cause one or both of two things to happen: the price of U.S. bonds could fall and/or the purchasing power of the dollar could fall. Either way the Chinese lose. Their current strategy is to shift their purchases to the short end of the yield curve, buying Treasury bills instead of 10-year bonds. But that doesn't address the currency risk. In a best-selling book titled Currency Wars, Chinese economist Song Hongbing warned that the United States has a bad habit of stiffing its creditors by letting the dollar slide. This, he points out, is what happened to the Japanese in the 1980s. First their currency strengthened against the dollar. Then their economy tanked.

As the Chinese begin to replace their investment in American government securities with investment in overseas assets (namely, raw material production in Africa), they will have more freedom to challenge American foreign policy. "[I]magine a rerun of the Anglo-German antagonism of the early 1900s," Ferguson writes, "with America in the role of Britain, and China in the role of imperial Germany. This is a better analogy because it captures the fact that a high level of economic integration does not necessarily prevent the growth of strategic rivalry and, ultimately, conflict."

We'll know something is up when dreadnought production increases. Oh, wait: it already has.

This is also a good moment to plug Gary Schmitt's new book The Rise of China: Essays on the Future Competition, which features essays from, among others, Robert Kagan, Dan Blumenthal, Ellen Bork, and Nicholas Eberstadt.

That's the official number of jobless Chinese migrant workers who have returned to their rural communities. Xinhua also reports that China's annualized growth rate in 2008 reached a seven-year low.

Remember: These are the official statistics released by the Chinese government. The actual numbers are probably much worse. How long before these economic dislocations produce social conflict?

Does the PRC advertise in Newsweek? Because this piece by Rana Foroohar sure reads like a retread from the Xinhua news service. The article is titled "China's Economy Stays out of the Red," and it includes phrases like "China is governed by a radical pragmatism" and "[i]n dire economic times (like now), China's bureaucrats can pick from traditional Western market tools, but also from their unique arsenal." The bottom line, according to Foroohar: "the only major economy that's likely to show any growth at all this year is the most closely controlled one of all."

This has to be the most vapid statement I've read in a long time. Leave aside the concern that there have long been questions regarding the official economic statistics released by Beijing, and that it is notoriously difficult to measure the complicated and shadowy Chinese economy. China's GDP may well grow in 2009 - but even Foroohar acknowledges that such growth will be "down from the double-digit pace of recent years." A significant reduction in growth as China's export sector declines as a result from lack of demand? That sounds like a recession with Chinese characteristics.

Indeed, China's leaders - "mostly engineers, trained to build from a plan," according to Foroohar - seem worried about the incipient downturn, as they have been unusually frank and direct about the steps they feel are necessary to forestall a severe contraction. You can read more about Chinese economic troubles here.

The most amazing thing about this piece is that it treats China as a country more or less like the United States and Europe, except with more government intervention in the economy. That is not the case. "The radical pragmatism" that Faroohar says governs China is the radical pragmatism of a one-party state that does anything it can to maintain power. That party manipulates China's currency, imprisons dissidents, heavily regulates speech and religion, degrades the environment, and supports thugs like Sudanese dictator Omar Bashir. Is it any wonder, then, that as the Chinese economy slows, the pace of civil unrest quickens?

What's more, Foroohar has the audacity to conclude that "the Chinese people still believe in their system - at least for now." I wonder how Foroohar arrived at this conclusion, since it is hard to measure public opinion in a country where expressions of opposition to the state get you thrown in jail. Granted, many Chinese are proud of their achievements as a nation over the last three decades and look forward to the day when China is truly a great power. But no doubt there are just as many Chinese, and certainly plenty of Uighurs, Tibetans, and others living under Chinese domination, who think that the Chinese "system" does not adequately respect the rights of man. Two thousand such people, in fact, recently signed Charter 08, calling for political and civil reform in China.

But I guess they don't get mentioned in Newsweek.

This coming from a country that single-handedly sparked a space weapons race and has thousands of missiles pointed at our Taiwanese ally....China Adopts Russian Anti-BMD Rhetoric:

China has followed Russia's lead in recent broad statements about missile defense efforts by "relevant countries."

On Nov. 5, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov spoke in Tokyo on Russia's Asia-Pacific foreign policy. He said Moscow was "closely watching the intensive deployment of a theater missile defense system in the region."

At a regular press conference the following day, China's Foreign Ministry spokesperson Qin Gang said China "always believes that setting up a global missile defense system, including deploying such a system in some regions of the world or conducting cooperation in this field, is detrimental to global strategic balance and stability, undermines mutual trust among countries and affects regional stability."

Objections on the grounds of regional stability are duly noted, China.

Joshua Kurlantzick's analysis of how the global economic crisis will affect the Chinese regime is well worth your time. One of the lessons of the current mess is that so-called "decoupling" - the theory that emerging markets were no longer dependent on the major economies - has been exposed as false. As the saying goes, we're all in this together. As U.S. consumption dwindles, Chinese production dwindles too. This means major layoffs in Chinese factories, and growing political instability in China. Kurlantzick:

As the economy turns sour, protest is rising. Many young Chinese have never even lived through an economic downturn. In the Pearl River Delta, months of layoffs are sparking street protests by blue-collar workers fearing they'll never see back pay owed to them and creditors furious at factory owners who shut their doors and vanish. These demonstrations are turning violent, and ultimately could provoke a violent response, since Chinese factory owners increasingly hire thugs to hit back at demonstrators. Overall, demonstrations are spreading, according to Radio Free Asia, which closely follows the Pearl River Delta. Though China has in recent years weathered thousands of protests, they tended to be clustered in poor, rural areas, not the prosperous Delta or other middle-class regions of the country.

Economic instability leads to political instability. That is one of the lessons of the Great Depression. Will declining economies in Russia, China, and Iran makes those countries' leaders more cautious, or more adventurous? More liberal, or more oppressive? We don't know the answer. We do know that it is already a dangerous world. And that the global economic downturn makes it more dangerous still.

Were the 2008 Beijing Olympics a "victory for China," as the headline on this front-page Washington Post story claims? That probably depends on, um, what the definition of "victory" is. China won more gold medals than any other country. The games demonstrated China's new economic power and ability to coordinate not one but two gigantic propaganda displays. But China did nothing to allay the concerns of Americans, and some American policymakers, about its "peaceful rise." Here's John F. Burns:

In weighing my own wonderment at all this, and what it has conveyed of the power and confidence of the new China, I’ve reproached myself often enough for credulity. In truth, some of the worst instincts of the old China have poked through the dazzle, most egregiously in the substitution of the pretty little girl in a red dress, and a voice-over, for the 7-year-old whose voice, but not her uneven teeth, met the Politburo’s standards. Then there was the female dancer paralyzed in a fall during rehearsals for the opening ceremony, whose tragedy was suppressed lest it, too, spoil the harmony of the opening night.

Burns also calls attention to

the dark underside of Chinese life that has changed little since Mao — the suppression of minority rights in Tibet and Xinjiang; the archipelago of labor camps, with perhaps two million prisoners; and other outrages, like the unspeakable trade in human organs that, at least in some cases, are suspected of having been taken from executed prisoners.

Little of this has featured, at least with much prominence, in Western coverage of the Games. Just as the Chinese leaders gambled, the 20,000 journalists accredited to the Games have marched onto the front pages of the world’s newspapers and into the television newscasts with stories of Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt and other astonishing athletes.

It's a credit to Burns's news organization that it covered China's treatment of those Chinese brave enough to apply for applications to protest at the Olympics. (The government detained them.) The games are over, and the show moves on to London in 2012. But the questions surrounding Beijing's ability to peacefully and responsibly join the liberal international order will endure for a long time to come.

The iTunes store just died in China.

And it’s all because the U.S.-based Art of Peace Foundation compiled an album for Olympians to download, for free, in the name of “compassion and non-violence ... overcom[ing] intolerance and oppression.”

The album is called Songs for Tibet and features songs by crooning luminaries such as Sting, Moby, Damien Rice, and Alanis Morisette. Over 40 athletes downloaded the album from Apple's iTunes store. And then, sensing danger, China erected the Great Firewall, barring access to the iTunes store, the only venue for the album when it was launched August 5.

Kate Saunders of the International Campaign for Tibet (ICT) told the Sydney Morning Herald, “The predictably hostile response to the album from Chinese internet users"--some of them wanting to ban Sting et al from ever setting foot in China--“reflects continued attempts to suppress any support for Tibet at a time of crisis for the Tibetan people, as well as the level of entrenched misinformation about Tibet propagated by the Beijing government among the Chinese people.”

Upset Apple users across China started to report trouble accessing the iTunes store on Monday, the same day the ICT reported that athletes from North America, Europe, and even Beijing were downloading the album. More complaints came in throughout the week. Apple, as appropriate, claimed no responsibility; they weren’t denying access. The only advice users got was to contact their ISP [internet service provider]. The Chinese government effectively controls all ISPs in China, barring customers access to websites it judges “sensitive or illegal.” A high-profile album that’s pro-Tibet certainly fits the bill.

Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs, a practicing Buddhist, must be cringing at the awkwardness of all this hullaballoo. Apple built its first store in China a month ago, plans to open more, and wants to introduce China to the iPhone 3G. We'll see what happens in the coming months.

Nicholas Kristof writes today about the dazzling rise of China. I don't mean to over-extrapolate his argument, but he seems to be suggesting that in a generation, China will be the world's leading culture and economy. At least I think that's what he's getting at here:

Now the world is reverting to its normal state--a powerful Asia--and we will have to adjust. Just as many Americans know their red wines and easily distinguish a Manet from a Monet, our children will become connoisseurs of pu-er tea and will know the difference between guanxi and Guangxi, the Qin and the Qing. When angry, they may even insult each other as "turtle's eggs." . . .

This transition to Chinese dominance will be a difficult process for the entire international community . . .

The problem with Kristof's analysis is that it entirely ignores China's gigantic demographic problem. A combination of shifting societal mores and the government's harsh One Child Policy has pushed the Chinese fertility rate to somewhere between 1.9 and 1.3. You need a rate of 2.1 to maintain a stable population, which means that, by 2050, China will be facing two extreme challenges to their rising dominance:

(1) The country will begin hemorrhaging bodies. The U.N. Population Division projects that Chinese population will peak around 1.458 billion by 2030 and then begin contracting. By 2050, they'll be losing a net of 20 million people every five years with the contraction accelerating from there. Historically, very few societies have managed population contraction with economic and social stability, let alone prosperity.

It's theoretically possible that China could solve this problem by either encouraging immigration or mandating some sort of Two or Three Child Policy. But I'd argue that both of these options are unlikely. A closed, authoritarian society cannot easily brook large-scale immigration. And it's harder to force people to have babies than it is to keep them from having babies. Just ask the Soviets. The USSR suffered from low fertility rates and tried several times to goose the numbers, with no success whatsoever.

Last Thursday the free world plunged into an uproar as it learned that the 20,000 journalists covering the Olympics in Beijing were not getting the full Internet access that China and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had promised. Kevan Gosper, the IOC’s press chief, expressed surprise that some sensitive websites had been blocked by Chinese authorities. One of those “sensitive” sites, coincidentally, is the website of Radio Free Asia (RFA), my employer.

As someone whose full-time job is to bring uncensored news to China, I couldn’t help being amused by the international outcry in general and by Mr. Gosper’s expression of surprise in particular. They were shocked, shocked to find that there was censorship going on in China. Claude Rains would be proud.

While Mr. Gosper felt “personally galled” and “disappointed,” he nevertheless attributed Internet crackdowns by Beijing to “a whole range of issues including threats of terrorism in the past few months” that have “traumatized” China.

The events of the past few months, including the Lhasa riot and the subsequent torch-relay debacle, may well have been traumatic to Beijing. The Chinese government’s efforts to control the Internet, however, began way back in 1998 with the launch of the Golden Shield Project Also known as the Great Firewall of China, the first stage of the project was completed in 2006 at a cost of $800 million. It is the most technologically sophisticated system of Internet filtering in the world. Undesirable sites are blocked using methods such as URL filtering, IP blocking, DNS redirection, and connection reset.

Internet content filtering by China’s 40,000 cyber-police targets not only the usual suspects – websites related to Tibet, Tiananmen, and Falun Gong – it also aims to protect Chinese citizens from one another. On July 27, the “Outlook” section of the Washington Post ran a feature titled "Rhymes Against the State,” written by the eminent China scholar Perry Link. Quoting “slippery jingles” popular among China’s masses, the article illustrates how these satirical poems serve as a safety valve for political discontent. Less than one week after its publication, the author learned that the Internet link to the article was blocked in China, making him, quite literally, a missing Link.

Last Friday, in the wake of worldwide condemnation over the broken promises by Beijing and the IOC, China unblocked some websites. For the first time in years, China-based Internet users were able to access Radio Free Asia without using proxy servers. But the Chinese people, the clever authors of those “slippery jingles,” are such cynics. One of them left a comment on RFA’s chat room bulletin board predicting that the accessibility will last only for the duration of the Games.

It's no wonder the Chinese Olympic Committee selected Yimou Zhang to produce the opening and the closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Yimou is an incredible talent. Aesthetically speaking, his work is unmatched in Chinese cinema. In the span of just two decades, Yimou has directed several masterpieces -- most recently, House of Flying Daggers, his ode to the marshal arts genre -- that will no doubt be studied and watched for the century to come. His decision to direct the opening and closing invites an analogy to Leni Riefenstahl.

Yimou may make beautiful films, but he is not the soul of Chinese cinema. He has been reluctant to criticize even subtly the persecution of millions under Communist rule. Yimou claims he's simply an artist. "The objective of any form of art is not political," Yimou observes. "I am not interested in politics." But his work is not without a political dimension. In Raise the Red Lantern, Yimou tackles the subjugation of women. But he does so with story set in China of the 1920s, decades preceding China's revolution. Yimou is not so much disinterested in politics as he is jeopardizing funding for his films.

Fortunately, other Chinese filmmakers are braver. In particular, Kaige Chen has ruthlessly taken on the Cultural Revolution in works like Farewell My Concubine, which depicts how Communism destroyed Chinese opera. In Chen's case, it is all very personal. At the behest of school officials, he named his father as an enemy of the regime when he was just a boy. He says the decision haunts him to this day.

Just in time for the Beijing Olympics, Ellen Bork of Freedom House, Tian Jian a student protester in China in 1989, and THE WEEKLY STANDARD's own Philip Chalk have created this map documenting where pro-Democracy demonstrators were killed by the Chinese government in 1989.

Visitors to the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing will be in a city that fewer than twenty years ago was the site of a massacre of innocent civilians by their government. As you enjoy the athletic events and the sights of the city, you may find yourself at street corners, subway stops, in parks or near hospitals where ordinary Chinese men and women were murdered.

Today is the magical number of 8 days before the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, to be held at 8 p.m. on the 8th day of August, the 8th month of the year.

The number 8 has all sorts of magical attraction for the Chinese. Eight, in Mandarin, also means “prosperity” and “fertility” and “wealth” or “fortune.” A powerful combination of ideas in any culture, so the combination of eights associated with the opening day of these games is like some once-in-a-century aligning of the planets would be to astrologers.

A large group of China’s most famous recording artists have produced a new song,"Beijing Welcomes You," that is not unlike the 1985 “We Are The World,” recorded by an all-star cast of singers and musicians to raise funds for famine relief in Ethiopia. Only this song was inspired not by the desire to generate donations for the recent Sichuan earthquake but to serve as an anthem for the Olympic Games, which are hardly in need of either more treacle or more pomposity—both of which the song has in spades.

You would have to be living underground in China not to know the song at this point. When I tried to email a copy of the MP3 version to a Beijing colleague she told me, “oh I do not need it. You cannot go to a shopping mall or supermarket or anywhere without hearing this now.” We can only be happy it's not 8 minutes long.

During his recent visit to Qatar, Chinese vice president Xi Jinping told a group of Hong Kong reporters traveling with him that the chaotic series of incidents leading up to the Beijing Games, including the Lhasa riot and the frequently interrupted torch relay, should be treated with this mindset:

We cannot worry too much whether people like the fact that Beijing is hosting the Olympics. The world is a big bustling place made up of all sorts of people. There are all kinds of birds in the cage. If we remove the ones making the most noise, the cage would no longer be a bustling place…

Despite Xi’s “bustling-cage theory,” the noisiest of the birds in China have been silenced or put on notice with less than two weeks to go before the Games. Chinese media remain characteristically mum about these arrests and detentions. Instead, they have inundated the public with reports that the Beijing Olympics is the realization of a century-old dream that started in 1908 with these three questions raised by the magazine Tianjin Youth:

When will China send an athlete to the Olympics? When will China send a team to the Olympics? When will China host the Olympics?

The first Chinese athlete to compete in the Olympics was sprinter Liu Changchun. He was eliminated in the preliminary heats of both the 100m- and 200m-dash at the 1932 Los Angeles Games. Chinese media have emphasized that Liu was a patriot who represented a poor nation considered by many as “the sick man of East Asia” and widely viewed with “suspicion, disdain, and ridicule.”

The second question raised by Tianjin Youth was answered in 1984, when Beijing sent a team to the Los Angeles Games. This marked the People’s Republic of China’s first full participation in the Olympics. Chinese media find it poignantly significant that it was in Los Angeles, more than half a century after Liu Changchun’s humiliating defeat there, that China won its first-ever Olympic gold medal.

On August 8, Beijing will meet the magazine’s third challenge as more than 80 heads-of-state attend the opening ceremony of the 29th Olympic Games. The magnitude of this moment of glory is not lost on the Chinese people, as evidenced by this Internet posting:

As foreign leaders gather in Beijing for the opening ceremony of the Olympics, they would not dare to sit when the Chinese master of ceremonies yells “stand,” just as they would not dare to stand when they are told to “sit.” They must listen to the Chinese national anthem. And they must be on their feet while they gaze at the Chinese national flag with respect...Ten thousand states have come to pay tribute to the Middle Kingdom, just as the Chinese anticipated a century ago.

A century ago, the famed Chinese educator Zhang Bolin predicted that “the day China hosts the Olympics is the day when China soars into the blue sky.”

The question is, how far can a nation of caged birds soar?

You're not the only one unhappy about the Olympic mascots, collectively known as the Fuwa.

If the Beijing Olympics' five cuddly mascots go down in history as a dud, their creator wants no part of the blame. After China's Olympics organizers gave him the assignment, folk artist Han Meilin initially sketched out five children representing the traditional Chinese elements of fire, wood, water, gold and earth. Then the bureaucrats got involved. "There had to be a panda, even though you'd think the public would have had enough of them," says the 72-year-old artist.

Alas, mankind will never get enough of the panda, but the problem with the Fuwa is much broader than anyone of them. Each of the five mascots is more annoying than the next. And why are there five of them anyway? Is this a statement about the diminutive role of individualism in the people's republic? As an official web site helpfully explains,

Each of [the] Fuwa has a rhyming two-syllable name -- a traditional way of expressing affection for children in China. Beibei is the Fish, Jingjing is the Panda, Huanhuan is the Olympic Flame, Yingying is the Tibetan Antelope and Nini is the Swallow. ... Like the Five Olympic Rings from which they draw their color and inspiration, Fuwa will serve as the Official Mascots of Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, carrying a message of friendship and peace -- and good wishes from China -- to children all over the world.

Don't talk about peace and friendship with Joe Bryant, a blogger at Footballguys.com. He asks, "Why do the Olympic mascots have to look like some mutant Pokemon / Telletubbie thing? What's wrong with a bull dog or a cougar or a sweat shop worker for a mascot?" That's the spirit!

For a long time in China the word “princelings” denoted the pampered, privileged, and frequently unscrupulous children of the country’s senior leaders. Over the years, the best, the brightest, and the most trustworthy of these blue-blooded Reds have been fast-tracked to positions of power. A few have demonstrated considerable leadership skills and helped improve the group’s image.

Enter the next generation. Xi Mingze, the 16-year-old daughter of vice president Xi Jinping, is reported to have spent a week recently working as a volunteer helping earthquake victims in Sichuan province. Her grandfather Xi Zhongxun was a Long March veteran and a former vice premier.

Wan Baobao is the granddaughter of party elder Wan Li. While her career choice may not embody the family’s revolutionary legacy, it most certainly reflects the changing trends in Chinese society today. She is a designer of high-end jewelry. Her father, Wan Jifei, is chairman of the ministry-level China Council for the Promotion of International Trade.

Hong Huang, daughter of Mao’s recently deceased English-language tutor Zhang Hanzhi and stepdaughter of former foreign minister Qiao Guanhua, is a renowned publisher. The fluent English speaker is also a highly popular blogger. Watch her explain Chinese nationalism on MSNBC here.

The undisputed media darling of this new generation of princelings, however, is Bo Guagua, son of former commerce minister Bo Xilai and grandson of Bo Yibo, one of the Chinese Communist Party’s “Eight Immortals.”

Bo Guagua is studying PPE at Balliol College, Oxford, on a full scholarship. The photogenic 20-year-old has been featured in Chinese Esquire and is the author of a book, written in English, titled Uncommonwealth. I was unable to get hold of a copy, but Chinese media describe the book as “a critique of the blind pursuit of fads.”

In the wake of the May 12 earthquake in Sichuan, Bo Guagua, current president of the Oxford University PPE Society, helped launch a drive to collect donations for the purchase of teaching equipment to be used by makeshift schools in the quake zone.

The young Bo is also an advisor to Oxford Emerging Markets Ltd., a company founded by Oxford undergrads with the aim of exploring investment and career opportunities in emerging markets.

At least some princelings may be emerging as stars in their own right.

The Beijing Olympics begin in less than a month, which means the Olympics-related advertising is only getting started. Here's hoping it gets better over time. The first Beijing ads have an interesting theme: "unity." Here, for example, is a new ad from Coca-Cola, a major Olympics sponsor:

There are some NBC spots that hit similar cues.

Why is "unity" an interesting choice? Because it is actually the total opposite of what the Olympics are about. The Olympics are about national competition, not cooperation. That is certainly the view from Beijing, anyway, which sees next month's Olympics as China's biggest step yet on the road to great power status. That is why Beijing invited world leaders to the opening ceremonies: so that the Chinese Communist Party can demonstrate its new power to them. You can be sure Chinese state media coverage will not stress "unity" and global convergence. The coverage will stress Chinese nationalism and supremacy.

China wants to win. It sees the Olympics as another competitive platform - not for athletics, but for the great power competition that increasingly characterizes the international system. Must we pretend otherwise?

The first bit of good to come from letting China host the Olympics.

For the first time in nearly a decade China is issuing new banknotes without the image of Chairman Mao Zedong. The 10 yuan ($1.5; £0.75) notes instead feature Beijing's new Olympic stadium on the front, with an ancient Greek statue of a discus thrower on the back. Both are set against the backdrop of the Temple of Heaven, sited in Beijing.

Most bills will continue to feature Mao, but apparently this is one of the most circulated denominations. The new emblem is called, "Chinese Seal, Dancing Beijing."

Chinese media have been enthusiastically quoting Russian press reports attributing last week’s post-election violence in Ulan Bator to a U.S.-engineered “color revolution” aimed at countering Russian and Chinese influence in resource-rich Mongolia.

A commentary widely circulated in Chinese cyberspace, including the website of People’s Daily, asks with obvious sarcasm whether the unrest in Mongolia resulting from “electoral chaos” constitutes a “millennium challenge":

It is acknowledged that democratization in Mongolia began 16 years ago. And in October of last year, Mongolia was designated by the American government as one of 16 “millennium challenge accounts” because of its “outstanding achievements in democratic reforms.” Why then is it that after all this time opponents of the government still feel they need to express themselves through “non-electoral” and “anti-electoral” means?

According to the article, the U.S.-Mongolian joint venture Eagle TV has been force-feeding the Mongolians ideas such as democracy and free elections. However, the piece continues, while both the ruling party and the opposition are well acquainted with these “fashionable words,” it is difficult for an “ancient, semi-feudal, and semi-nomadic” people to fully absorb and integrate these concepts into their own culture.

Mongolia’s development is dependent upon China. This is the thesis of another commentary carried by several Chinese news outlets, including People’s Daily:

Mongolia cannot rely on Russia. The United States and Japan--especially Japan--take great interest in Mongolia. They hope to participate in mineral exploration in Mongolia and contain China. But only China can provide Mongolia with the capital, technology, and goods it requires.

To drive home the point, readers are reminded that China long ago replaced Russia as Mongolia’s largest trading partner, that 90 percent of the consumer goods sold in Mongolia are Chinese made, and that having invested $1.181 billion in 3,769 projects, China is Mongolia’s biggest investor, creating more than 50,000 jobs in the landlocked country of three million people. Moreover, during the five-year period from 2003 to 2007 alone, Beijing provided Ulan Bator with more than three billion RMB (about $428 million) in loans and grants.

Between 1991 and 2008, U.S. aid to Mongolia totaled a mere $174.5 million.

Last week Chinese authorities released Zha Jianguo, vice chairman of the Beijing-Tianjin branch of the outlawed China Democracy Party (CDP). Zha had served out a nine-year prison sentence for "subverting state power." Last week also marked the 10th anniversary of the founding of Zha's party.

During a period of political thaw known as the "new Beijing Spring," the CDP attempted to officially register with the Chinese government. In March 1998, China announced its intention to sign the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, giving hope to the country's political activists. Grossly overestimating the government's tolerance for dissent, on June 25, 1998--as then-president Clinton began his nine-day state visit to China--CDP members in the eastern province of Zhejiang signed and posted on the Internet a declaration announcing the establishment of the party's local preparatory committee. It stated:

All political power can come only from the public and can only be [used] in the service of the public; a government can only come into being according to the wishes of the public and [can only] act according to the wishes of the public; a government is the servant of the public and not the one which controls it.

The crackdown on the CDP began shortly after Clinton's visit ended. Undeterred, CDP members, including Zha Jianguo, continued their efforts to form what would have been the first opposition party in China since the founding of the People's Republic in 1949. By December 1998, when three key figures of the movement--Xu Wenli, Wang Youcai, and Qin Yongmin--were tried and sentenced to lengthy prison terms, CDP branches or preparatory committees had been set up in more than 20 provinces throughout the country.

The arrest and jailing of CDP supporters continued well into 2000. More than 30 current or former CDP members remain in prison or in reeducation-through-labor camps, their names fading from the pages of international media as more attention-grabbing headlines dominate the landscape. Zha Jianguo, for instance, had disappeared from the list of Chinese political prisoners published annually by human rights groups. As Zha's sister lamented in a moving tribute to him published in The New Yorker last year, "the world has moved on."

But Zha Jianguo had long ago recognized that his conduct was placing him at great personal risk. In an interview with foreign media six months before his arrest in July 1999, Zha had this to say:

Democracy is a process, and in that process a small number of people will be sacrificed. We want to use our sacrifice to arouse the people, and we believe that sacrifice is worthwhile.

American declinists, who believe that the United States's ability to coerce or persuade other states is on the wane, often point to China's so-called "charm offensive" -- its financial and political support of developing countries regardless of ideology or political repression -- as an example of how a rising power effectively leverages "soft power" over other, smaller powers.

Here's how a recent report on grand strategy from the center-left Center for a New American Security puts it: "In Asia, a rising China's charm offensive is wooing many countries into a tighter embrace while the United States sees its influence on the decline."

Interesting theory. It's also bunk. The strategic situation in Asia is far more complex than a rising China and a declining United States. A host of small, medium, and large powers are constantly re-evaluating their status and their relationships with each other. The United States maintains steadfast alliances with major powers like Japan, South Korea, and Australia. The smaller powers consistently hedge against Chinese ambitions by seeking closer ties to America. Daniel Twining:

Asian leaders broadly seek closer relations with Washington, scold their U.S. counterparts for neglecting the region, are deeply insecure about any hint of an American pullback, and increasingly identify democratic political values as the basis for closer cooperation with America and each other. Popular majorities in countries as diverse as Japan, India, South Korea, Australia, and Vietnam hold the United States in high regard. Even China cultivates America as its most important external partner, while North Korea's totalitarian ruler covets a special relationship with Washington and has developed nuclear weapons in a perverse effort to secure it.

Today brings more evidence that China's "charm offensive" may offend more than it charms. A new report from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs concludes: "In terms of soft power in Asia -- the ability to wield influence by indirect, nonmilitary means, whether by persuasion or attraction -- China ranks well below the United States in the estimation of most of the Asians surveyed."

For my day job, I live and breathe China. When it comes to my annual vacation, however, I need to get away. Last year, I thought Ireland would be a good escape--only to discover after getting there that Mandarin is the second most spoken language in Dublin. Buying a Chinese-made stuffed leprechaun from a Mandarin-speaking shopkeeper, even on O’Connell Street, wasn’t exactly my idea of an Irish vacation.

This year I thought Machu Picchu would be a safe bet. As our tour bus pulled into Cuzco, the gateway to the ancient Inca ruins, our Peruvian guide pointed to a road-improvement project and informed us, “As you can see, the city of Cuzco is sprucing up to usher in the coming Free Trade Agreement with China.” China? There’s that word again. I knew I shouldn’t have had that third cup of coca tea at breakfast. The magical brew was supposed to ease high-altitude discomforts, but I was obviously having hallucinations.

It turned out that I was not hearing things. China and Peru are indeed set to sign a free-trade agreement (FTA) this November, and it's a big deal in South America. In fact, China is currently conducting FTA negotiations with a number of countries, including Costa Rica, Iceland, Singapore, South Africa, and Australia. This past April, Australia’s neighbor New Zealand signed an FTA with Beijing, the first such accord between China and a developed country. These bilateral pacts help shield China from anti-dumping complaints, many of which have been filed by Washington through the multilateral mechanism provided by the World Trade Organization.

Peru is the second Latin American country to sign an FTA with China, after Chile. Meanwhile, Chinese investment in the region has witnessed a significant increase with the launch of the “go abroad” policy. In 2004, the year the policy was instituted, 32 percent of Beijing’s direct foreign investment went to Latin America. But Beijing had its eyes set on Peru long before then. In 1992, state-owned Capital Steel purchased a Peruvian iron company for a whopping $312 million, making China the second biggest investor in the Andean country.

Beijing’s inroads into Peru reflect a larger Latin initiative. While its investment in the region is taking place largely in sectors that help meet a seemingly unquenchable appetite for energy and commodities, China has also maintained a long-running satellite program with Brazil and a more recent one with Venezuela.

In my conversations with Peruvians about Chinese investments, I noticed how they would usually start a sentence with “China is helping us do…” or “we are getting help from China with…”

Washington should take heed.

Writing at TNR's reliably misinformed Environment & Energy Blog, Dayo Olopade lauds the Chinese government's ambitious program to eliminate plastic bags:

The move, which bans outright ultrathin plastic bags and puts a price on all others, is said to save China 37 billion barrels of oil annually.

That's a typo--the China Daily report actually reads:

Residents in the country use up to 3 billion plastic bags a day and the country has to refine 5 million tons (37 million barrels) of crude oil every year to make plastics used for packaging, according to a report on the website of China Trade News (www.chinatradenews.com.cn) .

Does all that oil go to plastic bags? Obviously not. Packaging here seems to include every piece of plastic in China, for domestic consumption, export, and otherwise. That's a lot of plastic. According to this report from ABC, the United States uses 12 million barrels of oil to produce ten times as many bags annually. Figure the Chinese are using one-tenth as much oil, 1.2 million barrels, in which case 37 billion barrels is off by a factor so big we can't even do the math. China's action on plastic bags is about as trivial as you would expect. But hey, they still have that super eco-friendly one-child policy!

Russian president Dmitry Medvedev was the first foreign head-of-state to visit China since the May 12 earthquake. Although the May 23-24 trip had been planned before the quake struck, Chinese media nonetheless characterized it as "earthquake diplomacy” that provided the Chinese people with "mental support” in the aftermath of the disaster. Much was also made of the fact that the first shipment of international aid to reach hard-hit Sichuan province was donated by Russia.

Other than the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, China is the first country Medvedev has visited since taking office on May 7. Official Chinese media regarded the trip as one that was based on "thoughtful considerations." To reciprocate the gesture, a Chinese-language version of Russian National Development Issues, a collection of 13 speeches by Medvedev during his tenure as vice prime minister, was released in Beijing a day before the Russian leader’s arrival. Also marking the state visit were a newly designed set of stamps and commemorative envelopes.

In the lead-up to Medvedev’s visit, the Chinese media made a special point of reporting on a recent survey of the Russian public. In the poll, conducted by the All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion, China was mentioned most frequently when Russians were asked "Which country is friendliest towards Russia?"

Beyond the cordial welcome, Beijing’s assessment is that Medvedev’s decision to travel to China so soon after his inauguration reflected a number of geopolitical considerations. In addition to further consolidating bilateral ties which had reached "a historical high" under Putin, Medvedev saw in China "a breakthrough point" and "a special diplomatic arena" at a time when Moscow’s relations with Georgia, the EU, and the United States have all been strained.

Liberation Daily predicted that despite Medvedev’s "looking East," Moscow will continue to strive for "a balanced diplomacy":

When Putin first assumed office, and especially after the September 11 incident, U.S.-Russian relations experienced a "honeymoon period" as a result of mutual cooperation in anti-terrorism. Bilateral relations started cooling as the U.S., while accusing Putin of amassing dictatorial power, supported "color revolutions" in some CIS countries. The tensions intensified alongside America’s attempts to extend its missile defense shield to Eastern Europe. The straining of relations between Russia and the West in general, and between Russia and the U.S. in particular, means that Moscow is in greater need of reliable partners and allies in the East. However, Russia, although defiant, has no intention of engaging in total confrontation with the West. Objectively speaking, it does not yet have the strength required.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

As we content ourselves with the fallacy that never again shall we have to fight large, technological opponents, China is transforming its forces into a full-spectrum military capable of major operations and remote power projection. Eventually the twain shall meet. By the same token, our sharp nuclear reductions and China's acquisitions of ballistic-missile submarines and multiple-warhead mobile missiles will eventually come level. The China that has threatened to turn Los Angeles to cinder is arguably more cavalier about nuclear weapons than are we, and may find parity a stimulus to brinkmanship. Who will blink first, a Barack Obama (who even now blinks like Betty Boop) or a Hu Jintao?

Our reductions are not solely nuclear. Consider the F-22, the world's most capable air dominance aircraft, for which the original call for 648 has been whittled to 183, leaving, after maintenance, training, and test, approximately 125 to cover the entire world. The same story is evident without relief throughout our diminished air echelons, shrinking fleets, damaged and depleted stocks, and ground forces turned from preparation for heavy battle to the work of a gendarmerie.

Helprin is coming over 5x5 on his F-22 comments (we need at least twice as many to meet future threats), but Chinese nuclear parity? Eh, not so much. Though the Chinese have ICBMs, ballistic missile submarines, and aircraft capable of nuclear delivery, they lack the ability to accurately lay down atomic ordinance globally. Per the old Soviet model, you can substitute numbers for precision, but the DoD estimates that the Chinese only have something to the tune of 100 deployed warheads -- that is, nukes that are ready to fly in a hot minute. I'm sure the exact numbers are classified, but with our 500 ICBMs alone we've easily got the ChiComs out gunned.

Still, Helprin's overall point is well taken. The Chinese recognize their nuclear shortcomings and are adjusting accordingly. That's bad news for both America and her allies in the region. When China can operate under the protection of a fully operational strategic umbrella, the probably of a quick and dirty conventional war with Taiwan increases exponentially.

Enter the importance of the F-22 and other state v. state weapon platforms. To prevent war in the Far East, we simply must maintain at least a decade's worth of technological dominance over the Chinese -- both nuclear and conventional.

Once you put it together with Jennifer Chou's details about the religious crackdown in China in advance of the Olympics, does this mean Beijing is pursuing a 'good cop/bad cop' strategy?

A senior Chinese official has asked whether Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama would agree to attend the Beijing Olympics to ease recent tensions, a Tibet government-in-exile legislator said on Monday.

Tibet's spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, would consider going to Beijing for the Summer Olympics if an invitation were to be extended, according to a Tibetan legislator.

The Dalai Lama would consider going, the lawmaker said.

A leader of Tibet's parliament-in-exile suggests that the overture is probably nothing but a feint on the part of the Chinese government. I fail to see what Beijing gains from the move, however. If the Dalai Lama makes clear that he would attend, then doesn't Beijing look worse if they don't ultimately extend an invite?

And does he know that golf -- one of his favorite sports -- is again not being played at the Olympic games this year.

The prejudice against Tibetans that has been exhibited by Chinese people living in America has been startling. Not only did college students bussed to San Francisco to see the Olympic torch literally attack pro-Tibet protesters, many seem perfectly willing to deny or downplay their country's vicious record on human rights. An especially alarming example of slander recently appeared in the Columbia Daily Spectator, where a student majoring in American Studies alleged,

One Dalai Lama has admitted to having sex with a hundred men and women, knowing all the while that he had AIDS. His predecessor was abusive, forcing his students to perform acts against their will. The public praise and the private follies of the Dalai Lamas of the past and present construct a troublesome and hypocritical image of the Tibetan leader.

This would be amusing if it were not completely crackpot. The Spectator has since issued a correction, which will surely go down in the history of journalism as among the greats:

This submission misstates that one Dalai Lama admitted to having sex with hundreds of men and women while knowing that he had AIDS. Additionally, the submission misstates that many monks participated in the dismemberment of female bodies. In fact, there is no factual evidence to substantiate either of these claims....

Needless to say, the "Spectator regrets the error."

Glenn links this BBC report that China is now the world's 'top carbon polluter.'

The Onion broke this story a few weeks back:

Those Chinese guys accompanying the Olympic Torch (Codename: Flambeaux Keep-away) are actually paramilitary police who have developed quite the reputation for bullying even non-Tibetans. Track star Lord Coe had this to say:

The Olympic medallist and organiser of the 2012 Games was overheard saying that the officials had pushed him around as the torch made its way through the capital on Sunday. He added that other countries on the route should "get rid of those guys".

"They tried to punch me out of the way three times. They are horrible. They did not speak English . . . I think they were thugs."

In more democratic countries, we dress our Secret Service agents in suits and ties instead of blue tracksuits. That is, we make them look like Secret Service agents, not Olympians, unless it’s absolutely necessary for them to be undercover. But perhaps we should give China the benefit of the doubt and assume these thugs are actually Olympians. Maybe they’re competing in one of the new sports China added to this year’s Olympics. Panda wrestling? The summer biathlon that involves cross-country running (after Tibetans) and shooting (at Tibetans)?

Armed Forces Journal reports:

It might be tempting to dismiss the U.S. Navy’s potential focus on China as a passing fad — part of the now-familiar phenomena of “China fever.” Another perspective holds that this focus can best be explained by a simple case of enemy deprivation syndrome. While there is a kernel of truth in both of these intellectual approaches, facts on, above and especially under the water increasingly belie these conclusions and demand serious attention from American strategists.

China has launched more than 36 new submarines since 1995 — far outpacing U.S. intelligence estimates from a decade ago. Additionally, supersonic indigenous cruise missiles, rumored development of an anti-ship ballistic missile, dynamic mine warfare and amphibious warfare programs, invigorated aerial maritime strike capabilities, as well as a variety of new, sleek and modern surface combatants, suggest a broad front effort by the People’s Liberation Army Navy.

This is slowly becoming a dangerous situation.

Not because I think that we'll be at war with China anytime in the near future, but rather that the rapidly shrinking gap between China's military capabilities and our own makes a quick localized war over Taiwan or the Spratley Islands more likely.

This is precisely the reason that we need to retask the Air Force and Navy with their old primary mission as our principle strategic warfighting services. Back during the Cold War, the Air Force's Strategic Air Command had a great motto: Peace is our profession. That eventually blossomed into Reagan's peace through strength (or my favorite, peace through superior firepower), but the message was clear: the power of America's strategic forces assured the world that the Cold War would never go hot.

The same applies to China. The more we weaken our strategic forces, refuse to modernize the Air Force and bolster the size of the Navy, the higher the probability of war in the Far East. The Army and Marines--properly equipped and sized--can handle counterinsurgencies and low-level conflict, while a powerful Air Force and Navy will ensure that America's wars are contained and statistically small.

China seems determined to ascribe the unrest in Tibet to a concerted effort aimed at sabotaging the Beijing Olympics.

The world community, meanwhile, has demonstrated that it has little appetite for a boycott. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) clearly prefers "silent diplomacy." None of the 27 foreign ministers of the EU, meeting in Slovenia this past weekend, favored a boycott of the Games as a whole and none even "wished to speak about" boycotting the opening ceremony.

Not without irony, the handful of world leaders who have so far declined invitations to attend the opening ceremony--German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Czech president Vaclav Klaus, Polish prime minister Donald Tusk, Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves and prime minister Andrus Ansip--are all from former Eastern bloc countries that experienced life under communist rule.

That sports and politics should not mix was a theme voiced frequently by Beijing even before Tibet focused world attention on the Games. This past February, for example, after Steven Spielberg cut ties with the Beijing Olympics over the Darfur crisis, China criticized the famed director’s decision as "naïve and simple-minded," adding that it was "unacceptable" to link politics to sports.

The Save Darfur Coalition has noted how China itself has had a long history of politicizing the Olympics--from its bullying of Taiwan within the IOC to its own participation in the boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics.

For decades, China used the Olympics as a political weapon against Taiwan. In 1956, it pulled out of the Melbourne Games one day before they were to start to protest the presence of the Taiwan delegation. It was not until 1979 that the "two-China problem" was settled by the IOC and Beijing agreed to participate.

In February 1980, China took part in the Winter Olympics at Lake Placid. In May that year, it joined the U.S.-led boycott of the Moscow Summer Olympics to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In July 1980, Chinese athletes, along with those from 28 other nations, took part in the Liberty Bell Classic in Philadelphia, organized as an alternative to the Moscow Games.

Reasonable people can disagree as to whether China’s crackdown in Tibet merits an Olympic boycott of any kind. Indeed, even the Dalai Lama has said that a boycott is not the answer. Beijing’s righteous indignation in suggesting that the Olympic Games should not be linked to politics, however, is clearly disingenuous, if not outright hypocritical.

China’s brutal crackdown on Buddhist protesters in its annexed Tibet province has sparked a heated discussion in Europe about whether or not to boycott (at least parts of) the upcoming Beijing Olympics, which are set to begin with a grandiose opening ceremony on August 8. So far, the 27 EU countries currently meeting at the foreign minister level in Slovenia have failed to agree on a common approach on how to deal with this thorny issue.

Among the big three EU powers, French President Nicolas Sarkozy seems to be most open towards considering various potential Olympic boycott options. UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, in contrast, has already announced his intention to participate at the games. Finally, Germany just announced today that President Horst Koehler, Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier will not be attending the games. However, Merkel’s spokesman was eager to stress that this was nothing unusual and that none of the three had ever planned to go to the Olympics in the first place. Foreign minister Steinmeier also reiterated his government’s view that a complete boycott of the games should be avoided. Germany is certainly treading very carefully as it just weathered a dramatic deterioration in its bilateral relations with Beijing following Chancellor Merkel’s controversial meeting with the Dalai Lama at her official residence in Berlin last September.

France is already emerging as a key player in shaping Europe’s response to the Tibet crackdown. President Sarkozy, after all, will hold the rotating EU-presidency at the time of the Olympics this summer. Political leaders in Poland and the Czech Republic, for their part, have already announced that they will personally boycott the games and are urging other European politicians to do the same.

In this context it is interesting to draw a comparison between Europe’s response to developments in Tibet and Darfur. For example, previous attempts by U.S. human rights activists like Mia Farrow and others to effectively bill the Beijing games as "The Genocide Olympics." (because of "China’s role as business partner, diplomatic protector and underwriter of Sudan’s campaign of ethnic destruction in Darfur") have had only a very limited if negligible effect on international public opinion. For sure, the U.S. human rights campaigners scored some relatively minor points back home, as evidenced by Steven Spielberg’s recent resignation as an artistic director of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.

In a bold challenge to the Chinese government's crackdown in Tibet, nearly 30 dissidents have circulated an open letter titled "Twelve Suggestions for Dealing with the Tibetan Situation." The dissidents' letter contrasts with the Communist government's arrest of hundreds of Tibetans and official propaganda to "resolutely crush" the protests that have since spread east beyond the Tibetan Autonomous Region, to western provinces where Tibetans also live.

In their letter, the dissidents call for a dialogue between Chinese officials and the Dalai Lama, an international investigation into the events, an end to "Cultural Revolution-like" propaganda against the Dalai Lama, freedom of religion and speech for Tibetans, and access to the region for journalists. (See the letter at Chinese Human Rights Defenders)

Among the letter's signers is Teng Biao, a lawyer and human rights activist who only a couple of weeks ago was picked up by Chinese authorities, held for a few days and, before being released, warned to keep quiet about human rights abuses. Teng is also the co-author with Hu Jia of another open letter, "The Real China and the Olympics," which criticizes abuses committed in preparation for the games. (See the letter at Human Rights Watch) Arrested at the end of 2007, Hu was tried on March 18 on subversion charges and currently awaits sentencing. Wang Lixiong, an outspoken Chinese critic of Beijing's Tibet policy, who is married to Tibetan blogger Woeser, also signed the letter. Others who signed: Ding Zilin, a leader of the Tiananmen Mothers organization, and her husband Jiang Peikun. The two have waged a long campaign for justice for the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, who include their son.

The letter belies the idea, reinforced and spread by official propaganda and often accepted abroad, that Chinese opinion on Tibet reflects an innate and monolithic Chinese Han chauvinism. (So does a blog post by Lian Yue, criticizing official censorship for stoking the emotion on which ultra-nationalistic extremism is based.)

Nationalistic, territorial, and racist views about Tibet may be common and deep-seated, but it is not possible in China to accurately gauge public opinion. Nor are intellectuals and writers like Teng, Wang, and the others who signed this letter free to persuade their fellow citizens to adopt views contrary to the Communist party line.

Tibet is one of the most sensitive issues in China and these dissidents will no doubt face retaliation for openly challenging the party. According to reports, Wang and Woeser have been held under house arrest in Beijing since the protests first started.

When it won the honor of hosting this summer's Olympic games, the PRC made no binding commitments on human rights and the international community failed to extract any. Still, it is not too late for the international community, which grants legitimacy to Beijing by participating in the games, to give just as much legitimacy to the courageous Chinese dissidents who speak out now.

As was noted here the other day, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is in India this week, meeting with the Dalai Lama to express support for human rights in Tibet. The Telegraph provides this video of Pelosi's appearance, in which she called for an independent investigation into allegations that the Dalai Lama is encouraging violence against China:

I've made much of the low approval ratings that this Congress has earned, but there's a healthy appetite in the U.S. for criticism of China's human rights violations. It seems to be an annual tradition for criticism of China to ramp up in the House during the summer, and this year Speaker Pelosi is likely to ensure that such criticism has a somewhat higher profile, particularly in the run-up to the Beijing Olympic games. We're all for it.

Anyone remember a few years back when "Free Tibet!" was all the rage among the kids? They must’ve gotten lost on a side-trip to the nearest "Recreate ‘68" rally or something. That’s the only thing I can think of, what with not a peep of protest from the usual suspects (i.e., people who memorize dialogue and lyrics for a living) regarding the photos of Tibetan monks getting their skulls cracked open on the order of Chinese authorities.

There was a time when this kind of foul behavior was good for at least a shout-out to the Dalai Lama from the red carpet. Even better, of course, would be a call to boycott the Olympics. (I’m not a sports fan, you see, and I really, really dislike totalitarian governments, so it’s a win-win.) Al Gore would be the perfect cheerleader for such a cause; his followers hang to his every word the same way a dipso does to a flask of Thunderbird. But considering his track record (Howard Dean, global warming, bragging about his skills as a tobacco farmer), maybe he’s the last guy Tibet needs in its corner. Hope those people in Darfur aren’t expecting any long-term support from their protectors in Hollywood--pretty soon, they’re going to be way un-cool.

And speaking of the Olympics, if there are any doubts that there are payoffs involved in choosing the host country, China should allay them pronto. Forget about the politics. Look at the smog. My wife spent a couple of weeks there and was utterly appalled by the brown sludge that passes for air in Beijing. I mean, she saw trucks running on coal, for God’s sakes. And as for the tap water: she was instructed to keep her mouth tightly shut in the shower, brush her teeth using bottled water, and not eat fresh fruits because they’d been cleaned under faucets. At least one runner has already dropped out due to the smog.

The air’s unbreatheable, the water undrinkable, the regime unconscionable--this is the right country for a major sporting event?

The long fight over Tibetan independence has gotten hotter recently:

Protests spread from Tibet into three neighboring provinces Sunday as Tibetans defied a Chinese government crackdown, while the Dalai Lama decried what he called the "cultural genocide" taking place in his homeland.

Demonstrations widened to Tibetan communities in Sichuan, Qinghai and Gansu provinces, forcing authorities to mobilize security forces across a broad expanse of western China...

In a sign that authorities were preparing for trouble, AP and other foreign journalists were ordered out of the Tibetan parts of Gansu and Qinghai provinces by police who told them it was for their "safety."

This fighting is about to take on a much higher profile, as Speaker Pelosi will travel this week to Dharamsala, India, (home of Tibet's 'government-in-exile') to meet with the Dalai Lama. She will be joined by there Richard Gere. The two will reportedly 'express solidarity' over the Tibetan cause.

Pelosi's arrival is sure to make waves in Beijing, which is already smarting from protests over the decision of the Bush administration to remove China from its human rights 'blacklist.' With the House likely to vote to on legislation to slap China's wrists in advance of the Olympic games (perhaps on a measure sponsored by Frank Wolf), Beijing is only ikely to experience more agita in advance of the games.

Exit question: Is the Bush administration really going to get out-hawked on China by Pelosi (and Richard Gere!)?

HT: Instapundit

The Pentagon hosted a conference call today with bloggers in order to promote the Defense Department's latest report to Congress on the military power of China. When the DoD first started this outreach program, there was a great deal of criticism--the Pentagon was spoon feeding administration talking points to conservative bloggers, they said. Well, that was never quite the case, the Pentagon has allowed any and all bloggers to participate in these calls. The effect: today's call was dominated by lefty bloggers explaining to the Pentagon why the United States shouldn't concern itself with China's build-up, and why Beijing's bulking-up is entirely reasonable. Take my friend David Axe, for example:

Axe: Can I follow up on that? It seems that it might be possible that the increase in China's defense investment is actually perfectly consistent with their economic growth, in that what we're seeing is not anything that's unreasonable or out of proportion to China's means, especially in light of just how impoverished, in a sense, China's military was for so long. Couldn't we see this as just reasonable investment to somewhat modernize a vast, creaky, out of date military?

DoD: [silence]...that's a good question. In fact, if you look at the Xinhua press reports today on their announcing the 17.6 percent increase in their defense budget, that is something that we do hear...

Translation: yeah, that is the Chinese government's talking point.

But the most remarkable moment came in this exchange between Defense officials and Atlantic correspondent James Fallows, who was calling in from Beijing:

Fallows: I have two question about the transparency theme of your report, which I have not yet seen myself. One involves a comment one of you made a few minutes ago saying there needs to be more explanation from the Chinese about why they are increasing their budget so much when there was no threat to their territory. I just wanted to raise a question about that because, of course, from the Chinese point of view, Taiwan is their territory. And so I'm just wondering how you deal with that part of their perspective that they view Taiwan as part of their territory. More broadly, is there a way that you've been able to assess or interpret some of the more disturbing and non-transparent moves of the last few months, that is the antisatellite test and the problems with naval port calls?

DoD: Yes we do address both of those issues, we talk specifically to the Taiwan Strait situation in Chapter 6 of the report. That continues to be--preparing for potential conflict in the Taiwan Strait continues to be one of the primary drivers of China's military build-up. China continues to deploy some of the most advanced equipment to the three military regions opposite Taiwan. They continue to increase the numbers of short range ballistic missiles deployed to garrisons opposite Taiwan. So from that perspective, we do see the PLA focusing on really developing the capacity to use military force in the Taiwan Strait, if they're called upon by the senior party leadership in Beijing.

Fallows: I wonder if I could interrupt. I may have explained myself poorly. I'm just [inaudible] the premise of the question, which is why are they spending more money when there's no threat to their territory; from their point view, there is a threat to their territory.

DoD: Okay. I understand that's their position....I can articulate what U.S. policy is, and I understand what Beijing's argument is...

It was sort of stunning to listen to, and the response from the Defense official was not unlike Tony Snow's famous quip to Helen Thomas, "Well, thank you for the Hezbollah view." Whatever angst the left once had about these calls, they can rest assured that the propaganda isn't going from the Pentagon to the bloggers, but vice versa.

The BBC reports:

China says it plans to increase military spending by nearly 18% this year to 417.8bn yuan ($59bn; £30bn)....

But experts believe the actual amount allocated to the Chinese military is two to three times larger than the published figure.

There was a huge fuss last year over an increase of 17.8 percent, for a total of $44.94 billion. And you'll note that last year's increase was, at the time, the largest on record.

Of course, I don't put any stock at all in these numbers. The actual number is certainly far higher, once unofficial programs (like a nuclear powered aircraft carrier, anti-sattelite weapons, and lord knows what else) are taken into account. Figure in the lies they're telling themselves about how much corruption and inefficiency is built into their own military-industrial complex, take account of purchasing power parity--you could be talking about a figure not unlike what the United States is spending every year, except without all the health care expenses, the two wars, the blue water Navy, the global commitments, etc. etc. Oh, and they also don't include procurement in the official budget. How much might production of six submarines a year cost (the U.S. builds one a year) or the new, indigenous J-10 multirole fighter? Nobody really knows.

So what are we doing different this year? Here's the story from March 4, 2007:

The United States is calling on China to be more transparent on its military buildup. U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte made the call in Beijing Sunday after Chinese officials announced they plan to boost their military spending by nearly 18 percent to $45 billion this year..

And here's the story from March 3, 2008:

An annual Pentagon report on China on Monday said Beijing's lack of transparency posed risks to stability, voicing concern over how it would use expanding military power.

Seriously. The same exact story one year on. And could the Chinese be anymore transparent? They're building a war machine, they're going to seize Taiwan at the first hint of domestic instability or Taiwanese independence, and they're going to give the U.S. Navy and Air Force a hell of a bloody nose in the process.

Update: I forgot the cherry on top:

China Southern Airlines (CSA) announced on Monday that it will launch non-stop direct flights from Beijing to Tehran and double the frequency to four flights per week, starting on March 31.

If only we could discern their intentions...

China and the United States have agreed to establish a Cold War style hotline:

The U.S. and China aim to set up a telephone hot line between their militaries within a month after an agreement signed Feb. 29, the U.S. defense department said.

The deal was signed in Shanghai alongside a deal giving the U.S. access to China's military archives to search for missing servicemen from the Korean War and other conflicts, the official said.

"We welcome this important step forward in enhancing communication between our militaries," according to a U.S. defense department statement.

"The (hot line) will be a useful tool to make contact quickly, clarify issues and avoid miscalculations."

It added that the agreement allowed the two sides to move forward on installing the equipment over the next few weeks, meaning the hot line would probably become operational within a month.

A common misperception is that the hotline consisted of little red phones which sat on the desks of the Soviet Premier and POTUS. Not so (you can blame the movie Fail Safe for that particular urban legend). The Soviet hotline linked the Kremlin with the National Military Command Center, which in turn was able to summon the President at a moment's notice. The hotline was first used prior to the Six Day War, as Ivan was sweating the proximity of their Black Sea Fleet and the US Sixth Fleet in the eastern Med.

There have been more modern iterations of the hot line, which --I believe-- included satellite and fax technology, so who knows what communication equipment will be invoked to support a US-China link. I humbly suggest that President Bush and Wen Jiabo do it via AOL instant messenger, in the spirit of the digital age and all. There'd certainly be some cruel comedy in receiving a "nuKing u, lol!" text message just prior to Armageddon.

China Matters catalogues Chinese concerns regarding last night's satellite shoot-down:

1. Asserting China’s qualifications as a space power on par with Russia and the United States.
2. Imputing hidden motives to the US for conducting the operation
3. Expressing resentment that the US did a better PR job than the Chinese did with their test
4. Hoping that the US will screw up.

The post notes a Chinese "news report that the United States will call on fellow space powers Russia and China for assistance in tracking the hulk if the shootdown fails." The Chinese shouldn't believe everything they read in the paper. That never would have happened. And the Chinese can impute away, but whatever the reason for the shootdown, the administration effectively sold it as a public safety measure.

And it is the PR coup that most impresses. It's hard to see how this plays bad for the United States at home or abroad--though critics will surely take a different view (will Obama? doubtful). If the Russians and Chinese are convinced that this is evidence of some new capability, which it isn't, that's gravy. And our allies, especially those states who are collaborating with the United States on missile defense (Poland, Czech Republic, Japan), can only take this as evidence that the system is for real.

Leaving aside the left's criticism of the Bush administration as diplomatically-challenged, conservatives have long lamented the administration's inability to advocate on behalf of its own policies. But by taking this course of action, the Bush administration has done as much to assure future funding and allied support for missile defense as anyone could have hoped. Missile defense is one Reagan legacy that George W. Bush has safeguarded.

And, of course, we didn't screw up. The test was a complete and unvarnished success--assuming the plummeting debris doesn't destroy the island of Midway.

HT: China Rises

Slate explains "why the Air Force doesn’t need more F-22s":

On Feb. 13, according to today's issue of Aerospace Daily & Defense Report, Gen. Bruce Carlson, chief of the Air Force's materiel command, told a group of reporters, "We think that [187 planes] is the wrong number" and that the Air Force would find some way to build 380 before the program's done. He joked that 380 is a "compromise," since the original plan calls for 381.

Gen. Carlson's rationale for this expansion: "Most people say in the future there will be a China element to whatever we do." In plainer words: He says we need more than twice as many F-22s than the secretary of defense says we need because of the future military threat from China.

Two things should be noted about this claim. First, by the Pentagon's own measure, the Chinese military has a long way to go before it constitutes a threat to U.S. forces. Second, even if it does become a threat, it's not at all clear that the F-22 would be the best weapon to deal with it.

Disagree. The Raptor--poor, misunderstood soul that it is--isn't so much a means of winning a war against Red China as it is a tool for preventing one. China's subsidization of Russia's advanced defense sector has allowed the two nations to develop (and field) some particularly nasty fighter aircraft. With U.S. forces spread thin, allowing for Chinese air superiority over the straits of Taiwan would be bad news bears. Airpower is the cornerstone of our strategy to win any state v. state conflict; if China believes that we're no longer capable of controlling the air (or the sea), our strategy collapses, and we're up the Yangtze without a paddle.

Feel free to insert a "if you want peace, prepare for war" quote at your leisure.

The Raptor is expensive, true. It's a Cold War relic, also true. But if we're serious about fighting small wars, and remaining strong against peer competitors, we're going to need advanced platforms like the F-22. It's the "two-militaries" solution that's slowly evolving in the post-Rumsfeld Pentagon, a plan that hinges on modernizing the "geriatric" Air Force.

That according to Taiwanese Vice Defense Minister Ko Chen-heng as reported by Defense News. Ko made the statement while offering what is described as a rare public comment on a new land-attack cruise missile. The missile, he said, was developed by the Taiwanese for the express purpose of "allow[ing] time for U.S. forces to arrive to protect Taiwan from a Chinese attack."

“Since China lacks capability to cruise across the Taiwan Strait for a landing operation, China intends to fire missiles in the political and economic nerve centers of Taiwan to cause social paralysis, thereby forcing the U.S. to surrender.”

Ko said China is also working to turn the Taiwan Strait into an “internal sea of China.”

Militarily, this means building an aircraft carrier by 2015 and several more by 2020, and increasing submarine patrols in the area. But this also includes efforts to redefine the internationally recognized air defense identification zone to include what is now Taiwanese airspace. Ko said Chinese military aircraft are crossing the centerline of the Taiwan Strait more often — five or six times a year, up from once or twice annually in the late 1990s.

One should take such "rare" public comments with a grain of salt, but the message is clear. The Taiwanese are scared of China, they doubt the deterrent value of their current arsenal, and their only strategy in the event of attack is to wait until the U.S. Navy arrives. The reason? As the article notes, in 2005 U.S. officials denied Taiwanese "requests for Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs) and AGM-88C High-speed Anti-Radiation Missiles."Then in 2007, "U.S. officials declined four times . . . to accept Taiwan’s letter of request for price and availability for 66 F-16s." And now there are "indications that the U.S. government has been pressuring Taiwan to halt" production of this indigenous cruise missile system.

As far as the bit about the carriers, last year the South Korean newspaper Hankyoreh reported that China was "pushing ahead with construction of a mega-sized nuclear-powered aircraft carrier to be completed in 2020." This in addition to construction of a conventionally powered carrier.

If the Bush administration intends to restore and safeguard the balance of power in the Strait, it's running out of time, and it's moving in the wrong direction.

The Russian carrier Varyag, which is being refitted in the port of Dalian by the Chinese.
When the Chinese bought the ship from the Ukraine, they claimed it would be used in Macau as a floating casino.

If you believe in that sort of thing. People's Daily reports:

The share price of China Coal Energy, the country's second largest coal producer, jumped more than 40 percent in a strong debut in Shanghai on Friday amid volatile trading....

The capital would be used for the construction of major coal projects in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and Heilongjiang Province, and to supplement operating capital, according to the company.

China has a lot of coal. It's a cheap, efficient, and secure source of energy, so they aren't going to stop building coal-fired power plants any time soon--even if Obama hugs it out with them. Not only that, but much of the developing world, most notably Africa, will have to rely on affordable coal-fired power plants in order to lift themselves out of abject poverty. This type of thing puts the environmental movement at odds with efforts to eliminate global poverty--a conflict that Anne Applebaum captured well in her piece on India's Nano.

People's Daily reports:

China is expected to become the world's second largest power in terms of objective national strength by 2030, a top think tank reported on Tuesday.

In its report "China's Modernization 2008" that was released on Monday, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) said the country, currently number three globally in objective national strength, is expected to surpass Japan in 2030.

And earlier this week from the Strategy Page:

Expensive, and long term, efforts are being made to produce high tech items like jet engines, missiles and military electronics. At the current rate of progress, Chinese military technology will match that of the United States in a decade or so.

I think that second estimate is more than a little hysterical. The Chinese are putting Russian engines into fourth generation fighters while the United States operates the world's only fifth generation fighter, the F-22, and Boeing is even talking of a sixth generation fighter (though there's already some healthy skepticism at the Danger Room). Still, it sounds like the Chinese are doing a little sandbagging in the CASS study--it closes with this:

In its report, CASS also proposed the new concept of "Peace Dove Strategy" to stress its peaceful development policy.

The "Peace Dove, We Would Never Start a War Strategy"--who could worry?

Air Force Times:

The democratic Republic of China, commonly called Taiwan — which America backs and the communist People’s Republic of China considers part of its territory — frequently irritates Chinese leaders with calls for greater independence from the mainland. But while the American military mulls its options, Chinese missiles hit runways, fuel lines, barracks and supply depots at U.S. Air Force bases in Japan and South Korea. Long-range warheads destroy American satellites, crippling Air Force surveillance and communication networks. A nuclear fireball erupts high above the Pacific Ocean, ionizing the atmosphere and scrambling radars and radio feeds.

This is China’s anti-U.S. sucker punch strategy.

The scenario comes from a RAND report which drew on Chinese military journals and other unclassified documents to construct a best guess of how a conflict between the U.S. and China would kick off. It's a lot of asymmetric type stuff, but real heart of any Chinese first-strike would, according to the authors, be rather conventional: hitting runways and taking out aircraft at U.S. air bases in the region. To which they offer some simple solutions like adding an extra layer of concrete to all the runways and storing fuel underground. They also recommend keeping American aircraft, including larger aircraft, in hardened shelters, which the report says "would be expensive and difficult but likely worth the cost."

Another interesting item, straight from the report this time:

Chinese analysts assess that even a small number of casualties is sufficient to spark strong popular opposition and erode domestic support for U.S. participation in a conflict. The U.S. experience in Somalia is usually cited in support of this assertion.

It's hard to gauge just how damaging Somalia was to American credibility. It's been much discussed that al Qaeda interpreted that retreat as a sign of U.S. weakness. (And of course, bin Laden claimed that it was al Qaeda trained affiliates that shot down the American helicopters in the Battle of Mogadish.) It seems the Chinese drew the same conclusion--Americans don't have the stomach for a fight. Which leads to the obvious question: how would the Chinese interpret an American withdraw from Iraq?

Also, doesn't this sound an awful lot like the attack on Pearl Harbor? Strike at the U.S. ability to project power across the Pacific, inflict a maximum amount of damage and casualties in a very short period of time, convince the American people to abandon the fight. At the very least the parallels extend beyond the geography of the conflict (Taiwan=Philippines?). But that wasn't a good strategy then, and I don't buy it now. I'm thinking this type of attack ends more like Tora! Tora! Tora! than Black Hawk Down.

Apparently if you are, you're a coward:

"The distance between the Chinese and U.S. militaries is big. If you fear China's military build-up you don't have much courage," said Chen Bingde, chief of General Staff of the People's Liberation Army.

"We don't have the ability to make you afraid of us," he told reporters in Beijing, before meeting Timothy Keating, head of the U.S. Pacific Command.

At the same press conference, Chen rattled his saber on the issue of Taiwan:

"We have the ability and also relevant measures to resolve the Taiwan issue if the splittists dare to separate Taiwan from the motherland," Chen told reporters, without elaborating.

One can understand why there is some confusion about China's military "ability." And it is that confusion, perhaps more than anything else, that causes concern in Washington. As Sun Tzu said, "If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a 100 battles." The problem is we don't know our enemy, and the Chinese continue to frustrate efforts to improve military to military relations (refusing to allow the Kitty Hawk to make a call at Hong Kong late last year is just one example).

But it goes both ways. The Chinese don't understand the U.S. military that well either, and they certainly don't understand what our red lines might be in the event of a conflict in the Strait. There's plenty of reason for both sides to be a bit fearful.

Hong Kong
Throughout my 25-year Army career, I usually focused on national security as a "blood-and-bullets" concern. So it feels odd to be spending so much of my time nowadays worrying about food security. But it’s just another side of the national security coin. You never know when terrorists might try to slip E. Coli into the spinach.

Now Congress too is starting to pay more attention to the security aspects of food and product safety--thanks in no small measure to a spate of recalls on toys made in China with lead paint and other toxic bits. Hearings will be held soon. And some lawmakers will doubtless use the opportunity to push for more non-tariff trade barriers--proposals based more on promoting protectionism than protecting us.

More trade barriers are a bad solution for making food safe. Hong Kong has a better idea.

Though America imports about $75 billion in fresh produce every year, most of what Americans eat is still grown or raised in America. Not so in Hong Kong. Here they import 95 percent of their food--90 percent of it from China. Yet, they do not have a food security import problem. Why? Because Hong Kong employs a layered system of safety measures from "farm to fork."

Hong Kong focuses its efforts not on companies or countries, but on "high risk" foods--those most likely to carry deadly pathogens or contamination from pesticides. (Example: Because of bird flu, they spend a lot of time worrying about chickens.) They also check at all three links in the food chain--import, wholesale, and retail. It is a system that makes sense, with inspections based on an unbiased, scientific-approach to food security.

But watch out for what Washington does in the wake of the China-toy scandal. Some lawmakers are bound to promote an overkill approach that will involve checking everything, everywhere, every step of the way. It’s the kind of woefully inefficient approach Hong Kong has wisely rejected.

Consider Chinese food exports, for example. China has approved 12,700 of its 450,000 food producers for export. Hong Kong accepts the certifications of the Chinese Inspection and Quarantine Agency as all that’s needed to OK importation. But FDA bureaucracy builders are making noises indicating that won’t be good enough. Rather, they may try to certify all 450,000 themselves. That’ll never happen--the FDA would have to cover hundreds of thousands of companies from more than 100 countries.

For its part, Congress is only likely to make things worse--restricting ports that can receive imports; requiring more U.S. certification before countries can send goods here; and imposing more inspection fees. All that would do is drive up food prices without adding much real security. At best the FDA can actually inspect only about 1 percent of the food we import anyway.

A recent Heritage Foundation paper by Danielle Markheim and Caroline Walsh offers much better answers. Their recommendations (e.g., that government work with industry to establish clear, practical, science-based regulations regarding food importation) track well with Hong Kong’s proven "farm to fork" strategy.

Hong Kong
Forget Will Smith. In his new movie a global plague kills off all but the tiniest percentage of people. If the setting had been Hong Kong instead of the Big Apple, the screen would still be crowded with people.

Here in Hong Kong I have plenty of company. But one fellow visitor really caught my eye: Adm. Tim Keating. Keating, head of U.S. Pacific Command in Hawaii.

Keating’s area of responsibility covers most of Asia. Few people have more important jobs. A strong U.S. military presence in Asia is one of the most important factors promoting regional stability in the Pacific.

With a vigorous, vigilant U.S. presence in the region, nobody is capable of stealing a march on anybody else. That situation promotes peace and prosperity.

Asia also finds it good to have the United States around to help in combating piracy and terrorism, assisting in disaster response (like the 2004 tsunami); and thwarting trafficking in humans, drugs, and nuclear materials and technology.

And, of course, a safe and secure Asia is a better economic partner for the United States.

Keating is in Beijing for four days of talks. He is also going to visit military institutions in Shanghai and Guangzhou--and he will stop in Hong Kong.

There’s a lot to talk about. Last year the Chinese government forbade a port call in Hong Kong by the USS Kitty Hawk. Why? Beijing was miffed that President Bush had honored the Dali Lama and approved arms sales to Taiwan. But shutting out the Kitty Hawk was a big mistake. It made Beijing look petty and sent all the wrong messages to Washington.

Inviting the Kitty Hawk back would be a good first step. When militaries compete in Asia, everybody loses. When they start cooperating, everybody wins.

Editor’s note: The Heritage Foundation’s James Jay Carafano is in Hong Kong this week interviewing government officials and studying how they screen cargo and travelers for terrorist dangers. He will be filing reports for WWS.

Hong Kong
Lest we obsess over our presidential primaries, remember that keeping America safe, free and prosperous depends on far more than who occupies the Oval Office. How well we succeed as a nation will, in fact, be determined to a large degree by what happens overseas.

Homeland security does not begin at home. It is a global mission. From secur¬ing the border to protecting global supply chains that run from factories overseas to Wal-Mart shelves, virtu¬ally every aspect of preventing terrorist attacks has an international dimension that requires the United States to work effectively abroad. We can't make ourselves safe by sitting behind "Fortress America."

Ours is a “trading nation” and a “seafaring nation.” Global trade accounts for a full third of our economy. Virtually all of this trade--a whopping 99 percent--is conducted via the sea, where we move about 2.5 billion tons of goods, a year, worth about $10 trillion every year.

Ask most any American to name the one port in the world where a terrorist attack would have the most devastating impact on the U.S. economy and they will name one of the big three U.S. ports: New York, Los Angeles or Long Beach. And they’d be wrong. The answer is Hong Kong. It is the world’s leading international hub of global maritime shipping (and international passenger travel, as well). Should terrorists strike Hong Kong, the whole global conveyor belt of commerce would jerk.

And that would be horrible news for us. For American commerce is not only dependent on the sea, it is glued to the clock. Virtually every international business in the world today relies on “just-in-time” delivery. Rather than stockpile stuff in the storeroom, American business calculates what it needs and orders it from the factory just in time to put it in the assembly line or on the showroom floor or retail shelves. Mess with that system and you mess with every American.

Ports are also vital to defense. When the U.S. military goes overseas, 95 percent of the equipment and supplies go through ports.

Hong Kong sets the standard for port management, safety, and security for just about everybody--even the United States. As Hong Kong goes, so goes the world.

And that's why I'm here, and not in Michigan.

From Newsmax:

Santa Claus has been brought down somewhere over the South China Sea in an apparent collision with a Chinese fighter jet.

The collision occurred while St. Nick was flying his sleigh on a return trip from Hong Kong to the North Pole.

“Our pilots were flying within a reasonable distance when one of them was blinded by the lead reindeer’s nose. This caused him to lose control of his jet and accidentally fire two heat-seeking missiles that collided with the sleigh,” stated the Chinese foreign minister.

Very funny, worth reading the whole thing.

Update: Not funny: "Drug traffickers in a Rio slum opened fire on a helicopter carrying a Santa to a children's party, apparently mistaking it for a police helicopter." Via Danger Room.

"'Almost all enemies' of U.S. 'are China's friends'" says the report from East-Asia-Intel.com:

An official of the Chinese government last week confirmed that Beijing is supporting U.S. enemies around the world.

Yuan Peng, director of the Institute of American Studies, part of the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, said that "in the world, almost all enemies of the United States are China's friends."

The rare admission confirms the view of some critics who say China's arms sales to rogue states like Iran, Syria and North Korea are based on a deliberate strategy of indirectly confronting the United States.

Peng's institute, the CICIR, is an entity of the Ministry of State Security, China's main intelligence service. His remarks were included in a state-run media report.

Peng said long-term strategic stability between the U.S. and China "still remain[s] doubtful."

You have to wonder just how ugly things might get with the Chinese after the Olympics.

Update: As first reported in the November 5 issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...(click here for full view)

This isn't good:

France renewed its call for lifting the EU arms embargo against China on Tuesday, saying the punitive measure has long become obsolete and unable to reflect the current relationship between the European bloc and China....

In response to a question on French President Nicolas Sarkozy's demand for the removal during his recent visit to China, a Foreign Ministry official said that the embargo is out of date and does not conform to the EU's policy to build a full strategic partnership with China.

France stands for continued consultations among EU countries and will strive for the lifting of the arms embargo in light of a decision by the EU summit meeting in 2004, the official said....

The French Foreign Ministry official said the lifting of the embargo will be a "political message," which does not mean that France seeks a drastic increase in its arms export to China.

Chirac had angled for years to get out from under the EU-ban on arms exports to China. Not only was there money to be made in selling advanced military equipment, but lifting the ban almost guarantees the French increased access to China's rapidly expanding civil aviation market. Of course, the conditions that led to the ban--imposed after the Tienanmen Square massacre--have not changed in the least. The Chinese people have little more political freedom today than they did nearly 20 years ago, if any. What they have is economic freedom. And that economic freedom has apparently made China an irresistible market for European defense companies starved by declining national defense budgets throughout the EU.

If the Europeans are to lift this embargo without any concession or reform on the part of Beijing in return, it will put the lie to Sarkozy's oft repeated claim that his foreign policy would be a "moral foreign policy." There is no moral case for selling weapons to China, and neither does Europe have a strategic interest in lifting the ban. The motivation is purely economic--and decidedly amoral.

Yesterday it looked like the Chinese explanation for changing their minds about the Kitty Hawk's port call to Hong Kong was going to be nothing more than that it was a "misunderstanding."

Now, via Murdoc, they appear to be singing a different tune:

China hinted Thursday that Congress' honoring of the Dalai Lama and U.S. arms sales to Taiwan led it to cancel a U.S. Navy visit to Hong Kong, an incident that could open a new rift in military relations that had warmed in recent years.

That's pretty much what Tim Johnson had speculated, but I'm surprised the Chinese would be so straightforward about the whole thing. Of course, they aren't being straightforward at all. The Chinese now deny not only that the decision was the result of a misunderstanding, but that it was their decision at all:

"Reports that Foreign Minister Yang said in the United States that it was a misunderstanding do not accord with the facts," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao told a news conference.

"China approved the visit of the Kitty Hawk group to Hong Kong based on humanitarian reasons. The decision made by the U.S. later was up to them." He did not elaborate.

Rep. Randy Forbes put out a statement this morning in response to all these conflicting reports, and I think he pretty much nails it:

The duplicitous statements coming out of Beijing are emblematic of the way the Chinese conduct their brand of diplomacy and should serve as a cautionary statement to policymakers when dealing with Chinese leaders.

In other news from Red China:

Thousands of military academy students in central China’s Anhui province are rioting after news spread that the government wouldn’t recognize diplomas awarded to the fee-paying students, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reports....

A teacher at the academy, surnamed Ren, denied that rioting had occurred but added, “It could happen to any school. There are always some students who do not want to study. Right?”

“The majority of the students are good students. Those [who do not like to study] will be severely dealt with. What do the students know? Including the seniors. They have not even gotten their diplomas yet.”

“Only a small number of students with their own agenda were fanning the fire. I have told you too much already. If you are a reporter, I advise you not to touch things related to a military academy,” Ren said.

Can't wait for those Olympics...

WWS contributor Jennifer Chou sends along a link to this story that just hit the wires:

Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi told President George W. Bush on Wednesday that Beijing's refusal to let a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier into Hong Kong was a "misunderstanding," the White House said.

There's no additional explanation offered, but it strikes me that the Chinese are being more than a little reckless. "Misunderstandings" involving aircraft carriers are, by their nature, dangerous for all parties involved. At the beginning of the year, Bill Gertz reported on another Chinese "misunderstanding" that involved the Kitty Hawk:

The admiral in charge of the U.S. Pacific Fleet pressed Chinese military leaders to explain why an armed submarine challenged a U.S. aircraft carrier in the western Pacific by sailing within five miles of the warship, U.S. defense officials said.

The Chinese responded by claiming the Song-class submarine that surfaced near the USS Kitty Hawk on Oct. 27 was there by accident, and that it did not shadow the warship before making its presence known, the officials said.

Defense officials familiar with reports of closed-door military meetings in Beijing, Shanghai and Zhanjiang privately doubted the Chinese explanations and said it is more likely the Song-class diesel electric submarine was practicing anti-aircraft carrier operations.

A few months earlier, Larry Wortzel, chairman of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission and a leading expert on Chinese military policy, spoke on China's military ambitions in space at the National Press Club:

With respect to the goal the PLA has set of attacking a U.S. aircraft carrier battle group at sea, we don’t know, from their writings, whether their war plans--believe it or not, we all have war plans--are for a conventional, a nuclear or a high-altitude electro-magnetic pulse burst. But the PLA sees the goal of attacking a deployed American carrier battle group as realistic and achievable. Think of the implications of that! The Enterprise docked in Norfolk just before Thanksgiving and there are 5,000 people on the Enterprise alone. The casualties at Pearl Harbor reached only 2,400. The World Trade Center wasn’t much more than 2,400. Thus, when PLA officers routinely talk about being able to attack and sink an American aircraft carrier, they aren’t thinking really hard about what comes back at them after that.

I would argue that one of the implications of what seems to be serious research and writing in China is that the United States ought to be engaged in equally serious defense talks with the senior PLA leaders on what the red lines are in warfare. The anti-satellite programs that I talked about affect our strategic warning. The Chinese need to understand that we are very sensitive about interference with our strategic warning and about the ability of the United States to gather indications of hostility. When another nation interferes with that capability, we tend to take that as an indication that the nation may want to attack us. If you have been in the strategic warning system awhile, you know that the United States talked to the Soviets about this at great length. We still talk to the Russians about it. Senior American defense and foreign policy leaders have not had this dialogue with the Chinese. The PLA won’t even get serious about a dialogue with the Pacific commander about naval incidents at sea, to make sure that the next time a Song submarine broaches the surface, it doesn’t do it under the Kitty Hawk carrier battle group and bump into it. The PLA has avoided such discussions despite repeated requests from the U.S., and we need to talk to them about these matters.

The Chinese seem to think that putting these incidents off to mere "misunderstandings" is sufficient, but the behavior is in fact unbelievably reckless. They have no sense of what our red lines are, and this latest snub of the Kitty Hawk is unlikely to reduce the chance of escalation the next time we have a misunderstanding at sea.

No General Tso for the crew of the Kitty Hawk.

The USS Kitty Hawk and its task force were supposed to spend Thanksgiving in Hong Kong, at the invitation of the Chinese. Because the Kitty Hawk is the lone carrier stationed overseas, many of the families of the sailors and Marines on board took the relatively short trip from Japan to Hong Kong to spend the holiday with their active duty love ones. But the Chinese scuttled the visit, without any apparent reason, leaving families stranded in Hong Kong, and the sailors stuck aboard their ships in the South China Sea.

At FP Passport, Mike Boyer points to one possible reason for China's bad manners--a live-fire exercise off the Chinese coast that would have "have put U.S. ships (and their prying eyes) in a position that Beijing would consider too close for comfort." Boyer also links a piece by Tim Johnson, who speculates this may be payback for Bush's chummy visit with the Dalai Lama.

On Johnson's blog, China Rises (bookmark it!), he also posts a transcript of a press conference with Admiral Keating, which shows the level of frustration at the Pentagon with the Chinese decision:

ADM. KEATING: ...This is perplexing. It's not helpful. It is not, in our view, conduct that is indicative of a country who understands its obligations of a responsible nation. There is little strategic benefits to it. There's a lot more downside than upside. So it's hard to characterize it in anything but a at least perplexing, if not troublesome, light.

I have had no conversation with any Chinese officials. We are in dialogue with OSD (Office of the Secretary of Defense) and State, and I've got a phone call in to our ambassador there. I've not yet been able to connect to Amb. Randt.

So, perplexing, troublesome. No direct contact with the Chinese. Would certainly hope that this is not indicative of future repeated denials. We'd like to get into Hong Kong. We want to engage in even discourse. I'm hoping to go to China in January. As you know, Secretary Gates was just there a couple of weeks ago. He had a good visit. So this denial in the very late stages of port visit planning is -- came as a surprise and it's of some concern to us.

Keating later complains of a Chinese affront to the Navy far worse than the Kitty Hawk fiasco--China's refusal to grant two U.S. minesweepers safe harbor in Hong Kong after being caught in a dangerous storm:

ADM KEATING:...Those two minesweepers were engaged in an operation, not against China but out in international water, and a storm blew up and they needed to get into a place of refuge. And, you know, Hong Kong's nearby and that's a great place to go. So for the Chinese to have denied those two ships, in particular, small though they may be, that is a different kettle of fish for us and is, in ways, more disturbing, more perplexing than the denial for the Kitty Hawk's port visit request.

As it turns out, both the Patriot and Guardian remained unaffected. They suffered no damage. But this is a kind of an unwritten law among seamen that if someone is in need, regardless of genus, phylum or species, you let them come in; you give them safe harbor. Jimmy Buffett has songs about it, for crying out loud.

Okay, so they're busting the Navy's chops a bit with the Kitty Hawk visit. It's bad form, but I suspect these are the kind of silly games that the Soviet and U.S. military played for decades. But rejecting a request for safe harbor in a storm--as Keating says, this pretty much destroys any good will or trust that has been built between the Navy and the Chinese since the 2001 spy plane incident.

For good measure, Johnson adds that while the Chinese media has made little mention of the dust up over the Kitty Hawk, the official press has been flooding the zone with coverage of "the arrival of the Chinese missile destroyer Shenzhen in Tokyo for a four-day visit, casting it as a sign of 'new vigor' in relations between Beijing and Tokyo."

China's lunar probe, Chang'e-1, has sent its first image back to earth:

During the celebration work staff at a hall in the BACC where the picture was unveiled, played greetings and music decoded from the data transmitted back to Earth via the satellite.

"I come with greetings from China," said a female voice that was programmed into the Chang'e-1 probe to salute the moon.

The music broadcast included "The East is Red", which was also played in 1970 by the country's first man-made satellite, "Ode to the Motherland," a tribute to the country's power and prosperity, and some moon-themed songs, such as Chinese pop diva Faye Wong's rendition of a famous Song Dynasty (960-1127) poem.

The program cost some $187 million--though apparently nobody thought to include a color camera.

I've written before on the legislation introduced in Congress to deter internet providers from sharing data with governments that may use it to prosecute dissidents. The House Foreign Affairs Committee--which has approved that legislation--also held a hearing on November 6, to grill Yahoo for its testimony regarding the case of Shi Tao.

It seems that the Congressional brow-beating has caused Yahoo to settle the case brought against it by the families of Shi Tao and another dissident:

On Nov. 13, Yahoo decided to pay: It settled a lawsuit with the families of imprisoned journalist Shi Tao and political dissident Wang Xiaoning, both of whom were given 10-year sentences after the Internet company turned over information—from personal e-mails and anonymous posts on Yahoo message boards—to the Chinese government. The amount Yahoo will pay was not disclosed. "After meeting with the families, it was clear to me what we had to do to make this right for them, for Yahoo, and for the future," said Yang in a statement.

Yahoo also is establishing a fund to provide humanitarian and legal aid to people serving prison sentences for expressing their opinions online. The company is still working out the details of who will be eligible for aid, how much will be offered, and how it will be administered. "At Yahoo, we believe in the transformative power of the Internet," Yang's statement said. "That's why we are so committed to working to support free expression and privacy around the world."

While terms of the settlement have not been disclosed, the group that brought the suit on behalf of the dissidents' families says that they are pleased:

The terms of the settlement were not disclosed and are to remain confidential. But the plaintiffs and their families are pleased, according to Morton Sklar. He's the executive director of the World Organization for Human Rights USA, the Washington-based group that brought the suit on behalf of Shi and Wang. "Everyone's first priority is getting the prisoners released. What everybody realized was that if this case continued, that would take four or five more years."

It's unclear if Smith's legislation--the Global Online Freedom Act--will be considered by the full House. Nevertheless, the incident shows the power of Congress to affect how firms do business, without ever passing a law.

There has been much discussion regarding the threat to security from the sale of American technology companies to Chinese owners. Most recently it was the announcement that China's Huawei Technologies would attempt to purchase a stake in 3COM, which provides the Pentagon with technology to prevent cyber-attacks, that set off alarm bells (see Irwin M. Stelzer's "Selling National Security" in THE DAILY STANDARD). But it seems that American owned technology firms may be no less vulnerable to Beijing than those based in Shanghai. Here's the report from the Taipei Times:

Following findings by the Investigation Bureau that portable hard discs produced by US disk-drive manufacturer Seagate Technology that were sold in Taiwan contained Trojan horse viruses, further investigations suggested that "contamination" took place when the products were in the hands of Chinese subcontractors during the manufacturing process.

On Saturday, Seagate Technology LLC, the manufacturer of the Maxtor portable hard drive, said on its Web site (www.seagate.com) that Maxtor Basics Personal Storage 3200 hard drives sold after August could be infected with the virus....

The Investigation Bureau said the tainted portable hard drives automatically upload any information saved on the computer to Beijing Web sites without the user's knowledge.

The company does not confirm the specifics of the story, saying only that the "scenario [by which the virus is uploaded] seems unlikely"--but that won't inspire much confidence. Apparently the drives were made in Thailand, but that may just be final assembly. And given the nature of the attack, and the Beijing-based servers that received the hacked information, I don't see any reason not to take the Taiwanese report at face value. And if responsibility does lay elsewhere in the manufacturing process, it would hardly change the need to address this increasing threat to privacy and national security.

HT: China Rises

Yesterday I joined several other conservative bloggers in a session with former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton at the Heritage Foundation. (Check out Tech Republican, Soren Dayton, and Quin Hillyer for more coverage of the event, as well as the American Spectator for video of his appearance there.) Bolton was extremely impressive--he spoke with ease and precision about a range of foreign policy and national security issues--including Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Israel, China, the United Nations and internal State Department politics. Bolton's appearance is intended to help promote his new book, Surrender is Not an Option.

In a ranging interview, I'm not sure how best to summarize what Bolton had to say. For simplicity's sake, I'll simply give bullet points on each topic.

• Iran: On Iran, the United States has for more than 4 years followed a failed policy of negotiation, following the lead of our European allies. Those negotiations have gotten Iran 4 years closer to having nuclear weapons, instead of 4 years closer to regime change in Tehran--which ought to have been our policy. Iran's regime is extremely fragile, and is having a hard time satisfying an overwhelmingly young and ethnically diverse population. With our responsible policy choices limited to regime change and targeted use of force against Iran's military program, the former would be preferable. Yet the United States has not pursued this effort, and will not use covert means to force a change in Iranian leadership.

When I asked Bolton specifically what he expected the administration to do with regard to Iran in the waning days of the administration, he expressed disappointment that President Bush is now hearing 'nothing but don't attack; don't upset the apple cart.' Soon he said, President Bush will be told not to strike Iran because of the way it will influence the presidential campaign, and after the election, he will be told to leave the challenge for the next president. Bolton said he is 'not optimistic.'

• North Korea: The problem of North Korea won't be eliminated until the North Korea regime is eliminated, the Korean peninsula is reunited, and the last anomaly resulting from World War II is corrected. China does not want North Korea to have nuclear weapons, because it encourages the nuclearization of Japan and South Korea, which is against China's interests. Beijing refuses to put too much pressure on Kim Jong Il, however, because it believes that the collapse of the regime would lead to reunification under the leadership of South Korea, with the potential for U.S. troops to be stationed along the Yalu River.

Bolton also attached great significance to the recent Israeli strike in Syria, against a facility associated with North Korea's nuclear program. He expressed a strong desire for the declassification of all the information about the strike that can be declassified. Bolton said that many questions remain and that at the very least, all Members of Congress should be briefed on it. Is Syria cooperating with North Korea on nuclear technology? They could not do so on their own, and would not do so without Iran's assistance. Is Syria then serving as a conduit for nuclear cooperation between North Korea and Iran? Bolton believes these questions must be addressed.

Last week, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives approved legislation to make it illegal for U.S. Internet hosting companies to give users’ personal information to governments that restrict Internet access. The legislation is aimed at China, as well as companies like Google--which has reportedly censored search engine results in China--and Yahoo, which shared information with the Chinese government that led to the jailing of dissident Shi Tao.

The case of Shi Tao seems to be breathing life into a debate that went nowhere last year. While Speaker Hastert was no fan of the Chinese government, he had no desire to sour U.S.-China relations; this legislation gained no traction under Republican rule. Speaker Pelosi, however, has been more direct and passionate in her criticisms of China and its human rights record. Furthermore, a Yahoo representative testified before Congress early in 2006 that his company had not shared information that led to Shi Tao's arrest; it subsequently became clear that that testimony was false. Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang has been called to testify next Tuesday, and the company has made it clear that Congress will get an apology:

A senior executive at Yahoo Inc. will apologize to a House panel next week for failing to return with added information concerning circumstances under which the company agreed to cooperate with a request by the Chinese government for information on one of its users.

"Months after I testified before two House subcommittees on Yahoo's approach to business in China, I realized Yahoo had additional information about a 2004 order issued by the Chinese government seeking information about a Yahoo China user. I neglected to directly alert the committee of this new information, and that oversight led to a misunderstanding that I deeply regret and have apologized to the committee for creating," said Michael Callahan, executive vice president and general counsel at Yahoo, said in a statement released Thursday...

According to people who were present at them, there were three meetings between Yahoo executives and committee staffers in late August and early September.

A spokeswoman for the company said he would formally repeat that apology at a hearing the panel is holding next week.

The dustup between Yahoo and the Committee will likely take a while to settle. In the meantime, there's no indication as to how the Democratic leadership will handle Congressman Smith's legislation. Will it be considered on the House floor, or will the committee be satisfied simply with raising the profile of the issue?

When Speaker Pelosi has waded into foreign policy, it has usually led to a black eye for Congressional Democrats. Would a rebuke to China over civil rights help or hurt?

China's Buk-M1-2 SAM

In assessing the Chinese military buildup there is a tendency to swing from one extreme to the other--either to minimize the threat or to blow it entirely out of proportion. An example of this can be found in a an October 11 article in the New York Times by David Lague, "China Announces Gain in Air Defense." Drawing on press releases by the Chinese Ministry of Defense, Lague writes:

A senior officer from Chinese Air Force headquarters, Fang Lei, said a seamless network of all-weather air defense radars had been installed to cover all Chinese airspace, according to a report on the Web site of the official military newspaper, the Liberation Army Daily.

The network’s detection and surveillance capability was "very close" to those deployed in developed countries and could also assist Chinese forces in offensive operations, the report quoted Mr. Fang as saying.

Lague cites sources that point to China’s air defense buildup as a response to Taiwan’s development of an long-range land-attack cruise missile (LACM) with the potential to hit Chinese targets as far off as Shanghai. He also notes that the new air defense capability supplements China’s already potent offensive missile force (consisting of both LACMs and short-to-medium range ballistic missiles) and growing numbers of modern tactical fighters.

In addition to having a direct effect on the security of Taiwan (by diminishing its ability to respond to a Chinese attack), Lague also notes that it has implications for the United States:

China’s arms buildup could also pose challenges to the United States if it is drawn into a conflict with Beijing over Taiwan. The commander of American forces in Japan, Lt. Gen. Bruce Wright, told The Associated Press earlier this month that China’s air defenses were now almost impenetrable to the American F-15 and F-16 aircraft stationed in Asia.

Only the stealthy F-22 or the Joint Strike Fighter still under development could carry out missions over China, he said.

"Our planes are much older than the planes they would be matched against," Mr. Wright said, the Associated Press reported.

"For the first time in history, we are seeing another nation, in this case China, with newer fighters than we have."

All of which sounds extremely ominous--but just how ominous is it?

I hated middle school, but if anything could have made it better...

Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force presented a "retired" J-6 jet fighter to a middle school in southwest China's Chongqing Municipality on Tuesday, to provide a real teaching tool for the school.

The fighter plane will be used as prop for trainee pilots who are attending a pilot training base which lies in Ba County Middle School, Chongqing municipality, the Chongqing Economic Times reports.

The 120 students in the pilot trainee program can get in touch with a real jet fighter in the future besides taking lessons.

Many students didn't sleep well during night before the aircraft arrived as they were so excited. When they were informed the plane had been sent to school the next day, students rushed to the playground, and touched it. Some of them even climbed onto it after teachers approved it.

When the kids sit in the cockpit, do they pretend they're in a dogfight with an F-22, or strafing pro-democracy protesters?

HT Alert 5

Merkel says goodbye to the Dalai Lama after meeting at the chancellery.
(REUTERS/Markus Schreiber/Pool)

Even before the brutal crack-down in Burma turned the international spotlight on China’s cynical unwillingness to pressure the military junta in neighboring Rangoon, it was German Chancellor Merkel who--by receiving the exiled Tibetan leader Dalai Lama last Sunday in Berlin--decided to send a clear signal to Beijing emphasizing the importance of protecting fundamental human rights. Merkel was not only the first German chancellor to meet with the Dalai Lama. She also decided to receive him at her official residence for what was billed as "private and informal talks" about the Dalai Lama’s "work as the Buddhist Tibetan religious leader and his commitment to his Tibetan homeland." Ever since China forcibly annexed its Himalayan neighbor in 1950 and launched a tough campaign of repression against the native Buddhist Tibetans, Beijing has viewed any international red-carpet treatment for the "god king" as a threat to its political legitimacy and territorial integrity.

In the run-up to the Merkel-Dalai Lama talks, China had tried hard to prevent the sensitive meeting from happening. Last Friday, for instance, Beijing summoned the newly arrived German ambassador there to warn against the potential negative political and economic fall-out for relations between the two countries. Beijing also canceled several senior-level bilateral meetings during this week’s UN General Assembly opening session in New York for "scheduling reasons." According to the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, the meeting "grossly interferes with the internal affairs of China," "hurts the feelings of the Chinese people and seriously undermines China-Germany relations". While the Merkel government stressed the peaceful nature of the Dalai Lama’s international campaign to achieve autonomy--though not independence--for Tibet and confirmed its continued commitment to the "One China" policy, the German Chancellor nonetheless seized the opportunity to demonstrate that she is not willing to sacrifice her own political beliefs and principles on the altar of close political and economic ties with a rising China.

Merkel’s timing in sending a human rights message to Beijing was carefully chosen, coming just a few weeks after the chancellor’s trip to China (which was overshadowed by reports of PLA cyber attacks against German government computers), and less than a year before the start of the 2008 Olympics. Despite the blustering, Beijing knows too well that it would be counterproductive to make too big of a deal of the Dalai Lama visit, especially since it does not herald any major shift in Germany’s China policy. Just today, the ruling conservative CDU/CSU Bundestag group announced that Chancellor Merkel will give a major major foreign policy address on Asia at a conference in Berlin on October 26. She will leave for another Asia trip right after the speech, thus emphasizing the region’s growing political and economic importance.

Domestically, Angela Merkel got rave across-the-board political and media reviews for receiving the Dalai Lama, including from the opposition FDP and Green parties. Only SPD Chairman Kurt Beck, whose party is a member of the ruling Grand Coalition and who would surely like to take Merkel’s post after the next general elections, slightly criticized the chancellor, indicating that he would have chosen a more "neutral ground" for such an encounter. As an editorial in the left-leaning Berliner Zeitung put it:

"The chancellor's resolve is to be welcomed because a policy of cozying up to Beijing, such as that pursued by (former Chancellor) Gerhard Schroeder, is of no use to anyone and only covers up existing conflicts. The small disturbance will not undermine bilateral relations: The Chinese are reliable and sensible enough to be able to distinguish between tactics and strategy. They wanted--as did Merkel--to send out a signal, and they have done so. Neither side has any interest in further turbulence."

"The real tests lie ahead. The Olympic Games are taking place in Beijing next year and China will soon be the world’s biggest export nation. Beijing’s global influence is growing --and with it the temptation for other countries to not look quite so closely at the human rights situation there. Merkel is thus to be applauded for continuing to defy, in all friendliness, Germany’s biggest partner in Asia."

During the past two weeks or so, Germany seemed to be gripped by a certain "Dalai Lamania" as the Tibetan spiritual leader was on a non-stop political and media tour across the country. For Chancellor Merkel, the meeting in Berlin was also an important opportunity to reach out to centrist voters by once again stressing her personal commitment to the protection of human rights (remember her frank criticism of Russian President Putin in that regard). Traditionally, it had been the SPD party and the Greens who were widely seen as the champions of "soft" issues such as human rights; the tenure of former chancellor and Putin buddy Gerhard Schroeder notwithstanding. Gearing up for the next general elections to be held by the fall of 2009, Merkel is smartly expanding her party’s appeal to the rapidly growing number of swing voters in Germany. One final observation: While the Dalai Lama’s campaign to improve the human rights situation in Tibet in the face of Chinese repression is certainly a worthy cause, it was astonishing to see how otherwise strictly secular politicians from the SPD, Green, FDP, and Left party (and even some CDU folks) bowed down before the "god king," referring to him as "His Holiness." It should be pointed out that these are the same people who generally refuse to address Germany’s top Catholic and Protestant leaders Karl Cardinal Lehmann or Bishop Wolfgang Huber with their appropriate titles, opting instead for a more informal, i.e. less respectful, "Herr Lehmann" or "Herr Huber."

Beijing is taking some heat for blocking, along with Russia, a UN security council resolution condemning Burma, but the Communist party has other things to worry about besides international opinion and an Olympic boycott. The friendly junta that gives China an outlet to the Indian Ocean is facing a big challenge. Worse, the Chinese people are watching their neighbors--not far off Europeans--protest bravely in the face of overwhelming force.

Last night, my friend Kejian in Hangzhou skyped me. He says popular Chinese internet bulletin boards are dominated by statements of support for the democracy protests in Burma. Volunteers are translating news from English sites that are not blocked by censors. And, my friend pointed out, photographs don’t need translation. Later he reported that censors were starting to block and delete a lot of Burma postings.

One hopes it is no coincidence that President Bush announced he would attend a ceremony next month to honor the Dalai Lama, whom Beijing regards as an “evil splittist,” and button-holed Chinese foreign minister Yang Jiechi in the Oval Office to press him on Burma on the same day.

Meanwhile, the crackdown continues. You can read an eyewitness account at Radio Free Asia, a list of Burma's pro-democracy blogs at Pajamas Media, and a lot of other news at Michelle Malkin's site. And here's the video of the murder of Japanese journalist Kenji Nagai.

WWS pal Stuart Koehl emailed his two cents regarding the discussion here last Friday of Robert Kaplan's "Lost at Sea." Because Koehl is wicked smart, here is his response:

I'm in the midst of writing a chapter on rising great powers in a book on future American strategy in which I noted that China's military buildup has focused mainly on naval and air power precisely because China lives in a geo- strategic cul-de-sac from which it can get out only by sea. But China has no hope whatsoever of developing a blue-water sea control navy such as is now possessed only by the United States. Instead, it seems to be following a classic sea denial strategy, by which it hopes to keep the U.S. out of its critical waters (i.e., the South China Sea and the Taiwan Straits) for a limited time, during which it has to achieve its overall strategic objectives (e.g., seizing Taiwan or gaining access to raw materials in the South China Sea). It is doing so by investing in technologies that would inflict serious damage on any U.S. fleet trying to penetrate those shallow waters--at least initially. These include advanced mines, air-independent conventional submarines, anti-ship cruise missiles, and advanced land- based fighters.

China's acquisition of one or two medium-sized conventional takeoff and landing (CTOL) aircraft carriers (each with only about 20-30 strike fighters) is not central to this strategy, but is rather a "prestige" move--real navies have aircraft carriers--and one intended to give China leverage over its regional competitors (Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand--and not to be forgotten, India). But it took the U.S. more than twenty years to learn how to operate aircraft carriers effectively (from 1923 to 1944), and in the post-war era, only the United States has the resources to operate large CTOL carriers (each with 60 strike fighters, plus AEW, ASW and EW aircraft) at sea for extended periods at a high operational tempo.

Buying a carrier is not sufficient--one buys a whole carrier battle group, consisting of a carrier, a couple of Aegis cruisers, some guided missile destroyers, and a few ASW frigates or destroyers--plus the entire fleet train needed to support it: oilers, supply ships, munitions ships, tenders, and their escort group as well. The entire Chinese defense budget wouldn't buy one of these, and we consistently operate ten at sea. Moreover, it's one thing to have the ships and aircraft, it's another to have men who know how to use them. The keystone cops character of recent Russian deployments to the Mediterranean (or even some French efforts to get their carrier Charles de Gaulle out to sea) show that it takes many years of experience to make fleet carrier operations look as easy as it appears in the opening sequences of Top Gun.

So I am not too worried about the ability of China to wrest control of the Pacific from the U.S. Navy. As Lord St. Vincent once said of Napoleon's invasion force, "My Lords, I do not say they will not come. I only say they will not come by sea".

Spiegel reports that Chinese hackers have targeted computer networks operated by the German government. "German security officials managed to stop the theft of 160 gigabytes of data which were in the process of being siphoned off German government computers," the magazine reports. And Chancellor Merkel, who is currently in China, apparently raised the issue with Chinese prime minister Wen Jiabao.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel was all smiles after meeting Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on Monday, praising relations between the two countries as open and constructive.

But her visit has been marred by a report in SPIEGEL that a large number of computers in the German chancellery as well as the foreign, economy and research ministries had been infected with Chinese spy software. Germany's domestic intelligence service, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, discovered the hacking operation in May, the magazine reported in its new edition, published Monday.

The Chinese government has vehemently denied the report, with the Chinese Embassy in Berlin describing the accusation of state-controlled hacking as "irresponsible speculation without a shred of evidence."

But Prime Minister Wen Jiabao assured Merkel that measures would be taken to "rule out hacking attacks."

Earlier this year, military officials at the Naval Network Warfare Command told reporters that Chinese hackers "will exploit anything and everything" and that the nature of the attacks makes it "hard to believe it’s not government-driven.” It seems German officials have come to the same conclusion.

The Autoblog reports that the Chinese military, in conjunction with Dongfeng, has developed a copycat version of AM General's iconic Humvee. But it seems that the PLA, perhaps as a result of having glimpsed the Humvee's vulnerability in Iraq, is no longer interested in the vehicle, opting instead for the BJ2S Warrior (see a picture here).

So what will Dongfeng do with this vehicle, which required four long years of reverse engineering and intellectual property thieving? It seems they'll do what any good capitalists would, try and pitch it to the country's gigantic domestic automobile market, complete with a radio and CD player.

The name of the vehicle: The Crazy Soldier.

Dongfeng's Crazy Soldier

On July 15th, after nine days of captivity, Zhang Guohua, an executive with the China Nuclear International Uranium Corporation (Sino-U), was released by the Niger Movement for Justice (MNJ). Within days of the abduction, heeding MNJ’s call for foreign companies to withdraw, the China Nuclear Engineering & Construction Corporation, parent company of Sino-U, suspended its uranium-prospecting operation in Niger’s northern Agadez region.

Chinese President Hu Jintao (C) addresses the round table of the Beijing
Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) at the Great Hall
of the People in Beijing, Nov. 5, 2006. (Xinhua Photo)

The kidnapping in Niger is one of a string of attacks on Chinese nationals in Africa this year. In April, in a pre-dawn attack, guerrillas of the Ogaden National Liberation Front killed nine Chinese workers and 65 Ethiopians while they slept on the campground of a Chinese-owned oil exploration field in eastern Ethiopia.

In January, a Chinese engineer was killed and another injured in a Chinese stone materials plant in Kenya. And in three separate incidents in Nigeria this year, a total of 16 Chinese nationals were kidnapped, though all were subsequently released unharmed.

Motivated initially by political ideology, Chinese involvement in Africa began in the 1960s. More recently, the explosion of Chinese investment on the resource-rich continent is driven by China’s energy needs and Beijing’s "go-out" national strategic policy adopted at the 16th party congress in 2002. From Angolan oil to Zambian copper, African-Chinese trade between 2000 and 2006 grew from $10 billion to $55.5 billion. And by 2009, Chinese aid to Africa is expected to reach $10 billion. In the past 12 months, Chinese president Hu Jintao has visited 17 African countries, more than any other head-of-state.

Unlike Western countries, China typically attaches no conditions to its investment in, and economic aid to, Africa. One recent example of the practical effects of this tactic concerns Zimbabwe. In 2005, ostracized by Western governments and investors over human rights abuses in that country, President Robert Mugabe launched a "Look East" policy. China is now Zimbabwe’s second largest trade partner, behind only South Africa.

China’s economic offensive across Africa carries geopolitical implications as well. Since President Bush announced the creation of a unified military command for Africa this past February, Chinese media have been following the development closely.

After the April killing of nine Chinese oil workers in Ethiopia, Chinese media were quick to conclude that the incident was the result of internal strife in that restive country and that the action was not specifically targeted at China’s presence there. It was also noted that with the creation of the Africa Command, the Pentagon is putting the continent on a par with its Pacific Command and that "the unshakable superpower status of the United States has obtained yet another powerful pillar."
In fact, China’s suspicion of U.S. objectives in Africa pre-dates the Africa Command. A 2006 opinion piece in People’s Daily titled "U.S. steps up military infiltration into Africa" underscores Beijing’s concerns over the U.S. presence on the continent:

[The] U.S. military presence in Africa has two obvious tendencies: one is to deepen military cooperation in North Africa and the Horn of Africa for anti-terrorism purposes; and the other is to cooperate with West Africa for oil security. From strategic [sic] perspective, Washington’s Africa policy has combined anti-terrorism, oil and garrisoning.

The Washington Post reports today that the Chinese government quietly dispatched its vice foreign minister to meet with representatives of several presidential campaigns last week:

One of China's top government officials reached out to the leading U.S. presidential contenders last week, holding an unpublicized meeting with several of their top foreign policy advisers during a visit to Washington for high-level talks with Bush administration officials.

Among those present for the dinner with Vice Foreign Minister Dai Bingguo on June 19, according to people familiar with the encounter, were top advisers to Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), former senator John Edwards (D-N.C.), Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (R)...

By several accounts, the meeting was generally cordial, with Dai listing many areas of potential cooperation and warning the participants that they should not rock the boat on the status of Taiwan, which remains of paramount concern to Beijing.

Wary about pressure from U.S. politicians for China to ease controls on the fluctuation of its currency, Dai made a case for the benefits of expanding economic ties between the two countries, the sources said.

Dai also told the small group that China was interested in helping to stop the violence in Darfur but added that the 2008 Olympics in Beijing should not be held hostage to the issue. Some of the presidential contenders, including New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson (D), have suggested that the U.S. consider boycotting the Games if China does not do more to pressure Khartoum over the issue.

This is an interesting indication of China improving the way it 'plays the game' in DC. By opening lines of communication early, and establishing relationships with key advisers, the Chinese government might hope to improve upon what could already be considered a remarkably smooth relationship, given all the irritants between the two countries. One wonders how much more of this must go on than meets the eye.

There are many nations who would like to improve their relations with the United States, and who might see the upcoming presidential transition as a good opportunity to do that. Which ones might now be reaching out--in a less obtrusive way--to the nascent campaigns?

It's also interesting that among the 'top tier candidates,' Giuliani was the only one not to send a representative. Perhaps Giuliani is the real China hawk among the candidates for 2008, even if our friends over at The American Scene seem to think that title belongs to McCain--they claim they won't "be shocked if McCain got us into a war with China." Go figure.