organization:chinese government

Free nighttime electricity offered to ger district residents | The UB Post
▻http://theubpost.mn/2016/12/25/free-electricity-at-night-offered-to-ger-district-residents

On Friday, Prime Minister J.Erdenebat held a briefing on air pollution reduction efforts, and said that a number of projects to reduce air pollution have been carried out, but better outcomes have not been seen so far.

He pointed out that developing an electric heating system is of great importance to reducing Ulaanbaatar’s air pollution, and that a decision has been made to provide ger district residents with free electricity at night.

The Prime Minister noted that the Government of Mongolia is working to execute the following actions to reduce Ulaanbaatar’s air pollution:

Promote construction projects to minimize ger district occupancy and spend aid provided by the Chinese government on ger district re-planning and household relocation, as discussed during Premier of the State Council of the People’s Repoublic of China Li Keqiang’s visit to Mongolia in July.
Promote an electric heating system in Mongolia and provide residents with cheap electric heaters produced in Mongolia.
Help support herders who have lost their livestock to dzud conditions and other natural disasters to address rural-to-urban migration resulting in increased air pollution in Ulaanbaatar.
Promote people’s effective initiatives to reduce air pollution
Prime Minister J.Erdenebat said that a budget of four billion MNT has been set for projects and programs to be implemented in 2017 to reduce Ulaanbaatar’s air pollution.

Eighty percent of the budget will be spent on providing free electricity to ger distrcit households at night and addressing electricity deficits.

(c’était annoncé le 25 décembre 2016)

Friendly Fuedalism - The Tibet Myth
▻http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html

Many Buddhists maintain that, before the Chinese crackdown in 1959, old Tibet was a spiritually oriented kingdom free from the egotistical lifestyles, empty materialism, and corrupting vices that beset modern industrialized society. Western news media, travel books, novels, and Hollywood films have portrayed the Tibetan theocracy as a veritable Shangri-La.
...
Old Tibet was much more like Europe during the religious wars of the Counterreformation.” 5 In the thirteenth century, Emperor Kublai Khan created the first Grand Lama, who was to preside over all the other lamas as might a pope over his bishops. Several centuries later, the Emperor of China sent an army into Tibet to support the Grand Lama, an ambitious 25-year-old man, who then gave himself the title of Dalai (Ocean) Lama, ruler of all Tibet.

His two previous lama “incarnations” were then retroactively recognized as his predecessors, thereby transforming the 1st Dalai Lama into the 3rd Dalai Lama. This 1st (or 3rd) Dalai Lama seized monasteries that did not belong to his sect, and is believed to have destroyed Buddhist writings that conflicted with his claim to divinity. The Dalai Lama who succeeded him pursued a sybaritic life, enjoying many mistresses, partying with friends, and acting in other ways deemed unfitting for an incarnate deity. For these transgressions he was murdered by his priests. Within 170 years, despite their recognized divine status, five Dalai Lamas were killed by their high priests or other courtiers. 6
...
An eighteenth-century memoir of a Tibetan general depicts sectarian strife among Buddhists that is as brutal and bloody as any religious conflict might be. 9 This grim history remains largely unvisited by present-day followers of Tibetan Buddhism in the West.
...
Until 1959, when the Dalai Lama last presided over Tibet, most of the arable land was still organized into manorial estates worked by serfs. These estates were owned by two social groups: the rich secular landlords and the rich theocratic lamas.
...
Drepung monastery was one of the biggest landowners in the world, with its 185 manors, 25,000 serfs, 300 great pastures, and 16,000 herdsmen. The wealth of the monasteries rested in the hands of small numbers of high-ranking lamas. Most ordinary monks lived modestly and had no direct access to great wealth. The Dalai Lama himself “lived richly in the 1000-room, 14-story Potala Palace.”

Secular leaders also did well. A notable example was the commander-in-chief of the Tibetan army, a member of the Dalai Lama’s lay Cabinet, who owned 4,000 square kilometers of land and 3,500 serfs. 12 Old Tibet has been misrepresented by some Western admirers as “a nation that required no police force because its people voluntarily observed the laws of karma.” 13 In fact. it had a professional army, albeit a small one, that served mainly as a gendarmerie for the landlords to keep order, protect their property, and hunt down runaway serfs.

Young Tibetan boys were regularly taken from their peasant families and brought into the monasteries to be trained as monks. Once there, they were bonded for life. Tashì-Tsering, a monk, reports that it was common for peasant children to be sexually mistreated in the monasteries.
...
In feudal Tibet, torture and mutilation—including eye gouging, the pulling out of tongues, hamstringing, and amputation—were favored punishments inflicted upon thieves, and runaway or resistant serfs.
...
What happened to Tibet after the Chinese Communists moved into the country in 1951? The treaty of that year provided for ostensible self-governance under the Dalai Lama’s rule but gave China military control and exclusive right to conduct foreign relations. ... Among the earliest changes they wrought was to reduce usurious interest rates, and build a few hospitals and roads. ... No aristocratic or monastic property was confiscated, and feudal lords continued to reign over their hereditarily bound peasants.
...
Over the centuries the Tibetan lords and lamas had seen Chinese come and go, and had enjoyed good relations with Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek and his reactionary Kuomintang rule in China.
...
What upset the Tibetan lords and lamas in the early 1950s was that these latest Chinese were Communists. It would be only a matter of time, they feared, before the Communists started imposing their collectivist egalitarian schemes upon Tibet.

The issue was joined in 1956-57, when armed Tibetan bands ambushed convoys of the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army. The uprising received extensive assistance from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), including military training, support camps in Nepal, and numerous airlifts.

Many Tibetan commandos and agents whom the CIA dropped into the country were chiefs of aristocratic clans or the sons of chiefs.
...
As far as can be ascertained, the great bulk of the common people of Lhasa and of the adjoining countryside failed to join in the fighting against the Chinese both when it first began and as it progressed.

Whatever wrongs and new oppressions introduced by the Chinese after 1959, they did abolish slavery and the Tibetan serfdom system of unpaid labor. They eliminated the many crushing taxes, started work projects, and greatly reduced unemployment and beggary. They established secular schools, thereby breaking the educational monopoly of the monasteries. And they constructed running water and electrical systems in Lhasa.
...
Both the Dalai Lama and his advisor and youngest brother, Tendzin Choegyal, claimed that “more than 1.2 million Tibetans are dead as a result of the Chinese occupation.” The official 1953 census—six years before the Chinese crackdown—recorded the entire population residing in Tibet at 1,274,000.
...
If the Chinese killed 1.2 million in the early 1960s then almost all of Tibet, would have been depopulated, transformed into a killing field dotted with death camps and mass graves—of which we have no evidence.
...
The authorities do admit to “mistakes,” particularly during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution when the persecution of religious beliefs reached a high tide in both China and Tibet. After the uprising in the late 1950s, thousands of Tibetans were incarcerated. During the Great Leap Forward, forced collectivization and grain farming were imposed on the Tibetan peasantry, sometimes with disastrous effect on production. In the late 1970s, China began relaxing controls “and tried to undo some of the damage wrought during the previous two decades.”38

In 1980, the Chinese government initiated reforms reportedly designed to grant Tibet a greater degree of self-rule and self-administration.
...
By the 1980s many of the principal lamas had begun to shuttle back and forth between China and the exile communities abroad, “restoring their monasteries in Tibet and helping to revitalize Buddhism there.”
...
For the rich lamas and secular lords, the Communist intervention was an unmitigated calamity. Most of them fled abroad, as did the Dalai Lama himself, who was assisted in his flight by the CIA. Some discovered to their horror that they would have to work for a living. Many, however, escaped that fate. Throughout the 1960s, the Tibetan exile community was secretly pocketing $1.7 million a year from the CIA, according to documents released by the State Department in 1998. Once this fact was publicized, the Dalai Lama’s organization itself issued a statement admitting that it had received millions of dollars from the CIA during the 1960s to send armed squads of exiles into Tibet to undermine the Maoist revolution. The Dalai Lama’s annual payment from the CIA was $186,000.
...
Whatever the Dalai Lama’s associations with the CIA and various reactionaries, he did speak often of peace, love, and nonviolence. He himself really cannot be blamed for the abuses of Tibet’s ancien régime, having been but 25 years old when he fled into exile.
...
But he also sent a reassuring message to “those who live in abundance”: “It is a good thing to be rich... Those are the fruits for deserving actions, the proof that they have been generous in the past.” And to the poor he offers this admonition: “There is no good reason to become bitter and rebel against those who have property and fortune... It is better to develop a positive attitude.”
...
Violent actions that are committed in order to reduce future suffering are not to be condemned, he said, citing World War II as an example of a worthy effort to protect democracy. What of the four years of carnage and mass destruction in Iraq, a war condemned by most of the world—even by a conservative pope—as a blatant violation of international law and a crime against humanity? The Dalai Lama was undecided: “The Iraq war—it’s too early to say, right or wrong.” Earlier he had voiced support for the U.S. military intervention against Yugoslavia and, later on, the U.S. military intervention into Afghanistan.
...
It should be noted that the Dalai Lama is not the only highly placed lama chosen in childhood as a reincarnation. ... In 1993 the monks of the Karma Kagyu tradition had a candidate of their own choice. The Dalai Lama, along with several dissenting Karma Kagyu leaders (and with the support of the Chinese government!) backed a different boy. ... What followed was a dozen years of conflict in the Tibetan exile community, punctuated by intermittent riots, intimidation, physical attacks, blacklisting, police harassment, litigation, official corruption, and the looting and undermining of the Karmapa’s monastery in Rumtek by supporters of the Gelugpa faction.
...
Not all Tibetan exiles are enamoured of the old Shangri-La theocracy. Kim Lewis, who studied healing methods with a Buddhist monk in Berkeley, California, had occasion to talk at length with more than a dozen Tibetan women who lived in the monk’s building. When she asked how they felt about returning to their homeland, the sentiment was unanimously negative. At first, Lewis assumed that their reluctance had to do with the Chinese occupation, but they quickly informed her otherwise. They said they were extremely grateful “not to have to marry 4 or 5 men, be pregnant almost all the time,” or deal with sexually transmitted diseases contacted from a straying husband. The younger women “were delighted to be getting an education, wanted absolutely nothing to do with any religion, and wondered why Americans were so naïve [about Tibet].”

The women interviewed by Lewis recounted stories of their grandmothers’ ordeals with monks who used them as “wisdom consorts.” By sleeping with the monks, the grandmothers were told, they gained “the means to enlightenment” — after all, the Buddha himself had to be with a woman to reach enlightenment.
...
Notes:

Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God, (University of California Press, 2000), 6, 112-113, 157.
Kyong-Hwa Seok, “Korean Monk Gangs Battle for Temple Turf,” San Francisco Examiner, 3 December 1998.
Los Angeles Times, February 25, 2006.
Dalai Lama quoted in Donald Lopez Jr., Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1998), 205.
Erik D. Curren, Buddha’s Not Smiling: Uncovering Corruption at the Heart of Tibetan Buddhism Today (Alaya Press 2005), 41.
Stuart Gelder and Roma Gelder, The Timely Rain: Travels in New Tibet (Monthly Review Press, 1964), 119, 123; and Melvyn C. Goldstein, The Snow Lion and the Dragon: China, Tibet, and the Dalai Lama (University of California Press, 1995), 6-16.
Curren, Buddha’s Not Smiling, 50.
Stephen Bachelor, “Letting Daylight into Magic: The Life and Times of Dorje Shugden,” Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, 7, Spring 1998. Bachelor discusses the sectarian fanaticism and doctrinal clashes that ill fit the Western portrait of Buddhism as a non-dogmatic and tolerant tradition.
Dhoring Tenzin Paljor, Autobiography, cited in Curren, Buddha’s Not Smiling, 8.
Pradyumna P. Karan, The Changing Face of Tibet: The Impact of Chinese Communist Ideology on the Landscape (Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1976), 64.
See Gary Wilson’s report in Worker’s World, 6 February 1997.
Gelder and Gelder, The Timely Rain, 62 and 174.
As skeptically noted by Lopez, Prisoners of Shangri-La, 9.
Melvyn Goldstein, William Siebenschuh, and Tashì-Tsering, The Struggle for Modern Tibet: The Autobiography of Tashì-Tsering (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1997).
Gelder and Gelder, The Timely Rain, 110.
Melvyn C. Goldstein, A History of Modern Tibet 1913-1951 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 5 and passim.
Anna Louise Strong, Tibetan Interviews (Peking: New World Press, 1959), 15, 19-21, 24.
Quoted in Strong, Tibetan Interviews, 25.
Strong, Tibetan Interviews, 31.
Gelder and Gelder, The Timely Rain, 175-176; and Strong, Tibetan Interviews, 25-26.
Gelder and Gelder, The Timely Rain, 113.
A. Tom Grunfeld, The Making of Modern Tibet rev. ed. (Armonk, N.Y. and London: 1996), 9 and 7-33 for a general discussion of feudal Tibet; see also Felix Greene, A Curtain of Ignorance (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961), 241-249; Goldstein, A History of Modern Tibet, 3-5; and Lopez, Prisoners of Shangri-La, passim.
Strong, Tibetan Interviews, 91-96.
Waddell, Landon, O’Connor, and Chapman are quoted in Gelder and Gelder, The Timely Rain, 123-125.
Goldstein, The Snow Lion and the Dragon, 52.
Heinrich Harrer, Return to Tibet (New York: Schocken, 1985), 29.
See Kenneth Conboy and James Morrison, The CIA’s Secret War in Tibet (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 2002); and William Leary, “Secret Mission to Tibet,” Air & Space, December 1997/January 1998.
On the CIA’s links to the Dalai Lama and his family and entourage, see Loren Coleman, Tom Slick and the Search for the Yeti (London: Faber and Faber, 1989).
Leary, “Secret Mission to Tibet.”
Hugh Deane, “The Cold War in Tibet,” CovertAction Quarterly (Winter 1987).
George Ginsburg and Michael Mathos Communist China and Tibet (1964), quoted in Deane, “The Cold War in Tibet.” Deane notes that author Bina Roy reached a similar conclusion.
See Greene, A Curtain of Ignorance, 248 and passim; and Grunfeld, The Making of Modern Tibet, passim.
Harrer, Return to Tibet, 54.
Karan, The Changing Face of Tibet, 36-38, 41, 57-58; London Times, 4 July 1966.
Gelder and Gelder, The Timely Rain, 29 and 47-48.
Tendzin Choegyal, “The Truth about Tibet,” Imprimis (publication of Hillsdale College, Michigan), April 1999.
Karan, The Changing Face of Tibet, 52-53.
Elaine Kurtenbach, Associate Press report, 12 February 1998.
Goldstein, The Snow Lion and the Dragon, 47-48.
Curren, Buddha’s Not Smiling, 8.
San Francisco Chonicle, 9 January 2007.
Report by the International Committee of Lawyers for Tibet, A Generation in Peril (Berkeley Calif.: 2001), passim.
International Committee of Lawyers for Tibet, A Generation in Peril, 66-68, 98.
im Mann, “CIA Gave Aid to Tibetan Exiles in ’60s, Files Show,” Los Angeles Times, 15 September 1998; and New York Times, 1 October, 1998.
News & Observer, 6 September 1995, cited in Lopez, Prisoners of Shangri-La, 3.
Heather Cottin, “George Soros, Imperial Wizard,” CovertAction Quarterly no. 74 (Fall 2002).
Goldstein, The Snow Lion and the Dragon, 51.
Tendzin Choegyal, “The Truth about Tibet.”
The Dalai Lama in Marianne Dresser (ed.), Beyond Dogma: Dialogues and Discourses (Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic Books, 1996)
These comments are from a book of the Dalai Lama’s writings quoted in Nikolai Thyssen, “Oceaner af onkel Tom,” Dagbladet Information, 29 December 2003, (translated for me by Julius Wilm). Thyssen’s review (in Danish) can be found at ▻http://www.information.dk/Indgang/VisArkiv.dna?pArtNo=20031229154141.txt.
“A Global Call for Human Rights in the Workplace,” New York Times, 6 December 2005.
San Francisco Chronicle, 14 January 2007.
San Francisco Chronicle, 5 November 2005.
Times of India 13 October 2000; Samantha Conti’s report, Reuter, 17 June 1994; Amitabh Pal, “The Dalai Lama Interview,” Progressive, January 2006.
The Gelders draw this comparison, The Timely Rain, 64.
Michael Parenti, The Culture Struggle (Seven Stories, 2006).
John Pomfret, “Tibet Caught in China’s Web,” Washington Post, 23 July 1999.
Curren, Buddha’s Not Smiling, 3.
Curren, Buddha’s Not Smiling, 13 and 138.
Curren, Buddha’s Not Smiling, 21.
Curren, Buddha’s Not Smiling, passim. For books that are favorable toward the Karmapa appointed by the Dalai Lama’s faction, see Lea Terhune, Karmapa of Tibet: The Politics of Reincarnation (Wisdom Publications, 2004); Gaby Naher, Wrestling the Dragon (Rider 2004); Mick Brown, The Dance of 17 Lives (Bloomsbury 2004).
Erik Curren, “Not So Easy to Say Who is Karmapa,” correspondence, 22 August 2005, www.buddhistchannel.tv/index.php?id=22.1577,0,0,1,0.
Kim Lewis, correspondence to me, 15 July 2004.
Kim Lewis, correspondence to me, 16 July 2004.
Ma Jian, Stick Out Your Tongue (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006).
See the PBS documentary, China from the Inside, January 2007, KQED.PBS.org/kqed/chinanside.
San Francisco Chronicle, 9 January 2007.
“China: Global Warming to Cause Food Shortages,” People’s Weekly World, 13 January 2007

#Tibet #Chine #religion #bouddhisme

Doubling down | The Economist

▻http://www.economist.com/news/china/21699167-plans-new-railway-line-tibet-pose-huge-technological-challengean

http://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/cf_images/images-magazine/2016/05/21/CN/20160521_CNP001_facebook.jpg

“A COLOSSAL roller-coaster” is how a senior engineer described it. He was talking about the railway that China plans to build from the lowlands of the south-west, across some of the world’s most forbidding terrain, into Tibet. Of all the country’s railway-building feats in recent years, this will be the most remarkable: a 1,600-kilometre (1,000-mile) track that will pass through snow-capped mountains in a region racked by earthquakes, with nearly half of it running through tunnels or over bridges. It will also be dogged all the way by controversy.

Chinese officials have dreamed of such a railway line for a century. In 1912, shortly after he took over as China’s first president, Sun Yat-sen called for a trans-Tibetan line, not least to help prevent Tibet from falling under the sway of Britain (which had already invaded Tibet from India a decade earlier). Mao Zedong revived the idea in the 1950s. In the years since, many exploratory surveys have been carried out.

#tibet #chine

India Is Accused of Bowing to Chinese Pressure in Canceling a Uighur Leader’s Visa | TIME
▻http://time.com/4306140/india-dolkun-isa-uighur-china-visa-cancelled

India on Monday reportedly canceled a visa it had issued to a Uighur leader exiled from China and wanted by the Chinese government, days before he was scheduled to attend a conference with other anti-Beijing activists.

Dolkun Isa, a leader of the World Uyghur Congress, told Indian newspaper the Hindu that he had received an email from the Indian government saying his visa had been denied. He was scheduled to attend the Interethnic Interfaith Leadership Conference in the northern town of Dharamsala (where exiled Tibetan leader the Dalai Lama currently resides) from April 30 to May 1.
[…]
Indian officials responded by telling the Hindu that the visa Isa was granted is invalid for addressing public gatherings, and will be reissued if he applies for the correct category. Other government sources said the cancellation took place because of a “Red Corner Notice” issued against the Uighur leader by international law-enforcement agency Interpol, reportedly at Beijing’s behest.

Isa said that the notice pointed to “clear abuse” by China of Interpol’s authority and was “concerning.”

Are ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ Western colonial exports? No. Here’s why.
By Loubna El Amine
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/04/02/are-democracy-andhuman-rights-western-colonial-exports-no-heres-why

It would have been odd for protesters in Hong Kong to advocate for the Chinese government’s return to Confucian rituals, or for crowds in Cairo’s the streets to demand a return to the Islamic dhimmi system, which left minorities free to pursue private religious practices while being otherwise excluded from political life. These scenarios are implausible, if not impossible, not because Confucian rituals and the dhimmi system are ineffective in themselves but because they don’t match modern realities. To fight a modern state, to constrain rulers and protect minorities, one needs more appropriate tools.

#Apple demande pourquoi le #FBI n’a pas sollicité la #NSA pour rentrer dans l’iPhone du tireur de San Bernardino (ben oui, tiens !)
▻http://www.wired.com/2016/03/apple-lambasts-fbi-not-asking-nsa-help-hack-iphone

“The government does not deny that there may be other agencies in the government that could assist it in unlocking the phone and accessing its data; rather, it claims, without support, that it has no obligation to consult other agencies,” Apple wrote, noting that FBI Director James Comey danced around the question of NSA assistance when asked about it during a recent congressional hearing.

And if the FBI can’t on its own break into iPhones without NSA help, it should invest in developing that capability, Apple says, instead of seeking unconstitutional ways to force tech companies to assist it.

“Defining the scope of the All Writs Act as inversely proportional to the capabilities of the FBI removes any incentive for it to innovate and develop more robust forensic capabilities,” Apple wrote. The company quotes Susan Landau, a professor of cybersecurity policy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, who has said that “[r]ather than asking industry to weaken protections, law enforcement must instead develop a capability for conducting sophisticated investigations themselves.”

#wtf #FBIvsApple (via @oliviertesquet)

In the Apple encryption fight, the FBI is now on China’s side
▻http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/16/11244396/apple-vs-fbi-encryption-china-source-code-backdoor

As Apple filed its defense against the government on Monday, FBI Director James Comey was in Beijing, meeting with the head of China’s surveillance state. According to state media reports, Comey and Public Security Minister Guo Shengkun discussed ways to “deepen law enforcement and security cooperation.”

Angry China says shadowed U.S. warship near man-made islands in disputed sea - Yahoo News
▻http://news.yahoo.com/u-navy-destroyer-patrols-near-islands-built-china-012942916.html

http://l3.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/zq3NBEhfGrqPNCrWTgoCbg--/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3NfbGVnbztpbD1wbGFuZTtxPTc1O3c9NjAw/http://media.zenfs.com/en_us/News/Reuters/2015-10-27T064533Z_1_LYNXNPEB9Q09T_RTROPTP_2_SOUTHCHINASEA-USA.JPG

A U.S. Navy guided-missile destroyer sailed close to China’s man-made islands in the disputed South China Sea on Tuesday, drawing an angry rebuke from Beijing, which said it warned and followed the American vessel.

The patrol by the #USS_Lassen was the most significant U.S. challenge yet to the 12-nautical-mile territorial limits China asserts around the islands in the Spratly archipelago and could ratchet up tension in one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.

One U.S. defense official said the USS Lassen sailed within 12 nautical miles of Subi Reef. A second defense official said the mission, which lasted a few hours, included Mischief Reef and would be the first in a series of freedom-of-navigation exercises aimed at testing China’s territorial claims.

China’s Foreign Ministry said the “relevant authorities” monitored, followed and warned the USS Lassen as it “illegally” entered waters near islands and reefs in the Spratlys without the Chinese government’s permission.

“China will resolutely respond to any country’s deliberate provocations,” the ministry said in a statement that gave no details on precisely where the U.S. ship sailed.

US government hack stole fingerprints of 5.6 million federal employees | Technology | The Guardian
▻http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/23/us-government-hack-stole-fingerprints

The number of people applying for or receiving security clearances whose fingerprint images were stolen in one of the worst government data breaches is now believed to be 5.6 million, not 1.1 million as first thought, the Office of Personnel Management announced on Wednesday.

The agency was the victim of what the US believes was a Chinese espionage operation that affected an estimated 21.5 million current and former federal employees or job applicants. The theft could give Chinese intelligence a huge leg up in recruiting informants inside the US government, experts believe. It also could help the Chinese identify US spies abroad, according to American officials.

The White House has said it’s going to discuss cybersecurity with Chinese president Xi Jinping when he visits Barack Obama later this week.

The Chinese economy: Whether to believe China’s GDP figures | The Economist

▻http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2015/07/chinese-economy?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ed/ChinasGDPFigures

http://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/original-size/images/2015/07/blogs/free-exchange/20150718_woc063.png

IT ALL seems a little too perfect to be true. The Chinese government set a growth target of “about 7%” this year. And for a second consecutive quarter, despite ample evidence of stress in its industrial sector, it managed to hit that right on its head. In the three months from April to June, the economy expanded 7% compared with the same period a year earlier. Cue the chorus of scepticism: Chinese data just cannot be trusted, goes the usual refrain. Yes and no. There is a difference between smoothing data and totally fabricating it. Evidence suggests that China is guilty of the former (the lesser charge) but not the latter (the more serious allegation).

#chine #économie #croissance

Ramadan : La Chine interdit à des musulmans du Xinjiang de jeûner - Al Azhar dénonce cette interdiction

▻http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-again-bans-muslims-from-fasting-during-ramadan-say-uighur-commu

China has, once again, banned Ramadan in parts of the far western Xinjiang district for Muslim party members, civil servants, students and teachers.

Muslims throughout the district – which is known to have a minority population of Uighurs – have been told not to fast during the Holy Month.

The Uighur leader, Dilxat Raxit, sees the move as China’s attempt to control their Islamic faith and warned that the restrictions would force the Uighur people to resist the rule of the Chinese government even more.

He added: “The faith of the Uighurs has been highly politicised and the increase in controls could cause sharp resistance.”

In recent years, Chinese authorities have blamed separatist Uighurs for a string of terrorist attacks on civilian crowds and government institutions, but the group has consistently denied involvement.

Issues in the Xinjiang region between Uighur Muslims and Chinese authorities have been intensifying over the years
Activists have long-accused Beijing of exaggerating the threat as an excuse to impose restrictions.

Mr Raxit told Radio Free Asia: “They [the Chinese government] are extracting guarantees from parents, promising that their children won’t fast on Ramadan.”

According to the government’s website, halal restaurants near the Kazakh border are being encouraged by food safety officials to stay open during daylight hours in Ramadan.

Shops and restaurants owned by Muslins have also been ordered to continue selling cigarettes and alcohol over the course of the month – or be shut down altogether.

Beijing is continuing to crack-down against ‘religious extremism’ although human rights groups call it ‘religious repression’, adding that authorities want to prevent Muslims from ‘instilling religion’ into public bodies.

The ruling party says religion and education should be kept separate and students should not be subject to ‘religious influences’, although this rule is rarely enforced for children of Han Chinese, who – if they have a religion – are mostly Buddhist, Daoist or Christian.

Al-Azhar condemns China’s Ramadan restriction - Arabnews
▻http://www.arabnews.com/middle-east/news/764496

CritterNYC comments on Github may be inaccessible today due to a DDoS attack by the Chinese government using Baidu
▻https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/30hk3l/github_may_be_inaccessible_today_due_to_a_ddos/cpsk8z4

From a few different analysis oh HN and elsewhere... Baidu has an analytics product and an ads product, much like Google Analytics and Google AdSense, which are used on all kinds of websites via Javascript. China has set the Great Firewall of China to modify some of Baidu’s assets so that any non-Chinese IP gets a modified version of the Baidu analytics and ad code. The modification causes every web browser visiting a Chinese site using a Baidu analytics/ad product to load files from the greatfire and cn-nytimes projects on github (both of which are designed to circumvent Chinese government censorship) once every 2 seconds. The effect is that people all over the world outside of China are unwilling participants in a DDoS against github.

github has responded by taking both projects offline and replacing their content with a simple Javascript alert that shows a “WARNING: malicious javascript detected on this domain” messagebox. This causes the folks visiting baidu-infected sites to see the alert and know something is wrong with the website (hopefully not visiting it again). It also prevents the malicious Javascript from executing in a loop and reloading the site every 2 seconds.

One takeaway is that you should always have a backup of your code and resources outside a single central site like github. Another is that you should never ever have any webpage configured to load any resources from a server hosted within China IP address space as it is vulnerable to this sort of attack by the Chinese government.

#github #china #ddos #security

China Further Tightens Grip on the #Internet - NYTimes.com
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/30/world/asia/china-clamps-down-still-harder-on-internet-access.html

http://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/01/29/world/asia/30chinainternet/30chinainternet-facebookJumbo.jpg

after a number of #VPN companies, including StrongVPN and Golden Frog, complained that the Chinese government had disrupted their services with unprecedented sophistication, a senior official for the first time acknowledged its hand in the attacks and implicitly promised more of the same.

The move to disable some of the most widely used V.P.N.s has provoked a torrent of outrage among video artists, entrepreneurs and professors who complain that in its quest for so-called cybersovereignty — Beijing’s euphemism for online filtering — the Communist Party is stifling the innovation and productivity needed to revive the Chinese economy at a time of slowing growth.

#chine #surveillance #censure

Taking Letchworth to Chengdu: can garden cities work in China? | Housing Network | The Guardian
▻http://www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2014/dec/02/garden-cities-china-chengdu-letchworth

http://i.guim.co.uk/static/w-620/h--/q-95/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/11/24/1416853905296/An-artists-impression-of--012.jpg

The Chinese government is now committing vast resources to sustainable development and seeking to apply the lessons of the past to manage urbanisation, albeit with own adaptations.

As a representative of Letchworth Garden City on a trade and investment mission to China, I was able to see first-hand how the garden city ideals are being applied in China, where the principles of well-planned, sustainable communities with a good balance of jobs, homes and open space support the need for low-carbon development.

One proposed garden city on the outskirts of Chengdu, China’s fourth-biggest city and home to 14 million people, is a world away from Letchworth’s cottages. Here, clusters of skyscrapers emerge from leafy avenues, and a monorail swoops through trees. The sheer scale of the development is striking, with 13 new residential zones, specialist employment areas covering everything from electronics to modern agriculture, and major infrastructure projects, including a central park inspired by New York. Work began in 2011, and in October Tianfu was granted state-level new area status, bringing substantial government support. The area is due to be completed in 2030.

#chine #cité_jardin #urbanisme #agriculture_urbaine

China to Build Liberia Health System | The Liberian Observer
▻http://www.liberianobserver.com/news/china-build-liberia-health-system

The government of the People’s Republic of China has pledged that as a plan for the post-Ebola period, it will work with other international partners to help build and modernize Liberia’s health sector.
The Chinese government through its Ambassador accredited near Monrovia, Zhang Yue, said that there is a need to revamp the country’s health system and China will be wholeheartedly committed to that process as it has always done in the past.

#santé #chine #liberia #inégalités

BBC News - Who are Hong Kong’s protesters?
▻http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-29054196

Tensions are high in Hong Kong amid a row about how the city’s leader should be elected, with thousands taking to the streets in defiance of tear gas and government warnings.

Elections are due in 2017 - but the Chinese government has issued a ruling limiting who can stand as a candidate. Campaigns by students and pro-democracy activists ballooned into mass protests over the weekend. The demonstrations have been denounced by China. The BBC explains what is happening.

Who are the protesters?
At the heart of it is a civil disobedience movement launched by democracy activists, Occupy Central with Love and Peace, known as Occupy Central. It had been promising protests for months if Beijing’s movement on electoral reform did not go far enough.

#China #Hong_Kong #protests

Hong Kong’s “Occupy” Movement for Democracy
▻http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/hong-kongs-occupy-movement-for-democracy

The Chinese government is facing what may be the most organized democratic movement in its history as more than 20 percent of Hong Kong’s 3.5 million eligible voters cast a ballot in the past week...

Delay In Arrival Of Pandas Due To China’s Preoccupation With #MH370
▻http://www.bernama.com.my/bernama/v7/ge/newsgeneral.php?id=1029912

Natural Resources and Environment Minister Datuk Seri G. Palanivel said the Chinese Government’s postponement was due to preoccupation with the search for the Malaysia Airlines MH370 aircraft whose flight path ended in the middle of the southern Indian Ocean.
(…)
Palanivel said he had explained the matter at today’s Cabinet meeting.

"Initially, the two pandas were scheduled to arrive on April 16, but because of the incident (disappearance of MH370), the Chinese ambassador said they would send them at the end of May.

“They want to look for the black box first,” he told reporters at his office here Friday.

#diplomatie_du_panda

Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire
▻http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/why-i-want-bitcoin-to-die-in-a.html

Bitcoin just crashed 50% today, on news that the Chinese government has banned local exchanges from accepting deposits in Yuan. BtC was trading over $1000 yesterday; now it’s down to $500 and still falling.

Good.

I want Bitcoin to die in a fire: this is a start, but it’s not sufficient. Let me give you a round-up below the cut.

Like all currency systems, Bitcoin comes with an implicit political agenda attached. Decisions we take about how to manage money, taxation, and the economy have consequences: by its consequences you may judge a finance system. Our current global system is pretty crap, but I submit that Bitcoin is worst.

#bitcoin

China: End Involuntary Rehousing, Relocation of Tibetans

The Chinese government is subjecting millions of Tibetans to a policy of mass rehousing and relocation that radically changes their way of life, and about which they have no say. 
Since 2006, under plans to “Build a New Socialist Countryside” in Tibetan areas, over two million Tibetans have been “rehoused” – through government-ordered renovation or construction of new houses – in the #Tibet_Autonomous_Region (TAR), while hundreds of thousands of nomadic herders in the eastern part of the Tibetan plateau have been relocated or settled in “New Socialist Villages.”

Human Rights Watch has documented the extensive rights violations ranging from the absence of consultation to the failure to provide adequate compensation, both of which are required under international law for evictions to be legitimate.

http://www.newindia.tv/en/images/28062013/china_resettlements.jpg

►http://www.hrw.org/features/china-end-involuntary-rehousing-relocation-tibetans

#Tibet #Chine #relogement #logement #photo #photoreportage #maison #urbanisme
cc @albertocampiphoto

China commits billions in aid to Africa as part of charm offensive - interactive | Global development | The Guardian
►http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/interactive/2013/apr/29/china-commits-billions-aid-africa-interactive

China has committed $75bn (£48bn) on aid and development projects in Africa in the past decade, according to research which reveals the scale of what some have called Beijing’s escalating soft power “charm offensive” to secure political and economic clout on the continent.

The Chinese government releases very little information on its foreign aid activities, which remain state secrets. In one of the most ambitious attempts to date to chip away at this secrecy, US researchers have launched the largest public database of Chinese development finance in Africa, detailing almost 1,700 projects in 50 countries between 2000 and 2011.

China’s financial commitments are significantly larger than previous estimates of the country’s development finance, though still less than the estimated $90bn the US committed over that period. Researchers at AidData, at the College of William and Mary, have spent 18 months compiling and encoding thousands of media reports to construct the database, and hope users will contribute further detail on the projects.

The data, which challenges what has for years been the dominant story – Beijing’s unrelenting quest for natural resources – is likely to fuel ongoing debate over China’s motives in Africa.

There are few mining projects in the database and, while transport, storage and energy initiatives account for some of the largest sums, the data also reveals how China has put hundreds of millions of dollars towards health, education and cultural projects.

#Chine #Afrique #développement #cartographie

https://dl.dropbox.com/s/7si5954mjn7fuv8/chinafrique.jpg

Chine Infrastructure Industrie Economie

Mass protests force Chinese authorities to scrap industrial project

►http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/jul2012/chin-j11.shtml

By John Chan
11 July 2012

The Chinese government last week promised to abandon the construction of a $1.6 billion industrial plant in Sichuan province’s Shifang city following mass protests.

Hongda Chemical, a subsidiary of the privately-owned Chinese resources conglomerate, Hongda Group, planned to refine copper ore from Tibet and Australia. The project consisted of a molybdenum processor with an annual capacity of 40,000 tonnes and a 400,000-tonnes-a-year copper cathode production line.

Like many industrial projects in China, the plant had been approved with little consideration for the wellbeing of the local population or the impact on the environment. Fears that the plant’s emissions would destroy limited local water supplies or cause cancers made it a focal point of anger against the government.

Bain Capital Tied to Surveillance Push in China - NYTimes.com
►http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/16/world/asia/bain-capital-tied-to-surveillance-push-in-china.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=

As the Chinese government forges ahead on a multibillion-dollar effort to blanket the country with surveillance cameras, one American company stands to profit: Bain Capital, the private equity firm founded by Mitt Romney.

In public comments and in a statement posted on his campaign Web site, Mr. Romney has accused the Obama administration of placing economic concerns above human rights in managing relations with China.

“The scale of intrusion into people’s private lives is unprecedented,” she said in a phone interview. “Now when I walk on the street, I feel so vulnerable, like the police are watching me all the time.”

#surveillance #Chine #États-Unis #business

Eric De Keuleneer: The sovereign debt crisis can easily dissolve if real investors can be motivated
►http://www.dekeuleneer.com/2011/11/sovereign-debt-crisis-can-easily.html

If the Italian Sate is getting to be short of liquidity at the moment, and struggling with a debt of around 2 trillion euros, Italians are pretty wealthy, to the tune of an aggregate of 9 trillion euros (Bank of Italy figures). Morever, the gross savings of Italians are yearly about 15% of their GNP, more than the amount of bonds the Italian State has to issue every year. This might offer some alternative ideas to solve its liquidity problem. The idea has been floated to beg the chinese government; but, with barely 3 trillion euros of financial reserves, it appears as a pauper compared to the aggregate of Italian citizens. Of course a sizeable part of that is in Real Estate and other fairly illiquid assets, but a few trillions is in financial assets ; so why not turn to Italian citizens to help solve Italy’s liquidity problem? And so could the French, Spanish, Belgian States turn to their citizens, if need be.

#dette #epargne

艾未粉果 Ai Wei Fans’ Nudity
►http://awfannude.blogspot.com

Listen, Chinese Government： Nudity is not Pornography

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-cRbHvgfas50/Tse39Z2EWDI/AAAAAAAAADk/9c9acLrEcSE/s1600/21achang2.jpg

Art rocks : Electric Laydyland in China

#AiWeiwei #JimiHendrix

Chinese monks face murder charges over ’fire protest’ death of 16-year-old | World news | guardian.co.uk
►http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/26/chinese-monks-face-murder-charges

Authorities in south-western China will charge three Buddhist monks with murder over the death of a monk who set himself on fire in an alleged protest against Chinese government policies, China’s official Xinhua news agency has reported.

Two of the monks, Tsering Tenzin and Tenchum, are accused of plotting, instigating, and assisting in the self-immolation of 16-year-old Rigzin Phuntsog on 16 March.

#religion