Month: March 2007

I’m a big fan of the Danger Room at Wired, so I’m gonna help them out. They recently posted this item, entitled “China’s Secret Nuclear Carrier”, starting with the line “The Korean newspaper Hankyoreh is reporting that it’s obtained information on a top-secret dossier that claims China plans to build a nuclear-powered carrier by 2020.” (emphasis mine)

OK, so if I put the Chinese word for “aircraft carrier” (航空母舰 ) and “085” in Baidu, what do I get? Oh my gosh, it’s a top secret dossier on a BBS! Posted in January 2006! And recently again at Tiexue! And wait, here it is again in 2003! And what does it say? “Recently the Central Military Commission adopted the 085 conventionally powered aircraft carrier program.”

Wait, what did Hankyoreh say? Oh yeah, that’s right:

“A source close to Chinese military affairs said on March 27 that China has been promoting the construction of a 93,000-ton atomic-powered carrier under a plan titled the “085 Project.”“

Oh, Hankyeroh. It’s the 089 that’s nuclear powered. OK, OK, so maybe it got mixed up in Korean translation. Anyway, Hankreyoh’s “dossier” discussed specifications. Here’s the specs from the BBSs:

– Modified version of the Varyag, the Ukrainian carrier China bought in 1998
– standard displacement 48,000 tons, full load displacement 64,000 tons
– carries 30-40 J10s or 10-20 Su33s.
– built at Dalian shipyard.
– Varyag will be for training

All of that is in the Hankreyoh article. Those BBS posts don’t mention dates to finish the carriers, but this article says a Lt. General indicated they were on schedule to finish one by 2010. Here’s something that’s not:

– The Dalian shipyard will also build 2 escort destroyers.
– 12 batteries of 12 anti-ship missiles with a range of 500km capable of going Mach 4
– The idea, apparently, is that in the event of full-scale nuclear war, China would only be able to get its nuclear missile submarines into the open sea with the cover of an aircraft carrier battle group.

There’s a bit more, and I’m not 100% on that last bit, but I’m not fluent in Chinese or navy lingo. But I know one thing for certain: no dossier required. Hankyeroh didn’t get anything wrong (except for mixing up the 085 and 089), but there’s no secret here. In Chinese, this stuff is pretty much public record. Perhaps if the Pentagon wants transparency they should try Baidu.

Via Warren Ellis, an Ananova article on a 13 mile long Dragon being built in Xinzheng, Henan.
Chinese articles here and here.

ESWN pointed out this interview with Peter Hessler that I noticed a while ago. The reason I found it interesting was this part:

Culturally, China is vastly different from the United States. What is the most common Chinese misperception about America and Americans? Conversely, what American clichés about China need to be reconsidered?

PH: The Chinese tend to view America in extreme ways. Some Chinese speak of the US as if everybody there is rich and happy — I’d say this is probably the most common viewpoint among average Chinese. But there is also a lot of talk about American poverty, violence, guns, as well as the bullying tendencies of the American government. This line of thought is often encouraged by the Chinese media. When I taught in Sichuan, my students used a Chinese published textbook called Survey of America, which included one chapter about “Social Problems.” This is a sample paragraph:

“In 1981, in California University, robbery and rape increased one hundred and fifty percent. In a Cathedral school of Washington District, a girl student was raped and robbed by a criminal with a hunting knife while she was studying alone in the classroom. In a California university, a football coach was robbed on campus by someone with a gun. It is said that, in South Carolina University, gangs of rascals have been taking girl students, women teachers and wives of teachers working in this university as their targets of rape, which has caused a great fear.”

You can imagine how frustrating it is for an American teacher to be expected to use such a book to introduce the United States to a classroom of young Chinese. I’m sure that these incidents are true — certainly, there are rascals in South Carolina —and I imagine that the details were culled from American newspaper stories. But that doesn’t make them a useful starting point for students in a small town on the Yangtze. They need context, not a bunch of scattered facts and trivia. When I talk to Chinese about America, I often find myself trying to push them away from the extremes. I don’t want them to think of the U.S. as either paradise or hell. They need to see it in human, everyday terms.

When I taught at a university in Xinjiang in 2005, nearly ten years after Hessler taught in Sichuan, I used a similar textbook 英语国家社会与文化入门, or “The Society and Culture of Major English-Speaking Countries”, published in 1997. A cursory search of edu.cn sites on Baidu shows over 800 references to the book, so it’s safe to say it’s still being used. I don’t have the book anymore, unfortunately, but a course page at Shandong University of Finance does have a summary of the chapter I remember:

Chapter 8: Social Problems in the United States
Focal Point:
racial problems
inequality in American society
discrimination against blacks
the black “underclass”
poverty as a social problem
drug abuse
social costs of drug abuse
crime
the profile of a typical criminal
racial prejudice in the high rate of arrests
white-collar crime
the abuse of power by government
the abuse of power by corporations

The chapter in question had anecdotal stories much like Hessler’s. When I taught from this textbook, I told my students that I was happy to answer any questions about this chapter, but I had no interest in teaching it since the topics it covered were hardly unique to the United States or anywhere else, and my students hardly needed me to point out that Xinjiang suffered from every single one of these problems as well. I did point out to them, however, that I was uncomfortable with the fact that the book (two books, actually) did not have a “Social Problems” chapter for the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand or Canada. Only the United States received such treatment. Perhaps the authors wanted to impress upon students that the United States was not, as we say, “all that and a bag of chips”.

The Shandong University of Finance webpage also gives all of the test questions to the book, though it is not clear whether they are from the teachers book or written university faculty. There is no answer key, but perhaps you’d like to try and fill in the blanks.

1. American society is a stratified one in which _______, _______, and _______ are unequally distributed among the population.
2. The largest of the racial and ethnic minorities in the United States is _______ who make up about _______ percent of the population.
3. Former President _______ said that crime is America’s “number one enemy.”
4. Name two of the illegal acts by the FBI: _______ and _______.
5. Name two of the illegal acts by the CIA: _______ and _______.
6. The dominant group in American society that has taken control of economic assets and political power from the beginning of the nation is _______.
7. American slavery was finally abolished by _______, _______ and _______.
8. After the abolition of slavery, many states _______ to keep the races apart in schools, housing, restaurants and public facilities, and kept blacks in the lowest-paid jobs.
9. Those arrested for crimes are disproportionately likely to be _______, _______, and _______ city resident.
10._______ had tested variety of drugs, including LSD, on many people who were unaware that they were being used as _______ and had caused several deaths in the process.

Yes, that is a reference to MKULTRA.

Special bonus question from the Chapter One test on the origins of the United States:

1. Which of the following statements was correct around the time of the American Revolution?
A. The American had the mixed blood of Europeans or their descendants.
B. The American had the mixed blood of Europeans with American Indians.
C. The American had the mixed blood of Europeans with blacks.
D. The American had the blood of the English and their descendants only.

Just as Granite Studio had figured out how to use the Blogspot ban workaround posted earlier, the Great Firewall goes and unblocks it. Obviously the Net Nanny is just trying to mess with J’s head. Still, the workaround is now applicable to WordPress.com, which remains blocked.

Recently, I’ve been experiencing some bizarre access problems myself. For one 24 hour period, I lost access to Bloglines and Del.icio.us. Then yesterday and this morning, I had no access to Yahoo! Mail, Bloglines or, interestingly, ESWN. Perhaps a cable somewhere was unplugged. And within Bloglines, Global Voices Online and Virtual China always timed out – until I deleted saved posts on police corruption and 1940s Tibet, respectively. Perhaps there was a hiccup at a routing point somewhere. Some of it maybe tripping content filters, such as the GOV and Virtual China posts, but don’t seem like it. This all leads me to a bit of speculative paranoia: What if this wasn’t just a hiccup? Meanwhile, a colleague told me that they lost access in Shenzhen to Baidu.jp, which has been “under observation” *ahem* because it allows Chinese mainlanders to search for porn. More interestingly, Chinese users are driving the majority of traffic at Baidu.jp. Then, hours later, Baidu.jp was accessible in Shenzhen. Tech problem? Or something else?

For the Blogspot ban, there are two reasons I can think of why it suffered a brief ban. The first is that someone, somewhere on Blogspot posted something that someone, somewhere in the PRC found offensive, and a spank was applied. This seems unlikely, since the Nanny is quite capable of singling out a single blog. The best example of this is at the URL voyage.typepad.com: click “Letters From China”, which is located at /china, and you get blocked. Click “Saturday Night”, located at /saturdaynight, and there’s no problem.

The second, and more likely reason that Blogspot was banned is that when Google moved Blogspot out of Beta, it changed the root IP address. As a result, China sat up and took notice, and implemented a test run to ensure it could blanket ban Blogspot at the push of a button. The test was successful, and now the ban is lifted since they have that ability in place.

But a third possibility strikes me: if I were working on China’s Golden Shield (金盾工程) project, I wouldn’t be interested in having 30,000 Net Cops (an oft-repeated number that isn’t even proven to be true). No, I’d be interested in neural networks – software agents that learn and adapt based on new input, that would be able to examine large amounts of internet requests and identify particular users who often view questionable material (like me). Like Ren Jiadong and Huang Huiyu, who wrote a paper in 2004 entitled “基于人工神经网络的有害信息过滤智能决策系统: An Intelligent Decision-making System for Ill Healthy Information Filtering Based on Artificial Neural Networks”. The abstract says that in tests their neural network was quick and highly accurate in filtering “evil information”. And moreover, I’d test different approaches and software in different provinces and ISPs – not unlike how economic and political reforms have been carried out in China.

So are random hiccups in the system the work of experimental software agents doing “smart” censorship? Hell if I know. But I’d bet good money that the Chinese government has quite a few people working on such tools, and one day they will be deployed.

OK, so this meme was started over at TheThinkingBlog.com, where the goal stated is to name “5 Blogs That Make Me Think”. I got tagged by the always-making-me-think Granite Studio, so J can’t be on this list. He’s already on three, so he’s covered. So, in no particular order:

1) Chinese Blogger Yee at Ya, I Yee has been racking up the hits, such as a nifty workaround for the Blogspot ban and being the first to catch that Baidu.jp allows porn searches (for now), setting up a possible confrontation between the Net Nanny and China’s most prominent internet company.

2) Slouching Towards Bethlehem is the blog of Jess Nevins, librarian and pulp fiction expert extraordinaire. His explorations take him into such topics as Bad Girls of Early 20th Century China and Pulp Fiction of the Qing Dynasty. He also blogs over at No Fear of the Future with the likes of Chris Nakashima-Brown, where he’s tackled such topics as the Sixty Degrees of Sherlock Holmes, which has to be one of the ultimate pulp fiction blog posts ever. OK, so that’s two blogs, but one cool blogger. (blocked in China)

3) Looking for a wickedly funny confessional of the expat life in China? Look no further than Shenzhen Zen. (blocked in China)

4) BLDGBLOG. Go. It’s awesome. (blocked in China)

5) Xinjiang Watch is the only blog ever ambitious enough to do semi-regular translated rundowns of Chinese press about Xinjiang. Something tells me these guys are only going to get bigger and better soon.

(updated)
Ya I Yee has this sweet workaround on the blogspot ban, courtesy of Chinese blogger Fermi Zhang (wicked name). Do this:

Use the Notepad (or other text editor softwares) to write a file with the following codes:

function FindProxyForURL(url,host){
if(dnsDomainIs(host, ".blogspot.com")){
    return "PROXY 72.14.219.190:80";
}
}

save it as proxy.pac and put it in the root directory of C: .Take Firefox for example,click Tools->Options->Advanced->Network->Settings…-> fill the codes below in the blank that under “Automatic proxy configuration URL”:

file:///C:/proxy.pac

then press Reload on the right,press OK,and OK.And relaunch Firefox,done!

Fermi and Yee, I owe you each a beer. And if I understand this right, should the proxy server for some reason go down or be blocked itself, simply grab a new proxy and paste it in. Some of these at the Chinese site Hackbase might work. I’ll try some later. I’d like to point out that Hackbase has been around for a while, and as Yee has nicely pointed out in this post and another, Chinese bloggers have collectively been working on the blogspot ban. I take great pleasure in knowing my newly unfettered access to Blogspot is thanks to a Chinese blogger, not a product from the outside (I still love you, Tor).

UPDATE: Another Chinese proxy service is 9i7.cn, which also gives a list of proxy IPs. Found via webproxies.info.