Author: davesgonechina

Howard French’s recent article China’s Economic Revival Minted in Counterfeit asks “What is there to say about a country where something masquerading as the newest Harry Potter book comes out on the market 10 days before the genuine item?” Apparently, what to say is that because Deng Xiaoping announced everyone ought to become rich, no one in China cares about copyright or intellectual property rights. French then goes on:

I have searched in vain for signs of a serious, sustained discussion of counterfeiting and intellectual property violations in the Chinese press. Yes, there are occasional statements to the effect that intellectual property must be respected, but few have bothered to take a close look at the problem, to acknowledge its extent in China or vigorously debate its consequences.

That must have been a very short search, because I plugged words like “cultural industry”, “musicians”, “piracy” and “income” into Baidu and came up with some serious, sustained discussion, such as this long article on the difficulty of protecting royalties from karaoke, Rock God Cui Jian touching on the issue in a 10 year retrospective on Chinese musicians, excerpts from the meeting WIPO and the State Copyright Bureau, and dozens of others. And that was just in Baidu’s news search. There’s more out there, and some touches on the part of China’s weak IP protection that Howard French and many other Western commentators neglect – namely, that piracy wreaks far more damage on China’s domestic film, music and print industries than it does on other nations. Consider that the piracy rate in China is 90%, compared to 27% in the U.S., or that the cultural industries of the U.S., Singapore and Canada are 18-25%, 24.4% and 40% of GDP respectively. China’s? 3.1%. The title to French’s article suggests that counterfeiting has somehow fueled China’s growth. It seems far-fetched, considering piracy and government restrictions have conspired together to reduce China’s cultural industries to the equivalent of a school bake sale.

Part of the problem with piracy is certainly greed and corruption. As Cui Jian notes:

在某些官员的眼里，艺术家对社会的贡献，是远远低于商人，甚至非法商人的贡献。In the eyes of some officials, artists contribution to the community is far below that of businessmen and even illegal contributions.

他们宁愿忽略艺术，而纵容一些经济上的腐败现象，也不愿意在艺术领域里投入更多的关注，甚至有很多政府文化部门之所以存在，其最根本的意义就是限制艺术家的创作，限制所有具有争议性的艺术形式的出现。 They prefer to ignore the arts, and some participate in economic corruption, also none are willing to invest more attention in artistic fields, and even though many government cultural departments exist to foster the arts, in reality their sole purpose is to stifle artistic creation and the appearance of any controversial art.*

Yesterday I went by my local pirated DVD shop. They’ve been closed the last three days, and I asked why. Of course the answer was “the police were coming”. How did they know? “Everybody knows.” Why don’t the police come another time? “Because they’re paid off”. It’s funny, too, because Howard French gets it mostly right on this part when he says:

At the same time, as with product safety problems or intellectual property issues, the government is much like the greyhound on a racetrack chasing the mechanical rabbit. Reality exceeds its grasp, and there is no hope of catching up.

That much is certainly true. If local pirates pay off cops to file a false report, and everybody freakin’ knows (let’s all note that its consider so accepted that telling the foreigner is no big deal), and this happens all over the country – precisely what is the central government suppose to do about it? Start a massive political campaign? Death sentences? The issue is local, as are many others in China, and hanging it on the central government – encouraging the sort of paternalistic authoritarianism that is usually reprimanded – seems a rather stupid idea. Instead, perhaps finding open dialogue and reporting on where it is happening, and commenting on how to strengthen awareness and discussion, would be a better focus. Instead, at the end of French’s piece it is revealed that he’s using his IHT soapbox to bicker with a letter writer who says Westerners should quit bitching and moaning. Suddenly French’s opening about “What is there to say about a country…” not only looks like windbaggery, but it starts to look petty and snide. Is this letter really worth this attention? French translates this one, single letter into “a giant collective shrug in a body of opinion for which the world is effectively divided, consciously or not, into us and them, automatically inoculating the believers against anything perceived as outside criticism.”

Wait a minute: who just took the opinion of one letter, and applied it to a big ol’ mess of people? And when you have the answer to that, tell me just who is the one carving the world into “us” and “them”. One thing I’ve learned by blogging about China is that when a nationalist crank starts trying to push your buttons, you have to remember not to identify them as speaking for China. Because then they’ve got you right where they want you – helping them make it “us” versus “them”. Oh, Howie, you just failed China Blogging 101!

Trent Reznor, of Nine Inch Nails, however, seems to have a better handle on counterfeiting in China. He’s got a whole Chinese language section on his website, where he states:

“As for the special situation in China, it does not seem to be easy to obtain Western music via legal channels, so I have the following suggestion for our fans: If you can find and buy our legal CDs, I express my thanks for your support. If you cannot find it, I think that downloading from the Internet is a more acceptable option than buying pirated CDs. Our music is easy to find on the Internet, and you might not need to spend much effort to find most of our songs. If you like our songs after you’ve heard them, please feel free to share it with your friends. As I have put all my effort and heart into my music, I sincerely hope that more and more people can share the enjoyment with us.”

Instead of lecturing Chinese people on how bad they are, Reznor has elected to engage in dialogue. Chinese people are attracted to counterfeit goods for the same reason Americans are attracted to Chinese (and sometimes counterfeit) goods: they’re cheaper. He’s no fan himself of major record labels and their inflated CD prices. After their last contract album with Universal, NIN going to sell everything online, for “say, $4 an album”.

Reznor was last seen at the Beijing Pop Festival. Cui Jian was there too. I wasn’t. Dammit.

*Thanks to Feng37 for better clean-up of Google translation.

A brief note on a very nice online resource: The University of Oregon’s E-Asia Digital Library has everything from a 2002 report from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing on Bear Bile Farming, to a Joint Forces Quarterly article on Chinese Influence on U.S. Operational Access to African Seaports, to America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat written by Wu Tingfang in 1914. You can access the full collection here, or just peruse the ones in Microsoft Reader (e-book format) here (and download Microsoft Reader here). Also available: reports from the Manchukuo government, one of Kim Jong Il’s books (The Juche Idea), and pretty much all of Mao Zedong’s speeches. There’s tons of great reading here.

In a previous post, I pointed out how much hysteria and inaccurate reporting surrounds reports of Chinese spies (human, not digital). That continues unabated as well, and seems a close sibling of Heinous Hacker journalism. Consider FBI Goes On Offensive Against China’s Tech Spies from USA Today, where the two examples actually involve an American (non-Chinese descent) stealing secrets to sell to a Chinese company, and another (with a Chinese sounding surname) stealing them while leaving for a UK firm. While the headline screams of Chinese spies, the articles information lends it far more to a general piece on how the Information Age lends itself easily to corporate espionage from people of any nationality or persuasion. It does, curiously, refer to an FBI statistic of 3,000 Chinese “technology brokers” operating in the U.S., some of whom are “front companies. Sounds like the infamous “3,000 front company” fake number has nine lives. It is heartening to know, however, that FBI agents are reading The World Is Flat.

Or there’s Chinese Seek to Buy a U.S. Maker of Disk Drives in the New York Times. Like the Heinous Hackers, this quotes an anonymous insider:

“Seagate would be extremely sensitive,” said an industry executive who participates in classified government advisory groups. “I do not think anyone in the U.S. wants the Chinese to have access to the controller chips for a disk drive. One never knows what the Chinese could do to instrument the drive.”

I’m not an engineer. I have no idea what the ins and outs of controller chips are. But I do know that Seagate’s largest facility in the world is in Wuxi and has been for 12 years, and that if you wanted to have access to controller chips, you would engage in the sort of corporate espionage mentioned above. Buying the company would seem a great way to advertise that you might be spying on people, which usually makes them run away. As for “one never knows what the Chinese could do…”, that sounds like complete horseshit. It’s a chip, not the Sword of Greyskull.

Three days later, the Seagate story was dead:

HONG KONG (Reuters) – Seagate Technology (STX.N), the world’s largest maker of disk drives, has dashed speculation that a Chinese firm wanted to buy the firm, saying it had received no such offer and had no intention of selling.

This month The New York Times, citing an interview with Chief Executive William Watkins, reported that a Chinese technology firm had made overtures to Seagate.

But the U.S. company said on Tuesday that Watkins had in fact merely referred to growing interest in disk drives technology from companies in China, Japan and Korea in concert with their respective governments, which had made disk drive storage “a national agenda.”

In fact, the only quote from CEO Watkins in the NYT story was:

“The U.S. government is freaking out”

They are apparently not the only ones.

Sloppy and alarmist Yellow (Peril) journalism officially jumped the shark on September 8, 2007, with the following article in The Times:

The article goes like this:

Chinese military hackers have prepared a detailed plan to disable America’s aircraft battle carrier fleet with a devastating cyber attack, according to a Pentagon report obtained by The Times.

The blueprint for such an assault, drawn up by two hackers working for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), is part of an aggressive push by Beijing to achieve “electronic dominance” over each of its global rivals by 2050, particularly the US, Britain, Russia and South Korea.

China’s ambitions extend to crippling an enemy’s financial, military and communications capabilities early in a conflict, according to military documents and generals’ speeches that are being analysed by US intelligence officials. Describing what is in effect a new arms race, a Pentagon assessment states that China’s military regards offensive computer operations as “critical to seize the initiative” in the first stage of a war.

The plan to cripple the US aircraft carrier battle groups was authored by two PLA air force officials, Sun Yiming and Yang Liping. It also emerged this week that the Chinese military hacked into the US Defence Secretary’s computer system in June; have regularly penetrated computers in at least 10 Whitehall departments, including military files, and infiltrated German government systems this year.

OK, let’s make clear what assertions are made here, in just the headline, picture and first four paragraphs:

• China has a cyber “army”.
• They look like Lei Feng and other 1960s propaganda figures (with computers, presumably).
• This information is all from a Pentagon report that was “obtained” by The Times.
• Sun Yiming and Yang Liping wrote a plan to “cripple” US aircraft carriers using cyberattacks.
• Sun and Yang are “hackers”.

Apparently, in the Land of Serious Journalism, the word “obtained” actually means “downloaded from a public website where it has been available since May”, because the article in question appears to be China’s Nuclear Forces: Operations, Training, Doctrine, Command, Control and Campaign Planning by Larry Wortzel (mentioned by the Times as the author with matching quoted text), available at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College, where Wortzel works. It mentions Sun and Yang only twice: in the introduction, and the bibliographic footnote that comes with it:

To assist the PLA in its goal of attacking deployed aircraft carrier battle groups, two PLA Air Force (PLAAF) authors, Sun Yiming and Yang Liping, have built a virtual roadmap for attacking joint U.S. data control systems and military communications. They have carefully consulted dozens of corporate web sites and military tactical data link operator guides, as well as North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and U.S. military tactical and technical manuals, to produce a virtual guidebook for electronic warfare and jamming to disrupt critical U.S. cooperative target engagement and command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) data links: Tactical Data Links in Information Warfare (Xinxihua Zhanzheng Zhong de Zhanshhu Shuju Lian)

The book in question? Published in 2005, 信息化战争中的战术数据链 is available for purchase online, complete with a listing of its contents and introduction. Those contents are primarily concerned with TADIL, or Tactical Digital Information Links, used by the U.S. Navy and NATO, and the introduction states the book is there to fill the need for a book on the fundamentals and core concepts of network-centric warfare. I’d be very surprised if this book had anymore information on TADIL than I can find on GlobalSecurity.org. Indeed, in the above Larry Wortzel suggests that’s more or less what it is.

More to the point: TADIL is not on the Internet, but primarily found in high range UHF frequencies. Sun and Yang are not “hackers”, but a director and research assistant at an Air Force Institute. They did not write anything about crippling or blowing up aircraft carriers, or crippling anything for that matter. They wrote a technical manual that could maybe perhaps possibly be used to cripple something. There’s nothing about a “cyberarmy” in any of this material. And most importantly, this all has absolutely nothing to do with the recent reports of hacking in Germany, the UK and Robert Gates’ Office. So the headline, image, and nut graf are total bullshit.*

But it’s not just The Times. Apparently the AFP fact checkers thought The Times had a scoop worth regurgitating. And there’s other sloppy nonsense everywhere, mainly because everyone is tripping over themselves to get the movie plot version out, that no one is being suitably skeptical. Just consider some of the slobbering over the prospect of a new Cold War, beginning with The Guardian, where Chris Dalby invokes the dreaded Titan Rain (and in his mug shot, appears to be scanning the skies for it):

Titan Rain is now the final nail in the coffin for hopes of seeing relations with China improve.

A weighty pronouncement that I expect Dalby will have forgotten by next week, freeing him of the responsibility of retracting it when it proves to be nonsense. He never explains what Titan Rain is, or rather more accurately, was, since it was a US codename for a supposed Chinese hacker attack in 2003. Like these, it was never definitively shown to be a military operation.

The action thriller category, however, is truly elevated to an art form over at The Independent:

It’s hard to believe in the 30-degree-plus heat of Guangzhou, but this city has been named one of the epicentres of the Cold Cyber War. Instead of missiles pointing atcapital cities, and huge standing armies facing each other across ideological divides and barbed-wire fences, the only weapons in this secret war are keyboards, some sharp minds and a lot of caffeine pills.

The experts tell of how cyber spies breach supposedly unbreachable firewalls as smoothly as a skill
ed jewel thief, before swooping on a hard drive, snatching the secret files, and sending them to a third country, usually somewhere in Asia such as South Korea or Hong Kong. Then they make good their escape, often leaving no trace of the raid.

The secret agents and operatives are bleary-eyed computer whizzkids, cranked on cigarettes and coffee as they snoop through computer networks at Western military bases, armaments companies and aerospace giants. They hang out in online chatrooms rather than barrack rooms or smoky bars in communist enclaves, but they are just as hard to track as their Cold War counterparts.

That comes from one of our very own, journalist-who-blogs Clifford Coonan. I didn’t even include the part where he writes “Pure John Le Carré territory” as a stand alone sentence. Read it, it’s edge of your seat excitement. That is, until you reach some of the caveats in the latter part of the article, which I must give Clifford and his editor credit for including, since some of their peers never even bothered. Things like:

The webheads speculate about just how the hackers were tracked, given that the routes they took are supposedly untraceable. And they say that spammers and organised gangs using automated penetration tools are a much greater threat than the Chinese army.

Other security experts believe that China is as much a victim as it is a perpetrator in this conflict and that the Chinese are being scapegoated for what is a much wider problem.

Man, life is all like the Bourne Ultimatum and then those annoying “webheads” come and make it all grey and dull again, with their “skeptical inquiries”!

I for one have alot of questions I’d be asking if I were a correspondent in Beijing or D.C.:

1. The Financial Times article about the Pentagon hack quoted an unnamed official. Exactly why would a U.S. official want to publicize American failures at cybersecurity? Isn’t it general practice to downplay when the bad guys win one? I smell impending budget requests. Oh, wait: “The US Air Force will soon create a cyber war-fighting command aimed at improving defensive and offensive capabilities to counter such asymmetric threats.” Hmmmm…
2. Another official said there was a “very high level of confidence…trending towards total certainty” that it was from China. What does that mean? What method of attack was used?
3. Angela Merkel’s office, and possibly Gates as well, was compromised by a Trojan Horse attack. Doesn’t that mean that someone in the highest levels of the German government is dumb enough to open email attachments from strangers? After all, a Trojan Horse needs to be let in first.
4. Even in the Estonian “Cyberwar”, one attacking computer was “in Putin’s presidential administration office, the equivalent of the West Wing. But those computers were most likely hijacked in the same way US machines had been taken over — when their users opened an infected attachment or visited a site that automatically installed malware.” Botnets and malware are rife in China – in 2005, the New Yorker cited China contains 15% of the worlds zombies, another study in 2007 said 26%, another says 49% of malware sites are hosted in China. Anyone who lives here can tell you placing your USB in a Chinese computer is the digital equivalent having unprotected sex with a syphilitic prostitute. How about the accusing governments ponying up some technical details why this wasn’t malware on a government computer? Wouldn’t a pro be harder to track?
5. Like Russia in the Estonian kerfuffle, China has alot of young nerds with strong nationalist tendencies. They don’t necessarily have to train anybody (the world’s best hackers have usually been autodidacts). Isn’t this more of COIN/4GW/Non-state actor sort of thing? Aren’t we in a world now of roving bands of Angry Young Dorks and you just need to get them pointed in the right direction on a bulletin board, no Military Organization required? Claims that some attacks are just “too sophisticated” to be done without state support seem… familiar and unconvincing.
6. The French seem to be parsing their words carefully in revealing they’ve had attacks originating in China: “”We have proof that there is involvement with China. But I am prudent. When I say China, this does not mean the Chinese government. We don’t have any indication now that it was done by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.” Now why would they be so clear about making that distinction?
7. One last question: Why is it the UK newspapers who seem to be falling over themselves on this one? Or did I miss some awful fiasco in USA Today?

*Further down, the Times mentions “a [hacking] competition held [by the PLA] two years ago in Sichuan. The winner now uses a cyber nom de guerre, Wicked Rose. He went on to set up a hacking business that penetrated computers at a defence contractor for US aerospace.

I baidu’ed around for hackers named something like Wicked Rose, and couldn’t find one. But I did find, oddly enough, Withered Rose (凋凌玫瑰), who lives in Chengdu, has a hacking business, and is the right age (23). Did the Times source have a lisp???

—————-
Now playing: Golden Earring – Twilight Zone
via FoxyTunes

I’m back, and so is he!

Chapter 1: Heinous Hackers
Chapter 1.5: Hackers and Spies

Chapter 2: Poison Pajamas!

Updated to add appropriate inappropriate font from 1001FreeFonts, appropriately titled inappropriately as “Chinese Takeaway”.

To those of you who don’t remember Fu Manchu, he was the creation of Sax Rohmer, British pulp novelist. You can read the very first Fu Manchu book, The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu for free here. Fu is first described thusly:

“There is little to fear until we arrive home,” he said calmly. “Afterwards there is much. To continue: This man, whether a fanatic or a duly appointed agent, is, unquestionably, the most malign and formidable personality existing in the known world today. He is a linguist who speaks with almost equal facility in any of the civilized languages, and in most of the barbaric. He is an adept in all the arts and sciences which a great university could teach him. He also is an adept in certain obscure arts and sciences which no university of to-day can teach. He has the brains of any three men of genius. Petrie, he is a mental giant.”

“You amaze me!” I said.

“As to his mission among men. Why did M. Jules Furneaux fall dead in a Paris opera house? Because of heart failure? No! Because his last speech had shown that he held the key to the secret of Tongking. What became of the Grand Duke Stanislaus? Elopement? Suicide? Nothing of the kind. He alone was fully alive to Russia’s growing peril. He alone knew the truth about Mongolia. Why was Sir Crichton Davey murdered? Because, had the work he was engaged upon ever seen the light it would have shown him to be the only living Englishman who understood the importance of the Tibetan frontiers. I say to you solemnly, Petrie, that these are but a few. Is there a man who would arouse the West to a sense of the awakening of the East, who would teach the deaf to hear, the blind to see, that the millions only await their leader? He will die. And this is only one phase of the devilish campaign. The others I can merely surmise.”

“But, Smith, this is almost incredible! What perverted genius controls this awful secret movement?”

“Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present, with all the resources, if you will, of a wealthy government– which, however, already has denied all knowledge of his existence. Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man.”