Category: China

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???

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Now playing: Golden Earring – Twilight Zone
via FoxyTunes

I’m back, and so is he!

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.”

“Don’t drink the water” is a cliché amongst Americans, particularly in reference to Mexico (see: Montezuma’s Revenge). So it’s interesting to hear about two issues concerning Beijing’s water supply. First, Danwei reported an announcement that Beijing’s tap water was safe to drink:

Problem is, the fact that the city’s tap water is drinkable doesn’t mean it’s drinkable from the city’s taps. Water is drinkable at the plants, but the 7000 km of pipes in the city, some quite old, introduce “secondary pollution.” Fan says, “We have a dilemma. The water piped out is clean and safe but gets contaminated before it reaches users.”

Then, it turns out half the water cooler bottles in Beijing may be fake. I bring up Montezuma’s Revenge because drinkable tap water is probably the most basic yardstick any American might use to distinguish a “developed” nation from a “developing” one. If you’ve got potable water in the taps that I trust, you’ve passed a major milestone. Now repiping all of Beijing may just be the largest plumbing project ever conceived, but consider for a moment these photos posted online of government buildings in various Chinese cities (called Palaces of Corruption by FEER’s Travellers Tales), and what might be accomplished elsewhere in the country quite quickly:

To be developed (发达) is too often associated in China with massive buildings, sophisticated weapons and opulent wealth. In 2004, Fuchsia Dunlop guided three 4 or 5 star Chinese chefs around California, who seemed to be assessing everything in terms of what China should become:

What they do want is to see how America measures up to the American Dream. They’re all familiar with the stereotype of the United States as the richest and most advanced nation in the world, its lifestyle as the holy grail of development. And they want to see it in all its brilliant modernity, to understand how far China has to go to catch up, and whether the struggle will be worth it. Given their high expectations, it’s not surprising they are disappointed. Even lovely San Francisco doesn’t fit the bill. “If that’s going to be the end result of China’s development,” says one, “then I’m really in despair.”

The extravagant mansions and leafy avenues of Beverley Hills are more promising. “This is what we should be aiming for,” says one of the chefs. But perhaps it’s a shock that the gilded life of the Hollywood elite is such a tiny part of what we actually see. The rest is simply ordinary: people going about their lives, vagrants begging on the streets, cheap consumer goods.

That’s right folks: the Beverly Hillbillies Model of Development.

From Lian Yue’s blog, translated by ESWN:

Q: I want to know about the Xiamen real name registration system. Is it okay for you to talk?
A: Alright. It does not matter.

Q: As a Xiamen citizen, what are your views?
A: This is the most ignorant and stupid action that lacked basic commonsense about contemporary civilization.

Q: Do you think a real name system if accomplishable?
A: Not possible.

ESWN comments:

I predict that if this draft law gets passed, it will only lead to an interesting phenomenon with unique Chinese characteristics — an entire industry of people ready to sell ‘real’ ID numbers/names for the purpose of deceiving the ‘real name registration.’

Something like that industry already exists. It started when the real name system was applied to online games to cut down on addiction. The Inquirer claimed:

An obviously deviant gamer asked at a game forum, “I want to get a game account, can anyone give me an identity number?” The reply from another such gamer, “No problem. I have over two million real numbers. I am interested in retail sales.” Yet another helpfully provided the URL for a website where you can download an ID card number generator. The ID card numbers from the generator match up with real numbers from the Public Security Bureau’s database.

The image at the top is taken from this article from December 2006 entitled “ID Card Generator Now Online, Real Name System Appears Useless”. After the real name system was applied to MMORPGs, these generators became popular for beating the time limit imposed on how long you can play, as well as age restrictions. It could also generate HK, Taiwan and Korean ID numbers (Korea implemented a real name system earlier). The program appears to be available here, should anyone in Xiamen feel like experimenting.

UPDATED BELOW

Over at Tim Johnson’s blog, thoughts on Chinese spying:

I went to Middlebury College in the summer of 2003 to begin Chinese language training … and soon figured out that some were FBI counter-intelligence officers honing their Chinese. After some quiet conversations, a couple told me they were inundated with work. Beijing had a massive effort going in the United States, and it was what might be called “ant” intelligence. Many people picking up lots of little bits and pieces and taking it back to be put together at the mother nest. Is it true? Who knows.

Good point. How can we really know? Meanwhile, ESWN points out this little tidbit from the FBI:

One of your execs is on a business trip overseas. At an opportune time, a foreign spy covertly plants software on her laptop. Unsuspecting, she returns home and plugs her laptop into your company’s computer network. By the time your security experts get wind of it, your most cherished business secrets are long gone.

Is that a Dell laptop? Why evoke the threat of foreign spies when corporate espionage and data security should be a priority regardless of where you are in the world – including in your own home office?

It then lists what these spies want:

Know What Spies Want
At the top of their country’s hit lists:

* The inside skinny on our government’s policies and intentions towards their country.
* Details on U.S. military plans and weapons systems.
* The crown jewels of our economy: our nation’s best scientific and technological innovations and research, both public and private.
* Cutting edge U.S. management practices, which themselves are a valuable asset.

Know Their Favorite “Disguises”

* Representatives at supposed “research institutes”;
* Visiting business professionals and scientists who want to tour your state-of-the-art plants and operations worldwide (a great place to take pictures and make friends);
* Tourists or visitors on non-immigrant visas;
* Diplomatic officials, the standard cover;
* False front companies; and
* Students and educators.

The term “crown jewels” might ring some bells from the Wen Ho Lee debacle. Those crown jewels turned out to be public information, not classified data. Tim Johnson’s use of the word “ant” might be because it came into use at the time:

A March 21, 1999, Washington Post article explained that the Chinese had been perfecting their technique of “tasking thousands of Chinese abroad to bring secrets home one at a time like ants carrying grains of sand” since “at least the fourth century B.C., when the military philosopher Sun Tzu noted the value of espionage in his classic work, The Art of War.”

Little known fact: editors excised the following paragraph after counter-intelligence officials asked WaPo not to reveal US knowledge of ancient Chinese secrets:

Historical records show that the Tang Dynasty expansion into Central Asia was led by a vanguard of restaurants, using sophisticated ciphers such as “you likee flied lice” and “two egg roll, two dolla”. Locals became suspicious something was afoot when stray cats began vanishing from the streets of Samarkand.

I mean, c’mon. I consider it a meaningless stereotype when China Daily starts harping on about “the Chinese” and their civilization from the beginning of time, too, as if they’ve always been a colony of insects sharing one hive mind and race memory. Just because the PRC government talks like its true doesn’t mean it is.

The FBI mentions false front companies – which gives me yet another opportunity to flog ArmsControlWonk’s post on how claims of 3,000 Chinese false front companies come from, well, thin air. The number came about during the late 90s due to (intentionally?) illiterate people attempting to read the Cox Report.

Back to the “ants”. The idea of thousands of Chinese carrying away the entire picnic one crumb at a time is pretty suggestive of hive-minded Asiatic hordes. Is it possible that China recruiting and debriefing the thousands of doctors, scientists, students, businessmen and tourists that visit the U.S.? Sure, but that’s not exactly a new idea. Could they be using nationalism to turn Chinese citizens abroad into intelligence assets? Gosh, appealing to nationalism to recruit spies? Crazy talk.

Let’s say there really is such a far-spanning operation asking Chinese citizens of all walks of life to be “Spy for a Day”. First of all, how effective could it be? In 1999, DIA analyst Nicholas Eftimiades, author of “Chinese Intelligence Operations”, testified before Congress:

The operational differences between professional intelligence officers and co-opted individuals are often noticeable. The intelligence officer generally has less technical knowledge about the subject matter involved in the operation, while the co-optee usually has no expertise in collecting information clandestinely. For example, at a trade show in Paris, French military investigators observed members of a Chinese scientific delegation discreetly dipping their ties in a photo processing solution made by the German firm Agfa.

Uh… ok. I’m not sure how discreet they were if “they”, as in plural, were dipping ties. Wouldn’t one tie-load do? Second, this could just as easily be amateur industrial espionage that didn’t involve the Chinese government. Considering that China has alot of trouble with IP theft domestically, a little Occam’s Razor says the government didn’t have to recruit or debrief anybody to inspire this little fashion statement.

When it comes to the most serious form of espionage, military technology, what is the statistical probability that having thousands of loyal Chinese part-time spies collecting random scattered bits of information from varying levels of American society is actually helpful? It has a certain “Monkeys typing Shakespeare” kinda ring to it. A bit from a biology lab in Maryland, a CD from a shipyard in San Diego, some schmuck’s physics thesis from Chicago – does this really add up to something big? I imagine some nuggets would be great, but in general it’d be like getting bits of different 5000 piece jigsaw puzzles. It could take decades to get anything that fits together.

And then there’s looking at it from the other side: assuming such a massive dragnet exists, and its effective, then what condition is the U.S. defense industry to prevent infiltration? Consider the following:

Intelligence professionals tell me that more than 50 percent of the National Clandestine Service (NCS) — the heart, brains and soul of the CIA — has been outsourced to private firms such as Abraxas, Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. – Who Runs the CIA? Outsiders for Hire, R.J. Hillhouse, WaPo

The House’s Intelligence Authorization Act for FY 2008 released on May 7 took multiple shots at the Intelligence Community’s reliance upon contractors:

A recent Intelligence Community contractor survey did not include a review of accountability mechanisms in cored contracts, nor any data to judge whether any contractors have committed waste, fraud, abuse, or criminal violations. Based on this and other observations, the Committee has concluded that Intelligence Community leaders do not have an adequate understanding of the size and composition of the contractor work force, [sic] a consistent and well-articulated method for assessing contractor performance, or strategies for managing a combined staff-contractor workforce. – RJ Hillhouse’s blog The Spy Who Billed Me

On May 14, at an industry conference in Colorado sponsored by the Defense Intelligence Agency, the U.S. government revealed for the first time how much of its classified intelligence budget is spent on private contracts: a whopping 70 percent. Based on this year’s estimated budget of at least $48 billion, that would come to at least $34 billion in contracts. The figure was disclosed by Terri Everett, a senior procurement executive in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the agency established by Congress in 2004 to oversee the 16 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence infrastructure. A copy of Everett’s unclassified PowerPoint slide presentation, titled “Procuring the Future” and dated May 25, was obtained by Salon. (It has since become available on the DIA’s Web site.) “We can’t spy … If we can’t buy!” one of the slides proclaims, underscoring the enormous dependence of U.S. intelligence agencies on private sector contracts. – Salon.com

On 9/11, our spies found themselves shorthanded – untrained in the languages spoken by terrorists, unable to crack new communications technologies, generally lagging behind their counterparts outside the government. The privatization boom emerged out of sheer necessity. As it happened, the dot-com bubble had burst shortly before 9/11, cutting loose a generation of technology entrepreneurs who, when the government came calling, were only too happy to start developing new data-mining algorithms and biometric identification programs. New startups began sprouting in the suburbs around Washington. The number of “contractor facilities” cleared by the National Security Agency grew from 41 in 2002 to 1,265 in 2006. It was a gold rush, a national security bubble. – IHT via Military.com

Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, believes that the kind of military intelligence work contracted to CACI, Titan Corp., and other companies is particularly ripe for problems because intelligence agencies “operate under unusual authority.” He adds: “I don’t think the current oversight system is equipped to monitor the activities of contractors. That is one of the central lessons of the Abu Ghraib affair.”– Mother Jones

The OPM [Office of Personnel Management, U.S. agency responsible for background checks to issue government security clearances to contractors], which has scrambled to increase its staff to keep pace with requests for background checks on government workers, relies on “an inexperienced investigative workforce” and cannot always use technology to shorten processing time because some data must be entered into computer systems from paper applications, the GAO [General Accounting Office] said.

In its review, the GAO turned up troubling signs that some top-secret clearances are based on incomplete investigative reports. A study of 50 investigative reports found 47 were missing data required by federal rules, the GAO said.

Other background reports lacked information on where applicants worked and lived, their overseas trips, and their personal conduct, the GAO said.

“The use of incomplete investigations and adjudications in the granting of top secret clearance eligibility increases the risk of unauthorized disclosure of classified information,” the GAO said. – Washington Post

So, in conclusion: if China really has a vast legion of spies across industries, is it really such a good idea to be privatizing so much of the defense industry, expanding the number of companies, many of which are merely a few years old, and handing out security clearances on poor background checks? Increasing the number of possibly insecure channels to defense and intelligence data seems the wrong way to go if you’re being stuffed full of sleepers. But perhaps its too late to turn it around – the U.S. has even outsourced the background checks.

UPDATE: As if on cue, this report has just come out on classified military documents appearing online due to contractor error. The documents were put on an open FTP server by CH2M Companies Ltd, but other contractors mentioned of similar sloppiness are SRA International and Benham Companies LLC, as well as a number of agencies (even the DIA, as mentioned above, posted secret budget information). The more contractors there are, especially smaller ones, the more avenues there are for foriegn intelligence to exploit. China’s tactics don’t seem as great a concern as the U.S.’s lack of care.

In a previous post I pointed to several inaccurate facts in Edward Friedman’s diatribe on “Living Without Freedom in China”, meant to train high school teachers how to teach about China, among other blighted democracy-challenged countries. Several assertions I could completely verify as false, but one I just had a gut feeling about. I said:

“It’s also the world leader for people dying in industrial accidents, and about 400,000 each year die from drinking the water, which is unpotable.” – As far as I know, 400,000 die of air pollution, while millions drink unclean water but the number of deaths attributed to this is unclear.

Well, the news that China pressured the World Bank to excise statistics on pollution fatalities confirms Friedman mixed up a couple of things:

Cut from the report were findings that air pollution levels in Chinese cities cause 350,000 to 400,000 premature deaths each year, the newspaper said. Another 300,000 people die from exposure to poor air indoors, and more than 60,000 die due to poor quality water, it said.

As I said before, who cares about quoting accurate facts to high school students? As long as they get their ideology straight (“China Bad, Democracy Good”), we’re all good, aren’t we? And isn’t that the very same pedagogical model China uses, just in reverse?

Consider again how Peter Ford begins the Christian Science Monitor article on the Tangshan armored car story:

Sometimes you come across a story that sounds too good to be true. When that happens in China, where the authorities keep a tight grip on the media – and when the news first appears on the Internet, a hotbed of intentionally spread lies – I have learned to ask two questions right off the bat.

Is it really true? And regardless of how true it is, why are we hearing about it now?

Those question also apply not only to Edward Friedman’s sloppy bit of propaganda, but also every printed assetion of fact, anywhere, ever. If you are not applying that advice to all news, everywhere, all the time – you seemed to have missed one of the fundamentals of the nature of written information since time immemorial. Especially in this day and age when a New York Times reporter who co-wrote certain infamous articles with Judith Miller is uncritically quoting a single anonymous source about the evils of Iran.

This is not about China. This about critical thinking, the lack thereof, and the miserable failure of the press and experts to teach the public how to do so. Perhaps its because they’re terrible at it themselves. Maybe you don’t have the time to do the research on anything you read in the paper because you have a life. Fair enough. But at least remember to ask the questions while reading. Peter Ford at least posed the questions, but he could have also used his own article as a teachable moment. Then again, Edward Friedman has less of an excuse: he’s a teacher.

Sometimes you come across a story that sounds too good to be true. When that happens in China, where the authorities keep a tight grip on the media – and when the news first appears on the Internet, a hotbed of intentionally spread lies – I have learned to ask two questions right off the bat.

Is it really true? And regardless of how true it is, why are we hearing about it now?

So begins “Going Down a News Rabbit Hole in China” by Peter Ford in the Christian Science Monitor.

Ford was following up on a story that hit the Chinese ‘net recently. I first heard about The Tangshan Armored Vehicle, as so many do, from ESWN, who had gotten it from the generally esteemed Southern Metropolis Daily. Yang Shukuan was shaking down mining companies, hiring assassins and terrorizing the population of Tangshan, Hebei with an armored car. As you might imagine, this was popular on the internetz, and as Ford puts it:

Soon, papers and websites all over China – including People.com.cn, the online organ of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party – had published stories on “Three Treasures” Yang, as the mafia boss was known in Tangshan, a city 120 miles east of Beijing.

But when Ford goes looking for the offices of the website (Rule of Law Network, 中国百姓法制网) that first reported the story, they aren’t where they claim to be. Phone calls go unanswered. The police aren’t talking. And then:

By Friday evening, the official shutters were coming down in ways that every Chinese knows is a sign that the authorities have had enough. People.com.cn, the online version of Peoples Daily, had removed its article, for example.

Local government and police officials in Tangshan were refusing to answer questions, referring me to a police statement confirming that Mr. Yang had been arrested, along with a police officer and 36 other suspects, and saying that the case “is still under investigation.” The next day, the Rule of Law Network was “closed for maintenance.”

That apparently didn’t last long, because the Rule of Law Network is running right now, one of their articles about Yang corrupting local cops cited in the Southern Metropolitan Daily story is still there, People.com.cn still has this article with pictures up, and Baidu News throws out 743 articles on the topic.

Ford also mistranslates the pen name of Rule of Law Network’s “reporter”, Bei Dou, as “North Star”. 北斗 means “Big Dipper”. But that’s just nitpicking. Ford definitely has a point: the articles about the Tangshan case are all quoting one another, a common enough Chinese practice. Confirming such reports can be all but impossible. The Internet is a place where people can play let’s pretend. It’s not like before the Internet there were steady streams of reliable information for Chinese citizens – this country has developed a quite unique culture of skeptical readers.

But here’s a question: how about confirmation of Ford’s report? For starters, to find most of the links above, I had to reverse translate names like “Rule of Law Network” and confirm I had the right name through cross-reference because the article doesn’t provide any Chinese names. Second, while the article is about websites, it doesn’t link to any – the single most perplexing omission from the websites of most major American newspapers. Look at the New York Times, or the Washington Post, and usually you will find links that only direct you to keyword searches within their own (subscription only!) archives. Beyond links and linguistics, however, there are also major assertions in the above the report that are completely unsubstantiated:

1. “the official shutters were coming down in ways that every Chinese knows is a sign that the authorities have had enough” – Which authorities? Where is the confirmation that they’ve had enough of something? Enough of what, exactly? Who is threatened here? And even worse, there are still plenty of articles out there – no shutters actually came down.
2. Ford quotes Xiao Qiang, of China Digital Times, saying he believes “this is an internal leak through the Rule of Law Network,” apparently since “Bei Dou” blogged that the story was recommended to him by a Communist Party newspaperman. But no one can get Bei Dou on the phone – how do we know that’s really his blog? What do we know of his motives? “Somebody, somewhere, seems to have wanted to draw national attention to a criminal case that had gone unreported. Who that might be, and what the purpose was, remains unanswered,” surmises Ford. Who would leak and why? Why must there be some major authority involved? Why can’t it just be some bitter Xinhua reporter who knows lots of juicy stories he can’t report saying “Hey Bei Dou, you’re a muckraking risktaker with his own website. You oughta break that armored car story!” Hell, Bei Dou apparently lives in or around Beijing, and Tangshan is next door. Maybe a cousin lives there. Maybe HE lives there. To post something on the Internet doesn’t actually require you to be in your office. Maybe after writing about it, it turns out Yang really does do things like hire assassins, so Bei Dou skips town and puts up a blog or three. I’m presenting as much proof for this as Ford and Qiang do of a leak: nada. Well, actually, I’m at least giving you the links.

Oh, and there’s one other people.com.cn article about the case, from a week ago. It questions, just as Ford’s article does, whether the “Rule of Law Network”, or its supposed parent the Association of Chinese Legal Workers, really exist. More importantly, it states that government officials need to make direct and unequivocal statements to the public about such cases, otherwise rumor will triumph in the vacuum. Gosh, that sounds almost like Qiang’s diagnosis: “”We have to wait and see what the official version of events is, and how it differs from the Internet version.” But in the mean time, let’s speculate.

Spotted in Rebecca MacKinnon’s del.icio.us bookmarks: Living Without Freedom in China, based on a presentation by Edward Friedman given at a seminar for secondary school teachers intended to help them teach students what it means to “live without freedom”. In a brochure sporting Tank Man on the cover, the goal is

“Students grow up in a free society; it is the only kind of society they really know. To appreciate and comprehend the benefits of freedom, students need to know what it’s like to live without freedom—or worse, in conditions of harsh repression, even genocide.”

Learning about the rest of the world is great. And genocide and repression are bad. This is all very well and good. But Edward Friedman says the Chinese government tells its kids:

““How did Rwanda occur? Because they tried to build a democracy. If the Hutus had simply imposed their will, they never would have had that problem. If it moves in a democratic direction, China is going to fall apart; it will be like what happened to Russia, to Yugoslavia. Do you want to end up like Chechnya and Bosnia? That’s what the Americans really want. You are fortunate to be a Chinese living in an ethical, authoritarian system.” The TV will show pictures of say the Los Angeles riots, the Sudan, and people are made frightened and confused. They’re proud to be Chinese and want to raise ethical kids. They want a country they can be proud of, certainly not like American kids. The Chinese are taught that American youth are smoking at an early age, use pot, have babies in their teens, watch pornography on TV, spread AIDS, get divorced, and don’t care what happens to their elderly parents. Why would you want to live in such an immoral way? This propaganda seems to work with many Chinese.”

Um, there are such messages, but isn’t telling American teachers to teach their students about all the horrible things in China to make them love how their society is organized the, well, exact same thing? Oh, sorry that’s right, I forgot: we’re the good guys.

It doesn’t help Edward Friedman’s argument at all that his article has a few inaccuracies. For example:

1. “China has a ruthless free market, no regulation, no safety standards, no FDA, no CDC, no NIH.” – um, it has an FDA, they just sentenced its ex-chief to death. And they have a CDC as well. Perhaps they’re toothless, ineffectual, and are ignored during foolish face-saving maneuvers (see: SARS), but factually, this is still wrong.
2. “It’s also the world leader for people dying in industrial accidents, and about 400,000 each year die from drinking the water, which is unpotable.” – As far as I know, 400,000 die of air pollution, while millions drink unclean water but the number of deaths attributed to this is unclear.
3. My personal favorite: “A Chinese journalist recently went to 10 Chinese hospitals wanting to get his blood tested. So he complained of certain aches and pains that he knew would cause them to test his blood. But he didn’t give them his blood, he carried in a thermos with tea and poured that into the cups. Eight of the ten reported to him that he had the most serious blood disease and that it would cost them endless money for treatment.” – actually, it was not a test for blood but urine, which looks more like tea, it was six not eight out of ten hospitals, and five of which detected a urinary infection, for which they prescribed a maximum of $50 worth of drugs. A great deal for most Chinese, but not a “serious blood disease” or “endless money”. But who needs accurate facts when you’re talking to young’uns? Just as long as they know who the good guys and bad guys are. Y’know, there’s a reason DARE is joke among my generation.

Then there are the head scratchers:

1. “You can choose your physician freely” – huh??? Yeah, and the socialized medicine is fantastic. It’s freaking cash and carry, people.
2. “most young Chinese would say they live in a free, democratic society.” – What? How can they say its democratic when they’re all taught democracy is a bad word?
3. “There still are committees for the defense of the revolution. They have to make their own money and often turn into Avon ladies, visiting house to house, but you know that if you aren’t complicit, maybe you won’t get a passport.” – I would love to hear more on this, she didn’t seem to terrorize my neighbors.
4. “The state is building Confucian temples. The vision is that China is going to explain its extraordinary rise to its own people and to the world as the result of its unique ethical religion, its Confucianism. It’s going to spread Confucian societies all around the world, it’s going to teach everybody that China produces a better quality of people because it has this moral authority and all others are inferior. Confucianism is the only way to raise people, and the world is properly hierarchically ordered with Confucian Chinese at the center of it.” – I’m sure teaching the entire world they are inferior will go over well. Those Goethe Institutes must be some sort of Neo-Nazi front too.
5. “I can imagine a future in which unregulated hedge funds lead to an international financial crisis and this is seen as coming out of the Anglo-American countries, London and New York being the two centers of these monies. But China regulates capital, so these things are not allowed in. The Chinese model may yet look even more attractive than it does now.” – Yes, I imagine letting giant unregulated hedge funds stock up on sub-prime mortgages and screw the economy might make regulation look more attractive. Bear Sterns must be serving their Chinese paymasters, right? Cause China is responsible for our mistakes. Because they’re bad.

From the China Law and Politics Blog, run by Carl Minzner of the Council on Foreign Relations, a job ad:

Position: Program Officer for Asia, IRI

The International Republican Institute (IRI) seeks a Program Officer for their Asia regional programs, to be based in Washington, DC.

A nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, the International Republican Institute (IRI) advances freedom and democracy worldwide by developing political parties, civic institutions, open elections, good governance and the rule of law.

I have always found it odd when the IRI is described as an NGO or nonpartisan organization. The IRI receives its funding from the National Endowment for Democracy. The NED, started in 1983 by the Reagan Administration to promote democracy abroad, receives virtually all its funding from the US government. The “NED’s unique multisectoral approach is characterized by its four core institutes: the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, the International Republican Institute, the American Center for International Labor Solidarity, and the Center for International Private Enterprise, which represent the two major American political parties, the labor movement, and the business community, respectively.” In other words, the Democrats, Republicans, AFL-CIO and U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Reading the NED’s very own history page is enlightening. The House opposed directly funding two political party institutes, but in hammering out a compromise with the Senate, “the conferees agreed to maintain the House’s deletion of the earmarks for the party institutes, but pointed out that this was “without prejudice to their receipt of funds from the Endowment.”” In other words, the party institutes, the NDI and IRI, could receive money funneled through the NED, if the NED chose to do so. But the NED insists its an NGO, in it’s mindbending “Independence” section. Consider that

NED’s authorizing legislation spells out its non-governmental status, namely that “Nothing in this title shall be construed to make the Endowment an agency or establishment of the United States Government.”

Though it is a regular line item in the Federal budget, but

It is sometimes contended that without this official status, the Endowment lacks accountability. This charge overlooks the fact that NED is answerable to a wide array of overseers in both the Executive and Legislative Branches.

Don’t you see? It’s definitely not beholden to the government to which it is accountable! And you thought the Bush Administration used new ideas. And this must be some kinda of super-nongovernmental status: “NED is covered by the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), unique for a non-governmental entity.” You ain’t really nongovernmental unless you are subject to governmental sunshine requests, overseen by two branches of government and receive all your money from Congress! Yeah! Independence! Take that, Greenpeace!

Ahem. Sorry. Remember the International Republican Institute? They had that job at their “nonpartisan” organization? Meet the board of directors, whose notables include such nonpartisan favorites as:

John McCain
L. Paul Bremer
Laurence Eagleburger
Frank J. Fahrenkopf (former chairman of the Republican Party)
Chuck Hagel
David Dreier (congressman, R-CA)
Alec L. Poitevint, II
Cheryl Halpern (Bush appointed CPB chair)
J. William Middendorf II (Goldwater treasurer, Ford’s Navy Secretary, Reagan’s OAS rep)
Gahl Hodges Burt (Nancy Reagan’s social secretary)
Peter T. Madigan (lawyer, regular Republican PAC contributor)
Alison B. Fortier (former Reagan special asst. to the Prez on NatSec Affairs)
Olin L. Wethington (AIG in China, former John Snow appointee in Bush treasury)

… I can’t google anymore. Soooooo…. right. “Nonpartisan”. Galling, especially, since the NED website flat out says that these are “party structures”.

For an idea of the nonpartisan, but apparently virulently ideological way the IRI goes about promoting democracy, you can read the New York Times piece January 29, 2006 “Mixed U.S. Signals Helped Tilt Haiti Toward Chaos”, in which U.S. ambassador to Haiti, Brian Dean Curran, “accused the democracy-building group, the International Republican Institute, of trying to undermine the reconciliation process after disputed 2000 Senate elections threw Haiti into a violent political crisis.” He also accused IRI’s Haiti guy, Stanley Lucas, of “telling the opposition that he, not the ambassador, represented the Bush administration’s true intentions.” In other words, while the ambassador said one thing was the official U.S. policy, the IRI was the Bush administrations proxy for saying “no, no, no, he’s just a silly ambassador. We truly represent the U.S. government.” How nongovernmental of them. This was also covered long before the Times got to it in Mother Jones, and you can also look at RightWeb to see what IRI may or may not have done in Venezuela. Or Counterpunch’s article on IRI’s ties to Reporters Without Borders and their lopsided coverage of Haiti, as well as the return of bagman Otto Reich.

The best, though, has to be current Republican candidate Ron Paul’s article at antiwar.com, lambasting the NED institutes support of ex-Soviet strongmen in Eastern Europe:

The National Endowment for Democracy, by meddling in the elections and internal politics of foreign countries, does more harm to the United States than good. It creates resentment and ill-will toward the United States among millions abroad.

Thank you Ron. You might be a racist, but you’re helping as best you can I guess.

But my favorite part has got to be this: IRI president Lorne Cramer’s April 10, 2006 speech on “The United States and Human Rights in China”. I’m impressed that Lorne was speaking at the time about the Freezing Point shutdown, and that IRI was even allowed in China in 2006, let alone 1996! But check this out:

There has been explosive growth of civil society organizations – 153,000 registered ones according to some statistics – and we can assume many thousands more that are unregistered. What are these organizations doing? Everything from environmental monitoring, to advocacy on women’s rights, to helping exploited workers seek back pay and compensation, to working with ethnic minority groups on development and cultural preservation issues, to working with people living with HIV/AIDS.

Hmmmm. 153,000, eh? Let’s try and find that number… ok, first in English, from the 10th NPC 4th Session:

NGOs in China can be divided into three categories

First, overseas NGOs including those from China’s Hong Kong and Macao… reckons there are about 10,000.

The second category is foundations. Since the 1980s, China has carried out many non-profit
projects including the Hope Project … approximately 1,070 foundations in operation in China.

The third category can be subdivided into several smaller categories. One is social groups that are registered with civil affairs departments above county level in accordance with the Regulations on Management of Social Groups issued by the Ministry of Civil Affairs (MCA). There are currently 153,000 registered social groups in China.

The second sub-category consists of privately run non-enterprise units.

In addition, there are about 100,000 to 200,000 NGOs registered with the Industry and Commerce network nationwide. The reason is that the threshold for qualification as a social group and privately run non-enterprise unit or foundation is higher. Many organizations simply can’t qualify.

The fourth type is the urban community organization… some are quite simply for pure entertainment, for example, folk dancing groups. (100,000 to 200,000).

OK, so the 153,000 are social groups above the county level. Above them are foreigners/overseas brethren, and Project Hope (we’ll get to them in a second). Below are smaller local groups and mahjong clubs. Now, to the MCA website for some examples of the largest social groups (社会团体), which are given permission to run business operations:

Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, State Council Development Research Center, China Seismological Bureau, China Meteorological Administration, China Securities Regulatory Commission and China Insurance Regulatory Commission, the Central Party School, the Party Literature Research Center, Central Party History Research Center, Federation of Trade Unions, the Chinese Communist Youth League*…

Heh. Heheheheheh. The government funded ideologically partisan “nonpartisan NGO” IRI …*guffaw* … is pointing to the government funded ideologically partisan “NGO” Chinese Communist Youth League as a “civil society organization”.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

*Oh, the CCYL runs Project Hope.

I had a request not too long ago for more maps on the site. So here are some images of the Chinese Century of Humiliation Atlas, available at this 163 forum. You can read a good analysis of the atlas and the role of humiliation in the official interpretation of Chinese history in this PDF “National Insecurities: Humiliation, Salvation and Chinese Nationalism”. This book may only be 11 yuan online, and probably not widely read in urban and middle class circles, but it is on a list of 2,090 titles recommended for 1,550 rural farmers libraries by the Central Propaganda Ministry.

The “Century of Humiliation” refers to the 100+ years from the First Opium War in 1840 to the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. While the phrase isn’t exactly part of normal conversation these days, it certainly is still in use. An online martyrs memorial website, 血铸中华, or “Blood Casting Chinese”(?), uses the URL http://www.china1840-1949.net.cn/ has a redirect to its main domain name, which is http://xzzh.china5000.cn/, which uses the more well-known reference to China’s 5000 year history. The site is run by the China Youth League (Hu Jintao’s power base) and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. The introduction at the top of the window, which is not entirely visible, reads

China’s Online Revolutionary Memorial and Modern History Museum! Forever Remembering the Modern Century’s Countless Chinese Sons and Daughters for Resisting the Imperialist Great Powers Invasion, Fighting for National Independence, and Indomitable Struggle towards Liberation, to Achieve the Chinese People’s Great Rejuvenation! Forever Remember the Chinese Heroes Great Service!

It’s worth remembering that virulent nationalism is not pandemic across China, the idea of China’s humiliating fall (and subsequent picking itself off the ground – this corollary was the subtext of the documentary The Great Nations) is almost universally accepted, and did not begin with the Communist era. It stretches back to the end of the Qing Dynasty, as reformist Hanscholars quickly sought to interpret Chinese defeat in the Opium War as a sign of a decadent and failing Manchu court – a political battle for power between factions in the government. The Republican era embraced the idea as well, and even had a National Humiliation Day (I believe May 7th). It’s also worth remembering that China sees it’s own “modern era” as beginning with humiliation – the idea of being “modern” is deeply intertwined with being humiliated and weak. One would hope that one day this might change.