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Tucker, let me ask you a question, is it me or are the Chinese trying to kill us? First it was toxic toothpaste. Then they sent over a batch of lethal toys drenched in lead for our kids to play with. Then it was bad tires for our cars. Now the evil Chinese regime is hitting us where we sleep. A new study shows that some pajamas made in China contain levels of Formaldehyde 900 percent above what is considered safe.

The discovery was made when pajamas worn by two different children in New Zealand and made in China, literally caught on fire. So, if you are wearing Chinese pajamas right now, take them off slowly before you combust spontaneously.

Tucker, I don‘t know. I know your kids wear exclusively Chinese pajamas, so this one hits home for you.

CARLSON: Not only Chinese pajamas, but Chinese pajamas made by political prisoners about to be executed so their organs can be harvested. Yes.

– Tucker, August 21st, MSNBC (h/t Weifang Radish)

HAHAHAHAHA! Oh, that Tucker Carlson. Oh, I shouldn’t laugh: “his bowtie knows where you sleep”.

Pet food, shellfish, tires, pajamas, action figures – this was an exciting summer in the world of Chinese exported goods. CNN didn’t just have Tucker Carlson cracking jokes about the Yellow Imported Hordes that threatened Americans from every Walmart. No, they also had John Vause, who has reported from Baghdad, talking of how he dreads eating anything in China, and consider this bit of cognitive dissonance:

Even drinking a glass of water instills fear: A recent government report found half the bottled watered in this city was counterfeit… In a Communist country where corruption is rampant and the press appears only free to go after the little guy, I believe the deep systemic problems go unreported

Didn’t he just say it was the unresponsive Communist government that told him about the water? But like Tucker Carlson and his fellow correspondent, it must all lead back to Fu Manchu, erm, Hu Jintao. As the China logistics blog All Roads Lead to China points out, Vause was part of a half hour special on CNN titled “Made in China”, summarizing:

In the end, and besides the fact that the reporters are constantly adding elements of fear into the story, what I find most negligent about this report is that no one (except the guy on the street) mentioned the role that private business has in this. There was no acknowledgment that the importer of tires suspected 2 years ago that the tires were bad, there is no attempt to frame the actual problems in a responsible manner (the tires did meet highway safety standards), and there is absolutely zero attempt to responsibly report the statistics. Sure 80% of all toys in the U.S. are imported from China, but CNN really needs to distinguish between foreign products made in China and Chinese branded products made in China.

It’s just too easy to make this about “The Chinese” and “The Communist government”. As if a different form of government would change the immense pressure of so many millions of people are competing with one another to make a buck, in most cases to become not rich, but less poor. Never mind the tire importers responsibility. Never mind that a Canadian study at the same time found that “of the 550 toy recalls since 1988, 76.4 per cent were due to problems that could be attributed to design flaws”, meaning that foreign companies manufacturing in China share responsibility. Never mind that Mattel is still trying to figure out what supplier downstream provided the lead paint, when even the small firm I once worked for doing quality control had the good sense to source their own components and not leave it to their end assembly factory. For years its been no secret that some Chinese companies will substitute cheaper parts when possible. Sometimes its to skim profits, other times its because they simply have no idea of the consumer issues involved and think they’re passing on savings to you. As blogger Bunnie says: “In the end, there is no substitute for going out to China and getting directly involved in the quality process.” Or, put another way: “They [Mattel] did not do their own due diligence,” said Ed Mierzwinski, consumer program director for the consumer group U.S. PIRG.”They relied on Chinese subcontractors – that doesn’t cut it.”

The New York Times David Barbosa described accurately what American audiences are often being fed:

Each week, it seemed, brought news of another faulty Chinese product; and with it, growing concerns about unscrupulous Chinese businessmen: cutting corners; pouring cheap, sometimes lethal, ingredients into their products; endangering consumers around the world, even children, to make a bigger profit.

As All Roads pointed out, the focus is mostly on the Chinese side, not so much the American side. Both American and Chinese companies are under pressure to provide cheap goods because, well, Americans are addicted to them. There isn’t exactly a movement in the United States to have less stuff.

But its so much more profitable and fun to invoke the spectre of “China trying to kill us”, and that all these goods are far more dangerous than they really are. As Spiked Online points out:

Apparently it is ‘continuous sucking on such toys and putting them in the mouth for days at a stretch that is hazardous’. Children often suck on toys, but not for ‘days at a stretch’. A guide to ‘dangerous toys’ in Time magazine pointed out that ‘lead can’t be inhaled or absorbed through the skin, so a child would have to chew the paint off a toy and eat a significant amount of it before getting sick’

Now I know some three year olds who might chew on a Thomas the Tank Engine for a week, but its pretty unlikely. Moreover, lead paint or not, parents ought to be concerned if their child gnaws like a rodent on their Barbie dolls that much. The statistical probability of your kid being the one in flammable pajamas approaches zero, but that doesn’t make good copy. Speaking of statistics, consider that so far “the value of recalled toxic and dangerous Chinese goods to $430 million since June 6, from $152 million a year earlier”. In that time, Chinese imports to the U.S. have valued somewhere between $150 and $176 billion. If my math is correct, that means something like less than .3% of Chinese goods have been recalled. Go back and cruise through some of Bunnie’s recent posts on sourcing and assemblying his Chumby (looks fun) gadget. He talks about the factory workers he meets in posts titled Skill and Craft. It’s a good reminder that plenty of Chinese factories and workers care about their work, and the benefits of being hands on with your own supply chain and factories.

Meanwhile, there continues to be reports saying this like: Maybe the recent wave of Toys-made-in-China bashing is paying off. The Chinese government finally agreed to eliminate the use of lead paint on toys exported to the United States. Yes, according to Forbes, “

Instead of reacting defensively or merely resorting to slogans to “lift export quality,” Chinese officials sat down with their American counterparts and signed an agreement Tuesday to ban the use of lead paint on toys exported to the United States.” This is ridiculous. China has had stricter laws on the books against lead paint than the U.S. for a while (though Forbes reports, erroneously, that lead paint is legal in China).

The problem is with enforcement – the same local politics that limits the central governments reach on numerous issues is the problem here as well. The Chinese government can’t prevent local officials from land grabs that result in mass “unrest” that is supposedly a threat to their very existence, or block webpages that contain, supposedly, other seeds of revolt. If we are to believe that these are existential fears for Beijing, and they can’t keep these together, how likely is it they can truly enforce better standards for U.S. citizens, when they can’t even provide them for their own?

More repugnant is that the focus is on improving quality control for exports to the U.S. – no concern, apparently, for Chinese domestic consumers. As Barbosa points out, “China’s lead therefore poses perhaps the greatest risk to the Chinese themselves, and their environment. Chinese children are buying toys that are less likely to be inspected than those going onto US store shelves, and less likely to be subject to the same sort of recall system as in the US.” How will Chinese citizens feel about the U.S. suggesting you can kill Chinese kids, but lay off ours?

There isn’t alot of distinguishing between the various actors in China in alot of these reports. Often, it’s just “China” that is the source of the problem, and little or no mention that many Chinese people are the victims as well. According to Brendan O’Neill at Spiked, it echoes some less than stellar moments in Western history regarding China:

The idea of the Chinese as a pollutant has a long history. Today, the Chinese are seen as an environmental pollutant; in the past, as the American author Jess Nevins points out, they were seen as ‘physical, racial and social pollutants’. In the mid-nineteenth century, Western commentary was full of irrational fears that the Chinese might pollute the white racial pool with their inferior racial qualities, or pollute Western societies with their strange cultural habits. There was, in Nevins’ words, a ‘Western fear of the supposed limitless hordes of Chinese overrunning white countries’ (9). We can see the re-emergence, even the rehabilitation of these fears in the idea that the Chinese are now a ‘toxic pollutant’ whose toys might undermine Western children’s health and IQ levels and give rise to a new generation of cretins in the US and Europe.

This isn’t about China, or the Chinese, or Communism. This is about the Return of Fu Manchu.

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 skilled 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!

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.