Mutant Palm

“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.