CHINA

[Bact PhD]

Whoo, that didn't take long:

www.voanews.com/east-asia-pacific/voa-news-china/china-sanctions-28-former-trump-administration-officials

China imposed sanctions on Trump administration officials just minutes after Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th president of the United States, according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry.
[snip]
The ministry said the sanctioned individuals and their immediate family members “are prohibited from entering the mainland of China, Hong Kong and Macao.” It also said they and entities associated with them were banned from conducting business with China.

[Bact PhD]

I need a scorecard to keep up with this one. I also wonder how much a de-listing is symbolic, given how markets are globalized anymore.

www.bbc.com/news/business-55744400

The executive order from former President Trump barred Americans from investing in public companies the US government says has links with the Chinese military.

Incoming president Joe Biden has already started overturning some of Mr Trump's executive orders although it is unclear if he will address the many that have concerned Chinese companies and national security.

The NYSE agreed to delist all three on 31 December, but within days it reversed the decision based on "further consultation" with regulatory authorities.

But that reversal was short lived, with the NYSE announcing just days later that it would press ahead with its initial decision to delist based on "new specific guidance" from the US Treasury Department.

[Bact PhD]

There's less and less distinction between Hong Kong and the rest of mainland China:

Children as young as six are to learn about crimes under Hong Kong's national security law.

Schools will be asked to monitor children's behaviour and report any support for the pro-democracy movement, as part of new education rules.

The national security law was imposed last June with Beijing arguing it was needed to tackle unrest linked to pro-democracy protests in the city.

Thousands of children became involved in the protests.

Hong Kong's education bureau released the guidelines late on Thursday along with an animated video that explains to students what the national security law is.

The law criminalises secession, subversion and collusion with foreign forces with the maximum sentence life in prison.

The video, featuring an owl and two students, explains that the national security law has been enacted "for the sake of Hong Kong's continuous development and long-term prosperity".

"We all know Hong Kong is an inalienable part of our country," it tells students.

Primary school students will also be taught how to sing and respect the national anthem and learn about how the People's Liberation Army protects Hong Kong. Older students will learn about the limits of Hong Kong's rights and freedoms.

[LFC]

China has a clandestine navy that they won't admit exists. It consists of several hundred "fishing boats" which have swarmed areas that China has contentiously claimed to force every nation impacted into a choice of backing off or likely causing casualties.

They've been dubbed China's "Little Blue Men," an allegedly Beijing-controlled maritime militia that analysts say could be hundreds of boats and thousands of crew members strong.
China doesn't acknowledge their existence and when questioned, refers to them as a "so-called maritime militia."
But Western experts say the alleged militia is an integral part of Beijing's efforts to exert its territorial claims in the South China Sea and beyond. They claim its blue-painted vessels and their crews -- allegedly funded and controlled by the People's Liberation Army -- can quickly bring a Chinese presence so large around disputed reefs and islands they are almost impossible to challenge without triggering a military confrontation.

The apparent militia made headlines last month when more than 200 Chinese fishing boats crowded around Whitsun Reef, a Philippine possession in the Spratly Island chain in the South China Sea.

Analysts at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in Singapore say they've never seen a Chinese operation of this size before.

"The Whitsun Reef incident is unprecedented in scale and notable for its duration: the largest numbers of Chinese fishing vessels gathered at any time at one Spratly reef, and staying there for several weeks," Samir Puri and Greg Austin, both senior fellows at the IISS, wrote last week on the organization's blog.

[Bact PhD]

Shit. Here we go again...

www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/chinese-hackers-compromise-defense-contractors-agencies/2021/04/20/10772f9e-a207-11eb-a7ee-949c574a09ac_story.html

Sophisticated Chinese government hackers are believed to have compromised dozens of U.S. government agencies, defense contractors, financial institutions and other critical sectors, according to a private cybersecurity firm working with the federal government.

The intrusions are ongoing, the FireEye security company said, and are the latest in a series of disturbing compromises of government agencies and private companies.

The investigation is in its early stages but already has turned up evidence that the intruders breached sensitive defense companies, according to FireEye. That was not the case with the Russian SolarWinds campaign, which compromised nine federal agencies but not the Pentagon or its contractors, U.S. officials said.

[snip]

The hacking group involved was “very advanced” in its steps to evade detection, said Charles Carmakal, chief technology officer of Mandiant, a division of FireEye. The campaign was targeted, focusing on high-value victims with information of value to the Chinese government, he said.

“This looks like classic China-based espionage,” Carmakal said. “There was theft of intellectual property, project data. We suspect there was data theft that occurred that we won’t ever know about.”

The comments, a number from people who understand FAR more about the inner guts of tech than I do, are interesting as well.

[goldenvalley]

Apr 21, 2021 18:03:16 GMT Bact PhD said:

Shit. Here we go again...

www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/chinese-hackers-compromise-defense-contractors-agencies/2021/04/20/10772f9e-a207-11eb-a7ee-949c574a09ac_story.html

Sophisticated Chinese government hackers are believed to have compromised dozens of U.S. government agencies, defense contractors, financial institutions and other critical sectors, according to a private cybersecurity firm working with the federal government.

The intrusions are ongoing, the FireEye security company said, and are the latest in a series of disturbing compromises of government agencies and private companies.

The investigation is in its early stages but already has turned up evidence that the intruders breached sensitive defense companies, according to FireEye. That was not the case with the Russian SolarWinds campaign, which compromised nine federal agencies but not the Pentagon or its contractors, U.S. officials said.

[snip]

The hacking group involved was “very advanced” in its steps to evade detection, said Charles Carmakal, chief technology officer of Mandiant, a division of FireEye. The campaign was targeted, focusing on high-value victims with information of value to the Chinese government, he said.

“This looks like classic China-based espionage,” Carmakal said. “There was theft of intellectual property, project data. We suspect there was data theft that occurred that we won’t ever know about.”

The comments, a number from people who understand FAR more about the inner guts of tech than I do, are interesting as well.

This is the new warfare...all the fighters, naval ships, nuclear warheads, grunt soldiers that the US has is useless for cyber warfare.  I only hope our defense department recognizes this. 

[jackd]

True enough but it's also true that a sophisticated cyber capability won't adequately defend Taiwan, Ukraine, or other vulnerable targets of hostile powers who have military components that are hardware as well as computer code.

[george R]

We have been sticking the wrong pig for years.

[LFC]

I wonder how long Taiwan will retain its independence. Maybe I'm wrong but it just seems China is becoming increasingly aggressive about territorial claims.

John Cena issued a groveling apology to his fans in China after he called Taiwan a country during an interview for his new Fast & Furious movie F9.

Earlier this month the former WWE star told a Taiwanese news outlet that the island would be “the first country that can watch” the new film. The video clip has since been taken down.

While Taiwan views itself as a democratic, sovereign state after it broke away from China in 1949, the People’s Republic of China believes otherwise, claiming Taiwan is a territory. It has vowed to eventually regain control there, even by force.

So after decades of tension, Chinese nationals were outraged over Cena’s remarks, especially because the 44-year-old is a beloved celebrity there, primarily through his career in the WWE.

With China threatening to boycott the new movie, which has already raked in $135.6 million there, Cena addressed the backlash with his tail between his legs on the popular Chinese social media app Weibo on Tuesday.

“I made a mistake,” Cena apologized profusely in Chinese, which he has studied for years. “Now I have to say one thing which is very, very, very important: I love and respect China and Chinese people.”

Still, some Chinese fans weren't happy with Cena’s apology, wanting him to go even further and denounce Taiwan as a country.

[LFC]

Ethnic cleansing seems to be their jam. At least this one isn't violent ... yet.

Students, teachers, parents, and others are staging protests in Inner Mongolia, a semi-autonomous region in northern China, by surrounding police stations and gathering outside schools. Thousands are congregating in rare displays of open defiance of governmental orders.

These demonstrations were sparked by the Chinese government’s directive issued in the summer to broaden the footprint of Mandarin Chinese in state-compiled textbooks and classroom instruction within the region, displacing the Mongolian language in academic environments and daily usage.

From Sept. 1 onward, the authorities will shift public elementary and middle schools’ language of instruction to Chinese, specifically for three courses—language and literature, history, as well as morality and law (which includes political and ideological indoctrination). The change will be rolled out in phases, eventually keeping just mathematics and art classes in the region’s dominant native tongue.

On anonymous parent said teaching everything in a second language would make it more difficult for children to learn in school. “As Mongolians—myself and other parents—we are not willing to watch our mother tongue be gradually replaced by another language. Sure, we study Chinese, from a young age so that’s not an issue,” they told the Voice of America Mandarin service.

Ethnic Mongolians who reside in China see this as a step to erase an important part of their culture. Some see it as forced homogeneity directed at their youngsters, much like what is happening in Tibet and Xinjiang, where the Chinese government has strict rules that limit the public displays and practices related to each region’s cultural identity.

It’s all part of the Chinese central government’s objective to impose cultural and linguistic homogeneity on one of the world’s largest and most diverse nations. As new policies are rolled out to bring this closer to fruition, the many cultures of more than one hundred million people are slowly expunged.

[LFC]

Oh f***. I guess I didn't realize how often different strains of different flu viruses really popped up in China. It's like they're one big incubator.

A 41-year-old man in China’s eastern province of Jiangsu has been confirmed as the first human case of infection with the H10N3 strain of bird flu, China’s National Health Commission (NHC) said on Tuesday.

The man, a resident of the city of Zhenjiang, was hospitalised on April 28 after developing a fever and other symptoms, the NHC said in a statement.

He was diagnosed as having the H10N3 avian influenza virus on May 28, it said, but did not give details on how the man had been infected with the virus.

The man was stable and ready to be discharged from hospital. Medical observation of his close contacts had not found any other cases.

H10N3 is a low pathogenic, or relatively less severe, strain of the virus in poultry and the risk of it spreading on a large scale was very low, the NHC added.

The strain is "not a very common virus," said Filip Claes, regional laboratory coordinator of the Food and Agriculture Organization's Emergency Centre for Transboundary Animal Diseases at the Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific.

Only around 160 isolates of the virus were reported in the 40 years to 2018, mostly in wild birds or waterfowl in Asia and some limited parts of North America, and none had been detected in chickens so far, he added.

Analysing the genetic data of the virus will be necessary to determine whether it resembles older viruses or if it is a novel mix of different viruses, Claes said.

Many different strains of avian influenza are present in China and some sporadically infect people, usually those working with poultry. There have been no significant numbers of human infections with bird flu since the H7N9 strain killed around 300 people during 2016-2017.

No other cases of human infection with H10N3 have previously been reported globally, the NHC said.

[Deleted]

Yeah right ...... pull the other leg, Xi, it's got bells on A more 'loveable' China? Xi hints at a charm offensive to 'expand' Beijing's 'circle of friends'

:snip:

"It is necessary to make friends, unite and win over the majority, and constantly expand the circle of friends as regards international public opinion," Xi told Communist Party officials in remarks reported by China's Xinhua News Agency and other Chinese media.

[llewop]

Looks like Beijing is getting serious about banning crypto mining. The day after I posted that there was no change over there my biggest mining friend reported his mining pool had been taken down and he was asking about VPNs to use reach foreign pools.
Bad news is the great wall uses deep packet searches and will close his connection down. Some VPNs try to disguise themselves as regular traffic but from experience it is hit and miss to get a connection.
The electricity shortage has reportedly closed down aluminum smelting plants and is affecting other major industry, in part of because their refusal to buy Aussie coal.
And of course they are trying to get a cleaner regime before the olympics next year.

[LFC]

The China doth protest too much, methinks.

Chinese state media outlet Xinhua released an English-language parody video on Tuesday taking aim at U.S. and British fears about tech giant Huawei. And it’s one of those things that’s both extremely awkward and incredibly fascinating.

[Bact PhD]

This is a tad unnerving, if perhaps not too surprising (bold mine).

www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/china-harvests-masses-of-data-on-western-targets-documents-show/2021/12/31/3981ce9c-538e-11ec-8927-c396fa861a71_story.html

China is turning a major part of its internal Internet-data surveillance network outward, mining Western social media, including Facebook and Twitter, to equip its government agencies, military and police with information on foreign targets, according to a Washington Post review of hundreds of Chinese bidding documents, contracts and company filings.

China maintains a countrywide network of government data surveillance services — called public opinion analysis software — that were developed over the past decade and are used domestically to warn officials of politically sensitive information online.

The software primarily targets China’s domestic Internet users and media, but a Post review of bidding documents and contracts for over 300 Chinese government projects since the beginning of 2020 include orders for software designed to collect data on foreign targets from sources such as Twitter, Facebook and other Western social media.

[snip]

These include a $320,000 Chinese state media software program that mines Twitter and Facebook to create a database of foreign journalists and academics; a $216,000 Beijing police intelligence program that analyzes Western chatter on Hong Kong and Taiwan; and a cybercenter in Xinjiang, home to most of China’s Uyghur population, that catalogues the mainly Muslim minority group’s language content abroad.

“Now we can better understand the underground network of anti-China personnel,” said a Beijing-based analyst who works for a unit reporting to China’s Central Propaganda Department. The person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss their work, said they were once tasked with producing a data report on how negative content relating to Beijing’s senior leadership is spread on Twitter, including profiles of individual academics, politicians and journalists.

[pnwguy]

Jan 4, 2022 23:38:55 GMT Bact PhD said:

This is a tad unnerving, if perhaps not too surprising (bold mine).

www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/china-harvests-masses-of-data-on-western-targets-documents-show/2021/12/31/3981ce9c-538e-11ec-8927-c396fa861a71_story.html

China is turning a major part of its internal Internet-data surveillance network outward, mining Western social media, including Facebook and Twitter, to equip its government agencies, military and police with information on foreign targets, according to a Washington Post review of hundreds of Chinese bidding documents, contracts and company filings.

China maintains a countrywide network of government data surveillance services — called public opinion analysis software — that were developed over the past decade and are used domestically to warn officials of politically sensitive information online.

The software primarily targets China’s domestic Internet users and media, but a Post review of bidding documents and contracts for over 300 Chinese government projects since the beginning of 2020 include orders for software designed to collect data on foreign targets from sources such as Twitter, Facebook and other Western social media.

[snip]

These include a $320,000 Chinese state media software program that mines Twitter and Facebook to create a database of foreign journalists and academics; a $216,000 Beijing police intelligence program that analyzes Western chatter on Hong Kong and Taiwan; and a cybercenter in Xinjiang, home to most of China’s Uyghur population, that catalogues the mainly Muslim minority group’s language content abroad.

“Now we can better understand the underground network of anti-China personnel,” said a Beijing-based analyst who works for a unit reporting to China’s Central Propaganda Department. The person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss their work, said they were once tasked with producing a data report on how negative content relating to Beijing’s senior leadership is spread on Twitter, including profiles of individual academics, politicians and journalists.

I've been in the software world for close to 39 years, and people have asked me often why I'm not on social media, especially FB.  It has always seemed like a dangerous system to expose information to be used against people.  Just ask the 1/6 insurrectionists.  I've got nothing in particular to hide, but anonymity helps keep one from being a target by those with criminal intent.

[Traveler]

Same here. Next door is as far as I go.

[goldenvalley]

Jan 5, 2022 17:43:01 GMT Traveler said:

Same here. Next door is as far as I go.

I hate Next Door..."did you hear that?  was it gunfire?  my dog is lost.  I found a dog.  Did you hear the sirens last night?  What was that all about?"

[LFC]

Jan 5, 2022 18:33:13 GMT goldenvalley said:

I hate Next Door..."did you hear that?  was it gunfire?  my dog is lost.  I found a dog.  Did you hear the sirens last night?  What was that all about?"

Funny but I live far enough in the country that nobody looks twice when they hear gunfire. I think 1/3 to 1/2 of my street has backyard ranges set up for at least low caliber firearms.

[goldenvalley]

Jan 5, 2022 19:37:03 GMT LFC said:

Jan 5, 2022 18:33:13 GMT goldenvalley said:

I hate Next Door..."did you hear that?  was it gunfire?  my dog is lost.  I found a dog.  Did you hear the sirens last night?  What was that all about?"

Funny but I live far enough in the country that nobody looks twice when they hear gunfire. I think 1/3 to 1/2 of my street has backyard ranges set up for at least low caliber firearms.

The folks in my neighborhood aren't hearing gunfire.  They just think they might be.   

[pnwguy]

Jan 5, 2022 19:44:15 GMT goldenvalley said:

Jan 5, 2022 19:37:03 GMT LFC said:

Funny but I live far enough in the country that nobody looks twice when they hear gunfire. I think 1/3 to 1/2 of my street has backyard ranges set up for at least low caliber firearms.

The folks in my neighborhood aren't hearing gunfire.  They just think they might be.   

Next Door should be renamed "Karen & Ken Door".  

[Bact PhD]

Jan 5, 2022 19:37:03 GMT LFC said:

Jan 5, 2022 18:33:13 GMT goldenvalley said:

I hate Next Door..."did you hear that?  was it gunfire?  my dog is lost.  I found a dog.  Did you hear the sirens last night?  What was that all about?"

Funny but I live far enough in the country that nobody looks twice when they hear gunfire. I think 1/3 to 1/2 of my street has backyard ranges set up for at least low caliber firearms.

The area just west of my subdivision (about 150 yards from this house as the crow flies) has 5-acre “ranchettes” that back up to the westernmost houses in the subdivision. We’ll often hear someone taking target practice at odd hours.

Re NextDoor, our local one is an utter cesspool, between the scammers and the Karens and those who gripe about ANYTHING to do with city or county government, let alone about national politics (which last is supposed to be a no-no)…

[LFC]

Creepy. Just ... creepy.

A secret meeting with International Olympic Committee members over the weekend will do nothing to alleviate the mystery of Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai’s well-being.

The IOC, which has been heavily criticized for its seeming blindness to China’s human-rights abuses, and its apparent censuring of Peng, released as statement without saying whether Peng was accompanied by her usual Chinese government handlers, though IOC Director of Communications Mark Adams on Monday said the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG) were not informed of the meeting.

“During the dinner, the three spoke about their common experience as athletes at the Olympic Games, and Peng Shuai spoke of her disappointment at not being able to qualify for the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020,” the IOC statement said, without mentioning why they met.

The two-time Olympian had earlier given an interview—with a government official at her side—denying she was sexually assaulted by a powerful politician.

“I would like to know: Why such concern?” the 36-year-old athlete said of worries that she was essentially forced from public view after posting an accusation on the Chinese social media platform Weibo.

Peng’s comments to French newspaper L’Equipe are unlikely to quell concern that she is not free to speak her mind. A member of China’s Olympic committee was with the doubles champion as she spoke from a hotel room in Beijing.

[goldenvalley]

I've been secretly happy to see a number of figure skaters with Chinese surnames on the American Olympic team.

[andydp]

As advised, I have moved this to the "China" thread because Chinese SF units have nothing to do with the RIO Carnival.

2 little-known US and UK special-ops missions are influencing how Chinese military planners think about an attack on Taiwan



www.businessinsider.com/invasions-of-grenada-falklands-influence-china-thinking-about-taiwan-2022-3?fbclid=IwAR1zjEjNKJuXi9TuGm_41pGvbqGznbXseZiaFd0oEnmcDyUZ9T9Lvyh3dRE