Bloggers Call on Kerry to Help Tear Down Great Firewall of China

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry listens to a question during a discussion with Chinese bloggers in Beijing. Image by: POOL / REUTERS

Chinese bloggers urged US Secretary of State John Kerry to push for greater freedom online in China during a rare meeting in Beijing Saturday, asking for help to "tear down the great Internet firewall".

The US embassy-organised discussion was an opportunity for the top diplomat to hear directly from China's bloggers amid reports that Beijing is stepping up efforts to clamp down on political dissent.

Read more at The Sunday Times (UK) >> 

Has the Asian Tiger Gone Tiger?

By Patrick J. Buchanan

When Montecore, one of two white tigers in the Las Vegas act of Siegfried and Roy, turned and almost killed Roy on stage, the reaction was that the tame and complacent beast had gone berserk.

Comedian Chris Rock was nearer the mark:

“That tiger ain’t go crazy; that tiger went tiger.”

Seems our Asian tiger is going tiger as well.

Sharply escalating its clash with Japan over ownership of the Senkaku Islands, Beijing has established an air defense identification zone over the islands and a huge stretch of the East China Sea. Before entering its ADIZ, says Beijing, all planes must now notify China.

The United States responded by flying two B-52s through the zone. Japan and South Korea sent fighter jets through, also without permission. China then sent a squadron of fighters over the islands.

Now, in a move that has startled Tokyo, the United States has advised U.S. airliners entering China’s new ADIZ to alert China. Japan considers this tacit U.S. recognition of China’s territorial claim. 

Time to Stop Feeding the Tiger?

By Patrick J. Buchanan

 

As America grew in the 1800s from a republic of a few millions, whose frontier stopped at the Mississippi, into a world power, there were constant collisions with the world's greatest empire.

In 1812, we declared war on Britain, tried to invade Canada and got our Capitol burned. In 1818, Andrew Jackson, on an expedition into Spanish Florida to put down renegade Indians harassing Georgia, hanged two British subjects he had captured, creating a firestorm in Britain.

In 1838, we came close to war over Canada's border with Maine; in 1846, over Canada's border with the Oregon Territory.

Has the Bell Begun to Toll for China?

By Patrick J. Buchanan

“Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse? An important reason was that their ideals and convictions wavered,” China’s new leader, Xi Jinping, told a closed meeting of party elite in Guangdong province.

“Finally all it took was one quiet word from Gorbachev to declare the dissolution of the Soviet Communist Party, and a great party was gone,” said Xi, according to notes obtained by The New York Times.

Chen Guangcheng Leaves China on Flight for United States

After a second Congressional hearing, during which he called to update members of Congress on the current status of his tenuous situation in China, forced abortion opponent Chen Guangcheng has finally been granted his visa request to leave China for the United States.

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Is China Planning a Surprise Missile Attack?

From World Affairs

By Gordon G. Chang

A retired Chinese general recently revealed that his country might be planning a surprise missile attack on the United States. The public comment of Xu Guangyu came in response to WikiLeaks revelations that last year Washington had warned its allies beforehand of China’s test of a missile interceptor.

China Seeks to Legalise 'Disappearances'

China is making plans to legalise state-backed "disappearances" of the kind endured by the maverick artist Ai Weiwei earlier this year, in a move which lawyers and human rights advocates have described as "terrifying".

Ai WeiWei, the artist and Chinese dissident. Photo: REUTERS

From The Telegraph

By Peter Foster

Amendments to China's house arrest laws would allow prisoners to be detained in secret locations and without their families being informed, according to proposals published this week on the website of China's rubber-stamp parliament, the National People's Congress.

Comrade Obama and China's Infrastructure

Despite reports of severe power shortages, Obama insists that his comrades in China have eclipsed the United States with a far superior infrastructure.  So we regret that Obama is not in the Chinese promised land to celebrate the 90th birthday of the Communist Party.  In fact we wish he were on the two-day-old motorway that just collapsed, or the collapsing bridges, or the trains that don't run.  Sounds like just his kind of place.

Part of the collapsed motorway in China

A Chinese motorway has collapsed just two days after it opened, causing the deaths of two people, after builders were ordered to rush the project so it could be unveiled for the 90th birthday of the Communist party.

From The Telegraph

By Malcolm Moore

The 57-mile-long Xinsan motorway, through the mountains of Yunnan, was supposed to be a perfect example of how the Communist party has rolled out pristine infrastructure to even the most remote areas of China, creating economic prosperity.

Despite warnings from the construction team in charge of the project, it was included in the list of "glory projects" to be unveiled for the party's 90th anniversary on July 1.

US Admiral: Carrier Killer Won't Stop US Navy

Military vehicles with Dong Feng 21D missiles.

A new "carrier killer" missile that has become a symbol of China's rising military might will not force the U.S. Navy to change the way it operates in the Pacific, a senior Navy commander told The Associated Press.

Defense analysts say the Dong Feng 21D missile could upend the balance of power in Asia, where U.S. aircraft carrier battle groups have ruled the waves since the end of World War II.

However, Vice Adm. Scott van Buskirk, commander of the U.S. 7th Fleet, told the AP in an interview that the Navy does not see the much-feared weapon as creating any insurmountable vulnerability for the U.S. carriers — the Navy's crown jewels.

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China's Coming Fall

Like the Soviet Union before it, much of China’s supposed boom is illusory — and just as likely to come crashing down

A police building burning in Weng’an County in Guizhou Province, China.  Other government buildings have also been burned by rioters.

From the National Post (Canada)

By Lawrence Solomon

In 1975, while I was in Siberia on a two-month trip through the U.S.S.R., the illusion of the Soviet Union’s rise became self-evident. In the major cities, the downtowns seemed modern, comparable to what you might see in a North American city. But a 20-minute walk from the centre of downtown revealed another world — people filling water buckets at communal pumps at street corners. The U.S.S.R. could put a man in space and dazzle the world with scores of other accomplishments yet it could not satisfy the basic needs of its citizens. That economic system, though it would largely fool the West until its final collapse 15 years later, was bankrupt, and obviously so to anyone who saw the contradictions in Soviet society.

The Chinese economy today parallels that of the latter-day Soviet Union — immense accomplishments co-existing with immense failures. In some ways, China’s stability today is more precarious than was the Soviet Union’s before its fall. China’s poor are poorer than the Soviet Union’s poor, and they are much more numerous — about one billion in a country of 1.3 billion. Moreover, in the Soviet Union there was no sizeable middle class — just about everyone was poor and shared in the same hardships, avoiding resentments that might otherwise have arisen.

Last Week Obama Administration Officials Apologized to This China for Human Rights Abuses in America!

Last week Obama's Assistant Secretary of State, Michael Posner, equated Arizona's illegal immigration law with Communist China's worst human rights abuses -- a system that spies on every person, forces abortions, punishes faith, tortures and murders its own citizens, and has raped Tibet.

Here is a glimpse of the culture the Obama administration equates with our own - the slave auction of an 8 year old boy on a Chinese street.

Chained to a lamp post, the terrified Chinese boy whose poverty-stricken father tried to sell him on the street

From Daily Mail (UK)

A father staged a modern-day slave auction after chaining his son to a lamppost and taking bids from strangers to take the terrified eight-year-old off his hands.

Father Yong Tsui had put up a small table with a sign on it giving the youngster's age, name, and his capacity for hard work.

But when bidders began to ask how little he could eat, furious passers by turned on the auction and attacked Fai's father to stop the sale in Wuhan, central China.

Slave auction: Fai, 8, pictured chained to a lamp post by his father Yong Tsui, who tried to sell him to strangers in China


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Whose Century?

From World Affairs
By Gordon G. Chang

On October 1 last year, China’s Communist Party celebrated the country’s National Day, marking the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic. As they did ten years before, senior leaders put on a military parade of immense proportions in their majestic capital of Beijing. Like the Olympic Games in 2008, the parade was a perfectly executed and magnificently staged spectacle, but instead of international fellowship, the theme was the power of China’s ruling organization and the rise of the Chinese nation.

But did Beijing need two hundred thousand soldiers and school children to demonstrate its strength or ascendancy? The dominant narrative about China today is that it will, within a few short decades, become the preeminent power in the international system. Its economy, according to the conventional wisdom, was the first to recover from the global downturn and will eventually go on to become the world’s largest. Geopolitical dominance will inevitably follow.

How did this notion of Chinese supremacy gain hold? The answer is nothing more profound than statistical extrapolation. China was destitute when Deng Xiaoping grabbed power in December 1978. Since then, the country has averaged, according to official statistics, a spectacular annual growth of 9.9 percent. This rate, if carried forward, gives China the world’s largest economy in a few decades—2027, to be exact, according to a now-famous Goldman Sachs estimate.

So will ours be the Chinese century? Probably not. China has just about reached high tide, and will soon begin a long painful process of falling back. The most recent period of China’s fast growth began with Deng’s Southern Tour in early 1992, the event that signaled the restarting of reforms after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Fortunately for the Communist Party of China, this event coincided with the beginning of an era wherein political barriers to trade were falling and globalization was kicking into high gear, which set the table for a period of tremendous wealth generation.

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Poll: By 2-to-1 Margin, Americans Say U.S. Debt Owed to China Now Greater Threat than Terrorism

From CNS News
By Christopher Neefus

By a two-to-one margin, American adults believe the amount of money the U.S. owes China to cover the U.S. national debt is now a greater threat than radical Islam.

According to a Zogby International poll, 58 percent said the debt was a greater concern, versus just 27 percent who chose terrorism perpetrated by “radical Islamists.”

The polling firm asked respondents: “When you think about the long-term security and well-being of the U.S., which of these do you believe is a more serious threat?”

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Google, Citing Cyber Attack, Threatens to Exit China

From The New York Times
By Miguel Helft and John Markoff

Google threatened late Tuesday to pull out of its operations in China after it said it had uncovered a massive cyber attack on its computers that originated there.

As a result, the company said, it would no longer agree to censor its search engine in China and may exit the country altogether.

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Google to China: "We're Sorry for the Porn"

From OneNewsNow
By Charlie Butts

The Internet search engine Google has bowed to China's demand that it clean up its act.

Google and other major Internet sites were threatened by China because of the proliferation of pornography. But Pat Trueman of Alliance Defense Fund reports Google formally apologized.

"They said they would eliminate all vulgar material 'which may have had a negative effect on web users,'" Trueman notes. "Well, of course it has a negative effect. Child pornography and hardcore adult pornography harm people -- and Google apologized to the Chinese."

Google's statement, which was posted in the company blog on its Chinese side, added: "Google is willing to be a law-abiding citizen in China."

Trueman contends that Google and others can control pornography just as much for America as they can for China. "They should apologize to the world -- particularly to the United States of America, where they are a facilitator of child pornography and hardcore adult pornography," says the pro-family attorney.

Google was one of 20 Internet companies singled out earlier this month by the Chinese government, accusing them of spreading porn and other material that could corrupt young people. China's most popular search engine, Baidu, also issued an apology "for the negative impacts we brought upon the society."