White Fame in China

British actor Stephen Fry, known for playing everything from medieval clerics to alarm clocks, has a blog. And considering that he is so ubiquitous that he'll even rouse you in the morning, it's quite appropriate his second post is on Fame, it's advantages and drawbacks.

I am not famous. Not even a little. And yet, living in China, I experience something akin to Mr. Fry's fame. Consider this passage:

I get stopped on the street, I get (occasionally) hounded by photographers, I get letters from strangers asking for money, sex, advice, approval, time and so on. Journalists with nothing better to do write descriptions of my personality or offer glancing mentions of me. People who have never met me know that they loathe me, or that they like me. I am asked to be patron of this charity and to be on the board of that good cause and so on. I can get a table at the Ivy restaurant and tickets for premieres and parties. A medium ranking sleb.

In my time living in China, I have been stopped on the street, surreptitiously (and occasionally blatantly) photographed, been offered jobs, interviewed by journalists, and overheard people opine about whether or not they approve of me. But I am not famous. No, my skin, my genetic heritage, my physiology is famous. Because I'm white. I just hang on to those coattails, or rather, I'm dragged by them, since I can't change my appearance. My phenotype is a medium ranking sleb. I am a distinctly separate entity in these encounters, orbiting the interaction between this Chinese person and my body. Whether they actually are addressing me, or simply the archetype they assume I am, is a roll of the dice.

There are times when it is utterly impossible to have a reasonable conversation with someone in China because of my blinding whiteness. I am perceived as a White Man, with all the intrinsic characteristics attributed to that category. Some have been unable to accept that I am not Christian - I have been called a liar for asserting I was not. All white men are wealthy Christian Americans, for some, is a tautology.

Some expats and bloggers in China have argued with me that these are naive and sweet stereotypes, a product of isolation and ignorance, and separate and distinct from Racism™, which is the monstrous creature that burns crosses, enslaves nations and exterminates whole peoples. I cannot accept this argument. Once you are in the habit of placing people into boxes based on something as slight and insubstantial as appearance, it is merely a matter of changing the label on the box from "silly foreigner" to "inhuman enemy". I am not so quick as to embrace terrified imaginings of a near future in which tens of millions of sexually frustrated, xenophobic Chinese men invade Everything, but I recognize the backdrop that makes such a suggestion imaginable.

Mind you, if I were black in China, I might apply the word "infamous" rather than "famous". It's been no secret to those of us living in China that people of different races are painted with a brush as broad as Yunnan, and the recent round-up of black people in Beijing is par for the course. Likewise, other racial categories, including even Southeast Asian Chinese, are further down the totem pole. I've witnessed Chinese businesspeople say they will hire a Filipino because they are cheaper. Skills are irrelevant; your market value is determined by ethnicity. As a white man in China, I feel more self-consciously privileged than I ever have before in my life, and simultaneously never felt so discriminated against, objectified. In a strange way, it has been a good thing for me - I don't think I would be as aware or sensitive to how race is perceived, around the world, if I had only lived in the U.S.. Indeed, recent hysteria over China confirms this belief.

This tendency to define people in groupings like this is not strictly Chinese but all too human. To apply attributes to individual actors because of their membership in an ethnic group or nation, denying their individual choices or self-definition, is something I now prickle at when coming from my own country as well, as toy recalls invoke the dangers of "The Chinese", as opposed to the dangers of long supply chains and merciless price competition. It's interesting to read about the newly released Darjeeling Limited, Wes Anderson's movie about three well-heeled American brothers touring in India, and how it casually depicts Indians as essentially exotic props.

I find myself wanting to follow a sort of code of radical individualism, resisting the application of broad categories or stereotypes as shortcuts to familiarity with people I encounter. But it's damned hard - after all, it can become progressively harder not to stereotype a Chinese stranger who stops me on the street as someone who will stereotype me, becoming a negative feedback loop of stereotyping and distrust.

Like Mr. Fry, I would like people to stop coming up to me in supermarkets because of my face. But I don't think they will.

Cai Guo Qiang: From Quanzhou to the Guggenheim (and back)

I'm planning on blogging with more of a focus on where I live, Quanzhou, Fujian. I have not come up with a catchy title yet for this, like "QZ Bang" or "That's Quanzhou". Suggestions welcome.

Cai Guo Qiang is pretty hot stuff in the world of contemporary art. He's getting a retrospective at the Guggenheim, which pretty much confirms he's ascended and his stuff is ludicrously expensive. The retrospective will be from February to May 2008, after which it'll be at the National Museum in Beijing during the Olympics, and then on to Tokyo and the Bilbao. So he's doing alright. Cai lives where I grew up and I live where he grew up - New York and Quanzhou, Quanzhou and New York. Haven't run into him yet, but I imagine I might if I stick around, since the New York Sun mentions "Mr. Cai also has a hand in China's current museum-building boom, collaborating with the architect Norman Foster to build a museum in his hometown of Quanzhou."

And behold, Norman Foster and Cai hangin' out with the local attraction "Giant Lao Zi Statue". Foster and Partners is also responsible for the new Beijing Airport, London City Hall, the Reichstag... big time stuff. Cai's site says the Quanzhou Museum of Contemporary Art will open in 2009, though local friends say it might be more like a private gallery. Cai is still not beloved in China because of his replicas of the "Rent Collection Courtyard" sculptures (created by the Sichuan Art Academy) for the 1999 Venice Biennale. It really pissed off alot of Chinese critics who called him things like a "banana artist" who belonged to the "green card tribe", according to Cai. Legally he stood on firm ground - Chinese courts said that copyright could not be granted to Cultural Revolution era works (which I find really fascinating - anybody know more?).

Cai Guoqiang has kept ties with Quanzhou for a while though. Here's one of his gunpowder works at a local museum. The subject of both the museum and the artwork is quite interesting, especially in light of some other Cai Guoqiang work. I'll blog about it later.

China, Sex With Virgins make Radar's Hype Report

This post is a crude attempt to replace the most-trafficked search word at this site, which for far too long has been "Gong Li's breasts" (worksafe, no worries), driving the administrator to boredom.

Radar Magazine has listed China on its Hype Report, "a ridiculously scientific survey of the most overrated people, pets, politicians and products on the planet." Also included are Posh and Becks, Brad Pitt, Cupcakes, sex with virgins, Keira Knightly and America Ferrera. Congratulations all. Radar, however, seems to be looking to tweak Chen Shuibian:

CHINA, AS AN ECONOMIC THREAT

Those in college during the '80s no doubt remember classmates scrambling to learn Japanese in preparation for the Rising Sun's impending takeover. Well, a funny thing happened on the way to global domination: Japan's economy imploded, and students went back to studying Spanish in preparation for spring break in Cancun. Today, Taipei has replaced Tokyo as the new Asian bogeyman. The Chinese are industrious! They're efficient! They're out for blood! They also have a rapidly aging population, off-the-charts air pollution, and an OTB-style stock market that's grown 200 percent in just 18 months—a bubble waiting to burst. Better short the lead-painted toy futures market while you still can.

I guess Radar supports the One China policy?

Also at Radar: a profile of Cryptome.

From the NYT Archives: The Yellow Peril, 1906

Now that the TimesSelect wall is down, the historical fascinating New York Times archives from 1851-1910 are available for free, though all in PDF. Note to nytimes.com: your "advanced search" sucks. Fix it. This piece seems to be an unintentionally ironic work.

THE YELLOW PERIL.

Author Unknown

August 29, 1906, Wednesday

Mention of the Yellow Peril used to be connected with the vision of vast and armed Oriental hordes moving under the direction of some new Genghis Khan or Tamerlane, and spreading ruin throughout the world. But looked at from the modern point of view, the perilous features of the spectacle seem much modified; in fact, they are winnowed away altogether. Armies, to be sure, are already preparing to come out of that country with their Captains of tens and of hundreds and of chieftains of higher multitudes; but they are to come with instruments and intentions of peace, being the ministers of industry instead of destruction. It will no doubt come about that these armies will be drafted at will, conducted on their missions to the ends of the world, and brought back home again when their work is done and their peaceful campaigns brought to a close. They will bring their savings with them, and that will make them property owners and employers of labor all the rest of their lives. Handling these forces of labor on a great scale is a new business, but there is no great difficulty learning it.

The regulations prescribed for the Panamanian contractors to supply Chinese labor for the canal, settling down with precision their obligations to the laborers, to the Republic of Panama, and to the canal organization with this country behind it, seems to cover the ground with justice and good judgment, and may be regarded as the foundation of a code to rule in similar operations hereafter, and gradually shape itself to all their requirements. With a population of 400,000,000, more or less, roughly speaking a third of the inhabitants of the globe, potentialities of labor are locked up there to put a new face on mundane things and usher in the millennial possibilities which time has been dreaming about so long without coming to their realization. One can picture the ancient empire, sending out in processions its yellow hosts generation after generation and age after age, leaving giant monuments of labor on their track, instead of the brand and ravage of war which the politicians have thought now and then that they discerned alarming prospects of. Possibly in the industrial achievements of this age the organization and handling of Chinese labor, bringing it to bear on the right spots at the right time, and sending its armies home when their work is done, with a record of benefits and on both sides, no permanent infiltration of unwelcome Chinks into our society, and everybody satisfied, will stand as one of the greatest on the record. What we may call the Panamanian-Chinese Code, or the beginning of one, is likely to rank in the aftertime as an institute of high and permanent importance, its regulative prescriptions beneficently influential century after century and from end to end of the world. Moving and returning armies of labor outnumbering the legions of Rome and carrying the spade further than the latter ever carried the pilum, is probably the true solution of China's problem, not obscuring the yellow note in it, but taking away all peril which in the surmise of a timorous diplomacy used to be braided in with it.

The Return of Fu Manchu - Chapter Two: Poison Pajamas!

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.

Piracy in China: Trent Reznor 1, Howard French 0

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.

China E-Books

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.

The Return of Fu Manchu - Chapter 1.5: Hackers and Spies

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.

The Return of Fu Manchu - Chapter One: Heinous Hackers

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?

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*Further down, the Times mentions "a [hacking] competition held [by the PLA] two years ago in Sichuan. The winner now uses a cyber nom de guerre, Wicked Rose. He went on to set up a hacking business that penetrated computers at a defence contractor for US aerospace.

I baidu'ed around for hackers named something like Wicked Rose, and couldn't find one. But I did find, oddly enough, Withered Rose (凋凌玫瑰), who lives in Chengdu, has a hacking business, and is the right age (23). Did the Times source have a lisp???


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Now playing: Golden Earring - Twilight Zone
via FoxyTunes

LOL Fu Manchu: An Upcoming Three Part Series

I'm back, and so is he!

Chapter 1: Heinous Hackers
Chapter 1.5: Hackers and Spies

Chapter 2: Poison Pajamas!

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."