| November 14, 2012 | About Peng Liyuan, wife of Xi Jinping | 無評論 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| November 14, 2012 | What's Next for America? | 無評論 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| November 14, 2012 | There is a more to Huawei’s trouble with Congress than meets t... | 無評論 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| October 16, 2012 | What's Next for House Committee on Intelligence? | 無評論 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| October 16, 2012 | Let a Japanese Professor Explain the East China Sea Dispute | 無評論 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| October 16, 2012 | A Typical Wrong Headed American View of the East China Sea Dis... | 無評論 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| September 12, 2012 | The U.S. Must Avoid the Trap on East China Sea | 無評論 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
About Peng Liyuan, wife of Xi Jinping
by 顧屏山
The first clip of nearly 12 minutes long was produced (with English subtitles) to raise awareness of young children with HIV in China. She starred as the visiting dignitary (ambassador for children with AIDs) to a remote Anhui village with many orphans, shunned by society because they are HIV carriers and in many cases became orphans because their parents died of AIDs. This video was produced in 2006. In this documentary, Ms. Peng held the children, played with them, taught them songs and generally showed what a loving mother can be like to kids that have not experienced much joy in their young lives.
The second clip show she singing in a national day celebration and was filmed in 2011.
The videos showed a warm and selfless human being and that bodes well for China.
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What's Next for America?
by 顧屏山
The US presidential election is finally over. Now comes the hard part: having to deal with reality.
Over six billion dollars had been spent by the two political parties during the long arduous campaign. Almost none of it were used to explain how each candidate propose to solve the really, really hard challenges confronting the next administration.
Both Romney and Obama seemed to lack the confidence that American voters can stomach bad news or be told the harsh reality. Instead each tried to outdo the other in bombastic platitudes, grandiose promises and deceptive innuendos.
Now the American public will hold their collective breath (and nose) to see if Obama and the Congress can hammer out a solution that will keep the economy from going over the fiscal cliff. The campaign gave no hint on how that will be done.
The candidates always conclude their speeches with "God bless America." Whether God will or not, it seems to me, will depend on attributes heretofore rarely sighted in Washington: statesmanship and bipartisanship.
There is a more to Huawei’s trouble with Congress than meets the eye
by 顧屏山
Huawei’s debacle with US Congress raises troubling questions at many levels. Huawei will be paying a heavy price for a colossal failure to communicate across the two cultures, but this story is more than about just one company.
Huawei initiated the dialogue by inviting a Congressional investigation of its company operations. The House Select Committee on Intelligence responded but did not give Huawei officials the desired endorsement. Instead, the House Committee specifically recommends that the US government and private sector entities do no business with Huawei on the ground that their equipment constitutes a national security risk--a devastating hit on Huawei’s reputation that could hurt Huawei’s business around the world.
Based on the company’s past engagements in the US market, Huawei should have anticipated a hostile reception. Its past attempts to make a minority investment in a floundering 3Com and an acquisition of a relative start-up were stymied by the US government as a perceived threat to the US national security.
The company is said to have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on consultants and Washington lobbyists to help Huawei deal with the Congressional committee. Apparently these advisors did not appreciate the rather formidable built-in bias Huawei needed to overcome. Drawing from their investigative report, it is clear that the Committee began on the presumption that Huawei represents a real threat to national security. Nothing in the eleven-month investigation changed their minds.
Just the mere possibility that cyber espionage can take place via Huawei equipment was enough to brand Huawei a risk to national security. To overcome the bias, Huawei would have had to prove that Huawei equipment could never host cyber attack against the US, obviously not a stand Huawei could take credibly.
By way of mitigating the Committee’s concern, Huawei offered to have all their equipment thoroughly tested and certified by an independent laboratory before the equipment could be introduced into the US market similar to the arrangement accepted by the government of Great Britain. The Congressional Committee rejected Huawei’s proposal for the following reasons: (1) The US market is too large for any testing to be sufficiently comprehensive. (2) The testing only applies to the configuration being tested but the configuration could be altered subsequently during installation or later upgrades. (3) Such a certification can even encourage a false sense of security and reduced vigilance. In other words, there was no way for Huawei.
The Committee asked Huawei to provide information on their contracts, pricing practice for their products and services and scope of their operations and, recognizing the sensitive nature of the information being sought, offered to receive such information under a confidentiality agreement. Apparently, Huawei did not have the confidence that Congress could keep information confidential and refused to comply. Thus the Committee concluded that Huawei might be selling “at least some of its products in the United States below the costs of production,”--a huge leap indeed based on information the Committee did not get.
The Huawei officials also failed to established empathy with the House Committee—to put it mildly. Given a Congressional body with no understanding of China or at least none that they would admit to, empathy may have been too much to aspire. The Committee could not even make a distinction between state owned enterprises (SOEs) and privately owned ones. Somehow in their minds, a large successful private enterprise must be connected to the Chinese government, and a sinister connection at that.
They insisted on wanting to know about how Ren Zhengfei, Huawei’s founder, was able to leave his SOE employer to start his own company, as if that was unheard of, while actually in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, people in China were leaving SOEs in droves. How was Ren invited to attend the 12th National Congress, the Committee asked? Huawei’s answer should have been: Jiang Zemin began to recognize the important role of entrepreneurs in China’s economy and selectively honored them by inviting some to the national confab.
The House Committee’s conclusion on Huawei, as its report readily admitted, was based on hypotheticals and not on specific illegal acts committed by the company. The hypotheticals are easy to conjure. However, the only known successful cyber attack the world knows for certain is the deployment of American made Stuxnet worm on the Iranian centrifuges. Certainly Americans have the bona fides to imagine how cyber attacks can be done.
The Internet is populated with screaming accusations from network security consultants—undoubtedly looking for work—pointing to China as the source of rampant cyber attacks, thus providing cover for Congressional paranoia. The Committee does claim to have smoking guns describing Huawei wrongdoings but these are classified and not available to the public.
In a way, this is reminiscent of the Cox Committee’s investigation in the late 1990’s on the alleged espionage activities of Chinese in America. The unclassified part of the Cox Committee report painted a lurid picture of Chinese espionage running amuck in America. Tens of thousand storefronts in America registered to Chinese entities were cells and every ethnic Chinese was a potential spy for China. The Cox Committee also assured the public that they had smoking guns though consigned to the classified section of the report and not available to the public.
By now the smoke from the Cox Report has largely dissipated and the only concrete result was the arrest of Los Alamos scientist, Dr. Wen Ho Lee. He spent nine months in solitary confinement before the presiding judge apologized to Lee and threw out the case. The legacy of the hysteria created by the Cox Committee investigation is a lingering suspicion of the loyalty of Chinese Americans and the erosion of the idea that US Congress behaves honorably.
Sadly, politicians have continued to find profit in taking pot shots at China. The incumbent President Obama, a Nobel Peace laureate no less, proclaimed a military pivot to Asia, and thus encouraging conflict in the waters around China, to show that he is not soft on China. His opponent, Romney, promises to declare a trade war against China on the day he takes office—if elected. Members of Congress regularly take the floor to blame China for all the economic woes in America. None of the American leaders of any stature have spoken about the importance of getting along with China.
Bashing China has no apparent down side for American politicians unless and until the bilateral relations between the two most powerful nations spiral out of control leading to tragic consequences. The challenge for the incoming leaders of Beijing is to strike a balance between being more transparent to ameliorate American feelings and reassuring its own constituents that China’s sovereignty is not being compromised by American demands. It will be up to the American people to punish mindless China bashing by voting the offenders out of the office and encourage leaders that recognize the importance of promoting mutual trust between the two nations.
What’s at stake is the future peace and prosperity of the world depending on China and the US getting along without rancor.
What's Next for House Committee on Intelligence?
by 顧屏山
Fresh from their head-line grabbing investigation of Chinese Telecommunications companies Huawei and ZTE, Chairman Mike Rogers and Ranking Member C.A. Ruppersberger of House Select Committee on Intelligence (the spy kind and not related to IQ kind) announced that the Committee will next investigate how the Chinese acquisition of AMC Theaters will adversely affect national security.
AMC is the second largest chain of cinema theaters in North America with over 5300 screens. Each screen is a potential conduit for messages to corrupt our American youth, Chairman Rogers said.
Studies have shown that flashing subliminal messages at the moviegoers in between frames can induce involuntary purchase of soda pop and junk food. The Committee intends to ask Dalian Wanda, the acquirer, if the company intends to insidiously suggest to the American audience to gorge on chop suey.
The Committee also intends to ask Dalian Wanda as to its connection to the Chinese government and the PLA. Given that the company is based in the city where Bo Xilai was once mayor, we can presume the company has unsavory intentions and the Committee intends to find out what that is.
Dalian Wanda might offer to let an independent third party vet all the prospective projectionists before they are hired but that proposal will be rejected by the Committee. It will be too easy for the Chinese owner to slip in secret agents while the operating projectionists go on bathroom breaks and insert messages that turn the minds of American youth into mush. (Thanks to video games from Japan, the minds of American young people are already in a fragile state but that's a topic for another investigation.)
Chairman Rogers regrets that he did not initiate similar investigations when Wanxiang began to acquire auto parts companies in the US, including many in his home state of Michigan. Now Wanxiang USA is probably too big to tackle.
While the acquisitions saved many of those companies from going out of business and thus kept many employed, there is no telling what dastardly deeds that can be done to undermine the security of the US. For instance, spare auto parts could be manipulated to fail when put into American made cars and thus give Chinese cars an unfair economic advantage.
Sensors on the auto parts can be designed to send sensitive intelligence (the spy kind, not the smarts kind) back to Beijing and we wouldn’t even know it. For instance, the sensor could be telling Beijing that certain Senator is not at the office but his car is parked in his mistress’s garage.
As investigations by the Cox Committee have proven a decade or so earlier, every entity from China registered in the US is spying on us. If we begin on the presumption that the Chinese are up to no good, we will be able to sleep better at nights.
The House Select Committee on Intelligence (the spy kind not related to intelligence) intends to safeguard our national security. We stand on the premise that we don’t want the Chinese here and we don’t want Chinese investments here. They can take their American dollars and invest elsewhere.
Let a Japanese Professor Explain the East China Sea Dispute
by 顧屏山
A Typical Wrong Headed American View of the East China Sea Dispute
by 顧屏山
According to the terms of unconditional surrender demanded by the leaders of the Allies and accepted by Japan to end WWII, Japan gave up any claims to the islands in dispute with China, Korea and Russia. Korea and Russia took possession but China was not allowed to do so by the US because of an altered geopolitical landscape after the War.
In 1972, when the US returned administrative control of Okinawa to Japan, which was already contrary to the terms of surrender, the US compounded the wrong by including Diaoyu/Senkaku islands as part of the package. Whether this was done deliberately or not is a debate for another occasion, but the US must accept responsibility for causing the lingering dispute.
If it was in the US national interest to overlook Japan's lot as the defeated nation then, surely it is in our national interest to reconsider what's good for America now. I believe what's right and good for America is to acknowledge and retract a mistake that was made then and that the US will not side with Japan on this issue now. Once that declaration has been made, I am convinced that the tension will die down quickly.
The U.S. Must Avoid the Trap on East China Sea
by 顧屏山
Recently a strange “issue advocacy ad” appeared in the Wall Street Journal paid for by the Tokyo Metropolitan government. The gist of the ad is to tell the American people that the Tokyo government intends to purchase certain islands in East China Sea and is seeking American “understanding and support.”
The islands in question are ostensibly to be purchased from some private Japanese owner so one would wonder why American support is worthy of such attention-grabbing ploy. It turns out that there is a lot more to this story than meets the eye and the person orchestrating this scheme is none other than Shintaro Ishihara, the governor of Tokyo.
Ishihara is a rabid right-wing nationalist previously known for giving America the middle finger salute in the ‘80s when he wrote the book, The Japan that Can Say No. He is despised by China and other Asian nations for prominently denying that the Nanjing Massacre and other WWII atrocities were ever committed by the Japanese imperial troops.
The string of islands Ishihara wants to buy are located north of Taiwan, referred to as Senkaku by the people in Japan and as Diaoyu by the people in China, Taiwan and the Chinese diaspora over the world. These islands are geologically connected to Taiwan and separate from the geological formation that makes up the Ryukyu (or Okinawan) island chain.
Japan claimed possession of the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands since 1894 when the islands were made part of the Okinawa prefecture. But China had, since the 14th century, administered the islands as a part of Taiwan. These islands were ceded to Japan along with Taiwan in 1895 when the Qing forces lost the war with Japan.
At the end of WWII, according to the agreement struck by the leaders of the victorious Allies, Taiwan was returned to China and these islands should have been included. But for strategic reasons, the U.S. held onto these islands until 1972, at which time, the US handed these islands to Japan along with the Okinawan chain of islands.
There was no historical or geological justification for the regrettable American action. Instead, the action has directly led to the festering dispute between China and Taiwan on the one side and Japan on the other. Ishihara exploited this bone of contention to embarrass his own national government and raise the tension between China and Japan. The ad in the Wall Street Journal was his attempt to enlarge the dispute and bring the US into the boil.
Indeed, Ishihara has raised the temperature of the confrontation between the foreign affair ministries of China and Japan. Japan has had to recall its ambassador to Beijing and change to one less sympathetic to China. Cities in China raged with citizen protests, in some cases overturning Japanese branded police cars and smashing Japanese storefronts. Among the greater China, messages condemning Japan filled the Internet.
A group of activists from Hong Kong recently braved stormy seas to land at one of the islands to plant a flag of China. Their subsequent arrest by the Japanese coast guard was followed by immediate demand for release by the Beijing and Hong Kong governments. Prompt release without formal charges by Japan was then met with vocal disapproval from the Ishihara followers.
The American public needs to know that the Chinese reaction on these islands, whether from China, Taiwan or the diaspora around the world, is deeply rooted from a half century of humiliation suffered at the hands of Japanese imperialism. Since Japan has never formally apologized for the many atrocities committed by their imperial troops, the Chinese people cannot forget.
The squabble may seem trivial to the American policymakers but it is a tremendously emotional one for the Chinese people. Time and again it has been shown that it does not take much for the Chinese to react viscerally to any provocation instigated by Japan. There have been incidents of high seas chicken between fishing boats from China and Taiwan versus the coast guard cutters from Japan, each accusing the other for initiating the hostile bump and run. The incendiary nature of these incidents can quickly get out of hand, escalate into shooting conflicts and rage out of the control of either government.
The US State Department is aware of the sensitivity surrounding the islands but is playing the role of strategic ambiguity badly. The islands should never have been handed to Japan administratively. To this date, State Department spokesperson has to awkwardly demur when asked if the US security pact with Japan includes these uninhabited islands and avoid publicly stating as to which country is the rightful owner.
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