China

Taking the easy way out when it comes to China

Here's a headline you could have found crossing the news wires any time in the last decade: "Pentagon worried, China upgrading cyberwarfare capabilities."

But now Uncle Sam is really starting to fret. A new Pentagon report to Congress on the state of China's military (PDF) describes the People's Liberation Army as being on a march to acquire a more potent information technology-fighting capacity.

Looking more than a decade over the horizon, the Pentagon expects China to try to gain expertise that would allow it to strike foreign communications and logistics nodes, as well as financial … Read more

China Mobile CEO still interested in iPhone

China Mobile CEO Wang Jianzhou said he will "keep all options open" on the introduction of the iPhone in China, Paul Midler reports.

In January, a China Mobile executive announced that talks had broken off over Apple's desire for control. Now, Wang says talks have not "officially" begun.

China Mobile is the largest mobile provider in China, a market that is projected to reach $2.8 billion by 2010, and urban China is by no means a no-iPhone zone. Apple develops more advanced locking techniques at roughly the same rate unlocking techniques make their debut … Read more

Beijing entrepreneurs introduce cleaner coal furnaces

Coal is burned most days in my neighborhood in central Beijing. Even the newer electric heaters installed this year didn't stop my neighbors from cooking and keeping warm with smoke-spewing briquettes. Coal is a fact of life. But some businesspeople are marketing boilers that make the best of coal by burning it in a cleaner way, reports Feng Yongfeng of the Guangming Daily in a story republished at China Dialogue.

One such technology was developed by the Beijing Xiongcai Group, whose chairman, Wang Yongjiang, explains:

"Normally coal is burned from underneath," he explains, "but our boilers … Read more

Chinese music industry group sues Baidu over infringement

Baidu.com, the top Chinese search engine, gets lots of its traffic from a service that tracks and links to MP3s, most of which are illegally posted. Now a Chinese music industry group is suing the site over alleged copyright violation.

The AP reports:

Music Copyright Society official Qu Jingming said in a statement posted on the society's Web site Friday that Baidu.com provided "music listening, broadcasting and downloading services in various forms on its Web site without approval, and through unfettered piracy, earning huge advertising revenue on its huge number of hits."

The copyright society … Read more

China and U.S. to open military hotline ... and then what?

When most people think of military hotlines, it is safe to say, the Cold War movie images of a red telephone sitting at the ready in the White House and the Kremlin still dominates. As China and the United States move to set up a line between militaries, the real question is: how is a hotline technically different from a telephone?

News reports refer to a "direct dial" telephone between military establishments. Are we talking here about a dedicated line? Does the telephone use regular undersea cables? Is there a military satellite link being used for this purpose? … Read more

Growing open source in the land of pirates

Despite its myriad of other benefits, one of the primary reasons open source has spread so far so fast has been its price tag. $0.00.

As Mozilla is finding out in China, however, "free" as in price has less relevance to a market accustomed to software piracy. Firefox is looking to more than double its market share from 2 percent of the Chinese market to 5 percent in 2008. Its price ($0) is not helping it.

What is Mozilla to do?… Read more

Yahoo sued by Chinese dissidents again

Yahoo faces another lawsuit over its actions in China. Several Chinese men are suing the company and its Hong Kong subsidiary claiming they were harmed because of Yahoo's cooperation with the Chinese government.

The lawsuit filed last week in federal court in Oakland, Calif., alleges that Yahoo provided information to the Chinese authorities that led to the 2003 arrest of Li Zhi, who has served about half of an eight-year sentence. However, Li is not named as a plaintiff in the lawsuit.

Plaintiff Zheng Cunzhu alleges that when the arrest came to light in 2006, he was living in … Read more

Bill Gates, on Yahoo's trail, says China's online restrictions won't succeed

Microsoft is not a beacon of free expression in the face of China's government restrictions on online speech. But in a talk at Stanford, he said no one can control free expression on the web.

"I don't see any risk in the world at large that someone will restrict free content flow on the Internet," Gates said, according to IDC news service. "You cannot control the Internet."

As the article notes, Microsoft has been complicit in Chinese censorship. In the most high-profile case, the company shut down a blog by Michael Anti, a blogger … Read more

Yang asks U.S. to seek release of jailed Chinese writers

Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang is asking U.S. officials to secure the release of political dissidents jailed for using the Internet to share information about life in China.

Several of the dissidents were imprisoned with 10-year sentences after Yahoo provided to the Chinese government evidence from the mens' Yahoo accounts.

In a letter sent Thursday to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Yang writes: "I believe it is essential for our government--led by the State Department--to actively pursue the release of Shi Tao, Wang Xiaoning and other Chinese dissidents who have been imprisoned for exercising internationally recognized rights of … Read more