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THE RISING SEA DRAGON IN ASIA - 2012 UPDATE (Click on any of the following images for a larger picture) 2011 has seen significant increases in major combatant shipbuilding by the PLAN across the board. From the PLA Navy's first carrier being launched and in trials, to continued testing and production of J-15 Fighters for that carrier's airwing, to the increased tempo of serial production for the PLAN's Type 071 LPD, the Yuzhao Class (with a second and third unit launched and a fourth being built), to increased serial production of the PLAN's premier stealthy, area-wide anti-air/multipurpose destroyer, the...

WASHINGTON—A former research scientist was sentenced late yesterday to 60 months in prison for stealing trade secrets from Dow Chemical Company and selling them to companies in the People’s Republic of China, as well as committing perjury, announced Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division and U.S. Attorney Donald J. Cazayoux Jr. for the Middle District of Louisiana. U.S. District Court Judge James J. Brady also sentenced Wen Chyu Liu, aka David W. Liou, 75, of Houston, to two years of supervised release and ordered him to forfeit $600,000 and pay a $25,000 fine. A...

<p>Los Angeles police said a protester apparently fired shots at a security guard outside the Chinese Consulate on Thursday afternoon, missing his target and hitting a building in the compound instead.</p> <p>There were no initial reports of injury, though details were still developing.</p>

CAIN’S VISION FOR FOREIGN POLICY & NATIONAL SECURITY The Americas Mexico: Friend and Partner Mexico is a friend in need. Our southern neighbor is struggling with drug-related violence that has claimed an estimated 40,000 lives over the past several years. By standing with Mexico now to help it solve its increasingly severe economic and security problems, we will help solve the problem of illegal immigration at home. Some 40% of Mexicans believe Mexico is a failed state. This helps explain why so many are seeking to emigrate. With declining oil reserves, a looming water shortage in Mexico City, and youth...

Will work for national honor. We don’t know if the Chinese stonemasons who built the new Martin Luther King memorial got the job by shoving a sign bearing that message into the faces of its overseers. We know only that unpaid, nonunion, foreign nationals built the massive shrine on the Mall. They toiled for “national honor” and “to bring glory to the Chinese people,” one of them explained to an investigator hired by the DC-area stonemasons promised the job. Happy Labor Day! Martin Luther King died in Memphis supporting a strike by the city’s garbagemen. So it’s not a stretch...

In what would be the biggest ever sale price for a Major League Baseball team, Chinese investors have put in a $1.2 billion bid for Frank McCourt’s Los Angeles Dodgers, according to the Los Angeles Times. The bid is headed by Los Angeles Marathon founder Bill Burke and funded in part by unidentified Chinese state-owned investment institutions and others.

...Although the PLA is contending with a growing array of missions, Taiwan remains its main strategic direction.China continued modernizing its military in 2010, with a focus on Taiwan contingencies, even as cross-Strait relations improved. The PLA seeks the capability to deter Taiwan independence and influence Taiwan to settle the dispute on Beijing’s terms. In pursuit of this objective, Beijing is developing capabilities intended to deter, delay, or deny possible U.S. support for the island in the event of conflict. The balance of cross-Strait military forces and capabilities continues to shift in the mainland’s favor. Over the past decade, China’s military...

http://internet-haganah.com/harchives/007413.html "Whither the jihadi forums?" SNIPPET: "There are currently only three jihadi forums that are sufficiently active and well-connected to be of any interest whatsoever. Why we claim to be on the verge of defeating al-Qaida while simultaneously watching passively as they use these forums to regroup and regenerate is beyond me. These are the forums three: • al-Fidaa, a forum created by al-Qaida core. That it is directly linked to al-Qaida by definition moves it to the top of the list. Current membership: 2,462, all of whom can be considered "active" if only because they just joined the forum....

The IDF attacked terror targets in Rafah in the Gaza Strip on Thursday, in response to a three-stage terrorist attack which killed seven Israelis and wounded dozens in the South earlier in the day. Five Palestinians were killed in the joint IDF and Shin Bet strike. Among those killed was the chief of the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC), Kamal al-Nairab. The four others that were killed were also members of the terrorist faction . Security sources said that the PRC was behind Thursday's triple attack near Eilat. They added that the operatives had crossed from the Gaza Strip into Egypt...

TOKYO (Reuters) – Vast deposits of rare earth minerals, crucial in making high-tech electronics products, have been found on the floor of the Pacific Ocean and can be readily extracted, Japanese scientists said on Monday.

NOTE The following snippet is a quote: losangeles.fbi.gov/dojpressrel/pressrel11/la050911.htm Southern California Man Sentenced to 25 Years in Prison for Convictions in Smuggling Schemes, Including Plot to Bring Surface-to-Air Missiles Into United States LOS ANGELES—A Southern California man was sentenced this morning to 25 years in federal prison after being convicted on a series of federal charges related to schemes to smuggle many items into the United States, including surface-to-air missiles designed to shoot down aircraft. Yi Qing Chen, 49, of Rosemead, California, received the 300-month sentence from United States District Judge Dale S. Fischer. Last October, following a two-week trial, a...

Chinese President Hu Jintao had an embarrassing moment in mid-January when his military flight-tested a new tactical aircraft during a visit by U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Several features of the plane looked remarkably similar to America’s top-of-the-line F-22 fighter, and yet somehow leaders of the People’s Liberation Army air force managed to not mention to Hu that the test was happening. So the Chinese leader ended up learning about it from Gates. The episode suggested that although Hu is formally in charge of the Chinese military, he doesn’t know what it is doing much of the time

For nearly ten years, I have been arguing that China may well be the first example of a mature fascism in power. The highest praise imaginable has been bestowed on this theory, by the People’s Republic itself. When I published an updated version of my theory (first published in the Wall Street Journal in 2002 and reprised in different form in NRO thereafter) in the Far East Economic Review in May, 2008, the entire issue was banned in China. On the occasion of Mr. Hu’s visit to Washington, it seems appropriate to revisit this theme, which seems to me to...

Chinese troops in Bhutan raising concernBy UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL Published December 28, 2005 NEW DELHI -- The presence of Chinese soldiers in Bhutan has set off alarm bells in Thimphu and New Delhi.          Chinese soldiers are building roads and bridges deep inside Bhutan, The Hindustan Times newspaper said Wednesday. More than 200 Chinese troops crossed into Bhutan in mid-November.          "Relations between the two countries have been on the edge since then," said the report.          Bhutanese Foreign Minister Khandu Wangchuk took up the matter with Chinese authorities after the issue was raised in Bhutanese parliament.          "They (Chinese) told them (Bhutanese)...

Kathmandu: Thousands of Tibetan children and their families face stiff punishment at the hands of the Chinese government for enrolling into schools in India that are run by the Tibetan government in exile, headed by their spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, a rights body said. The Washington-headquartered International Campaign for Tibet (ICT) has expressed its misgivings as the ultimatum issued by the Communist Party of China authorities to the Tibetan Party and government workers expired last week. In July, Communist Party authorities in the Tibet Autonomous Region had issued a directive stating that Tibetan children must confess if they have...

China has officially admitted for the first time that it has embarked on an aircraft carrier building program, part of a grand strategy to "build itself up as a maritime power." A report published by the State Oceanic Administration says the country's leaders decided last year to back plans to build China's first aircraft carrier. The Chinese government and military had kept the program under wraps until now. The annual national ocean development report says that asserting China's power at sea is "indispensible to accomplishing the great resurgence of the Chinese people." Chinese military sources said initial plans had called...

The hottest market in the hottest economy in the world is Chinese real estate. The big question is how vulnerable is this market to a crash. One red flag is the vast number of vacant homes spread through China, by some estimates up to 64 million vacant homes. We've tracked down satellite photos of these unnerving places, based on a report from Forensic Asia Limited. They call it a clear sign of a bubble: "There’s city after city full of empty streets and vast government buildings, some in the most inhospitable locations. Click here to see the ghost towns

Continuing the theme of a newly assertive China, the Congressionally-mandated U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission’s latest report to lawmakers highlights the fact that the previously inward-focused nation is getting serious about offensive operations outside its territory. From the paper’s executive summary: Augmenting its modernization efforts, Beijing has expanded the PLA Air Force’s focus in recent years from solely concentrating on territorial defense operations to now include extraterritorial offensive operations. It goes on to say: As China’s air and missile modernization efforts progress, Beijing’s ability to threaten U.S. forward deployed forces and bases in the region is improving. Any PLA...

China and Turkey have conducted another military exercise.Sources said China has sent army special operations forces for an exercise in Turkey. They said the exercise in early November lasted a week at the commando school in Turkey. "This was an exercise planned nearly a year ago," a Turkish source said. This marked the second major military exercise between China and Turkey in as many months. In October, the two countries, in the first such mission with a NATO member, participated in a combat air exercise called Anatolian Eagle

Nyugen Tan Dung, the Vietnamese prime minister, said Cam Ranh Bay, 180 miles north west of Ho Chi Minh city, would stand ready to service ships and submarines "from all countries". Russia is to help rebuild the port as part of an £1.3 billion defence deal signed earlier this year. The move is one of a series of interlocking regional arrangements that are being put in place to counter China's growing might. In October, Vietnam signed an agreement giving Indian naval ships base facilities at its ports. India, in turn, agreed to help Hanoi expand its naval logistics capabilities, and...

The military dimension of Sino-Russian ties, particularly arms sales, has been deteriorating since 2006-07. While that decline partly reflects the growing prowess of China's defense industrial base, a major part stems from Russia's growing apprehension about China's growing capabilities and anger over its wholesale piracy of Russian weapons' designs and ensuing competition with Russia for third party markets in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The unlicensed copying of military arms has made China a formidable military player and a redoubtable competitor with Russia in emerging defense markets. For instance, Russian experts profess surprise at how fast China has been able...

The news that Turkey and China had organized a joint military exercise at the huge Konya airbase in Turkey's central Anatolian region last month came as a surprise to many. After all, just a year ago, when clashes between Uighur and Han Chinese broke out in China's Xinjiang province in July 2009, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused Chinese authorities of mishandling a situation that he compared to "genocide." What explains such a dramatic improvement in relations between Turkey and China? And how should this military exercise be understood in the context of the current shifts taking place in...

Taiwan is developing a potent missile system that can strike airfields and harbours on the mainland, in a bid to nip a Chinese invasion in the bud, local media said Tuesday. The "Wan Chien" or "Ten Thousand Swords" missile system, which so far has cost nearly three billion Taiwan dollars (97 million US), passed an initial operating test earlier this year, said Defence Technology Monthly. Each missile carries more than 100 cluster bomb warheads capable of blowing dozens of small craters in airport runways, making them impossible to use, the magazine said. The missile is also designed to target harbours,...

China has taken the lead in the supercomputer (the fastest computers on the planet) race, having built a 155 ton system using 7,168 GPUs (Graphic Processing Units, from high end graphic cards) and 14,336 CPUs to achieve peak performance of 2.507 petaflops (a petaflop is one million billion floating point operations per second, otherwise known as FLOPS). Sustained speed is 563 teraflops (one thousand billion). The Chinese Tianhe-1A supercomputer cost $88 million, requires 4.04 magawatts of power and occupies 1,000 square meters (10,764 square feet). Given that China manufactures a growing share of electronic items, and Chinese students have long...

Earlier this month, the State Department learned that debris from the Chinese weather satellite destroyed in their 2007 anti-satellite test would be coming uncomfortably close to another — functioning — Chinese satellite. So, like any good neighbor, State told China about the possibility of a collision. In technical terms, the US shared conjunction analysis with our PRC brethren. But, as often happens with the fabulously opaque Chinese government, the US isn’t sure if China heard us or believed us. At a conference on space debris last week in Germany, a U.S. military officer spoke with someone presumed to be a...

Chinese Type 093 class SSN (nuclear attack sub) was recently seen moored at their new naval base on Hainan island. This base, just north of Vietnam, must make the Indians nervous, because more and more Chinese warships are showing up in the Indian Ocean. It was only a year ago that China confirmed, as many suspected, that the first Type 093 boar entered service in December, 2006. Officially, that was a secret, and Chinese nuclear subs don't go to sea at much, so it's difficult to tell if new ones are actually in service, and not just tied up at...

The air forces of China and Turkey have carried out a joint exercise, the U.S. Defense Department said on Friday, in what appeared to be the first such drill involving Beijing and a NATO member country. Turkey assured the United States it would take the "utmost care" to protect sensitive U.S. and NATO technologies, said U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Tamara Parker, a department spokeswoman. She described Turkey's government as committed to the NATO alliance and the continuation of strong ties to the United States. "To the best of our knowledge, U.S.-made F-16s were not involved in the exercise," Parker said....

Many Western analysts make a huge mistake when commenting on changes inside communist countries. This mistake has huge huge consequences in terms of Western foreign and trade policy and ultimately for the survival of Western civilization itself. The mistake is to assume that because a communist country seems to be adopting capitalist production methods, that this signals a softening on the part of communist leaders and even an eventual abandonment of communism per se. In the 1920s many Westerners claimed that Lenin's New Economic Policy, which allowed some free enterprise to operate signaled the death of communism. For thirty...

The International Institute for Strategic Studies’ Military Balance 2010 report places China third in the number of artillery systems it fields, after Russia and North Korea. But China doubtless exceeds both in resource commitment and breadth of artillery investments. Credited with an estimated 17,700-plus towed, self-propelled and rocket systems, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has at least 56 artillery systems in use, development or available for export. The U.S. Army and Marine Corps, by contrast, have 8,137-plus artillery pieces of roughly 10 types. China has had a mixed record of using artillery for military and political-military goals. Its successes, as...

NOTE The following text is a quote: Chinese National Charged with Economic Espionage Involving Theft of Trade Secrets from Leading Agricultural Company Based in Indianapolis WASHINGTON—Kexue Huang, aka John, 45, has been arrested and charged in a 17-count indictment with economic espionage intended to benefit a foreign government and instrumentalities, and interstate and foreign transportation of stolen property, announced Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer of the Criminal Division and U.S. Attorney Timothy M. Morrison for the Southern District of Indiana. Huang was arrested on July 13, 2010, in Westborough, Massachusetts by FBI agents, and today made his initial appearance...

Security: The Pentagon report warning that Beijing is amassing high-tech missiles leaves out another alarming domestic security issue: massive Chinese spying. Forget about the Russian spy ring the FBI broke up that stole mostly headlines (as opposed to U.S. secrets) for their amateurish methods. This is no joke. These Chinese moles mean business. And they're stealing highly sensitive military secrets. At least 44 of them have been quietly prosecuted in the last two years alone — a figure that dwarfs the number of Russian spies expelled last month. And those are just the ones we've caught. The Chinese agents are...

A former B-2 stealth bomber engineer was found guilty on Monday of selling sensitive military technology to China, the United States Justice Department said in a statement. Noshir Gowadia, 66, was convicted of five offences following trial in a federal court in Hawaii. Gowadia had been accused of passing on design information which would allow cruise missiles to avoid infra-red detection. (Snip) "Mr Gowadia provided some of our country's most sensitive weapons-related designs to the Chinese government for money,"

China will have 2,000 missiles aimed at its rival Taiwan by the end of the year, several hundred more than the current number, despite fast-warming trade ties between the two sides, an island defense study said. Beijing's preparations setting Taiwan further back in the military power balance against its political adversary could destroy 90 percent of the island's infrastructure, the report published in the defense ministry's naval studies periodical said. The increase from today's estimate of 1,000 to 1,400 missiles could raise tensions after two years of upbeat dialogue between the rivals that has cleared the way for direct civilian...

must come from the sea,” said the chief of naval operations, Adm. Gary Roughead, recently about any new U.S. Navy procurement, leaving open to interpretation the programs and projects that will be included in coming budgets. The Navy is “reimagining naval power,” he said. “With cyber-power and unmanned systems we must ask ourselves fundamental questions.” If new capabilities proposed for procurement do not “come from the sea,” Roughead is not interested. The Navy no longer has the luxury of being interested in every new program or platform. The defense budget is getting slimmer. And pressure is coming from above to...

Chinese media reports that beginning today the People’ Liberation Army (PLA) will hold six days of military exercises in the East China Sea, a message, analysts say, to the U.S. Navy not to steam its carrier battle groups too close to Chinese shores. While a Chinese military official said the drills are routine, observers say the anti-carrier exercise is intended to pressure the U.S. Navy not to hold joint exercises with the carrier USS George Washington and South Korean ships in the Yellow Sea. Respected China analyst Andrew Erickson says the live fire training aims to demonstrate China’s ability to...

A report by the Council on Foreign Relations stated last week that China has not signed on to the U.S. goal of denuclearizing the Korean peninsula and its main interest remains support for North Korea as a way to maintain regional stability. Evans Revere, an analyst at the Albright Stonebridge consulting group and member of a CFR task force on U.S. policy toward the Korean peninsula, said China is “very deeply conflicted” on North Korea. “We've seen that played out since March 26th, the sinking of the Cheonan, where the initial Chinese reaction to the sinking of that ship by...

Some military specialists suspect that China's failure to accept the findings of an international panel on the sinking of the South Korean coastal patrol ship in March is related to Beijing's probable foreknowledge of North Korean submarine movements. “I would suspect that either the PRC has on-site knowledge of DPRK submarines from a presence at their base or their own underwater monitoring systems in the Yellow Sea and East China Sea,” said one expert. “If their was the slightest indication of either foreknowledge or complicity it would hurt PRC standing in the international community.” China also has a close relationship...

China says arms sales to Taiwan are the cause of Sino-US defence tensions. But even if they stopped now, ties would be chilly. The poor state of Chinese-US military ties were laid bare earlier this month at a leading Asian security conference. In his June 5 speech to the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates expressed annoyance at the refusal of the government in Beijing to allow him to visit the People’s Republic of China during his trip to Asia. He went on to express regret that the United States and China hadn’t managed to establish a...

Detail by painful detail, the CIA is coming to grips with one of the most devastating episodes in its history, a botched cloak-and-dagger flight into China that stole two decades of freedom from a pair of fresh-faced American operatives and cost the lives of their two pilots. In opening up about the 1952 debacle, the CIA is finding ways to use it as a teaching tool. Mistakes of the past can serve as cautionary tales for today's spies and paramilitary officers taking on al-Qaida and other terrorist targets. At the center of the story are two eager CIA paramilitary officers...

n February, Colonel Meng Xianging promised a “hand-to-hand fight with the U.S.” sometime within the next 10 years “when we’re strong enough.” “We must make them hurt,” said Major-General Yang Yi this year, referring to the United States. And last month, at the Strategic and Economic Dialogue in Beijing, a Chinese flag officer launched a three-minute rant that stunned the 65 or so American officials in the audience. Everything that is right with U.S. relations with China is due to China, said Rear Admiral Guan Youfei. Everything that is wrong is Washington’s fault. According to Guan, the United States sees...

I thought that Russian military official’s slapdown of the Chinese knock off of their Su-33 carried based fighter (Chinese designation J-15) was really interesting. Now, as I mentioned yesterday, this could all just be posturing for the global arms market, a bit of tainting the competition if you will. Or, it could just be public griping over the Chinese stealing intellectual property from Russian aircraft builder Sukhoi. But then again, there is not much of a global market for carrier based fighters. Also, what the Russian official said about shortcomings in China’s aerospace industry resonates with what I’ve seen from...

NOTE The following text is a quote: www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/message-president-regarding-lightscanner-32-system Home • Briefing Room • Statements & Releases The White House Office of the Press Secretary For Immediate Release June 09, 2010 Message from the President Regarding the LightScanner 32 System TO THE CONGRESS ON THE UNITED STATES: Pursuant to the authority vested in me by section 902(b)(2) of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act, Fiscal Years 1990 and 1991 (Public Law 101-246)(the "Act"), and as President of the United States, I hereby report to the Congress that it is in the national interest of the United States to terminate the suspensions under...

China Sold Nuclear Missiles to Saudi Arabia, Ex-CIA Officer Claims Tuesday, June 8, 2010 An ex-CIA analyst who oversaw intelligence dispatches on Saudi Arabia has asserted in a new self-published book that China provided the Middle Eastern nation with nuclear-capable ballistic missiles during the early years of the Bush administration, the Washington Post reported yesterday (see GSN, Aug. 24, 2009). "I believe the People’s Republic of China delivered a turn-key nuclear ballistic missile system to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia over the course of several years beginning no later than December 2003," asserted Jonathan Scherck in his book "Patriot Lost,"...

China's rapid development of ballistic and cruise missile forces is altering the balance of power in Asia and threatens U.S. forces in a conflict over Taiwan and beyond, according to a forthcoming report. "Driven in large measure by a Taiwan scenario, China's capacity to conduct a successful aerospace campaign to quickly gain a decisive advantage in the air is growing faster than the defenses that its neighbors, including Taiwan, Japan, perhaps India, and even U.S. forces operating in the Western Pacific, can field," stated the report by the Project 2049 Institute, a private research institute, that highlighted "significant advances" in...

SNIPPET: "Israel Air Force jets attacked three tunnels in the Gaza Strip in a joint Israel Defense Forces and Shin Bet operation on Thursday night, several hours after a Qassam rocket hit the Ashkelon Coast Regional Council. Two of the targets attacked were in the southern Strip and one was in the northern Strip. According to the IDF, terrorists were using the tunnels to try to infiltrate Israel. The IDF Spokesperson's Office said the tunnels were located about 1 kilometer (0.62 miles) from the border fence and that the targets were hit. There have been no reports of injuries among...

Taiwan's former security chief has confirmed for the first time that Taipei and Beijing used secret communications channels from 2008 as they worked to thaw glacial ties, it was reported Sunday. Su Chi, who was chief of the National Security Council until earlier this year, said in an interview with the Taipei-based United Daily News that the sensitive channels helped build trust between the longtime foes. He said the National Security Council did not talk directly to authorities on the mainland, but declined to provide details of the secret channels. "In my office, there were no hotlines. I did not...

The other day we linked to a piece by a Navy commander warning of increasingly activist Chinese naval exercises in recent months. IISS has a new brief providing useful detail on a number of recent Chinese sorties into the South China Sea. Two exercises in March and April were the first of any real size beyond the First Island Chain, and “indicated that deployments beyond the chain were now official policy,” says London based IISS. The flotillas contained the PLA’s most advanced warships, of Russian manufacture (Kilo class diesel electric subs and Sovremenny class destroyers). In March and April a...

Following his return from a May 3-7 visit to the People’s Republic of China, North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il affirmed his government’s willingness to respect his hosts’ desires and resume participation in the Six-Party Talks on denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula at an appropriate time. The talks have remained suspended following an upsurge in tensions last April, when the UN Security Council imposed additional sanctions on the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea after North Korea launched a ballistic missile under the guise of testing space rockets. Pyongyang responded defiantly by withdrawing from the talks and then testing another nuclear weapon, the...

China's decision to roll out a glitzy welcome mat for the North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il has stunned and shocked South Korea's leaders, ignoring South Korea's anger over the sinking, undoubtedly by the north, of a South Korean navy patrol ship on March 26 with the loss of 46 lives. South Korean President Lee Myung-bak was not given any hint from his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao at a Shanghai summit meeting, hardly a week ago on May 1, that Kim was on his way to Beijing. It was on May 2 that the 68-year-old North Korean leader's clandestine visit initially...

former Chinese general has used state media to propagate Beijing's position that its nuclear buildup is defensive rather than offensive in nature. Retired PLA Maj. Gen. Xu Guangyu wrote in the official military newspaper PLA Daily last week that China’s nuclear strategy includes developing weapons to carry out a second-strike following a nuclear attack. "Anyone who says that China's nuclear strategy poses a threat to surrounding countries is misunderstanding (China's intentions) or misleading (others), or even has ulterior motives," Xu wrote, adding that the nuclear strategy is one of deterrence and without threat. “China resolutely adheres to a defensive nuclear...