A 60-mile traffic jam near the Chinese capital could last until mid-September, officials say.
Traffic has been snarled along the outskirts of Beijing and is stretching toward the border of Inner Mongolia ever since roadwork on the Beijing-Tibet Highway started Aug. 13. The following week, parts of a major road circling Beijing were closed, further tightening overburdened roadways.
As the jam on the highway, also known as National Highway 110, passed the 10-day mark Tuesday, local authorities dispatched hundreds of police to keep order and to reroute cars and trucks carrying essential supplies, such as food or flammables, around the main bottleneck. There, vehicles were inching along little more than a third of a mile a day. Zhang Minghai, director of Zhangjiakou city’s Traffic Management Bureau general office, said in a telephone interview he didn’t expect the situation to return to normal until around Sept. 17 when road construction is scheduled to be finished and traffic lanes will open up.
Villagers along Highway 110 took advantage of the jam, selling drivers packets of instant noodles from roadside stands and, when traffic was at a standstill, moving between trucks and cars to hawk their wares.
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Traffic jam in China could last weeks
China may shield North Korea
Bloomberg, “China May Shield North Korea as Lee, U.S. Seek Action”
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao is likely to resist pressure to acknowledge that North Korea torpedoed a South Korean warship when he flies to Seoul tomorrow to meet President Lee Myung Bak and Japan’s Yukio Hatoyama.
China hasn’t followed South Korea, Japan and the U.S. in blaming North Korea for the March 26 sinking of the Cheonan, which killed 46 sailors. Vice Foreign Minister Zhang Zhijun yesterday repeated a call for “restraint” by both sides and said China had no “firsthand information” on the sinking.
China wants to avoid a conflict on the Korean peninsula, and is concerned that taking South Korea’s side may provoke North Korea into further escalations and even lead to war, said Shen Dingli, vice dean of the Institute of International Affairs at Shanghai’s Fudan University.
Bloomberg article continues here.
Communist China has problems with America’s “human rights” violations
Yahoo! News (AP), “No breakthroughs in US, China human rights talks”
by Foster Klug
Posner said in addition to talks on freedom of religion and expression, labor rights and rule of law, officials also discussed Chinese complaints about problems with U.S. human rights, which have included crime, poverty, homelessness and racial discrimination.
He said U.S. officials did not whitewash the American record and in fact raised on its own a new immigration law in Arizona that requires police to ask about a person’s immigration status if there is suspicion the person is in the country illegally.
The United States was represented by officials from the State Department, White House, the departments of Commerce, Justice, Homeland Security, Labor, the trade representative’s office and the Internal Revenue Service. The Chinese side was led by Director General for International Organizations Chen Xu and included officials from nine agencies.
Yahoo! News (AP) article continues here.
China buys air defense systems from Russia
Yahoo! News (Reuters), “China buys air defense systems from Russia”
by Dmitry Solovyov
Russia has delivered 15 batteries of S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to China, Interfax news agency reported on Friday, under a contract analysts said could be worth as much as $2.25 billion.
China is a major buyer of Russian weapons, and the two countries say they are trying to forge a strategic partnership, though senior Russian officials are privately concerned about an increasingly assertive China.
Russia has delivered 15 S-300 batteries to China, Interfax news agency quoted Igor Ashurbeili, director general of Almaz Antei which makes the missiles, as saying.
Yahoo! News (Reuters) article continues here.
China blasts Google move as ‘totally wrong’
Fox News, “China Blasts Google Move as ‘Totally Wrong’”
China’s government reacted testily Tuesday to Google Inc.’s decision to stop censoring its China-based search engine, calling the move “totally wrong” and accusing the company of violating promises.
More than two months after it threatened to shut down Google.cn if it had to continue policing the site, Google made the shift early Tuesday Beijing time. Visitors to Google.cn are automatically redirected to the Chinese-language service based in Hong Kong, where Google is not legally required to censor searches.
“Google has violated its written promise it made when entering the Chinese market by stopping filtering its searching service and blaming China in insinuation for alleged hacker attacks,” an official with the State Council Information Office, a Cabinet office that oversees the Internet, said in a statement carried by the official Xinhua News Agency.
Fox News article continues here.
Google appears to drop censorship in China
MSNBC, “Google appears to drop censorship in China”
by Adrienne Mong
Web sites dealing with subjects such as the Tiananmen Square democracy protests, Tibet and regional independence movements could all be accessed through Google’s Chinese search engine Tuesday, after the company said it would no longer abide by Beijing’s censorship rules.
Despite a report in the China Daily that Google China was still filtering content on its search engine and the firm’s own insistence that its policies had not changed, people in Beijing found that it wasn’t necessarily the case.
NBC News, using the publicly accessible Internet, tried searching for three sensitive topics normally blocked in China.
MSNBC article continues here.
Google to shut China search engine
Financial Times, “Google to shut China search engine”
by Richard Waters and Kathrin Hille
Google has drawn up detailed plans for the closure of its Chinese search engine and is now “99.9 per cent” certain to go ahead as talks over censorship with the Chinese authorities have reached an apparent impasse, according to a person familiar with the company’s thinking.
In a hardening of positions on both sides, the Chinese government also on Friday threw down a direct public challenge to the US search company, with a warning that it was not prepared to compromise on internet censorship to stop Google leaving.
The signs that Google was on the brink of closing Google.cn, its local search service in China, came two months after it promised to stop bowing to censorship there. But while a decision could be made very soon, the company is likely to take some time to follow through with the plan as it seeks an orderly closure and takes steps to protect local employees from retaliation by the authorities, the person familiar with its position said.
Financial Times article continues here.
Google: We will pull out of China before accepting country’s censorship laws
The Hill, “Google: We will pull out of China before accepting country’s censorship laws”
by Kim Hart
Google said it is fully prepared to shut down its China operation if that is the only way to end the country’s censorship of its networks.
“Google is firm in its decision to stop censoring in China,” said Nicole Wong, Google’s deputy general counsel, in a hearing today before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. “We do not underestimate the seriousness or sensitivity of the decision is made…We are not going to change our decision.”
“If the option is that we shutter our .cn operation and leave the country, we are prepared to do that,” she said.
The Hill article continues here.
China’s military warns Washington, denies hacking
Yahoo! News (Reuters), “China’s military warns Washington, denies hacking”
China’s military warned the United States on Thursday to “speak and act cautiously” to avoid reigniting tensions between the two powers, denying the People’s Liberation Army played a part in Internet hacking.
Huang Xueping, spokesman for the Chinese Ministry of Defense, said his government would not reverse its decision to suspend “bilateral military plans” with Washington after it said in late January that it would sell $6.4 billion of arms to Taiwan, the self-ruled island Beijing claims as its own.
In January, the giant Internet search company Google Inc threatened to pull back from China after complaining of censorship and hacking attacks on it and other companies.
Yahoo! News (Reuters) article continues here.
China says cyberattack allegations are “groundless”
The Hill, “Beijing blasts Google claims as ‘groundless’”
by Tony Romm
China fired back at Google on Tuesday, describing assertions that the country was involved in a massive cyberattack as “groundless.”
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang stressed his country remained “opposed” to Google’s conclusions about last month’s attack, which targeted U.S. businesses’ trade secrets, human-rights workers in China and the search-engine giant itself.
“Reports that these attacks came from Chinese schools are totally groundless and the accusation of Chinese government involvement is also irresponsible and driven by ulterior motives,” the Chinese spokesman said.
“China administers its Internet according to law, and this position will not change. China prohibits hacking and will crack down on hacking according to law,” Qin said.
The Hill article continues here.
Despite censorship, cracks widen in China’s Great Firewall
Los Angeles Times, “Despite censorship, cracks widen in China’s Great Firewall”
by David Pierson
Reporting from Beijing – Zhang Shan never paid much attention to Internet censorship in China. The stylish art gallery clerk said it didn’t really matter in her daily life.
Then last year, she lost access to some of her favorite websites. First YouTube. Then Twitter. Then Facebook.
It was her first memorable brush with the so-called Great Firewall of China — one of many powerful mechanisms the Chinese government uses to block content deemed too sensitive for the eyes of its 384 million Internet users.
Los Angeles Times article continues here.
Google refuses censorship in China after recent cyber attacks
The Washington Post, “Google may pull out of China over cyber attacks”
by Ellen Nakashima
The company said it had evidence to suggest that “a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts” of Chinese human rights activists. The attack was discovered in December.
David Drummond, Google senior vice president and chief legal officer, added that the attacks “have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China.”
Google has further decided it is no longer willing to continue censoring its search results in Chinese Google sites, Drummond said, and over the next few weeks it will discuss with the Beijing government how it may operate “an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all,” he said.
The Washington Post article continues here.
China ends U.S.’s reign as largest auto market
Bloomberg, “China Ends U.S.’s Reign as Largest Auto Market”
China supplanted the U.S. as the world’s largest auto market after its 2009 vehicle sales jumped 46 percent, ending more than a century of American dominance that started with the Model T Ford.
The nation’s sales of passenger cars, buses and trucks rose to 13.6 million, the fastest pace in at least 10 years, according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers. In the U.S., sales slumped 21 percent to 10.4 million, the fewest since 1982, according to Autodata Corp.
China’s vehicle sales have surged since 1999 as economic growth averaging more than 9 percent a year has helped automakers including General Motors Co. and Volkswagen AG compensate for slumping demand in the U.S. and Europe. The market will likely remain the world’s largest, even as sales slow this year on a reduction in tax cuts, according to Booz & Co.
Bloomberg article continues here.