The US and Japan are going through a rocky patch but mutual fear of China makes their relationship too precious to wreck
A long-running row about relocating a US Marine Corps base on Okinawa is threatening to boil over, with Yukio Hatoyama, Japan's prime minister, admitting at the weekend that failure to resolve the dispute could force his resignation. Given that his Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) swept to a watershed election victory only last August, such an outcome could be deeply embarrassing for the US and deeply resented in Japan.
Financial Times
By Tim Johnston in Hanoi
Published: March 3 2010
More than two decades after doi moi – the “renovation” that opened Vietnam to the outside world – some conservative elements in the Communist party are rattling foreign investors by trying to put the brakes on reform. In a series of recent announcements, government officials have introduced plans for price controls and import restrictions that have drawn foreign investors, who are normally discreet in their criticism of the government, into the open.
BEIJING — On the surface, Amazon.cn resembles its global siblings, selling everything from Harry Potter books to sex toys. But a few searches of what the Web site proclaims is “the world’s largest Chinese online bookstore” reveals limits to this literary universe.
A query for Zhao Ziyang — the former Communist Party leader who was stripped of power for supporting the 1989 democracy demonstration in Tiananmen Square — returns no matches. The Dalai Lama? A list of books that portray him as a dangerous “splittist” or that refer to the Chinese government’s hand-picked spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, who goes by the same title. A search of the words “censorship” and “China” comes back with “censorship” crossed out and three Sino-themed suggestions, including a book called “When China Rules the World.”
At Columbia's commencement last spring, I asked the 12,000
graduates to consider one of the most daunting questions their
generation will face in the increasingly interconnected world they
will inherit: How will they—and we—realize on a global scale the
principles of freedom of speech and press that have defined their
experiences at an American university, where the prerogative to
speak out on any topic and to pursue ideas has been the norm? That
is not an easy question for any of us to answer. Rapid globalization,
driven by the combined forces of expanding free-market economies
and new communications technologies (principally, of course, the
Internet), means that creating a system of free expression of news
and knowledge is no longer only a moral issue of spreading human
rights. It is also a very practical challenge of getting access to the
ideas and information we need to function as a society dealing with
a myriad of border-crossing challenges, including financial
recession and climate change, terrorism and infectious disease.
US experts close in on Google hackers
By Joseph Menn in San Francisco
Published: February 21 2010 23:33 | Last updated: February 21 2010 23:33
US analysts believe they have identified the Chinese author of the critical programming code used in the alleged state-sponsored hacking attacks on Google and other western companies, making it far harder for the Chinese government to deny involvement.
Their discovery came after another team of investigators tracked the launch of the spyware to computers inside two educational institutions in China, one of them with close ties to the military.
Touring Asia in November, Barack Obama hit all the usual presidential themes, including free trade, investment, and strategic alliances, except for one: human rights. During a scripted press conference in Beijing, Obama barely mentioned it. In Shanghai he offered only mild criticism of China's Internet blocks, saying he was a "big supporter of noncensorship." Obama's nonstatements amount to a clear break from nearly three decades of U.S. policy. From its engagement with the brutal Burmese junta to its decision to avoid the Dalai Lama when he first visited Washington during Obama's tenure to its silence over the initial outbreak of protests in Iran, Obama's administration has taken a much quieter approach to rights advocacy than his predecessors George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. "Conceding to China upfront doesn't buy you better cooperation further down the track," says Sophie Richardson of Human Rights Watch.
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