links for 2008-08-31
By l00p
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The visitors from China seemed innocuous enough. The five of them had flown in from Beijing to attend the 1989 American Physical Society Conference on Shock Waves in Condensed Matter in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Danny Stillman, director of the technical intelligence division at Los Alamos National Laboratory, met the visitors' plane, took care of their transportation and food needs, and escorted them through the National Atomic Museum in Albuquerque. All five visitors seemed to be jolly academic tourists, but appearances can be—and in this case were—deceptive. In the next year or two, all five were revealed to be top scientists in the Chinese Academy of Engineering Physics, the equivalent of the combined US nuclear weapons laboratories at Los Alamos, Livermore, and Sandia. Those visitors from China were scouting the American turf.
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The blazing pageantry of the Beijing Olympics—the most spectacular Olympian celebration in over 70 years—is rightfully being heralded as the symbol of China’s arrival as a global power. The bright Olympic spotlight showed the world a Chinese communist regime that is secure in its power, even if not in its legitimacy. While China cared deeply about the impression it made during its time in the international limelight (cared to the tune of $44 billion) such concern does not extend outside the Olympic venues. Dazzling show and winning gold medal count aside, the Beijing Olympics’ message was clear: China is now big and important enough to do what it wants. And anyone who doesn’t like it—including Chinese citizens—should tolerate China’s ascent in silence.
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China gave Pakistan the blueprint for an atomic bomb, testing the finished product in 1990, and unveiled a sophisticated nuclear weapons complex to visiting U.S. scientists in the last decade, report former weapons lab officials. Former Air Force secretary Thomas Reed, a former weapons lab scientist, paints a portrait of China as a reckless distributor of nuclear weapons know-how in a report released Thursday in PhysicsToday magazine. He charges the Chinese with giving extensive weapons support to Pakistan in detail far beyond a 2001 Defense Department report that acknowledged such links. "The Chinese nuclear weapons program is incredibly sophisticated," Reed says. "The scary part is how much Pakistan has learned from them." The Chinese and Pakistani embassies in Washington did not reply to requests for comment on the report.
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China on Friday confirmed that two police officers were stabbed to death and five others were injured during the latest in a series of attacks in the restive Central Asian region of Xinjiang. The officers were 'investigating a previous case' when they were ambushed by attackers who were hiding in a cornfield on Wednesday night in Xinjiang's Jiashi county, the official Xinhua news agency quoted a police spokesman as saying. Police were investigating the attack, the agency said without giving any further details. The German-based World Uighur Congress reported the deaths on Thursday and said at least 20 people were arrested following the attack in Jiashi, which is about 100 kilometres east of China's westernmost city of Kashgar.
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"This is incredibly dramatic for a global perception of China, and also for China's self-perception [that] it can handle something on this scale," says historian Jonathan Spence of Yale University. "It's a kind of financial coming-of-age. It'll be an important marker, probably in a positive direction, as far as we can tell at the moment."
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China has stepped up random checking of blood of travellers entering the country as part of the efforts to prevent the spread of HIV. Under the new exercise, 312 travellers were found to be HIV positive in the first seven months of this year, up 19 per cent year-on-year, a report said. They were among 756,000 travellers on whom random blood checks conducted at border crossings, according to the report compiled by the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, the quality watchdog.
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A Chinese man accused of murdering six policemen has attracted increasing levels of approval and adulation from internet users as his trial begins in Beijing.
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