Sinomania!

Last month the Pentagon funneled over 50,000 troops and millions of gallons of fuel through the Manas "Transit Center" in Kyrgyzstan, the euphemism for the US air base that Kyrgystan's parliament voted closed in 2009.

The "Tulip Revolution" of 2005 failed as Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev preferred his neighbors Russia and China to Uncle Sam. On March 11 the US State Department issued a human rights report against the Kyrgyz Republic creating the background and justification for future intervention. Now the "United Tajik Opposition" or UTO (which was active in Kyrgyzstan's civil war after the Soviet Union collapsed) is disrupting the urban centers of the country.

Coincidentally, just in the last two weeks major investments by Chinese ventures were ramping up in Kyrgyzstan including energy giant China Guodian Corp. Guodian opened an office last week in Bishkek, the Kyrgyz capital, and said it was pursuing electricity generation projects including hydropower. Guodian is still scheduled to issue 1 billion Yuan in corporate bonds on April 13.

It will be interesting to see how the situation in Kyrgyzstan unfolds. Watch closely and you might catch the interaction of clandestine operations, "legitimate" warfare, psyops, American, EU, Russian, Chinese, and multinational interests of all stripes collide!

At issue is transport and supply of the so-called Af-Pak theater and the larger contest for the resources and markets of the one of the world's least developed regions. As with Vietnam the USA is opting to destabilize a border region of China where Beijing wants to gain the upper hand. We know how that ended. Beijing is just as content to watch patiently as America bleeds on a different Chinese border....

After just 4 years in China Google wants to take its ball and go home. The snap decision is a surprise for a company famous for not losing its cool. Co-founder Sergey Brin is behind the decision to pull the plug on Google China. Brin, born in the Soviet Union, wants to embody Google’s pompous corporate motto “do no evil.” Yet his company had no problem appeasing Beijing’s Internet regulations while it tried to build its business and brand in China. And Brin himself admits that Google blocks material in the USA, France, and Germany - just to name a few instances. A simple warrant is all Google requires to hand over to US feds data on its users going back 180 days.

Last week Google’s chief Legal Officer flamed China’s central government (and by association Chinese people) on the official Google blog with a cryptic ultimatum that it may “shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China” over a hacker attack. But could Google’s knee-jerk reaction become one of the biggest corporate blunders in American history?

Google first tried to enter China the Yahoo! way by buying a Chinese Internet company. But Google went small taking only a 2% stake in Baidu the leading Chinese search engine portal. Google set up its China business in January 2006 choosing the Chinese name “Gu Ge” meaning “harvesting song.” A few months later Google partnered with China Mobile and invested $50 million for a venture to develop mobile services. Not long after that Google sold its stake in Baidu after Baidu went public on NASDAQ and pocketed a nice return of approximately $63 million. Google chose Taiwan born Kai-fu Lee to head up the Beijing office and said it was in it for the long haul, a must for any foreign business in China.

But Google couldn’t bring it. Kai-fu Lee quit Google China last year to head a Beijing venture capital firm to nurture Chinese Internet startups that will compete directly with Google. Four years on Google is no match for Baidu which consistently claims over 60% of the Chinese search market. Google’s share is flat and falling. According to marketing research company comScore Google’s share of the Chinese search market sank to just 14% last November. And search is just one failure of Google in China.

Google’s main focus in China is mobile phones and related services. Investments in Chinese companies such as Xunlei (a video download service) all seemed to fizzle and somehow end up in Baidu or another company’s favor. China Mobile, with more subscribers than any other telecom, now plans to open its own apps store and develop its own services. Google had plans to launch smart phones in China based on its Android operating system. That was cancelled this week.

The loss of what will most likely be the world’s largest market for smart phones and the apps and mobile advertising that come with them means Google’s showdown has serious implications for its future. Sure most Americans think Google is number 1 everywhere in everything but need Google be reminded that at its peak in 2000 Yahoo! shares also cost three digits and its market capitalization of $120 billion was not far off Google’s worth today?

Google dropped its bomb on China in a blog post with links to reports of the overtly anti-China US-China Economic and Security Review Commission. Within hours Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced she had been “briefed” by Google and helped spin a media cycle in which Google purchased ads in print media and online to imply its business entanglements are a human rights issue.

Fact is Google is embedded in the Obama White House. Google was the number 3 contributor to the Obama campaign. CEO Eric Schmidt (sitting next to Obama in the photo) sits on the President's Council of Science and Technology Advisers. Three other Google executives are in White House positions including Sonal Shah of Google global development and Andrew McLaughlin head of Global Public Policy and Government Affairs for Google who is the White House's Deputy Technology "czar".


On his first official visit to China Obama told a group of Shanghai youths that the USA considered unfettered Internet access a universal human right and tut-tutted over censorship. Last week Secretary Clinton enshrined the view in her lengthy “Internet Freedom” speech. Billed as a major policy initiative the speech mentioned China throughout and contained a direct ultimatum to Beijing to “conduct a thorough review of the cyber intrusions that led Google to make its announcement.” Afterwards Hillary took questions from an audience filled with plants from front groups and organizations affiliated with the NED (National Endowment for Democracy).

The scold on Internet Freedom is odd considering Hillary believed the Internet needed “gatekeepers” back in 1998. And how relevant is Internet Freedom for the world? Fully a quarter of Americans do not even have the Internet in their homes and broadband access in the USA is one of the lowest in the so-called “developed” world. But to Obama’s crowd America equals the Internet and the Internet equals Google.

NO EVIDENCE FOUND

Google was not alone in the hacker attack. Over 30 multinationals were affected by what was apparently called “Operation Aurora.” But there is no evidence the Chinese government was behind it. American Internet security firms Verisign, Adobe, and McAfee pointed fingers and Microsoft admitted that an unrevealed flaw in Internet Explorer was used by the culprits. Google even suspected its own employees. Headlines in the mainstream media declared “Evidence Found for Chinese Attack” (to quote the New York Times’s lead) when a malware sleuth found a circumstantial link but no direct evidence of Chinese involvement. The attack could just as likely have been a psyop from a rival company or government intent on framing Beijing.

Google now says it wants to stay in China and is working behind the scenes with Beijing regulators. And Google’s co-founders will sell enough stock to reduce their control down to 48% indicating the company may yet be run on business pragmatism over emotion. But the message that China attacked Google is sticking and the incident shows clearly who guides China policy in the Obama White House.

(c) copyright, Ben Calmes 2010
(Disclaimer: the author owns shares of Google via a mutual fund)

This writer hoped that President Obama would have his eyes wide open for his first trip to China - take it in, allow himself to see past the warped perceptions nearly every American has about the Celestial Empire. Sadly, he started his visit with yet another lecture on "human rights,” now defined by the USA as uncensored Internet access. Obama told a crowd of perky Fudan University students in Shanghai that: "...freedoms of expression and worship -- of access to information and political participation -- we believe are universal rights." As the USA continues to run the infamous Guantanamo detention camps, CIA black jails, and conduct military occupations around the world, it remains absurd to lecture other countries on "human rights". Not long before his death, Nixon - architect of the rapprochement with China - said that it was time to drop "human rights" as a wedge issue with China. The issue may have had some leverage in Clinton’s first term but is meaningless today. The Chinese people are not going to rise up and overthrow their government because the websites of state-controlled (BBC) and wealthy conservatives’ media in Western nations are sometimes blocked on the mainland.

Now in Beijing, Obama will meet privately with President Hu tomorrow (Tuesday) and visit the Forbidden City and the Great Wall....

A week of Asian summits begins tomorrow with the APEC 2009 meeting in Singapore and President Obama's first official junket to China with stops in Shanghai and Beijing. Chinese President Hu is already in Singapore celebrating close ties with the independent Chinese city-state that oversees the world's most precarious shipping choke point. During APEC Hu will meet with Taiwan President Ma's envoy Lien Chan, Kuomintang Party chairman.

In Beijing Obama will have his first official state visit with Chinese Communist Party leaders and already in the USA various right wing interests are pushing for Obama to confront the "ChiComs" with their pet issues such as "human rights" and the need to forcibly appreciate the Chinese currency. Word is Obama will pressure Beijing on climate change. Here's an idea: rather than try fruitlessly to get China to accept sweeping agreements to regulate CO2 emissions and accept Western nation mandates about global warming why not agree to explore a program for both the USA and China to reduce reliance on coal for electric power generation?....

On this day (September 9) in 1976 Chairman Mao died. For all the attempts to paint Mao as a Chinese Stalin, it must be remembered that Mao emancipated Chinese women. The plight of women in China was always a concern to Mao despite his troubled relations with the many women in his life. In some of his earliest writings Mao bemoaned the Chinese practice of selling girls and the complete lack of economic opportunity outside of marriage and prostitution. The constitution that Mao introduced to China and the 1960 marriage and divorce laws gave Chinese women greater rights than existed in many western nations at the time.

Although China remains a patriarchal society the independence of women in China today stands in stark contrast to many other nations in Asia (i.e., India) and other parts of the world....

News of the "bloodiest civil unrest since Tiananmen" in far western Xinjiang Autonomous Region, specifically the capital city Urumqi, comes primarily from two sources: western media (AP and British tabloids) and the Uyghur American Association based in Washington, DC. Dig deeper and most quotes and opinion on the street violence in Urumqi comes directly from the Uyghur American Association itself. The group supports something called the "Uyghur Human Rights Project" which is paid for by US taxpayer dollars. The Uyghur American Association is in fact the sixth largest recepient of National Endowment for Democracy (NED) grants on China.

The NED is Ronald Reagan's private diplomacy organization run from its inception in 1984 by a man named Carl Gersham. The NED supports 4 Uygher dissident groups. The amount of money and number of groups supported by NED in Xinjiang has been growing steadily for years and far exceeds the NED's efforts in neighboring Tibet.

Any news reports taking at face value information from the Uyghur American Association should be read CRITICALLY.

Incidentally, reports are that the unrest may have "spread" to Kashgar where one report quoted an eyewitness saying that there was shouting but "no violence."

The Rainbow League, a Shanghai gay sports organization and American expat Tiffany LeMay are holding the first ever Shanghai Gay Pride under the radar (as gay and lesbian stuff is in China) with exhibitions and film screenings all week. The unofficial pride will culminate with a big party this Saturday June 13. The author remembers when several Shanghai drag queens tried to throw a gay pride event about 10 or so years ago only to be quickly shut down so to speak by local police. How the times are a changin' in Shanghai....

Hello Pot? This is Kettle...

Although most of the photos from the ground in Yangon, Myanmar (Burma), appear to come from the the same source and show a crowd of monks numbering perhaps in the thousands, the tagline "100,000 Pro-Democracy Protesters" has taken root in the Anglo-American press. Combined with a speech from President Bush condemning the ruling "junta" of the country, the stage appears set for a showdown. But do we really have any idea what is going on there apart from the black and white creations of America's premiere (and oh so trustworthy) newspapers?