• China urges Philippines to end “provocations“ in South China Sea
• In Beijing, Schumer urges China to support Israel after Hamas attacks
• China extends Taiwan trade probe, Taipei cries election interference
• China urges Philippines to stop provocation near Second Thomas Shoal
• Chinese programmer ordered to pay 1m yuan for using virtual private network
• Analysis: Inside Asia“s arms race: China near “breakthroughs“ with nuclear-armed submarines, report says
• China Aims to Grow Influence in Space with ‘Tiangong’ Station

China urges Philippines to end “provocations“ in South China Sea

https://reuters.com/article/southchinasea-philippines/china-urges-philippines-to-end-provocations-in-south-china-sea-idUSKBN31912F

China on Monday warned the Philippines against further "provocations" at an atoll in the South China Sea, saying such acts had violated Chinese territorial sovereignty, contravened international law and disrupted regional peace and stability.

The Philippines' territory is defined by a series of international treaties, and the atoll has never been part of its territory, the Chinese foreign ministry said in a strongly worded statement, referring to the atoll as Renai Reef.

In recent months, the Philippines has been sending supplies to its troops stationed on a World War Two-era, transport-ship-turned-military outpost on the Second Thomas Shoal, prompting the China Coast Guard to repeatedly deploy vessels to block the resupply missions.

China claims sovereignty over nearly the entire South China Sea, pointing to a line on its maps that cuts into the exclusive economic zones of Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia. The Permanent Court of Arbitration in 2016 said the line on China's maps had no legal basis, which Beijing rejects.

The atoll is known as Ayungin in the Philippines, while China calls it the Renai Reef, lying 190 km (118 miles) off the Philippine island of Palawan.

"The Philippines has no legal basis at all to claim sovereignty over Renai Reef on the grounds of its comparative proximity to Philippine territory," the Chinese foreign ministry said in a statement.

Since the grounding of the BRP Sierra Madre at the atoll in 1999 in Manila's attempt to assert its sovereignty claim, China has repeatedly called on the Philippines to tow away the vessel.

"The Philippines repeatedly promised to do so as soon as possible," the Chinese ministry said.

"However, 24 years have passed, and the Philippine warship is still there. China cannot accept the Philippines' acts of going back on its words again and again and violating China’s territorial sovereignty," it said.

The Philippines must stop "making provocations" and "creating troubles" at sea, the ministry added.

China will continue to do what is necessary to firmly safeguard its territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests, it said.

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In Beijing, Schumer urges China to support Israel after Hamas attacks

https://reuters.com/article/china-usa-israel/in-beijing-schumer-urges-china-to-support-israel-after-hamas-attacks-idUSKBN31907M

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Monday called on China to support Israel after deadly attacks by Hamas, adding he was "disappointed" that Beijing showed "no sympathy" for the country over the weekend.

Fighters from Islamist group Hamas killed 700 Israelis and abducted dozens more as they attacked Israeli towns on Saturday, the deadliest incursion into Israeli territory since Egypt and Syria's attacks in the Yom Kippur war 50 years ago.

In response, China's foreign ministry urged the "relevant parties" to remain calm and immediately end hostilities to protect civilians, adding that "the fundamental way out of the conflict lies in implementing the two-state solution and establishing an independent State of Palestine".

Schumer is leading a bipartisan congressional delegation to Asia, which includes stops in South Korea and Japan. It aims to advance U.S. economic and national security interests, and in China, the group hopes to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping.

"The ongoing events in Israel over the past few days are horrific. I urge you and the Chinese people to stand with the Israeli people and condemn these cowardly and vicious attacks,” Schumer said at a meeting with China's top diplomat, Wang Yi, in Beijing.

"I was very disappointed, to be honest, by the Foreign Ministry statement that showed no sympathy or support for Israel during these troubled times," he added.

Wang said it is hoped that this visit can help the United States understand China in a more precise manner and help Washington see China in a more objective way, while managing existing contradictions more reasonably.

China extends Taiwan trade probe, Taipei cries election interference

https://reuters.com/article/china-trade-taiwan/china-extends-taiwan-trade-probe-taipei-cries-election-interference-idUSKBN3190KW

China on Monday extended an investigation into what it calls Taiwan's trade barriers against it by three months to the eve of the island's presidential election, prompting Taipei to accuse Beijing of attempting to interfere in the vote.

Taiwan, which China claims as its own territory, frequently accuses Beijing of seeking to exert pressure, whether military or economic, to sway the outcome of its elections to ensure an outcome favourable to the Chinese government.

China's Commerce Ministry originally announced the probe into what it says are Taiwan's trade barriers in April, but has now extended the investigation period to Jan. 12, one day before Taiwan's presidential and parliamentary elections.

The Taiwanese government's Office of Trade Negotiations said the extension of the probe "once again proves that China's so-called trade investigation is politically motivated and an attempt to interfere with our elections with economic coercion".

Extending the date to Jan. 12, just before the election, "highlights the political motivations" behind the decision, it added.

It also violated the norms of the World Trade Organization, the office said, of which both Taiwan and China are members.

"We have said many times that any bilateral trade issues should be resolved through consultation between the two sides in accordance with WTO mechanisms. We also once again call on China to return to the right track and not to repeatedly manipulate trade issues politically."

The brief statement from China's Commerce Ministry into the extension gave no details or explanation for why they made the decision.

Taiwan has denounced what it calls Chinese economic coercion before, including China's punishment of Lithuania with trade measures after the European Union member allowed Taipei to open a de facto embassy in Vilnius.

China's government has refused to speak to the government of Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen, who it accuses of being a separatist. She has repeatedly offered talks with China, but says only Taiwan's people can decide their future.

Tsai's deputy, Vice President William Lai, is the frontrunner to be Taiwan's next president, according to opinion polls. He has also offered to talk to China, thought it also calls him a separatist.

China urges Philippines to stop provocation near Second Thomas Shoal

https://reuters.com/article/southchinasea-philippines/china-urges-philippines-to-stop-provocation-near-second-thomas-shoal-idUSKBN31912F

China said on Monday that recent actions by the Philippines near the Second Thomas Shoal in the South China Sea have seriously violated China's territorial sovereignty, its foreign ministry said in a statement.

China urged the Philippines to stop the provocation in order to avoid further damaging peace and stability in the South China Sea, the statement said.

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Chinese programmer ordered to pay 1m yuan for using virtual private network

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/09/chinese-programmer-ordered-to-pay-1m-yuan-for-using-virtual-private-network

A programmer in northern China has been ordered to pay more than 1m yuan to the authorities for using a virtual private network (VPN), in what is thought to be the most severe individual financial penalty ever issued for circumventing China’s “great firewall”.

The programmer, surnamed Ma, was issued with a penalty notice by the public security bureau of Chengde, a city in Hebei province, on 18 August. The notice said that Ma had used “unauthorised channels” to connect to international networks to work for a Turkish company.

The police confiscated the 1.058m yuan (£120,651) Ma had earned as a software developer between September 2019 and November 2022, describing it as “illegal income”, as well as fining him 200 yuan (£23).

Ma said on Weibo that the police had first approached him a year ago, believing him to be the owner of a Twitter account that they were investigating. Ma said that the account didn’t belong to him. “I stated that I was currently working for an overseas company, and my personal Twitter only occasionally liked and retweeted the company’s tweets,” Ma wrote. His post has since been deleted but was archived by China Digital Times.

Ma said the police seized his phone, laptop and several computer hard drives upon learning that he worked for an overseas company, holding them for a month. He was later asked to provide details about his work, his bank details, his employment contract and other information, before being issued with the penalty in August. Ma said that he would be appointing a lawyer to appeal against the decision.

Charlie Smith (a pseudonym), the co-founder of GreatFire.org, a website that tracks internet censorship in China, said: “Even if this decision is overturned in court, a message has been sent and damage has been done. Is doing business outside of China now subject to penalties?”

VPNs, which help users circumvent the “great firewall” of internet censorship by making it look as if their device is in a different country, operate in a legal grey area in China. Technically, companies are allowed to use government-approved VPNs for commercial activities. Businesses and universities rely on the software to communicate with international partners.

The government generally turns a blind eye to the relatively small number of individuals who use the technology to access websites like Google, Facebook, Twitter and, often, view pornography. But in recent years, the government has been making it harder for people to access the VPNs, and in rare cases has punished their use.

Several people have been jailed for selling VPNs. In 2017, a man named Wu Xiangyang was sentenced to five and a half years in prison, and fined 500,000 yuan, for selling the software. In June, Radio Free Asia reported that a Uyghur student, Mehmut Memtimin, was serving a 13-year sentence in Xinjiang for using a VPN to access “illegal information”.

Ma said that he only used a VPN to access Zoom for meetings and that most of his work, which uses GitHub, could be done without scaling the firewall.

In discussion about the incident on Zhihu, China’s Reddit-like platform, one user wrote: “If we impose convictions and fines based on this reason, China’s IT industry would basically be wiped out.” The comment has since been deleted.

Ma and the Turkish company he is believed to have worked for did not respond to requests for comment.

The case raised questions that authorities were profit-seeking rather than crime-fighting. In a now-deleted Weibo post, an influencer wrote: “This incident has become an international laughing stock, and the police in a certain place have become synonymous with robbers.”

Local governments in China are laden with an estimated $23tn of debt, which economists see as a brewing crisis in the country’s economy. Already, several municipalities have struggled to pay for salaries and public services and have resorted to creative measures to boost their coffers. In Chengde, the city’s revenues from forfeitures reached nearly 990m yuan in 2022, a year-on-year increase of more than 7%.

Chengde’s Public Security Bureau did not respond to calls from the Guardian.

Additional research by Chi Hui Lin

Analysis: Inside Asia“s arms race: China near “breakthroughs“ with nuclear-armed submarines, report says

https://reuters.com/article/china-military-submarine/analysis-inside-asias-arms-race-china-near-breakthroughs-with-nuclear-armed-submarines-report-says-idUSKBN319018

A submarine arms race is intensifying as China embarks on production of a new generation of nuclear-armed submarines that for the first time are expected to pose a challenge to growing U.S. and allied efforts to track them.

Analysts and regional defence attaches say evidence is mounting that China is on track to have its Type 096 ballistic missile submarine operational before the end of the decade, with breakthroughs in its quietness aided in part by Russian technology.

Research discussed at a conference in May at the U.S. Naval War College and published in August by the college's China Maritime Studies Institute predicts the new vessels will be far harder to keep tabs on. That conclusion is credible, according to seven analysts and three Asia-based military attaches.

"The Type 096s are going to be a nightmare," said retired submariner and naval technical intelligence analyst Christopher Carlson, one of the researchers. "They are going to be very, very hard to detect."

The discreet effort to track China's nuclear-powered and -armed ballistic missile submarines, known as SSBNs, is one of the core drivers of increased deployments and contingency planning by the U.S. Navy and other militaries across the Indo-Pacific region. That drive is expected to intensify when Type 096s enter service.

The Chinese navy is routinely staging fully armed nuclear deterrence patrols with its older Type 094 boats out of Hainan Island in the South China Sea, the Pentagon said in November, much like patrols operated for years by the United States, Britain, Russia and France.

But the Type 094s, which carry China's most advanced submarine-launched JL-3 missile, are considered relatively noisy - a major handicap for military submarines.

The paper notes that the Type 096 submarine will compare to state-of-the-art Russian submarines in terms of stealth, sensors and weapons. It said that jump in capabilities would have "profound" implications for the U.S. and its Indo-Pacific allies.

Based partly on Chinese military journals, internal speeches by senior People's Liberation Army (PLA) officers and patent data, the paper charts more than 50 years of the PLA navy's often-glacial nuclear submarine development.

It contains satellite imagery taken in November at China's new Huludao shipyard showing pressure hull sections for a large submarine being worked up. That puts construction on schedule to have the boats operational by 2030, the timeline stated in the Pentagon's annual reports on China's military.

The research also details potential breakthroughs in specific areas, including pump-jet propulsion and internal quieting devices, based on "imitative innovation" of Russian technology.

Neither the Russian nor the Chinese defence ministries responded to Reuters' requests for comment.

The vessel is likely to be significantly larger than the Type 094, allowing it to contain an internal "raft" mounted on complex rubber supports to dampen engine noise and other sounds, similar to Russian designs.

Carlson told Reuters he did not believe China had obtained Russia's "crown jewels" - its very latest technology - but would be producing a submarine stealthy enough to compare to Moscow's Improved Akula boats.

"We have a hard time finding and tracking the Improved Akulas as it is," Carlson said.

Singapore-based defence scholar Collin Koh said the research opened a window on discreet research projects to improve China's SSBNs as well as boosting its anti-submarine warfare capabilities.

"They know they are behind the curve so they are trying to play catch-up in terms of quieting and propulsion," said Koh, of Singapore's S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.

Carlson said he believed China's strategists would, like Russia, keep SSBNs within protective "bastions" close to its coasts, utilising recently fortified holdings in the disputed South China Sea.

The prospect of advanced SSBNs will significantly complicate an already intense subsurface surveillance battle.

In an echo of the Cold War-era effort to hunt for Soviet "boomers", the tracking of Chinese submarines is increasingly an international effort, with the Japanese and Indian militaries assisting the United States, Australia and Britain, analysts and military attaches say.

Anti-submarine warfare drills are increasing, as are deployments of sub-hunting P-8 Poseidon aircraft around Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean.

The United States, Japan, India, South Korea, Australia, Britain and New Zealand operate the advanced plane, which use sonobuoys and other more advanced techniques, such as scanning the ocean surface, to find submarines far below.

The United States is also carrying out the biggest overhaul of its top-secret undersea surveillance network since the 1950s to combat China's growing presence, Reuters reported in September.

The prospect of a quieter Chinese SSBN is driving, in part, the AUKUS deal among Australia, Britain and the U.S., which will see increased deployments of British and U.S. attack submarines to Western Australia. By the 2030s, Australia expects to launch its first nuclear-powered attack submarines with British technology.

"We are at a fascinating point here," said Alexander Neill, a Singapore-based defence analyst. "China is on track with a new generation of submarine ahead of the first AUKUS boats - even if they are at parity in terms of capability, that is highly significant," said Neill, an adjunct fellow at Hawaii's Pacific Forum think-tank.

Even if China's submarine force reaches technological parity, it will need to train aggressively and intensively over the next decade to match AUKUS capabilities, he added.

Vasily Kashin, a Moscow-based Chinese military scholar at HSE University, said it was possible Chinese engineers had made the breakthroughs described in the report.

Although China most likely obtained some key Russian technology in the 1990s after the break up of the Soviet Union, Kashin said, there was no known sharing agreement between Beijing and Moscow outside of a 2010 nuclear reactor agreement.

He said China may have made progress via adaptations of Russian designs and through other sources, including espionage, but it is unlikely they have the newest-generation Russian systems.

"China is not an adversary of Russia in the naval field," Kashin said. "It is not creating difficulties for us, it is creating problems for the U.S."

China Aims to Grow Influence in Space with ‘Tiangong’ Station

https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/china-aims-to-grow-influence-in-space-with-tiangong-station/7298407.html

China plans to increase the size of its space station in the coming years.

The station will offer astronauts from other countries a different choice for near-Earth missions. The International Space Station (ISS), led by NASA, is nearing the end of its service life.

The China Academy of Space Technology (CAST) said the operational lifetime of the Chinese space station will be more than 15 years. The organization is China's main space contractor. Chinese officials made the estimate recently at the 74th International Astronautical Congress in Baku, Azerbaijan.

That new operational lifetime would be more than the 10 years announced earlier.

China's space station, known as Tiangong, or the Celestial Palace in Chinese, has been operational since late 2022. It holds up to three astronauts and orbits 450 kilometers above Earth.

After an increase from three to six modules, Tiangong will be about 180 metric tons.

Tiangong is 40 percent of the mass of the ISS, which can hold a crew of seven astronauts. But the ISS, in orbit for more than 20 years, is expected to stop service after 2030.

China has said it expects to become "a major space power". Chinese state media said last year as Tiangong became fully operational that China would be no "slouch" as the ISS headed toward retirement. State media added that "several countries" had asked to send their astronauts to the Chinese station.

But, the European Space Agency (ESA) said this year it did not have the financial or "political" approval to take part in Tiangong.

The announcement suspended a plan that had been developed over years for a visit by European astronauts.

The Global Times, a newspaper linked to the Chinese Communist Party, wrote at the time: "Giving up cooperation with China in the manned space domain is clearly short-sighted, which reveals that the U.S.-led camp confrontation has led to a new space race."

Tiangong has become a symbol of China's growing influence and belief in its space missions. U.S. law bans China from any work, direct or indirect, with NASA.

Russia is highly involved in the ISS and has similar space diplomacy plans. Russia suggested that its partners in the BRICS group - Brazil, India, China and South Africa - could build a module for its new space station.

Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, said last year that it was planning to build a space station. The goal is for the station to have six modules that could hold up to four astronauts.

I’m Mario Ritter Jr.

 

Ryan Woo reported on this story for Reuters. John Russell adapted it for VOA Learning English.

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Words in This Story

contractor – n. a person or business who is hired to perform work or to provide goods at a certain price or within a certain time

module – n. a part of a space vehicle that can work alone

no slouch – expression used to say that someone is good at a particular job, activity

domain – n. an area of knowledge or activity

confrontation –n. a conflict or dispute

symbol –n. a person or thing that represents an idea or goal and stands for it