Changing China
Giant on the move
Panda Diplomacy: China’s goodwill pandas ready for Australia mission
See Panda Diplomacy report on reuters.com
A tough time for trade and diplomatic ties between China and Australia, but the loan of this cuddly couple may repair the rift. Wang Wang and Fu Ni, from China’s southwest Sichuan province, will be sent to the Adelaide zoo by yearend in a 10-year loan for research purposes. Relations have been tense between China and Australia after Chinese state-owned metals firm Chinalco failed in a $19.5 billion bid for a stake in Rio Tinto, and separately four Rio employees were arrested on suspicion of corporate espionage. A decision by Australia’s government in July to grant a visa for exiled Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer further soured ties. But panda diplomacy may be answer.
Video Credit: Guan Yongning
“The hidden danger of blogs”
China’s government may be fretting about the vast new potential for leaking information opened up by the internet (see this Xinhua piece on planned revisions to the state secrets law). But that hasn’t stopped the many bureaucrats who police the nebulous world of Chinese state secrets from wanting to leap headfirst into the online world.
The web is awash with the sites of state secrets bureaux, I discovered after a colleague dug up a report posted on one of them about the commercially and diplomatically sensitive detention of executives from mining giant Rio Tinto.
It was on www.baomi.org (which roughly translates as www.protectsecrets.org), the succinctly named Website of the apparently not-as secretive-as-its-name-suggests National Administration for the Protection of State Secrets.
Someone in the Administration may be more old-fashioned than the technophiles who set up the site, as it stopped working soon after Reuters report was followed by dozens of other media outlets and spread around the world.
But it is now back online, although with several articles removed. And lower-level protectors of the nation’s many, many secrets (which in the past have been deemed to include newspaper clippings sent abroad in the conventional mail) are also offering up a flurry of non-classified information.
Vast modern cities like Guangzhou, Shanghai and Tianjin are teeming business and political hubs that might well have important government and commercial information to worry about.
But Puyang city? I had to do a quick map check to pin down where it is (northern Henan province, if you were curious). There are secrets to protect everywhere, it seems, and you can read about the efforts in Puyang at www.pybm.cn
Interesting that China’s using all kinds of “____ diplomacy” lately, from panda diplomacy to art diplomacy, like we saw when Beijing recently lent a collection of imperial works for exhibition in Taipei. Who knows where it’ll all lead…jingdaily dot com