#china security

Editorial Disclosure: This article is an editorial-assisted curated synthesis of verified global coverage. The original source reporting has been analyzed, structured, and compiled by Pune.Media’s Editorial Desk to bring you high-density business insights. Original Coverage & Source Attribution: www.securitymagazine.com A Chinese cybersecurity platform has claimed to discover a “backdoor”…

Former China Security Chief Gets Life Imprisonment Over Corruption

  Former China Security Chief Zhou Yongkang has been given life imprisonment after he was found guilty of bribery, abuse of power and intentionally disclosing national secrets.

Zhou Yongkang who pleaded guilty at a closed-door trial in the northern city of Tianjin was until his retirement in 2012 one of China’s most powerful men.

Mr Zhou was charged in April, nine months after a formal…

Asia-Pacific

China to strengthen surveillance, security in anti-terror push

China will establish a national population database linked to ID information and credit records, state media reported late on Monday, as part of a larger push to beef up surveillance and security in response to violent unrest. China has already taken a series of measures to prevent attacks by extremists, including plans for an anti-terrorism law that would give the government broader surveillance powers and offering to pay for tips about violent plots.

(The measures will help to) prevent violence, terrorist attacks or extreme events.

China's Communist Party's Central Committee and the State Council

China is...being strange. Again. This time, their propaganda - at least, propaganda as viewed through a foreigner's eyes - is centered on the Occupy Wall Street/Occupy Everywhere movement that is taking place in the US. Humorously enough, the media within China is making statements about control of the protests by US authorities that are, 1) untrue, and 2) serve the purposes of the Chinese government perfectly.

It is not unknown to everyone following the Occupy Wall Street movement that a number of journalists have been arrested during particularly tense times of protesting - for example, when the protestors took to the Brooklyn Bridge and stopped traffic. However, many people do not know that the Chinese government, and government-run media, have taken these arrests, exaggerated them, and have used them to their advantage to demonstrate to the Chinese people why their country is not nearly as suppressive, and the US not nearly as free, as they would like to think.

On September 27, Chen Weihua, a columnist for the Chinese government mouthpiece newspaper the China Daily, wrote a piece on the Occupy movement, stating that US newspapers had only run "one or two sporadic articles" on the Occupy movement, when 16 had really already been run that day. On the day the article ran, 282 stories in the four main New York papers were dedicated to the coverage of the Occupy Wall Street protests. However, the arrests of journalists involved in some of the most inflammatory protests and the dramatic drop in articles related to the protests from 631 to 282 have allowed Chinese coverage to step in, claiming that the US is not allowing their media to cover the protests at all. Despite the fact that this information is categorically untrue, the Chinese people don't know otherwise - the only media they have regular access to are these government-run newspapers, which are telling them the US is even more suppressive than China.

The author of the article, Chen, in an interview with the San Fransisco Chronicle, stated, "One of the best-kept secrets in the United States over the past two weeks seems to be on and near Wall Street in New York." Chen also stated that he witnessed police brutality at the New York protests and complained that "the gap in real reporting is really serious to me. It's really absurd." This, from a journalist who skewed the very information he claimed to have first-hand account of to benefit the image of his home government.

Another government newspaper, the Global Times, wrote "The U.S. crisis is a result of the unrestrained freedom for the rich."

China is worried. Following major events in the Arab Spring such as the overthrows of Tunisia and Egypt, China staged crackdowns on peaceful protests in major cities in China, disallowing Chinese citizens from even walking down the street in organized groups. Now, China is using the internet, a powerful tool in organizing social movements, to preempt the spread of the Occupy movement to their country. The first step they have taken is to ban certain combinations of words on search engines, such as the word "Occupy" followed by any city in the country, such as "Occupy Guangzhou."  They have also sent out a number of officers to bars in large cities, to canvas and ask patrons if they were in any way related to the Occupy movement.

I know not all the Chinese people are blind enough to think that the US is seriously more suppressive than China is. The US is in no way perfect. We have some serious governance issues - issues with corruption, a strong favor for the upper class in our government's policies, and an obvious fiscal issue. However, I find it exceedingly humorous that the Chinese government will press their media to exaggerate US control of the Occupy movement, and follow that with serious crackdowns on internet freedom and social gatherings. But the US still has something to be proud of - we are one of the most free countries in the world, and as long as peaceful protests adhere to the law, we are allowed to protest.

- Jessi