This article titled “China imposes tariff on US car imports” was written by Graeme Wearden, for The Guardian on Thursday 15th December 2011 01.39 UTC

The tension between America and China over international trade escalated on Wednesday when Beijing imposed additional duties on cars imported from the United States.

China’s commerce ministry accused America’s car industry of “dumping and subsidising”, thereby causing substantial damage to China’s domestic car industry. From Thursday, levies will be charged on larger-engined cars from several manufacturers, some being European firms with factories in the US.

General Motors faces the greatest impact, almost 22% extra on some sports utility vehicles (SUVs) and other cars with engine capacities above 2.5 litres. Chrysler faces a 15% penalty, while a 2% levy will be imposed on BMW, whose US plants make many of the cars it exports to China.

Existing taxes and duties already push up the cost of US imports by 25%, and the new levies make it even more expensive for Chinese consumers to buy American. The move was swiftly attacked in the US. Carl Levin, the Democratic senator for Michigan (which includes the motor city of Detroit), called it an “unjustified” attempt to circumvent international trade laws. “Instead of ending its unlawful trade practices, China is choosing to take further steps that are unauthorised by world trade rules,” he claimed.”The livelihoods of American families and the integrity of global trade law are at stake.”

GM says the levies will have little immediate impact, as it mostly exports lower-power cars to China. Analysts, though, said the decision underlined China’s determination to protect its car industry.

“The move shows that China is always capable of intervening politically in its markets,” Juergen Pieper of Bankhaus Metzler, the German investment bank, told Bloomberg. Georges Dieng, a Paris-based analyst with Natixis Securities, said the levies had been set to “inflict pain on the Americans, above all”. Shares in General Motors fell by over 3%, while BMW’s shares slipped 5%.

China and the US have peppered each other with legal actions and tariffs over the past few years.

Earlier this month, the US International Trade Commission ruled against China’s solar-power industry after an anti-dumping and anti-subsidy investigation. Last week, the US pledged to take China’s anti-dumping measures against American poultry imports to the World Trade Organisation.

Debbie Stabenow, the junior senator for Michigan, urged the US government to take China’s car levies to the WTO as well. “China relentlessly breaks international trade rules, and seeks to gain an anti-competitive advantage over our companies and workers. America must be equally relentless in fighting back,” she said.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

This article titled “China’s great leap towards superpower status with space station test launch” was written by Jonathan Watts in Beijing, for The Guardian on Thursday 29th September 2011 20.02 UTC

China marked a new milestone on its road towards superpower status on Thursday night by putting its first research module – called the Heavenly Palace – into orbit.

The unmanned Tiangong 1 laboratory, launched from a remote base in the Gobi desert, is a step towards the construction of a fully-fledged orbiting platform.

This latest demonstration of Beijing’s otherworldly ambitions comes in a year when the US has wound down its space shuttle fleet and its partners have said the International Space Station should be buried at sea in 2020.

China’s 10.5-metre cylinder will ride 220 miles into space on board the Long March 2F rocket that blasted off from the Jiuquan satellite launch centre.

It will remain in orbit for two years and be used by Chinese scientists and astronauts to practise rendezvous and docking techniques needed to construct bigger space structures.

Another vessel, Shenzhou 8, will launch later this year and attempt to link up with the lab.

If this is successful and life support systems within the module remain stable, manned missions will be tried next year and yuhangyuan [astronauts] will spend two weeks inside the lab.

Wu Ping, a spokeswoman, said these missions could include China’s first female astronauts.

Following China’s first manned space flight in 2003, the launch of the Heavenly Palace is the second stage in a 10-year programme to build a manned 60-tonne platform by 2020.

This could give China the largest habitable space platform. That title currently belongs to the International Space Station (ISS), which is supported by the US, Europe, Russia, Japan and Canada.

The 400-tonne ISS’s future is in doubt because of the high cost of ferrying supplies through space and the economic problems faced by its principal funders.

China’s political differences with the US have so far stymied hopes to draw the country into this international programme.

When the current commitments expire in 2020, Russian scientists have proposed that the ISS be left to fall into an ocean.

China attaches great political prestige to its space programme – as evidenced by launch events in Beijing and Jiuquan attended by president Hu Jintao and key politburo members.

At this stage, Beijing claims its programme is cheaper. While Russia and the US initially practised docking by sending up two vessels for each trial, China said it saves money by leaving one in space for an extended time.

“The US is still ahead – they sent a man to the moon 40 years ago,” said Fu Song, a professor at the school of aerospace at Tsinghua University.

“But there is the advantage for latecomers. The cost is less and wrong turns can be avoided. If the Tiangong is successful, it will be a significant symbol for the Chinese space industry.”

Though the hardware is based primarily on Russian technology, China says it has enhanced navigation and other systems.

The launch is part of a wider space strategy which has notched up several notable achievements in recent years.

In 2003, China became only the third country to independently put a man – Yang Liwei – in space.

Four years later, it put a satellite – the Chang-e – into lunar orbit and, more aggressively, proved the effectiveness of a satellite-busting rocket.

In 2013, it will collaborate with Russia to send a probe to Mars. Four years after that, the country’s scientists expect to land a lunar rover as a step towards a manned moon landing.

The Tiangong will provide useful preparation for all future missions, according to Ping.

The forward momentum of China’s programme stands in contrast to that of the old space powers. The US mothballed its space shuttle programme in July, when the Atlantis completed its final mission.

Now that Barack Obama has reversed plans for a new manned lunar mission, China is the only country with realistic plans to land humans on the moon.

Such developments could also add to concerns in Washington that China’s space push may be driven my military motives. This is dismissed by Chinese academics.

Jiao Weixin, professor in the school of earth and space at Peking University, said the spirit of space exploration now was different from the past.

“During the cold war, the Soviet Union and the US competed in a space race. Today, the trend is towards peaceful, international co-operation.

“China is involved for scientific reasons and to gain experience. It has no goal of surpassing other countries.”

Different trajectories

After edging out the Soviets and winning the race to land a human on the moon in 1969, the United States has enjoyed more than four decades unchallenged as the world’s dominant force in space. Today’s(Thursday) The launch on Thursday of the first stage of a new Chinese space station could be seen as the beginnings of a shift in that power.

That China has joined the US and Russia as the third nation with the capability of a permanent crewed presence in space is not, in itself, a significant challenge to American supremacy. Nasa launched its first habitable research laboratory, Skylab, in 1973, and even if China’s Tiangong-1 remains safely into orbit after its arrival, it is still likely to be at least another year before its astronauts are able to make any kind of extended-duration stay.

The wider concern of those who follow the US space programme is the converse trajectories the two nations appear to be taking in support of their ambitions in space. China, which has invested millions of dollars in recent years into a burgeoning space programme, now has a flagship piece of hardware already off the launchpad. Nasa currently has no manned launch capability of its own for crewed vehicles followingafter the retirement of the space shuttle fleet this summer. It is a situation that rankles with prominent figures in the US space community, among them Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, who last week lambasted the American programme as an embarrassment”embarrassing” that could soon be eclipsed by the achievements of other nations.

“For a country that did so much for so long to achieve a leadership position in space exploration and exploitation, this is viewed by many as lamentably embarrassing and unacceptable,” he told a congressional hearing on the future of space flight. “Nasa leaders enthusiastically assured the American people that the agency was embarking on a new age of discovery. But the termination of the shuttle, the cancellation of existing rocket and spacecraft programmes, the lay-off of thousands of aerospace workers [and] the outlook for American space activity through the next decade is difficult to reconcile with agency assertions.”

Nasa did, earlier this month, announce its vision of a future spacecraft, the Space Launch System, which will be the most powerful rocket ever built and is designed to carry astronauts farther into space than ever before. Its cost, estimated in leaked Nasa calculations at more than $62bn over the next 15 years, could yet prove a barrier and the first unmanned test flights are not scheduled until 2017.

In the shorter term, Nasa is contracting out work that was previously its lifeblood. Cargo, and eventually crew, transportation to the international space station is being tendered to commercial enterprises such as SpaceX and Blue Origin, established respectively by internet entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. SpaceX plans its first cargo transfer launch in November. Until commercial spacecraft are deemed safe enough, US astronauts must hitch rides aboard Russia’s Soviet-era Soyuz spacecraft, at a cost of up to $63m per seat.

But the Russian programme is embroiled in its own turmoil after an unmanned Soyuz failed on its way to the international space station last month, and the next manned mission was delayed until November. China’s progress, and uncertainty elsewhere, have led to renewed calls for greater partnership between the world’s space-faring nations, although US co-operation with the Chinese is specifically prohibited by an act of Congress.

“China has the technology but doesn’t have the spaceflight experience that we do,” said Leroy Chiao, a former ISS commander and shuttle astronaut, and advocate for closer ties. “Co-operation is the way forward. You can argue that Nasa and Russia did all this before but China started its programme in 2003 and in eight years has demonstrated more ambitious flights. It has a modern vehicle with sophisticated technology, so this isn’t just a copy of Skylab. It leaves China on the verge of a major step forward.”Copy ends

Richard Luscombe in Miami

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

This article titled “Russia refuses more Syria sanctions” was written by Ian Black, for The Guardian on Monday 12th September 2011 19.44 UTC

Russia has rebuffed western attempts to increase the pressure on the Syrian regime, led by Bashar al-Assad, as new United Nations figures show at least 2,600 people have been killed since anti-government protests erupted in March.

President Dmitry Medvedev said after talks with David Cameron that additional pressure was “absolutely not needed” because existing UN and European Union sanctions were squeezing the regime.

Britain, the US and France have been pushing for tougher action by the UN but have met opposition from Russia and China, veto-wielding permanent members of the security council, and others.

The latest UN casualty figures – 400 more than previously given – were announced on Monday by the UN high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, who called the situation “dire” and again complained that Syria had refused access for a UN humanitarian assessment team.

Syria has banned almost all journalists from entering the country but new images have emerged of killings, injuries and funerals of victims.

One clip, [WARNING: Contains explicit images] posted by the Local Co-ordination Committees, appeared to show the final moments of a 14-year-old boy, Izzat al-Babidi, reportedly shot in the head during a demonstration in the Damascus suburb of Douma on Monday morning.

Other pictures showed hundreds of people attending the funeral of another boy, Subhi Salam, who was fatally wounded by a sniper during protests last Friday.

Pillay’s figure of 2,600 dead was immediately contradicted by a senior aide to Assad, Bouthaina Shaaban. “There are 700 casualties among the army and the police, and 700 among the rebels,” she said in Moscow. “We have a list [of the victims' names], and we can provide it.”

Shaaban’s visit was part of an attempt by Syria to stave off any danger that its Russian ally would abandon it. Medvedev appeared to show that he would stand firm, calling for a “well-balanced position between both parties to the conflict, the Syrian government and the rebels”. This was a far cry from the now firm western position that Assad has lost all legitimacy. Russia’s support brought a call from Syrian opposition activists for a “day of anger”.

Al-Arabiya TV quoted opposition sources as claiming that Syrian military aircraft had been flying low over the central city of Homs, where many have died in recent weeks. Syrian activists describe fighting in the nearby Rastan area between army defectors and loyalists, and an incipient “low-intensity civil war”, with Islamists smuggling in weapons from abroad.

The Saudi-owned channel also reported three clergymen from the Assad family’s Alawite sect in Homs as distancing themselves from the “atrocities” carried out by the regime. This week, opposition figures plan to unveil the final makeup of the Syrian National Council, a broad coalition of different anti-Assad groups.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

This article titled “China boosts internet surveillance” was written by Tania Branigan in Beijing, for The Guardian on Tuesday 26th July 2011 10.27 UTC

Police have told cafes, hotels and other businesses in central Beijing to install surveillance technology for Wi-Fi users or face fines and possible closure, in a further tightening of internet controls.

China has the world’s largest and most sophisticated web censorship and monitoring system, which it has tightened still further after the Middle Eastern uprisings. Measures included blocking major virtual private networks, which allow people to evade internet controls.

The new software, which costs about 20,000 yuan (£1,900), allows officials to check the identities of users and monitor their activity. Businesses that fail to comply face a fine of the same size and could have their licences revoked.

Strict controls already apply at internet cafes, which poorer people rely on for access.

It is unclear how strictly the measures will be enforced, and it appears that only Dongcheng district has told owners of the regulations. A staff member at its internet security unit said the initiative was city-wide, but Beijing police headquarters had not responded to a faxed query at time of writing.

The Dongcheng police officer added: “This regulation is made to enhance internet security and to assist public security bureaux to break criminal cases. Details of implementation are confidential.”

According to the New York Times, a notice from the district office said the measure would tackle offenders seeking to “conduct blackmail, traffic goods, gamble, propagate damaging information and spread computer viruses”.

“This is undoubtedly an invasion of Wi-Fi users’ privacy,” said Jason Chen, a 22-year-old Beijing resident.

“We have already felt the restriction on university campuses, since they have always been monitored. But this time, the control is stretching to cafes and people’s feeling of violation is sharper. If cafes cancel their Wi-Fi I will care a lot, and I believe young people will react strongly.”

Some venues in Dongcheng complained they were already losing custom after cutting off Wi-Fi.

“It is just unbelievable. Customers are not happy either,” said Leona Zhang, manager of the Contempio bar.

“Some owners simply think this is for the public security bureaux to make money from us. The charge is the same regardless of size, even for small ones with only two or three tables.”

Businesses in other parts of Beijing said they had not heard of the measure.

“If the regulation was implemented here, it would struggle to be accepted. The cost is too high,” said a worker at the New Seven Day Bar in Haidian.

“Furthermore, there is also the privacy of our customers to protect.”

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

This article titled “Tony Blair issues Arab spring warning to west” was written by Patrick Wintour, for The Guardian on Wednesday 8th June 2011 22.28 UTC

Tony Blair warns the west today that it urgently needs a wider plan to respond to the Arab spring, including a warning to autocratic leaders across the Middle East “to change or be changed”.

His call for a clearer strategic approach comes in a new foreword to the paperback edition of his bestselling autobiography, The Journey.

The former prime minister also praises Europe, and by implication David Cameron, for showing leadership in Libya, saying it would have been inconceivable to leave Muammar Gaddafi in power.

He said that if America and Europe had done nothing, “Gaddafi would have retaken the country and suppressed the revolt with extraordinary vehemence. Many would have died.”

If he had been left in power while the west was willing to see President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt deposed, “the damage to the west’s reputation, credibility and stature would have been not just massive but potentially irreparable. That’s what I mean by saying inaction is also a decision.”

Blair does not call for immediate military intervention across the region, saying instead that “where there is the possibility of evolutionary change, we should encourage and support it. This is the case in the Gulf states.”

He hails the way in which “Europe and America came together over Libya and, though it is difficult and though the way things will turn out is uncertain, it showed leadership; and amongst the criticism, there was also – in the region – relief that leadership was shown”.

While praising European and US efforts in Libya, Blair also calls for an elected European president who would have a mandate for far-reaching reforms including collaborating on taxes. In an interview in the Times he says such an office would give Europe “strong, collective leadership and direction”. But he accepts that the idea has “no chance of being accepted at the present time”.

In his book, Blair acknowledges that the west cannot intervene across the Middle East and claims some leaders are “already embarking on a path of steady change. We should help them keep to it and support it. None of this means we do not criticise strongly the use of violence against unarmed civilians. Or that if that violence continues, we do not reserve the right then to move to outright opposition to the status quo, as has happened in Libya. But it is more sensible to do so in circumstances where the regime has excluded a path to evolutionary change. Then it is clear: the people have no choice. But if there is a process that can lead to change with stability, we should back that policy.”

He adds: “My point is simple: we need to have an active policy, be players and not spectators sitting in the stands, applauding or condemning as we watch.”

He says that the lesson for autocratic regimes the world over is to change – or be changed.

Largely in line with the policy laid out at the G8 summit of most industrialised nations in Deauville last month, he says: “We should stand ready to help with aid, debt relief and the muscle of the international financial institutions, but we should also be quietly insistent that such help won’t succeed unless proper rules and order are put in place.”

Blair, still the special envoy of the quartet in the Middle East, admits the Arab spring is going to make it harder to secure a Palestinian peace deal since Israel is less certain about the nature of the threat it faces.

The stability and predictability of Israel’s neighbours, he says, has been replaced by instability and unpredictability.

“For similar reasons, but with an opposite conclusion, the Palestinian leadership find it hard to go into negotiation with an Israeli partner they don’t trust, to make difficult compromises which will be tough to sell, in circumstances where they don’t know the regional context into which such compromises will be played.”

Blair also warns more broadly that the world has not yet adjusted to the emergence of China as a global economic giant, saying “engagement with geopolitics of the 21st-century will be unlike anything the modern world has seen. Our children in the west will be a generation growing up in a situation where virtually every fixed point of reference that my and my parents’ generation knew has changed or is changing”.

He claims energy security will become as serious an issue for the nation states as defence.

Blair says: “Currently China consumes around 10% of worldwide demand for oil. If its GDP per head carries on rising – and follows the path of similar increases in living standards in South Korea and Taiwan, say – the world output will need to double, and China’s share of demand will rise from 10% to 50%.”

He also questions the way in which the EU leaders have led the debate about its future, saying “there has been an obsession about institutional integration in itself rather than a debate about what we want to do as Europe, where the institutions should be at the service of the policy, rather than the policy at the service of institutions”.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

I wrote last week about the Pentagon’s fear that China would end up with parts of the downed helicopter used in the raid against Bin Laden. The covert mission to kill the world’s most wanted terrorist ended up accidentally revealing to the world a secret stealth helicopter used by Special Forces. One of the special choppers clipped one of the walls of Bin Laden’s compound and was forced to make a hard landing. The Navy SEALs had no choice but to blow it up on site. Unfortunately, a tail rotor survived the blast intact and is now in Pakistani hands.

Pakistani officials said today that China has already privately expressed interest in seeing the tail rotor:

Pakistani officials said today they’re interested in studying the remains of the U.S.’s secret stealth-modified helicopter abandoned during the Navy SEAL raid of Osama bin Laden’s compound, and suggested the Chinese are as well.

The U.S. has already asked the Pakistanis for the helicopter wreckage back, but one Pakistani official told ABC News the Chinese were also “very interested” in seeing the remains. Another official said, “We might let them [the Chinese] take a look.”

Pakistan has some balls threatening to give our technology to the Chinese after we just busted them for harboring Osama bin Laden. These bastards are out of control. Even entertaining the idea of giving them $3 billion in aide this year is complete lunacy. These people are not and have never been our friends. They go along with us just enough to keep the money flowing but not enough to make any real difference in the War On Terror.

President Obama should call up President Zardari and inform him that we’re coming to get our tail rotor back. How much are we going to let these jerks get away with? This is a freaking embarrassment.

This article titled “Australia leases out mineral-rich land as China’s hunger for resources grows” was written by Stephen Sackur in Cue, western Australia, for The Guardian on Tuesday 12th April 2011 06.00 UTC

China is leasing huge areas of land in Australia to secure a vital source of mineral resources, the latest sign of its acquisitive approach to the commodities trade.

No longer satisfied with buying iron ore and coal from Australian mining companies, Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton, China is developing its own mining operations, funding a port with a mile-long breakwater jutting into the Indian Ocean.

Citic Pacific’s Sino Iron project, in the Pilbara region in the north-west of Australia, illustrates the scale of Beijing’s ambitions. China expects to mine at least 2bn tonnes of ore from Sino Iron over the next 25 years. The open cast mine, which will become fully operational this year, promises to be the biggest magnetite iron ore mine in the world. The ore will be processed on site and brought to China on a fleet of purpose-built container ships.

In return, Australia, already China’s biggest overseas supplier of iron ore, is guaranteed a steady stream of royalties and taxes. The project will also generate thousands of Australian jobs – China will provide finance and management, but not labour.

The deal’s biggest winner will be Clive Palmer, the larger-than-life Australian entrepreneur who holds the lease on the mine. His partnership with Citic Pacific is one big reason why he is close to the top of Australia’s rich list.

According to Palmer, his mining alliance with the Chinese has barely begun. He claims to control the mining rights to land which contains 160bn tonnes of iron ore – 100 times greater than the entire global output of iron ore last year.

If China’s steel mills maintain current level of demand, Palmer is set to become an “Aussie oligarch” to rival Russia’s richest resource billionaires, a suggestion to which he responds with a smile. “I hope I’m nicer,” he says.

Palmer commutes between Australia and his other home in Beijing by private jet, and boasts of friends at top levels in the Chinese government. Chinese banks seem to trust him. Last year, the Import-Export Bank of China made a bn loan to a Palmer-backed Queensland coal project which is supposed to deliver China’s power industry 1bn tonnes of coal in the next 30 years.

But China’s arrival has raised hackles. After Rio Tinto came close to accepting a major large investment from a the Chinese metals giantcompany Chinalco, Barnaby Joyce, senate leader of the opposition National party, has railed against “Australia’s prime sources of wealth being hijacked by a foreign government”. Palmer, himself one of the biggest financial supporters of the conservative opposition, dismisses such criticism. He said: “China is the only country willing and able to invest the billions needed to develop these projects. Three hundred million people are moving from the countryside to the cities. The demand is in the People’s Republic of China.”

But there are good economic reasons for Australians to worry. The windfall from the country’s mineral exports has strengthened the Australian dollar to a point where manufacturing bosses say their exports are becoming uncompetitive.

In Perth, Australia’s mining capital, there are signs of a bubble economy. Restaurants and farms are struggling to find labour as unskilled workers flock to the mines, where the average annual wage is A8,000 (£69,000). A truck driver in the mines can earn more than a surgeon.

Meanwhile, Australia’s prime minister, Julia Gillard, is committed to imposing a carbon tax and cutting greenhouse gases, goals that sit uneasily with the boom in the energy-intensive mining sector.

Beijing seems to be treading carefully. Sinosteel, another Chinese-owned metals conglomerate, has plans to develop a massive opencast iron ore mine in the Weld range, a ridge of hills 400 miles north-east of Perth. Geologists believe it will yield up to 300m tons of high-grade iron ore over 20 years. But it is a sensitive project. The red-tinged rock is not just rich in iron oxide, it contains archaeological evidence from thousands of years of Aboriginal life.

Colin Hamlett, an elder of the Wajarri people, is leading a campaign to prevent Sinosteel digging up his ancestors’ sacred places. His great-grandmother was buried at a site designated as dump for mine tailings. The plan has since been changed. “This land tells the story of my people,” Hamlett said. “Our songlines, our camps, our relics, they’re all here.”

Sinosteel’s top executive has assured Hamlett that sites sacred to the Wajarri will remain untouched. Top of his list is an unremarkable-looking hill known as Wilgie Mia. “This is where we get our ochre,” Hamlett said. “You see it in paintings hundreds of miles away.”

According to archaeologists, Wilgie Mia could be the oldest continuously worked mine in the world, proof that for 10,000 years, indigenous Australians have been digging holes in search of mineral riches. Now the Chinese are on a similar quest.

• An episode of Stephen Sackur’s Hardtalk, examining the Australian mining industry, is on the BBC News channel today.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

China has the largest and most sophisticated Internet censorship program on earth. It’s known as “The Great Firewall” of China. The Great Firewall blocks access to sensitive subjects in China like democracy or Tibetan independace. It also blocks access to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social networking sites. Why would China want to block Facebook? Think Egypt.

The LA Times has a story about the man who created China’s Great Firewall. His name is Fang Binxing and he heads up the telecommunications department at Beijing University. Binxing is vilified throughout the country for creating the climate of censorship for Chinese Internet users. He says being the bad guy is a sacrifice he was willing to make for his country.

Ironically, Binxing admits to having six Virtual Private Networks (VPN) on his computer for getting past the very firewall he created.

VPN’s are illegal but nevertheless widely used throughout China to get through the Great Firewall. The fact that Facebook has 700,000 members in China even though the site is blocked speaks to that.

This article titled “Chinese authorities restrict news of Egypt protests” was written by Tania Branigan in Beijing and agencies, for guardian.co.uk on Monday 31st January 2011 13.51 UTC

The Chinese authorities are censoring references to the protests in Egypt as some internet users draw comparisons with China, it emerged today.

Searches for the Chinese characters for Egypt on the popular Sina microblog service returned a message saying results were not being shown due to local regulations. But tactics such as employing the English word or characters sounding the same as the Chinese name – also “ai ji”, but this time meaning “sad and worried” – allowed internet users to discuss the situation.

Some people said they had also been able to post messages containing the characters for Egypt, although it was not clear how long they stayed up.

Although Beijing’s grip on power remains strong, the authorities are deeply aware of social tensions and are anxious to avoid mass unrest. There has been carefully controlled coverage of Egypt in the mainstream media, with newspapers and major news portals running short pieces from the Xinhua state news agency. They are often told to use only Xinhua articles on sensitive subjects.

Reports have focused on the economic impact of the protests and the risks of instability, rather than their causes. But the official Global Times newspaper ran a commentary on its English site arguing that the so-called colour revolutions “will not bring about real democracy”. It concluded: “When it comes to political systems, the western model is only one of a few options. It takes time and effort to apply democracy to different countries, and to do so without the turmoil of revolution.”

The Chinese edition today pointed to US interests in Egypt, declaring that the west was trying to decide which direction the country will take.

Officially, Beijing has urged a return to order in Egypt, with the foreign ministry spokesman, Hong Lei, saying in a statement: “China is paying very close attention to developments in Egypt. Egypt is a friend of China, and we hope Egypt will return to social stability and normal order as soon as possible.”

But some internet users embraced the protests. One message on the popular Baidu.com message board read: “We must clearly support this revolution.”

Another asked: “Will Mubarak become [late Chinese leader] Deng Xiaoping?” That was apparently a reference to the brutal military crackdown on the pro-reform protests that began in Tiananmen Square in 1989, which resulted in hundreds, possibly thousands, of deaths.

On the Sina microblog, several users drew parallels with their own situation. “So much tax every year, visiting the hospital once would cost a fortune – this reminds me of Egypt,” one wrote.

“[Am] watching TV. One woman said: ‘The Egyptians don’t have the most basic rights. They can’t vote, they don’t have freedom of expression, some of them can’t even work. The poor are extremely poor and the rich are extremely rich, and the government has been ignoring the gap for 30 years.’ OK … very thought-provoking …” noted another.

A third wrote: “No matter how wealthy the society seems, there is one thing that’s missing, just like the Egyptians – they are missing the exact same thing, too. The evil will eventually perish and we will have the thing which has been missing in our hearts.”

Others questioned why news programmes were not devoting more time to the subject.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

Donald Trump was interviewed on CNBC this morning. He ripped Obama’s SOTU speech and then ranted about China. He made some very good points.