NPR has a great interview with the author Rachel DeWoskin today on All Things Considered. Highly recommended.

It’s not really surprising that Chen’s alarming assertion that there were more than 1,000 Chinese spies in Australia has helped to ignite worldwide concern over China’s espionage capabilities and techniques. This article taks a look at how Chinese intelligence compares to that of other countries, and how Chen Yonglin has generated fresh interest in the subject.

Like those of most countries, China’s intelligence efforts employ a system of concentric circles, analysts said. Unlike U.S. intelligence agencies, with their reliance on satellite data and high technology, China is known for its “humint,” or human intelligence.

“They can and do send out thousands of people with limited tasking, flooding the target country,” said retired Col. Larry Wortzel, a former U.S. Army attaché in Beijing now at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington.

China has three kinds of spies, asylum-seeker Hao told Australian reporters: “professional spies” paid to collect information; “working relationship” spies operating in business circles; and “friends” in less-formal networks, a category analysts said Chen’s 1,000 spies would fall into.

China employs a relatively small number of well-trained, professional spies, intelligence analysts said, charged with digging up the most-sensitive military secrets and strategic policy.

In the second tier, China relies on well-placed front companies and scientists to go after key technologies, including dual military and civilian-use products that are easier to acquire than top-secret military items. “But you use dual-use or trading companies as far from the embassy as possible,” said an intelligence expert who declined to be identified. “They’re a big radioactive tag.”

In one recent case, a Chinese-American couple in Wisconsin was arrested on suspicion of selling China $500,000 worth of computer parts with potential applications in enhanced missile systems.

But it’s China’s biggest concentric ring that often garners the most attention. Beijing is known for gathering small bits of information from “friends” — Chinese businesspeople, students, scientists, trade delegations and tourists traveling overseas — which it assembles into a bigger picture.

“They spread a rather wide net,” said James Lilley, a former CIA station chief and U.S. ambassador to China. “It’s often a rather blurred line between ‘cooperator’ and ‘undercover agent.'”

The article also quotes analysts who say one reason Australia wasn’t that interested in Chen as an intelligence resource was his focus on the Falun Gong. If he’d been involved in nuclear intelligence or something else of immediate and crucial concern to Australia’s national security, they would probably have offered him a visa right away and started picking his brain. But his assignment of watching the wheelers made him less than a prize catch for Australia’s intelligence community.

Thanks to Gordon for emailing me this link.

This certainly sounds ominous.

Concerns about media censorship were heightened in Hong Kong Sunday when a delegate to China’s legislature said the city’s public broadcaster should be clipped of its independence.

The comments from National People’s Congress member Peter Wong came as the Chinese territory’s Journalists Association accused the city’s new Beijing-appointed leader of paying lip-service to free speech.

Wong, an outspoken supporter of the former British colony’s closer integration into China, stepped into a row over Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK) following speculation that political leader Donald Tsang could strip it of its editorial freedom.

Tsang was accused of leaning on the public broadcaster to end its 30-year horse-racing show. Critics said the move was a bad omen for talk-shows and other politically sensitive programming.

Wong said Tsang was right in his action and asserted the broadcaster should become simply a mouthpiece of the government.

“RTHK actually uses public funds and it’s for all sectors of the community, so taking a position against a government issue is not advisable,” he told a public forum.

His comments are likely to infuriate rights activists who gathered in Hong Kong Saturday night for a candle-light vigil in honor of sacked radio talk show host Wong Yuk-man.

Wong, known as Mad Dog, is famous for hosting controversial shows that take pot shots at the Chinese government and supports Hong Kong’s campaign for full democracy.

He was sacked by a commercial channel over a contractual row he claims was politically motivated.

He resigned from a different show last year after claiming to have received violent threats from Chinese officials over his on-air outbursts.

One country, two systems? I sure hope so, because that other system would be the worst thing for Hong Kong. That they think they could pull something like this off without setting off a firestorm of criticism is beyond me. The people of HK won’t just accept this passively – will they?

Speak out against the machine. Subvert the dominant paradigm. Create your own reality.

I am going to break my own rule here and post an entire lengthy article from the NY Times, knowing that in a few days it will be archeved and rendered unattainable without a payment. I want it here so we can refer to it in the future.

As usual, Frank Rich manages to get right to the heart of the matter. He strips aside those subplots that the right-wing bloggers try so deperately to cling to, the details they try to use to obfuscate the issue. They are smokescreens, designed to divert attention away from the crime. Word games and tricks. What we have to remember, Rich argues, is why this is such a huge story: because it is a microcosm of what Bush was willing to do to push for the Iraq war in spite of the evidence indicating it was unnecessary. Thousands — hundreds of thousands — of lives may have beed spared had BushCo not been so eager to push this war down our throats.

It’s long. But it’s great. Please, read it all. And don’t miss that last paragraph, where he says Rove’s resignation is now only a matter of time. I still have a hard time believing it, but Rich is almost always right. And based on this article, Cheney should be next.

“I am saying that if anyone was involved in that type of activity which I referred to, they would not be working here.”
– Ron Ziegler, press secretary to Richard Nixon, defending the presidential aide Dwight Chapin on Oct. 18, 1972. Chapin was convicted in April 1974 of perjury in connection with his relationship to the political saboteur Donald Segretti.

“Any individual who works here at the White House has the confidence of the president. They wouldn’t be working here at the White House if they didn’t have the president’s confidence.”
– Scott McClellan, press secretary to George W. Bush, defending Karl Rove on Tuesday.

WELL, of course, Karl Rove did it. He may not have violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, with its high threshold of criminality for outing a covert agent, but there’s no doubt he trashed Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame. We know this not only because of Matt Cooper’s e-mail, but also because of Mr. Rove’s own history. Trashing is in his nature, and bad things happen, usually through under-the-radar whispers, to decent people (and their wives) who get in his way. In the 2000 South Carolina primary, John McCain’s wife, Cindy, was rumored to be a drug addict (and Senator McCain was rumored to be mentally unstable). In the 1994 Texas governor’s race, Ann Richards found herself rumored to be a lesbian. The implication that Mr. Wilson was a John Kerry-ish girlie man beholden to his wife for his meal ticket is of a thematic piece with previous mud splattered on Rove political adversaries. The difference is that this time Mr. Rove got caught.

Even so, we shouldn’t get hung up on him – or on most of the other supposed leading figures in this scandal thus far. Not Matt Cooper or Judy Miller or the Wilsons or the bad guy everyone loves to hate, the former CNN star Robert Novak. This scandal is not about them in the end, any more than Watergate was about Dwight Chapin and Donald Segretti or Woodward and Bernstein. It is about the president of the United States. It is about a plot that was hatched at the top of the administration and in which everyone else, Mr. Rove included, are at most secondary players.

To see the main plot, you must sweep away the subplots, starting with the Cooper e-mail. It has been brandished as a smoking gun by Bush bashers and as exculpatory evidence by Bush backers (Mr. Rove, you see, was just trying to ensure that Time had its facts straight). But no one knows what this e-mail means unless it’s set against the avalanche of other evidence, most of it secret, including what Mr. Rove said in three appearances before the grand jury. Therein lies the rub, or at least whatever case might be made for perjury.

Another bogus subplot, long popular on the left, has it that Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, gave Mr. Novak a free pass out of ideological comradeship. But Mr. Fitzgerald, both young (44) and ambitious, has no record of Starr- or Ashcroft-style partisanship (his contempt for the press notwithstanding) or known proclivity for committing career suicide. What’s most likely is that Mr. Novak, more of a common coward than the prince of darkness he fashions himself to be, found a way to spill some beans and avoid Judy Miller’s fate. That the investigation has dragged on so long anyway is another indication of the expanded reach of the prosecutorial web.

Apparently this is finally beginning to dawn on Mr. Bush’s fiercest defenders and on Mr. Bush himself. Hence, last week’s erection of the stonewall manned by the almost poignantly clownish Mr. McClellan, who abruptly rendered inoperative his previous statements that any suspicions about Mr. Rove are “totally ridiculous.” The morning after Mr. McClellan went mano a mano with his tormentors in the White House press room – “We’ve secretly replaced the White House press corps with actual reporters,” observed Jon Stewart – the ardently pro-Bush New York Post ran only five paragraphs of a wire-service story on Page 12. That conspicuous burial of what was front-page news beyond Murdochland speaks loudly about the rising anxiety on the right. Since then, White House surrogates have been desperately babbling talking points attacking Joseph Wilson as a partisan and a liar.

These attacks, too, are red herrings. Let me reiterate: This case is not about Joseph Wilson. He is, in Alfred Hitchcock’s parlance, a MacGuffin, which, to quote the Oxford English Dictionary, is “a particular event, object, factor, etc., initially presented as being of great significance to the story, but often having little actual importance for the plot as it develops.” Mr. Wilson, his mission to Niger to check out Saddam’s supposed attempts to secure uranium that might be used in nuclear weapons and even his wife’s outing have as much to do with the real story here as Janet Leigh’s theft of office cash has to do with the mayhem that ensues at the Bates Motel in “Psycho.”

This case is about Iraq, not Niger. The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit – the big enchilada, to borrow a 1973 John Ehrlichman phrase from the Nixon tapes – is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in so doing diverted finite resources, human and otherwise, from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. That’s why the stakes are so high: this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war, not the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative who posed for Vanity Fair.

So put aside Mr. Wilson’s February 2002 trip to Africa. The plot that matters starts a month later, in March, and its omniscient author is Dick Cheney. It was Mr. Cheney (on CNN) who planted the idea that Saddam was “actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time.” The vice president went on to repeat this charge in May on “Meet the Press,” in three speeches in August and on “Meet the Press” yet again in September. Along the way the frightening word “uranium” was thrown into the mix.

By September the president was bandying about the u-word too at the United Nations and elsewhere, speaking of how Saddam needed only a softball-size helping of uranium to wreak Armageddon on America. But hardly had Mr. Bush done so than, offstage, out of view of us civilian spectators, the whole premise of this propaganda campaign was being challenged by forces with more official weight than Joseph Wilson. In October, the National Intelligence Estimate, distributed to Congress as it deliberated authorizing war, included the State Department’s caveat that “claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa,” made public in a British dossier, were “highly dubious.” A C.I.A. assessment, sent to the White House that month, determined that “the evidence is weak” and “the Africa story is overblown.”

AS if this weren’t enough, a State Department intelligence analyst questioned the legitimacy of some mysterious documents that had surfaced in Italy that fall and were supposed proof of the Iraq-Niger uranium transaction. In fact, they were blatant forgeries. When Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said as much publicly in the days just before “shock and awe,” his announcement made none of the three evening newscasts. The administration’s apocalyptic uranium rhetoric, sprinkled with mushroom clouds, had been hammered incessantly for more than five months by then – not merely in the State of the Union address – and could not be dislodged. As scenarios go, this one was about as subtle as “Independence Day” and just as unstoppable a crowd-pleaser.

Once we were locked into the war, and no W.M.D.’s could be found, the original plot line was dropped with an alacrity that recalled the “Never mind!” with which Gilda Radner’s Emily Litella used to end her misinformed Weekend Update commentaries on “Saturday Night Live.” The administration began its dog-ate-my-homework cover-up, asserting that the various warning signs about the uranium claims were lost “in the bowels” of the bureaucracy or that it was all the C.I.A.’s fault or that it didn’t matter anyway, because there were new, retroactive rationales to justify the war. But the administration knows how guilty it is. That’s why it has so quickly trashed any insider who contradicts its story line about how we got to Iraq, starting with the former Treasury secretary Paul O’Neill and the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke.

Next to White House courtiers of their rank, Mr. Wilson is at most a Rosencrantz or Guildenstern. The brief against the administration’s drumbeat for war would be just as damning if he’d never gone to Africa. But by overreacting in panic to his single Op-Ed piece of two years ago, the White House has opened a Pandora’s box it can’t slam shut. Seasoned audiences of presidential scandal know that there’s only one certainty ahead: the timing of a Karl Rove resignation. As always in this genre, the knight takes the fall at exactly that moment when it’s essential to protect the king.

But we all know the truth, that the king is equally guilty, if not more so.

Amazing, that it’s cheaper to send salmon around the world and back to have it filleted than just doing it here.

Pacific salmon swim as far as 2,000 miles to lay their eggs in rivers up and down the Northwest. Once caught, some make a longer journey: 8,000 miles round-trip to China.

Facing growing imports of low-cost seafood, fish processors in the Northwest, including Seattle-based Trident Seafoods, are sending part of their catch of Alaskan salmon or Dungeness crab to China to be filleted or de-shelled before returning to U.S. tables.

“There are 36 pin bones in a salmon and the best way to remove them is by hand,” says Charles Bundrant, founder of Trident, which ships about 30 million pounds of its 1.2 billion-pound annual harvest to China for processing. “Something that would cost us $1 per pound labor here, they get it done for 20 cents in China.”

I don’t know how many salmon filleters there are in the US, but I suggest they start learning new skills.

And the Democrats are as bad as the Republicans on this one. Yesterday Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) introduced a bill that would bar China’s purchase of Unocal on rather specious grounds of national security.

“This really isn’t very complicated,” Dorgan said. “Unocal is located in the United States and has approximately 1.75 billion barrels of oil. It would be foolish, to say the least, to allow a foreign government … to own that much of such a strategic resource so vital to the U.S. economy and the national defense.”

Dorgan went on to say that because no U.S. corporation or government entity is allowed to hold controlling interest in any of China’s state-owned oil companies, giving China a chance to buy U.S. companies in the sensitive energy sector would be unfair to U.S. businesses.

“Given this unlevel playing field,” Dorgan said, “China should be barred from owning a U.S. oil company, at least until it allows American companies to purchase controlling interests in Chinese energy companies.”

Pombo’s amendment would require U.S. investigators to determine the extent to which Beijing subsidizes Chinese investments in a variety of U.S. assets. Consideration of the amendment may help delay any sale of Unocal to CNOOC, which could aid Chevron.

Congressional rhetoric against the bid “is a bunch of bunk,” said Mark Denbow, who helps manage CNOOC shares at USAA International Fund, a San Antonio firm. “The energy market is completely fungible. It’s not like they are going to corner the market.”

I am afraid America simply isn’t ready to accept a deal that has such strong psychological implications (even if there’s no reality behind them). The very idea of Red China buying a US oil company frightens us Americans and makes us worry that we are becoming weak and the Chinese are becoming strong, and soon they will own everything. I’m tempted to put up the picture of the crying baby I used a few days ago. Grow up, America.

The Rove soap opera continues its march into melodrama with an intriguing new twist, the possibility of Judy Miller being not a pawm but a willing perpetrator in the whole thing. And oh, what a new spin that would be. Editors have been wringing their hands over Judy D’Arc’s burning at the stake, but it may just turn out that she’s played a larger and uglier role in this mess. Anyone aware of her working as a government shill during the Iraq War knows she is highly capable of it.

As usual, I’m finding the best information, written with the most flair, wit and diligence, over at this blog. Scroll around and you’ll soon see what I mean. This is a good place to start.

For great background on why this is about much more than a CIA agent’s outing, see this article from a year ago. At the heart of today’s scandal is whether the “evidence” that led us into the disastrous Iraq war was fixed. (Of course it was, which is why it was so essential to demolish Joseph Wilson’s reputation, smearing him as a veritable monster, madman and compulsive liar. And that is still the only strategy the GOP has as it ramps up its smear machine into super–overdrive.)

Hey, generals have a right so speak their personal views on things, don’t they? China therefore seems unruffled at General Zhu’s casual assertion that China might use nukes to fight the US in a war over Taiwan. What’s the big deal? He was just sayin’….

Remarks by a Chinese general that Beijing could use nuclear arms against the United States in a war over Taiwan were his personal views, but China will never allow Taiwan to be independent, China’s Foreign Ministry said.

“We will firmly abide by the principles of peaceful reunification and ‘one country two systems’ and we will express the deepest sincerity and exert the greatest efforts to realize peaceful reunification,” state-mouthpiece Xinhua news agency reported a ministry spokesman as saying late on Friday.

But, he added: “We will never tolerate ‘Taiwan Independence’, neither will we allow anybody with any means to separate Taiwan from the motherland.”

The Financial Times reported on Friday that Zhu Chenghu, a general in the People’s Liberation Army, said China would have no option but to go nuclear in the event of an attack over the contentious Taiwan issue.

Zhu had told reporters visiting from Hong Kong he was expressing his own views and did not anticipate a conflict with Washington, it said.

Nevertheless, a State Department spokesman called the remarks irresponsible.

Beijing considers Taiwan, split politically from the mainland since 1949, a part of China and has vowed to bring the it back into the fold. In March, China passed an anti-secession law authorizing the use of “non-peaceful means” to do so.

While the United States only recognizes one China and says it does not support Taiwan independence, Washington is bound by law to help the democratic island of 23 million people defend itself.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman did not explicitly say that Zhu’s comments conflicted with policy. However, China has had a declared policy of not using its nuclear weapons unless it has already suffered nuclear attack.

Zhu is dean of China’s University of National Defense.

“Zhu had repeatedly emphasized that he would express personal views on the issues that the reporters are interested in before they started discussions,” the Foreign Ministry spokesman said.

Can you imagine General Franks saying we could drop nukes on Fallujah — or anywhere else on earth — to secure the peace? (If I recall my history, back in the 60s George Wallace’s running mate Curtis Lemay said he’d consider nuking Vietnam, which didn’t earn him very high marks. He was promptly labeled a nutcase, quite correctly. What a novel way to win hearts and minds.)

Or so claims MS Money’s senior editor Jim Jubak, who lays out an interesting argument that fiddling with the yuan will have next to zero impact. The key, he argues, is ensuring Chinese laborers earn more money. Period.

The solution isn’t in trying to reduce demand for cheaper Chinese goods by somehow raising the price of these goods enough so world consumers stop buying them. Even if that were a good idea in itself (and I don’t think trade wars are ever good ideas), the cost gap is so huge that I don’t think there’s anyway to shrink it enough to reduce demand for Chinese goods.

Instead, we should be going after the other end of the trade deficit by increasing the demand for U.S. and other goods from the developed world. We can’t achieve that by putting the currency markets on the job. Private consumption in China last year averaged $520 a person. Think that average Chinese spending $520 a year is going to fill a trade gap running at $170 billion a year if there’s a 10% drop in the price of U.S. goods?

To get that average Chinese to spend more, period — and to spend more on U.S. goods — he or she has got to make more money. Average real wages did climb 11% in 2004, and that did increase labor costs per hour by about 15% in 2004. But that only took the national average labor cost per hour to $1 from 87 cents.

Jubak isn’t too clear about how the unions would be set up and administered but it’s still a quaint notion. I agree with him that, while it won’t be a panacea, it would certainlyt benefit the government, the workers and the world trade community alike. Whether it could ever possibly happen is another story. Since this is China we’re talking about, the government would have to run the unions and they’d soon become as corrupt as the teamsters under Jimmy Hoffa. So ios the idea totally off the wall?

(As some readers know, I usually shy away from economics because I simply don’t have enough facts and figures at my fingertips to make my arguyments cogently and persuasively. Some have asked that I try to focus more on China’s economic issues, however, so I’m giving it a try. No laughter from the peanut gallery.)

Update: Jubak, by the way, is very much in favor of letting China by Unocal. That earns him points for me.