Chinese Activities

[Gary Oak]

China has far more computer experts than the entire west does though.

[Blue Frost]

They are still working off the West tech though. I forget who it was, but yesterday I read that students built a processor four times as fast as any other, and small.
Along with bio computation they are not that far ahead.

[Gary Oak]

I love how Chinese like to complain about how they were mistreated in the past by foreign powers all the while liking that China has been genociding the Tibetans for a half century and the Inner Mongolians. China has no more claim to the South China Sea than Mexico has to the Gulf Of Mexico and they know it.

http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/the ... &ocid=iehp

[Blue Frost]

China had always been bad to it's neighbors, and many right back to them, nothing new.
They have always tried to expand also beating down peoples until they become Chinese as they have always done all the way back to the warring states.
The spy plane crash, I wonder where it was, and why the Chinese pilot crashed into it, ordered to commit suicide maybe to take it down.

[Gary Oak]

Another secret Chinese don't like to talk about is the long strips of hairdressers. There are pretty girls outside trying to lure customers and I believe to try and make it look normal but all the hairdressers are young late teens to early twenties young guys with goofy multi colored hairdos. After a searching for a long time to find a female barber I finally found a couple of ladies around 60 and I asked them if it was gay prostitution and one nodded yes.

Behind China’s one-child policy is a growing army living alone

(Bloomberg) -- In her chic Beijing studio, 26-year-old Summer Liu relaxes on a sofa, admiring the pink vase she keeps full of fresh flowers. In the eastern city of Jining, Hu Jiying, 81, sits on an old bed that’s scattered with clothes, towels and half a bag of snacks, worrying about the cost of her medicine.


What they have in common is that they live alone, two ends of a rapidly growing demographic that is breaking down China’s traditional family structure and presenting the government with a social and environmental headache.

China had 66 million registered one-person homes in 2014, or 15 percent of all households, compared with 6 percent in 1990, according to government data. The actual number may be as many as 83 million -- more than the population of Germany -- and could rise to 132 million by 2050, according to Jean Yeung, director of the centre for family and population research at the National University of Singapore.

"The prevalence will only increase in the next few decades due to continued aging, migration, and divorce," Yeung said. "Some choose to live alone because they have more economic resources and prefer more time and space for themselves, others have no choice."

Those forces are eating away at an economic structure based on family units that goes back centuries, part of the twin Confucian values of loyalty to the emperor and filial obedience known as Zhongxiao that Chairman Mao Zedong tried to destroy during the Cultural Revolution. Where Mao largely failed, economic growth is succeeding, boosting demand for power and consumer goods and putting an increasing strain on services for the elderly.

"The rise of the one-person homes makes increasing demand for housing, it makes increasing demand for automobiles, it makes increasing demand for energy," said Nicholas Eberstadt, a demographer at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. "It would affect mainly the composition and to some degree the quality of growth in China. This is part of China’s transition into a more consumption-driven economy."

Statistics from developed countries suggests the trend in China has a long way to go. In neighboring Japan, more than 30 percent of households have only one occupant. In Norway and Finland the ratio is as high as 40 percent.

"This rapid increase in single-person households represents a fundamental shift at the very bottom of the Chinese social structure," said Wang Feng, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine. "Households, often with many members co-residing, have long been the most basic units to organize production and consumption, to socialize individuals, and to maintain networks of political power and social support."

The breakdown of that structure began with the imposition of the one-child family rule which was only removed last year. When millions of migrants began leaving family homes in the past three decades to seek work in the cities, many left parents behind. Some 19 million people 65 years and older live alone now in China, and the number will more than double to 46 million by 2050, according to estimates of Yeung and her colleagues.

Hu’s 56-year-old daughter lives two hours away in another part of Shandong province and is a paraplegic, so can no longer visit. Her own poor health means she can’t travel often and she hasn’t seen her daughter since last summer. Her son also lives away and visits once a year, but is too poor to help out, Hu said.

"How can I not be lonely?" said Hu, who has difficulty breathing and spends much of her time watching television in her dingy flat. "I want someone to live here with me. She doesn’t need to pay rent. I just need someone to be nearby, to be with me."

Hu gets 600 yuan a month ($91) from the government agency of her late husband, who died “maybe 17 years, maybe 18 years ago,” and spends half of it on medicine.

Many elderly, especially in rural areas, don’t have full health insurance or a pension. The government said it has expanded rural healthcare, encouraged private businesses to invest in retirement facilities and more than tripled the number of beds in nursing homes in the past five years. The nation’s top economic planning body allotted 10.8 billion yuan in that period to support the elderly.

More government subsidies will be needed. Only 9 percent of China’s private nursing homes made a profit as of 2015.

At the other end of the age spectrum, young, middle-class people like Liu are moving out of their parents’ house before they get married as they can afford their own place.

At the last census in 2010, 36 percent of men and 22 percent of women aged 25 to 29 weren’t married, twice the level of 2000. In cities, the ratio for unmarried women is even higher at 30 percent, according to Wang at the University of California.

"I’m thinking about one or two years before I meet someone and get married," said Liu, who moved into her cozy 6,000-yuan-a-month flat a year ago. "I can do whatever I want living alone."

Singles like Liu are driving the growth of new services, such as the gym where she works out in the evening, or smartphone app Ele.me, which delivers her single-portion dinners. The Alibaba-backed company, founded in 2009, is now worth $4.5 billion and employs more than 6,000 people to deliver meals in over 260 cities.

In between the young consumers and the elderly, there’s another group swelling the ranks of solitary dwellers that rarely existed before: divorcees.

China’s divorce rate almost tripled between 2002 and 2014, to 2.7 divorces per 1,000 people, according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs. Newspaper commentators have blamed the rise of social media and dating sites, increased financial independence of women, and regulations that allow quick and cheap divorces.

In 1985, when Deng Xiaoping was still fomenting China’s market opening, the rate was only 0.4 divorces per 1,000 people.

Still, it’s the nation’s inexorable aging that is likely to contribute the largest share of single-occupant households, putting increasing stress on healthcare and social services.

"For every one step of yours, I need to take three," says Ni Yuehua, 82, who takes more than an hour to go to and from her local supermarket, 80 meters away. She calculates the weights of the yogurt and vegetables in her small trolley, because she can’t carry more than 5 kilos to her one-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a block in Beijing.

Ni’s husband passed away in 2002 and her older daughter died in 2006 from disease. She lived in the U.S. with her son, a computer scientist, until 2010, when he was shot and killed in a robbery. Her other child, a daughter, lives in Sydney but is almost blind. So Li lives alone, nursing her arthritic fingers and taking medicine each day for her diabetes and heart disease.

"Early morning is the most difficult time," she said, wiping tears from behind her reading glasses with a checked handkerchief. "I have to turn on the radio so I can distract myself from those sad things."

On the back of the door in the one-bedroom apartment that she used to share with her husband are signs in large, red characters: "Switch off the fire," "switch off the water."

Across the hall is another apartment, where her children grew up. She never goes into it any more. "That’s too tragic for me to even look at," she says.

--With assistance from Kevin Hamlin To contact Bloomberg News staff for this story: Xiaoqing Pi in Beijing at xpi1@bloomberg.net. To contact the editors responsible for this story: Brian Bremner at bbremner@bloomberg.net, Adam Majendie, Malcolm Scott

http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/beh ... &ocid=iehp

[Blue Frost]

Interesting read, i gotta wonder how the average person feels being alone like so many are there. So many people, and still alone, gotta be hard on many of them.

[Gary Oak]

That's a very lucrative industry but of course it could only accur in a nation who lack normal humanity

Up to 1.5 Million Killed by Chinese Regime for Their Organs, Report Reveals

New report details how China built a massive transplant industry through harvesting organs from prisoners of conscience—believed to be mainly Falun Gong practitioners

WASHINGTON—Transplant surgeons in China are awash in human organs. Some complain of working 24-hour shifts, performing back-to-back transplant surgeries. Others ensure they’ve got spare organs available, freshly harvested—just in case. Some hospitals can source organs within just hours, while others report having two, three, or four backup organs, in case the first organ fails.

All this has been taking place in China for over a decade, with no voluntary organ donation system and only thousands of executed prisoners—what China says is its official organ source. In phone calls, Chinese doctors have said the real source of organs is a state secret. Meanwhile, practitioners of Falun Gong have disappeared in large numbers, and many have reported being blood tested while in custody.

Jump to Infographic

An unprecedented report by a small team of relentless investigators published on June 22 documents in sometimes astonishing detail the ecosystem of hundreds of Chinese hospitals and transplant facilities that have been operating quietly in China since around 2000.

Up to 1.5 Million Killed by Chinese Regime for Their Organs, Report Reveals‘Slow Motion Genocide’ Subject of New Report on Organ Harvesting in China


Collectively, these facilities had the capacity to perform between 1.5 and 2.5 million transplants over the last 16 years, according to the report. The authors suspect the actual figure falls between 60,000 and 100,000 transplants per year since 2000.

“The ultimate conclusion of this update, and indeed our previous work, is that China has engaged in the mass killing of innocents,” said co-author David Matas upon the report’s launch at the National Press Club in Washington on June 22.

The study, titled “Bloody Harvest/The Slaughter: An Update,” builds on the previous work of the authors on the topic. Released shortly after the passage of an official censure of organ harvesting in China by the U.S. House of Representatives, the research poses an explosive question: Has large-scale medical genocide been taking place in China?

Big Profits

The People’s Liberation Army General Hospital, whose main task is to provide health care for top Communist Party and military officials, is among the most advanced and well-equipped hospitals in China. The number of organ transplants it performs is a military secret—but by the early 2000s, its clinical division, the 309 Hospital, was making most of its money from them.

“In recent years, the transplant center has been the primary profitable health care unit, with gross income of 30 million yuan in 2006 to 230 million in 2010—a growth of nearly eightfold in five years,” its website states. That’s a jump from US$4.5 million to US$34 million.

The PLA General Hospital wasn’t the only health care institution to stumble across this lucrative business opportunity. The Daping Hospital in Chongqing, affiliated with the Third Military Medical University, also managed to boost its revenue from 36 million yuan in the late 1990s, when it had just started performing transplants, to nearly 1 billion in 2009—a growth of 25 times.

Even Huang Jiefu, China’s spokesman on organ transplantation, stated to the respected business publication Caijing in 2005: “There’s a trend of organ transplantation becoming a tool for hospitals to make money.”

How these remarkable feats were achieved in so short a time across China, when there was no voluntary organ donation system, when the number of death row prisoners was decreasing, and where the waiting times for patients expecting transplants could sometimes be measured in weeks, days, or even hours, is the subject of the new 817-page (including citations) report.


Parts of the report, drawing from whistle blower testimonies and Chinese medical papers, state that some donors may not have even been dead when their organs were removed.



“This is extremely difficult research to have done,” said Li Huige, a professor at the medical center of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany, and a member of the Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting advisory board, after reviewing the study.

The report contains a forensic tally of all known organ transplantation centers in China—over 700 of them—and counts their bed numbers, utilization rates, surgical staff, training programs, new infrastructure, recipient waiting times, advertised transplant numbers, use of anti-rejection drugs, and more. The authors, armed with this data, estimated the total number of transplants performed. The number stretches past 1 million.

This conclusion, though, is only half the story.

“It’s a mammoth system. Each hospital has so many doctors, nurses, and surgeons. That in itself isn’t a problem. China’s a big country,” said Dr. Li, in a telephone interview. “But where did all the organs come from?”

Captive Bodies

Organs for transplant can’t be removed from dead bodies and simply placed into storage until needed; they need to be recovered before or soon after death, and then quickly implanted into a new host. The often desperate timing and logistics around this process make organ matching in most countries a complex field, with waiting lists and dedicated teams who encourage family members of accident victims to donate organs.

But in China, the donors seem to be captive, waiting around for the recipients.


Related CoverageUp to 1.5 Million Killed by Chinese Regime for Their Organs, Report RevealsRemoval of Organ Harvesting Mastermind Cues Real Change in China


Changzheng Hospital in Shanghai, a major PLA medical center, reported performing 120 “emergency liver transplants” as of April 2006.

The term refers to when a patient with a life-threatening condition is admitted to the hospital or transplant ward, and a matching organ is found within only hours or days. This is rare in other countries.

But Changzheng Hospital published a paper in the Journal of Clinical Surgery, a Chinese medical journal, about its success with emergency transplants. “The shortest time for a patient to be transplanted after entering the hospital was four hours,” it stated.

In a one-week period from April 22 to April 30, 2005, the hospital performed 16 liver and 15 kidney transplants.

The First Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University published its own study in a similar vein, documenting that between early 2000 and late 2004, 46 patients received “emergency liver transplants”—meaning that recipients were all matched with a donor within 72 hours.

Even the official China Liver Transplant Registry, in a set of slides presenting its 2006 annual report, compares the number of “selectively timed” transplant surgeries with the emergency transplants. There were 3,181 regular transplants in the year, and 1,150, or just over a quarter, were made under emergency matching conditions.

These phenomena are extremely difficult, if not impossible, to explain according to official pronouncements. And they stand as prima facie evidence that a captive donor population is on standby for its organs to be harvested.

“This is very emotive for me,” said Wendy Rogers, an Australian bioethicist at Macquarie University, whose close friend suffered liver failure due to hepatitis and needed a transplant within three days if she was to live.

“She was extraordinarily lucky to get one in that timeframe,” Dr. Rogers said.

“But to do 46 of them in a row? It’s hard to think of another plausible explanation, apart from killing on demand.”

Parts of the report, drawing from whistleblower testimonies and Chinese medical papers, state that some donors may not have even been dead when their organs were removed. This includes the testimony of a former paramilitary police officer, who said he witnessed a live harvest operation conducted without anesthesia, and that of a former health care worker in Jinan.

Targeted for Elimination

The authors of the new report, relying on previous evidence and new findings, contend that the primary population in China that could have been targeted in this way are prisoners of conscience, composed primarily of practitioners of Falun Gong.

Falun Gong is a traditional discipline of the Buddhist school that became extremely popular in China throughout the 1990s. It involves doing five meditative exercises and living according to teachings based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. The state tacitly supported Falun Gong, and an official survey indicated there were upward of 70 million practitioners by 1999—more than the number of members in the Communist Party.

Plain-cloth police brutally arrest Falun Gong practitioners on Tiananmen Square. (Compassion Magazine)
Plainclothes police arrest Falun Gong practitioners on Tiananmen Square, Beijing, in 1999. (Compassion Magazine)

In July 1999, the leader of the regime, Jiang Zemin, unleashed a national campaign to eliminate the practice. He initially met with high-level opposition, but quickly turned the anti-Falun Gong mobilization into a means of consolidating his power within the Party, as he promoted loyalists and sidelined resisters.

Organ harvesting as a means of eliminating the Falun Gong population appears to have begun by the following year.

The evidence that this has been taking place has been available for a decade now—but this is the first time the estimated death toll has been so formidable, the sheer volume of evidence so overwhelming, and the central role of the state as enabler so clear.

The three authors of the report—David Kilgour, David Matas, and Ethan Gutmann—have previously published reports on the topic, but this is the first time they have joined forces. Even they were surprised by the results of the study.

“When you were a kid, did you ever pick up a big rock and see all this life underneath it—ants and insects? That’s what the experience of working on this report has been like,” said Gutmann, a journalist whose book on the topic, “The Slaughter,” was published in 2014.


Related CoverageUp to 1.5 Million Killed by Chinese Regime for Their Organs, Report RevealsInterview With David Kilgour, Co-author of New China Organ Harvesting Report


Kilgour is a former Canadian parliamentarian and Matas is a well-known human rights lawyer; the pair published a book on the topic, “Bloody Harvest,” in 2009, which followed a groundbreaking report by the same name released in July 2006.

In the last few years, researchers of transplant abuse in China had largely been under the impression that the scale of organ harvesting had retreated considerably, or at least that Falun Gong practitioners and other prisoners of conscience were no longer targeted.

The authors discovered this was not so. “They’ve built a juggernaut,” Gutmann said. “We’re looking at a gigantic flywheel, which they can’t seem to stop. I don’t believe it’s just profit behind it, I believe it’s ideology, mass murder, and the cover-up of a terrible crime where the only way to cover up that crime is to keep killing people who know about it.”

The backbone of the report, and its single largest section, is an exhaustive account of every hospital in China that is known to perform transplants. Of the 712 hospitals that are identified, 164 are given detailed, individual treatment in the report.

Centers of Harvesting

The Nanjing General Hospital, in the Nanjing Military Command, for instance, is given two pages. The report discusses the prolific career of Li Leishi, the founder of the kidney research center at the hospital; there was even a Communist Party document that made it mandatory to study the “model” he had established. Li was commended by the regime for building one of the fastest growing kidney transplant centers in the country.

In a 2008 interview, Li, then 82 years old, said that in the past he typically performed 120 kidney transplants a year, but now does only 70. Another chief surgeon was reported to be performing “hundreds of kidney transplants a year” as of 2001. With 11 chief and six associate surgeons engaged in kidney transplants, the total volume of transplants at the hospital may have reached around 1,000 annually, the report states.

Astonishing transplant volumes like this appear throughout the report.

At Fuzhou General Hospital, also in the Nanjing Military Command, Dr. Tan Jianming had personally directed 4,200 kidney transplants as of 2014, according to his biography on a website belonging to the Chinese Medical Doctor Association.

The Xinqiao Hospital, affiliated with the Third Military Medical University, in southwest Chongqing, said it had performed 2,590 kidney transplants by 2002, including 24 in a single day.

Zhu Jiye, director of the Peking University Organ Transplant Institute, said in 2013: “There was one year in which our hospital did 4,000 liver and kidney transplant operations.”

An re-enactment of organ harvesting in China on Falun Gong practitioners, during a rally in Ottawa, Canada, 2008. (Epoch Times)
A re-enactment of organ harvesting in China on Falun Gong practitioners, during a rally in Ottawa, Canada, in 2008. (Epoch Times)

In a June 2004 paper published in the Medical Journal of the Chinese People’s Armed Police Forces, a handy table is provided that notes that the Beijing Friendship Hospital and the Guangzhou Nanfang Hospital had conducted more than 2,000 kidney transplants by the end of 2000. Three other hospitals each recorded performing 1,000 by the end of that year. Most of these must have been performed only in a year or so, given that up until the end of the 1990s, transplantation in China was a boutique medical niche.

Hospital after hospital, page after page, volume figures like this are laid down, sourced back to official Chinese publications, including speeches, internal newsletters, hospital websites, medical journals, media reports, and more.

Without exception, these hospitals only discussed such impressive volume figures beginning in the year 2000. The massive infrastructure development and surgeon training programs also only began to be reported then—soon after the onset of the persecution of Falun Gong.

State Killing Machine

The Chinese regime’s official line on its organ sources has shifted over time. In 2001, when the first defector emerged from China claiming that the regime was using death row prisoners as an organ source, official spokesmen denied it, claiming that China relies primarily on voluntary donors.

In 2005, officials began hinting that death row prisoners were used instead. And after allegations of organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners were made public, in 2006, Chinese officials insisted that death row prisoners, who consented to having their organs removed after death, were the primary source.


Related CoverageUp to 1.5 Million Killed by Chinese Regime for Their Organs, Report RevealsInterview With Ethan Gutmann, Co-author of New China Organ Harvesting Report


But the menacing conclusion that slowly emerged through the research published in the report—which includes nearly 2,000 footnotes—is that the entire industry was deliberately created, almost overnight—right after an abundant new organ source became available.

This is suggested by the immense state involvement, both at the central and local levels, in the industry. Beginning in the 1990s, China’s health care system was largely privatized, with the state only paying for infrastructure, while hospitals had to finance themselves.

The liver transplant center at Renji Hospital saw a leapfrogging number of transplant beds: from 13 in late 2004, to 23 only two weeks later, to 90 in 2007, to 110 in 2014.

In 2006, Tianjin First Central Hospital added an entire 17-story building, with 500 beds, just for organ transplants. There are many other such cases; the report contains photographs of the often impressive buildings.

Organ transplantation quickly became a profitable business, and the central and local governments underwrote research and development, the construction of palatial new transplant facilities, and funded doctor training programs, including the overseas training of hundreds of transplant surgeons.

The Tianjin First Central Hospital. (Hospital files)
The Tianjin First Central Hospital. (Hospital files)

An entire industry of Chinese-made anti-rejection drugs came online, while Chinese hospitals began developing their own preservative solutions, chemicals in which organs are kept while being transported between the donor and the recipient.

As the transplant center associated with China Medical University in Shenyang said on its website: “To be able to complete such a large number of organ transplant surgeries every year, we need to give all of our thanks to the support given by the government. In particular, the Supreme People’s Court, Supreme People’s Procuratorate, Public Security system, judicial system, Ministry of Health, and Ministry of Civil Affairs have jointly promulgated laws to establish that organ procurement receives government support and protection. This is a one-of-a-kind in the world.”

The authors of the report have declined to give a death toll. While it is possible that in some cases multiple organs came from a single victim, until 2013 China had only an ad hoc and localized matching system. Chinese surgeons have also complained about the great wastage in China’s transplant industry, where often only one organ comes from one donor. Thus, if 60,000 to 100,000 transplant surgeries were performed annually, the death toll of organ harvesting in China may stretch to 1.5 million.

As China Medicine Report wrote in a late 2004 summary of the transplant industry: “Currently, because China has no interactive organ registration system, sometimes only a kidney is taken from a donor and many other organs are simply wasted.”


Related CoverageUp to 1.5 Million Killed by Chinese Regime for Their Organs, Report RevealsInvestigative Report: A Hospital Built for Murder


Matas, at the press conference on June 22, said: “The phenomena of multiple organs from one person has been happening, but in a statistically insignificant way.”

According to Lan Liugen, the deputy director of surgery at the PLA’s No. 303 Hospital in Guangxi Province, as of early 2013 there were only two hospitals in China that could procure and transplant multiple organs from a single donor. “Such surgeries are the best use of donor resources,” he said. “Currently only countries like the United States, Germany, and Japan can do multiple organ transplants from the same donor simultaneously.”

The authors are publishing their findings at a time when the climate of opinion on this issue seems poised for a shift: Journalists are more willing to look into the topic; documentaries on it are being produced and winning awards; and the number of transplant doctors and ethicists who are learning about China’s transplant system, and who are appalled by it, is growing.

Recently, the United States House of Representatives passed a resolution expressing concern about China’s practices, with House members denouncing them as “ghoulish” and “disgusting.”


Related CoverageUp to 1.5 Million Killed by Chinese Regime for Their Organs, Report RevealsChina’s Former Security Chief Implicated in Organ Harvesting
Up to 1.5 Million Killed by Chinese Regime for Their Organs, Report RevealsInterview With David Matas, Co-author of New China Organ Harvesting Report


A 2015 documentary titled “Hard to Believe,” now screening on PBS stations, explores how the issue has been received by the fields of journalism and medicine. The gravity of what has taken place in China for a decade and a half is only now beginning in sink in. (Disclosure: The author of this article was interviewed for the documentary.)

Rogers, the Australian bioethicist, says she has found that others have difficulty taking in what is happening in China.

“I had to explain it in detail to a German friend who’s a bioethicist, who deals with many challenging international topics,” Rogers said. “She literally couldn’t believe me, and asked, ‘Why didn’t I know about this already?'”

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/2097522 ... t-reveals/

[Blue Frost]

I think it's been about 5-7 years ago, but they did have mobile units that went around harvesting them.
I actually think it's a great idea if the person is guilty without doubt, and would repay life for a life in some way, but of course the system would abuse the power.

[Gary Oak]

I agree that terrorists and criminals that need to be put to death should at least be productive in supplying body parts but Fulon Gong practitioners I don't believe are deserving of the death penalty to supply organs for $$$$$$

[Blue Frost]

Yeah they are usually political prisoners, or simply some fat cat needs your organs. The Fulon Gong practitioners are just usual people looking into themselves like Christians, or any other religion.
I'm sure Christians are on their menu also.

[Gary Oak]

Actually China has loosened up it's persecution of Christians a lot. I met a Chinese girl who was adopted by white missionaries who'se parents are banned from entering China a long time ago however now I see churches there though of course there will be agents or informers in all of them. They were not persecuted at all from what I could see.

[Blue Frost]

Last year I think they demolished a church I read, and still persecuting them in rural areas.

[Gary Oak]

China Planning Underwater Great Wall of Robots

Two recent and interconnected developments out of China suggest that the world's most populous nation has big plans for the deep seas.

China is designing a manned deep-sea "space station" to hunt for mineral resources in the South China Sea, according to a recent Bloomberg report. The proposed location is significant for a couple of reasons. For one thing, the South China Sea is a highly disputed area these days among China and its neighbors, especially Vietnam and the Philippines.

Vertically speaking, the location is also pretty remarkable for different reasons. The oceanic base would be built as deep as 3,000 meters (9,800 feet) below the surface, and would be inhabited by a full time crew. No one has ever attempted to build a manned underwater station at those depths.

But more worrisome for international observers is the idea that the underwater station could serve as an anchor for China's other big deep-sea initiative, the so-called Underwater Great Wall of China.


According to reports that surfaced in May, the underwater wall refers to a network of floating and submerged sensors designed to detect enemy submarines. Intelligence agencies have presumably known about these plans for a while, but China has only recently gone public with details on the system -- and the underwater robots and drones that would be involved.

China Planning Underwater Great Wall of Robots

Credit: tuku.military.china.com

Two recent and interconnected developments out of China suggest that the world's most populous nation has big plans for the deep seas.

China is designing a manned deep-sea "space station" to hunt for mineral resources in the South China Sea, according to a recent Bloomberg report. The proposed location is significant for a couple of reasons. For one thing, the South China Sea is a highly disputed area these days among China and its neighbors, especially Vietnam and the Philippines.

RELATED: China to Send a Mission to Moon's Mysterious 'Dark Side'

Vertically speaking, the location is also pretty remarkable for different reasons. The oceanic base would be built as deep as 3,000 meters (9,800 feet) below the surface, and would be inhabited by a full time crew. No one has ever attempted to build a manned underwater station at those depths.

But more worrisome for international observers is the idea that the underwater station could serve as an anchor for China's other big deep-sea initiative, the so-called Underwater Great Wall of China.


According to reports that surfaced in May, the underwater wall refers to a network of floating and submerged sensors designed to detect enemy submarines. Intelligence agencies have presumably known about these plans for a while, but China has only recently gone public with details on the system -- and the underwater robots and drones that would be involved.

WATCH VIDEO: How Does China's Government Work?

In a recent military exhibit, Chinese government officials showed off a fleet of unmanned vehicles -- a.k.a. sea drones -- that would be part of the underwater wall defense system. These drones would be capable of maneuvering both on the surface of the water and at various depths beneath the waves. The sea drones would also be capable of carrying anti-submarine weapons and other payloads. The image above shows a kind of diorama exhibit from the Chinese presentation.

Back to the South China Sea space station: While the manned underwater base would be chiefly used for natural resource development, the platform will also be movable and could be used for military purposes, said Chinese officials at yet another recent presentation.

RELATED: China Is Building World's Biggest Trash Incinerator

China's plans -- for a deep-sea space station and an underwater wall of drones -- should keep military strategists around the world busy for the next few years. On the more hopeful side, both projects could have massive potential for the advancement of undersea scientific projects.

Originally published on Discovery News.

http://www.livescience.com/55187-china- ... obots.html

[Blue Frost]

I was wondering when someone would be up to doing that, i thought it would be us first. With the likes of what we have had running things the last few decades, I'm surprised we still have internet.

[Gary Oak]

I wouldn't be surprised at all if this isn't how many of these Chinese nationals aquire the funds to buy houses in Canada.

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/chinas-citic- ... nance.html

China's CITIC Bank tries to seize real estate assets in Canada

VANCOUVER (Reuters) - China CITIC Bank Corp Ltd has launched a Canadian lawsuit to try to seize the assets of a Chinese citizen the bank claims took out a multi-million dollar loan in China then fled to Canada, the lender's Vancouver-based lawyer said on Monday.

The bank is looking to seize numerous Vancouver-area homes, valued at some C$7.3 million ($5.58 million), along with other assets, according to the lawsuit, which was filed in the Supreme Court of British Columbia in Vancouver on June 24.

The defendant, Shibiao Yan, owns three multi-million dollar properties in a Vancouver suburb and resides in a C$3 million Vancouver home owned by his wife, according to court documents.

China is in the midst of a massive corruption crackdown and has stepped up efforts to find fugitives it says are hiding stolen assets abroad. The lawsuit comes amid a debate about the role foreign money, particularly from China, has played in Vancouver's property boom.

"The person involved left China with a large debt owed," said Christine Duhaime, a lawyer who represents China CITIC Bank in the case, adding that she is not aware of any criminal charges against the man.

Yan could not immediately be reached for comment. He has not yet filed a response to the lawsuit and the claims have not been proven in court.

China has been working with Canada for years to finalize a deal on the return of ill-gotten assets seized from those suspected of economic crimes. The agreement was originally announced in July 2013 and has not yet been ratified.

But it is rare for Chinese banks to use Canadian courts to pursue those who have left the country.

According to the lawsuit, China CITIC Bank is seeking repayment for a line of credit worth 50 million yuan, or roughly $7.5 million, taken out by a Chinese lumber company and personally guaranteed by Yan, who was the company's majority shareholder at the time.

Vancouver residents have questioned the legitimacy of foreign funds invested in the city's real estate market and have urged authorities to do more to scrutinize their origin.

Housing prices in the west coast city have jumped 30 percent in the last year.

The case is China CITIC Bank Corporation Limited versus Yan, Shibiao filed in the Supreme Court of British Columbia in Vancouver.

(Additional reporting by Elizabeth Dilts in New York; Editing by Andrew Hay)

[Blue Frost]

It's kind of funny, wonder what he used as collateral for the money.
It sounds like one big scam all all sides. Maybe they should try extradition, and then deal with him.

[Gary Oak]

The South China Sea belongs to China no more than the Gulf of Mexico belongs to Mexico and this is an obvious fact.


China to hold drills near disputed islands as court due to decide on territorial row

The Chinese military is set to hold exercises near disputed islands in the South China Sea amid tensions with the Philippines that has filed a complaint at an international court.

China said it will start the drills around the disputed Paracel Islands on July 5 and will continue them until July 11. The exercises will cover an area from the east of China’s Hainan Island down to the Paracels.

Other ships are prohibited from entering the waters during the drills, Beijing said. The Paracels are also claimed by Vietnam and Taiwan.

The United States claims that China has built a runway on Woody Island, the site of the largest Chinese presence on the Paracels, and placed surface-to-air missiles there.

China routinely carries out military exercises in the South China Sea which is partly claimed by a number of countries.

Regional tensions are slightly rising as an arbitration court in The Hague is due to announce a ruling on July 12 in a dispute between China and the Philippines.

China has already announced that it will not recognize any potential verdict, saying the territories have been Chinese since ancient times. Beijing has also refrained from attending any of the little-known court’s hearings.

On Friday, Chinese President Xi Jinping said his country will never compromise on its sovereignty in the South China Sea.


“No foreign country... should expect us to swallow the bitter pill of harm to our national sovereignty, security or development interests,” Xi told ranks of top officials during the ruling Communist Party’s 95th anniversary.

China has long-standing disputes over maritime territory in the South China Sea with other regional states such as Brunei, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines and Taiwan.

Washington has sided with China’s rivals in the territorial dispute, with Beijing accusing the US of meddling in the regional issues and deliberately stirring up tensions in the South China Sea.


http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2016/07/03 ... hilippines

[Blue Frost]

[video][/video]

[Gary Oak]

Everything China does has some military connection.

[Blue Frost]

It's all military with that, hold the high ground you own the battlefield.