Some Tuesday China links:
The Financial Times reports that China’s state-owned Cnooc is making a bid for Arctic oil, the first time a Chinese company has done so.
After the U.S. ramped up its charges of cyber-espionage against China, Beijing responded by charging the U.S. with collecting mountains of data on China. In typical fashion, the Western world didn’t give much consideration to Beijing’s claims at the time, but over at Foreign Policy, Matthew Aid confirms that Beijing was spot on. From the report, “A highly secretive unit of the National Security Agency (NSA), the U.S. government's huge electronic eavesdropping organization, called the Office of Tailored Access Operations, or TAO, has successfully penetrated Chinese computer and telecommunications systems for almost 15 years, generating some of the best and most reliable intelligence information about what is going on inside the People's Republic of China.”
As China’s water crisis worsens, China’s central government has pledged to spend US$3.3 billion over the next five years on desalination plants in the northeastern part of the country, the BBC reports. This comes in addition to other actions Beijing is taking to solve the country’s water woes.
The honorary chairman of Taiwan's Kuomintang (KMT), Wu Poh-hsiung, will meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping to discuss cross-strait relations on Thursday, South China Morning Post reports.
CNN’s Nic Robertson is the only Western journalist on hand for China’s space launch. He reviews the “super-secret space base.”
Matt Schiavenza of The Atlantic highlights a recent survey on how Chinese people view the U.S.
One American Chinese social media users are particularly fond of these days is Edward Snowden, according to Vocativ’s review of Weibo. China Real Time confirms this.
Plus new issues of the Jamestown Foundation’s China Brief and the Hoover Institution’s Chinese Leadership Monitor.
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