Some Friday China links:
China and the U.S. continued to throw accusations at each other on cyber issues on Thursday, this time with the military leaders taking the lead. At the Brookings Institution, Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said: All nations on the face of the planet always conduct intelligence operations in all domains. [But] China's particular niche in cyber has been theft and intellectual property I've had some conversations about that with them. Their view is that there are no rules of the road in cyber, there's nothing, there's no laws that they are breaking, there's no standards of behavior.”
Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman, Col. Yang Yujun fired back, however, declaring: “The Prism-gate affair is itself just like a prism that reveals the true face and hypocritical conduct regarding Internet security of the country concerned.” These comments echoed earlier ones by a Chinese military expert, who told Xinhua that the U.S. is a “hacker empire” with “many faces.”
Meanwhile, the liquidity crisis over the last few weeks continues to dominate news coverage. On Thursday it was first reported that the Agricultural Development Bank of China has pumped US$100.1 billion into the market since late May to unfreeze lending.
Over at Foreign Policy, Michael Pettis argues that the slower growth in China is the new normal, and everyone should get used to (and try to accommodate) the type of turbulence in credit markets we saw last week.
One way the PBSC, and Li Keqiang in particular, hope to stave off this slowdown is by accelerating the pace of urbanization. To that end, the Economic Observer reports on some of the details of the State Council’s forthcoming plan on urbanization, including how to reform the Hukou system.
More and more upper-class Chinese are sending their kids to elite Western summer school programs, with the ultimate goal being to gain admission to a Western university for college, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Clashes in Xinjiang killed over thirty this week, while a new report by Human Rights Watch claims China has forcibly relocated 2 million people in Tibet since 2006. U.S. Ambassador Gary Locke has decided to go check it out for himself.