All posts by LLD - 203. page

The Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), also known as Politburo of the CCP, is elected by the Plenary Session of CCP’s Central Committee. The members of the Politburo are known as Politburo commissioners. When the Central Committee is not in session, the Politburo and its Standing Committee exercise the power and authority of the Central Committee. On October 22, the 17th National Congress of the CCP elected Hu Jintao as the General Secretary of the CCP Central Committee, and elected Hu Jintao, Wu Bangguo, Wen Jiabao, Jia Qinglin, Li Changchun, Xi Jinping, Li Keqiang, He Guoqiang, and Zhou Yongkang as the members of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau. Besides these 9 Standing Committee members, the Politburo also has 16 other members, they are:

Wang Gang: Central Work Department head.
Wang Lequan: Party chief of the Xinjiang Autonomous Region.
Wang Zhaoguo: Vice-Chairman of the National People’s Congress, Chair of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions.
Wang Qishan: Executive Chair of the Organizing Committee and Deputy General Secretary of the Beijing Olympics.
Hui Liangyu: Vice-Premier.
Liu Qi: Party chief of Beijing, head of the Beijing Olympics organizing committee.
Liu Yunshan: Central Publicity Minister, Secretary of the CCP Central Secretariat.
Liu Yandong (female): Vice-Chair of The Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC)
Li Yuanchao: General Secretary of the Secretariat of The Central Committee of the CCP, CPC Organization Department head.
Wang Yang: Party chief of Guangdong.
Zhang Gaoli: Party chief of Tianjin.
Zhang Dejiang: no posts in the administration
Yu Zhengsheng: Party chief of Shanghai.
Xu Caihou: Vice-Chairman of Central Military Commission.
Guo Boxiong: Executive Vice-Chairman of Central Military Commission.
Bo Xilai: Party chief of Chongqing.

On September 17, 2007, Xinhua News published a report of the general overviews of the previous discussions of the Political Bureau. Below is the translation to this report. [1]
Original editorial note: Dai Guofang, a reader from Jiangsu Province, sent a letter and asked for descriptions of the Politburo’s discussions, led by President Hu. As of August 28, 2007, the Politburo had held 43 sessions of group discussions. This article gathered the following information for your reference.
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1st 26 Dec 02 The Constitution of China
2nd 28 Jan 03 The world economic situation and the developing economics of China
3rd 28 Mar 03 The development of the world employment situation and studies of the employment policy in China
4th 28 Apr 03 Apr 03 The development of modern technology in the world, in China, as well as using modern technology for prevention and cure of SARS
5th 23 May 03 The development of the changes in the situation of the new world military and powers
6th 21 Jul 03 A rreview of the changes over time of the Party ideology and theories
7th 12 Aug 03 The development of world culture and China’s culture development strategy
8th 29 Sep 03 Insisting on governing the nation according to law, and building the Socialist political civilization
9th 24 Nov 03 Historical reviews of major countries’ developments since the 15th century
10th 23 Feb 04 Patterns in the world and China’s safety circumstances
11th 29 Mar 04 Today’s world agricultural development situation and the agricultural development of China
12th 26 Apr 04 The development of legislative affairs and the perfecting Socialism marketing economics system
13th 28 May 04 Flourishing and developing China’s science of philosophy and social science
14th 29 Jun 04 Strengthening the Party’s ability to govern China
15th 24 Jul 04 Insisting on the guideline of developing self-defense and economics simultaneously and harmoniously
16th 10.21 Oct 04 Several historic issues on ethical relationships
17th 12.1 Dec 04 Reviewing the path of exploring Chinese Socialism
18th 12.27 Dec 04 China’s strategy for development facing 2020
19th 1.24 Jan 05 Discussions on keeping Party members advanced in the new period
20th 2.21 Feb 05 Working hard on constructing a harmonious Socialist society
21st 5.31 May 05 Several issues on the strategies of development of China’s economics
22nd 5.31 May 05 Economics globalization and the new characteristics of today’s international trade
23rd 6.27 Jun 05 The international situation on energy and resources and China’s strategy
24th 8.26 Aug 05 Looking back on the wars of anti-Fascism and thoughts
25th 9.29 Sep 05 The developing models of overseas cities and the paths of constructing cities with China’s characteristics
26th 11.25 Nov 05 Studies of Marxism in the world as well as studies done by China and the project of constructing it in China
27th 12.20 Dec 05 Reformation on the systems of administration and management and perfecting the systems of economics and law
28th 25 Jan 06 About constructing the new Socialism in rural areas
29th 21 Feb 06 The changing pattern of the international industrial structure and choosing China’s strategies to accelerate our economic grow
{mospagebreak} 30th 27 Mar 06 The policies of construction safety of other countries and strengthening China’s policy on construction safety
31st 26 May 06 The copyright protection policy of other countries and the construction of China’s copyright protection policy
32nd 29 Jun 06 Insisting on governing the nation scientifically, democratically, and based on the law.
33rd 25 Jul 06 Looking back on the triumph of the Long March of the Red Army and thoughts
34th 29 Aug 06 The world’s trend on the development of education and the deepening of China’s reforms on education
35th 23 Oct 06 Other countries health and medical care systems and China’s developments of them
36th 30 Nov 06 Studies of the construction of China’s Socialist democracy of the common people
37th 25 Dec 06 About building an energy-saving society in China
38th 23 Jan 07 The technical development of the Internet in the world and construction and management of China’s Internet culture
39th 15 Feb 07 Regional development in other countries and promoting the harmony of China’s regional development
40th 23 Mar 07 Several issues on establishing and carrying out the Property Law
41st 23 Apr 07 Studies of China’s agriculture standardization and food safety
42nd 26 Jul 07 Nanchang Revolution and the establishment of the revolutionary base area in Jinggangshan Mountain
43rd 28 Aug 07 The world situation on finance and China’s reformation of the financial system

Endnotes:
[1] Xinhua, September 17, 2007
http://news.xinhuanet.com/banyt/2007-09/17/content_6740932.htm

Xinmin Evening News reported that recruiting for Olympic usher girls from ten colleges in Shanghai began on February 13, 2008. Shanghai followed Beijing in beginning this process. It was reported that 40 college girls would be chosen to represent “Shanghai Image, China Etiquette.”  They will participate in the medal ceremonies for the 2008 Summer Olympics and the Handicapped Olympics. [1]
College girls will be selected from Fudan University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai Theatre Academy and seven other colleges. Not only do they have to satisfy the age requirements of between 18 to 24 years old but also their heights must range from 1.68m to 1.78m.  Meanwhile, the criteria of these girls’ weights, face shapes, skin colors, manners and intelligence are also strictly laid out. The judges will divide the registered girls into groups and hold preliminary, semi-final and final contests. The total processing time is one month.

Olympics Usher Girls’ Appearance Criteria:

1. Facial Appearance Criteria:

Three distances, the distance from the hairline on forehead to the upper start point of the nose bridge, the length of the nose and the distance from the tip of the nose to the lowest chin point, should be equal.

The lengths of the eyes, the distance between the two tear ducts and the width of the nose should be equal.

When the distance from the lower nose ending point to the lowest chin point is divided into three equal parts, the first divided line should be between two lips, and the second divided line should be the lower line of the lower lip.

The start points of the eye brows should be right above the tear duct; the ending point of the eye brow, the outside corner of the eye and the widest point of the nose should be on the same line.

2. Five Sense Organs’ Criteria

The heights of the eyes should be three tenths of the face length;

The distance between eye brow and eye should be one tenth of the face length;

The nose width should be one tenth of the face width;

The mouth width should be equal to the distance between the pupils;
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The chin length should be one sixth of the face length.

3. Body and Four Limbs’ Criteria

The skeleton of the whole body should be symmetrical and proper;

The muscles should be elastic, showing health and the body’s beauty.

The body shape should be plump but not fat and clumsy.

The skin should be reddish and shining.

The four limbs should be long; the overall body should not be heavy-headed.

The thighs should show nice curves and the calf muscles should be high and a little bit popped out.

The two shoulders should be symmetrical, round and smooth, but should not drop down or pop up.

The overall body should not be clumsy, or have loose fat or be too skinny or unbalanced. Looking from the back, the spine should be straight, showing a beautiful body line.

Endnotes:
[1] Xinmin Evening News, February 13, 2008
http://sh.xmnext.com/shizheng/2008/02/13/1050157.html

It is not news that the Chinese regime routinely censors the Internet, though it remains opaque to many who want to learn how the government applies information management in an era with new technologies. The following anonymous story appeared at an overseas discussion board www.space.live.com, which is hosted by Microsoft, and tells a personal story of a Chinese Internet policeman. Although not published at a credible media (it is highly risky for a Chinese Internet policeman to tell his work to any journalist), we believe the accounts conform to the visible pattern of the Chinese regime’s control of the Internet. Thus, it is the reader’s decision whether to take it as a fiction or a report. [1]
Flickr was unfortunately blocked. I felt uneasy momentarily and thus wrote this following article. I hope that my personal space will not be blocked because of this article.

I am a policeman. However, my job is not to enforce the law in real life, but rather to find problems and solutions in a virtual world. Some people curse us, some hate us, and some constantly look for ways to go against us. But who really understands our difficulties and reluctances?

I have always loved computers and the Internet since I was a child. Nine years ago, with my good grades and test scores, I got into the computer science department of a famous university. There, I got to know more and more about the Internet. During my junior year, I found some of my classmates were using a program called “eDonkey.” They were using it to download some weird files. Finally, I figured out that they were “porn.” I was a pure and innocent young man back then and I could not bear those things that contaminate people’s minds. Since then, I was determined to study Internet techniques so that I could get rid of these unbearable things. The four years in college soon passed. With my university diploma, CISCO Internet engineering diploma, and Microsoft MVP diploma, etc., I walked into the door of the recruiting office of the city police department to apply for the Internet supervisor position.

Relying on my good communication and excellent technical skills, I was approved by the admission officials among more than ten applicants. After a series of training sessions, I quickly became an Internet police officer. My first job was to manage the ISP security log system of the city. My responsibility was to detect and stop Internet hackers. In the beginning, there were not many serious combat episodes. However, as SQL was having a vulnerability issue and more and more Windows vulnerabilities were exposed, it was no longer difficult to hack into systems even for rookies. Thus, we were getting busier and busier. More and more young people carelessly tried to hack into the websites of the government and big companies—which are the sites we watch most carefully—and they all paid for their actions due to our efforts. Since I was doing so well, I was well-recognized by the upper officials within a year, and I was promoted up to the provincial Internet supervision group. When Japan’s prime minister visited the Yasukuni Shrine, many indignant young “hackers” attacked Japanese websites and websites of Japanese companies located in China. I was not against this so-called nationalist fever. However, we then received an order to destroy these “people who destruct orderly Internet.” Once we got the order, we took vigorous efforts and obtained lots of evidence. We discovered many organized hacker groups. Cooperating with the local police, we captured all of them. I received the second-level award and was again promoted to the national Internet supervision bureau of the Ministry of Public Security.
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I had a totally different kind of work there. I was no longer doing things such as anti-hacker work. Instead, I was responsible for the biggest and most tedious work in the Internet supervision group. To the outside world, it was said that we “supervise international websites.” However, to the internal branches or our upper officials, we were responsible for the management and maintenance of the “Golden Shield Project”—a project of the Ministry of Public Security and State Security that the government had adopted from another country with a huge expense. Actually, I knew about it even before I went to college. Back then, the two most famous personal space providers, “Geocities” and “Tripod,” were the first two victims of this filter system. However, this system got really powerful when this “Golden Shield Project” was started. Our everyday work in the supervision group of the Ministry of Public Security was through our special Internet connection (we are on the “white list”) to collect information about overseas websites, then analyze them, and figure out which ones should be blocked. Our blocking system was on top of the national and several provincial’s ISP ports. It mainly includes two parts: data package port analysis and data package content analysis. We take turns to be on-call 24 hours a day and analyze countless numbers of websites and look for our targets. The most prioritized ones are obviously the anti-government organizations, such as Taiwan’s news and political groups, Democracy Movement groups, and Falun Gong organizations, and the three groups that try to get independency. For the websites of these groups, we not only have to constantly update their main servers’ names and IPs and put them into the blacklist, but more importantly, we have to constantly update the keywords of their websites and put them into the keyword blacklist. Our targets were determined by many factors. Some internal references were passed to us from the upper and lower branches, and others were based on our investigation results. For example, before Chairman Hu Jintao visited United States, we received the order of temporarily opening up access to part of the U.S. news websites. In the past years, there have been some disharmonious incidents in the local area. The local governments often block the information on the regional level and also turn in these internal references to the upper government branches including the security, political, and judicial branches. Also, some anti-government people often get arrested. Usually, the upper branch would tell us to put the keywords of this news into the blacklist. Many times the range of these keywords is extremely wide and thus would implicate some unrelated people. This includes people who are against false science—Fang Shimin and Si Manan and such, whom I really admire. As long as these websites have services that are used by the anti-government people, they will be immediately blocked. But we do not have a choice, because without an order from the upper branch, we have no power in deleting keywords from the blacklist. Every year the number of the overseas websites and servers that are on the blacklist increases. For example, only because it has something that we do not wish to see, Wikipedia—an ingenious invention of the Internet era—has all its servers on the blacklist, which are thus blocked. The Chinese Wikipedia’s domain names and some contents are also on the keywords blacklist. In the recent period, since the Internet is getting more and more complicated, our work is thus getting more and more intense. Many times we would also make small mistakes and would mistakenly block some websites that have not reached the danger-level standards set by the upper branches. Also many times, because a server of ours or the blocked ones have been upgraded, the data may not get updated quickly enough. So some websites that have been blocked for a long time would be temporarily unblocked. For instance, it happened to Wikipedia in the second half of last year. Recently it has been a very sensitive period and even our upper officials began to get nervous. They ordered us to adopt the policy that when in doubt, rather than missing one website and let it get away, we would prefer to block 1000 websites that are not supposed be blocked. Therefore, many overseas personal space services, online photo services that have long been famous, became useless inside China.
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There are many people who resent us, and it is not only limited to those who are anti-government. They sarcastically call our system the “Great Firewall,” or call us “Golden Shield”—the name of this security information project. They have all kinds of ways to get around our filter system and look at the things “outside the window.” These programs include “Freegate,” “Ultrareach,” “Garden,” and “Fire Phoenix.” Of course, there are also neutral and purely technical software for anonymously encrypting Internet systems, such as “Onion Routing Tor” and those overseas websites that provide anonymous browsing. In order to deal with these things, we have thought of many ideas. “Freegate” and “Ultrareach” are widely used encrypting systems. Their old versions of index servers have already been put into the blacklist. However, we have not found a good solution. For Tor, we have also studied it a lot since it is an open source program. We have tried to set the “TorNode” in China that is controlled by us, in order to supervise the Tor users, but we were never able to find the characteristics of the data packages that Tor sends, nor could we decrypt Tor’s Internet transmission data. If the TorNode we set is the final node and can pass around our system, then the Node will be exposed; if our final Node is within the domain supervised by our system, then we will not be able to obtain any interesting information we need, because the node has been filtered by our system. We are still doing research very intensively, but I think as for our current software and hardware, we cannot promise on always dealing with the encrypted information successfully. As for Internet transmission encrypted by HTTPS protocol, although filtering is virtually impossible (even for the Internet supervision branches of the CIA and FBI in the United States, which have countless supercomputers, it is very hard to achieve 100 percent success). However, through filtering the keywords in the HTML certifications, we can easily and effectively stop the links.

I am risking being charged with betraying confidential matters and sent this article out through encryption with Tor. It was just to let it off my mind a little bit. I also hope that those people will get to know that we are not the chief plotters. We only carry out actions. Actually many people who oppose us have already figured out the things I wrote, so they are not really secrets anymore. As for another point, my dream of many years—stopping Internet porn—we still cannot achieve at this point. “eDonkey” has become “eMule” and it is even harder to deal with.

Endnotes:
[1] http://yksoft1.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!66B9967EC9D22DD4!251.entry