Information/Technology - 42. page

Well-known Chinese news site Sohu recently reported that, in a recent focus investigation, the police from Guangdong Province discovered a large number of Chinese mobile applications that have stolen customer’s private information. In the first quarter of this year, Guangdong Province identified over 1,670 mobile apps that exceeded the proper scope and collected user information without permission. Key categories of these invasive apps were in the areas of TV and entertainment, the stock market, free novels, and money management. The apps collect user information like phone call logs, text messages, contacts lists, and other accounts. Abuse of the microphone and of video cameras is also a common practice. The Guangdong police activities are a part of a campaign that the Central Government Internet Information Office, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Public Security, and the General Administration of Market Supervision lead jointly.

Source: Sohu, April 30, 2019
https://www.sohu.com/a/311163491_120027127?sec=wd

The British Financial Times reported that Huawei plans to build a 400-person chip research and development plant in a suburb of Cambridge, England, and plans to start production in 2021.

According to the report, the plant will be located in the heart of the UK’s silicon chip industry, only 15 minutes from the headquarters of Arm Holdings, the UK’s largest chip design company. Huawei plans to use its plant to develop chips for broadband networks.

The U.S. has repeatedly warned that the Chinese government can use Huawei’s equipment for espionage and has urged allies not to use Huawei products in the construction of 5G networks.

The report said that, in order to win the support of local people, when Huawei announced the plan at a local junior high school last week, Huawei executives urged local residents to raise their concerns. They also claimed that Huawei could fund new medical centers or build bus stations locally.

A local resident told the Financial Times that the site that Huawei chose is an ideal location to monitor the British government. However, most locals have a positive attitude toward Huawei’s construction.

According to a report in the Financial Times, Huawei has thousands of employees in the UK, including about 120 in Cambridge. Also Huawei didn’t deny that it selected Cambridge as the chip factory site with the intention to gain access to Cambridge graduates.

Source: Voice of America, May 6, 2019
https://www.voachinese.com/a/huawei-to-build-chip-plant-in-cambridge/4903659.html

On April 19, 2019, Southern Weekend, a Chinese media headquartered in Guangzhou of Guangdong Province, published a feature article about how Internet censorship has become a booming industry in China.  The article itself was quickly censored.

The article titled, “Jinan: The Rising Internet Audit Capital,” reported that Jinan, the capital of Shandong Province, is becoming the second largest operation area for Beijing ByteDance Technology Co. Ltd., an Internet company known for its content auditing business. It takes on the censorship work of other companies.  Up to 3,600 personnel have been hired to trawl the Internet and remove content that the Communist government prohibits.

In the Internet content audit industry, Jinan and Tianjin are the bases in the north; Xi’an is the base in the northwest; Chongqing and Chengdu are responsible for the southwest; and Wuhan handles the central China region.

According to a person close to the Jinan municipal government department, the expansion of the content auditing operation has received the support of the Propaganda Department and the Cyberspace Administration of the Jinan Municipal Communist Party Committee.

Source: Epoch Times, April 20, 2019
http://www.epochtimes.com/gb/19/4/19/n11199613.htm

According to the statistics of the Ministry of Education of China, there were 492,000 foreign students studying in China in 2018. Among them there were 50,000 from South Korea which is the highest in the world; the second were from Thailand, Pakistan, India, and the U.S., each country had between 20,000 and 30,000 students studying in China. Among these foreign students, there were 60,304 people who had received scholarships from the Chinese government, accounting for 12.81 percent. The number of foreign students studying for a college degree was 258,122 or 52.44 percent and rest of them were there for training programs. These foreign students were studying at 1,004 colleges and universities in 31 provinces and autonomous regions across China, an increase of 3,013 people over 2017, with an annual growth rate of 0.62 percent. The regions include 88,786 people in Beijing, 61,400 in Shanghai, 45,778 in Jiangsu, 38,190 in Zhejiang, and 27,879 in Liaoning.

Source: Central News Agency, April 13, 2019
https://www.cna.com.tw/news/acn/201904130072.aspx