In the latest episode of the ongoing Google-Beijing dispute, Google’s attempt to bypass Chinese censors by sending Chinese users of its search engine to an uncensored Hong Kong-based site seems to have failed.
Within 24 hours of the rerouting, Beijing has clamped down, restricting mainland users’ access to the uncensored content on the Hong Kong site. Mainland Chinese users on Tuesday could not see uncensored Hong Kong content because government computers either disabled searches for objectionable content completely or blocked links to certain results [The New York Times]. Earlier, the Chinese government described Google’s move to redirect users to the Hong Kong site as “totally wrong.”
The clash comes two months after Google and China began a bitter standoff over internet censorship on the mainland. Instead of exiting the country entirely, Google has taken on Beijing by defying its censorship controls and sending mainland users to its Hong Kong site, where censorship rules are more lenient.
While the move seemed provocative, Google’s founders at first seemed to think that this redirection would be acceptable to the Chinese government. “We got reasonable indications that this was O.K.,”Sergey Brin, a Google founder and its president of technology, said. “We can’t be completely confident” [The New York Times]. Google said that while the search operations were being redirected to Hong Kong, it would continue to host its maps and music search service in China. However, it now seems that the company misjudged the Chinese government’s mood.
When researchers rack up the carbon emitted across the world, the standard trends emerge: Europeans put less CO2 into the atmosphere than Americans, but China’s rapid ascent is sending its emissions shooting past those of the United States. However, this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Stanford University researchers attempt to rejigger the numbers to reflect not just where the emissions are produced, but who is responsible for them—who’s buying and consuming the products that cause those emissions.
After study global trade databases, Steven Davis and Ken Caldiera say that in 2004, 23 per cent of global CO2 emissions – some 6.2 gigatonnes – went in making products that were traded internationally. Most of these products were exported from China and other relatively poor countries to consumers in richer countries [New Scientist]. The researchers say that developed countries outsource about a third of the carbon dioxide emissions connected to their consumption.
China will soon have an outpost in space. The government has announced that its first unmanned space module, the Tiangong-1 (or “The Heavenly Palace”), will be launched next year.
The module will serve as a docking station for other spacecraft before being transformed into a permanent taikonaut residence and space lab within two years of the launch [Nature blog]. It was originally due to launch this year, but now will see flight only late in 2011, due to technical reasons, Chinese officials said. The Tiangong-1 is expected to be 30 feet long and capable of housing three taikonauts; future missions will add other modules to construct a larger Chinese space station.
Recently at 80beats we’ve covered some of troubles China has had with toxins leaking into its waterways from petroleum spills and the environmental degradation caused by mining for rare Earth metals. But in a study this week in Science, Zhang Fusuo raises another concern: The country’s soil is on the path to being dangerously acidic.
Zhang’s team looked at the government’s research data for soil over 30 years, and also compared a survey of China’s soil conducted in the 2000s to one from the 1980s. For nearly all soil types found in China, soil pH has dropped 0.13 to 0.80 units since the early 1980s [ScienceNOW]. When soil lowers in pH and therefore becomes more acidic, it becomes more of a haven for pests and nematodes and less of one for plants—most plants prefer the neutral range between a pH of 6 and 8. If the trend continues, Zhang argues that China could have trouble producing enough food for its population.
It’s been little over a week since the beginning of the spat between Google and China over censorship and hacking attacks. But that was more than enough time for the fracas to escalate into international political tensions and name-calling.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joined in today. In a wide-ranging speech in Washington, Mrs Clinton said the internet had been a “source of tremendous progress” in China but that any country which restricted free access to information risked “walling themselves off from the progress of the next century” [BBC News]. In taking a foreign policy stand on information freedom, she also singled out other countries that she says harass bloggers or promote censorship and called on other companies to follow Google’s lead in taking a stand against restrictive governments.
“A new information curtain is descending across much of the world,” she said, calling growing Internet curbs the modern equivalent of the Berlin Wall [Reuters].
Are the world’s most popular search engine and the world’s most populous country headed for a breakup? That’s the word reverberating around the Internet today after Google said it would no longer put up with the Chinese government’s demands to censor the Internet and the rampant hacking attempts against it, which could result in the company ending its Chinese operations.
The announcement came as a stunning reversal for Google, which had capitulated to the government’s wishes to gain access to China’s fast-growing population of Internet users. Since arriving in 2006 under an arrangement with the government that purged its Chinese search results of banned topics, Google has come under fire for abetting a system that increasingly restricts what can be read online [The New York Times].
Last week, while the world gearing up to ring in a new year, China was quietly reeling from a new pollution scare. A pipeline operated by the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC)—the country’s number one oil producer—ruptured and spilled 40,000 gallons of diesel in the northern part of the country.
The spill occurred in the Wei River, a tributary of the Yellow River–which is the source of fresh water for millions of Chinese. Over the weekend, workers threw 17 floating dams across the Wei to block the toxic diesel and save the Yellow River. But scientists discovered diesel traces in a reservoir behind a dam in Sanmenxia, a city about 100 kilometers (62 miles) downstream from the point where the Wei meets the Yellow River, an official in the Henan provincial environmental protection bureau said on Monday [Wall Street Journal].
China’s Harmony train can now boast of being the fastest long distance passenger train on the planet. The Harmony express raced 1,100 km in less than three hours on Saturday, travelling from Guangzhou, capital of southern Guangdong province, to the central city of Wuhan. The journey previously took at least 11 hours [Financial Times]. That’s almost like traveling from New York City to Indianapolis by train in three hours. Even if you encountered a two and a half hour delay, which happened to one unlucky load of Harmony riders this week, you’d still make great time.
Wind turbines, energy-efficient light bulbs, and hybrid cars and three of the most iconic products in the lineup of green technologies that can help us build a cleaner world. But in an ironic twist, these technologies all rely on elements called rare earths, which are primarily extracted from environmentally destructive mines in China.
The environmental damage can be seen in the red-brown scars of barren clay that run down narrow valleys and the dead lands below, where emerald rice fields once grew. Miners scrape off the topsoil and shovel golden-flecked clay into dirt pits, using acids to extract the rare earths. The acids ultimately wash into streams and rivers, destroying rice paddies and fish farms and tainting water supplies [The New York Times].
China has dished out justice in the tainted milk case, and severe justice at that. The country has executed two men, Zhang Yujun and Geng Jinping, convicted in January of crimes connected to last summer’s powered milk and infant formula contamination incident, which killed six children and sickened about 300,000 people in total.
Zhang, a farmer, produced some 770 tonnes of the powder from July 2007 to August 2008 which was laced with an industrial chemical, melamine, used in the manufacture of plastics and fertiliser [The Telegraph]. Geng was convicted of selling the powder to dairy brokers. The Supreme Court reviewed the cases before the executions, now done with lethal injection, took place. Nineteen other people were convicted of crimes; three got life sentences.
The Chinese government has banned the controversial use of electroconvulsive therapy, or shock therapy, to treat the controversial diagnosis of “Internet addiction.” With an estimated 300 million Internet users, China has been grappling with how to keep avid Web surfers from spending their whole lives online, and various clinics have sprung up, offering parents the chance to “cure” their children of the uncontrollable urge to blog or play online games [Telegraph]. But a recent scandal involving a psychiatric hospital in Shandong province that was using a “brain-waking” treatment of electric shocks has rallied public opinion against such clinics.
China’s Ministry of Health has now posted a notice on its Web site stating that there is no evidence that electric shock therapy is an effective treatment for Internet addiction. A hospital spokeswoman last week said “sensationalized” media reports had already led it to cease the shock treatment. The shocks were meant to cause subjects to associate a negative result with Internet use, according to the hospital [ComputerWorld]. People who were subjected to the treatment report that they were forced to apologize for and repudiate their Internet-using ways while receiving the shocks, which were also used as punishment for uncooperative behavior. In what might be an indication of the clinic’s effectiveness, its practices came to light when former patients went online to complain [The Wall Street Journal].
In a rare victory for freedom of information in China, the government has abruptly reversed course on its mandate that Internet filtering software be installed on every computer sold in China after July 1.
Yesterday, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced that mandatory installation of the software, called Green Dam Youth Escort, would be delayed indefinitely. The software caused a torrent of protests from both Chinese computer users and global computer makers…. China has said the software is designed to filter out pornography and violence to protect minors, but many experts say it can also block any other content that the authorities deem subversive [The New York Times].
While some experts suggested that the Chinese government might be delaying the program’s roll-out simply to give computer makers more time to test the software and comply with the policy, others believe that the government was forced to bow to the pressure from outraged citizens. “This shows that social pressure can’t be ignored,” said Zhou Ze, a Beijing lawyer who challenged the legality of the plan. “They tried to control public opinion to back the plan by creating a fuss about pornography, but that failed, and they will have learnt to be more careful next time” [Reuters]. Analyst Edward Yu of Beijing says that while protests from foreign computer companies probably influenced the government’s decision, “we think public opinion played an even more important role” [AP].
China’s recent economic boom has come at the cost of polluted landscapes and newly endangered species, and now a new study explains how another species has been left teetering on the brink of extinction. The endangered Chinese sturgeon live in the East China and Yellow seas and return to China’s Yangtze River to spawn. Construction of dams on the river is thought to have contributed to a decline in the species, and an artificial propagation effort has not resulted in recovery of the fish [AP]. But the new study shows that a chemical called triphenyltin (TPT), which is commonly used in paint, may be the true culprit behind the sturgeon’s decline.
The tin-containing organic compound TPT is extensively used in paints to prevent the fouling of ship hulls and fishing nets. It is also used in fungicide to treat crops in China. A derivative of TPT is also used to eliminate snails in paddy fields [Reuters]. In the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers found that river water polluted with the chemical is producing sturgeon with misshapen skeletons and deformed eyes.
China’s plan to build dams along the Mekong River poses the greatest threat to the river’s future, according to a United Nations report released yesterday. China is constructing a series of eight dams on the upper half of the Mekong as it passes through high gorges of Yunnan Province, including the recently completed Xiowan Dam, which — at 958 feet (292 meters) high — is the world’s tallest. Its storage capacity is equal to all the Southeast Asia reservoirs combined [AP], according to the report.
The Mekong, which is known as the Lancang in China, is an important source of water, food, and jobs for residents in the river basin, and runs through China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. It provides a habitat for rare species of bird and marine life. If the dams move ahead, said the report, the consequences will include “changes in river flow volume and timing, water quality deterioration and loss of biodiversity” [AP]. But Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu defended the proposed plans, saying China would give equal attention to hydropower development on transnational rivers and ecological protection [Xinhua].
Cyber spies have hacked into computers containing information about the U.S. Defense Department’s most expensive weapons program ever: the $300 billion Joint Strike Fighter, a fighter jet also known as F35 Lightning II. The intruders were able to copy and siphon off several terabytes of data related to design and electronics systems, officials say, potentially making it easier to defend against the craft. The latest intrusions provide new evidence that a battle is heating up between the U.S. and potential adversaries over the data networks that tie the world together [The Wall Street Journal].
U.S. officials reportedly traced the hackers back to China, but experts note that it’s extremely difficult to determine the real origin of an online attack, as paths can be disguised and identities masked. Meanwhile, the Chinese Embassy said in a statement that China “opposes and forbids all forms of cyber crimes.” It called the Pentagon’s report “a product of the Cold War mentality” and said the allegations of cyber espionage are “intentionally fabricated to fan up China threat sensations” [The Wall Street Journal].
80beats is DISCOVER's news aggregator, weaving together the choicest tidbits from the best articles on the day's most compelling topics.
80beats is written by Veronique Greenwood and Valerie Ross. This team darts through each day's science news faster than the ruby-throated hummingbird that beats its wings 80 times per second. Send ideas, tips, suggestions, and complaints to [azeeberg at discovermagazine dot com].
When researchers rack up the carbon emitted across the world, the standard trends emerge: Europeans put less CO2 into the atmosphere than Americans, but China’s rapid ascent is sending its emissions shooting past those of the United States. However, this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Stanford University researchers 
China will soon have an outpost in space. The government has announced that its first unmanned space module, the Tiangong-1 (or “The Heavenly Palace”), will be launched next year.
Recently at 80beats we’ve covered some of troubles 
It’s been little over a week since the beginning of the 
Are the world’s most popular search engine and the world’s most populous country headed for a breakup? That’s the word reverberating around the Internet today after Google said it would no longer put up with the Chinese government’s demands to censor the Internet and the rampant hacking attempts against it, which could result in the company ending its Chinese operations.
Last week, while the world gearing up to ring in a new year, 
Wind turbines, energy-efficient light bulbs, and hybrid cars and three of the most iconic products in the lineup of 
China
The Chinese government has banned the controversial use of electroconvulsive therapy, or shock therapy, to treat the controversial diagnosis of “Internet addiction.” With an estimated 300 million Internet users, 
In a rare victory for freedom of information in 
China’s recent economic boom has come at the cost of 
China’s plan to build dams along the Mekong River poses the greatest threat to the river’s future, according to a United Nations report released yesterday. China is constructing a series of eight dams on the upper half of the Mekong as it passes through high gorges of Yunnan Province, including the recently completed Xiowan Dam, which — at 958 feet (292 meters) high — is the world’s tallest. Its storage capacity is equal to all the Southeast Asia reservoirs combined [
Cyber spies have 
