Day: March 8, 2023

China has announced plans to set up a central data bureau to tighten control over “big data” intelligence on its 1.4 billion citizens, as well as implement tighter Communist Party control over the banking system and financial markets, state media reported.

The restructuring of the State Council included moves to stabilize government control over the massive amounts of big data generated by people in their day-to-day interactions, as well as implement stricter governance in the financial sector, analysts told Radio Free Asia.

The “institutional reform plan” is aimed at streamlining the country’s bureaucracy, and putting strategic planning and resource management directly into the hands of party leaders, current affairs commentator Bi Haitao said.

“It’s also about guarding against financial risks,” Bi said. “The establishment of a new financial management bureau will integrate the Securities Regulatory Commission and the Insurance Regulatory Commission into a department directly under the State Council.”

“Controls over China’s financial markets are going to get stricter.”

‘Profound impact on industry’

Meanwhile, a National Data Center in China’s equivalent of Silicon Valley – Beijing’s Zhongguancun district – will bring the management of all online data generated by internet users under one roof and outside of the control of the powerful Cyberspace Administration, he said.

“I believe that this will have a huge impact on law enforcement, the national economy and the internet in China,” Bi said. “It will also have a profound impact on industry, albeit quietly.”

At the same time, the Central Cybersecurity and Informatization Commission will formulate plans for a “digital China,” promote the digitization of public services and social governance, as well as promoting the construction of “smart cities,” state news agency Xinhua reported.

The moves are part of structural reforms that will bring government security and intelligence functions under the direct control of the ruling party, rather than the country’s cabinet, suggest a further bid to consolidate political power in the hands of leader Xi Jinping as well as a possible preparation for war, analysts told RFA in recent interviews.

Reforms that will streamline the system for commissioning and applying scientific and technological research, allowing for centralized planning and strategic innovation, are also underway, Xinhua reported, in a move that seems aimed at cutting China’s reliance on imported technology.

Last month, Chinese search engine giant Baidu said it would launch its own artificial intelligence chatbot Ernie amid reports that regulators have warned major tech companies not to offer the Microsoft-backed artificial intelligence bot ChatGPT to the public.

The equivalent of Skynet

Song Defu, a Jiangxi-based financial scholar, said the plan will mean far tighter controls over the financial system and over big data.

“The security of the regime and of the financial system are all about the data,” Song said. “Every time you transfer funds out of your personal account, it will immediately show up in the big data, and they will know where the money is going.”

Song said the big data center was the digital equivalent of the Skynet system of nationwide surveillance cameras and facial recognition AI that enables law enforcement to track the movements of any individual anywhere in the country.

“Big data is a form of Skynet, and there is no way that these controls will be relaxed,” he said. “They already started using it during the pandemic.”

He said the role played by big data and algorithms in law enforcement and security would continue to be a crucial one for the government.

“The role of numbers is so huge that it can affect intelligence [conclusions],” Song said.

The cuts to central government jobs show that the government needs to cut its financial commitments now that coffers have been drained by the huge costs of Communist Party leader Xi Jinping’s zero-COVID policy, which ended in December 2022, he added.

“There are too many people who rely on government finances, and actually 5% is not much … layoffs are only just getting started,” Song said, adding that he expects to see further cuts of 10-15% of government posts at lower levels of government after the National People’s Congress ends, as part of the cost-cutting exercise “in the spirit” of the recent annual session.

The jobs will likely be reassigned to “strategically important” areas of government, the reform plan reported by Xinhua said.

Xi told military and armed police leaders at the National People’s Congress in Beijing on Wednesday that the restructuring and streamlining of military-industrial systems would also be important for a planned approach to strategic and military research, as well as the management of stockpiled resources, the agency said in a separate report.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Matt Reed.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has confirmed he will meet Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen when she visits the United States in coming weeks, according to a report by Bloomberg.

The planned meeting, first reported by the Financial Times a day prior, would take place in McCarthy’s home state of California with the Taiwanese president en route to visit a number of the self-governing island’s allies in Central America.

McCarthy told reporters on Tuesday night that the meeting did not mean his plans to lead a congressional delegation to Taiwan later this year had been called off, according to the Bloomberg report.

“That has nothing to do with my travel, if I would go to Taiwan,” McCarthy was quoted as saying, rejecting reports that the pair were trying to avoid angering Beijing during a tense moment in U.S.-China relations. “China can’t tell me where and when I can go,” he said. 

McCarthy’s office has not responded to requests for comment from Radio Free Asia about his plans to meet with Tsai.

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan in August caused a rupture in relations between China and the United States, due to Beijing’s claims that the democratic island is its territory. 

The relationship appeared on the mend, with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken scheduled to visit Beijing last month. But that trip was “postponed” at the last minute after U.S. authorities discovered what they said was a Chinese spy balloon in American airspace.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said on Wednesday that Beijing was “gravely concerned” about any meeting between McCarthy and Tsai and had reached out to U.S. officials.

“Taiwan is part of the sacred territory of the People’s Republic of China,” Mao said at a press conference. “I need to stress that China firmly opposes any form of official interaction between the U.S. and the Taiwan region, firmly opposes any visit by ‘Taiwan independence’ separatist leaders to the U.S. in any name under whatever pretext.”

Trillions of small bits of plastic are floating on the world’s oceans due to a rapid and unprecedented increase in the last two decades, scientists said in a new study released on Wednesday.

Calling it “a growing plastic smog,” the researchers said the rate of plastic entering the oceans could accelerate 2.6 times by 2040 if left without widespread policy changes.

The research, published in the PLOS ONE journal, estimated that between 82 trillion and 358 trillion plastic particles – primarily microplastics – were floating on the ocean’s surface in 2019. 

The total amount would weigh between 1.1 million tons and 4.9 million tons, according to the analysis from a global dataset of ocean plastic pollution between 1979 and 2019.

“We observed no clear trend until 1990, followed by a fluctuating but stagnant trend until 2005 and a rapid increase thereafter,” the study said. “This acceleration of plastic densities in the world’s oceans, also observed in beaches worldwide, necessitates immediate international policy interventions.”

Marcus Eriksen, the study’s co-author, said in a statement that he was alarmed by the “trend of exponential growth of microplastics in the global ocean.” 

“This is a stark warning that we must act now at a global scale. We need a strong, legally binding UN Global Treaty on plastic pollution that stops the problem at the source,” he said.

The study analyzed data on plastic pollution at the ocean surface level from 11,777 stations across six marine regions (North Atlantic, South Atlantic, North Pacific, South Pacific, Indian and Mediterranean). 

The significant and rapid increase in the global ocean abundance and distribution of plastics in the ocean surface layer since 2005 is reflective of the worldwide growth in plastic production and waste generation, the researchers said. 

The report also cites a lack of adequate plastic recycling worldwide, which “has resulted in a flood of plastic products and packaging” that remain as mismanaged waste in the receiving country. Another factor is an increased amount of plastic waste from “large fishing fleets and artisanal fisheries.”

“Some of this pollution is due to our consumer choices: every piece of plastic we dispose of has the potential to escape from waste streams and enter our oceans, where it fragments into countless microplastics that harm marine life,” said Charlene Trestrail, an Australian ecotoxicologist who was not involved in the study.

Plastic pollution and Southeast Asia

Wednesday’s study did not contain regional breakdown. However, according to a 2021 study six Southeast Asian countries are among the top 10 nations producing the highest amount of ocean plastic waste annually.

The researchers of that study published in the Science Advances journal estimated that some 1,000 rivers accounted for 80 percent of global annual emissions, with small urban rivers among the most polluting.

The Philippines is estimated to account for 35 percent of the total plastic waste in the ocean. The archipelago country, with more than 7,000 islands, produces 356,371 metric tons of plastic waste in the sea each year, the study said.

In fact, 75 percent of the plastic accumulated in the ocean comes from mismanaged waste in Asian countries, which include India, Malaysia, China, Indonesia, Myanmar, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Thailand and the Philippines. Brazil was the only non-Asian country in the top 10.

In 2021, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations launched a regional action plan to combat marine plastic debris with the World Bank’s $20 million fund.

“The volume of solid waste and marine debris generated across Southeast Asia is on the rise. Coupled with expanding urbanization and a growing consuming class, the long-term effects are only just emerging,” Thailand’s Environment Minister Varawut Silpa-archa, said at the time.

If the problem is not addressed, the amount of plastic entering marine environments could increase tenfold by 2025, he added.

Plastic is estimated to account for 80 percent of all marine debris in the oceans, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

Their 2017 report found that 95 percent of the plastic in the ocean originates from the land through rainwater and river systems and from maritime activities such as fishing and shipping.

According to the OECD, less than 10 percent of plastic waste is recycled, which predicts that global plastic waste will increase by almost three times from 460 million tons in 2019 to 1,231 million tons in 2060.

Problem much bigger than previously thought

Applied chemist Amy Heffernan said the latest estimate “is the equivalent of 500,000 elephants floating in our oceans worldwide.”

The findings “suggest that there is much more plastic pollution floating in the oceans than we previously thought,” Trestrail added, which “means that we have been underestimating the scale of marine plastic pollution.”

Paul Harvey, an environmental public health scientist, also said the “numbers in this new research are staggeringly phenomenal and almost beyond comprehension.”

“The mind boggles imagining what 4.9 million tons of plastic would look like. Globally, we have reached a point where we can no longer ignore the plastic pollution pandemic that is infecting our oceans,” said Harvey, who was not involved in the study.

He said the beach clean-ups and similar citizen environment projects on plastics “have little impact on solving the enormity of the plastic problem.”

“Solutions that are applied across the material lifecycle are the only way to solve the plastic pollution crisis and prevent more loss to the environment,” he said.

Last year, delegates from around 160 nations met in Uruguay for the first-ever United Nations-led plastics treaty negotiations, which ended an agreement to end plastic pollution.

However, they could not agree on whether the efforts should be global and mandatory or voluntary and country-led.

On Saturday night, some 193 countries agreed to an ambitious United Nations treaty to protect ocean life by establishing protected areas in international waters. It comes as ocean life faces growing threats from climate change, overfishing, shipping traffic and seabed mining on the high seas.

Edited by Matt Reed.

The inflation rate in Laos surged 41.3%  in February, government figures show – a whopping jump from just a 2% rate the same time last year – despite drastic measures taken by authorities to tame the crisis.

The government has ordered import restrictions and the closure of all private money exchangers in the country, allowing only banks to exchange foreign currencies.

The soaring inflation has been driven by a depreciation in the Lao currency, the kip, and declines in foreign investment.

But some residents say the government’s new import limits have made the crisis worse since domestic industries don’t produce all the supplies needed for factories.

“Laos doesn’t have enough goods to produce by itself, so we have to import from Thailand,” said a resident in the capital Vientiane, speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons like others in this report. “If prices in Thailand are up, prices in Laos are up too. If the Thai baht is up, the Lao kip is up too.” 

Some merchants have been forced to raise prices, further exacerbating the crisis.

“One bottle of vegetable oil sells in my store for almost 40,000 kip (around US$2.35), and I get a profit of 2,000 kip (12 U.S. cents),” one merchant in Vientiane told RFA. “Our government has a one-party system – so we can only listen to what they decide and cannot go against it.”

Low-income earners and government employees – whose salaries have not kept up with the price gains – have been hit hardest.

“One kilogram of pork or beef is over 100,000 kip (US$5.90), they used to be between 80,000-90,000 kip (around US$4.70-$5.30).” said one villager in Savannakhet province.

In Luang Prabang, one Lao woman said that locally-grown vegetables and other goods are selling at somewhat of a stable price, but imported goods are more expensive. “Meat prices never go down because of limited supplies,” she said. 

An official with the Asian Development Bank in Laos had previously said that the government “needs to pay more attention” to inflation and called for urgent measures to address the issue.

Translated by Sidney Khotpanya. Edited by Nawar Nemeh and Malcolm Foster. 

The U.S. intelligence community is “divided” over whether COVID-19 originated from a lab in Wuhan or from natural exposure to an infected animal, and is only sure it wasn’t a deliberate bioweapon, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told the Senate on Wednesday.

Asked by Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, why she would not say categorically that COVID-19 leaked from a Chinese virology lab, Haines said the intelligence community “remains divided on this issue,” with different agencies offering different analyses. 

“Basically, there’s a broad consensus in the intelligence community that the outbreak is not the result of a bioweapon or genetic engineering,” Haines said. “What there isn’t a consensus on is whether or not it’s a lab leak, essentially … or natural exposure to an infected animal.” 

“We’ve been trying to collect additional information,” she explained. “China has not fully cooperated, and we do think that’s a key critical gap. That would help us to understand what exactly happened.”

Haines was appearing before a hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee – alongside the directors of the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Security Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency – to answer questions relating to the intelligence community’s latest annual worldwide threat assessment report.

FBI Director Christopher Wray told the committee his agency believed the so-called “lab-leak theory” was accurate. “The FBI has long said, going all the way back to the summer of 2021, that the origin of the pandemic was likely a lab incident in Wuhan,” Wray said.

But Haines stressed that was not a universal view, with analysts “trying to do the best that they can to figure out what exactly happened.” 

“The Department of Energy has changed its view slightly, with low confidence: It says that a lab leak is most likely, but they do so for different reasons than the FBI does, and their assessments are not identical,” she said. “So you can see how challenging this has been.”

TikTok threat

Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, on Tuesday had announced a new bipartisan bill that would give the Biden administration the authority to ban TikTok, the popular Chinese-owned social media platform, across the United States. 

The bill, which has bipartisan support in the Senate and has also been backed by the White House, would allow the secretary of commerce to ban any foreign-owned technology deemed a national security threat.

None of the intelligence chiefs were asked if they supported the bill, but each said TikTok created an intelligence threat for the United States.

“In terms of our national security, it obviously enables our adversaries’ efforts at espionage,” CIA Director William Burns said. “It enables them to steal intellectual property, it enables them to get access to sensitive technologies, it enables them to spy on our citizens as well. So it offers enormous opportunities, I think, for our adversaries.” 

Wray said that TikTok’s threat stemmed from the inability of its Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance, to refuse to follow orders from the Chinese Communist Party given China’s authoritarian system.

“The difference between an ostensibly private company and the CCP is essentially a distinction without a difference,” Wray said. “So if you were to ask Americans, ‘Would you like to turn over all your data, control of your devices, control of your information to the CCP?’ Most Americans would say ‘I’m not down with that,’ as my kids would say.”

Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican and the vice-chair of the committee, said that he believed the failure of Congress so far to ban TikTok came down to the fact that “we’ve forgotten what it’s like to live in a world where we have near-peer competitors” like China.

“The commentary class, think tanks, academia, to some extent even Congress, is still filled with officials who came of age in the post-Cold War fantasy about the end of history,” Rubio said, also blaming business for becoming reliant on off-shoring. “We’ve become a society addicted to cheap products from China, and viral videos on TikTok.”

He asked Wray whether TikTok could be used for propaganda.

“Could they use it to drive narratives, like to divide Americans against each other – for example, let’s say China wants to invade Taiwan – to make sure Americans are seeing videos arguing why Taiwan belongs to China [and] why the U.S. should not intervene?” Rubio asked.

“Yes,” Wray responded, adding: “We’re not sure that we would see many of the outward signs of it happening if it was happening.”

U.S.-China relations

Before shutting its doors for a closed hearing, the committee did not ask about a number of other claims made in the threat assessment report released by the intelligence committee on Wednesday. 

The report notably said that North Korea’s cyber program could “cause temporary, limited disruptions of some critical infrastructure” in the United States, and that the situation in Myanmar is heading toward a stalemate with neither side able to achieve military superiority.  

Instead, the meeting focussed mainly on the threat posed by China, which has become one of few areas of bipartisanship in Congress. 

Haines, the national intelligence director, told the hearing Beijing would likely soon seek a calming of tensions to allow China to get its house further in order, while outwardly “signaling opposition” to Washington.

“We assess that Beijing still believes it benefits most by preventing a spiraling of tensions, and by preserving stability in its relationship with the United States,” she said, explaining that Chinese President Xi Jinping seeks “a period of relative calm to give China the time and stability it needs to address growing domestic difficulties.”

“Beijing wants to preserve stability in East Asia,” she said, even as it adopts “an increasingly aggressive approach” to the world.