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Report: China Eyeing Strategic Atlantic Island Base to Threaten American Mainland

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On June 27, a plane carrying Wen Jiabao made a “technical” stop on the island of Terceira, in the Azores. Following an official greeting by Alamo Meneses, the regional secretary of environment of the sea, the Chinese premier spent four hours touring the remote Portuguese outpost in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

Wen’s Terceira walkabout, which followed a four-nation visit to South America, largely escaped notice at the time, but alarm bells should have immediately gone off in Washington and in European capitals. For one thing, Wen’s last official stop on the trip was Santiago, the capital of Chile. Flights from Chile to China normally cross the Pacific, not the Atlantic, so there was no reason for his plane to be near the Azores. Moreover, those who visit the Azores generally favor other islands in the out-of-the-way chain.

Terceira, however, has one big attraction for Beijing: Air Base No. 4. Better known as Lajes Field, the facility where Premier Wen’s 747 landed in June is jointly operated by the U.S. Air Force and its Portuguese counterpart. If China controlled the base, the Atlantic would no longer be secure. From the 10,865-foot runway on the northeast edge of the island, Chinese planes could patrol the northern and central portions of the Atlantic and thereby cut air and sea traffic between the U.S. and Europe. Beijing would also be able to deny access to the nearby Mediterranean Sea.

And China could target the American homeland. Lajes is less than 2,300 miles from New York, shorter than the distance between Pearl Harbor and Los Angeles.

Lajes is certainly the reason Wen went out of his way to win friends in Terceira. For years his country has been trying to make inroads into the Azores and waiting for opportunities to pounce. There is nothing the Chinese can do if the U.S. stays, but Pentagon budget cutters, according to some observers, are planning to make Lajes a “ghost base.”

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New Chinese Leader’s Close Ties to People’s Liberation Army Could Have Implications for US

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BEIJING — On one of his many visits abroad in recent years, Xi Jinping, the presumptive new leader of China, met in 2009 with local Chinese residents in Mexico City, where in a relaxed atmosphere he indirectly criticized the United States.

“There are a few foreigners, with full bellies, who have nothing better to do than try to point fingers at our country,” Mr. Xi said, according to a tape broadcast on Hong Kong television. “China does not export revolution, hunger, poverty nor does China cause you any headaches. Just what else do you want?”

Mr. Xi is set to be elevated to the top post of the Chinese Communist Party at the 18th Party Congress scheduled to begin here on Nov. 8 — only two days after the American election. He will take the helm of a more confident China than the United States has ever known. He will be assuming supreme power in China at a time when relations between the two countries are adrift, sullied by suspicions over a clash of interests in Asia and by frequent attacks on China in the American presidential campaign.

In the last four months, China has forged an aggressive, more nationalistic posture in Asia that may set the tone for Mr. Xi’s expected decade-long tenure, analysts and diplomats say, pushing against American allies, particularly Japan, for what China considers its territorial imperatives. The son of a revolutionary general, Mr. Xi, 59, boasts far closer ties to China’s fast-growing military than the departing leader, Hu Jintao, had when he took office. As Mr. Xi rose through the ranks of the Communist Party, he made the most of parallel posts in the People’s Liberation Army, deeply familiarizing himself with the inner workings of the armed forces.

Even if Mr. Xi does not immediately become head of the crucial Central Military Commission as well as party leader, he will almost certainly do so within two years, giving him at least eight years as the direct overseer of the military.

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Insecure Obama, Insecure World

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The United States has had good presidents and bad, but it has never had a leader who came to a debate on national security with so much insecurity. It was a small petty man who sat on the other side of the screen, alternately smirking and scowling, grinding his teeth and launching attack after attack instead of finally taking the opportunity to set the record straight with the American people.

Barack Obama came to the debate with a roster of prepared speeches, few of them about foreign affairs and most of them about the economy. Even while his Secretary of Defense has given an unprecedented order to top military officials to stonewall the congressional investigation into Benghazigate, even as it has become known that his administration watched four Americans be murdered in real time and did not lift a finger to save their lives, talking points prepared by highly paid speechwriters fell out of his mouth assuring the American people that everything was going well. There was nothing wrong except for a few non-optimal bumps in the road made up of dead Americans.

Anyone listening to Obama would have to conclude, like Voltaire’s Pangloss, that we truly live in the best of all possible worlds. During the Bush administration, liberal pols like Obama liked to claim that they were part of the reality-based community. But as Calvin of “Calvin and Hobbes” said, “I’m not in denial. I’m just very selective about the reality I accept.” Obama would appear to have joined Calvin’s selective reality community.

Instead of discussing foreign affairs and national security, the Contender-in-Chief did his best to divert the debate with a talking point that he called “Nation Building at Home.” “Nation Building” is usually a term reserved for the reconstruction of backward or broken nations. That Obama insisted on applying it to the United States was telling, but even more telling was that his big idea for the debate was not only a distraction but a call to repeat the same disastrous stimulus and shovel-ready project boondoggles that had dug the country 16 trillion dollars into debt.

Obama’s idea of a foreign policy agenda is to borrow trillions of dollars from China to invest in green energy and teachers unions while calling it nation building. Left unasked was the question of what nation would we be building—America or China?

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House Intel Committee: China’s Largest Phone Equipment Maker Could Imperil US Telecommunications Infrastructure

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U.S. companies should avoid business with Huawei Technologies Co., China’s largest phone-equipment maker, to guard against intellectual-property theft and spying, the U.S. House Intelligence Committee chairman said.

U.S. companies considering purchases from Huawei should “find another vendor if you care about your intellectual property, if you care about your consumers’ privacy, and you care about the national security of the United States of America,” Representative Mike Rogers told CBS News’s “60 Minutes,” according to a CBS release about an interview set to air tomorrow.

Rogers, a Michigan Republican, and the committee’s top Democrat, Maryland Representative C.A. “Dutch” Ruppersberger, are preparing to issue a report Oct. 8 on their yearlong investigation of Huawei and ZTE Corp. (763), another Chinese phone- equipment maker. The lawmakers have been looking at whether the companies’ expansion in the U.S. market enables Chinese government espionage and imperils the U.S. telecommunications infrastructure.

“Huawei is a globally trusted and respected company doing business in almost 150 markets with over 500 operator customers, including nationwide carriers across every continent save Antarctica,” William Plummer, a Washington-based spokesman for Huawei, said in an e-mail. “The security and integrity of our products are world proven. Those are the facts today. Those will still be the facts next week, political agendas aside.”

Susan Phalen, a spokeswoman for the committee, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Big U.S. Fleet Nears Disputed Islands, But What For?

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It’s probably just a coincidence; no need to worry yet. But the U.S. has quietly assembled a powerful air, land and sea armada not far from where Japan and China are squaring off over disputed islands in the East China Sea.

Two Navy aircraft carrier battle groups and a Marine Corps air-ground task force have begun operating in the Western Pacific, within easy reach of the Senkaku Islands. That’s where Japanese and Chinese patrol boats are engaged in an increasingly tense standoff.

Chinese vessels have repeatedly entered territorial waters around the small islands in recent weeks and Coast Guard vessels from Japan and Taiwan fired water cannons at each other last week. The islands are controlled and administered by Japan, but claimed by both China and Taiwan.

No warships have been directly involved in the confrontations, so far. But China has vowed to continue sending patrol vessels into territorial waters and Japan has assembled scores of Coast Guard vessels to “defend” the islands.

The U.S. hasn’t taken sides in the ownership dispute, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has called for “cooler heads” to prevail. Nonetheless, U.S. officials have stated clearly that the Senkakus fall under the U.S.-Japan security treaty, which would require the U.S. to come to Japan’s aid in case of attack.

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Chinese Government Hackers Break into White House Military Office in Charge of Nuclear Football

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Hackers linked to China’s government broke into one of the U.S. government’s most sensitive computer networks, breaching a system used by the White House Military Office for nuclear commands, according to defense and intelligence officials familiar with the incident.

One official said the cyber breach was one of Beijing’s most brazen cyber attacks against the United States and highlights a failure of the Obama administration to press China on its persistent cyber attacks.

Disclosure of the cyber attack also comes amid heightened tensions in Asia, as the Pentagon moved two U.S. aircraft carrier strike groups and Marine amphibious units near waters by Japan’s Senkaku islands.

China and Japan—the United States’ closest ally in Asia and a defense treaty partner—are locked in a heated maritime dispute over the Senkakus, which China claims as its territory.

U.S. officials familiar with reports of the White House hacking incident said it took place earlier this month and involved unidentified hackers, believed to have used computer servers in China, who accessed the computer network used by the White House Military Office (WHMO), the president’s military office in charge of some of the government’s most sensitive communications, including strategic nuclear commands. The office also arranges presidential communications and travel, and inter-government teleconferences involving senior policy and intelligence officials.

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China Launches Its First Aircraft Carrier, Experts Doubt Its Strategic Value

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In a ceremony attended by the country’s top leaders, China put its first aircraft carrier into service on Tuesday, a move intended to signal its growing military might as tensions escalate between Beijing and its neighbors over islands in nearby seas.

Officials said the carrier, a discarded vessel bought from Ukraine in 1998 and refurbished by China, would protect national sovereignty, an issue that has become a touchstone of the government’s dispute with Japan over ownership of islands in the East China Sea.

But despite the triumphant tone of the launching, which was watched by President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, and despite rousing assessments by Chinese military experts about the importance of the carrier, the vessel will be used only for training and testing for the foreseeable future.

The mark “16” on the carrier’s side indicates that it is limited to training, Chinese and other military experts said. China does not have planes capable of landing on the carrier and so far training for such landings has been carried out on land, they said.

Even so, the public appearance of the carrier at the northeastern port of Dalian was used as an occasion to stir patriotic feelings, which have run at fever pitch in the last 10 days over the dispute between China and Japan over the East China Sea islands, called Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China.

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Powder Keg: Now Over 50 Taiwanese Vessels Challenge Japanese Claim to Islands (+video)

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About 40 Taiwanese fishing boats and 12 patrol ships intruded into Japanese territorial waters near the Senkaku Islands on Tuesday morning to assert Taipei’s claim to the Japan-controlled chain.

The armada further intensified the territorial dispute that has already seen ties between Japan and China deteriorate.

It was the first time such a large number of foreign vessels has intruded into the territorial waters since the diplomatic row over Japan and China broke out last month.

The Taiwanese fishing ships started entering waters near the islands around 7:40 a.m., and had left the area by midday, according to Japan Coast Guard officials.

The coast guard repeatedly sought to prevent the Taiwanese ships from approaching the islets by spraying water over them.

But the accompanying Taiwanese patrol ships responded to the warnings by announcing that it is their right to operate in Taiwanese territorial waters, according to the Japan Coast Guard.

There were no major clashes between the Japanese and Taiwanese maritime authorities, but officials confirmed that three Taiwanese patrol ships had fired their water cannons at the Japanese patrol boats.

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Here’s a video of the confrontation:

Apple Supplier Foxconn Faces Massive Worker Riot in China

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A large-scale incident involving some 2,000 Foxconn Technology Group factory workers has forced the closure of one of the tech supplier’s plants in China, the company confirmed Monday.

The company described the incident as a “personal dispute between several employees” that escalated to include thousands of people. Some 40 people were taken to the hospital, and “a number” of individuals were arrested. According to the statement from Foxconn, local police were in control of the situation by 3 a.m., some four hours after the dispute began.

The incident, which a worker at the scene described as a “riot,” took place in Taiyuan, a city in central China. Foxconn employs 79,000 workers at the facility. Production at the plant has been halted, but Foxconn said in a second statement that the factory will resume activity on Tuesday.

Foxconn, which supplies parts to Apple and other manufacturers, has drawn harsh criticism for its labor policies. A spate of suicides at the company’s factories in 2010 garnered media coverage of alleged harsh working conditions, including unsafe facilities and illegal amounts of overtime.

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The Coming Global Disorder

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Woody Island is a speck of land in the middle of the South China Sea, not quite a square mile in size. Over the past 80 years it has been occupied by French Indochina, Imperial Japan, the Republic of China, the People’s Republic of China, South Vietnam, and, after a brief war in 1974, the People’s Republic again. Now known as Yongxing to the Chinese (or Phu Lam to the Vietnamese, who still lay claim to it), the island has an airstrip, a harbor, and a few hundred Chinese residents, none native-born, many of whom make their living as fishermen.

An obscure tropical island may seem an odd starting point for an essay on the coming global disorder. Yet great conflicts have been known to flare over little things in faraway places. “On the morning of July 1, [1911,] without more ado, it was announced that His Imperial Majesty the German Emperor had sent his gunboat the Panther to Agadir to maintain and protect German interests,” wrote Winston Churchill in his history of the First World War. The proximate causes of the German foray to this deserted Moroccan bay “were complicated and intrinsically extremely unimportant.” But the real purpose of the kaiser’s move was to test—and, he hoped, to break—Britain’s alliance with France and, perhaps, scope out the possibility of establishing a German naval base in the north Atlantic. “All the alarm bells throughout Europe,” Churchill recalled, “began immediately to quiver.”

Could another Agadir crisis be lurking in the South China Sea? On July 24, 2012, Beijing decreed that henceforth the little village of Sansha on Woody Island would be considered a “prefecture-level city,” complete with a mayor, a people’s congress, a military garrison—and claims to administer the 770,000 square miles of surrounding waters, an area larger than the Gulf of Mexico. Beijing’s coup was protested loudly by Vietnam and more quietly by the U.S. State Department, which fretted that the move ran “counter to collaborative diplomatic efforts to resolve differences” in the South China Sea. In response, Beijing called a U.S. embassy official to the carpet and demanded that the United States “shut up.”

China’s leaders are fond of advertising their country’s “peaceful rise,” and the pro-China chorus in the West has sought to engage Beijing as a “responsible stakeholder” in global affairs. Yet in the last three years alone, Beijing has provoked quasi-military confrontations over disputed waters with Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, and even the United States, all the while insisting that it has “indisputable sovereignty” over nearly the whole of the sea. “China is a big country and other countries are small countries,” explained Chinese foreign minister Yang Jiechi at a regional summit in 2010. “And that is just a fact.”

What is also a fact is that the South China Sea sits on estimated oil reserves of 213 billion barrels and equally massive reserves of natural gas. Fully one-third of the world’s overall volume of trade passes across the sea every year. Each of the sea’s other claimants has reasons to accommodate Beijing even as they resent its bullying habits. China, it is sometimes noted, sees the sea not just as an economic resource and an extension of its sovereign domain, but as the natural basin for a 21st-century version of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, this time under Beijing’s sway.

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