February 11:
The official Xinhua News Agency reports that China’s Ministry of Public Security is dispatching “numerous supervisory teams to localities to get a better idea about the situation in social stability in each locality and to supervise the work in upholding social stability.” In the wake of thousands of worker layoffs and business bankruptcies, Beijing demanded that supervisors enhance their “understanding of ideology” and “watch closely new developments [and] report them to the party committees and governments, notify relevant departments. They must be good at discovering, summing up, and analyzing problems in the work, and uncover deep-rooted problems that appear in regular patterns to achieve the desired results in supervisory work.”
China’s President Hu Jintao, who was visiting Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on a three-day tour en route to a tour of Mali, Senegal, Tanzania and Mauritius, announced that by 2013 China will complete a speed railway link to ferry Muslim pilgrims between Mecca and Medina. "This train will be able to rapidly evacuate the crowd at the peak of the Hajj," said Yang Honglin, the Chinese ambassador to Saudi Arabia, adding that the line will have a maximum capacity of five million people a year in comments carried by London’s Telegraph. The new rail link, which will be built by China Railway Construction Corporation, together with a Saudi Arabian company and an unnamed French firm, will cut the five hour car journey between Islam's two holiest cities to just half an hour.
[Editor’s Note: "Saudi Arabia is the biggest oil exporter to China. We value the role it plays and look forward to strengthening cooperation in this field," said China’s foreign ministry. Chinese officials said there are now sixty two Chinese companies working in the kingdom, employing over 15,000 Chinese workers. Huawei, China’s giant telecommunications company, is the largest supplier of communications during the Hajj.]
February 12:
Chinese government and freelance hackers are the primary culprits behind as many as several hundred daily attacks against U.S. government, electric-utility, and financial computer networks, House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson said in comments carried by Bloomberg. “Sophisticated hackers could really wreak havoc on our financial systems if they were successful,” he said in an interview. The threat is “primarily from China.” These problems will be detailed in a 60-day review the Obama administration will conduct on government cyber-security efforts, Thompson said. President Barack Obama also has said he would appoint a computer-security chief who will report directly to him. Wang Baodong, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy responded that, “Allegations that the Chinese government is behind cyber attacks against the U.S. computer networks are totally unwarranted and misleading.” Wang said the Chinese government is “cracking down” on computer hacking and other cyber crimes.
Tens of billions of dollars began leaving China in the last three months of 2008 as Chinese investors began bargain-hunting abroad, the Associated Press reports. A growing number of Chinese investors are joining buying tours organized to take advantage of slumping U.S. real estate prices amid the financial crisis. While China's ultra-rich have been buying property in the U.S. for years, the buying tours are new, made attractive by still-rising Chinese income levels and slumping American real estate prices. More than 100 Chinese buyers have joined such tours since late 2008; many are unfamiliar with U.S. markets and focus on well-known ethnic Chinese neighborhoods. Last year China had the world's fifth-largest population of millionaires with 391,000, up 20 percent from the previous year. But stock prices peaked in October 2007 and real estate prices are cooling, leaving rich Chinese with few good investment options at home.