January 19:
Following Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s visit to the Yasakuni Shrine last December China has christened a memorial hall at Harbin Railway Station in honor of Korean nationalist Ahn Jung Geun, who shot dead the first governor general of Japanese-ruled Korea there in 1909. The Ahn Jung Geun memorial hall, a 200 square meter room featuring historical memorabilia, photos, and records of the assassination, was created after South Korean President Park Geun Hye raised the idea last June in a meeting with President Xi Jinping. “We welcome the opening of the memorial hall and it is highly appreciated,” said a South Korean Foreign Ministry statement. Ahn, a hero in Korea, shot Ito Hirobumi as he arrived for a meeting with the chief Russian representative in then Manchuria. Tokyo regards Ahn as a “murderer” and has protested Beijing’s decision to build the memorial hall’s construction, Kyodo news reports.
January 22:
Members of China’s political elite have “set up a large numbers of offshore companies that allow them to conceal billions of dollars abroad,” the New York Times reports. Leaked documents on more than 37,000 people from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan include over a dozen children of high officials, among them Xi Jinping’s brother-in-law, Deng Jiagui; former prime minister Li Peng’s daughter, Li Xiaolin; Deng Xiaoping’s son-in-law,Wu Jianchang; and the son, daughter and son-in-law of former prime minister Wen Jiabao. Although offshore companies can also be used to launder money and avoid taxes, the Chinese government does not require its officials to publicly disclose their financial assets while offshore bank accounts, trusts, and shell companies are not illegal.
PricewaterhouseCoopers, UBS, Credit Suisse and others act as middlemen to help Chinese clients set up trusts and companies in Samoa, the British Virgin Islands and other offshore centers.
[Editor’s Note: This report comes just before the start of the trial of Xu Zhiyong, a legal scholar who called for the public disclosure of officials’ assets. Xu, who is accused of “assembling a crowd to disrupt order in a public place,” is among a group of dissidents, known as the New Citizens Movement, expected to stand trial in the coming days, the New York Times reports.]
For several hours the Great Firewall rerouted hundreds of millions of Internet users attempting to visit China’s most popular websites to the homepage of a U.S.-based company that sells anti-censorship web services tailored for Chinese users. Dynamic Internet Technology (DIT) is tied to the banned spiritual group Falun Gong, which has been blamed for past attacks. Yet, although the “glitch” could have been a hack, it appears a malfunction occurred while technicians were updating the system. The state-run China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) said the servers that match alphabetic domain names with a database of numeric IP addresses of computers hosting different websites – known as the Domain Name Service (DNS) –malfunctioned. Instead of matching the names of Chinese websites with their proper IP addresses, Chinese DNS servers instead redirected users to DIT’s IP address. Tests conducted by the UC Berkeley School of Information suggest that the source of the malfunction originated within the Great Firewall itself, Reuters reports.
January 23:
As part of China’s “opening-up policies” Beijing has approved 12 free trade zones (FTZ) including one in Tianjin and another in Guangdong. Last September, China established the Shanghai FTZ, the first of its kind, as “a national strategic trial to tap market forces and push market-oriented trade and investment reforms,” the official China Daily reports. Over the next year or more several central government departments will conduct a survey and prepare a plan for each proposed zone. So far, Tianjin and Guangdong have completed their surveys, while the other 10 zones have just started. Those 10 remaining locations have yet to be announced, although Zhejiang, Shandong, Liaoning, Henan, Fujian, Sichuan, Guangxi and Yunnan provinces, and cities including Suzhou, Wuxi and Hefei, have all expressed interest.
January 25:
Three explosions in Xinjiang near China’s border with Kyrgyzstan have killed three people and wounded two others. One person was killed after two blasts in a hairdressing salon and two other “suspects” died at a market when their car “self exploded” after being surrounded by police, said the South China Morning Post, citing the official Tianshan web portal. Meanwhile, according to Agence France Presse, Tianshan web portal also reports that as many as 12 in Xinjiang were also shot to death by local police “As police were dealing with violent incidents a mob threw explosives,” resulting in police killing six people, arresting five more, with another six killed as they “committed the offence.”