China Reform Monitor: No. 870

December 15:

Local authorities have instructed Guangdong’s state-owned weekly Shidai Zhoubao [Time Weekly] “to initiate an internal rectification” after it claimed melamine milk activist Zhao Lianhai as its Grassroots Person of the Year in its December 13 hard-copy issue. The deputy editor-in-chief of the weekly was required to write a self-criticism and to pull copies off newsstands. An editor told Hong Kong’s Ming Pao that the report on Zhao Lianhai had not drawn government attention when it was first published online on December 9, but the Central Propaganda Department officials “got angry when overseas media began to hype up the report.”

December 16:

The People's Liberation Army’s (PLA) armed police construction team has broken through the last obstacle in the 3.3 km Galongla Tunnel built at 12,300 ft, Britain’s Telegraph reports. The tunnel is the key to the 117 km Metok highway near the China–India border in southern Tibet. Connecting the remote and forbidding Metok county to the rest of the country provides enormous economic and military value. The highway is key piece of infrastructure to defend the border with India, the PLA Daily reports. Metok has about 11,000 residents and about 400 PLA personnel. As of now, the mountain roads are impassable for nine months out of the year and troops get by with cured meat and canned food. Once the highway is finished in 2011, the PLA can mobilize thousands of soldiers to Metok and send up to 2000 vehicles a day, according to the South China Morning Post.

December 17:

The PLA’s Chengdu military region will train nearly 10,000 homing pigeons as part of a signaling system to connect different regions in the military zone, the Chengdu Shangbao and South China Morning Post report. Pigeons are effective for army signaling in remote areas when telecommunications fail. The pigeon signaling system will ensure that regional army communications will be functional even in wartime, said one PLA official, adding that back-up communication stations had been set up in the mountainous provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou, Sichuan, Chongqing and Tibet to deal with emergencies.

[Editor’s Note: The mainland has long depended on carrier pigeons for military use. In 1950, Yunnan border forces formed China's first military pigeon squad, with about 200 Soviet and Polish pigeons. The provincial capital, Kunming, has since built a base to train more than 50,000 pigeons for military use.]

December 23:

In mid-December, Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan's Cabinet approved the new National Defense Program Guidelines and the Mid-Term Defense Program that call for Japan to increase its submarine fleet from 16 to 22 and add new reconnaissance functions to 12 new fighter aircraft. The U.S. requested this and additional surveillance measures following a final report presented by a panel of U.S. and Japanese experts in late August. The Japanese and U.S. representatives agreed that the surveillance activities would be focused on China and North Korea’s submarines. U.S. officials suggested increasing the frequency of patrols by Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force's P-3C anti-submarine surveillance aircraft. Japanese P-3Cs have been flying surveillance missions since the Cold War era, when they monitored Soviet submarines, and are now used to spot suspicious vessels approaching Japanese territorial waters. Tokyo concluded that the U.S.-requested measure “would involve using existing equipment and face smaller political risks” because public criticism would be less pronounced, The International Herald Tribune (Asahi) reports.