Rebecca MacKinnon defends a liar

I just came across an article titled "Xinjiang Info-War" on Rebecca MacKinnon's blog. Ms. MacKinnon stars the article by defending a lie told by Rebiya Kadeer at a news conference in relation to the recent race riot in XinJiang.

Here is a brief recap of the lie: in a news conference, Rebiya Kadeer held up a large picture for the western media to see. The picture shows a large group of people protesting in the presence of a large number of Chinese police officers. Rebiya Kadeer claimed that this picture was taken from a peaceful protest of Uyghurs students in Urumqi, and the protest was violently broken up by the Chinese police.

However, some Chinese netizen found out that the picture used by Rebiya Kadeer was actually from another protest which took place in city thousands of kilometers away from Urumqi many months ago, and that protest had nothing to do with Uyghurs. Therefore, these Chinese netizen publicized that Rebiya Kadeer had given false information to the western media, i.e. she told a lie.

Here is the picture of the news conference with Rebiya Kadeer holding a picture of the completely unrelated protest:


Here is how Ms. MacKinnon defends Rebiya Kadeer's lie:

"The unfortunate - but it appears genuinely honest - mistake by Rebiya Kadeer sparked a fury of comments on anti-cnn, many of which denounced the Western media for emphasizing Uighur casualties while making light of Han Chinese casualties."

I find it rather bizzare that Ms. MacKinnon would call this blatant lie a "genuinely honest mistake". How exactly does Ms. MacKinnon know Rebiya Kadeer just made an honest mistake? Does Ms. MacKinnon know Rebiya Kadeer so well that she can be confident in her judgement of Rebiya Kadeer's character? Does Ms. MacKinnon have the ability to go back in time and read Rebiya Kadeer's mind across the Internet? Did Ms. MacKinnon actually instruct Rebiya Kadeer to use that fake photo?

Ms. MacKinnon believes that Rebiya Kadeer used that fake photo because the Reuters used this fake photo first. So, basically, Ms. MacKinnon is implying that Rebiya Kadeer is so lazy that she couldn't even bother to do her own research before mouthing off to the western media. However, Ms. MacKinnon hasn't bothered to do a bit in-depth analysis of Rebiya Kadeer's character in her article. Rebiya Kadeer actually has a history of telling lies on TV. Here is a youtube video of Rebiya Kadeer pouring her heart out to show her loyalty to the Chinese government and the unification of the "motherland":





So, did Ms. MacKinnon forget to do her own homework, or did she deliberately forget to include that tidbit of information in her article?

On the other hand, Ms. MacKinnon doesn't seem to think very highly of the Chinese netizen's resposne to the lie, and the theory of anti-China terrorism. Here is what she wrote:

"Some comments on that page and on other threads on the anti-cnn (which unfortunately I did not save) described the July 5th race riot as an act of terrorism, accused the Uighurs of being terrorists, and accused Western governments and the Western media of supporting anti-Chinese terrorism."

Ms. Mackinnon's tone here seems to suggest that she does not believe that the race riot was an act of anti-Chinese terrorism, but she doesn't give any of her thoughts on why she doesn't believe so. In fact, other than her tone, you couldn't tell what she thinks of the riot at all. There is no expression of sympathy to the victims of the riots in her article, nor is there any description of the riots. The first half of her article is to defend Rebiya Kadeer's lie, the second half is her criticism on how the Chinese government has managed the release of information so far.

If I had to sum up her article in two sentences, they would be "Rebiya Kadeer made a mistake -- big fucking deal! The Chinese government still sucks!".

For the record, I believe it would be incredibly stupid or naive of anyone to dismiss the anti-China terrorism connection to the riot in XinJiang. XinJiang has had a long history of violent anti-government terrorism. The most recent one being the murders of police officers some time around the 2008 Olympics. The level of organization and scale of the race riot is simply too big for terrorism to be ruled out completely.

I also find this bit of Ms. MacKinnon's analysis interesting:

"One reason for dialing things back may be the reactions coming from the Islamic world. Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan has condemned China's crackdown in Xinjiang as genocide."

Right, the spineless Chinese government is pedelling backwards because a misinformed Turkish PM is condemning the murder of hundreds of Han Chinese by Uyghurs mobs as a genocide of Uyghurs. Does Ms. MacKinnon understand the necessity to stand up for the truth?

Ms. MacKinnon is obviously not a big of of anti-CNN, which was setup to expose the lies and misinformation about China spread by the western media. I wonder if she ever wonders why anti-CNN existed in the first place.

For China's sake, leave Tibet alone for a while!

Unless you live in a cave on Mars, you should be rather familiar with all the anti-China/pro-Tibet protests that have been going on for the last a few months. I for one, have really had enough of these pointless protests and I reckon I've just got a solution that's gonna make everyone happy ... in the long run.

So, what's my brilliant solution, you ask? Well, it's simple:

The PRC government should invite the Dalai Lama back to Tibet, give him total rule over the Tibet Autonomous Region(TAR) on the condition that no foreign army is going to enter TAR without the permission of PRC, and stop funding and assisting the development of Tibet. In other words: no assistance without governance.

In the short term, this solution will benefit the Tibetan people in the following ways:

1. They get their religious freedom and beloved spiritual leader back.
2. If they want, they can get rid of the non-Tibetans in their own land.
3. They get to practice their culture in whatever way they want.

In the short term, this solution will benefit the Chinese people and the RPC government in the following ways:

1. They get to spend their hard-earned cash (a few billion yuan a year) on developing their own regions and help out more poor people who are far more likely to appreciate and support the development.
2. They can shut up those Tibetan-Independence SOBs ... at least for a while.
3. The goverment may be able to use this as some short-term political capital and get a boost for its international image (not that it matters that much).

However, there are also a few short term downsides to this solution. I can think of the following for the Tibetans living in TAR:

1. The living standard for some Tibetans might drop rather significantly.
2. The separation of church and state may dimish.

Someone may argue that the downsides to the Tibetans aren't downsides at all, because the Tibetans would prefer a spiritually rich life than a materially rich life any day, and being led by their wise spiritual leader is better than any other form of governance. Well, these people might be right, and to be honest, I don't really care.

The downside to the Chinese may be a bigger issue. Here ar the ones that I can think of:

1. A large number of people, especially the "angry youths" are gonna get pissed off, and riots will be started, and the political stability of the government will be threatened.
2. Other parts of China may demand the same treatment, especially Xin Jing, Taiwan and HK, again, threatening the stability of China.

However, these are just short term problems, and they can be mitigated. To smooth over the people, the government can start preparing the PR campaign a long time before the handover of power, and making sure that the people know how China can benefit from granting TAR an almost total indepedence, i.e. more money for poorer Chinese, better International image, national pride, etc., etc..

For other parts of China that may also seek similar independence, that's not a problem at all. Regions like Xin Jing can be told to wait for a few years to see how TAR works out. Regions like HK probably won't bother to seek independence, because they are pretty much independent anyway, especially now that they are rather tightly coupled with PRC in terms of economy. Taiwan won't be a big issue either, especially now that KMT is in charge, and again, economically, Taiwan is rather tightly coupled with PRC, and I doubt KMT would do much to upset the current status quo.

I cannot really predict the benefits in the long run for TAR or PRC. However, if TAR works out for itself, that'd be good for TAR and it would really show that the PRC was wrong to get in there in the place. On the other hand, if TAR doesn't work out, that'd be good for PRC, because it would save tons of money for not helping a bunch of ungratful Tibetans, and it would show the other ethnic minority regions that breaking off from PRC is a terrible idea, and it would probably gain more support for taking back the political power in TAR, and terminate the poltiical power of the Lamas.

The current China-TAR situation is that both sides are losers. The Tibetans in TAR feel that their freedom, religion and culture are being destroyed by the PRC, and the PRC is being hated both domestically and internationally while spending large chunks of money developing TAR.

So, really, PRC, please give TAR and Dalai Lama their independence. They hate you now because you are not giving them what they want. They will probably also hate you after you've given them what they want, but that's ok, because at least you get to keep your money.

Chinese cyber army, myth or reality?

In the last a few months, there have been quite a few reports of Chinese cyber army attacking computer systems of different western governments to steal valuable secrets. First America, then Britain and now Germany, have all come out and publicly accused China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) of launching systematic attacks at their governmental and industrial computer networks. So, is there really an army of PLA hackers that are blatantly attacking western government's computer networks, or is this just paranoia and China bashing?

Well, I suspect that the truth is somewhere in the middle. I'm sure the PLA has some sort of electronic warfare division, and so do probably all the armies in the world. I'm also sure that some of the PLA hackers have attempted to break into other country's networks -- that's what hackers do. However, I'd be very surprised if PLA have indeed been systematically attacking foreign government's computer networks amid all these already very loud accusations.

I'm a computer scientist, and I have been running my own Linux server for several years, so let me explain why all these accusations of hacking are probably nonsense.

All the accusations so far claimed that the hackings were launched through the Internet. In other words, the attackers, if they existed, did not have physical access to the computers that they attacked. So, what exactly constitutes an Internet based cyber attack and how does one carry out such an attack? To answer these 2 questions, one has to first ask what the hacker can gain by attacking someone's computer network?

There are two fundamental goals of hacking:

1. Theft: stealing the data on the victim's computer.
2. Disruption: disrupting the operations carried out by the victim's computer.

Therefore, one can claim to have been cyber attacked when their private files have been accessed, or their computer has been remotely controlled by someone else, or the service provided by their computer is being inundated by malicious requests.

Let's further quantify what it means to "have your files stolen". Computer hardware and software are very very dumb, they are so dumb that they cannot understand you if you do not given them explicit instructions that they can understand. Therefore, if you unintentionally allow a file to be accessed through legal operations of your own software, then it probably will be accessed and that would not be hacking in my books.

For example, if you set up a web server on your computer, and you tell the server software that every file under the directory of "XYZ" can be accessed by your Internet users, then you should not put any of your private files in that directory.

So, if you have not unintentionally shared your private files, then how can a hacker get to them? Well, they can get to it with 3 methods:

1. Trojan horse software
2. Exploiting security holes of your networking software
3. Remotely logging into your computer using legit user name and password combination
   

Your files do not have cyber legs or normal legs. They will not copy, move, change or transmit themselves without outside influences. It doesn't matter whether your file is a piece of executable code, or just some random data, or a device (for *nix systems), it will not do anything unless something else tells it to do so. Therefore, if someone wants to read your private files or copy them onto their computers, they are gonna have to use another program on your computer to do so. However, if they are not already logged onto your computer, how can they run one of your programs?

Trojan horse software is one way for hackers to run a program on your computer. Basically, the hacker will write a malicious program and give it an exotic and tempting name and advertisement, and when you download it and run it on your computer, it will be able to do the hacker's biddings. For example, if someone tells you that their free program allows you to watch porn, or can crack the serial number of some software that you didn't pay for, then there is a pretty good chance that their "free" program is a Trojan horse.

So, how do you protect yourself against Trojan horse attacks? It's quite simple actually: DO NOT DOWNLOAD ANY DODGY SOFTWARE FROM THE INTERNET!!!! DO NOT OPEN OR RUN ANY EMAIL ATTACHMENT FROM PEOPLE YOU DON'T KNOW!!! Now, I don't think it's very likely for the PLA hackers to attack western government computers using Trojan horse software. I mean, could you imagine senior western government officials browsing the net and downloading dodgy software during their working hours on their government computers? Well, maybe you can, but then the problem wouldn't really be the hackers, would it?

Exploiting security holes of your networking software is another method that hackers can use to run programs on your computer, and it's much harder to defend against, but luckily, it's also extremely hard to do. Like any other software, networking software (email, remote logging software, internet messaging software, etc.) is essentially a list of machine readable instructions which were written to perform a specific task. When you run such a software, some of its instructions and some of its data are stored in your RAM. A security hole is a bunch of instructions that allow the users to modify the instruction part of the program through unexpected inputs. A security hole allows malicious users to replace legit instructions with their own illegit machine instructions, and cause damage.

So, how do you defend against security holes of your networking software? Well, not much really. On the one hand, you can rely on the publisher of the software to have done sufficient testing and apply patch whenever you can. Commercial software are normally pretty bad at this, because they hide their source code from the public and nobody knows what's wrong with their software until it's too late. On the other hand, you can use a good operating system and minimize the damage that can be done by an exploited process(a "process" is a software in execution). For example, on Linux/Unix systems, each process is given a set of permissions on what they can read and write, and these permissions are enforced by the operating system and cannot not be changed unless the exploited process is being run by the system admin user. Therefore, by restricting the permissions of your software to the bare minimum, you can minimize the damage.

The more important question is then how many hackers does it take to exploit the security hole of a networking software? My answer would be ... just 1 actually. You don't need an army of hackers, you just need 1 guy who knows what he's doing. It doesn't matter how many millions of hackers you have, if there is no security hole on your networking software, they would never be able to get through. In fact, it's probably a bad idea to have more than one hacker attacking the same networking software on the same computer -- they can easily interfere with each other and corrupt each other's illegal instructions. Therefore, the idea of armies of PLA hackers launch coordinate software exploit attacks on western government networks is not really plausible.

Another type of cyber attack is the often-talked about denial-of-service (DOS) attack. How does this work? Well, suppose that you are running a web server that allows people to order flowers over the net, and then one day, a bunch of hackers come along and use multiple computers to generate millions of flower orders at your website. Since you've only got a crappy computer, the poor thing is then so swamped with all these nonsense requests that it cannot handle any legit flower orders. This type of attacks can easily render ordinary web servers useless. However, all the hackers can do is disrupting your daily operations, they cannot steal anything from you at all. This is the type of attacks that an army of hackers are mostly suitable for, but since they cannot get any information from their victims, they can only disrupt single servers. If these servers are running highly classified mission critical services that concern the national security of America, Britain and Germany, then that would be a problem for them. However, could you imagine America coordinating real time military operations using a bunch of servers that are openly accessible via the Internet? I don't think so.

So, how do you defend yourself against DOS attacks? Well, some firewalls would be a good idea. For example, you can identify the IP address of the computers that the malicious requests come from and tell your networking software/hardware to simply ignore them. That would probably get rid of the vast majority of DOS attacks ... but yes, that also means someone has to be monitoring the requests at all times, but then again, that's what system admins are for, isn't it?


Finally, the least likely but most damaging way of hacking is for a hacker to guess your user name and password combo and remotely logging into your computer. This is the dumbest way of hacking and theoretically the least likely way to succeed. Basically, it just involves someone trying to first guess your user name, then your password through some remote logging software such as SSH or Telnet or FTP.

You'd think that an army of hackers would be perfectly suitable to carry out this sort of attacks. However, let's do a bit of math. Suppose you mandate your user name and password both have to be 8 characters long and they can be numbers, punctuations, and alphabetical characters. That means each character of your user name and pass word can be an upper case letter, a lower case letter, a digit and a symbol. A quick look at my keyboard tells me that the number of choices is 26 *2 + 11 *2 = 74. So the total number of possible user name and password would be 74^8 each, and the total number of user name/password combos would be (74^8) * (74^8) = 8.085 * 10^29 which is a very very large number. Since the guessing has to be done over the Internet, there is actually a delay. Let's suppose that we have 1 million hackers each with their own computer and trying to crack the user name and password of a single victim computer, and the delay between each try is 0.1 second, it would basically take 2563898975171665 years for these hackers to crack the victim computer. Does this seem plausible to you?

So, how do you defend against people who want to guess your user name and password? Well, my recommendations are:

1. Only use the most secure remote logging software, e.g. SSH.
2. Have proper user names and passwords. DO NOT USE EMPTY PASSWORDS OR ALLOW GUEST LOGIN!!!
3. Configure your remote logging software to disable remote logging for all known users, i.e. "root", "admin", "mail", "web", etc.
4. Configure your remote logging software to use non-standard ports so that the potential intruders cannot easily know what services you are running.
5. Configure your remote logging software to introduce delays between unsuccessful login attempts from the same remote host, i.e. first failure -- wait for 2 seconds, second failure -- wait for 4 seconds, etc.
6. DO NOT TELL OTHER PEOPLE YOUR USER NAME AND PASSWORD! DO NOT ACCESS HIGHLY CLASSIFIED COMPUTER NETWORKS FROM DODGY INTERNET CAFES!

Of course, there are many other forms methods of electronic intrusion, however, they don't fit the western government's accusations.

Now, let's have a look at exact what was described by the computer experts from the governments that accused the PLA. According to the following reuters article (http://www.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUSL2225757020071022?sp=true):

"In our view, state Chinese interests stand behind these digital attacks," said Hans Elmar Remberg, vice president of the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the country's domestic intelligence agency.

"Supporting this view is the intensity, structure and scope of the attacks, and above all the targets, which include (German) authorities and companies," he told a conference on industrial espionage in Berlin.

In August German media reported that computer hackers believed to be linked to the Chinese army had infected German government ministries with spying programs. Beijing denied the allegation and said all "hacking" behavior was prohibited.

....

The attacks often rely on "Trojan horse" email programs or the hacking of Web sites, he said.

Well, maybe Mr.Remberg was not allowed to reveal more information on these attacks, but from what he said, there is precisely 0 solid proof of any PLA involvement. It's perfectly possible to trace the source of the attacks to specific IP addresses, therefore the attacker's cities, countries and Internet service providers. However, unless the PLA not only openly advertises their military subnet addresses but also foolishly launches these attacks from computers on these same subnets, there would be no evidence to link anything to the PLA. It seems that Mr.Remberg couldn't actually confirm the offending IP addresses actually belonged to the PLA ... well, that didn't stop him from accusing the PLA anyway.

Furthermore, it was also mentioned that "computer hackers believed to be linked to the Chinese army had infected German government ministries with spying programs". Well, as I explained before, there is no way for anyone to infect your computer with spying programs unless you actively download and run these programs yourself. So, could it be that the German ministries employees "accidentally" installed Trojan horse software on their work computers when they were browsing unsavory websites, and they just blamed the PLA to cover up their own dirty deeds?

Anyway, in conclusion, it is of my opinion that:

• Every military, PLA included, has electronic intrusion divisions which often hack other government's computer networks.
• None of the attacks described by the accusing western government are remotely plausible by any army of hackers.
• None of the reports of the attacks provide any solid proof of PLA involvement.
  
• If one just observes the most basic common sense in computer network safety, it would be very unlikely for your network to be breached by Internet based attacks.

Feel free to let me know what I've missed.

Some observations on western media's reporting of the Chinese lunar orbit launch

China launched a lunar orbit yesterday. The launch is a remarkable scientific achievement no matter how you look at it, and it has been reported all over the world. However, while the overwhelming majorities of the reports from western media seem to be neural and positive, a quick look at the titles of the reports on google news seems to suggest that not everyone considers the lunch as just some scientific activity.

Some reports prefer to view the launch as China flexing its military muscles again:

• China flexes muscle in space race with launch of lunar explorer (Guardian Unlimited, UK)
• China launches lunar ambitions with moon shot (Euronews.net, France)
  

Some reports seem to suggest that this is part of the Asian space race:

• What's behind Asia's moon race? (Christian Science Monitor, MA)
• China joins Asian race to the moon (Sydney Morning Herald, Australia)
• Asia’s space race heats up (The Times, South Africa)
• Asian space race heats up as PRC launches orbiter (Taipei Times, Taiwan)
• Dark side of the moon? China's lunar probe boosts Asian rivalries (USA Today)

And there are a few reports that prefer to talk about the propaganda value of the launch:

• Chinese media trumpet space launch (NEWS.com.au, Australia)
• Chinese propaganda reaches new heights (National Post, Canada)
• China prepares for moon launch with patriotic blast (Washington Post, United States)

This is really a non-issue and I'm not trying to say that there is lots of bias in western media's reporting on China, but these titles do make a rather interesting contrast with the ones on the launch of U.S. space shuttle a few days ago.

What do you think?

Dodged a bullet

Around December, 2005, I invested a rather large amount of money (by my poor student standard) with an investment company called Australian Capital Reserve (ACR). They gave me about 8% annual interest. The duration of my investment was 12 months and they returned the principles and interest back to me at the end of 2006. I was pretty happy about my investment and thought about investing with them again with a bit more of my savings.

However, I didn't end up reinvesting with ACR because my parents insisted that I switch back to term deposit with the bank, as they felt ACR was a bit too risky.

It turned out that my parents were right! ACR has just put itself into voluntary administration, in other words, the company is about to collapse. According to their website, for now ACR does not know when the private investors like me would get any of their money back. It seems that there is a pretty good chance that the private investors will lose all their money, as ACR's assets will be first used to pay off its debt to its corporate lenders.

This is a really terrible outcome for the mum and dad investors who were the main target of ACR's advertising. I remember that most, if not all, of the ACR ads depicted elderly people getting lots of money in return of their investments. While I'm feeling fortunate for myself to have pulled out in time, I cannot help thinking what would happen to the 7000 (elderly) people who haven't.

I was also a bit startled to hear that ACR was in fact a property investment company, and its collapse was caused by the slump of the property market. I was under the impression (from a telephone conversation with an employer/sales person from ACR) that they were sort of like a bank that lends money to other people/companies for a high interest. I particularly remember that the ACR person told me that their investments were safe, because they would only lend 80% of the value of the mortgaged asset.

My thoughts on the Chinese border guards shooting the Tibetans who tried to go to Nepal

There has been a rather unfortunate incident in which a bunch of Chinese border guards fired upon a group of Tibetans trying to go to Nepal and one of the Tibetans was killed. If the Tibetans had not been armed, then it would be crystal clear that none of them deserved to die and the Chinese border guard responsible for the killing, as well as his commanding officer, should be punished accordingly. On paper, this just looks like another case of big bad China bullying innocent little Tibet ... but is it really?

Let's now look at what happened factually and logically. It is clear that the Tibetans were trying to sneak into Nepal from China illegally. In other words, they are illegal immigrants. It is also clear that the duties of the Chinese border guards include stoping people from illegally coming into China or leaving China. The logic is simple here, every country has the right to decide who and what comes into their land, as well as who and what leaves their land. This is why most, if not all, countries have set up immigration offices at their internation ports and airports. You certainly don't want people who committed crimes in your country to leave before they can be punished.

Obviously the border guards had every right to demand whoever tries to cross the border to show their legal travel documents, and it was their job to stop people from crossing the border illegally. So what do you expect them to do when they discover a group of people trying to cross the border illegally? Now, before everyone gets all emotional about the "pilgrims", it is necessary to realize that as far as the guards are concerned, it makes absolutely no difference. All the guards could see was a group of people trying to illegally leave one country and enter another. Without talking to these people and seeing their travelling documents, it is impossible to determine whether they are pilgrims, travellers, murderers or smugglers. People may argue that it was clear what these Tibetans were from the clothes they were wearing, but that's just bollocks, because clothes can be wore by anyone. Therefore, under this circumstance, the guards did the only thing that was reasonable -- they tried to stop these illegal immigrants, and this is where the real problem is.

So, what should be a reasonable way for the border guards to stop illegal immigrants (who could potentially be criminials fleeing from justice) when the illegals have a pretty big head start? The border guards tried talking to them -- it didn't work, and the border guards had no transports that was fast enough to overtake the illegals, so they did the next logical thing and fired warning shots which were also ignored by the illegals. Now, the only options left were either letting the illegals get away without knowing who they were and why they were fleeing, or taking them down and catching them. Taking the first option would mean a failure to carry out their duties for the border guards, and that was probably why they chose the second option, and it was tragic that one of the Tibetans died.

Let's take one step back and look at what happened. The first question that came to my mind was why couldn't the Tibetans have gone to Nepal legally? Despite what most westerners think, Tibetans are not prisoners in their own country, they are legal citizens of PRC, and China belongs to them as much as the Han people. There are no border checks within China and Tibetans can go wherever they damn please in China. Furthermore, legally there is no barrier whatsover that can stop the Tibetans from obtaining Chinese passports, they just have to follow the proper application procedures like everyone else and they will get their passports. Of course there is the issue of getting the visa to wherever they want to go, but that's not really the problem of the Chinese government, is it? Surely it would be illegal to enter a foreign country without the proper travelling documentation except for the refugees, but as far as I know, these Tibetans were not refugees, they were not wanted by the Chinese government before they tried to go to Nepal illegally. So, there really is no reason for them to do what they did, and I think they should bear some of the blame too.

Lastly, it would be totally illogical to use this incident to accuse the PRC of committing genocide in Tibet. Despite all the "genocide", the population, life expectancy and literacy rate of the Tibetans have increased dramatically since 1950 -- this is the exact opposite of what a genocide would do to a race. Furthermore, if the Hans wanted as few Tibetans as possible in China, they would encourage the Tibetans to leave, and stop the Tibetans from coming back -- this is opposite of shooting people who want to leave. It's not even clear what race the border guards were, they could have been Tibetans for all we know.

You are welcome to comment, but don't even think about trying to convince me that Tibet is an independent country, because for every reason you can give me, I can give you an equally, if not more, convicing reason why Tibet is part of China.

A questionable report from BBC about China's organ harvesting program

BBC seems to have dug up some rather shocking dirt on China's organ harvesting business. It has produced a report in which a white British reporter who speaks a reasonable amount of Chinese went undercover to what he claimed to be oen of the largest organ translplant hospitals in Northern China, and got verbal evidence of this harvesting business from a doctor in charge and an agent for the hospital. Here is the report:



However, as a native speaker of Chinese, I found this report to be rather suspicious for the following reaons.

First, when I first saw this report on ABC and then again on SBS, I couldn't help noticing that it was impossible to see the actual name of the hospital. There was a couple of seconds of footage on the front of the hospital at the beginning, but the camera was so far away that it was impossible to see the name of the hospital. From the youtube video, you can see just how blurred the characters were. There was also a wide shot of the name of ths hospital after the interviews at the hospital, but for some reason, the actual name of the hospital was blocked out, and all you see is the two big characters: 医院, which just means "hospital". The reporter also never explicitly mentioned the name of the city in which the hospital is located. I find this lack of information rather strange, given the aim of the report is obviously to name and shame. I also don't believe that the reporter is hiding the details of the hospital to protect his sources -- since he's given the name of the doctor and a rather good overview of the hospital in the report such that anyone who actually lives in that city should be able to identify that hospital with ease. At the end of the report, he says "Robert something in Tian Jin ... ". Well, Tian Jing (天津) is not traditionally classified as in Northern China.

Second, at the beginning of the report (maybe 6 seconds into the footage), you see the reporter walked up to a bunch of girls at what seemed to be the reception and said in Mandarin "hey, we are looking for director Deng in room 210", and one of the girls just pointed at a direction and off he went. This seems rather strange that he had to ask for directions when he already knows the room number for the person he wanted to see. Was he trying to confirm the existence of the doctor here? If so, how come there is no subtitle to tell the viewers what he was actually asking there?

Third, the most suspicious part of the report starts at around 1 minute and 16 seconds into the interview. Here, a man in blue shirt and wearing glasses gave a rather lengthy confession to the reporter, and the reporter claimed that this man was an agent of the hospital for dealing with foreign clients on the organ business, and this guy gave an apparant confession and justification on using the organs of executed criminals. So what's so suspicious here? Well, this guy did not speak a single world of Chinese and he gave the entire interview in Japanese!! What's even more suspicous here is that the white reporter actually responded to him in Chinese!! So why would a Chinese speak Japanese to a white guy who actually speaks and responds in Chinese? Surely, he could've just spoken Chinese? What exactly is the reporter trying to pull here? Did he think that no Chinese speaking people would pick this up?

There are a few other weird things about this report, and I will watch it a bit more and provide more updates later. Hopefully, I will be able to use some imaging tools to find out the name of the hospital -- if it's a hospital at all and more details on this "director Deng", so stay tuned.

Update 1. I just listend a bit more carefully at the interview with the old man -- who was supposed to be the father of one of the criminals executed. Now, I used the word "supposed" here, because there is no way that I can verify that the relationship between the old man and the person executed. The only photographic evidence is the picture shown at around 3 minutes and 11 seconds -- the picture only has 2 kids and an old woman, the older kid seems like around 10, the executed prisoner seems to be in his 20s. The only part of the interview conducted in clear Chinese goes as the following (starts at around 3 minutes and 13 seconds):

The old man: from the arrest to execution ... it was about 2 years.

The female interviewer: Then during the 2 years, did the court ....

Yes, the interview was cut off exactly at that point, the question asked by the female interviewer was not finished, but here is the subtitle displayed during this interview:

I didn't even get to see my son. After he was arrested I wasn't allowed to see him once.

Well, maybe he said something like that during other parts of the interview ... but we may never know because BBC hasn't shown it!!

Update 2. After a bit more research on hospitals in Tianjing, as well as the footage of the report, I've come to a fairly confident conclusion that the hospital in the report is Tianjing's Oriental Organ Transplant Center, or 东方器官移植中心, here is their website: http://www.ootc.net/default.aspx. Here is a picture of the hospital:




See if you can make the connection between that picture and the buildings in the report. If my guess is right, then the Dr Deng in the report would be the deputy director of the liver transplant group, Dr.邓永林, according to the personnel page of this OOTC. This would add to the credibility of this report if the Dr. Deng in the report could be verified with photographic evidence.