Tag: china

Air Force To Totally Revamp Its Structure To Compete With China

To counter the growing threat especially from China, the Air Force is undergoing major changes in how it operates and is organized. Dubbed “Reopitmization for Great Power Competition,” details of the initiative will be unveiled Monday at the Air and Space Forces Warfare Symposium in Denver by Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall and other senior leaders, an Air Force official told The War Zone.

The changes will run the gamut from how the Air Force organizes its operational units to how it acquires new weapons systems, Andrew Hunter, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, suggested on Friday.

“We’re driving towards…the ability to do integration across our organizational stovepipes in the acquisition community but also on the operational community across the department to a much higher degree,” said Hunter, speaking at an Atlantic Council event.

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The Sprawling Radio Network That China’s Firewall Can’t Stop

Locked inside the crowded Chinese prison, blind lawyer Chen Guancheng hid his most treasured possession from the guards – inside a single serve milk box.

A pocket-size shortwave radio.

For three years, Mr. Chen looked forward to the hours after curfew. With a blanket wrapped over his head and the radio’s metal antenna parallel to his body, he lay still as the vibrating device under his ear brought to life a world outside the prison’s walls. Petitioners, protesters, human rights abuses, a grassroots movement to cut ties with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—in that tiny murmuring voice, he saw them all. He was free.

Over the decade since Mr. Chen escaped to the United States, the pool of Western broadcasters for information-hungry Chinese like him has shrunk considerably.

Radio powerhouses—BBC, Deutsche Welle, Voice of America—have either cut back on their China service or moved programs online. Meanwhile, the “Great Firewall,” the regime’s censorship apparatus aimed at isolating China digitally, seems only to grow taller by the day.

Bucking the trend is a largely volunteer-run radio network called Sound of Hope, whose 10 p.m. and midnight segments kept Mr. Chen informed about current affairs in China during his years in prison.

The company now boasts one of the largest shortwave broadcasting networks around China, with about 120 stations beaming signals to China 24/7.

Allen Zeng, Sound of Hope’s co-founder and CEO, sees shortwave as the answer to the regime’s information blackout.

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Infrared Sensors Can Now Peer Around Corners 

Just because an object is around a corner doesn’t mean it has to be hidden. Non-line-of-sight imaging can peek around corners and spot those objects, but it has so far been limited to a narrow band of frequencies. Now a new sensor can help extend this technique from working with visible light to infrared. This advance could prove help make autonomous vehicles safer, among other potential applications.

Non-line-of-sight imaging relies on the faint signals of light beams that have reflected off of surfaces in order to reconstruct images. The ability to see around corners may prove useful for machine vision—for instance, helping autonomous vehicles foresee hidden dangers to better predict how to respond to them, says Xiaolong Hu, the senior author of the study and a professor at Tianjin University in Tianjin, China. It may also improve endoscopes that help doctors peer inside the body.

The light that non-line-of-sight imaging depends on is typically very dim, and until now, the detectors that were efficient and sensitive enough for non-line-of-sight imaging could only detect either visible or near-infrared light. Moving to longer wavelengths might have several advantages, such as dealing with less interference from sunshine, and the possibility of using lasers that are safe around eyes, Hu says.

Now Hu and his colleagues have for the first time performed non-line-of-sight imaging using 1,560- and 1,997-nanometer infrared wavelengths. “This extension in spectrum paves the way for more practical applications,” Hu says.

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EVIDENCE OF 45,000-YEAR-OLD ADVANCED MATERIAL CULTURE DISCOVERED IN NORTH CHINA

Evidence of an advanced material culture that once thrived 45,000 years ago in East Asia has been discovered in China, according to an international team of archaeologists.

Analysis of materials from previous excavations that occurred in the early 1960s at the Shiyu archaeological site in China’s Shanxi Province represents what is believed to be the oldest use of such technologies in Northeast Asia, and provides new insights into ancient migrations of humans across the continent.

THE ANCIENT HORSE HUNTERS

According to the new analysis of materials retrieved from the location, the site’s Upper Palaeolithic assemblage dates to 45,000 years ago, and includes “blade technology, tanged and hafted projectile points, long-distance obsidian transfer, and the use of a perforated graphite disk,” according to Yang Shixia, an associate professor and first author of a new study detailing the team’s work.

In addition to its stone tool assemblage, obsidian from the site was determined to have been carried from quarries as far as 1000 kilometers away in the Russian Far East. Yang and the team also found evidence of “increased hunting skills denoted by the selective culling of adult equids, and the recovery of tanged and hafted projectile points with evidence of impact fractures,” according to a recent paper that describes their discoveries.

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U.S. Asks China to Ask Iran to Ask Houthis to Stop Attacking Red Sea Shipping

The Financial Times reported on Wednesday that the Biden administration has asked top Chinese officials to pressure Iran to make its Houthi proxy terrorists in Yemen halt their attacks on Red Sea shipping.

According to the Times’s sources, these pleas from top Biden officials — all the way up to White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Secretary of State Antony Blinken — have fallen on deaf ears in Beijing.

The Biden team has reportedly been asking China for help for “the past three months” but saw “little evidence China had put any pressure on Iran to restrain the Houthis.”

The best Beijing could do was a bland statement asking all parties to guarantee the safety of Red Sea shipping. The Houthis responded by assuring China and Russia that ships flying their flags would not be attacked. Terrorist attacks on the vessels of other nations continued unabated.

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New Evidence Shows Modern Humans First Arrived in China 45,000 Years Ago

A new study presents evidence showing that Homo sapiens (modern humans) arrived in China approximately 45,000 years ago, or several thousand years earlier than previously suspected. The original human settlers to the region likely arrived from the north and east, experts believe, migrating to northern China from the adjacent lands of modern-day Siberia and Mongolia.

An international team of researchers who study human evolution, led by Paleolithic archaeologist Shi-Xia Yang from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, completed a thorough re-examination of artifacts collected from a long-neglected and nearly forgotten archaeological site known as Shiyu, which is located in China’s Shanxi province. This fresh study just published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution uncovered the true age of this prehistoric human settlement, which will now be recognized as the oldest Homo sapiens site ever found on Chinese soil.

“Our new study identified an Initial Upper Paleolithic (IUP) archaeological assemblage from the Shiyu site of North China dating to 45,000 years ago that includes blade technology, tanged and hafted projectile points, long-distance obsidian transfer, and the use of a perforated graphite disk,” Shi-Xia Yaong stated in a Chinese Academy of Sciences press release covering his teams findings.

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More proof the Chinese covered up Covid: Congress investigation finds Beijing was studying virus weeks before it told the world

Chinese scientists mapped out the genetic makeup of the pandemic-causing coronavirus nearly a month before it was made public, raising questions about what those scientists knew and when they knew it.

A congressional committee obtained federal government documents showing that Dr Lili Ren, a scientist at the Beijing-based Institute of Pathogen Biology, sequenced the novel virus on December 28, which at the time the government was calling viral pneumonia ‘of unknown cause’.

It confirms suspicions that the Chinese were studying the virus before announcing it to the world – a delay experts say cost countless of lives.

 The fully sequenced virus – which would have allowed scientists to begin developing drugs and vaccines, and given them a better understanding of how the virus behaves – was not made available to the World Health Organization until January 11.

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Chinese lab crafts mutant COVID-19 strain with 100% kill rate in ‘humanized’ mice: ‘Surprisingly’ rapid death

In a Wuhan-esque study, Chinese scientists are experimenting with a mutant COVID-19 strain that is 100% lethal to “humanized” mice.

The deadly virus — known as GX_P2V — attacked the brains of mice that were engineered to reflect genetic makeup similar to people, according to a study shared last week out of Beijing.

“This underscores a spillover risk of GX_P2V into humans and provides a unique model for understanding the pathogenic mechanisms of SARS-CoV-2-related viruses,” the authors wrote.

The deadly virus is a mutated version of GX/2017, a coronavirus cousin that was reportedly discovered in Malaysian pangolins in 2017 — three years before the pandemic. Pangolins, also called scaly anteaters, are mammals found in warm areas of the planet.

All the mice that were infected with the virus died within just eight days, which researchers noted was a “surprisingly” rapid death rate.

GX_P2V had infected the lungs, bones, eyes, tracheas and brains of the dead mice, the last of which was severe enough to ultimately cause the death of the animals.

In the days before their deaths, the mice had quickly lost weight, exhibited a hunched posture, and moved extremely sluggishly.

Most eerie of all, their eyes turned completely white the day before they died.

Although terrifying, the study is the first of its kind to report a 100% mortality rate in mice infected by the COVID-19-related virus — far surpassing previously reported results from another study, the researchers wrote.

More importantly, the results of the study do not indicate how it would affect human beings.

Francois Balloux, an epidemiology expert at University College London’s Genetics Institute, slammed the research as “terrible” and “scientifically totally pointless.”

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Joe Biden Fails to Congratulate Taiwan’s President-Elect: ‘We Don’t Support Independence’

President Joe Biden offered no words of congratulations or support to Taiwanese President-elect Lai Ching-te following his election victory on Saturday, telling reporters simply that America does “not support independence.”

Lai, of the anti-communist Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), defeated two leftist rivals on Saturday to hand his party an unprecedented third term in power. Lai is currently the vice president of the country and will succeed current DPP President Tsai Ing-wen.

Taiwan is a sovereign nation with its own government and civil institutions wholly independent of the Chinese Communist Party. Despite this reality, Beijing insists that Taiwan is a province of China and its government is a rogue “separatist” organization. The Chinese government forces countries to choose between recognition of Taiwan’s sovereignty or diplomatic ties with China, so most of the world’s nations do not maintain formal ties with Taiwan. At press time, only 12 countries in the world recognize Taiwanese sovereignty, following Nauru’s abandonment of Taipei this weekend in the aftermath of Lai’s election. America is not one of the 12; former President Jimmy Carter abandoned Taiwan to forge ties with the Communist Party in 1979.

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The Big Flaws in That Study Suggesting That China Manipulates TikTok Topics

The latest wave of fearmongering about TikTok involves a study purportedly showing that the app suppresses content unflattering to China. The study attracted a lot of coverage in the American media, with some declaring it all the more reason to ban the video-sharing app.

“Hopefully members of Congress will take a look at this report and maybe bring the authors to Washington to give testimony about their findings,” wrote John Sexton at Hot Air. The study “suggests that the next generation will have had a significant portion of their news content spoon fed to them by a communist dictatorship,” fretted Leon Wolf at Blaze Media. “TikTok suppression study is another reason to ban the app,” declared a Washington Examiner editorial.

But there are serious flaws in the study design that undermine its conclusions and any panicky takeaways from them.

In the study, the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) compared the use of specific hashtags on Instagram (owned by the U.S. company Meta) and on TikTok (owned by the Chinese company ByteDance). The analysis included hashtags related both to general subjects and to “China sensitive topics” such as Uyghurs, Tibet, and Tiananmen Square. “While ratios for non-sensitive topics (e.g., general political and pop-culture) generally followed user ratios (~2:1), ratios for topics sensitive to the Chinese Government were much higher (>10:1),” states the report, titled “A Tik-Tok-ing Timebomb: How TikTok’s Global Platform Anomalies Align with the Chinese Communist Party’s Geostrategic Objectives.”

The study concludes that there is “a strong possibility that TikTok systematically promotes or demotes content on the basis of whether it is aligned with or opposed to the interests of the Chinese Government.”

There are ample reasons to be skeptical of this conclusion. Paul Matzko pointed out some of these in a recent Cato Institute blog post, identifying “two remarkably basic errors that call into question the fundamental utility of the report.”

The errors are so glaring that it’s hard not to suspect an underlying agenda at work here.

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