4.3.2005  China's Military Spending to Rise  China on Friday announced a 12.6 percent increase in military spending for 2005 but tried to allay fears that a proposed anti-secession law would prompt an attack on rival Taiwan.

The rise in military spending adds to a series of double-digit annual increases as Beijing modernizes its forces to back up threats to invade Taiwan, which the communist mainland claims as its territory ...

Taiwanese lawmakers on Friday raised a clamor in their parliament over the proposed law, chanting slogans to denounce legislation they said could severely strain relations between the rivals.

Several lawmakers wore headbands that said ``Against Anti-Secession Law'' and chanted ``Save Taiwan and say no to annexation'' on the floor of the chamber. Some lawmakers called for enacting an anti-annexation law to counter the proposed Chinese legislation.

``We hope the mainland won't miscalculate the situation and do something to upset the stability in the Taiwan Strait,'' Premier Frank Hsieh warned... (AP)

4.3.2005  China Worries About Economic Surge That Skips the Poor  ... Although the leadership has focused on social inequality and wealth distribution for over a year - it was also the theme of the 2004 legislative session of the National People's Congress - there have been several mass riots and thousands of small protests over land seizures, corruption and unpaid wages... At past meetings, the stress was on fast growth - how many bridges were built, how tall the new buildings are," said Hu Jinguang, a legal scholar at People's University in Beijing who follows the workings of the legislature. "Now the main emphasis is on social well-being and spreading the wealth."

Delegates to the congress, which is controlled by the Communist Party, have put forward dozens of proposals to reduce rural taxation, extend pensions and welfare to peasants, and provide better education and health care in rural areas, reflecting an emphasis on populist themes.

The legislature, which has only one full session a year, each lasting about 10 days, has little practical authority and is generally used to ratify decisions made by party leaders. But delegates occasionally raise contentious local issues that the leadership has ignored.

Aside from economic matters, President Hu has promoted a measure to ban secession by any Chinese territory. The legislation would probably lead to military action if Taiwan tried to solidify its independence from mainland China... (Joseph Kahn zur aktuellen Tagung des NVK)

4.3.2005 Chinese Censors and Web Users Match Wits ... Already the most sophisticated in the world, China's Internet controls are stout even in the absence of crucial political events. In the last year or so, experts say the country has gone from so-called dumb Internet controls, which involve techniques like the outright blocking of foreign sites containing delicate or critical information and the monitoring of specific e-mail addresses to far more sophisticated measures.

Newer technologies allow the authorities to search e-mail messages in real time, trawling through the body of a message for sensitive material and instantaneously blocking delivery or pinpointing the offender. Other technologies sometimes redirect Internet searches from companies like Google to copycat sites operated by the government, serving up sanitized search results...

"What they are doing is a little bit like sticking fingers into the dike," said Stephen Hsu, a physicist at the University of Oregon who formerly developed technologies for allowing ordinary Chinese to avoid government censorship. "Beijing is investing heavily in keeping the lid on, and they've been pretty successful at controlling what appears. But there is always going to be uncontrolled activity around the edges."

As with the policing efforts, the evasion techniques range from the sly and simple - aliases and deliberate misspellings to trick key-word monitors and thinly veiled sarcastic praise of abhorrent acts by the government on Web forums that seem to confound the censors - to so-called proxy servers, encryption and burying of sensitive comments in image files, which for now elude real-time searches... (Howard W.French)