Tomio Geron (’06) writes for the Press Telegram on the dramatic case of Tai Wang Mak and his wife, Fuk Heung Li, who were arrested in 2005 on charges of espionage. The pair were nabbed boarding a flight for Hong Kong while several relatives, including Mak’s brother, were arrested in a separate sting. Mak and Li are scheduled to stand trial in May.

The FBI surveillance was a spy novelist’s dream, involving secret wiretaps, garbage can searches, torn-up documents pieced together, secret code words in Chinese, and audio- and videotaping of the suspects in their homes, cars and workplaces.

The 15-count indictment against the Maks, together with thousands of pages of court filings, paint a picture of a onspiracy extending from China to Hong Kong to Southern California.

The Chinese government wanted the information on U.S. warships and submarines to develop its own “blue water” or deep sea navy and “gain a tactical advantage over U.S. Naval and allied forces,” the indictment alleges.

Read the full story here.

By Josh Chin (’07)

What’s the greatest benefit to living 44 kilometers from the source of one of northwest China’s most important rivers? For 22-year-old Li Ning, a core sampler on the country’s most studied glacier, it is undoubtedly the water.

“It’s fantastic,” the recent high school graduate told us as we stared at photos the water in its still-frozen form. “You can drink it cold and not get diarrhea.”

Li is one of five winter employees at the Tianshan Glaciological Station, a ramshackle collection of concrete bunkers buried deep the jagged Tianshan range in the heart of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. Li and his colleagues, most of them unskilled workers hired in distant Gansu Province and sent here by the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Insitute, spend December through April in the station with only a lion-voiced Tabby named Mimi, a pair of german shepherds and each other for company. Once a week, they trudge up the face of the nearby No. 1 Glacier—a horseshoe-shaped vastness of permanent ice that, like all glaciers on the Qinghai-Tibet plateau, is becoming steadily less vast—in thinly insulated rain boots to take core samples and measure air temperatures. The rest of the time they sit around playing cards or watching TV and wait for summer, when two dozen scientists and graduates students arrive to conduct annual their annual experiemnts. For Li, who plans to one day start a family in this outpost of a province, there’s just one word to describe existence at the station: “Lonely.”

(more…)

Josh Chin (’07) writes in the San Francisco Chronicle about his experience inside a safe house for North Korean refugees in northeast China and why it took him a year to put it all down on paper:

A year later the smell of Korean pickled cabbage still works in my head like a Proustian nightmare. Kimchi for me is the food of paranoia, of paralyzing ambivalence and, ultimately, of failure.

In January 2006, I shared several meals with a dozen North Korean orphans in a safe house in China, half a day’s train ride from the North Korean border. Run by a missionary couple, the house was part of a loose network — made up almost entirely of Christian aid workers — that shelters some of the 100,000 or so North Koreans who’ve fled their criminally mismanaged country in search of food and economic opportunity. Many of these migrants, living in China illegally, are victims of abuse and exploitation. The missionaries are virtually their only protectors.

To supporters in the United States, the network is known as the “Underground Railroad,” a reference to its incredible secrecy and its agents’ occasional successes in smuggling North Koreans through China to freedom in South Korea. Journalists craved access to this network, and the access I had was about as good as it gets: deep and exclusive. For a reporter taking his first stab at the North Korean refugee story, this was an unimaginable coup.

Read the full piece here.

Former visiting scholar Setsuko Kamiya (’06) reports for the Japan Times on the upcoming election for Tokyo governor with a focus on the scandal-saddled two-term incumbent:

Confident speeches and bold accusations flew Thursday as the campaign to elect the next Tokyo governor got under way, with national attention focused on whether the powerful incumbent, Shintaro Ishihara, can overcome scandal to win a third four-year term.

A colorful mix of 14 candidates officially signed up to run against the outspoken 74-year-old nationalist the same day — up from five candidates four years ago. Most are running as independents.

“(The election) is becoming a close contest, which was unexpected,” said Ishihara, a feisty independent who unofficially enjoys support from the Liberal Democratic Party. “But please look at what I have achieved.”

Read the full article here.

A long piece by Aryn Baker (’01) about Pakistan’s tribal region was the cover story for three editions of TIME (Europe, Asia, and South Pacific) this week. As Baker reveals, the area has become home to a swelling population of jihadists fleeing NATO forces on the Afghan side of the border:

The residents of Dara Adam Khel, a gunsmiths’ village 30 miles south of Peshawar, Pakistan, awoke one morning last month to find their streets littered with pamphlets demanding that they observe Islamic law. Women were instructed to wear all-enveloping burqas and men to grow their beards. Music and television were banned. Then the jihadists really got serious. These days, dawn is often accompanied by the wailing of women as another beheaded corpse is found by the side of the road, a note pinned to the chest claiming that the victim was a spy for either the Americans or the Pakistani government. Beheadings are recorded and sold on DVD in the area’s bazaars. “It’s the knife that terrifies me,” says Hafizullah, 40, a local arms smith. “Before they kill you, they sharpen the knife in front of you. They are worse than butchers.”

Stories like these are being repeated across the tribal region of Pakistan, a rugged no-man’s-land that forms the country’s border with Afghanistan–and that is rapidly becoming home base for a new generation of potential terrorists. Fueled by zealotry and hardened by war, young religious extremists have overrun scores of towns and villages in the border areas, with the intention of imposing their strict interpretation of Islam on a population unable to fight back. Like the Taliban in the late 1990s in Afghanistan, the jihadists are believed to be providing leaders of al-Qaeda with the protection they need to regroup and train new operatives. U.S. intelligence officials think that Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, may have found refuge in these environs. And though 49,000 U.S. and NATO troops are stationed just across the border in Afghanistan, they aren’t authorized to operate on the Pakistani side. Remote, tribal and deeply conservative, the border region is less a part of either country than a world unto itself, a lawless frontier so beyond the control of the West and its allies that it has earned a name of its own: Talibanistan.

Read the full piece here.

In TIME Asia, Austin Ramzy (’03) writes about the re-election prospects for Hong Kong Chief Executive Donald Tsang. Hint: They’re pretty good.

The campaign headquarters of Hong Kong’s Chief Executive, Donald Tsang, is unusual for an election nerve center. For one thing, it’s clean, and quiet: no spilled coffee, no half-eaten pizza slices, no one cursing into a phone. The staff are unfailingly polite, and they don’t run—they walk. As befits Hong Kong’s profile as a financial town above all else, Tsang’s election office is in a commercial tower, on the 28th floor. (Hong Kong people consider 28 to be an advantageous number because, in Cantonese, it sounds like “easy to prosper.”) In case that isn’t powerful enough joss, a large Chinese character written on gold paper stands above the reception counter; it’s the word “luck.”

Tsang doesn’t need any. The 62-year-old is running for a second term as Chief Executive—the strangely apt title for the head of Hong Kong’s government. But the vote is restricted to the 800 members of an electoral college who are drawn from assorted business, professional and social groups. Most of them tend to bend whichever way the wind from Beijing is blowing. And, these days, it is blowing in Tsang’s favor. Though he is facing a challenger from the city’s democratic camp—lawyer and lawmaker Alan Leong—Tsang already commands 641 nominations from the Election Committee, and will defeat Leong handily in the ballot, which takes place on March 25.

Read the full article here.

Shi Ting (’03) reports for the South China Morning post on the quashing of a protest over rising bus fares in the Hunan Province town of Zhushan. Witnesses say one student was killed in the clash between farmers and police, a charge state-run media have denied.

An uneasy calm has returned to a village in Hunan province that has been the scene of mass rioting after more troops were brought in to maintain order and the local government intervened to cut bus fees after public pressure, witnesses said.

Armed vehicles were moved in from the adjacent Guangzhou Military Region, which covers Hunan, and troops were stationed along the main streets of Zhushan village, in Yongzhou, where more than 20,000 farmers clashed with local police over a controversial increase in transport fees.

Witnesses said local authorities were tracking down the organisers of the protest, and scores of “violent villagers” who were believed to have smashed and burned at least seven police cars and nine buses.

Read the full article here.

In The Irrawaddy, former visiting scholar Kyaw Zwa Moe (’06) explores the uncertainty of life as a Burmese migrant in Malayasia, starting with the story of Tun Min Naing, a 21-year-old who broke of his studies at Rangoon University and crossed the border in order to better support his family:

But Tun Min Naing’s Malaysian journey ended behind bars at the Semenyih detention camp outside Kuala Lumpur, where about 1,000 illegal immigrants wait for deportation or, in rare cases, recognition as bona fide refugees. Several hundred are Burmese, many of them registered with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. “Living here is terrible. But I don’t want to go back to my country,” Tun Min Naing said, sitting with other detainees behind iron bars in the visitors’ room of the camp.

Read the full article here.

Josh Chin (’07) interviews Shanghai-based New York Times writer Howard French for China Digital Times‘ ChinaCast:

French covers a wide swathe of China through a staggering variety of lenses—the Internet, business, demographics and social dislocation, mass incidents and marginal politics. He’s been a foreign reporter for the New York Times since 1990, with previous postings in West Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Before coming to China, he was the newspaper’s man in Tokyo. He talks to us about the shock his first dining experience in China, drowning in the abundance of China stories, and whether or not he’ll be able to cope with ayi withdrawal once he goes back to the US.

Listen to the interview here. Also see French’s blog, A Glimpse of the World.

French spent a week straddling February and March at the journalism school as a Regent’s Lecturer.

Ling Liu (’06) contributes to an article by TIME’s Tim Morrison on the battle in progress between two documentaries on the 70th anniversary of the Rape of Nanjing. Among the films they write about is the Sundance award-winner Nanking, co-produced by Violet Feng (’04)

In the last years of her life, her mother remembers, author Iris Chang wanted to make a movie. Chang’s 1997 best seller, The Rape of Nanking, had shone a spotlight on an infamous 1937 atrocity. This was the massacre of an estimated 260,000 people, and the rape of as many as 20,000 women, by Japanese troops occupying Nanjing (formerly Nanking), then the Chinese capital. The book spent 10 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and made the 29-year-old a literary star. But Chang wanted to do more. “She firmly believed that a movie or a documentary film would get her message out more than the book,” says Ying-Ying Chang. Sadly, her daughter never got the chance. Iris Chang committed suicide in 2004, at the age of 36. “We were interviewed at the time and asked, ‘What was Iris’ last wish?’” recalls her mother. “And we said, ‘To have a movie made out of her book.’”

Read the full article here.