Konflikti Kiinan merellä

[ctg]

Thousands of protesters in Hong Kong, some draped in American flags, have staged a “Thanksgiving” rally in the heart of the city after the approval by Donald Trump of human rights legislation aimed at protecting them.

“The rationale for us having this rally is to show our gratitude and thank the US Congress and also president Trump for passing the bill,” said 23-year-old Sunny Cheung, a member of the student group that lobbied for the legislation.

“We are really grateful about that and we really appreciate the effort made by Americans who support Hong Kong, who stand with Hong Kong, who do not choose to side with Beijing,” he said, urging other countries to pass similar legislation.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...with-thanksgiving-rally-as-more-protests-loom

Tuntuu jotenkin väärältä nähdä trump tuolla keholla.

 

[ctg]

Kiina on reagoinut Yhdysvaltain päätökseen ilmaista tukensa Hong Kongin mielenosoittajille rajoittamalla Yhdysvaltain laivaston alusten pääsyä Hongkongiin.

Yhdysvaltain presidentti Donald Trump allekirjoitti viime viikolla lain, jolla tuetaan Hongkongin ihmisoikeuksia ja demokratiaa.

Kiina vaatii, että Yhdysvaltojen pitää lopettaa Kiinan sisäisiin asioihin puuttuminen.

Samalla Kiina ilmoitti asettavansa pakotteita useille amerikkalaisille kansalaisjärjestöille, joiden toiminta on sen mukaan ollut moitittavaa. Listalla on muun muassa ihmisoikeusjärjestö Human Rights Watch.

Yhdysvaltain laivaston alukset käyvät säännöllisesti Hongkongissa niin sanoitulla "port call" vierailuilla. Ne ovat osa maiden välistä diplomatiaa, mutta tämän lisäksi ne tarjoavat mahdollisuuden aluksien huoltoon ja varastojen täydentämiseen.

https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-11098372

 

[ctg]

En hirveästi tykkää tuosta ukosta koska kokoajan mieleen tulee propaganda. Onko muilla samoja tunteita?

 

[ctg]

Satellite imagery from last month shows that a tethered aerostat, a type of unmanned airship, floating in the air above one of China's man-made islands in the South China Sea. This lighter-than-air craft is almost certainly carrying a sensor system of some kind, such as a radar. A network of these platforms could help provide additional, but relatively low-cost early warning capabilities, especially against low-flying cruise missiles, and improved general situational awareness throughout the disputed region.

Private satellite imagery from intelligence firm ImageSat International first released the image of Mischief Reef in the Spratly Islands showing the aerostat on Nov. 24, 2019. One of the company's satellites had grabbed this image of the island six days earlier. The reef is one of the largest of China's controversial man-made outcroppings in the South China Sea, which the country has been expanding since 2014.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zo...-south-china-sea-is-likely-just-the-beginning

 

[Lopperi]

En hirveästi tykkää tuosta ukosta koska kokoajan mieleen tulee propaganda. Onko muilla samoja tunteita?

Lienee siellä taustalla onkin propaganda-agendaa. Mitä itse olen ymmärtänyt, niin esitetyt asiat eivät ole valheellisia, mutta tekijöillä lienee jotain yhteyksiä Falun Gongiin. Itse tulee monesti katsottua vaikka tyyli ärsyttääkin.

 

[ctg]

A panel of foreign experts overseeing an investigation into allegations of excessive force used by the Hong Kong police force has said it is stepping down, further calling into question the probe.

For months anti-government protesters have been demanding an independent investigation into allegations of police brutality in response to the demonstrations. The government has repeatedly said an independent inquiry is unnecessary and that the existing police watchdog, the Independent Police Complaints Council (IPCC), should complete its review first.

But on Wednesday the group of foreign experts recruited to ensure objectivity in the probe said in a statement that they would be formally standing aside after discussions with the IPCC failed to result in “any agreed process” through which the [IPCC] would be able to conduct an effective investigation.

The experts said the IPCC lacked the powers necessary “to meet the standards citizens of Hong Kong would likely require” in a society that “values freedom and rights”.

“While we assessed that meaningful progress had been made in data collection and analysis, we ultimately concluded that a crucial shortfall was evident in the powers, capacity and independent investigative capability of IPCC,” the panel said, according to the South China Morning Post.

Experts on the panel had previously cast doubt on the police watchdog’s ability to deliver an objective investigation and called on the government to grant it more powers. The IPCC cannot summon witnesses or force the police to hand over evidence.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...-police-brutality-inquiry-over-lack-of-powers

Se siitä poliisien toimien tutkimisesta. Tämä saattaa tulla uudelleen esiin Haagissa, mutta tiedämme tämän konfliktin myötä mitä Kiina ajattelee niin esityksistä muutenkaan.

 

[ctg]

China’s President Xi Jinping has begun a three-day visit to the gambling hub of Macau to mark the 20th anniversary of its handover to China, with security tight as protests rock nearby Hong Kong.

Xi’s visit to the former Portuguese colony, where he is expected to announce a slew of supportive policies, is widely seen as a reward for Macau’s stability and loyalty, unlike the former British colony of Hong Kong, which has seen six months of anti-government protests.

Xi is expected to announce measures for Macau aimed at diversifying its casino-dependent economy into a financial centre, including a new yuan-denominated stock exchange.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...dover-anniversary-as-nearby-hong-kong-seethes

Vai uusi pörssi macaoon. Se selittää osan HKn ongelmista.

 

[ctg]

 

[ctg]

Taiwan’s top military official was among eight people killed when a helicopter crash-landed on Thursday in a mountainous area near the capital, Taipei, the defence ministry has said.
The chief of general staff, air force general Shen Yi-ming, died in the incident while five of the 13 people onboard survived, the military.
The defence ministry said aviation authorities lost contact with the Black Hawk helicopter at 8.22am local time a

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/02/taiwans-military-chief-missing-helicopter-crash

 

[ctg]

 

[ctg]

China has sacked the official in charge of relations with Hong Kong, Chinese state media reports.

Wang Zhimin was director of Beijing's liaison office for the territory.

The Xinhua news agency said Mr Wang had been replaced by Luo Huining, the Communist Party secretary for the northern province of Shanxi.

The sacking follows six months of often violent pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong that have tested Beijing's patience with top officials there.

Carrie Lam, the chief executive of Hong Kong, remains in office with the public support of the mainland leadership, despite being the face of a proposed bill which initially sparked unrest in March 2019.

The bill would have allowed for criminal suspects to be extradited from Hong Kong to mainland China, raising fears that the new law would be abused to detain dissidents and remove them from the territory.

China sacks top Hong Kong envoy amid protests

Wang Zhimin will be replaced as director of Beijing's liaison office after six months of unrest.

www.bbc.com

Hong Kong authorities has moved to “serious response” level as fears spread about a mysterious infectious disease that may have been brought back by visitors to a mainland Chinese city.

Five possible cases have been reported of a viral pneumonia that has also infected at least 44 people in Wuhan, an inland city west of Shanghai and about 900km north of Hong Kong.

The outbreak, which emerged last month, has revived memories of the 2002-2003 SARS epidemic that started in southern China and killed more than 700 people in the mainland, Hong Kong and elsewhere.

The serious-response level activated on Saturday indicates a moderate impact on Hong Kong’s population of 7.5 million people. It is the second highest in a three-tier system that is part of a new government plan launched Saturday to respond to infectious diseases of unknown cause.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...k-in-hong-kong-revives-fears-of-sars-epidemic

 

[ctg]

Beijing has said that anyone seeking to keep Taiwan separate from China would “leave a stink for 10,000 years” in its strongest remarks since the re-election of Tsai Ing-Wen, who opposes unification with China.

On Monday while on a tour in Africa, the foreign minister, Wang Yi, said: “The unification of the two sides of the strait is a historical inevitability,” Xinhua news agency reported.

He described those going against this trend as bound to “stink for 10,000 years” – an idiom to say one will go down in infamy.

Tsai’s landslide electoral victory on Saturday has been embarrassing for China, where state media spent most of the past year isolating Taiwan on the diplomatic stage, deriding Tsai and highlighting the popularity of her opponent, Han Kuo-yu, of the pro-China Kuomintang party.

Beijing says Taiwan's unification with China is 'inevitable' despite election result

After re-election of Tsai Ing-Wen, who vowed to protect the country from China, the foreign minister pushes back

www.theguardian.com

 

[ctg]

Taiwan’s president Tsai Ing-wen has called on China to “face reality” and “review” its current policy toward the de facto nation that Beijing claims is part of its territory.

Tsai, who won re-election in a landslide victory on Saturday, told reporters: “We hope China can thoroughly understand the opinion and will expressed by Taiwanese people in this election and review their current policies.”

The president’s comments come days after China’s top diplomat said that unification with China was a “historical inevitability” and that anyone who opposed it would “stink for 10,000 years,” an idiom to mean someone will go down in infamy.

China has repeatedly said that it will bring Taiwan under its authority by any means necessary, including force. Analysts believe Chinese leader Xi Jinping aims to achieve that by 2049, the deadline for the country to achieve its “great rejuvenation”.

Tsai Ing-wen says China must 'face reality' of Taiwan's independence

China has repeatedly said that it will bring Taiwan under its authority, but president says election result shows citizens don’t agree

www.theguardian.com

 

[ctg]

Hong Kong’s leader, Carrie Lam, has said the “one country, two systems” framework under which the city is meant to enjoy autonomy from China could be extended beyond 2047 if loyalty to Beijing is upheld.

In her first appearance at the Legislative Council since October, Lam answered a question from a lawmaker about what might happen in 2047, the year the semi-autonomous territory is meant to return to Chinese rule.

“As long as we uphold the principle of one country, two systems … we will have sufficient reasons to believe that it will not change after 2047, and it will continue to develop steadily for long in the future,” Lam said.

Under the terms of the former British colony’s 1997 handover to China, Hong Kong is supposed to keep its freedoms and separate political system for 50 years. Critics say those terms have already been broken as Beijing’s influence over the city has grown under a local government backed by China.

Lam said the recent months of protests would encourage Beijing to abandon the experiment, and said young Hongkongers should “treasure” the framework rather than “bring damage to this important system”.

“Otherwise, they will be creating the situation that they are in fact worried about today,” she said, according to the South China Morning Post.

Lam’s comments are unlikely to appease the protesters. During the question and answer session, several pro-democracy opposition lawmakers were ejected from the legislature after they shouted slogans and held up signs, including one that portrayed Lam as a vampire with bat wings.

The protests have lessened in intensity over the last few weeks but residents continue to rally against the government, calling for an independent investigation into police behaviour and free elections, among other demands.

Lam has repeatedly rejected the demands and on Thursday continued to support the police force. “I would not accept anyone accusing the police of brutality,” she said.

Hong Kong could keep semi-autonomy for longer, says Lam

Leader says ‘one country, two systems’ deal could continue if city shows loyalty to China

www.theguardian.com

 

[ctg]

In the face of these Chinese advantages, could the United States still neutralize the island bases early in a fight? Probably, but not at an acceptable cost. Doing so would require expending a lot of ordnance likely desperately needed in Northeast Asia, diverting important air and naval platforms and placing them at risk out of proportion to the potential battlefield gains.

The island facilities are considerably larger than many observers seem to realize. As Thomas Shugart, then a visiting fellow at the Center for a New American Security, once pointed out, most of the District of Columbia inside the I-495 beltway could fit inside the lagoon at Mischief Reef. Pearl Harbor Naval Base could fit inside Subi Reef. The critical infrastructure that would need to be hit to seriously degrade Chinese capabilities is spread out across a considerable area. That amounts to a lot of ordnance to drop, even if the goal were just to hit critical nodes like sensors, hangars, ammunition depots, and command and control facilities.

Disabling the airstrips themselves would be an even taller order. The United States fired 59 Tomahawks at the Shayrat Air Base in Syria in 2017, all but one of which hit, yet the runway was back in operation just a few hours later. Considering that China has deployed HQ-9 surface-to-air missiles and constructed point defenses at all these bases, some percentage of missiles fired would never reach their target. And much of the infrastructure has been hardened, including China’s missile shelters, larger hangars, and buried ammunition depots. The most effective means of cratering the runways themselves would be to drop heavier ordnance from the air, but that would put high-value U.S. bombers at unacceptable risk in a secondary theater (more on that below). So a safer bet would be to just focus on hitting key information nodes with longer-range munitions. A hundred cruise missiles per outpost would not be an unreasonable estimate to effectively disable the bases. That amounts to 300 missiles just for the major bases in the Spratlys, another 100 for Woody Island, and dozens more if the United States wanted to disable smaller facilities (for instance, the heliport on Duncan Island that would likely be used for anti-submarine warfare operations).

What platforms would launch these hundreds of cruise missiles? The only thing safely operating in the theater after hostilities started would be U.S. submarines. They would find it a lot harder to remain undetected in the face of active Chinese anti-submarine operations once they started shooting. Every launch would put them at some risk. And in that environment, U.S. subs would likely be busy attacking Chinese surface ships and other high-value platforms, not trying to blanket thousands of acres of infrastructure at Mischief or Subi Reefs with valuable ordnance with no guarantee of success. Anything else sent into the theater — long-range bombers from Guam, surface ships, etc. — would be operating at high risk given Chinese dominance of the sea and air space.

No matter how the ordnance was delivered, the math would be the same. Effectively neutralizing China’s bases would require hundreds of missiles, emptying the magazines of valuable U.S. platforms that don’t have ordnance to spare. And it would do so in what is sure to be a secondary theater. It is hard to imagine a scenario in which the United States would be seriously considering kinetic strikes on Chinese bases in the South China Sea that would not also involve fighting in Northeast Asia. That would mean that anything the United States launched against the Spratlys would be something it could not use for operations in defense of U.S. and Japanese forces or for the relief of Taipei.

This punishing math could be changed, especially by the full implementation of the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement to allow rotational deployments of key U.S. capabilities in the Philippines. These should include combat aircraft at Basa Air Base on Luzon and Antonio Bautista Air Base in Puerto Princesa to contest Chinese air dominance over the South China Sea. And it should include preparations to rapidly stand up U.S. fire bases at these and other facilities in case of hostilities to hold Chinese outposts and ships in the South China Sea at risk.

Barring an unexpected change of heart, these plans are unlikely while Rodrigo Duterte remains president of the Philippines through 2022. In the meantime, the United States can lay the groundwork for full implementation of the defense cooperation agreement by undertaking more ambitious infrastructure projects at agreed-upon sites and pushing the Armed Forces of the Philippines to support those upgrades. It should also push for more opportunities to deploy combat aircraft to defense cooperation sites as part of bilateral exercises, as American F-16s were for the first time at Basa last year. This would help acclimate both sides to U.S. fighters operating from these bases and, if frequent enough, could strengthen deterrence by giving the United States some rapid-response capability in the South China Sea. But these steps will not fundamentally alter the math.

Without the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, or some undiscovered (and unlikely) stand-in, U.S. forces would have little choice but to concede the waters and airspace of the South China Sea to China in the opening stages of a conflict. The logistics and maintenance hurdles China would face during wartime would likely prevent its island bases from effectively operating over the long-term. But for several weeks at least — time that would be critical in a Taiwan contingency, for instance — they would pay huge dividends for Beijing. So long as the United States lacks ground-based combat aircraft and fire bases along the South China Sea, American planning needs to acknowledge that reality.

The Conventional Wisdom on China’s Island Bases Is Dangerously Wrong - War on the Rocks

Last month, during a conference on China’s maritime ambitions, I was asked a question I often get about Beijing’s artificial island bases in the South

warontherocks.com

 

[Huhta]

Oletteko pohtineet Wuhanin viruksen mahdollisen leviämisen vaikutusta Hong Kongin protesteihin?

Itse arvelisin, että sikäli kuin tauti pääsee kunnolla valloilleen, niin väkivaltaviranomaisten resurssit saattavat käydä vähiin. Hong Kongin asukkaille se voi näyttäytyä oivana tilaisuutena, vaikka taudin pelko voikin toisaalta hillitä joukkokokoontumisia. Sitten onkin luojassaan, tuleeko Tiananmen 2 vaiko vallankumous.

 

[ctg]

Oletteko pohtineet Wuhanin viruksen mahdollisen leviämisen vaikutusta Hong Kongin protesteihin?

Joo mietiskelin että PLAlla on loistava mahdollisuus päästää virus kaupungiin ja sitten määrätä ulkonaliikkumiskielto

 

[rty19]

Kiina lentää aktiivisesti Japanin suunnalla

Japan Intercepts Chinese Military Aircraft 523 Times in 9 Months

Japan has seen a rise in the number of Chinese military aircraft approaching Japanese airspace over the last nine months.

thediplomat.com

 

[ctg]

British F-35Bs deploying to the South China Sea next year may not meet key reliability metrics set by an American government watchdog, its annual report has revealed.

The US Department of Defense's Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOTE) warned that the multinational F-35B fighter jet fleet is lagging behind a key flight-hours metric needed to show maintenance maturity.

On top of that, the supersonic stealth jet project's move towards Agile methodology for "minimum viable product" (MVP)-phased development of critical flight and weapons software every six months is a "high risk" strategy, according to DOTE.

The F-35B fleet worldwide needs to rack up 75,000 flight hours before DOTE thinks it has gathered enough data to meet the contract spec. Currently the B model has just 45,000 hours across the board – and with HMS Queen Elizabeth due to deploy to the Pacific next year with two squadrons of F-35Bs aboard, this could mean the aircraft carrier will set sail with jets that haven't met their required reliability standard. So far the B fleet is unable to meet its target of flying for 12 hours or more between critical failures.

Software development processes used to build F-35 software also fall under DOTE's remit, and the auditor is not impressed by what it saw.

Uncle Sam tells F-35B allies they'll have to fly the things a lot more if they want to help out around South China Sea

Plus: Move to Agile is 'high risk' and infosec snafus still not fixed

www.theregister.co.uk

 

[KymJP2K]

Kiina antoi kenkää hong kongin todelliselle johtajalle ja korvasi kaverin Xi Jinpingin lähimiehellä. Carrie Lam sen sijaan saa jatkaa, joten Hong Kongin johtajan puppet status taitaa olla 100%.

錯誤 - RTHK

錯誤 - RTHK

news.rthk.hk