YI PENG 3 (IMO: 9224984) is a Bulk Carrier and is sailing under the flag of China. Her length overall (LOA) is 225 meters and her width is 32.3 meters.

Germany Says Damage to Baltic Underwater Cables Should be Presumed Sabotage

Two fiber-optic cables – one linking Finland and Germany, the other connecting Sweden to Lithuania – stopped working between Sunday and Monday, recalling previous security incidents in the busy waterway affected by war between Russia and Ukraine.

“We have to state, without knowing specifically who it came from, that it is a ‘hybrid’ action. And we also have to assume, without knowing it yet, that it is sabotage,”

“No one believes that these cables were cut accidentally. I also don’t want to believe in versions that these were ship anchors that accidentally caused the damage,” German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius said before a meeting with EU colleagues in Brussels.

November 18, 2024

Second Subsea Cable Cut in Baltic Sea, Germany and Finland Fear Sabotage

 Two undersea fiber-optic communications cables in the Baltic Sea, including one linking Finland and Germany, were severed, raising suspicions of sabotage by bad actors, countries and companies involved said on Monday.

The episode recalled other incidents in the same waterway that authorities have probed as potentially malicious including damage to a gas pipeline and undersea cables last year and the 2022 explosions of the Nord Stream gas pipelines. 

The 1,200-kilometer (745-mile) cable connecting Helsinki to the German port of Rostock stopped working around 0200 GMT on Monday, Finnish state-controlled cyber security and telecoms company Cinia said. 

A 218-km (135-mile) internet link between Lithuania and Sweden’s Gotland Island went out of service at about 0800 GMT on Sunday, according to Lithuania’s Telia Lietuva, part of Sweden’s Telia Company group. 

Finland and Germany said in a joint statement that they were “deeply concerned about the severed undersea cable” and were investigating “an incident (that) immediately raises suspicions of intentional damage.”

November 18, 2024

Details of Baltic Sea Cable Incident Remain Murky as Danish Coast Guard Shadows Chinese Vessel

A day after the C-Lion1 and BCS subsea data cables in the Baltic Sea, connecting Finland and Germany as well as Sweden and Lithuania, were damaged, specifics of the incident remain unconfirmed. 

The incident is reminiscent of a similar event in 2023 when the Balticonnector between Finland and Estonia was damaged. Hong Kong-registered container vessel NewNew Polar Bear was later found to have dragged its anchor across the pipeline. 

Danish authorities appear to have narrowed down a possible culprit to Chinese bulker Yi Peng 3, which traveled over the reported incident site at the time of the failure. Its AIS track shows the vessel drifting back and forth for around an hour the morning of November 18.

November 19, 2024

Does the Internet Route Around Damage? - Baltic Sea Cable Cuts

Maciej Leszczynski ‘Old Chongqing’ #photography #China

via http://maciejleszczynski.com/

China is the world’s biggest consumer of raw materials. Each year it buys billions of tonnes of crude oil, coal and iron ore. But there is one commodity market in which the country may soon play a less dominant role: waste. Last month China told the World Trade Organisation that by the end of the year, it will no longer accept imports of 24 categories of solid waste, as part of a government campaign against “foreign garbage”. Government officials say restricting such imports will protect the environment and improve public health. But the proposed ban will threaten billions of dollars in trade and put many Chinese recyclers out of business. Why is Beijing so eager to trash its trade in rubbish?

via https://medium.com/@the_economist/why-china-is-sick-of-foreign-garbage-d3ff837f3734?source=ifttt————–1

A pair of chatbots have been taken offline in China after turning on the country’s governing Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Chinese messenger app QQ introduced two chatbots — BabyQ and XiaoBing — in March but they were removed by media company Tencent after social media users shared conversations in which the bots appeared to criticise the CCP.

via http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017–08–04/chinese-chatbots-deleted-after-questioning-communist-party/8773766

Liu Xiaobo, who has died after eight years in jail, despite being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, was a complex human being, but he was bold, an intellectual, and in China he was a threat because he understood that civil society can organize against corruption and autocracy. Beijing released him from jail, not for the medical treatment he deserved, but simply to die. In other words, he was murdered by a murderous regime. It is time for the world to ask itself, are we accomplices, do we appease this, or do we stand up against so-called Chinese values?

via https://medium.com/@wuerkaixi/murdered-betrayed-but-unconquered–5a6dc3c04ccb

The landscaped lawns and flowering shrubs of Country Garden Holdings Co.’s huge property showroom in southern Malaysia end abruptly at a small wire fence. Beyond, a desert of dirt stretches into the distance, filled with cranes and piling towers that the Chinese developer is using to build a $100 billion city in the sea. While Chinese home buyers have sent prices soaring from Vancouver to Sydney, in this corner of Southeast Asia it’s China’s developers that are swamping the market, pushing prices lower with a glut of hundreds of thousands of new homes. They’re betting that the city of Johor Bahru, bordering Singapore, will eventually become the next Shenzhen. “These Chinese players build by the thousands at one go, and they scare the hell out of everybody,” said Siva Shanker, head of investments at Axis-REIT Managers Bhd. and a former president of the Malaysian Institute of Estate Agents. “God only knows who is going to buy all these units, and when it’s completed, the bigger question is, who is going to stay in them?” The Chinese companies have come to Malaysia as growth in many of their home cities is slowing, forcing some of the world’s biggest builders to look abroad to keep erecting the giant residential complexes that sprouted across China during the boom years. They found a prime spot in this special economic zone, three times the size of Singapore, on the southern tip of the Asian mainland.

via http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016–11–21/–100-billion-chinese-made-city-near-singapore-scares-the-hell-out-of-everybody

In the West, unions (for manual labourers) and professional associations (for groups such as doctors and lawyers) played a critical role in setting national standards. They gave people an identity that depended, in part, on both mastery and morality, a group of peers to compete against, and to be held to account by. But, as Adam Smith argued in The Wealth of Nations (1776), every profession ‘ends in a conspiracy against the public’ and the Chinese Communist Party tolerates no conspiracies except its own. Especially since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, any group that might represent a cross-national basis of resistance to the Party has been cut down. Unionisation, outside of the toothless and corrupt All-China Trade Union Federation, is a threat to the Party, which no more wants hod-carriers or rail workers across the nation to come together than it does Christians, democrats or feminists. In the end, what perpetuates China’s carelessness most might be sheer ubiquity. Craft inspires. A writer can be stirred to the page by hearing a song or watching a car being repaired, a carpenter revved up by a poem or a motorbike. But the opposite also holds true; when you’re surrounded by the cheaply done, the half-assed and the ugly, when failure is unpunished and dedication unrewarded all around, it’s hard not to think that close enough is good enough. Chabuduo.

via https://aeon.co/essays/what-chinese-corner-cutting-reveals-about-modernity

this is about social sadism – deliberate, invested, public or at least semi-public cruelty. The potentiality for sadism is one of countless capacities emergent from our reflexive, symbolising selves. Trying to derive any social phenomenon from any supposed ‘fact’ of ‘human nature’ is useless, except to diagnose the politics of the deriver. Of course it’s vulgar Hobbesianism, the supposed ineluctability of human cruelty, that cuts with the grain of ruling ideology. The right often, if incoherently, acts as if this (untrue) truth-claim of our fundamental nastiness justifies an ethics of power. The position that Might Makes Right is elided from an Is, which it isn’t, to an Ought, which it oughtn’t be, even were the Is an is. If strength and ‘success’ are coterminous with good, what can their lack be but bad – deserving of punishment?

via http://salvage.zone/in-print/on-social-sadism/

The speed and scale of China’s island-building spree have alarmed other countries with interests in the region. China announced in June that the creation of islands — moving sediment from the seafloor to a reef — would soon be completed. “The announcement marks a change in diplomatic tone, and indicates that China has reached its scheduled completion on several land reclamation projects and is now moving into the construction phase,” said Mira Rapp-Hooper, director of the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington research group. So far China has built port facilities, military buildings and an airstrip on the islands. The installations bolster China’s foothold in the Spratly Islands, a disputed scattering of reefs and islands in the South China Sea more than 500 miles from the Chinese mainland.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/07/30/world/asia/what-china-has-been-building-in-the-south-china-sea.html?_r=0

Reincarnation is a phenomenon which should take place either through the voluntary choice of the concerned person or at least on the strength of his or her karma, merit and prayers. Therefore, the person who reincarnates has sole legitimate authority over where and how he or she takes rebirth and how that reincarnation is to be recognized. It is a reality that no one else can force the person concerned, or manipulate him or her. It is particularly inappropriate for Chinese communists, who explicitly reject even the idea of past and future lives, let alone the concept of reincarnate Tulkus, to meddle in the system of reincarnation and especially the reincarnations of the Dalai Lamas and Panchen Lamas […] Bear in mind that, apart from the reincarnation recognized through such legitimate methods, no recognition or acceptance should be given to a candidate chosen for political ends by anyone, including those in the People’s Republic of China.

http://www.dalailama.com/messages/statement-of-his-holiness-the-fourteenth-dalai-lama-tenzin-gyatso-on-the-issue-of-his-reincarnation

In ‘Maker to Market’ spaces, things can get even messier. Several of the companies on this path depend on ‘open innovation’ models that allow them to engage with keen communities, providing ongoing feedback and mass customisation. This also allows customers to be used as a cheap form of R&D; a practice common in the creative and culture industries, described by Miya Tokumitsu as ‘Do what you love’ where a volunteer workforce works for passion and social capital rather than actual hard cash.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2014/apr/24/making-in-china-maker-faire-shenzhen-global-politics-maker-movement

The replica of Hallstatt, a centuries-old village in Austria, opened in the Chinese province of Guangdong amid some controversy, as natives of the original Hallstatt were not initially made aware that their historic buildings and streets were being ripped off.

http://www.businessinsider.com/china-has-built-a-copycat-version-of-an-entire-austrian-village–2012–6