China suspended military exchanges with the United States and threatened sanctions against American defense companies Saturday, just hours after Washington announced $6.4 billion in planned arms sales to Taiwan.

The development has further strained the complex relations between the two powers, which are increasingly linked by security and economic issues.

China’s Defense Ministry said the sales to self-governing Taiwan, which the mainland claims as its own, cause “severe harm” to overall U.S.-China cooperation, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported. The Foreign Ministry threatened sanctions against U.S. companies involved in the arms sales.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Embassy, Susan Stevenson, had no comment on China’s actions Saturday.

Taiwan is the most sensitive topic in U.S.-China relations, and the sales announced Friday could complicate cooperation between the two sides on issues ranging from Iran’s nuclear program to the loosening of Internet controls, including a Google-China standoff over censorship.

China’s Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei warned U.S. Ambassador Jon Huntsman that the sales of Black Hawk helicopters, Patriot Advanced Capability-3 missiles and other weapons to Taiwan would “cause consequences that both sides are unwilling to see,” a ministry statement said Saturday.

The United States is Taiwan’s most important ally and largest arms supplier, and it’s bound by law to ensure the island is able to respond to Chinese threats.  [Associated Press]

This is really nothing to get to concerned about because this is what the Chinese government usually does in response to arms sales to Taiwan.

Chinese officials have told companies to back state control of the internet, showing no sign of giving ground on censorship after US internet giant Google threatened to quit the country.

Minister of the State Council Information Office, Wang Chen, said online pornography, fraud and “rumours” were a menace.

He said internet media must help “guide public opinion” in China, which has the world’s biggest number of internet users at 360 million. He did not mention Google.

Mr Wang’s comments suggested little room for compromise in the internet dispute that could stoke tensions between China and the US, already at odds over the yuan currency, trade, climate change and Taiwan.

“If you look at the overall internet industry, it is becoming increasingly repressive, not just for Google but the whole industry,” said Elinor Leung, an industry analyst for CLSA in Hong Kong.

“The reason is the explosive internet user growth, and the Chinese government wants to ensure control.”

Internet companies should help China’s one-party government steer the fast-changing society, Mr Wang said, whose Information Office is the government arm of the China’s propaganda system.

“Our country is at a crucial stage of reform and development, and this is a period of marked social conflicts,” he said.

“Properly guiding internet opinion is a major measure for protecting internet information security.”

Google, the world’s top search engine, threatened to shut its Chinese-language google.cn website and offices in China because of cyber-attacks from China on Chinese dissidents using its Gmail service and on dozens of foreign companies.

Cyber-experts said more than 30 firms were victims of attacks that used tailored emails to deliver malicious software that exploited vulnerabilities in the popular Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader software.  [ABC News]

What really gets me is that Google tries to appear surprised this is happening.  They had to have known going in about how the Chinese government operates.

Via Mutant Frog.

Two thieves on a motor-scooter flew by and snatched a womans purse on a street in Wenzhou, China. Surveillance video shows a man riding a bicycle. As he was passing by the front of a hotel near where the thievery happened, he stopped, calmly got off his bicycle, picked it up, and then threw it at the thieves. The bicycle hit them, they lost control, and crashed to the ground.

Stick a fork in him, he’s done.

Traffic in Taiwan was brought to a standstill when a miniature musk hog broke loose.

It took five men to capture the small animal but the pint size porker escaped and had to be rounded up a second time.

Police say it’s most likely an escaped family pet and are now waiting for the owners to come forward.- Big Pond

There’s a rumor that if the owners aren’t found, a Filipino family will buy the pig. Lechon will be on the menu not long afterwards.

Up to 30cm (12 inches) of snow fell in China’s capital and its neighbouring port city of Tianjin over the weekend.

Thousands of travellers have been left stranded at Beijing’s international airport, and more than 30 highways across northern China are closed.

Officials have ordered residents into work groups to clear the snow and ice.

Heavy snowfall has also led to flight cancellations and delays in South Korea.

The snowfall over the weekend in Beijing was the most the capital has seen since 1951, according to local media reports.- BBC

Schools were closed and the public mobilized to help clear the roads. Want to bet many were schoolchildren and they weren’t paid for their labors?

I wonder if the China government acknowledges any weather records from before the 1949 revolution that put the communists in power.

China on Saturday unveiled what it billed as the fastest rail link in the world — a train connecting the modern cities of Guangzhou and Wuhan at an average speed of 350 kilometres (217 miles) an hour.

The super-high-speed train reduces the 1,069 kilometre journey to a three hour ride and cuts the previous journey time by more than seven and a half hours, the official Xinhua news agency said.

Work on the project began in 2005 as part of plans to expand a high-speed network aimed at eventually linking Guangzhou, a business hub in southern China near Hong Kong, with the capital Beijing, Xinhua added.

“The train can go 394.2 kilometres per hour, it’s the fastest train in operation in the world,” Zhang Shuguang, head of the transport bureau at the railways ministry, told Xinhua.

Test runs for the service began earlier in December and the link officially went into service when the first scheduled train left the eastern metropolis of Wuhan on Saturday.

By comparison, the average for high-speed trains in Japan was 243 kilometres per hour while in France it was 277 kilometres per hour, said Xu Fangliang, general engineer in charge of designing the link, according to Xinhua.  [AFP]

In retrospection of the things related to the Chinese armed forces in 2009, the high-frequency military exercises are a conspicuous highlight. Up to the present, authoritative media in China have given public coverage of a total of 18 large-sized actual-force military exercises participated in by the Chinese troops in 2009.

One of the most important reasons for the appearances of so many military exercises in 2009 is that, behind the military exercises, an exploration of organizing trainings under actual-war conditions according to the new Outline of Military Training and Evaluation is going on in the whole armed forces from the general headquarters/departments of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) down to battalions and companies, the basic combat unit of the PLA.

These military exercises serve as an explanation of the direction and new ideas of the military training reform of the PLA.

Regularized military exercise contributes to entrenchment of battle effectiveness

Is there any way to test the battle effectiveness and the level of military training of the troops in time of peace? It’s obvious the military exercise is the best choice. Maybe the year of 2009 has become an important year in the process of military exercise regularization of the PLA.

Most of the military exercises held in 2009 were designed to be “confrontational”, “test-oriented” and “research-oriented”.

“Both the performances of our weapons and combat capabilities of the troops can be tested through exercises,” said a responsible person with the Military Training and Arms Department of the General Staff Headquarters (GSH) of the PLA.  [Defence Pros]

Red the rest on your own because there is a lot of good stuff in this report, but I did find it interesting that much like the US military the PLA is implementing an increasing amount of simulations into their exercises.

Less than a month after Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) launched a microblogging service in China, the company has pulled the product off the market, among rampant accusations that it had blatantly copied a competitor’s own microblogging service. In a statement issued late last night, Microsoft said, “Because questions have been raised about the code base comprising the service, MSN China will be suspending access to the Juku beta feature temporarily while we investigate the matter fully.”

Juku, which we covered when it went on the market, let users write up to 140-character messages which showed up on a page along with similar messages from Windows Live Messenger contacts. A competitor, Plurk, pointed out that Juku’s code and appearance had a very striking resemblance to its own (See screenshots below). In a blog post, it said it was “in shock asking why Microsoft would even stoop to this level of wilfully plagiarising a young and innovative upstart’s work rather than reach out to us or innovate on their own terms.”  [PaidContent.org]

You can read more at the link.

South Korea said Wednesday it will conduct an economic and technical feasibility study on building undersea tunnels with Japan and China, according to President Lee Myung Bak’s press office.

The decision was made at a meeting of a committee chaired by Lee on regional development that is to draw up plans for nationwide land development by 2020, the office said.

The envisioned proposals are to build an undersea route connecting a southern point in South Korea to a point in Kyushu, and also a point in western South Korea to a point in China’s Shandong Province.

A South Korea-Japan undersea tunnel has been the object of discussions by local governments of the two sides, but the Wednesday decision is likely to elevate the ideas to the central government level.

A South Korea-Japan tunnel, however, has drawn negative reactions from many South Koreans since the idea was first floated when the Korean Peninsula was under Japan’s 1910-45 colonial rule.

Whether the proposed project could become a reality remains unclear, considering that the project would cost an estimated 100 trillion won (¥7.5 trillion).

According to the South Korean government, undersea tunnels with Japan and China are aimed at establishing a network of transporting materials when the divided Koreas become unified in the future.  [Japan Times]

Buildings these tunnels is better than digging a canal across the country I guess.

Anyway you can read more about these tunnels at these prior postings:

• Japan Advocates for Peace Tunnel to Korea
• Study Promotes Tunnel Linking China to Korea