BEIJING (Reuters) - China said on Monday it would give rewards amounting to 5 billion yuan ($816.91 million) for curbing air pollution in six regions where the problem is serious, underscoring government concern about a source of public anger.

The Finance Ministry said the regions eligible for the rewards were Beijing and its neighboring city of Tianjin, the provinces of Hebei, Shanxi and Shandong, as well as the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.

The awards would be made at the end of the year and would be determined by pollution reduction targets, investment in tackling the problem and falls in PM 2.5 particles, which are especially bad for health, the ministry said on its website.

The provinces of Shanxi and Inner Mongolia are among China's top coal-producing provinces and have been a major source of air pollution.

Smog over northern cities in January generated widespread anger as did the discovery of thousands of dead pigs in March in a river that supplies water to the city of Shanghai.

Protests over pollution in China are becoming common, to the government's alarm. (...)

(...) In a parallel experiment, King’s group recruited dozens of people inside China to help post 1,200 different updates to 100 different social sites to see what got censored. Just over 40 percent of all those posts were immediately held back by automated censorship tools. Those filtered posts either appeared within a day or two or never made it online. Watching the fate of different posts suggested sites used a wide variety of different censorship technologies and procedures.

Those findings and King’s experience running his own site suggest that China has created a kind of competitive market in censorship, he says. Companies are free to run their censorship operations mostly as they wish, as long as they don’t allow the wrong kind of speech to flourish. That creates an incentive to find ways to censor more effectively so as to minimize the impact on profitability. “There’s plenty of diversity and room for technical and business innovation in censorship,” says King. “Companies get to experiment and choose from firms trying to sell them censorship technology.”

Jason Q Ng, a research fellow at the University of Toronto specializing in Chinese censorship, says that King’s look at the options available for censorship is unprecedented. “The authorities seem to recognize that government isn’t best suited for the performance of censorship,” says Ng. “It’s better for private companies to do this not just for innovation but for resources.” (...)

The results from the Harvard group’s experiment in which posts were made to existing sites adds further evidence that although China’s censorship is rarely consistent, it is more targeted than often assumed, says Ng. By carefully choosing the content of posts to create a randomized trial, King’s group showed that censors don’t target complaints about the government. Instead, they’re much more concerned about talk of collective action. (...)

China deploys anti-ship missile off Taiwan

By Sarah Mishkin in Taipei and Kathrin Hille in Beijing

©AP

Taiwanese soldiers took part in Taiwan's first big live-fire military exercise this week, designed to show it has the capacity to defend an attack from China

China has deployed near Taiwan a powerful missile designed to take out US aircraft carriers as Beijing strengthens its ability to prevent US forces from aiding Taiwan during potential conflict.

The central challenge for China and its relations with the wider world will be managing its own inexorable rise, writes former Australian Prime Minister and China expert Kevin Rudd as part of a series of features on challenges for China's new leadership.

Xi Jinping - the man most likely to become China's new president - appears to be a man very comfortable with the mantle of leadership. (...)

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is holding a new congress, the 18th, due to start on November 8. The CCP is at the helm of the single-party system of the People's Republic. The nine-member Politbureau Standing Committee (PSC) acts as the supreme body that rules over this vast country with a population of 1.3 billion souls. The secretary general of the party, ranking number one in the PSC, automatically becomes the president of the country and the number three member the premier. (...)

Beijing angry over China discussion in US presidential debate
Wed Oct 17, 2012

The discussion of Sino-American relations during the second presidential debate draws angry reaction from China.

An article in China's state-run news agency Xinhua calls on U.S. politicians to paint a "truer" picture of Beijing than offered to constituents during the campaign season.