Stevie's last obstacle . . .

HUPACASATH FIRST NATION battles China-Canada FIPA in court. So says the VO, aka the Vancouver Observer.

Photo via @Lyacksongirl

Closing arguments began Wednesday for the historic Hupacasath First Nation court challenge of a FIPA, or foreign investor protection agreement between Canada and China. The Hupacasath's case against the Harper government says that Canada has a duty to consult First Nations before entering into international treaties.

Canada holds FIPAs with 14 countries, and is in talks to establish a dozen more. But the Canada-China FIPA is the first to position Canada as a capital-importer rather than a capital-exporter country.

It's all about Chinese money: Stevie wants to give its owners entitlement, and the First Nations are rightly concerned. IF the Hupacasath  win, this goes to the Supreme Court, who won't rule on it until after the next election, when FIPA may be toast.

A mystery in the desert . . .

— One half of the mystery. Big. —

WHAT ARE THEY UP TO? According to WIRED, it's big and mysterious and in the desert of western China: "What Did Google Earth Spot in the Chinese Desert? Even an Ex-CIA Analyst Isn’t Sure". One thing, whatever they're doing, it doesn't need a lot of water. Logistically, it's a hump.

The power of oil . . .

IRANIAN OIL has all sorts of political complexities, a lot of which are not immediately apparent to those of us who rely on orthodox news sources and commentary. Indeed, as we see, the Iranian nuke project and the posturing over Hormuz is rather a side-show, a distraction for American conservatives to dick-thump over.

ALJAZEERA has a report by Pepe Escobar, who is the roving correspondent for Asia Times, titled "All aboard the New Silk Road(s)", where he believes that Iran, India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, China and the US are all scrambling to get the upper hand across Eurasia. Add Russia to the mix and we have a three-ring circus here, folks, as the Great Game continues.

In the complex chessboard where the New Great Game in Eurasia is being played, both Kings are easy to identify: Pipelineistan, and the possible, multiple intersections of a 21st century Silk Road.  

Few have noticed a crucial meeting that took place during the recent Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit in Tehran, between senior Foreign Ministry diplomats from Afghanistan, India and Iran. Their ultimate goal; a new Southern Silk Road connecting Iran to Central and South Asia through roads, railways and last but not least, major ports.

The crucial Silk Road port in this case is Chabahar, in Sistan-Balochistan province in southeast Iran. Tehran has already invested $340 million to complete 70 per cent of the port construction - a decade-long project.

But with US and EU sanctions biting harder and harder, Tehran expects Delhi to come up with a closing $100 million. India has already invested $136 million to link Chabahar to Afghanistan's ring road system.

One does not have to be Alexander the Great to notice the fastest connection between Kabul and India would be through the fabled Khyber Pass. But that does not take into account the accumulated historical venom between Islamabad and Delhi - their constant promises to increase cross-border trade notwithstanding.

With Chabahar linking Iran directly to Afghanistan and India, in theory Pakistan is sidelined. But it's much more complicated than that.

• • •

Enter Pipelineistan - via the key Iran-Pakistan umbilical cord in the making: the 2,700 kilometre-long IP gas pipeline, from Iran's gigantic South Pars field through Balochistan and Sindh and into Punjab.

According to National Iranian Gas Company (NIGC) managing director, Javad Oji, the stretch from Iranshahr in southeast Iran to Zahedan and the Pakistani border is 90 per cent ready. The 900 kilometre-long pipeline on the Iranian side should be active one year from now. It's up to Islamabad to finish its stretch.

Totally in character in terms of interminable Pipelineistan soap operas, IP used to be IPI (Iran-Pakistan-India) - but Delhi pulled out, forced by relentless pressure from the Bush and Obama administrations.

And it's here that the going gets really tough - because there's nothing Beijing would love more than turn the former IPI into IPC.

Now, add the confrontation between China and its neighbors bordering the South China Sea and further North over deep-sea oil deposits, and the future has all sorts of interesting possibilities.

Pepe has another article, in Tom's Dispatch, "Tomgram: Pepe Escobar, Pipelineistan Goes Af-Pak", which points out that

Iran's relations with both Russia and China are swell -- and will remain so no matter who is elected the new Iranian president next month. China desperately needs Iranian oil and gas, has already clinched a $100 billion gas "deal of the century" with the Iranians, and has loads of weapons and cheap consumer goods to sell. No less close to Iran, Russia wants to sell them even more weapons, as well as nuclear energy technology.

And then, moving ever eastward on the great Grid, there's Turkmenistan, lodged deep in Central Asia, which, unlike Iran, you may never have heard a thing about. Let's correct that now.

Gurbanguly Is the Man

Alas, the sun-king of Turkmenistan, the wily, wacky Saparmurat "Turkmenbashi" Nyazov, "the father of all Turkmen" (descendants of a formidable race of nomadic horseback warriors who used to attack Silk Road caravans) is now dead. But far from forgotten.

The Chinese were huge fans of the Turkmenbashi. And the joy was mutual. One key reason the Central Asians love to do business with China is that the Middle Kingdom, unlike both Russia and the United States, carries little modern imperial baggage. And of course, China will never carp about human rights or foment a color-coded revolution of any sort.

The Chinese are already moving to successfully lobby the new Turkmen president, the spectacularly named Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, to speed up the construction of the Mother of All Pipelines. This Turkmen-Kazakh-China Pipelineistan corridor from eastern Turkmenistan to China's Guangdong province will be the longest and most expensive pipeline in the world, 7,000 kilometers of steel pipe at a staggering cost of $26 billion.

So, the players are making plans, but the future will be different from our expectations, it always is. My guess, my stupid opinion is that technology will have some surprises, and that 30 years from now, petroleum oil will be a 3rd world fuel of decreasing importance.

H/T — Daniel

Dragon's Den ? ? ? ?

Michael Byers has an excellent analysis on China, the Arctic, oil and international relations in today's Al Jazeera:

The dragon looks north

China grows hungry for Arctic resources and shipping routes as northern ice melts.

_______________

Snubbed by Arctic countries

China's laissez-faire approach to Arctic legal disputes has, however, been shaken by the recent actions of Arctic countries.

In 2009, China applied for permanent observer status at the Arctic Council, a regional organisation composed of Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the US. It was a reasonable request, since countries as distant as Poland and Spain had already been accorded that status.

However, the Chinese request came at the same time as one from the European Union, which was caught up in a dispute with Canada over restrictions on the trade of seal products. When Canada retaliated by blocking the EU's request for permanent observer status at the Arctic Council, China's application was collaterally suspended - and has remained so ever since.

_______________

China is respecting international law and has legitimate interests in the Arctic. Its request for permanent observer status should be granted forthwith.

Dragons, even well behaved ones, do not appreciate being snubbed.

Indeed . . . .

Mega Gridlock

NPR has a report on a humongous traffic jam in China. It defies belief:

Bumper-to-bumper gridlock spanning for 60 miles (100 kilometers) with vehicles moving little more than a half-mile (one kilometer) a day at one point has improved since this weekend, said Zhang Minghai, director of Zhangjiakou city's Traffic Management Bureau general office.

Some drivers have been stuck in the jam for five days, China Central Television reported Tuesday. But Zhang said he wasn't sure when the situation along the Beijing-Zhangjiakou highway would return to normal.

Five days in gridlock? Dave Dudley would not be impressed.

True grit . . . .

CHINA DAILY has a report by Cao Li and Hu Yinan "Desert storm blankets most of North China". It's a report of interest, because it indicates a continuing and worsening problem for the Party. The climate is producing a humongous dust-bowl. When you need all the agricultural production you can get, this is a heaping, steaming bowl of NOT GOOD.

The sky across North China turned dark yellow over the weekend as the biggest sandstorm this year offered a grim reminder of the impact of the country's worsening desertification.

Tons of sand carried by winds of up to 100 km/h have affected more than 270 million people in 16 provinces since Friday, covering about 2 million sq km, said meteorological experts. The storm, the worst since January last year, reached Shanghai on Sunday.

Thanks to overgrazing, deforestation, urbanization and drought, deserts now make up more than 16 percent of the country, and scientists say the shifting sands are increasing the risk of sandstorms - the grit from which could travel as far as the western United States.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences estimates that the number of sandstorms has jumped six-fold in the past 50 years to two dozen a year.

Now, why should you care? Well, if the wheels fall off Chinese agriculture, then a Chinese expansion into less gritty areas further south might happen. As well, it will make the Party more intransigent to change and challenge and Taiwan.

YIKES!

CHINA HUSH is a site devoted to stories of China. The author proclaims

Most of the posts are selected from Chinese websites, blogs and BBS sites. We translate them into English so friends who cannot read Chinese, but are interested in the stories, can enjoy them. Some of the selected stories are current news items. Some are shocking, sad or inspiring. Others cover controversial issues or show cultural differences. A few are just funny and purely for entertainment and amusement…. We hope we present another perspective, so friends who have this common interest will learn a little bit about Chinese cultures, lifestyles, what is hot in China, what Chinese people are talking about, the latest memes…

Anyway, check out the pictures of the cost of development . . .

A chilly breeze in the South China Sea

Adding to previous examples of the Chinese Peoples' Liberation Army (PLA) Navy spreading the web and venturing into places they haven't been seen before this report appeared last Friday.

A Chinese submarine accidentally collided with an underwater sonar array being towed by a U.S. military ship, CNN reported on Friday, quoting an unnamed military official.

The incident occurred on Thursday near Subic Bay off the coast of the Philippines, according to the CNN report.

The destroyer USS John S. McCain was towing the array, deployed to track underwater sounds.

"The John S. McCain did have a problem with its towed array sonar. It was damaged" on Thursday in Subic Bay, a Pentagon spokesman told Reuters in a telephone interview.

[...]

The U.S. Navy does not view the incident as a deliberate move by Beijing to harass military ships operating in the region, CNN reported.

No? I waited until after the weekend to see if anything more was going to come of this because there is an element of strangeness to it.

Things went into the security hole. Nobody is talking about anything.

Thinking maybe it was just me, I went over to check and see what Galrahn had on it. It seems we were viewing this the same way. (Emphasis mine)

First, if the USS John S. McCain (DDG-56) had its towed sonar deployed off the coast of the Philippines, then she was actively searching for a submarine. It is not normal behavior for the US Navy to tow around an expensive towed sonar in the littorals off a country with no submarines like the Philippines. That suggests the USS John S. McCain (DDG-56) knew there was a Chinese submarine in the area, then deployed the towed sonar, and it was at that time a PLAN submarine hit the sonar. Second, if the PLAN submarine hit the towed array, it means the submarine was positioning itself behind the USS John S. McCain (DDG-56), meaning just like the USS John S. McCain (DDG-56) was hunting the submarine, the submarine was hunting the destroyer.

Yup. In fact, I'll go one further and suggest that USS McCain's towed array got whacked during either streaming or recovery operations when the "tail" is most vulnerable.

More important though is that, despite the USN silence on the matter and the brushing it off as an accidental encounter, it was hardly that. The incident supposedly took place in international waters. While the Chinese have now acknowledged the encounter (finally), a nasty little issue remains: China is claiming the entire South China Sea as its territorial waters.

The US 7th Fleet, based in Yokosuka, Japan, probably had good information on the Chinese submarine from the time it sailed. The US destroyer was likely the quick response surface ship dispatched to localize and report the position of the PLA unit.

In short, this is old Cold War stuff. This time, however, it may not end well. China takes a much longer view than either the US or the former USSR.

Hat tip Boris.

When in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout

Two thoughts on this video clip:

First, I see this kind of behavior every week. At my office, where some people need to work on their interpersonal skills and at the pool where I take my kids for swimming lessons, there is a bank of vending machines that sell canned coffee and soft drinks, bottles of cold green tea, water, sports drinks and, everyone's favorite -- ice cream. The room is stuffy and overheated and I'm there for a couple of hours along with all the other parents and the little brothers and sisters of the kids who are in the pool. I take my ipod and sit facing the ice cream machine and watch a succession of toddlers completely and utterly misplace their feces (occasionally this literally happens, but the diaper-throwing story is one for another day). I'm talking about two-, three- and four-year-old kids who see the ice cream machine and upon being denied a frosty treat, go straight to defcon 5 and launch the mother of all tantrums.

The duration record so far this year is held by a three-year-old girl who, being told she could not have a second ice cream, launched into a 35-minute fit of floor-pounding, screeching, purple-faced rage that culminated in running across the room and repeatedly kicking her mother (the kid, not me) before actually falling asleep/passing out from lack of air mid tantrum.

The intensity record was set by a three-year old boy who after jumping up and down hollering for a few minutes, ran straight into a concrete pillar in the center of the room and bloodied his nose, which seemed to calm him down a bit.

For the record, my kids, while they might occasionally whine, never threw tantrums when they were little. In fact, with one notable exception when I had to take my son outside and explain that no, he could not go to karaoke in the bar adjoining the restaurant and crying at the table wasn't going to get him anywhere, they have always been extremely well behaved where ever we go.

Second, the woman in the video is in the airport in Hong Kong. Its a good thing she's in a country that respects human rights as much as China. Imagine what might have happened if she had carried on like this in certain other places.

crossposted from the Woodshed

Sharp rise in China birth defects

ACCORDING TO THE BEEB, "A senior family planning official in China has noted an alarming rise in the number of babies with birth defects, a Chinese media report says."

Jiang Fan, from China's National Population and Family Planning Commission, said environmental pollution was the cause of the problem.

He said a child was born with physical defects every 30 seconds because of the degrading environment.

The report said China's coal-rich Shanxi province had the highest rate.

I for one welcome our new Chinese corporate overlords

Chrysler Canada has asked Ottawa and Ontario for $1-billion in aid, as the "big three" in the US are attempting to hit up their taxpayers for $25-billion.

US Ford CEO Alan Mulally took home $28 million in pay in 2007 while GM's Rick Wagoner struggled by on just $15.7 million.
As a private company, Chrysler is not required to disclose the salary paid to its execs and CEO Robert Nardelli has offered to reduce his salary to $1 till business "picks up", but don't feel too sorry for him - Home Depot just paid him $210 million to piss off last year.

All three U.S. auto industry leaders flew to the Washington bailout hearings to ask for money in separate luxury jets. Each flight was estimated to cost $20,000 (U.S.)

.

Anyway, while knocking around teh google, trying to find out how much the Canadian Chrysler CEO makes, I ran into this at The Truth About Cars :
Chinese May Buy GM and Chrysler :

"Chinese carmakers SAIC and Dongfeng have plans to acquire GM and Chrysler, China’s 21st Century Business Herald reports today. The paper cites a senior official of China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology– the state regulator of China’s auto industry– who dropped the hint that “the auto manufacturing giants in China, such as Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation (SAIC) and Dongfeng Motor Corporation, have the capability and intention to buy some assets of the two
crisis-plagued American automakers."

An editorial at TTAC notes :

"As of September, the U.S. Treasury owes China $585b. With GM’s market cap now standing at a pocket change rate of $1.35b, and getting cheaper by the minute, China could buy 433 General Motors with their T bills alone."

Cross-posted, more or less, at Creekside.

Update : Heh. Great minds google images alike.

A Chinese heartbreaker

I REALLY LIKE ALJAZEERA — beats the hell out of Fox news. Covers areas that mainline North American newsnets seem to ignore.

And it seems that child abduction is turning into a nasty problem.

China is struggling to cope with a wave of child abductions which sees more than 200 babies and toddlers being stolen every day, according to some estimates.

It is a lucrative business in which an abducted girl child can fetch $1,200 and a boy anything up to $5,000, more than the average annual salary in urban China.

"Where they end up, it is purely speculation a lot of the times, but a lot the anecdotal evidence seems to show that they go to families who are really wanting to have a boy child.

"Girls who are trafficked for illegal adoption are generally because families are looking for future wives, they want to raise girl children as future wives for their boys, and also to look after the families."

Other children end up abroad after being sold for foreign adoptions or into slavery.

Desperate parents put up posters of their missing children

Goose, Gander, etc., etc., etc. . . . .

Per Reuters:

China spying on Olympics hotel guests: U.S. senator
Tue Jul 29, 2008 - By Richard Cowan


WASHINGTON (Reuters) - China has installed Internet-spying equipment in all the major hotel chains serving the 2008 Summer Olympics, a U.S. senator charged on Tuesday.

"The Chinese government has put in place a system to spy on and gather information about every guest at hotels where Olympic visitors are staying," said Sen. Sam Brownback.

The conservative Republican from Kansas, citing hotel documents he received, added that journalists, athletes' families and others attending the Olympics next month "will be subjected to invasive intelligence-gathering" by China's Public Security Bureau. He said the agency will be monitoring Internet communications at the hotels.

_______________


The senator called on China to reverse its policy, but said the hotels are advising guests that "your communications and Web site activity are not private" and that e-mails and Web sites being visited are accessible to local law enforcement.

Exactly how is this any different from the US government with the "new and improved" FISA legislation passed by a democratic Congress and signed by gwbush?

What a bunch of hypocrites . . . .

(Cross-posted from Moved to Vancouver)

The Pornography of Power

Journalist Robert Scheer on "The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America"

From a rough transcript of an interview on Democracy Now :

AMY GOODMAN: The Pornography of Power—why pornography?

ROBERT SCHEER: Because it’s not the real thing. It’s a trick. It’s like—I liken it to a lap dance. You know, you’re promising something that doesn’t exist. They’re promising security. These defense contractors, lobbyists, politicians, they pretend they’re dealing with real issues in the world, and they’re not. They’re just getting your money, and they’re deceiving you."

"I say, we had a situation where Bush vetoed an extension of child healthcare that would have involved $7 billion, OK? That’s two subs that we don’t need that are built every year. Alright? We have the F-35, an airplane that’s a $300 billion program. Why do we need new planes? The F-22, a $65 billion program. So we are wasting trillions of dollars on this old-fashioned defense budget that benefits Boeing, benefits Lockheed. Everyone knows it’s a scam. Everyone knows there is no military function for this, there’s no national security. And what happened is they got a license to steal. 9/11 was their license to steal."

"The irony now is that when these defense hawks—when they challenge my book and they say, "Well, of course, we don’t need these submarines to fight al-Qaeda. They don’t even have a rowboat. And of course we don’t need, you, now, new stealth bombers to fight al-Qaeda. But there’s the China menace."

The irony is here, China is financing our arms development. They are charging us interest to lend us money to build weapons ostensibly to attack them, and they’re laughing up their sleeve. They know this is a joke."

"Imperialism doesn’t pay. You know, here in California, I’m paying, what, $4.40 for gas, and we have seized the second-biggest pool of oil in the world? And we’re now paying—you know, the price of oil has gone up six-fold since George Bush has been president, and you want to tell me imperialism pays?

So I think the failure of the neoconservatives really is the failure of the imperial model. The Germans learned that. The French learned it, the English. Everybody in the world knows old-fashioned imperialism does not pay for the average person. It pays for Halliburton. It pays for, you know, Exxon. But it doesn’t pay for the taxpayer."

China goes to Gitmo

NYT : Terrorism and the Olympics

"After 9/11, China declared its own war on terror in Xinjiang, but Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have documented that this often has targeted Uighurs who are completely nonviolent. [Uighurs are Turkic farmers inhabiting the Xinjiang region]

Unfortunately, the Bush administration has largely backed this Chinese version of the war on terror. Indeed, a Department of Justice report this month suggests that American troops softened up Uighur prisoners in Guantánamo Bay on behalf of visiting Chinese interrogators. The American troops starved the Uighurs and prevented them from sleeping, just before inviting in the Chinese interrogators."

The author Nicholas Kristof also has a blog where he notes :

"What irks me is the Bush administration backing the Chinese Communist Party as it uses the "war on terror" as a cover to go after those moderate Uighur dissidents who favor more autonomy or religious freedom but oppose any violence. The Bush administration listed the "East Turkistan Islamic Movement" as a terror organization in the aftermath of 9/11, apparently as a "thanks" to Beijing for its help in cracking down on terror financing."

"Thanks", as in : China leaned on Pakistan, Pakistan made promises, Pakistan is no longer keeping them.

So in exchange for some financial finangling, China gets to blur the line between dissidents who oppose violence and terrorists.

All of which leaves me wondering what Canada's Gitmo deal is with the US, the one wherein we make nice about being the last country in the world to press for release of a Canadian child-soldier held there since his 15th birthday in 2002.
Yesterday Khadr's US military lawyer William Kuebler alleged that Col. Peter Brownback, the judge hearing Omar Khadr's case, was abruptly dismissed, after he "threatened to suspend the case unless prosecutors turned over key evidence to the defense lawyers".

In April Maxime Bernier stood beside Condi Rice in Washington and announced it would be

"premature to comment about the legal process right now and appeal process because they’re still ongoing. And what we will do is we’ll do -- and I received also assurances that Mr. Khadr has been treated humanely."

"And what we will do is we'll do --" a little thought hiccup there from Max. I wonder now what he stopped himself from saying.

Cross-posted at Creekside

China opts to block tourists from Tibet

Chinese authorities jittery about protests during the Mount Everest leg of the Olympic torch relay have abruptly reversed a decision to reopen Tibet to foreign tourists.

Foreigners have not received permits to visit the Himalayan region since deadly anti-government riots broke out in the capital, Lhasa. Tourism authorities announced last week that foreign tour groups would be allowed in on May 1, the start of a three-day national holiday.

Tour operators said Thursday, however, that the Tibetan Tourism Bureau told them this week to stop arranging trips for foreigners. They said the bureau cited the need for safe passage for the torch relay to the summit of Everest, as well as continuing safety concerns in Lhasa.

But, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.

H/T Cat

What's holding your building up? Chinese steel?

Two years ago Canada and the United States imported almost no steel from China. In the first six months of 2007, however, steel imported from China to North America constituted 102,000 metric tons.

That may pose more of a problem than just the economic damage done to North American steel producers. Steel being used domestically in China's building boom has been found to be up to five times lighter than the weight required to be used in construction.

HALF the steel material sold at wholesale markets and now being used in construction has failed quality tests.

The Shanghai Industrial and Commercial Administrative Bureau inspected 52 batches of steel material at three markets and 15 construction sites in seven districts, including Xuhui, Zhabei and Baoshan, and officials said 27 batches had quality problems.

The tested materials were too light to reach the country's standard - some of the products were five times lighter than the required weight.

About 22 percent of the tested products failed tension tests. Buildings with such steel would not be able to withstand major earthquakes, the bureau said.

Forty-eight percent of the tested material had inadequate amounts of carbon. Shortage of carbon can cause steel to break easily, officials explained.

One good earthquake could bring Shanghai down.

OK. So, aside from the fact that it will devastate Shanghai, what does that have to do with North America?

A lot.

Tim Johnson of the McClatchy Beijing bureau picked up on the problem of weak Chinese steel being exported to North America last September.

Steel imports from China that fall apart easily are making U.S. manufacturers and constructions firms more than a little nervous. Reports of failures during initial fabrication and questions about certification documents will mean closer scrutiny. The American and Canadian institutes of steel construction have already advised member companies to be vigilant and report any problems.

The biggest concern is hollow structural sections widely used in construction of skyscrapers, bridges, pipelines, office, commercial and school buildings. This high-strength steel is also commonly used in power lifts, cranes, farm equipment, furniture and car trailer hitches.

Chinese high-strength steel tubes and pipes are also a potential problem. They’re used extensively in power plants and in large industrial boilers, and must withstand enormous pressures and hellish heat around the clock for weeks or months on end. This kind of steel also is used extensively in scaffolding that's erected on building exteriors during construction or renovation, as well as for interior work.

Inferior high-strength steel could cause catastrophic failures of buildings, pipelines or in power plants' boiler tubing. This is a large worry for structural engineers who will be working overtime as states embark on what amounts to a crash program to shore up bridges, following the collapse of the Minnesota span over the Mississippi River. China is already seeing problems. A Chinese power plant exploded recently when high-strength steel tubing blew out, says Roger Schagrin, general counsel for the Committee on Pipe and Tube Imports, which represents U.S. manufacturers of these products.

As steel producers across North America bring their plants to an idle while their product is replaced by the cheaper Chinese-produced steel, an old adage rises as a reminder: You get what you pay for.

Something to keep in mind when you're driving over that refurbished bridge.

Does Pat Robertson know about this?

China seems to be able to make anything. And now, when you open that hotel room book in the drawer by the bed, staring back at you will be those now familiar words.... Made In China.

It is a country where people caught smuggling religious texts or organizing illicit services can face years in jail. Yet China is about to become home to the world's biggest Bible factory, producing a staggering 1 million copies a month.

The aircraft hangar-sized plant on an industrial park outside the eastern city of Nanjing will be capable of producing more than one Bible every second and is expected to supply one quarter of all the world's Bibles by 2009.

There is, of course some irony to be had here.

There is no religious paraphernalia or portraits or even a single crucifix to be seen anywhere in the Nanjing factory - a courtesy to China's strict religious laws which ban foreigners from proselytizing, or attempting to convert people.

No, that's not it.

Ironically, all but one of the dozens of workers we spoke to insisted they were not Christians. One woman, a Ms Li who has worked at Amity since 1987 and now earns 320 US dollars a month, said: 'I work here for the salary, not because of my beliefs. I print the Bibles but I have no time and no interest in reading them.'

Cool. As ironic as that may sound, that's still not it.

No. You'll have to go to Hairy Fish Nuts to get the real irony behind this endeavour.

Here's a hint.

Earlier this year, one of the leaders of China's underground Protestant church was released after serving three years hard labour for possessing thousands of unauthorised Bibles. He reportedly spent his sentence making soccer balls for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

(I know. If you're from British Columbia now you're looking at those cute little 2010 Winter Olympic license plates wondering what prisoner stamped them out. Let me ease your mind. They're made in Nova Scotia. Until some company in China under-bids them.)

Nothing to see here. Just your run-of-the-mill arms buildup.

China has the largest army in the world, and they have never been too forthcoming as to its expansion. This announcement should be of some concern.

China said Friday it will strengthen its military to thwart any attempt by Taiwan to push for independence, but vowed that it was committed to the peaceful development of the world's largest army.
A report issued by the State Council, China's cabinet, also said the country's defence policy will focus on protecting its borders and sea space, cracking down on terrorism and modernizing its weapons.
"China will not engage in any arms race or pose a military threat to any other country," the 91-page white paper said.

Really? They didn't really identify their "sea space". And, as for not posing a military threat to any other country, one would have to question this.

And more from the CBC report:

China has announced double-digit military spending increases nearly every year since the early 1990s, causing unease among its neighbours.
But despite its huge size, its forces are said to lag well behind those of other major countries. In recent years, leaders have focused on improved training and advanced technology, hoping to close that gap.
"This increase … is compensatory in nature, and is designed to enhance the originally weak defence foundation," the white paper said. "It is a moderate increase in step with China's national economic development."

Lag behind or not, why is it that when a burgeoning military power makes the statement that they are not engaged in an arms race, it turns into an arms race?

And then there is an old adage: Those who build a massive military machine will eventually use it.