Last Friday, China presented the European nation with 23 school buses. By Monday, more than half a million online comments about the donation were posted to China’s Weibo micro-blog service.

One common question: How could China donate brand-new school buses to another country when Chinese school children are subjected to shoddy and unsafe transportation conditions at home?

At Monday’s regular foreign ministry briefing in Beijing, spokesman Hong Lei referred to the aid to Macedonia as payback.

Hong said Macedonia overcame, in his words, “all kinds of difficulties,” to provide aid to China following the devastating 2008 Wenchuan earthquake. He said it is necessary for China to provide relevant assistance, to fulfill its international responsibilities.

The Macedonian government issued a statement saying each bus has 35 seats, meets all safety requirements and will be used for students primarily in rural areas.

The donation comes less than two weeks after 19 preschoolers died in Gansu province when the minivan they were riding to school crashed into a truck. Sixty-four people were crammed into the vehicle.

The accident once again highlighted the chronic under-funding of China’s school systems. The issue also was under the spotlight following the 2008 earthquake, when more than 5,000 school children died in buildings activists say were shoddily constructed.

On Sunday, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao specifically promised new rules on school bus safety. He added that central and local governments will be financially responsible for bringing buses up to standard. The China Daily reports that 35 students were injured Saturday when a school bus carrying 39 people in Liaoning province rolled over.

- VOANews

Defector Li Fengzhi said agents of China’s Ministry of State Security — where he used to work — often focus on politicians.

Li was commenting on the case of Conservative MP Bob Dechert, who has admitted to sending flirty emails to a female correspondent for the state-controlled Xinhua news agency. Dechert is parliamentary secretary to Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird.

“Yes, the Canadian government should pay attention to this, to this kind of issue,” Li told a conference on espionage, speaking via video link from a secret location.

Li said not all Chinese journalists are spies, but politicians are prime targets.

The head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service was rebuked last year when he suggested Chinese agents were influencing some provincial politicians.

CSIS head Dick Fadden later downplayed his comments, but they echoed when the incident involving Dechert and Shi Rong, Xinhua’s chief Toronto correspondent, became public knowledge last summer.

Shi has since been recalled to Beijing.

Li suggested CSIS likely knew more about the case than it was willing to say openly

Neither CSIS nor the RCMP has commented publicly on the matter.

Li defected in 2009, so he said he has no direct knowledge of the case, but he read numerous stories about the matter before he gave his keynote address Wednesday to a packed hotel ballroom on the far side of the Ottawa River from Parliament Hill.

He said targeting politicians is “the normal way to get the job done” for Chinese spies and they commonly pose as reporters when posted abroad.

Li said he believes Shi “possibly had some relationship with the security services” even if she wasn’t an actual spy.

But now that she is back in China, she is likely getting lots of attention from the Chinese espionage apparatus, he said.

“Other agents should try to get close to her … to use her as a bridge to get intelligence from the politician.”

He said the main goal of Chinese spies is to learn “how to influence the politician,” for example to get him to speak out on China’s behalf. They also want to plant seeds “to influence this gentleman to do something, say when he’s doing some policy-making.”

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who is expected to travel to China next year as part of Canada’s continuing re-engagement with the Asian economic giant, has said he doesn’t believe Dechert compromised Canadian interests.

Dechert has insisted his relationship with Shi was an innocent friendship

Baird has also said he stands by his colleague.

Xinhua, which was created by the Chinese Communist Party in the 1930s to handle revolutionary propaganda, has grown into a multimedia empire with offices across the world and throughout China. It is run by the Chinese government in Beijing.

It is also widely known by western intelligence agencies to have links to China’s intelligence services.

- CBC.ca

“The big thing that China is after is technology and information and military secrets,” Brian McAdam told a corporate espionage conference in Gatineau, Que.

“They are really targeting foreign scientists and engineers in a major way.”

McAdam said Chinese intelligence officials have perfected the “honey trap” – using agents to seduce visiting business people, scientists, or politicians while secretly videotaping their sexual encounter.

“This happens with incredible frequency,” said McAdam. “These (encounters) are now on film and it will be made very clear to (the victims) that they either co-operate or this information will be provided to their husband or wife, their social friends, their employer.”

McAdam adds that sometimes police will accuse a victim of rape, if that’s what it takes to blackmail them.

The conference also heard that China examines social networking sites and visitors’ visa applications to figure out which foreigners could have valuable information.

In September, there were fears Conservative MP Bob Dechert might have been caught in a “honey trap” when his flirtatious emails with a Chinese journalist came to light.

The journalist worked for Xinhua, China’s state news agency, that security experts fear often serves as a front for Chinese spies.

Dechert apologized for the emails but denied any inappropriate behaviour, while Prime Minister Harper said there was nothing to link Dechert’s flirtations with government business.

- TorontoSun

The sharpest attacks have come during the Republican primary race, on the campaign trail and in debates such as one this week that focused on U.S. foreign policy.

Texas Governor Rick Perry named China as the biggest national security issue for the United States during that debate.

“When you have 35,000 forced abortions a day in that country,” said Perry. “When you have the cyber security that the PLA [China's army - People's Liberation Army] has been involved with, those are great and major issues both morally and security wise that we’ve got to deal with now.”

Former Massuchusetts Governor Mitt Romney agrees that China is a long term security issue. Here are some comments Romney made recently on the campaign trail.

“In the agreements we have with them on trade they don’t follow them and one of the most reprehensible practices on the part of Chinese enterprises – many of which are of course owned by the government – is stealing the designs, patents and technology of American and other companies,” said Romney. “And stealing it, re-selling it, and making money off of what we’ve created.”

Cheng Li, a China analyst at The Brookings Institution here in Washington says that with economics dominating the U.S. elections, polticians are looking for someone to blame.

“Nowadays, when we talk about economics, talk about the global economy, talk about the U.S. economy, we cannot do so without talking about China’s rise and China’s growing economic competitiveness,” said Cheng Li.

He adds that for the first time in this election, the Republican candidates all have chosen China as a major target.

“Usually the Republicans can be considered as more pro-China because of the tremendous economic interests and to colloborate with China,” he said. “But the whole game has changed.”

However, Republican presidential hopefuls are not the only ones with tough words for China. At the recent APEC Leaders Summit in Hawaii, President Barack Obama took China to task over its trade practices.

“Their role is different now than it was 20 years ago, or 30 years ago, where if they were breaking some rules, it did not really matter,” said President Obama. “It did not have a significant impact, you were not seeing huge trade imbalances that had consequences for the world financial system.  Now, they have grown up and so they are going to have to help mange this process in a responsible way.”

Beijing is frequently accused of cheating at trade and of supporting or not doing enough to stop unfair trade practices. Those calls are getting more intense and focused and it appears that resonates with voters.

According to a CBS News Poll released last month, 61 percent of Americans consider China’s economic expansion as generally bad.

Recently, the U.S. Ambassador to the World Trade Organization sent a letter to his Chinese counterpart about China’s strict control of the Internet.

The letter asked China to explain why it blocks Internet web sites and raised concerns that such practices were limiting companies access to consumers in China.

At a hearing last week, U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio, argued that China’s Internet policies were not only undermining human rights, but unfair to American trade interests as well.

“This policy benefits Chinese domestic companies at the expense of companies like Facebook, Twitter, and You Tube who are completely blocked in China. Companies whose business models rely on openness and transparency – are forced to be an arm of the Chinese government or turn their backs on 1.3 billion customers,” said Brown.

In October, the U.S. Senate passed a bill – with support from both Democrats and Republicans – that seeks to punish China for manipulating the value of its currency, the yuan. Economists and politicians argue that China keeps the value of its currency artificially low to keep its exports cheap. This in turn, they argue, leads to a loss of American jobs.

China denies it keeps its currency artifically low and notes it is working maintain a floating exchange rate at its own pace.

Chinese state media say U.S. politicians are using China as a scapegoat for their own problems.

And while Cheng Li says there is concern growing anti-American sentiment in China could get out of control, the country’s leaders are keeping themselves out of the debate.

“[The] Chinese leadership has been careful not to overstate the tensions or problems because this will make them more difficult in the future if they want to improve the relationship,” said Cheng Li.

Heightening those tensions, Li adds, is something China would want to avoid ahead of a major visit by Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping to the United States in January. Xi is expected to succeed current President Hu Jintao in 2012, around the time that the U.S. elections take place.

- VOA News

The protest came after a series of strikes in factories in Guangdong province, China’s economic powerhouse.

Rural land disputes are increasing and spreading to the undeveloped west of the country, according to a poll published in October in a magazine run by Xinhua news agency.

One witness identifying himself by his surname Yang said by phone that 4,000 villagers and farmers from Wukan surrounded government offices in Lufeng City on Monday. The protesters denounced local officials as greedy and corrupt. They dispersed after an hour without incident.

A villager surnamed Zhang, who sent photographs of the protest to Reuters, said authorities had failed to tackle collusion between developers and local officials. No progress had been made in renegotiating inequitable land deals back to 1998.

“They have done nothing for us. They lied,” Zhang said by phone from Wukan.

Residents of Lufeng ransacked government offices two months ago over the same issue.

There are also reports of a round of industrial disputes over pay and benefits in export hubs such as Guangdong, as overseas demand for Chinese goods weakens amid a sluggish western economy.

Hong Kong’s Sing Tao Daily said on Tuesday at least 500 female workers at a bra factory in Shenzhen had protested in the past few days about overtime pay.

Thousands of workers at a factory in Dongguan city, Guangdong, manufacturing shoes for brands including New Balance, Nike and Adidas went on strike last week over wage cuts and redundancies, Ming Pao Daily reported.

Workers at PepsiCo bottling plants in China protested earlier this month at a deal in which beverage and noodle maker Tingyi will buy the loss-making bottling business. The head of PepsiCo’s China operations pledged to protest workers’ rights following the stoppages.

- Source: Guardian.co.uk

The video, which AFP cannot independently verify, was posted online by Students for a Free Tibet and shows a figure being engulfed in flames in the middle of a street before collapsing to the ground.

The group says the figure is Palden Choetso, a 35-year-old Buddhist nun who self-immolated on November 3 in a Tibetan-inhabited town in Sichuan province.

The Tibetans shown in the footage had “risked everything” to smuggle it out of China, said Tenzin Jigdal, programme director of Students for a Free Tibet, which has offices in New York and Dharamshala, the Indian town that is home to the Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama.

The video released by the group also shows Tibetan Buddhist clergy gathering to mourn the nun’s passing, as well as Chinese security forces converging on the Tibetan monastery where the funeral was held.

China’s state-controlled Xinhua news agency was the first to report the incident in Sichuan’s Ganzi prefecture, identifying Palden Choetso by her Chinese name, “Qiu Xiang.”

She was the second nun to burn herself to death in Sichuan, a province with a large ethnic Tibetan population that has seen protests against what some see as growing domination by China’s majority Han ethnic group.

Nine Tibetan monks have also attempted to burn themselves to death this year and rights groups say at least five have succeeded.

China, which has invested heavily in development in the remote Himalayan region, maintains that it has brought modernisation and a better standard of living.

“This footage shows not only the desperation but also the determination of Tibetans to fight for their freedom at any cost,” Tenzin Dorjee, director of Students for a Free Tibet, said in a statement.

“We fear the situation will continue to escalate and more Tibetan lives will be lost if the Chinese government does not lift its repressive measures and commit to a just and lasting resolution to this spiralling crisis in Tibet.”

- afp