One never really knows when it comes to the veracity of supposed “facts” in China, though China-watchers can usually guess when a supposed “error” or misunderstanding is deliberate or genuine.
But few clues emerge from developments in the past week, not least the confusion generated by Monday’s news reports on an extraordinary accusation in the magazine of the dauntingly named National Administration for the Protection of State Secrets.
An editorial comment in the NAPSS journal accuses Anglo-Australian miner Rio Tinto of spying on China’s steel industry for six years, costing the country Rmb700bn ($102bn) in excessive charges for iron ore and, the article argues, highlighting the need to overhaul the way China deals with state secrets in order to better fend off systemic threats to its economic security.
What’s more, says the FT, the editorial indicates that Beijing’s detention of four Rio employees in China on accusations of stealing state secrets about iron ore price negotiations could be the start of a widening campaign rather than an isolated case:“From the large amounts of intelligence data that was found on Rio Tinto computers … it is clear that the economic spies, using bribes for six years, forced the Chinese steel companies … to pay more than Rmb700bn more for imported iron ore than they would otherwise,” the NAPSS said.
The report said the Rio case was only the tip of the iceberg and China should treat commercial espionage as seriously as a national security threat as does the west. “Our country has already entered a peak period of a commercial espionage war,” it said.
Hardly a surprising line from the NAPSS. But then later on Monday came a Bloomberg report quoting the author of the magazine editorial, claiming the article was his “own opinion” and based on previously published data:
Jiang Ruqin, an employee with the Jiangsu Province Administration for the Protection of State Secrets, said he has no involvement in a legal case against four Rio employees detained last month, and that no “leaders” assigned him to write the essay or reviewed the piece before publication.
“I just wanted to write the article because this situation’s impact is really big, it affects the country’s economic security,” Jiang said in a telephone interview from Nanjing, the capital of eastern China’s Jiangsu Province. “We cadres who protect state secrets must speak up.”
Jiang, in the article posted August 8 on the website http://www.baomi.org, said the Rio case amounted to “taking away 500 yuan from every Chinese citizen and it means giving $100bn of ‘free’ gross economic product to the spies’ employers”, noted Bloomberg. The site, affiliated with the NAPSS, was unavailable as of Monday late morning Beijing time.
The figures Jiang used for the article came from China Central Television and the China Youth Daily newspaper, he said. To confuse matters more, it happens that China’s vaguely worded law on guarding state secrets allows officials to classify as “secret” information that is already public by arguing it is related to economic and social development or “other issues”.
And in a separate essay accompanying Jiang’s magazine editorial, Luo Jianghuai, a secrets protection official in eastern Jiangsu province, railed against the use by multinationals of Chinese staff to “illicitly gain information and influence.” The Rio Tinto “spying case”, he said, “has again sounded the alarm over secrets protection by our country’s state-owned enterprises and corporations”.
Curiouser and curiouser. Unfortunately for China’s tenuous credibility on facts and figures, the magazine kerfuffle comes on the heels of the FT’s report late last week on the rather large discrepancy between growth figures supplied by provincial versus national government.
As the FT noted, the latest set of first-half numbers provided by provincial-level authorities were about 10 per cent higher than the central government’s national figure, “raising fresh questions about the accuracy of statistics in the world’s most populous nation”.
Perhaps that is why China has decided to issue all its monthly economic data - save for GDP figures - in one big lump, in a “bury the bad news under a numbers-mountain” strategy. According to Reuters, China’s National Bureau of Statistics will issue all its monthly economic data for July at a news conference on Tuesday.
Related link:
China says Rio spying has cost it $100bn - FT
