Chinese bid to set up East Timor spy base

Often, I think I know China well. However, just as often, it occurs to me that I don't really know what I thought I knew. The visions and experiences collected and stored in my mind while I am awake are gone after I have slept. Reasoning and understanding seem to last only for a few hours before becoming illusory: the images and meanings disappear one by one, stolen from me by apparitions and secreted away, never to be returned in their original form. The understandings that I have assiduously acquired are nothing more than banal when bound together to try and shape the oldest continuous civilization on earth. Experience, learning and proudly possessed knowledge, gained from many sources and from interaction with its people, are taken from everyone who thinks they know China and passed on to others who share them smugly, use them with confidence, reverently broadcast them as Gospel for a few praiseworthy moments. "I know China." Then, time and circumstance mangle them until they are beyond comprehension. These too will be passed on and shared as truth, only to be proved wrong again. The enigma is this: China never changes, but China is always changing. Its people beset by burden, affected with melancholy, inured to bewilderment, and suckled on uninterrupted millennia of incalculable hopelessness and sorrow. "There is chaos under heaven and things could not be better", said Mao Zedong. This is the real truth: "China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese" - Charles De Gaulle. China: don't ask, it is what it is...

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05/09/2011

Strategic threat' ... Chinese officials approached East Timorese authorities about installing a surveillance radar in 2007. Photo: Fiona-Lee Quimby

CHINA failed in its attempt to establish a spy base in East Timor, according to leaked United States diplomatic cables.

The Chinese proposal to build and operate a surveillance radar facility on East Timor's north coast was made in December 2007, but was viewed with suspicion by senior East Timorese officials who consulted the United States and Australia before rejecting the project.

The Chinese initiative, described as "a strategic threat", is revealed for the first time in US embassy cables leaked to WikiLeaks and provided exclusively to the Herald.

Posted by wdbox on 05/09/2011 at 11:05 PM in Current Affairs, Government, Military | Permalink

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REFLECTIONS IN A CHINESE EYE