The commander of U.S. military space operations says he lacks sufficient data to determine who interfered with two U.S. government satellites through a ground station in Norway, as revealed in a report on China sent to the U.S. Congress on Wednesday.

“The best information that I have is that we cannot attribute those two occurrences,” the Reuters news agency quoted General Robert Kehler, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, as saying in a teleconference.

“I guess I would agree that we don’t have sufficient detail,” he said.

Gen. Kehler was speaking on the same day that Australian authorities said they had not consulted the U.S. before allowing China to use a ground station in Western Australia that is run by a Swedish state-owned company and is also used by NASA.

The bipartisan U.S.-China Economic Security and Review Commission, which was created by Congress, said in its 2011 annual report that at least two U.S. environment-monitoring satellites were interfered with four or more times in 2007 and 2008.

It didn’t say how, but earlier drafts of the report that were made public said the interfence was conducted through the Svalbard ground station in Spitsbergen, Norway. The ground station is owned and run by Kongsberg Satellite Services, which is owned 50/50 by a Norwegian state company and a private Norwegian defense company.  Kongsberg Satellite Services has denied there was any such interference through its ground station.

The 12-member commission said in the report released on Wednesday that the interference had not been traced directly to China, but that the techniques used “appear consistent with authoritative Chinese military writings” that have advocated disabling an enemy’s satellite control facilities on the ground in a conflict.

“If executed successfully, such interference has the potential to pose numerous threats, particularly if achieved against satellites with more sensitive functions. For example, access to a satellite’s controls could allow an attacker to damage or destroy the satellite. The attacker could also deny or degrade as well as forge or otherwise manipulate the satellite’s transmission,” it said.

The report also said that China’s military continued to play a central role in civil space activities, and directly controlled the manned space program, noting that “ground-based infrastructure enables all space operations.”

It recommended that Congress mandate that the Pentagon and other government space operators to assess and report on their “preparedness for potential Chinese counterspace activities.”

“To the extent that commercial entities provide essential services, assessments should also cover their systems,” it said.

China has maintained that its space ambitions are peaceful and that it  is often a victim itself of such intrusions.

China’s embassy in Washington said in response that it was “obvious that the commission is entrusted with the mission of vilifying China’s image and spreading China threat theory by patching up unwarranted allegations against China,” according to Reuters.

“We urge the commission to stop issuing such reports for the good of increasing mutual trust between our two countries while China will continue to play a responsible role in both the realistic and the virtual worlds,” the agency quoted Wang Baodong, the embassy spokesman, as saying in an email.

– Jeremy Page

Annual inflows of foreign direct investment rose to nearly $108 billion in 2008.

The Chinese government seeks to add energy production capacity from sources other than coal and oil, and is focusing on nuclear and other alternative energy development.

China has emphasized raising personal income and consumption and introducing new management systems to help increase productivity.

Some economists believe that Chinese economic growth has been in fact understated during much of the 1990s and early 2000s, failing to fully factor in the growth driven by the private sector and that the extent at which China is dependent on exports is exaggerated.

China is the world’s largest producer of rice and is among the principal sources of wheat, corn (maize), tobacco, soybeans, peanuts (groundnuts), and cotton.

A report by UBS in 2009 concluded that China has experienced total factor productivity growth of 4 per cent per year since 1990, one of the fastest improvements in world economic history.

Over the years, large subsidies were built into the price structure, and these subsidies grew substantially in the late 1970s and 1980s.

On top of this, foreign direct investment (FDI) this year was set to “surpass $100 billion”, compared to $90 billion last year, ministry officials predicted.

“The growth rate (for ODI) in the next few years will be much higher than previous years,” Shen said, without elaborating.

China is aiming to be the world’s largest new energy vehicle market by 2020 with 5 million cars.

In large part as a result of economic liberalization policies, the GDP quadrupled between 1978 and 1998, and foreign investment soared during the 1990s.

Despite initial gains in farmers’ incomes in the early 1980s, taxes and fees have increasingly made farming an unprofitable occupation, and because the state owns all land farmers have at times been easily evicted when croplands are sought by developers.

In terms of cash crops, China ranks first in cotton and tobacco and is an important producer of oilseeds, silk, tea, ramie, jute, hemp, sugarcane, and sugar beets.

Sheep, cattle, and goats are the most common types of livestock.

Oil fields discovered in the 1960s and after made China a net exporter, and by the early 1990s, China was the world’s fifth-ranked oil producer.

There are also deposits of vanadium, magnetite, copper, fluorite, nickel, asbestos, phosphate rock, pyrite, and sulfur.

In addition, implementation of some reforms was stalled by fears of social dislocation and by political opposition, but by 2007 economic changes had become so great that the Communist party added legal protection for private property rights (while preserving state ownership of all land) and passed a labor law designed to improve the protection of workers’ rights (the law was passed amid a series of police raids that freed workers engaged in forced labor).

Although a British crown colony until its return to Chinese control in 1997, Hong Kong has long been a major maritime outlet of S China.
Rivers and canals (notably the Grand Canal, which connects the Huang He and the Chang rivers) remain important transportation arteries.

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