Inside China’s secret three-front war vs. the US

Inside China’s secret three-front war vs. the US

A Chinese paramilitary policeman stands guard on Tiananmen Square in Beijing Monday, March 4, 2013.

Sun

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China is waging political warfare against the United States as part of a strategy to drive the US military out of Asia and control seas near its coasts, according to a Pentagon-sponsored study. 
A defense contractor report produced for the Office of Net Assessment, the Pentagon’s think tank on future warfare, describes in detail China’s “Three Warfares” as psychological, media, and legal operations. 

They represent an asymmetric “military technology” that is a surrogate for conflict involving nuclear and conventional weapons. 

The unclassified 566-page report warns that the US government and the military lack effective tools for countering the non-kinetic warfare methods, and notes that US military academies do not teach future military leaders about the Chinese use of unconventional warfare. It urges greater efforts to understand the threat and adopt steps to counter it. 

The report highlights China’s use of the Three Warfares in various disputes, including dangerous encounters between US and Chinese warships; the crisis over the 2001 mid-air collision between a US EP-3E surveillance plane and a Chinese jet; and China’s growing aggressiveness in various maritime disputes in the South China and East China Seas. 

“The Three Warfares is a dynamic three dimensional war-fighting process that constitutes war by other means,” said Cambridge University professor Stefan Halper, who directed the study. “It is China’s weapon of choice in the South China Sea.” 

Seven other China specialists, including former Reagan Pentagon policymaker Michael Pillsbury, contributed to the study. A copy of the assessment was obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. Disclosure of the report is unusual as most studies produced for the Office of Net Assessment are withheld from public release. 

The May 2013 report was written before the dangerous near collision in the South China Sea last December between the guided missile cruiser USS Cowpens and a Chinese naval vessel. Senior defense officials said the incident could have led to a larger military “miscalculation” between the two nations. 

Chinese state media blamed the United States for the incident and asserted that it had declared a no-sail zone prior to the Dec. 5 encounter. The zone was imposed after that date. 

According to the final Pentagon report, China’s use of Three Warfares is based on the notion that the modern information age has rendered nuclear weapons unusable and conventional conflict too problematic for achieving political goals. China’s goals are to acquire resources, influence, and territory and to project national will. 

“China’s Three Warfares [are] designed to counter US power projection,” the report says. “The United States is one of four key audiences targeted by the campaign, as part of China’s broader military strategy of ‘anti-access/area denial’ in the South China Sea.” 

The Pentagon regards China’s high-technology arms, such as anti-satellite missiles and cyber warfare capabilities, as arms designed to prevent the US military from entering the region or operating freely there. 

The study concludes that in the decade ahead China will employ unconventional warfare techniques on issues ranging from the Senkaku Islands dispute in northeast Asia to the disputed Paracels in the South China Sea. 

For the United States, the Three Warfares seek to curtail US power projection in Asia that is needed to support allies, such as Japan and South Korea, and to assure freedom of navigation by attempting to set terms for allowing US access to the region.

The use of psychological, media, and legal attacks by China is part of an effort to raise “doubts about the legitimacy of the US presence.”

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The Vulnerability of China’s Left-Behind Children

By Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

Children sleep in a dormitory at a kindergarten, a school for children of migrant workers, on the outskirts of Beijing in November 2013.

 

Reuters

Among the many appeals made at China’s annual legislative sessions earlier this month was a call by political advisers for stronger efforts to protect children against sexual assault.

According to a study published just ahead of the meetings, Chinese authorities uncovered 125 cases of assault involving 419 victims in 2013. Sexual assault of minors is not a problem unique to China, of course, but experts quoted in local media pointed out that sexual predators in China benefit from having unusually vulnerable prey: left-behind children.

An estimated 61 million children live apart from their parents in China today, remaining in the countryside with grandparents while their mothers and fathers stream into cities and factories looking for work. Often left to their own devices, they are an easy target for attackers: Various studies indicate that a shockingly high percentage of assault cases involve left-behind girls—in the range of 90% in some areas of Guangdong province. But sexual predation is not the only problem that left-behind children face. Local and foreign news websites are littered with stories of left-behind children being kidnapped by human traffickers (in Chinese), dying in dumpsters and committing suicide.

Discussion of the plight of left-behind children hearkens back to an earlier era of widespread public concern about child welfare: the 1940s, when China was torn apart by war, first against the Japanese and later between Mao Zedong’s Communists and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists.

At the time, international child-advocacy workers estimated that the Anti-Japanese War (or World War II outside China) left approximately two million children without families. The civil war soon added to their numbers, and the streets of cities like Shanghai became clogged with vagrant children who overwhelmed orphanages and begged for handouts. Bitterly cold winters, disease outbreaks and starvation killed thousands of these youths. Benevolent societies picked up hundreds of corpses at a time from Shanghai’s sidewalks.

After Mao and the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949, they made addressing child-welfare problems a high priority. China’s new rulers launched immunization drives and improved midwifery services to lower child-mortality rates. They rounded up street children and placed them in orphanages to eliminate the population of homeless youngsters that had mushroomed during more than a decade of war. Children, like women, were a vulnerable group in pre-1949 China, and the Party derived some of its early legitimacy from achieving real improvements in the lives of the country’s youth.

When the issue of left-behind children comes up, however, the Chinese government cannot claim to be improving their lives. Instead, it is responsible for the biggest obstacle to family reunification—the hukou, or household-registration system, created in the late 1950s to control the flow of people during the Party’s early land-reform movement. Social benefits like subsidized health care and public schooling are linked to the hukou, and an individual can only access full benefits in the jurisdiction where his or her hukouis registered.

Since cities offer significantly better social services than the countryside does, most urban areas prevent an influx of peasant families by barring rural hukou-holders from transferring their registrations into the city.

Migrant parents leave their children behind not because they necessarily want to, but because their sons and daughters will not be able to attend most urban schools. Some smaller cities are relaxing hukou regulations and permitting migrants to become residents, but this is currently only happening on a limited basis. And as China’s vice minister of public security made clear this week, migrants have virtually no hope of becoming residents in the country’s biggest cities any time soon.

In other words, there’s little likelihood that the population of left-behind children will shrink much anytime in the near future.

Export-oriented manufacturing and urbanization, both encouraged by the government, have offered migrant workers the opportunity to earn far more than they would have in their rural hometowns. But if economic security comes at the cost of their children’s health and safety, some migrant parents might ask themselves if the trade-offs are too great.

Today’s left-behind children are becoming a population as vulnerable in some ways as the vagrant children of the late 1940s were. But while the Party worked to help those children as part of its social-welfare reforms in the early 1950s, the problems that left-behind youths suffer are inextricably linked to the hukou system that the Party put in place and continues to maintain.

Maura Elizabeth Cunningham is a historian and writer based in Shanghai. Follow her on Twitter @mauracunningham.

6:59 pm
Mar 28, 2014

ECONOMY & BUSINESS

China Will Dominate the World. Americans Need to Get Ready, Fed Official Says

A student embroiders a star on a huge Chinese flag. Reuters

This post originally appeared on Real Time Economics.

It won’t be long until the U.S. is eclipsed economically by China—and Americans need to start thinking about how to adjust to such a world.

That’s according to Federal Reserve Board of St. Louis President James Bullard, who spoke to the Wall Street Journal on the sidelines of a conference during a recent visit to Hong Kong.

“Attitudes in the U.S. are going to have to change, because the U.S. will not permanently be the global leader,” Mr. Bullard said.

China is already the largest economy in the world after the United States, and is growing much faster than the U.S. Not too far in the future — estimates range from as soon as 2016 to as “distant” as 2028 — it will surpass the American economy in size.

Most likely, China will eventually match the U.S. in per capita income terms as well. With a population about four times as large as America’s, that would imply a massive shift in the global balance of power.

In that case, “the U.S. would be playing a role to China similar to the role the U.K. plays to the U.S. today,” Mr. Bullard said. “People think it’s 50-75 years away but it’s probably only 25 or 20 years away, something like that.”

China’s economy currently is a little more than half the size of America’s, IMF data show, clocking in at $8.9 trillion in 2013 versus $16.7 trillion for the U.S.

But China’s economy is growing much more quickly, targeting growth of about 7.5% this year. In contrast, the U.S. economy will be lucky to grow by 3%.

Then there’s India, another economy of a billion-plus people that’s also growing quickly. Eventually, Mr. Bullard said, he can foresee a tri-polar world in which China and India are the major economic powers, counterbalanced by a bloc of the United States, Europe and Japan, whose populations together will total about one billion people.

“We’ve said the U.S. is a superpower, an economic superpower. But these are giants, they’re bigger than a superpower,” he said. “What would that world be like, both economically and politically? I think that’s really hard to understand. How much would the Western bloc be willing to cooperate politically to be a counterbalance to China and India?”

Mr. Bullard offered few specifics of what such a world would look like, but did acknowledge that it might require some adjustment on the part of ordinary Americans like those he serves in the heartland.

“The U.S. is just used to being so much bigger than all of its typical rivals, both in terms of population and in terms of GDP, that it can heavily influence policy on many dimensions — not only economic policy, regulatory policy, even stretching into politics and certainly military aspects. This really dictates the world we live in,” he said.

“A lot of people who’ve grown up with that, it’s been that way their whole life — they’re just not used to thinking about a world where you’re going to have to make more alliances, you’re not going to be the big kid on the block,” he said. “And the big kid on the block might not even be a democracy.”

Heavy stuff. On the (relatively) lighter side, Mr. Bullard said hearing the perspective of people on the other side of the world helps inform his work as a Fed official. This time, he said, he’s been hearing plenty of concern in Asia about potential asset bubbles – particularly in Hong Kong real estate – growing risks to China’s growth, and the potential for disruptions in global markets as the Fed tapers its bond purchases.

His own take? Tapering reflects an improved outlook for the U.S. economy, and hasn’t created the wild ructions in international markets that some feared.

“I think policy is actually in a pretty good place right now,” he said. “But I’ve learned in this business you can’t ever count on anything staying the same for more than a couple months at a time.”

– Michael Arnold

war,its coming!

only a handful of nations remain in the world that don't have a Vatican Controlled Central Bank operated by the Rothschild's.

Jackie Chan: Is No Friend Of The West..."America [s] is Most Corrupt [nation] In The World"

His loyalties need to be questioned. America has been fooled

Exclusive: China seizes $14.5 billion assets from family, associates of ex-security chief: sources

BY BENJAMIN KANG LIM AND BEN BLANCHARD

BEIJING Sun Mar 30, 2014 8:31am EDT

1 OF 2. China's Public Security Minister Zhou Yongkang reacts as he attends the Hebei delegation discussion sessions at the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China at the Great Hall of the People, in Beijing in this October 16, 2007 file photo.

CREDIT: REUTERS/JASON LEE/FILES

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(Reuters) - Chinese authorities have seized assets worth at least 90 billion yuan ($14.5 billion) from family members and associates of retired domestic security tsar Zhou Yongkang, who is at the centre of China's biggest corruption scandal in more than six decades, two sources said.

More than 300 of Zhou's relatives, political allies, proteges and staff have also been taken into custody or questioned in the past four months, the sources, who have been briefed on the investigation, told Reuters.

The sheer size of the asset seizures and the scale of the investigations into the people around Zhou - both unreported until now - make the corruption probe unprecedented in modernChina and would appear to show that President Xi Jinping is tackling graft at the highest levels.

But it may also be driven partly by political payback after Zhou angered leaders such as Xi by opposing the ouster of former high-flying politician Bo Xilai, who was jailed for life in September for corruption and abuse of power.

Zhou, 71, has been under virtual house arrest since authorities began formally investigating him late last year. He is the most senior Chinese politician to be ensnared in a corruption investigation since the Communist Party swept to power in 1949.

"It's the ugliest in the history of the New China," said one of the sources, who has ties to the leadership, requesting anonymity to avoid repercussions for speaking to the foreign media about elite politics.

The government has yet to make any official statement about Zhou or the case against him and it has not been possible to contact Zhou, his family, associates or staff for comment. It is not clear if any of them have lawyers.

The party's anti-corruption watchdog and the prosecutor's office did not respond to requests for comment. In the secretive world of China's Communist Party, targets of its investigations usually disappear, often for months or even years, until an official announcement is made.

Xi ordered a task force formed in late November or early December to look into accusations against Zhou, sources have previously told Reuters. They have not said what the allegations were except that they were related to violating party discipline, official jargon for corruption.

A third source with ties to the leadership said Zhou had refused to cooperate with investigators, insisting he was the victim of a power struggle.

"Zhou Yongkang is tough and claims its political persecution," the source said.

Zhou rose through the ranks of China's oil and gas sector before joining the elite Politburo Standing Committee in 2007, where as domestic security chief his budget exceeded defense spending. He retired in 2012 and was last seen at an alumni event at the China University of Petroleum on October 1.

BONDS, VILLAS, CARS, LIQUOR, GOLD

The first two sources said prosecutors and the party's anti-corruption watchdog had frozen bank accounts with deposits totaling 37 billion yuan and seized domestic and overseasbonds and stocks with a combined value of 51 billion yuan after raiding homes in Beijing, Shanghai and five provinces.

Investigators had also confiscated about 300 apartments and villas worth around 1.7 billion yuan, antiques and contemporary paintings with a market value of 1 billion yuan and more than 60 vehicles, the sources added. Other items seized included expensive liquor, gold, silver and cash in local and foreign currencies.

The seized assets belonged to those in custody, the sources said, without saying how many people in total had been detained compared to just questioned. Most of the assets were not in Zhou's name, they added.

According to the sources, the seized assets had a combined value of at least 90 billion yuan, although it was unclear what share of that total was ill-gotten and would be turned over to the state.

The amount eventually made public could be smaller to avoid embarrassing the party and angering ordinary Chinese, the sources said.

Such asset seizures, while large, are not uncommon in China, where excess has often been revealed from graft probes in recent years. In January, the respected Chinese magazine Caixin said authorities had seized a solid gold statue of Mao Zedong among other things from the mansion of a senior military officer who has been under investigation since he was sacked in 2012.

LONG LIST

The first two sources added that more than 10 of Zhou's relatives had been detained. They included Zhou's one-time television reporter wife Jia Xiaoye, his eldest son from a previous marriage Zhou Bin, Zhou Bin's in-laws and Zhou Yongkang's brother.

About 10 officials who held a rank equivalent to at least vice minister were also under investigation, the sources said.

Among them were Jiang Jiemin, former chairman of both state energy giant PetroChina and its parent China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), former Vice Minister of Public Security Li Dongsheng and Ji Wenlin, ex-vice governor of the southernmost island province of Hainan.

Chinese state media has announced that all three were being investigated for serious violations of discipline. They were either proteges or aides to Zhou.

Reuters has been unable to contact the three men. It's unclear if they have lawyers.

More than 20 of Zhou's bodyguards, secretaries and drivers had also been detained, the sources said. Many other family members and associates had been questioned.

THE BIGGEST TIGER?

Since becoming head of the party in late 2012 and then president a year ago, Xi has vowed to go after both powerful "tigers" and lowly "flies" in an effort to crack down on the corruption he says threatens the party's very existence.

But Xi is in a dilemma over whether to put Zhou on trial lest it further undermine public faith in the party, the three sources said, referring to the growing disillusionment in China over rampant graft and abuse of power.

Xi would also risk alienating other party elders who fear that they and their families could be next, political analysts say.

Putting someone as powerful as Zhou in the dock would be a political decision that only Xi could make after getting the consensus of senior party members, Xi's predecessors and other retired top officials, they say.

In ordering the investigation, Xi broke with an unwritten rule that incumbent and retired members of the Standing Committee were immune from prosecution.

As a member of the Standing Committee, the apex of power in China, and a former domestic security chief, Zhou would have intimate knowledge of the skeletons in the party's closet.

It is still unclear exactly why Zhou has been targeted, though an early sign that he might have overstepped was when he retired and the position of domestic security chief was dropped from the Standing Committee.

Sources have also said Zhou angered Xi and other leaders over Bo Xilai, whose career was ended in 2012 by a murder scandal in which his wife was eventually convicted of poisoning a British businessman who had been a family friend.

Before Bo's downfall, Zhou had recommended that Bo succeed him as domestic security chief, multiple sources with direct knowledge of the matter have said.

China-Philippines navy spat captured on camera

The Chinese crew instructed the Filipinos to turn away

Continue reading the main story

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Journalists on board a Philippine ship have witnessed Chinese coast guard vessels trying to block access to a disputed shoal in the South China Sea.

One of the Chinese ships radioed to demand the crew turn around, or "take full responsibility" for their actions.

But the Philippine boat, ferrying food to troops stationed on the Second Thomas Shoal, managed to slip past.

The shoal is one of many flashpoints in the area, where several countries have overlapping territorial claims.

Multiple claims

China claims a U-shaped swathe of the sea - creating multiple overlaps with areas claimed by the Philippines, Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia and Taiwan.

Saturday's incident, which took place at Second Thomas Shoal (known as Ayungin in Manila and Ren'ai Reef in Beijing), is a rare glimpse into the tensions that routinely play out in the disputed waters.

The Chinese crew instructed the Filipinos to turn away

Philippine crew members flashed peace signs at the Chinese vessel

The Philippine boat slipped past the Chinese and reached their troops on a rusty beached vessel

Journalists say they saw two Chinese coast guard ships attempt to block the path of the Philippine boat, sending a radio message, in English, warning that it was entering Chinese territory: "We order you to stop immediately, stop all illegal activities and leave."

But instead of leaving, the Philippine boat managed to manoeuvre away and enter waters that were too shallow for the Chinese ships to follow.

The captain of the Philippine vessel, Ferdinand Gato, later told Reuters news agency that if they had not changed direction, they would have collided with one of the Chinese vessels.

Air-drop

Philippine troops are stationed on a beached, rusting military ship on the shoal that analysts say has become a symbol of the country marking its territory.

Two weeks ago, Manila made a formal complaint to Beijing after a similar incident when Chinese vessels succeeded in blocking a resupply mission to the shoal.

These Philippine marines have been stationed aboard the BRP Sierra Madre for the last five months

Philippine planes resorted to air-dropping food and water supplies for the soldiers stationed on board the marooned ship.

The latest confrontation was witnessed by more than a dozen journalists.

They had been invited by the Philippine military to board the government vessel to show alleged bullying by Chinese vessels in the area.

The Chinese foreign ministry condemned the Philippines for trying to "hype up" the issue, according to a statement quoted by Xinhua news agency.

The ministry accused Manila of trying to "illegally seize" the shoal.

The incident comes a day before the Philippines is due to file a case against China with the UN tribunal in The Hague, challenging its territorial claim to most of the South China Sea.

the origins of mankind, Lemuria?

The Pacific Peoples, The Uighur, Northern China, Caucasians?

Earliest Chinese, Caucasians?

yes!

 

An amazing investigation into the identity of human mummies exhumed from desert sands of China´s Xinjian region. Some are as old as 4000 years , but all Caucasoid.

The Discovery Channel explores the mystery of the ancient mummies of the Xinjang region of China. Learn why these non-Chinese mummies -- some more than 4,000 years old -- are buried in the Chinese Takla Makan Desert and how they were preserved so well. DNA testing answers some of the mysteries of these blond- and red-haired people, some appearing to be European. What happened to their society? Witness the examination of remnants of their brittle clothing, including hats that resemble cone-shaped magician hats. 
In the late 1980's, perfectly preserved 3000-year-old mummies began appearing in a remote Taklamakan desert. They had long reddish-blond hair, European features and didn't appear to be the ancestors of modern-day Chinese people. Archaeologists now think they may have been the citizens of an ancient civilization that existed at the crossroads between China and Europe.

Victor Mair, a specialist in the ancient corpses and co-author of "Mummies of the Tarim Basin", said:"Modern DNA and ancient DNA show that Uighurs, Kazaks, Krygyzs, the peoples of Central Asia are all mixed Caucasian and East Asian. The modern and ancient DNA tell the same story."

The discoveries in the 1980s of the undisturbed 4,000-year-old "Beauty of Loulan" and the younger 3,000-year-old body of the "Charchan Man" are legendary in world archaeological circles for the fine state of their preservation and for the wealth of knowledge they bring to modern research. In the second millennium BC, the oldest mummies, like the Loulan Beauty, were the earliest settlers in the Tarim Basin. 
The first Tocharian Nordic mummy found in 1989: a White female with long blond hair, finely preserved by the arid desert atmosphere of the Taklamakan desert. Based on her partially dismembered limbs and gouged out eyes, archaeologists believe she was a sacrificial victim
Meanwhile, Yingpan Man, a nearly perfectly preserved 2,000-year-old Caucasoid mummy, discovered in 1995 in the region that bears his name, has been seen as the best preserved of all the undisturbed mummies that have so far been found.

Yingpan Man not only had a gold foil death mask -- a Greek tradition -- covering his blonde bearded face, but also wore elaborate golden embroidered red and maroon garments with seemingly Western European designs.

His nearly 2.00 meter (six-foot, six-inch) long body is the tallest of all the mummies found so far and the clothes and artifacts discovered in the surrounding tombs suggest the highest level of Caucasoid civilization in the ancient Tarim Basin region.
One of the most famous Tocharian mummies found, the so-called "Beauty of Loulan"; and right, her face as reconstructed by an artist.


"Beauty of Loulan" The oldest mummies found in the Tarim Basin come from Loulan located at the east end of the egg shaped Taklamakan Desert. Dressed only in shades of brown, she was alive as early as 2000 B.C. during the era of Abraham and the patriarchs. She died when she was about 40. Next to her head there is a basket which contains grains of wheat.
A Tocharian man with red-blond hair; his clear European features still visible after nearly 3,500 years in his desert grave in Taklamakan. This mummified man was approximately 40 years old at the time of his death. 
Cherchen_Man_and Family_China

Mair had encountered the Cherchen Man, one of dozens of 3000-year-old Caucasian mummies to have been unearthed in remote parts of the Tarim Basin in what is now the Xinjiang region of China. The fact that the remains of people of Indo-European origin could be found so far east flew in the face of received wisdom about the lack of cultural exchange between early European and Chinese populations. Equally amazing was the fact that the mummies had withstood the rigours of time so well.

Tiger Penis Soup

Businessmen Bribe Officials With Tiger Meat and Bones in China

By Lu Chen, Epoch Times and Cassie Ryan, Epoch Times | March 28, 2014

A dead tiger being butchered in China. (Screenshot/Sina News)

Half a dozen men are crowded into a small concrete room, standing around a helpless tiger trapped in a cage. A loud electrical generator is chugging away nearby. Then, one man grabs a wooden stake with a metal spike on the end, and rams it into the tiger’s mouth. The tiger is being electrocuted. Another man pours water over the tiger’s body, so the electric current spreads. In three minutes the beast is dead, and they start cutting it up for on sale.

The leaked video, shocking in its detail, spread across the Chinese Internet recently. A criminal gang that has captured and killed more than 10 tigers was also uncovered. Their key market? Businessmen who use tiger products—meat, and salves made from ground up bone—to bribe officials. 

Criminals Uncovered

The criminal gang that was broken up in Zhanjiang City, Guangdong Province, recently, had been in the business of killing tigers for around a decade. 

Along with a dead tiger, police seized a range of tiger products, stun guns, bullets, explosive-proof shields, and knives, at the group’s base in Leizhou, a part of the city of Zhanjiang. 

So far 15 suspects have been arrested, and one suspect, who was later confirmed to be the butcher, died after he jumped off a building while trying to escape police. 

The Tiger Trade

There is a range of tiger-related products available for those with the wealth and interest to indulge. Typically, officials reserve the tiger ahead of time. Then, to make sure that they are getting fresh product, they go along to watch it being killed. Watching the show has also become a symbol of status in business and political circles in the area—something to boast about to colleagues afterward. 

Once the tiger is dead, attendants can then purchase the products. These are favorites for cultivating relationships with Communist Party officials, according to Southern Daily, a newspaper in Guangzhou. 

Tiger slaughters have become a “party” for political and business elites, said Mr. Chen, an official, in an interview with Southern Daily. He describes the killings as a “visual feast,” and the extension of invitations a way to accumulate social capital. 

“Tiger products have a very good market. All parts are reserved by buyers even before the tigers are brought in,” the source said.

Tiger bone sells for around $1,000 per pound, while meat is worth around $80 per pound, according to the Southern Daily. Ground tiger bone can be used to make wine that is supposed to have medicinal value, according to traditional Chinese medicine.

Medicinal Value?

The trade and use of tiger products was banned in China in 1993, but continues illegally because it is highly profitable.

The tiger killed in the video, which was taken two years ago and only surfaced recently, was said by the authorities to be a Bengal tiger. There are no indications of where they come from, however, and how they are captured. One theory being circulated on the Internet said that they were hunted in and imported from Vietnam; another said the tigers were raised by people in the central regions of China.

“Tigers will be subject to slaughter as long as Chinese have faith in the medical value of tiger products, such as their bones or male genitalia, which are actually very controversial in terms of their efficacy,” said zoologist Xie Yan at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in an interview with state mouthpiece Global Times.

“Tigers are first class national protected animals in our country, and it’s illegal to raise tigers without a certificate. But many will raise them for profit and do underground business.”

Sophia Fang contributed research.