October 19, 2007: Taiwan apparently has some of its new Hsiung Feng IIE cruise missiles in service, and aimed at Chinese targets. This has alarmed the Pro-Communist Nationalist party (which used to control Taiwan, and represents descendents of Chinese who came to Taiwan in 1948, and took over, after being defeated in a civil war with the communists). So the Nationalists, who still have the support of ethnic Chinese in Taiwan, as well as those who prefer to placate, rather than confront, the Chinese government, have blocked efforts to build another 245 of the missiles (costing about $4.1 million each.) China knows that a military attempt to take over Taiwan could have catastrophic economic and political impact on them (because of interrupted trade and lots of suddenly unemployed, and unhappy, Chinese). So getting chummy with the Nationalist Party in Taiwan presents an opportunity to take over Taiwan without a battle. This, throughout Chinese history, has been the preferred way to do things.

October 16, 2007: The government has continued to add restrictions to Internet access to sites outside China. While there are ways around this, and millions of savvy Chinese take advantage of these technologies, most Chinese Internet users are not adept enough to understand the workarounds. News still gets circulated, but government efforts have slowed down the flow of unfavorable (to the government) items. Internet censorship within the China continues, with efforts aimed to terrorize Chinese Internet users as much as possible. Regularly, Internet users who are caught spreading "forbidden" (embarrassing to the government) information on the net, are arrested and sent to prison. This is given wide publicity, just so everyone knows how things work in China.

Meanwhile, the military's Cyber War efforts continue to grow. The Indian armed forces recently discovered that their email system had been hacked into, and were able to determine the location of the hackers. It was inside China.

October 14, 2007: The Chinese Communist Party is meeting to select new leaders. While the official line is that there will never be democracy in China, the insider talk is that the party is in the midst of a battle between unpopular (among the public) corrupt officials, and much less corrupt reformers who are more open the elections.

October 6, 2007: China and Russia signed organized a treaty of cooperation between the CSTO (Collective Security Treaty Organization) and the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization). This joins Russia, China, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Belarus. In other words, most of the components of the former Soviet Union, plus China are now joined in a military cooperation (although not mutual defense) treaty.