China said yesterday its mobile phone carriers can use Google’s Android operating system so long as it complies with regulations, apparently trying to limit damage to Chinese industry from their dispute over Internet censorship.
Google Inc’s Jan. 12 announcement that it would no longer censor search results in China prompted concern about possible commercial fallout. The company postponed the launch of its own smartphone in China but others are developing Android-based phones and could be hurt if Beijing tries to penalize Google by barring its use.
“As long as it fulfills Chinese laws and regulations and has good communication with telecom operators, I think its application should not have restrictions,” Zhu Hongren (朱宏任), a spokesman for the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said at a regular news briefing when asked whether Beijing would permit use of Android.
The comments reflect the conflicting pressures on the government, which insists on controlling information but needs foreign companies like Google to help achieve its goal of making China a technology leader.
Google is in sensitive talks with the government, trying to keep an important Beijing development center, a lucrative advertising sales team and access to China’s booming market for its fledgling mobile phone business.
A Google spokesman, Jessica Powell, declined yesterday to comment on the status of talks or confirm whether top managers from the company’s Mountain View, California, headquarters were in Beijing.
Zhu gave no indication of the possible fate of Google’s own phone, planned with local carrier China Unicom Ltd (中國聯通).
State-owned China Mobile Ltd (中國移動), the world’s biggest phone company by subscribers, is developing its own smartphone, the OPhone, which uses a system that has Android as its foundation.
Dell Inc, Motorola Inc and Samsung Electronics Corp also plan to sell Android-based phones in China.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
WHAT WAS ALL THAT FOR? Jaw Shaw-kong said that Cheng Li-wen had pushed for more drastic cuts and attacked him, just for the outcome to be nearly identical to his bill The legislature yesterday passed a supplementary budget bill to fund the purchase of separate packages of US military equipment, with the combined amount of spending capped at NT$780 billion (US$24.8 billion). The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) used their legislative majority to pass the bill, which runs until 2033 and has two main funding provisions. One was for NT$300 billion of arms sales already approved by the US for Taiwan on Dec. 17 last year, the other was for NT$480 billion for another arms package expected to be announced by Washington. The bill, which fell short of the NT$1.25
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
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