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China's Communist government is rolling out a plan to assign everyone in the country "citizenship scores." According to the ACLU, "China appears to be leveraging all the tools of the information age-electronic purchasing data, social networks, algorithmic sorting-to construct the ultimate tool of social control. It is, as one commentator put it, 'authoritarianism, gamified.' " In the system, everyone is measured by a score ranging from 350 to 950, and that score is linked to a national ID card. In addition to measuring your financial credit, it will also measure political compliance. Expressing the wrong opinion-or merely having friends who express the wrong opinion-will hurt your score. The higher your score, the more privileges the government will grant you.

This horrifying plan is to be administered by Alibaba and Tencent, companies that run much of China's approved social networks and already have tremendous stores of data about what Chinese citizens are saying. When it comes to weaponizing oppression, even the Communist Chinese now see the value of private enterprise. That's something to keep in mind when American politicians inevitably start agitating to enlist Apple or Google in launching some grand political initiative.

It's worth noting that at least one big American tech company is already a party to this oppressive nightmare. Yahoo still owns a hefty chunk-worth about $23 billion-of Alibaba stock. As The Weekly Standard's Mark Hemingway noted in "The Media Kowtow" (Nov. 11, 2013), a feature on how American media are complicit in covering up Chinese human rights abuses, Yahoo was allowed to purchase a big chunk of Alibaba way back in 2006, less than a year after it voluntarily coughed up the identity of a democracy activist who was anonymously using a Yahoo email address, at the Chinese government's request.

Journalist Shi Tao as a result was sentenced to 10 years in prison for leaking Chinese Propaganda Department directives showing that Beijing was suppressing attempts to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Yahoo may hope you believe that approval to purchase what turned out to be an extremely lucrative pre-IPO stake in Alibaba was in no way related to its willingness to help the Chinese government imprison Shi Tao for the crime of wanting to live in a free country. But no one believes that.

Yahoo has plans to spin off their Alibaba investment into a profitable holding company so they can avoid billions in taxes, but so far the IRS has dragged its feet approving the deal. It would be nice if the American government-to say nothing of Yahoo's investors and business partners-did something to demonstrate they care that the company is set to make billions profiting off Alibaba and its plans to reduce the financial prospects and political freedom of 1.3 billion people to a "citizen score" controlled by a murderous and oppressive regime.

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China's Communist government is rolling out a plan to assign everyone in the country "citizenship scores." According to the ACLU, "China appears to be leveraging all the tools of the information age-electronic purchasing data, social networks, algorithmic sorting-to construct the ultimate tool of social control.

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Mao barrow his philosophy from the american gang member Al capone

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The Chinese breach of the Office of Personnel Management network was wider than first acknowledged, and officials said Friday that a database holding sensitive security clearance information on millions of federal employees and contractors also was compromised.

In an announcement, OPM said that investigators concluded this week with "a high degree of confidence" that the agency's systems containing information related to the background investigations of "current, former and prospective" federal employees, and others for whom a background check was conducted, were breached.

OPM is assessing how many people were affected, spokesman Samuel Schumach said. "Once we have conclusive information about the breach, we will announce a notification plan for individuals whose information is determined to have been compromised," he said.

The announcement of the hack of the security-clearance database comes a week after OPM disclosed that another personnel system had been compromised. The discovery of the first breach led investigators to find the second - all part of one campaign by the Chinese, U.S. officials say, evidently to obtain information valuable to counterespionage.

"This is potentially devastating from a counterintelligence point of view," said Joel Brenner, a former top counterintelligence official for the U.S. government, speaking about the latest revelation. "These forums contain decades of personal information about people with clearances . . . which makes them easier to recruit for foreign espionage on behalf of a foreign country."

[How the Internet became so vulnerable]

Last week, OPM announced that a database containing the personal information of about 4 million current and former federal employees was hacked. Privately, U.S. officials said the Chinese government was behind the breach. The administration has not publicly pointed a finger at Beijing.

The breach of that data system affected 4.1 million individuals - all 2.1 million current federal civilian employees and 2 million retired or former employees. Information on officials as senior as Cabinet secretaries may have been breached. The president's and vice president's data were not, officials said.

China has dismissed the hacking allegations, with a Foreign Ministry spokesman last week calling them "irresponsible and unscientific."

The separate background-check database contains sensitive information - called SF-86 data - that includes applicants' financial histories and investment records, children's and relatives' names, foreign trips taken and contacts with foreign nationals, past residences, and names of neighbors and close friends.

[The career-spanning details that were hacked]

That database was also breached last year by the Chinese in a separate incident, and the new intrusion underscores how persistent and determined Beijing is in going after data valuable to counterespionage.

"The adversary is obviously very interested in that data," said a U.S. official, who, like several others who were interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation.

The discovery of the second compromise was not exactly a surprise. "It's like cancer," a second U.S. official said. "Once you start operating on the cancer, you find it has spread to other areas of the body."

Employees of intelligence agencies, such as the CIA, generally do not have the records of their clearance checks held by OPM, although some do, officials said.

"That's the open question - whether it's going to hit CIA folks," the second official said. "It would be a huge deal. They could start unmasking identities."

Matthew Olsen, a former National Security Agency general counsel and former head of the National Counterterrorism Center, said the breach is "truly significant." The data can be used in many different ways to target people, "whether it's blackmail, to recruit, to punish individuals in China who are connected to people in the United States."

In the past year or two, the Chinese government has begun building massive databases of Americans' personal information obtained through cyberespionage. Besides the series of OPM intrusions, a federal government contractor that conducted background investigations for OPM and the Department of Homeland Security was hacked last year by the Chinese. And Beijing has been linked to penetrations of several health insurance companies that hold personal data on tens of millions of Americans.

"Who can be surprised?" Brenner said. "They're making a concerted effort to gather vast quantities of information about Americans. This is perfectly clear. That they have all this clearance information is a disaster."

President Obama, as with previous high-profile breaches, has been briefed on the investigation. What steps, if any, the administration can or should take in response is a difficult discussion, current and former officials said.

"There are a whole array of things we need to do across the board, from raising our defenses to making sure that this stuff isn't actually on the criminal underground to understanding the full scope" of the breach, the first official said. "We haven't gotten there yet."

What complicates this case is that unlike many other Chinese breaches of U.S. networks, the OPM hacks do not involve theft of commercial secrets. Last year, the United States indicted five Chinese military officials on charges of commercial cyberespionage. With traditional espionage, the options are fewer.

"You're not going to start a shooting war over this," a former intelligence official said. "We need to improve our defenses. We also want to go on the offense."

Offensive actions might include directing a U.S. agency to locate the servers holding the stolen data and deleting or altering the data, the former official said.

The administration timed its announcement last week of the initial OPM breach to comply with its own policy, as reflected in proposed legislation, to notify individuals of a breach within 30 days of concluding that there is a "reasonable basis to believe" that personal information has been compromised, the first U.S. official said.

Although the breach was discovered in April, it was not until early May that investigators determined that employees' personal data probably was taken. That led to the announcement last week even though, the official said, the investigation was not complete.

During a briefing for congressional staff last week, Ann Barron-DiCamillo, a senior DHS official, tried to explain the delay in alerting employees to the breach. "It takes time to do the forensics and to understand what's happened, and even to understand what data, if any, has been exposed," she said, according to notes taken by a congressional aide.

The breach, she said, took place in December. "It took awhile to pinpoint what actually went out the door because it happened six months ago," she said.

Adam Goldman and Lisa Rein contributed to this report.

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Chinese hack of federal personnel files included security-clearance database

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The Chinese breach of the Office of Personnel Management network was wider than first acknowledged, and officials said Friday that a database holding sensitive security clearance information on millions of federal employees and contractors also was compromised.

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The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is an independent, nonpartisan member organization, think tank, and publisher.

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The red guards murdered 20 million people

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In 1966, a group of middle school students in Beijing named themselves "Chairman Mao's Red Guards." Mao's support for them led to the name "Red Guard" being adopted by groups who were sanctioned by Mao and his supporters to "rebel against the system" all over China.

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They're rehearsing the fireworks in preparation for the opening of the Beijing Olympics which debut later this week. But behind the scenes, complaints continue about the blocking of some Internet sites, and journalists are grappling with government restrictions - which would probably suit the late Mao Tse Tung just fine. Martha Teichner looks back on the legacy of Mao.

Call the Olympics China's coming-out party: The celebration of how far it's come and how fast, the Beijing skyline proof that Mao Tse Tung's determination to make China a superpower is coming to pass.

Thirty-two years after his death, if Mao miraculously woke up tomorrow, would he even recognize the capitalist colossus China has become? Would he recognize himself in the embalmed icon, the distant founding father figure, the Chinese Communist Party has cast him as in the new China?

It seems rewriting history where Mao is concerned is nothing new. He did it himself, big time.

You may have always believed the official line that Mao was the man who transformed China, a heroic leader, even if he did some bad things.

The real Mao, we discover, did horrendous things.

"Mao was responsible for well over 70 million deaths of the Chinese in peacetime, and he was as evil as Hitler or Stalin," said Jung Chang, "and he did as much damage to mankind as Hitler and Stalin."

She and her husband, historian Jon Halliday, are the authors of "Mao, The Unknown Story" (Random House), based on ten years of research.

"In China we interviewed about 150 of Mao's inner circle, in Mao's family, relatives, friends," Chang said, "and many people talked for the first time."

Even Chang and Halliday were shocked by what they learned:

"I did not realize how much of the misery and hardship he caused was done knowingly and so ruthlessly in terms of his own personal interests," Halliday said.

You've heard of the Long March? It changed history. In order to win their war against the ruling Nationalists, the Chinese Communists needed help from the Soviets. So between 1934 and '35, 80,000 Communist soldiers and civilians walked 6,000 miles across China, so they would be in a secure position to receive arms and supplies. Mao, supposedly the hero of the Long March, slogging along with everybody else, in fact, was carried.

"He even designed his own transport, a bamboo litter," Halliday said. "He said in his later life, 'I was lying in the litter. I had nothing to do. What did I do? I read, I read a lot.'"

Mao knew his political future depended on getting to the Russians first, so on the way he schemed to outmaneuver his party rivals, even though that meant the calculated sacrifice of the lives of thousands of Red Army soldiers.

"Whoever linked up with Moscow, had the communications with Moscow, and [was] recognized by Moscow as the party leader, would be the boss," Chang said.

"So at the end of the Long March, Mao is number one?" Teichner asked.

"Yes," Chang said.

"Well, Stalin I think spotted Mao as probably the guy in the Chinese Communist Party most like himself," Halliday said. "And of course Mao also like Stalin had long range vision. I mean, Mao could think strategically. He was very, very smart."

Ultimately he outsmarted Nationalist leader and U.S. ally, Chiang Kai Shek. Defeated, the Nationalists retreated to the island of Formosa, now called Taiwan, where they remain to this day.

On October 1, 1949, Mao declared himself leader of the renamed People's Republic of China. The crowd chanted "Long live Chairman Mao," unaware of the horrific suffering his ambition would bring, beginning with a campaign which, he claimed, was to modernize China. He named it "The Great Leap Forward."

"Thirty-eight million people died of starvation and overwork," Chang said. "And Mao didn't want to stop. He said for all his projects to take off, half of China may well have to die."

Imagine: half the population. And for what? In fact, it was to pay for the technology to build an atomic bomb. China eventually exploded one in 1964.

China's people starved, because Mao was selling what food they produced to Russia and Eastern Europe. Glowing reports to the outside world about agricultural and industrial production were propaganda.

"And when he was shown the report of, you know, food shortages, of peasants starving, Mao said, 'Educate the peasant to eat less,'" Chang said. "He even said, 'Death have benefit, they can fertilize the land.'"

It was China's president, Liu Shao-Chi, who finally stood up to Mao and rallied top Communist Party officials to put an end to the famine. But Liu and the others soon paid: The infamous Cultural Revolution was Mao's revenge.

Beginning in 1966, "It brought trauma, misery, torture, death, to hundreds of millions of people," Chang said.

We've heard the name "Cultural Revolution," but who even knew what it was? Mao didn't just purge the party of anybody who could vaguely be called "elite"; he literally stripped China of all culture. His Red Guards - violent vigilante student groups - pillaged homes, burned books and tortured party officials.

Jung Chang's family suffered, too. It is their story she tells in her hugely successful first book, "Wild Swans."

"My father was one of the few who stood up to Mao and opposed the Cultural Revolution," she told Teichner. "And as a result he was arrested, tortured, driven insane, and he was exiled to a camp and died very young."

Her parents (seen at left) had been conscientious Communists, but even her mother was imprisoned and denounced.

"She went through over a hundred of those denunciation meetings," Chang said, "and she was made to kneel on broken glass, and she was paraded in the streets where children spat at her and threw stones at her."

A child herself, Jung Chang was sent to a work camp, and never saw her grandmother again. She died in 1969.

While literally millions of families like Jung Chang's were enduring the agonies of the Cultural Revolution, Mao had himself photographed swimming. He wanted his enemies to know he was well and in charge. Mao loved to swim, but how's this for weird: He never bathed or brushed his teeth.

"Instead he would have his servants, his mistresses wiping him every day with a hot towel," Chang said. "He didn't like to wash his hair either, and he liked this slightly itchy feeling."

Mao was a serious womanizer, and he was famous for doing government business from his bed.

His rare public appearances were all about the cult of personality. The party faithful would wave the little red book, the collection of Mao quotations everyone in China was ordered to carry - and never to question.

"You know, we were told that socialist China was paradise on Earth," Chang said, "but if this is paradise, what then is hell?

"I blamed people around Mao, I blamed Madame Mao, but I could never contemplate Mao."

Madame Mao Jiang Xing (Mao's fourth wife) was his attack dog. She was one of the so-called Gang of Four, enforcers who ultimately took the heat. Within a month of Mao's death the Gang of Four were arrested and tried. Madame Mao committed suicide in prison.

Mao died in September 1976, after 27 years in power. The world struggled to process his impact.

Given China's secrecy, China watchers had little to go on.
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What did it mean that in 1972 and again in 1976, President Nixon went to Mao, not the other way around?

The Cultural Revolution ended with Mao's death, and in 1978 Jung Chang was allowed to go to Britain to study. She's lived there ever since.

She keeps with her one of the shoes her grandmother wore (on bound feet), the arm band Jung herself wore as a Red Guard, some Mao badges - a little history of 20th century China in objects.

"Mao left a tattered China," Chang said.

Teichner asked, "How do you explain the economic miracle that's transformed China?"

"The economic miracles happened because Mao died, and people had had enough of living under Mao's kind of rule," she said. "I mean, they wanted a good life."

Jung Chang is equally dismissive of claims that Mao liberated Chinese women.

"They became more equal in, you know, basically slave labor."

"If there's one criticism that has come to light in the book, is that there's such an unrelenting sort of attack on Mao," Teichner said.

"Well, one way to answer that would be to say 'No,'" Halliday said. "Should one be even-handed about Hitler, for example? I mean, Mao did what he did."

Mao has been conveniently repackaged. A generation of Chinese born after his death know only the revisionist version.

"Young people don't know that's the myth," Halliday said. "I mean, they think he is still the great hero."

"So the truth of Mao really isn't out in the open in China, even now, 30 years after his death?" Teichner asked.

"No, not at all," Chang said.

And may never be. "Mao, The Unknown Story" has been published in Chinese, but the book is banned in China.

Last week, Amnesty International released a report claiming that human rights violations in China have actually increased since Beijing was awarded the Olympics.

Repression may, in the end, be what remains of Mao's legacy.

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They're rehearsing the fireworks in preparation for the opening of the Beijing Olympics which debut later this week. But behind the scenes, complaints continue about the blocking of some Internet sites, and journalists are grappling with government restrictions - which would probably suit the late Mao Tse Tung just fine.

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Table of Contents

1. The Cultural Revolution Begins

2. Lin Biao's Role in the Cultural Revolution

3. Cultural Revolution Comes to an End

4. Long-Term Effects of the Cultural Revolution

The Cultural Revolution was launched in China in 1966 by Communist leader Mao Zedong in order to reassert his authority over the Chinese government. Believing that current Communist leaders were taking the party, and China itself, in the wrong direction, Mao called on the nation's youth to purge the "impure" elements of Chinese society and revive the revolutionary spirit that had led to victory in the civil war 20 years earlier and the formation of the People's Republic of China. The Cultural Revolution continued in various phases until Mao's death in 1976, and its tormented and violent legacy would resonate in Chinese politics and society for decades to come.

The Cultural Revolution Begins

In the 1960s, Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong came to feel that the current party leadership in China, as in the Soviet Union, was moving too far in a revisionist direction, with an emphasis on expertise rather than on ideological purity. Mao's own position in government had weakened after the failure of his " Great Leap Forward " (1958-60) and the economic crisis that followed. Chairman Mao Zedong gathered a group of radicals, including his wife Jiang Qing and defense minister Lin Biao, to help him attack current party leadership and reassert his authority.

Did you know? To encourage the personality cult that sprang up around Mao Zedong during the first phase of the Cultural Revolution, Defense Minister Lin Biao saw that the now-famous "Little Red Book" of Mao's quotations was printed and distributed by the millions throughout China.

Mao launched the so-called Cultural Revolution (known in full as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution) in August 1966, at a meeting of the Plenum of the Central Committee. He shut down the nation's schools, calling for a massive youth mobilization to take current party leaders to task for their embrace of bourgeois values and lack of revolutionary spirit. In the months that followed, the movement escalated quickly as the students formed paramilitary groups called the Red Guards and attacked and harassed members of China's elderly and intellectual population. A personality cult quickly sprang up around Mao, similar to that which existed for Josef Stalin, with different factions of the movement claiming the true interpretation of Maoist thought. The population was urged to rid itself of the "Four Olds": Old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas.

Lin Biao's Role in the Cultural Revolution

During this early phase of the Cultural Revolution (1966-68), President Liu Shaoqi and other Communist leaders were removed from power. (Beaten and imprisoned, Liu died in prison in 1969.) With different factions of the Red Guard movement battling for dominance, many Chinese cities reached the brink of anarchy by September 1967, when Mao had Lin send army troops in to restore order. The army soon forced many urban members of the Red Guards into rural areas, where the movement declined. Amid the chaos, the Chinese economy plummeted, with industrial production for 1968 dropping 12 percent below that of 1966.

In 1969, Lin was officially designated Mao's successor. He soon used the excuse of border clashes with Soviet troops to institute martial law. Disturbed by Lin's premature power grab, Mao began to maneuver against him with the help of Zhou Enlai, China's premier, splitting the ranks of power atop the Chinese government. In September 1971, Lin died in an airplane crash in Mongolia, apparently while attempting to escape to the Soviet Union. Members of his high military command were subsequently purged, and Zhou took over greater control of the government. Lin's brutal end led many Chinese citizens to feel disillusioned over the course of Mao's high-minded "revolution," which seemed to have dissolved in favor of ordinary power struggles.

Cultural Revolution Comes to an End

Zhou acted to stabilize China by reviving educational system and restoring numerous former officials to power. In 1972, however, Mao suffered a stroke; in the same year, Zhou learned he had cancer. The two leaders threw their support to Deng Xiaoping (who had been purged during the first phase of the Cultural Revolution), a development opposed by the more radical Jiang and her allies, who became known as the Gang of Four. In the next several years, Chinese politics teetered between the two sides. The radicals finally convinced Mao to purge Deng in April 1976, a few months after Zhou's death, but after Mao died that September, a civil, police and military coalition pushed the Gang of Four out. Deng regained power in 1977 and would maintain control over Chinese government for the next 20 years.

Long-Term Effects of the Cultural Revolution

Some 1.5 million people were killed during the Cultural Revolution, and millions of others suffered imprisonment, seizure of property, torture or general humiliation. The Cultural Revolution's short-term effects may have been felt mainly in China's cities, but its long-term effects would impact the entire country for decades to come. Mao's large-scale attack on the party and system he had created would eventually produce a result opposite to what he intended, leading many Chinese to lose faith in their government altogether.

Sources

China Transformed By Elimination of 'Four Olds.' New York Times.

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Cultural Revolution - Definition, Effects & Mao Zedong

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In 1966, China's Communist leader Mao Zedong launched what became known as the Cultural Revolution in order to reassert his authority over the Chinese government. The Cultural Revolution and its tormented and violent legacy would resonate in Chinese politics and society for decades to come.

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a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.

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Xi Jinping