Last week, U.S. web hosting company Name.com received an email ordering them to stop unregister the domain of Boxun, a Chinese news portal run out of North Carolina. Boxun, which has the same retro, link-heavy feel as Craigslist or Drudge Report, serves as a clearinghouse of the rumor and intrigue circulating the web about Chinese elite politics. "We have our sources," says Watson Meng, a Duke University graduate from China who founded the website in 2000 and still runs it, supervising the editing and posting of an average of more than ten articles daily.

Since former police chief Wang Lijun fled to a U.S. Consulate in Chengdu in February, precipitating the downfall of Politburo rising star Bo Xilai and China's biggest political scandal in decades, Meng's site has published and reposted stories about Bo's wife's links to the Tiananmen square massacre, a text message Bo's brother apparently sent last week that said Bo Xilai's case had been "settled," and reports that the Bo case has finally given President Hu Jintao control over the military. "We got the eavesdropping story weeks ago," he said, referring to recent reports that Bo had spied on other leaders. Many of Boxun's stories appear to be true; others feature what could best be called speculation supported by anonymous sources. Still, it's been an exceptional three months for the website, which has seen its traffic increase by 160 percent.

A source familiar with the matter forwarded me the original English-language email Name.com received: "Hello, due to a domain name of your platform: "boxun.com", serious damage to the interests of my company, now we hope you stop any services for this domain immediately...Please pay attention, we would began to attack in a few hours except satisfying our conditions. Please treasure your own commercial interests, if for any loss caused to you, please forgive!!!" [ellipsis mine, spelling and grammar same as in the original.]  

After the email, Meng says Name.com was hit by a ferocious denial-of-service attack of "ten gigabytes" a second and Boxun found a new server. Name.com did not respond to a request for comment, and Meng didn't say where the email was sent from.

By his counting, Meng's website has been attacked dozens of times. Last January, with the Arab Spring gaining steam in the Middle East, Meng posted calls for a "Jasmine Revolution" in China from an anonymous group. Pro-Communist Party groups "were pretty hardcore about this," he said. "They put my family's names online. That was the first time that happened." Meng grew up in a small county in rural Hebei province in the 1960s and 1970s, where his parents still live. During the Cultural Revolution, many urban youth were sent to villages across China. I asked if that was the case with him and he replied, "nope, we were always peasants." His father was a local functionary on the county's science committee; his mother was a farmer. His family on the whole is supportive of his actions and he's not worried about them. "The Cultural Revolution has already passed," he said. "There are not too many illegal things people can do to my family."

Meng thinks this web attack was specifically ordered by Zhou Yongkang, the ninth ranking member of the Politburo Standing Committee and ideological ally of Bo. Meng describes him as a "very strong person who runs the PSB, state security, or, well, don't know if he runs anything anymore," though he thinks Zhou will keep his position until the next Party Congress this fall. In earlier Boxun posts, Meng has speculated that Bo and Zhou had been working together to overthrow Xi Jinping. "We believe Wang Lijun already told the U.S. Consulate that Bo Xilai had a plot to stop Xi Jinping's rise" he said, citing "reliable sources."

Since Chinese official news outlets usually function as mouthpieces of the Communist Party, rather than trustworthy providers of fact or clearly sourced opinion, Chinese readers are comparatively more trusting of Weibo (microblogs), rumors, and sites like Boxun. Wang is currently looking into a 2002 crash of a flight from Beijing to Dalian, in which more than 100 people died. He thinks Bo orchestrated the crash to kill the wife of a political rival, who was carrying evidence that could have been harmful for the former powerbroker. "He's done so many things to cover up this or cover up that," Wang said. He declined to elaborate on what proof he has for his latest claim and the scenario seems somewhat farfetched, but, like all of Boxun's stories, it falls within the realm of possibility.  

Gary Shteyngart, the Russian-American novelist whose books Absurdistan and The Russian Debutante's Handbook enliven the farcical edges of living in a totalitarian society, returned recently from a two week reporting trip to China, the cruel and prosperous land of the future. "We suck," Shteyngart said over the phone. "The saddest flight in the world is Beijing Capital to Newark." FP interviewed Shteyngart about Jews in China, how to build a successful business, and the world outside Brooklyn, edited and condensed for clarity.  

Foreign Policy: Did you tell people you were Jewish in China?

Gary Shteyngart: I did. They said ‘why are Jews so sad and anxious? Why can't you cheer up?' What I said to that, was, you know, the Holocaust. They said we were kind of similar that way. I don't know what happened [to the Chinese] exactly, I read about it on Wikipedia.

FP: You mentioned in a tweet that you started your own boutique investment firm in Shanghai but it failed after five hours. What did you get from it?

GS: A lot of dignity. You can't really monetize dignity.

FP: What did you talk to the Chinese about?

GS: A lot of people in the United States want to be Chinese. A lot of the Chinese want to be writers. They're adorable. I told them not to do it. It's so sweet -- I was talking to one young lady, she was so touched that I would speak to her. Kind of a rough and tumble society, China. We gentle Jewish professors of creative writing are just incredible to them.

FP: What did you feel after you came back from China?

GS: The saddest flight in the world is Beijing to Newark. Beijing is Charles De Gaulle, Newark is Burkina Faso.  I'd feel better if America looked great -- but we don't. We've been working too hard, we need to retire now and let someone else do it. It's not easy. The pollution in China. I'm still coughing up some weird petro-chemical things out of my lung (and I've been back for ten days). My whole cardio-vascular thing is so affected.

FP: What did you perform at Racist Park [a Chinese theme park that shows all of the minorities living together in harmony, now known in English as China Ethnic Culture Park]?

GS: I did the ol' Fiddler in the Roof. I was the third daughter, the one who married a goy. Fiddler on the Smokestack.

FP: What about Shanghai?

GS: I went to Pudong and saw that they're building the (world's) tallest building there. It's going to be taller than the other buildings.

We went to a steampunk club, called #88; [people were wearing] all sorts of Victorian corsets -- I guess some people had the leisure time to look appropriate. The world is so fascinating, I'm telling you -- this is what I tell young writers: Get out of Brooklyn.  

Oh, and I drank this horrifying thing. If there is one of thing chaining civilization back, its baijiu. You're burping sorghum for the rest of your life. There's no cure for baijiu.

FP: What do you recommend a young writer do in China?

GS: I'd start in the financial side -- young guy or girl, just out of Princeton, gets involved in some sort of private equity thing, learns about the corruption, and at the same time learn about the Asian work ethic. That's amazing that there hasn't been a great expatriate novel; it seems like half of the Ivy League is holed up in Shanghai.

FP: What about for the Williams environmental science grad?

GS: Well, they can go teach English. English teaching is sad, because everyone does it; it's the last resort. Or you could do NGO work. I met some NGO people, they were cute.

Writers, though. You have a lot of power as a writer here; anything with an embossed business card gives you face.

FP: Did you hand out copies of an embossed business card in China?

GS: No, I brought 800 copies of my book to give out to China, and handed them out with two hands to people all across the country, cab drivers...

FP: What did cab drivers think of your book?

GS: The cab drivers loved that it has both postmodern and traditional aspects.

FP: Best business idea in China that would last for more than five hours?

GS: We could have Communist Party youth league people collect used wire, and use this used wire in the penal system to flog people, or just to poke people with the wire. It's green. [environmentally friendly]. It's a good way to get in on China's growing penal system.

Last week, controversial politician Bo Xilai, whose relatively open campaigning for a seat on China's top ruling council shocked China watchers (and possibly his elite peers, as well), was removed from his post as Chongqing's party secretary. He hasn't been seen since. Rumors of a coup, possibly coordinated by Bo's apparent ally Zhou Yongkang, are in the air.

Western media has extensively covered the political turmoil: Bloomberg reported on how coup rumors helped spark a jump in credit-default swaps for Chinese government bonds; the Wall Street Journal opinion page called Chinese leadership transitions an "invitation, sooner or later, for tanks in the streets." The Financial Times saw the removal of Bo, combined with Premier Wen Jiabao's strident remarks at a press conference hours before Bo's removal as a sign the party was moving to liberalize its stance on the Tiananmen square protests of 1989. That Bo staged a coup is extremely unlikely, but until more information comes to light, we can only speculate on what happened.

Reading official Chinese media response about Bo makes it easy to forget how much Chinese care about politics. The one sentence mention in Xinhua, China's official news agency, merely says that Bo is gone and another official, Zhang Dejiang, is replacing him.  But the Chinese-language Internet is aflame with debate over what happened to Bo and what it means for Chinese political stability.

Mainland media sites have begun to strongly censor discussion of Bo Xilai and entirely unsubstantiated rumors of gunfire in downtown Beijing (an extremely rare occurance in Beijing). Chinese websites hosted overseas, free from censorship, offer a host of unsupported, un-provable commentary on what might have happened in the halls of power. Bannedbook.org, which provides free downloads of "illegal" Chinese books, posted a long explanation of tremors in the palace of Zhongnanhai, sourced to a "person with access to high level information in Beijing," of a power struggle between President Hu Jintao, who controls the military, and Zhou, who controls China's formidable domestic security apparatus. The Epoch Times, a news site affiliated with the Falun Gong spiritual movement (which banned in China), has published extensively in English and Chinese about the coup.

Speculation is rife: A Canadian Chinese news portal quoted Deutsche Welle quoting the Hong Kong newspaper Apple Daily quoting a netizen that a group of citizens unfurled a banner in a main square in Chongqing that said "Party Secretary Bo, We Love and Esteem You," and were subsequently taken away by plain-clothes security forces. A controversial Peking University professor Kong Qingdong, a 73rd generation descendant of Confucius, said on his television show that removing Bo Xilai is similar to  "a counter-revolutionary coup;" one news site reported his show has since been suspended.

The Wall Street Journal reports that searching for Bo Xilai's name on Baidu, China's most popular search engine, lacks the standard censorship boilerplate ("according to relevant rules and regulations, a portion of the search results cannot be revealed") that accompanies searching for top leaders like Wen Jiabao and Hu Jintao. A recent search for other Politburo members like Bo rival Wang Yang and People's Liberation Army top general Xu Caihou were similarly uncensored. Conversely, searching for Bo's name on Sina's popular Weibo micro-blogging service now doesn't return any relevant results. A censored fatal Ferrari crash on Sunday  night has raised suspicions of elite foul play, possibly realted to Bo. The bannedbook.org reports that Hu and Zhou "are currently fighting for control of China Central Television, Xinhua News (the official Communist Party wire service), and other ‘mouthpieces,'" which have been eerily but unsurprisingly taciturn about Bo Xilai.   

What we do know, as one message that bounced around Sina Weibo said, is that "something big happened in Beijing."

The agreement announced yesterday between the United States and North Korea has been greeted with both cheers and jeers. Optimists see this latest development as a small, necessary first step on the path toward a Korean peninsula free of nuclear weapons -- and this, for a relatively modest amount of aid. Pessimists see it as just more of the same -- yet another ploy by a corrupt, failed and cynical North Korean leadership making meaningless commitments in exchange for badly needed food.

Here is a guest post from Philip Yun, executive director of the Ploughshares Fund and a former advisor to the State Department during talks with North Korea from 1998-2001. Yun sees the significance of the agreement in the surprisingly number of differences in the statements issued by the United States and the DPRK.

Normally, the U.S. State Department announcement and the DPRK Foreign Ministry statement should be almost the same, as language and details are typically coordinated before final announcements are made. The two documents' striking discrepancies and omissions in significant places making me wonder if a "meeting of the minds" actually took place: 

"While productive dialogues continue." The DPRK agreed to a moratorium on nuclear tests, long-range missile activity, and uranium enrichment activity at their main reactor site in Yongbyon, as well as IAEA monitoring of uranium enrichment activities "while productive dialogues continue."  The U.S. statement makes no mention of this qualifier.  Did North Korea just add this unilaterally? 

No starting date. The three moratoriums are potentially significant because they concretely limit North Korea's ability (for as long as the moratorium is in place) to produce more fissile material, improve its weapons design through miniaturization and refine its weapons delivery systems. In exchange, the United States agreed to provide 240,000 metric tons of nutritional biscuits.  But when do the moratoriums take place?   And how will the food be delivered and under what conditions?  The U.S. statement specifically refers to "intensive monitoring" of this aid, but the DPRK statement bears no mention of such monitoring.

What about the other facilities? Many experts believe that North Korea has uranium enrichment facilities in other locales, but an initial reading of the statements appears to apply the moratorium to Yongbyon only. Were there any understandings for other locations?  If limited to Yongbyon (which is start, but access to other sites inevitably remains a major issue for both the United States and the North), when will the IAEA go to Yongbyon and under what conditions?

What about that light water reactor? The DPRK statement raises the issue of light water reactors (LWRs).  The State Department's version doesn't mention LWRs. The DRPK has been persistent through the years about its demand and right to have an operational LWR, which the United States since 2003 has resisted or ignored -- LWRs were central to the U.S.-DPRK nuclear deal of 1994 and a significant sticking point in negotiations of September 2005 Joint Statement. Does this new agreement require North Korea to stop its ongoing construction of a light water reactor at Yongbyon, which according to the North, is for the production of electricity?  Last year at Fukushima we saw what can happen to a nuclear plant built with the best materials and to the highest standards. Yongbyon is being constructed with far lower standards: a similar disaster would be dire.

Will there be a peace treaty?  Both statements contain a reference to the 1953 Armistice Agreement.  The State Department and DPRK versions both say that they recognized the Armistice as "the cornerstone of peace and stability;" but the DPRK added, "until the conclusion of a peace treaty."  The subject of a peace treaty and its impact has posed a whole series of long-standing issues military, legal and otherwise. This difference just adds to the overall need to clarify what exactly was agreed to between the United States and the DPRK.

This latest news could be a very good sign that North Korea's leadership is willing to make commitments.  So long as China continues to shield North Korea as it has, a concerted, sustained and focused diplomatic push with North Korea appears to be the only way to move forward. Having IAEA inspectors on the ground in North Korea would especially be extremely useful -- rather than speculating about North Korean activity and relying on rumor, we would have something more concrete to consider.   However, if progress is to be made, we have to avoid unpleasant surprises. The U.S. must figure out a way to patch the holes that still seem to exist between the two negotiating parties or this latest development may once again set expectations too high. In short, the devil is in the details - and we had better find out quickly what they are.  

As pundits debate whether or not Xi Jinping will follow in the footsteps of current President Hu Jintao, we at FP would like to point out something he does share with his predecessor: a dangerously enticing name for Anglophone headline writers to abuse.  

Xi, visiting the United States this week, will likely be appointed this fall as China's next President. Journalists, let us be the first to sound the warning: avoid the temptation (that we have already succumbed to several times) of a Xi headline pun! 

From the FP editorial staff, here's a list of ten Xi headlines NOT to use:

1. Territorial disputes in the South China Sea: "Xi's Gotta Have It."

2. A profile of his teenage years: "Xi was only 16."

3. His second visit to Iowa: "There Xi Goes Again."

4. His portrayal in Chinese state media: "Isn't Xi Lovely?" (Or "Xi Will Be Loved.")

5. A Chinese Gorbachev: "Xi Change."

6. Bizarre policy choices: "Xi Moves in Mysterious Ways."

7. A definitive chronicle of his speeches: "That's What Xi Said."

8. His meeting with Henry Kissinger: "The Old Man and the Xi."

9. On a conflict with the current head of the disciplinary committee: "He Said Xi Said."

10. His stylish sartorial choices: "Ain't Nothing But a Xi Thing."

This is by no means a comprehensive list. Please let us know any suggestions you have for other Xi headlines that should be banned- either write them in the comments section or send them to me via twitter: @isaacstonefish. Whoever comes up with the worst Xi headline pun will win a free copy of the book "Becoming China's Bitch."  

Update: After careful consideration, we at FP have decided that the worst headline pun imaginable is China announces new high speed train line: "Xi's Got a Ticket to Ride." Thanks to twitter user @james_s_evans  for his submission! Honorable mention to @christophercherry for his China Daily all-purpose headline: "Every Little Thing Xi Does is Magic." We look forward to future contests if Shanghai Party Secretary Yu, Standing Committee Member He, or Director of the United Front Work Department Du become trending topics. 

Adam Johnson, a professor of creative writing at Stanford University, tried to create an account of the mental life of the citizens of Pyongyang with his new novel, The Orphan Master's Son. It is the story of the many vicissitudes of a North Korean everyman, Pak Jun Do: raised as an orphan, he enters the army, joins a special forces team to kidnap Japanese, learns English, and gets sent to a gulag, from which he mysteriously emerges as a high-ranking official.  

Two months into the reign of Kim Jong Un, North Korea remains impenetrable. "I'd much rather trade my story for a North Korean telling his own story," said Johnson. "We won't know if my version is right until North Koreans are able to tell their own stories."

What follows is an interview with Johnson about the gulags, fictions, and lacunas of North Korea, edited and condensed for clarity:

"In the stories we tell ourselves in the West, we expect to be the central character in our own narrative; we are a society of individuals and no matter how much we love others, they're secondary characters. The DPRK is exactly the opposite. There's one national narrative, tailored and maintained by script writers and censors. In a totalitarian world that script writer is responsible for everything that happened.

If you're a secondary character in North Korea, your aptitude for certain things and your class background sends you down paths, maybe to be a doctor, or a peasant farmer, or a soldier, or a music player. Your own wants and desires are only going to get in the way of the role you've been given and that you have to play if you're going to survive.

We have pretty clear information about citizens outside of the capital. We know how much food they eat, how much they ‘volunteer,' how much propaganda they consume; we have a portrait of the average person. Pyongyang is the mystery. Residents of Pyongyang tend not to defect because they're the top 3-4 percent of the nation.  If you're in Pyongyang you've made it. These people are the unknowns.

It makes me dubious about people claiming to be experts there. Maybe they're getting briefings-but what we have publically is testimonies from defectors that are completely unverifiable.

Put your phones and personal electronics away in North Korea, or risk a messy ending.  The Telegraph reported this morning that cell phone users in North Korea will be deemed "war criminals," as part of the new rules being implemented for the 100 days of mourning following former North Korean leader Kim Jong Il's death.

Of course, it's easy to see why the regime is becoming so antsy about cell phone usage. The Arab Spring protests were energized by Twitter and Facebook via cell phones, and other mass movements including the Occupy protests were spread through this medium as well. But the more pertinent question is, how effective will this crackdown actually be?

As Peter Beck wrote in 2010, there were over 300,000 cell phone users in North Korea, all on a network developed by Egyptian telecommunications firm Orascom. Reuters reported last November that the number has since grown to nearly a million people on the 3G capable network. Analysts at the time said that the network posed little of a threat to the regime, mainly because officials had controlled outside information so tightly.  Additionally, severe limitations on the internet restrict access to any domain except a handful of historical sites that are accessible to a select few people.  However, as the Nautilus Institute's Alexandre Mansourov said in a report, "The DPRK mobile communications industry has crossed the Rubicon and the North Korean government can no longer roll it back without paying a severe political price."

Of course, its not to say that the North Koreans won't try their hardest to ban the technology. They did it in 2004 following the explosion of a passenger train, which officials suspected was due to a bomb controlled via a cell phone. To the regime's chagrin, cell phone usage continued to grow in the expanding North Korean black market, with relay stations set up on the Chinese border that connected North Koreans with their counterparts in the South.

Earlier this evening eight police raided the home of prominent Chinese dissident Hu Jia, confiscated two computers, and told him to report to a police station for further questioning on Thursday, in a move that potentially presages a further crackdown towards rights activists in China.

A skinny firebrand, Hu made his name fighting for better treatment of AIDS patients. Like the better known international artist and provocateur Ai Weiwei, Hu made a point of using the law to fight the system, even if his adversaries didn't always operate legally. In a 2006 interview with Radio Free Asia, after describing being detained for 41 days, accused of nebulous crimes and warned that "more misfortune would come upon me if I continued to take part in those activities," Hu said: 

I am going to sue the Beijing Public Security Bureau, because they have become more and more reckless in violating human rights, which not only has brought misfortune to my family, but also to many other families. In order to put restraint on them, to awaken them, and to make them repent, I must use the law as my weapon...

Arrested in 2007 and charged with the menacingly broad crime of "inciting subversion of state power," Hu spent three years in prison, before being released in June of 2011, four days after Ai emerged from his 81 day detention.  Ai kept agitating, in November offering supporters the chance to help pay a tax bill from the government that he claimed was politically motivated. Hu remained active on Twitter, but mostly kept quiet. 

Beijing remains in the thralls of what one journalist called The Big Chill, a crackdown on activists, human rights lawyers, and bloggers. While things have been relatively quiet over the past few months, Hu's treatment might be the start of a new wave of seasonal arrests and detentions related to the political transition slated for later this year, when Xi Jinping, barring any major changes, will be announced as the new Chairman of the Communist Party. Like the Olympics were China's coming out party, the 2012 National Congress in China is Xi’s debut; he would prefer that Hu and others didn’t spoil it with their simmering voices of discontent.   

In preparation for secretive Kim Jong Il's state funeral, planned for an unknown time today (we told you he was secretive!) we asked Chad O'Carroll, Director of Communications at the Korea Economic Institute, to explain the simularities between this procession and that of Kim's father.

Later today anyone who's anyone in Pyongyang will turn out for the funeral of Kim Jong Il. While Kim's death may have been unexpected, his mourning and burial process seems to be almost identical to that of his father sixteen years ago.

Both Kims underwent an initial mourning period of ten days at Kumsusan Memorial Palace.   Overseeing the mourning, like his father, Kim Jong Un has been wearing almost identical clothing to his own father at Kim Il Sung's funeral  - a dark grey Mao jacket.  Four days after Kim Jong Il's death, the Korean Central News Agency reported that North Korea's successor was distributing food and drink at mourning stations throughout the country, just as his father did sixteen years prior. And KCNA released almost matching coroner's reports within hours of reporting the deaths.  In 1994 and 2011, causes of death were similarly reported as "acute myocardial infarction", following "heavy mental strains" in Kim seniors' case, complemented by "a great ... physical strain" in Kim juniors' case.  The goal: to show the deaths had been brought on by the toil of working to bring about improvement for the North Korean people. 

Fast-forward a day or two past death, and reports in both cases emerged of natural wonders occurring throughout the country.  In Kim Il Sung's case, violent storms at North Korea's legendary Mount Paekdu and "rivers that were crying because of the sorrow".  For Kim Jong Il, news of similar "natural wonders" included a series of "blue flashes accompanied by thunder", unseasonal snowfall, and most recently, willows sprouting out of season in revolutionary sites.  Will the funeral of Kim Jong Il follow the same formula as that of Kim Il Sung, complete with glass coffin, motorcade, and the world's largest display of uncontrollable grief? Stay tuned.

South Korea has a problem: Energy demand is outpacing energy supply, and the country could face debilitating electricity shortages this winter (a surge in consumption during an unseasonably hot September already caused widespread blackouts). But, fortunately, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, who's already constructed additional power plants and imposed new power-saving regulations, has an unorthodox, deeply personal solution. In a radio address on Monday, Lee informed South Koreans that he has taken to wearing thermal underwear after lowering the thermostat in his office.

"Naturally, I had to wear warmer underwear which was uncomfortable initially," Lee explained, according to the Yonhap News Agency. "But after a while, I got used to it, and now I am very warm and comfortable wearing it." Having resolved any outstanding confusion over the comfort of his underwear, Lee issued a challenge to South Koreans:

We can save energy beyond our expectations if we lower the temperature in houses and offices a little, turn off unnecessary lights during the night and use high-efficiency electric appliances. I urge businesses, civic organizations and the general public to participate in this campaign voluntarily.

Lee may be thinking outside the box, but he has an intellectual forebear. In 1977, a cardigan-clad Jimmy Carter informed Americans that if they would only keep their thermostats at "65 degrees in the daytime and 55 degrees at night," America "could save half the current shortage of natural gas." Carter, who would later install solar panels on the White House roof, was trying to develop a national energy policy in the wake of an exceptionally cold winter that had depleted supplies of oil and natural gas.

But the exercise in lead-by-example, micromanaged energy conservation fueled ridicule more than anything else. In 2009, for example, an op-ed in the Tulsa World claimed that "Carter's sweater" was "haunting the discussion" of energy conservation, making it "permanently associated with malaise and discomfort." Here's some footage from Carter's 1977 speech (the part about thermostats comes right after the end of the clip):

Perhaps South Koreans will look back on Monday, November 28 as the day the country got serious about energy conservation. Or, of course, they may remember it as the day South Koreans started making fun of Lee Myung-bak's long underwear.

Ulan Bator is funding a $730,000 ‘ice shield' initiative to counterbalance urban heat island effect and global warming and to lighten up the city's air conditioning bill. The experiment is sort of like a scotch on the rocks, except instead of scotch it's Mongolia, and instead of one cube or two it's the artificially super-frozen Tuul river. The hope is that a giant ice sheet --  known as a naled -- will store the winter's cold and cool the city through the hot months to come.

At the end of November, the engineers of the Mongolian ECOS & EMI firm will begin recreating the natural naled-forming process by drilling holes through the ice covering the river Tuul. This will allow water to rise through the ice sheet in the warmer daytime temperatures and spread across its surface. Then the new layers will freeze during the nights and create an ever thickening ice shelf.

While naleds have served industrial applications before, as military bridges in North Korea or as platforms for drilling in Russia, the Ulan Bator climate experiment is unprecedented. But if the Tuul successfully cools down the spring and summer as it gradually melts, providing water and a hospitable microclimate, the practice may become more common in places like Mongolia where the environmental conditions are right.

Worst comes to worst, with Winter Olympics only two years away, Mongolia's figure skaters have a new place to practice in the summer.

It's been a very public few days for Kim Jong Il's 16-year-old grandson, Kim Han Sol.

On Friday, the United World College's (UWC) Bosnia-Herzegovina campus, one of 13 UWC international schools globally, announced Kim Han Sol's acceptance. Board chairman David Sutcliffe explained that the decision "understandably generated surprise and comment, some of it critical." But, echoing the school's mission statement, he went on to say that the UWCs "exist in order to cross new frontiers in international education.… The opportunity of taking a first step in bringing North Korea into the international community, through youth, is one to be cherished."

Three days after the UWC announcement, the Korean Daily News discovered what's believed to be Han Sol's Facebook page as well as the page of his father, Kim Jong Il's eldest son, Kim Jong Nam. If it is really him, then one picture shows Han sporting dyed blond hair and posing with a girlfriend. His favorite movie, according to the page, is Love Actually. Notably for the grandson of one of the world's most brutal tyrants, the page includes an encyclopedia definition of democracy. He also reportedly polled his friends on whether they preferred it to communism, as he did.

In this way, Kim Han Sol would resemble his father, whose talk of reform within North Korea (and being caught with a fake passport with the name "Fat Bear" en route to Tokyo Disney Land) cost him his position in line for the throne. Kim Jong Nam has lived in exile in China and Macau since 2001. What's believed to be his own Facebook page criticizes both his father and the North Korean establishment including his half brother, heir apparent Kim Jong Un.

In any event, it doesn't seem like there's much future for Kim Han Sol in the family business.

Chinese ambitions in Africa have been no secret to Western policymakers. In the past 7 years, Beijing has devoted over $14 billion dollars to Africa, through a mixture of aid for resources packages and direct investment. However, the outcome of this weekend's Zambian presidential election could be an indication that the policy is beginning to backfire. Four-time candidate, and former train station sweeper Michael "King Cobra" Sata, was confirmed as the winner last Friday.

The Global Post reports:

Sata referred to Chinese investors as "infesters." He called for Chinese migrant workers to be expelled from Zambia. And he described Taiwan as a country, breaching Beijing's obsessive "one China" policy, which considers Taiwan a rogue province rather than an independent nation. China threatened to cut ties with Zambia if Sata won.

China responded to Banda's defeat with the same pragmatism as it had toward the loss of friendly regimes in South Sudan and Libya: It tried to befriend the new boss.

"As a friendly country of Zambia, China respects the Zambian people's choice and would like to work with Zambia to promote friendship and expand mutually beneficial cooperation across the board," Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei said in Beijing.

But privately, the Chinese government must be worried. Sata has said he may implement capital controls aimed at keeping foreign-exchange earnings in Zambia, Africa's biggest copper producer and a country that has seen strong economic growth averaging 6 percent over the last three years. Foreign-exchange controls would prevent Chinese companies from sending their profits home to China.

China relies extensively on its investment and foreign aid apparatus to bolster its soft power on the continent. A white paper released this past April by the Chinese government went into more detail about the different components and extent of their operations. A significant portion of the monies are channeled through various Chinese state owned corporations and banks to the countries that they have ties with, including resources hubs Angola, D.R Congo, Sudan, and Zambia.

It will also trouble China Inc., as the election served as a vote of no confidence against their existing projects within the country. As the Economist covered in April, the reputation of Chinese companies has been slowly crumbling with the regular reports of poor working conditions, routine bribery and environmental damage. In Zambia, a Chinese built road was washed away by rainfall.

While Sata's election will not deter  the Chinese from further investing in Zambia, it could signal the beginning of a trend in African politics for candidates to run on anti-Chinese platforms.  Much in the way that prominent Latin American leaders such as Hugo Chavez ran on U.S-bashing platforms, African countries could see the beginnings of a similar type of movement to protest the wider abuses stemming from Chinese involvement. How it affects further economic relations will be seen in the coming months.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Il traveled to Russia this week, his first visit to his country's former Cold War ally in nine years. Kim rode an armored train to eastern Siberia to meet with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, crossing the Russian border on Sunday, Aug. 21, touring the Bureyskaya hydroelectric power station, and meeting with Medvedev on Wednesday. Medvedev flew 3,500 miles across Russia to a Siberian military base for the meeting.

Kim promised Medvedev a moratorium on the production and testing of nuclear weapons, a move that could help restart nuclear disarmament talks, stalled in 2009. North Korea has been isolated both economically and diplomatically since March 2009, when it conducted a second nuclear weapons test. Both the United States and South Korea demand concrete action from North Korea before they return to the six-party talks.

Kim's weeklong trip to Russia is also expected to focus on trade talks and gaining economic and political support from Russia. North Korea is facing chronic food shortages and factory closures thanks to punishing international sanctions. Russia pledged 50,000 tons of wheat to North Korea and also discussed energy and infrastructure projects, including a pipeline carrying Russian gas to South Korea through the North.

According to the Christian Science Monitor, Kim is also concerned about the downfall of Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi and Middle East unrest in general. While North Korean media has not been reporting on the Arab Spring, news of the uprisings has been spread through radios and word of mouth from people who have illegally crossed into China and back. "That dynamic is probably much more alarming to Kim Jong Il than anything else," Lee Jong-min, dean of international studies at Yonsei University in Seoul, told the Monitor. "He's prompted by the need to bolster his power."

Kim has visited China five times since 2002, the year of his last trip to Russia, when he met with then-President Vladimir Putin.

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