State urges out-of-court settlement of former cadre's libel suit over book about exploited farmers

The government is stepping up pressure on the publisher of a banned book exposing the dark side of rural life in China to settle a libel lawsuit with a former official named in the publication.

Chen Guidi, who wrote the award-winning An Investigation of Chinese Peasants with his wife Wu Chuntao, said he was told by sources the People's Supreme Court had approached the People's Publishing Group to pay former Linquan county party boss Zhang Xide to drop the lawsuit. 'I called a vice-president of the publishing house after I heard the news. He told me they were unwilling to pay but they could do nothing but pay if there was administrative intervention [from the government],' Chen said.

Better understanding the strengths of the enemy will only make China stronger, according to the project team led by researcher Wang Tianxiao with the North China Institute of Computing Technology, a supplier of the PLA’s war gaming system in Beijing.

Chang Guang Satellite Technology Co, which owns Jilin-1, the world’s largest sub-metre commercial remote sensing satellite constellation, said it achieved a 100 gigabit per second ultra-high-speed image data transmission rate in testing last weekend.

The feat – 10 times the speed of its previous record – was accomplished between a truck-mounted ground station and one of the 117 satellites that currently make up the Jilin-1 constellation, the company said.

“Musk’s Starlink has revealed its laser inter-satellite communication system but hasn’t deployed laser satellite-to-ground communication yet. We think they might have the technology, but we’ve already started large-scale deployment,” he said.

“We plan to deploy these laser communication units across all satellites in the Jilin-1 constellation to improve their efficiency, with a goal of networking 300 satellites by 2027.”