Wired’s Danger Room posted a piece yesterday on the US awarding a no-bid defense contract to Russian state-run weapons exporter Rosoboronexport. The real eyebrow raiser is the Russian company’s history of arms deals with Syria and Iran that led to sanctions imposed (since lifted) by the US. So aside from the two “bad guy” names in the Danger Room post, what other countries can the company claim as customers?

We’ll use Recorded Future to first analyze the web for mentions of Rosoboronexport and company activity taking place between 2005 and 2009:

Rosoboronexport 2005-2009 - Click for live view

Highlighted in grey are events mentioning both the company and India, and below the timeline, you can see a number of other countries associated with the company in news, blogs, and so on. Aside from those locations clearly in view, if you click through to the live visual, you’ll find links to deals with Libya, Belarus, Burma, Algeria, Sudan, and more.

And how have things looked since the US lifted it’s freeze on trade with the company? We can see lots of activity with interests ranging from Western governments to southeast Asia to Africa.

Rosoboronexport - From 2010 into the Future - Click for Live Details

Some of the juiciest points that stand out include the supply of weapons or military vehicles to both sides of serious conflicts on the horizon for China. We’re talking the simultaneous provision of arms for China and India (neighboring superpowers that seem almost certain to butt heads), and separately, selling submarines to Vietnam, which is on tense terms with China due to ongoing conflict over the South China Sea.

Presumably there is quite a bit about Rosoboronexport buried in the open source intelligence available on the web that may be useful to government and risk analysts. Click the second of the images above to keep tabs on future developments related to the Russian arms company or head over to our website and get started with your own temporal analysis of the web.

Tensions are escalating between China and neighboring countries over sovereignty of the South China Sea. Disputes over control of the sea (and more importantly its oil and gas fields) are not unfamiliar, but they’ve escalated recently as China steps up its rhetoric in advance of state-owned oil company CNOOC beginning drilling later this year.

The timeline below shows online momentum of coverage related to the South China Sea so far this year:

Momentum of Discussion on South China Sea - Click for Live View

Now, I won’t try to speculate about what the range of geopolitical chest thumping necessarily implies since there’s an awful lot of diplomatic feinting. For example, a spokesperson for the Philippine Armed Forces suggests that other countries simply change the name of the sea.

However, I do know that scanning the future of the region for any impending, contentious events will be useful in anticipating the next phase of this conflict. So, below is a view of events referencing the South China Sea and a time point over the rest of the year:

We see Taiwan plans to continue regular patrol missions. So, which countries are involved? Quite a few as it turns out since China is claiming territory that bumps up aginst Malaysia, Taiwan, Brunei, the Phillipines, and Vietnam. All are represented in discussion about the future of the region as seen in the treemap below.

Certainly an issue to watch as Taiwan and others plan to continue military exercises in the region, the CNOOC rig is set for drilling possibly as early as July, and several US allies are lined up against China. All the while, American officials are calling for China to resolve the dispute peacefully in advance of Hillary Clinton’s travel to the country later this month, while China claims it’s resolving the dispute exactly the way it is entitled.

If you bump this view of the future related to South China Sea out further, you find even more interesting power grabs from China including the expected deployment of three aircraft carriers in the region by 2017 as the possibility of another competitor (India) emerges.

Future Events Related South China Sea - Click for Live View

If you want to keep tabs on this issue click on the image above and choose the “Create Future” button to set up an alert on forward looking events related to the South China Sea. We’ll certainly track this closely to see if further signals appear tilting this in the direction of a physical, up in arms conflict or if it all turns out to be political posturing.

If you find some of this analysis interesting, check out our open source intelligence tools for government and defense research.

When it comes to Xi Jinping, Hu Jintao’s heir apparent in the Communist Party of China, very little can be said except that he is enigmatic. He is presumably being groomed to take leadership in 2012-2013, but for such an important figure who is likely to soon have a major effect on world affairs, and who will certainly shape China’s future at a critical stage, it is surprising that so little is known about him. In comparison, the world knew a fair amount about Hu Jintao before he assumed leadership of China’s three highest offices — General Secretary of the Communist Party, president of the state, and Chairman of the Central Military Commission.

There are certain facts and patterns, however, that we can tease out from Mr Xi’s background using open source intelligence tools. He has been doing a fair amount of travel in the last few years to burnish his foreign policy credentials, and both domestic Chinese and foreign media have been there to capture these visits.

His most widely discussed visits have been the following:

• Feb 2009 — Latin America: Brazil, Colombia, Jamaica, Mexico, and Venezuela.
• Oct 2009 — Belgium, Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary, Romania.
• Dec 2009 — Cambodia, Japan, Myanmar, South Korea.

These trips are all well known and included a few revealing and controversial moments, such as some prickly remarks in Mexico regarding the United States. But looking at the Recorded Future treemap below, we can clearly see that he has been far more active than his publicized grand tours would suggest. In fact, given China’s historically inward-looking nature in the last half century, this seems to foreshadow an expectation that China will play a more diplomatically forward role during the likely Xi presidency.

Click here to interact with the Xi Jinping - Travel Recorded Future treemap

As we can see, these are mostly countries that are strategically and economically important to China — several African countries, resource rich South American countries, industrial economies, and North Korea. Indeed, drilling down into the articles, not only are they economic, but in the wake of the financial crisis, China sent Mr Xi as an emissary to some of the U.S.’s partners and neighbors in order to promote the Shanghai World Expo and bring attention to China’s more robust reaction to the crisis’s deleterious effects.

Take this travel agenda in contrast to Hu Jintao’s treemap within the same period; fewer countries, but also highly important ones.

Click here to interact with the Hu Jintao - Travel Recorded Future treemap

Notably absent from Mr Xi’s travel profile are Pakistan and India. Mr Xi in June 2010 visited Bangladesh and other Southeast Asian countries, bringing with him infrastructure and financial package deals, among other things, presumably with a geopolitical interest in countering India’s expanding influence. While he has not traveled to either India or Pakistan in an official capacity, he has met with Pakistani party officials with whom he has affirmed “strategic and cooperative partnership”.  He has also had some positive contact with high-profile Indian officials in Beijing.

Click here to interact with the Xi Jinping - Pakistan Recorded Future timeline

It is remarkable that there is discussion regarding every other major relationship China maintains except this one. One may be tempted to say that he is staying away from controversial visits, but he has visited Japan and Venezuela and made those thorny comments regarding the United States on his Mexico trip. What is likely the case here is that he understands that India and Pakistan will perceive his choice on which country to visit first as a signal that will reveal the Chinese leader’s preference or China’s priorities. There is certainly curiosity about that, considering the sharp spike in momentum (see timeline above) that is noticeable in March of this year when Mr Xi and “Pakistani leaders agreed during meetings in Beijing Thursday to consolidate their ‘all-weather’ friendship and deepen pragmatic cooperation.”

Click here to interact with the Xi Jinping - India Recorded Future timeline

India, by contrast, has received a good deal more focus, albeit without any travel on Mr Xi’s part. He was selected to preside over a reception on May 28^th with Indian President Pratibha Patil to celebrate the 60^th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties between the two countries. While this was more of a spectacle than the recent Pakistani visit — and involved a more senior official from the subcontinent — there was far more content to the Pakistani visit, which had been planned around the eighth Sino-Pakistani Defense and Security Talks. Still, appearances have been maintained, but with Pakistan coming out slightly ahead. This year has been dubbed the China-Pakistan Year of Friendship recognizing their 60 years of diplomatic relations.

Part of the same large spike in momentum on the timeline above is the official visit to Bangladesh by Mr Xi (also shown below). China sells arms to Bangladesh, which has been making peculiar statements regarding power projection and “maintaining stability” in their region. (For comparison, it has only been very lately that a large country with serious security concerns like India has been using language like that.) There are also several infrastructural projects in the works that would enable China to have the ability to more easily project influence into the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean beyond.

Click here to interact with the Xi Jinping - Bangladesh timeline

Mr Xi’s political involvement in this naturally raises the issue of what political goals this meets and whether this is targeted at India. Energy security, from pirates and potential conflict corridors like the South China Sea, is an urgent concern to China. But there are also reservations that India may have due to their intense displeasure with the so-called “String of Pearls” strategy, which is a Chinese effort to develop a line of bases along the Indian Ocean littorals projecting into what India considers its sphere. A similar visit to Myanmar by Chinese premier Wen Jiabao around the same time suggests that this is a fairly pressing issue for the Chinese leadership. That trip was also in relation to the infrastructural projects that would give China access to its own territory from the Bay of Bengal for oil and ground transport.

So far, it does not appear that India has commented on the matter.

Conclusion

Clearly Mr Xi is staying away from potentially disruptive political moments. Most of his visits are economic in nature, but even so, some of them are strategic and related to security. At first glance, China’s priorities are easy to discern from Mr Xi’s travel treemap above: energy security, resources, selling infrastructure projects, and developing a sense of economic and political camaraderie among emerging market countries. From time to time, though, one can make out signals of Mr Xi’s style and goals, and China’s needs more broadly looking into the future.

Last month, a major rift between Asia’s two largest economies broke out because of a fisherman, one Zhan Qixiong.  The Recorded Future timeline below shows the story as events have been reported by online media.

Going through the events on the timeline, we learn that on September 7, a Chinese fishing trawler collided with two separate Japanese Coast Guard ships about forty minutes apart. The ship was fishing in waters rich in oil and natural gas controlled by Japan but long claimed by China.

The Japanese Coast Guard detained Zhan, the Chinese trawler’s captain. In response, Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao a week later called for the captain’s release and threatened further actions. The next day, China arrested four Fujita employees — all Japanese nationals — for entering and videotaping a restricted military zone. A few hours later, reports came out that China would block all exports to Japan of rare-earth elements. These reports were later denied by the Chinese commerce ministry, claiming the stoppage of shipments was caused by a Chinese holiday. Still, by Saturday of that week, Japan had agreed to release Zhan Qixiong.  The timeline view clearly lays out what happened over the course of the month, event-by-event.

China flexing its muscles, coincidentally or not, came a few weeks after it overtook Japan to become the world’s second largest economy. This new position of economic strength has allowed China to play tough in many areas, including their near-monopoly on producing rare earth elements. Rare earth elements are 17 elements found in the periodic table that are vital to the manufacturing of electronics, batteries, engines, and other miniaturized high-tech components.

We can use Recorded Future to research the multiple ways China is using its stranglehold on rare earth elements. To begin, the first search done is to look for quotations containing the words “rare earth”.  The first hit is a link to an article in which Jiang Zemin, the former Chinese president, is quoted as saying that China must use its advantage in rare-earth resources to create “economic superiority”.

The next step is is a co-entity search involving the country China and the free text “rare earth”.  This is what we learn:

We find that the West was initially happy to give China this market, as they were able to extract a great amount at a low cost because of cheap labor and lax environmental concerns.  All the other mines closed down, though, and now China’s dominance in the market puts the world at a critical point.

To see how this could effect international relations with the only economy larger than China, we do a co-entity search for “rare-earth”,Pentagon.

The China-Japan dispute caused the Pentagon to focus on the US dependence on China for rare-earth elements.  Following those links, we learn that until around 1990, the U.S. was self-sufficient and the world leader in producing and refining rare earth elements.  Within a decade, though, the US became reliant on China for more than 90% of its use.

These elements are used not only in everyday items Americans have become dependent on, such as cell phones and televisions, but in items that the Pentagon is dependent on, such as smart bombs and radar.  This Business Week article in particular laid out in detail the perils of being too dependent on China for these vital elements.

The United States is already dependent on the Middle East for oil, perhaps the most vital resource of the past century.  Just as America begins to look at alternative fuels, it has become dependent on another area of the world for another vital resource, perhaps the most vital over the next century.

China has already proven that they are not afraid to use their monopoly to push their neighbors into getting what they want.  With Chinese demand growing internally, fewer deposits will be left to be exported, leaving the American military and the global market for electronics in the back of the line.  Time will tell how this plays out.

Contact Recorded Future to learn more about our open source intelligence analysis tools and how to incorporate news analytics into your research.

As we’ve noted previously, Hu Jintao was a very active traveller in 2009 and an active participant in international meetings. However – after his non-appearance at the global warming summit in Copenhagen (when he was busy doing energy deals in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan) his travel activity has decreased, his coverage in media as fallen, and finally, his external communications have plummeted.

We will explore these patterns using open source intelligence and discuss their potential implication.

The “official view” on change in leadership in China is that in 2012 both Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao will step down (when Hu’s maximum tenure is up, by the time of the 18th party congress), and the current vice president Xi Jingping will step up to become the new president. We can very easily see this in Recorded Future by just typing EmploymentChange Hu Jintao Future – and get the below result.

Click to enlarge

For updates on the future of Hu Jintao, click the below link and fill in your email address – and you’ll be subscribed to a Future for Hu Jintao (very easy to unsubscribe!).

Travel Patterns

First we review the travel patterns of Hu Jintao in 2009-10 by posing the question Person Travel Hu Jintao 2009-01-01–2010-12-31. We can visually inspect how President Hu’s travel has shrunk across 2009 and even come to a stand still lately (including uncertainty around a trip to the US in April for a key nuclear weapons summit). In 2009 Hu visited a whole set of countries, key meetings, and world leaders.

Timeline view of Hu Jintao travel.

We can also export these travel patterns to Google Earth to visually and geographically review where President Hu has travelled across time. Click here to explore Hu Jintao’s travel patterns in Google Earth.

Travel patterns over Google Earth

To stay abreast of Hu Jintao travel click the below link to subscribe to a Future on travels of Hu Jintao.

Personal Communication

Personal Communications include meetings, phone calls or direct verbal communications – that Recorded Future picks up in news, blogs, government filings, speeches, etc. Just like we reviewed travel patterns we can review the personal communications of Hu Jintao. During 2009 we recorded a large number of public communications including Hu Jintao.

Hu Jintao Network Graph

However, in the first quarter of 2010, Hu Jintao’s public communications seem to have come to a halt as well, with only a few interactions being recorded, including Russian premier Putin, head of North Korea Kim Il, Barack Obama, and Harmid Karzai who recently visited in Beijing.

Fewer Public Communications for Hu Jintao

Quantitative analysis of media flow

Now, the above analysis of reviewing travels and communication patterns may be quite insightful and compelling, however it might be that we miss signals that requires more rigorous quantitative analysis. The below plot shows the volume of media flow on Hu Jintao across the world – in a so called SPC chart allowing us to find extreme levels of media flow – when it goes outside say 3 standard deviations or when there is an improbable run of higher or lower than average levels of media flow. The data is normalized and low media flow/weekend days are omitted in an attempt to show “true outliers”.

The visualization is produced in R using the Recorded Future API. We will shortly share an entry in the Predictive Signals blog on how these were done.

An interesting note: from the end of 2009 President Hu seems to be disappearing off the face of the earth compared to earlier. We can’t answer exactly why – but clearly it is a signal that correlates with the above patterns of communication and travel.

R Process Chart of Hu Jintao on the web.

Now then, when comparing, on a normalized basis, Hu Jintao to Wen Jiabao it gets even more interesting. Whereas both them had a “media lull” around Christmas/Chinese New Year, Wen Jiabao has had an upwards trend in general and has come back strongly after the holidays. We might try to draw some “big conclusion” from that, but probably too early.

Wen Jiabao in the media.

Detecting co-occurrence in media flow

Finally we will explore media co-occurrence of key Chinese leaders over time, to see if we can find anything interesting regarding who is clustering in their behavior. To identify the key Chinese leaders along with Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, we consulted the CIA World Factbook/Word Leaders on China and extracted a set of key leaders with good coverage in Recorded Future. The below visualization (done in R) displays a dendrogram with Chinese leader clusters who’s behavior is similar in terms of media coverage over time (i.e. reaches peaks and lulls at same times). The theory would be that co-occurring in media systematically could infer subtle patterns alignment in behavior – such as part-taking in same events, travelling together, co-occurring in same speeches, etc.

Perhaps the most interesting thing is to look at Xi Jinping, the rumoured president to be. By exploring who clusters closely to him we might be able to find clusters of politicians that are close to him that we should watch in terms of their behavior and actions. Yin Weimin clusters the closest, his current portfolio is modest. Yang Jiechi, minister of foreign affairs, has had much more strong views on the US and its relationship to the China. Definitely worth watching.

Clustering of Chinese individuals in the media.

Post the Copenhagen summit December 7-18th there has been intense debate on why it failed to generate a strong agreement (depending on your view!). Blogger/journalist Mark Lynas wrote a scathing piece on how “China wrecked the deal” which received a lot of attention including an official Chinese rebuke in Xinhua.

We wanted to use Recorded Future to analyze whether the Chinese sent lower level officials (Premier Wen Jiabao rather than President Hu Jintao) than other countries (e.g. President Barack Obama from the US) as way of manipulating negotiations (requiring “calling home to HQ” by the Chinese – as a stalling tactic).

Analysis

Mark Lynas wrote in the Guardian “The Chinese premier, Wen Jinbao, did not deign to attend the meetings personally, instead sending a second-tier official in the country’s foreign ministry to sit opposite Obama himself.”

In Recorded Future’s open sources data we cannot track what happened behind closed doors (i.e. who attended what session) – but we can examine public travel patterns.

Pretty much every country sent their most senior government leader to Copenhagen – President Obama from the US, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh from India, Prime Minister Angela Merkel from Germany, Prime Minister Gordon Brown from the UK, etc. etc.

We can easily find these public travel records in Recorded Future – e.g. searching PersonTravel Barack Obama/Manmohan Singh/Dmitry Medvedev December yields

Why was Hu Jintao not in Copenhagen?

Hu Jintao may not have attended the Copenhahen summit for a number of reasons. He may

1. Not travel very much in general
2. Be busy with other activities
3. Have deliberately stayed away – to appear “beyond actual negotiations” or make it more complicated for the negotiations to arrive at “final answer/be put up against wall” – classic negotiation tactic.

We can at least analyze the 1) and 2) easily in Recorded Future – e.g. initially quickly review his 2009 travel in this time line visualization – and find that Hu Jintao has had a very intensive travel record in 2009 – including every continent, many countries, meetings like G8/G20 and UN meetings on climate change, many trips to energy rich countries, etc.

Click to enlarge

We’re probably safe to conclude that Hu Jintao is not afraid of travel in general, not afraid of big UN / G8/ G20 like summits, and finally not afraid of the Energy/Climate subject in itself. However he chose to avoid this “final step” in the negotiation in Copenhagen.

So what did Hu Jintao do in December?

Interestingly enough Hu Jintao had a very busy travel record in December. Searching for PersonTravel Hu Jintao December we find first a trip to Malysia – but maybe more interesting – a visit to Central Asia – that is very nicely covered in these to hits from Chinese and Central Asian sources:

Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Hu Jintao Person Travel
…BEIJING, Dec 10 – China aims to deepen energy ties with Central Asian states seeking new markets for their oil, gas and uranium, an official said today, ahead of a visit to Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan by Chinese President Hu Jintao.

Hu Jintao traveled to Central Asia to secure carbon based fuel deliveries, while sending a junior delegation to deal with world leaders on climate change a day later.

Hu Jintao returned from Central Asia December 15th, per below

2009-12-15, on Tuesday, Beijing, Hu Jintao Person Travel
President Hu Jintao returned to Beijing on Tuesday after wrapping up his Central Asia visit to Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan.

Interestingly enough Wen Jiabao left the 16th for Copenhagen – Hu Jintao would have had plenty of time to travel to Copenhagen logistically, and still have time for his energy deals in Central Asia.

Conclusion

Travel records, even viewed exclusively through open source intelligence, can be a very powerful way of analyzing intent. We obviously can’t conclusive say that Hu Jintao deliberately stayed away from Copenhagen as a negotiation tactic from the above – however it certainly provides a very compelling track of analysis, that can be cross-checked in many ways.

If we want to stay abreast on Hu Jintao’s travel we can easily register a Future on PersonTravel Hu Jintao – or say more specifically PersonTravel Hu Jintao Africa to catch any trips he’s making to African countries/cities – and if we want to explore future travel by Hu Jintao we can equally easily just search PersonTravel Hu Jintao Future.

As always, we welcome your comments below!

Christopher