Absurdity, Allegory and China

A post at ESWN (EastSouthWestNorth) entitled The Truth About The Google Affair claims to have information of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) plants within Google’s Shanghai office. While this in itself would not be a surprise, that it took so little time for it to actually become public is. The post is “a translation of an anonymous blog/forum post by an omniscient person who is somehow privy to confidential information from all sides.” Here is teaser. It is very specific about why Google’s actions were so swift:

There were three moles, one of whom was the Chinese Communist Party branch secretary.  This party secretary was set up four years ago by the National Security Ministry.  This guy studied at Jiaotong University and then jointed Computer Security Department.  The department sent him to study computers at the Computer Security School in Jiaotong University.  He programmed every day. When he graduated, he joined Google.  There, he recruited two more insiders.  One of them was the insider who broke into the source code for Gmail and gave it to the Chinese government.
The government wanted this mainly to monitor the anti-Communist persons who use Gmail.
So this was sensationalistic, because of the involvement of the Chinese Communist Party branch.
This guy got a 1,000,000 yuan reward, plus public servant status.
These people used to sneak over to Lujiazui after work to attend Chinese Communist Party branch meetings.

These are some very specific accusations in this post. The source is anonymous, and it is difficult to know if this is fact or fiction. It will be interesting to see if things actually unfold as this person is claiming. If there is truth here, I can already hear the official Beijing spin: “It’s those damn rogue Shanghai bunch again. We had no idea! Really!”

(h/t to elliottng on Twitter.)
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Update 1: January 17, 2010 (7:00 AM ,+8 UTC)

I have it from a trusted source that the ESWN piece “contains several statements that I know, first-hand and for sure, are false,” regarding internal Google details. As I mentioned above, it is difficult to know whether this piece is fact, fiction or a bit of both. The original link to the Chinese site which ESWN translated is now blank. That said, at his moment the front page of Xinhua (English) has a link to a story Inappropriate to play up Google China’s withdrawal, though the link leads to a page in Chinese that translates to “Sorry! You see that the manuscript has been deleted or expired.” This is how it often goes here.

On a personal note, this morning the password of my secondary Google email account mysteriously stopped working after never having been a problem before. When I logged in online I received a message that said “suspicious activity” had been detected, and I needed to enter a new password. Hacked? Who knows? But I think I’ll change the password to my primary account too.
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Update 2: January 17, 2010 (7:38 AM ,+8 UTC)

My wife has just pointed me towards the following post by Xujun Eberlein at Inside-out china entitled Communist Spies at Google China? She points out that the original post in Chinese uses a specific term that “[a] mainland Chinese almost certainly would not use,” concluding that the piece looks to have been written by someone from Taiwan. Disinformation? We’ll see.