Rio Tinto not alone in not knowing. It appears that Rio Tinto and the Australian Government are not alone in not knowing where in China the line is drawn between legitimate market research and illegal commercial espionage. This morning the China Daily gives some details of a report written by a Jiang Ruqin, ex-director of the Huai’an State secrets bureau in Jiangsu province, and published on Baomi.org, a website affiliated with the National Administration for the Protection of State Secrets.

The Fairfax broadsheets splashed with a story from their China correspondent John Garnaut based on the Jiang Ruqin report in which China accuses Rio Tinto of stripping $123 billion from the country through a six-year program of commercial espionage. The Fairfax translation of the Chinese language website says that Rio was involved in a six-year clandestine operation against China’s steelworks and accuses the Anglo-Australian miner of ”winning over and buying off, prising out intelligence … and gaining things by deceit”.

Like The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, the English language China Daily leads this morning with a story based on the Jiang report from the website. The paper highlights Jiang’s claim that the severity of the case highlights the need for enhanced surveillance of commercial secrets by the government but points out that he did not elaborate on any evidence to support his claims.

Jiang’s report states, says the China Daily, that, even though the State secrets laws listed economic intelligence as being under the purview of the National Secrets Protection Law, commercial secrets received insufficient attention from the watchdogs. The watchdogs division is short-staffed, so staff members focus on government organisations and military research and development, rather than State-owned enterprises, the report says.

The website version of Jiang’s report says the Rio case should prompt State officials and companies to do more to protect sensitive commercial information, and tighter measures should be taken to deter foreign businesses from spying. He also said, according to the China Daily translation, the country has entered a peak period of commercial espionage warfare, while the threat to economic intelligence and security of national economic activity increases by the day. He urged the government to make it clear what commercial data is regarded as an official secret.

The emphasis in that last sentence has been added by me. If an ex-director of the Huai’an State secrets bureau in Jiangsu province reckons this difference is not clear then surely Rio Tinto’s Stern Hu and his three Chinese national Rio Tinto colleagues can be forgiven for being uncertain as well. That at least should give Australian diplomats something to work on as they attempt to get the four at least released from prison on bail while awaiting trial.

More ominous, however, was this section of the China Daily report that was not based on the Baomi.org website report:

Misinterpreting a fine line between commercial data and an official secret is one thing. Bribery is quite another.

For those of you who would like to do battle with an automatic Google translation of the Baomi.org report it is available here.

German campaign gets much-needed dose of humour. The German election campaign is by all accounts a rather dour affair but Der Spiegel has found a few satirical pledges to liiven things up a bit. My favourite is the pledge by one candidate to rebuild the Berlin Wall and to send pensioners to the east of it. Free cosmetic surgery for everyone surely beats fixing the public hospital system and the installation of a rabbit as German’s national symbol has a certain logic to it.

First the classifieds and now the retail groceries? The stampede of job and motor vehicle advertisements to specialist internet sites was the start of the decline in proiftability of our daily newspapers but until now they have at least had all those pages of retail advertisements to soldier on with. But this morning I notice for the fist time a serious attempt to put those red spot supermarket specials into a web friendly format. Woolies have come up with a neat way of displaying their goodies in a small space. If the internet ads work then Rupert Murdoch will not be able to charge enough to compensate for his papers to cover the revenue loss.