
Russell Leigh Moses notes at China Real Time that a recent Xinhua News Agency headline, “The consequences of China’s collapse will be even worse than the Soviet Union’s,” has sparked a strong debate on Chinese social media sites. According to Moses, Xinhua warns that China could face misery and poverty because of “the destabilizing activity of its growing population of microbloggers.” In January Gao Yu at Seeing Red in China published a leaked speech Xi Jinping apparently gave to Party members in which he attributed the Soviet Union’s collapse to the lack of ideological conviction on the part of its Communist leaders. Chinese leaders have long debated the causes of the Soviet Union’s collapse.

APT1, the hacking group exposed as a PLA unit in a February computer security report, tried to take control of an industrial water plant in a U.S. municipality last December, MIT Technology Review reports. A computer security expert lured them in by setting up a fake, decoy industrial water plant. “You would think that Comment Crew wouldn’t come after a local water authority,” the expert said. “I actually watched the attacker interface with the machine. It was 100 percent clear they knew what they were doing.” The expert noted that APT1 was far from the only group intentionally trying to break into industrial projects water control plants.

China is considering loosening the restrictions on having a second child for many Chinese families, Bloomberg News reports, citing a Xinhua report that itself cited the National Health and Family Planning Commission.

Over at Jing Daily, Liz Flora reports that the Chinese first lady , Peng Liyuan, was included on Vanity Fair’s historic “best dress” list this year, while Michelle Obama did not make the cut. My colleague Jon has pointed out that Peng Liyuan could be seen as China’s answer to Michelle Obama. Perhaps he had it backwards?

Steve LeVine notes over at Quartz that for all the talk from U.S. officials about establishing a new Silk Road as a means of stabilizing Afghanistan, China is the one actually making progress on this front