>Edward was influenced by Japanese and Chinese culture and learned Japanese and Chinese along with Chinese martial arts
American authorities were stunned. “For some reason Hong Kong and China wanted to let Snowden get away and this is a direct slap at the U.S.,”
It’s true that this is likely to sap some goodwill from the U.S.-China relationship, though a drawn-out extradition battle would have been even messier. From Beijing’s perspective, Snowden was an asset of diminishing value: he had already given Chinese authorities a gift that will be paying dividends for years to come. In an interview, he said that the N.S.A. “does all kinds of things like hack Chinese cell phone companies to steal all of your SMS data”; he described the hacking of university computers in Beijing and of systems run by Pacnet, a telecommunications company. Xinhua, the state news agency, responded with glee. “These, along with previous allegations, are clearly troubling signs. They demonstrate that the United States, which has long been trying to play innocent as a victim of cyber attacks, has turned out to be the biggest villain in our age.”
In China, Snowden left an astonishing feat in his wake: he actually improved the credibility of government censors and information-security czars, who make up one of China’s most unloved groups. Fang Binxing, a computer scientist known as the “father of the Great Firewall” for his role in developing China’s censorship régime, is so unpopular among his countrymen that he has been pelted with eggs and shoes while giving speeches; when he opened a social-media account in 2010, people called him a “eunuch” and a “running dog” and someone Photoshopped his head onto a voodoo doll. For years, Fang justified government intervention on the Web largely by arguing, as he once did, that unseen enemies abroad “sit comfortably at home, thinking only of how, through their fingertips on a keyboard, they can bring chaos to China.” He warned that using telecom equipment from international companies like Cisco threatened China’s national security. Snowden has given Fang and his cohort new reasons to argue for stricter control of the Web.
But, over time, Snowden was becoming popular in China for reasons that the government almost certainly found intolerable. China may have invented the whistle, but today’s Communist Party has little appetite for whistleblowers—and Snowden’s popularity as a digital renegade was not going to be allowed to grow forever. His usefulness was almost exhausted.
Was the Chinese Gov getting all the content of the 4 laptops from ES a good reason to let him go??
!! Intelligence experts cited by the Times believed that the Chinese government “had managed to drain the contents of the four laptops that Mr. Snowden said he brought to Hong Kong, and that he said were with him during his stay at a Hong Kong hotel.”
https:// www.newyorker.com/news/evan-osnos/why-china-let-snowden-go
https:// www.nytimes.com/2013/06/24/world/asia/china-said-to-have-made-call-to-let-leaker-depart.html?emc=tnt&tntemail0=y
https://www. nytimes.com/2013/06/24/world/asia/china-said-to-have-made-call-to-let-leaker-depart.html?emc=tnt&tntemail0=y
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“I see the sun of Sunnylands disappearing into the snow of Snowden,” the diplomat said.
Expansive Setting for Obama’s Meeting With Xi
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/us/politics/an-expansive-setting-for-obamas-talks-with-chinas-leader.html?module=inline
Sunnylands 2.0: Xi, Obama to Meet Informally Again
https://thediplomat.com/2014/08/sunnylands-2-0-xi-obama-to-meet-informally-again/