From www.chinaelections.org:
The pseudonym Huangfu Ping is by no means an unknown one. It is much more prominent than its user. In early 1991, as deputy editor-in-chief of the Jiefang Daily, the party mouthpiece of Shanghai, Zhou Ruijin penned four commentaries arguing loudly for jettisoning ideological debates and adopting more assertive opening-up steps, which attuned perfectly to Deng Xiaoping‘s famous Southern Tour. His political astuteness conveniently assisted the meteoritic rise of Zhu Rongji from Shanghai’s party boss to the top echelon of the Chinese leadership; Zhou himself was too rewarded with a job as deputy editor-in-chief of the People’s Daily.
Fifteen years later, Zhou has retired but remains politically engaged. In January he astounded everyone by calling for “sunshine management” over the “underground” sex industry. A few days later, he wrote in Caijing magazine accusing those intellectuals, who had profusely exposed the dark side of economic development such as environmental degradation, rampant corruption and widening wealth gap, of being anti-reform and anti-market. While critics still struggled to characterize him as either ultra-conservative or simply off the point, Zhou quickly shifted his focus from market to high politics by comparing Vietnam favorably to China.
In this article published in the Guangzhou-based Yangcheng Evening News in mid-July, Zhou commends Vietnam for pushing political reform ahead after economic reform moved to a certain stage as indicated by the seemingly voluntary handover of power from the old leadership to a new one in June 2006 and claimed that the Vietnamese leaders all believed what Deng Xiaoping said, “Whether all our reforms ultimately succeed or not will be determined by whether we are going to launch political reform.” [Full Text]
