Luxury watchmakers expect sales growth to slow this year as a recovery in the United States and buoyant Middle East demand fail to offset a China slump more deep-rooted than a temporary blip caused by anti-corruption moves.

[...]Luxury watch makers have expanded at breakneck speed in recent years in Greater China, which includes Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan as well as the mainland – and enjoyed double-digit sales growth rates there until last summer.

But their latest comments reinforce the view that the region, to which luxury group Richemont (CFR.VX) is the most exposed, is being hit by more than the government’s crackdown on gifts for favours, which often involve watches, and is feeling the draught from a wider slowdown in the world’s second-largest economy.

Watchmakers and retailers questioned about their China strategy noted that some companies went overboard with their retail presence in China, and that affluent Chinese consumers – who now account for 25 percent of global luxury good purchases – can still be reached abroad. From the New York Times

“People simply went overboard about China, thinking that there could be no issue with suddenly opening 40 or 50 stores,” said John Simonian, a watch distributor and owner of Westime, a watch retailer based in Los Angeles. “The stores in China are now full of inventories, with no guarantee that they can all get sold.”

[...]Affluent and travel-hungry Chinese are increasingly buying overseas. About half of Chinese spending on luxury goods occurs outside the mainland, according to a study released in December by the consulting firm McKinsey.

As a result, “50 square meters in Paris could be much more meaningful now than having those same 50 square meters in China,” said Mr. Bennahmias of Audemars Piguet.

Executives from Swiss luxury brand Piaget SA have long-term optimism on China, also noting the importance of cashing in on overseas purchasing habits of wealthy Chinese tourists:

Executives at Cie. Financière Richemont SA’s Piaget watch and jewelry brand remain upbeat on China’s luxury sector, despite recent blunted demand amid a crackdown on gift-giving in the country.

Piaget’s watch sales from China are still strong and are likely to be robust in the long term, though there has been increased pressure in the short term, said Philippe Leopold-Metzger, Piaget’s global chief executive, on the sidelines of a luxury conference in Shanghai. He declined to disclose financial details of the Geneva-based company.

“We talk a lot about slowdown and many people say that stores in China are empty, but if you look at stores all over the world, they are full of Chinese who are buying,” said Mr. Leopold-Metzger. Companies looking at profit and sales alone coming from within China don’t have a good understanding of the buying patterns, he said.

Luxury watches, widely worn by officials whose salaries alone shouldn’t allow, have become a symbol of corruption in China’s bureaucracy. In August, well-fed Shaanxi provincial work safety minister Yang Dacai was photographed with a grin and an expensive watch at the scene of a deadly traffic accident. After China’s human flesh search engine exposed Yang’s larger collection of pricey watches, netizens dubbed the official “Watch Brother“.  Yang was removed from his post in September and investigated for graft.

After the 2013 Sichuan earthquake, photographs of a quake-zone official’s watch-tanned wrist led netizens to speculate that the watch was removed in the wake of high profile corruption cases like Yang’s.

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: anti-corruption, Chinese tourists, global recession, luxury goods, official corruption, retail sales, watches
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The Rotten Tree, by Crazy Crab of Hexie Farm for CDT:

Read more about Hexie Farm’s CDT series, including a Q&A with the anonymous cartoonist, and see all cartoons so far in the series.

[CDT owns the copyright for all cartoons in the Hexie Farm CDT series. Please do not reproduce without receiving prior permission from CDT.]

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Post tags: anti-corruption, hexie farm, political cartoons, transparency, Xi Jinping
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China’s upscale restaurants and hotels are feeling the pain as the government pulls back on public funding for fine dining amid efforts to project an image of increasing official austerity.

Upwards of 60% of restaurants have faced cancellations since the austerity push began, according a report released on Thursday by the China Cuisine Association (in Chinese), which surveyed 100 restaurants and hotels across the country to determine the economic impact of the government’s belt tightening.

One five-star hotel in Beijing saw roughly 10 million yuan ($1.6 million) in reservations cancelled, according to the report. Catering businesses in the northeast city of Tianjin have seen business drop by 30% this year compared to the same period last year, the report added, though it didn’t specify a time frame for the period.

In another article about the ongoing crackdown on corruption, The Wall Street Journal cites a Xinhua report on an official who was suspended for failing to observe the ban on official banquets:

Officials have suspended Zhou Shaoqiang, the manager of state-owned Zhuhai Financial Investment Holdings Co., for holding a luxury banquet last month despite a government ban on lavish government-sponsored events, according to a report Tuesday from the official Xinhua News Agency.

Luxury brands have also long raked profits from the pockets of corrupt officials, and have also been a cause for public outrage – last September, Yang Dacai, aka “Watch Brother,” was removed from his official post after netizens lambasted him for wearing designer watches whose price tags far outweighed his salary. On his blog at The New Yorker, Evan Osnos reports on the gains that luxury brands have seen in China, and the declining returns that watchmakers have seen since the anti-corruption campaign began:

Global luxury sales and epic Chinese political corruption have become so inextricably intertwined over the last decade that the recent kerfuffles in Chinese politics—the investigations and convictions and pledges of propriety—have been nothing but trouble for the privileged few. That became clear last fall, when political disorder in Beijing made it difficult to know which faction would end up on top, and one luxury-brand representative told the Journal that sales were down because “no one knows who to bribe.”

Some of the heaviest hearts are in the luxury-watch business. No industry has enjoyed such a warm embrace in China as the one that packs such enormous monetary value into a small, easily exchanged physical object. And, sure enough, the luxury watch business enjoyed a banner year in 2011, growing forty per cent. But then China’s anti-corruption campaign began, and by September, Bo Xilai was in handcuffs, and watch exports to China suffered a devastating blow—down 27.5 per cent compared to a year earlier, according to the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry. China Daily quoted an industry consultant saying the anti-corruption drive “hurts the luxury watch business a lot.”

It’s not just watches. In 2009, the industry experts estimated that gifts to government officials made up nearly fifty per cent of all of China’s luxury sales.[...]

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: anti-corruption, chinese new year, corrupt officials, corruption, lunar new year, luxury brands, luxury goods, official conduct, Year of the Snake
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With his five cellphones constantly ringing, it is not easy these days to get the undivided attention of Zhu Ruifeng, a self-styled citizen journalist whose freelance campaign against graft has earned him pop-star acclaim and sent a chill through Chinese officialdom.

[…] A former migrant worker with a high school education, Mr. Zhu has become an overnight celebrity in China in the two months since he posted online secretly recorded video of an 18-year-old woman having sex with a memorably unattractive 57-year-old official from the southwestern municipality of Chongqing. The official lost his job. Mr. Zhu gained a million or so new microblog followers.

The takedown was just the opening act, Mr. Zhu says. He promises to release six more sex videos that he predicts will make a number of other men run for cover. “I’m fighting a war,” he said with characteristic bombast, his voice a near-shriek. “Even if they beat me to death, I won’t give up my sources or the videos.”

[…] Mr. Zhu, who began his Web site in 2006, largely relies on whistle-blowers to funnel damning evidence to him. Through the years, he said, he has exposed 100 officials, bringing down more than a third of them. He has been threatened and beaten; more than once, he says, he has been offered huge sums of money to delete an incriminating post from his site, which is called People’s Supervision.

Zhu’s “characteristic bombast” may seem excessive, but is at least in part a matter of self-defense: by courting attention from traditional and social media, he hopes to deter attempts to silence him. That he credits Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption speeches, the Chinese Constitution and his own love of country with inspiring his activities may confer some measure of additional protection.

Nevertheless, his crusade has cost him. He has chosen to end his marriage, he says, rather than see his wife, a P.L.A. officer, suffer retaliation from his adversaries. “To be honest,” he told The Times’ Jonah Kessel, “I would like to tend to the big family in sacrifice of the small family.”

Kessel has also posted outtakes from their conversation on Vimeo, including an extended account of a recent police visit to Zhu’s Beijing home. Chongqing authorities appear determined to contain the sex tape scandal by acquiring Zhu’s remaining videos, but as in the recent New York Times hacking attacks, identifying sources seems to be their primary goal. From Tom Lasseter at McClatchy:

Powerful interests were searching for his sources, he explained over lunch last Friday [January 25th]. Police detained one contact in the southwestern city of Chongqing, where the scandal had erupted, Zhu said. They traced a second source to Henan province, hundreds of miles away, and had questioned that person at least twice.

Two days after that conversation, the police showed up at Zhu’s home in Beijing. They banged on his door Sunday night and demanded that he come with them. He refused but reported to a police station Monday morning, where he was held for more than seven hours. Police officers from Chongqing pressed him to hand over five sex recordings he hasn’t made public and to tell them the identities of his informants. They threatened that “if you don’t present evidence, you will be in violation of national law,” according to Zhu’s account.

The pressure on Zhu suggests that despite Communist Party rhetoric about an all out campaign against corruption, limits remain. The party’s leader, Xi Jinping, said shortly after being installed in November that failing to crack down on corruption would risk the downfall of the state. But while Beijing has dismissed some wayward officials and canceled extravagant banquets that stoked resentment among average Chinese, it so far seems set on keeping a tight grip to keep the process from spinning out of control.

Undaunted, Zhu has offered a cash reward to anyone who can verify the identity of a state-owned enterprise president allegedly caught on one of the videos. Meanwhile, the woman in the videos was formally charged with extortion last week, though she too has been hailed—perhaps less plausibly than in Zhu’s case—as an anti-corruption crusader. From Keith Zhai at the South China Morning Post:

“Zhao was officially arrested on December 31 for extortion,” Zhang said yesterday, adding that she had been “brainwashed” by a company she left in 2009 to secretly record herself having sex with officials to give the firm leverage. “After all, she was young and a victim herself.”

[…] Zhao has drawn support on social media, with internet users hailing her as a heroine for exposing corrupt officials.

Many have compared Zhao’s case with that of Deng Yujiao , a hotel waitress who in 2009 stabbed to death a local party official in Hubei and wounded another after they tried to force themselves on her.

Deng was charged with assault, rather than murder, but walked free on grounds of diminished responsibility after having received widespread support from the online community.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: anti-corruption, Beijing, bloggers, Chongqing, citizen journalism, citizen journalist, constitution, corrupt officials, Deng Yujiao, extortion, journalistic ethics, lei zhengfu, migrant workers, muckraking, PLA, sex scandals, Xi Jinping, Zhu Ruifeng
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A statement issued by the meeting, reported by CCTV, said some party organs were not strict when enlisting members and the quality of new recruits needed to be looked at. Meanwhile, some party members were corrupt and not disciplined.

[...] ”The overall number of party members should be controlled, and the membership structure and quality should be optimised in order to let them play their role,” the statement said.

[...] ”Unqualified party members will be handled in a timely manner and the management of floating party members, those who do not work or live in places where their membership is registered and cannot regularly attend party activities, should be strengthened,” the statement said.

Following the statement, some Chinese political watchers  are calling for stricter Party recruitment standards for new members and harsher punishment for corrupt officials. From Yang Jinghao at Global Times:

Cai Xia, a professor of Party building with the Party School of the CPC Central Committee, told the Global Times that the meeting showed that the Party leadership has fully realized the problems existing among Party members and its determination to administer the Party strictly.

[...] Cai Zhiqiang, a professor of Party building with the Party School of the CPC Central Committee, said the CPC’s large size had inevitably brought many management challenges for the Party, considering the increasingly complicated domestic and international situations and diversified values and interests in the new era.

[...] ”The punishment of unqualified members should also be strictly in line with the Party regulations,” said Cai Zhiqiang. In May 2012, 102 Party members were expelled for poor work performances or violations of family planning policy. The cleanout was regarded as a landmark example of Party membership adjustment.

Just this week, yet another corruption investigation of a high-ranking official, Li Jianguo, once again demonstrates resolution on this issue from the top and a thirst for justice from the general public. From Celia Hatton at BBC:

Mr Li, who serves as vice chairman of China’s parliament, reportedly engineered the promotion of his nephew to a plum government position.

[...] Just last week, Mr Xi promised he would battle both “tigers” and “flies”, indicating that officials at all ranks were under scrutiny.

Li Xinde, an influential citizen journalist, was the first person to interview the whistleblower exposing Li Jianguo’s high-flying nephew. The fact that this case has been picked up by the authorities, he says, shows that things are changing in China.

[...] All evidence, he says, that individual citizens are no longer working alone to expose corruption on a case-by-case basis. Instead, there is new hope that the system as a whole is becoming more transparent.

See more on Xi Jinping and anti-corruption work via CDT.

© Mengyu Dong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: anti-corruption, high-level corruption, investigative journalism, journalists, online public opinion, transparency, Xi Jinping
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“They never register the houses in their own names and they use a string of agents to do the deals,” said Mr Fu. He said one company had bribed an official by buying him a property at the Mountain Water International Complex. “The property was put in the name of the official’s relative. After six months, it was sold for two million yuan (£200,000), around the same amount it cost. Then the official could cash out.

[…] Marco Pearman-Parish at Corporation China, a company in Beijing that helps clients find properties abroad, said there had been a strong rise in clients looking for homes in the Cayman Islands.

“In Beijing, half our clients are government officials,” he said. “Nine out of ten claim to be businessmen, but it emerges over the course of the deal that they have government jobs. What they are looking for is resident permits abroad so that if anything happens they can escape easily.”

Neither the anti-corruption speeches nor the escape artistry began with Xi’s appointment in November. According to the Commission report, Moore writes, as much as U.S. $1 trillion was smuggled out of China last year—though this figure is disputed—while 714 officials made successful getaways during the October National Day holidays alone.

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Xi, in comments carried by the official Xinhua news agency, said it was just as important to go after the “flies”, or lowly people, as it was to tackle the “tigers”, or top officials, in the battle against graft.

“We must uphold the fighting of tigers and flies at the same time, resolutely investigating law-breaking cases of leading officials and also earnestly resolving the unhealthy tendencies and corruption problems which happen all around people,” he said.

Bureaucrats must not be allowed to get away with skirting rules and orders from above or choosing selectively which policies to follow, added Xi.

“The style in which you work is no small matter, and if we don’t redress unhealthy tendencies and allow them to develop, it will be like putting up a wall between our party and the people, and we will lose our roots, our lifeblood and our strength,” Xi told a meeting of the party’s top anti-graft body.

Xinhua has more on Xi’s comments:

Xi said “the mainstream of our cadres and Party members is good. But we should soberly recognize that corruption is still prone to occur or happen quite frequently in certain areas.”

He added that some major law violation cases have had a negative impact and the anti-corruption situation is still severe.

He stressed that the fight against corruption is a long-term, complicated and arduous task. Anti-corruption efforts must be consistent and will never slacken.

“We must have the resolve to fight every corrupt phenomenon, punish every corrupt official and constantly eliminate the soil which breeds corruption, so as to earn people’s trust with actual results,” he said.

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Post tags: anti-corruption, high-level corruption, local power, Xi Jinping
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“The anticorruption storm has begun,” People’s Daily, the party mouthpiece, wrote on its Web site this month.

The flurry of revelations suggests that members of China’s new leadership may be more serious than their predecessors about trying to tame the cronyism, bribery and debauchery that afflict state-run companies and local governments, right down to the outwardly dowdy neighborhood committees that oversee sanitation. Efforts began just days after Xi Jinping, the newly appointed Communist Party chief and China’s incoming president, warned that failing to curb corruption could put the party’s grip on power at risk.

“Something has shifted,” said Zhu Ruifeng, a Beijing journalist who has exposed more than a hundred cases of alleged corruption on his Web site, including the lurid exertions of Mr. Lei [Zhengfu]. “In the past, it might take 10 days for an official involved in a sex scandal to lose his job. This time he was gone in 66 hours.”

The “astonishingly ranine” Lei took a starring role in Evan Osnos’ survey of the recent string of sex scandals at The New Yorker (via CDT).

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The official, Li Chuncheng, 56, did not attend an important provincial Communist Party gathering on Tuesday and has not been seen in public since Nov. 19, the official Xinhua news agency said, without saying whether he had been detained. Although not on a career track that would be likely to take him to the highest echelons of the Chinese government, he was named at the party congress as one of 171 alternate members of the Central Committee; there are 205 full members.

Communist Party officials like Mr. Li face a sometimes harsh investigative process that is separate from the country’s judicial system, although party investigations can often lead to prosecution by the judiciary as well. Xinhua deleted its article about Mr. Li from its Web site early Wednesday afternoon, possibly a sign that public release of the announcement had not been fully vetted.

The investigation of Mr. Li comes as Xi Jinping, the new general secretary of the Communist Party, is trying to make an anticorruption campaign one of the first hallmarks of his tenure. Mr. Xi emphasized the fight against corruption in his inaugural address after taking office on Nov. 15, and in his first speech to the Politburo he warned that failing to act against corruption would “doom the party and the state.”

Reuters reports that official Chinese media announced the investigation before taking reports down:

Sichuan party authorities announced the investigation on Monday and Li did not appear as scheduled at a propaganda meeting on Tuesday, the media said.

However, by early afternoon the Youth Daily and Xinhua websites had deleted their reports on Li without explanation. Calls to the Sichuan government seeking comment went unanswered.

The South China Morning Post looks at Li’s background and political rise:

From the 1970s to 1998, Li spent most of his time in Harbin , Heilongjiang , first as a student and then in various positions, including deputy chief of the city’s branch of the Communist Youth League and deputy mayor.

He was appointed deputy mayor of Chengdu , Sichuan’s provincial capital, in 1998, and promoted to mayor in 2001. Four years later, he was named party chief of Chengdu. He became the province’s deputy party chief in September last year. He was regarded as a key architect of Chengdu’s building boom, and dismayed Premier Wen Jiabao with a vanity project in 2008, after the province was hit by a massive earthquake.

Staff began moving into a new city government headquarters, which reportedly cost more than US$176 million, following the earthquake. Wen visited the headquarters after travelling to the quake-hit area, but left “in disgust, having spent less than three minutes in it”, according to a US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks last year.

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So how, exactly, do you crack down on corruption in China?

Li Chengyan, a professor at Peking University’s Research Center for Government Integrity, has an idea: Involve the mistresses. No, seriously. A staunch party loyalist, he is researching the role of kept women, or ernai, as whistleblowers, intentionally or otherwise. “The phenomenon of mistresses is so common in Chinese history, but the scale today is really unprecedented,” says Li, who thinks the problem is caused by loopholes in the discipline system and lack of effective supervision. “If we examine corrupt officials, about 80 to 90 percent of them also have mistresses.”

Li sees a connection between China’s modern concubine culture and its runaway graft: the “emperor psychology” of the unrestrained: “Absolute power corrupts absolutely. When officials have absolute power, they become bold to ignore the law and social norms and do everything they like.” This ultimately hurts the party: “It’s misleading to think that keeping a mistress is not a big problem — that it won’t affect the official’s main work, records, and achievements. Temptation brings temptation.”

But where others see moral hazard, Li also sees a silver lining. “Many corruption investigations begin with information or lawsuits from the mistresses. Why not? They have direct knowledge of the officials’ behavior.” Eleven mistresses of a Shaanxi province official — many of them wives of his subordinates — exposed his dealings in 2007 after their families stopped prospering. The mistress of a former Navy vice-admiral ratted him out in 2006 after he rebuffed demands for continued financial support for her and their secret love child. “She wanted compensation to buy a house and raise the kid as a condition to end the relationship,” says Li. “Changes in relationship status always produce unstable results.”

Read more about corruption and mistresses in China, via CDT.

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The translations are by Rogier Creemers of China Copyright and Media.

26 August 2005

(1) Close news trackers on “Anti-Corruption: More than 10,000 Leading Cadres Actively Handed Over More than 60 Million Yuan in Cash, Etc.” Existing ones are to be deleted, it is not to be discussed.

(2) Search websites, if there are articles such as “North Korea’s Fall-out with China,” these are to be deleted.

23 August 2005

Heading: Corpse of Old Person Discovered Exposed on Hospital Roof, Ten Days After Hospitalization (Images), the content of this article is about an incident of a violent struggle between the hospital and relatives after an old person died in Xi’an Gaoxin Hospital. This incident may not be reported, if discovered, immediately delete it!!

22 August 2005

Everyone, a small number of people in Meishan Town, Changxing, Zhejiang used the masses’ emotions of appealing to enterprises to protect the environment, and took advantage to create a mass disturbance, at present, the situation has already calmed down. It is only permitted to reprint Xinhua copy, forums and other interactive columns may also not disseminate or play up this matter. Our websites do not have news qualifications, no channel may disseminate this news, please immediately delete this when examining and verifying matters.

18 August 2005

Gong Xiantian’s “Open Letter on the ‘Property Law’ (Draft)” may not be reprinted by any website without exception. Concerning “Li Datong’s Open Letter on the China Youth Daily’s New Assessment Methods to Editor-in-chief Li Erliang and the Editorial Committee” and corresponding content inspection of forums must be strengthened, and relevant information timely blocked and deleted.

13 August 2005

The incident of the Heilongjiang Higher Procuratorate Director’s suicide may not be reported.

13 August 2005

Phoenix Net issued three articles on the 11th, with the respective titles: (1) Japan and the U.S. Plan to Use Military Exercises to Probe China and Encircle China’s March to the Oceans; (2) Japan Blocks China’s Gas Exploration in the East China Sea, Related Persons Point Out China and Japan May Come to Blows Within the Year; (3) Chinese Ex-diplomat in Japan: China and Japan May Come to Blows Within the Year Because of the East China Sea Dispute. Content corresponding to this and netizen discussion must be deleted without exception.

11 August 2005

“China’s Ten Worst Cities,” this article is pure foreign fabrication, and is to be deleted without exception.

The article “SARFT Notice concerning Further Strengthening Radio and Television Channel Management” must be deleted.

7 August 2005

Concerning the mass attack on the Huangshi Municipal Party Committee and Municipal Government building that took place in Huangshi City, Hubei Province, networks may not report without exception, corresponding information on forums is to be deleted without exception.

2 August 2005

(1) Online information related to demobilized military personnel. (Information referring to treatment and corresponding demobilization systems must be deleted.)

(2) Domestic online information concerning hotspots and commentaries that shareholders pay attention to, as well as information concerning inciting and arousing netizens to conduct rallies and demonstrations. (Apart from incitement of rallies and demonstrations, it is permitted to not delete this.)

(3) Online matters related to Japan, activities and trends of organizations and individuals to protect the Diaoyu Islands. (Where language is radical and destructive to the Sino-Japanese relationship.)

(4) Online information related to rights defense and petitioning by workers and peasants. (To be deleted where the cause of the matter is related to the government.)

(5) Online information on activities concerning Tibetan independence and Xinjiang independence, East Turkestanists planning terror activities during the 50th anniversary celebrations. (All pieces containing this information are to be deleted.)

(6) Online information concerning network real-name systems. (Maintain the positive side, delete the negative side.)

(7) Online interest paid to information concerning the Sichuan illness that has no clear cause. (Do not manage the past, delete the pieces maliciously playing this up this week.)

(8) Foreign websites’ attention paid to peasant land rights defense at the South China Sea, as well as the level of domestic attention. (Those clashing with the government are to be deleted, others are provisionally not to be deleted, but must be reported.)

(9) Online information related to unemployed laborers’ rights defense as well as the issue of the Three Rurals.

2005年8月北京网管办发出的禁令

2005-8-26

1：关闭《反腐：万余领导干部主动上交现金等6000余万元》一文的新闻跟贴。原有的删除，论坛中不讨论。

2：搜索网站,如有”朝鲜对中国翻脸”相关文章做删除处理.
2005-8-23

标题：老人住院十日后被发现暴尸于医院天台 [组图] ，此文章内容是一老人死于西安高新医院后发生的医院和家属的暴力纠纷事件。此事件不准报，发现即删！！
2005-8-22

各位，浙江长兴煤山镇少数人利用群众最企业环保诉求情绪，趁机聚众闹事一事，目前事态已经平息．只许转载新华社通稿，论坛等互动栏目亦不得传播炒作此事。我们网站没有新闻资质，任何频道不转转载此新闻，请审核时看到立即删除！
2005-8-15

巩献田关于《物权法（草案）》公开信》各网站一律不得传播。《李大同就中国青年报新的考评办法致李而亮总编辑并编委会的公开信》及相关内容，要加强对论坛的检查，及时封堵和删除有关信息。

2005-8-13

黑龙江高检检察长自杀事件，不准报。
2005-8-13

凤凰网11日发了三篇稿子，标题分别为：1、日美拟借军演试探中国围堵中国走向海洋 2、日阻华东海采气 相关人士指出中日年内或动武 3、中国前驻日外交官：中日年内或因东海纷争动武。与此相关的内容及网友讨论一律删除.
2005-8-11

“中国十大最差城市”此文纯属境外造假，一律删除。

“广电总局关于进一步加强广播电视频道管理的通知”一文要删除。
2005-8-7

关于湖北省黄石市发生群众冲击黄石市委市政府大楼的事件，网站一律不报，论坛中相关信息一律删除。
2005-8-2

1.网上有关复转军人的相关信息。（提到待遇和相关复转制度的要删）

2.境内网上股民关注热点、评论以及煽动、鼓动网民进行集会、游行的相关信息。(除煽动集会游行外可不删)

3.网上涉日、保钓组织、人员的活动动向。(言词激进的破坏中日关系的）

4.网上有关工人、农民维权、上访的相关信息。（事情原因与政府有关系的删）

5.网上藏独、疆独活动信息，东突分子策划50周年大庆之际进行恐怖活动。(凡有与此信息的删除）

6.网上关于网络实名制的相关信息。（正面保留，负面的删）

7.网上对于四川不明原因疾病相关信息的关注。（以前不管，对于这周的恶意炒作的删）

8.境外网站对南海农民土地维权问题的关注，以及境内网的关注程度。(与政府相冲突的删，其他先不删，但要上报）

9.网上有关下岗工人维权以及三农问题的相关信息。

These translated directives were first posted by Rogier Creemers on China Copyright and Media on November 10, 2012 (here).

© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
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“The work of constructing a system of punishing and preventing corruption has shown to be effective,” He Guoqiang, head of the party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, said yesterday, according to the People’s Daily newspaper.

The plan is part of broader efforts to burnish the party’s image before the once-a-decade leadership transition. China’s leaders are seeking to recover from a series of scandals including the downfall of former Chongqing Party Secretary Bo Xilai, and Premier Wen Jiabao warned in March that corruption could endanger the government’s survival.

“In the past ten years, the more they fight corruption, the more plans and agencies they set up, the worse the corruption gets,” said Zheng Yongnian, director of the East Asian Institute at the National University of Singapore. “A truly clean government comes from the rule of law.”

The precise timing of the congress is not yet known, but He’s announcement and signs of tightening security in Beijing suggest a sooner-than-expected start next month, according to The Hindu’s Ananth Krishnan.

Xinhua’s report on the announcement shed little light on the next five-year plan’s specifics:

The spirit of the 18th CPC National Congress should be fully implemented in the formation of the next five-year plan to fight corruption, He said.

He said China has always paid great attention to fighting corruption and creating a clean government, adding that the country has created its own unique methods to combat corruption.

[…] The formation of the new five-year plan should be based on the results of the previous plan, as well as past experience, He said.

The government has much past experience to draw on. TIME’s Austin Ramzy pointed out a 2001 China Daily article promising that corruption would be under control within five years “as effective legal and structural measures become more perfect.”

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: anti-corruption, Bo Xilai, corruption, He Guoqiang, history, party congress, rule of law, Wen Jiabao
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[Mainland customers'] pullback shows how the slowest economic expansion in three years and an effort to curb corruption are starting to ripple through China’s 22-billion euro ($27 billion) luxury market, where CLSA Ltd. estimates that almost a fifth of spending is on corporate gifts. That will likely hurt makers of pricey brands such as Cartier seller Cie. Financiere Richemont SA (CFR), Swatch Group AG (UHR) and Hong Kong jewelerLuk Fook Holdings International Ltd. (590)

“Lower earnings resulting from China’s economic slowdown may lead to companies spending less on business gifts,” said Luk Fook Chief Financial Officer Paul Law. “Corporate gifting helps foster business relationships: You can cut the red tape and speed up approval processes when you have good relations.”

These gifts include cigarettes, Maotai liquor, Rolex and Longines watches, Louis Vuitton wallets, and gold bars carved with lucky characters. Some disagree over the factors that caused the decrease in China’s appetite for luxury goods:

Gifting is important in Chinese personal and professional life and is centered around the idea of reciprocity. Even though companies and government officials may be under public scrutiny there will still be demand for gifts because “corporate gifting is so prevalent in China’s business practices,” said Law, who sees economic pressures as a bigger threat than the anti-graft measures, which can be hard to enforce.

In what could be perceived as an attempt to win back the China market, Louis Vuitton today took the unprecedented move of running a full-page ad on the front cover of the official China Daily newspaper.

In response to reports of an industry slowdown, several luxury brands announced today that their sales in China are still robust and not experiencing a downturn.

See Also: Officials’ Luxury Watches Set Off Alarms and China Targets Corruption With Expense Crackdown via China Digital Times.

© Wendy Qian for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: alcohol, anti-corruption, anti-graft, luxury goods, official corruption
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As Xi climbed the Communist Party ranks, his extended family expanded their business interests to include minerals, real estate and mobile-phone equipment, according to public documents compiled by Bloomberg.

Those interests include investments in companies with total assets of $376 million; an 18 percent indirect stake in a rare- earths company with $1.73 billion in assets; and a $20.2 million holding in a publicly traded technology company. The figures don’t account for liabilities and thus don’t reflect the family’s net worth.

No assets were traced to Xi, who turns 59 this month; his wife Peng Liyuan, 49, a famous People’s Liberation Army singer; or their daughter, the documents show. There is no indication Xi intervened to advance his relatives’ business transactions, or of any wrongdoing by Xi or his extended family.[...]

After Bloomberg makes the important note that none of these assets can be tied directly to Xi, it offers a contextual picture of a China rife with tension surrounding wealth and corruption. The in-depth piece of investigative reporting outlines the Xi family’s revolutionary history and Jinping’s “princeling” status before diving into the massive business holdings of his extended family:

Xi and his siblings are the children of the late Xi Zhongxun, a revolutionary fighter who helped Mao Zedong win control of China in 1949 with a pledge to end centuries of inequality and abuse of power for personal gain. That makes them “princelings,” scions of top officials and party figures whose lineages can help them wield influence in politics and business.

The Guardian briefly summarizes some of Bloomberg’s findings:

The Bloomberg report said most of the assets it traced were owned by Xi’s older sister, Qi Qiaoqiao, her husband, Deng Jiagui, and Qi’s daughter, Zhang Yannan.

It said Deng held an indirect 18% stake in a rare earth firm with $1.7bn (£1.1bn) in assets, while the couple held 1.83bn yuan (£184m) of the assets of the Shenzhen Yuanwei Investment Company and wholly owned the Yuanwei group, which had assets worth at least 539m yuan (£55m). The report did not assess the liabilities of relatives and so could not calculate their net worth.

Deng told the agency he was retired and it was “not convenient” to talk much about the couple’s business interests. The Chinese government refused to comment when the agency provided a list showing the Xi family’s holdings to the foreign ministry.

Shortly after the piece went online, Bloomberg found its website on the harmonious side of the Great Firewall. AP reports:

China blocked access to Bloomberg’s website on the mainland after the business and financial news agency published a report Friday detailing the multimillion-dollar assets of relatives of the man set to become the country’s next president.

Bloomberg noted that no assets were traced to Xi, his wife, or their daughter and said in the report that there was no indication of any wrongdoing by Xi or his extended family.

Still, the move to block access to Bloomberg’s main website, on which the Xi story was the lead news item, underscores the government’s sensitivity to such exposure of wealth belonging to people linked to top leaders amid a burgeoning gap between rich and poor and rampant official corruption.

“The government has always been very careful in, on the one hand, emphasizing how they want to contain corruption but yet also worrying about how reports of this nature might galvanize public opinion against the Communist Party,” said Dali Yang, a political scientist at University of Chicago Center in Beijing.

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: anti-corruption, Bloomberg, censorship, corruption, Great Firewall, princelings, Xi Jinping
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With inflation running high and stock markets depressed, it is no wonder that Moutai, China’s most famous brand of the infamously potent baijiu liquor, has been elevated to the status of investment-grade luxury item in recent years. But according to one unexpectedly straight-talking communist party official [Shenzhen CCP Secretary Wang Rong], the sky-rocketing price of Moutai is also emblematic of another Chinese trend: rising corruption.

[...]“Moutai is so expensive. If there were no such consumption using public funds, it wouldn’t have reached its current price,” Mr. Wang said.

The most expensive category of Moutai, which is made in the southwestern province of Guizhou, now fetches a retail price of 2,000 yuan per bottle, up from around 1,500 yuan last year, the equivalent of many blue-collar Chinese workers’ monthly salary.

Mr. Wang’s tirade comes at a time of widespread public anger over the so-called “three publics” phenomenon, a reference to government officials’ use of public funds to travel abroad, buy cars for personal use, and eat and drink.

AFP covers President Hu’s recent remarks about the importance of combatting corruption. The article outlines the latest and most highly publicized cases of corruption in China:

[...]The most high-profile corruption scandal in recent years involved railway minister Liu Zhijun, who was sacked last February for “serious disciplinary violations”, wording that typically refers to corruption.

State media reports have alleged Liu took more than 800 million yuan (about $127 million) in kickbacks over several years on contracts linked to China’s high-speed network.

The public is increasingly intolerant of perceived official corruption, with a growing number of people taking to the streets and social networking sites to criticise the government and protest against pollution and graft.

Last month villagers in the southern province of Guangdong lived under police blockade for more than a week after driving out Communist Party leaders they said had been stealing their land for years.

A Xinhua article relays the rhetoric from a recent press release that came out of a plenary session of the CCP’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI):

[...]The communique said China’s current fight against corruption comes while the international environment is severe and complicated, and the domestic economic system and social structure are undergoing significant changes.

The war on corruption has scored evident achievements, but prominent problems still exist, and although anti-corruption efforts have been intensified, corruption still occurs, it said.

The general situation also features people’s higher expectations for anti-corruption achievements coexisting with the fact that corruption cannot be eradicated in the short term, it said.

And for some video coverage, see New Tang Dynasty TV’s report on corruption in China:

According to official data, 140-thousand officials were investigated for corruption in China in 2011. Professor Hu Xingdou from the Beijing Institute of Technology says that based on the world’s average corruption level, 99 percent of the corruption in China goes unreported.

[...]Liu Kaiming from the Shenzhen Institute of Contemporary Observation says there are ways the Chinese regime could combat corruption if it really wanted to.

[...]Corruption is an endemic problem in China, with public officials and managers of state-owned enterprises having stolen an estimated $123-billion since 1990.

Also see previous coverage of Chinese corruption and the campaign against it, via CDT.

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: anti-corruption, baijiu, corruption, moutai
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