On March 17, 2012, the Public Security Bureau in Chenzhou, in the central province of Hunan, said it was removing Huang Bailian as head of its drug squad.

Huang’s explanation for the move was simple: “This is retaliation.”

Three years earlier Huang, who is 48 years old and a 25-year veteran of the police force, cracked what he thought was a large drug trafficking case. However, before the case could be handed to prosecutors, his classification of it was changed to clear one suspect. Furthermore, some of the drugs seized during his arrests quickly went missing.

Evidence of the theft pointed to a subordinate of Huang’s, Wang Bin. Furthermore, there were suspicions that Wang and Huang Bailian’s boss, vice-captain of the drug squad Huang Zhongxiang, were protecting traffickers.

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Post tags: corrupt officials, corruption, drug trafficking, Hunan, Murong Xuecun, police corruption, Wen Jiabao
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This may seem strange, given that the Chinese have propelled their country into the top ranks of global economic powerhouses over the past 30 years. There are those who predict a hard landing for an overheated economy — where growth has already slowed — but the acquisition of wealth is better understood not just as an economic cushion, or as pure greed, but as a political hedge.

China’s Communist leaders cling to Deng Xiaoping’s belief that their continuance in power will depend on economic progress. But even in China, a mandate based on competence can crumble in hard times. So globalizing one’s assets — transferring money and educating one’s children overseas — makes sense as a hedge against risk. (At least $120 billion has been illegally transferred abroad since the mid-1990s, according to one official estimate.)

…

Today, the party’s 80 million members are still powerful, but most join the party for career advancement, not idealism. Every day, there are some 500 protests, demonstrations or riots against corrupt or dictatorial local party authorities, often put down by force. The harsh treatment that prompted the blind human-rights advocate Chen Guangcheng to seek American protection is only one of the most notorious cases. The volatile society unleashed against the state by Mao almost 50 years ago bubbles like a caldron. Stories about the wealth amassed by relatives of party leaders like Mr. Bo, who have used their family connections to take control of vast sectors of the economy, will persuade even loyal citizens that the rot reaches to the very top.

Last week, The Guardian reported that three retired CCP officials called on leaders to disclose their family wealth before the issue further erodes the party’s grip on power ahead of the upcoming leadership succession.

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Post tags: Bo Xilai, CCP legitimacy, chinese communist party, corruption, Deng Xiaoping, luxury, princelings
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As the scandal over Bo Xilai continues to reverberate, the authorities here are eager to paint Mr. Bo, a fallen leader who was one of 25 members of China’s ruling Politburo, as a rogue operator who abused his power, even as his family members accumulated a substantial fortune.

But evidence is mounting that the relatives of other current and former senior officials have also amassed vast wealth, often playing central roles in businesses closely entwined with the state, including those involved in finance, energy, domestic security, telecommunications and entertainment. Many of these so-called princelings also serve as middlemen to a host of global companies and wealthy tycoons eager to do business in China.

“Whenever there is something profitable that emerges in the economy, they’ll be at the front of the queue,” said Minxin Pei, an expert on China’s leadership and professor of government at Claremont McKenna College in California. “They’ve gotten into private equity, state-owned enterprises, natural resources — you name it.”

For example, Wen Yunsong, the son of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, heads a state-owned company that boasts that it will soon be Asia’s largest satellite communications operator. President Hu Jintao’s son, Hu Haifeng, once managed a state-controlled firm that held a monopoly on security scanners used in China’s airports, shipping ports and subway stations. And in 2006, Feng Shaodong, the son-in-law of Wu Bangguo, the party’s second-ranking official, helped Merrill Lynch win a deal to arrange the $22 billion public listing of the giant state-run bank I.C.B.C., in what became the world’s largest initial public stock offering.

The foreign press has been reporting on China’s princelings and the challenge they pose to the CCP since well before the Bo Xilai scandal erupted, with a number of China’s incoming generation of top leaders (including president-in-waiting Xi Jinping) descending from Communist Party elite. Still, the Bo scandal turned the princeling issue into a “U.S. media phenomenon,” especially in light of already existing reports of son Bo Guagua’s lavish and conspicuous lifestyle, writes Jay Newton-Small for TIME’s Global Spin blog:

China has changed in the years since the revolution when everyone was expected to live simply. Bo Guagua and his contemporaries are everything the Communist Party stalwarts have sought not to be: frivolous, glittering, pampered, privileged. And while Bo Guagua has dropped off the map, abandoning his $3,000-a-month Boston luxury apartment for something in an undisclosed location, there is no shortage of princelings to focus on. There are hundreds if not thousands of them in the U.S. alone. “The reality is [there is] a very large number of Chinese officials, not only of highest levels but throughout the system, who send their children abroad whenever they can,” says Lieberthal.

The American media aren’t the only ones to find the princelings fascinating. Indeed, it is a much more crucial development that Chinese blogs were onto Bo Guagua even before the scandal enveloped his parents. They were the first to track his glitzy existence, for example, writing about Bo Guagua allegedly using his red Ferrari to pick up the daughter of former U.S. ambassador to China Jon Huntsman for an event. The same blogs follow former People’s Liberation Army marshal Ye Jianying’s granddaughter Ye Mingzi’s latest fashion design or former Vice Premier Wang Li’s granddaughter Wan Baobao’s jewelry designs. They also traffic in unsubstantiated speculation (like whether the daughter of a prominent Chinese leader, attending Harvard under an assumed name, dated basketball phenom Jeremy Lin).

Singling out Bo Guagua may be the regime’s shot across the bow to other young princelings: keep a low profile or you could end up like him. But surely Bo Guagua is only the first installment in what promises to be a long and dramatic soap opera. It’s hard to imagine that none of the princelings want to be the Paris Hilton of China. As the story unfolds, the test will be how the Communist Party handles it. The trouble is that money and what it can flaunt is central to Chinese society nowadays. “China itself is very much focused on making money as a core goal of people throughout that system,” says Lieberthal. “In fact, there are complaints in China all the time that people are worried that the focus is so strong that it isn’t properly balanced by ethical considerations. The ethic is making money. And if that ethic isn’t tempered, you may have a rapidly growing economy but you’ve got real problems.”

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Bo Guagua, Bo Xilai, CCP 5th generation, chinese communist party, corruption, Hu Jintao, princelings, Wen Jiabao, Wu Bangguo
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Mr. Devillers, 51, has graying hair and stands with slightly stooped shoulders. A pair of reading glasses hung from a black cord around his neck. He has an occasional wry smile, and a calm demeanor that may stem from his years of close study of Taoism, a mystical philosophy with deep roots in Chinese culture.

Mr. Devillers declined to speak on the record at his modest home, a sparsely decorated but attractive two-story French colonial building that survived the Khmer Rouge’s bloody rule of Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. After a subsequent exchange of e-mails, late Wednesday evening he allowed one comment to be attributed to him, a quote from the most famous Taoist text, the Dao De Jing, also known as the Tao Te Ching.

Mr. Devillers used the quote to summarize his contempt for the media interest in him, his denial that he has engaged in money laundering for anyone in China or been involved in any other wrongdoing, and his hope that the outside world will soon lose interest in him.

“Regarding our subject, I came on this quote from the Dao De Jing by Laozi which says: ‘Give evil nothing to oppose and it will disappear by itself,’ “ Mr. Devillers wrote. “I believe this teaching to be full of wisdom and hope facts will unfold the truth of it.”

Meanwhile, with Gu Kailai’s whereabouts still unknown as she faces murder charges in connection with Heywood’s death, The Los Angeles Times’ Barbara Demick reports that family members, activists and even former critics have all called for her to receive an open trial:

“The family is in a bad position. [The government] didn’t tell them where she is. They don’t know what will happen to her,” said the friend, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject. He said he saw Gu’s 90-year-old mother and a sister last week.

The friend said he was concerned that Gu, who is accused of poisoning Neil Heywood, doesn’t have a lawyer and may not be able to mount a defense. “I hope China will follow the law and let the world know what is happening with this case,” he said.

…

Chen Ziming, an activist during the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations at Tiananmen Square and now a prominent intellectual in Beijing, says there is rare agreement across the political spectrum about how Gu should be handled.

“For once there is a common cause between the left and the pro-democracy camp, that this case should be dealt with in open court,” said Chen, who also wrote an editorial on the subject. “What Bo Xilai did … was a threat to the rule of law, but there is no reason his family should suffer retribution. To the contrary, her trial should serve as a model.”

…

The irony is that the people now expressing concern for Gu were vocal critics of the Maoist campaigns that her husband led in the city of Chongqing, where he was party secretary. Li Zhuang, a prominent Beijing lawyer who was persecuted by Bo after defending suspects in Chongqing, suggested last month that he would be willing to come to her defense.

“It would make people appreciate the role of lawyers in a modern and civilized world,” Li wrote on his microblog.

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Post tags: Bo Xilai, corruption, gu kailai, legal system, murder, Neil Heywood, Patrick Henri Devillers, rule of law, scandal
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Some, like Levin Zhu, head of investment bank China International Capital Corp and son of former Premier Zhu Rongji, do not hide their family backgrounds.

But for others, while kinship to China’s political elite can guarantee lucrative business offers, it can also create problems in a country where politics has been historically volatile.

From a princeling’s point of view, changing a name, or using several names simultaneously, is often seen as a way to hedge against political risk.

As a result, it is very common for princelings to change their names or use aliases when they go overseas to study or do business, according to Johnny Lau, a veteran China watcher based in Hong Kong.

“There is a long history of this,” he says. “First, they do this to feel safe. They sometimes worry about being kidnapped.

“But they also want to guard their image, to avoid the kind of attention that could invite trouble.”

Li Xueming resigned from the board of a Hong Kong-listed state-owned alternative energy company in late April as the net of scrutiny extended to Bo Xilai’s relatives.

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Until now, only Heywood was alleged to have also had a close personal relationship with Bo’s glamorous wife, Gu Kailai – a factor that has led Chinese police to treat his murder as one where intense feelings of betrayal played a part. Gu is alleged to have poisoned Heywood in November after a row over money.

But one man who knew Heywood and Devillers during the pair’s association with the Bo family said Devillers had shown much more affection and intimacy towards Gu than Heywood had done, and that he had assumed Gu and the Frenchman were lovers.

“Heywood was an interesting and amusing character,” said UK businessman Giles Hall. But he added, “Devillers was the one who used to pat her on the back and put his arm around her in a restaurant. They were definitely, I would have said, an item.”

…

The suspicion Devillers had a romantic link with Gu – in addition to business ties – suggests the Frenchman could be more than a peripheral figure in the Bo scandal, details of which are sketchy. The police case against Gu has not been made public.

The connection between Devillers and Gu Kailai adds yet another layer to a scandal which has spilled into the tabloids and taken on the characteristics of a Hollywood thriller, with the now-deposed Chongqing party chief Bo Xilai at the center. Keisuke Udagawa, a conservative Japanese political commentator and longtime friend of the Bo family, told a Japanese tabloid that he was allowed to meet and dine with Bo in Beijing in late April after the one-time Politburo Standing Committee hopeful had been detained. The Telegraph has more on the “stunning contents” of Udagawa’s claims:

They were accompanied by two translators, including one from the national security bureau, while two police officers stood outside the room, according to his version.

Mr Bo did not deny reports that his wife arranged for Mr Heywood to be killed after a bitter falling-out in a financial dispute, he said.

He also reportedly told Mr Udagawa that he wished he had divorced Mrs Gu in 2000, when the couple nearly split, but that they stayed together for political appearances and for their son, Bo Guagua.

Mr Bo said that he had been framed by the enemies he made during his controversial anti-corruption crackdown while he was mayor of Chongqing. He denied that his downfall was the result of a party power struggle.

The Financial Times’ Geoff Dyer writes for Foreign Policy that as the Bo saga continues, it will become more difficult to separate fact from fiction as we search for hints about the political implications for a Party in transition:

But as the scandal moves from the immediate circumstances to the broader political fallout, the Bo case could become harder to report. Political stories in China can be like quicksand. White House reporters might not get to talk too often to the president, but they can speak to people who were in the room with him when he makes a decision. In China, foreign reporters have to rely on more removed sources: advisors, Chinese journalists, foreigners who have recently met senior leaders, and lower-level bureaucrats. All sources have an agenda, but the more tenuous their link to power, the harder it can be to decode their bias — or assess their credibility. Even with reporting on Bo’s fall, stories about his phone-tapping antics and links to the death of Heywood depended heavily on anonymous sources. Trying to gauge the political machinations of a group of a few dozen standing committee members, kingmakers, and PLA generals is at best an imperfect task when much of the information is coming third-hand.

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Post tags: Bo Xilai, corruption, detention, divorce, gu kailai, murder, Neil Heywood, Patrick Henri Devillers, scandal
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Earlier this week, I left China after five years as an Al Jazeera English correspondent following the decision by the government to revoke my press credentials. At a subsequent Foreign Ministry press briefing, spokesman Hong Lei did not provide a public explanation, only saying that “foreign journalists should abide by Chinese laws and regulations”. But I have not broken any laws. And I believe I have tried to cover China as honestly and equitably as one can. As I say goodbye to China, I think back to some of the issues and people we’ve covered ….

China is a country of contradictions. One minute you marvel at the speedy transformation, the new wealth, the great hope of many. Another minute, and in this case powerfully felt because it can all happen in one day, you’re disgusted by the corruption, the systemic problems of a one-party authoritarian state, and the trampling of individual human rights and dignity.

Read it all, and see previous posts on CDT for more on Chan’s expulsion, its context and possible explanations.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: corruption, deportation, development, foreign journalists, foreign media regulations, journalists conditions, news media
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At The New York Times, Murong Xuecun explains his own view of corruption’s place in Chinese society, recalling an encounter with an entrepreneurial road builder in Sichuan some fifteen years ago. “Like most Chinese people,” he writes, “he was harmed by corruption yet he dearly wanted in.”

I will never forget something Mr. Zhao said to me: There’s not a single straight road in China; they were all built with kickbacks ….

If corruption is inevitable, then people inevitably force themselves to get used to it, and even defend its legitimacy. Most of us Chinese go from being shocked to being numb ….

The leadership in Beijing needs corruption and actually encourages it. Corruption is the system’s natural lubricant, without which everything would grind to a halt. There’s no shortage of upright people in China, but in this system even the upright must study the crooked arts simply to survive.

Not a single person in China can completely break free from corruption, and not a single road is straight.

The South China Morning Post reports that Murong Xuecun is one of a number of prominent weibo users whose accounts have been suspended during the past week.

Hao Qun, a novelist-turned-blogger who uses the pen-name Murong Xuecun , said his microblog, which had 1.85 million followers, was suspended on Thursday and he had learned it could last a month or so, until after the 23rd anniversary of the bloody crackdown on the pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989.

He said he had also learned that the order to suspend his microblog had come from the government’s top internet censor.

Hao said he imagined that the suspension was punishment for his comments on the ongoing Chen [Guangcheng] saga in the overseas press and his attempt to visit Chen in Shandong in October. “If you’d asked me or any other bloggers, we’d have all told you with confidence that we knew where to draw a line, but apparently we’re all wrong,” he said.

“The order could just come from anyone at the top or even his secretary, who simply call the censors because they bump into a posting they’re not happy with.”

Read an account of the attempted visit to Chen Guangcheng and more by and about Murong Xuecun, via CDT.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: bribery, Chen Guangcheng, corruption, Internet censorship, June 4th, Murong Xuecun, road construction, sina weibo, United States, weibo
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The first was to blame the killing on the local mafia as retaliation for the much-vaunted crime-fighting operation in the city, portraying the police chief as an anti-corruption “martyr”.

The second was to present his death as a suicide, carried out to escape punishment for his own corruption. The third was suicide caused by depression.

Mr Bo decided against the first course as too difficult to execute and the second was ruled out as he feared it would undermine the anti-crime campaign that was the backbone of his push for national power.

So he reportedly opted for the third option with the help of his allies, Xu Ming, a billionaire businessman, and Che Keming, former China National Security Agency director.

Mr Bo’s aides are said to have forged a medical history of depression for Mr Wang, leaking a supposed hospital certificate that circulated on the internet and spreading the word that the police chief had become mentally unstable.

Separately, The Telegraph dug further into Gu Kailai’s business interests and has identified a Frenchman, Patrick Henri Devillers, who ran a lucrative UK-based property firm from her personal office in Beijing and signed contracts on her behalf. While it is unclear how Mr. Devillers met Gu Kailai and what connection he had with Neil Heywood, the Telegraph reports that he likely first crossed paths with the Bo’s during Bo Xilai’s tenure as mayor of Dalian in the early 1990′s and more recently he acted as the “middle man” in Gu’s business affairs:

The firm, D2 Properties S.a.r.l, registered in Luxembourg, which in 2009 was put on G20′s “grey list” of countries with “questionable banking arrangements”, has large stakes in a series of property firms.

The 51-year-old Frenchman, whose whereabouts are unknown, claimed to be living at the address, an apartment in the Asian Games Village, overlooking the “Bird’s Nest” Olympic Stadium in Beijing.

He has used the address on all official filings to the Luxembourg authorities connected with the firm since it was set up in 2006 and it is listed as his “home” on its most recent accounts, dated 12 October 2011 – a month before Mr Heywood’s death.

But the address is also listed as the office of Horus L. Kai, the name used as an alias by Mrs Gu in dealings with Western businessman, and the original name of her law practice, which is now known as Ang Dao. The address was printed her personal business cards and registered with the Beijing Lawyer’s Association, the official body overseeing legal practices in the Chinese capital.

As Bo and his wife continue to be held in undisclosed locations as the two-pronged as investigations into their wrongdoings proceed, The New York Times reports from Chongqing that the party has rushed to implement a long-used post-purge strategy of erasing all traces Bo’s legacy:

“There is a manual on how to delete the legacies of a fallen leader, and they’ve got it down to the smallest details,” said Minxin Pei, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College in Southern California.

The results have been swift and efficient. Residents say that just 15 hours after Mr. Bo’s ouster, Chongqing’s satellite television station, which he had required to broadcast only commercial-free “red culture” programming, began showing advertisements. Then came a media campaign meant to destroy his reputation.

But the party’s sudden vilification of Mr. Bo and his once-lauded projects has laid bare its thin ideological marrow. After years of instructing citizens to revere Mr. Bo, the party has aggravated public cynicism by orchestrating his hasty downfall.

“People here just don’t trust the central government,” said a local magazine journalist, who described the orders from editors to stop reporting on Mr. Bo’s accomplishments. “Now they’re telling us Bo’s a bad guy. But no government official is innocent. At least we know our lives got better after he came.”

The New York Times’ Michael Wines also writes that Bo, whose demise “has transfixed the world,” developed a reputation as a ruthless boss early in his career and earned powerful enemies at every stop along his rise:

For all his success, the seeds of Mr. Bo’s destruction were evident long ago to many of those who knew him. He was a man of prodigious charisma and deep intelligence, someone who not only possessed the family pedigree and network of allies that are crucial in Chinese politics, but who had also mastered the image-massaging and strategic use of public cash that fuel every Western politician’s rise.

But Mr. Bo’s undisputed talents were counterbalanced by what friends and critics alike say was an insatiable ambition and studied indifference to the wrecked lives that littered his path to power. Little is known about career maneuvers in China’s cloistered leadership elite, but those who study the topic say that Mr. Bo’s ruthlessness stood out, even in a system where the absence of formal rules ensures that only the strongest advance.

“Nobody really trusts him: a lot of people are scared of him, including several princelings who are supposed to be his power base,” said Cheng Li, a scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington. The so-called princelings — like Mr. Bo, offspring of China’s first revolutionary leaders — remain a powerful, though fragmented, force in China’s internal politics.

“That’s just his character,” the son of one Communist Party elder, who knows Mr. Bo well, said in February. “From the county up to the Politburo, he’s a person who has to have it his way.”

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Post tags: Bo Xilai, Chongqing, corruption, gu kailai, murder, Neil Heywood
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We don’t much think of the party as a political organization these days. It is dominated by technocrats obsessed with economic and engineering challenges. These men–and they are almost all men–are comfortable talking about detailed economic and technical data, but they are not skilled politicians, adept at handling large crowds or palace intrigue. This apolitical system is a recent phenomenon and the outcome of a conscious decision by the founder of modern China, Deng Xiaoping.

…

Eventually, politics had to re-emerge. China has reached a level of growth and development at which the big questions it faces are not technical engineering puzzles but deep political, philosophical ones.

Bo represented the revival of politics in at least two ways. In a system of colorless men, he was charismatic, conniving and political. He was comfortable in front of crowds, eager to push himself forward, and he rubbed against the grain of consensus decisionmaking. Money was, as in U.S. politics, the grease that smoothed Bo’s rise. But he also represented the “new left,” an ideological movement that emphasized social and cultural solidarity, the power of the state and other populist issues. Whether he truly believed in these stances is irrelevant. Like all good political entrepreneurs, he saw a market for these ideas in modern China and filled it. And there are other would-be leaders–military nationalists, economic liberals, even more-full-throated populists–who are debating China’s future furiously, though privately, in Beijing and Shanghai.

Bo’s ouster is the most significant purge in the party’s top ranks since Tiananmen Square. The party may hope that the People’s Republic, as it did after that earlier upheaval, can return to its efficient and steady technocratic path. But China has changed too much. And politics in China is xenophobic, populist, nationalist, messy and certainly unpredictable–like politics everywhere.

TIME subscribers can also read Hannah Beech’s cover story on Bo Xilai in the current issue of the magazine. Bloomberg Businesweek’s Bruce Einhorn writes that Bo’s family is just one of many in which the relatives of leaders have advanced and enriched themselves on the coattails of their family’s status, but questions whether the scandal will really threaten the ability of future “princeling” families to do the same:

Will Bo’s downfall threaten his princeling brethren? Stan Abrams, law professor at Central University of Finance and Economics in Beijing, believes they’re feeling some pressure but don’t need to worry too much. “Princelings are being read the riot act in terms of conspicuous consumption,” he says. With the Bo affair still unfolding, the princelings at SOEs might need to lay low for a while. “Their decision making is going to be under more scrutiny than usual,” says Abrams, who believes foreign investors hoping to make big deals with state companies will need to be patient. “Making a deal with an SOE might be a little tougher these days,” he says. “Things that were sensitive before are even more sensitive now—and dealing with an SOE is always more sensitive.”

Don’t hold your breath waiting for the princelings to give up their power in the post-Bo world. “I don’t think one or two [high]-profile cases are going to change anything,” says Abrams, who is author of the China Hearsay blog. “These people are still the sons and daughters of those in charge. Why would they change the whole system? They will do whatever they can to make sure they are protected. [That means] you demonize the folks who screw up and keep the rest running as smoothly as possible. Anything else overturns the system, which is not something they want to do.”

On a lighter note, The Wall Street Journal reports that the political thunderstorm on the mainland has created a business opportunity for Hong Kong’s bookstores, with bestselling books boasting titles such as Bo Xilai’s Crimes, The Inside Story of Bo Xilai’s Fall, and Chongqing’s Department of Murder capturing the intrigue of local residents and mainland visitors:

Such books have sprung up across Hong Kong in the past month and are being sold everywhere, from newspaper stalls to airport shops. The sudden proliferation seems astonishing, given Mr. Bo was purged from the Communist Party just over three weeks ago. Still, many of the books (which are issued by Hong Kong or overseas publishers) recycle material that’s been previously written about Mr. Bo—including numerous newspaper articles and other content culled from the Internet.

“The books are written with varying quality,” says Ms. Zheng frankly. “Not all of what they publish may be true.”

These days, she adds, there’s too much repetition among books, and much of the content is stale. Still, that doesn’t stop mainland customers from loading up with reading material. Near the cash register, customers flick through their purchases and trade fears that their books might get confiscated if spotted by customs officials, who often seize any books that appear to contain sensitive information about Chinese leadership. Some readers go so far as to put different book jackets on their contraband purchases, the better to avoid getting them confiscated.

Most customers just pick up one or two volumes, but one man—who didn’t want to talk about his purchases—walked out this morning with a stack of ten titles. “People will make special trips to Hong Kong just to buy these books,” comments Ms. Zheng. “Some just pick titles randomly, but some of them really understand Chinese politics better than us and know what they’re looking for,” she says. Previous popular releases include titles like Tombstone—an acclaimed two-volume, over 1,000-page expose by a former Xinhua journalist of China’s government-caused famine in the 1950s—as well as China’s Best Actor: Wen Jiabao, a highly critical account of current China’s premier, both banned on the mainland. Another book, The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang, which chronicles the memoirs of Zhao, who was purged and kept under house arrest for 15 years after the 1989 Tiannamen Square protests, has sold some 130,000 copies in Hong Kong since its 2009 publication.

See also a post on China Beat by Xujun Eberlein, who was born in Chongqing and writes about how the city’s people view Bo Xilai.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Bo Xilai, books, CCP, Chen Guangcheng, corruption, Hong Kong, princelings, scandal
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