The rare interview with one of the world’s most powerful men seems newsworthy, but besides a brief mention in the Christian Science Monitor, I couldn’t find any major Western news outlet that picked up on his remarks. Even English-language Chinese media outlets (see here, here, and here) focused their coverage on the fact that Xi Jinping was giving an interview to foreign media before his trip, not on the newsworthiness of anything he said during the meeting. The Chinese-language edition of China’s Foreign Ministry website and a few other Chinese news outlets were the only places where I found a full transcript of the interview, or anything even like it. After reading it, it’s not hard to see why.

[…] On Sunday, many of Beijing’s foreign correspondents attended a press conference held by Li Keqiang, China’s new prime minister. (The New York Times wasn’t invited.) Peter Ford, the Christian Science Monitor’s Beijing bureau chief, and the president of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China (an organization in which I was a board member in 2011) also attended. Ford writes in his newspaper that Li “seemed confident and relaxed, but like his predecessors, he answered only questions that journalists had submitted in advance, and that his press office had approved. At Chinese press conferences you learn which topics the government thinks are important and what message it wants to transmit to the citizenry from the questions that the authorities allow. But you don’t get much fresh information from the answers.”

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We had Yeſterday another Holland Mail , which brings no conſiderable News, except that the Emperor of China, his Court, and a great Part of his Kingdom have embraced the Chriſtian Religion; but this is too extraordinary to be believed without farther Confirmation. Whatever I hear more certain, I’ll acqaint you with in my next.

TIME’s Austin Ramzy saw another contemporary parallel:

Chinese leadership rumors, circa 1694 – bit.ly/V597xx “too extraordinary to be believed without farther Confirmation”

— Austin Ramzy (@austinramzy) December 18, 2012

Talk of China’s leadership this year has frequently matched that description, with rumours frothing intensely around episodes such as the Bo Xilai affair and the fatal Ferrari crash involving Ling Jihua’s son. “Farther Confirmation” is often hard to obtain, more now because of official opacity and obstruction than distance. The Economist lamented this enduring difficulty in September, after Xi Jinping’s unexplained disappearance just weeks before his anticipated appointment as Party General Secretary:

With no hard facts, rumours flourish, even more so today with the rise of social media and a huge global China-watching profession. In the case of Mr Xi’s disappearance, explanations have ranged widely and wildly from a back injury to a heart attack to, most implausibly, an assassination attempt by means of a traffic accident, though the source of this last tale, Boxun, a Chinese-language website hosted in America, quickly deleted it.

All of this reminds China-watchers how little has changed in the four decades since Mr MacFarquhar admitted the tools of his trade were blunt and unreliable. They might recall one of their early manuals, “The Art of China-Watching”, an in-house article produced by the CIA in 1975, containing the best wisdom that American spymasters could offer. The author summed up years of exasperation in one subheading: “Does Logic Help?”

Since that forlorn cry, China has undergone a dramatic social and economic transformation. But its elite politics remains an intricate and frustrating puzzle to be tackled with crude techniques and unreliable sources. Genuine knowledge of the handful of men who rule the country, including whom they will choose to rule after them and what policies they will favour, is as rare as the Chinese unicorn. Even their health is a state secret.

See also Gady Epstein’s survey of The Economist’s 170 years of China reporting, which marked the launch of its Analects blog in February.

Spoof site China Daily Show also addressed the issue last month in a piece shared by a number China-based foreign correspondents on Twitter:

BEIJING (China Daily Show) – The chief correspondent for a top US newspaper has admitted that he has pretty much no idea what is currently going on in China.

“Nope – I’ve got nothing, to be honest with you. Not a goddamn clue,” said 44-year-old Peter Whitman, a veteran of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars who was previously a correspondent in Syria and Egypt. “And neither does anyone else. Your next guess is probably just as good as mine.”

[…] Observing somewhat bitterly that even the most well-researched bit of Pekingology might as well be pulled out of his own behind, Whitman pointed out that most of the sources available to well-placed journalists regarding the Party’s inner dynamics are likely to be in some way flawed, compromised or subject to bias.

[…] “I mean, I probably shouldn’t be telling you this but it’s all pointless, in a way. I don’t know why I bother sometimes,” Whitman shrugged. “I really don’t [….]”

While secrecy is particularly dense around China’s leaders, it extends much further afield. This has posed particular problems for coverage of self-immolations in Tibetan areas, where restrictions on foreign journalists obstruct independent verification of reports leaked by activist networks. In an interview with Global Times last week, Barbara Demick of The Los Angeles Times suggested that this kind of opacity has backfired in the past:

As a Western reporter in China, Demick finds ordinary people are happy to talk to her. By contrast, the government can be unnecessarily elusive at times, she said, noting as a journalist she has to find ways to persevere to carry out her watchdog role.

“Tibetan rioters really did a lot of bad things,” Demick said, referring to the 2008 incident in Lhasa, capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region. “But when the riots started, we weren’t allowed to go to Tibet, and [the government] wasn’t giving us any information,” she said. “At the beginning, much of the information [reported by the Western media] came from Tibetan exile groups in Dharamsala.”

Demick based her stories on the incident on conversations she had with a colleague in Tibet, although this was hindered when communications were cut. She also visited an ethnic Tibetan township in Qinghai Province to seek deeper perspective.

“If [the government] had let the story be told, it would have been more critical of the rioters,” she said.

As for the Account Of The Publick Transactions in Christendom, the rumour in queſtion presumably had roots in the successes of Jesuit missionaries established as scientific and military advisors in the court of the Kangxi Emperor. Their efforts led to the 1692 Edict of Tolerance, which for almost thirty years allowed the preaching and practice of Catholicism in China. From S. Neill’s A History of Christian Missions, quoted at Fordham University’s Internet Modern History Sourcebook:

“The Europeans are very quiet; they do not excite any disturbances in the provinces, they do no harm to anyone, they commit no crimes, and their doctrine has nothing in common with that of the false sects in the empire, nor has it any tendency to excite sedition … We decide therefore that all temples dedicated to the Lord of heaven, in whatever place they may be found, ought to be preserved, and that it may be permitted to all who wish to worship this God to enter these temples, offer him incense, and perform the ceremonies practised according to ancient custom by the Christians. Therefore let no one henceforth offer them any opposition.”

The Emperor later changed his mind after a papal decree ordered Chinese Christians to abandon “pagan” ancestor worship and Confucian rituals. The IMHS’s editor, Paul Halsall, describes this as the loss of “a very good opportunity to convert a significant part of the Chinese elite to Catholicism.” From the Emperor’s 1721 decree:

“Reading this proclamation, I have concluded that the Westerners are petty indeed. It is impossible to reason with them because they do not understand larger issues as we understand them in China. There is not a single Westerner versed in Chinese works, and their remarks are often incredible and ridiculous. To judge from this proclamation, their religion is no different from other small, bigoted sects of Buddhism or Taoism. I have never seen a document which contains so much nonsense. From now on, Westerners should not be allowed to preach in China, to avoid further trouble.”

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Bo Xilai, Christianity, journalism, journalists conditions, Kangxi, leadership, Lhasa riots, Ling Jihua, news gathering, news media, rumors, Tibet, Xi Jinping
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This year, the ostensible goal of the meeting is to achieve consensus on a new slate of top party leaders. But that agenda is complicated by the fact that the leadership is gathering in the shadow of the Bo Xilai scandal. The party formally dumped Bo from the Politburo in April, after he was tripped up by his own deceit, abuse of power, and unbridled ambition. Granted, the leadership took a big step last week by formally charging Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai, with the murder of Neil Heywood, a British businessman who worked for the couple as a fixer. But Gu was always the low-hanging fruit, marked as the sacrificial lamb from the beginning, when the state media announced her as a formal suspect in the Heywood killing.

Yet, unlike in April, there was no simultaneous announcement concerning Bo, suggesting he remains adrift in the netherworld of the party’s extrajudicial detention system. What is more, it remains unclear what will happen to Bo’s erstwhile security chief, Wang Lijun, whose flight to a U.S. consulate in February touched off the whole scandal in the first place. The lack of synchronization suggests moving forward on Gu may be a holding action rather than the beginning of the final act. If so, the CCP’s early hopes of wrapping up the entire Bo case, and all of its unbecoming implications, well ahead of the fall turnover have hit a snag.

In dragging its feet on resolving Bo’s fate, the CCP has missed an opportunity to demonstrate, both at home and abroad, that the party’s leadership is marching in lockstep into the transition. Its failure to make speedier progress is curious, as important interim steps could have been taken by now. A simple announcement, similar to that on Gu, that the party was handing Bo over to the state judicial authorities for formal prosecution would allay any lingering doubts among party insiders or foreign investors by sending an unambiguous signal that the leadership has at least agreed to an initial list of charges.

Instead, Hu and other top leaders have reportedly been messaging with internal edicts to argue that Bo’s case be treated as a breach of law and party regulations rather than as an attempt to split the party. Trying to limit Bo’s transgressions to the narrower allegation of violations of party discipline helps avoid destabilizing factional splits, but a flurry of recent reports suggesting that he has stopped cooperating with interrogators could make any resolution even more illusory.

In the run-up to the leadership transition, the Communist Party is also working to make itself relevant to the younger generation, who primarily see the CCP as a step on the ladder to career success. To that end, the Communist Youth League, which nurtured current leaders, including President Hu Jintao, is now investing in online companies. From Bloomberg:

Now, the Communist Youth League is an investor in online entertainment. It partnered with Chinese gaming firm PowerNet Technology in 2005 to develop a game in which players repel Japanese invaders during World War II, harking back to one of the most celebrated chapters in party history.

The Youth League’s investment arm owns a stake in PowerNet subsidiary Shenzhen Zhongqingbaowang Network Technology Co. (300052), known as Shenzhen ZQ, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Rather than as a source of ideological inspiration, China’s young have flocked to the party as a networking tool and resume builder in an economy dominated by state-owned enterprises.

“The reality here is we have to focus on our own career path,” said Brook, a 23-year-old party member who refused to give her Chinese name for fear of punishment from the government. “Ten to 20 years ago people really wanted to join. Now it’s not ‘We want to,’ but ‘We have to.’”

Read more about the 18th Party Congress and the incoming 5th generation of CCP leadership, via CDT.

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It is palace intrigue by the sea. In their guarded villas, current and past leaders will negotiate to try to place allies in the 25-member Politburo and its elite Standing Committee, at the top of the party hierarchy. The selections will be announced at the 18th Party Congress this fall in Beijing, heralding what is expected to be only the second orderly leadership transition in more than 60 years of Communist rule.

“This is where the factional struggles are settled and the decisions are made,” said one resident, surnamed Li, who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicate nature of Chinese politics. “At the meetings in the fall, everyone just raises their hands.”

Beidaihe is a Chinese combination of the Jersey Shore and Martha’s Vineyard, with a pinch of red fervor: the hilly streets and public beaches are packed with shirtless Russians and Chinese families, while the party elites remain hidden in their villas and on their private patches of sand. A clock tower near Kiessling chimes “The East is Red,” a classic Mao anthem.

The security presence has surged in recent weeks. Police officers in light blue uniforms patrol on Suzuki motorcycles and stand on street corners watching for jaywalkers. They have set up a checkpoint on the main road leading into town.

Read more about the 18th Party Congress and about Bo Xilai via CDT.

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Public supervision is needed to limit the abuse of power, and authorities must continue to work for a “clean government” in 2012, the last year of the current administration, he wrote in Qiushi, Seeking Truth, according to a preview posted on the central government website yesterday.

In his article, titled “Let Power be Exercised in the Sunshine,” Wen wrote that governments at all levels should be open to supervision by the people, as well as stricter administrative inspection and auditing, according to the preview.

Those that underperform, allow important case of corruption to occur or fail to handle corruption cases in a timely manner will be held accountable, he wrote. They should “immediately respond to and investigate problems reported by the people and the media and publicize the results of investigations in a timely manner,” Wen wrote.

In an April 14 commentary, “Law and Party Disciplines Brook No Violation,” Xinhua said “The spouses and children of some officials have taken advantage of their power to seek personal gains, disregarding the law, thus stirring public outcry.” The cases of Bo and his former police chief Wang Lijun have ”nothing to do with a so-called ‘political struggle,’” Xinhua said.

As Premier Wen urges for a campaign against corruption, some analysts are saying that this move may not be the best move for the party. The Washington Post reports:

Usually, campaigns against corruption are seductive for Chinese leaders, in part because they are inherently popular with the masses. Nearly every citizen with a gripe about the well-connected wealthy is heartened by Beijing striking out at local leaders for excessive largesse. Anti-corruption efforts are meant to show Chinese subjects that upper-level officials want to rectify social imbalances produced by cadres behaving badly.

So, amid normal times in China, anti-corruption campaigns are the perfect placebo. But these are anything but normal times. And the party leadership is caught in a bind.

Striking out at Bo’s family has brought to the fore public rage about officials using their position to secure everything from economic advantage to foreign assets and passports. It would be popular to launch a major crackdown on the back of Bo’s fall, but that risks public indignation spilling into the streets, especially if the expectation of action against major families and high officials goes unfulfilled.

And there could be fallout inside the party. Bo’s supporters on the Left could claim that they’re the real supporters of social justice, not the hardline Center. Reformers would protest that all of these campaigns do not focus on the core challenge for this leadership and the next: economic and political restructuring. The party, at the very time it needs unity, could easily end up in deeper strife.

Read more about the Bo Xilai investigation via CDT.

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Analysts say that by moving decisively to bury Ms. Gu and her husband, party leaders are trying to send a message to allies of Mr. Bo who are still putting up resistance. “This is why the dog who has fallen into the water is still being beaten,” said Steven Tsang, director of China Policy Institute at the University of Nottingham in England.

Official news media reports this week accused Mr. Bo of various disciplinary violations, not explicitly corruption. However, several people briefed on the investigation into the couple say that central authorities have included corruption among the accusations circulated to high-level officials in recent weeks.

People’s Daily, the party’s official newspaper, appeared to lay out a list of potential charges on Wednesday that could be brought against Ms. Gu and her husband, who is also the offspring of a revolutionary “immortal” and, like his wife, has long enjoyed the access to power that comes with such a pedigree.

The article said that corrupt party officials have been secretly using children, wives, friends and even mistresses to transfer and conceal ill-gotten wealth overseas. “Some even go through a variety of channels to clandestinely gain a foreign identity or dual nationality,” it said.

Meanwhile, friends of Heywood have provided some details on his background and his state of mind before his death, the Guardian reports:

Heywood’s friend told the Wall Street Journal that the businessman had been unable to reach any of his usual contacts after arriving in Chongqing. He had previously told the same friend he had left documents on the overseas investments of Bo’s family with a lawyer in Britain, as an “insurance policy” in case anything happened to him.

The newspaper, however, added that other friends of Heywood said they had not heard him talk about having a lawyer in Britain or leaving documents, and that it was not clear whether the documents actually existed.

Questions have been raised as to how Bo and Gu paid for their son Bo Guagua’s expensive education at two private schools in England – Papplewick and Harrow – and at Oxford University, given that Bo’s salary as an official would not have covered the fees and that his wife was said to have curtailed her career. Bo said he won full scholarships.

Heywood had previously told friends that Gu had become increasingly anxious that she had been betrayed by a member of the family’s inner circle. Relations appear to have soured in 2010 and the Times reported that Heywood unsuccessfully sought a passport for his Chinese wife that year, going straight to the Home Office in London with his mother.

Bo Xilai and Gu Kailai both come from powerful revolutionary families. It has now been revealed that Bo’s brother has been serving as a senior executive at one of the largest Chinese state-owned companies, China Everbright Holdings, under an assumed name.

See also:

- Bo Xilai tangled in a web of own making from the Financial Times
- Why the Bo Xilai affair ‘isn’t just about China’ from SBS
- Chinese Media Fight Scandal Fallout; Focus on Bo’s Family from the New York Times
- Media in China ordered to run People’s Daily editorial on front page, from China Media Project
- CDT’s previous coverage of Bo Xilai

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
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The decision to banish Bo from the Central Committee and its Politburo effectively ends the career of China’s brashest and most controversial politician, who was widely seen as pressing for a top post in China’s next leadership, to be settled later this year.

The official Xinhua news agency confirmed a Reuters report several hours earlier that Bo had been suspended from his party posts, and separately reported that his wife is suspected in the murder of Briton Neil Heywood.

“Comrade Bo Xilai is suspected of being involved in serious disciplinary violations,” said the news agency said, citing a decision by the central party leadership to suspend Bo from its top ranks.

And from the official Xinhua report (Gu Kailai is also known as Bogu Kailai):

According to investigation results, Bogu Kailai, wife of Comrade Bo Xilai, and their son were in good terms with Heywood. However, they had conflict over economic interests, which had been intensified.

According to reinvestigation results, the existing evidence indicated that Heywood died of homicide, of which Bogu Kailai and Zhang Xiaojun, an orderly at Bo’s home, are highly suspected.

Bogu Kailai and Zhang Xiaojun have been transferred to judicial authorities on suspected crime of intentional homicide.

According to senior officials from related authorities, China is a socialist country ruled by law, and the sanctity and authority of law shall not be tramped. Whoever has broken the law will be handled in accordance with law and will not be tolerated, no matter who is involved.

Meanwhile, an article in the English-language edition of the official Global Times argues that the handling of Bo’s case demonstrates the “resilience” of the rule of law in China:

The high-profile case has finally brought an initial conclusion to two months of speculations and rumors. This emergency, starting from former deputy mayor of Chongqing Wang Lijun seeking refuge at the US consulate in Chengdu in February, shows that China has its own resilience. It is not easily disrupted by sudden incidents.

Law is the base to deal with problems at all levels. This is the foundation for China to keep a healthy political structure.

When the Wang Lijun case was disclosed, the government did not cover it up but initiated an investigation accordingly. This is no longer the era where China would rather cover issues up to avoid revealing problems.

The CPC’s decision against Bo highlights that nobody is above the law and discipline in China. Power abuses are not allowed no matter how superior one’s authority is. Local affairs cannot be dominated by an individual’s interests.

UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal’s China Real Times blog reports on the response to the latest developments on China’s social media sites:

“Why does it seem like, throughout Chinese history, behind every colorful man there’s a powerful woman?” asked real-estate executive Mi Ruihong.

TV mega-personality Hung Huang tackled the news from a different angle, writing: “In this country, whenever men do something bad, it’s all the woman’s fault.”

Writer Beicun, meanwhile, took exception to all the excitement: “What does tonight change? Nothing, nothing at all,” he wrote. “Five-thousand years ago through to today, nothing has changed. Power games played over and over again for thousands of years…this culture’s inhumanity is as eternal as death.”

Censors appeared to be working overtime to control the flood of commentary, with Sina Weibo continuing to block searches for Mr. Bo’s and Ms. Gu’s names and engaging in wholesale erasure of comments even on its own official posts.

Read more reactions from netizens via Tea Leaf Nation.

Update 2 (10:00pm PST April 10): China Media Project has published translations of three Xinhua dispatches about today’s events.

CDT has translated a list of keywords that have been banned from Sina Weibo search relating to Bo Xilai, Gu Kailai, and Neil Heywood.

The Los Angeles Times reported from Chongqing on reactions on the street to Bo Xilai’s downfall:

Many academics, lawyers and other intellectuals were happy to see Bo leave. But the party’s campaign against him is unlikely to convince Bo supporters such as the group of retirees swaying recently to Chinese pop music in Chongqing’s People’s Square, a tree-lined swath of red and gray tile sandwiched between an imposing government building and a leafy hillside.

“Ninety-five percent of us common people support Bo. He was a good leader,” said a woman in a red tracksuit. “Now Chongqing people want to take him back.”

“We’re retired now, so we’re not afraid to talk about these things,” said a 59-year-old man who identified himself as Mr. Shi. When two security guards began approaching from the far end of the square, the crowd dispersed.

See also reports from the Wall Street Journal and the Economist. Read more about Gu Kailai and the death of Neil Heywood via CDT. Much more about the case is available on our Bo Xilai page.

This post will be updated as more news becomes available.

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Post tags: Bo Xilai, CCP, CCP 5th generation, Chongqing, gu kailai, leadership, Politburo, Politburo Standing Committee, Wang Lijun
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This October, the Communist Party will likely execute a once-in-a-decade leadership transition in which President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen hand over to a new team led by current Vice President Xi Jinping. The majority of leaders will retire from the elite Politburo Standing Committee, and the turnover will extend down through lower tiers of the Communist Party, the government, and the military. Wen hopes his words influence who gets key posts, what ideological course they will set, and how history records his own career.

Wen Jiabao and Bo Xilai have long stood out from their colleagues for their striking capacities to communicate and project their individual personalities and ideologies beyond the otherwise monochromatic party machine. The two most popular members of the Politburo, they are also the most polarizing within China’s political elite. They have much in common, including a belief that the Communist Party consensus that has prevailed for three decades — “opening and reform” coupled with uncompromising political control — is crumbling under the weight of inequality, corruption, and mistrust. But the backgrounds, personalities, and political prescriptions of these two crusaders could not be more different.

Bo has deployed his prodigious charisma and political skills to attack the status quo in favor of a more powerful role for the state. He displayed an extraordinary capacity to mobilize political and financial resources during his four and a half year tenure as the head of the Yangtze River megalopolis of Chongqing. He transfixed the nation by smashing the city’s mafia — together with uncooperative officials, lawyers, and entrepreneurs — and rebuilding a state-centered city economy while shamelessly draping himself in the symbolism of Mao Zedong. He sent out a wave of revolutionary nostalgia that led to Mao quotes sent as text messages, government workers corralled to sing “red songs,” and old patriotic programming overwhelming Chongqing TV.

From his leftist or “statist” perch, Bo has been challenging the “opening and reform” side of the political consensus that Deng Xiaoping secured three decades ago. Wen Jiabao, meanwhile, who plays the role of a learned, emphatic, and upright Confucian prime minister, has been challenging the other half of Deng consensus — absolute political control — from the liberal right. He has continuously articulated the need to limit government power through rule of law, justice, and democratization. To do this, he has drawn on the symbolic legacies of the purged reformist leaders he served in the 1980s, particularly Hu Yaobang, whose name he recently helped to “rehabilitate” in official discourse. As every Communist Party leader knows, those who want a stake in the country’s future must first fight for control of its past.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports on how Bo’s ouster is playing out among different factions of the Communist Party as the leadership prepares for a transition of power later this year:

…The ouster of Bo Xilai, the populist icon formerly in charge of the southwestern megacity of Chongqing, has spurred weeks of frenzied internal politicking and a rare dissenting vote within the Politburo Standing Committee, according to interviews with publishers, academics and analysts tied to the Communist Party’s upper echelons or its powerful families.

They say that the outward calm is tenuous and was achieved only after China’s leadership team of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao appealed to party elders for support and yielded important posts in Chongqing to representatives of other influential political blocs.

“They want everyone to believe that the top level has no problem — that there’s no split and no struggle,” said Jin Zhong, publisher of the influential China-watching magazine Open, in Hong Kong. “But this is a false impression.”

According to people briefed by central party officials, Mr. Bo is being confined to his house in Beijing, watched by the Central Guard Bureau, a unit of the People’s Liberation Army under control of the party’s General Office. He faces a disciplinary investigation over a range of allegations of corruption and abuse of power, these people say. His wife, a noted lawyer, is under more formal detention in connection with some of those allegations.

Read more about Bo Xilai via CDT.

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Post tags: Bo Xilai, CCP 5th generation, Cultural Revolution, hu yaobang, leadership, Wen Jiabao
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But Hu and Wen cannot just sack Bo from all top offices. It would have implications for the balancing of different factions and vested interests in the party. Bringing Bo down has implications for those top leaders from privileged backgrounds like Bo, known popularly as the princelings, who enjoy support from former general secretary Jiang Zemin, head of the old “Shanghai faction”. The choice of another princeling, Zhang Dejiang, to replace Bo as party secretary in Chongqing is undoubtedly part of this balancing.

The future of Bo has not yet been decided, as the party leadership needs to do more horse-trading. It will probably be settled in the next few weeks. However, this will not be the end of the matter. What is involved here is much more than the fate of Bo. It is about the jockeying for position in the leadership succession schedule for the party congress in the autumn.

Until then, there will be plenty of manoeuvring by those holding top positions and those hoping to get a seat at the standing committee of the politburo. Bo’s standing committee dream is over, but how his fate will be decided will affect the prospect of others – and with it how China will be managed in the next decade.

The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos observes that the U.S. Republican Presidential primary race looks like a “group hug” in comparison to the dirty drama of Chinese politics, and The Economist adds that the Bo saga provides a rare glimpse beneath the publicly smooth facade of recent Chinese leadership transitions. The Financial Times’ Jamil Anderlini calls Bo’s sacking “probably the most important political event in China in more than two decades,” reports that most analysts believe Bo is “almost certainly being confined in some way to Beijing” to prevent he and his family from fleeing the country, and proposes several possible end-games for the former Politburo Standing Committee hopeful:

It is possible that Mr Bo will be given some minor official position so he can live out his days in comfort and relative obscurity but his boundless ambition and popularity among conservative intellectuals and officials means this is unlikely.

If Mr Bo is accused of relatively trivial charges, such as dereliction of duty for promoting Mr Wang, then he may still have a chance to agitate and rally support against his political enemies.

…

But if he is accused of very serious crimes such as corruption or political assassination then it could provoke a backlash among his powerful supporters and the general populace who have often welcomed his widely publicised political campaigns.

“President Hu [Jintao] and Premier Wen [Jiabao] have to think very carefully about their next move because whatever they do could potentially provoke a challenge to the entire political system,” Mr Li said.

Tsinghua University’s Patrick Chovanec, meanwhile, stresses that it’s important to step back from the immediate causes of yesterday’s news, including the drama surrounding the disappearance of former right hand man Wang Lijun, when tracing the roots of Bo’s downfall:

Bo’s real problem wasn’t liberal critics or sports cars or even turncoat lieutenants — although these became convenient nails in his coffin. Plenty of Chinese officials, snug in their patronage networks, have survived (or even shrugged off) far worse. The Party takes care of its own. But top Party leaders, regardless of political philosophy, had come to dislike Bo, not as a person per se — by all accounts, Bo is an extraordinarily charming man — but as a political persona, at least in his Chongqing incarnation, for three reasons:

First, they were offended by his courting of the media and his vigorous self-promotion, which showed a lack of appropriate deference and humility to established power channels and ways of resolving competition. Second, they felt threatened, because few of them were equipped to compete on this basis, if that’s what it took. Third, they were alarmed by Bo’s tactic of “mobilizing the masses” in ways that explicitly invoked the Cultural Revolution, which called up deep-seated fears that populist fervor could be used as a weapon against rival leaders within the Party — as indeed happened during the Cultural Revolution, to horrific results.

As for the fate of Bo’s polarizing “Chongqing Model” and his controversial “Red Culture” revival, Shanghaiist notes that Chongqing TV has already begun recruiting new staff for its advertising department. Bloomberg calls Bo’s removal, and Premier Wen Jiabao’s revealing press conference at the end of this week’s National People’s Congress, signals that Chinese leaders feared his aggresssive style. A separate Bloomberg piece points out that Bo’s firing may open up a slot on the Politburo Standing Committee for presumed rival and Guangdong party secretary Wang Yang, whose “Guangdong Model” of reform stood in stark contrast to Bo’s Mao-era tactics. The South China Morning Post agrees, publishing the following cartoon and calling Bo’s exit a setback for leftists:

Regardless of where Bo lands, Peking University politics professor Zhang Jian told the Christian Science Monitor, the very public scandal threatens a consensus within the Chinese Communisty Party that “factional struggles should never rock the ship.” China scholar Sam Crane questions whether yesterday marks the end of elite political unity in China:

For those of us who were around in 1989, one of the key factors that fueled the massive demonstrations that year was the split at the very top of the Chinese political hierarchy, a difference of opinion on how to deal with the students in Tiananmen Square. Roughly, Zhao Ziyang seemed to be seeking some sort of compromise, while Li Peng took a harder line. That difference ultimately led to the failure of the first deployment of military power in May and the eventual downfall of Zhao. Since then it appears that everyone at the top of the political order, especially the Politburo, learned the same lesson: if they let internal differences spill out into the public they could face another crisis of 1989 proportions.

…

Chinese politics, especially at the elite level, has been a rather staid and stodgy affair, at least since 1989. Bo’s fall has blown up the usually carefully controlled movements of the top leadership. Whatever happens, it is safe to say that working out the succession of the Standing Committee will be more time- and attention-consuming for the denizens of Zhongnanhai than we might have thought a few months ago.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Bo Xilai, CCP, CCP 5th generation, leadership, zhang dejiang
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Xi’s five-day visit, which begins Tuesday when he meets President Obama, is an essential step in the world’s most important power relationship. Xi needs to show officials back home that the Americans will treat him with respect; the White House wants to gauge Xi’s style before it has to deal with him as the Chinese leader.

Xi, 58, who has been China’s vice president since 2008, is expected to replace Hu Jintao as Communist Party leader this year, and next year as president, a post he would be expected to hold for a decade.

With the U.S., and the world, about to catch its first high-profile glimpse of China’s next leader, fascination with the man, about which little is known, is at an all-time high. An abundance of newspaper profiles have compiled whatever information reporters can cull on his background, his political views, and his suitability for high office. A Guardian article looks at his privileged and painful childhood as the son of a Communist revolutionary who was later persecuted by Mao Zedong, and how that may impact his policy-making:

But when he was only nine his father fell from grace with Mao Zedong. Six years later, as the cultural revolution wreaked havoc, young Xi was dispatched to the dusty, impoverished north-western province of Shaanxi to “learn from the masses”.

He spent seven years living in a cave home in Liangjiahe village. “I ate a lot more bitterness than most people,” he once told a Chinese magazine. He has described struggling with the fleas, the hard physical labour and the sheer loneliness.

All this, of course, fits into classic Communist party narratives of learning to serve the people. But political commentator Li Datong suggests this “double background” has proved genuinely formative for princelings such as Xi and might even lead them to bolder policy making.

“One aspect is their family background as children of the country’s founders and the other is their experience of being sent to the countryside, which made them understand China’s real situation better. It gives this generation a strong tradition of idealism and the courage to do something big,” he said.

A Washington Post profile delves deeper into Xi’s relationship with his father:

For China’s next leader, such a father is a mixed blessing. It connects him with the party’s heroic early years. But it also brings risks at a time of deep public resentment toward so-called “princelings.” Membership in this revolutionary aristocracy “is a serious liability” in terms of public image, said Cheng Li, an expert on Chinese politics at the Brookings Institution in Washington. Xi’s daughter, like the offspring of many senior Communist officials, studies in the United States, at Harvard.

Xi nonetheless has a reputation for probity, and his close relatives are not known to be multimillionaires. He was raised, according to biographer Jia, on frugal values: The elder Xi, after taking a bath, made his son bathe in the same water. In an interview with Chinese television, Xi Jinping recalled having to wear flowery hand-me-down clothes from his sisters. As a teenager, after his father’s fall, he was banished to a poor village in Shaanxi.

He “takes after his father’s excellent qualities,” the official biographer said.

A big question, though, is whether those include his father’s political outlook, or whether his father’s troubles left Xi convinced that unwavering toughness and extreme caution offer the best hope for survival. Although respected by crusty conservatives and neo-Maoist firebrands, Xi senior is particularly popular with many liberals, who remember him as unusually open-minded and tolerant — and hope that his son, under a carapace of political rectitude, is perhaps similar.

On Sunday, the Washington Post published a written interview with Xi, for which the Chinese government ignored many of the questions provided by the paper and instead wrote their own questions and answers. Meanwhile, in the New York Times, China expert David Shambaugh poses ten hypothetical questions (without answers) for Xi. See also a Foreign Policy profile: “The Insider.” In the New York Times, writer and publisher Ho Pin writes an op-ed calling into question Xi’s ability to effect change within the constraints of the system:

Economic growth has offered Mr. Hu a temporary reprieve; Mr. Xi will not be so lucky. The economy is showing signs of stalling, the real estate bubble could burst and the financial system is being undermined by unregulated and corrupt lending. Meanwhile, protests against corruption and social injustice are intensifying as the country’s environmental resources are depleted without any consideration of future generations.

Inaction isn’t an option for Mr. Xi. He will have to combat corruption, improve protections for peasants and migrant workers and rejuvenate private enterprise. Given that his father was once persecuted for supporting a banned book, Mr. Xi should grasp the importance of free speech, and one hopes he will work to regain the trust of intellectuals. But without free elections, a free press and independent judges, the government can’t fulfill its promise to stamp out corruption and build a fair and just society.

Read more about Xi Jinping, about the 5th generation of CCP leaders that he belongs to, and about “princelings” via CDT.

Update: The New York Times Lede blog points out that in China, Xi Jinping is not as famous as his wife, military folk singer Peng Liyuan. In a country where first ladies usually stay low-key and out of the news, Ms. Peng may rewrite the template once she takes on the position:

It is not uncommon for Chinese leaders to leave their wives at home, but a report in The Wall Street Journal speculated that Ms. Peng stayed home in part to avoid outshining her husband as he steps onto the world stage. As the BBC noted, “When he was first announced as China’s next leader-in-waiting, he was already vice president, but people still joked: ‘Who is Xi Jinping? He is Peng Liyuan’s husband.’”

Ms. Peng, who holds the rank of major general in the army, has kept a low profile since her husband’s promotion into China’s senior leadership. Ms. Peng is Mr. Xi’s second wife.

Watch Ms. Peng perform “The Land of China” (在中国的大地上):

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Post tags: CCP 5th generation, Cultural Revolution, leadership, PRC history, princelings, Xi Jinping, xi jinping u.s. visit 2012
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an article titled “The paradox of prosperity”

Only 20 years ago, China was a long way from being a global superpower. After the protests in Tiananmen Square led to a massacre in 1989, its economic reforms were under threat from conservatives and it faced international isolation. Then in early 1992, like an emperor undertaking a progress, the late Deng Xiaoping set out on a “southern tour” of the most reform-minded provinces. An astonishing endorsement of reform, it was a masterstroke from the man who made modern China. The economy has barely looked back since.

Compared with the rich world’s recent rocky times, China’s progress has been relentless. Yet not far beneath the surface, society is churning. Recent village unrest in Wukan in Guangdong, one province that Deng toured all those years ago; ethnic strife this week in Tibetan areas of Sichuan; the gnawing fear of a house-price crash: all are signs of the centrifugal forces making the Communist Party’s job so hard.

The party’s instinct, born out of all those years of success, is to tighten its grip. So dissidents such as Yu Jie, who alleges he was tortured by security agents and has just left China for America, are harassed. Yet that reflex will make the party’s job harder. It needs instead to master the art of letting go.

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Post tags: CCP, China's rise, leadership
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China’s ruling Communist Party’s 80 million members attend special schools to learn party ideology at facilities that serve as a training ground for the next generation of Chinese leaders.

And defying stereotypes, it appears that one of the freest places in China is at the heart of the Communist Party.

[...] “We have to talk about and analyze sensitive issues,” Liu said. “The academic and teaching environment here is very relaxed. There are no limitations to what can and cannot be discussed.”

The Party School is an open forum, Liu went on to explain, because it has to be. Officials can’t afford to avoid problems that could directly threaten their governance. The Propaganda Department may present news to the public, selecting facts and fabrication for inclusion. But on the closed campus of the Party School, officials must consider the real issues of income inequality, protests, and what direction the country should be headed, both politically and economically.

 

Read also CDT’s translation of a personal account: Developing a New Understanding of the Communist Party at a Party School.

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Post tags: CCP, Central Party School, freedom of expression, leadership
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Qiu of the Unirule Institute of Economics believes that the existence of the Chongqing model and the Guangdong model, with their different constituencies, has sharpened the debate.

“These two models have made people conscious of the factions. They will seriously consider which model they support,” Qiu says. “An even bolder prediction is that maybe the Communist Party could split along those lines, and become two parties: one for the middle class, let’s call it a Liberal Party; the other for the lower class, the Democratic Party.”

As China’s Communist leadership celebrated the anniversary of the 1911 revolution, it’s no longer monolithic. Nowadays the Communist Party is a seething mass of different — sometimes overlapping — interest groups. That means it could be harder for the next generation of leaders to make policy.

“My conclusion is I don’t think the Communist Party can settle upon one political program that everyone will follow,” Qiu says.

Last week, Chongqing’s Bo Xilai responded to criticism over his ideological campaigns and a style of governance that the rest of China has noticed but been hesitant to adopt. From The Wall Street Journal’s China Real Time Report:

In a presentation to a visiting group of editors of provincial newspapers attending a conference in Chongqing (in Chinese), Bo defended his governance of the municipality, saying that the media focus on revolutionary nostalgia (such as singing red songs) was “a total misreading” of what he was up to in Chongqing. Bo blasted back at doubters and dissenters in the Party, asking if perhaps “some comrades have misunderstood, feeling that development of the economy and improve people’s livelihood might be a contradiction?”

Bo insisted that his administration was focused on “people-oriented development,” and that the initiatives he had implemented had been “effective in improving people’s livelihood, not only by mobilizing the enthusiasm of the masses, but also by effectively promoting consumption and promoting development,” while “shrinking the wealth disparity between the rich and the poor.” Chongqing, Bo insisted, was attempting to “achieve the ideal of socialism by carrying out a specific and concrete exploration,” not something abstract or whimsical.

In light of a New York Times report last week on Chongqing’s plans to release a series of books and a “Godfather”-style movie to chronicle Bo’s 2009 anti-corruption campaign, The Diplomat examines the potential fallout in Beijing as Bo angles for a seat on the Politburo’s Standing Committee:

Corruption is certainly not an off-limits topic in Chinese politics. These days, top leaders routinely raise the issue in speeches, and the 2009 Chongqing trials weren’t especially politically dangerous – they were a purely local affair, while investigators in cases like the Chen Liangyu and Lai Changxing scandals reached officials at the ministerial level, requiring backing from powerful people in Beijing.

But, if the Times has described the coming series accurately, Bo has gone a step farther in a dangerous direction. Major corruption cases are often prosecuted harshly, but discussion is quickly hushed up and turned away from systemic failures within the Communist Party. By directing Huang to focus on the role of officials and opening secret archives, Bo has taken a major step away from the Party’s ordinary damage control methods – and departed from the President Hu Jintao pattern of modest deference to collective decision-making. While talking frankly about official corruption seems like a sure bet for making outspoken Chinese bloggers into Bo fans, taking on the Party’s problems independently is a terrible way to make friends at the top.

See also previous CDT coverage of the opposing leadership styles of Bo Xilai, Guangdong’s Wang Yang, and the jockeying for succession as next year’s leadership change approaches.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Bo Xilai, CCP, Chongqing, Guangdong, ideology, leadership, Politburo, Wang Yang
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Guo Shuqing, chairman of China Construction Bank Corp., and Xiang Junbo, chairman of Agricultural Bank of China Ltd., resigned effective immediately to take up “state financial work,” according to statements from the banks. They didn’t give further details.

…

Personnel reshuffling in China’s banking system typically come in waves. The last shake-up was in late 2009, when the five biggest banks and state-run overseas lender China Development Bank exchanged vice presidents among themselves.

While the move by an executive from one bank to a competing institution might raise eyebrows in the West, such changes aren’t unusual in China, as Beijing is the largest shareholder in state-run banks and executives at state firms are effectively civil servants who can be reassigned at the government’s discretion.

Bloomberg writes that Guo and Xiang will likely assume leadership over the China Securities Regulatory Commission and the China Insurance Regulatory Commission, respectively. See also CDT coverage of China’s leadership succession, including a primer on the institutions and individuals at the center of the upcoming transition.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Agricultural Bank of China, banking regulation, CCP 5th generation, china construction bank, leadership
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Most analysts believe the Chinese intelligence threat is largely amorphous, a vast human network vacuuming up many bits of information. China’s seemingly unique approach to intelligence is known by various names, including ‘human wave,’ ‘mosaic,’ or the ‘thousand grains of sand’ approaches to intelligence. Ultimately, it’s a view of Chinese operations fundamentally at odds with normal understandings of intelligence.

There a three major assumptions about this approach. First and most importantly, is that Chinese intelligence officers don’t rely on the traditional tradecraft of clandestine collection, such as paying or blackmailing for secrets. Second, that their secret services rely on the efforts of ethnic Chinese émigrés and citizenry abroad rather than the willingness of foreign citizens to betray the trust afforded them.And third, that the Chinese intelligence services play a secondary role relative to large, informal networks of amateurs, vacuuming up information irrespective of Beijing’s economic, military, and political priorities.

But is this really an accurate picture?

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: CCP 5th generation, CCP Central Committee, central committee, leadership
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