Also from today’s Washington Post: “……The party functionary, a 52-year-old former farmer with a middle-school education, captured the national imagination with his complaints because most Chinese are all too aware of the official corruption that has accompanied the last 25 years of economic liberalization. The tale of a county-level party secretary recounting his struggles against local officials on the take blew across the country like a blast of fresh air, a sign that China’s system could still work to reconcile a modern market economy with honesty.
But Fuzhou city authorities, who have jurisdiction over nearby Lianjiang County, flashed back to hoary Marxist rhetoric in announcing that Huang, by denouncing corruption, had committed a serious breach of party discipline that could provide leverage to China’s enemies abroad and weaken its stability within. Fuzhou’s party and government authorities, it turned out, reached their conclusion at a meeting held Friday about the same time Chinese readers were learning of Huang’s boldness in their newspapers and cheering him on in a flood of Internet messages. ”
This article is Edward Cody’s second article on Huang Jingao’s open letter. The full article is here. Huang’s original open letter in Chinese was here (http://www.people.com.cn/GB/shehui/212/4828/4836/2700363.html) but now gone.
