Party Like It's 1989 - By Perry Link. In 1989 Deng Xiaoping, then China's paramount leader, made a long-term calculation that is now receiving its most severe test. Deng knew that China's authoritarian power structure, in which officials at each level are beholden to the people above, had one glaring weak point. Who appoints the person at the very top -- where by definition there is no superior to do the appointing? In China before the twentieth century, the seed of the emperor normally performed this function (as so it is even today in North Korea). If Mao had left a healthy son, his regime might have gone this way as well. But Mao had no such heir, and the top spot was left open for jockeying among peers. Deng, the victor of the Mao succession battle, decided not only to appoint a successor but to lay down a plan that he hoped would institutionalize succession, at least for a few generations of leaders.
It is very likely that Xi will ascend to party secretary as Deng intended. Feng Li/Getty Images. In China, Fear at the Top. In thrall of the empire of the sons. Blood ties ... Some of China’s most respected public intellectuals are warning that Chinese society and the economy are being held hostage to the wealth-maximising requirements of the political elite. Photo: AP When the kingmaker of Chinese politics, Zeng Qinghong, asked to see quintessential Australia, his diplomatic minders treated him first to jugs of beer and an oversized fillet steak at Brisbane's Breakfast Creek Hotel.
Next stop was Sydney, where he dropped into Rupert Murdoch's Fox studios and was introduced to Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor on the set of Moulin Rouge. ''He had a grin from ear to ear,'' says a source who accompanied him. Zeng was then taken for a leisurely early dinner at Lachlan Murdoch and Sarah O'Hare's mansion, in Wolseley Road, Point Piper. Zeng had clearly enjoyed taking off his tie, rolling up his sleeves, and bantering with the punters at the Brekky Creek, but he was even more impressed with the Murdochs' stunning harbour views.
Bo Guagua ... "China’s Political Storm" by Brahma Chellaney. Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space NEW DELHI – As senior leaders are purged and retired provincial officials publicly call for Politburo members to be removed, it has become clear that China is at a crossroads. China’s future no longer looks to be determined by its hugely successful economy, which has turned the country into a world power in a single generation.
Instead, the country’s murky and increasingly fractured politics are now driving its fate. One need look no further than the ongoing power struggle in the run-up to this autumn’s planned leadership changes, or official figures showing that rural protests have been increasing at the same rate as China’s GDP. The Party’s abrupt vilification of Bo after lauding him for his leadership in Chongqing has fueled public cynicism over his orchestrated downfall and laid bare the leadership’s thin ideological core. The Soviet Union imploded because the party was the state, and vice versa. China's 'Princelings' Pose Issue for Party. Reform in the Air in Beijing. At the moment, the Communist Party elite is gathered in Beijing for the annual meeting of the National People’s Congress. China’s Constitution makes the NPC, as it is known, the supreme organ of state power, but everyone views it as just the “rubber stamp” that it in fact is.
This year, however, the massive gathering has taken on significance because it is considered the “warm-up” for the 18th Communist Party Congress. The Party Congress, to be held sometime this fall, will set China’s direction for the next decade. At the event, the party will, among other things, select a new Central Committee, the body that presides over the organization between congresses. And then things really get interesting. On the day after the Congress, the new Central Committee will convene the First Plenum to appoint a new leadership.
Specifically, we will see a new Politburo, Central Military Commission, and Secretariat. "The Paradox of China’s Reform" by Jamie F. Metzl. Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space NEW YORK – The compelling drama of former Chongqing Communist Party chief Bo Xilai’s ouster amid allegations of corruption and murder, and of blind Chinese human-rights advocate Chen Guangcheng’s dash to safety in the US Embassy in Beijing, are more than just fascinating narratives of venality and courage. Unless China can purge the thousands of corrupt Party leaders like Bo, and empower people – like those Chen represents – who have been left behind or harmed by rapid growth, its economy will increasingly suffer. Like the Asian Tiger economies before it, China has excelled in the first phase of capitalist economic growth, benefiting from massive infusions of capital, low-cost labor, intellectual-property theft, and centralized planning.
China’s leaders understand this, which is why the government’s 12th Five-Year Plan calls for a gradual opening up of the Chinese economy. What's going on in Xinjiang. Will China hold together? I'd say yes. But as scholars and pundits debate China's future, a critical issue is whether the government will face powerful internal challenges of the sort that eventually helped bring down the USSR. One piece of that puzzle is whether minority groups such as China's restive Uighur population in Xinjiang province will pose a significant threat to internal stability. I know very little about this issue, but I found this brief commentary by Arabinda Acharya and Wang Zhihao, two researchers at the S.
Equally interesting was their reminder about the dearth of reliable information on the true situation in Xinjiang. "The Xinjiang situation is also characterized by a lack of facts. State media attributes the incidents to rioters or terrorists belonging to the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) also going by the name Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP). LIU JIN/AFP/Getty Images. Chinese coup watching. Last week, controversial politician Bo Xilai, whose relatively open campaigning for a seat on China's top ruling council shocked China watchers (and possibly his elite peers, as well), was removed from his post as Chongqing's party secretary. He hasn't been seen since. Rumors of a coup, possibly coordinated by Bo's apparent ally Zhou Yongkang, are in the air. Western media has extensively covered the political turmoil: Bloomberg reported on how coup rumors helped spark a jump in credit-default swaps for Chinese government bonds; the Wall Street Journal opinion page called Chinese leadership transitions an "invitation, sooner or later, for tanks in the streets.
" The Financial Times saw the removal of Bo, combined with Premier Wen Jiabao's strident remarks at a press conference hours before Bo's removal as a sign the party was moving to liberalize its stance on the Tiananmen square protests of 1989. Still the People’s Republic of Rumors. As my FP colleague Isaac Stone Fish, Bloomberg View's Adam Minter, and others have very ably documented, China's microblogs have been buzzing all week with rumors - unsubstantiated -- of a political coup in Beijing. (Were those gunshots you heard? Oh, just fireworks, as per the usual in Beijing.) Ironically, this latest eruption of China's online rumor mill has happened shortly after the government's plans to enforce real-name registration and other controls on Weibo -- the most-prominent Twitter-like microblog -- went into effect. Or were supposed to. Although Ai Weiwei's real-name Weibo account was quickly deleted, other lesser-known users report myriad workarounds: You can verify your identity with an SMS message to a phone that isn't actually yours, for example.
Stepping back, this has been quite a year for Weibo. ChinaFotoPress/Getty Images. The Insider - By Kerry Brown. There is a joke in China that the Communist Party actually doesn't mind elections, as long as it knows the outcome in advance. So though the stately, plump Vice President Xi Jinping still needs to officially stand for the position of general secretary to replace President Hu Jintao in October, the result -- barring disaster -- seems pretty certain. For Xi, a former pig farmer and provincial leader, and the scion of one of the reddest families in China, the last five years have been a campaign with Chinese characteristics to ensure that when he steps out behind the red curtain at the Great Hall of the People in six months' time, the last thing on anyone's mind will be a sense of surprise. Xi, the son of a former vice premier, with an easy smile and the paternalistic manner of a well-seasoned Chinese leader, seemed destined to rise to the top.
But it wasn't always clear that he would rise this far. Xi has also succeeded in avoiding knotty issues like health-care reform and social unrest. A Shot Across the Bo - By A. McLaren. BEIJING – China is a democracy. Just ask the Communist Party secretary of Chongqing, Bo Xilai, who was abruptly removed from office on Thursday, March 15. "Multiparty cooperation is an important symbol of democracy," he said in February in the lead-up to the National People's Congress (NPC) annual meeting, the pageant where delegates pass laws and revel in Communist Party rule. Last week, during his first public statements about a brewing corruption scandal involving his former police chief, he told reporters, "We need to take the road of democratic rule. " Saying the word "democracy" in China isn't necessarily a crime, and many high-ranking officials pay lip service to the term.
But perhaps Bo said it a bit too loudly. Nowhere is the gulf between propaganda and reality so wide as in the Communist Party's view of its own democracy. Communist cadres can praise democracy, as long as it's China's. Today the parties are shadows of their former selves. Feng Li/Getty Images.
China’s Falling Star by Ian Johnson. In China, the year is traditionally divided into periods based on the moon’s orbit around the earth and the sun’s path across the sky. This lunisolar calendar is laden with myths and celebrated by rituals that allowed Chinese to mark time and make sense of their world. So too the modern political calendar in China. It takes shape around the mysterious workings of the Communist Party, which rotates its top leaders every decade at a Party Congress, a comet-like event that awes onlookers as a portent of change and renewal.
The next congress is set to take place in the fall of 2012—the 18th occurrence in the party’s 91-year history—and is already being associated with unusual phenomena. The most spectacular was last week’s eclipse of Bo Xilai. The answer is rooted in a constellation of powerful families who helped the communists win power in the 1940s and are trying to align their interests before the great congress begins. Wang’s embarrassing behavior was likely the final blow for Bo. Blood on His Hands - By Matthew Fishbane. The very public disgrace of Bo Xilai, the deposed Communist Party chief of China's heartland megacity Chongqing, is a chronicle of a fall foretold. In 2009, Bo grabbed headlines in the Western press for his campaign to stamp out widespread corruption as leader of the region of more than 32 million inhabitants. Handsome, with an impeccable revolutionary pedigree (his father was a former vice-premier), Bo was seen as either cleverly positioning himself for a seat on the highest decision-making body in China, the Politburo Standing Committee, or proving himself a liability to the leaders of the Communist Party who would find his swashbuckling ways unnerving.
Bo was undoubtedly ambitious, and in many ways he improved Chongqing. Under his three-and-a-half year tenure, the province grew at nearly 15 percent a year on average. He said he planned to build cheap housing for 2.4 million people and attract international investment on the scale of Hong Kong. Matthew Fishbane. Insight: Children of Mao's wrath vie for power in China. Bo Xilai and coming changes in China. In the last couple of days, Western media has been abuzz with rumors sourced from Chinese social media websites, Falun Gong-sponsored news outlets, and analysts in Hong Kong of an attempted coup in Beijing. The only thing lending credence to these rumors is the seeming existence of a power struggle that resulted in the sacking of Chongqing Party Secretary Bo Xilai. This is the most significant removal of a government official since 2006 when Shanghai Party Chief Chen Liangyu was fired during a corruption probe.
The recent string of events have made for exciting political drama, but let's remember that only nine men in China know what is really going on. This holds true in the case of Bo Xilai and his deputy Wang Lijun, as well as the current status of security chief Zhou Yongkang (some of the recent rumors are swirling around him). Given the uncertain political environment, those nine will not be talking much anytime soon. First, Bo Xilai's ouster was about power, rather than ideology.
The Revenge of Wen Jiabao - By John Garnaut. If Premier Wen Jiabao is "China's best actor," as his critics allege, he saved his finest performance for last. After three hours of eloquent and emotional answers in his final news conference at the National People's Congress annual meeting this month, Wen uttered his public political masterstroke, reopening debate on one of the most tumultuous events in the Chinese Communist Party's history and hammering the final nail in the coffin of his great rival, the now-deposed Chongqing Communist Party boss Bo Xilai.
And in striking down Bo, Wen got his revenge on a family that had opposed him and his mentor countless times in the past. Responding to a gently phrased question about Chongqing, Wen foreshadowed Bo's political execution, a seismic leadership rupture announced the following day that continues to convulse China's political landscape to an extent not seen since 1989. But the addendum that followed might be even more significant.
Perhaps he had an inkling of what was coming. Wang Hui · The Rumour Machine: The Dismissal of Bo Xilai · LRB 10 May 2012. ‘March 14’ used to be shorthand in China for the 2008 unrest in Tibet; now it stands for the 2012 ‘Chongqing incident’. It is unusual for municipal policy to have national impact, and rarer still for the removal of a city leader to become international news. Some observers have argued that the dismissal of Bo Xilai, the party secretary of Chongqing, is the most important political event in China since 1989. Stories began to circulate on 6 February, when Wang Lijun, Chongqing’s police chief, fled to the US consulate in the nearby city of Chengdu. Neither the Chinese nor the American authorities have revealed anything about what followed, the US saying only that Wang had an appointment at the consulate and left the next day of his own accord.
As the stories multiplied, two main interpretations emerged. Both interpretations, one denying, the other privileging the political character of the Chongqing events, are partial. 27 April. The Challenge for China's New Leaders. Beijing's Cracked Consensus. April Is the Cruelest Month … for China - By Sophie Richardson. The Bo Xilai Crisis: A Curse or a Blessing for China? "The Paranoid Style in Chinese Politics" by Minxin Pei. State of Injustice - By Sophie Richardson. Chinese Dissidence From Tiananmen to Today. Standoff in Beijing: A Blind Activist vs. A Silent Government.
Chen Guangcheng's US-brokered deal unravels after leaving embassy | World news. Blind Chinese Dissident Leaves on Flight for U.S. "Round-Trip Freedom" by Jianli Yang. "Chinese Shadows" by Ian Buruma. From China Activist's Flight, a Diplomatic Crisis. "The Myth of Chinese Meritocracy" by Minxin Pei. The Debacle That Wasn't - By David Rothkopf. Out of the Embassy and Into the Fire.