| Further Fallout from Wen Family Wealth Exposé Posted: 31 Oct 2012 12:02 AM PDT At The New York Times' The Lede blog, David Barboza answered readers' questions about his recent investigation into the wealth of Wen Jiabao's family, discussing the article's origins, timing and sources: I began looking into the business dealings of Wen Jiabao's family late last year. I had been working on a series called "Endangered Dragon," which looked at China's government-managed economy, and wanted to include a piece that would give deeper insight into how China's capitalism worked at the top. It is a broad subject, which I decided would be made more manageable by focusing on one family. I chose the prime minister's family because I had heard conjecture about their business dealings for many years. People talked openly about the family's wealth as if it was fact, but there was really no reporting on the subject that I could find that cited hard evidence backing up the claims. I kept scratching my head about why no one had tried to truth-squad the widespread rumors.
My only real source for this lengthy article was a filing cabinet full of documents I requested from various Chinese government offices over a period of about a year. After having some luck with my initial requests for corporate registration documents from the State Administration for Industry and Commerce bureaus, I went on a reporting spree: requesting and paying fees for the records of dozens of investment partnerships tied to the relatives of Wen Jiabao.
Barboza has previously explained how he gathered publicly available corporate records. Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei, who accused the article last week of having "ulterior motives" and trying to "smear" China, attacked it again on Monday. "There are always some voices in the world that do not want to see China develop and become stronger," he said, "and they will try any means to smear China and Chinese leaders and try to sow instability in China. Your scheme is doomed to failure." People's Daily's former international news editor Ren Yujun has also attacked The New York Times. Instead of challenging Barboza's report itself, however, he brought up the Jimmy Savile sexual abuse scandal in which the Times' new chief executive, formerly at the BBC, has become embroiled. In another article [zh], Ren wrote of "an explosion in plagiarism and fabrication" at the newspaper, pointing out the 2010 Zachery Kouwe and 2003 Jayson Blair scandals. The Financial Times' Simon Rabinovitch noted, however, that Ren's own piece consisted almost entirely of unacknowledged passages from other articles, from Xinhua, People's Daily and beyond. While Barboza accused neither Wen nor his family of anything illegal, Donald Clarke wrote at China Law Prof Blog that Wen may still have broken Party disciplinary rules which "as written are arguably tighter than is reasonable": The bottom line is that Wen appears to be in violation of a Party rule requiring senior officials to prevent their close relatives from engaging in business in areas (geographical or subject-matter) under their jurisdiction or, failing that, to resign. Since Wen is the premier, all of China falls within his geographical jurisdiction, and pretty much all areas of business would be within his subject-matter jurisdiction as well. This, of course, means that his close relatives can't engage in any business in or even relating to China at all. I don't claim that this is a reasonable or practical result, or that it was intended by those who wrote the rule, but that's how I read it. My reasoning is below.
Following a statement from Wen family lawyers on Saturday, Clarke also briefly discussed the prospect of legal action by Wen's family within the United States. He linked to a more in-depth analysis by Jonathan Turley, who concluded that: Wen may have lawyers but he may not have a particularly good lawsuit. The most important defense to defamation remains truth. That could put the family in a difficult position. As a highly secretive family in a highly secretive country, they are not used to American discovery rules. They could be forced to disclose copious amounts of financial records to make their case. Many could find that even a few million dollars as opposed to hundreds of millions as a curious nest egg for "Communist" leaders and their families.
Legal action at home might be more easily controllable; Isaac Stone Fish suggested at Foreign Policy that the Times' past legal defeats in Singapore offer a precedent. But both He Weifang and Pu Zhiqiang told the South China Morning Post that even this would probably be considered too risky. Evan Osnos, assessing the fallout from Barboza's report at The New Yorker, agreed, and dismissed "conspiracy theories" that the newspaper had been manipulated by Wen's political enemies. He concluded: • Not Surprised by This Story? Perhaps you should be. One of the standard lines going around in recent days has been the notion that this subject is somehow old news, that people already "knew" that Chinese leaders benefit from public office, so why bother? To me, that's akin to saying that since we "knew" that campaign finance corrupts American government, we shouldn't have bothered to unearth the crimes of the lobbyist Jack Abramoff; and since we "knew" British tabloids would walk a fine line to get a story, we shouldn't have gotten so exercised about digging out the details of phone-hacking and the paying of police for information. In the end, that's the nature of investigation: it puts details on what we don't know but think we do. Sometimes the conventional wisdom is right, and sometimes it's wrong, but you never know until you look. Corruption in China, after all, is hardly a scoop in itself. Lin Yutang, for one, wrote, "In China, though a man may be arrested for stealing a purse, he is not arrested for stealing the national treasury." He wrote that observation in 1935.
© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: donald clarke, Foreign Ministry, He Weifang, investigative journalism, journalism, journalistic ethics, legal dispute, Lin Yutang, new york times, people's daily, plagiarism, pu zhiqiang, singapore, transparency, Wen Jiabao
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| Checkpoint on the Road to Lhasa Posted: 30 Oct 2012 11:06 PM PDT In the New Statesman, Tibetan dissident Tsering Woeser writes about the tightening government control over Tibet as a result of recent protests: Early one summer morning in August, travelling from Golmud to Lhasa on the Qinghai-Tibet Highway, we came across the first checkpoint. A police officer wearing a dark cotton uniform used a flashlight to inspect our identity cards: "There's a Tibetan? Tibetan, get out of the vehicle! Do you have a permit to enter Tibet? If not, you can't enter!" [...] Around the checkpoint there were all kinds of blockades. I said pointedly: "I'm not from the 'four major Tibetan regions'." This was because, one day in May, two Tibetans from other regions, doing contract work in Lhasa, self-immolated between the Jokhang Temple and the police station on Barkhor Street, where it was busiest with the military, police, tourists and believers. This brought the number of Tibetans who had self-immolated in recent years to 39. It is an unprecedented action of personal sacrifice and protest against the Chinese government. Such protests have moved from the borders of Tibet to the hinterland, and the Tibet Autonomous Region issued an urgent notice requesting that Tibetans in the "four major Tibetan regions" of China, namely in the four provinces of Sichuan, Qinghai, Gansu and Yunnan, must have a certificate from the public security bureau of the local county to enter Lhasa. After this decision, another 14 Tibetans self-immolated, one of whom was a herdsman from near Lhasa. [...] I once discussed an important question with Tibetans from the Amdo, U-Tsang and Kham regions: had Tibetans been right to protest in 2008? Some think the protest incurred severe repression and even tougher policy reform, so that the little space that had previously been won rapidly diminished. But we think this outcome was not related to the protest. It just turned the lukewarm water used to boil a frog into boiling water.
In March 2008, widespread protests broke out in Tibet ahead of the Olympic torch relay's trip across China. Since 2009, more than 60 Tibetans have self-immolated in protest against Beijing's policies in the region. See more on Tibet protests via CDT.
© Mengyu Dong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Dalai Lama, lhasa, self-immolations, Tibet protests, Woeser
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| One Party, Two Coalitions Posted: 30 Oct 2012 10:57 PM PDT Although CCP leaders have been trying to present themselves as a unified entity, the behind-the-scenes power struggle appears to be heating up as the leadership transition draws near. CNN's Alexis Lai analyzes the split between Hu Jintao's populist faction and Jiang Zemin's princeling faction: The Chinese Communist Party is broadly divided between informal "elitist" and "populist" coalitions, according to China expert and Brookings Institution analyst Cheng Li. Other analysts conceive of the split in different terms, such as between liberal-minded reformist and conservative hard-liner camps. [...] Hu's heir apparent, Xi, is a princeling, whereas Wen's likely successor, Li Keqiang, represents the tuanpai. [...] Their factional inclinations are reflected in their policy priorities, says Li of the Brookings Institution. Xi is focused on the private sector, market liberation in foreign investment, and Shanghai's role as a financial and shipping center. In contrast, Li Keqiang emphasizes affordable housing, basic health care and clean energy. This equilibrium extends within the upper echelons of the leadership, which is about evenly split between the elitists and populists, according to Li. Most analysts concur that the era of charismatic, paramount leaders ended after Deng Xiaoping, replaced by relatively colorless technocrats who governed through collective leadership.
John Garnaut at the Sydney Morning Herald offers more details about the effects of the political jockeying for the 18th Party Congress personnel lineup: Earlier, President Hu Jintao's key powerbroker, Ling Jihua, was removed as head of the party's General Office after being implicated in a cover-up of his son's death in a high-speed Ferrari accident. [...] "It is a state of extreme chaos," said political watcher Li Weidong. "There is no absolute authority, otherwise two sides won't bite each other like this." [...] Mr Hu appears to have won crucial appointments in the People's Liberation Army, particularly the new Chief of the General Staff, Fang Fenghui, as first reported by the Age last Tuesday. This would suggest Mr Hu is gaining strength in the military while losing it at party central.
See more on the 18th Party Congress via CDT.
© Mengyu Dong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 18th party congress, CCP 5th generation, factions, Hu Jintao, Jiang Zemin, leadership transition, Ling Jihua, princelings, Youth League faction
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| At 79, Ex-Party Official Lambastes Chinese Leaders Posted: 30 Oct 2012 05:38 PM PDT On NPR, Louisa Lim interviews Bao Tong, former aide to former CCP General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, about the current state of the Communist Party and the new generation of leadership who is slated to take power early next year: Bao is damning in his assessment of the current administration: "There's no ideology, there's no socialism, there's no communism. All that's left is power." [...] "The party is more powerful than an emperor. No emperor could mobilize and organize 80 million people. Every company and every law court has a party branch. They're all under the party's control, including lawyers and newspapers. What emperor could do that?" he asks. [...] But Bao still has hopes for the new administration that will be headed by a new president, Xi Jinping. He believes that if the administration can act fast in pushing through reforms, it may be able to claw back some legitimacy. "They need to be pro-active," he says. "If they admit that many mistakes were made in the past, the people would immediately forgive them."
Read more about Bao Tong, via CDT, including an interview with Ian Johnson in the New York Review of Books.
© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 18th party congress, Bao Tong, corruption, Xi Jinping, Zhao Ziyang
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| Photo: Street food, in Shangqiu, Henan, by Mark Hobbs Posted: 30 Oct 2012 05:42 PM PDT |
| Australia Spells Out Asia Blueprint Posted: 30 Oct 2012 12:08 PM PDT The Wall Street Journal reports Australia plans to grow business with Asian countries, including China and India, to a third of its economy. This plan comes amid growing anxieties over China's increasing influence in Australia: "The world economy is coming our way," Prime Minister Julia Gillard said in a speech Sunday to launch a long-term policy document called "Australia in the Asian Century". "We are living through an economic and social transformation on a scale and at a speed which defies comparison," Ms. Gillard said of the reforms underway in countries such as China which are shifting the base of global power eastwards. China is already Australia's biggest trading partner due mainly to demand for raw materials like iron ore and coal, helping cushion the resource-rich economy from the recent economic woes in Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere. Tensions have also arisen in recent times over the thorny issue of foreign investment. Rural-based lawmakers have been critical of the Chinese buying farmland and agricultural businesses, an attitude Ms. Gillard's Labor government has described as "xenophobic clap-trap".
As China is undergoing a change in leadership, Australian Treasurer, Wayne Swan, expects new challenges and opportunities to arise from cooperation between the two countries, from The Australian: But he told a conference in Canberra on Tuesday regardless of who is at the helm, China and Australia will "remain intertwined". Mr Swan told the 2012 China Advanced Leadership Program conference strong relationships have been formed between the leaders of its two countries. "We will continue to build and strengthen these relationships so we can manage the transitions that come with a close and evolving partnership," Mr Swan said. "As we forge further ahead into the 21st century, China's transformations – its urbanisation, its extraordinary mega-cities, the growing middle class – are not just a sign of progress, they also symbolise China's return to pre-eminence in the global economy," he said.
Aside from economic ties, Australia also plans to build diplomatic ties with its Asian partners, from Bloomberg Businessweek: Australia also plans to improve diplomatic relations with China, its top trading partner, India, Indonesia, Japan and South Korea, while expanding ties with countries in the region including Vietnam and Mongolia, Gillard said. By the end of the decade, Asia will surpass Europe and North America combined in economic output, Australian Treasurer Wayne Swan said yesterday. Asia's middle class is forecast to rise by more than 2.5 billion people by 2030, he said. "A consumer boom is fast gathering momentum," Swan said in an e-mailed statement. "This will increase demand for a diverse range of goods and services, like health, aged care, education, tourism and financial services." "We will continue to support a greater role for Asian countries in a rules-based regional and global order," according to the report, entitled 'Australia in the Asian Century.' "Australia's alliance with the U.S. and a strong U.S. presence in Asia will support regional stability, as will China's full participation in regional developments."
According to China Daily, Canberra plans to emphasize education and language studies to better embrace the 'Asian Century': To better embrace the Asian Century, the Australian government plans to put a renewed emphasis on Asian studies in schools and universities, according to the white paper Australia in the Asian Century released on Sunday. All Australian students will have the opportunity, and be encouraged, to undertake a continuous course of study in an Asian language throughout their schooling, said the white paper. The white paper points out that the number of Australian students studying languages other than English is declining, with less than 6 percent studying Mandarin and other Asian languages in 2008. Coupled with an increased educational focus on Asian languages, the Australian government will finance and boost the number of Australian students studying in Asia to let them better experience Asian culture.
Read more about China's ties with Australia, via CDT.
© Melissa M. Chan for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Australia, Australian relations, chinese language learning, diplomacy, raw materials market
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| China Tries Building Jet Engine Posted: 30 Oct 2012 11:59 AM PDT While China was able to blast its astronauts into space and send a submarine down into the depths of the sea, it has yet to build a successful jet engine. Previously, China has relied on Russia for advanced fighter aircraft. According to Reuters, Beijing is evaluating a 100 billion yuan plan to galvanize the engine research effort, which is dominated by the state-owned Aviation Industry Corporation of China: The engine financing plan is under high-level discussion in Beijing, said Zhao Yuxing, an official at the securities office of Shanghai-listed Xi'an Aero-Engine Plc (600893.SS), a key military engine-making unit of AVIC. "What we know is our company has been included in the strategic programme, which is designed to greatly develop and support the engine industry," he said by phone from his company's headquarters in the northwestern city of Xi'an. Some Chinese aviation industry specialists forecast that Beijing will eventually spend up to 300 billion yuan on jet engine development over the next two decades. "China's aircraft engines have obviously been under-invested," said Wang Tianyi, a defence sector analyst with Shanghai's Orient Securities. "One hundred billion yuan is not a huge amount of money in the engine world." Foreign engine manufacturers including General Electric (GE.N), Snecma, a subsidiary of French aerospace group Safran (SAF.PA), Rolls Royce Plc (RR.L) and Pratt & Whitney – a unit of United Technology Corp (UTX.N), jealously guard their industrial secrets, limiting the transfer of know-how and opportunities for intellectual property theft.
While the priority has been put on building military aircraft, China's aviation industry is also interested in building commercial aircraft. Despite the plan to expand the budget for engine research, China is still reliant on foreign companies for its commercial planes. Boeing, an American company, recently delivered a new jet to Air China, from China Daily: Boeing Co formally delivered one of its 777-300ER jets to Air China, the nation's flag carrier, at a ceremony on Monday at Seattle's Future of Flight Aviation Center. Chi Zhihang, vice-president and general manager of Air China North America, said the Boeing 777-300ER provides a better customer experience and offers more legroom for passengers. The extended-range aircraft, which can fly up to 7,900 nautical miles (about 14,500 kilometers) before refueling, sports a distinctive paint job: Forty smiling faces of Chinese people adorn the exterior to honor the national aviation industry's role in linking China to the world. The airplane delivered Monday is the tenth of 19 Boeing 777-300ERs that Air China has ordered since 2008. The carrier received its first 777-300ER in the Chinese mainland in July 2011. Air China has been using the planes to expand routes, particularly in Europe.
See also China advances its aviation dream, via CDT.
© Melissa M. Chan for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Air China, air force, airlines, aviation, Boeing, military spending
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| Taiwan Arrests Three Suspected Spies Posted: 30 Oct 2012 04:43 AM PDT Taiwan has arrested a retired Taiwanese naval officer and two others on suspicion of spying for China, according to The Wall Street Journal: Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense said in a statement Monday that Lt. Col. Chang Chih-hsin was suspected of "spying for officials at the Communist Party in China" and "bribing other officers in the navy for illegal gains" during his tenure, which ended in May, at the Naval Meteorological & Oceanographic Office. The office provides mapping data for the military. Authorities arrested Lt. Col. Chang after "gathering evidence of Chang's illegal behavior" following a report the ministry received in March, the statement said, but added "there was no leakage of confidential information and [the behavior] didn't involve any officials currently serving in the navy." It didn't elaborate further. The ministry didn't make Mr. Chang available to comment, and said he will be tried by a military court, but the date hasn't been set. The ministry said the two others arrested were also retired military officials but declined to identify them.
The Taiwan Affairs Office of China's State Council denied any knowledge of the spy case to the Global Times, and its spokesman declined to comment. The Taiwan-based China Post has more on the case: According to Luo, the case came to light after the 45-year-old Chang was accused of attempting to collect information for the Beijing government from military personnel. The MND's anti-espionage system received tips on Chang's alleged misconduct as early as this March. The ministry later turned the case over to prosecutors for further investigation on the alleged spying attempt. Initial probes showed no confidential military intelligence was leaked to Beijing via Chang, he said. Chang, who filed for retirement this May, was reportedly recruited by a Chinese intelligence agency before his discharge from the Naval office that is responsible for mapping the maritime areas surrounded Taiwan.
In 2011, Taiwanese Military High Court sentenced General Lo-Hsein Che to life in prison after he admitted to selling military secrets to China since 2004.
© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: bribery, corruption, Cross-Strait relations, espionage, State Council, Taiwan
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