News » Society » Typhoon Son-Tinh to bring rainstorms to S. China
News » Society » Typhoon Son-Tinh to bring rainstorms to S. China |
- Typhoon Son-Tinh to bring rainstorms to S. China
- Cash for tips to snuff out human fireballs
- China's art village feels global shift
- Chen, Lin win big at Golden Bell Awards
- Think tank calls for loosening of one-child policy
- Call to ease residency permit
- Law passed in China to protect mentally ill
- Bo expelled from the NPC, put under criminal probe
- US-based ponzi scheme rips off 200,000 investors
- Satellite launch to bolster Beidou navigation system
- Police warn of find-and-flirt chat app risks
- China Reaches Accord on Military Makeup
- China paves way for prosecuting disgraced politician Bo Xilai
- Billions in Hidden Riches for Family of Chinese Leader
- Have You Heard…
- China adopts mental health law to curb forced treatment
- China’s year of political surprises not over yet
- Has Wen Jiabao Failed the Confucius Test?
- Ponzi scheme rips investors off 2.4b yuan
- Bo Xilai's post as national legislator terminated
| Typhoon Son-Tinh to bring rainstorms to S. China Posted: 26 Oct 2012 07:38 PM PDT SON-TINH, the 23rd tropical storm this year, strengthened to typhoon early this morning and is expected to bring rainstorms and gales to China's southern coastal areas, the country's meteorological authority said today. The National Meteorological Center of China said the center of Son-Tinh, which is gaining strength, was 75 kilometers to the southwest of Sansha, a newly established city in the South China Sea, at 5 am today. It was moving northwestward at a speed of 20 to 25 km per hour. The approaching Son-Tinh is expected to bring heavy rainfall and strong wind to the southern parts of China, including parts of Hainan Province and Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in the coming two days. Sansha and southern parts of Hainan will be hit the hardest by downpours, according to the meteorological center. |
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| China's art village feels global shift Posted: 26 Oct 2012 05:16 PM PDT China's famous art village turns to local buyers |
| Chen, Lin win big at Golden Bell Awards Posted: 26 Oct 2012 10:41 AM PDT Taiwanese actor Berlin Chen and actress Ariel Lin hold their trophies yesterday after winning the Best Actor and Best Actress awards of the 47th Golden Bell Awards, an annual Taiwanese television production award. This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Think tank calls for loosening of one-child policy Posted: 26 Oct 2012 10:24 AM PDT CHINA should consider adjusting its family planning policy, as structural problems have overtaken excessive growth as the most significant population-related problem, a government think tank said yesterday. Problems in population structure, quality and distribution have become increasingly visible and will have a profound impact on China's future social and economic development, the China Development Research Foundation reported. China's population has seen a declining annual growth rate, slowing to 0.57 percent in the first decade of the 21st century, down from 1.07 percent in the previous 10 years, according to the report. Its population situation is quite different from that of 30 years ago, when a family planning policy limited the majority of urban families to just one child. The report said the population is heading for negative growth and an ultra-low fertility rate, adding that it also faces issues related to aging, gender imbalances, urbanization, an expanding shortage of migrant workers and an only-child generation. The CDRF said the government should gradually loosen the one-child policy over the next three years in regions where family planning has been strictly implemented. By 2020, there will be no need to continue birth planning, as people will make more rational decisions on birth issues, the CDRF said in its report. China will also have an ultra-low fertility rate after 2026 and that the government should start encouraging families to have more children. The family planning policy was introduced around 1980 to rein in China's surging population by encouraging late marriages and pregnancies, as well as limiting most urban couples to one child and most rural couples to two children. "The family planning policy has had a profound influence on China's economic and social development," said the CDRF. The implementation of the policy has reduced the pressure created by a rapidly rising population, made contributions to economic growth and helped improve population quality. However, China has paid a huge political and social cost for the policy, as it has resulted in social conflict, high administrative costs and led indirectly to a long-term gender imbalance at birth. Efforts should be made to support one-child and disadvantaged families in family planning, the report said. It also pointed out the aging population and the fact that China's "demographic dividend" has already ended and will pose a severe challenge for the country's development. "This means China cannot rely on an unlimited labor supply for its future economic development, but must instead boost its total factor productivity," said Cai Fang, director of the Institute of Population and Labor Economics under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Cai, one of the writers of the report, urged the government to increase investment in healh care and education.
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| Posted: 26 Oct 2012 10:24 AM PDT A SENIOR Party official yesterday called for relaxation of the controversial residency permit, or hukou, to ensure that migrant workers can enjoy better services like health care and housing. The 230 million-strong migrant workforce drives China's economy, but a lack of access to education, health and other services tied to the country's strict household registration system forces massive saving, restraining efforts to shift the focus of growth to consumption from investment. Zhou Yongkang, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Party's Central Committee, said China should establish as soon as possible a new "national residence permit system" to improve services for migrant workers. The new system would help with employment, health care, housing, social security and education for the children of migrant workers, said Zhou, who is in charge of political and legal affairs at the Party's decision-making inner circle. "These efforts would help to avoid a new discriminatory dual system in cities and better ensure migrant workers enjoy the fruits of reform and opening up," he said, according to Xinhua news agency. It provided no other details. China has talked of reforming the hukou system for years, but with little progress. The government has said the system is necessary to manage its vast population. It essentially classifies its more than 1.3 billion people into two groups, farmers and non-farmers. The rigid regime means an officially rural resident has no access to education, health and other welfare services in the towns where they live and work, even though they may have been there for years. China's migrant workers in their millions flood into cities each year from the impoverished countryside. They are relatively low paid, but have earned annual double-digit pay raises for years, making them a huge potential source of consumer spending. |
| Law passed in China to protect mentally ill Posted: 26 Oct 2012 10:06 AM PDT CHINA yesterday adopted a long-awaited mental health law that aims to prevent normal people from being wrongly institutionalized while also protecting the rights of the mentally ill. In a country where 16 million people suffer from some kind of mental disorders, the law standardizes mental health care services for them, requires general hospitals to set up special outpatient clinics or provide counseling, and train more doctors. Debated for years, the law attempts to address an imbalance in Chinese society - a lack of mental health care services for a population that has grown more prosperous but also more aware of modern-day stresses and the need for treatment. Psychiatrists who helped draft and improve the legislation welcomed its passage. "The law will protect the rights of mental patients and prevent those who don't need treatment from being forced to receive it," said Dr Liu Xiehe, an 85-year-old psychiatrist in Chengdu, capital of the southwestern Sichuan Province, who drafted the first version of the law in 1985. "Our mental health law is in line with international standards. This shows the government pays attention to the development of mental health and the protection of people's rights in this area," Liu said. Forced treatment Pressure has grown on the government in recent years after reported cases of people forced into mental hospitals when they did not require treatment. Some were placed there by employers with whom they had wage disputes, others by their family members in dispute over money. On October 10, or World Mental Health Day, four people who claim to have been wrongly institutionalized sent written pleas to hospitals and courts across China, demanding fairer diagnoses of mental diseases and greater scrutiny of patients' custodians. Among them was Chen Guoming, a former gold store owner, who was forced into an asylum in February 2011 by his wife and locked up for 56 days after refusing to lend money to his in-laws at their request. When he was released, he found his wife had transferred nearly 800,000 yuan (US$126,182) from his account and taken all of the jewelry in his store. His losses totaled 6 million yuan. |
| Bo expelled from the NPC, put under criminal probe Posted: 26 Oct 2012 10:05 AM PDT AUTHORITIES yesterday launched a criminal probe into Bo Xilai, former Party chief of southwestern Chongqing City. Lawmakers yesterday formally expelled Bo from China's top legislature in a bid to strip him of his last official post, clearing the way for criminal proceedings against him. On September 28, the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee decided at a meeting to deprive Bo of the CPC membership and kick him out of public service for severe disciplinary violations. Bo was accused of offenses dating back two decades that range from taking bribes and abusing his power to having improper relationships with an unspecified number of women. His expulsion from the National People's Congress, China's top legislature, removes his immunity from prosecution for a criminal case against him involving accusations of corruption and other wrongdoing, including interfering in the investigation into the murder of a British businessman by his wife. Bo's wife Bogu Kailai and a household aide were convicted in the murder of Neil Heywood in August. She was sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve. Investigations have found that Bo seriously violated CPC disciplines while managing Dalian City in Liaoning Province and the Ministry of Commerce, as well as serving as the Party's Political Bureau member as well as the Party chief of the southwest city of Chongqing. Bo had abused his power, made severe mistakes and borne major responsibility in an incident that former Chongqing police chief and Vice Mayor Wang Lijun entered, without permission, the US Consulate General in Chengdu, investigators said. Bo was also accused of taking advantage of his position to seek profits for others and received huge bribes personally or through his family. His position was utilized by his wife to seek profits for others, and the Bo family accepted a huge amount of money and property from others, authorities said. He was also found to have violated organizational and personnel disciplines and made erroneous decisions in certain promotion cases, resulting in serious consequences. Bo's downfall started when Wang fled to the US Consulate in Chengdu, where he revealed to diplomats details of Heywood's death, which previously was called accidental. A month later, Bo was sacked as Chongqing's Party secretary and suspended from the 25-member Political Bureau. Wang was sentenced on September 24 to 15 years in prison on charges of abusing power, attempt to defect to the US, and taking bribes.
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| US-based ponzi scheme rips off 200,000 investors Posted: 26 Oct 2012 09:00 AM PDT US-BASED ponzi scheme website Hootoot660 has been busted after allegedly swindling 200,000 Chinese people out of 2.4 billion yuan (US$384 million), police said. The perpetrators targeted short-term profit-seeking investors by promising high returns. People were first required to pay 660 yuan to 12,540 yuan in membership fees and were then encouraged to buy an online stock called Guquan, which was said to never drop in price, and attract more members to earn commissions, Yangtze Evening News reported yesterday. To earn trust, the website paid off early investors with the money paid in by new clients, the report said. The case came into the spotlight in April when police in Xinyi City in Jiangsu Province found hundreds of residents registered to Hootoot660, a website that has no real business. A preliminary police investigation found the website was operating a pyramid selling scam. A Chinese businessman surnamed Yun started Hootoot trading company in Texas in 2010 and opened the website one year later. But the company didn't do well until he masterminded the plan to promote a virtual stock in January and cheat people out of billions of yuan, the report said. Hootoot's co-founder, surnamed Pang, was arrested in Henan Province on May 3 and a major Internet engineer surnamed Xie was caught in Guangdong Province on May 10 in joint police raids. Other ringleaders on the Chinese mainland were also caught although Yun remains at large. |
| Satellite launch to bolster Beidou navigation system Posted: 26 Oct 2012 09:00 AM PDT China successfully launched another satellite into space late on Thursday for its global navigation and positioning network, the launch center said yesterday. The satellite was launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Sichuan Province and was boosted by a Long March-3C carrier rocket. It is the 16th satellite for the Beidou, or Compass system, the launch center said. The network is scheduled to officially provide services for most parts of the Asia-Pacific region early next year and begin offering global services by 2020. Since it started to provide services on a trial basis on December 27, 2011, the Beidou system has been stable, said a spokesperson of the China Satellite Navigation Office. The system has been gradually used in more sectors including transportation, weather forecasting, marine fisheries, forestry, telecommunications, hydrological monitoring and mapping, according to the spokesperson. The satellite will play an important role in improving the system's service, the spokesperson added. China started to build its own satellite navigation system to break its dependence on the US-made Global Positioning System in 2000. Between October 2000 and May 2003, the country set up a regional satellite navigation system after launching three Beidou geostationary satellites. Beidou-1 could not meet growing demand, so China set up the more advanced Beidou-2 regional and global navigation system, Qi Faren, former chief designer for Shenzhou spaceships, said in 2011. |
| Police warn of find-and-flirt chat app risks Posted: 26 Oct 2012 09:00 AM PDT POLICE suggest the ever growing numbers of handset users close social-networking apps when in public over concerns they are putting themselves at risk to theft, fraud and even sexual attacks. The apps, usually featuring location-based services, or LBS, allows users to track friends or search for a random woman or man in the same city who you would like to meet. Unwary users often instantly pinpoint themselves and disclose personal information, making them vulnerable, Xinmin Evening News reported. Tencent's Weixin, one of the country's most well-known smartphone messaging apps, has more than 200 million users, which means it also attracts people with bad intentions. Police in Hangzhou City, capital of Zhejiang Province, told the newspaper they have received 100 Weixin-related cases this year. Wang Chen, a police officer in Changzhou City of Jiangsu Province, was quoted as saying the highly popular app makes prostitution easier. Apple's well-received Siri, a voice-activated personal assistant app, has also been plagued by a sex scandal after it was found last week to have helped a user locate 15 brothels in Kunming City, capital of Yunnan Province. Call girls can even post nude pictures to entice customers, the report said. These fast-growing social apps, most of which are free on Apple's iOS and Google's Android operating systems, have burst onto the scene and quickly become popular among Chinese youth. Apps featuring match-making functions are especially popular. Though Apple's iPhone warns only those over the age of 17 are allowed to download such apps, no departments or authorities are assigned to supervise them. Users also do not need to provide their real identity. In the popular LBS chat app Momo, a user can follow others and go through their personal details without their knowledge. Perpetrators thus find there are many opportunities to commit crimes via such apps since it's relatively easy and they feel they can get away with it. However, few users realize criminals are targeting them. Most of the victims are young women or teen girls who want to find Mr Right, police said. Last December, a 32-year-old man in Ningbo city looked to date college girls via Weixin. He successfully lured seven for dates and after gaining their trust, he drove them to remote parking lots and raped them. In June, he was sentenced to eight years and six months in jail. |
| China Reaches Accord on Military Makeup Posted: 26 Oct 2012 08:59 AM PDT  Source: Wall Street Journal by Jeremy Page BEIJING—China announced the promotion of four more generals to key military posts Thursday, indicating that its leadership had nearly completed a generational shake-up of the military top brass ahead of a once-a-decade Communist Party leadership change next month. The appointments indicate that agreement has been reached on the composition of the new 12-man Central Military Commission, the body that controls the armed forces. At least seven of its members are expected to retire after the 18th Party Congress, which is set to start Nov. 8. The military shuffle is a key element of the transition of power as the party has long relied on the military to enforce its rule, and it remains unclear whether outgoing Chinese party chief and President Hu Jintao plans to stay on as chairman of the commission. The Defense Ministry website showed that Gen. Fang Fenghui, previously commander of the Beijing military region, had been appointed the new chief of general staff. The position is responsible for operational command and administration of the People's Liberation Army. Gen. Fang is considered to be a close ally of Mr. Hu, according to military experts. The website also showed that Gen. Zhang Youxia, previously commander of the Shenyang military region, had been appointed director of the Armaments Department, which is responsible for development and procurement of new weapons. Gen. Zhang is considered a "princeling" in China because his father—also an army general—was a senior party figure. Gen. Zhang is thought to have close ties to Vice President Xi Jinping, who is also a princeling and is expected to take over as party chief next month. Gen. Zhang's father fought alongside Mr. Xi's father in the 1940s, according to some military experts. Mr. Xi became a vice chairman of the Central Military Commission in 2010 and is believed to have had some say in the promotion of Gen. Zhang to the rank of full general in 2011, according to those experts.  Gen. Zhao Keshi, former commander of the Nanjing military region, had been appointed director of the General Logistics Department, the Defense Ministry site showed. A ministry spokesman said Gen. Wei Fenghe had been named head of the Second Artillery Corps, which controls China's strategic missile arsenal. The spokesman declined further comment. The officers in these key posts are traditionally also given seats on the party's Central Military Commission, whose new membership will be officially unveiled at the end of the weeklong Party Congress, according to party insiders and military experts. Military experts suggested that a compromise had been reached between competing factions in the leadership with Messrs. Hu and Xi and former President Jiang Zemin each choosing loyal generals to guard their interests in the new military leadership. The Defense Ministry said earlier this week that Gen. Zhang Yang had been appointed as head of the General Political Department, and Gen. Ma Xiaotian had been appointed as the new air force chief. Those posts also usually command seats on the military commission. Gen. Zhang's appointment was significant because among the candidates for that post were two generals with close ties to Mr. Bo, whose wife was convicted in August of murdering a British businessman. The Defense Ministry website showed that one of those generals, Liu Yuan, whose father was former Chinese President Liu Shaoqi, has remained in his post as political commissar of the General Logistics Department. Adm. Wu Shengli, the current commander of the navy who is already a member of the Central Military Commission and is just below the retirement age of 68, is expected to stay in that post, according to military experts. The Defense Ministry didn't respond to an inquiry about Adm. Wu's post, but the state-run Xinhua news agency reported that he attended a meeting in that role on Tuesday. Two other members of the current Central Military Commission are too young to retire, and are expected to be promoted either to the post of defense minister or to one of the two uniformed vice chairmanships—the top military officers in the party who are usually also members of its 25-member Politburo. They are Gen. Xu Qiliang, the outgoing air force chief, and Gen. Chang Wanquan, the outgoing director of the armaments department. That leaves one commission slot open, and some military experts say they expect Gen. Fan Changlong to take one of the two military vice chairmanships. U.S. officials noted the change in Chinese military leadership, but avoided making early pronouncements that could affect their future policy options. "We look forward to establishing a positive relationship with the new military leadership and advancing the development of a healthy, stable, reliable and continuous military-to-military relationship," said Maj. Cathy Wilkinson, a Pentagon spokeswoman. |
| China paves way for prosecuting disgraced politician Bo Xilai Posted: 26 Oct 2012 08:42 AM PDT  Source: Reuters By Sui-Lee Wee and Ben Blanchard (Reuters) – China's largely rubber stamp parliament has expelled disgraced former senior politician Bo Xilai, state news agency Xinhua said on Friday, paving the way for formal criminal charges to be laid against him. The announcement comes a fortnight before the Communist Party holds a key congress, which opens on November 8, that will unveil the country's new central leadership. Bo's wife, Gu Kailai, and his former police chief, Wang Lijun, have both been jailed over the scandal, which stems from the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood while Bo was Communist Party chief of the southwestern city of Chongqing. The government last month accused Bo of corruption and of bending the law to hush up the murder. Before Bo is charged and tried, investigators must first complete an inquiry and indict him, but China's prosecutors and courts come under party control and are unlikely to challenge the accusations. A lawyer for Bo, who has been employed by the family to represent him, said on Thursday he was unable to say whether the government would allow him to represent Bo when the case comes to trial. "It's theatre," said Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, a New York-based advocacy group, who spoke before Bo's expulsion was announced. "The judiciary grinds into action only when the outcome has been determined. There is no indication we will see a genuine trial because Bo knows too much." Bo, 63, was widely seen as pursuing a powerful spot in the new leadership before his career unraveled after Wang fled to a U.S. consulate for more than 24 hours in February and alleged that Bo's wife had poisoned Heywood. DISAPPEARED FROM VIEW An official account of Wang's trial in September said Wang fled to the U.S. consulate in Chengdu, southwest China, after Bo beat him and stripped him of his police job following Wang's decision to confront Bo with the murder allegations against Gu. Bo, a former commerce minister, used his post as Communist Party chief of Chongqing in southwest China since 2007 to cast the sprawling, haze-covered municipality into a showcase for his mix of populist policies and bold spending plans that won support from leftists yearning for a charismatic leader. Wang had spearheaded Bo's controversial campaign against organized crime, a prominent plank in Bo's barely concealed campaign to join the topmost ranks of the Communist Party. Bo was dismissed from his Chongqing post in March, and suspended from the party's top ranks in April, when his wife Gu was named as an official suspect in the murder in November of Heywood, a long-time friend of the couple who also helped their son Bo Guagua settle into study in Britain. Bo has disappeared from public view since he was dismissed and has not had a chance to respond publicly to the accusations against him. The removal of Bo has disrupted the Communist Party's usually secretive and carefully choreographed process of settling on a new central leadership. Sharply dressed and courting publicity, Bo stood out in a party of stolid conformists, and he promoted Chongqing as a bold egalitarian alternative to China's current pattern of growth. But Bo's promotion of "red" culture inspired by Mao Zedong's era and his campaign-style crackdown on crime prompted fears that he was rekindling some of the arbitrary lawlessness of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s — a criticism that Premier Wen Jiabao spelled out before the public in mid-March. |
| Billions in Hidden Riches for Family of Chinese Leader Posted: 26 Oct 2012 08:54 AM PDT  Source: New York Times by David Barboza BEIJING — The mother of China's prime minister was a schoolteacher in northern China. His father was ordered to tend pigs in one of Mao's political campaigns. And during childhood, "my family was extremely poor," the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, said in a speech last year. The details of how Ms. Yang, a widow, accumulated such wealth are not known, or even if she was aware of the holdings in her name. But it happened after her son was elevated to China's ruling elite, first in 1998 as vice prime minister and then five years later as prime minister. Many relatives of Wen Jiabao, including his son, daughter, younger brother and brother-in-law, have become extraordinarily wealthy during his leadership, an investigation by The New York Times shows. A review of corporate and regulatory records indicates that the prime minister's relatives — some of whom, including his wife, have a knack for aggressive deal making — have controlled assets worth at least $2.7 billion. In many cases, the names of the relatives have been hidden behind layers of partnerships and investment vehicles involving friends, work colleagues and business partners. Untangling their financial holdings provides an unusually detailed look at how politically connected people have profited from being at the intersection of government and business as state influence and private wealth converge in China's fast-growing economy. Unlike most new businesses in China, the family's ventures sometimes received financial backing from state-owned companies, including China Mobile, one of the country's biggest phone operators, the documents show. At other times, the ventures won support from some of Asia's richest tycoons. The Times found that Mr. Wen's relatives accumulated shares in banks, jewelers, tourist resorts, telecommunications companies and infrastructure projects, sometimes by using offshore entities. The holdings include a villa development project in Beijing; a tire factory in northern China; a company that helped build some of Beijing's Olympic stadiums, including the well-known "Bird's Nest"; and Ping An Insurance, one of the world's biggest financial services companies. As prime minister in an economy that remains heavily state-driven, Mr. Wen, who is best known for his simple ways and common touch, more importantly has broad authority over the major industries where his relatives have made their fortunes. Chinese companies cannot list their shares on a stock exchange without approval from agencies overseen by Mr. Wen, for example. He also has the power to influence investments in strategic sectors like energy and telecommunications. Because the Chinese government rarely makes its deliberations public, it is not known what role — if any — Mr. Wen, who is 70, has played in most policy or regulatory decisions. But in some cases, his relatives have sought to profit from opportunities made possible by those decisions. The prime minister's younger brother, for example, has a company that was awarded more than $30 million in government contracts and subsidies to handle wastewater treatment and medical waste disposal for some of China's biggest cities, according to estimates based on government records. The contracts were announced after Mr. Wen ordered tougher regulations on medical waste disposal in 2003 after the SARS outbreak. In 2004, after the State Council, a government body Mr. Wen presides over, exempted Ping An Insurance and other companies from rules that limited their scope, Ping An went on to raise $1.8 billion in an initial public offering of stock. Partnerships controlled by Mr. Wen's relatives — along with their friends and colleagues — made a fortune by investing in the company before the public offering. In 2007, the last year the stock holdings were disclosed in public documents, those partnerships held as much as $2.2 billion worth of Ping An stock, according to an accounting of the investments by The Times that was verified by outside auditors. Ping An's overall market value is now nearly $60 billion. Ping An said in a statement that the company did "not know the background of the entities behind our shareholders." The statement said, "Ping An has no means to know the intentions behind shareholders when they buy and sell our shares." While Communist Party regulations call for top officials to disclose their wealth and that of their immediate family members, no law or regulation prohibits relatives of even the most senior officials from becoming deal-makers or major investors — a loophole that effectively allows them to trade on their family name. Some Chinese argue that permitting the families of Communist Party leaders to profit from the country's long economic boom has been important to ensuring elite support for market-oriented reforms. Even so, the business dealings of Mr. Wen's relatives have sometimes been hidden in ways that suggest the relatives are eager to avoid public scrutiny, the records filed with Chinese regulatory authorities show. Their ownership stakes are often veiled by an intricate web of holdings as many as five steps removed from the operating companies, according to the review. In the case of Mr. Wen's mother, The Times calculated her stake in Ping An — valued at $120 million in 2007 — by examining public records and government-issued identity cards, and by following the ownership trail to three Chinese investment entities. The name recorded on his mother's shares was Taihong, a holding company registered in Tianjin, the prime minister's hometown. The apparent efforts to conceal the wealth reflect the highly charged politics surrounding the country's ruling elite, many of whom are also enormously wealthy but reluctant to draw attention to their riches. When Bloomberg News reported in June that the extended family of Vice President Xi Jinping, set to become China's next president, had amassed hundreds of millions of dollars in assets, the Chinese government blocked access inside the country to the Bloomberg Web site. "In the senior leadership, there's no family that doesn't have these problems," said a former government colleague of Wen Jiabao who has known him for more than 20 years and who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "His enemies are intentionally trying to smear him by letting this leak out." The Times presented its findings to the Chinese government for comment. The Foreign Ministry declined to respond to questions about the investments, the prime minister or his relatives. Members of Mr. Wen's family also declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment. Duan Weihong, a wealthy businesswoman whose company, Taihong, was the investment vehicle for the Ping An shares held by the prime minister's mother and other relatives, said the investments were actually her own. Ms. Duan, who comes from the prime minister's hometown and is a close friend of his wife, said ownership of the shares was listed in the names of Mr. Wen's relatives in an effort to conceal the size of Ms. Duan's own holdings. "When I invested in Ping An I didn't want to be written about," Ms. Duan said, "so I had my relatives find some other people to hold these shares for me." But it was an "accident," she said, that her company chose the relatives of the prime minister as the listed shareholders — a process that required registering their official ID numbers and obtaining their signatures. Until presented with the names of the investors by The Times, she said, she had no idea that they had selected the relatives of Wen Jiabao. The review of the corporate and regulatory records, which covers 1992 to 2012, found no holdings in Mr. Wen's name. And it was not possible to determine from the documents whether he recused himself from any decisions that might have affected his relatives' holdings, or whether they received preferential treatment on investments. For much of his tenure, Wen Jiabao has been at the center of rumors and conjecture about efforts by his relatives to profit from his position. Yet until the review by The Times, there has been no detailed accounting of the family's riches. His wife, Zhang Beili, is one of the country's leading authorities on jewelry and gemstones and is an accomplished businesswoman in her own right. By managing state diamond companies that were later privatized, The Times found, she helped her relatives parlay their minority stakes into a billion-dollar portfolio of insurance, technology and real estate ventures. The couple's only son sold a technology company he started to the family of Hong Kong's richest man, Li Ka-shing, for $10 million, and used another investment vehicle to establish New Horizon Capital, now one of China's biggest private equity firms, with partners like the government of Singapore, according to records and interviews with bankers. The prime minister's younger brother, Wen Jiahong, controls $200 million in assets, including wastewater treatment plants and recycling businesses, the records show. As prime minister, Mr. Wen has staked out a position as a populist and a reformer, someone whom the state-run media has nicknamed "the People's Premier" and "Grandpa Wen" because of his frequent outings to meet ordinary people, especially in moments of crisis like natural disasters. While it is unclear how much the prime minister knows about his family's wealth, State Department documents released by the WikiLeaks organization in 2010 included a cable that suggested Mr. Wen was aware of his relatives' business dealings and unhappy about them. "Wen is disgusted with his family's activities, but is either unable or unwilling to curtail them," a Chinese-born executive working at an American company in Shanghai told American diplomats, according to the 2007 cable. China's 'Diamond Queen' It is no secret in China's elite circles that the prime minister's wife, Zhang Beili, is rich, and that she has helped control the nation's jewelry and gem trade. But her lucrative diamond businesses became an off-the-charts success only as her husband moved into the country's top leadership ranks, the review of corporate and regulatory records by The Times found. A geologist with an expertise in gemstones, Ms. Zhang is largely unknown among ordinary Chinese. She rarely travels with the prime minister or appears with him, and there are few official photographs of the couple together. And while people who have worked with her say she has a taste for jade and fine diamonds, they say she usually dresses modestly, does not exude glamour and prefers to wield influence behind the scenes, much like the relatives of other senior leaders. The State Department documents released by WikiLeaks included a suggestion that Mr. Wen had once considered divorcing Ms. Zhang because she had exploited their relationship in her diamond trades. Taiwanese television reported in 2007 that Ms. Zhang had bought a pair of jade earrings worth about $275,000 at a Beijing trade show, though the source — a Taiwanese trader — later backed off the claim and Chinese government censors moved swiftly to block coverage of the subject in China, according to news reports at the time. "Her business activities are known to everyone in the leadership," said one banker who worked with relatives of Wen Jiabao. The banker said it was not unusual for her office to call upon businesspeople. "And if you get that call, how can you say no?" Zhang Beili first gained influence in the 1990s, while working as a regulator at the Ministry of Geology. At the time, China's jewelry market was still in its infancy. While her husband was serving in China's main leadership compound, known as Zhongnanhai, Ms. Zhang was setting industry standards in the jewelry and gem trade. She helped create the National Gemstone Testing Center in Beijing, and the Shanghai Diamond Exchange, two of the industry's most powerful institutions. In a country where the state has long dominated the marketplace, jewelry regulators often decided which companies could set up diamond-processing factories, and which would gain entry to the retail jewelry market. State regulators even formulated rules that required diamond sellers to buy certificates of authenticity for any diamond sold in China, from the government-run testing center in Beijing, which Ms. Zhang managed. As a result, when executives from Cartier or De Beers visited China with hopes of selling diamonds and jewelry here, they often went to visit Ms. Zhang, who became known as China's "diamond queen." "She's the most important person there," said Gaetano Cavalieri, president of the World Jewelry Confederation in Switzerland. "She was bridging relations between partners — Chinese and foreign partners." As early as 1992, people who worked with Ms. Zhang said, she had begun to blur the line between government official and businesswoman. As head of the state-owned China Mineral and Gem Corporation, she began investing the state company's money in start-ups. And by the time her husband was named vice premier, in 1998, she was busy setting up business ventures with friends and relatives. The state company she ran invested in a group of affiliated diamond companies, according to public records. Many of them were run by Ms. Zhang's relatives — or colleagues who had worked with her at the National Gemstone Testing Center. In 1993, for instance, the state company Ms. Zhang ran helped found Beijing Diamond, a big jewelry retailer. A year later, one of her younger brothers, Zhang Jianming, and two of her government colleagues personally acquired 80 percent of the company, according to shareholder registers. Beijing Diamond invested in Shenzhen Diamond, which was controlled by her brother-in-law, Wen Jiahong, the prime minister's younger brother. Among the successful undertakings was Sino-Diamond, a venture financed by the state-owned China Mineral and Gem Corporation, which she headed. The company had business ties with a state-owned company managed by another brother, Zhang Jiankun, who worked as an official in Jiaxing, Ms. Zhang's hometown, in Zhejiang Province. In the summer of 1999, after securing agreements to import diamonds from Russia and South Africa, Sino-Diamond went public, raising $50 million on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. The offering netted Ms. Zhang's family about $8 million, according to corporate filings. Although she was never listed as a shareholder, former colleagues and business partners say Ms. Zhang's early diamond partnerships were the nucleus of a larger portfolio of companies she would later help her family and colleagues gain a stake in. The Times found no indication that Wen Jiabao used his political clout to influence the diamond companies his relatives invested in. But former business partners said that the family's success in diamonds, and beyond, was often bolstered with financial backing from wealthy businessmen who sought to curry favor with the prime minister's family. "After Wen became prime minister, his wife sold off some of her diamond investments and moved into new things," said a Chinese executive who did business with the family. He asked not to be named because of fear of government retaliation. Corporate records show that beginning in the late 1990s, a series of rich businessmen took turns buying up large stakes in the diamond companies, often from relatives of Mr. Wen, and then helped them reinvest in other lucrative ventures, like real estate and finance. According to corporate records and interviews, the businessmen often supplied accountants and office space to investment partnerships partly controlled by the relatives. "When they formed companies," said one businessman who set up a company with members of the Wen family, "Ms. Zhang stayed in the background. That's how it worked." The Only Son Late one evening early this year, the prime minister's only son, Wen Yunsong, was in the cigar lounge at Xiu, an upscale bar and lounge at the Park Hyatt in Beijing. He was having cocktails as Beijing's nouveau riche gathered around, clutching designer bags and wearing expensive business suits, according to two guests who were present. In China, the children of senior leaders are widely believed to be in a class of their own. Known as "princelings," they often hold Ivy League degrees, get V.I.P. treatment, and are even offered preferred pricing on shares in hot stock offerings. They are also known as people who can get things done in China's heavily regulated marketplace, where the state controls access. And in recent years, few princelings have been as bold as the younger Mr. Wen, who goes by the English name Winston and is about 40 years old. A Times review of Winston Wen's investments, and interviews with people who have known him for years, show that his deal-making has been extensive and lucrative, even by the standards of his princeling peers. State-run giants like China Mobile have formed start-ups with him. In recent years, Winston Wen has been in talks with Hollywood studios about a financing deal. Concerned that China does not have an elite boarding school for Chinese students, he recently hired the headmasters of Choate and Hotchkiss in Connecticut to oversee the creation of a $150 million private school now being built in the Beijing suburbs. Winston Wen and his wife, moreover, have stakes in the technology industry and an electric company, as well as an indirect stake in Union Mobile Pay, the government-backed online payment platform — all while living in the prime minister's residence, in central Beijing, according to corporate records and people familiar with the family's investments. "He's not shy about using his influence to get things done," said one venture capitalist who regularly meets with Winston Wen. The younger Mr. Wen declined to comment. But in a telephone interview, his wife, Yang Xiaomeng, said her husband had been unfairly criticized for his business dealings. "Everything that has been written about him has been wrong," she said. "He's really not doing that much business anymore." Winston Wen was educated in Beijing and then earned an engineering degree from the Beijing Institute of Technology. He went abroad and earned a master's degree in engineering materials from the University of Windsor, in Canada, and an M.B.A. from the Kellogg School of Business at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., just outside Chicago. When he returned to China in 2000, he helped set up three successful technology companies in five years, according to people familiar with those deals. Two of them were sold to Hong Kong businessmen, one to the family of Li Ka-shing, one of the wealthiest men in Asia. Winston Wen's earliest venture, an Internet data services provider called Unihub Global, was founded in 2000 with $2 million in start-up capital, according to Hong Kong and Beijing corporate filings. Financing came from a tight-knit group of relatives and his mother's former colleagues from government and the diamond trade, as well as an associate of Cheng Yu-tung, patriarch of Hong Kong's second-wealthiest family. The firm's earliest customers were state-owned brokerage houses and Ping An, in which the Wen family has held a large financial stake. He made an even bolder move in 2005, by pushing into private equity when he formed New Horizon Capital with a group of Chinese-born classmates from Northwestern. The firm quickly raised $100 million from investors, including SBI Holdings, a division of the Japanese group SoftBank, and Temasek, the Singapore government investment fund. Under Mr. Wen, New Horizon established itself as a leading private equity firm, investing in biotech, solar, wind and construction equipment makers. Since it began operations, the firm has returned about $430 million to investors, a fourfold profit, according to SBI Holdings. "Their first fund was dynamite," said Kathleen Ng, editor of Asia Private Equity Review, an industry publication in Hong Kong. "And that allowed them to raise a lot more money." Today, New Horizon has more than $2.5 billion under management. Some of Winston Wen's deal-making, though, has attracted unwanted attention for the prime minister. In 2010, when New Horizon acquired a 9 percent stake in a company called Sihuan Pharmaceuticals just two months before its public offering, the Hong Kong Stock Exchange said the late-stage investment violated its rules and forced the firm to return the stake. Still, New Horizon made a $46.5 million profit on the sale. Soon after, New Horizon announced that Winston Wen had handed over day-to-day operations and taken up a position at the China Satellite Communications Corporation, a state-owned company that has ties to the Chinese space program. He has since been named chairman. The Tycoons In the late 1990s, Duan Weihong was managing an office building and several other properties in Tianjin, the prime minister's hometown in northern China, through her property company, Taihong. She was in her 20s and had studied at the Nanjing University of Science and Technology. Around 2002, Ms. Duan went into business with several relatives of Wen Jiabao, transforming her property company into an investment vehicle of the same name. The company helped make Ms. Duan very wealthy. It is not known whether Ms. Duan, now 43, is related to the prime minister. In a series of interviews, she first said she did not know any members of the Wen family, but later described herself as a friend of the family and particularly close to Zhang Beili, the prime minister's wife. As happened to a handful of other Chinese entrepreneurs, Ms. Duan's fortunes soared as she teamed up with the relatives and their network of friends and colleagues, though she described her relationship with them involving the shares in Ping An as existing on paper only and having no financial component. Ms. Duan and other wealthy businesspeople — among them, six billionaires from across China — have been instrumental in getting multimillion-dollar ventures off the ground and, at crucial times, helping members of the Wen family set up investment vehicles to profit from them, according to investment bankers who have worked with all parties. Established in Tianjin, Taihong had spectacular returns. In 2002, the company paid about $65 million to acquire a 3 percent stake in Ping An before its initial public offering, according to corporate records and Ms. Duan's graduate school thesis. Five years later, those shares were worth $3.7 billion The company's Hong Kong affiliate, Great Ocean, also run by Ms. Duan, later formed a joint venture with the Beijing government and acquired a huge tract of land adjacent to Capital International Airport. Today, the site is home to a sprawling cargo and logistics center. Last year, Great Ocean sold its 53 percent stake in the project to a Singapore company for nearly $400 million. That deal and several other investments, in luxury hotels, Beijing villa developments and the Hong Kong-listed BBMG, one of China's largest building materials companies, have been instrumental to Ms. Duan's accumulation of riches, according to The Times's review of corporate records. The review also showed that over the past decade there have been nearly three dozen individual shareholders of Taihong, many of whom are either relatives of Wen Jiabao or former colleagues of his wife. The other wealthy entrepreneurs who have worked with the prime minister's relatives declined to comment for this article. Ms. Duan strongly denied having financial ties to the prime minister or his relatives and said she was only trying to avoid publicity by listing others as owning Ping An shares. "The money I invested in Ping An was completely my own," said Ms. Duan, who has served as a member of the Ping An board of supervisors. "Everything I did was legal." Another wealthy partner of the Wen relatives has been Cheng Yu-tung, who controls the Hong Kong conglomerate New World Development and is one of the richest men in Asia, worth about $15 billion, according to Forbes. In the 1990s, New World was seeking a foothold in mainland China for a sister company that specializes in high-end retail jewelry. The retail chain, Chow Tai Fook, opened its first store in China in 1998. Mr. Cheng and his associates invested in a diamond venture backed by the relatives of Mr. Wen and co-invested with them in an array of corporate entities, including Sino-Life, National Trust and Ping An, according to records and interviews with some of those involved. Those investments by Mr. Cheng are now worth at least $5 billion, according to the corporate filings. Chow Tai Fook, the jewelry chain, has also flourished. Today, China accounts for 60 percent of the chain's $4.2 billion in annual revenue. Mr. Cheng, 87, could not be reached for comment. Calls to New World Development were not returned. Fallout for Premier In the winter of 2007, just before he began his second term as prime minister, Wen Jiabao called for new measures to fight corruption, particularly among high-ranking officials. "Leaders at all levels of government should take the lead in the antigraft drive," he told a gathering of high-level party members in Beijing. "They should strictly ensure that their family members, friends and close subordinates do not abuse government influence." The speech was consistent with the prime minister's earlier drive to toughen disclosure rules for public servants, and to require senior officials to reveal their family assets. Whether Mr. Wen has made such disclosures for his own family is unclear, since the Communist Party does not release such information. Even so, many of the holdings found by The Times would not need to be disclosed under the rules since they are not held in the name of the prime minister's immediate family — his wife, son and daughter. Eighty percent of the $2.7 billion in assets identified in The Times's investigation and verified by the outside auditors were held by, among others, the prime minister's mother, his younger brother, two brothers-in-law, a sister-in-law, daughter-in-law and the parents of his son's wife, none of whom is subject to party disclosure rules. The total value of the relatives' stake in Ping An is based on calculations by The Times that were confirmed by the auditors. The total includes shares held by the relatives that were sold between 2004 and 2006, and the value of the remaining shares in late 2007, the last time the holdings were publicly disclosed. Legal experts said that determining the precise value of holdings in China could be difficult because there might be undisclosed side agreements about the true beneficiaries. "Complex corporate structures are not necessarily insidious," said Curtis J. Milhaupt, a Columbia University Law School professor who has studied China's corporate group structures. "But in a system like China's, where corporate ownership and political power are closely intertwined, shell companies magnify questions about who owns what and where the money came from." Among the investors in the Wen family ventures are longtime business associates, former colleagues and college classmates, including Yu Jianming, who attended Northwestern with Winston Wen, and Zhang Yuhong, a longtime colleague of Wen Jiahong, the prime minister's younger brother. The associates did not return telephone calls seeking comment. Revelations about the Wen family's wealth could weaken him politically. Next month, at the 18th Party Congress in Beijing, the Communist Party is expected to announce a new generation of leaders. But the selection process has already been marred by one of the worst political scandals in decades, the downfall of Bo Xilai, the Chongqing party boss, who was vying for a top position. In Beijing, Wen Jiabao is expected to step down as prime minister in March at the end of his second term. Political analysts say that even after leaving office he could remain a strong backstage political force. But documents showing that his relatives amassed a fortune during his tenure could diminish his standing, the analysts said. "This will affect whatever residual power Wen has," said Minxin Pei, an expert on Chinese leadership and a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College in California. The prime minister's supporters say he has not personally benefited from his extended family's business dealings, and may not even be knowledgeable about the extent of them. Last March, the prime minister hinted that he was at least aware of the persistent rumors about his relatives. During a nationally televised news conference in Beijing, he insisted that he had "never pursued personal gain" in public office. "I have the courage to face the people and to face history," he said in an emotional session. "There are people who will appreciate what I have done, but there are also people who will criticize me. Ultimately, history will have the final say." |
| Posted: 26 Oct 2012 08:34 AM PDT Have You Heard…   |
| China adopts mental health law to curb forced treatment Posted: 26 Oct 2012 08:39 AM PDT  Source: Reuters (Reuters) – China adopted a law on Friday to protect for the first time the rights of the mentally ill after years of accusations that psychiatric hospitals are used to lock up people against their will and silence dissidents. The law will "curb abuses regarding compulsory mental health treatment and protect citizens from undergoing unnecessary treatment or illegal hospitalization", the Xinhua state news agency said. "We welcome it because having a law is better than not having one," Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, a New York-based advocacy group, told Reuters. "The most important thing that this law does is it will allow civil society to step in to monitor and press for improvement in the management of mental health in China, including … pushing for greater transparency and progressive curtailment of police rights." Activists have long argued that authorities force people they consider troublemakers into psychiatric hospitals without providing any evidence of their supposed crimes. The tactic has been used to silence dissidents, whistle-blowers and petitioners. More recently, it has been used by people against relatives during family disputes. State media has reported on people being locked up in psychiatric hospitals against their will. Chen Guoming, a former gold store owner, was forced into an asylum in 2011 by his wife and locked up for 56 days after refusing to lend money to his wife's family, Xinhua said. The new law bans mental health examinations of a citizen against his or her own will, Xinhua said. But Bequelin said he was still concerned about China's police-run psychiatric hospitals, which confine people the authorities consider troublemakers. China had long been criticized for its lack of a mental health law, which did not give people the right to an independent review of their mental health status. The lack of a law contravened the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, a U.N. treaty ratified by China in 2008, rights group Chinese Human Rights Defenders said in an August report. China has about 16 million people suffering from severe mental disorders, Xinhua said, citing the Health Ministry. |
| China’s year of political surprises not over yet Posted: 26 Oct 2012 08:46 AM PDT  Source: Reuters By Sui-Lee Wee (Reuters) – China's year of political intrigue is likely to spring a few more surprises yet, as the ruling Communist Party tries to pull off a smooth leadership change next month against a backdrop of purges, plots and prison sentences. One of the few things known with almost total certainty is that Vice President Xi Jinping will take over as party leader at the congress which opens November 8, leaving dozens of senior positions to be fought over in the political backrooms. Xi then becomes president in March at the annual meeting of parliament. China's three most powerful men – former President Jiang Zemin, current President Hu Jintao and Hu's anointed successor, Xi – have tried to minimize any factional in-fighting over the new line-up by coming together to agree a preferred list of candidates for the party's top decision-making body, the Politburo Standing Committee, sources said. But China experts say their plan could still be thwarted. "I think we will have surprises this time … Negotiation is a very complicated process," said Cheng Li, an expert on Chinese politics at the Brookings Institution think-tank in Washington. "Outsiders have no idea. We probably have only 20 percent of an idea of what's going on. There will be some last-minute changes, possibly even to the Standing Committee." The preferred list drawn up by Jiang, Hu and Xi has already delivered a major surprise, with the omission of a top contender, Wang Yang, 57, party boss of southern Guangdong province and viewed by many in the West as a political reformer. His omission could, in turn, have been linked indirectly to the earlier fall of another one-time contender for the Standing Committee, Bo Xilai, a high-flying politician who was ousted this year in China's biggest political scandal in two decades. Bo was purged after allegations emerged that his wife had murdered a British businessman – she was given a suspended death sentence in August – but he remains a favorite among party leftists who want to slow the pace of market-based reforms. China experts suspect Jiang, Hu and Xi did not want to further provoke the left by backing Wang. "Some people say he's Bo Xilai on the right – Bo Xilai is on the left and he's the counterparty on the right – and that the party is equally worried of this person," said Wang Zhengxu, a senior research fellow at the University of Nottingham's School of Contemporary Chinese Studies in Britain. However, the process of choosing the standing committee means Jiang, Hu and Xi may not get their way entirely. BACKROOM DEALS Front-runners can fall at the final hurdle if, during the congress, delegates fail to elect them as one of the 200-odd full members of the Central Committee, the largest of the party's elite power-making bodies, or if party elders and current Standing Committee members veto them. The Central Committee has never voted down a Standing Committee front-runner but it famously shot down a candidate to the wider Politburo in 1987, when Deng Liqun, an unpopular conservative ideologue, failed to win a Central Committee seat. The new Standing Committee – which sources say will be cut to seven from nine currently – is hammered out in horse-trading between past, present and future leaders anxious to preserve political power and protect their networks. To avoid surprises, the party held a straw poll earlier this year to informally measure the popularity of the candidates for the Politburo and Standing Committee. The results are unknown. About 70 percent of the current leadership will be replaced at the congress, involving the party, the military and the state, said Cheng of the Brookings Institution. Other key roles, such as the central bank governor, will also likely be decided. The new Standing Committee will not be made public until the end of the congress, when the members will file out from behind a screen in Beijing's cavernous Great Hall of the People. The backroom politicking can be ruthless, and some experts still rate Wang Yang a chance to join Xi's top table, and take up the reformist mantle of outgoing Premier Wen Jiabao. "I do think Wen Jiabao might want to support him," said Wang of the University of Nottingham. If he does not get in this time, Wang Yang could move to Beijing to serve as a vice-premier, Wang Zhengxu added. Wang Yang, 57, is young enough to make another run at the Standing Committee at the 2017 congress, said Zheng Yongnian, director of the East Asian Institute at the National University of Singapore. DIRTY POLITICS At this point, among the greatest possible upsets at next month's congress would be the failure of Vice Premier Wang Qishan, 64, a darling of foreign investors who runs the finance portfolio, and Li Yuanchao, 61, who heads the party's powerful organization department, to make the Standing Committee. Both men appear on the list backed by Jiang, Hu and Xi, as well as nearly all the lists that have circulated on Chinese websites speculating about the final line-up. Outgoing Standing Committee members can nominate their successors while party elders such as ex-premier and parliament chief Li Peng have veto power over candidates. However, Nottingham's Wang said one committee member may be decided by election at next month's congress, possibly for the first time. That would be in keeping with the party's tentative steps toward more internal democracy since the late 1980s. For the Central Committee, ballots will contain at least 5 percent more names of candidates than seats. Those who fail to get elected can run for election the next day as alternate Central Committee members, who have no voting rights and are not eligible to join the Standing Committee. More than 2,000 delegates to the congress will elect 200-odd full members of the Central Committee. The Central Committee then holds elections to choose the Politburo, Standing Committee, Central Military Commission and the party's anti-corruption body, though the outcomes have already been decided at this point by the party's power-brokers. The real threat for a candidate is not in the internal elections, but in the dirty politics that can precede them. In September, Ling Jihua, a close ally of Hu who had been eyeing a promotion to the Politburo and to become head of the party's organization department, was demoted after press reports that his son was involved in a fatal crash involving a luxury sports car in Beijing. |
| Has Wen Jiabao Failed the Confucius Test? Posted: 26 Oct 2012 07:56 AM PDT Everyone's talking about the big NYT piece on the vast wealth of the family of China's Prime Minister, Wen Jiabao. At one level this is utterly unsurprising. This is how the PRC's political economy works. Those people who stand at the intersection of state and market in the partially-reformed Chinese economy are in a position to make billions of dollars (and, yes, it is ultimately about dollars, a globally convertible currency, as this article suggests). And high level political leaders and their children and spouses and family members are very often the ones who push themselves into those positions. We see the same pattern with Xi Jinping and Bo Xilai. That's how they roll at the top of the PRC system. The difference in the case of Wen Jiabao is that he has presented himself, and has been presented by the PRC media, as a man of modest means and tastes. He was famous for wearing the same plain overcoat for years on end. He styled himself a man of the people: "Grandpa Wen" comforted victims of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and personally apologized for the transportation havoc wreaked by the 2006 New Year's bilzzard. Earlier this year, he made a plaintive appeal for some sort of political reform. In all of this there is a resonance with Mencius: the righteous leader, working to secure the people's basic livelihood while personally maintaining a frugal and simple lifestyle. Perhaps Wen somehow abosrbed Confucian-Mencian values somewhere along the way - though it is hard to know how a person who came up through the Party apparatus, beginning in the Cultrual Revolution, might have been able to practice Confucian benevolence. Or maybe the "Grandpa Wen" thing is bascially a political act. It's hard to know in the opaque world of Chinese politics. But let's give Wen the benefit of the doubt. Let's say he has, at least in the post-Mao era, been trying to live a morally good life in something like Confucian terms. It is not an easy thing to do in contemporary China. He is embedded in a system driven by powerful material incentives. Money and corruption and power fuel the party-state machine. And those create behaviors and outcomes that contradict Confucian morality. We should not, therefore, expect that Wen might have been able to transform the system in a Confucian-Mencian direction. But if he were to have moral effect anywhere, it might have been in his family life. Were he serious about setting an example of a moral ruler, he would have done so, first and foremost, in his relationships with his immediate family. And that is precisely where, based on these new revelations, he seems to have failed the Confucian test. Any judgment here, however, relies upon assumptions about just what Wen knew and when (if you'll excuse the unavoidable pun) he knew it. The NYT story suggests he was generally in the dark about the fortunes being amassed by his mother and wife and son: The prime minister's supporters say he has not personally benefited from his extended family's business dealings, and may not even be knowledgeable about the extent of them. On the other hand, there are some hints that he was aware of what was going on: While it is unclear how much the prime minister knows about his family's wealth, State Department documents released by the WikiLeaks organization in 2010 included a cable that suggested Mr. Wen was aware of his relatives' business dealings and unhappy about them. "Wen is disgusted with his family's activities, but is either unable or unwilling to curtail them," a Chinese-born executive working at an American company in Shanghai told American diplomats, according to the 2007 cable. I think he did know. You don't rise to the top of the PRC poltiical order wtihout being a very shrewd and sharp individual. He certainly was in a position to know if he wanted to know. If that is true, and he did know that his famly was using his public position to amass personal wealth (which he will ultimately benefit from), what could he have done? More than simply make public statements against corruption like this: In the winter of 2007, just before he began his second term as prime minister, Wen Jiabao called for new measures to fight corruption, particularly among high-ranking officials. "Leaders at all levels of government should take the lead in the antigraft drive," he told a gathering of high-level party members in Beijing. "They should strictly ensure that their family members, friends and close subordinates do not abuse government influence." The speech was consistent with the prime minister's earlier drive to toughen disclosure rules for public servants, and to require senior officials to reveal their family assets. Whether Mr. Wen has made such disclosures for his own family is unclear, since the Communist Party does not release such information. Even so, many of the holdings found by The Times would not need to be disclosed under the rules since they are not held in the name of the prime minister's immediate family — his wife, son and daughter. These are just words. And we know that, from a Confucian perspective words alone are not enough. If words do not match actions - in this case the continuation of family wealth-making off of Wen's position - then more meaningful action should be taken. A person trying to fulfill Confucian morality would be willing to resign from the postion that is the root cause of the corrupt behavior. In Mencius, Shun, the exemplary sage-ruler, faces a situation where his family obligations conflict with his official duties and: Shun would have regarded abandoning the realm as he would abandoning an old shoe. (7A.35: Bloom). Maintaining the moral fiber of the family comes first. In the example of Shun, the moral problem is more dire: his father has committed murder. But the principle extends to other circumstances as well, especially if the office itself is the source of immoral family behavior. Wen Jiabao, if he were truly a Mencian exemplarly ruler, should have resgned to stop the corruption he could affect. He didn't. And in that, he has not lived up to the standards of Confucian morality. |
| Ponzi scheme rips investors off 2.4b yuan Posted: 26 Oct 2012 01:51 AM PDT A US-based Ponzi scheme website, Hootoot660, has been destroyed after it reportedly swindled more than 200,000 Chinese out of 2.4 billion yuan (US$384 million), police said. The website targeted people who want quick profits, promising them higher returns and charging them 660 yuan to 12,540 yuan for membership. It asked them to buy Guquan, an online stock that "would never fall," and find new investors in order to earn high commissions. To win others' trust, the website paid returns to early investors with money defrauded from new members, Yangtze Evening News reported today. A Chinese businessman surnamed Yun set up the Hootoot Trading Company in Texas in 2010 and opened the website a year later. But he failed to make money until he hit the idea of selling virtual stocks this January and raked in hundreds of millions of yuan in just three months. His co-founder, a Chinese surnamed Pang, was arrested in Henan Province on May 3. Their website engineer, surnamed Xie, was caught in Guangdong Province on May 10. Other members of the fraud ring were also seized. Only Yun is still on the run. Police have issued three arrest warrants online, the newspaper said. |
| Bo Xilai's post as national legislator terminated Posted: 25 Oct 2012 09:27 PM PDT The Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC), China's top legislature, announced today the termination of Bo Xilai's post as an NPC deputy. The Standing Committee of Chongqing Municipal People's Congress removed the former high-ranking official, who was suspected of violating laws, from his post as the NPC deputy late last month. "According to the law on deputies to the NPC and to local people's congresses, his post was terminated," said a statement of the NPC Standing Committee which wrapped up a bimonthly session today. The Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee decided at a meeting on September 28 to deprive Bo of the CPC membership and expel him from public service for severe disciplinary violations. Bo was formerly secretary of the CPC Chongqing Municipal Committee and also a Political Bureau member, after serving Dalian mayor, Liaoning governor and minister of Commerce. The September 28 meeting also decided to transfer Bo's suspected law violations and relevant evidence to judicial departments. Investigations have found that Bo seriously violated CPC disciplines while managing Dalian City, Liaoning Province, and the Ministry of Commerce, as well as serving the Political Bureau member and the Chongqing Party chief. Investigations also showed Bo had abused his power, made severe mistakes and borne major responsibility in an incident that former Chongqing Vice Mayor Wang Lijun entered, without permission, the US Consulate General in Chengdu, and an intentional homicide case involving Bogu Kailai, Bo's wife. A Chinese court on August 20 sentenced Bogu Kailai to death with a two-year reprieve for murdering British citizen Neil Heywood. Bo was accused of taking advantage of his position to seek profits for others and received huge bribes personally or through his family. His position was utilized by his wife to seek profits for others, and the Bo family accepted a huge amount of money and property from others. He was also found to have violated organizational and personnel disciplines and made erroneous decisions in certain promotion cases, resulting in serious consequences. |
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