| Bloomberg: “Revolution to Riches” Posted: 26 Dec 2012 11:36 PM PST Back in June, an in-depth report on the accumulated fortune of those acquainted with newly appointed CCP general secretary Xi Jinping prompted China's infamous Internet custodians to block the Bloomberg website. Now, Bloomberg has added two new articles to launch a series probing into the elite "princeling" class. The series is supplemented by an infographic mapping out the aristocratic weave of family and business guanxi between descendants of the "Eight Immortals" – those veteran revolutionaries who maintained party power after Mao's passing. Bloomberg provides a series overview: Bloomberg News series "Revolution to Riches" lifts the veil of secrecy on China's princelings, an elite class that has been able to amass wealth and influence because of their bloodline. Mapping the family trees of China's "Eight Immortals," founding fathers of Communist China who later led the country's economic opening, Bloomberg tracked 103 descendants and spouses — from the powerful leaders of state-owned conglomerates to their jet-setting, Prada-accessorized grandchildren. The extended family of another princeling, China's new leader Xi Jinping, amassed a fortune in assets and real state, reporting by Bloomberg shows. The identities and business dealings of this red nobility are often hidden behind state censorship and complex corporate webs. To document them, Bloomberg scoured thousands of pages of corporate filings, property records, official websites and archives, and conducted dozens of interviews from China to the United States.
The first article in the Bloomberg series highlights the ideological dissonance between the PRC's revolutionary forefathers and their affluent offspring, walking us through changes in China's economy and introducing prominent princelings: Lying in a Beijing military hospital in 1990, General Wang Zhen told a visitor he felt betrayed. Decades after he risked his life fighting for an egalitarian utopia, the ideals he held as one of Communist China's founding fathers were being undermined by the capitalist ways of his children — business leaders in finance, aviation and computers. "Turtle eggs," he said to the visiting well-wisher, using a slang term for bastards. "I don't acknowledge them as my sons."[...]
In the next article, we meet the U.S. assimilated children of PLA general Song Renqiong: At least five of the general's eight children have lived in the U.S., with three daughters becoming citizens and a son obtaining his green card. Their family is the most extreme example of the pull that the U.S. — "beautiful country" in Chinese — has on the Immortals' descendants.[...] The siblings found opportunity in the U.S., not just to educate their children and themselves, they say, but to start businesses and leave behind the chaos and trauma of the Cultural Revolution. In the country held up as the antithesis of China's ideals, they could lead anonymous and simple lives that adhered, ironically, more closely to the values of public service and egalitarianism espoused by their Communist parents. Their choices in many cases contrast with those of some other Immortal families, who pursued lives of privilege after Ivy-League educations and Wall Street training. [...]Song Kehuang, who spends time in the U.S. twice a year at his family home in Irvine,California, says he regrets the fact that the wealth and power of the princeling class made some of his counterparts forget their roots.[...]
Elsewhere in recent western coverage of princelings, the contrasting experiences of Bo Xilai and Xi Jinping – both sons of "immortal" revolutionary heroes – have been in focus. At the Atlantic, Damien Ma recalls Bo's fall and Xi's rise, and the Financial Times' Jamil Anderlini has dubbed 2012 the "year of the princeling". Also see prior CDT coverage of China's princeling generation.
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Post tags: Bloomberg, Bo Xilai, guanxi, investigative journalism, princeling, princelings, wealth, wealthy, Xi Jinping
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| Scholars Cautiously Urge Political Reform Posted: 26 Dec 2012 06:55 PM PST An open letter released on Christmas Day seeks to sway the new Party leadership towards renewed political reform, encouraged by Xi Jinping and others' strong words against corruption and bureaucratic excesses. From Bloomberg News: The letter, signed by 71 people and posted on the blog of Peking University law professor Zhang Qianfan, calls for the party to end its oversight of government personnel decisions, leave court decisions to judges and lawyers, and allow people to speak and assemble freely. […] "I don't think society should simply wait passively for whatever comes up but we should express our ideas and try to build a social consensus," Zhang, who helped draft the letter, said in a phone interview. "Now is a good time to do something new and if we miss such a chance then our social problems will become more serious." […] "None of this is new and it's not something that's really against the Party's will," Zhang said. "They already expressed their will in the constitution or in the charter of the party itself." Zhang's calculation that a gentle approach may be more productive—and less dangerous—is not universally accepted, with critics arguing that the resulting text is too watered down. From Didi Tang and Gillian Wong at the Associated Press: The document echoes some of the requests made in Charter 08, a 2008 manifesto that made an unusually direct call for an end to single-party rule and other democratic reforms. The manifesto landed its lead architect, dissident writer Liu Xiaobo, in prison for inciting subversion — an 11-year term he is still serving. The petition, released on Christmas Day, adopts a milder tone, asking the party leadership to rule within existing laws. […] Hong Kong-based Chinese free-speech activist Wen Yunchao said the requests made in the petition were sound but the style in which it was written was "too subservient." "It's like they are slaves, kneeling there and writing it," Wen said. He said the proposed changes should have been stated more directly.
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Post tags: Charter 08, constitution, freedom of expression, judicial system, Liu Xiaobo, Peking University, political reform, reform, Wen Yunchao, Xi Jinping
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| Testing Time for China’s Migrant Millions Posted: 26 Dec 2012 06:25 PM PST Desperate migrant workers packed Beijing's education bureau this month, demanding that their children be allowed to take the national college entrance exam (gaokao) together with their urban peers. Carol Huang at AFP News reports: Around a third of the capital's 20 million population are migrants, but many of their families become split by rules requiring their children to go to their "home" provinces — even if they have never lived there — sometimes for years, to study for and take the test, which varies by location. [...] "Either you let the country share in your education resources or you accept the reality that outsiders are stuck in your education gutter," said Du Guowang, a 12-year Beijing resident from Inner Mongolia. [...] But bigger cities are less willing to share residency or benefits, fearing doing so would burden their already strained resources and spur a new influx. [...] Despite years of lobbying national and city education officials, the migrant parents in Beijing have received noncommittal answers — along with occasional warnings. Their website, where they posted their demands, stopped working recently.
Meanwhile, Chongqing has allowed migrant children to take gaokao in the city. Xinhua News Agency reports: Chongqing is the latest metropolis to ease the household restriction on migrants attending gaokao, following Heilongjiang, Anhui, Jiangsu, Shandong and other provinces. Outside the pilot regions, the exam restriction is still in place, although children of migrant workers can take the nine-year compulsory education (from elementary to high schools) without household restrictions. [...] Wang Boqing, president of MyCOS, a Beijing-based higher education consulting and outcome evaluation company, said that the move would definitely boost equity of schooling but was more than that. "It's really about the rights of people. Migrant workers pay taxes and contribute to government revenues. So universities in cities where they work should be open to them, because these schools all receive funding from governments," he said.
See also China to "Speed Up" Hukou System Reform, via CDT.
© Mengyu Dong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: college entrance exam, education, gaokao, hukou, migrant workers, public opinion, social inequality, urban rural divide
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| Corrupt Officials Draw Unusual Publicity Posted: 26 Dec 2012 06:11 PM PST In the wake of several recent corruption and sex scandals, a new round of the anti-corruption game has been launched. From Andrew Jacobs at The New York Times: "The anticorruption storm has begun," People's Daily, the party mouthpiece, wrote on its Web site this month. The flurry of revelations suggests that members of China's new leadership may be more serious than their predecessors about trying to tame the cronyism, bribery and debauchery that afflict state-run companies and local governments, right down to the outwardly dowdy neighborhood committees that oversee sanitation. Efforts began just days after Xi Jinping, the newly appointed Communist Party chief and China's incoming president, warned that failing to curb corruption could put the party's grip on power at risk. "Something has shifted," said Zhu Ruifeng, a Beijing journalist who has exposed more than a hundred cases of alleged corruption on his Web site, including the lurid exertions of Mr. Lei [Zhengfu]. "In the past, it might take 10 days for an official involved in a sex scandal to lose his job. This time he was gone in 66 hours."
The "astonishingly ranine" Lei took a starring role in Evan Osnos' survey of the recent string of sex scandals at The New Yorker (via CDT).
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Post tags: anti-corruption, corruption, high-level corruption, lei zhengfu, local corruption, sex scandal, sex scandals, Xi Jinping
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| Sony: China Business “More or Less” Back to Normal Posted: 26 Dec 2012 05:55 PM PST The head of Sony's China operations claimed on Tuesday that business has "more or less" returned to normal for Japanese companies hit by this year's Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands dispute. From Reuters: The spat plunged relations between Japan and China into a deep freeze and hit sales of Japanese goods in China. Kurita said, however, that Sony's China business would recover strongly in the coming three business years after a dip in the current one. "My general impression is business conditions have more or less returned to the pre-crisis environment," he told a media briefing at a Sony store in eastern Beijing. He saw sales in China falling 10 percent in the business year to next March from the previous year, but rebounding in the year to March 2013 and growing strongly in the two subsequent years. Kurita declined to comment on what impact the election of the hawkish Shinzo Abe as Japan's new prime minister could have on Japan-China relations. See also 'China Irked by "Hawkish" Abe', at CDT.
© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: anti-Japan demonstrations 2012, anti-Japan protests, business, diaoyu islands, Japan relations, senkaku islands, Shinzo Abe
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| Photo: Tuanjie Lu, by Mark Hobbs Posted: 26 Dec 2012 05:13 PM PST |
| Word of the Week: Five Times Better Posted: 26 Dec 2012 12:00 PM PST Editor's Note: The Word of the Week comes from China Digital Space's Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon, a glossary of terms created by Chinese netizens and frequently encountered in online political discussions. These are the words of China's online "resistance discourse," used to mock and subvert the official language around censorship and political correctness.  "China's human rights are the best." If you are interested in participating in this project by submitting and/or translating terms, please contact the CDT editors at CDT [at] chinadigitaltimes [dot] net. 好五倍 (hǎo wǔ bèi): a good five times better than This comes from a statement made by Sha Zukang when he was the Chinese ambassador to the United Nations: I have openly remarked that the human rights situation in China today is better than that in the United States. The population of China is five times larger than the population of the United States. If you look at it just in terms of comparing the populations, one would expect China's problems to be at least five times greater than those of the U.S. in order for our human rights situations to be the same. But the reality is that our human rights situation is better than that of the U.S.—this shows that China's human rights situation is a good five times better than that of the U.S.… America has highly politicized the concept of human rights to serve the nation's political aims. They have used human rights issues as a tool; this way of doing things goes against the will of the people. 沙祖康说，"我公开讲过，中国今天的人权状况就比美国的人权状况要好，中国人口比美国多五倍，如果按照人口比例来讲，我们问题至少应该比美国多五倍，那才说明我们人权状况和美国一样。但现实是，我们目前人权状况比美国的好，说明中国人权至少比美国好五倍。我在大会上讲这话引起会场上哄堂大笑，大家都鼓掌，也可以看出美国不得人心，他们把人权问题高度政治化，为本国政治服务，把人权问题作为工具，做法很不得人心。"
Netizens latched onto the phrase "a good five times better than" and used it to parody Sha's fuzzy logic.
© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: good five times better than, grass-mud horse lexicon, Sha Zukang, word of the week
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