| Online Account of Affair Leads to Dismissal of Official Posted: 21 Jan 2013 10:23 PM PST The latest casualty of a shifting tide against official power and privilege is Yi Junqing, director of the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau, who recently lost his job over "lifestyle issues." These issues came to light after a female researcher in his department published a 100,000 character account of their year-long affair. From the New York Times: In a season when dozens of ethically challenged Chinese officials have been felled by their lust for women, money and luxury watches, the downfall of Mr. Yi prompted a hearty round of snickering and schadenfreude, and not just because his vice minister's rank made him one of the more senior party members to lose his job over malfeasance. "People have come to treat such news as entertainment, but that's only because we feel so helpless," said Zhu Ruifeng, a muckraking journalist. [...] More than a theoretician, Mr. Yi was a vocal critic of vulgarity in popular culture and an advocate for enhancing China's soft power by selling the notion of Chinese virtue to the world. Speaking to the state news media in 2011, he said the nation should be "selecting moral models and setting positive examples" that portray China's image in a positive light, "so the world would see the true glamour and strength of modern China." While it was the party leadership that ultimately tossed Mr. Yi overboard, it was the Internet that sealed his fate. Over the past two months, a parade of corrupt officials have been exposed by enterprising journalists, anonymous tipsters or, in Mr. Yi's case, jilted lovers.
Ministry of Tofu has more details on the affair and the online account: Last December, a woman posted a 120,000-word diary that documented in excruciating detail her 17 sexual encounters with Yi Junqing, including dates and the names of hotels. A dozen others working at the Compilation and Translation Bureau were mentioned in the diary. The article immediately grabbed eyes of curious net users, and had circulated on almost every popular web portals, message boards and social media. "A bottle of sake, we each emptied half. My face flushed terribly, but my mind was sober. I leaned on the side of the bed, as he walked to the bathroom. Having the last 'lesson,' this time, I undressed until only two little undergarments were on me. When he came back to the bedroom, I was already lying under the duvet, blushing. Naturally, two became one," she wrote. In a nutshell, the author, Chang Yan, a postdoctorate researcher at the bureau, claimed that she wanted to relocate to Beijing and secure a hukou, or a permanent residence permit, in Beijing. Only after slipping over 50,000 yuan into Yi's pocket did she get a chance to sleep with him. When Chang, already emotionally attracted to Yi, found Yi had other mistresses and would never keep his promise of a hukou, she demanded Yi of a million yuan as hush money. Though Yi gave her the money, Chang aired the dirty laundry anyway after they fell out. A few days later, as the internet was buzzing about the kiss-and-tell story, Ms. Chang took down the article and issued a written apology on the web, stating that the diary is "a mere fictional work" she wrote "under severe depression due to huge stress from scientific research."
Feichang Dao blog reports that a Zhejiang Daily editorial on the case, entitled "Mouth Full of Marxism, Belly Full of Deceit," was deleted from the website.
© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: corruption, mistresses, online public opinion
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| Gamers Fight Corrupt Officials, Learn from Lei Feng Posted: 21 Jan 2013 08:56 PM PST Chinese authorities' attitude toward video games has been mixed, with large industry subsidies on one hand and wariness of moral corrosion on the other. At the same time, The Telegraph's Malcolm Moore reports, the Party has also sought to harness games as propaganda tools, allowing players to learn from Lei Feng, battle corrupt officials, or liberate the Diaoyu Islands. Liu Yang, a Shanghai-based game developer said the games with the most propaganda embedded in them had been the least successful. "The problem is that the propaganda related themes are not intrinsically popular with players and tends to push them away. "The public today have their own judgment and criteria, and most of them do not like this sort of propaganda stuff," he said. Meanwhile, Prof Nie found that the Chinese players in Resistance War Online often spent more time squabbling with each other than fighting the Japanese. "The players are easily distracted from the patriotic nature of the game and have, instead, turned the games into feuds among the Chinese resistance forces. Ironically, the internal feuds are actually closer to the historical reality than the notion of a perfectly united resistance against the Japanese". Propaganda gaming is not a Chinese invention. Since 2002, the U.S. has produced America's Army, a hugely successful game-slash-recruitment tool which has also spawned a series of comic books. The game has come under fire from critics including veterans' organizations who accuse it of exploiting impressionable teenagers.
© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: corrupt officials, diaoyu islands, Japanese, Lei Feng, online games, propaganda, U.S military, video games
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| Bo’s Lawyers From Party-Friendly Firm Posted: 21 Jan 2013 06:53 PM PST The Associated Press reported on Tuesday that the lawyers defending disgraced former Chongqing Communist Party chief Bo Xilai, who faces criminal charges, hail from a firm that has close ties to the Party. From the South China Morning Post: Lawyer Li Guifang said he and colleague Wang Zhaofeng of the DeHeng Law Offices will represent Bo. "The case is still being investigated … an indictment has not yet been issued," Li said. He declined to answer further questions. … DeHeng is well-known in the Chinese legal community as one of the country's largest firms, with branches in major mainland cities and overseas. On its website, the firm says it has had good relations with large state enterprises and government departments, providing legal services in projects such as the Three Gorges Dam and acting as advisers to the finance and health ministries. The firm also enjoys favourable standing with the party leadership: the newly appointed party leader, Xi Jinping , visited the firm's office in Beijing in 2010 and praised its efforts in promoting party ideology within its ranks, according to a report by the official Xinhua News Agency at the time.
The Telegraph's Tom Phillips noted last week that one of the lawyers, Li Guifang, spent time studying in the UK in 1989: Colleagues describe Mr Bo's lawyer as one of China's best. Li Guifang is the deputy director of the Criminal Law Committee of the Chinese Bar Association and an expert in "economic crimes", according to his official profile.
Read more about Bo Xilai via CDT.
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Post tags: Bo Xilai, communist party, DeHeng Law Offices, high-level corruption, Li Guifang, United Kingdom, Wang Zhaofeng
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| Has Chongqing’s Great Divide Widened Since Bo? Posted: 21 Jan 2013 05:13 PM PST The Globe and Mail's Mark MacKinnon checks in from Chongqing, where he sees evidence of China's large and growing wealth gap: Chongqing, a vibrant Yangtze River metropolis, has found itself at the centre of the income equality debate in recent years. Until his sudden fall last year, Bo Xilai, the city's former boss and the one-time rising star of the Communist Party, called for a return to Mao Zedong-era socialist values and better distribution of the country's growing wealth. However, he was ousted following revelations of his wife's involvement in the murder of a British businessman. Mr. Bo himself is expected to soon face trial on charges of corruption and abuse of power. But Mr. Bo is remembered well by porters like Ms. Yang, who say life for Chongqing's poor was better under his rule. Yang Xingcheng, one of Chongqing's legendary "bang-bang" porters who carry goods up and down the city's hills on a bamboo pole slung over their shoulders, didn't want to talk politics, but also said business today is "not as good as last year or a few years ago."
See also photos from The Globe and Mail's John Lehmann, who also joined MacKinnon on a journey to retrace the path of Mao Zedong's Long March and explore the challenges facing today's China. China made its Gini coefficient – which measures income inequality – public last week for the first time since 2000.
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Post tags: Bo Xilai, Chongqing, gini coefficient, income inequality, wealth gap
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| An Overture From China Is Yet to Win Hollywood Posted: 21 Jan 2013 04:38 PM PST Chinese conglomerate Dalian Wanda Group is planning to expand its entertainment business into the United States, but boss Wang Jianlin's ambitions of a share in mainstream Hollywood productions are not developing smoothly. From Michael Cieply at the New York Times: Wanda has been talking with some studios, as Mr. Wang promised when Wanda completed its $2.6 billion acquisition of AMC Entertainment with a flashy presentation in early September. But any progress has come in halting steps, according to people briefed on the talks, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid conflict with the principals. And that probably carries an overall message about the film industry's current rush to do business in China: The promise is great, but much is still being lost in translation. "Hollywood would prefer to accept what they commonly call 'dumb money' and not give very much back in return," said Stanley Rosen, a University of Southern California political science professor who has written extensively about China. "China is now pushing back." Both sides are likely to continue pressing their efforts; Hollywood is eager to have a partner that can help it tap into China's fast-growing film market, and Wanda wants to strengthen its foothold in the lucrative North American market. But the slow going underscores the disconnect inherent in negotiations between parties whose goals reflect their own, more narrow interests.
See more on Wanda's acquisition of AMC and Cieply's recent account, with Brooks Barnes, of the political strings attached to co-productions in China, via CDT.
© Mengyu Dong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: AMC Entertainment, dalian wanda, entertainment industry, film industry, hollywood, movie industry, soft power
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| Contemporary Chinese Art: Young and Restless Posted: 21 Jan 2013 04:16 PM PST At The Economist's Analects blog, Alec Ash discusses ON / OFF: China's Young Artists in Concept and Practice. The exhibition at Beijing's Ullens Center includes the Foxconn-focused Consumption by Li Liao, who was interviewed last week by Evan Osnos, and a leather tank, lying crumpled and deflated like a discarded snake skin, by He Xiangyu. Where the old guard of Chinese contemporary art lived through the Cultural Revolution, the experiences of this new generation are more rooted in the everyday competition of urban life, and the rapid changes that China has gone through as they grew up. For one installation, the 30-year-old artist Li Liao laboured at a Foxconn factory for 45 days. With his wages he bought the very iPad Mini model he had been assembling. He displays it—alongside his work overalls, identity badges and contract—as "Consumption". (The New Yorker's Evan Osnos has posted an interview with Mr Li.) But they are not entirely divorced from the past. In another work, Zhao Zhao, a 30-year-old former assistant of Ai Weiwei, cut cubes out of stone Buddha statues that had been destroyed by Red Guards, "to return them to their original state…in a repetition of history". And that tank fashioned from leather cannot help but hold a particular charge in a post-1989 Chinese setting, even if the artist who conceived it, He Xiangyu, was only three years old when those tanks rolled into central Beijing. Bao Dong, himself 33 and one of the exhibit's two curators, said that "since 2000…China's artists no longer only face an autocratic system but one of soft power. The market and capitalism [is] a soft, invisible cage." It takes just as much courage to be original and daring in these conditions, he thinks, and such is the challenge for young artists who have "grown up in a society and culture beset by binaries, constantly toggling between extremes". Photographs and more information on the exhibition are available at the Ullens Center's website.
© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: art, art exhibition, artists, Cultural Revolution, Evan Osnos, Foxconn, IPad, June 4th, Red Guards, Tiananmen Square
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| Photo: Flying Dogs, by Svend Erik Hansen Posted: 21 Jan 2013 02:57 PM PST |
| Hexie Farm (蟹农场): The Spell of Xixiphus Posted: 21 Jan 2013 02:51 PM PST For his latest contribution to the Hexie Farm CDT series, cartoonist Crazy Crab depicts Xi Jinping as the belabored Sisyphus from Greek legend, who was punished for his hubris by repeatedly trying in vain to push a boulder up a mountain, only to have it roll back down to the bottom each time. In Hexie Farm's rendering, "Xixiphus" is pushing the promises of reform up to the summit, the "rejuvenation of the nation," but they have yet to be realized. The Spell of Xixiphus, by Crazy Crab of Hexie Farm for CDT: 
Read more about Hexie Farm's CDT series, including a Q&A with the anonymous cartoonist, and see all cartoons so far in the series.
[CDT owns the copyright for all cartoons in the Hexie Farm CDT series. Please do not reproduce without receiving prior permission from CDT.]
© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: hexie farm, political reform, rejuvenation, Xi Jinping
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| Exiled Poet Liao Yiwu’s Prison Memoir Released in France Posted: 21 Jan 2013 02:45 PM PST Liao Yiwu spent the early 1990s in prison for writing the poem Massacre, about the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. His account of these four years will be published in English this summer as For a Song and a Hundred Songs: A Poet's Journey through a Chinese Prison, and was released in French this month under the title Dans l'empire des ténèbres (In the Empire of Darkness). From the AFP: The book was a long time in the making and has come at huge personal cost. Faced with the threat of more prison if he had it published abroad, he decided to flee China in 2011, leaving his mother and others behind. "They were watching my emails and they knew I was in touch with editors in Germany and Taiwan," he said at the launch of For a Song and a Hundred Songs in Paris. "They said I couldn't publish the book, and if I did, they would put me in prison again, this time for at least 10 years … The German and Taiwan editors got worried about my safety and they pushed back the publication date. "All in all, they pushed it back three times. The third time, I decided to escape." Liao discussed the book's origins with Mariana Grépinet (article in French) at Paris Match: This book almost never saw the light of day. Why is that? I started writing it upon leaving prison. I'd formed the habit of scribbling poems in very small writing, because they only gave us pencil and paper for a couple of hours each month. The first time, it took a little over a year. I had over 300,000 characters! On April 4th, 1995, the police came and confiscated my manuscript. At that point, I wasn't using a computer, I wrote it all by hand. So I had a choice: I could forget about it, or rewrite the whole thing. I spent two years rewriting it. That was a formidable memory exercise! And paradoxically, it helped a lot with the literary structure as well as my reports on the dregs of Chinese society: I was able to record everything down to the slightest details …. Then the police came back. I'd written even smaller so I could hide the pages more easily, but they stole it again anyway. The third time, I had a computer, a big one, and took the precaution of making extra copies. Of course, each version was different. Only the police could say which was best: they are my most loyal readers! […] You seem bitter …. In China, the air, the blood, the milk, and even the values are polluted. If the west continues to import from China, it too will end up as one vast dustbin. Fragments of Liao's time in prison can be seen in Nineteen Days, his recollections of June 4ths from 1989 to 2009, translated by Wenguang Huang and published in The Paris Review: June 4, 1993 I was transferred from the No. 2 Sichuan Provincial Prison in the suburbs of Chongqing. I will serve out the rest of my sentence at the No. 3 Prison in Dazu County, in northern Sichuan Province. Tonight, a dozen convicted counterrevolutionaries gathered spontaneously in the courtyard, squatting down and silently watching the sky like those fabled frogs stuck at the bottom of a deep well. I was holding a flute in my hand. The crowd surrounded me, asking me to play a tune. I was still an amateur, though, and hadn't yet mastered the instrument. I became really nervous in front of the crowd and played out a string of dissonant notes. Li Bifeng, an inmate, patted me on my shoulder and said: "Old Liao, I'm glad that you will be released soon." Another inmate, Pu Yong, who died soon after his release, interrupted us: "We will all be released soon. I bet you that on the fifth anniversary, the verdict will be overturned and all of us, no matter what type of sentences we are serving, will be released." In November, Li was sentenced to 12 years in prison for charges related to a property deal. According to Liao, the case was actually motivated by officials' misplaced suspicions that Li had financed his escape to Germany. See also Philip Gourevitch on Liao's move to Germany at The New Yorker, and an interview with Ian Johnson at The New York Review of Books soon afterwards, via CDT.
© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: exiles, France, Germany, June 4th, Liao Yiwu, prison, prisoners, Taiwan, Tiananmen Square, writers, writers and literature
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| China Critical of Clinton’s Diaoyu Remarks Posted: 21 Jan 2013 02:50 AM PST U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton stood with Japan's Foreign Minister on Friday and said that America opposed "any unilateral actions that would seek to undermine Japanese administration" of the Diaoyu Islands, comments that drew sharp criticism from China on Sunday. From Bloomberg: Clinton's comments last week "are ignorant of facts," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said yesterday in comments posted on the ministry's website. The U.S. can't be "held hostage" by Japan in the conflict, a commentary in China's People's Daily newspaper today said. Three Chinese marine surveillance ships entered Japanese-administered waters today, the Coast Guard said in a statement. … China expresses "firm discontent," Qin said. "We urge the U.S. side to adopt a responsible attitude in regard to the issue of the Diaoyu islands." While Japan won't make any concessions on the issue, it will "respond calmly" so as not to provoke China, Kishida told reporters after meeting Clinton. In an unsigned commentary today, the Xinhua News Agency said it was "exceedingly wrong" for Clinton to make the comments about Japan's administration of the islands.
Jane Perlez of The New York Times reported that the Chinese military also took a hawkish tone with indirect warnings in its media mouthpieces: The reports did not refer directly to Japan, but more broadly echoed a recent declaration by the new Communist Party leader, Xi Jinping, that the Chinese military could not rest on its laurels after a long period of peace. The People's Liberation Army Daily, a military newspaper, said Sunday in a front-page article that a "long period without battle has encouraged the fixed habits of peace in some of the military so that their preparedness for battle is dulled." The newspaper said that some troops had recently conducted exercises in the Beijing military region.
Read more about the Diaoyu Islands dispute via CDT.
© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: diaoyu islands, Hillary Clinton, maritime security, People's Liberation Army, Sino-Japanese relations, Sino-U.S. Relations, territorial disputes, XInhua News
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