Sri Lanka meltdown exposes China loan policy: 5 things to know - Nikkei Asia - "Numbers crunched by Verite Research, a Colombo-based think tank, show that the interest rates on Chinese loans averaged 3.3%, versus 0.7% for Japan's. And the maturity period averaged 18 years for Chinese debt, shorter than India's 24 years and Japan's 34 years. None of this hindered the Rajapaksas' appetite for Chinese credit, opening the door for the Asian powerhouse to fund over a third of 313 debt-funded projects in post-conflict Sri Lanka... China's position threatens to scupper plans by Sri Lanka's central bank to treat all creditors equally about an inevitable haircut during its debt restructuring negotiations at the IMF. Beijing's detractors in the West and in India have scrutinized the Chinese lending that has underwritten Sri Lanka's post-conflict growth. The China-funded Hambantota Port in the south has been painted as the poster child of Beijing's "debt-trap diplomacy." Now, in capitals across small Southeast and South Asian nations where Chinese loans have also poured in, officials are following how China handles Sri Lanka's economic woes. Beijing's debt map spans Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar to the Maldives and Nepal. As one senior Southeast Asian government official put it, "All eyes will be on the Chinese haircut or if Beijing will balk and worsen the situation for Sri Lanka.""
Victor Gevers on Twitter - "Megvii is building its own "Skynet". This is an excerpt is from Vice on HBO's documentary, “How China Tracks Everyone”. They mention how they match the data with a "criminal database." These tech companies get free access to Chinese police systems."
Meme - "Comforting to know that China has amassed the largest navy in the world while we focus on race, gender and which cartoon character could offend. Sleep well."
China Unscripted: #172 China Is Tracking You Through Your Phone - "Chinese apps don't have to steal your data from you, you give them permission to steal your data when you download them. And even after you delete Chinese apps from your phone, Beijing can still track you. Watch this episode of China Unscripted for more on how China is tracking you through your phone, other reasons Chinese apps are so dangerous, and what China could be doing with your data. Joining us in this episode is Dr. Jaswinder Singh Sekhon, a cybersecurity expert and assistant professor at GTB National College Dakha."
He claims that by getting your IMSI number (via the deleted app) they can surveil you after you delete it - but doesn't say how. If you're worried, just change your SIM card regularly
David Chou, suspect in deadly California church shooting, charged with murder - The Washington Post - "A 68-year-old Nevada man accused of killing one person and wounding five others in a Taiwanese congregation in Orange County, Calif., was allegedly motivated by anti-Taiwan sentiment in what law enforcement is calling a politically motivated hate crime... Officials have offered differing accounts on Chou’s background. A representative from the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Los Angeles told The Washington Post that Chou was born in Taiwan in 1953. During a Monday news conference, Orange County Sheriff Don Barnes originally described Chou as a Chinese-born U.S. citizen who has lived in the United States for “many years” and who was “upset by political tensions between China and Taiwan.” However, late Tuesday, the Orange County Sheriff’s Office clarified that Chou had told them he was born and raised in Taiwan. Barnes said notes written in Mandarin were found in Chou’s vehicle that supported “his hatred [of the] Taiwanese people” and his beliefs that Taiwan should not be an independent country. Barnes said he believed that hate manifested when Chou was living as a youth in Taiwan, where he was “not well-received.” China claims Taiwan, a self-governing democracy, as its own and has asserted it could one day use force to take control of Taiwan."
California church shooting: Gunman targeted us as Taiwanese Americans - "When I was younger, I didn’t understand all the complexity behind my grandparents' adamance that we retain our Taiwanese identity. I just knew I was proud to be Taiwanese because they were proud to be Taiwanese. They would tell us, “Never say you are Chinese. We are Taiwanese." "Goan shi Taiwan lang.”"
China reckons with its first overseas debt crisis | Financial Times - "The 350m Lotus Tower that looms over the skyline in Sri Lanka’s capital Colombo is one of the tallest buildings in South Asia. Funded by a Chinese state bank and designed to look like a giant lotus bud about to burst into flower, it was intended to be a metaphor for the flourishing of Sri Lanka’s economy and the “brilliant future” of the bilateral co-operation between Beijing and Colombo. Instead, the tower has become a symbol of the mounting problems facing China’s overseas lending scheme, the “Belt and Road Initiative”. The construction suffered from lengthy delays and an allegation of corruption levelled by Sri Lanka’s then-president Maithripala Sirisena against one of the Chinese contractors. Now, three years after its official launch, the tower’s amenities including a shopping mall, a conference centre and several restaurants stand either unfinished or largely unused while outside on the streets outrage over Sri Lanka’s financial mismanagement has boiled over into popular protests... a large number of projects, such as the tower, have failed to yield a commercial return while the huge loans it takes to build such infrastructure can exacerbate financial pressures on vulnerable governments. Those pressures have converged in Sri Lanka, which defaulted on its sovereign debt in May, the first Asia-Pacific country to do so for more than two decades. Such cases are becoming much more common. A Financial Times examination of the financial health of the Belt and Road Initiative — once hailed by Chinese leader Xi Jinping as the “project of the century” — has uncovered a mountain of non-performing loans... Critics argue that the Belt and Road credit was extended at high interest rates for infrastructure projects — like the Lotus Tower, and a port and an airport in the southern city of Hambantota — that have often failed to generate returns. The money from the binge in foreign borrowing was misspent on “ports, airports, cricket stadiums, all sorts of stupid-looking towers . . . all bullshit,” says Harsha de Silva, a member of parliament from Sri Lanka’s opposition Samagi Jana Balawegaya party... Another big recipient of Chinese loans is Zambia, which defaulted in 2020 on its external debt. China is Lusaka’s biggest bilateral lender with about $6bn out of the country’s $17bn of external debt. Zambia had been presented as a star of the Belt and Road Initiative on the African continent. As recently as 2019 — just months before the country’s default — the Chinese embassy in Lusaka was extolling the virtues of the scheme in a public statement... Such financial problems are prompting a quiet but fundamental rethink in Beijing as economic risks around the world rise, says a senior government adviser in Beijing, who declined further identification. “A lot of investment in Belt and Road countries didn’t make commercial sense and was in effect a form of capital flight,” the adviser says. “What’s more, the economic prospects in many BRI countries, led by African ones, has worsened dramatically in recent years. That makes it more imperative for us to think twice before going on another lending spree.”... Chen Zhiwu, professor of finance at the University of Hong Kong, also sees a clear downsizing under way. “Especially given the changed geopolitical landscape after [Russia’s] invasion of Ukraine, China is significantly downsizing the BRI,” he says. “I have not seen the BRI being mentioned so much at all in mainstream Chinese media. It is not the same BRI as a year or two ago.”"
China shills claim that because Chinese debt is only 10% (?) of Sri Lanka's debt portfolio, it's racist to pinpoint it as a problem. But this assumes that all debt is created equal: on the same terms, subject to the same amount of oversight and spent on equally sustainable projects
Damn CIA, forcing Zambia to default! We all know the Chinese would never lie!
Meme - "You never actually own a Chinese stock. You merely look after it for the Politburo."
China Property Crisis Is Spiraling With Homebuyers’ Boycott - Bloomberg - "Mounting signs of stress this week in an industry that accounts for about a quarter of the world’s second-largest economy have roiled China’s credit markets, dragged down the nation’s bank stocks and pummeled commodities from iron ore to copper. After a burst of optimism earlier this year that looser regulatory curbs might stem the industry’s debt crisis, investors are getting spooked by rolling Covid lockdowns and a rapidly escalating homebuyer boycott of mortgage payments on stalled projects. The bigger worry is that a widespread loss of confidence in real estate will put major strain on China’s economy and financial system, which is sitting on 46 trillion yuan ($6.8 trillion) of outstanding mortgages and still has 13 trillion yuan of loans to the country’s beleaguered developers... What started as trouble with China Evergrande Group is now snowballing into a crisis that risks engulfing the majority of the country’s developers, its biggest lenders and a middle class that has significant wealth tied to the property market. China’s home prices have tumbled 10 months straight... Housing in China has gone from being a sure bet over the past two decades to a growing risk."
University of Minnesota student is jailed in China after tweeting pictures of a cartoon villain - "Luo Daiging, 20, was sentenced to six months behind bars for comparing the general secretary of China's Communist Party of China to a cartoon villain and Winnie the Pooh... He is accused of tweeting pictures of a cartoon villain from the TV show Biker Mice from Mars. Lawrence Limburger supposedly resembles President Jinping... Luo's arrest comes just one month after Chinese government officials allegedly ordered library workers to burn 'illegal books and religious publications' in a library. In April, a church was fined $1,400 after South Korean versions of the bible were found which hadn't been approved by the state. And a new internet game, created by the state, called Everyone Hit the Traitors involves hitting Hong Kong pro-democracy supporters with baseball bats. In December when Arsenal player Mesut Ozil showed support for Uyghur Muslims, the club's game against Manchester City wasn't televised in China and and his character was removed from video games such as Fifa."
China economy's 3 big problems risk Xi Jinping's third-term plans | Fortune - " thousands of people in central Henan province have protested at banks that have refused to give them back their deposits; tens of thousands of homebuyers across the country have boycotted the mortgage payments they owe on stalled housing projects; and people across the country have fled from COVID lockdowns. Combined, the social unrest amounts to the largest collective mobilization of disaffected Chinese citizens in years; individually, they each stem from one of Xi’s signature policies, blotting the president’s track record as he vies for another five years in power. “People in China are clearly unhappy with the state of the economy,” says Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute at the University of London. “And many see the problems as driven by [the government’s] misguided policies.” Last week, Xi stuck to his guns by not making any major changes at a Politburo meeting of China’s top leaders to set economic policy for the rest of the year. Xi’s decision to maintain his current economic policies is a risky bet, experts say. Until now, Xi has staked his legitimacy on delivering a GDP that grows year after year. Standing by policies that are hurting China’s economy and igniting social dissent may not deny him a third term, but they could dilute his mandate and make it harder for him to carry out his vision. For decades, Chinese citizens have snapped up homes as a means of investment... Evergrande, a property giant that built up a $300 billion debt load, became the prime example of Xi’s attempts to curtail the sector’s excesses. Last year, Evergrande struggled to meet the Xi administration’s new ‘three red lines’ rules that forced developers to limit their debt. The firm plunged into free fall while struggling to meet its debt obligations. Evergrande’s crisis contaminated other indebted developers, and China’s housing market suffered. The prices for new homes in China have fallen for 10 straight months, and analysts expect prices to keep dropping in coming months... “It’s not actually that Chinese citizens are becoming bolder,” says Alfred Wu, a Chinese politics professor at the National University of Singapore. “Housing is just a life-or-death issue for Chinese families…they spend so much money on it.” At least one Chinese city is establishing a bailout fund to quell the concerns of boycotters and ensure that property developers finish their projects. But experts say such measures may only provide a temporary reprieve... Due to the Omicron subvariant BA.5, cases are once again on the rise in China. But people are also finding new ways to resist the government’s policies. In recent days, people in places like Shenzhen have climbed fences and run away on foot to escape mandatory quarantines. “There is clearly this growing unhappiness with the COVID zero policy,” says Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations. “We’ve seen this simmering social discontent. But so far, it’s mainly confined to cities like Shanghai that were directly impacted by the policy and has not resulted in mass incidents or widespread violence against the government.” Still, there’s a risk that China’s COVID-zero policy could backfire in coming months, Huang says, especially since the BA.5 subvariant is so transmissible it escapes traditional containment measures. “There’s a chance that BA.5 may lead to nationwide outbreaks that would render the COVID-zero strategy useless,” says Huang. “The social economic cost may increase to a level that it’s not acceptable anymore to even Xi himself.”"
Hebe Tien Accused Of Supporting Nancy Pelosi’s Visit To Taiwan After Posting Pictures Of Herself Eating Pasta - "the 39-year-old posted two pictures of her eating spaghetti, which is also known as ‘Italian noodles’ in Chinese, on her IG Story... Chinese netizens took Hebe’s post as a sign that she’s in favour of Nancy’s visit to Taiwan 'cos Nancy is of Italian descent. They then went on to declare that this means Hebe "supports Taiwan's independence from China". Incensed, these netizens then took to leaving heated comments on Hebe’s social media, demanding that the singer-actress explain herself."
How come they don't believe the myth that pasta was from the Chinese?
Celebs called out for not showing support for 'One China' - "Many Chinese celebrities, including those from Hong Kong and Taiwan, have shared CCTV’s post to show their support. Some of these celebs are Charmaine Sheh, Angela Chang, Rainie Yang, Joe Chen and Amber Kuo. A Chinese netizen later posted on Weibo, filtering and naming the celebrities who have yet to share the “One China” post. The list, which has since been deleted, had sorted them based on their nationalities, such as Singaporean, Malaysian, American, Canadian and Taiwanese... Several of these lists even name celebrities who are not even ethnically Chinese like BoA, G-Dragon, Blackpink members, Adele, Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, and Rihanna... the original list creator rebutted that it is the duty of these celebrities to share the post if they’ve come to China to earn money. “If they don’t share (the post), it’s obvious what kind of attitude they hold (towards China)”... In China, it is a common practice for Chinese celebrities to re-post on Weibo as a form of showing their love and respect for the country. When there are key events or significant dates, such patriotic posts tend to circulate around Weibo. The “One China” post has now been shared more than 9.9 million times."
Is dual loyalty still racist if it's the same race promoting it?
China spokeswoman's Taiwan restaurant tweet sparks ridicule online - "A senior Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman has prompted a storm of ridicule online, after a late-night tweet where she used restaurant listings to assert Beijing's claim over Taiwan. "Baidu Maps show that there are 38 Shandong dumpling restaurants and 67 Shanxi noodle restaurants in Taipei," spokeswoman Hua Chunying posted on the social media site late on Sunday (Aug 7). "Palates don't cheat. #Taiwan has always been a part of China. The long lost child will eventually return home," she added... "There are over 100 ramen restaurants in Taipei, so Taiwan is definitely a part of Japan," a Twitter user with the handle "Marco Chu" wrote in Hua's replies. "Google Maps show that there are 17 McDonalds, 18 KFCs, 19 Burger Kings, and 19 Starbucks in Beijing. Palates don't cheat. #China has always been a part of America. The long lost child will eventually return home," Twitter user "@plasticreceiver" wrote in a parody of Hua's tweet. Others wondered jokingly if Hua's logic meant Beijing could place claims on territories far beyond the Asia Pacific region. "There are 29 dumpling houses in the Greater Los Angeles area not to mention 89 noodle restaurants," a person tweeting under the name "Terry Adams" wrote."
Has Xi Jinping overplayed his hand? - The Spectator World - "the party has often neglected to point out that the abject state from which the nation has had to ‘rejuvenate’ was largely self-imposed by People’s Republic founder Mao Zedong. During the post-World War Two economic boom, Mao prioritized emulating other countries’ economic growth by commanding China’s agrarian economy into an industrialized one. Food production plunged as farmers left their fields and crops to work in steel production, resulting in a great famine that caused untold death. Some experts estimate the death toll to be as high as 45 million. To date there has been no moral reckoning of Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ by the CCP, which continues to primarily blame natural disasters for the famine in official party history. It wasn’t until the party gave up on its central planning and collectivist fantasies that the Chinese people were able to lift themselves out of the poverty for which the CCP was responsible in the first place. And then came the laughable claim in Xi’s speech that China does not ‘carry aggressive or hegemonic traits in its genes’ and has never ‘bullied, oppressed, or subjugated the people of any other country’. Vietnam’s history is littered with bouts of Chinese invasion, occupation and retaliation since ancient times, culminating in the Sino-Vietnamese War in 1979. Ask just about any local Vietnamese about war and they think China, not the US. The bad blood continues between the two countries at odds with Chinese expansionism and militarization of the South China Sea. Certainly the Tibetans, Uighurs, Mongolians, Taiwanese, Hong Kongers and those on the China-India border in Ladakh would also have something to say about Xi’s denial of ‘bullying’ and ‘oppression’. For Hong Kong, today also marks the grim one year anniversary of the implementation of the National Security Law. Since then, 117 people have been arrested under the law, popular newspaper Apple Daily was forced to close as its founder and senior executives were imprisoned, and for the first time ever, pro-democracy protests on July 1 were entirely smothered. Almost nothing has been left of the autonomy guaranteed to Hong Kong by the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ framework that was set to expire in 2047. Speaking forcefully to a 70,000-strong crowd in Tiananmen Square, Xi delivered a message for China’s rivals: anyone who attempts to bully China will ‘surely break their heads on the Great Wall built with the blood and flesh of 1.4 billion Chinese people’. These comments were later edited to soften its aggressive tone in the CCP’s own English-language translation of the speech... After 100 years, what does the CCP, with more than 91 million members, have to show for it? To its credit, the party has reinvented itself several times, including abandoning old Soviet models, embracing economic reforms and the ‘open-door policy’ that ushered in foreign investment and encouraged the development of the private sector. Still, its Marxist-Leninist foundation inculcated a totalitarian impulse that has never changed — and that today under Xi has only become more visible. Deng Xiaoping introduced market reforms and China ascended to the WTO in 2001 after the West had spent decades trying to get the CCP to play by the rules of the international world order. The opposite happened — the CCP eroded the world order from inside. China could have taken advantage of Western gullibility for longer, coasting for a few more decades as it played the long and quiet game, enriching itself at the expense of the West while keeping its ambitions for global domination shrouded in secrecy. But the party’s increasing insecurity about its grip on power led China to turn inward and ultimately, with the rise of Xi Jinping who purged corruption in the politburo to preserve loyalists and removed presidential term limits, it fell back to a personality cult not seen since Mao. Steadily in the last few years and particularly since the COVID-19 pandemic, China has turned the world against it by proving itself to be an irresponsible world actor. For starters, after mismanaging the pandemic in its early days and shutting down domestic travel while broadcasting how banning international travel was racist, China continued to hamper independent investigations into the origins of the virus. It retaliated strongly against countries like Australia who demanded a full inquiry by slapping huge tariffs on Australian imports and then absurdly claiming that the virus came from frozen Australian meat. Aggressive vaccine diplomacy involving the questionable efficacy of Sinovac, military excursions in the South China Sea and Taiwan Straits and belligerent wolf-diplomacy all signal China’s deep insecurities and fragility. Few nations have so thoroughly indoctrinated sentiments of historical grievances into the public consciousness than the Chinese about the decline and turmoil brought upon by the Opium Wars beginning in the 1840s, in what has been dubbed the ‘century of humiliation’ at the hands of the West. With a party too suspicious of foreign entities and influence, too flushed in ethnocentric and national pride, too proud to reverse course and too paranoid to reciprocate on the global scene, the CCP is only hastening the demise of its global reputation."
How Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping has fallen; details on China's brutal moves to retain power - "Numerous testimonies and revelations by CCP officials and members have exposed the double standards of the party--the stark difference between principles and actions. In one of the recent testimonies, Cai Xia, a life-long member of the CCP and a frontline cadre of the party revealed how her once unshakable faith in the party ideology was eventually converted into creeping doubts... under the leadership of Jinping, the CCP government has fallen further into the regime's old habits and appears to be determined to use brutality and ruthlessness to hold on to that power. A personality cult has developed around Xi Jinping and China under him has further transformed into a repressive regime that has been the author of countless tragedies over the years. Xia in her writings also highlights how when her faith in the party ideology was challenged. She began criticizing the party to her friends and colleagues, which ultimately brought her under the scrutiny of party officials until China, her home, no longer became safe for her. She further revealed that through the course of her academic career, through her lectures, and interaction with Colleagues and party officials, she realized that the ideology that was being promoted by CCP was just Propaganda meant to keep the party in power and it has entirely become a hollow ideology. In her testimony, she reveals that she had begun to feel and disgusted with the ‘superficial methods of the party's publicity apparatus and that the multitude of ideas that were promoted by the CCP was merely serving tools that were meant to deceive the Chinese people’. The Chinese Communist Party, since the time of Mao Zedong, has relied on three main pillars, or the three Ps, in order to maintain its iron grip on China. These are control of personnel, propaganda, and the People's Liberation Army... Chinese academia believes that Jinping ‘lacked basic knowledge’. Xi Jinping's reform plan delivered in 2013 also did not stir confidence as the plan purposefully avoided mentioning key issues on political reform... Chinese officials also made veiled threats against her daughter in China and her young son and that is when she realized that there was no going back to her country... Xia is not the only open critic of the CCP and Xi Jinping to be expelled from the party. Recently, the former chairman of a real estate company that was owned by China, Ren Zhigiang, was expelled from the CCP for publicly criticizing Jinping and his administration's poor handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Ren has been absent from public life after her article got published. As soon as Ren’s views came out in public, the CCP announced that Ren will be charged with corruption charges. He was well known for speaking up about excessive state censorship by the Chinese government and other sensitive issues. Cai Xia was born into a Communist military family and from a young age, she possessed an unshakable faith in the CCP and its ideology. But over the years, as her understanding and knowledge grew, she began to realize that the party and China desperately needed democratic reforms. She came to realise that CCP’s stubborn grip over power had stagnated the country and under the leadership of Xi Jinping, China has even intensified the pre-existing regression."
China’s Leader Attacks His Greatest Threat - The Atlantic - "Xi, now the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, has launched a broadside against private business in China. Along with tightening regulations governing firms—mandating that companies have Communist Party committees, which can have significant input in their direction, for example—he is also targeting entrepreneurs themselves, as a collective and as individuals. In September, he directly oversaw the imposition of an 18-year prison sentence, the longest for a political crime since the 1970s, on a real-estate executive who’d criticized him in a private email... he personally axed what would’ve been the world’s largest initial public offering, that of the financial firm Ant Group. Then, in November, a leading private businessman who ran an agricultural conglomerate, was arrested—ostensibly because of a dispute between his company and a state-owned farm, though a person close to him, who declined to be identified discussing the case, told me he was in jail because he’d spoken in favor of political reform. Finally, until a recent low-key appearance, Jack Ma, the founder of both Ant Group and the e-commerce giant Alibaba, hadn’t been seen in public for months after he criticized the party’s handling of financial reform... since Xi took the reins of power in China—first as party boss in 2012 and then as president in 2013—he has moved to reverse much of the country’s economic liberalization of recent decades. The number sequence 60/70/80/90 is used to delineate its contribution: As a rough rule of thumb, private firms churn out 60 percent of China’s GDP, generate 70 percent of its innovation, constitute 80 percent of urban employment, and create 90 percent of the country’s new jobs. Why is he messing with this golden goose? In a word, control. Despite his chatter to the Americans in 2007, Xi, like many others in the party, has long feared that the private sector could serve as a separate locus of power in China. The bourgeoisie contributed to the fall of Europe’s aristocratic class in the 18th and 19th centuries, and Xi worries that private business in China could play a similar role. He recently told entrepreneurs to model themselves on Zhang Jian, an early-20th-century businessman who made substantial amounts of money not by innovating, but by sucking up to China’s government. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the party wasn’t so paranoid about private business. On July 1, 2001, one of Xi’s predecessors, Jiang Zemin, made a historic speech that welcomed leading Chinese citizens, including entrepreneurs, into the party’s ranks. Even though Jiang wrapped his announcement in party-speak, the word salad didn’t mask the momentousness of the change. Communist China’s founder, Mao Zedong, had stolen private property from the country’s capitalist class and relegated its members to the bottom rung of society. Deng Xiaoping later returned some property and gave entrepreneurs a leg up by acknowledging that with economic reforms some people would “get rich first.” And here was Jiang inviting them to enter at least the margins of political power... The turn against entrepreneurs began under Xi’s predecessor, Hu. In the past, private businesses were small—a corner noodle shop or a guy with a local-delivery van. But by the early 2000s, they had begun competing with lumbering state-owned monopolies... Known by the nickname “Big Cannon,” Ren was famed for his bluntness. He’d spoken out against Xi’s views before, contradicting his missive in 2016 that China’s state-run media must be loyal to and serve the party. “Since when has the people’s government turned into the party’s government?” he asked soon after, in a post to his then–37 million Weibo followers. The party responded by placing Ren under investigation. Auditors pored over his accounts in an attempt to finger him for corruption, an old tactic, but found nothing to justify prosecution. Ren’s friends pleaded with him to stop commenting on politics. For a while, it worked: He got into woodworking and exhibited his art at a Beijing gallery in December 2019. The Global Times, a newspaper owned by the party’s Central Committee, even ran a short news item about the show. Then the coronavirus took hold in Wuhan, China. Parts of the government covered up the news. In February, Xi gave a speech in which he claimed that the party’s handling of the pandemic demonstrated its Communist system’s superiority. Soon after, Ren wrote in a short essay that, watching the speech, he “saw not an emperor standing there exhibiting his ‘new clothes,’ but a clown stripped naked who insisted on continuing being emperor.” Ren emailed the piece to 11 friends, one of whom leaked it. Ren, his son, and an accountant who’d worked for him were arrested. In jail, according to five sources with knowledge of the executive’s case, Ren was told that unless he admitted to whatever crimes he was going to be accused of, his son would be sentenced to life in prison. Ren was subsequently charged with corruption, even though he’d already been cleared in the 2016 probe. He pleaded guilty. On September 22, a Chinese court sentenced him to 18 years in prison. Ren did not challenge the verdict. The party, however, has yet to keep its side of the bargain: Ren’s son remains in jail. Ma has not been charged with any crimes, but the handling of his case also reveals Xi’s handiwork. As Ant Group readied for its IPO, Ma made a speech criticizing Xi’s campaign to control financial risks, alleging that it was stifling innovation... Experts such as Dexter Roberts, the author of The Myth of Chinese Capitalism, believe that the economic consequences of Xi’s move to limit private business could be severe. He sees slower growth, weakened innovation, and less competition all contributing to economic stagnation. Already, the lurch back to reliance on state-owned firms has affected productivity: The amount of capital needed to generate one unit of economic growth has nearly doubled since Xi took power. This attack on entrepreneurs sets China back politically as well. Xi seems to have embraced Leninist logic essentially unchanged since the days of Mao: Only in times of crisis does the party loosen its grip, allowing more free enterprise and more freedom. It always does so reluctantly and then reverts to form."
Behind Xi Jinping’s Steely Façade, a Leadership Crisis Is Smoldering in China - "The party also appears to be facing internal challenges to its authority at the grassroots level, prompting repressive action against its own members. In early September, the Associated Press reported that 23 people had been detained in Inner Mongolia in relation to widespread protests that erupted in August over efforts to replace Mongolian-language textbooks with Chinese versions. Among those targeted were several CCP members, including teachers, who were suspended without pay or turned over for investigation because they refused to carry out the new policy. Prominent academics from top universities are among those speaking out, and in some cases facing punishment. Law professor Xu Zhangrun, whose eloquent essays criticizing Xi’s leadership have gone viral online, was detained for six days in July. His employer, the prestigious Tsinghua University, fired him upon his release. In September, a letter written by another well-known intellectual — Leng Jiefu, a retired dean of the Politics Department at Renmin University — began circulating widely online. Leng explained in a media interview that he had actually written the letter, addressed to Politburo Standing Committee member Wang Yang, in April and was uncertain why it only emerged now. The letter echoes many of the same points raised by the other prominent critics, voicing concerns about China’s mounting internal crises and international isolation, and recommending several steps to help extract the country from its predicament, including calls for Xi Jinping to retire honorably from all his positions in the party, state, and military and for China to adopt a federal model of government that grants greater autonomy to regions like Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong... On the day that Cai Xia’s expulsion was announced, managers at the Central Party School reportedly convened a meeting of 60 department heads and senior officials, urging them to meticulously ensure that current, former, and retired staff remain loyal to the party, while increasing scrutiny of foreign travel to curb future defections. In August, central leaders close to Xi announced an almost unprecedented “rectification” campaign aimed at the political-legal apparatus — covering judges, prosecutors, police, prisons, and other parts of the criminal justice system. The campaign will begin in full next year and run through 2022, but several “pilot programs” have already begun in select locales. As Chinese political expert Ling Li notes, the entire endeavor is highly unusual, even in the context of the rough-and-tumble reality of CCP politics. In a more mysterious case, China-born Australian citizen Cheng Lei, an anchor for the state-run China Global Television Network (CGTN), was abruptly detained in mid-August in Beijing. The charges against her and the impetus for her detention remain unclear, but CGTN has apparently scrubbed all mention of her from the station’s site and past posts to social media. Despite the bold and impressive image that Xi Jinping and the party-state’s media apparatus seek to display at home and abroad, these developments point to a deeply insecure regime that perceives a threat even from its own members... It is not entirely uncommon for waves of internal criticism or factional fighting to peek through the cracks of the CCP’s opaque armor, but the thoughtful nature of the recent critiques and the profile of those voicing them should give pause to anyone inside or outside China who is attempting to assess the country’s direction. The fact that professors from top academic institutions — including the party’s own national training center — are calling Xi’s leadership a failure, urging his removal from power, and explicitly envisioning a transition to a more democratic and federally structured political system is simply incredible. It indicates that Xi is facing a serious crisis of faith within the party, even if no one has the power to act on it at present. It also underscores the reality that Xi and his enforcers do not speak for all Chinese. There are many, many people who would like to see China change course."
