The exile-based Epoch Times, which bitterly opposes the Beijing regime, ran an enlightening story Nov. 13, "Open Alliance of Power and Money Meets in Beijing." 

The state-run Xinhua News Agency recently published an article by China Economic Weekly titled "Red Entrepreneurs." The article reported that, according to incomplete statistics, 145 out of the 2,270 Party delegates are CEOs of state-owned enterprises, banks, and financial institutions, and of private enterprises from provinces and municipalities.

Bloomberg News published an article in February, titled, "China's Billionaire People's Congress Makes Capitol Hill Look Like Pauper," saying, "The net worth of the 70 richest delegates in China’s National People’' Congress, which opens its annual session on March 5, rose to 565.8 billion yuan (US$89.8 billion) in 2011, a gain of US$11.5 billion from 2010, according to figures from the "Hurun Report," which tracks the country’s wealthy. That compares to the US$7.5 billion net worth of all 660 top officials in the three branches of the U.S. government."

The 18th Party Congress is hosting political and military elites, along with rich businessmen...

The feast of wealth began in 1990s in China, and now red aristocrats can be seen in every sector, including electricity, oil, real estate, the stock market, the financial sector, and so on. According to reports on the Internet, about 200 Chinese political families have monopolized China’s wealth.

A diplomatic cable leaked by WikiLeaks in August 2011 said former Chinese Premier Li Peng and his family controlled all electric power interests, Politburo member and security czar Zhou Yongkang and his cronies controlled the oil interests, while Premier Wen Jiabao's wife controlled China's precious gems sector.

Over 130 state-owned enterprises under the state-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council are said to be operated or managed by people who come from an official family background.

In fact, the biggest problem in China today is not the gap between rich and poor, but that the regime's insiders took the nation's wealth hostage long ago.

Um, now what exactly is the difference between these two concepts? In addition to being completely naive about the US ("In the United States, rich peoples' wealth is mainly attributed to personal capabilities"), Epoch Times seems to accept the Orwellian construction of "red entrepreneurs" at face value. We have noted before their outdated anti-Communist prism. Do they really think nothing has changed since 1945, when the constitution of the CCP read:

The Communist Party of China is the organized vanguard of the Chinese working class and the highest form of its class organization. The Party represents the interests of the Chinese nation and the Chinese people. While at the present stage it works to create a system of new democracy in China, its ultimate aim is the realization of a system of communism in China. [Quoted in Fanshen by William Hinton, p. 168]

OK, sophomoric exercise in historical irony over now...
 

The 1984 jingo-fest Red Dawn was nearly an official piece of Cold War propaganda, given the advisory role of bellicose Secretary of State Alexander Haig (as Fast Rewind recalls), and the controversy over the current remake reveals much about the contradictory nature of the New Cold War with China—characterized by an uneasy tension between imperial rivalry and globalist interpenetration. When word got out that this time the enemy occupying forces of the American heartland would be Chinese rather than Russian, China's largest paper, Global Times, ran not just one but two angry editorials accusing Hollywood of "demonizing" and "planting hostile seeds against China." Producers MGM capitulated like spineless cultural-elite quislings, spending $1 million to go through the movie frame by frame and digitally alter every Chinese symbol seen on the screen into North Korean!

Of course in so doing, they sent the film's premise over the edge from wildly improbable to straight-up impossible. C. Thomas Howell, a star from the 1984 version, stated the obvious, telling USA Today: "Quite frankly, we all know North Korea cannot afford to invade itself. How is that going to happen? That's already stupid in my book."

Maybe the North Koreans will now protest too, as they did the execrable 2002 James Bond flick Die Another Day, Wikipedia recalls...

By the way, dig these shots from the movie at the Daily Mail. See those Chinese, I mean North Korean, propaganda posters...? See the one that says "Fighting Corporate Corruption" with the staff of a Communist flag skewering an image of the Wall Street bull? Is that supposed to make us think of Occupy?

Lost amid the endless hoopla about the end-of-the-world panic last week is what a big deal it was in China—and how nervous it made the authorities. From NBC's Behind the Wall blog:

The government is taking one aspect of the doomsday talk seriously; it has reportedly rounded-up members of a religious group calling for the toppling of the Communist Party. 

The group, known as the "Almighty God," has called for a "decisive battle" to slay the "big red dragon," a reference to the Book of Revelation and the organization’s name for the Chinese Communist Party.

Nearly 1,000 members of the sect have been arrested, The New York Times reported. NBC News could not independently verify the number of detentions, but Chinese state media also reported that authorities had detained around 1,000 members over some seven provinces, Reuters reported.

This is not the first time that China has dealt with a fast-moving Christian cult it deems a risk to party rule. In fact, according to the newspaper, "Almighty God" has its roots in a sect that claimed it had 300,000 adherents called "Lightning from the East," according to Time Magazine in 2001.

Lightning from the East propagated the belief that Jesus had returned to earth in the form of a 30-year old Chinese woman who had written a third testament of the Bible and promised salvation from the coming apocalypse for all who joined her.

You can bet that China's rulers, in ordering the mass arrests, were recalling the Taiping Rebellion, a mid-19th century peasant upsurge against the Qing dynasty, with apocalyptic Christian overtones, that shook China for 15 years at a cost of millions of lives and nearly brought about the collapse of the imperial state. 

Such memories doubtless also inform the harsh crackdown on the Falun Gong movement. We are agnostic on the claims of Falun Gong leaders that their movement's imprisoned adherents are being killed so that their organs can be harvested. (Epoch Times, Dec. 21)   But it is bad enough that they are being imprisoned. It's been 12 years now since Falun Gong followers filled Tiananmen Square. (See The Telegraph, Oct. 2, 2000) It's a shame that just a decade after the 1989 Tiananmen Square movement was crushed, popular dissension was being exploited by an obscurantist and cultish sect. But the dissension remained real. And has probably only grown since then.
 

The New York Times noted Feb. 14 that off-the-record comments made by Xi Jinping to party insiders in Guangdong in December were leaked by a blogger named Gao Yu (who seems to be associated with the Seeing Red in China website). In the comments, which may not be verbatim, Xi apparently said that China must heed the "deeply profound" (sic) lessons of the fall of the Soviet Union. "Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse? An important reason was that their ideals and convictions wavered... Finally, all it took was one quiet word from Gorbachev to declare the dissolution of the Soviet Communist Party, and a great party was gone. In the end nobody was a real man, nobody came out to resist."

The Times notes the signifance that the comments were made in Guangdong: "In a province famed for its frenetic capitalism, he demanded a return to traditional Leninist discipline."

Xi's reference to "ideals and convictions" is very revealing—showing the propaganda utility of the Mao era for maintainence of the one-party state, even as the actual "ideals and convictions" of the Mao era are utterly betrayed. This is telegraphed by the reigning bureaucracy in other ways—e.g. in the continuing official denigration of the Cultural Revolution (also evidenced in the Bo Xilai affair). A Feb. 21 AFP report notes the strange trial of an octogenarian in Zhejiang who is charged with having carried out a murder in connection with the Cultural Revolution purges in 1967. This has actually sparked some wry commentary on Weibo, China's answer to Twitter. According to AFP, dissident attorney Liu Xiaoyuan posted: "The biggest murderer in the Cultural Revolution has no responsibility, while a common murderer is held accountable decades later." This is obviously a reference to Mao, without actually naming him. The fact that he (apparently) got away with this comment indicates how finely the line is drawn in contemporary China.

Of course this little game actually began with the Gang of Four trial, when scapegoats were needed for the Cultural Revolution to signal the consolidation of the "revisionist coup" (as the Maoists continue to call it today)—while Mao himself, safely dead, remained sacrosanct so that the regime could exploit him as a symbol of national unity. Note how these anti-Gang of Four propaganda posters all ironically invoke the style of Cultural Revolution propaganda posters from a decade earlier. Of course, you don't see anything like that in China today—but commercial adverstizing is just as crass and ubiquitous as in the West (see reports at Ad Age), and Col. Sanders' face is far more ubiquitous than that of Mao.

As we have noted.
 

A revealing juxtaposition of news stories. New Statesman is but one among several outlets to give play to Dan Washburn's new book, The Forbidden Game: Golf and the Chinese Dream. Golf is (appropriately) illegal in China, yet there is nonetheless a golf course boom going on—with the connivance of authorities. And the boom and illegality are another example of the paradoxical unity of opposites. Golf was banned under Mao for the same reason it is now being avidly embraced by China's contemporary elite—it is an ostentatious symbol of bourgeois profligacy.

Meanwhile OffGridQuest.com makes note of a story in the LA Times last year finding that up to 30 million Chinese currently live in caves. The report portrays cave life favorably, and we are not here to diss it. But we wonder if the ranks of the cave-dwellers are not growing as poor Chinese are forced from their homes by the country's real estate boom.

Here we go again. The outward appearance of a good old-fashioned Communist party purge—but it is obvious that what is at issue here is a struggle for private, capitalist control over China's financial and industrial apparatus. The man named in a Wikileaks cable (see above) as controlling the country's oil sector, ex-Minister of Public Security Zhou Yongkang, is being investigated for "serious disciplinary violation"—the most senior Chinese official to be investigated since the Gang of Four trial, and the first time ever for a member of the Politburo Standing Committee. The investigation is to be conducted by the Communist Party's Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. His son, Zhou Bin, has been arrested for "involvement in illegal business operations." He is named as an oil industry equipment investor, and one of China's richest men.

Liu Han, a mining tycoon also said to be part of Zhou's clique, has been sentenced to death for "organizing and leading mafia-style crime and murder." Liu is the former head of mining conglomerate Sichuan Hanlong Group, with operations in several African countries. 

Also under investigation is Jiang Jiemin, Zhou's close ally and former head of the China National Petroleum Company (CNPC). 

Finally, Zhou is being linked to the imprisoned ex-Politburo member Bo Xilai, and there were apparently rumors that the two of them were plotting a coup together against President Hu Jintao. Despite Bo's Maoist pretensions, the shake-up is being portrayed as an effort by the new generation that came in with Xi Jinping to break up the old "Elitist" oligarchy that rose with Jiang Zemin, paramount leader in the '90s. (Caixin, Epoch Times, Aug. 21; Foreign Policy, Aug. 4; The Guardian, BBC News, July 29, Mining.com, March 31)

Here's a telling juxtaposition of news items. The Financial Times headlines July 1: "Xi Jinping pledges return to Marxist roots for China’s Communists"...

Communist orthodoxy is hard to come by in an increasingly prosperous and materialist China where a growing wealth gap is generating class tensions. But the president stayed well within the careful choreography of party ceremony as he urged its 88m members not to “betray or abandon” Marxism. “The whole party should remember, what we are building is socialism with Chinese characteristics, not some other -ism,” Mr Xi said in an 80-minute address in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People. The speech was live-streamed on the website of state news agency Xinhua as well as on YouTube — a site banned in China.

Just two days earlier, China Labour Bulletin headlined: "China starts to shift social insurance burden from employers to workers"...

China’s Social Insurance Law, which went into effect five years ago on 1 July 2011, was supposed to create a comprehensive social insurance system in which the responsibilities of employees, employers and the government were clearly spelled out.

However, the majority of employers simply ignored their legal obligations to provide employees with a basic pension, unemployment, medical, work-related injury and maternity insurance. Local government officials, likewise, ignored their obligation to enforce the law, leaving hundreds of millions of workers without an effective social welfare safety net.

Now, there is growing evidence that China’s increasingly pro-business government is looking to place the burden of social security firmly on to the shoulders of workers and individual citizens and gradually reduce the limited burden currently carried by employers.

The government’s own figures show that in 2015, only 262 million workers, about one third of China’s total workforce of around 775 million, actually had a basic pension, while only 213 million workers had basic medical insurance provided by their employer.

By contrast, there are currently 357 million working age people with a government-backed pension—but what they receive from this is often "token at best." Meanwhile, "responsibility for medical insurance likewise is gradually shifting away from employers towards individual citizens."

Marxism? Really?

The contemporary Chinese state has zero to do with Marxism, apart from appropriating its rhetoric—and ever less of that over the past generation. What Xi is really defending here is a legacy of Leninism—the one-party dictatorship—actually bereft of its Marxist character. The Marxist-Leninist justifications of totalitarianism are employed, but in support of a state which is aggressively, savagely capitalist.

China's Communist Party elevated President Xi Jinping’s political status on Oct. 27, referring to him as the "core" of its leadership. A communique released after the end of the Central Committee's four-day Sixth Plenum in Beijing adopted new sets of regulations governing the conduct of senior cadres and called on all members to "closely unite around [its] Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping as the core." The term is believed to confer veto power on Xi ahead of the party's five-yearly congress late next year. 

The term "core" was used by Deng Xiaoping in 1989 to describe Mao Zedong, himself and his successor Jiang Zemin. From the early 1990s, various top-level documents and state media reports referred to Jiang as the "core." However, the title was abandoned under Jiang's successor and Xi's predecessor, Hu Jintao. During Hu’s decade-long term as party chief, he was only referred to as the "general secretary" of the leadership, and in practice he was "first among equals" with the ­other eight Politburo Standing Committee members. (SCMP, Oct. 27)

Did you catch that little tiff? Next month will mark 15 years that China has been a member of the World Trade Organization, and it is making a big push to have "free market status" confered on it, despite European concerns about dumping. See this editorial in China Daily, and (for the other side of the story) this analysis from the European Council on Foreign Relations. "Socialism," eh? How do they square it?