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My babysitters are feeling agitated a bit lately. Can somebody do me a favor and find recent stories from the last few days about Zhou Yongkang/Bo Xilai and cut and paste them in this thread, please. Anyways, my wife says there has been gunfire exchanged today but I can't find anything about that anywhere and all google searches of Zhou Yongkang are blocked. Thanks.

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The aftershocksfrom the sacking last week of a powerful Communist Party secretary are still rattling China, injecting an element of turmoil into a transition the government had hoped would showcase the stability of its political system.

 

State media reported this week that 3,300 party cadres from the security apparatus would be sent to Beijing for ideological retraining. The order was unusual enough, but even more so was the fact that the report omitted mention of internal security czar Zhou Yongkang, who heads the Political and Legislative Affairs Committee that is recalling the cadres.

 

Zhou, a member of the Politburo Standing Committee and until now one of the most powerful men in China, had been the committee's strongest backer of Bo Xilai, the Communist Party secretary of Chongqing who was removed from his post last week. Some overseas Chinese-language Internet sites carried wild (and unsubstantiated) rumors that Zhou and Bo, a popular figure among Maoist traditionalists, had tried to stage a coup.

 

A level of edginess was apparent this week in the unusually large security presence in central Beijing, complete with armed SWAT teams in some subway stations.

 

 

Jin Zhong, a veteran political analyst based in Hong Kong, dismissed the more fantastic rumors, while acknowledging the underlying tension between economic reformers and Maoist traditionalists.

 

"It hasn't reached the point where you are going to hear gunshots. It is not like when China arrested the Gang of Four in 1976, but there is a very strong conflict going on," Jin said.

 

Zhou had been a strong supporter of Bo's law-and-order campaigns in Chongqing, where thousands were swept up in a gang-busting dragnet and retirees had been gathering in a public park for now-banned patriotic singing and dancing. According to Jin, Zhou made several visits to the Chongqing delegation at the recently concluded National People's Congress, fighting for Bo's political future until the very end.

 

Like most of China's senior leaders, the 70-year-old Zhou is due to retire at the 18th party congress in October. Until recently, Bo was thought to be a likely replacement. Jin said he doubted that Zhou would be removed from the Standing Committee because he is already set to leave.

 

"They won't touch anybody on the Standing Committee before the congress. It is too risky. They've put in a big effort trying to present a picture of stability," Jin said.

 

Given the opaque nature of the Chinese Communist Party, only whispers and hints of turmoil are being reported in the Chinese press. But the topic is feeding a furious rumor mill on blogs. Numerous reports have appeared in Taiwan and Hong Kong as well as on Chinese-language news sites run out of the United States.

 

The Mingjing News, a U.S.-based news portal, reported that Bo had been scheming with Zhou to prevent vice president and heir apparent Xi Jinping from being confirmed as President Hu Jintao's successor. It also reported that Bo purchased 5,000 rifles and 50,000 rounds of ammunition through the Chongqing Public Security Bureau, causing nervousness in Beijing.

 

Bo, 62, a charismatic populist, was fired as party secretary for Chongqing on Friday while he was in Beijing attending the National People's Congress, the annual legislative session.

 

"They wanted to do it when he was in Beijing to avoid trouble. Historically, this is the way they'd handle warlords who'd gotten their own militias," said Zhang Ming, a political scientist at People's University in the capital.

 

Chinese censors have been hurriedly trying to remove political gossip from the Internet, leading people to come up with creative nicknames for their leaders. Zhou has been nicknamed for a popular brand of instant noodles, giving rise to numerous reports that "the noodles have been taken off the shelf."

 

"We are in a black box. Everything is happening behind the curtain, so people come up with their own stories," Zhang said.

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Bo Xilai received a hint of a gathering storm that would soon topple him and shake China’s ruling Communist Party in the form of an oblique warning about the weather.

 

Bo had flown to Beijing from Chongqing, his city power-base in the southwest, for the annual session of the party-run parliament. He was struggling to subdue an uproar after his police chief took refuge in a U.S. consulate for a day.

 

Telegenic and self-assured in a political elite crowded with wary conformists, Bo was already controversial for thrusting forward “red” Chongqing as a bold alternative model for China.

 

The astounding antics of his long-time aide, Vice Mayor Wang Lijun, threatened to spoil parliament’s show of unity and Bo’s run for a place in the party’s innermost circle of power.

Related

 

Leading Chinese Communist Party member Bo Xilai ousted after U.S. consulate scandal

 

The warning came on March 3 from a senior central leader who told Bo and other assembled officials in Chongqing to be careful while attending the parliament session in Beijing.

 

“The climate in Chongqing is very different from the climate in Beijing,” said the official, who several sources have told Reuters was He Guoqiang, the Party’s top man for keeping discipline and fighting corruption. “So I hope that everyone will take care against the cold and stay warm, and be careful to stay healthy.”

 

NO ISOLATED INCIDENT

 

Beijing’s political winds indeed turned brutally against Bo. His removal as party chief of Chongqing was announced last week, stoking uncertainty about how China will manage a tricky handover later this year to a new generation of leaders at the 18th Communist Party Congress.

 

A reconstruction of the events leading to Wang’s flight and Bo’s downfall offers insight on how China is run that reaches far beyond their political base in Chongqing, a smoggy city-province of 30 million people on the Yangtze River.

 

Wang’s flight to the U.S. consulate in nearby Chengdu was not the “isolated incident” Chinese officials first described. In interviews in Beijing and Chongqing, serving officials, retired cadres, Chinese journalists and other sources close to the government called it a climactic outburst of tensions that stretched back a year and involved the top reaches of China’s leadership.

 

The tale involves allegations of corruption and abuse of power by Bo’s family, bugging of senior leaders, and growing distrust between Bo and Wang.

 

Above all, Bo’s rise and abrupt fall as a hero of leftist supporters exposed ideological rifts that threaten to tear at party unity if the leadership mishandles his departure.

 

“The loss of Bo Xilai means the whole balance of the 18th Congress succession preparations has been disturbed,” said Li Weidong, an editor and commentator in Beijing who has closely followed the unfolding scandal. “Finding the right equilibrium will be more difficult.”

 

Since China’s secretive political system discourages people from speaking candidly about contentious news, most of the people interviewed for this report demanded anonymity.

 

DEMOTION AND THREATS

 

Wang’s flight to the U.S. consulate in Chengdu on February 6 was not confirmed until later by the Chinese and U.S. governments. But the intense security surrounding the consulate prompted an outpouring of Internet speculation that made it impossible for party leaders to hush up the scandal.

 

“It’s like politics in an emperor’s court. The politics behind the screen is very secretive until a crisis exposes all the players,” said Li, the Beijing commentator.

 

Just days earlier, Bo had removed Wang as public security chief and appointed him vice mayor for education, science and culture. It was an abrupt demotion for a career police officer whose campaign against crime overlords in Chongqing had won him and Bo flattering national attention in 2009.

 

Distrust had been mounting between the two, according to a former official who said he has often met Bo and his family. “Relations between Bo and Wang began to really sour in January, but it was a process deepening over months.”

 

Bo “forced Wang Lijun out of his police uniform, which made him fall into even deeper despair and panic about his future. At the very least, it looked dictatorial and arbitrary. It made a bad relationship much worse,” the former official said.

 

Days before the demotion, Wang had confronted Bo over a criminal investigation touching on Bo’s family, including his wife Gu Kailai, and that a task force had been assembled to handle the case, two former officials said.

 

“It was because of this special case group that relations finally snapped,” said the first retired official.

 

Talk spread among Chongqing officials of furious shouting between Bo and Wang, and even of Bo slapping his long-time ally, a city official said.

 

“Bo felt Wang Lijun was using this [case] to take him hostage,” said an editor in Beijing who said he heard about the episode from central government officials. “Bo was furious and then he decided to adjust Wang’s position to protect himself.”

 

BREAKING THE RULES

 

Self-protection and self-promotion came easily to Bo.

 

His upbringing as the “princeling”, son of revolutionary leader Bo Yibo, dubbed one of the “Eight Immortals”, had imbued him with ambition, confidence and a sometimes dismissive impatience with subordinates and even superiors, said several people who had dealings with him.

 

“The red second generation feel that they naturally deserve to be on top, and the current leaders have been too weak,” said a former Chongqing official turned businessman.

 

After arriving in Chongqing in 2007, Bo turned it into a bastion of Communist “red” culture and egalitarian growth, winning national attention with the crackdown on organized crime that jailed or even executed officials accused of protecting crime bosses.

 

It was a bold comeback for a sharp-suited and sharp-elbowed politician whose assignment to Chongqing was widely seen as a grimy exile after serving as commerce minister since 2003.

 

The campaign against endemic corruption could not have cast either of his predecessors there in a good light: Wang Yang, now governor of Guangdong and a candidate for a coveted position on the Standing Committee; and He Guoqiang, the disciplinarian.

 

Bo’s populist social and economic reform, and crime clean-up won a large following who hoped he could try his policies nationwide as a member of the Communist Party’s next generation of central leaders who will emerge in late 2012.

 

His bald self-promotion and Maoist revivals, however, irked pro-market liberals, as did his courting of left-wing intellectuals who lauded the “Chongqing model.”

 

“Bo made a big gamble in Chongqing. He played a card that he could set the direction for the whole country,” said Zhu Zhiyong, a former businessman in Chongqing who has been critical of Bo. “It breaks the rules of politics.”

 

TAKING AIM AT WANG

 

Contention over whether Bo would win a place in the Party’s next Standing Committee, the inner core of power now with nine members, intensified last year, and added to the tensions that turned Bo and Wang against each other, said several sources close to Chongqing leaders.

 

“A group in the central leadership has been adamantly opposed to Bo’s entry, because he was seen as a trouble-maker who doesn’t respect the rules,” said the former official, who has often met Bo and other senior leaders.

 

“The most likely possibility is that high-level people didn’t want Bo to rise, so they took aim at Wang Lijun.”

 

The central leader who played a key role in marshalling accusations against Bo and Wang was He Guoqiang, said the ex-official and several other sources.

 

From 1999 to 2002, He was party chief of Chongqing, watching as his acolytes in government there were sidelined under Bo’s campaigns. As head of the party’s Central Discipline Inspection Commission, he backed corruption investigations that could damage Bo, said the sources. By last year, He had seen enough, and began driving the initial wedge between Wang and Bo.

 

“He Guoqiang supported investigating Wang Lijun to go after Bo Xilai,” said a Chongqing official.

 

His gambit, according to this account, worked to perfection. Distrust between the once close allies broke down “and so then Wang Lijun began to turn to blackmail to protect himself,” the Chongqing official said

 

PRAISE FROM KISSINGER

 

As of late January, Bo was still focused on securing a spot in the Communist Party core leadership. The top job, successor to President Hu Jintao, is almost sure to go to Vice President Xi Jinping. Bo had been leading the pack of provincial chiefs whose prominence, age and connections made them contenders for spots around Xi.

 

On January 9, the top Party newspaper, the People’s Daily, devoted the top of its front-page to effusive praise for Chongqing’s successes.

 

Foreign heavyweights, including former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, had flown to Chongqing to meet Bo and admire the steel and glass buildings rising along the steep sides of the Yangtze.

 

Chongqing claimed to have achieved China’s fastest growth rate for any province-level area, 16.4 percent.

 

Then came Wang’s stunning dash to the consulate of China’s chief rival. He was worn out and emotionally spent and had taken “vacation-style therapy”, the city initially explained.

 

With the national parliament in session, the central government also tried to downplay the incident, with an official scolding the media for speculating about it and praising Chongqing’s successes.

 

“Initially, the central leadership wanted to cool things down during the parliament session, but that failed,” said a former Chongqing official.

 

Wang, meanwhile, was in custody, raising the possibility that damaging information about Bo could come out. Two sources said word had spread in government circles that Bo and Wang were suspected of bugging rivals and even central leaders.

 

Bo seized his chance to explain himself at a March 9 news conference at the parliament, and did so in his characteristically brash style.

 

Bo dismissed as “nonsense” reports, circulated on the Chinese internet and backed by diplomats’ sightings, that his son, Bo Guagua, whizzed around Beijing in a red Ferrari, and scholarships paid his expensive education at Oxford and Harvard.

 

“These people who have formed criminal blocs have wide social ties and the ability to shape opinion,” Bo said of his critics. “There are also, for example, people who have poured filth on Chongqing, and poured filth on myself and my family.”

 

Central leaders had had enough. They were riled by Bo’s decision to brandish contempt for foes, rather than show contrition. They were especially irked by Bo’s comment he was confident Hu would visit Chongqing, implicitly claiming the confidence of China’s president.

 

GAME NOT OVER

 

Accounts vary of when the party leadership decided Bo had to go, but most sources said the curtain fell within 72 hours of his combative news conference.

 

At a post-parliament news conference five days after Bo’s performance, Premier Wen Jiabao suggested Bo was culpable not only for Wang’s flight but also for conjuring up false nostalgia for Mao’s era. China needed political reform, without which “such historical tragedies as the Cultural Revolution may happen again in China”, Wen said.

 

“Wen’s words revealed the split,” said the former Chongqing official. “It turned this into a line struggle.”

 

The next day, the government announced Bo had been removed as party secretary of Chongqing.

 

China’s leaders now appear uncertain about how to deal with the downfall of a popular politician.

 

“The 18th Congress outcome hasn’t been settled yet, and this makes it more difficult, because Bo Xilai represented many left-leaning voices in China,” said Wang Wen, a Beijing journalist who has met Bo.

 

A week after his fall, Bo remains out of sight, with unconfirmed speculation he remains in Beijing available for questioning. His abrupt departure has kindled wild rumors, including one this week of a coup attempt.

 

“The game is not over yet. There’s no full-stop on this yet,” said the ex-official familiar with Bo.

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My babysitters are feeling agitated a bit lately. Can somebody do me a favor and find recent stories from the last few days about Zhou Yongkang/Bo Xilai and cut and paste them in this thread, please. Anyways, my wife says there has been gunfire exchanged today but I can't find anything about that anywhere and all google searches of Zhou Yongkang are blocked. Thanks.

 

BTW..wouldn't asking someone to do this for you put yourself at risk?

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Images of tanks and military vehicles moving along Beijing's Changan Avenue have given rise to rumours of a coup taking place. Bill Gertz of the Washington Times with a quick roundup of what's been happening online:

 

Chinese microblogging sites Sina Weibo, QQ Weibo, and the bulletin board of the search engine Baidu all reported “abnormalities” in Beijing on the night of March 19.

The comments included rumors of the downfall of the Shanghai leadership faction and a possible “military coup,” along with reports of gunfire on Beijing’s Changan Street. The reports were quickly removed by Chinese censors shortly after postings and could no longer be accessed by Wednesday.

 

The unusual postings included reports that military vehicles were sent to control Changan Street, along with plainclothes police officers and metal barriers.

 

Another posting quoted internal sources as saying senior Communist Party leaders are divided over the ouster of Mr. Bo. The divide was said to pit Prime Minister Wen Jiabao and against party security forces and Minister of Public Security Zhou Yongkang.

 

Late Wednesday, another alarming indicator came when Beijing authorities ordered all levels of public-security and internal-security forces under Mr. Zhou to conduct nationwide study sessions, although Mr. Zhou’s name was not on the order - a sign his future may be in doubt.

 

Isaac Stone Fish of Foreign Policy with more rumours:

 

Mainland media sites have begun to strongly censor discussion of Bo Xilai and entirely unsubstantiated rumors of gunfire in downtown Beijing (an extremely rare occurance in Beijing). Chinese websites hosted overseas, free from censorship, offer a host of unsupported, un-provable commentary on what might have happened in the halls of power. Bannedbook.org, which provides free downloads of "illegal" Chinese books, posted a long explanation of tremors in the palace of Zhongnanhai, sourced to a "person with access to high level information in Beijing," of a power struggle between President Hu Jintao, who controls the military, and Zhou, who controls China's formidable domestic security apparatus. The Epoch Times, a news site affiliated with the Falun Gong spiritual movement (which banned in China), has published extensively in English and Chinese about the coup.

Speculation is rife: A Canadian Chinese news portal quoted Deutsche Welle quoting the Hong Kong newspaper Apple Daily quoting a netizen that a group of citizens unfurled a banner in a main square in Chongqing that said "Party Secretary Bo, We Love and Esteem You," and were subsequently taken away by plain-clothes security forces. A controversial Peking University professor Kong Qingdong, a 73rd generation descendant of Confucius, said on his television show that removing Bo Xilai is similar to "a counter-revolutionary coup;" one news site reported his show has since been suspended.

 

Adam Minter of Bloomberg on humorous netizens commenting on the non-coup:

 

For every netizen who tweeted “coup?” “coup!” and “coup …” there were others who dismissed the whole matter, often with the devil-may-care humor so characteristic of Weibo. For example, on Tuesday, a netizen in Shanghai asked, “If there’s a coup d’etat, is it a legal holiday?”

Still, that humor can often exhibit a very harsh anti-government edge. One of the more common jokes expressed during the coup fever was one that referenced the Chinese government’s unpopular decision to raise gasoline prices by 6.5 percent, and diesel by 7 percent, such as in this now deleted post (also posted as an attachment to this article) :

 

"Regarding last night’s internet rumors that loud noises in Beijing were caused by gunfire … actually the citizens of Beijing welcome the news that oil prices will rise and spontaneously gather in the streets to set off fireworks and celebrate. Don’t worry about a coup!"

 

Taiwan's Want China Times cites political portal Mingjing News saying the coup may have been related to Bo Xilai and Zhou Yongkang and that Bo might have been trying to create a private army:

 

According to an unnamed Beijing source, Zhou Yongkang, a member of the elite nine-member Politburo Standing Committee, secretly promised to help Bo join him in the country's most powerful decision-making body and take over his role as secretary of the Political and Legislative Affairs Committee. This would have allowed Bo to control the People's Armed Police and Ministry of Public Security, and force Xi to step down before inserting himself in the vice president's place as expected future general secretary, the source said.

Mingjing also reported that Bo, through Wang and in the name of Chongqing's Public Security Bureau, purchased 5,000 rifles and 50,000 rounds of ammunition from a local munitions factory last year in order to create a private army. The People's Armed Police has already been sent to Chongqing to investigate the whereabouts of the weapons, the report said.

 

Another Mingjing News "revelation" suggests that since Chinese New Year, Bo had been using his influence over domestic and international media to heighten attention on the forthcoming 18th CPC National People's Congress, where Xi is expected to succeed Hu Jintao, current president and general secretary. Mingjing alleges that this was part of Bo's inside-outside assault to destabilize Hu, Xi and Premier Wen Jiabao while inserting himself into the leadership conversation.

 

Hu's predecessor Jiang Zemin — who continues to hold significant influence over the Chinese political landscape — is also believed to be involved in the Bo Xilai affair, according to Mingjing. Jiang has allegedly called Zhou a traitor for backing Bo and is said to have supported Hu and Wen's presumed decision to remove him from positions of power. Jiang and former vice president Zeng Qinghong believe a smooth succession is critical to maintaining the stability of China's political system and any dissent must therefore be quashed, Mingjing News wrote.

 

Mark MacKinnon of The Globe & Mail on why those coup rumours aren't going away:

 

One of the truths of reporting on China is that few journalists, maybe none, can honestly claim to know what’s going on inside the upper echelons of power.

In other countries, you might see reporters offhandedly refer to their unnamed contacts inside the Prime Minister’s Office, or the White House, or whatever institution they’re covering. Even when I worked in famously enigmatic Russia, I had a few “Kremlin sources” I could occasionally turn to.

 

Not in China. I know many of the foreign journalists based here, and more than a few of the Chinese ones. None have ever claimed to me, or their readers, that they have a contact inside, or even close to, the decision-making Standing Committee of the Politburo of the Communist Party of China.

 

Which, often, is to the credit of those who run this country. This is not a place where trial balloons get floated by cabinet ministers trying to build public support and win funding for their pet project, nor are China’s leaders crippled by the constant and public infighting that brought down Canada’s Liberal Party or Britain’s Labour, to name two prominent examples.

 

http://shanghaiist.com/2012/03/22/china_coup_rumours_set_weibo_aflutt.php

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Thanks guys.

 

For the record, I use to live in Chongqing (Bo's seat of power) until a year ago. Now I live in Chengdu, where the US consulate I go to for all birth/passport stuff was the place that Wang went to seek refuge.

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BTW..wouldn't asking someone to do this for you put yourself at risk?

I've not had an ounce of trouble with the government here with that sort of thing. I'm more worried that this lightly trafficked FF site will get blocked.

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Looks Like there is a chink in their armor.

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You commies still have more freedoms than we do here in America under President Obama's 5th Reich. :banana:

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Did anyone else come into this thread thinking that Volty was going to tell us that he had a fortune in China that he needed help getting out of there? :unsure:

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