CCTV FOLLIES 1.8 XI DECLARES WAR ON CORRUPTION...AGAIN!
In other words, a new purge of rivals, real and imagined, is underway, and if they get in Xi's way, they will be declared guilty of corruption. China is entering a dangerous and unstable new phase.
“After persistent anti-corruption efforts over the past 10 years of the new era, an overwhelming victory has been achieved in the fight against corruption, with the gains fully consolidated…But the situation remains grave and complex."
“There is no possibility of stopping, slackening or compromising the anti-corruption campaign”
"We should be fully aware of new development in the fight against corruption and the breeding grounds and conditions for corruption," Xi said, urging more efforts to win the tough and protracted battle.”
The militaristic metaphors used by Xi in his speech—overwhelming victory, the fight, consolidated gains, grave situation, protracted battle, contingent, iron army—suggest that his latest campaign is not a feel-good celebration of his past accomplishments or the usual stern-sounding party bromides, but a frightening new life-and-death struggle in the making.
Xi Jinping appears to be at the height of his powers, but he’s losing mojo fast as he fritters away more and more of his political capital just to strike out at enemies real and imagined in his battle to hang on to power. Using the party as a personal instrument, Xi has launched one political campaign after another demanding ever greater discipline, ever greater obeisance and ever greater conformity.
If these campaigns to “purify” China in Xi’s image are even partially successful, taking Xi’s pronouncements as the writ of the law, the country’s once-bright prospects are looking darker by the day. Already state TV news has been reduced to a tone-deaf propaganda vehicle for the seemingly no-limits and insatiable personality cult of Xi. State propagandists are not wrong when they say we are living in turbulent times, but China’s ability to react in a supple and resourceful way in the face of such challenges is diminished by every brick that is put in the wall of the unthinking Xi personality cult. The gist of CCP policy these days is to give lip service to the people and China’s historic accomplishments, while pursuing politically-tinged purges of rivals.
China’s great leap backward in the height of the Mao years was due to the constant infighting, costly political campaigns and the concomitant rise of superstition in the place of science at a time when the answer to everything was, with ridiculous implausibility, attributed to the wise and all-knowing paramount leader.
Xi’s personality cult undermines the work of scientists, entrepreneurs, businessmen and concerned civil servants and citizens who depend on the free flow of information to do their jobs and be of service to the nation.
Corruption costs money, but going after political rivals in the name of corruption is costly, too, especially if the result is a hardening of the impregnable fortress of the dictator and a glorification of his cult.
There is just so much money going around, and even less goodwill. The blatant and gross misappropriation of public funds to shore up the prestige of Xi Jinping is perhaps the biggest unaddressed corruption case in China today.
With all eyes on Xi all the time, and fear becoming the leading wedge of governance, China will be hard-pressed to find creative solutions to its troubled economy. No one’s marching in the streets just yet, or if they attempt it, it’s a flash in the pan, but there are credible signs that China’s huge population is getting sick of the CCP’s constant exhortations to show more loyalty by turning off the news and tuning out from society. Viewership numbers of the flagship news service Xinwen Lianbo, are said to be flagging dramatically.
The exploitation and repurposing of the organs of governance to consolidate the paranoid grip on power by a single clique, which at its core is built around the ceaseless deification and adulation of the paramount one, is leading the nation astray and people are taking notice, albeit quietly.
If there’s anything to the rumors that Xi is facing an existential challenge within the heart of the party, from red heirs and princelings angered at Xi’s self-centered accumulation of power, breaking notions of collective leadership that party elders had bestowed on them to share.
The battle royal has been going on, mostly out of public view, since the early days of Xi’s rise to power, and the road is littered with contenders who tried, and failed, to vanquish Xi.
The motivations, intentions and political platforms of the powerful men taken down by Xi vary widely, but the one thing they all share in common is guilt of corruption according to Xi. Corrupt or not, and there are precious few climbers within the CCP who are not corrupt on one level or another, they can expect to get tarred and feathered with charges of corruption when their number is up.
All opponents of Xi are invariably painted black.
Bo Xilai is a prominent case in point; a contender with a vital network, active faction and impeccable red credentials who got too close to the pinnacle of power; he was slapped in prison in 2012 on a variety of lurid charges, clearing the way for Xi’s unchallenged assumption of power. Zhou Yongkang, once a powerful minister of public security aligned closely with the Jiang Zemin faction, was also vanquished at that time.
To borrow one of Xi’s pet phrases, Chinese politics is decidedly not a “win-win” proposition, but a zero-sum do-or-die contest. When challenging the top leader, winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing. While purges in China today do not resemble the bloody excess of Stalin’s continual culling of his own people, the price of being purged is severe, grim and lasting. The usual disposition of losers is through judicial humiliation and banishment, usually in the form of a life prison term.
Politburo heavyweight Sun Zhengcai was purged as party secretary of Chongqing, a regional powerhouse that had also seen the rise of Bo Xilai. Xu Caihou and Guo Boxiong, both influential vice-chairs of the Central Military Commission, were also sacked.
Ling Jihua, a powerful and trusted adviser to Hu Jintao at the peak of his power was accused of bribery and slapped with a life sentence in 2016, relatively early in Xi’s tenure as top leader. This effectively isolated and humiliated Hu Jintao, who got no respect as a party elder under Xi’s brash tenure, and was infamously dragged off the stage of the 20th party congress that was meant to celebrate Xi’s consolidation of power and assumption of iron-clad rule.
The recently-deceased premier Li Keqiang, who was once poised to assume the top slot ultimately won by Xi, is a curious example of a viable contender for power who was not destroyed, but emasculated and rendered powerless in a subordinate role, serving under the great Xi, with a relative distribution of power comparable to that of an ineffectual US vice-president under a President who has no time who him or her.
Defense Minister Li Shangfu was sacked in October 2023 after going missing for two months, and in perhaps the most public case of all, China’s face to the world and roving diplomat Foreign Minister Qin Gang was “disappeared” last June and has not been seen or heard from since. A month later his dismissal was announced and there are credible fears he might not have survived the purge.
If 2023 was a year of purges, with the case of Xi’s dashing, hand-picked protege Qin Gang getting the most traction in the media, the new year 2024 looks to be following suit. Xi’s first big initiative since the New Year holiday is the new political campaign launched by Xi on January 7 vowing to crackdown on the “grave and complex” corruption he suddenly sees everywhere around him.
No one knows the fallout of a personality cult gone bad better than Mao’s victims, and the son of one of Mao’s most prominent victims recently made a subtle and dignified plea to reconsider the personality cult.
Liu Yuan, a retired general and former and former governor of Henan, knows a thing or two about the dangers of standing in the way of personality cult-crazed leader. He is the son of Liu Shaoqi, the former premier of China who was hounded to death by Mao’s Red Guards. Widely expected to share power in a Xi Jinping led-government, Liu Yuan declared support for Xi’s initial anti-corruption campaign but then discreetly retired in 2015, perhaps to assuage Xi that he was no longer a threat.
Once consider a top rival for power alongside Xi Jinping and Bo Xilai, Liu Yuan, who served as governor of Henan before stepping aside from a political career—he was reportedly deemed unfit for the top slot after showing “weakness” in his support of student protesters at Tiananmen Square in 1989. He nonetheless enjoyed a prestigious military career culminating in his role as commissar of the PLA’s general logistics department, which now appears to be one of the bureaucracies in Xi’s crosshairs.
Last November, Liu Yuan presided over a commemorative event for his father Liu Shaoqi at the Beijing Concert Hall which was attended by many other princelings, including close relatives of Mao, Zhou Enlai, and Zhu De.
Xi, who makes no secret about his father’s Xi Zhongxun’s fairly high position under Mao, was conspicuous by his absence. (Perhaps humiliated by his lack of comparably stellar red credentials and/or incensed at protocol arrangements that would place him on the side rather than at the center of the event seating and group pictures. Two of Liu’s surviving children, Liu Yuan, and his sister Liu Ting attended the November 6, 2023 "Concert to Commemorate the 125th Anniversary of the Birth of Comrade Liu Shaoqi"
One way to measure the depth of Xi’s displeasure is to see if he now turns his jaundiced gaze to the PLA procurement people who served under Liu in the General Logistics Department, and there are signs of that happening already in the first stirrings of crackdowns and purges of the New Year.
If the increasingly Stalinist style paranoid purges continue apace, until there will nothing left on top but a rump dictatorship, lonely and isolated, defending itself against challengers real and imagined, whittling down inner party contenders, until it becomes painfully apparent that China’s future is being shaped not so much by the whirl of toadies, factotums and sycophant eunuchs around emperor Xi, but the crazed and paranoid voices in his head.
In the past two weeks alone, nine PLA generals have been sacked, this in addition to the month by month piece-meal decimation of the PLA’s rocket command, which has been, since last summer, the scene of a ruthless political cleansing spearheaded by Xi.
In tried and tested propaganda fashion, if Xi speaks, the popular reaction has to be enthusiastic. Never mind that he sounds to be on the verge of declaring war on his own party and military, if Xi says it, and CCTV stuffs a microphone in your mouth, you tell the world how much you’re lovin’ it.
In today’s news, CCTV’s crack editorial team documents effusive official enthusiasm for Xi’s crackdown with cherry-picked vox populi quotes and lavish visual spreads.
As if to belay any lingering doubt on the part of the hapless official to be interviewed, CCTV goes the extra distance and films their ID badges, including it as part of an all-out effort to convince.
When Xi utters an order or mutters an ideological command, it is time for all good men to stand up and be counted!
Some of the images from January 8 news to remind viewers that Xi is the party and the party is Xi. The hammer and sickle nicely emphasizes this point as various Xi boosters wax poetic about the “self-revolution” spear-headed by Xi.
But even the most deferential, cowering and kowtowing official cannot put a candle to the words of Xi himself, why, his words are almost like law, or divine revelation, so here excerpts from an authorized summary of Xi’s anti-corruption speech as offered by Xinhua:
“The party’s Central Committee has unswervingly advanced the Party's self-reform and deepened its efforts to promote full and rigorous Party self-governance, which has guaranteed that the new journey gets off to a good start…Xi also stressed the importance of maintaining a tough stance against corruption and said that in the continued grave and complex situation, there is no possibility of stopping, slackening or compromising the anti-corruption campaign…
Noting that discipline inspection and supervision agencies are important forces driving the Party's self-reform, Xi said that these agencies should be loyal, reliable and pure in an absolute manner.
Xi ordered efforts to build a strengthened contingent of disciplinary inspection and supervision cadres, as well as efforts to forge them into an "iron army" that the Party can trust and that can meet the people's expectations.”
