China's Nanjing Mayor Ji Jianye under investigation

[Ray]

China's Nanjing Mayor Ji Jianye under investigation

The mayor of China's eastern city of Nanjing is under investigation for corruption, state media say, amid an ongoing high-profile clean-up campaign.

Ji Jianye was being investigated for "suspected severe violations of disciplines and laws", a brief report from Xinhua news agency said.

Mr Ji appears to be one of the most senior targets of the campaign to date.

It was launched by President Xi Jinping after he took over as Communist Party chief in November 2012.

He warned that public anger over corruption threatened the survival of the party, and promised to pursue "tigers" - top-level officials - as well as "flies".

Several high-profile officials have been felled in recent months, including the former railways minister and a top economic planner.

A number of senior PetroChina executives are also under investigation.

Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu province, is a major city home to about seven million people.

A report on Communist Party mouthpiece People's Daily said Mr Ji's case could involve about 20m yuan ($3.3m, £2m) in funds.

According to Xinhua, he has been mayor of Nanjing since January 2010 and is also deputy party secretary.

BBC News - China's Nanjing Mayor Ji Jianye under investigation

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Apparently, this is Xi Jumping's sophisticated style of copying Mao's Cultural Revolution to get rid of challengers to the Throne!

 

[Ray]

China 'smiling official' Yang Dacai jailed for 14 years

A Chinese official who caused an outcry by grinning at the scene of a bus crash has been given a 14-year jail sentence for corruption.

A Xi'an court found Yang Dacai guilty of taking bribes and possessing "a huge amount of property of unclear origin", state-run news agency Xinhua said.

The bribes and illicit property would be confiscated by the state treasury, Xinhua added.

Several Chinese officials have been tried for corruption in recent months.

Yang pleaded guilty to corruption charges last week, saying he could not explain where wealth of 5m yuan ($817,000; £527,195) came from.

Yang was formerly head of a work safety body in Shaanxi province.

He attracted attention after photos showed him smiling at the scene of a bus crash which killed 36 people in August 2012.

Angry internet users then found several pictures of him wearing luxury watches. They argued that Yang could not have afforded the watches on his civil servant salary.

Following a probe, Yang was sacked for "serious wrongdoing" and then expelled from the Communist Party in February.

'Legal income'

Responding to criticism that he grinned at the scene of the crash, he said: "My heart was heavy when I reached the scene... Junior officials appeared nervous when they were updating me on the situation.

Chinese netizens profiled Yang's luxury watch collection]

"I was trying to get them to relax a little, so maybe, in an unguarded moment, I got a little too relaxed myself."

He also said, before his trial, that he "used legal income" to buy a number of watches, saying that the most expensive one he owned was worth 35,000 yuan ($5,550, £3,420).

President Xi Jinping has vowed to crack down on bribery in China and launched a anti-corruption campaign as his first public initiative after taking office.

Several high-profile officials have been felled in recent months, including the former railways minister and a top economic planner.

Internet users are also increasingly pursuing those perceived as having done wrong through online exposes and campaigns.

But in recent weeks there have been signs that this has worried the authorities, with a number of journalists and bloggers arrested on charges including "rumour-mongering".

BBC News - China 'smiling official' Yang Dacai jailed for 14 years

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Xi's 'Cultural Revolution' continues with speed!

 

[Dinesh_Kumar]

OT, but growth in Chinese cities largely due to efforts of the Mayor and local City Officials. Many have become famous in their own right, like ex. PM Zhu Rhongzi (Shanghai Mayor?) . Contrast to India, where it is political dole to appoint the "Worshipful" Mayor, a lackluster personality, who is anonymous to common citizens and as effective as a rubber duck !

 

[Ray]

Mayors in China become a political liability to the Central leadership at Beijing.

The Chinese political leadership is all corrupt including Xi.

It will be noticed that the Mayors who get too popular (and their good work enthuses the common man and is known all around China) are the ones who are axed before they become a threat to the Head of the CCP ladder!

 

[Ray]

Xi Jinping Millionaire Relations Reveal Fortunes of Elite


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Xi Jinping Millionaire Relations Reveal Fortunes of Elite

By Bloomberg News - Jun 29, 2012 1:02 PM GMT+0530
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Xi Jinping, the man in line to be China's next president, warned officials on a 2004 anti-graft conference call: "Rein in your spouses, children, relatives, friends and staff, and vow not to use power for personal gain."
As Xi climbed the Communist Party ranks, his extended family expanded their business interests to include minerals, real estate and mobile-phone equipment, according to public documents compiled by Bloomberg.

Those interests include investments in companies with total assets of $376 million; an 18 percent indirect stake in a rare- earths company with $1.73 billion in assets; and a $20.2 million holding in a publicly traded technology company. The figures don't account for liabilities and thus don't reflect the family's net worth.

No assets were traced to Xi, who turns 59 this month; his wife Peng Liyuan, 49, a famous People's Liberation Army singer; or their daughter, the documents show. There is no indication Xi intervened to advance his relatives' business transactions, or of any wrongdoing by Xi or his extended family.

While the investments are obscured from public view by multiple holding companies, government restrictions on access to company documents and in some cases online censorship, they are identified in thousands of pages of regulatory filings.

The trail also leads to a hillside villa overlooking the South China Sea in Hong Kong, with an estimated value of $31.5 million. The doorbell ringer dangles from its wires, and neighbors say the house has been empty for years. The family owns at least six other Hong Kong properties with a combined estimated value of $24.1 million.

Standing Committee

Xi has risen through the party over the past three decades, holding leadership positions in several provinces and joining the ruling Politburo Standing Committee in 2007. Along the way, he built a reputation for clean government.

He led an anti-graft campaign in the rich coastal province of Zhejiang, where he issued the "rein in" warning to officials in 2004, according to a People's Daily publication. In Shanghai, he was brought in as party chief after a 3.7 billion- yuan ($582 million) scandal.

A 2009 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing cited an acquaintance of Xi's saying he wasn't corrupt or driven by money. Xi was "repulsed by the all-encompassing commercialization of Chinese society, with its attendant nouveau riche, official corruption, loss of values, dignity, and self- respect," the cable disclosed by Wikileaks said, citing the friend. Wikileaks publishes secret government documents online.
A U.S. government spokesman declined to comment on the document.

Carving Economy

Increasing resentment over China's most powerful families carving up the spoils of economic growth poses a challenge for the Communist Party. The income gap in urban China has widened more than in any other country in Asia over the past 20 years, according to the International Monetary Fund.

"The average Chinese person gets angry when he hears about deals where people make hundreds of millions, or even billions of dollars, by trading on political influence," said Barry Naughton, professor of Chinese economy at the University of California, San Diego, who wasn't referring to the Xi family specifically.

Scrutiny of officials' wealth is intensifying before a once-in-a-decade transition of power later this year, when Xi and the next generation of leaders are set to be promoted. The ouster in March of Bo Xilai as party chief of China's biggest municipality in an alleged graft and murder scandal fueled public anger over cronyism and corruption. It also spurred demands that top officials disclose their wealth in editorials in two Chinese financial publications and from microbloggers. Bo's family accumulated at least $136 million in assets, Bloomberg News reported in April.

Revolutionary Leader

Xi and his siblings are the children of the late Xi Zhongxun, a revolutionary fighter who helped Mao Zedong win control of China in 1949 with a pledge to end centuries of inequality and abuse of power for personal gain. That makes them "princelings," scions of top officials and party figures whose lineages can help them wield influence in politics and business.

Most of the extended Xi family's assets traced by Bloomberg were owned by Xi's older sister,Qi Qiaoqiao, 63; her husband Deng Jiagui, 61; and Qi's daughter Zhang Yannan, 33, according to public records compiled by Bloomberg.

Deng held an indirect 18 percent stake as recently as June 8 in Jiangxi Rare Earth & Rare Metals Tungsten Group Corp. Prices of the minerals used in wind turbines and U.S. smart bombs have surged as China tightened supply.

Yuanwei Group

Qi and Deng's share of the assets of Shenzhen Yuanwei Investment Co., a real-estate and diversified holding company, totaled 1.83 billion yuan ($288 million), a December 2011 filing shows. Other companies in the Yuanwei group wholly owned by the couple have combined assets of at least 539.3 million yuan ($84.8 million).

A 3.17 million-yuan investment by Zhang in Beijing-based Hiconics Drive Technology Co. (300048) has increased 40-fold since 2009 to 128.4 million yuan ($20.2 million) as of yesterday's close in Shenzhen.

Deng, reached on his mobile phone, said he was retired. When asked about his wife, Zhang and their businesses across the country, he said: "It's not convenient for me to talk to you about this too much." Attempts to reach Qi and Zhang directly or through their companies by phone and fax, as well as visits to addresses found on filings, were unsuccessful.

New Postcom

Another brother-in-law of Xi Jinping, Wu Long, ran a telecommunications company named New Postcom Equipment Co. The company was owned as of May 28 by relatives three times removed from Wu -- the family of his younger brother's wife, according to public documents and an interview with one of the company's registered owners.

New Postcom won hundreds of millions of yuan in contracts from state-owned China Mobile Communications Corp., the world's biggest phone company by number of users, according to analysts at BDA China Ltd., a Beijing-based consulting firm that advises technology companies.
Dozens of people contacted over the past two months wouldn't comment about the Xi family on the record because of the sensitivity of the issue. Details from Web pages profiling one of Xi Jinping's nieces and her British husband were deleted after the two people were contacted.
The total assets of companies owned by the Xi family gives the breadth of their businesses and isn't an indication of profitability. Hong Kong property values were based on recent transactions involving comparable homes.

Identity Cards

Bloomberg's accounting included only assets, property and shareholdings in which there was documentation of ownership by a family member and an amount could be clearly assigned. Assets were traced using public and business records, interviews with acquaintances and Hong Kong and Chinese identity-card numbers.

In cases where family members use different names in mainland China and in Hong Kong, Bloomberg verified identities by speaking to people who had met them and through multiple company documents that show the same names together and shared addresses.

Xi Jinping Millionaire Relations Reveal Fortunes of Elite - Bloomberg

 

[Ray]

China's leader, Xi Jinping, consolidates power with crackdowns on corruption, Internet

After Xi Jinping took over as head of China's Communist Party in December, some liberals dared to hope that change was in store for the world's most populous nation.

Xi's father, a veteran party leader, had a reputation for open-mindedness and moderation; Xi quickly embraced the idea of economic reform and even seemed to hint at some loosening of China's one-party system.

Almost no one noticed when Xi reportedly told Russian President Vladimir Putin in March that their "personalities" were similar.

But now, six months later, Xi appears to be more of a Putin than a Mikhail Gorbachev, behaving like a leader more interested in consolidating his power and ensuring the survival of an authoritarian system than in adopting significant political reforms.

"The fundamental priority for him is to guarantee the ruling position of the party," said historian Zhang Lifan. "From the bottom of his heart, Xi Jinping wants to be a strong man. But I am not optimistic. In my understanding, a strong man should be creative. I don't see any new

Xi was something of an enigma when he took over from Hu Jintao as China's supreme leader in an eagerly anticipated transfer of power. There was, after all, no election campaign to introduce him to China; instead, his ascent came about as the result of compromises between factions in the Communist Party, reached entirely behind closed doors.

Complicating matters, Xi has sent different messages as he has sought to unify the party behind him. He has promised economic reforms but urged his party colleagues to promote the ideology of Marx and Mao. He has cast himself as a nationalist, determined to restore China to its ancient glories, but his "Chinese dream" seems mostly about achieving middle-class comfort. He has brought new energy to the relationship with the United States while simultaneously cozying up to Russia.

But the emerging portrait of China's new leader is of a man who wants to reinvigorate the Communist Party without relinquishing its stranglehold on Chinese politics. He looks set to become a stronger leader than his cautious predecessor, Hu Jintao, but he is no radical reformer, experts say.

Xi's signature initiative so far has been what he has called a "thorough cleanup" of the party, with cadres told to "take baths" to purify themselves of greed, extravagance, laziness and hedonism, to reconnect with the grass roots and to firmly adhere to Marxist ideology.

A profile in a regional newspaper last month painted a picture of Xi as a "simple, low-profile, amiable and practical" man, who ate steamed buns with ordinary folk when he worked as a local-level party secretary in Hebei province in the early 1980s and used old clothes to patch his worn mattress. It seemed designed to cast Xi as the true successor of Mao, a man connected with the "masses."

In reality, Xi's family has been able to accumulate assets worth hundreds of millions of dollars, according to a Bloomberg News report. But he is clearly aware that the party's image has been tarnished by lavish displays of wealth.

Xi's second, and related, campaign has been a wide-ranging attempt to battle corruption, to bring down both the "tigers" and the "flies" — the high-ranking and lower-level officials whose actions have undercut the party's popularity.

Both campaigns reflect party tactics employed since the days of Mao. They are attempts to bolster the party's legitimacy that are also useful tools to bash Xi's rivals.

So when corruption investigations were opened into state-owned PetroChina in August, experts saw not only a tough attempt to rein in a powerful vested interest group but also an attack on proteges of former security chief Zhou Yongkang, who had crossed Xi during a factional power struggle last year.

Xi realizes that Chinese people are angry about corruption, but his attempts to address the problem will almost inevitably fall short, experts say.

"There is a pretty hard and deep and wide attempt to look at everybody's books," said Jeremy Goldkorn, the founder of a media research firm in Beijing. "But what will inevitably happen is, one, it will be used to pursue vendettas, and two, because they won't give up press control, because they won't open up the party to outside scrutiny — because they are not able to address the systemic problems — it won't be effective."

But it is the third campaign that has done the most to unsettle liberals — a crackdown launched on dissent and the limited freedoms of speech afforded by social media. Popular bloggers and businessmen have been arrested, and humiliating televised confessions extracted, in ways that carried faint echoes of Mao-era justice.

Instructions have reportedly also been distributed in recent months to officials throughout China banning discussion of "dangerous Western influences" such as universal values, freedom of speech and civil rights.

Journalists say they are being more heavily censored this year than last. University professors say that they have been discouraged from speaking to foreign media and that there is widespread disillusionment within their ranks.

"At least under Hu Jintao we had hope," said one professor at a major university in Beijing, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "Under Xi, we have no hope."

Xi is the son of a veteran Communist leader, Xi Zhongxun, who was purged and imprisoned under Mao. Rehabilitated under reformist leader Deng Xiaoping, the elder Xi helped champion the economic liberalization that began in southern China in 1979. But he was sidelined again after he was thought to have opposed the use of force to break up the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

When Xi Jinping traveled to the economic powerhouse of Shenzhen in southern China shortly after taking over the party, the symbolism seemed unmistakable — like Deng and his father, Xi intended to open up China's still state-dominated economy.

Then, when he declared in February that no organization should be above the rule of law or the constitution, liberals allowed themselves to dream that he might also consider meaningful political reform.

In March, shortly after being named president, Xi visited Russia and compared his character to Putin's, according to the Kremlin's Russian-language transcript. At the time, the remark, which did not appear in the English transcript, did not draw attention. Six months later, it rings increasingly true, says Zhang, the historian, who accuses Xi of moving toward a "new authoritarianism."

Some commentators are inclined to give Xi the benefit of the doubt, arguing that the clampdown on social media might not be his idea but instead the work of a hard-line faction running the powerful Propaganda Department. Others, such as Zhang Ming, a political science professor at Renmin University of China, say Xi's actions are simply tactics.

"There are problems in the party, and Xi wants to concentrate on handling that," he said. "Cracking down on street protests and the Internet are just showing he doesn't want more external chaos while he is trying to unify his authority from within."

Similarly, Robert Lawrence Kuhn, a corporate strategist and adviser to the Chinese government, believes that Xi is merely protecting his left flank as he prepares to undertake significant economic reforms.

"The way to stop reform is to appeal to a nationalistic view, to accuse reformers of bowing down to the West," he said. "Knowing that, Xi gets out in front of that. Nobody can accuse him of being soft. He has totally buttoned up the entire left."

Xi's plans for the economy may become clearer at an important party plenary meeting in November. But even if his recent crackdowns on dissent are largely tactical, it is becoming clear that political change is not in the cards for the foreseeable future.

The twin traumas of the Tiananmen Square protests and the Soviet Union's collapse produced a collective determination among Communist leaders in China to maintain the party's monopoly on political power, analysts say.

"The main, single, ferocious idea of the party is that there is not going to be a Chinese Gorbachev," said James Mann, author of "The China Fantasy," a book that aims to explode the assumption that economic progress inexorably leads to democracy.

"They are committed to a collective leadership, where nobody can get too far out in front of the others," he said. "They are not open to restraints on the power of the party." There was no reason to think Xi wanted to relax the party's hold on power, Mann added. "And if he did, he wouldn't be allowed to."

China's leader, Xi Jinping, consolidates power with crackdowns on corruption, Internet - Washington Post

 

[Ray]

In any dictatorship, you have to watch your back since there are too many who would vie for your position.

In a democracy, it is not that easy, though it can happen, as it happened in Australia, because you will finally have t face the wrath of the voters.

That is what happened in Australia.

In a dictatorship you have to be on the guard and keep scheming how to get rid of opponents who threaten.

Mao did it in a ruthless way through the Red Guards and the Cultural Revolution.

Xi is doing it in a sophisticated way through a moral line against corruption which the common man would support and delighted with and knowing that all bigwigs are corrupt.

He is aware that nothing about him can come out since the media is his to control and so is the Internet.

Hence, he is happily manoeuvring public opinion, he media and Internet in his favour since he is the Dictator and he has the Laogai to ensure stifling dissent or the power of others to overthrow him!