corruption

In an effort to fight corruption at grassroots level in the countryside, a document has been jointly issued by the General Offices of the Central Committee of the CPC and the State Council. It advocates clean governance in rural areas and aims to improve the codes of conduct for party members and officials at grassroots level. China Daily said that everything, except state secrets, must be open to party members and villagers as to promote transparency.

I've gone through the Chinese document and haven't found anywhere mentioning "state secrets". It probably is politically correct to makeup anything like that in the mainstream media, even it doesn't exist.

On October 22, after watching CCTV's All-China News Broadcast, I found Jia Qinglin didn't show up at the meeting to celebrate the 70th Anniversary of Chinese Communist Party's (CPC) successful Long March in 1936, in which many prominent political figures attended. All members of the 9-member Politburo Standing Committee of the CPC except Jia showed. Party chief Hu Jintao has delivered a speech to pay tribute to the martyrs of the Long March.

At the meeting, several old-time political figures unexpectedly appeared on the chairman panel, they are Jiang Zemin, Li Peng, Zhu Rongji and Li Ruihuan. Before the meeting the four presbyters have made a high profile appearance in a visit to the Long March exhibition in Beijing, followed by a 2-minute news featuring their visit at the All-China News Broadcast via CCTV.

I sensed that Jiang and Zhu's sudden appearance and Jia's disappearance might indicate another round of anticorruption probe and political power reshuffle is underway. So, I went check the English section of 'people.com.cn' and 'gov.cn' for Jia's latest official activities. Both showed that his last official show-up was with Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Douglas Williams from UK. Then I wrote a piece titled, 'Jia Qinglin Can Escape No More'.