Blog posts by Kristina Sandklef

As usual when Premier Wen talks about political reforms, he did not specify which reforms are needed. Instead he warned that if political reforms are not implemented the country could fall back into disorder similar to the Cultural Revolution.

The last phrase, Cultural Revolution, was an implicit criticism of Red Chongqing leader Bo Xilai who has been in troubles for several weeks since his former police chief, Wang Lijun, took refuge to the US consulate in Chengdu, apparently trying to defect (see previous posting) just days before Vice President Xi Jinping was due to go on his first official visit to the US. The Wang Lijun incident was probably as disturbing to the US as it was to China.

Wang Lijun appears to have ended up at the Ministry of State Security in Beijing and China watchers have followed Bo’s whereabouts closely ever since. Last week, Bo did not show up at the NPC on Thursday, and there were reports about suicides and arrests following the Wang incident, something that gave me flashbacks of Beijing 1995 when a similar scandal involving the Beijing vice mayor surfaced, which was the start of the Shanghai faction ousting the Beijing faction within the party.

Last Friday, Bo emerged again, blamed a cold for not being present at the NPC the day before and scolded foreign journalists for spreading false rumours about his son driving a red Ferrari and attending expensive schools in England and the US on corrupt money.

Today, Bo Xilai was sacked as party secretary in Chongqing and nobody really knows what will happen next, except that Bo’s future as a political leader in China is over. In best case, he will be investigated for poor personnel judgment hiring Wang Lijun as his assistant and then given some honorary post within the party.

In worst case he could face corruption charges and be sent to jail. That he was not fired before is likely due to the fact that at first there was the Xi trip to the US and then the NPC not to be disturbed. It is common practice in China to act like this; we witnessed a similar approach when the SARS epidemic was raging in Beijing together with loads of rumours making SMS traffic peak back in the spring of 2003.

The reasons why Bo was removed from his political positions in Chongqing are many. Some analysts say he was way too charismatic and thus posed a threat to the other contenders going for top leadership in Beijing this autumn and they used the Wang Lijun incident to oust him. Bo’s political campaigning in Chongqing trying to revive Cultural Revolution values by sending out red text messages to the inhabitants and making them sing old communist songs could have become too much to the more liberal leaders in Beijing.

What will happen next? Bo is replaced by Zhang Dejiang, currently Vice Premier, who has worked in provinces such as Jilin, Guangdong, and Zhejiang. He holds a degree in economics from the Kim Il-sung University in Pyongyang, where he studied in the late 1970s when the economic reforms in China were in its cradle. Apparently, he was in charge of the cover up of SARS in Guangdong in 2002, but appears to belong to the same faction as Bo Xilai, which means that he could be in for some damage control in Chongqing, but reforms are likely to continue in the city, though without the redness.

Some media have put forward Bo’s Chongqing model as being opposed to the Guangdong model represented by Wang Yang, and some even made the daring comparison of Chongqing being the North Korea model while Guangdong would be the Singapore model. I disagree with these comparisons even though the red songs coming from Chongqing did indeed remind me of the Cultural Revolution, which I believe few Chinese actually would like to return to.

Even if the new leader of Chongqing has a North Korean connection and apparently is fluent in Korean, it is unlikely that he will continue to pursue the return to old communism à la Cultural Revolution. If we see what he has done in both Zhejiang and Guangdong, it appears that he is a reform oriented politician who favours economic growth first. Besides the redness of the Chongqing model, it appears to have been experimenting with some social security policies, which were already in place before Bo arrived (and when Wang Yang, ironically, was the party secretary of Chongqing).

So even if today was a big day in Chinese politics and one step forward to the political leadership transition this autumn, reminding me of the old child rhyme “Ten little Indians”, the Chinese politics once again shows that they will continue their reforms, but not in the “red” direction.

As some might have noted, the Work Report lowered the growth target from 8 percent to 7,5 percent for 2012. This came as no surprise for us and other China watchers. For the entire Five Year Plan (2011-2015), growth target is set at 7 percent and a lower growth target rarely means that this will happen in reality.

For example, last year the growth target was 8 percent and growth still ended at 9,4 percent. Thus, we still expect economic growth to land at around 8-8,5 percent in 2012.

Instead, the Work Report’s targets should be seen as a message to local governments in China that the central government understands that the international financial crisis will affect the economic growth in the provinces and Beijing does not expect growth to be as high as last year.

A picture of China’s currently highest sky-scrapper, the Shanghai World Financial Center.
Photo: Elisa Hirn

The lower growth target also signals that Beijing is not going to implement a huge stimulus program as it did in 2008-2009 during the previous financial crisis. The logic is that if you set an attainable target it is easier to reach and this is also why the inflation target is 4 percent, rather than 3,5 percent, which is the figure most analysts believe will be the total inflation rate in 2012.

Other news so far from the NPC is that China will continue to improve its health care system, build more social housing, increase both its defense budget and its budget for internal security.  The defense budget will be increased by 11,2 percent to RMB  670.3 billion, which is a lower percentage increase than previous years.

The budget for internal security remains bigger than for the defense with RMB 701.8 billion, which many observers interpret as the Chinese being worried about social instability this year of leadership transition.

Wukan made the international headlines a couple of months ago after its villagers staged a massive protest against a land grab with too small compensation and to get back the body of one of their protest leaders, Xue Jinbo, who had mysteriously died in custody. Meanwhile, a journalist from British The Daily Telegraph was tweeting the events to the world from within Wukan, which made the incident quite unique.
 
After the angry villagers had driven the Communist Party cadres out of the village, the provincial leadership promised to investigate what really had happened to Xue and elections of a new village committee were to be held.

The protests subsided and one of the protest leaders, Lin Zulian, became temporary party secretary of the village until elections with sealed ballots had been held to elect a new village leadership. Since then Wukan has been hailed as having the first free democratic election in China and the phrase ”Learn from Wukan” has since been used in other protests in other parts of China.
 
But how important is really Wukan for China and its future democratic development? I would say that the most important thing with Wukan is that Guangdong’s party secretary Wang Yang, one of the candidates for a seat in the Communist Party Standing Committee of the Politbureau later this year, actually handled the situation very well. Wang Yang is known for being quite liberal and also for promoting ”Happy Guangdong”, where the province’s inhabitants are supposed to get happier, which is to be measured by a happiness index.

One of the main streets in the city of Chongqing in China.

Rather than being a part of democratizing China – village elections have after all been held in China since the 1980s, some of them more democratic than others – Wukan has been part of the leadership struggles taking place as seven of the nine members of the Standing Committee are leaving this autumn.
 
As Chinese leadership selections are secretive, it is hard to know what is really going on behind the scenes. The fifth generation of leaders coming up is the first generation that has not been picked by one of the revolutionaries and it is also believed that there could be experiments with inner party democracy selecting the new leaders. Seen is this light, Wukan was thus a positive move for Wang Yang.
 
Last week, the party secretary of Chongqing, Bo Xilai, known for busting mobsters in his city and trying to revive communism à la Cultural Revolution creating ”Red Chongqing”, had a serious blow. One of his closest allies, the former vice mayor and police chief Wang Lijun who helped Bo to bust thousands of corrupt mobsters in the city a couple of years ago, turned up at the US consulate in Chengdu apparently trying to seek refuge from Bo, possibly seeking asylum.

Nobody really knows what happened, but it seems that Wang is not ill getting vacation style treatment, as Chongqing authorities claimed on their website, but is now in Beijing taken care of by the Communist Party’s Disciplinary Committee, which is the party’s main watch dog for corruption. Was this an attempt by Beijing to bring down popular Bo Xilai to prevent him from being one of the top leaders in the fifth generation leadership? Or is Bo strong enough to survive anyway?
 
Meanwhile, vice president and most likely the future party leader and president, Xi Jinping made an official visit to the US this week. His visit to the US, where his daughter studies at Harvard under an alias, was important for him to boost his international reputation and showing the Chinese back home that he will be able to handle the important relationship with the US as the new leader of China.

The visit appears to have gone well, with Xi talking agriculture in Iowa, shipping in Los Angeles, meeting Obama and having lunch with Hillary Clinton and Joseph Biden in Washington. Back home in Beijing the secretive power struggle for the seats in the Standing Committee continues and we will for sure see more political struggle this year.

Chinese authorities estimate that 3,2 billion trips, including intercity flights, trains, boats, and local buses to remote villages, will take place during the six weeks around the national holiday starting on Monday. An estimated 250 million people are going home by train, which already made the online booking system for railway tickets slow and even crash when it got 1,66 million hits once.

Mainland transport, energy and security authorities have been put on high alert by Beijing to make the return of migrants run smoothly. Likely, the authorities also hope that there will be no huge snow storms as in the Chinese New Year back in 2008 when millions of migrants got stuck in southern China unable to return home.

To many Chinese, the Chinese New Year holiday is the only time during the year when they can return home to their home villages and hometowns. This is especially important for the rural migrants who have left the rural, poorer hinterlands for the coastal, more prosperous regions to get better paid jobs in factories, construction sites and urban service sector where they work as maids or custodians.

Chinese New Year begins on Monday with the Year of the Water Dragon.

Many rural peasant migrants have left their children behind in the rural areas as it is hard for rural children to enroll in urban schools, which requires an urban registration. Instead, the rural children stay with their grandparents in the countryside and hope to join their parents when they are old enough to work in the cities. Sometimes, the parents only return home once every second year, making the trip back home even more important.

The coming two weeks, China is basically closed down as the Chinese families congregate making dumplings, jiaozi, sticky rice cakes, nian gao (which sounds like “a year higher” in Chinese) or spring rolls, depending on where in China you live. Jiaozi are especially popular in northern China, and there is also a saying that the more jiaozi you eat during the New Year celebration, the more money you will make the coming year.

Chinese New Year is also celebrated with massive use of fire crackers, which are said to scare away the old year, this time the old rabbit. To a Westerner like myself, it feels like being in a war zone as the fire crackers never seem to end, and accidents are common despite SMS-warnings from the government to be careful when setting them off.

Chinese employers usually pay out a 13th month of salary to its employees and there are big New Year’s parties with food and karaoke. Gifts are also important and the Chinese are estimated to spend 17 percent of their annual spending on gifts for the New Year celebrations. Popular gifts include expensive liquor, nicely boxed in chocolate, food specialties and of course the hong bao, the red envelope with money that people give to children.

Despite the joy of celebrating the Chinese New Year, not everybody is happy. According to some surveys, many Chinese worry about the high expenses for gifts, heavy traffic and the troubles getting back home safely, not to mention the social pressure singles feel as they return home and their parents want them to get married. But on the Chinese Internet, there are now ads for renting a fake boyfriend or girlfriend over the holiday to keep your family happy, at least this year.