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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.

The flag carrier Malev has, just like the Hungarian economy in general, been struggling for quite some time so the closure did not come as a major surprise. It had accumulated almost EUR 300mn of debt and was grounded after failure to service those debts.

It was also running into problems with the EU Commission over allegedly illegal state aid from the Hungarian government, which is the main owner of Malev. It remains unclear what airline(s) will fill the void but two low cost airlines have already tried to seize the opportunity.  

Meanwhile, the Prime Minister Boc in neighboring Romania resigned as a result of public protest that took place throughout the country in January. People are protesting against political incompetence and economic austerity in general.

President Basescu and Prime Minister Boc have been targeted and their ruling Democratic Liberal Party has dropped sharply in the opinion polls. PM Boc defended the austerity measures, which have been applauded by the IMF and foreign analysts, but stepped down in order to “defuse political and social tension.”

President Basescu quickly nominated former foreign minister Mihai Razvan Ungureanu as Prime Minister. He promised to continue with the reforms and will now try to form a government. The winter of discontent is thus not over quite yet.