Party Official "Couldn't Stop" Three Day Wedding

An investigation has been launched into a deputy village chief from the Beijing suburb of Qingheying after it was reported that his son's wedding lasted for three days, and cost somewhere in the region of 1.6m RMB.

Stating that he was "well aware" of the Party's rules concerning lavish overspending on exactly this type of celebration, Ma Linxiang said that the bride's family paid for the epic wedding party, and that he couldn't stop them.  Ma admits that he spent 200,000 Yuan on a party that lasted two days in his village, but the one on Beijing was hosted at a convention centre at the Olympic village and included a couple of celebrities, and a troupe of performers.  When asked about the fleet of luxury cars involved, Ma said that they were just "borrowed" for the occasion.

The investigation continues.

Qiushi Lambasts Critical Posts Online

Hammering the message home that online message criticizing the government is A Bad Thing, the Communist Party's own journal has come out with some gems.  "Seeking Truth", a magazine, and highly effective cure for insomnia has said that online rumours are no better than the "big character posters" that were put up during The Cultural Revolution, often attacking an establishment or individual as being "bourgeois" or "counter-revolutionary".

“There are some who make use of the open freedom of cyberspace to engage in wanton defamation, attacking the party and the government.  The Internet is full of all kinds of negative news and critical voices saying the government only does bad things and everything it says is wrong.”

Yes, the Chinese government is coming up against that most insidious of terrorist insurgent - a person who goes online and whines about the government fouling things up.  Descending into rhetoric usually reserved from the North Korean News Agency, the communist rag went on to say

“In truth, the work of the Chinese government has received wide praise all over the world, even public opinion in Western countries can't deny that,” Qiushi said. “This is a great truth, and overly criticising the government violates that truth.”

So the yardstick of achievement is measured by how much Western countries acknowledge that you've done good things.  What's missing is any kind of understanding that it's not what you do, but how you do it.

By the standard of simply "achieving great things", then Hitler's Nazi government achieved wonderful, amazing things by having 100% employment in the country.  Everyone was hard at work making guns so that Germany could invade and slaughter people in other countries, and there's the whole Holocaust PR fail, but apart from the that, the economic was powering ahead and plenty of people had enough to eat.

Charles Xue, a microblogger on Weibo with over 12 million followers appeared on TV in handcuffs, telling the good masses how "freedom of speech cannot override the law".  Going after criticism online is going hinder the government rather than help it.  Driving liberal voices online deeper underground, widening the gulf between the people at the government can only foment more violent outbursts of rebellion, not whip the people into line as it's supposed to.

Could China's Austerity Drive Lead to a Mooncake Scandal?

China may well have saved the ocean's sharks with it's crackdown on officials spending thousands of RMB on lavish dinners to impress their friends, and now sales of mooncakes are about to be hit as the austerity drive targets the all important Mid-Autumn Festival Mooncake Giving Extravaganza.

Mooncakes, usually boxed in outlandish packaging, are a traditional foods that's eat around the time of the Mid-Autumn Festival.  To fully understand the important of the mooncake, which is a small round pastry with various fillings, ranging from the utterly disgusting (beef and peanut) to the bland (egg whites), one need only take a look at the number of scandals that have risen up in their name.

In 2011, news footage played on the Beijing subway routinely shows police smashing fake mooncake gangs as 8,000 boxes of fakes were discovered in Guangzhou.  The following year, another gang used mooncakes from 2011 (hopefully not from the same Guangzhou batch), put them in new packaging - complete with a few dead cockroaches - and sold them at a discount.  Such was the scale of the operation that a police raid on the factory recycling the cakes took an epic seven hours, and the goods confiscated filled five trucks.

Whether the crackdown on expensive moon shaped snacks this September 19th will increase the sales of dodgy mooncakes as officials continue to face scrutiny over their expenses remains to be seen.  The last thing China needs now is a Mooncake Scandal on top of everything else.

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Chinese Crackdown on Xinjiang...Christians

In spite of telling the Americans at last month's human rights talks that people in Xinjiang enjoy "unprecedented freedoms", Christian Solidarity Worldwide reports that a number of unregistered churches have been closed down by the police in the region.

In March, one such group in Yili was shut down by local police and the religious affairs bureau, and a residence used for church meetings in Kurla was searched by police equipped with guns and electric batons; a woman was later detained. In June, two meetings in Urumqi were disrupted by local police and security officials and two people were detained for short periods. One of the leaders was detained a second time in August when another meeting was disrupted by officials. He has since filed an application for administrative reconsideration. A Bible study leader detained in June after being charged with conducting “illegal” Christian activity is also filing for administrative reconsideration.

The report also goes on the say that the police present didn't show ID, or present any warrants, also they failed tell detainees why they were being arrested and questioned.  Good job, lads.

Read more at CSW

China's Revolution Needs Supersizing

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="460" caption="move along, nothing to protest about here"][/caption]

Chinese citizens were told to shout “We want food, we want work, we want housing, we want fairness”, referencing rising food and housing prices, the overqualified and underpaid ant-tribe, and massive government corruption and cronyism that has dogged the Chinese government since its inception.

While the protests in Egypt, Libya and Bahrain were gathering momentum, I found myself hoping that the same wouldn’t happen in China.  If it did, I explain on Facebook, the government crackdown would make Gadhafi’s violent response look like a paintballing outing for extremely nervous insurance salesmen.  The choice of venues (KFC and McDonalds) neatly illustrates the pampered nature of the Angry Young Men of China – we can have a protest, but we really need to go somewhere where we can get some food later on, possibly with a the local neighborhood American diplomat.

Suffice to say that the Chinese didn’t really grasp the nettle and give an all-out protest on the same scale as their Egyptian and Libyan counterparts.   A number of factors conspired against them a) they publicized the whole thing on Twitter which is banned in China, b) the Chinese authorities are stupid, but they’re not too stupid not to use Twitter to keep tabs on troublemakers c) they used Google Maps to pinpoint exactly were the protests were being held.  It was, to borrow one of Hannibal Lecter’s lines, a fledging protestor’s first attempt at a transformation, and not that great a success.  That said, at least the members of one of the world’s largest standing armies had something to other than stand.

The authorities didn’t really do themselves any favors either.  Fearing massive negative publicity, they duly phoned up every reporter in the city and told them not to go anywhere near Wangfujing or Tiananmen Square without special permission - which is a little like telling a two year old not to press, under any circumstances, the big red button with “danger – do not press” written in yellow and red letters above it.  If anyone should be arrested for subverting state power, it’s the Chinese idiots who spread news to the people who didn’t even know there was news in the first place to be spread.  It’s also given officials, as the 9/11 terror attacks in American gave the American officials, more wiggle room to collect in one place all the troublemakers, and any excuse to tighten the rules is a good excuse.

While their tactics have been quite simple, they have been quite effective – no one can argue that spraying water from a street cleaning van is a more acceptable than an M1 tank rumbling down the Wang Fu Jing.  If the dissidents get the idea that the most they have to deal with is getting a little bit wet (which, admittedly for Chinese people is on the same level as contracting leprosy) every weekend, they may get that little bit bolder.  It’s a shame that the Chinese police didn’t deal with the foreign news media.  Nothing makes a western report moist with anticipation more than a protest in China, but nothing eats up column inches like reports of Chinese police beating the living daylights out of foreign reporters and illegally detaining those covering a protest in China.

Related Articles

• China Continues Crackdown on Protests (time.com)


• U.S.: China 'illegally' harasses media (edition.cnn.com)


• Police but no protesters in Beijing (guardian.co.uk)


• China puts on show of force to block rally (behindthewall.msnbc.msn.com)


• Call for Demonstrations in China Draws More Police than Protesters (nytimes.com)


• Organizers call for 2nd round of demonstrations across China (cnn.com)


• China facing new calls for jasmine revolution (ki-media.blogspot.com)


• Inspiring manifesto from China's Jasmine revolution (boingboing.net)


• "China's jasmine revolution: police line streets of Beijing" and related posts (chinhdangvu.blogspot.com)


• Shanghai Tightens Security Ahead of China 'Jasmine' Rallies - Bloomberg (news.google.com)