Ideological training sessions in communist China are notoriously boring. But in a Beijing rife with rumors of coups and purges, such a boring training session is causing excited speculation that another top official is being shown the door.
The Political and Legislative Affairs Committee (PLAC) is a very powerful organization in the apparatus of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), controlling the police, the Armed Police, the courts, and the procuratorate—nearly everything having to do with law enforcement. Zhou Yongkang has been China’s top cop for a long time—he has headed the PLAC since 2007 and before that was the Minister of Public Security.
On the evening of March 21 Party mouthpiece Xinhua announced the PLAC would hold a nationwide training session, the first meeting of which would take place on March 26. Large-scale nationwide training will start in late April, and 3,300 secretaries are expected to participate. This was also announced on Zhou’s nameplate page on People’s Daily Online.
There were a few odd things about this announcement. On March 19, Zhou had held a full meeting of the PLAC and never mentioned that a nationwide training session would meet in one week.
Update 4: Chinese Internet Allows Searches for ‘Live [Organ] Harvest’ (Mar. 25)
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The Modern ‘Games’ of China (Illustration)
The Beijing Olympics are four years gone, yet a variety of curious ‘games’ continue to play out in China with an array of characters including regime heavies Zhou Yongkang and Bo Xilai. Here we explore some of them.Bo Xilai, the former Party chief in the province-level city of Chongqing, and Zhou Yongkang have been core members of the Party faction led by former Party head Jiang Zemin. Jiang has contested with the current Party chief Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao for authority ever since they assumed office ten years ago.
On March 15, Zhou’s handpicked successor to head the PLAC, Bo Xilai, was placed under house arrest by the Central Guard Bureau, the agency responsible for the security of the CCP’s top leaders. Many bloggers assumed Zhou has now suffered Bo’s fate.
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UPDATE 1: Regime Mouthpiece Reveals Confusion Over Chinese Leadership
Another blogger wrote, “It looks like the Party secretary of the PLAC is a goner, and Party officials have to realign the formation.”
“This is how a power struggle is carried out in an imperial court: the top officials in the capital have to line up to make a public stance, followed by the army, then local government leaders. So secretaries of all local PLAC need to go to the capital to make a public stance. The Party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection will hunt down and remove the opponents.”
Reports of Zhou’s Arrest
Multiple sources have claimed that Zhou Yongkang has in fact been arrested, although no confirmation of these claims has so far been possible.Who are the major players engaged in the current infighting among the upper echelon of the Chinese Communist Party?
Major Players in Beijing Power Struggle
Wang—Bo—Zhou
Zhou has been the subject of rumors suggesting he might be on the way out ever since Wang Lijun spent the night in the U.S. Consulate in Chengdu on Feb. 6. Wang, the former Chongqing police chief and Bo Xilai’s former right-hand man, turned over a stack of documents to the U.S. Consulate. The next day, deputy ministers flown in from Beijing took charge of Wang.Wang’s attempted defection brought out into the open a power struggle the CCP leadership had preferred to keep out of public view.
The dissident website Boxun reported that at the U.S. Consulate Wang revealed Bo’s practice of corruption and also fingered Bo and Zhou as planning a coup after Xi Jingping ascended to head the CCP at the 18th Party Congress in October.
Longtime national security reporter Bill Gertz quoted a U.S. official as saying that Wang knew of “the efforts of the hardliners like Zhou Yongkang and Bo Xilai to upset the smooth succession of Xi Jinping.”
After the Wang incident, Zhou traveled to Chongqing, seeking to control events there and prevent any investigation of Bo.
But Zhou could not protect Bo in Beijing. At a March 14 press conference Premier Wen Jiabao publicly criticized the leadership in Chongqing, and the next day the state-run press announced Bo and his wife had been arrested.
If Zhou has been arrested in turn, this may not be the end of the reshuffling in Beijing. As the Apple Daily report indicates, other members of Jiang’s faction are assumed to be on the hot seat.
