Thursday 26 April 2012

Bo Xilai Is Said to Have Spied on Other Top Officials

When Hu Jintao, China’s top leader, picked up the telephone last August to talk to a senior anticorruption official visiting Chongqing, special devices detected that he was being wiretapped — by local officials in that southwestern metropolis.

Wednesday 25 April 2012

Hong Kong Probes $2.5 Million Payment in Kwok Case

Hong Kong's anti-graft agency is looking into payments totalling more than US$2.5 million to a former top public servant as part of the city's corruption investigation involving two billionaire brothers who run Asia's largest property developer.

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Statement from Bo Guagua to The Harvard Crimson

Harvard Kennedy School student Bo Guagua corresponded with Crimson staff writers Hana N. Rouse and Justin C. Worland on Tuesday via his Kennedy School and Google email accounts and sent The Crimson a statement, which is published verbatim below.

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Chinese students beaten, robbed in Australia

Australia, land of racists.

Australia's Mandarin-speaking ex-leader Kevin Rudd on Tuesday weighed into the case of two Chinese students who were burned and beaten in Sydney, sparking a media storm in their homeland, reports said.

Monday 23 April 2012

Probe into Bo family’s Hong Kong links

Beijing sends task force to investigate allegations the disgraced former party boss has assets hoarded here

Review of jail term cut for good conduct

A longstanding scheme that gives prisoners an automatic and unconditional one-third reduction of their jail term for good conduct is set to be replaced, in a move to cut down the number of convicts who keep returning to a life of crime.

Showflats to show fact, not fiction, come May

Developers will have to provide drawn-to-scale plans, inform buyers of changes

After Scandal, China Takes a Moral Inventory

Pleading with mafiosos who had cornered him while he was on a study tour of Italy, Wang Lijun, the former police chief of the Chinese city of Chongqing whose dramatic bolt to a U.S. consulate in February set off China’s biggest political crisis in two decades, explained his mission.

Disgraced Chinese Official’s Loyalists Are Rounded Up for Questioning

Officials in critical Communist Party and government posts in Chongqing who are considered loyalists of Bo Xilai, the city’s deposed party chief, are being detained as part of the wide-ranging investigation into Mr. Bo and his family, according to a Chongqing official and other people with knowledge of political appointments in the city.

Flamboyance of Bo’s son ‘a factor in family’s fall’

His antics are said to have angered leaders of Communist Party

Brazen and eccentric, the cop at centre of China scandal

The raucous diners in a hilltop restaurant in southwest China ignored a waiter’s request to quieten down after a complaint from a petite woman at a nearby table.

Frenzied Hours for U.S. on Fate of a China Insider

On the evening of Feb. 6, a vice mayor of a major Chinese city who had a reputation as a crime fighter turned up at the American Consulate in Chengdu in an agitated state, telling a tale of corruption and murder that has ensnared the Obama administration in a scandal it wants nothing to do with.

Master of the Media Spotlight Is Now Its Victim in China

Intimidating and courting Chinese journalists, Bo Xilai, an ambitious Communist Party official, fuelled his political career by ably shaping his public image and seizing the spotlight in a way no peer had as he governed a Chinese city. But with his purge from the party’s top ranks this month, Mr. Bo has suddenly found himself the target of the same media apparatus that he once so carefully manipulated, and that now vilifies him in the name of the party’s leaders.

Torture claims emerge in China’s Bo Xilai scandal

The Chinese politician who launched an attack on organised crime is accused of heading a police apparatus that carried out “evil” operations against its enemies.

Party rethinks twin-role postings

Bo’s downfall prompts calls to stop awarding powerful regional positions to Politburo members because the system lacks checks and balances

Political fallout of Bo Xilai probe shows up China’s outdated system of government

Lanxin Xiang says the political fallout of the Bo Xilai investigation exposes a major flaw in China’s governing model - secretive decision-making at the top that is badly out of step with society today

The homes China builds may make or break it

Nine years have passed since Beijing embarked on a programme to cool China’s overheating housing market. Only recently have its tightening measures started to work with new supply stalled and prices no longer rising.

China scandal ‘exposes elite’s impunity’

A sensational political scandal unfolding in China has exposed the high level of impunity enjoyed by elites at a time when social tensions are rising, highlighting the need for change, observers say.

Sunday 22 April 2012

For love or money?

Theories abound in China about Bo family’s link to Briton’s murder

Princelings still rule despite Bo’s ouster

Their political clout will rise further when leadership transition takes place this year

Corruption rampant in state-owned enterprises in mainland China

For talented young mainlanders, they have proved to be secure, safe ... and great avenues for illicit gain

China’s selective reading of history weakens its South China Sea claims

Philip Bowring says China’s ethnocentric reading of the past neither bolsters its territorial claims in the South China Sea, nor helps to promote peace with its neighbours

KMT spies infiltrated colonial police

Special Branch - the counter-espionage arm of the colonial police - was infiltrated by Kuomintang spies plotting terrorist attacks on the mainland and in Hong Kong, intelligence reports released by the British government reveal.

Shoddy schools, grand offices

Audit in wake of Sichuan disaster points to school building flaws, overspending on vanity projects, but fails to mention scale of misconduct nor any sanctions