If you smell anything burning, it’s likely your Internet cable melting from the heat of all these rumors. Which is why at Sinica we turn our unforgiving gaze this week at unsubstantiated press, foreign and domestic, focusing first on reports of heightened police security in Beijing, midnight tank appearances, gunshots near the square, luxury car crashes, and even whispers of a coup d’etat.
Huang Bo, founder and lead singer of the funk band The Verse, is a Chinese artist who looks to the West for musical and spiritual inspiration. Huang grew up in Changsha and moved to Guangzhou in the 1990s to study oil painting at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. It was there that he formed a grunge/metal band called Blind Influx and his musical career began. In the late ’90s he moved to Beijing and joined up with guitarist Guan Wei. Together they formed The Verse in 1999. A decade later, Huang now lives and works in Xiamen, Fujian province.
In China, the year is traditionally divided into periods based on the moon’s orbit around the earth and the sun’s path across the sky. This lunisolar calendar is laden with myths and celebrated by rituals that allowed Chinese to mark time and make sense of their world.
For months, thousands of villagers in Wukan, Guangdong Province, staged large protests over illegal land seizures, rigged elections and official corruption. The unrest started in September, and as the months wore on they attracted nationwide, then worldwide, attention. Finally, an election in March put a coda on the Wukan protests.
A typically opaque investigation can begin with a tip from a Shanghai Stock Exchange official and end with a ten-year jail term for a businessman convicted of insider trading. What happens in between is a carefully guarded secret.
Likewise hidden from the public eye are the job’s inherent dangers.
“We can get rid of a person for 300,000 yuan” was an indirect threat delivered to one securities inspector after he started working on an insider trading tip, according to an inspector who helped investigate the suspicious, Shenzhen-listed cement company.
In a China accustomed to glacial political change, Bo Xilai’s dramatic fall from power this week has stunned observers nationwide. Joining us to help make sense of things is Guardian correspondent Tania Branigan, who helps review what exactly happened to the former Chongqing Party Secretary and once Politburo contender.
Sinica is coming out a bit earlier than usual this week: We were lucky enough to catch Jeffrey Wasserstrom on Monday during a well-timed visit to Beijing, and dragged him into the studio to get his views on the recent elections in Wukan, what is happening in Beijing right now with the CPPCC, and also his more general thoughts on the way people tend to look into China’s past when seeking a mirror for its present: what comparisons are actually useful or valid for this current period?
Work on China’s nuclear power plants started picking up again about a year after the Fukushima disaster in Japan. But the meltdown in March 2011 was still fresh on the minds of four retired cadres in Anhui Province’s Wangjiang County.
They filed a petition opposing the Pengze nuclear power project in neighboring Jiangxi province, eventually winning local government support. This kind of official opposition to a nuclear project is almost unheard of in China.
Since 1988, China has undergone one of the largest, but least understood experiments in grassroots democracy. Across 600,000 villages in China, with almost a million elections, some three million officials have been elected. The Chinese government believes that this is a step towards "democracy with Chinese characteristics". But to many involved in them, the elections have been mired by corruption, vote-rigging and cronyism. This book looks at the history of these elections, how they arose, what they have achieved and where they might be going, exploring the specific experience of elections by those who have taken part in them — the villagers in some of the most deprived areas of China. —Zed Books
In August 2011, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress issued the Criminal Procedure Law Draft Revisions, which were then submitted for approval at the March 2012 meeting of the National People’s Congress. This Amnesty International report details the organization’s assessment of the Draft Revisions and explains why they would bring about an overall set-back to the protection of civil and political rights within the criminal justice process in China and to the government's long stated “demand, pursuit and practice” to “govern the country according to law and build a socialist country under the rule of law.”
