When Wenguang Huang was nine years old, his grandmother became obsessed with her own death. Fearing cremation, she extracted from her family the promise to bury her after she died. This was in Xi’an, a city in central China, in the 1970s, when a national ban on all traditional Chinese practices, including burials, was strictly enforced. But Huang’s grandmother was persistent,
To those raised in the Marxist tradition, nothing in the media happens by accident. In China, the flagship newspapers are still the “throat and tongue” of the ruling party, and their work is directed by the Party’s Propaganda Department.
In the almost one-hundred-year existence of the Chinese Communist Party (C.C.P.), its current general secretary, Xi Jinping, is only the second leader clearly chosen by his peers. The first was Mao Zedong. Both men beat out the competition, and thus secured a legitimacy their predecessors lacked.1 Why was Xi chosen?The Beijing rumor mill had long indicated that the outgoing
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After the 1989 Tiananmen Incident, Chinese political struggles became milder and more mundane. Members of the Politburo and politicians of higher rank rarely were toppled (except for Chen Liangyu in 2006) and ideology seldom triggered significant rifts. Bo Xilai changed all that. He was a Politburo member and a favored candidate for a spot on the all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee when he was pulled down dramatically in 2012. His radical Maoist movement in Chongqing, where he was Communist Party Chief, sparked a red fervor with his throwback policies and disturbed the whole of Chinese political and economic society. Some Politburo Standing Committee members went to Chongqing and endorsed Bo’s venture while others refused to talk about it and warned of impending disaster. Quickly, an unprecedented division among China’s top leaders materialized. Even today, in front of the court where Bo is being tried in Jinan, Shandong province, in Eastern China, both supporters and detra