Yala Governor Dethrat Simsiri pictures removed from internet

Yala Governor Dethrat Simsiri pictures removed from internet

once Thailand run outta gossips the nail southern Thai Muslims as a tactic of Islamist separatists conducting an insurgency in Thailan’s southernmost provinces.

Now be cool and read the Media Horse Manure, Ain’t Fuckn’ Delicious I was there. I warned you!

 

Bomb attacks in Thailand have killed at least 10 people and wounded more than 70 in the center of a southern provincial capital.

The blasts rocked the center of the town of Yala at about midday on Saturday. Yala Governor Dethrat Simsiri said there had been three explosions within a 100-meter (110-yard) radius in the commercial district over a period of 10 minutes.

Two of the bombs were believed to have been hidden in motorcycles, while the other was in a car.

Several shops and houses near the scene were ablaze after the powerful explosion, which also damaged cars and motorcycles.

A policeman was also reported to have been wounded in a separate motorcycle bomb attack in Mae Lan district of neighboring Pattani province.

Such bombings have been cited as a tactic of Islamist separatists conducting an insurgency in Thailan’s southernmost provinces.

The region is formerly an independent Malay Muslim sultanate which was annexed by Thailand in 1909. There have been daily bombings and shootings ever since the decades-old insurgency resurfaced in 2004.

In a separate incident, an explosion caused a fire at a hotel in the Hat Yai district in Song Kha province . Officials say five people have died and dozens injured.

It remains unclear whether the explosion was caused by a bomb or a gas leak.

QUIT BITCHN’ AND GET QUEEN’S MOTHER DNA TEST INSTEAD OF MOANING AS ROYALITY LOSERS Fury over book’s claim that Queen Mother and her brother were born to family’s French cook

QUIT BITCHN’ AND GET QUEEN’S MOTHER DNA TEST INSTEAD OF MOANING AS ROYALITY LOSERS

Fury over book’s claim that Queen Mother and her brother were born to family’s French cook

 

 

Extraordinary claims that the Queen Mother’s real mother was her family’s French cook are to be made in a sensational new book.

Aristocratic author Lady Colin Campbell says the domestic help may have been ‘an early version of surrogacy’ for both Elizabeth Bowes Lyon and her younger brother David.

The cook, an ‘attractive and pleasant Frenchwoman’ called Marguerite Rodiere, gave birth to the future Queen Elizabeth because her own mother Cecilia, who already had eight children, was unable to have any more.

 

Elizabeth with her mother Cecilla in 1923. It has been claimed in a new book that a cook gave birth to the future Queen Elizabeth because her own mother was unable to have any more children

According to Lady Colin, this explains the unflattering nickname ‘Cookie’ given to the Queen Mother by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

The astonishing claims are contained in ‘The Queen Mother, The untold story of Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, Who became Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother’, on sale next month.

The publication of the extracts could not have been more ill-timed, as the Queen on Friday held a service of remembrance for her beloved mother to mark the 10th anniversary of her death.

 

 

Held at St George’s Chapel in the grounds of Windsor Castle, it was attended by almost every senior member of the Royal Family and saw glowing tributes paid to the former Queen and her daughter, Princess Margaret, who died just a few weeks earlier.

The allegations immediately came under fire from royal experts.

Elizabeth Bowes Lyon at the age of seven. The Queen Mother’s exact date of birth in August 1900 as the fourth daughter of Lord Glamis, later 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, has always been disputed

Hugo Vickers said: ‘It is exactly ten years to the day that the Queen Mother died and I do not think it very nice at all to be promulgating these kind of theories at this time, particularly when the Queen has been celebrating her much loved mother’s life at Windsor today.

‘Lady Colin Campbell has been pushing this bizarre theory for some time in conversations etc. and I have to say I think it is complete nonsense. 

Elizabeth and her brother in 1904

‘You only have to look at pictures of the Queen Mother and her mother to see that they are related.’ 

Royal author Michael Thornton said: ‘I suppose that Georgie Campbell, whom I have known for many years, was faced with the same difficulty confronting all biographers of the Queen Mother: namely that everything of importance has already been said, leaving it difficult to find anything new to say.

‘But I have to say that I utterly disbelieve this claim on her part, and without DNA evidence to support it, there is absolutely no way now of proving it. 

‘I think it is unfortunate to publish this allegation in the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee year. 

‘It is bound to distress the Queen, and most particularly the Prince of Wales, who was devoted to his grandmother.’ 

The Queen Mother’s exact date of birth in August 1900 as the fourth daughter of Lord Glamis, later 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, has always been disputed.

It also remained unclear whether she was actually born in the back of a London ambulance or the family home, St Paul’s Waldenbury, in Hertfordshire.

Another puzzle has been why the Queen Mother, born the Honourable Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes Lyon, was given a French middle name.

 

In U.S. author Kitty Kelley’s notorious book The Royals, published in 1997, she suggested the Queen Mother was the daughter of a Welsh maid who worked in the family’s castle in Scotland.

But Lady Colin, who has herself had a colourful life after being raised as a boy during her early years in Jamaica, says the mother may have been another member of the household.

Elizabeth with her brother in 1915. Another puzzle has been why the Queen Mother, born the Honourable Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes Lyon, was given a French middle name

She writes: ‘For the fact is, royal and aristocratic circles had been alight for decades with the story that Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, while undoubtedly the daughter of the 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, was not the child of his wife Cecilia, nor was her younger brother David, born nearly two years after her on 2nd May, 1902.

‘The two Benjamins, as they were known in the Bowes Lyon family (in a Biblical allusion to the brother of Joseph, who was himself the product of a coupling between his father and his mother’s maid) were supposedly the children of Marguerite Rodiere, an attractive and pleasant Frenchwoman who had been the cook at St Paul’s Waldenbury and is meant to have provided Lord and Lady Glamis with the two children they so yearned for after Cecilia was forbidden by her doctors from producing any more progeny.

‘Hence the nickname of Cookie, which the Duke and Duchess of Windsor took care to promulgate throughout international society once Elizabeth proved herself to be their most formidable enemy.’

In the book – the first chapter of which has been published on her U.S. publishers’ website – Lady Colin, says Cecilia Glamis never recovered from the death in 1893 of their eldest child Violet.

She writes: ‘Claude Glamis had no problem fathering children, as his wife Cecilia had proven eight times over. Nor did she have problems producing healthy, happy, good-looking and charming children.

Lady Elizabeth with her parents and the Duke of York in January 1923 shortly before they got engaged

‘However, one of the tragedies that periodically happened in those pre-antibiotic days, might well have been the root of the problem.’ 

Violet died of heart failure following a bout of diphtheria, less than three weeks after Cecilia had given birth to her youngest son Michael.

According to Lady Campbell: ‘Lady Glamis was an exceptionally loving mother who lived primarily for her children. 

‘Already emotionally vulnerable following the latest birth, she was devastated by the death of this child whom she always said was “beautiful” and admitted to her dying day to missing.’ 

 

 

Lady Colin continues: ‘The fact is, she suffered a severe nervous breakdown from which she never entirely recovered.

‘She would always remain fragile, both physically and personally, and while she recovered sufficiently to resume her role in Society, she was prone to nervous attacks which incapacitated her for the remainder of her life.’

From left: Queen Mary, King George VI, Princess Elizabeth (later Queen Elizabeth II) holding Princess Anne, Duke of Edinburgh (Prince Philip) and Queen Elizabeth (‘Queen Mum’) holding Prince Charles

The author says that some people did know the truth surrounding the Queen Mother’s birth, chiefly her brother-in-law, David. 

‘As King Edward VIII, David had access to all the information about Elizabeth’s secret which was not so secret in aristocratic and royal circles.

‘When he discovered, to his horror, that Elizabeth was actively scheming with his own courtiers to undermine his position as king and prevent him from marrying the woman he loved, he used the wealth of access at his disposal to circumvent his own private and deputy private secretaries and obtain sight of the documents, which confirmed that Elizabeth had been born, not of 4th August as supposed, but on 3rd August at St Paul’s Waldenbury to Marguerite Rodiere.’ 

 

Lady Colin continued: ‘The Duke of Windsor always maintained that he would never have revealed Elizabeth’s secret had he not discovered at the time of the Abdication Crisis, through Lord Beaverbrook, that Elizabeth was behind the scurrilous and utterly untrue rumour that Wallis (Simpson) had learnt secret sexual techniques in a bordello in China, and it was this which was the secret hold she had over King Edward VIII.

The publication of the extracts could not have been more ill-timed, as the Queen on Friday held a service of remembrance for her beloved mother to mark the 10th anniversary of her death

 

‘Once he knew this to be true, however, he felt justified in rumbling the sister-in-law who had a secret of her own, and one, moreover, which had in his view, more merit than the one she had invented about his beloved.’ 

Lady Colin says that’s why thereafter, Elizabeth was known as Cookie.

She writes: ‘For those who asked, as I did when I was a late teenager, why she was being called by that nickname, there was always a member of the Windsor circle willing and able to recount how the High and Mighty Princess Elizabeth, Queen of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, Empress of India, Queen of Canada, Australia, etc,etc, was not even legitimate, but the daughter of the 13th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne and St Paul’s Waldenbury cook, Mademoiselle Marguerite Rodiere.

‘Whether this was indeed the case, none of us will ever know definitively unless DNA studies are done on Elizabeth and Cecilia to establish whether they shared a genetic link.’ 

Royal biographer Michael Thornton said: ‘It actually doesn’t make any sense. I did investigate all these rumours while I was researching Royal Feud, and I found absolutely no hard evidence whatever to support them.’

 

 

 

Surrogacy and the upper classes

It was not unusual for the upper classes to use ‘surrogacy’ arrangements to create large families

It was not unusual for the upper classes to use ‘surrogacy’ arrangements to create large families, the book claims.

In the days before antibiotics, child mortality rates were high and sole male heirs stood a good chance of being killed in a war.

As a result, Lady Colin claims it was important that aristocrats left a ‘spare heir or two’, and sometimes enlisted the aid of their domestic staff.

‘The grander the couple, the more likely that there was a serious problem, for great estates were entailed upon the title, meaning that a peer could not leave his property to whom he pleased,’ she said.

‘The aristocracy was filled with horror stories about widows and daughters of great peers living in penury while some distant cousin was lording it over them.’ 

Lady Colin refers to the time when George VI allegedly took offence to the growing friendship between the young Princess Elizabeth and ‘Little Porchy’, who later became Lord Carnarvon.

According to Lady Colin, the King is alleged to have said: ‘Young Porchester is charming, but there is no possibility of my condoning a union between a daughter of mine and a butler’s son.’

Writer who revealed the ‘secrets’ of Diana in first warts-and-all account of marriage to Charles

Lady Colin Campbell was brought up as male until she was 18

Colourful biographer Lady Campbell first annoyed the upper classes with her explosive 1992 biography of Diana, Princess of Wales.

Called Diana In Private, it was the first warts-and-all account of her disastrous marriage to Charles and came out shortly before Andrew Morton’s controversial biography.

Lady Campbell, also known as Georgie Campbell, later published a second book, The Real Diana, which revealed more shocking ‘secrets’ including a string of alleged affairs. Scandalous at the time, the book was derided by royal experts.

In 2004 she claimed Diana and King Juan Carlos of Spain had had an affair during a cruise in August 1986.

She wrote: ‘Diana did it to make Charles jealous, but it didn’t work. Charles couldn’t have cared less.’ 

Born in 1949 into the Ziadie family, one of Jamaica’s most influential clans, Lady Campbell was first registered as a boy, George William, due to a physical defect. 

She continued to be brought up as male until she was 18, when she had an operation to correct the defect.

She spent much of her early life in  the U.S. and later worked as a model in New York, where she was regarded as a society beauty.

She moved to Britain after marrying Colin Campbell, younger brother of the 12th Duke of Argyll, but the union lasted only 14 months. 

A newspaper later claimed her husband had not known about her physical history when they married and that some of his friends alleged that he had married a transvestite.

Lady Campbell successfully sued every newspaper that implied this, and blamed her ex for selling the story.

She said at the time: ‘It was awful. It is offensive beyond belief. It was rape.’

Seven years ago she was forced to pulp her book about a ruthless murderess after the world’s richest widow, Lily Safra, threatened to sue her.

She re-published her book Empress Bianca with certain tweaks, insisting it was fiction.

The Revenge of Wen Jiabao Communist Party will likely execute a once-in-a-decade leadership transition in which President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen hand over to a new team led by current Vice President Xi Jinping. The majority of leaders will retire from the elite Politburo Standing Committee, and the turnover will extend down through lower tiers of the Communist Party, the government, and the military. Wen hopes his words influence who gets key posts, what ideological course they will set, and how history records his own career. Wen Jiabao and Bo Xilai have long stood out from their colleagues for their striking capacities to communicate and project their individual personalities and ideologies beyond the otherwise monochromatic party machine. The two most popular members of the Politburo, they are also the most polarizing within China’s political elite. They have much in common, including a belief that the Communist Party consensus that has prevailed for three decades — “opening and reform” coupled with uncompromising political control — is crumbling under the weight of inequality, corruption, and mistrust. But the backgrounds, personalities, and political prescriptions of these two crusaders could not be more different. Bo has deployed his prodigious charisma and political skills to attack the status quo in favor of a more powerful role for the state. He displayed an extraordinary capacity to mobilize political and financial resources during his four and a half year tenure as the head of the Yangtze River megalopolis of Chongqing. He transfixed the nation by smashing the city’s mafia — together with uncooperative officials, lawyers, and entrepreneurs — and rebuilding a state-centered city economy while shamelessly draping himself in the symbolism of Mao Zedong. He sent out a wave of revolutionary nostalgia that led to Mao quotes sent as text messages, government workers corralled to sing “red songs,” and old patriotic programming overwhelming Chongqing TV. From his leftist or “statist” perch, Bo has been challenging the “opening and reform” side of the political consensus that Deng Xiaoping secured three decades ago. Wen Jiabao, meanwhile, who plays the role of a learned, emphatic, and upright Confucian prime minister, has been challenging the other half of Deng consensus — absolute political control — from the liberal right. He has continuously articulated the need to limit government power through rule of law, justice, and democratization. To do this, he has drawn on the symbolic legacies of the purged reformist leaders he served in the 1980s, particularly Hu Yaobang, whose name he recently helped to “rehabilitate” in official discourse. As every Communist Party leader knows, those who want a stake in the country’s future must first fight for control of its past. Meanwhile, the New York Times reports on how Bo’s ouster is playing out among different factions of the Communist Party as the leadership prepares for a transition of power later this year: …The ouster of Bo Xilai, the populist icon formerly in charge of the southwestern megacity of Chongqing, has spurred weeks of frenzied internal politicking and a rare dissenting vote within the Politburo Standing Committee, according to interviews with publishers, academics and analysts tied to the Communist Party’s upper echelons or its powerful families. They say that the outward calm is tenuous and was achieved only after China’s leadership team of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao appealed to party elders for support and yielded important posts in Chongqing to representatives of other influential political blocs. “They want everyone to believe that the top level has no problem — that there’s no split and no struggle,” said Jin Zhong, publisher of the influential China-watching magazine Open, in Hong Kong. “But this is a false impression.” According to people briefed by central party officials, Mr. Bo is being confined to his house in Beijing, watched by the Central Guard Bureau, a unit of the People’s Liberation Army under control of the party’s General Office. He faces a disciplinary investigation over a range of allegations of corruption and abuse of power, these people say. His wife, a noted lawyer, is under more formal detention in connection with some of those allegations. Now be cool and read the Media Horse Manure, Ain’t Fuckn’ Delicious I was there. I warned you! If Premier Wen Jiabao is “China’s best actor,” as his critics allege, he saved his finest performance for last. After three hours of eloquent and emotional answers in his final news conference at the National People’s Congress annual meeting this month, Wen uttered his public political masterstroke, reopening debate on one of the most tumultuous events in the Chinese Communist Party’s history and hammering the final nail in the coffin of his great rival, the now-deposed Chongqing Communist Party boss Bo Xilai. And in striking down Bo, Wen got his revenge on a family that had opposed him and his mentor countless times in the past. Responding to a gently phrased question about Chongqing, Wen foreshadowed Bo’s political execution, a seismic leadership rupture announced the following day that continues to convulse China’s political landscape to an extent not seen since 1989. But the addendum that followed might be even more significant. Indirectly, but unmistakably, Wen defined Bo as man who wanted to repudiate China’s decades-long effort to reform its economy, open to the world, and allow its citizens to experience modernity. He framed the struggle over Bo’s legacy as a choice between urgent political reforms and “such historical tragedies as the Cultural Revolution,” culminating a 30-year battle for two radically different versions of China, of which Bo Xilai and Wen Jiabao are the ideological heirs. In Wen’s world, bringing down Bo is the first step in a battle between China’s Maoist past and a more democratic future as personified by his beloved mentor, 1980s Communist Party chief Hu Yaobang. His words blew open the facade of party unity that had held since the massacres of Tiananmen Square. This October, the Communist Party will likely execute a once-in-a-decade leadership transition in which President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen hand over to a new team led by current Vice President Xi Jinping. The majority of leaders will retire from the elite Politburo Standing Committee, and the turnover will extend down through lower tiers of the Communist Party, the government, and the military. Wen hopes his words influence who gets key posts, what ideological course they will set, and how history records his own career. Wen Jiabao and Bo Xilai have long stood out from their colleagues for their striking capacities to communicate and project their individual personalities and ideologies beyond the otherwise monochromatic party machine. The two most popular members of the Politburo, they are also the most polarizing within China’s political elite. They have much in common, including a belief that the Communist Party consensus that has prevailed for three decades — “opening and reform” coupled with uncompromising political control — is crumbling under the weight of inequality, corruption, and mistrust. But the backgrounds, personalities, and political prescriptions of these two crusaders could not be more different. Bo has deployed his prodigious charisma and political skills to attack the status quo in favor of a more powerful role for the state. He displayed an extraordinary capacity to mobilize political and financial resources during his four and a half year tenure as the head of the Yangtze River megalopolis of Chongqing. He transfixed the nation by smashing the city’s mafia — together with uncooperative officials, lawyers, and entrepreneurs — and rebuilding a state-centered city economy while shamelessly draping himself in the symbolism of Mao Zedong. He sent out a wave of revolutionary nostalgia that led to Mao quotes sent as text messages, government workers corralled to sing “red songs,” and old patriotic programming overwhelming Chongqing TV. From his leftist or “statist” perch, Bo has been challenging the “opening and reform” side of the political consensus that Deng Xiaoping secured three decades ago. Wen Jiabao, meanwhile, who plays the role of a learned, emphatic, and upright Confucian prime minister, has been challenging the other half of Deng consensus — absolute political control — from the liberal right. He has continuously articulated the need to limit government power through rule of law, justice, and democratization. To do this, he has drawn on the symbolic legacies of the purged reformist leaders he served in the 1980s, particularly Hu Yaobang, whose name he recently helped to “rehabilitate” in official discourse. As every Communist Party leader knows, those who want a stake in the country’s future must first fight for control of its past. Until last month Bo appeared to hold the cards, with his networks of princelings — the children of high cadres — and the gravitational force of his “Chongqing Model” pulling the nation toward him, while Wen’s efforts had produced few practical results. Bo earned his reputation as a rising star until Feb. 6 when his police chief and right-hand man, Wang Lijun, drove to an appointment at the local British consulate to shake his official minders and then veered off and fled for his life down the highway into the U.S. Consulate in Chengdu. He carried with him allegations of sordid tales of Bo family criminal behavior including in relation to the death of British businessman Neil Heywood, according to Western government officials. In Beijing’s eyes, this was the highest-level known attempted defection in 40 years, and it occurred on Bo’s watch. Wang “betrayed the country and went over to the enemy,” said President Hu Jintao, according to a Chinese intelligence official. Wen, the son of a lowly teacher, saw his family constantly criticized and attacked during the Cultural Revolution, and rose to power by impressing a series of revolutionary veterans. Bo, in contrast, was born to rule. The son of revolutionary leader Bo Yibo, he studied at the nation’s most prestigious middle school, Beijing No. 4. Bo had not yet turned 17 when a rift between the princeling children and those with “bad class backgrounds” erupted into class warfare. In June 1966, in the early months of the Cultural Revolution, one of Bo’s school mates invented the rhyming ditty that became the anthem for the princelings that led the early Red Guard movement: “The father’s a hero, the son’s a brave lad; the father’s a reactionary, the son’s a bastard.” The student red guards at Beijing No. 4 turned an old eating hall into a gruesome incarceration chamber for the teachers and other reactionaries they captured. They painted the popular slogan “Long live the red terror” on the wall, in human blood. Within months, however, Mao directed his Cultural Revolution toward his comrades-in-arms and unleashed a coterie of lesser-born red guards against the old “royalist” ones. Bo Xilai spent six years in a prison cell. His father, Bo Yibo, was tortured. Red Guards abducted Bo’s mother in Guangzhou and murdered her, or she committed suicide; if any records exist, they remain sealed. Since former leader Deng Xiaoping’s 1981 “Resolution on History,” the Cultural Resolution has officially been a “catastrophe,” but the Communist Party never explained what happened. It was left as little more than a name, signifying bad but unknown things. By raising the specter of the Cultural Revolution, Wen Jiabao has opened a crack in the vault of Communist Party history: that great black box that conceals the struggles, brutality, partial truths and outright fabrications upon which China has built its economic and social transformation. Beneath his carefully layered comments is a profound challenge to the uncompromising manner in which the Chinese Communist Party has always gone about its business. And to grasp what the Cultural Revolution means to Wen Jiabao requires taking a journey through the life of his mentor, the 1980s reformist leader Hu Yaobang who ran the Communist Party in its most vibrant era. Hu Yaobang was struck down from his job at the helm of the Communist Youth League on Aug. 13, 1966, five days before Chairman Mao presided over the first mass rally of the Cultural Revolution. Detained for six weeks, Red Guards beat and abused him and forced him to stand for hours with a huge wooden placard hanging from his neck and his arms wrenched behind his back. Six weeks later, as they retired for their national holidays, they called Hu’s eighteen year-old son Hu Dehua to pick him up. “I cried when I saw his appearance,” Hu Dehua told me. “He told me ‘don’t be such a good-for-nothing, let’s go home, it doesn’t matter.’” Hu Yaobang was already back at work when Mao died, in 1976, and the Communist Party united behind the idea of moving on from the Cultural Revolution but lacked any further road map. Appointed head of the powerful Organization Department, Hu led a crusade to “seek truths from facts” — for ideology to yield to reality — and to rehabilitate fallen comrades. Deng, who by 1980 had secured his position as paramount leader, elevated Hu to general secretary of the Communist Party. By the early 1980s the Communist Party was rapidly retreating from everyday social life. As the economy grew, Chinese people began to enjoy a degree of personal freedoms, but the essential norms of internal party politics remained unchanged. At crucial junctures there were no enforceable rules, no independent arbiters, only power. In 1985, while most elders had been appointing each other or each other’s children to important positions, Hu Yaobang recruited Wen Jiabao, the teacher’s son, to run his Central Office — a position akin to cabinet secretary. The following year Hu Yaobang’s elder son, Hu Deping, spoke in terms uncannily similar to Wen Jiabao’s of two weeks ago. “The Cultural Revolution was a tragedy,” he said to the then propaganda minister, at a time when his father was at the height of his power. “It will not appear again in the same form, but a cultural revolution once or even twice removed cannot be ruled out from once again recurring.” Perhaps he had an inkling of what was coming. By 1986 the tensions between an increasingly market-oriented economy and more liberal social environment began to clash with Communist Party elders’ demand for absolute political control. Hu Yaobang tried to limit corruption among the elders’ children, studiously ignored conservative ideological campaigns, and tolerated student protests. By the end of that year the elders had had enough. Then, as during the Cultural Revolution, and as remains the case today, no rules governed Hu Yaobang’s downfall; just a group of backstage power brokers who judged that he had gone too far. In January 1987, 21 years after his purging in the Cultural Revolution, party elders subjected Hu to a torrid five-day criticism and humiliation session called a “Democratic Party Life meeting.” The harshest of Hu’s critics was Bo Xilai’s father. Hu Dehua, the youngest son, lives at home with his wife in the same large but rundown courtyard home, just west of Beijing’s closed-off leadership district Zhongnanhai, where he has lived nearly all of his life. His recollections about what the Cultural Revolution meant to his family and his father, Hu Yaobang, informs the story that Wen Jiabao is telling today. Hu Dehua tells how his father was pained, but not surprised, when Communist Party elders used his own political demise to drive an “anti-bourgeois liberalization” campaign across China. Party apparatchiks instructed Hu Dehua to show his ideological opposition to his own father’s political platform, but he refused. “It was the same as 1966. If someone was said to be ‘liberalized’, then everyone would line up to criticize them,” Hu Dehua said. “The country was turning back at a time when it should be have been democratizing and transitioning to rule of law.” Hu Dehua told his father how pessimistic he felt about his country’s future. Hu Yaobang agreed that the methods and ideologies of the 1987 anti-liberalization movement came straight from the Cultural Revolution. But he told his son to gain some historical perspective, and reminded him that Chinese people were not joining in the elite power games as they had 20 years before. He called the anti-liberalization campaign a “medium-sized cultural revolution” and warned that a small cultural revolution would no doubt follow, Hu Dehua told me. As society developed, Hu Yaobang told his son, the middle and little cultural revolutions would gradually fade from history’s stage. It is fortunate, perhaps, that Hu Yaobang could not see how his death in April 1989 triggered an outpouring of public grief at Tiananmen Square, as Chinese students held him up his honesty and humanity in contrast to their perception of other leaders of the time. The protests morphed into a mass demonstration for liberalization and democratization and against growing corruption among children of the political elite. Wen Jiabao remained in charge of the Communist Party Central Office, now working for Hu Yaobang’s increasingly reformist successor, Zhao Ziyang. A famous photo shows Wen standing behind Zhao’s shoulder as his boss declared the haunting words “I’ve come too late” to students who refused to leave the square. Shortly afterward, Deng and the party elders ordered in the tanks, triggering another Cultural Revolution-style convulsion and adding a new bloody file to the Communist Party’s vault of history. Bo Yibo moved to have Wen purged, according to a source whose father was a minister at the time, but other elders were impressed with how Wen shifted his loyalty from Zhao (who spent the rest of his life under house arrest) and supported martial law. Wen played by the rules of a ruthless system, his family — especially his wife and son — leveraged his official status for their own business interests, while his career progression resumed. Hu Yaobang was largely airbrushed from official history after his purge in 1987. But because he did not publicly challenge the Communist Party, he maintained his legacy and his supporters, including all of the current and likely future party chiefs and premiers: Hu Jintao, Wen Jiabao, Xi Jinping, and Li Keqiang. All four regularly visit the Hu family home during Spring Festival. But only Wen Jiabao has publicly honored his mentor’s legacy. Two years ago, on the 21st anniversary of Hu Yaobang’s death, Wen penned an essay in the People’s Daily that was remarkable in a nation whose leaders rarely give any public hint of their personal lives. “What he taught me in those years is engraved on my heart,” wrote Wen. Of the four top leaders who regularly pay homage to Hu Yaobang’s old home, Wen Jiabao has the warmest connection with Hu Yaobang’s widow and four children. Hu taught his children to resist the idea, wired into the Communist Party psyche, that they had any particular hereditary right to high office. Nevertheless the eldest son, Hu Deping, rose to vice minister rank in the United Front Department. And last year he used his princeling heritage and networks to organize and say things that would have banished lesser-born men to jail. He published a book about his father, with a forward written by Wen. He organized a series of closed-door seminars for leading intellectuals and other princeling children of reformist leaders to try and build a consensus for reform. The first and most low-key seminar, in July, ignited what became a raging public debate about Bo Xilai’s “Chongqing Model” versus its possible antidote, the more liberal “Guangdong Model.” The second, in August, celebrated the 35th anniversary of the arrest of Mao’s radical “Gang of Four,” which slammed the door shut on the Cultural Revolution just weeks after Mao’s death in August 1976. The third, in September, explored the 30th anniversary of the 1981 Resolution on History, which had confirmed the Cultural Revolution as a catastrophe that must never occur again. It was at the September gathering that Hu Deping set down the themes that Wen later referred to in his press conference, and published his comments on a website dedicated to chronicling the life and times of his father: “The bottom line is making sure to adopt the attitude of criticizing and fundamentally denouncing the Cultural Revolution … In recent years, for whatever reason, there seems to be a ‘revival’ of something like advocating the Cultural Revolution. Some people cherish it; some do not believe in the Cultural Revolution but nevertheless exploit it and play it up. I think we must guard this bottom line!” The subtext, only barely concealed, was that Bo Xilai must be stopped from dragging Communist Party back toward its most radical, lawless past. How, one could be forgiven for asking, could Bo grasp for power by praising a movement that killed his own mother? Hu Deping honed in on the need to forge mechanisms to institutionalize the power games between party leaders. He told his princeling and intellectual friends in the seminar audience that the remnants of feudal aristocracy — old fashioned despotic power — might again emerge as the party had said it had during the Cultural Revolution. He foreshadowed the ructions that are now taking place: “If we really want to carry out democratization of inner-party political life, the cost is going to be enormous. Do we have the courage to accept that cost? If we do it now, there is a cost certainly. Do we dare to bear the cost? Is now the right time? I cannot say for sure. However, I think it might create some ‘chaos’ in some localities, some temporary ‘chaos’, and some localized ‘chaos’. We should be prepared.” Hu Deping has been stepping forward, with some reluctance, to draw on his father’s legacy to help shape China’s future. He is a member of the standing committee of one of China’s two representative-style bodies and mixes with senior leaders. He discussed the Cultural Revolution with both President Hu Jintao and his expected successor, Xi Jinping, not long before Wen Jiabao’s news conference and Bo Xilai’s demise, according to a source familiar with those conversations. China’s politically engaged population is watching the battle now under way within the Politburo to frame the downfall of Bo Xilai and set the lessons that will shape China’s future. “So far we cannot identify whether Wen Jiabao is representing himself or representing a group,” says a recently retired minister-level official, who had confidently predicted Bo’s sacking to me 10 days before it happened. “Maybe it’s 80 percent himself and 20 percent the group. We still have to watch.” It remains far from clear whether the Communist Party’s webs of patronage and knots of financial and bureaucratic interests can be reformed. But with China’s leftist movement decapitated by the purge of Bo Xilai, and Bo’s critics now talking about his reign of “red terror” after daily revelations of political and physical brutality under his command, Wen has begun to win over some of his many detractors. “In the past I did not have a fully positive view of Wen Jiabao, because he said a lot of things but didn’t deliver,” says a leading media figure with lifelong connections to China’s leadership circle. “Now I realize just to be able to say it, that’s important. To speak up, let the whole world know that he could not achieve anything because he was strangled by the system.” Hu Yaobang’s most faithful protégé, who carried his funeral casket to its final resting place, is building on the groundwork laid by Hu and his children ostensibly to prevent a return of the Cultural Revolution. Wen Jiabao is defending the party line set by Deng Xiaoping’s 1981 historical resolution against attack from the left. Between the lines, however, he is challenging the Communist Party’s 30-year consensus from the liberal right. Hu Dehua, the youngest son, spelled out the gulf between these positions in a rare Chinese media interview one month ago: “The difference between my father and Deng is this: Deng wanted to save the party; my father wanted to save the people, the ordinary people.” Wen Jiabao sees Bo’s downfall as a pivotal opportunity to pin his reformist colors high while the Communist Party is too divided to rein him in. He is reaching out to the Chinese public because the party is losing its monopoly on truth and internal roads to reform have long been blocked. Ironically, he is doing so by leading the public purging of a victim who has no hope of transparent justice, because the party to which he has devoted his life has never known any other way.

The Revenge of Wen Jiabao

 

Communist Party will likely execute a once-in-a-decade leadership transition in which President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen hand over to a new team led by current Vice President Xi Jinping. The majority of leaders will retire from the elite Politburo Standing Committee, and the turnover will extend down through lower tiers of the Communist Party, the government, and the military. Wen hopes his words influence who gets key posts, what ideological course they will set, and how history records his own career.

Wen Jiabao and Bo Xilai have long stood out from their colleagues for their striking capacities to communicate and project their individual personalities and ideologies beyond the otherwise monochromatic party machine. The two most popular members of the Politburo, they are also the most polarizing within China’s political elite. They have much in common, including a belief that the Communist Party consensus that has prevailed for three decades — “opening and reform” coupled with uncompromising political control — is crumbling under the weight of inequality, corruption, and mistrust. But the backgrounds, personalities, and political prescriptions of these two crusaders could not be more different.

Bo has deployed his prodigious charisma and political skills to attack the status quo in favor of a more powerful role for the state. He displayed an extraordinary capacity to mobilize political and financial resources during his four and a half year tenure as the head of the Yangtze River megalopolis of Chongqing. He transfixed the nation by smashing the city’s mafia — together with uncooperative officials, lawyers, and entrepreneurs — and rebuilding a state-centered city economy while shamelessly draping himself in the symbolism of Mao Zedong. He sent out a wave of revolutionary nostalgia that led to Mao quotes sent as text messages, government workers corralled to sing “red songs,” and old patriotic programming overwhelming Chongqing TV.

From his leftist or “statist” perch, Bo has been challenging the “opening and reform” side of the political consensus that Deng Xiaoping secured three decades ago. Wen Jiabao, meanwhile, who plays the role of a learned, emphatic, and upright Confucian prime minister, has been challenging the other half of Deng consensus — absolute political control — from the liberal right. He has continuously articulated the need to limit government power through rule of law, justice, and democratization. To do this, he has drawn on the symbolic legacies of the purged reformist leaders he served in the 1980s, particularly Hu Yaobang, whose name he recently helped to “rehabilitate” in official discourse. As every Communist Party leader knows, those who want a stake in the country’s future must first fight for control of its past.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports on how Bo’s ouster is playing out among different factions of the Communist Party as the leadership prepares for a transition of power later this year:

…The ouster of Bo Xilai, the populist icon formerly in charge of the southwestern megacity of Chongqing, has spurred weeks of frenzied internal politicking and a rare dissenting vote within the Politburo Standing Committee, according to interviews with publishers, academics and analysts tied to the Communist Party’s upper echelons or its powerful families.

They say that the outward calm is tenuous and was achieved only after China’s leadership team of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao appealed to party elders for support and yielded important posts in Chongqing to representatives of other influential political blocs.

“They want everyone to believe that the top level has no problem — that there’s no split and no struggle,” said Jin Zhong, publisher of the influential China-watching magazine Open, in Hong Kong. “But this is a false impression.”

According to people briefed by central party officials, Mr. Bo is being confined to his house in Beijing, watched by the Central Guard Bureau, a unit of the People’s Liberation Army under control of the party’s General Office. He faces a disciplinary investigation over a range of allegations of corruption and abuse of power, these people say. His wife, a noted lawyer, is under more formal detention in connection with some of those allegations.

Now be cool and read the Media Horse Manure, Ain’t Fuckn’ Delicious I was there. I warned you!

If Premier Wen Jiabao is “China’s best actor,” as his critics allege, he saved his finest performance for last. After three hours of eloquent and emotional answers in his final news conference at the National People’s Congress annual meeting this month, Wen uttered his public political masterstroke, reopening debate on one of the most tumultuous events in the Chinese Communist Party’s history and hammering the final nail in the coffin of his great rival, the now-deposed Chongqing Communist Party boss Bo Xilai. And in striking down Bo, Wen got his revenge on a family that had opposed him and his mentor countless times in the past.

Responding to a gently phrased question about Chongqing, Wen foreshadowed Bo’s political execution, a seismic leadership rupture announced the following day that continues to convulse China’s political landscape to an extent not seen since 1989. But the addendum that followed might be even more significant. Indirectly, but unmistakably, Wen defined Bo as man who wanted to repudiate China’s decades-long effort to reform its economy, open to the world, and allow its citizens to experience modernity. He framed the struggle over Bo’s legacy as a choice between urgent political reforms and “such historical tragedies as the Cultural Revolution,” culminating a 30-year battle for two radically different versions of China, of which Bo Xilai and Wen Jiabao are the ideological heirs. In Wen’s world, bringing down Bo is the first step in a battle between China’s Maoist past and a more democratic future as personified by his beloved mentor, 1980s Communist Party chief Hu Yaobang. His words blew open the facade of party unity that had held since the massacres of Tiananmen Square.

This October, the Communist Party will likely execute a once-in-a-decade leadership transition in which President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen hand over to a new team led by current Vice President Xi Jinping. The majority of leaders will retire from the elite Politburo Standing Committee, and the turnover will extend down through lower tiers of the Communist Party, the government, and the military. Wen hopes his words influence who gets key posts, what ideological course they will set, and how history records his own career.

Wen Jiabao and Bo Xilai have long stood out from their colleagues for their striking capacities to communicate and project their individual personalities and ideologies beyond the otherwise monochromatic party machine. The two most popular members of the Politburo, they are also the most polarizing within China’s political elite. They have much in common, including a belief that the Communist Party consensus that has prevailed for three decades — “opening and reform” coupled with uncompromising political control — is crumbling under the weight of inequality, corruption, and mistrust. But the backgrounds, personalities, and political prescriptions of these two crusaders could not be more different.

Bo has deployed his prodigious charisma and political skills to attack the status quo in favor of a more powerful role for the state. He displayed an extraordinary capacity to mobilize political and financial resources during his four and a half year tenure as the head of the Yangtze River megalopolis of Chongqing. He transfixed the nation by smashing the city’s mafia — together with uncooperative officials, lawyers, and entrepreneurs — and rebuilding a state-centered city economy while shamelessly draping himself in the symbolism of Mao Zedong. He sent out a wave of revolutionary nostalgia that led to Mao quotes sent as text messages, government workers corralled to sing “red songs,” and old patriotic programming overwhelming Chongqing TV.

From his leftist or “statist” perch, Bo has been challenging the “opening and reform” side of the political consensus that Deng Xiaoping secured three decades ago. Wen Jiabao, meanwhile, who plays the role of a learned, emphatic, and upright Confucian prime minister, has been challenging the other half of Deng consensus — absolute political control — from the liberal right. He has continuously articulated the need to limit government power through rule of law, justice, and democratization. To do this, he has drawn on the symbolic legacies of the purged reformist leaders he served in the 1980s, particularly Hu Yaobang, whose name he recently helped to “rehabilitate” in official discourse. As every Communist Party leader knows, those who want a stake in the country’s future must first fight for control of its past.

Until last month Bo appeared to hold the cards, with his networks of princelings — the children of high cadres — and the gravitational force of his “Chongqing Model” pulling the nation toward him, while Wen’s efforts had produced few practical results. Bo earned his reputation as a rising star until Feb. 6 when his police chief and right-hand man, Wang Lijun, drove to an appointment at the local British consulate to shake his official minders and then veered off and fled for his life down the highway into the U.S. Consulate in Chengdu. He carried with him allegations of sordid tales of Bo family criminal behavior including in relation to the death of British businessman Neil Heywood, according to Western government officials. In Beijing’s eyes, this was the highest-level known attempted defection in 40 years, and it occurred on Bo’s watch. Wang “betrayed the country and went over to the enemy,” said President Hu Jintao, according to a Chinese intelligence official.

Wen, the son of a lowly teacher, saw his family constantly criticized and attacked during the Cultural Revolution, and rose to power by impressing a series of revolutionary veterans. Bo, in contrast, was born to rule. The son of revolutionary leader Bo Yibo, he studied at the nation’s most prestigious middle school, Beijing No. 4. Bo had not yet turned 17 when a rift between the princeling children and those with “bad class backgrounds” erupted into class warfare. In June 1966, in the early months of the Cultural Revolution, one of Bo’s school mates invented the rhyming ditty that became the anthem for the princelings that led the early Red Guard movement: “The father’s a hero, the son’s a brave lad; the father’s a reactionary, the son’s a bastard.”

The student red guards at Beijing No. 4 turned an old eating hall into a gruesome incarceration chamber for the teachers and other reactionaries they captured. They painted the popular slogan “Long live the red terror” on the wall, in human blood.

Within months, however, Mao directed his Cultural Revolution toward his comrades-in-arms and unleashed a coterie of lesser-born red guards against the old “royalist” ones. Bo Xilai spent six years in a prison cell. His father, Bo Yibo, was tortured. Red Guards abducted Bo’s mother in Guangzhou and murdered her, or she committed suicide; if any records exist, they remain sealed.

Since former leader Deng Xiaoping’s 1981 “Resolution on History,” the Cultural Resolution has officially been a “catastrophe,” but the Communist Party never explained what happened. It was left as little more than a name, signifying bad but unknown things. By raising the specter of the Cultural Revolution, Wen Jiabao has opened a crack in the vault of Communist Party history: that great black box that conceals the struggles, brutality, partial truths and outright fabrications upon which China has built its economic and social transformation. Beneath his carefully layered comments is a profound challenge to the uncompromising manner in which the Chinese Communist Party has always gone about its business. And to grasp what the Cultural Revolution means to Wen Jiabao requires taking a journey through the life of his mentor, the 1980s reformist leader Hu Yaobang who ran the Communist Party in its most vibrant era.

Hu Yaobang was struck down from his job at the helm of the Communist Youth League on Aug. 13, 1966, five days before Chairman Mao presided over the first mass rally of the Cultural Revolution. Detained for six weeks, Red Guards beat and abused him and forced him to stand for hours with a huge wooden placard hanging from his neck and his arms wrenched behind his back. Six weeks later, as they retired for their national holidays, they called Hu’s eighteen year-old son Hu Dehua to pick him up. “I cried when I saw his appearance,” Hu Dehua told me. “He told me ‘don’t be such a good-for-nothing, let’s go home, it doesn’t matter.’”

Hu Yaobang was already back at work when Mao died, in 1976, and the Communist Party united behind the idea of moving on from the Cultural Revolution but lacked any further road map. Appointed head of the powerful Organization Department, Hu led a crusade to “seek truths from facts” — for ideology to yield to reality — and to rehabilitate fallen comrades. Deng, who by 1980 had secured his position as paramount leader, elevated Hu to general secretary of the Communist Party.

By the early 1980s the Communist Party was rapidly retreating from everyday social life. As the economy grew, Chinese people began to enjoy a degree of personal freedoms, but the essential norms of internal party politics remained unchanged. At crucial junctures there were no enforceable rules, no independent arbiters, only power.

In 1985, while most elders had been appointing each other or each other’s children to important positions, Hu Yaobang recruited Wen Jiabao, the teacher’s son, to run his Central Office — a position akin to cabinet secretary. The following year Hu Yaobang’s elder son, Hu Deping, spoke in terms uncannily similar to Wen Jiabao’s of two weeks ago. “The Cultural Revolution was a tragedy,” he said to the then propaganda minister, at a time when his father was at the height of his power. “It will not appear again in the same form, but a cultural revolution once or even twice removed cannot be ruled out from once again recurring.”

Perhaps he had an inkling of what was coming. By 1986 the tensions between an increasingly market-oriented economy and more liberal social environment began to clash with Communist Party elders’ demand for absolute political control. Hu Yaobang tried to limit corruption among the elders’ children, studiously ignored conservative ideological campaigns, and tolerated student protests. By the end of that year the elders had had enough.

Then, as during the Cultural Revolution, and as remains the case today, no rules governed Hu Yaobang’s downfall; just a group of backstage power brokers who judged that he had gone too far. In January 1987, 21 years after his purging in the Cultural Revolution, party elders subjected Hu to a torrid five-day criticism and humiliation session called a “Democratic Party Life meeting.” The harshest of Hu’s critics was Bo Xilai’s father.

Hu Dehua, the youngest son, lives at home with his wife in the same large but rundown courtyard home, just west of Beijing’s closed-off leadership district Zhongnanhai, where he has lived nearly all of his life. His recollections about what the Cultural Revolution meant to his family and his father, Hu Yaobang, informs the story that Wen Jiabao is telling today.

Hu Dehua tells how his father was pained, but not surprised, when Communist Party elders used his own political demise to drive an “anti-bourgeois liberalization” campaign across China. Party apparatchiks instructed Hu Dehua to show his ideological opposition to his own father’s political platform, but he refused.

“It was the same as 1966. If someone was said to be ‘liberalized’, then everyone would line up to criticize them,” Hu Dehua said. “The country was turning back at a time when it should be have been democratizing and transitioning to rule of law.”

Hu Dehua told his father how pessimistic he felt about his country’s future. Hu Yaobang agreed that the methods and ideologies of the 1987 anti-liberalization movement came straight from the Cultural Revolution. But he told his son to gain some historical perspective, and reminded him that Chinese people were not joining in the elite power games as they had 20 years before. He called the anti-liberalization campaign a “medium-sized cultural revolution” and warned that a small cultural revolution would no doubt follow, Hu Dehua told me. As society developed, Hu Yaobang told his son, the middle and little cultural revolutions would gradually fade from history’s stage.

It is fortunate, perhaps, that Hu Yaobang could not see how his death in April 1989 triggered an outpouring of public grief at Tiananmen Square, as Chinese students held him up his honesty and humanity in contrast to their perception of other leaders of the time. The protests morphed into a mass demonstration for liberalization and democratization and against growing corruption among children of the political elite.

Wen Jiabao remained in charge of the Communist Party Central Office, now working for Hu Yaobang’s increasingly reformist successor, Zhao Ziyang. A famous photo shows Wen standing behind Zhao’s shoulder as his boss declared the haunting words “I’ve come too late” to students who refused to leave the square. Shortly afterward, Deng and the party elders ordered in the tanks, triggering another Cultural Revolution-style convulsion and adding a new bloody file to the Communist Party’s vault of history. Bo Yibo moved to have Wen purged, according to a source whose father was a minister at the time, but other elders were impressed with how Wen shifted his loyalty from Zhao (who spent the rest of his life under house arrest) and supported martial law. Wen played by the rules of a ruthless system, his family — especially his wife and son — leveraged his official status for their own business interests, while his career progression resumed.

Hu Yaobang was largely airbrushed from official history after his purge in 1987. But because he did not publicly challenge the Communist Party, he maintained his legacy and his supporters, including all of the current and likely future party chiefs and premiers: Hu Jintao, Wen Jiabao, Xi Jinping, and Li Keqiang. All four regularly visit the Hu family home during Spring Festival. But only Wen Jiabao has publicly honored his mentor’s legacy.

Two years ago, on the 21st anniversary of Hu Yaobang’s death, Wen penned an essay in the People’s Daily that was remarkable in a nation whose leaders rarely give any public hint of their personal lives. “What he taught me in those years is engraved on my heart,” wrote Wen. Of the four top leaders who regularly pay homage to Hu Yaobang’s old home, Wen Jiabao has the warmest connection with Hu Yaobang’s widow and four children.

Hu taught his children to resist the idea, wired into the Communist Party psyche, that they had any particular hereditary right to high office. Nevertheless the eldest son, Hu Deping, rose to vice minister rank in the United Front Department. And last year he used his princeling heritage and networks to organize and say things that would have banished lesser-born men to jail. He published a book about his father, with a forward written by Wen. He organized a series of closed-door seminars for leading intellectuals and other princeling children of reformist leaders to try and build a consensus for reform.

The first and most low-key seminar, in July, ignited what became a raging public debate about Bo Xilai’s “Chongqing Model” versus its possible antidote, the more liberal “Guangdong Model.” The second, in August, celebrated the 35th anniversary of the arrest of Mao’s radical “Gang of Four,” which slammed the door shut on the Cultural Revolution just weeks after Mao’s death in August 1976. The third, in September, explored the 30th anniversary of the 1981 Resolution on History, which had confirmed the Cultural Revolution as a catastrophe that must never occur again.

It was at the September gathering that Hu Deping set down the themes that Wen later referred to in his press conference, and published his comments on a website dedicated to chronicling the life and times of his father: “The bottom line is making sure to adopt the attitude of criticizing and fundamentally denouncing the Cultural Revolution … In recent years, for whatever reason, there seems to be a ‘revival’ of something like advocating the Cultural Revolution. Some people cherish it; some do not believe in the Cultural Revolution but nevertheless exploit it and play it up. I think we must guard this bottom line!”

The subtext, only barely concealed, was that Bo Xilai must be stopped from dragging Communist Party back toward its most radical, lawless past. How, one could be forgiven for asking, could Bo grasp for power by praising a movement that killed his own mother?

Hu Deping honed in on the need to forge mechanisms to institutionalize the power games between party leaders. He told his princeling and intellectual friends in the seminar audience that the remnants of feudal aristocracy — old fashioned despotic power — might again emerge as the party had said it had during the Cultural Revolution. He foreshadowed the ructions that are now taking place:

“If we really want to carry out democratization of inner-party political life, the cost is going to be enormous. Do we have the courage to accept that cost? If we do it now, there is a cost certainly. Do we dare to bear the cost? Is now the right time? I cannot say for sure. However, I think it might create some ‘chaos’ in some localities, some temporary ‘chaos’, and some localized ‘chaos’. We should be prepared.”

Hu Deping has been stepping forward, with some reluctance, to draw on his father’s legacy to help shape China’s future. He is a member of the standing committee of one of China’s two representative-style bodies and mixes with senior leaders. He discussed the Cultural Revolution with both President Hu Jintao and his expected successor, Xi Jinping, not long before Wen Jiabao’s news conference and Bo Xilai’s demise, according to a source familiar with those conversations. China’s politically engaged population is watching the battle now under way within the Politburo to frame the downfall of Bo Xilai and set the lessons that will shape China’s future.

“So far we cannot identify whether Wen Jiabao is representing himself or representing a group,” says a recently retired minister-level official, who had confidently predicted Bo’s sacking to me 10 days before it happened. “Maybe it’s 80 percent himself and 20 percent the group. We still have to watch.”

It remains far from clear whether the Communist Party’s webs of patronage and knots of financial and bureaucratic interests can be reformed. But with China’s leftist movement decapitated by the purge of Bo Xilai, and Bo’s critics now talking about his reign of “red terror” after daily revelations of political and physical brutality under his command, Wen has begun to win over some of his many detractors.

“In the past I did not have a fully positive view of Wen Jiabao, because he said a lot of things but didn’t deliver,” says a leading media figure with lifelong connections to China’s leadership circle. “Now I realize just to be able to say it, that’s important. To speak up, let the whole world know that he could not achieve anything because he was strangled by the system.”

Hu Yaobang’s most faithful protégé, who carried his funeral casket to its final resting place, is building on the groundwork laid by Hu and his children ostensibly to prevent a return of the Cultural Revolution. Wen Jiabao is defending the party line set by Deng Xiaoping’s 1981 historical resolution against attack from the left. Between the lines, however, he is challenging the Communist Party’s 30-year consensus from the liberal right.

Hu Dehua, the youngest son, spelled out the gulf between these positions in a rare Chinese media interview one month ago: “The difference between my father and Deng is this: Deng wanted to save the party; my father wanted to save the people, the ordinary people.”

Wen Jiabao sees Bo’s downfall as a pivotal opportunity to pin his reformist colors high while the Communist Party is too divided to rein him in. He is reaching out to the Chinese public because the party is losing its monopoly on truth and internal roads to reform have long been blocked. Ironically, he is doing so by leading the public purging of a victim who has no hope of transparent justice, because the party to which he has devoted his life has never known any other way.

Apple’s Contracting Manufacturer FoxConn Devastating Chinese Slave Workers to commit suicide. As Machines repeat same monotonous motion thousands Times. Poverty Wages, Excessive Forced Overtime. Mercilessly Apple Carping Intellectual Property Protection

click the picture below to watch the video

Apple’s Contracting Manufacturer FoxConn Devastating Chinese Slave Workers to commit suicide. As Machines repeat same monotonous motion thousands Times. Poverty Wages, Excessive Forced Overtime. Mercilessly Apple Carping Intellectual Property Protection

http://www.metacafe.com/fplayer/8296506/Apple_s_Contracting_Manufacturer_FoxConn_Devastating_Chinese_Sla.swf
Apple’s Contracting Manufacturer FoxConn Devastating Chinese Sla – The best home videos are here

http://www.dailymotion.com/embed/video/xprxt7
Apple’s Contracting Manufacturer FoxConn… by alakhtal

OSAMA’S WIVES SUEN’ PAKIS FOR NOT PAYN’ THEIR CUT IN KERRY LUGAR BERMAN BILL

OSAMA’S WIVES SUEN’ PAKIS FOR NOT PAYN’ THEIR CUT IN KERRY LUGAR BERMAN BILL

If you ever Fucked Up your Heart, Veins, Arteries by Monsanto & Stoopid Doctors, Quit Bitchn’ Now! Eat raisins, Chilies, Chocolate, Tofu, Kiwi, Purple Potatoes, Watermelon & Peas, Bananas, Potassium-Rich Foods or else get Graveyard Hunchbacked Assistant to find you Dick Cheney’s Rejected Hearts

The House approved a 2013 budget resolution from Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Ohio) on Thursday by a 228-191 vote, and suffered just 10 GOP defections compared to four last year.

This year’s vote was by a narrower margin than the 2011 vote that passed Ryan’s budget 235-193. This year and last, all Democrats voted “no.”

An increase in Republican “no” votes was expected this year, as many have grown frustrated with their inability to achieve more aggressive budget savings, due in large part to opposition in the Democratic-led Senate and the White House.
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) seemed to address that frustration indirectly on Thursday as he praised Ryan for putting forward a budget that represents a “real vision of what we were to do if we get more control here in this town.”

“It’s still a Democrat-run town,” he added.

The GOP budget plan again draws a clear contrast between Republicans, who are looking reduce the deficit almost entirely through cuts to federal spending, and Democrats, who continue to push for a combination of spending cuts and tax increases. Republicans spent Wednesday and Thursday arguing that the is mired in a debt and deficit crisis that demands a serious response.

“We are ceding our sovereignty and our ability to control our own destiny as a country when we have to hope that other countries will lend us money,” Ryan said Wednesday. “We’ve got to get this under control.”

“If we don’t tackle these debt problems soon, they’re going to tackle us as a country.”

Ryan’s budget would cut more than $5 trillion more than President Obama’s proposal, reduce spending in 2013 and 2014 compared to 2012, and revive his proposal last year to turn Medicare into a health insurance supplement program for anyone younger than 55.

Ryan’s proposal is more aggressive than Democrat-led budget alternatives that the House rejected Wednesday and Thursday, some of which he disregarded as leaning too heavily on tax increases to reduce the deficit. At the same time, it is not as aggressive as the Republican Study Committee budget, which also failed.

Democrats protested the Ryan budget throughout the entire process, warning that it would cut too deeply into critical federal programs. House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) had harsh words for the Ryan budget as debate closed.

“Tragically, the product we will produce today is far less than the sum of our parts in this body,” he said. “It is, I would suggest to you, a product unworthy of the intellect that has been applied to it.

“It is a product, indeed, that I think will hurt America, not help America. It is a product that is too much politics and too little policy. It is a product of which I think this House cannot be proud.”

“It is a recipe for national stagnation and decline,” Budget Committee Ranking Member Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said Wednesday. “It retreats from our national goal of out-educating, out-building, out-competing the rest of the world.”

Just before the final vote, the House rejected a mainstream Democratic budget alternative from Budget Committee Ranking Member Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.). Members shot down that proposal 163-262, very close to the 166-259 margin seen in 2011 on Van Hollen’s budget.

The 23 Democratic votes against the Van Hollen amendment is the same total as last year. Liberal Democrats for the most part were able to bury their reservations about the spending cuts in the August debt deal in order to back a budget based on those cuts.

Democratic opponents included most of the Blue Dog caucus, like Rep. Heath Shuler (D-N.C.) and Mike Ross (D-Ark.) as well as some liberals like Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio).

No Cheese Country Coup d’état

 

China’s Power Struggle
Is a Dangerous Divide Opening Between Beijing Leaders?
By Wieland Wagner AFP
For weeks, China’s communist leaders have been embroiled in a bitter power struggle that could jeopardize a carefully planned transition in the national leadership and the course charted by more moderate reformers. Although the state has tried to keep the feuding under wraps, the Internet is awash with rumors — including those of a possible coup.
The 7 p.m. news isn’t one of the best parts of Chinese state television. Two newscasters, a man and a woman, stiffly rattle off the achievements of the nine members of the Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China, including stories about the model companies they have visited and the mines they have toured. They read off the names of the workers who have received awards from the party leaders, and of the state guests being received by leaders in Beijing.
Still, last week, many Chinese paid close attention to the evening propaganda ritual, searching for signs indicating which of China’s leaders are still in power in Beijing.
There had been rumors and speculation about a possible coup, prompting many to wonder whether President and party leader Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao would even appear on the screen. Or would the newscast suddenly show other top officials?
The rest of the world, alarmed by reports from bloggers, also looked to China with concern. The country has enjoyed enviable successes for the last three decades. It has become the world’s second-largest economy, it now has the largest foreign currency reserves (about $3.2 trillion, or €2.4 trillion) and it controls the most dynamic growth market in the world — and one that German industries are increasingly dependent on.
Some Western businesspeople have even come to believe that the Chinese economic miracle is proof of the superiority of its authoritarian system. They have raved that the Chinese — unlike their counterparts in the West — don’t waste time in endless debates but, instead, make quick and clear decisions, thereby enabling them to govern more efficiently. And hasn’t it been true, they have argued, that the top political players are selected much more carefully and are not brought into senior government positions until they have proven their worth in the provinces?
It certainly seemed that way. But, in reality, China’s communist leaders have been embroiled in bitter power struggles for weeks, the details of which are only gradually reaching the outside world.
It is also becoming clear that the supposed competitive advantages of the Chinese one-party dictatorship — with no freely elected parliament, no independent judiciary, no meddlesome press — could become the biggest threat to the stability of this country of 1.3 billion people.
Rumors of a Coup
Last week’s uncertainty was triggered by rumors of a coup, which appeared online on the night of Monday, March 19, via the migroblogging website Sina Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter. Although government censors quickly deleted the messages, they had already been rapidly disseminated.
Bloggers reported that gunshots had been heard on the edge of Zhongnanhai, the downtown Beijing neighborhood surrounded by high walls in which Chinese leaders live and work. They also described sightings of military vehicles on Changan Avenue, the long parade route along the Forbidden City and the Great Hall of the People.
Life seemed to be proceeding normally in Beijing, and many of the photos posted online of allegedly sighted tanks subsequently turned out to be old. Nevertheless, a state of emergency prevailed on the Internet in China. For instance, anyone searching for key words or phrases, such as “gunfire” or “Changan Avenue,” got the following message: “These terms are not being displayed in accordance with the applicable laws, regulations and political guidelines.”
Still, in posting these statements, the censors merely fueled additional speculation over what was happening in the government district. According to websites run by Chinese exiles, Zhou Yongkang, 69, a leading Poliburo official in charge of the police and judiciary, had been neutralized by his rival, party leader Hu, who enjoys the support of the military.
The security chief was mentioned in the TV news on Thursday, but it was unusually brief and without a photo. Like so many things in Beijing, his future has seemed uncertain.
A Leadership Shake-Up
The Chinese capital hasn’t experienced a power struggle like the one now underway since the bloody suppression of the democracy movement in Tiananmen Square in 1989. At the time, there were also deep divisions within the country’s communist leadership.
The current showdown threatens to jeopardize the carefully planned change in the party and national leadership. Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping, 58, is expected to succeed Hu as party leader in the fall and replace him as president in March 2013.
The shake-up had been prepared for so long that it didn’t seem to be in jeopardy. On the other hand, China’s communists have only managed to achieve a smooth transition of power once since the death of Chairman Mao Zedong in 1976. That was in 2002, when the current Communist Party leader took office.
This fall, however, seven of the nine positions on the Politburo Standing Committee are to be filled with new people. This is almost more important than the presidential succession because it is this committee that ultimately sets the agenda in China. Even the president and party leader has to negotiate compromises within the committee.
Seeking to Avoid a ‘Historical Tragedy’
The tussle over the replacement of the seven members has been going on for months. On March 15, one of the most promising candidates for a top post withdrew, albeit involuntarily. The Beijing leadership deposed Bo Xilai, 62, the popular party chairman in Chongqing, a city of 32 million on the Yangtze River in central China.
The ambitious and charismatic Bo’s fall from grace came as a surprise because he is considered a “princeling.” His father became one of China’s “immortal” revolutionaries after making a name for himself fighting the Japanese. His son Bo encouraged the citizens of Chongqing to revive the custom of singing revolutionary songs in the city’s parks. He had thousands of corrupt officials and underworld figures arrested. And he helped the poor by forgiving their school fees and providing them with inexpensive apartments.
Conservatives in the Communist Party applauded Bo, believing that he could resolve the contradictions of communist state capitalism, especially widespread corruption and the growing chasm between the rich and the poor.
But moderate reformers, such as Premier Wen Jiabao, saw the Chongqing-based populist as a new Mao, a dictator who could threaten them and their families’ business interests. Speaking on the day before Bo was deposed, Wen said that China had reached a “critical stage.” “Without a successful political structural reform, it is impossible for us to fully institute economic structural reform, and the gains we have made in this area may be lost,” Wen said. In fact, he added that, if China could not get to the root of its problems, it might experience another “historical tragedy like the Cultural Revolution.”
The assessment by a Chinese academic in a US diplomatic cable that was disclosed by WikiLeaks in 2010 shows how deeply Bo had alarmed the party bosses in Beijing. According to the academic, in an effort to make himself politically unassailable, Bo had even denounced his own father during the Cultural Revolution. As the professor stated in his assessment, since the Chinese value family ties above all else, many viewed Bo as a “base traitor.”
The Wang Lijun Affair
In addition to quarreling over positions, Beijing’s leaders are also at odds over the future positioning of the superpower. Should China be more “revolutionary” again — that is, more directed from above — as Bo demonstrated in Chongqing? Or should the party embark on reforms leading in the direction of a constitutional state, as the southern province of Guangdong, a key center of the country’s export industries, is currently practicing with the support of party leader Hu and Premier Wen?
Although personal and political issues are difficult to separate in this power struggle, a public contest to determine the best arguments has so far been avoided. Instead, Hu, Wen and their supporters employed a tried-and-true method for eliminating the upstart from Chongqing: corruption charges.
An incident in early February provided the necessary excuse. At the time, Wang Lijun, Bo’s recently demoted vice-mayor and police chief, had fled to the US Consulate in Chengdu because he allegedly wanted to seek asylum. But the effort fizzled, and he only stayed in the consulate for a single day. The former official is now being questioned in Beijing, where he has reportedly provided authorities with incriminating material about Bo and his family.
Whether the ousted “princeling” will be put on trial or relegated to a more minor position within the party was still unclear last Friday. Bo has powerful allies in Beijing, including Zhou Yongkang, the chief of security in the Politburo who, according to rumors among Chinese bloggers, has now been deposed. To fool the Internet censors, net activists have made a code name out of the last character in his name. They refer to him as “Kang Shifu,” the name of a Chinese brand of instant noodles.
Trusting the Internet More than the State
And what is Xi Jinping saying, the man who — at least at the moment — is in line to become the next party leader and president? He has remained tight-lipped on where he intends to take China. Such is consistent with the approach he has used to climb to the top of the party: not attracting attention and not making enemies.
Granted, this is a recipe that has proven effective in the past, as was also the case with censorship. But how effective is this approach today, when an alternative to the government’s propaganda — and one accessible to millions of Chinese — has taken shape on the Internet? And when there are two versions of the truth?
The most recent events must even give a man like Xi pause. The Communist Party is beginning to have trouble maintaining secrecy on issues of personnel and power. Too much information is leaked, and it rapidly spreads online.
Meanwhile, the party remains silent, which only fuels additional speculation. Even when Zhou was shown on television on Friday, many bloggers were unimpressed: “It’s all an illusion, full of twists and turns,” one blogger wrote.
Indeed, many Chinese have become so cynical that they don’t even trust the party media, such as state-run television, when they actually are telling the truth. But they do believe every rumor on the Internet.
Perhaps that was why they still didn’t know, at the end of last week, what was actually happening in their country.

BILL TO GEERT Q…

BILL TO GEERT QUIT FUCKN’ HENK AND INGRID FOR ISRAEL

Now be good and read Losers HorseManure, Ain’t Fuckn’ Delicious I was there. I warned you!

Microsoft founder turned philanthropist Bill Gates has been busy trying to persuade the Netherlands not to cut its development aid budget, with interviews and columns in several Dutch papers this week.

On Friday night, Bill Gates apparently telephoned the Volkskrant newspaper and Nos television to express his fears about the possibility of the Netherlands slashing its development aid budget.

The call came while the coalition parties and alliance partner PVV are negotiating about a tit-for-tat cutback solution PVV leader Geert Wilders has repeatedly said he will only agree to economic reforms if development aid is cut significantly.

Gates, in an interview with the Volkskrant, said he would gladly invite Wilders to come with him on a trip to Africa. ‘I would show him how spending a thousand dollars can save a child’s life. I think he would soon change his mind about cutting back on development aid,’ Gates told the paper.

TOULOUSE-EVOLUTIONSnapShot

TOULOUSE EVOLUTION The first day Israel blamed Hezbollah The second day Israel blamed Neo-Nazi The third day Israel blamed them for being Jews. The fourth day Israel rob a Palestinian land to bury the corpse in Jerusalem The fifth day Israel found Merah (Hebrew name) The sixth day Israel had him shot in the head as Osama The seventh day Israel blamed Sarkozy BEING headlined instead. The eight is Sabbath Israel ordered everybody to insert cucumber and don't scat. Tomorrow the whole world will be looking for Next Jews attacked News. So shut up sit down and listen. Do you hear me?

Can you guess w…

Can you guess which country this describes?

The national birthrate is collapsing. The economy is in ruin. Unemployment is

skyrocketing. Young people are demoralized. Decadence envelopes the nation, drug use is rampant, and sizeable portion of the women work as prostitutes.

Is it Greece? Cuba? Russia?

NoAin’t Iran! Asshole.. Its the Israeli Utopia that Jason Mattera & David Goldman day dream