A Quiet Beidaihe Meeting: Has Jiang Zemin Been Detained?

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• published: 20 Aug 2014
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Follow us on TWITTER: http://twitter.com/cnforbiddennews Like us on FACEBOOK: http://www.facebook.com/chinaforbiddennews The Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) Beidaihe closed-door meeting has ended in silence. Sources said this year's Beidaihe meeting had been unusually quiet as Xi Jinping established his absolute power inside the party. There are no more struggles between CCP officials that were frequently seen in the past two years. Even retired leaders stopped their activities to avert trouble. In addition, there have been massive flight delays between Beijing and Shanghai since mid-July, and military drills continue around the sea area northeast of Jiangsu province for an unusually long time of over four months. Commentators thus speculate that Xi Jinping may have already placed Jiang Zemin into absolute control. Hong Kong media recently said that the key result of this year's Beidaihe meeting is the announcement of the investigation of Zhou Yongkang, a former member of the Politburo Standing Committee. Xi Jinping managed to establish his absolute authority during his anti-corruption campaign. He has used that power to bring about the announcement of Zhou's dismissal. The report also mentioned that retired CCP leaders mostly showed a passive attitude in talking about politics. Other than voicing support of Xi's anti-corruption moves, many of them tactfully chose to make no comments at such a moment. Xia Ming, professor of political science at CUNY: "Anyone may become the next target of Xi's cleaning up moves and therefore they are very nervous. Nobody wants to be involved and nobody knows what can guarantee their safety. Probably you have to be inside Xi Jinping and Wang Qishan's group to be safe." Back in 2012, the Beidaihe meeting was a completely different story. Xi felt tremendous pressure at that time and even applied to resign. Following that, he “disappeared” from public view for 14 days. Back then, the focus was on how to handle Bo Xilai's case, whether to take down former secretary of the Central Politics and Law Commission Zhou Yongkang and former vice chairman of the Central Military Commission Xu Caihou. Jiang Zemin and his followers had conspired with various factions inside the CCP to impeach Xi Jinping during the Beidaihe Meeting. Meanwhile, media reports revealed that there had been two assassination attempts on Xi. In 2014, massive flight delays were announced between Beijing and Shanghai right before the Beidaihe meeting. The CCP officially claimed the delay was caused by military drills. Later, it was said to be bad weather that caused the delays. However, the weather was indeed pretty good during that period. Along with China 's air traffic control, the United States announced an outage in its visa system. The system has yet to be fully recovered. Column writer Zhuang Feng commented that the "visa system glitch" might be a cooperative move by the U.S. to prevent any CCP top officials from defecting. Zhuang said, the visa system is unlikely to be attacked since most important military or economic secrets are not involved. It is somehow hard to imagine U.S. had to spend such a long time in fixing a system like that. Chen Pokong, visiting scholar of Colombia University, speculated that Xi Jinping might have blocked a coup in a very short period. In addition, the CCP had performed massive military drills that last unprecedentedly long. The drills in the sea area northeast of Jiangsu will continue until Nov 20, which adds up to over 4 months. On July 29, the long-rumored investigation of Zhou Yongkang was abruptly announced in the middle of massive military drills. The next day, the Central Discipline Inspection Commission sent a powerful inspection group to Shanghai. The team will stay there until September, which again matches the schedule of nearby military drills. In addition, chairman of Shanghai Bright Food and one of Jiang's intimate friends, Wang Zongnan was detained for investigation. Probably not accidentally, the CCTV began to broadcast a TV series "Deng Xiaoping During the Historical Transformation" on Aug 8. The series started with the story of Hua Guofeng taking down the Gang of Four. China's major Internet media also published an article on that day, titled "Hua Guofeng: A Civil War Would Break out without Arresting the Gang of Four." Among Chinese, some begin to use "the New Gang of Four" to refer to key members of Jiang 's faction. Hua Po, Beijing political observer:"Xi has held all power in his hands as he is now the leader of nine key teams or groups. All those (Jiang's followers) are under his control. He can take down any of them if he wants. The only concern now is the response of Chinese society to his moves." Chen Pokong commented that, the CCP leadership had taken down Chen Liangyu from investigating Zhou Zhengyi, a businessman; 《神韵》2014世界巡演新亮点 http://www.ShenYunPerformingArts.org/