Reading all of the interesting reporting this morning on the Bo Xilai case from the Financial Times, Bloomberg, the South China Morning Post and others, I felt I had to share the news with my Chinese readers on Sina Weibo. Here is an English translation of my original Chinese-language post.

A special work team from Beijing has arrived in Hong Kong to investigate BXL’s [Bo Xilai’s ] assets there and his relationship to Zhou YK [Zhou Yongkang]. The Financial Times reports that Zhou YK faces investigation for discipline violations. http://t.cn/zOWR7WT

The post was made at 9:47:13 am, and deleted within 13 minutes. At 10:00 am I received a notice from Sina Weibo featuring Sina Weibo’s signature eye icon wearing a blue police cap. It read:

We are sorry, your post “A special work team from Beijing has arrived in Hong Kong . . . ” has already been secreted [or “encrypted”] by managers. This microblog post is not appropriate for making public to the outside (对外公开). If you require assistance, please contact support (Link: http://t.cn/z0D6ZaQ)
抱歉，您在2012-04-23 09:47:13发表的微博“北京的专门工作组到达香港调…”已被管理员加密。此微博不适宜对外公开。如需帮助，请联系客服（链接：http://t.cn/z0D6ZaQ）

The following re-post with comment by Chinese media scholar and former CMP fellow Zhan Jiang (展江) about China’s ongoing poison drug capsules scandal was deleted from Sina Weibo sometime before 9:05pm Hong Kong time on April 20, 2012. Zhan Jiang currently has more than 665,000 followers, according to numbers from Sina Weibo. [More on deleted posts at the WeiboScope Search, by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre].

The health minister even says [people] need to have confidence. // @XueManzi: //@ZhaiXingshou010: In officialdom at present, what is most deficient is a culture and sense of shame. Since Ding Guangen (丁关根) resigned his post as railway minister in 1988 following a train disaster, we haven’t again seen anyone courageous enough to show a sense of shame. Thousands of students died in shoddy buildings during the Wenchuan Earthquake, and the minister of education gave not so much as a single apology.

The original Chinese post by Zhan Jiang (including the posts from previous users) follows:

卫生部长还说要有信心。 //@薛蛮子: //@摘星手010: 现今官场最匮乏的，是耻感文化。自1988年铁道部长丁关根因火车事故辞职以来，再不见知耻近乎勇者。汶川地震校舍倒塌，死难学生数千，教育部长连句道歉的表示都没有。

NOTE: All posts to The Anti-Social List are listed as “permission denied” in the Sina Weibo API, which means they were deleted by Weibo managers, not by users themselves.

In China’s world of public opinion guidance, everything is just fine and dandy until we’re told it’s not. That, at least, is the ideal. Thunder might roll across China’s microblogs, but until those who exercise political control over the media are good and ready for a storm, the waters must appear perfectly calm on major political stories. So it was with Bo Xilai (薄熙来), and so it might prove with Zhou Yongkang (周永康), the ninth-ranked member of China’s powerful Politburo Standing Committee, whose fate is now the subject of intense speculation outside China.
In early March, as the annual National People’s Congress was in session, there seemed to be little more than ripples surrounding Bo Xilai weeks after an embarrassing episode in which his former police chief, Wang Lijun (王立军), sought refuge in the American consulate in Chengdu. As he addressed an audience at the Great Hall of the People, Bo seemed poised, though the uncharacteristic caution suggested turbulence just below the surface.
The storm came full force on April 10 and 11, as the official Xinhua News Agency issued three notices that signaled a dramatic change in Bo’s political fortune. He is now under investigation for unspecified “serious discipline violations,” and his wife is a chief suspect in the alleged murder of a British national. He has become a political pariah, used by the Party (or perhaps more accurately, by his political opponents) to shore up the Party’s image of clean governance and rule of law.
Will the next political storm pulverize Zhou Yongkang, who is known to have been one of Bo Xilai’s closest allies, and around whom rumors swirled of a coup attempt in late March?
The Financial Times has reported that Zhou is already facing a probe over possible disciplinary violations, and the South China Morning Post quotes a source today as saying that a working group charged with investigating financial issues “relating to Bo and Zhou has already arrived in Hong Kong.”
In today’s edition of Taiwan’s Apple Daily, Jiang Chunnan ( 江春男) jumps the gun and refers to Zhou Yongkang as “the biggest sacrifice of the Bo case.”

[Former President] Jiang Zemin (江泽民) retired but did not withdraw [from politics]. He and [former Standing Committee member] Zeng Qinghong (曾庆红) have placed a lot of hindrances before Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, and Hu has used the Bo case to further cancel out the power of the Jiang faction, particularly in the case of Zhou Yongkang (周永康), this secretary of the CCP’s Politics and Law Committee who was pulled up by Jiang Zemin and has a hold on the police apparatus and the power of stability preservation, and who is Bo Xilai’s most important political ally. He [Zhou Yongkang] is the biggest sacrifice of the Bo case. Moreover, there is now greater validity to Hu’s holding on the post as chairman of the Central Military Commission because of the Bo case.

All of this news and speculation outside China contrasts starkly with Zhou Yongkang’s image as it continues to play out in China’s media. He is a man busy with the responsibilities of office, meeting overseas leaders and urging on the ranks below in China’s police and judicial systems.
In China today, Zhou Yongkang — whose official business reportedly took him on an inspection tour of Hubei province from April 18 to 20 — appears in just three newspapers, all in Hubei province. They include Hubei Daily, the province’s official Party mouthpiece, Chutian Metropolis Daily, a commercial spin-off of Hubei Daily, and Changjiang Daily, the official Party mouthpiece of the top leadership in the city of Wuhan.
Zhou appears on the front page of today’s Hubei Daily, with two prominently placed photographs of him smiling as he makes his tour. In the paper’s commercial spin-off, Chutian Metropolis Daily, a large headline at the top of the front page announces Zhou’s visit, but readers are directed to page two, where the report appears.

[ABOVE: News of Zhou Yongkang’s April 18 visit to Hubei province appears on the front page of today’s Hubei Daily].
While news of Zhou’s visit to Hubei did not appear in the People’s Daily or other central-level Party media, concluding on the basis of this alone that Zhou is being at once featured and sidelined would be premature. But of course it’s tempting to suppose that he’s playing a high-wire act, like that unrelated photo on the front page of today’s Chutian Metropolis Daily.

[ABOVE: News of Zhou Yongkang’s April 18 visit to Hubei province appears in today’s edition of Chutian Metropolis Daily].
Zhou was in the news last week (on April 18-19) after meeting in Beijing on April 17 with a senior Communist Party of Cuba leader, Victor Gaute Lopez. Coverage of that meeting did appear on the front page of the overseas edition of the People’s Daily two days later, but not in the official China edition of the People’s Daily on either April 18 or 19.
The very same day as his meeting with Lopez, Zhou reportedly held a so-called “judicial agency construction summary and commendation videophone conference” in which he addressed those “on the front lines” of “judicial agency construction” and “represented the Central Committee of the CCP and the State Council in commending 100 ‘national model judicial agencies’.” News of this videophone conference was reported by both the official China News Service and the Economic Daily on April 18.
If the news being reported outside of China has any basis, Zhou Yongkang could already be the political walking wounded. But until the top leadership is ready to weather another political storm, they will no doubt do their best to give the impression that everything is business as usual.

The following post by legal scholar and poet Xu Xin (徐昕) sharing a recent report about Bo Xilai’s son Bo Guagua in The New York Times was deleted from Sina Weibo sometime before 11:59am Hong Kong time today, April 20, 2012. Xu Xin currently has just under 88,000 followers, according to numbers from Sina Weibo. [More on deleted posts at the WeiboScope Search, by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre].
The post from Xu Xin draws from a passage in the report that reads: “One former government employee with party ties said the leadership tolderated a certain level of corruption among top officials or their relatives as long as it was kept out of public view.”

A long report on the front page of The New York Times talks about the dissolute life of Prince B, and says the general rule is: “Corruption is ok, but you can’t show corruption openly as this challenges the game rules.”

The post was accompanied by the following image of the New York Times, which is headlined: “.”

Despite the deletion of this post, CMP did note that other versions of the NYT article on Bo Guagua were readily available on Weibo on August 20, using the search term “Prince B”, or “B gongzi” (B公子).
The original Chinese post by Xu Xin follows:

【一般规则】《纽约时报》头版长文，讲述B公子奢华浪荡生活，说一般的规则是：“腐败可以，但不能以公开腐败挑战游戏规则。”http://t.cn/zO0xdHJ

NOTE: All posts to The Anti-Social List are listed as “permission denied” in the Sina Weibo API, which means they were deleted by Weibo managers, not by users themselves.

In recent years, many Chinese have criticized the way the country’s education system has been twisted and constrained by political priorities. In an article published in the journal Freezing Point in 2006, Chinese historian Yuan Weishi argued that children in mainland China were being raised on “wolf’s milk”, the twisted accounts they read in official history textbooks feeding a sense of xenophobia and unthinking nationalism. In this cartoon posted to Sina Weibo on April 18, 2012, Shanghai-based user Chen Huhua (陈沪华) recapitulates this criticism of China’s education system. Chinese children sit at attention at their desks as the teacher points to two large characters — on the left a white character for “black” on a black background, and on the right a black character for “white” on white background. “Let me emphasize again: white is black, and black is white,” the teacher explains.

In the midst of a state-pushed craze surrounding the propaganda icon Lei Feng (雷锋) back in early March, the English-language Global Times asked for my views on Lei Feng “as a foreigner.” Did I think, the reporter asked, that the “Lei Feng spirit . . . actually doesn’t only belong to China, but also applies to the world as well?”
When I explained to the reporter that I didn’t see Lei Feng as a symbol of altruism at all, they made a point of writing back and begging to differ. But I was pleased to see several days later that the English-language paper did publish my remarks:

“Seen in his proper political context, Lei Feng is a symbol not of altruism but of submission to political power. In my view, the image of Lei Feng is completely out of step with a modern China,” wrote David Bandurski, a researcher at the University of Hong Kong’s China Media Project, in an e-mail to the Global Times. “What China needs today is a new model of active and critical citizenship, not of subservience,” he wrote.

The rest of my response, which for whatever reason did not run in the Global Times was:

Premier Wen Jiabao spoke not long ago about ‘creating the conditions for the people to criticize the government.’ An article in the Central Party’s School’s Study Times this week deals with the exact same issue. But would Lei Feng have dared criticize, or demanded more from those in positions of power?”

I thought of this exchange today when I read a story making the rounds on the internet — it was on the front page of QQ until this afternoon — about Lei Chuang (雷闯), who may be exactly the kind of new “model of active and critical citizenship” I suggested to the Global Times.
According to a report by The Beijing News, Lei Chuang, a 25-year-old graduate student in the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Shanghai Jiaotong University, submitted open government information requests to 53 central government departments on April 13, requesting that they release information about the 2011 annual salaries of ministers or directors [at their agencies].
As the basis of his request, Lei Chuang cited Chapter II, Article 9 of the Regulation of the People’s Republic of China on Open Government Information, which took effect on May 1, 2008.

Administrative agencies should disclose on their own initiative government information that satisfies any one of the following basic criteria: 1) Information that involves the vital interests of citizens, legal persons or other organizations; 2) Information that needs to be extensively known or participated in by the general public; 3) Information that shows the structure, function and working procedures of and other matters relating to the administrative agency; 4) Other information that should be disclosed on the administrative agency’s own initiative according to laws, regulations and relevant state provisions.

Apparently, Lei Chuang has already received a response from one government office. But that response offers a hint of how the government generally regards requests for making information available in a political culture that still thrives on secrecy.
Here is the relevant section from the report in The Beijing News:

Lei Chuang said that as of yesterday, he had already received a phone call from the State Food and Drug Administration, which said it had received his request and wanted to know his objective in seeking the information and how he would use it.
According to Lei Chuang, this employee [from the State Food and Drug Administration] said that as the head of its department was a deputy minister for the Ministry of Health, their wages were paid by the Ministry of Health, and therefore the authority on releasing [the requested information] was with the Ministry of Health. [Lei Chuang said:] “I requested that they respond in writing [to my request], and they said they would look into this, so they didn’t entirely avoid me. I’ll wait for their response.”

[ABOVE: Lei Chuang holds up a sign that reads: “Requesting officials’ salary figures by made available.”]
The Beijing News report on Lei Chuang’s open government information (OGI) requests in fact mixed together the issue of making the salaries of government officials known — Lei Chuang’s specific request — and making the assets of government officials known, a much bigger issue.
The newspaper noted that National People’s Congress delegate Han Deyun (韩德云) has submitted a proposal during each of the past six years calling for the creation of a system for making the assets of government officials public.
Zeng Kanghua (曾康华), the head of the School of Public Finance at the Central University of Finance and Economics, told The Beijing News that the question of making the assets of government officials public was “rather complex,” and that “under the current institutional arrangement in China there was not an institutional basis for this.” But from a “technical standpoint,” he added, “there should be no difficulty.”
Lei Chuang is apparently finding himself something of a celebrity today. He wrote on his Sina Weibo account at 3:16 this afternoon: “The matter of my submitting requests for open government information has already impacted progress on my research, so for now I’m no longer accepting media interviews. As for the whole process of my applications, readers can go to http://t.cn/zO0nQuQ . . .”

The following post by scholar and former journalist Guo Yukuan (郭宇宽) about his witnessing of the arrogant use of an expensive luxury vehicle with official military plates was deleted from Sina Weibo sometime before 1:36pm Hong Kong time on April 16, 2012. Guo Yukuan currently has just under 22,000 followers, according to numbers from Sina Weibo. [More on deleted posts at the WeiboScope Search, by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre].

Today is the weekend, and at the Minsu Temple in Luoyang, which was overflowing with people, and people were suddenly ordered around and berated, told to make way. It turned out this was for the mount [vehicle] of an old military official, the road cleared before him and a retinue following. As the crowd looked on, an attendant stood at the door, and a small old military official emerged. First, as a fan of Henan Opera [with which the temple is associated], they disturbed my aesthetic mood. Second, as a taxpayer, I felt out of sorts. And finally, as there was also a child [in the vehicle], I felt pained for unfortunate impact this kind of family would have on the child’s upbringing.

The post was accompanied by the following photo taken by Guo Yukuan.

The original Chinese post by Guo Yukuan follows:

今日是周末，洛阳民俗庙会人山人海，忽有马弁开道呵斥众人肃静回避，原来是一位军爷的坐骑，前有开道，后有扈从，众人侧目之际，侍从手挡车门，迎下的原来是一位小军爷。 一是作为豫剧爱好者，他们扰了我的雅兴。 二是作为纳税人，我很不爽。 三作为也有孩子的，我痛心这样的家庭对儿童成长不利。

NOTE: All posts to The Anti-Social List are listed as “permission denied” in the Sina Weibo API, which means they were deleted by Weibo managers, not by users themselves.

The following post by writer and traditional culture expert Wuman Lanjiang (雾满拦江) dealing with political secrecy in China was deleted from Sina Weibo sometime before 6:34pm Hong Kong time yesterday, April 17, 2012. Wuman Lanjiang currently has more than 164,000 followers, according to numbers from Sina Weibo. [More on deleted posts at the WeiboScope Search, by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre].

Yang Hengjun (杨恒均) wrote on his blog: in bookstores in the Hong Kong airport, you can see a huge section of the shelves all devoted to inside secrets of the Chinese government, insider looks at political affairs, and at the lives of leaders. If these disclosures were happening in Western countries, you could go right to the government archives and have a look at them, but in China they’ve become secrets . . . Another article said that in our country the people’s right to know is so insignificant as to be pathetic, and we live in a world where we cannot know.

The post was accompanied by the following cartoon, in which a probing journalist trying to report on government affairs — in the background, an official leaps up across a serious of bigger and bigger official red stamps representing power — is shielded from the facts.

The original Chinese post by Wuman Lanjiang follows:

杨恒均在他的博客里说：在香港机场逛书店，看到整整一大片书架上，几乎全部都是揭秘中国政府、政务内幕、领导人情况的，而这些揭露的内幕如果放在西方国家的话，你都可以到政府档案馆去查阅，在中国却成了秘密……另有文章称：我国民众的知情权少得可怜，活在一个不可知的世界上。要不犯傻，要不犯法。

NOTE: All posts to The Anti-Social List are listed as “permission denied” in the Sina Weibo API, which means they were deleted by Weibo managers, not by users themselves.

In 2006, one year before the Chinese Communist Party’s 17th Congress, Yu Keping (俞可平), a political scholar generally seen as part of President Hu Jintao’s inner circle of theorists, leapt into China’s spotlight with a book called Democracy is a Good Thing. This week, in the wake of last week’s turbulent removal of Bo Xilai — and just six months from the crucial 18th Congress — Yu Keping is in the spotlight again.
Last month, Yu Keping released a new book called Democratic Governance and Political Reform in China (敬畏民意：中国的民主治理与政治改革). The English-language title on the book’s jacket is in fact a partial translation of the Chinese title. The full title should read something like: Prizing the Will of the People: Democratic Governance and Political Reform in China.

In the book, Yu discusses a set of key points about Chinese society and politics in recent years, and argues (as Premier Wen Jiabao often has in recent months) that China stands at an important crossroads on the question of whether and how a basic consensus on reforms, both economic and political, can be maintained.
Yu Keping’s Chinese title, Prizing the Will of the People, in fact expresses the core idea of his book, that the popular will as expressed in public opinion is the only true basis for the legitimacy of political leadership in China.
Yu, the deputy director of the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau, is one of China’s most prominent political scholars, his research covering such areas as political philosophy, comparative politics and civil society development. Yu, who is closely associated with the Hu-Wen administration, sparked debate in China about “democratic politics” in 2006 with the publication of his book Democracy is a Good Thing.
In the essay that provided the foreword to Democracy is a Good Thing Yu Keping wrote [a nod once again to Roland Soong for his translation]:

Democracy is a good thing, and this is not just for specific persons or certain officials; this is for the entire nation and its broad masses of people. Simply put, for those officials who care more about their own interests, democracy is not only not a good thing; in fact, it is a troublesome thing, even a bad thing. Just think, under conditions of democratic rule, officials must be elected by the citizens and they must gain the endorsement and support of the majority of the people; their powers will be curtailed by the citizens, they cannot do whatever they want, they have to sit down across the people and negotiate. Just these two points alone already make many people dislike it. Therefore, democratic politics will not operate on its own; it requires the people themselves and the government officials who represent the interests of the people to promote and implement.

The following is a partial translation of the transcript of an interview Yu Keping gave recently to Huashang Bao, in which he discusses his new book:

Huashang Bao: You’ve just recently come out with a new book. I’ve found something quite interesting, which is that the full name of the book is Prizing the Will of the People: Democratic Governance and Political Reform in China, but in the publicity the book has gotten everyone seems to have simply called the book Prizing the Will of the People. It seems right to suggest that this overlooks a much more concrete sense of the book [and its content] and that is “democratic governance and political reform in China.” Do you think that in China today, just as with this process of publicizing [your book], democratic governance and political reform and such questions have been consciously or unconsciously ignored, or insufficient attention paid to them?
Yu Keping: No, not at all. Emphasizing “prizing the will of the people” is in fact my intent. It is the root of democratic politics. As I’ve said before, the Chinese Communist Party defines as its purpose “establishing the Party for the public, governing for the people” (立党为公，执政为民). It takes the power by the people (人民当家作主) of people’s democracy (人民民主) as the very life of socialism. For the Chinese Communist Party, the interests of the people should be the core value to be pursued, and the will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of governance. Regardless of whether this is about “all rights for the people” (权为民所有) and “power for the people” (权为民所赋), or about “power exercised for the people” (权为民所用), we can’t step around these two words “popular will” (民意) [or “will of the people”]. If you depart from the popular will, there’s no such thing even as “taking charge for the people” (为民做主), not to mention “exercising power for the people”.
But as you’ve just said, Prizing Public Opinion encapsulates my thinking over the past few years about democratic politics and political reform in our country. In Democracy is a Good Thing, Let the People Make China Prosper (让民主造福中国) and Thought Liberation and Political Progress (思想解放与政治进步), I’ve continued to argue that democracy is a good thing, and I’ve talked about such concepts as “increasing democracy” (增量民主), “dynamic stability” (动态稳定), good government and good leadership, civil society and “renewing the government” (政府创新). . . I’ve indicated strongly that in this key areas, we must have a breakthrough on political reform. Otherwise, our project of modernization will suffer setback, the cost of development will constantly rise, and the pressures on governance will rise dramatically.
I’ve also tried to raise some new methods and new ideas about possible solutions. For example, I think that “to rule the country by law we must first rule the Party by law” (依法治国必先依法治党), that “we must innovate social management and at the same time prioritize the self-governance of society” (既要创新社会管理，又要重视社会自治), that “mutual governance by the government and the people is the basic path to good governance” (官民共治是通向善治的基本途径), etcetera.
Huashang Bao: My impression is that among high-level officials you’re the one who talks most publicly about reform and about democracy. Where did these convictions of yours come from?
Yu Keping: They have a lot to do with my family and background. I was born into a poor farming household. I used to graze the cattle, and I once served as a cadre in a rural production brigade. My parents and my brothers and sisters are still in the countryside. I know the hardships among the people, and I know that only democratic politics can allow every ordinary citizen to enjoy lives of fairness, justice and prosperity. Besides this, there is my professional background. I am a political scholar. In fact, I was the first political studies PhD that China fostered all on its own. It is my responsibility to promote democratic politics and to share a knowledge of democracy with all.
In my study of the development of political principles in China and beyond, from ancient times to the present, I’ve come to have a deep understanding that an advanced state of democracy and rule of law is the only true way to achieve the great revitalization of the Chinese people, and it is where the basic nature of socialism lies. I believe that any scholar or official who cares for China’s fate and has a responsible attitude toward the people will feel the same profound sense of historical responsibility and gravity that I feel.
Huashang Bao: Nevertheless, it can’t be denied that there are some officials that really do have no interest at all in these things that you care about and advocate. All they care about is there own power and their own interests. How do you view this?
Yu Keping: If you care only for your own interests and power, that shows not just that you have no interest at all in democracy and rule of law but even worse that you will do your utmost to vilify and harm the democratic undertaking. In clear anticipation of exactly this situation, I made a point of adding in a “note”: seeing these words, some officials will laugh narrow-mindedly to themselves; some scholars will turn up their noses; some readers will dismiss what I say as empty chatter. Knowing this only too well, I reaffirm my views? Why? Because I deeply believe that there will be more people who cherish their rights, there will be more scholars who hold on to their ideals, and there will be more officials who prize public opinion. Where the public will goes, so trend the times.

According to recent reports in Chinese media, products from 13 pharmaceutical companies including Xiuzheng Pharmaceutical (修正药业) were recently found to contain excessive amounts of chromium, with products in some cases having 90 times the accepted levels of chromium. The companies, which are now being investigated by the State Food and Drug Administration, are alleged to have manufactured capsules for medicinal products by using industrial gelatins made from recycled leather and other waste products processed with quicklime.
In this cartoon, posted by artist Shang Haichun (商海春) to his blog at QQ.com, a homegrown pharmaceutical manufacturer — apparently perspiring with guilt — throws old shoes into the top of an old-fashioned meat grinder and medicinal capsules pop out the other end.