China Central TV: champion of the people with a blurred picture

Financial Times

©AFP/AP

The China Central Television (CCTV) complex (main photo) and Chinese journalist Chen Yongzhou, confessing on state television (inset)

At the end of October, a young journalist in handcuffs, green prison jacket and a freshly shaved head appeared on China Central Television, the state-owned national broadcaster, and confessed to taking bribes in exchange for writing negative articles about a large Chinese company.

Just days earlier, the newspaper that employed Chen Yongzhou, 27, had published front-page banner headlines calling for his release, while human rights groups had mobilised to defend him. But after his admission on national television, the issue quickly died away.

Mr Chen’s is the latest in a series of televised public pre-trial confessions that have aired on the CCTV in recent months and have included British and US citizens being paraded before the camera to admit their crimes.

The performances, reminiscent of an earlier age in which political “struggle sessions” and show trials were the norm, have raised concerns inside China about the damage that they cause to the government’s stated goal of improving the rule of law.

But they have also raised an important question about the role of the state broadcaster and the balance it must strike between being a global media organisation, a commercial moneymaking venture and a political mouthpiece for the ruling Communist party.

The question is increasingly important to multinationals such as Apple, KFC, Volkswagen, Starbucks and Samsung, which have all been targeted in the past year by the broadcaster and accused of varying degrees of malfeasance or unfair practices in the Chinese market.

For major global companies, understanding why they have been singled out and on whose orders is crucial to avoiding one of the most dangerous pitfalls that can befall their businesses in the country.

In a recent book entitled Two Billion Eyes: The Story of China Central Television, author Ying Zhu says: “CCTV is full of serious-minded creators who regularly experience bouts of self-doubt, philosophical ambivalence and in some cases clinical depression.”

She also describes: “certain common themes, about ideals distorted or altogether thwarted by commercial and political pressure”.

Founded in 1958 as the country’s first TV station, CCTV did not convert to colour or extend its programming beyond a couple of hours in the evenings until the late 1970s.

Xinwen Lianbo: China’s Top Gun of news

Nowhere is the tension at CCTV between idealism, politics and commercial imperatives more obvious than at 7pm every night on its “Xinwen Lianbo” main news programme, which all regional television stations in China are required to broadcast.

A popular Chinese joke says that if anyone were to rely on this show for their information about the world they would come away with the following impressions:

After the first 10 minutes, which invariably features the activities of senior Communist cadres, they would believe that China’s leaders were all very busy.

The next 10 minutes of the half-hour broadcast would convince them that everyone in China was happy and prosperous, while the final segment would lead them to understand that everybody outside China was living in an abyss of suffering and extreme misery.

The format has barely changed in three decades, and the broadcast remains one of the most important ways for the Chinese government to issue decrees and political messages to the nation.

But in the age of social media, the show has borne the brunt of popular cynicism and ridicule over state control of information.

Ordinary netizens are quick to jump on mistakes or inconsistencies, such as when the show focuses heavily on negative events in western countries but ignores similar stories at home.

In 2011, a report about a new Chinese fighter jet showed the aircraft blowing another one up with a missile but ordinary viewers soon worked out that the footage in the news story was in fact taken from the 1986 Hollywood movie Top Gun and the featured fighter jet was American.

As late as 1978, fewer than 10m Chinese people had access to a TV, but today CCTV boasts more than 1bn potential viewers for its 45 channels that broadcast mostly soap operas, historical dramas and variety shows.

The broadcaster now earns billions of dollars a year in advertising revenue and its direct funding from the state accounts for a relatively minor part of its annual budget.

But it remains a vice-ministerial level government department and is always led by a senior Communist party official who has worked his way up through the party propaganda system.

The boss of the network, Hu Zhanfan, raised eyebrows in 2011, not long before he took the job, when he declared that the “first and foremost social responsibility [of journalists] is to serve well as a mouthpiece tool; this is the most core content of the Marxist view of journalism and it is the most fundamental of principles”.

According to current and former CCTV employees, the constant and pervasive censorship and political orders make it easy for individuals to become jaded.

So when they are presented with the opportunity to make money through unethical or, in some cases outright illegal deals, the temptation is heightened by their sense of disillusionment.

“The corruption inside CCTV is extremely serious,” says Hu Yong, an associate professor at the School of Journalism and Communication at Peking University and a former CCTV employee. “For example, [CCTV employees] will blackmail interviewees by threatening to expose them publicly or they will become public advocates for their interview subjects in exchange for economic benefits.”

Shi Feike, a senior journalist who once had close ties with CCTV, has a more nuanced view.

“The corruption inside CCTV is not necessarily more serious than in any other monopolistic state-owned enterprise in China,” he says. “There are some highly professional and ethical staff working at CCTV and the situation varies depending on the department, the channel and the individual programme.”

CCTV said: “CCTV has strict requirements regarding its employees’ professional ethics, and employs comprehensive disciplinary measures to restrict their activities.

In the wake of serious food and product safety scandals, CCTV has taken on the role of self-appointed public watchdog, with a focus on the transgressions of multinationals operating in China.

In recent weeks, the broadcaster has targeted smartphone maker Samsung for allegedly unfair after-sales policies, while earlier this year it directed similar charges against Apple that prompted the company to apologise to Chinese consumers.

Other companies such as KFC, McDonald's, Volkswagen, and Walmart have all been targeted by similar reports that appear to concentrate less on large Chinese companies, in particular state-owned monopolies that are often derided by consumers for their substandard products and services.

“The reasons for this bias towards reporting [negatively] on foreign companies are complicated; sometimes it is political as in the case of Google, often it is rent-seeking [trying to force large companies to buy advertising or pay bribes] and sometimes it is just the path of least resistance,” says Mr Shi.

“They cannot touch state enterprises because they will be censored so it is much safer to beat up on foreign companies. It will get on air without any trouble [from the censors] and it will gain support from nationalists.”

The negative campaigns do not always have the desired effect.

In late October, CCTV aired a seven-minute segment lambasting Starbucks for overcharging Chinese consumers for its coffee.

With more than 1,000 outlets across China and plans for the country to become its second-largest market after the US by next year, Starbucks wants to avoid a fight with the propaganda apparatus at all costs.

But on this occasion the reports were mostly greeted with derision rather than outrage from the wider public.

“Coffee is not a necessity for life, the price is determined by the market and it is up to Starbucks to charge what it wants,” said one user of China’s Twitter-like Weibo service whose message went viral. “If CCTV really cares about high prices why can’t they pay attention to prices that are actually related to people’s livelihoods?”

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Chinese leaders control media, academics to shape the perception of China

How Chinese officials shape and limit what Americans learn about China.

By Fred Hiatt

Paramilitary policemen stand in formation as they pay tribute to the Monument to the People's Heroes on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, November 17, 2013. China's new national security commission will enable the government to speak with a single voice when it comes to dealing with crises at home and abroad, state media cited President Xi Jinping as saying.

It’s well known that Chinese censors shape and limit the news and history their people can learn. 

What may be more surprising is how Chinese officials shape and limit what Americans learn about China.
Last month, a cultural attache in the Chinese embassy in Washington invited Perry Link to attend a Forum of Overseas Sinologists in Beijing in December.
Given that Link is one of America’s eminent China scholars, this might not be surprising — except that he had not received a visa to enter China since 1996 for reasons the Chinese have never explained.
Link replied that he would be interested in attending, but would he receive a visa?
Absolutely, he was told.
You’re sure? Link e-mailed back.
Of course, the attache replied. 

Just send your passport, “and I can help you to finish the visa application.”
Link sent his passport and application, and on Nov. 8 received the following message: “After review, I’d like to inform you that you will not be invited to the forum.”
The Lucy-and-the-football quality of this exchange is striking, but Link is far from the only foreign scholar to be blacklisted. 

In 2011, 13 respected academics who had contributed chapters to a book on Xinjiang, a province of western China that is home to a restive Muslim minority, found themselves banned.
Link, who has forged a distinguished career at Princeton and the University of California at Riverside can survive a visa ban. 

But for a young anthropologist seeking tenure, the inability to do field research could be terminal. 

And because China never explains its refusals or spells out what kind of scholarship is disqualifying, the result is a kind of self-censorship and narrowing of research topics that is damaging even if impossible to quantify.
“The costs to the American public,” Link told me, “are serious and not well appreciated... It is deeply systematic and accepted as normal among China scholars to sidestep Beijing demands by using codes and indirections. One does not use the term ‘Taiwan independence,’ for example. It is ‘cross-strait relations.’ One does not mention Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who sits in prison... Even the word ‘liberation’ to refer to 1949 is accepted as normal.”
Academics understand the code, he added, “but when scholars write and speak to the public in this code, the public gets the impression that 1949 really was a liberation, that Taiwan independence really isn’t much of an issue, that a Nobel Prize winner in prison really is not worth mentioning.”
Increasingly, foreign journalists are subject to similar pressure. 

Paul Mooney, a veteran Asia journalist for Reuters, recently was denied a visa, with no reason given, according to the agency. 

Knowledgeable China hands for Bloomberg News, the New York Times and The Washington Post have met similar fates.
Bloomberg provides a telling case. 

Last year it published groundbreaking investigations on the wealth that China’s elites are accumulating. Corruption is a sensitive issue for Communist Party leaders, and, given Bloomberg’s business interests in China, the journalism took courage.
After the reports, Bloomberg’s Web site was blocked to Chinese viewers, and journalists were denied visas. Recently, according to the New York Times, Bloomberg spiked an investigative report about a billionaire’s connection to Chinese leaders, with its editor in chief arguing that it was important to maintain his reporters’ access to the country.
The editor denied the report, telling the Times that the stories remain “active and not spiked.” 

Until they appear, Chinese officials are emboldened to believe that their hardball tactics can succeed in shaping what Americans read — and don’t read — about their country.
Visa denials are only one way the Communist Party attempts to influence how China is depicted. 

American universities increasingly depend on money-making campuses in China and on Chinese students paying full tuition here. 

Hollywood rewrites scripts to ensure access to China’s screens.
As Sarah Cook of Freedom House writes in her recent 67-page report, “The Long Shadow of Chinese Censorship: How the Communist Party’s Media Restrictions Affect News Outlets Around the World”:
“In many cases, Chinese officials directly impede independent reporting by media based abroad. However, more prevalent — and often more effective — are methods of control that subtly induce self-censorship...”
Many Chinese-language newspapers outside China have become more pliant because of pressure on advertisers or threats to relatives of journalists still inside China.
But what the Communist Party sees as propaganda success may not help the country in the long run, for at least three reasons.
Debates overseas on the most contentious issues — Tibet, Taiwan, the one-child policy — are waged by the sharpest partisans, while China scholars who might bring more nuance to the discussions stay silent.
The leaders’ desire to have China be seen as a confident new power on the world stage is undermined by their apparent fear of honest scrutiny.
And stifling scholarship and journalism doesn’t just harm Americans’ ability to understand the complexities of the world’s most populous country, it also limits information and analysis for China’s decision makers. 

In the end, that can’t be an advantage.

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Bloomberg blocks report to stay in China

Bloomberg was opening a “hornets nest” by withholding information that could be important to its clients.
By Demetri Sevastopulo in Hong Kong

Matthew Winkler, Bloomberg editor-in-chief, said the Chinese Communist party had made very clear that printing stories about the financial assets of its leaders was off-limits.

Bloomberg News has been accused of quashing a story that alleges financial ties between China’s richest man and relatives of top Chinese Communist party officials because of fears that the government would prevent it from operating in China.

An investigative team at the agency spent the past year probing links between the businessman and several current and former members of the Politburo Standing Committee – the body that ultimately rules China.

One person familiar with the circumstances said senior Bloomberg editors blocked the story at the eleventh hour. The person said Matthew Winkler, editor-in-chief, told the reporters in a conference call on October 29 that Bloomberg could not risk jeopardising its position in China by running the story.

Bloomberg denied that the group, whose main business around the world is selling financial data, had spiked the story. 

“The reporting as presented to me was not ready for publication,” Mr Winkler told the Financial Times, adding that Laurie Hays, a senior editor, and other top editors agreed with that assessment.

The person familiar with the discussions dismissed Bloomberg’s comments that the story was not ready for publication, saying it had been approved and just needed a Chinese government response. “We had crossed the Rubicon,” the person said. “The story was fully edited, fact checked and vetted by the lawyers.”

Mr Winkler declined to comment on whether he said on the conference call that the Chinese government would kick Bloomberg out of China if it printed the story.

“It’s not appropriate for me to comment on a private, internal conversation,” Mr Winkler said.

On Sunday, Mr Winkler sent an email to Bloomberg editorial staff stating that there had been “misleading” reports in rival media about its reporting in China.

“I want to assure you that there has been no change in policy on how and when we publish our stories,” Mr Winkler said in the email.

In the October conference call, Mr Winkler compared the situation with Nazi-era Germany where some media undertook self censorship to remain in the country, the person said. A Bloomberg spokesman did not challenge the veracity of the comment about Nazi-era Germany when asked by the FT.

Reuters reporter denied China visa

Reuters over the weekend said the Chinese foreign ministry had rejected a visa application for Paul Mooney, a veteran China reporter who wrote widely about human rights in China while working for the South China Morning Post, writes Tom Braithwaite in New York.

The reporter has called on western governments to retaliate against Chinese media organisations.

Mr Mooney, whose request for a visa was turned down after an eight-month wait, said reporters from Xinhua, People’s Daily and CCTV should be blocked from working in the US.

“Unless western and foreign governments stand up and have some kind of reciprocal policy, China is going to continue to do it,” he said. “I believe there are more than 700 Chinese reporters in the US and they don’t have to jump through the hoops that we have to and it’s not fair.”

“It’s up to the US government, the British government to retaliate, to reciprocate,” he said, naming Xinhua, People’s Daily and CCTV as examples of large Chinese media organisations active overseas.

He said he disagreed with the comments attributed to Matt Winkler, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, that operating in China, like Nazi Germany, required some concessions to be able to stay in the country.

“I don’t agree with that,” he said. “If they do that, they win. These kind of intimidation tactics win. If everyone stands up and continues to report the reality are they going to close down The New York Times, The Financial Times and Bloomberg? I don’t think so.

Mr Mooney’s visa rejection was first reported by the New York Times.

Several people familiar with the story said it focused on Wang Jianlin, the founder of Dalian Wanda, a real estate group, who recently paid $28.2m for Picasso’s “Claude et Paloma”. Forbes ranks Mr Wang as China’s richest man with $14.1bn.

​A spokesman for Wanda declined to comment. The FT itself has seen no evidence to indicate links between Mr Wang and party officials.

Mr Wang got his start in Dalian, the northeastern city where Bo Xilai, the jailed former high-flying Chinese politician, served as mayor for a number of years. The other major Dalian property developer, Xu Ming, was detained in connection with the Bo scandal and was not seen until he appeared in court in August during the Bo trial.

Bloomberg’s decision not to print the story comes as China becomes even more aggressive in clamping down on the foreign media. Bloomberg’s website has been blocked since last year when it published an exposé on the wealth accumulated by relatives of Xi Jinping, China’s president. It is also having trouble getting journalist visas for reporters.

Censors have also blocked access to the website of the New York Times, which published a similar story last year about then Premier Wen Jiabao. The paper has had difficulty obtaining some journalist visas since then.

Jonathan Fenby, former editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post and author of The Penguin History of Modern Chin a, said Bloomberg’s move to spike the story “brings into question the service that you [Bloomberg] are supplying”. He added that the company was opening a “hornets nest” by withholding information that could conceivably be important to its clients.

In the conference call with four reporters and editors in Hong Kong who worked on the year-long investigation, Mr Winkler said the Communist party had made very clear that printing stories about the financial assets of its leaders was off-limits, the person familiar with the story said.

The person said that senior editors in the US had given strong support all along to Michael Forsythe and Shai Oster, the two reporters who led the large team chasing the story. But, in October, they suddenly changed their mind, and said the story was not fit for publication.

“They said they were putting it on the backburner, but it was blindingly clear that it was being killed,” the person said.

On September 18, Ms Hays wrote an email to the reporters in Hong Kong which said the latest version of the story was “almost there” and that once she and other editors, including managing editor Jonathan Kaufman, had taken a close read, they would review it with the company’s lawyers.

Nine days later, Mr Kaufman emailed the reporters to say the story was “terrific”. In the email, which was obtained by the FT, he wrote: “The story is terrific. I am in awe of the way you tracked down and deciphered the financial holdings and the players. It’s a real revelation. Looking forward to pushing it up the line.”

I want to assure you that there has been no change in policy on how and when we publish ourstories

- Matthew Winkler, Bloomberg editor-in-chief in email to staff

However, four weeks later, Ms Hays called the reporters in Hong Kong to tell them that the story was going to be put on the “backburner”, according to the person familiar with the situation. The spokesman declined to comment on the emails, or say why Mr Winkler felt compelled to refer to self-censorship if editors had simply decided that the story was not yet ready for publication.

The spokesman also declined to say why Bloomberg had allowed the reporters to pursue the story for so long if they had harboured concerns about the potential impact on the company’s ability to operate in China.

The person familiar with the dispute said the journalists on the conference call with Mr Winkler “appreciated his honesty” but disagreed that Bloomberg would be thrown out of China if the story was published.

The dispute emerged in public on Friday after the pro-democracy Taiwan arm of a Hong Kong media group released an animated video that ridiculed Bloomberg and Mr Winkler for spiking the story and the New York Times published a story on Saturday.

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China’s Touchy Luxury Love Affair

The shifting of a Christian Dior exhibition reveals much about the sensitivity of Chinese officialdom to luxury today.
By Roseann Lake

BEIJING – On November 29, 2012, soon-to-be Chinese president Xi Jinping visited the National Museum of China and made a speech that was hailed as a coup in the State-sponsored “war against formalism and bureaucracy.” 

After touring the museum’s famed “Road to Renewal” exhibition, Xi spoke to the press casually and in a very informal setting, a move that earned him praise for abandoning the more stilted socialist jargon of his predecessor. 

The content of his speech, which has since become known as the “China Dream,” also won him accolades. Seemingly inspired by the exhibition, which houses historical elements dating back to the First Opium War and emphasizes China’s victimization by imperial forces, Xi offered up heaping spoons of nationalism while urging his comrades to unite in fostering “the great renewal of the Chinese nation.”
As he delivered these lines – dressed in a black windbreaker and dress shirt with the top few buttons undone – on the second floor of the same museum, 100 mannequins dressed in couture Christian Dior gowns, silently awaited their unveiling.
Slated to open at the National Museum of China on November 13 – just two weeks before Xi’s speech – “Esprit Dior,” was billed as an exhibition of Dior gowns, perfumes, accessories, photography and accompanying artwork by contemporary Chinese artists. 

In late November, various international media outlets reported that its opening had been delayed because the accompanying works by Chinese artists had not yet been completed. 

In early December, shortly after Xi’s speech, luxury conglomerate CEO Bernard Arnault of LVMH visited Beijing hoping to attend the opening of the exhibition, but the champagne flown in for the occasion remained in its bottles and the doors to the exhibition, closed.
A technician associated with the exhibition confirms that everything was vernissage ready by the time of Arnault’s visit, and that the only thing delaying a grand opening seemed to be mysterious resistance from the museum itself. 

On a regular basis, the technician, who prefers to remain anonymous due to the sensitive nature of the subject, tells The Diplomat that the exhibition would receive “visits.” 

These included various delegations from the museum, but also from the Chinese Vice-Minister of Culture, and two days later, from the Minister of Culture, himself. 

As a result of these “visits,” which lasted anywhere from an hour (the Vice-Minister of Culture was enraptured) to a few minutes (her superior, the Minister of Culture, was far less captivated), small changes were made to the exhibition.
The first was rather foreboding. 

At the entrance to the exhibition, which was the replica of the original Dior storefront on Avenue Montaigne in Paris, the name “Christian Dior,” which appeared etched into the stone of the storefront, was retouched, so that it was no longer visible. 

New insoles were also made for the 10 pairs of couture Dior shoes on display, masking their iconic Christian Dior label visible in the instep. 

The plaques which accompanied the items on display – indicating their year of creation and materials used to make them – were also edited so that “Christian Dior” was no longer visible on them. 

Videos of Dior fashion shows scheduled to play during the exhibition were frozen on frames with images where there was no detectable representation of the Dior label. 

Even the very name of the exhibition, which publications as mainstream as Vogue had been referring to for months as “Esprit Dior,” was changed to the rather cryptic, “La Beauté de l’Allure.”
Exactly why these changes were made is a subject neither the Museum nor Dior headquarters wish to comment on, but the mystery of why, on December 21, Dior staff in Beijing received a call from their superiors with instructions to pack everything up and repatriate it to France – before the Chinese public could get a glimpse of any of it – is a larger intrigue that has been delicately unraveling itself over the course of the last several months.
The day following Xi Jinping’s “China Dream” speech, his chief appointed corruption-buster, Wang Qishan, met with a committee of corruption fighting experts to stress the importance of cracking down on graft. 

The meeting marked the start of an anti-corruption campaign, which launched with a flurry of articles in Chinese media cheering the comeuppance of various party miscreants; the former district legislator who fathered 10 children with four different women, the prefecture chief who was revealed to own 23 homes, and the bureaucrat with $19 million in unexplained assets, among others. 

These types of strategically penned news stories have continued over the following months, with reports of corrupt officials embroiled in sex tape scandals and mistresses avenging and outing corrupt lovers, among the most popular.
Rod Wye, an associate fellow at the London-based think-tank Chatham House, attributes the persistence of salacious news stories to the new regime’s attempt to distinguish itself from the former administration; and particularly, from some of the more egregious problems that have plagued it. 

“Anti-corruption is the headline they’ve chosen, because it goes down well with the people. It shows the party is self-policing and self-cleansing,” he says, though he warns that there may be more rotten eggs than the party is willing or able to eradicate.
To Wye, the entire anti-corruption movement smacks of the strategy used by the party when handling cases of social unrest. 

“The narrative is that it’s all the fault of the corrupt, inefficient local officials who have brought this bad state of affairs about,” he explains. 

“They like to make it seem that a deus ex machina from the center swoops in and waves his magic wand, the corrupt inefficient official is dealt with, and everyone lives happily ever after.” 

The danger with this approach is that it only deals with the problem in a very isolated, superficial way, and allows the central governing force to put a distance between itself and the mal-administrations of its system. The local administrations are turned into the scapegoats, and the central powers who discipline them are reinforced in their role as the ultimate source of power and salvation of the people.
But what might all of this have to do with a 67-year old French luxury label?
As one of the only museums in China to operate under the direct jurisdiction of the Chinese Ministry of Culture, the National Museum of China is one of the Party’s prime means of showcasing and shaping the narrative of history. 

While this may sound rudimentary in a country where State-controlled media confections the news on a daily basis, it’s more complicated than it sounds. 

The governing elite tasked with writing this narrative are often in disaccord on how they’d like it to be presented. 

A statue of Confucius, for instance, once stood prominently at the front of the museum, until one night when it was quietly relegated to a remote internal courtyard because certain members of the elite decided that China’s revival would not benefit from a reminder of the strictly hierarchical relationships enforced by Confucianism.
These types of internal tiffs and changes, Dior employees may be unsurprised to learn, have resulted in the museum spending more time closed, than open, in the 50-odd years of its existence. 

Built in 1959 as one of the Ten Great Buildings commissioned to celebrate the ten-year anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the museum occupies an honorary place overlooking Tiananmen Square (where, ironically, some of China’s most violent manifestations against government corruption have taken place). 

When it was first scheduled to open, Prime Minister Zhou Enlai is said to have visited and objected that it did not sufficiently emphasize the “red line,” or the spirit of the country’s supreme leader, Mao Zedong.
The museum officially opened in 1961, closed a few years later in 1966 with the onset of the Cultural Revolution, and didn’t open again until 1979. 

It continued to erratically open and close until 2001, when Beijing won the bid to host the 2008 Olympics. At this time, it was decided that China needed a world-class museum to spruce up its capital. 

In an attempt to make it the largest in the world, what were formerly known as the Museum of Chinese History and the Museum of the Chinese Revolution were combined in 2003 and renamed the National Museum of China. 

Then, in 2005, a German architectural firm was enlisted, and renovations were set to be completed in time for the Games in 2008, but the museum’s opening was postponed again to October 1, 2009, or the 60th anniversary of Communist Party rule. 

That deadline wasn’t met either, but in March 2011, after a decade of renovations worth $400 million, and more than 50 years of spotty operation, the National Museum of China once again opened its doors.
As noted by Kirk Denton, China historian and author of Exhibiting the Past: Historical Memory and the Politics of Museums in Postsocialist China, the museum reopened with a selection of three very telling marquee exhibitions. 

The first was the previously mentioned “Road to Renewal” exhibition, which Denton notes, plays to the glorious socialist legacy which the Party would like to keep fresh in the minds of its people. 

Next, there was the exhibition on the Chinese Enlightenment, which traced the Party’s origins to the May 4th Movement, highlighting a move towards anti-imperialism and an upsurge in Chinese nationalism. 

The third exhibition, opening just two months later in May of 2011, was “Louis Vuitton Voyages,” an spread of luxurious LV suitcases and travel accessories.
“It was very odd that a museum meant to represent China’s tradition, history and revolution reopen with an LV exhibition,” notes Denton, “though it is completely representative of the post-socialist consumerist society supported by the Party.”
And indeed, the Party’s relationship to luxury is deeper than it might like to admit.
Luxury brands began their foray into China in the early 1990s, with Louis Vuitton at the helm. 

Former Chairman and CEO of LV Yves Carcelle is largely credited with making LV the luxury retail giant that it has become, as a result of his foresight and determination to make LV the first major luxury house with a store in China. 

It is also no secret that the early days of the luxury industry in China were fueled by the purchases of Party officials; either in the form of lavish gifts to grease their “guanxi;” the system of backdoor favors and exchanges on which China runs, or in the form of lavish gifts to mistresses, in exchange for favors of another variety.
As might be expected, the “Louis Vuitton Voyages” exhibition was met with a fair degree of ire. 

Yet while Peking University professor Xia Xueluan won support for his critique that the exhibition was ill-suited to a state-level public museum – would should instead restrict itself to non-profit cultural promotion – the general response to the museum was positive. 

Lines for the exhibition extended for hours, and netizens rejoiced at their opportunity to see craftsmanship mixed with commercial success; something rarely reflected in the “made in China” label. 

On the heels of LV, the Italian luxury giant, Bvlgari hosted “125 Years of Italian Magnificence” at the National Museum of China that following September, and Chanel showcased more than 400 articles in “Culture Chanel,” at the National Art Museum in November of 2011.
Dior’s experience at the Museum, however, was less fortunate. 

Before it could open, the luxury label had to scotch an exhibition that had been several months and millions in the making. 

All 100 gowns and accompanying elements were sent back to France, denying the Chinese public of an exhibition which otherwise promised to be both exquisite and edifying. 

Prior to its original opening date, a Dior team had spent over a month inside the National Museum of China, custom-building a set tgar included a sprawling atelier where an artisan leather-worker, flown in from France, would be cutting and stitching together Dior bags. 

A brodeuse would also be on site, hand-embroidering gowns as visitors made their way through the exhibition, which was designed to educate visitors about the artistry and artisanship that define the luxury of the label. 

Several elements featured in the exhibition were also historical, including a perfume coffret that had belonged to Grace Kelly, and was on special loan from the Principality of Monaco. 

Accompanying artworks by Chinese artists were also plentiful, among them, Zhang Huan’s stunningly realistic oversized portrait of Dior, made from the ashes of a Chinese temple.
Though considerable time, money, and opportunity to increase brand awareness was lost, as of September 13, 2013, the Dior exhibition is now back in China. 

Nearly one year later, it enjoyed a much warmer reception at the privately owned Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) in Shanghai, which has previously hosted other luxury giants such as Chanel, Ferragamo and Van Cleef & Arpels. 

“We’re getting over 1,200 visitors per day, and the weekends are crazy,” explains the MoCA Marketing Manager, who preferred not to be mentioned by name.

The 1,800-square-meter exhibition space contains a similarly spectacular display of couture and art intended for the National Museum of China, but with none of the imposed subtlety or label masking. 

Advertisements for the exhibition, which has been restored to its original name, “Esprit Dior,” abound in People’s Park, and even the museum café has paid its homage to haute couture, allowing diners to eat in a garden of topiaries shaped like Dior handbags and J’adore perfume bottles.
With the exhibition at MoCA, Dior has recovered a tremendous opportunity to connect with the Chinese market, which already appears geared in its favor. 

Dior currently has more than 40 stores on the Mainland, and according to reports by Bain Capital, in 2012, it surpassed Burberry as the second most popular brand of womenswear, after Chanel. 

As the top five luxury brands are reported to account for 50 percent of luxury goods sales in China, in a luxury market worth an estimated 115 billion RMB ($18.9 billion), this is a significant accomplishment. Though Dior’s rise may have more to do with the increased buying power of young Chinese women than the purchases of profligate party officials, Bain reports that 35 percent of luxury purchases made in China are still for gifting purposes.
“The bottom line is, luxury brands in China are not going to go away,” says Radha Chada, a leading marketing and consumer insights expert, and co-author of The Cult of the Luxury Brand: Inside Asia’s Love Affair with Luxury. 

“They’re now so much a part of Chinese culture, they’ve become the very ecosystem that guanxi puts into place.” 

She suspects the Dior debacle at the National Museum was just a matter of extremely unfortunate timing; evidence of the far-reaching ramifications of sudden changes in the Chinese political climate, a testament to how meticulously orchestrated these changes can be, and a shallow, temporary attempt at feigning thrift.
“The Party’s strong link to luxury will persist until there’s a more proper legal system that enforces transparency, accountability and justice in China,” says Chada. 

“Until then, if you’re in trouble, you reach out to your internal relations, and in order to be able to count on them when needed, you must nurture them.”

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China Is Choking on Its Success

Walking the streets of Beijing, it’s hard not to feel like you are trapped in an airport smoking lounge. The only tourists heading to Beijing in the years ahead will be adventure seekers donning gas masks.

By William Pesek 

Walking through Beijing’s Tiananmen Square last week, a German family of five surrounded me, all wearing large face masks and sunglasses. 

They weren’t robbing me, just asking me to take their photo. 

When I yelled the customary “Say ‘cheese,’” the dad joked: “We are smiling under here.”
Only China’s pollution bubble is no laughing matter, and tourists tell the story. 

Thanks to extreme air pollution, foreign arrivals plunged by roughly 50 percent in the first three-quarters of the year. 

Beijing could see even fewer visitors to the Forbidden City, the Great Wall and the famous square dominated by a painting of Mao Zedong thanks to images of acrid smog that have been beaming around the globe.
The timing doesn’t help. 

Jokes about renaming the city “Grayjing” or “Beige-jing” coincide with the Communist Party’s much-anticipated Third Plenum meeting Nov. 9-12. 

In a more democratic system, that might increase the urgency to act boldly to address a bad-air crisis that’s literally impossible not to see. 

But early signals aren’t encouraging. 

News media leaks have the more than 200 members of the party’s Central Committee crafting a vague blueprint for readjusting China’s economic structure. 

Nowhere are there hints the plan will do what China really needs to do: Ban coal.

China’s Crisis
The conventional wisdom is that China will eventually get serious about the environment, and when it does, the skies will turn blue before we know it. 

This view finds comfort in the experiences of the U.K. and the U.S. and concludes that Beijing’s toxic-air challenge pales in comparison with London’s back in the days of Charles Dickens. 

But what if the comparison is a false one? 

What if China’s crisis is different and harder to reverse?
Neither London in the 1850s or 1950s nor Pennsylvania in the 1940s was at the mercy of a paranoid authoritarian government whose legitimacy relies on 8 percent growth. 

Case studies of the past weren’t as linearly reliant on manufacturing. 

They weren’t dealing with urbanization anywhere near the scale of modern-day China. 

They didn’t rely on huge overseas investment predicated partly on the ability to pollute freely. 

Large numbers of their politicians weren’t becoming multimillionaires from the existing system.
China is entering completely uncharted territory -- navigating the demands of a newly vocal middle class without the democratic and civil institutions that helped Japan and the U.S. clean up environmental damage in the 1970s. 

It’s also doing so with higher levels of corruption.
The party is playing with fire. 

Anger over pollution has replaced land grabs as the primary cause of social unrest. 

The last 12 months have seen a sharp increase in protests against chemical plants and oil refineries. 

Fewer than 1 percent of China’s 500 largest cities meet the World Health Organization’s air-quality standards, while seven are ranked among the 10 most polluted in the world. 

Walking the streets of Beijing, it’s hard not to feel like you are trapped in an airport smoking lounge.
As China chokes on its success, the solution is obvious: Phase out the use of coal immediately. 

Flush with $3.7 trillion of currency reserves, China could finance a transition to natural gas. 

Doing so requires political will of the kind that neither President Xi Jinping nor Premier Li Keqiang has displayed. 

When China does make the transition away from coal, the economy will slow significantly in ways that would damage the state-owned enterprises that dominate the economy and enrich the Communist Party and its cronies.

Embarrassing Year

China’s new leaders are acting in other ways. 

A series of embarrassments this year -- not least of them thousands of dead pigs floating in the Huangpu River near Shanghai and myriad food-contamination scandals -- and the increased frequency of protests leave them little choice. 

In August, China promised to spend the equivalent of the gross domestic product of Singapore, or about $275 billion, to improve air quality.
“Of course, the country continues to be an investment destination and expats will come here in numbers, but it is definitely harder to sell Beijing as a posting,” says Kobus van der Wath, founder of the Beijing Axis, an international advisory firm. 

“Also, the level of dissatisfaction among Chinese is very high at the times when pollution is at its worst.”
But there’s little sign China understands the extent to which bad air is imperiling investment. 

Many of the government’s ideas about cleaning up first-tier cities such as Beijing involve moving coal-burning plants toward Shanxi province and inner Mongolia -- in other words, redistributing pollution to less populated areas. 

Better emissions standards are vital, too. 

In 2012 alone, China added more cars than the total number that plied its roads in 1999.
Once the U.K. and U.S. got serious about reducing carbon emissions, the transition away from coal took a few decades. 

But China doesn’t have decades. 

So Beijing can rail against the foreign media for exaggerating its gray air. 

It can pretend wind turbines, solar farms and other renewables alone will do the trick. 

But China should do the inevitable and curb coal use today. 

Otherwise, the only tourists heading to Beijing in the years ahead will be adventure seekers donning gas masks.

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China, corruption and the court intrigues of Nanjing

What really lay behind the sacking of Ji Jianye, mayor of one of China's largest and booming cities?
By David Hearst

'To have called the sacked mayor Ji Jianye a Mr Big was something of an understatement.' 

For much of the week, few locals in Nanjing knew what to say to a group of foreign journalists on an exchange visit organised to show a western audience life in a part of booming China that was neither Beijing or Shanghai.
The historians talked up the city's glorious past, the six dynasties it lived through as the pre-communist capital of China. 

Software engineers pointed to a glorious future as a clean new Silicon Valley, a city with two top-class universities and an abundant supply of graduates. 

It has to be said the smog was pretty persistent.
Together they waxed lyrical with a combination of genuine local pride at a city with modern infrastructure and confected party rhetoric. 

Brilliant achievements, social development and, that ubiquitous word, harmony featured large in their presentations.
There was just one elephant in the room. 

The day we arrived, Beijing announced Nanjing's mayor had been fired. 

The city's boss had become the latest target of President Xi Jinping's anti-corruption crusade. 

It was too late to cancel the visit. 

Everyone froze.
To have called the sacked mayor, Ji Jianye, a Mr Big was something of an understatement. 

In a city with a population the size of London and in a province with more people than Britain, the former mayor had a finger in every pie.
The trouble started when he began ripping up the city's beloved plane trees to build the underground. 

Two lines have been completed, seven more are under construction and four of them will be completed by next year. 

The breakneck pace of construction earned Ji the title of "the digger", and prompted a silent march of 3,000 people.
Then there were the motorways, the railway station (the biggest reportedly in Asia), the tower blocks bearing 82,000 flats. 

They sprout like mushrooms in the once-rural hinterland of the lush Yangtze delta. 

Every day the cranes swing and bulldozers clear another footprint for a high-rise block. 

Even by China's standards, the construction boom in this once sleepy walled city is frenetic.
So when the organisation department of the central committee of the Communist party of China announced that Ji had been fired for "suspected serious disciplinary violations", and when the People's Daily put the figure for the sum that Ji had allegedly embezzled by passing construction contracts to friends at 20m yuan ($3.3m), many here greeted the news with a wry grin. 

That could only have been a fraction of the sum involved. 

The CPC, they concluded, was once again sheltering one of its own.
News of Ji's removal triggered a wave of rumour on the internet: Ji had been arrogant; he had run city hall from a luxury hotel suite; he had a bad temper and hit his aides round the head with their briefing papers.
The pall cast over a man who had still to face any charges, let alone defend himself in a court of law, spread by osmosis to the projects he promoted. 

A dodgy venture to separate rainwater from sewage water, into which millions of yuan had been poured, was suspended.
But then people started asking other questions. 

Was Ji a rotten apple, was he different from the rest of the party elite, or had he simply lost political cover? The People's Daily said that investigations into Ji were connected to a parallel probe into the richest man in Suzhou in Jiangsu province, Zhu Xingliang. 

His construction company received many of Ji's contracts. 

Ji worked for eight years as mayor and party secretary in Yangzhou, which was Jiang Zemin's hometown. The former president and head of the party often used to return for a visit and Ji became one of Jiang's proteges.
Not long ago Jiang emerged from the shadows of his retirement praising Xi Jinping as an "extraordinarily capable and wise leader". 

Observers were at the time perplexed by Jiang's lavish praise for the princeling who had displaced him. 

They speculated that one motive for doing so was to shield Jiang's supporters from Xi's anti-corruption drive. If Ji does indeed belong to that group, we now know that Jiang's efforts were in vain.
The silence about Ji's fate was broken by his former boss, Nanjing party secretary Yang Weize. 

To the foreign journalists, it was clear that Yang was a man on the rise. 

He compared his own city to Boston, where his daughter and grandchildren live. 

He was unabashed by the comparison. 

He spoke with ease about the failings of the man who just one week ago had the same relationship to him as a prime minister has to a president.
Ji was responsible for the city budget and yet ,according to Yang, removing Ji was like removing a tumour from your body. 

At the time, the operation hurts, the cool party secretary explained, but then the body recovers and leads a healthy life: "The root of Mr Ji's corruption was that he let his personal interests prevail against the people's interests. We needed to remove this person from his position, which has been done."
The legacy of Ji's removal was a good one: "The rule of law has been established. Anyone who violates the law will be punished. This case will help improve the legal environment of the city. In the past, the fairness and justice of the market was affected by corruption, but now we will be able to build a fairer and better market governed by the rules of competition."
Yang dismissed any talk of a political coup. 

Political trials belonged, the city's party secretary maintained, to the era of the cultural revolution. But today that path "had been corrected". 

The party had its own disciplines and procedures and anyone who violated them knew what to expect.
Yang did not talk like a man who had anything to hide. 

He embellished the party line with his own metaphors and rhetorical swirls. 

Whatever battle had been waged behind the scenes in some luxury hotel where Ji was forced to write his confession, it was clear that Yang now represented the winning side. 

The people of Nanjing may never know what went on way over their heads. 

Their jobs, contracts, flats and, ultimately, freedom depends on keeping as far away from these court intrigues as they can.

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In China, everyone is guilty of corruption

Your business can't survive a day if you are not corrupt.

By Lijia Zhang

Police stand guard outside the court where disgraced politician Bo Xilai was sentenced to life in prison in September.

• Use of guanxi or connections part of everyday life
• Businessmen say they can't survive unless they are corrupt
• China needs to focus on rule of law not "rule of men"

Another "tiger" has been caught. 

Last week, Ji Jianye, the mayor of my hometown Nanjing, a major city in eastern China, was arrested on suspicion of accepting bribes worth about 20 million yuan ($3.3 million)
After taking power in March, President Xi Jinping launched a high-profile anti-corruption campaign, vowing to catch both tigers and flies -- big and small corrupt officials. 

China has seen plenty of such campaigns, arising and subsiding like summer storms.
But this one appears to be the most vigorous since China opened up; when corruption became rampant in the new market economy and officials started to trade power for financial gains.

Author and social commentator Lijia Zhang

Much as I appreciate our president's determination, his battle feels like an attempt to "put out a big fire with a glass of water," given how corruption has reached every corner of our society.
Chinese public opinion surveys identify corruption as the most hated social problem, yet everyone is also guilty of it.
Last year, when my father fell seriously ill, we took him to a decent hospital close by but were told the beds were fully occupied. 

As always, we turned to our guanxi -- our network of connections -- for help.
Fortunately, a relative, a not so senior but well-connected official, managed to secure a private room at the hospital, which is reserved for ranking leaders. 

In return, the relative agreed to get the son of the hospital director into the most desirable school in Nanjing.

Corruption hurt Communist Party

On China: Reform

On China: Tigers and flies

I became aware the weight of guanxi shortly after I was thrust into adulthood: At 16 I was dragged out of the school to work at a military rocket factory.
Two months later, when Spring Festival came, my mother requested that I visit my boss' home with gifts she had prepared.

Naive and embarrassed, I refused. 

Mother angrily predicted: "You'll never go far in life if you don't know how to la guanxi!" 

The verb la means to pull or to develop. 

Sure enough, I never got any promotion during my decade-long stint at the factory even though I acquired a degree in mechanical engineering.
For any Chinese businessman, guanxi is essential. 

Recently, I met up with a long-lost friend, with whom I marched in the Nanjing streets back in the spring of 1989 and shouted "Down With Corruption" -- one of the complaints that had sparked the unprecedented Tiananmen Square democratic movement.
More than 20 years later, this friend spends 90% of his time running his high-tech company. 

His youthful idealism has gone and his waistline has expanded considerably. 

With a ghost of a smile, he blames it on the excessive dining, drinking and occasional visits to prostitutes that are part of the tiresome game of guanxi. 

"Your business can't survive a day if you are not corrupt," he told me.
He has to smooth every step of his business with gifts or outright bribes: From obtaining the business license, to entertaining potential clients, to receiving 15% of the tax deduction that a high-tech company is entitled to. He estimates that 3% to 5 % of operating costs goes to guanxi.
Such practices drive entrepreneurs to seek senior officials as their patrons because politicians in China have the power to approve projects and allocate resources.
The relationship between the now disgraced politician Bo Xilai and businessmen Xu Ming, the founder of Dalian Shide Group, was typical of such patron-client relationships. 

Xu, a large man, allegedly fattened his pockets through his guanxi with the Bo family as he funded the family's jet-set life style.
Xu was detained shortly after Bo's arrest and testified against Bo at his trial in August, although Xu has not been charged with any wrongdoing.
Local media reports suggest that authorities are investigating similar ties between the newly disgraced Nanjing mayor and Zhu Xingliang, the richest businessman in Suzhou, a city near Nanjing, who has also been placed under house arrest.
And politically, China produces its top leaders more or less based on patron-client ties rather than meritocracy. 

Both President Xi and Bo are "princelings" -- the children of senior leaders, the most powerful and influential group in China. 

Nepotism, a form of corruption, has feudal roots.
In fact, I believe the whole corrupt practice of guanxi is rooted in China's long tradition of renzhi -- rule of men rather than the rule of law.
President Xi has called for a curb on official extravagance: No red carpet treatment, no luxury banquets and no fancy office buildings. 

But these are the symptoms not the root of the problem.
To stamp out corruption, he will have to not only observe the rule of law but also introduce genuine political reforms that would allow checks and balances, transparency, and independent scrutiny. 

Such remedies, although proven elsewhere, may be too strong for him to take.
I don't doubt that the authorities will net more tigers. 

But there will be hundreds and thousands more at large and countless flies, thriving in China's politically and culturally rich breeding ground for corruption.

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Chinese American accused of being mob boss in China

Police in China say Vincent Wu was a ruthless mob boss who led gangsters.

• Wu's children and lawyers say he is upstanding philanthropist, entrepreneur
• Wu is expected to stand trial within weeks in China

BEIJING (AP) — When more than 500 policemen swooped in to arrest 40 suspected gangsters in southern China last year, the alleged kingpin was a Los Angeles businessman who had hoisted an U.S. flag amid a crowd to welcome Xi Jinping, now China's president, to California.
Vincent Wu's children and lawyers say he's an upstanding, philanthropic Chinese-American entrepreneur who has been framed by business foes who want to seize his assets, including a nine-story shopping mall. 

But police in the southern city of Guangzhou say he was a ruthless mob boss who led gangsters with nicknames such as "Old Crab" and "Ferocious Mouth."
Wu is expected to stand trial within weeks in Guangzhou on charges of heading a crime gang that kidnapped rivals, threw acid at a judge, set fire to farmers' sheds, operated illegal gambling dens and committed other offenses. 

Wu has told his lawyers that police interrogators tortured him into confessing.
In the absence of an independent legal system, the truth may never emerge. 

And although Wu is a naturalized U.S. citizen, American diplomats have not been able to see him because China recognizes only his residency in Hong Kong, a semi-autonomous Chinese territory.
The case provides a glimpse into the often murky world of business in China. 

Widespread corruption means entrepreneurs can cozy up with police and run roughshod over the law, but they are also vulnerable if their rivals gang up with local authorities.
When disgraced politician Bo Xilai led the southwestern metropolis of Chongqing, hundreds of businesspeople were accused of involvement in organized crime; many were believed to have been tortured into confessing while authorities seized their assets. 

Bo was sentenced to life imprisonment last month for embezzlement, bribery and abuse of power, but allegations that the businessmen were wrongfully convicted were not aired at his trial.
Wu was detained in June last year in a dramatic pre-dawn operation involving hundreds of police across Guangdong province, which includes Guangzhou and Wu's hometown of Huizhou.
He is charged with getting an associate to throw acid at a judge who ruled against him in a lawsuit, and with ordering thugs to set fire to sheds owned by farmers who refused his offer of compensation to clear off land he wanted to develop. 

He's also accused of operating illegal casinos that raked in 48 million yuan ($7.8 million), and of attacking or kidnapping people who crossed him in various disputes. 

About 30 other people face related charges of gang crimes.
Wu maintains his innocence, his attorney Wang Shihua said. 

Prior to his detention, Wu had been praised by local Chinese newspapers for giving more than 20 million yuan ($3 million) to his hometown.
"My dad is a really good person at heart, especially to the people who are farmers and have not enough money to go to school. He's donated money to the elderly and to help build a road," said Wu's daughter, Anna Wu, in an interview from Hong Kong, where she has based herself to try to draw attention to her father's case. 

"But in China, money speaks louder than law… if you want to bring someone down, you can bribe the police and certain people to make it happen."
Huang Xiaojun, a former business partner of Wu's and one of his accusers, said it is Wu who exploited government corruption. 

Huang said Wu tried to kidnap him four times and sought to seize his share of their business by bribing court officials.
"He is a man with no morals and integrity," Huang said in a phone interview. 

"He's extremely good at playing or acting and confusing right and wrong."
Wu's lawyers want to use his case to test the Chinese government's resolve to stick by its stated opposition to convictions based on evidence extracted through torture. 

In a written record of a December 2012 meeting with his lawyers, Wu described being beaten, kicked and deprived of food and sleep as police tried to coerce him to sign a confession.
On occasion, Wu's arms were tied behind his back with a rope that was then strung from a ceiling beam — a torture method dubbed the "suspended airplane," he told his lawyers.

If he fainted, he was woken with water or chemical stimulants.
"As soon as I did not cooperate, they hit me, hanged me," Wu told his lawyers, according to a copy of the deposition provided to The Associated Press by Wu's family.
Wu's legal adviser, Li Zhuang, said more than 20 witnesses also were tortured. 

During a pretrial meeting at the Guangzhou Intermediate People's Court on Monday, Wu's lawyers demanded that the court keep their testimony out of Wu's trial, which they expect to begin within a month.
An official at the Huizhou police bureau's propaganda department said he "had not heard" that interrogators might have tortured Wu.
Wu left China in the late 1970s as a stowaway to neighboring Hong Kong, where he obtained residency. 

He moved with his family to the U.S. in 1994, settled in Los Angeles and eventually became a U.S. citizen.
Even as an American, Wu spent most of his time in China, tending to his businesses and visiting Los Angeles twice a year, his daughter said. 

But she said he was also active in Los Angeles' Chinese-American business community; photos provided by her show him hoisting an American flag as he welcomed then-Vice President Xi Jinping — now the president — to the city early last year.
Chinese authorities have denied Wu access to U.S. officials, saying they regard him as a Hong Kong resident because he last entered China on a Hong Kong identity card.
U.S. officials have sent several notes to Chinese authorities about Wu's case, Wu's daughter said. 

U.S. Embassy spokesman Nolan Barkhouse said American officials were monitoring the case but could not comment out of privacy concerns.

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Meet China's Beverly Hillbillies

The absurdity of the Middle Kingdom's Bentley-driving, blinged-out nouveau riche.
BY RACHEL LU

This solid gold, gem-encrusted toilet, which Chinese web users would likely deem very tuhao, was valued at $4.8 million in February 2005 while on display in a Hong Kong jewelry store.

They have been mentioned more than 56 million times on Sina Weibo, China's Twitter. 

Everyone wants to be their friend, but no one likes them. 

They seem to be everywhere, throwing around their newly minted renminbi and well-used UnionPay debit cards; yet they are elusive and shun the media. 

Their love for bling has become the backbone of the global luxury goods industry, yet they are also the subject of disdain, the butt of jokes, the punching bag for that which is offensive to good taste.
They are the tuhao -- tu means dirt or uncouth; hao means splendor -- and they are the Beverly Hillbillies of China. 

Or something like that: A crowdsourced translation call on China's social media yielded "new money," "slumdog millionaire," the "riChinese" and "billionbilly." 

When English falls short, French is on hand to help: Tuhao have the artistic sensibilities of the arriviste, the social grace of the parvenu, and the spending habits of the nouveau riche.
Tuhao once meant rich landowner -- the villainous landed gentry and class enemy of communist China's proletariat -- but the term's modern revival began with a popular joke that made its rounds on Chinese social media in early September. 

A young man asks a Zen master, "I'm wealthy but unhappy. What should I do?" 

The Zen master responds, "Define 'wealthy.'" 

The young man answers, "I have millions in the bank and three apartments in central Beijing. Is that wealthy?" The Zen master silently holds out a hand, inspiring the young man to a realization: "Master, are you telling me that I should be thankful and give back?" 

The Zen master says, "No... Tuhao, can I become your friend?"
This rather lame joke struck a chord with China's middle class, a rapidly expanding group that now numbers over 300 million. 

As a middle-class lifestyle grows increasingly normal, so has disdain for flaunted wealth. 

Many Chinese would now say they consider themselves the antithesis of tuhao -- educated, fashionable, and disdainful of conspicuous consumption. 

After taking office in November 2012, Chinese President Xi Jinping started cracking down on corruption in the Communist Party. 

Chinese officials, some of the most notorious wearers of tuhao goods, cut down on ostentatious purchases, and luxury brands suffered.
At the same time, Chinese live in a society where understanding tuhao is valuable, catering to tuhao taste is lucrative, and making tuhao friends is sensible. 

Multinational corporations, while wary of going against Xi's policies, understand this. 

Fancy a Hermès bag with the Chinese national flag on it? Done. 

Want to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a watch with a Chinese zodiac motif? Why, you have more than 20 to choose from.
Tuhao had their breakout moment on Sept. 20, when Apple introduced a gold version of the new iPhone 5s smartphone. 

Despite initial disbelief that Apple would indulge such tackiness alongside its Zen-like tradition of elegant design, the gilded phone has become insanely popular in China, where it is known -- even in state media headlines --as the "tuhao gold."
The tuhao concept extends beyond gilded gadgets. 

On Sept. 22, members of Hollywood royalty, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Harvey Weinstein, and Nicole Kidman, flocked to the seaside Chinese city of Qingdao for the opening of a cinema complex owned by developer Wang Jianlin, whom Bloomberg calls China's richest man. 

China's Internet users labeled the event an "Extravaganza of tuhao" and a celebration of "Haollywood" [sic] because while Wang's company spent a considerable amount of cash to lure the big names to Qingdao, the event's fusty Chinese flavor reduced its glamour factor. 

A-listers rubbed shoulders with security guards in uniforms styled after those worn by soldiers in China's People's Liberation Army; elderly locals performed Chinese opera. 

The country's middle class, it seems, is conflicted: The nouveau is surely gauche, but the old is still uncouth.
Among stiff competition, the most famous tuhao on the Chinese Internet in early October was a nameless woman in backwater Anhui province. 

Chinese media reported that she gave a Bentley worth approximately RMB 4 million (about $650,000) to her son-in-law as a wedding gift. 

Some allege the reporter fabricated the story, but it has already caused uproar online, where responses range from derision to expressions of real or exaggerated jealousy of the young man's good luck.
Those combinations -- derision and jealousy, dirt and splendor -- go to the root of the conflicts undergirding modern, gilded-age China. 

Wealth alone is proving to be an empty promise, yet it remains essential for many kinds of access and influence. 

Small wonder that while Chinese may resent tuhao and poke fun at their taste, making their acquaintance (or better yet, marrying into their families) remains a convenient and enviable way to move up China's increasingly treacherous social ladder. 

Reactions to the Bentley story "highlight a blatant opportunistic mentality" among our youth, commented a blogger who goes by the name Jumo. 

"If our young people didn't face so much totally unfair and unclear competition in their personal lives and careers, they would not have to bear so much pressure or be so impetuous, anxious, or old before their time." 

Then perhaps they wouldn't need their mother-in-law to buy them a Bentley.

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China's scorned mistresses take revenge on 'corrupt lovers'

Chinese government officials are using public money to pay for their love lives.

By Martin Patience

Ms Ji, left, posted photos and videos of her spending time with Mr Fan

Lust, power and corruption can make for an explosive mix. 

An unlikely whistle-blower for President Xi Jinping's much publicised crackdown on official corruption has emerged -- the scorned mistress.
In recent weeks their public accounts have offered a rare glimpse of the extravagant lifestyles of the Communist Party elite, enraging the Chinese public.
The most high-profile case is that of Ji Yingnan -- a mistress who shamed her former lover in the full glare of China's hundreds of millions of microblog users.
Sensationally, the 26-year-old identified him as Fan Yue, a deputy director at the State Administration of Archives.
This summer Ms Ji posted videos and pictures of the couple on the internet. 

There were pictures of the couple enjoying shopping sprees, splashing about in a private swimming pool, and at a party where the official asked his mistress to marry him.
According to Ms Ji's account, she exposed her boyfriend after discovering he was married with a teenage son.
"I had no idea he was such a liar," Ms Ji, the TV presenter, told the Global Times, a Chinese newspaper.
"He always promised to marry me and I always thought he would be my fiance, or even husband."
But what shocked the public were the staggering sums of cash involved. 

According to the mistress, her lover gave her more than a $1,000 (£600) a day in pocket money, a luxury car and promises of an apartment.
She told the Global Times that she initially reported Mr Fan to the authorities, believing he was involved in corruption. 

But she said she never received a reply and then decided to post her allegations online.
The details of her lavish lifestyle raised the obvious question: how could her lover afford all this on a modest government salary?
According to the state-run news agency, Xinhua, Mr Fan was sacked from his job in June and is now being investigated over the corruption allegations. 

The BBC could not reach Mr Fan for comment.

Public domain
One of the main sites that posted the revelations is run by Zhu Ruifeng, an anti-corruption blogger. 

He shot to prominence last year after posting an explosive sex tape starring a government official, Lei Zhengfu, which triggered a corruption investigation, ultimately landing the official in jail.
With the growing power of the internet, details that would have once remained private are now leaking into the public domain.
Sex scandals, of course, happen in all countries. But the difference in China, says Mr Zhu, is that government officials are using public money to pay for their love lives.

"In China nothing is clear," he says, "The public don't know what officials are up to. 

"But mistresses live with government officials, they spend their money, they know about everything that goes on.

"When a mistress stands up, the truth comes out."
A powerful energy official, Liu Tienan, was sacked from his post in May after his former mistress told a journalist that her lover had helped defraud banks of $200 million.
Mistresses have become the ultimate symbol of corruption in China. 

According to a government report in 2007, an astonishing 90% of top officials brought down by corruption scandals had kept a mistress -- and in many cases they had more than one.
Former Railways Minister Liu Zhijun, jailed for corruption earlier this year, reportedly kept 18 mistresses.

An explosive sex tape got Lei Zhengfu, centre, into trouble

'Emperor's complex'
I met a 26-year-old who told she me was once a mistress. 

With her long, black hair and designer clothes, she looked like she had just stepped off a catwalk.
She did not want to be identified, but told me her lover was a top company executive. 

She says that she witnessed corruption.
"Businessmen and officials work together very closely," she said. 

"A government official asked my boyfriend for a favour. But this time, he didn't want money. He wanted my boyfriend to get him a mistress."
Mistresses are nothing new in China. Emperors were renowned for keeping concubines. 

But China's top sexologist, Li Yinghe, believes that many Chinese men believe they are still living in imperial times.
"I think many Chinese men have an emperor's complex," she says. 

"Being an emperor means you can have many women. This is something they are proud of. They see women as trophies of their success."
Little wonder then that the ruling Communist Party is now trying to stop its pillow talk becoming public.
In May, the People's Daily newspaper -- the mouthpiece of the party -- ran an editorial saying that the country cannot count on mistresses to expose corruption.
"Some [mistresses] directly solicit bribes or seek huge illegal profits," it said. 

"To pin anti-corruption hopes on them is to go in for evil attacking evil."
In recent weeks, authorities have also introduced tougher measures to control the internet -- where many of the revelations have emerged. 

It is clear that the party wants to draw a veil over its most intimate secrets.

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