Joe Biden mum on airspace tensions after meeting with Xi Jinping

By Josh Lederman

Xi Jinping (R) shake hands with Joe Biden (L) inside the Great Hall of the People on Wednesday in Beijing, China.

BEIJING -- Emerging from a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Vice President Joe Biden said Wednesday that U.S.-China relations depend on trust and a positive notion of each other's motives. 

Neither leader made public mention of a major clash over disputed airspace that's pitted China against the U.S. and its Asian allies.
Vice President Biden meets with China's president among other world leaders to discuss China's decision to declare an air defense identification zone that includes disputed islands.
Appearing somber and subdued, Biden said the relationship between the two major powers will significantly affect the course of the 21st century. 

If the U.S. and China can get that relationship right, the possibilities are limitless, Biden said as reporters were allowed in briefly after he met with Xi in Beijing.
"This new model of major country cooperation ultimately has to be based on trust and a positive notion about the motive of one another," Biden said.
Biden said he had come to Beijing because complex relationships require sustained engagement at high levels. 

He said Xi's candor and constructive approach had left an impression on him.
"Candor generates trust," Biden said after a meeting that ran more than an hour longer than scheduled. 

"Trust is the basis on which real change — constructive change — is made."
The two leaders had a second meeting involving larger delegations and a working dinner planned for later Wednesday.
Absent from Biden's comments was any discussion of U.S. concerns over China's new air defense zone. Only a day earlier, Biden pledged to raise those concerns "with great specificity" with Xi and other Chinese leaders, adding that China's move was deeply concerning.
"This action has raised regional tensions and increased the risk of accidents and miscalculation," Biden said in Tokyo Tuesday after meeting with Japanese President Shinzo Abe.
Japan has been on edge for the past two weeks since China unilaterally declared any planes flying through the zone must file flight plans with Beijing. 

The airspace sits atop tiny islands that are at the center of a long-running territorial dispute between China and Japan.
The U.S. refuses to recognize the zone, but Biden has avoided calling publicly for Beijing to retract it, wary of making demands that China is likely to snub. 

Rather, the vice president hoped to persuade China not to enforce the zone or establish similar zones over other disputed territories.
After meeting with Biden, Xi said the U.S.-China relationship had gotten off to a good start this year "and has generally maintained a momentum of positive development." 

But he said the global situation is changing, with more pronounced challenges and regional hotspots that keep cropping up.

"The world as a whole is not tranquil," Xi said through a translator, adding that the U.S. and China shoulder important responsibilities for upholding peace. 

"To strengthen dialogue and cooperation is the only right choice facing both of our countries."
Added Biden, "The way I was raised was to believe that change presents opportunity."
At the start of his visit to Beijing, Biden urged Chinese students to challenge orthodoxy and the status quo, drawing an implicit contrast between the authoritarian rule of China's government and the liberal, permissive intellectual culture he described in the United States.
"I hope you learn that innovation can only occur where you can breathe free, challenge the government, challenge religious leaders," Biden told young Chinese citizens waiting at the U.S. embassy to get visitor visas processed.
Biden said he hoped they would learn during their visit that "innovation can only occur where you can breathe free."
"Children in America are rewarded — not punished — for challenging the status quo," he said.
Biden's comments were not immediately reported by Chinese state media and were not likely to be widely known in China. 

A one-minute excerpt of his speech posted by the Sina news website included Biden's comment about challenging the "status quo," but left out the one about challenging the government.

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Xi Jinping’s Rise Came With New Attention to Dispute With Japan

By JANE PERLEZ

BEIJING — The new air defense zone declared by China has been approved by Xi Jinping, the culmination of more than a year of pressure by Beijing to weaken Japan’s grip on the Senkaku islands in the East China Sea, and by extension to expand China’s long-term access to the Western Pacific.
As Mr. Xi amassed power in the past year, he voiced increasing displeasure with Japan, and in a curt, impromptu encounter in St. Petersburg, Russia, in September with the prime minister, Shinzo Abe, Mr. Xi said Japan must face “history squarely,” according to an account in China’s state-run news media.
Mr. Xi has rebuffed Mr. Abe’s requests for a formal summit meeting, another sign of Mr. Xi’s firm stance on Japan.
Mr. Xi’s position as leader of the Communist Party and chairman of the military commission that runs China’s armed forces made him the primary decision maker on issues like the air defense zone, Chinese experts said. 

Over the past year, they say, he has been particularly attentive to the East China Sea dispute.
Unlike some other Chinese leaders, Mr. Xi had little involvement with Japan as he climbed the ranks of the Communist Party.
On a visit to Japan in 2009 as vice president, he was granted an audience with the emperor, met numerous politicians and was treated to a gala dinner. 

In 2001, when he was governor of Fujian Province, he toured the prefecture of Nagasaki and visited Okinawa. 

He has spoken little of these trips, although as vice president he did welcome the governors of Nagasaki and Shizuoka when they came to Beijing, Japanese officials say.
Most likely he sees the country as a policy lever, said Rana Mitter, a historian at Oxford University and the author of “Forgotten Ally,” an account of China’s struggle with Japan from 1937 to 1945.
“He does not appear to have any direct experience with Japan or connection with it through his family background,” Mr. Mitter said. 

“This is different from some other politicians, for instance Bo Xilai, who courted Japanese business quite strongly through his period as mayor of Dalian and later as commerce minister.” 

Mr. Bo is the disgraced Communist Party leader of the city of Chongqing now serving a life sentence in prison.
The idea for the air defense identification zone had been circulating within the Chinese military for some time before it reached Mr. Xi’s level, said Jia Qingguo, professor of international relations at Beijing University.
The military was acutely aware that other countries, including Japan and the United States, had air defense zones but China did not, he said.
As the tensions mounted this year in the East China Sea, with Chinese and Japanese planes flying in close quarters over the Senkaku islands, Japan often complained that China’s planes were flying in the Japanese air defense zone.
The leadership reasoned that if Japan had an air defense zone for the past 40 years, China should have one, too, as a way of achieving parity, and as a tool to eventually wrest the islands from Japan’s control, Mr. Jia said.
But Tokyo’s position on the islands is simply that there is no dispute, that the islands belong to Japan and there is nothing more to discuss.
It is this Japanese position that Mr. Xi and his top military and foreign policy advisers wanted to change.
China’s top foreign policy makers believed that China’s new air defense zone overlapping with Japan’s and covering the islands would be “another way to force Japan to recognize there is a dispute,” and come to the negotiating table, Mr. Jia and other experts said.
Even before Mr. Xi became general secretary of the Communist Party in November 2012, he was in charge of a small leading group of maritime affairs that had principal responsibility for the problems in the East China Sea — both in the air and on the sea.
It was a period when the dispute over the islands had spilled onto the streets of China, with government-sanctioned anti-Japanese protests, and Mr. Xi’s quick ascent to the policy making group on the islands signaled his plans to take overall control of the issue.
After becoming general secretary of the Communist Party in November 2012, and then assuming the presidency of the country in March, Mr. Xi toured important military installations, including ports where China is building its blue water navy — another signal of his long-term interest in gaining unfettered access in the Western Pacific.
Mr. Xi told a Politburo meeting this summer that China must become a “maritime strong power,” according to Xinhua, the state-run news agency.
In late October, Mr. Xi called a conference of senior party leaders, including the six other members of the Politburo Standing Committee and the Chinese ambassador to Washington, Cui Tiankai, to discuss how China should maintain good relations with its neighbors in Asia.
“The fundamental guiding policy for our country’s diplomacy with its periphery is to treat neighbors with friendship and as partners,” Mr. Xi said.
But it was clear that Japan was not included in the friendly group of neighbors — those consisted chiefly of countries in Southeast Asia — and a few days later, the Chinese Ministry of Defense intensified its warnings to Japan over the disputed islands.
A Defense Ministry spokesman, Geng Yansheng, said that China would consider it “an act of war” if Japan carried out its threat and shot down a Chinese drone flying over the islands. 

“We would have to take decisive measures to counterattack,” Mr. Geng said, the most warlike words from China in the dispute so far.
A recent account in a Hong Kong-based magazine, Asia Weekly, which often carries reliable reports on Beijing’s foreign policy deliberations, described the imposition of the air defense zone as a “great sea-air strategic breakthrough for China.” 

The magazine said Mr. Xi finalized the decision four months ago.
The breakthrough the article referred to was the piercing of what China sees as a boundary that stretches from the southernmost Japanese islands toward the east coast of Taiwan and joining the South China Sea.
“China is no longer focusing just on Senkaku Island, not only on the gas field of the East China Sea median line, but this is a way of breaking through the first island chain to reach the ocean,” the account said.

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What's at Stake in Bloomberg's China Coverage

The company's refusal to offend the Chinese Communist Party reveals the limitations of "journalistic access."
By Matt Schiavenza

Bloomberg News editor in chief Matt Winkler

Last June, Bloomberg News published a major investigative report into the wealth of the family of Xi Jinping, now China's president. 

The report, written by two well-respected Bloomberg reporters, Mike Forsythe and Shai Oster, tracked the parallel rise of Xi's political career and that of his extended family's business empire, which had accumulated $376 million in assets. 

Though the article did not allege any wrongdoing, its discoveries illuminated the symbiotic relationship between wealth and power in China, where the elite goes to great lengths to conceal the extent of their prosperity.
The report was groundbreaking. 

Widely praised around the industry, Bloomberg News clearly saw the piece as a feather in its cap; a major accomplishment for a still-fledgling news organization. 

When Amanda Bennett, an executive editor for projects and investigations, announced her resignation last week, she cited the investigation into Xi Jinping's family wealth as the work she was "most proud of."
For the Chinese government, which regards the wealth of top officials a taboo subject, the report triggered an immediate reaction: Bloomberg News was censored on the mainland. 

But the blowback didn't end there. 

In addition to the site's censorship, sales of Bloomberg terminal subscriptions, the financial information portals which provide a huge amount of revenue for the company, temporarily slumped in China. 

And the family of Forsythe, one of the journalists responsible for the article, even received death threats.
This year, Forsythe and Oster completed work on a fresh investigation into the connection of wealth and power in China, this time focusing on Wang Jianlin, a real-estate developer and the country's richest citizen. In September, Bloomberg News Managing Editor Jonathan Kaufman told the reporters that the story was "terrific" and added "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.”
But the next month, progress on the story suddenly came to a halt. 

The reporters learned from an editor that the story would indefinitely be "put on the back burner" for an indefinite amount of time. 

In a report by Edward Wong of The New York Times, Winkler told the reporters that publishing the report would jeopardize Bloomberg's access to China, and compared their situation to Nazi-era Germany, where journalists engaged in self-censorship in order to avoid expulsion from the country.
Winkler, speaking to The New York Times, denied the story and said that the investigation was still ongoing; the delay, he said, reflected a belief that the story was as yet unfit for publication, a claim that seems to belie the editorial enthusiasm for the article. 

But further reporting by the Times' Wong revealed the extent to which Bloomberg ensures that its editorial and business sides do not interfere with each other in China; in every Bloomberg story on China that might offend Beijing, editors insert a code that ensures that the story does not appear on mainland-China Bloomberg terminals.
Meanwhile, though the Times' article did not cite him as a source of information of the spiked story, Bloomberg placed Forsythe on unpaid leave of absence last Tuesday. 

Monday night, on Twitter, he thanked his followers for support.

Thanks everyone for the incredible outpouring of sympathy and support. It has really helped me and my family get through this. 

— Mike Forsythe 傅才德 (@PekingMike)
And yesterday, he announced that his tenure with Bloomberg, which began in 2000, had come to an end.
I can confirm that I have left Bloomberg News. That's all I'm going to say for now. 

— Mike Forsythe 傅才德 (@PekingMike) November 19, 2013
The story, in many ways, is just beginning, and there are many unanswered questions. 

Will Bloomberg ultimately decide to publish a version of the story? 

If so, how will Beijing react? 

But these details obscure the larger point: Given The New York Times' reporting, it appears that the Chinese government has successfully intimidated a major American news organization into killing a story that the government deemed offensive. 

And not just any story, either: a major investigative report on a subject central to any understanding of contemporary China—a subject on which a similar report last year won the Times a Pulitzer Prize.

Meanwhile, George Orwell's famous quote on the purpose of journalism—that it consists of printing what someone else does not want printed—is becoming no less vital in China, where the domestic media lack the wherewithal to do the investigations themselves.

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China's impossible contradiction

   

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

 Chinese leader Xi Jinping is to unveil sweeping economic reforms at the Party's Third Plenum next month, with an assault on the state behemoths and the Party patronage machine (really?).
Yet he also wants to tighten the grip of the one-party, one-ideology, authoritarian state.
Here's a good account this morning from Wiang Xiangwei at the South China Morning Post.

The Development Research Centre has published its road map of reform measures.
It is being taken very seriously since it is written by none other than reformer Liu Wei and by President Xi's right-hand man on economic affairs, Liu He.
The problem is that these proposals skirt over/contradict the core finding of a joint DRC-World Bank report last year.
It said China would not succeed in jumping to the next stage of economic development and would languish in the the "middle income trap" unless it embraces the whole package of modern free thinking.
It did not quite say democracy, but that is what it meant.
The 2012 report warned that China risks hitting an invisible ceiling just like Latin America and the Middle East after their catch-up growth spurts in the 1960s and 1970s, failing to join the rarer "breakout" states such as Japan and Korea.
"If countries cannot increase productivity through innovation, they find themselves trapped. China does not have to endure this fate," it said.
All the arguments are by now well known.
China is running out of cheap labour from the countryside.
The DRC report said it faces a "wrenching demographic change" as the old-age dependency ratio doubles to north European levels within 20 years.
It then went on to say that China has picked the low-hanging fruit of cheap-labour, investment-led, export-led, catch-up growth.
It can longer rely on imported technology to keep growth humming. (It has averaged just under 10pc since Deng Xiaoping began to throw open the economy in 1978.)
"China has reached another turning point in its development path when a second strategic, and no less fundamental, shift is called for," it said.
As I reported at the time, the DRC said China’s growth will slow to 7pc later this decade and 5pc by the late 2020s even if China embraces deep reform.
Stagnation lies in wait if it clings to the dirigiste model.
"The forces supporting China’s continued rapid progress are gradually fading. The government’s dominance in key sectors, while earlier an advantage, is in the future likely to act as a constraint on creativity," it said. "The role of the private sector is critical because innovation at the technology frontier is quite different in nature from catching up technologically. It is not something that can be achieved through government planning."
Xi Jinping seems to think he can dispense with half of this, cherry-picking the bits of reform that he thinks will generate growth while clamping down on the press, the internet, free science, and reviving Maoist "self-criticism" sessions to tighten control over the party.
The Leninist reflexes are plain to see.
This week's treatment of the Guangzhou Express journalist – made to utter absurdities in a staged-TV confession with police watching, and the judicial process be damned – has Cultural Revolution all over it.
Surely something must give: either the Party gives up more social and political control to let that "creativity" flourish; or the reforms will degenerate into meaningless incantations and rhetoric, leaving China in the middle income trap.
We are at the moment when China has to decide.
Watch the Third Plenum very closely.

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Xi Jinping Is No Fun

By Dexter Roberts

Xi, taking a page from Chairman Mao, doesn't go for fancy dinners

At the end of September, Chinese officials gathered in Shijiazhuang, in Hebei province, to discuss their shortcomings in Maoist-style self-criticism sessions. 

Under the watchful eye of President Xi Jinping, senior Communist Party members admitted to sins ranging from excessive ambition to detachment from the people.
“Formalism, bureaucracy, hedonism, and extravagance,” are “undesirable work styles,” that are “harmful, stubborn in nature, and prone to relapse,” Xi warned the Hebei party secretary and other assembled provincial cadres, reported the Xinhua News Agency on Sept. 25. 

“Party members and officials should be taught to look in the mirror, straighten their attire, take a bath, and seek remedies,” Xi said.
Much to the consternation of those who hoped the new leadership would adopt a more liberal approach, Xi is promoting what some Chinese scholars are calling a Maoist restoration. 

While authorities clamp down on the Internet and lash out at foreign pharmaceutical companies and infant formula makers, they’re resurrecting party slogans and practices used decades ago.

The campaign aims to restore party discipline and purity by stamping out everything from lavish banqueting to bribery, including the practice of cadres taking gifts. 

Some businesses are already getting hit hard. 

High-end restaurants, Swiss watchmakers, and sellers of the fiery baijiu liquor, all favorites of bureaucrats, have seen sales slump. 

“Now nobody dares to eat out or wear nice things,” says one traffic police investigator in Dongguan, in Guangdong province, who declined to give his name, as he was not authorized to comment.
At the center of Xi’s rectification campaign is a hoary Maoist doctrine known as the “mass line.” 

That means making sure the Communist Party of China learns from and remains close to the people, or as Mao Zedong himself put it, “from the masses, to the masses.” 

In June, Xi launched a one-year campaign to strengthen party-people ties and crack down on luxurious living among the party’s 85 million members. 

“Winning or losing public support is an issue that concerns the CPC’s survival or extinction,” Xi warned in a speech kicking off the campaign.
Confidence in the government has been badly battered as more cases of corruption emerge. 

The recently concluded trial of former Chongqing Party Secretary Bo Xilai, sentenced to life imprisonment for embezzlement, abuse of power, and accepting bribes valued at 20.4 million yuan ($3.3 million), has fueled cynicism about the party. 

“China today is so far away from what the Communist Party tried to build in its first 30 years. But Xi wants to demonstrate that the party is legitimate,” says Jean-Pierre Cabestan, director of government and international studies at Hong Kong Baptist University. 

“So he is trying to reinvigorate ideology and reintroducing Maoism Lite.”
The campaign is pinching purveyors of luxury goods. 

Exports to China and Hong Kong of Swiss watches, a sought-after gift for those currying favor with officials, were down 17 percent in May. 

The 14-year jail sentence announced Sept. 4 for Shaanxi province’s work safety administrator Yang Dacai, nicknamed Brother Watch on the Chinese Internet for his many luxury timepieces, won’t help sales. 

Yang was convicted on corruption charges.
“You have to be much more circumspect about whom you are gifting to and what you are gifting to them,” says Rupert Hoogewerf, chairman of the Hurun Research Institute, which surveys the lifestyles and buying habits of China’s rich. 

A Hurun study from early this year shows that in 2012 Rolex had already fallen off a list of the top 15 most popular gifts in China. 

“If you are in a position of power, now that the line has been drawn, accepting certain gifts makes you vulnerable,” he says.
Another casualty: expensive liquors, particularly baijiu, a standard gift for Chinese officials. 

In Guangdong province annual sales have exceeded 10 billion yuan ($1.63 billion) in each of the last four years, estimates a Dongguan-based sales representative from baijiu producer Luzhou Laojiao, who declined to give her name because she wasn’t authorized to speak by her company. 

This year sales have fallen 35 percent to 40 percent. 

The price for a bottle of fancy Feitian Moutai, produced by distiller Kweichow Moutai, has come down from as high as 2,300 yuan ($376) last year, to 1,100 yuan now, she estimates. 

Moutai fell from 5th to 13th in the latest Hurun gift survey (No. 1 is Louis Vuitton). 

“The baijiu industry has suffered because high-end entertaining has been hit so hard,” Hurun’s Hoogewerf says.
The catering industry, including all restaurants, saw growth slow to 9.4 percent in July, down from 12.7 percent the year before, according to China’s Ministry of Commerce. 

“Before, you needed to make reservations two days in advance for my restaurant. Officials from the court, police force, and industry and commerce departments were all regulars,” says Yin Xiaobing, the 54-year-old owner of a Cantonese-style eatery in Dongguan. 

“Now none of them come to eat. Xi has had a huge impact on our business,” she says, surveying her largely deserted restaurant.
The optimists say Xi’s Maoist tactics may be temporary and even meant to provide cover for a good cause. They say the campaign will strengthen the top leadership’s conservative credentials, even as it prepares, at a crucial party meeting in early November, to make sweeping economic and financial reforms that will hurt powerful state enterprises and the bureaucrats who control them.

Others say they are less hopeful. 

Rather than targeting unhealthy cadre behavior or providing cover for economic change, Xi wants to strengthen his own position, argues Willy Lam, an expert on Chinese elite politics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. 

That’s true of Xi’s anti-corruption campaign, which has mainly netted officials with connections to jailed princeling Bo and his patron, former security czar Zhou Yongkang, says Lam.
Bo Zhiyue, a senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore, doubts the Maoist tactics will work. 

He points out that if the party really wanted a watchdog for corrupt behavior among its ranks, it wouldn’t be cracking down on the Internet. 

Popular bloggers have been called in and warned to behave responsibly. 

New rules making “rumor mongering” on the Web illegal have already led to arrests. 

On Sept. 17, Wu Dong, the microblogger who played a key role in exposing Brother Watch, was detained for 24 hours on suspicion of blackmail. 

The episode led to online speculation that Wu was targeted for his whistle-blowing.
Bo notes that ordinary Chinese have already begun mocking Xi’s ne0-Maoism on China’s microblogging site Sina Weibo. 

“These are tactics used by Mao in the 1940s. When you use them in the 21st century, it looks really ridiculous,” Bo says. 

Xi and the top leadership “are somehow detached not only from the masses, but also from all political reality in China.”

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China's Xi sidesteps SE Asia pressure over South China Sea disputes

By Kanupriya Kapoor
Xi Jinping walks during a welcoming ceremony at the Presidential Palace in Jakarta October 2, 2013. Xi is on a two-day visit to Indonesia.

JAKARTA -- Chinese President Xi Jinping showed no sign of bending to Southeast Asian pressure to resolve increasingly irascible territorial disputes over the South China Sea on Thursday, simply repeating calls for dialogue.
Xi, in the first address by a foreign leader to Indonesian MPs, made no reference to regional demands, echoed in Washington, that Beijing deal with the rival claims through multilateral talks rather than with individual negotiations.
The issue is certain to overshadow two regional summits next week that Xi will attend. 

But while Xi is touring Southeast Asia, including signing off on multibillion dollar deals with Indonesia, U.S. President Barack Obama has had to cancel trips to the Philippines and Malaysia because of the U.S. government shutdown.
The U.S. crisis has also put into doubt Obama's attendance at the two regional summits at a time when Washington has been promoting its strategy of putting more emphasis on its ties with Asia.
"As for the disagreements and disputes between China and certain Southeast Asian nations on territorial sovereignty and maritime rights, both sides must always uphold the use of peaceful methods ... to maintain the broad picture of bilateral relations and regional stability," he told MPs on the second and last day of his visit to Southeast Asia's largest country.
"China's development is a force for peace and friendship in the world, bringing development opportunities for Asia and the world and not threats."
Last month, the Philippines accused China of violating an informal code of conduct in the South China Sea, home to some of the world's most vital trade routes, by planning new structures on a disputed shoals.
The disputes have centred on concerns that China's use of its growing naval might to back claims to much of the oil- and gas-rich sea could spark a military clash.
Four of the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), including Vietnam and the Philippines but not Indonesia, have overlapping claims with China. 

Indonesia has offered to mediate but has in the past criticised China for not showing more restraint over the disputes.
Next Tuesday sees the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in the Indonesian resort island of Bali. 

After that, Xi and several other leaders will head to Brunei for the East Asia summit.
"What we wanted to hear from President Xi Jinping was whether China has the goodwill to resolve the South China Sea issue... But he didn't address the issue at all, so I'm disappointed," legislator Tantowi Yahya told Reuters.
Xi has used his visit try to lift relations in the region, saying China hoped trade with ASEAN would reach $1 trillion by 2020. 

He flies later in the day to Malaysia.
China is already Indonesia's biggest trading partner after Japan. 

The two were expected to finalise a raft of deals, mainly in the mining sector, worth more than $30 billion during Xi's visit.
Only about a third of the members of the combined houses attended the speech, the first such address by a foreign leader.

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A devious blueprint to empower the party

By Francesco Sisci

BEIJING -- A few days ago, a junior official came to me asking to check the name of an Italian author and the thesis of a book. 

At first I really could not figure out the author, but then from the name of the book I made out the writer. 

The official wanted to apply the argument of the book to the Communist Party. 

He was raving and talking what I thought was nonsense. 

I tried to calm him down, but he then grew even more agitated trying to explain the deep connections between these two old civilizations, China and Italy, that went well beyond the love for spaghetti or fireworks.
I pretended to understand and agree, but actually could not quite get it. 

He calmed down and left on my table two typewritten pages with some blurred red stamps on them. 

The pages were a more lucid presentation of what he was talking about and even more bizarre than I figured. It is unlikely that anybody will pay attention to this, yet to add to the many thoughts circulating on the Internet nowadays, I figured I would translate it, adapt it, and just for fun offer it to readers patient enough to follow me. 

The missive follows ...

*** 

The predicament of President Xi Jinping is quite understandable. 

After the difficulties he faced in carrying out the broad economic and political reforms he had in mind early this year, and because he had to eradicate the influence of former Chongqing party chief Bo Xilai, Xi had to move fast to concentrate power and don the neo-Maoist mantle of his enemy, Bo. 

Therefore he could only use the tools he had available: Mao's old techniques of launching a propaganda campaign for the unification of thought and mobilizing the people against the party's middle ranks. 

The president is doing this through his ongoing campaign for self-criticism and his emphasis on control of the media.
To concentrate power, Xi had also to show he was in the middle and not leaning too much on the right. Therefore he had to clamp down on high-flying dissident financier Wang Gongquan in order to better strike down the top echelons of people still supporting Bo.
This I all understand: it is old-school Chinese Communist Party and necessary at this moment, as it was after the Tiananmen protests in 1989 or the Falun gong movement in 1999. 

But party history also shows that these tools cannot be used for a long time, and after a while they tend to backfire. 

To unify thoughts in the short term gives power to the center, but in the medium and long term makes the center blind and management at the grassroots ineffective. 

Everybody will be afraid to report the truth out of fear of offending their superiors, and everybody will stop taking initiatives in ruling their areas since they are scared of being criticized for deviating from the center.
Soon, the country will fall apart from the periphery and the center will not be informed; and the leaders will realize this when it is too late. 

This happened during Mao's times, but then China was closed and the impact of these mistakes could be digested over a long period of time. 

Now China is open and similar mistakes could be much harder to digest and could produce deep cracks in the society and party.
China needs a change of the political system and it must look at Western democracies for inspiration, just as it looked at the West when it imported Marxism as its main theory for the communist revolution or took from the West when it started Deng Xiaoping's reforms. 

However, the party has to be clear that western democracy is not an absolute democracy. 

It is a system built to find peaceful compromises and agreements between different interest groups and different agendas for running a country.
Power struggle is inherent in any power structure, but a different political system can resolve a power struggle in a peaceful or not peaceful manner. 

Western democracies have managed to solve their power struggle issues in a peaceful manner that ultimately better preserves the losing party (who most times do not end up in prison) and the system, because the power struggle does not affect the system but only the interested parties.
Therefore we think that although these present measures are necessary, the center should think about the medium and long term, as described in the Italian novel The Leopard by Tomasi di Lampedusa. 

To enhance the power of the center and of the party in China, everything has to change -- in order to change nothing. 

The Italian writer described the behavior of the Sicilian aristocracy around 1861, when Garibaldi liberated the south of Italy and gave it to the Piedmont to rule. 

The Sicilian aristocrats, who a few years before sided with the king of Naples in cracking down on the liberals, later turned into supporters of liberal Garibaldi in order to retain their power and continue accruing their riches.
Our [the Communist] party perhaps ought to do the same with a medium- and long-term plan.
After the end of this mass campaign and the launch of the long-promised economic reforms, which will reduce the power and money of the state-owned enterprises, the president should consider two moves.
In the medium term, he should consider a cultural campaign centered on China being a normal country in the world, and thus adhering to generally accepted international practices. 

China cannot be isolated with its "Chinese characteristics" any longer, as it is part of a global environment, and neither can it impose its "Chinese characteristics" on the whole world. 

China has to adapt by absorbing foreign ideas and contributing ideas to the world. 

This is a path already shown by thinkers like Zhao Tingyang and Ge Zhaoguang, who are both very Chinese and can be very international. 

This cultural campaign is the only real guarantee that a neo-Maoist campaign a la Bo Xilai will cut less and less ice in the country.
In the long term, there should be open elections between two candidates selected by the party but voted on by the whole population, who then will have a sense of belonging. 

The rest of the world will also take part and feel they are inside China, and thus de facto supportive of its political system. 

To have a vote before the cultural campaign would only lead to the election of a nationalist demagogue. 

Bo Xilai was not a real leftist; he only leaned on the left because he understood it would help him get popular approval and support from old party veterans. 

The cultural campaign therefore cannot be short or hasty.
Now is surely not the time, but the president should consider announcing soon his plans for the future. 

Many in China are very uncertain about the direction of the country, and despite easy sympathies with the new left, the real "decision-makers" -- the people able to make money, the ones able produce the necessary new ideas, and many honest officials -- are worried that reforms may stall and lead back to a Maoist path. 

If they do not feel reassured, they could flee abroad or stop working, both things that will hamper our growth and development, and thus all our ambitions to become a great country.
Conversely, these steps would insure our party's hold on power, which is our ultimate goal.

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