There has been a bit of frenzy over the last day about the whereabouts of Jack Ma, with many reports saying that he is “missing” and some speculating he may have been detained.
I have hard time believing that all those egregious staged scenes of "apartments full of cash" coming one after another for years are not completely staged.
It's a very routine practice getting somebody down. Remember, those only surface due to tightest censorship regime somehow letting them through rather prominently.
Imagining that anything can really "leak" out of PRC's investigatory organs is unbelievable. And people in question are certainly not idiots themselves. To anybody who ever dealt even with obviously unsavoury personas from the party, it would be very obvious that such carelessness was not characteristic of them even back in Jiang days.
There is nothing staged about the apartments full of cash; they were the norm during the Hu years, and some people still do it now. I know because I have seen them myself, the homeowner would follow the cleaning lady as she cleaned the apartment because the homeowner was afraid she would take some of the bags of cash which were lying around. The owner of the home was a Party member.
Everyone violates party discipline in one way or another; and the party's security services knows what is going on. It is just a game as to whether Party Central wants to go after someone. Xi believes that takedowns are necessary on a regular basis to keep party discipline in shape. Arresting officials for discipline violations are a feature of the system now, not a bug.
That is why it is always a good idea to go abroad or die before the winds change direction.
Pompeo's comments about China being 'the Pangolin' under the Arctic curtain made me laugh: I presume the choice of animal was a Covid reference? In which case its a bit obscure, Pangolin's are found throughout Asia and Africa, its not an exclusively Chinese mammal.
As for China not being near the Arctic, well that's true, but then neither are Germany, Netherlands, Poland, United Kingdom, France, Spain, India,
Italy, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, or Switzerland, all of which like China are Observer nations to the Arctic Council and were accepted by the Arctic Council secretariat, including the United States. In any event, China has a huge interest in the Arctic; it is a major investor in the region with interests in Russia's Yamal LNG fields and along the Northern Sea Passage, a route which cuts 30 days off shipments between Asia and Europe. Russia meanwhile has declared the entire Russian Arctic a Free Trade Zone and is offering free land use, tax breaks and other incentives to investors there. I covered that here: https://www.russia-briefing.com/news/why-investors-should-be-looking-to-the-russian-arctic-for-opportunities.html/
Pompeo's Arctic rhetoric should not be seen as purely an American position, and neither does the US hold complete territorial rights to it; the US claim is only through Alaska - which they purchased from the Russians back in 1867. The other Arctic natons are Canada, Finland, Greenland (Denmark), Iceland, Norway, Russia, and Sweden. Pompeo's rhetoric is certainly not the view of many of those countries, rendering his stance as a puff of hot air, once again singling out China among a host of Arctic interested nations. And Pangolins! What have they ever done wrong? LOL
Glad to see Sinocism posts again, hope you had a nice break, for what it's worth during the pandemic.
Not really sure why the PRC is blocking the WHO investigation, I think it's unlikely that the CCP found a smoking gun and is hiding it, why not just let them in? How high up does this order go? Is it lower-level bureaucrats just being bureaucrats, or is this an order from the Central Committee? It's an odd situation and I don't think we'll have any definitive answers anytime soon.
Glad to hear Jack Ma is still alright, not that I have much sympathy for someone who is still among the world's richest. Maybe he should just retire.
Trump's administration has left a massive mess for Biden and his team to clean up, domestically and abroad. Just damage control's gonna take up a lot of Biden's bandwidth for the first few months. All eyes on Georgia now, probably including plenty from Zhongnanhai. A split government would make it pretty hard to act decisively for the US. Not expecting an imminent invasion of Taiwan or Senkaku/Diaoyu or anything, but leaving this big vulnerability unchecked would seem like an...unwise decision for the US.
Who cares where Jack Ma is? Basically his life is over.
If he were in the US, he could hire a publicist to invent his coming out. Maybe by writing a book, or something like that.
His chances of doing that while Xi is in power in China is zero.
I have hard time believing that all those egregious staged scenes of "apartments full of cash" coming one after another for years are not completely staged.
It's a very routine practice getting somebody down. Remember, those only surface due to tightest censorship regime somehow letting them through rather prominently.
Imagining that anything can really "leak" out of PRC's investigatory organs is unbelievable. And people in question are certainly not idiots themselves. To anybody who ever dealt even with obviously unsavoury personas from the party, it would be very obvious that such carelessness was not characteristic of them even back in Jiang days.
There is nothing staged about the apartments full of cash; they were the norm during the Hu years, and some people still do it now. I know because I have seen them myself, the homeowner would follow the cleaning lady as she cleaned the apartment because the homeowner was afraid she would take some of the bags of cash which were lying around. The owner of the home was a Party member.
Everyone violates party discipline in one way or another; and the party's security services knows what is going on. It is just a game as to whether Party Central wants to go after someone. Xi believes that takedowns are necessary on a regular basis to keep party discipline in shape. Arresting officials for discipline violations are a feature of the system now, not a bug.
That is why it is always a good idea to go abroad or die before the winds change direction.
Pompeo's comments about China being 'the Pangolin' under the Arctic curtain made me laugh: I presume the choice of animal was a Covid reference? In which case its a bit obscure, Pangolin's are found throughout Asia and Africa, its not an exclusively Chinese mammal.
As for China not being near the Arctic, well that's true, but then neither are Germany, Netherlands, Poland, United Kingdom, France, Spain, India,
Italy, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, or Switzerland, all of which like China are Observer nations to the Arctic Council and were accepted by the Arctic Council secretariat, including the United States. In any event, China has a huge interest in the Arctic; it is a major investor in the region with interests in Russia's Yamal LNG fields and along the Northern Sea Passage, a route which cuts 30 days off shipments between Asia and Europe. Russia meanwhile has declared the entire Russian Arctic a Free Trade Zone and is offering free land use, tax breaks and other incentives to investors there. I covered that here: https://www.russia-briefing.com/news/why-investors-should-be-looking-to-the-russian-arctic-for-opportunities.html/
Pompeo's Arctic rhetoric should not be seen as purely an American position, and neither does the US hold complete territorial rights to it; the US claim is only through Alaska - which they purchased from the Russians back in 1867. The other Arctic natons are Canada, Finland, Greenland (Denmark), Iceland, Norway, Russia, and Sweden. Pompeo's rhetoric is certainly not the view of many of those countries, rendering his stance as a puff of hot air, once again singling out China among a host of Arctic interested nations. And Pangolins! What have they ever done wrong? LOL
Glad to see Sinocism posts again, hope you had a nice break, for what it's worth during the pandemic.
Not really sure why the PRC is blocking the WHO investigation, I think it's unlikely that the CCP found a smoking gun and is hiding it, why not just let them in? How high up does this order go? Is it lower-level bureaucrats just being bureaucrats, or is this an order from the Central Committee? It's an odd situation and I don't think we'll have any definitive answers anytime soon.
Glad to hear Jack Ma is still alright, not that I have much sympathy for someone who is still among the world's richest. Maybe he should just retire.
Trump's administration has left a massive mess for Biden and his team to clean up, domestically and abroad. Just damage control's gonna take up a lot of Biden's bandwidth for the first few months. All eyes on Georgia now, probably including plenty from Zhongnanhai. A split government would make it pretty hard to act decisively for the US. Not expecting an imminent invasion of Taiwan or Senkaku/Diaoyu or anything, but leaving this big vulnerability unchecked would seem like an...unwise decision for the US.