Free Republic

According to unconfirmed reports, General Zhang Youxia, China’s vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), sent a company of troops (over a hundred or more) to the government’s Yingxi Hotel in western Beijing on 18 January. Their mission was to arrest Xi Jinping. A few hours before, the Chinese president – alerted by an informant – set in motion countermeasures. Troops under the command of Cao Qi, head of Xi’s Central Guards Bureau, ambushed Zhang’s soldiers. In the ensuing gunfight at Yangxi Hotel, nine guards were reportedly killed along with dozens of Zhang Youxia’s soldiers. Throughout China, military movements have...

China: Two Incidents Open Pandora’s Box – Analysis May 22, 2012 By Bhaskar Roy Two incidents, one regarding Chongqing Party Secretary Bo Xilai, and the other involving a blind human rights activist and self-taught lawyer Chen Guangchen, destroyed the myth that the Chinese system is a well oiled machine. Policy, individual, and bitter factional rivalries are kept sealed from the public to ensure the Party’s inviolability. This is the biggest political quake the country has experienced since the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident. The new age of social communication, the internet, has also damaged the Party’s secrecy. Even people inside the...

BEIJING - Bo Yibo, the last of the "Eight Immortals" who led China through economic reforms and the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, has died, an official news agency reported Tuesday. He was 98. Bo's death was announced in a one-sentence dispatch by the Xinhua News Agency. It gave no date or cause of death, but Hong Kong's Phoenix Satellite Television, which has close ties to Beijing, said Bo died Monday at a hospital in the Chinese capital. Bo, the father of China's commerce minister, was a veteran of the 1949 communist revolution and a former vice premier. He was the...