{"id":6750,"date":"2016-04-17T12:01:53","date_gmt":"2016-04-17T16:01:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/?p=6750"},"modified":"2016-04-22T12:11:03","modified_gmt":"2016-04-22T16:11:03","slug":"chinese-website-publishes-then-pulls-explosive-letter-calling-for-president-xis-resignation-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/chinese-website-publishes-then-pulls-explosive-letter-calling-for-president-xis-resignation-2","title":{"rendered":"Chinese website publishes, then pulls, explosive letter calling for President Xi\u2019s resignation"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Emily Rauhala<\/span><\/a> and Xu Yangjingjing<\/span><\/p>\n

\"XJP\"

Chinese President Xi Jinping speaks with media in a press conference with his Iranian counterpart Hassan Rouhani after their meeting at the Saadabad Palace in Tehran, Iran, Saturday, Jan. 23, 2016. (AP Photo\/Ebrahim Noroozi)<\/p><\/div>\n

Two weeks after China\u2019s President toured state media offices and called for absolute loyalty from the press, a website with links to the government published an explosive letter asking him to resign \u201cfor the future of the country and the people.\u201d<\/p>\n

The letter was reportedly posted in the early hours of March 4 by a website called Wujie News, which claimed to be jointly owned by SEEC Media Group, Alibaba and the government of Xinjiang, in China’s far northwest. The Washington Post found a cached version of the document that shows the post live on the site. (A spokesperson for Alibaba said the company “never had an equity stake in Wujie,” but did sign a “memorandum of understanding” with the company at a government-sponsored event.)<\/p>\n

The letter, signed “loyal Communist Party members,” lambasts China’s president for “abandoning the principle of collective leadership,” for concentrating power in his own hands and “indulging” flatterers. Xi’s declaration that the press should serve the party, not the people “dismayed the whole nation,” it charges.<\/p>\n

The strident but anonymous critique was printed amid a string of three other high-profile rebukes of the Xi and his media policy. Taken together these incidents hint at anger and frustration within China’s elite \u2014 and show a willingness to speak out despite the risks.<\/p>\n

Their message to the government: We won’t go quietly.<\/p>\n

Questions about Xi\u2019s press policy surfaced soon after his \u201cinspection tour\u201d of China Central Television (CCTV) and People\u2019s Daily last month. While visiting the outlets, Xi said the media ought to \u201creflect the will of the Party, mirror the views of the Party, preserve the authority of the Party, preserve the unity of the Party and achieve love of the Party, protection of the Party and acting for the Party.\u201d<\/p>\n

A retired property developer and blogger named Ren Zhiqiang was not impressed. \u201cWhen did the \u2018People\u2019s Government\u2019 turn into the \u2018Party\u2019s Government?\u2019\u201d he asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce all the media is part of one family and stops representing the interests of the people, then the people will be cast aside and left in some forgotten corner.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ren\u2019s comments made a splash online but were quickly purged from the Web. Party-backed media soon swarmed, lambasting him as an ungrateful and treacherous advocate \u201cfor capitalism\u201d with \u201cvicious\u201d motives, in a smear campaign that some compared to Cultural Revolution-style public shaming.<\/p>\n

Undeterred by the attack on Ren, the website of one of China\u2019s most respected magazines, Caixin, last week blasted government censors for asking them to remove an article in which an academic called for the government to heed a greater variety of views.<\/p>\n

In the article , an academic named Jiang Hong said people like him should \u201cbe free to give Communist party and government agencies suggestions on economic, political, cultural and societal issues.\u201d<\/p>\n

Should be, perhaps, but are clearly not: In an English-language follow-up headlined \u201cStory about Adviser\u2019s Free Speech Comments Removed from Caixin Website,\u201d Caixin reported that government censors called the first piece \u201cillegal content,\u201d and ordered them to take it down.<\/p>\n

In the second piece, Caixin re-interviewed Jiang, who went on the record about the \u201cterrible and bewildering\u201d act of censorship. \u201cI examined [the article] in all respects, but I couldn\u2019t see anything illegal,\u201d he told Caixin.<\/p>\n

As if to emphasize the absurd circularity of it all, the second post was also pulled.<\/p>\n

A man who identified himself as an employee at China\u2019s Party-controlled newswire, Xinhua, on March 7 published an open letter on his Weibo account calling on Chinese authorities to investigate an China’s censorship body for infringing on the right to free speech.<\/p>\n

The letter included his name, Zhou Fang, his government ID and his phone number, and listed his place of work as Xinhua. A man reached at that number said he was indeed Zhou Fang and said he did not deny writing the letter.<\/p>\n

The since-pulled post was a detailed critique of China’s approach to digital censorship that compares Xi-era Internet policing to the Cultural Revolution. The letter mentions the case of Ren Zhiqiang and says that the crackdown on Party critics is causing people to lose confidence in the central government.<\/p>\n

The March 4 letter was even more strident in tone. Whereas Zhou called on the government to investigate the censors, the short-lived open letter signed “loyal Communist Party members” took it a step further, taking aim at Xi’s handling of the anti-corruption campaign, picking apart his handling of the economy and foreign affairs.<\/p>\n

“Your indulgence in a personality cult and silencing ‘improper discussion of the center’ has made those of us who have been through the cultural revolution concerned. Our Party, our country, and our people can not afford another 10 years of turmoil.”<\/p>\n

If Xi and his Party is worried about the backlash, they are not saying so \u2014 or not directly, anyway. A top official, Yu Zhengsheng, this week praised the press for its loyalty, thanking journalists for their “productive,” “constructive” and “inspirational” coverage of China’s annual legislative meetings.<\/p>\n

“The media has maintained the correct political stance,” he said, “And spread positive energy.”<\/p>\n

This article has been updated. An earlier version reported that Wujie news was a joint venture with SEEC Media group, Alibaba and the government of Xinjiang. Alibaba denies it has invested in Wujie. It did, however, sign a “non-binding memorandum of understanding” with the company, a spokesperson said.<\/p>\n

Source: https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/news\/worldviews\/wp\/2016\/03\/16\/government-linked-website-published-then-pulled-call-for-president-xis-resignation\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Emily Rauhala and Xu Yangjingjing Two … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6922,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,110],"tags":[37,1578,1577,103],"views":6303,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6750"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6750"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6750\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6923,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6750\/revisions\/6923"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6922"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6750"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6750"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6750"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}