Government insider turned dissident writer asks whether 2008 will be remembered as the year the CCP started to lose its stranglehold over China.
“A once-in-a-hundred-year snowstorm marked an ominous beginning for a supposedly magnificent year for China. In its aftermath came violent protests in Tibet, the controversial Olympic torch relay, the devastating Sichuan earthquake, the Olympics themselves, a poisoned milk powder scandal and financial turmoil.”
Jennifer Zeng’s summary of a turbulent year for China and it’s ruling party cites the last year as one of rising social injustice, increasing information control, pollution, corruption and propaganda, all of which, she concludes, point to a CCP whose control over the past twelve months has started to slip and which bare witness to its desperate attempts to retighten its grip and regain its waning authority.
The CCP, Zeng argues, cynically used the Beijing Olympics to enhance and perpetuate its own political legitimacy while the inhabitants of the thousands of homes that were bulldozed to make way for the Olympic infrastructure were thrown out onto the street with little or no compensation and thousands more people, thought to be a threat to the PR campaign that was to be orchestrated around the Olympics, were rounded up and imprisoned in the six months before the games began. Most, Zeng writes, are still in custody, many of whom have been tortured and some even killed.
Meanwhile more than 44 million people have already publicly renounced the CCP and its related organisations and many people, including a large proportion inside the CCP, “no longer doubt that the Party boat is sinking.” Read more »
