Ћина-Средње Краљевство

#BREAKING: Hong Kong democracy activists arrested after months of #antiELAB movement. Ex-lawmaker Au Nok-hin says Martin Lee, Jimmy Lai, Lee Cheuk-yan, Leung Kwok-hung, Raphael Wong, Avery Ng and he have been arrested and believes it is related to a protest they held last Aug.

— Ezra Cheung (@ezracheungtoto) April 18, 2020

A new poll by the Pew Research Center provides the clearest snapshot yet of the collapse in American views of China thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. Taken March 3-29, the big takeaway from the survey of 1,000 adults is that 66% now have a negative view of China, compared with 26% favorable. That is a 20% jump in unfavorable ratings since 2017 and a 6% rise since last year. These are the worst numbers ever recorded for China, despite Beijing's global public relations campaign to portray its coronavirus response in a positive light.
The damage to China's image is deep and widespread. Nearly 90% of Americans polled believe that China’s power and influence are a threat, with fully 62% saying it is a “major” threat. As for the most visible Chinese leader, 71% of respondents have “no confidence” in Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping. Interestingly, those with a college degree and above were slightly more negative about China than those without a college degree, but at 68% percent to 64%, both were healthy majorities. Even the youngest demographic, aged 18-29, held a 53% unfavorable view, compared to 71% of those aged 50 and above. 

The Chinese government is taking draconian measures to slash birth rates among Uighurs and other minorities as part of a sweeping campaign to curb its Muslim population, even as it encourages some of the country’s Han majority to have more children.

While individual women have spoken out before about forced birth control, the practice is far more widespread and systematic than previously known, according to an AP investigation based on government statistics, state documents and interviews with 30 ex-detainees, family members and a former detention camp instructor. The campaign over the past four years in the far west region of Xinjiang is leading to what some experts are calling a form of “demographic genocide.”

The state regularly subjects minority women to pregnancy checks, and forces intrauterine devices, sterilization and even abortion on hundreds of thousands, the interviews and data show. Even while the use of IUDs and sterilization has fallen nationwide, it is rising sharply in Xinjiang.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-07-05/is-the-u-s-in-a-new-cold-war-china-has-already-declared-it



America and China Are Entering the Dark Forest
To know what the Chinese are really up to, read the futuristic novels of Liu Cixin.
By
Niall Ferguson
5. јул 2020. 14:00 CEST



“We are in the foothills of a Cold War.” Those were the words of Henry Kissinger when I interviewed him at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Beijing last November. 

The observation in itself was not wholly startling. It had seemed obvious to me since early last year that a new Cold War — between the U.S. and China — had begun. This insight wasn’t just based on interviews with elder statesmen. Counterintuitive as it may seem, I had picked up the idea from binge-reading Chinese science fiction.

First, the history. What had started out in early 2018 as a trade war over tariffs and intellectual property theft had by the end of the year metamorphosed into a technology war over the global dominance of the Chinese company Huawei Technologies Co. in 5G network telecommunications; an ideological confrontation in response to Beijing’s treatment of the Uighur minority in China’s Xinjiang region and the pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong; and an escalation of old frictions over Taiwan and the South China Sea.

Nevertheless, for Kissinger, of all people, to acknowledge that we were in the opening phase of Cold War II was remarkable.

Since his first secret visit to Beijing in 1971, Kissinger has been the master-builder of that policy of U.S.-Chinese engagement which, for 45 years, was a leitmotif of U.S. foreign policy. It fundamentally altered the balance of power at the mid-point of the Cold War, to the disadvantage of the Soviet Union. It created the geopolitical conditions for China’s industrial revolution, the biggest and fastest in history. And it led, after China’s accession to the World Trade Organization, to that extraordinary financial symbiosis which Moritz Schularick and I christened “Chimerica” in 2007.

How did relations between Beijing and Washington sour so quickly that even Kissinger now speaks of Cold War? 

The conventional answer to that question is that President Donald Trump has swung like a wrecking ball into the “liberal international order” and that Cold War II is only one of the adverse consequences of his “America First” strategy.

Yet that view attaches too much importance to the change in U.S. foreign policy since 2016, and not enough to the change in Chinese foreign policy that came four years earlier, when Xi Jinping became general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. Future historians will discern that the decline and fall of Chimerica began in the wake of the global financial crisis, as a new Chinese leader drew the conclusion that there was no longer any need to hide the light of China’s ambition under the bushel that Deng Xiaoping had famously recommended.

When Middle America voted for Trump four years ago, it was partly a backlash against the asymmetric payoffs of engagement and its economic corollary, globalization. Not only had the economic benefits of Chimerica gone disproportionately to China, not only had its costs been borne disproportionately by working-class Americans, but now those same Americans saw that their elected leaders in Washington had acted as midwives at the birth of a new strategic superpower — a challenger for global predominance even more formidable, because economically stronger, than the Soviet Union.

It is not only Kissinger who recognizes that the relationship with Beijing has soured. Orville Schell, another long-time believer in engagement, recently conceded that the approach had foundered “because of the CCP’s deep ambivalence about the way engaging in a truly meaningful way might lead to demands for more reform and change and its ultimate demise.”

Conservative critics of engagement, meanwhile, are eager to dance on its grave, urging that the People’s Republic be economically “quarantined,” its role in global supply chains drastically reduced. There is a spring in the step of the more Sinophobic members of the Trump administration, notably Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, deputy National Security Adviser Matt Pottinger and trade adviser Peter Navarro. For the past three and a half years they have been arguing that the single most important thing about Trump's presidency was that he had changed the course of U.S. policy towards China, a shift from engagement to competition spelled out in the 2017 National Security Strategy. The events of 2020 would seem to have vindicated them.

The Covid-19 pandemic has done more than intensify Cold War II. It has revealed its existence to those who last year doubted it. The Chinese Communist Party caused this disaster — first by covering up how dangerous the new virus SARS-CoV-2 was, then by delaying the measures that might have prevented its worldwide spread.

Yet now China wants to claim the credit for saving the world from the crisis it caused. Liberally exporting cheap and not wholly reliable ventilators, testing kits and face masks, the Chinese government has sought to snatch victory from the jaws of a defeat it inflicted. The deputy director of the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s information department has gone so far as to endorse a conspiracy theory that the coronavirus originated in the U.S. and retweet an article claiming that an American team had brought the virus with them when they participated in the World Military Games in Wuhan last October.

Just as implausible are Chinese claims that the U.S. is somehow behind the recurrent waves of pro-democracy protest in Hong Kong. The current confrontation over the former British colony’s status is unambiguously Made in China. As Pompeo has said, the new National Security Law Beijing imposed on Hong Kong last Tuesday effectively “destroys” the territory’s semi-autonomy and tears up the 1984 Sino-British joint declaration, which guaranteed that Hong Kong would retain its own legal system for 50 years after its handover to People’s Republic in 1997.

In this context, it is not really surprising that American public sentiment towards China has become markedly more hawkish since 2017, especially among older voters. China is one of few subjects these days about which there is a genuine bipartisan consensus. It is a sign of the times that Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s campaign clearly intends to portray their man as more hawkish on China than Trump. (Former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s new memoir is grist to their mill.) On Hong Kong, Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker of the House, is every bit as indignant as Pompeo.

I have argued that this new Cold War is both inevitable and desirable, not least because it has jolted the U.S. out of complacency and into an earnest effort not to be surpassed by China in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and other strategically crucial technologies. Yet there remains, in academia especially, significant resistance to my view that we should stop worrying and learn to love Cold War II.

At a forum last week on World Order after Covid-19, organized by the Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins University, a clear majority of speakers warned of the perils of a new Cold War.

Eric Schmidt, the former chairman of Google, argued instead for a “rivalry-partnership” model of “coop-etition,” in which the two nations would at once compete and cooperate in the way that Samsung and Apple have done for years.

Harvard’s Graham Allison, the author of the bestselling "Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?", agreed, giving as another example the 11th-century “frenmity” between the Song Emperor of China and the Liao kingdom on China’s northern border. The pandemic, Allison argued, has made “incandescent the impossibility of identifying China clearly as either foe or friend. Rivalry-partnership may sound complicated, but life is complicated.”

“The establishment of a productive and predictable US/China relationship,” wrote John Lipsky, formerly of the International Monetary Fund, “is a sine qua non for strengthening the institutions of global governance.” The last Cold War had cast a “shadow of a global holocaust for decades,” observed James Steinberg, a former deputy secretary of state. “What can be done to create a context to limit the rivalry and create space for cooperation?”

Elizabeth Economy, my colleague at the Hoover Institution, had an answer: “The United States and China could … partner to address a global challenge,” namely climate change. Tom Wright of the Brookings Institution took a similar line: “Focusing only on great power competition while ignoring the need for cooperation will not actually give the United States an enduring strategic advantage over China.”

All this sounds eminently reasonable, apart from one thing. The Chinese Communist Party isn’t Samsung, much less the Liao kingdom. Rather — as was true in Cold War I, when (especially after 1968) academics tended to be doves rather than hawks — today’s proponents of “rivalry-partnership” are overlooking the possibility that the Chinese aren’t interested in being frenemies. They know full well this is a Cold War, because they started it.

To be sure, there are also Chinese scholars who lament the passing of engagement. The economist Yu Yongding recently joined Kevin Gallagher of Boston University to argue for reconciliation between Washington and Beijing. Yet that is no longer the official view in Beijing. When I first began talking publicly about Cold War II at conferences last year, I was surprised that no Chinese delegates contradicted me. In September, I asked one of them — the Chinese head of a major international institution — why that was. “Because I agree with you!” he replied with a smile.

As a visiting professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, I have seen for myself the ideological turning of the tide under Xi. Academics who study taboo subjects such as the Cultural Revolution find themselves subject to investigations or worse. Those who take a more combative stance toward the West get promoted.

Yan Xuetong, dean of the Institute of International Relations at Tsinghua, recently argued that Cold War II, unlike Cold War I, will be a purely technological competition, without proxy wars and nuclear brinkmanship. Yao Yang, dean of the National School of Development at Peking University, was equally candid in an interview with the Beijing Cultural Review, published on April 28.

“To a certain degree we already find ourselves in the situation of a New Cold War," he said. “There are two basic reasons for this. The first is the need for Western politicians to play the blame game” about the origins of the pandemic. “The next thing," he added, "is that now Westerners want to make this into a ‘systems’ question, saying that the reason that China could carry out such drastic control measures [in Hubei province] is because China is not a democratic society, and this is where the power and capacity to do this came from.”

This, however, is weak beer compared with the hard stuff regularly served up on Twitter by the pack leader of the “wolf warrior” diplomats, Zhao Lijian. “The Hong Kong Autonomy Act passed by the US Senate is nothing but a piece of scrap paper,” he tweeted on Monday, in response to the congressional retaliation against China’s  new Hong Kong security law. By his standards, this was understatement.

The tone of the official Chinese communiqué released after Pompeo’s June 17 meeting in Hawaii with Yang Jiechi, the director of the Communist Party’s Office of Foreign Affairs, was vintage Cold War. On the persecution of the Uighurs, for example, it called on "the US side to respect China's counter-terrorism and de-radicalization efforts, stop applying double standards on counter-terrorism issues, and stop using Xinjiang-related issues as a pretext to interfere in China's internal affairs."

And this old shrillness, so reminiscent of the Mao Zedong era, is not reserved for the U.S. alone. The Chinese government lashes out at any country that has the temerity to criticize it, from Australia — "gum stuck to the bottom of China's shoe" according to the editor of the Party-controlled Global Times — to India to the U.K. 

Those who hope to revive engagement, or at least establish frenmity with Beijing, underestimate the influence of Wang Huning, a member since 2017 of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, the most powerful body in China, and Xi’s most influential adviser. Back in August 1988, Wang spent six months in the U.S. as a visiting scholar, traveling to more than 30 cities and nearly 20 universities. His account of that trip, "America against America," (published in 1991) is a critique — in places scathing — of American democracy, capitalism and culture (racial division features prominently in the third chapter).

Yet the book that has done the most to educate me about how China views America and the world today is, as I said, not a political text, but a work of science fiction. "The Dark Forest" was Liu Cixin’s 2008 sequel to the hugely successful "Three-Body Problem." It would be hard to overstate Liu’s influence in contemporary China: He is revered by the Shenzhen and Hangzhou tech companies, and was officially endorsed as one of the faces of 21st-century Chinese creativity by none other than … Wang Huning.

"The Dark Forest," which continues the story of the invasion of Earth by the ruthless and technologically superior Trisolarans, introduces Liu’s three axioms of “cosmic sociology.”

First, “Survival is the primary need of civilization.” Second, “Civilization continuously grows and expands, but the total matter in the universe remains constant.” Third, “chains of suspicion” and the risk of a “technological explosion” in another civilization mean that in space there can only be the law of the jungle. In the words of the book’s hero, Luo Ji:

The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost … trying to tread without sound … The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life — another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod — there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people … any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out.

Kissinger is often thought of (in my view, wrongly) as the supreme American exponent of Realpolitik. But this is something much harsher than realism. This is intergalactic Darwinism.

Of course, you may say, it’s just sci-fi. Yes, but "The Dark Forest" gives us an insight into something we think too little about: how Xi’s China thinks. It’s not up to us whether or not we have a Cold War with China, if China has already declared Cold War on us.

Not only are we already in the foothills of that new Cold War; those foothills are also impenetrably covered in a dark forest of China’s devising.

China’s first Type 075 amphibious assault ship is reportedly ready for its maiden voyage soon. In April, it reportedly suffered a fire but resulted in no major damage, showing a superior damage control mechanism than that of USS Bonhomme Richard: analysts https://t.co/7D8nOfZn5X pic.twitter.com/N22lHn53qz

— Global Times (@globaltimesnews) July 14, 2020

Mercer and all of her favorite toys! pic.twitter.com/bGal0ui6E2

— Mike Pompeo (@mikepompeo) July 15, 2020

China's kindergarten game: Cooperation. pic.twitter.com/2vxAsEetHm

— ShanghaiPanda (@thinking_panda) August 23, 2020

China should weaponise its exports of medicines and drug precursors if the US cuts the country’s access to computer chips, a prominent Chinese academic and government adviser says, as supply chain security emerges as a key theme in the upcoming American presidential election.

The United States is heavily reliant on imported medicines from China, something both US President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden have vowed to address after the coronavirus pandemic exposed vulnerabilities in the nation’s pharmaceutical and medical device supply.

The candidates have pledged to shift production of critical medical products back to the United States, creating jobs and loosening reliance on foreign manufacturers like China.

Though Beijing has not yet used pharmaceuticals to put pressure on the US, high-profile economist Li Daokui said China could limit American access to medicines if it was starved further of semiconductors.

“For vitamins and antibiotics, more than 90 per cent of their raw materials are produced in China,” Li recently told local media, reiterating comments he made last year.

“The US will definitely not be able to produce them in the short term. Of course, we will not take the lead in doing this, but if the US dares to play dirty, we have these countermeasures.”

US-China relations have deteriorated to an all-time low in recent months over a complex mix of issues including trade, diplomacy, the pandemic and Hong Kong.

The US Department of Commerce last week further curbed Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei from accessing American technology and software, escalating a tech war that has prompted China to redouble efforts to improve its hi-tech production capabilities.

To prevent the company circumnavigating export controls, the agency added another 38 Huawei affiliates across 21 countries to the “entity list”, which restricts the sale of key US technology to designated Chinese companies.

Li, who is a professor of finance at Tsinghua University in Beijing, said the US would continue to “suppress” China’s access to technology by strengthening sanctions against firms like Huawei. But completely cutting it off from chip supplies would be the “nuclear option”.

“Disrupting the Chinese economy is equivalent to picking a fight with the Chinese people on the food issue. China can then pick a fight with the US on the supply of medicines, right?” he said.

China should also be prepared for the “very realistic” risk that the US may cut Chinese banks’ access to the SWIFT international messaging system, the primary network that underpins international transactions, Li said.

Chinese banks have been revamping contingency plans in case they are prevented from using the system, as US legislation allows sanctions on lenders serving officials involved in implementing the Hong Kong national security law.

Cutting Chinese banks from the SWIFT system would be “economic terrorism” and the two sides needed to communicate, said Li, who is also a former member of the central bank’s monetary policy advisory committee.

“We are open to negotiations, but if you are unreasonable, we will fight you to the end at any cost,” he said.
In a recent interview with Fox News, Trump said the US would decouple from China if “they don’t treat us right”. The Trump re-election campaign has made “ending our reliance on China” a key part of its platform.

In a rare bright spot of news, top trade negotiators from the two nations held the first high-level trade talks since the signing of the phase one trade deal in January on Tuesday. The meeting has been described as the only remaining area of constructive dialogue in the crumbling superpower relationship.

The discussion was described as constructive and both sides have promised to push ahead with implementation of the trade deal.
According to Li, US-China relations in the future will be “an era of intense game playing” that would defy simplistic characterisations like “decoupling”.

https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3098940/china-could-weaponise-drug-exports-retaliate-against-us-chip

If WeChat is banned, then there will be no reason why Chinese shall keep iPhone and apple products. pic.twitter.com/qkKuMNQ87f

— Lijian Zhao 赵立坚 (@zlj517) August 27, 2020

Qelbinur Sidik, a Chinese teacher at two camps in Xinjiang, says she was forcibly sterilized at age 50 on government orders to sterilize women between 19 and 59, part of a campaign to suppress birthrates among Uighurs and other minorities. with @_EmmaGH https://t.co/N7qMcS1XPh

— Lily Kuo (@lilkuo) September 4, 2020

U većinski ujgurskim regijama, Hotan i Kašgar, broj rođene djece strmoglavio se za više od 60 posto između 2015. i 2018. godine, a to je zadnja godina za koju su dostupni vladini podaci, utvrdio je AP. Za usporedbu, u istom razdoblju u cijeloj zemlji, broj rođenih pao je za 4,2 posto.

China’s ‘Big Cannon’ Blasted Xi. Now He’s Been Jailed for 18 Years.

The Communist Party accused Ren Zhiqiang of being disloyal. His lengthy sentence underscores Xi Jinping’s crackdown on dissent among the elite.

By Chris Buckley
Sept. 22, 2020
Updated 7:35 a.m. ET

Ren Zhiqiang, the property tycoon nicknamed “Big Cannon,” was notorious for his blunt criticisms of the Communist Party, and yet his wealth and political connections long seemed to shield him from severe punishment. Until now.

A court in Beijing sentenced Mr. Ren to 18 years in prison on Tuesday. The court said he was guilty of graft, taking bribes, misusing public funds and abusing his power during and after his time as an executive at a property development company.

Mr. Ren’s supporters and sympathizers said that his real crime was criticizing the Communist Party and calling the country’s hard-line leader, Xi Jinping, a “clown.”

“Very clearly this was punishment for his words, that’s going to be obvious to everyone,” Guo Yuhua, a sociologist in Beijing, said by telephone. “Those economic problems — this one, that one — can be concocted whenever you want.”

Mr. Ren’s punishment has underlined how far Mr. Xi has rolled back allowances for dissent, even from members of the elite like Mr. Ren, a scion of a Communist family and former friend of senior officials. His supporters also see the long prison term as a warning to others, especially elites, who may be thinking about openly challenging the party and Mr. Xi.

“Cracking down on Ren Zhiqiang, using economic crimes to punish him, is a warning to others — killing one to warn a hundred,” said Cai Xia, an acquaintance of Mr. Ren’s who formerly taught at the Central Party School, which trains rising officials.

“It’s a warning to the whole party and especially to red offspring,” Ms. Cai said, referring to the children of party officials. She spoke before the court’s judgment in a telephone interview from the United States, where she now lives.

At 69, Mr. Ren is old enough that he could spend the rest of his life in prison unless his sentence is reduced.

So far, the Beijing Second Intermediate People’s Court has issued few details of the evidence that it said proved Mr. Ren had illegally enriched himself by about $2.9 million between 2003 and 2017. The official summary of the court’s judgment said that his abuses had led Chinese state-owned companies to lose around $17 million. The court said that he had “fully admitted to the facts of all the crimes and willingly accepted the court’s judgment.”

But his case was cloaked in secrecy, and the court’s decision was swift by the standards of politically sensitive cases that come before China’s party-controlled courts. The court did not say when Mr. Ren’s trial took place, but supporters said the court posted an announcement that his trial was to be held on Sept. 11. The news of his sentence was downplayed by Chinese state-run news outlets, which mostly carried the court’s statement.

“This is political persecution, plain and simple,” Ms. Cai said. “He was already audited when he retired, and then repeatedly checked again in 2016.”

Mr. Ren retired from the Huayuan company in 2014. He waded into political hot water in 2016, when he scoffed at Mr. Xi’s call for Chinese journalists to staunchly follow the Communist Party. But at the time the party’s punishment was relatively light: it put Mr. Ren on probation and he received a round of censuring by the state news media.

This time, Mr. Ren was detained in March after he criticized Mr. Xi’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak that spread across China and then the world from late last year. In an essay that spread on the internet, he said the officials’ mishandling of the outbreak — including stifling information about initial infections — vindicated his 2016 warning against stifling public criticism.

After citing a February speech in which Mr. Xi defended the party’s handling of the coronavirus crisis, Mr. Ren wrote, “Standing there was not an emperor showing off his ‘new clothes,’ but a clown stripped of his clothes who still insisted on being emperor.”

In July, the Communist Party announced that Mr. Ren had been expelled and that he had been placed under criminal investigation. The party announcement said that Mr. Ren’s misdeeds included using public funds to pay for use of a golf course. But the announcement also singled out Mr. Ren’s opinions, accusing him of distorting party history and being disloyal.

“Ren Zhiqiang lost his ideals and convictions,” the party said. “On major matters of principle, he failed to stay in line with the party’s central authorities.”

While other Chinese people have criticized the Chinese government, and suffered punishment for it, Mr. Ren stood out for his ties to the party establishment and for his willingness as a prominent businessman to bluntly criticize the party.

He came from a family steeped in Communist Party tradition — his father served as a vice minister of commerce — and he was once close to senior party leaders, including Vice President Wang Qishan.

Like many in his generation, Mr. Ren worked in the countryside and then as a soldier before he ventured into business in the 1980s, when China’s market economy was opening under Deng Xiaoping. He made his name and his fortune in real estate, overseeing the Huayuan property company. City authorities in Beijing held a controlling stake in the company, but Mr. Ren left his stamp on it.

He was “confident, decisive, aggressive, like a commanding officer in the military,” a Beijing official-turned-businessman, He Yang, wrote in a memoir shared on the Chinese internet.

Even before he ventured into political debate, Mr. Ren ignited controversy with his public comments on the economy and the housing market. His many profiles in Chinese magazines often mention an incident in 2010 when a man threw a shoe at him while he was attending a real estate forum at a high-end hotel.

Mr. Ren appeared to brush off the criticism, and embraced the opportunities to share his views on the internet.

“What’s most lacking in this society isn’t lies but truth-speaking,” Mr. Ren said in 2013.

Mr. Ren has joined a handful of wealthy and educated Chinese who have spoken out against the party’s expanding power, and have been punished as a result.

Since coming to power in 2012, Mr. Xi has steadily throttled dissent in China, and he has been especially incensed at wayward party members who criticize his policies.

“Never allow eating the Communist Party’s food and then smashing the Communist Party’s cooking pot,” Mr. Xi said in 2014, according to a book collecting his comments on risks to China and the party that was published last month.

This month, the police in Beijing detained Geng Xiaonan, a businesswoman who runs a publishing company. Ms. Geng had supported Xu Zhangrun, a professor of law at the prestigious Tsinghua University, who had condemned Mr. Xi’s hard-line policies in a series of essays.

Mr. Xu was detained by the police for about a week in July, and Ms. Geng had leapt to his defense after investigators said he had used prostitutes, an accusation he vehemently denied.

The police have said that Ms. Geng and her husband were accused of conducting illegal business activities. Their supporters say Ms. Geng was targeted for helping Mr. Xu and other dissenters who have run foul of the party.

Ms. Cai, the former party school professor, was expelled from the Communist Party last month after she scathingly denounced Mr. Xi’s policies in speeches and essays.

For a while after his 2016 censure, Mr. Ren appeared to retreat from public view. He held an exhibition late last year to showcase his new love of artistic carpentry. But as the coronavirus gripped China, Mr. Ren seemed unable to hold back from sharing his scathing criticisms of the government with friends.

Rights activists criticized Mr. Ren’s 18-year sentence as excessive. Sophie Richardson, the China director at Human Rights Watch, called it “off-the-charts ruthless” and said the court’s account of Mr. Ren fully capitulating was alarming, as it used language that often indicated that defendants were under immense pressure.

“It rings alarm bells that they are trying to avoid ill-treatment,” Ms. Richardson said, “not that they have become cheerleaders of Xi’s rule by law.”

rumbeando wrote:Nazovi Sija klovnom i dobij 18-godišnji smeštaj u mardelju.

China’s ‘Big Cannon’ Blasted Xi. Now He’s Been Jailed for 18 Years.

The Communist Party accused Ren Zhiqiang of being disloyal. His lengthy sentence underscores Xi Jinping’s crackdown on dissent among the elite.

By Chris Buckley
Sept. 22, 2020
Updated 7:35 a.m. ET

Ren Zhiqiang, the property tycoon nicknamed “Big Cannon,” was notorious for his blunt criticisms of the Communist Party, and yet his wealth and political connections long seemed to shield him from severe punishment. Until now.

A court in Beijing sentenced Mr. Ren to 18 years in prison on Tuesday. The court said he was guilty of graft, taking bribes, misusing public funds and abusing his power during and after his time as an executive at a property development company.

Mr. Ren’s supporters and sympathizers said that his real crime was criticizing the Communist Party and calling the country’s hard-line leader, Xi Jinping, a “clown.”

“Very clearly this was punishment for his words, that’s going to be obvious to everyone,” Guo Yuhua, a sociologist in Beijing, said by telephone. “Those economic problems — this one, that one — can be concocted whenever you want.”

Mr. Ren’s punishment has underlined how far Mr. Xi has rolled back allowances for dissent, even from members of the elite like Mr. Ren, a scion of a Communist family and former friend of senior officials. His supporters also see the long prison term as a warning to others, especially elites, who may be thinking about openly challenging the party and Mr. Xi.

“Cracking down on Ren Zhiqiang, using economic crimes to punish him, is a warning to others — killing one to warn a hundred,” said Cai Xia, an acquaintance of Mr. Ren’s who formerly taught at the Central Party School, which trains rising officials.

“It’s a warning to the whole party and especially to red offspring,” Ms. Cai said, referring to the children of party officials. She spoke before the court’s judgment in a telephone interview from the United States, where she now lives.

At 69, Mr. Ren is old enough that he could spend the rest of his life in prison unless his sentence is reduced.

So far, the Beijing Second Intermediate People’s Court has issued few details of the evidence that it said proved Mr. Ren had illegally enriched himself by about $2.9 million between 2003 and 2017. The official summary of the court’s judgment said that his abuses had led Chinese state-owned companies to lose around $17 million. The court said that he had “fully admitted to the facts of all the crimes and willingly accepted the court’s judgment.”

But his case was cloaked in secrecy, and the court’s decision was swift by the standards of politically sensitive cases that come before China’s party-controlled courts. The court did not say when Mr. Ren’s trial took place, but supporters said the court posted an announcement that his trial was to be held on Sept. 11. The news of his sentence was downplayed by Chinese state-run news outlets, which mostly carried the court’s statement.

“This is political persecution, plain and simple,” Ms. Cai said. “He was already audited when he retired, and then repeatedly checked again in 2016.”

Mr. Ren retired from the Huayuan company in 2014. He waded into political hot water in 2016, when he scoffed at Mr. Xi’s call for Chinese journalists to staunchly follow the Communist Party. But at the time the party’s punishment was relatively light: it put Mr. Ren on probation and he received a round of censuring by the state news media.

This time, Mr. Ren was detained in March after he criticized Mr. Xi’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak that spread across China and then the world from late last year. In an essay that spread on the internet, he said the officials’ mishandling of the outbreak — including stifling information about initial infections — vindicated his 2016 warning against stifling public criticism.

After citing a February speech in which Mr. Xi defended the party’s handling of the coronavirus crisis, Mr. Ren wrote, “Standing there was not an emperor showing off his ‘new clothes,’ but a clown stripped of his clothes who still insisted on being emperor.”

In July, the Communist Party announced that Mr. Ren had been expelled and that he had been placed under criminal investigation. The party announcement said that Mr. Ren’s misdeeds included using public funds to pay for use of a golf course. But the announcement also singled out Mr. Ren’s opinions, accusing him of distorting party history and being disloyal.

“Ren Zhiqiang lost his ideals and convictions,” the party said. “On major matters of principle, he failed to stay in line with the party’s central authorities.”

While other Chinese people have criticized the Chinese government, and suffered punishment for it, Mr. Ren stood out for his ties to the party establishment and for his willingness as a prominent businessman to bluntly criticize the party.

He came from a family steeped in Communist Party tradition — his father served as a vice minister of commerce — and he was once close to senior party leaders, including Vice President Wang Qishan.

Like many in his generation, Mr. Ren worked in the countryside and then as a soldier before he ventured into business in the 1980s, when China’s market economy was opening under Deng Xiaoping. He made his name and his fortune in real estate, overseeing the Huayuan property company. City authorities in Beijing held a controlling stake in the company, but Mr. Ren left his stamp on it.

He was “confident, decisive, aggressive, like a commanding officer in the military,” a Beijing official-turned-businessman, He Yang, wrote in a memoir shared on the Chinese internet.

Even before he ventured into political debate, Mr. Ren ignited controversy with his public comments on the economy and the housing market. His many profiles in Chinese magazines often mention an incident in 2010 when a man threw a shoe at him while he was attending a real estate forum at a high-end hotel.

Mr. Ren appeared to brush off the criticism, and embraced the opportunities to share his views on the internet.

“What’s most lacking in this society isn’t lies but truth-speaking,” Mr. Ren said in 2013.

Mr. Ren has joined a handful of wealthy and educated Chinese who have spoken out against the party’s expanding power, and have been punished as a result.

Since coming to power in 2012, Mr. Xi has steadily throttled dissent in China, and he has been especially incensed at wayward party members who criticize his policies.

“Never allow eating the Communist Party’s food and then smashing the Communist Party’s cooking pot,” Mr. Xi said in 2014, according to a book collecting his comments on risks to China and the party that was published last month.

This month, the police in Beijing detained Geng Xiaonan, a businesswoman who runs a publishing company. Ms. Geng had supported Xu Zhangrun, a professor of law at the prestigious Tsinghua University, who had condemned Mr. Xi’s hard-line policies in a series of essays.

Mr. Xu was detained by the police for about a week in July, and Ms. Geng had leapt to his defense after investigators said he had used prostitutes, an accusation he vehemently denied.

The police have said that Ms. Geng and her husband were accused of conducting illegal business activities. Their supporters say Ms. Geng was targeted for helping Mr. Xu and other dissenters who have run foul of the party.

Ms. Cai, the former party school professor, was expelled from the Communist Party last month after she scathingly denounced Mr. Xi’s policies in speeches and essays.

For a while after his 2016 censure, Mr. Ren appeared to retreat from public view. He held an exhibition late last year to showcase his new love of artistic carpentry. But as the coronavirus gripped China, Mr. Ren seemed unable to hold back from sharing his scathing criticisms of the government with friends.

Rights activists criticized Mr. Ren’s 18-year sentence as excessive. Sophie Richardson, the China director at Human Rights Watch, called it “off-the-charts ruthless” and said the court’s account of Mr. Ren fully capitulating was alarming, as it used language that often indicated that defendants were under immense pressure.

“It rings alarm bells that they are trying to avoid ill-treatment,” Ms. Richardson said, “not that they have become cheerleaders of Xi’s rule by law.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/22/world/asia/china-ren-zhiqiang-tycoon.html