There will likely be one more issue of Sinocism before the Chinese Year Holiday starts Wednesday. For the record, I am going with “Year of the Sheep”. Red Envelopes from those who have found Sinocism useful are still welcome via this link.
Today’s Links:
THE ESSENTIAL EIGHT
1. 习近平春节前夕赴陕西看望慰问广大干部群众 向全国人民致以新春祝福 祝祖国繁荣昌盛人民幸福安康新闻频道央视网(cctv.com) Almost 19 minutes at top of Monday CCTV Evening News on Xi’s visit to Shaanxi before the Chinese New Year
Related: Xinhua Insight: Xi’s New Year visit marks village homecoming – Xinhua Forty-seven years ago, a teen Xi Jinping came to Liangjiahe as part of a campaign launched by Chairman Mao Zedong that asked urban youth to experience rural labor life. On Friday, Xi, now leader of more than 1.3 billion people, returned to the village in Shaanxi to extend Spring Festival greetings to locals in old revolutionary base areas. During his seven years in the village, Xi lived in a cave dwelling with villagers, slept on a kang, a traditional Chinese bed made of bricks and clay, endured flea bites, carried manure, built dams and repaired roads. It was also here that he joined the Communist Party of China. “Ying’er, you’ve grown old,” said Xi, who immediately recognized villager Wang Xianjun and called him by his nickname. The two reminisced about building mud dams together to hold water for irrigating the dry land.
Related: Chinese President Returns to Mao’s (and His) Roots in Yan’an – NYTimes As China prepared to celebrate passing from the lunar Year of the Horse to the Year of the Goat next week, Mr. Xi visited Yan’an: the rural stronghold from where Mao Zedong pushed the Communist revolution to victory. And there Mr. Xi returned to the village of Liangjiahe, with its steep, yellow-earth hills and cave dwellings where Mr. Xi grew into adulthood during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, when he, like millions of urban youths, was “sent down” to the countryside. On the cusp of each Lunar New Year, Chinese Communist Party leaders make heavily publicized trips to mix with common citizens, sharing New Year’s greetings and traditional dinners, usually dumplings.
2. Is Mao Still Dead? | ChinaFile Conversation Rebecca Karl–The invocation and evocation of Mao or Marx in today’s China—whether by Xi Jinping or Yuan Guiren—has nothing to do with Maoism or Marxism, both of which, after all, provide some of the most potent critical positions on capitalism, injustice, inequality, and power. Rather, the invocation and evocation have to do with strengthening a centralized Party apparatus and its political-economic systems of domination, whose waning legitimacy in face of massive and systemic corruption can only be bolstered by ideological contortionism. Mao-era ideological control was about including all who would or could be included into a revolutionary-democratic mobilization that was not merely about the “rise of China” or the renaissance of the Chinese people, as such, but more important, such a mobilization was about the transformation—fānshēn 翻身—of an intertwined global and domestic system of inequality, whose rapaciousness threatened not only the survival but also the ethical, moral, and environmental possibilities of human life. The current nationalist reduction of Mao into a totem of a Chinese dream of national supremacy does as much violence to his systemic socialist project as he intended to do during the Cultural Revolution to the Party-centered hyper-bureaucracy that aspired to a monopoly on truth and social domination.
Related: Leftist Website Apparently Shut Down – China Digital Times (CDT) If Xi is really a neo-Maoist as some pundits claim why is he shutting leftist sites like haijiang? // Haijiang Online’s latest Weibo posts are mostly terse comments on other posts—often nothing more than an emoticon. Original posts from 2014 give a better sense of why the site may have been targeted by censors: the editors elegize Maoism and write about politically sensitive topics such as the Hong Kong protests of last fall and color revolutions.
3. Thoughts from the Chairman: How to Pragmatically Respond to Greater Chinese Activism on the Global Stage | Center for Strategic and International Studies These efforts do mark a turning point in Chinese foreign policy in a more proactive direction, and not all of them deserve U.S. endorsement. But the recent framing of the issue exaggerates the inherent conflict between the current order, Chinese behavior to date, and China’s recent proposals, and as a result, unnecessarily heightens regional tensions while forestalling opportunities for collaboration.
Related: The shuttering of China? | FT Alphaville at least FT Alphaville prefaced this with the word “speculative” // This is gonna be speculative, so bear with us. It’s the idea that China will — as more and more capital threatens to flow out of the country — start to shut its doors and look inwards once again. // If you are in DC February 20 you can attend a talk by the person quoted at CSIS-China Reality Check: Has the Hard Landing in China Already Started? | Center for Strategic and International Studies
4. Economic data: Lunar eclipse | The Economist The numbers made it look as if China was on the brink of deflation. Consumer prices rose just 0.8% from a year earlier, a sharp decline from preceding months. Trade was also weak, with exports falling 3% and imports down 20% (see chart). But the distortion of the variable-holiday effect was sizeable. Everything from shipping to roadworks is completed in a rush before China shuts down for its New Year. That burst was concentrated in January last year. This year, with the later holiday, it has spilled into February.
Related: China January FDI grows at strongest pace in four years | Reuters Foreign direct investment (FDI) in China grew at its strongest pace in nearly four years in January, surging 29.4 percent from a year earlier to $13.9 billion as investors largely shunned the troubled manufacturing sector and focused on the more resilient services industry. But analysts cautioned about reading too much into economic indicators for January alone, given the strong seasonal distortions caused by the timing of the Lunar New Year holidays, which began on Jan. 31 last year but start on Feb. 19 this year
5. 谁主民生银行新世纪周刊频道财新网 Caixin cover story on Minsheng & Anbang, Deng family clearly trying to distance itself from Wu Xiaohui, strange Chinese media battle has been going on over Anbang, doesn’t seem like a sign of a firm with an “all-powerful backer”. And in a real shocker, Minsheng has a lot of bad loans in Shanxi… // i近年来，安邦的投资手法十分彪悍。海外投资超过160亿元且还在不断有新的并购项目出现；2013年起在二级市场大举建仓招行、民生、工行等银行股，投资也超过600亿元。安邦实际控制人吴小晖，曾娶前国家领导人邓小平的外孙女卓苒为妻。因此，安邦一直被认为有“强大背景和人脉关系”，外界各种议论分析亦有意强化其家庭背景作用（参见本刊2014年第1期“黑马安邦”、2015年第5期“安邦大冒险”）。据财新记者了解，邓家对吴小晖杠杆这一“红色背景”十分反感。2014年底，卓苒退出了安邦多家关联公司的股东名单…有知情人士告诉财新记者，经民生银行内部调查，山西分行疑似不良贷款规模相当大。能源、冶金、地产事业部纷纷“沦陷”于山西，大部分贷款并未经过总行审批，而是走表外通道，如今劣变为不良贷款。
Related: SNS Reaal Agrees to Sell Dutch Insurance Arm to Anbang of China – NYTimes The Chinese company will pay 150 million euros, or about $172 million, for all of Vivat’s shares, SNS Reaal said. Anbang would also inject €770 million to €1 billion into Vivat and assume €552 million in debt, according to NL Financial Investments, which manages the Dutch state’s investments in SNS Reaal and other companies nationalized during and after the financial crisis.
6. State Firms Yank Job Offers to Students from Outside Beijing – Caixin Recent university graduates who thought they had coveted positions with big state-owned companies in Beijing will have to restart their job hunts after the central government cut the number of out-of-towners the firms could hire as part of population-control efforts in the overcrowded capital. One postgraduate from the northern province of Hebei told Caixin that he has been told by his new employer, a large company controlled by the central government, that it had to rescind its offer because the central government cut the number of people for whom it could get a Beijing hukou, or household registration. // A post I wrote 4 years ago-Beijing for Beijingers
Related: Rule Change Forces Migrants’ Children out of Beijing for School-Caixin does not just affect migrant workers…know some well off non-Beijingers who now can’t get their kid into a local public school. The same set of reforms also made it much harder to use guanxi/bribe your way into a Beijing public school // In April 2014, city education officials issued a policy requiring children without Beijing hukou to provide at least five extra documents to gain admission to a public school in the capital. The required paperwork included his parents’ working certificates, residency permits and documents signed by hometown authorities. Each district is also allowed to ask for more documents. For instance, the capital’s eastern district of Chaoyang requires migrant workers – the hundreds of millions of people come from rural areas around the country to live and work in cities – to provide pension payment documents. Many migrant workers say some of the documents are very difficult to get. Meanwhile, Beijing Mayor Guo Jinlong has said several times that the capital would adopt policies to control population growth through measures aimed at the job market, house purchases and in other areas. The effort to control access to schools is apparently in part of this effort.
7. 关于全面深化公安改革若干重大问题的框架意见_网易新闻中心-网易新闻客户端 新华网北京2月15日电 近日，《关于全面深化公安改革若干重大问题的框架意见》及相关改革方案，已经中央审议通过，即将印发实施。 党中央、国务院对公安工作高度重视，对公安队伍建设十分关心。党的十八大以来，习近平总书记等中央领导同志多次听取公安工作汇报，并就深入推进公安改革、进一步加强和改进新形势下的公安工作和公安队伍建设作出重要指示。在中央全面深化改革领导小组的领导下，在中央司法体制改革领导小组的指导下，公安部成立全面深化改革领导小组，加强研究谋划、深入调研论证，在形成《意见》和方案稿后，又广泛征求了各地、各有关部门和基层单位的意见，并根据各方意见反复修改完善。《意见》和方案先后经中央全面深化改革领导小组会议、中央政治局常委会议审议通过。
Related: China to abolish controversial temporary residence permit – Xinhua China plans to abolish its controversial temporary residence permit and push forward reform of the household registration system, according to a public security reform plan released on Sunday. Permanent residence permits will be adopted to replace the much-criticized temporary residence permit, according to the plan approved by central authorities. Temporary residence permits have long been held by hundreds of millions of Chinese migrant workers, who have to apply for the permit before formally living and working in a new city
Related: China Promises Police Will be Better Paid, and Better Behaved – – WSJ Those changes were among more than 100 items included in a public security reform plan (in Chinese) released by the Communist Party on Sunday, a next step in Beijing’s efforts to improve law enforcement following the creation of an ambitious legal reform blueprint in October.
Related: China to hold police accountable for erroneous cases, for life_Xinhua Chinese police will establish an accountability system for officers in light of high profile cases, according to a policy paper issued recently. The paper, which focused on public security reform, vowed to improve law enforcement responsibility; the correction system; and establish life-long accountability for erroneous cases. It added that, to ensure accountability, investigators should take responsibility for the cases they investigate.
Related: 经济参考网 – 告别暂住证 迎来户籍改革关键年 专家认为此举有助于推动城乡一体化 近日，《关于全面深化公安改革若干重大问题的框架意见》（以下简称《意见》）及相关改革方案，已经中央审议通过，即将印发实施。《意见》提出，扎实推进户籍制度改革，取消暂住证制度，全面实施居住证制度，建立健全与居住年限等条件相挂钩的基本公共服务提供机制。落实无户口人员落户政策。
8. 浙江“首虎”斯鑫良退休仍落马政经频道财新网 retired senior Zhejiang official Si Xinliang under investigation, once head of provincial organization department. One of knocks against the corruption crackdown has been the lack of senior takedowns in places where Xi worked. Is that changing? // 曾担任八年半的浙江省委组织部长，从省政协副主席任上退休两年仍难逃被查…”斯鑫良落马，也打破了十八大后浙江尚无省部级大老虎被查的先例…目前，全国已有23个省份出现省部级官员落马，尚无“大老虎”现身的省市自治区仅剩北京、上海、福建、吉林、宁夏、新疆和西藏。”
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