China: Leaders who rose and fell

Often, I think I know China well. However, just as often, it occurs to me that I don't really know what I thought I knew. The visions and experiences collected and stored in my mind while I am awake are gone after I have slept. Reasoning and understanding seem to last only for a few hours before becoming illusory: the images and meanings disappear one by one, stolen from me by apparitions and secreted away, never to be returned in their original form. The understandings that I have assiduously acquired are nothing more than banal when bound together to try and shape the oldest continuous civilization on earth. Experience, learning, and proudly possessed knowledge, gained from many sources and from interaction with its people, are taken from everyone who thinks they know China and passed on to others who share them smugly, use them with confidence, reverently broadcast them as Gospel for a few praiseworthy moments. "I know China." Then, time and circumstance mangle them until they are beyond comprehension. These ,too, will be passed on and shared as truth, only to be proved wrong again. The enigma is this: China never changes, but China always changes. Its people beset by burden, affected with melancholy, inured to bewilderment, and suckled on uninterrupted millennia of incalculable hopelessness and sorrow. "There is chaos under heaven and things could not be better", said Mao Zedong. This is the real truth: "China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese" - Charles De Gaulle. China: don't ask, it is what it is... ,,,,,,,,W.D. Box

07/27/2012

China: Leaders who rose and fell

Bo Xilai is not the first high-profile politician to fall out of favour with
China's Communist Party. The BBC's Michael Bristow looks at three others who
suffered a similar

Zhao Ziyang

Zhao Ziyang was the Communist
Party's general secretary in 1989

Zhao Ziyang is the most important Chinese politician to lose his job - and
his freedom - in the last 20 odd years.

His success in charge of Sichuan province in the 1970s brought him to the
attention of Deng Xiaoping, then China's paramount leader.

Mr Deng promoted him to national office, where he helped craft China's
initial economic reforms and opening up to the outside world.

Mr Zhao was the Communist Party's general secretary when protests broke out
in Beijing and other cities in 1989.

His reluctance to condemn the demonstrators led to him being removed from
office by Mr Deng and the other elderly revolutionary leaders who still ran
China.

Read more at BBC NEWS

Chen Xitong AND Chen Liangyu

Jul 27, 2012 12:33:27 AM | Current Affairs

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In Charge for Wife of Chinese Ex-Leader, Sign of an Old Tactic BEIJING — In a nation that prefers the wives of political leaders to be bland adornments, Gu Kailai was positively fluorescent. Married to Bo Xilai, the Politburo member whose downfall earlier this year is still shaking the Communist Party, she reveled in her brash, ambitious ways. Gu Kailai and her husband, Bo Xilai. Admirers bragged that Ms. Gu, a pioneering lawyer who spoke fluent English, was China’s answer to Jacqueline Onassis. But in formally charging her on Thursday with the poisoning death late last year of a British businessman, the Chinese government, almost certainly intentionally, has placed the larger-than-life Ms....

China faces to watch China faces to watch China is gearing up to change its top leaders, a process that begins at the end of the year. This week, the annual parliamentary session will give those in the running the chance to show off their credentials. The BBC's Michael Bristow profiles key figures. CLICKABLE Click the faces below View and read at BBC NEWS Xi Jinping More at website