The News From China

* According to the February 4th edition of the Chinese-language weekly Yazhou Zhoukan (published in Hong Kong under the auspices of the Ming Pao Group), former Chinese premier and economic czar Zhu Rongji, aka China’s Gorbachev, has a new hobby: Internet surfing. The article cites “Beijing insiders” as saying that “Zhu Rongji has recently taken up the computer and logs on frequently to surf the Internet. Zhu no longer gets together with fellow Peking opera aficionados every couple of days, as online surfing has become a newly acquired hobby of his.” * As the Communist party gears up for the 17th Party Congress, there have been a number of major personnel changes throughout the country. Despite an earlier pledge to enjoy a leisurely retirement and avoid meddling in affairs of state, the Yazhou Zhoukan article speculates that perhaps the 79-year-old former premier, who left office in 2003, is surfing for information about those changes: “What is the former premier reading online? It is unlikely to be trivia, but rather matters of national and international concern.” * The phrase “to usher in the 17th Party Congress” (yingjie shiqida) has appeared in Chinese media reports with increasing frequency since late last year, although not so often as the expression “harmonious society.” Scheduled to take place this fall, the Congress is to set the direction of the party for the next five years. In anticipation of the event, President Hu Jintao has stepped up his efforts to position alumni of the Communist Youth League, his institutional power base, in key posts. * In October and November of last year, across 16 provinces, there were personnel changes involving nearly 50 provincial-level officials: “What is unprecedented is the effort to scale down the size of the bureaucracy. In many cases, the number of deputy provincial party secretaries was reduced to two from five or six.” New personnel appointments have continued into 2007, involving top leaders in Hebei, Jilin, Sichuan, Hainan, and Guangdong provinces. The appointment of Ms. Huang Yanrong, vice chair of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, as the vice governor of volatile Sichuan province, “came as a surprise to some. . . . Formerly a member of the standing committee of the Sichuan provincial party committee, Huang Yanrong returns to Sichuan in the wake of two recent mass incidents involving thousands of protesters–one in the city of Guangan, brought on by hospital negligence that led to the death of a 4-year-old boy, the other in Dazhu county over the rape and death of a 16-year-old female hotel worker.”