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China’s Consensus Blog Website: Death of a Young Man

Chinascope recently reported on the death of Wei Zexi, the 21-year-old college student who died from a rare form of cancer after receiving allegedly effective treatment that he found on a Baidu website. Before his death on April 12, Wei wrote a lengthy post on a Chinese website detailing his plight.

Shortly after the news of his death, the Consensus Website, affiliated with a media company based in Beijing, published a blog article about his death. The author raised several sensitive points in the blog, examining the roles played by the parties involved, including Baidu, China’s leading search engine company; the Second Hospital of the Beijing Armed Police Corps; the privately-owned Putian hospital system; and Chen Zhili, a former vice-chairperson of China’s top legislature. According to another blog, which has since been taken down at China’s leading portal Sina.com, Chen owed her career to Jiang Zemin, former secretary-general of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). She was responsible for China’s highly controversial drive to commercialize education and its public health systems.

The Consensus Website blog author raised the question of how Baidu got to dominate China’s search engine market. Not only was Google’s China presence short-lived, but even a competing search product backed by the CCP’s leading newspaper, People’s Daily, did not have a chance when challenging Baidu.

The author then pointed out that the Second Hospital of the Beijing Armed Police Corps, where Wei sought treatment, was not content with funding from the government. It resorted to increasing its revenue by partnering with Putian hospitals.

The author gave the reasons behind the rapid expansion of Putian, a privately operated chain of hospitals. The chain invited Chen to serve as its top advisor; it relied on paid promotions on Baidu; it opened and operated clinics in brand name public hospitals; and it sought support from top officials. 

One thing that these players have in common, observed the blog author, is that they are all good at packaging their true [profit-seeking] motives. In hospitals, and in the rhetoric of "connecting people with services" in Baidu, they used high-sounding slogans, such as "saving people’s lives" and "the world’s leading technology and medicine."

The author is optimistic that, with the advent of social media, such outright dishonesty in misleading the public can hardly be sustained. In Wei’s case, two female journalists were able to raise awareness of Wei’s misguided treatment through Weibo (i.e. mini-blog) and WeChat (a popular mobile messaging service), completely bypassing traditional media.

Sources: The Concensus Website
http://www.21ccom.net/html/2016/zhoushuo_0504/3868.html
Blogs at Sina.com
http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_70282b520102wbr2.html                                                                                                                                                                                        

Briefings | | |   Social Stability

China’s Tibetan Scholar Criticized China’s Tibet Policy

[Editor’s Note: Jambey Gyatso (降边嘉措), a veteran Tibetan scholar in China published two articles to criticize two Chinese officials, Ye Xiaowen (叶小文), the former Director of the State Administration for Religious Affairs (SARA), and Zhu Weiqun (朱维群), Director of the Ethnic and Religious Commission of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) National Committee.

Jambey Gyatso observed that, over the past decade, the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) religious management group, of which both Ye and Zhu are key members, adopted the wrong policies to govern Tibet. Instead of separating religion from governance, Ye tried to replace Tibetan Buddhism with a new orthodox religion: the will of the Party’s religious office. Ye’s new policy of “certifying” Living Buddhas led to corruption in the Buddhist temples. Zhu tried to escalate this simple event to the level of the political, linking it to “Tibetan separation.”

It is rare to see a scholar, who has worked for several decades under the CCP’s system, be so open in criticizing the CCP’s religious policy and leaders.

The Paper, a media with close ties to Xi Jinping and Wang Qishan, reported on February 22, 2016, that Ye Xiaowen was removed from his latest official positions as the Party Secretary and Deputy Director of the Central Institute of Socialism. [1]

The following are excerpts from several articles about this development.]

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Reports | | |   Report

The CCTV 2016 Chinese New Year’s Gala Propaganda Disaster

[Editor’s Note: China Central Television (CCTV) started broadcasting a special Chinese New Year celebration program in 1983. This Chinese New Year’s Gala, also called the Spring Festival Gala and commonly abbreviated in Chinese as chunwan (春晚), consists of songs, dances, talk show segments, acrobatics, martial arts performances, and other forms of entertainment.

While there is always some of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) propaganda embedded in the performances, the public generally finds the show entertaining. Many Chinese watch it on Chinese New Year’s eve, from 7:30 p.m. to 12:30 a.m., to welcome in the New Year.

This year, the Chinese people felt that the CCTV 2016 Chinese New Year’s Gala on February 7, 2016, carried an unbearable amount of propaganda. Netizens flooded the Internet with so much criticism that the CCP’s Internet guards remained frantically busy deleting them. Of course, the Chinese media praised the show as a great success.

Many overseas Chinese media reported this propaganda disaster. Reports from a number of different sources follow.]

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Reports | | |   Report

Is Xi Thinking About Political Reform?

Xinhua and other Chinese media recently reported, with great calm, “Putin criticized Lenin. He said, ‘Lenin’s ideas eventually led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.'” [1]

The report of Putin’s statement may turn out to be an event of some consequence in China’s ideological history. Lenin was the founder of Communism in Russia and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) inherited that legacy. To the CCP conservatives, criticizing Lenin is the same as denouncing Mao Zedong, the first generation leader of the CCP. It undermines the very pillar of the CCP’s legitimacy. Thus it is definitely a taboo in China.

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Perspectives | | |   Opinion

People’s Daily: Beijing Public Security Bureau Openly Recruits Internet Police Volunteers

On January 14, 2016, People’s Daily and Beijing Youth Daily published an article titled, “Internet Police Volunteers Reported over 15,000 Online Clues (for Police to Investigate). The Main Force Consists of Young People Born in the 1980s and 1990s.” According to the article, the Beijing Public Security Bureau started to recruit "Internet Police Volunteers” in 2014. By December of 2015, the Beijing Police had recruited over 3,000 people as members of its team of “Internet Police Volunteers.” The team has submitted over 15,000 reports on “clues leading to potential criminals.” Based on the reported clues, the official "Beijing Internet Police" gave “educational warnings” to 8,400 Internet users, released over 1,400 warning tips through Chinese microblogs and the Chinese Internet messenger (WeChat) and uncovered 210 “criminal activities and public security cases.” 

The recruited “internet police volunteers” are from all over China. 80 percent of them are young people born in the 1980s and 1990s. These “volunteers” who work regularly at scientific research institutes and security companies, also actively carry out “safety inspections” on over 45,000 websites that are in the records of the Internet Security Headquarters. They use their professional technological skills and inspection equipment in their work. The article on People’s Daily and Beijing Youth Daily on January 14, 2016, calls for more people to join the “Internet Police Volunteers” team by sending an email to a listed email address. 
 Sources: People’s Daily and Beijing Youth Daily, January 14, 2016 
http://it.people.com.cn/n1/2016/0114/c1009-28050676.html http://epaper.ynet.com/html/2016-01/14/content_177158.htm?div=-1
Briefings | | |   Social Stability

Xinhua: China Faces Serious Shortage of Pediatricians

China faces a shortage of pediatricians. With the launch of the new two-child policy which is replacing the one-child policy, Chinese parents are wondering where they will find pediatricians for their children. 

In 2012, there were only 0.43 pediatric specialists for each 1,000 children in China, or only 96, 000 pediatricians for the 220 million Chinese children who were less than 14 years old. By comparison, in the United States, the ratio is 1.46 pediatricians for every 1,000 children. Because of the shortage of pediatricians, many Chinese hospitals have had to shut down their pediatric departments. As China has just replaced its one-child policy with the two-child policy, the expected dramatic increase in births will make the pediatrician shortage even more severe. 

Because they have longer working hours and have a higher work load, pediatricians encounter more medical disputes with parents. In addition, pediatricians earn less income compared to doctors in other fields because children need smaller doses of medication. [Editor’s note: The Chinese regime encourages doctors and hospitals to sell extra prescriptive drugs to patients. The doctors prescribe an abundance of expensive drugs whether their patients need them or not. It is a secret rule in China, which is, nevertheless, fairly well known to, “Use drugs to get income for doctors.”] 

Source: Xinhua, January 16, 2016
http://www.sn.xinhuanet.com/society/2016-01/16/c_1117796882.htm

Briefings | | |   Government/Politics