This fear led to news reports appearing in Bloomberg and the New York Times claiming to document the wealth, respectively, of the families of Xi Jinping and Wen Jiabao. All of the CCP leadership rightly fears the exposure of the tremendous fortunes the top leaders have made.
Most of China is still very poor, and the Chinese people hate how the CCP elite have enriched themselves on the backs of the people.
Zhou Yongkang let it be known that the next step would be publishing similar information about the wealth of Hu Jintao, Li Keqiang, Li Yuanchao, and others. This would have amounted to pulling the building of the CCP down around all of their heads.
Deal Struck
The blackmail worked. In order to preserve the Party, Hu Jintao felt he had no choice but to cut a deal. No PLAC members would get into the Politburo Standing Committee, but three individuals tied to Jiang—Zheng Dejiang, Liu Yuanshan, and Zhang Gaoli—would get on. They would take places originally meant for key members of Hu’s faction, including Wang Yang and Li Yuanchao, who are known as reformers.
At the same time, in order to give Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang more freedom, Hu decided to retire completely in order to break with the unwritten rule that retired Party veterans can interfere with the running of the country.
Jiang Zemin retired in 2004 and yet has meddled regularly in affairs, following a precedent set by Deng Xiaoping. Hu Jintao, who could have stayed on as head of the military for two more years, sought by quitting to deprive this precedent of any authority.
However, no matter how hard Hu Jintao tries to protect the CCP, at best he can only achieve a short-lived balance. The Chinese communist regime has long lived a precarious existence, but now more so than ever.
Continued on the next page: Illusions Dissolving
Illusions Dissolving
Everyone in China has suffered under the CCP. It has caused the deaths of 80 million Chinese citizens, persecuted several hundred million people, and committed heinous crimes. Most recently, it has persecuted 100 million practitioners of the spiritual discipline Falun Gong.
Hopes that the CCP might adopt the rule of law have been shattered. Society’s morality is collapsing. The state’s finances are in crisis.
