“From this it can be seen that if there were no people in the state apparatus helping collect this material, it would be impossible to get this kind of highly confidential information,” Boxun wrote.
Boxun said the conservative faction sought to achieve “the effect of a stereoscopic assault.” In the cases of the attack on Xi Jinping in June and the current attack on Wen Jiabao, the information used was circulated to both English-language and Chinese-language media in the hopes of getting simultaneous coverage in both.
Ongoing Information War
Boxun places the information circulated about Wen Jiabao’s family in the context of ongoing attempts by the now disgraced former Party heavyweight Bo Xilai and others to use “large resources and manpower to continually launch media attacks on Wen Jiabao and his family members in the past few years.”
An information war being waged as part of the power struggle going on in China has been reported on by others, including The Epoch Times.
According to an article published by Hong Kong’s Open Magazine in May, when Bo Xilai’s former Chongqing police chief Wang Lijun attempted to defect at the U.S. Consulate in Chengdu in February, among the items he brought with him were documents detailing orders Bo Xilai gave to attack top leaders, including Wen Jiabao, by spreading information online.
The Epoch Times published an exclusive report in April that described how Bo Xilai and the domestic security czar Zhou Yongkang worked in 2009 and 2010 with the Chinese search engine Baidu to drive Google out of China.
Based on information provided by a high-ranking government official in Beijing, the article described how Bo Xilai and Zhou Yongkang did this in order to use Baidu to attack their opponents.
According to investigative reports by the CCP’s Committee for Disciplinary Inspection, Bo Xilai and Zhou Yongkang came up with a “very detailed plan to achieve a powerful online campaign against [CCP head] Hu Jintao, Wen Jiabao, and Xi Jinping.”
Articles published in 2010 on Baidu as a result of Bo and Zhou’s efforts had titles such as “Hu Jintao’s Son Terribly Corrupt, Jiang Zemin Wants to Get to the Bottom of It,” and “Xi Jinping is a Lecher, Plays With Women in Zhejiang Behind His Second Wife.”
A more recent example of this kind of manipulation of the media occurred this past August, when Chinese-language media outside China and Western media carried stories claiming that Hu Jintao was planning on resigning from the Central Military Commission. According to an Epoch Times source, these stories were planted by domestic security czar Zhou Yongkang, a member of the faction formed by former CCP head Jiang Zemin.
Rumors of Hu Jintao “resigning completely” could degrade his power inside the CCP, and he was forced to have former Hong Kong chief executive Tung Chee-hwa deny them in an interview he gave to CNN on Sept. 19.
Boxun emphasized the role of Bo Xilai and an unspecified “conservative faction” in arranging for the distribution to media of the information about the wealth of Wen Jiabao’s family. How Bo could have had any recent, direct involvement is not clear. He is currently in Qincheng Prison in Beijing.
