SinoInsight 1
On Jan. 30, Kong Qingdong, a controversial professor at Peking University who holds radical left views, posted a cryptic message on his official Weibo account: “Cannon fire from the Great Shun can be heard in Xuanwumen. Teacher Zhu stands in front of the Hall of Supreme Harmony and gives a final shake of the class bell, but not a single student is in class. Old Zhu knows that it’s time for class to be dismissed. He packs up his teaching material, leaves via the Gate of Divine Prowess, walks back and forth twice, and ascends Coal Mountain, unhurriedly gazing at the campus where he teaches every day. The dark clouds blanketing the sky stays silent, waiting to swallow his last sentence, the message that he is fermenting.”
Kong’s message was subsequently scrubbed from Weibo.
OUR TAKE
1. On the surface, Kong Qingdong’s Weibo post appears to be a critique of the Chongzhen Emperor, the last ruler of the Ming Dynasty:
- “Great Shun” refers to the Shun dynasty, a short-lived dynasty founded by Li Zicheng, the leader of a large peasant rebellion.
- The sentence, “Cannon fire … can be heard in Xuanwumen” refers to the armies of Li Zicheng having arrived at Xuanwumen, the South-west gate of the Forbidden City in Beijing.
- The sentence, “Teacher Zhu … not a single student is in class” refers to Ming officials not attending court in the Forbidden City. “Teacher Zhu” refers to the Chongzhen Emperor.
- The sentence, “Old Zhu knows … dismissed” refers to the Chongzhen Emperor knowing that he is going to lose the throne.
- The part of the sentence, “He packs up … ascends Coal Mountain” refers to the Chongzhen Emperor’s eventual suicide on a small hill in the Forbidden City’s Jingshan Park.
- The part of the sentence, “unhurriedly gazing … teaches every day” is Kong Qingdong’s way of saying that the Chongzhen Emperor is still reluctant to relinquish his dynasty as he contemplates suicide.
- The sentence, “The dark clouds … message that he is fermenting” is Kong’s way of saying that the Chinese people, like the storm clouds, are preparing to rebel against the Chongzhen Emperor and overthrow him.
2. Kong Qingdong is a political ally of the disgraced former Chongqing boss Bo Xilai. Before Bo was purged, Kong made great efforts to tout Bo’s “Chongqing Model,” and there was speculation at the time that Bo had promised to make Kong his education minister after the 18th Party Congress in 2012 if he succeeded in the coup against Xi Jinping. Coup plotters Bo and former security czar Zhou Yongkang are members of the Jiang Zemin faction which rivals the camp of Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping.
After state mouthpiece Xinhua announced that Bo Xilai was purged on March 15, 2012, Kong complained about the “injustice” on his regular program on V1.cn (第一視頻), a mainland new media company listed in Hong Kong. Kong Qingdong said that Bo’s removal amounted to “an anti-revolution coup” that “hurt the feelings of hundreds of millions of Chinese people.” He added that China “will surely fall into the kind of Cultural Revolution turmoil that Wen Jiabao once described” where “no one will be better” and “jade and stone burn alike,” a Chinese proverb used to describe indiscriminate destruction. Kong’s brazen defense of Bo during an extremely sensitive time in CCP elite politics indicates that the two share a special relationship.
Given Kong Qingdong’s factional allegiances, his cryptic message about the Chongzhen Emperor is almost certainly an oblique jibe at Xi Jinping and possibly the Jiang faction’s way of putting Xi on notice.
3. Since the CCP acknowledged the outbreak of the Wuhan coronavirus on Jan. 20, we have spotted several signs that Xi’s political rivals, and particularly the Jiang faction (including Zeng Qinghong and his supporters), are possibly preparing to take advantage of the Wuhan epidemic to launch a coup against Xi Jinping. This coup, should it materialize, will unlikely resemble the “soft coup” attempt in 2018 (see here, here, here). Instead, the coup will likely be a serious challenge aimed at overthrowing Xi Jinping and “enthroning” the Zeng Qinghong clique of the Jiang faction.
From the perspective of Xi’s rivals, they will very likely believe that conditions are favorable for a serious coup attempt because Xi Jinping currently faces a “perfect storm” of problems: Growing anger from the Chinese people over the CCP’s inept handling of the Wuhan virus outbreak; a rapidly worsening economy; massive debt refinancing problems; property bubble problems; and the Xi leadership’s signing of a “phase one” trade with America that can be justly interpreted as an “unequal treaty” and the perpetuating of the “century of humiliation” for China. Xi also lacks sufficient “quan wei” (權威; also see here and here) to shut down a serious coup when it is well underway, especially given his many policy failures since the 19th Party Congress.
Xi will likely try to guard against a coup by finding ways to boost his “quan wei,” strengthening his control over the military, tightening censorship, and enforcing stricter controls over CCP cadres and society at large. Ironically, the more Xi tries to “strictly govern the Party” (從嚴治黨), the more at risk he becomes of having his opponents use his momentum against him in a “judo move.”
4. We wrote in our China 2020 outlook that, “Factional struggle in the CCP elite will be even fiercer in 2020 as compared to 2019. Xi Jinping faces very high levels of personal political risk; his political opponents could use a variety of ways to attack him, including leaking damaging information, assassination attempts, economic coups, and political coups.”
The Wuhan virus outbreak has aggravated the various regime-threatening risks facing the CCP regime and could serve as a catalyst that brings the “you die, I live” CCP factional struggle to a watershed moment. If Beijing cannot adequately resolve the coronavirus outbreak and the epidemic does not abate over the coming months, then our above prediction could come to pass as early as during the first half of 2020.
The political situation in China is highly unstable. Businesses, investors, and governments must closely track political and military developments in the CCP regime to avoid being blindsided by political Black Swans.
SinoInsight 2
On Jan. 30, Yang Gonghuan, the former deputy director of China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, talked about the PRC’s infectious disease reporting system in an interview with mainland media outlet eeo.com.cn (經濟觀察網).
Yang said that China had spent a lot of money building a nation-wide infectious disease and public health emergency information monitoring and reporting system after the SARS experience in 2003. He added that the system, which tracks various infectious diseases and even pneumonia of “unknown origins,” has been working well for a prolonged period.
Yang said that even town-level health authorities have access to the information monitoring and reporting system, and that hospitals are required to report infectious diseases via the system when they surface so that CDC people can understand the situation “as soon as possible.” He added that there is a dedicated group of staff in the CDC keeping tabs on the infectious diseases monitoring system and that the CDC will automatically dispatch staff to an area where more than five instances of pneumonia of unknown origin are reported to carry out investigations, interviews, and collect samples.
Yang Gonghuan stressed that while the infectious disease monitoring system does not produce progress reports, the CDC should be able to receive information about reported infectious diseases in real-time as long as hospitals are reporting cases via the system.
OUR TAKE
1. Yang Gonghuan’s description of China’s infectious disease monitoring and reporting system corroborates our analysis of the CCP covering up the Wuhan virus outbreak until “it is no longer politically prudent to do so.” And unless the hospitals in Wuhan were entirely not reporting the emergence of a SARS-like pneumonia via the system (not possible since the Wuhan health authorities acknowledged a virus outbreak in late December 2019), the CCP has long known about the situation.
And if the CCP knew about the virus outbreak ahead of officially acknowledging it on Jan. 20, then its current attempts to curb and control the epidemic are both inept and inhumane. Local governments are locking down cities without being able to guarantee resupplies and there are numerous reports of hospitals with severe shortages of medical supplies and isolation wards. There are even accounts on Chinese language social media of hospital medical staff deliberately not caring for or treating patients infected with the coronavirus. Meanwhile, millions of people in Wuhan and other cities are essentially being left to fend for themselves.
As we previously wrote, we could be seeing the “beginnings of a humanitarian crisis in mainland China.”
2. Suspicions of a government cover-up have increased following the recent unearthing of a Hubei government report in September 2019 about the Wuhan customs authorities holding military and emergency response drills for an “unexpected 30-day incident” at the city’s borders. According to the report, one of the drills conducted by the Wuhan government involved emergency response at the Wuhan Tianhe International Airport to the discovery of a new coronavirus outbreak.
Chinese citizens are furious that the Wuhan government was “prophetic” in holding a coronavirus outbreak drill three months before an actual outbreak, yet somehow failed to enact proper epidemic control measures in time, leading to a real epidemic crisis.
