{"id":24570,"date":"2012-01-03T13:09:00","date_gmt":"2012-01-03T13:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/127.0.0.1:10081\/?p=24570 "},"modified":"2012-01-03T13:09:00","modified_gmt":"2012-01-03T13:09:00","slug":"24570-revision-v1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/?p=24570","title":{"rendered":"Rising Chinese Official Tries out More Moderate Approach"},"content":{"rendered":"<div><div><span style=\"font-size: 12pt; \">BEIJING &#8212; In a year of China under lockdown, when dissident writers have received breathtaking prison sentences and the mere whisper of a &#8220;Jasmine Revolution&#8221; has spurred mass detentions, perhaps the riskiest thing a Chinese politician could do is put his iron glove on the shelf.<\/span><\/div><div>&nbsp;<\/div><div><\/div><div><span style=\"font-size: 12pt; \">Which makes Wang Yang&#8217;s gamble this month in Wukan all the more interesting.<\/span><\/div><div>&nbsp;<\/div><div><\/div><div><span style=\"font-size: 12pt; \">Mr. Wang, the up-and-coming Communist Party secretary of the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, faced a political turning point when 13,000 irate residents of Wukan evicted their leaders and barricaded themselves in their coastal village for 13 days in a last-straw uprising against local corruption.<\/span><\/div><div>&nbsp;<\/div><div><\/div><div><span style=\"font-size: 12pt; \">Given a choice of storming the village with armed police officers or conceding that the villagers&#8217; complaints had merit, Mr. Wang chose the latter. And in a single morning, he defused a standoff that had drawn unflattering worldwide news coverage.<\/span><\/div><div>&nbsp;<\/div><div><\/div><div><span style=\"font-size: 12pt; \">The decision won him praise in the Communist Party&#8217;s flagship newspaper, People&#8217;s Daily, which called it an act of &#8220;political courage&#8221; in a tense situation. Some analysts said it might have strengthened his already strong prospects to land a seat on China&#8217;s elite ruling body, the nine-member Standing Committee of the party&#8217;s Politburo, when a wave of mandatory retirements vacates seven of the seats this coming year.<\/span><\/div><div>&nbsp;<\/div><div><\/div><div><span style=\"font-size: 12pt; \">And it raised the hopes of those here who want someone liberal &#8212; as defined by China&#8217;s restrictive definitions &#8212; to push for political and social reforms at the highest level of China&#8217;s leadership.<\/span><\/div><div>&nbsp;<\/div><div><\/div><div><span style=\"font-size: 12pt; \">&#8220;He seems to favor reform,&#8221; said Zhang Lifan, a historian formerly with the government-run Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. &#8220;At least Mr. Wang realizes that maintaining stability with force and violence is both economically and politically unsustainable, and came up with an alternative that seems to work better.&#8221;<\/span><\/div><div>&nbsp;<\/div><div>&nbsp;<span style=\"font-size: 12pt; \">But as is amply shown by the travails of China&#8217;s best-known quasi liberal, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, having a soft heart for the dispossessed gets a politician only so far in a party where stability is the trump card.<\/span><\/div><div>&nbsp;<\/div><div><div><\/div><div><span style=\"font-size: 12pt; \">&#8220;How high can a man jump?&#8221; asked Yan Lieshan, a senior editor of Southern Weekly, a Guangzhou-based newspaper known for hard-hitting reporting. &#8220;If officials overstep the limits set by the central government, their positions will become untenable.&#8221;<\/span><\/div><div>&nbsp;<\/div><div><span style=\"color: #2d2d2d; text-align: -webkit-left; background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; \">Continue reading&nbsp;<\/span><strong style=\"color: #2d2d2d; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', 'Lucida Grande', 'Segoe UI', Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: -webkit-left; background-color: #ffffff; \"><span style=\"font-size: 12pt; \"><a href=\"http:\/\/thelede.blogs.nytimes.com\/2011\/12\/05\/journalists-should-be-government-mouthpieces-chinas-state-tv-president-says\/?ref=china#h[]\" style=\"color: #034af3; text-decoration: none; \"><\/a><\/span><\/strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/world\/asia-pacific\/us-ambassador-to-china-calls-on-beijing-to-improve-its-human-rights-record\/2011\/12\/10\/gIQAeRlEkO_story.html\" style=\"color: #034af3; text-decoration: none; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', 'Lucida Grande', 'Segoe UI', Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: -webkit-left; background-color: #ffffff; \"><strong style=\"color: #2d2d2d; \"><\/strong><\/a><strong style=\"color: #2d2d2d; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', 'Lucida Grande', 'Segoe UI', Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: -webkit-left; background-color: #ffffff; \"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/12\/31\/world\/asia\/chinese-official-wang-yang-tests-new-political-approach.html?_r=1&amp;pagewanted=1\" style=\"text-decoration: none; color: #034af3; \"><span style=\"font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; \">original article<\/span><\/a><\/strong><span style=\"color: #2d2d2d; text-align: -webkit-left; background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; \">.<\/span><span style=\"color: #2d2d2d; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', 'Lucida Grande', 'Segoe UI', Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: -webkit-left; background-color: #ffffff; \">&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/span>&nbsp;<\/div><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&lt;div&gt;Wang Yang, a rising CCP secretary in Guangdong Province, managed to diffuse the 13-day revolt in Wukan with a unique approach for a Communist leader: he sided with the citizens. &amp;nbsp;Instead of using armed police officers to charge the town, Wang negotiated with the villagers to reach a settlement.&amp;nbsp;&lt;\/div&gt;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ChinaHumanRights","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24570"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24570\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}