Interesting Take On The Ching Cheong Incident...

A while back, I read the must-read biography of Mao by his personal physician the late Li Zhi-Sui. He details the process and procedures used by Mao and others to purge officials. Typically, it takes the form of applying pressure to, discrediting and arresting underlings of the targeted official. Essentially, the official's legs are knocked from underneath him in a tortuously slow process. After this is done, the official has very few trusted supporters and the official is purged and sent for re-education.

Simon World posted a linklet to Chatter Garden on the mysterious arrest of Ching Cheong, a journalist with the Straits Times of Singapore, in China recently.

You might choose to believe this official story. Or with Ching's wife's remarks on their modest life, you argue that Ching is such a patriot that all accusations are unfounded. Here I suggest you tell an alternative story to the official one with a different narrative point of view. While the China government told a story of spy without providing any substantial evidence, we could take this incident as a political conflict within the government. That explains why some information called as "national secrets" was released.

So, maybe there is a behind the scenes political conflict brewing that causes these sudden detentions of journalists like Ching Cheong.

About a year ago, there was also a purge of several high powered investment bankers here in Hong Kong. This purge included, Margaret Ren, the daughter-in-law of Zhao Ziyang, the discredited former premier of China, who was fired from running Citigroup's investment banking unit for alleged violations of securities laws. However, oddly, the SEC in Washington, DC is currently reviewing her case to grant her a license to continue working as an investment banker. So, maybe she was a victim of intimidation of Citigroup by some mainland officials after all.

After the mysterious firings of Margaret Ren and a few others on unspecified securities rules violations, I suggested to several people that in modern China, the first steps of purges of officials may take the form of purging not just the underlings as in the Mao days but also the investment bankers that they deal with or are associated with. And now we can speculate that in the case of Ching Cheong, foreign journalists may also be a target of the purging games in the fever swamps of Beijing.