Waiting for WikiLeaks: Beijing’s Seven Secrets
Posted by John Malloy on 08/31/2010
While people in the US and elsewhere have been reacting to the release by WikiLeaks of classified US documents on the Afghan War, Chinese bloggers have been discussing the event in parallel with another in their own country. On July 21 in Beijing, four days before WikiLeaks published its documents, Chinese President Hu Jintao convened a high-level meeting to discuss ways to prevent leaks from the archives of the Communist Party of China.
Party archives in China exist at local, provincial, and central levels and have always been secret and extremely closely guarded. At local levels, some, in recent years, have been digitized, but at the highest levels the original paper is guarded physically, and rules of access are complex and extremely rigid.
The importance of the July 21 meeting, which was officially called an “All-China Work Meeting on Party History,” is plain from its list of attendees, which included not only President Hu but his heir-apparent Xi Jinping, chief of propaganda Li Changchun, and dozens of other high officials. In his widely-publicized keynote, Xi Jinping said:
We must resolutely oppose any mistaken tendency to distort or defame the Party’s history [and] must use only authorized Party history to educate Party members, officials, and the masses, especially the young.
Very little else about the meeting was shared with the Chinese public. But three days later, the main content of this anti-leak meeting was leaked, apparently by a reporter from the Communist Party’s official Xinhua news agency. The leaked account went to the overseas boxun (“broad information”) network, from where it spread around the world. The Chinese government has not (as it has in similar cases in the past) claimed the boxun report to be inaccurate or a “fabrication.”
The report says that two worries dominated the secret meeting: one was the matter of how archives can be kept secure. What would happen, the officials wondered, if they were raided during “social disturbances” such as the recent riots in Guangzhou protesting the central government’s effort to end Cantonese-language broadcasts in Cantonese-speaking areas. (The number of such “disturbances” has grown steadily in recent years, to more than 230,000 in 2009.) Should emergency incineration equipment be supplied at all archive sites, just in case? What if archive staff realize that they can sell things for profit? Should the staff be paid more, to buy their loyalty?
The second major worry was the growing problem of retired party officials writing unauthorized memoirs. Recent examples of this genre include Zhao Ziyang’s 2009 memoir and the “June Fourth Diary” of Li Peng, the Chinese premier at the time of the Tiananmen Square protests. (Li’s diary was refused publication in China, leaked to Hong Kong, published there, and then leaked back to the mainland on the Web. Bloggers on the whole have excoriated Li, who doesn’t appear to have been involved in the Web publication, because his motive from the beginning was probably not to try to win public opinion but to show for history that Deng, not he, ordered the Tiananmen Square killings.) General Yang Baibing, perhaps still smarting from his purge in 1992, reportedly has penned memoirs as well, as has Tian Jiyun, a former politburo member and long-time critic of his hard-liner colleagues. Altogether, an unnamed “54 high-level officials” have requested to see archives for the purpose of writing memoirs, and many of these people are believed to be preparing two versions—one to submit for official approval and the other to keep separately.
via Waiting for WikiLeaks: Beijing’s Seven Secrets | The New York Review of Books.
Posted by
John Malloy
on 08/31/2010. Filed under
International.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the
RSS 2.0.
You can leave a response or trackback to this entry
