Xi seeks to enforce will at meet

Anti-graft campaign far from done, authority undiminished

BEIJING, Oct 24, (AP): Having punished more than a million Communist Party members for corruption, Chinese President Xi Jinping will use a key meeting that started Monday to drive home the message that his signature anti-graft campaign is far from done and his authority remains undiminished.

The Central Committee plenary gathering also begins preparations for next year’s party congress that will kick off Xi’s second five-year term as head of the ruling party.

At next year’s gathering, Xi is expected to place trusted lieutenants into the party’s top bodies, including the all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee, five of whose seven current members are, by custom, due to step down. Only Xi and Premier Li Keqiang, with whom he doesn’t always see eye-to-eye, are expected to remain.

This week’s meeting comes as Xi is riding high as China’s most powerful leader since Deng Xiaoping led the country in the 1980s and gaining kudos at home for his assertive foreign policy, including the leveraging of China’s political and economic heft to open a rift between the Philippines and its longstanding treaty ally, the United States.

Yet Xi’s domestic challenges are legion, ranging from slowing economic growth to massive layoffs resulting from the closure of steel and coal mines and other heavy industries in an effort to reduce industrial overcapacity.

has extreme inequality among its foreign workers. The Asian financial center and former British colony has a sizable whitecollar expatriate elite alongside more than 300,000 migrant domestic workers, almost all of them women from Indonesia or the Philippines.

The defendant, Cambridge University The state sector still is an outsize part of the economy, debt is soaring and the potentially volatile wealth gap continues to broaden.

Xi, the son of a former vice premier, has sought to exercise near total control by heading-up a collection of party “leading groups” including a newly created National Security Council that are seen as further eroding the legitimacy of established government institutions. Few political reforms have been mooted and Xi has drawn fire overseas for waging a sweeping campaign against activist lawyers and government critics resulting in a series of televised confessions reminiscent of Josef Stalin’s show trials.

Theme

Official sources have offered little insight into this week’s discussions bringing together the more than 350 Central Committee members and their alternates at a military guesthouse in western Beijing. The official Xinhua News Agency reported their theme would be “strengthening and standardizing intra-party political life,” while seeking to “primarily resolve problems of Party leadership fatigue and slackness in party governance and discipline observation.”

That indicates Xi is experiencing difficulty keeping the rank and file onprogram and establishing himself as the party’s “core,” said Zhang Lifan, an independent political commentator in Beijing.

graduate Rurik Jutting, had worked at the Hong Kong office of Bank of AmericaMerrill Lynch in structured equity finance and trading. The bodies of Sumarti Ningsih, 23 and Seneng Mujiasih, 26, were found in his upscale apartment near the Asian financial center’s Wan Chai red-light district.

Jutting pleaded not guilty to two murder

This handout picture received from the Thailand Royal Bureau and taken on Oct 23 shows Thailand’s Crown Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn taking part in a ceremony to pay respects to his late father King Bhumibol Adulyadej in the Grand Palace in Bangkok. Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej died at the age of 88 on Oct 13 after years of ill health, ending a seven-decade reign and leaving the

politically divided nation without its key pillar of unity. (AFP)

“The (meeting’s) agenda ... indicates that resistance within the system is persistent and the leader needs to crack the whip,” Zhang said. “If he fails to get it done now, it will be even harder to achieve in future.”

Xi’s main goal at the gathering is to get rid of “governance by personality and hidden rules,” said Beijing Institute of Technology political scientist Hu Xingdou. “For a long time now, problems have existed such as party above state, individual above party or party above law,” Hu said.

Other state media reports say new declarations on the anti-corruption front will be issued and the most recent defaulters arrayed before the public.

The past year has seen a number of retired and serving party bigwigs fall, including former top general Guo Boxiong. That followed the downfall earlier in Xi’s term of powerful officials including former Politburo Standing Committee member Zhou Yongkang. More than 1 million of the party’s 88 million members have been handed punishments since 2013, according to party corruption watchdog, the Central Committee for Discipline Inspection.

State media say a pair of documents toughening discipline will be put forward at this week’s meeting, reflecting Xi’s preference for pursuing anti-corruption through party channels rather than the legal system.

charges, with prosecutors rejecting his attempt to plead guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter. If convicted, he faces life in prison.

At the start of the trial, High Court Judge Michael Stuart-Moore warned jurors that evidence would include “extremely upsetting” photo and video evidence. (AP)

‘Unofficial’ talks held:

A group of former US diplomats held closed door talks at the weekend with senior Pyongyang officials, even as international efforts gather pace to further isolate North Korea, diplomatically and economically.

The two-day meeting in Kuala Lumpur, which was confirmed by the South Korean and US governments, was the latest in a series of unofficial talks commonly referred to as Track 2 that are closely monitored in the absence of any official contact between Washington and Pyongyang.

In July, the North cut off its only remaining official channel of diplomatic communications with the United States in retaliation for American sanctions against its leader, Kim Jong-Un.

The so-called “New York channel” had previously served as a key point of contact between North Korean and US diplomats at the United Nations.

American participants at the talks in the Malaysian capital included Robert Gallucci, who had led the US negotiating team that brokered a 1994 deal with Pyongyang on freezing its nuclear weapons programme. (AFP)