RAWALPINDI: Army chief General Raheel Sharif on Sunday met state councilor and minister for public security of China Guo Shengkun, Inter Services Public Relations said.
During the meeting, issues of mutual interest, regional security and measures to enhance bilateral defence and security collaboration were discussed.
Shengekun and other members of the Chinese delegation were briefed about prevalent situation in the region.
“Chinese dignitaries acknowledged Pakistan’s efforts towards fighting terrorism and regional stability and appreciated the successes achieved in the ongoing operation Zarb-e-Azb,” the statement added.
A Beijing House of Cards : editorial comment in the Wall St Journal, Dec 8, 2014
The Chinese Communist Party’s expulsion and arrest of former Politburo Standing Committee member Zhou Yongkang is the latest episode in a gripping drama of politics and skulduggery. As with any such entertainment, the audience must pay attention to the little details to understand the action. When authorities announced an investigation into Mr. Zhou’s alleged corruption in July, they tipped their hand by dropping the honorific “comrade.” It was a reminder that the struggle for power in Beijing’s back courtyards is the drama that matters in China.
The next step is a criminal trial for Mr. Zhou, and even if it is held in secret, as some analysts of Chinese politics suspect, it will explain much about how the Party worked under its last two leaders. It will also show how the new leader, Xi Jinping , is using his anticorruption campaign to consolidate power.
Mr. Zhou was a protégé of Jiang Zemin , who ruled China from 1989-2002. So was Gen. Xu Caihou, a former vice chairman of the Central Military Commission expelled from the Party on corruption charges in June.
Mr. Xi is going after more than Mr. Jiang’s “Shanghai faction,” however. The noose is closing around Ling Jihua, the No. 2 of Hu Jintao , the man who led China from 2002-12. In June authorities opened an investigation into Ling Zhengce, an older brother who was a vice chairman of a Shanxi province advisory body. Another brother, Ling Wancheng, was detained last month. The capture of relatives and associates before the main target is standard practice and presaged the fall of Mr. Zhou.
Ling Jihua has been largely sidelined since the death of his son at the wheel of a Ferrari with two young women in 2012 put him out of the running for the Politburo Standing Committee. However, as the former linchpin of Mr. Hu’s “Communist Youth League faction” his downfall would have huge repercussions for his colleagues, including the present Premier Li Keqiang .
So far Mr. Xi has played his cards brilliantly. When he first came to power in 2012, many doubted his ability to take control since he lacked a strong faction of his own. But he has managed to turn his enemies’ strength into a weakness.
He has backfooted both of the major Party factions by taking down a key member whose foibles were suddenly exposed. A large element of luck was involved. In 2012 the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood by the wife of the Chongqing Party Secretary Bo Xilai suddenly came to light when the city’s police chief, Wang Lijun, tried to seek asylum in a U.S. consulate and started talking.
Mr. Zhou had formed an alliance with Mr. Bo and tried to help him paper over police chief Wang’s indiscretions. He was aided by Mr. Ling, who sought help from Mr. Zhou in the coverup of his son’s car crash. Then other forces in Beijing took an interest in Mr. Wang’s story and began to unravel the web of deceit.
Mr. Xi has skillfully exploited these openings and the vulnerabilities of his peers. Corruption has become a necessary part of high office for many cadres so they can maintain their network of loyalists. Relatively stable leadership under two competing factions was possible for two decades because of the convention that new leaders would not root out the networks of their predecessors.
By tearing up that unwritten agreement, Mr. Xi has won popularity with the public and consolidated his own power. But he has also made enemies of the beneficiaries of the old system who now see him as an existential threat. His best chance of survival may be the creation of a cult of personality that makes him immune to internal plots. That risks bringing back another form of instability, the mass movements that Mao Zedong used to take down his Party enemies.
It’s no wonder that the Netflix drama “House of Cards” is phenomenally popular in China, a fact that the Communist Party is sensitive to. In June the Discipline Inspection Commission, the Party’s chief corruption fighter, posted an article on its website that lauded the series as an accurate portrayal of politics in Western democracies. That only provoked more online musing about how American fiction parallels Chinese reality—and how the intrigues of Frank Underwood are trumped by the rise of Xi Jinping. http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-beijing-house-of-cards-1417977154
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