Chinese Coup Watching

Source: Foreign Policy

Last week, controversial politician Bo Xilai, whose relatively open campaigning for a seat on China's top ruling council shocked China watchers (and possibly his elite peers, as well), was removed from his post as Chongqing's party secretary. He hasn't been seen since. Rumors of a coup, possibly coordinated by Bo's apparent ally Zhou Yongkang, are in the air. 

Western media has extensively covered the political turmoil: Bloomberg reported on how coup rumors helped spark a jump in credit-default swaps for Chinese government bonds; the Wall Street Journal opinion page called Chinese leadership transitions an "invitation, sooner or later, for tanks in the streets." The Financial Times saw the removal of Bo, combined with Premier Wen Jiabao's strident remarks at a press conference hours before Bo's removal as a sign the party was moving to liberalize its stance on the Tiananmen square protests of 1989. That Bo staged a coup is extremely unlikely, but until more information comes to light, we can only speculate on what happened. 

Reading official Chinese media response about Bo makes it easy to forget how much Chinese care about politics. The one sentence mention in Xinhua, China's official news agency, merely says that Bo is gone and another official, Zhang Dejiang, is replacing him.  But the Chinese-language Internet is aflame with debate over what happened to Bo and what it means for Chinese political stability. 

Mainland media sites have begun to strongly censor discussion of Bo Xilai and entirely unsubstantiated rumors of gunfire in downtown Beijing (an extremely rare occurance in Beijing). Chinese websites hosted overseas, free from censorship, offer a host of unsupported, un-provable commentary on what might have happened in the halls of power. Bannedbook.org, which provides free downloads of "illegal" Chinese books, posted a long explanation of tremors in the palace of Zhongnanhai, sourced to a "person with access to high level information in Beijing," of a power struggle between President Hu Jintao, who controls the military, and Zhou, who controls China's formidable domestic security apparatus. The Epoch Times, a news site affiliated with the Falun Gong spiritual movement (which banned in China), has published extensively in English and Chinese about the coup. 

Coup in Beijing, Says Chinese Internet Rumor Mill

Source: Epoch Times

UPDATE: Words Related to ‘Coup’ in Beijing Censored on Weibo

Over the night of March 19 and early morning of March 20, Bejing local time, a message about a large number of military police showing up in Beijing spread widely across microblogs in mainland China.

The key figures in the action are said to be: Hu Jintao, the head of the CCP; Wen Jiabao, the premier; Zhou Yongkang, who has control of the People’s Republic of China’s police forces; and Bo Xilai, who was dismissed from his post as head of the Chongqing City Communist Party on March 15 by Wen Jiabao, after a scandal involving Bo’s former police chief.

Li Delin, who is on the editorial board of Securities Market Weekly and lives in Dongcheng District of Beijing, wrote on his microblog a report that confirmed unusual troop movements: “There are numerous army vehicles, Changan Street is continuously being controlled. There are many plainclothes police in every intersection, and some intersections even had iron fences set up.”

According to the message that went viral on China’s Internet, a military force with unknown designation quickly occupied many important places in Zhongnanhai, the Chinese leadership compound in Beijing, and Beijing in the early morning of March 20, with the cooperation of Beijing armed police.

The troops entered Beijing to “get and protect Bo Xilai,” according to the message.
A mainland Chinese reader has told The Epoch Times that a military coup has taken place in Beijing.

It is still unknown who, if anyone, has been arrested.

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WARNING: Corporate-Fascist Military Coup Brewing in the United States?

From: Land Destroyer Report

Tony Cartalucci 

The US intelligence community, in conjunction with Wall Street corporate-financier interests, have spent an inordinate amount of time positioning themselves for a possible military coup and martial law take over of the United States. This is being done under the guise of the fraudulent "War on Terror" as preparation for a very real and inevitable economic collapse. In particular, one personality above all others is being groomed by intelligence operatives and policy wonks, while built-up by the corporate media [1][2] in the eyes of the public to intercede in America's accelerating political, economic, and even global tactical decline. This man is General David Petraeus who served as former head of US Central Command which included combat operations in Iraq and former commander of US forces in Afghanistan before being sworn in as the current director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in September 6, 2011.

Image: Julius Caesar crosses the Rubicon, on his way to seize power in Rome via a military coup and become the republic's first emperor. America is not immune from suffering a similar prolonged, ignoble death to the extreme, parasitic elitism that empire breeds.

Posing as a venerable American hero, "leading" American troops through two wars in service to his nation, Petraeus' ties are in fact to Wall Street and London corporate financier oligarchs. His membership [3] in the corporate-financier Council on Foreign Relations [4] is perhaps the most significant conflict of interest in America's political landscape. He has been both commander of America's troops and now director of the CIA, all while privately associating with the unelected policy makers of the CFR; an organization that represents the collective interests of the largest banks, private institutions, and corporations on earth. Whether Petraeus is guilty or not of improprieties amidst this enormous conflict of interest is irrelevant. The fact that he hasn't shown the proper judgment to rectify such a conflict by either resigning, or ending his CFR associations, should be alarming to all Americans.

To add further fears regarding the ambitions and agenda of Petraeus, one must examine those that are gravitating around him and indeed prodding him along.

In 2010, Petraeus gave a speech before the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI) [5], another private institution funded by corporations, working on behalf of corporations, essentially producing their own self-serving policy and using their vast connections and resources to have it rubber stamped by Congress and executed by the US Government at the American people's expense. In his speech, Petraeus would praise Neo-Conservative policy wonk Frederick Kagan who he credited for developing the "surge" strategy in Iraq.