Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s pro-democracy leader, concluded a visit to China on Sunday. While there, she met with Xi Jinping, China’s leader and general secretary of the Communist Party. Suu Kyi also visited Shanghai and Yunnan Province, which borders on Burma’s territory.

Just five years ago, her visit would have been unimaginable. China had close ties to Burma’s military junta, which held her under house arrest for the better part of two decades, only releasing her in 2010 as it undertook a tentative, and so far quite limited, political opening.
Despite calls for her to do so, while in China, Suu Kyi did not speak publicly about Liu Xiaobo, one of China’s most prominent political prisoners, and a fellow Nobel laureate. Liu, a writer, was sentenced in 2009 to 11 years on subversion charges. His arrest was triggered by his support for Charter 08, a declaration of democratic principles. He won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, while in jail, as Suu Kyi herself did, while under house arrest, in 1991. Suu Kyi only received her award on a visit to Norway in 2012.
Suu Kyi has often said of China that you don’t choose your neighbors, as if to say pragmatism is necessary in dealing with an enormous, Communist party dictatorship next door. That may be so, but the political opening in Burma that created the potential for democratic change came in large part because the Burmese military junta recognized the need to stem China’s influence. More important, Burma’s people also want to offset China’s influence and look to the US and Europe as models. This is not simply a contest of power but one of political systems.
Navigating the shoals of Burma’s political development is undeniably difficult. The outcome in Burma is still in doubt and depends on a number of factors. One of these is Aung San Suu Kyi’s ability to maintain Western pressure on Burma’s government for institutional changes inside Burma. What made the US stick with sanctions for so long was Suu Kyi’s example of steadfast principle. Yet Suu Kyi has disappointed many admirers with her silence on the plight of Burma’s Muslim Rohingyas and the racist monks, led by U Wirathu, who incite violence against them.
When Suu Kyi at last traveled to Oslo to receive her Nobel Peace Prize, she spoke poignantly of the isolation she and her fellow citizens felt during so many years of struggle. “When the Nobel Committee awarded the Peace Prize to me they were recognizing that the oppressed and the isolated in Burma were also a part of the world, they were recognizing the oneness of humanity. For me,” she said, “receiving the Nobel Peace Prize means personally extending my concerns for democracy and human rights beyond national borders.” Many of her admirers wish she would do just that, both in her foreign travels and at home. If she doesn’t, she might find herself with neither power nor principle.

Xi's Purge: Anticorruption or Loyalty-Based? Is It Finished Yet?

 

 

Thursday, Beijing disclosed the trial, plea, and sentencing of Zhou Yongkang, once the country’s security czar and now the highest official to be prosecuted since Maoist times.

The reviled Zhou received a life term for taking bribes, disclosing state secrets, and abusing power. He was also deprived of political rights for life and forfeited assets.
Zhou, according to state media, admitted his crimes and will not appeal. “The basic facts are clear,” he said according to the official Xinhua News Agency. “I plead guilty and repent my wrongdoing.”
“Zhou’s trial was a symbol of the CPC’s commitment to the rule of law,” Xinhua reported.
No one should believe Xinhua on the Communist Party’s commitment. “Zhou’s trial was about loyalty to Xi and control,” Nottingham University’s Steve Tsang told the Financial Times, referring to Chinese leader Xi Jinping. “Justice has got nothing to do with it. Justice is incidental.”
Many now believe that, with Zhou’s sentencing, Xi’s “anticorruption” campaign will enter a new phase, focusing more on institutional restraints on graft instead of taking down more “tigers,” high officials in Communist Party parlance. “The task has changed,” said the party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection in a statement on its website. Prominent corrupt officials are mere “gusts of wind.”
Many have reported that the biggest tigers, former leaders Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, have reined in Xi’s once-relentless campaign. For instance, Deng Yuwen, a former editor of Study Times, the Central Party School journal, believes Xi reached a deal on Zhou Yongkang with Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, former Vice President Zeng Qinghong, and former premiers Li Peng and Wen Jiabao to not go after them or their children. “Many people want to know if other ‘big tigers’ or ‘old tigers’ will be ensnared,” Deng wrote in July in Ta Kung Pao, a Chinese-language Hong Kong newspaper. “The possibility of this happening in the rest of the first five-year term is close to zero.”
It would make sense for Xi to back off, especially because his efforts could tear the country’s ruling organization apart. On a general level, Xi is “deconstructing” the webs of relationships that keep the party in power, explains Lynette Ong, a political scientist at the University of Toronto. “In an authoritarian system like China’s, the system’s foundational stability comes not from popularly elected officials but from patronage networks,” Ong writes. “Autocrats garner support by promising to share spoils with their followers, a practice that holds the political insiders together. Undermining this system is thus highly disruptive to the party’s grip on power.”
Moreover, Xi is forcing his opponents to fight back hard to protect themselves, their patronage networks, and their families. So far, he has managed with his bold tactics to unite his opponents, a dangerous situation for him, and so it would appear that this would be a particularly appropriate time for Xi to beat a retreat.
Nonetheless, Deng Yuwen’s prediction that Xi’s purge was coming to an end looks wrong. It now appears that former Vice President Zeng, who was allied with Jiang and was reportedly instrumental in Xi’s rise to power, is under investigation. Zeng, by many accounts, arranged Xi’s ascent in November 2012. Xi, in short, could be turning on his former backers, something his hero, Mao Zedong, often did before the tumultuous decade-long Cultural Revolution.
Reports indicate Zeng is being held in Tianjin, the seaport adjacent to Beijing. Tianjin is also home to the people’s court that conducted the secret trial of Zhou Yongkang.
So prepare for another gust in China, perhaps soon.

Should Kyiv Blockade the Donbas Enclave?

 

Ever since the Poroshenko Bloc’s leader, Yuri Lutsenko, stated that the “President of Ukraine believes the cancerous tumor should be subjected to a blockade,” Ukrainians have been heatedly debating whether Kyiv should sever all ties with the Russian-occupied Donbas enclave.

The argument for a blockade, which would entail a total cutoff of economic relations as well as deliveries of electricity, gas, and water, is straightforwardly strategic. Ukraine is at war with Russia and its puppets. The Kremlin started the war and seems to have no intention to end it. Putin’s puppets engage in continual aggressions, systematically violating cease-fires, and openly stating that they intend to conquer at least all of the Donbas. Kyiv knows it can’t win on the battlefield, but is hoping to be able to stop further Russian expansion. If Ukraine is to prevail, Kyiv needs to do everything possible to weaken the Kremlin’s proxy war machine. A blockade would hasten the Donbas enclave’s economic decline and make the region ungovernable. The blockade would do the trick.

The argument against a blockade rests on humanitarian and political concerns. A blockade would hurt the enclave’s citizens—Ukrainian citizens who don’t deserve to suffer for the misdeeds of the separatists. Abandoning these people would not only be cruel, but counterproductive, as it would turn them completely against their mother country, Ukraine. Moreover, cutting off all economic ties to Ukraine would only drive the region into Russia’s arms and thereby seal its loss to Ukraine.

Both arguments are compelling, and both arguments entail painful trade-offs, but I find the one for a blockade to be more persuasive. Which side you choose depends on what you believe Ukraine’s top priority is. For me, that’s easy: it’s the war, which is killing soldiers and civilians, undermining Ukraine’s national economy, threatening its stability and its prospects for survival, and hampering reform. The war must either end or be frozen, and the sooner the better. If a blockade promotes that goal, then it’s justified.

Would the people of the enclave suffer as a result? Yes, but remember this. The choice before Kyiv is not who should suffer, but who should suffer more: the 40 million Ukrainians in Ukraine, who are already paying an exorbitantly high price in terms of blood and money for Putin’s war, or the 3 million “Enclavians” in the Donbas, who are also paying an exorbitantly high price for their misguided support of the separatist adventure? For me, 40 million who made the right choice beats 3 million who made the wrong choice hands down.

Would a blockade drive the region into Russia’s arms? Yes and no. For starters, the vast majority of the enclave’s residents detest Ukraine and everything it hopes to become (such as a Western, democratic, rule-of-law, market state). Ditto for the separatists and their leaders. In effect, the region is already lost to Ukraine. At the same time, it’s not at all clear that the enclave would therefore join Russia. The Kremlin has made it pretty clear that it wants the enclave to remain in Ukraine. And if you don’t believe Moscow’s statements, consider its deeds. Russia has constructed a 100-kilometer-long ditch along its border with the occupied Donbas, ostensibly to keep out smugglers. Whether that’s the actual intent is unclear, but the mere fact of a long ditch separating Russia proper from the enclave its puppets claim to be liberating obviously does not testify to Russia’s desire to incorporate the enclave. And why should it? Rebuilding the region would cost billions, and Moscow is already saddled with the economic mess that is Crimea.

The choice before Kyiv—and it’s one that Ukrainian policymakers have assiduously been pretending doesn’t exist—is quite stark. Either a reformed, Western-oriented, and prosperous Ukraine without the Donbas enclave or an unreformed, Russia-oriented, and backward Little Russia with the enclave. You can’t have both. And if you don’t believe me, listen to Yuri Shvets, a former Ukrainian KGB agent now living in Washington: “The Donetsk and Luhansk province territories captured by the aggressor … are a Trojan horse. Putin created it; let him now feed it. To let that ‘horse’ into Ukraine is tantamount to political and economic suicide.”