An anonymous letter calling on Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to resign for the good of China and his own safety seemed to be digital rumor-mongering when it appeared on the Internet earlier this month. It spread by e-mail and lingered on a small domestic Chinese news site before it was removed.
However, the response from Beijing has been anything but dismissive.
Surprising even some hardened critics, Xi’s security forces have overseen a far-reaching inquisition to root out the culprits behind the letter, resorting to measures that have drawn more attention than the letter itself. They have detained at least 11 people, including relatives in China of two exiled writers accused of spreading or promoting the letter.
Photo: AP
Xi’s handlers have sought to give him an aura of unshakable dominance. However, the unusually severe response to what might be nothing more than an outlandish Internet ruse suggests some anxiety about his hold on power, including among security officials keen to show their loyalty and avoid any hint of exposing him to danger, experts said.
“The response has shown how jittery they are,” said Kerry Brown, professor of Chinese politics at King’s College, London. “The fear seems to be that these views might be taken as representative of real elite figures.”
Xiao Qiang (蕭強), an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who monitors Chinese media for the Web site China Digital Times, attributed the response in part to the letter’s unusual phrasing.
“Bluff or true, this tone sounds more like coup plotters talking to the leader they want to depose, rather than an open letter with dissenting political views,” he said.
There is no evidence that any coup plot could be in the works. Xi appears firmly in control; this week he has been visiting the Czech Republic, and he is scheduled to arrive in Washington on Thursday for a nuclear security meeting.
However, the government’s alarmed reaction has highlighted the alternating pulls of swaggering confidence projected outward and internal anxiety about political control driving Xi to stamp down harder on critics, said several people embroiled in or closely watching the investigation.
“Xi Jinping wants full control, and for the letter to appear on a domestic Web site marked a loss of control,” said Zhang Ping (張平), a Chinese journalist and rights advocate living in Germany, whose siblings have been detained in southwest China as part of the investigation.
Zhang, who writes under the pen name Chang Ping, said two younger brothers were held by the police in Sichuan Province after his immediate family and even distant relatives were told to tell him to remove from the Internet an essay he wrote condemning the detention of a Chinese journalist, Jia Jia (賈葭), possibly over the letter. Zhang said his younger sister was also missing, almost certainly detained.
Zhang said it would be impossible to take down the essay, which was published on a Chinese-language Web site of Deutsche Welle, the German news service. Jia has since been released.
The police initially said Zhang’s brothers were suspected of illegally starting a fire by burning joss sticks and paper at ancestral graves.
On Tuesday, the Sichuan police also issued a letter, purporting to be from one of Zhang’s detained brothers, Zhang Wei (張偉), in which Zhang Wei said that the family had urged him to stop criticizing the party and that they were “very angry” with him for saying his siblings had been detained for political reasons.
“If my brother were free, we would not have said that,” Zhang said in response to the statement. “The police are using my brothers as hostages to first blackmail me and then attack me.”
Wen Yunchao (溫雲超), a Chinese writer and rights activist living in New York, has said that his parents and younger brother in southern China were also detained by the police after being pressed to tell him to admit to spreading the letter online. He has refused, adamantly denying disseminating the letter.
The letter appeared online on March 4, just before China’s national legislature started its annual session. It lays out accusations against Xi from “loyal Communist Party members,” using a mix of old-school party jargon and liberal criticisms that makes its true authorship difficult to discern.
Xi has amassed too much power, betraying the party’s recent traditions of collective decisionmaking, it says. He has abandoned the calibrated foreign policy of late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) for dangerous adventurism, it continues, and has turned the news media into servile tools for promoting his own image.
“Comrade Xi Jinping, you do not possess the abilities to lead the party and the country into the future,” it says.
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