Chinese officials should take a lesson from the selflessness of Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in not living extravagant lifestyles or separating themselves from the people, Chinese state TV said in the latest episode of an anti-corruption documentary.
Xi has waged a sweeping war on deep-seated graft since assuming power almost four years ago, vowing to go after powerful “tigers” as well as lowly “flies,” warning the problem is so bad it could affect the Chinese Communist Party’s grip on power.
In the second episode of show Always on the Road, aired late on Tuesday night, Xi’s simple life and close connection to ordinary people are contrasted with the high living and arrogance of the corrupt.
When Xi visited the southern province of Guangdong in late 2012, shortly after becoming party chief, no red carpets were laid out, no roads shut for his convoy and no luxury vehicles used, the show said.
“He stayed in a simple room, had buffet-style meals. All the details were self-evident of the practices he preaches,” it said, calling his actions a “model” for the party’s rules against extravagance and corruption.
The program also showed the small, unadorned room Xi stayed in while visiting the northern province of Hebei in 2012.
“He ate very simply,” it said of the meals he had while there, and showed him interacting with poor farmers in their homes.
In contrast, the program presented the former party boss of the southern metropolis of Guangzhou, Wan Qingliang (萬慶良), jailed for life last month for corruption, as a model of what not to do.
Wan had a love of banquets, at which he was wined and dined by corporate types looking for a helping hand, and even went so far as to shut off his favorite restaurant in a scenic spot to the public, which has now been reopened, the show said.
“When I was with them, they picked up the bill. Of course, there are lots of companies present, and I thought they’d handle it, that it was nothing,” Wan told the program. “I thought this was what everyone did and I just went with the flow.”
The program interviewed a group of older people at the restaurant Wan was so fond of, who talked approvingly of how they were now able to get back in.
It was not possible to confirm if Wan participated willingly in the program, or to reach family members or lawyers for comment.
However, the party views contrition and confession favorably, and officials have avoided death sentences if they are judged to have shown remorse or cooperated.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
CARTEL ARRESTS: The president said that a US government operation to arrest two cartel members made it jointly responsible for the unrest in the state’s capital Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Thursday blamed the US in part for a surge in cartel violence in the northern state of Sinaloa that has left at least 30 people dead in the past week. Two warring factions of the Sinaloa cartel have clashed in the state capital of Culiacan in what appears to be a fight for power after two of its leaders were arrested in the US in late July. Teams of gunmen have shot at each other and the security forces. Meanwhile, dead bodies continued to be found across the city. On one busy street corner, cars drove
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to