The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) expulsion of a former top aide to former Chinese president Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) for corruption is a political move reinforcing Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) power, analysts said yesterday.
Following an internal party investigation into former United Front Work Department head Ling Jihua (令計劃), once one of Hu’s most senior advisers, he was expelled from the party and handed over to prosecutors who formally arrested him, authorities said on Monday.
The development came three years after his son was killed in a Ferrari crash that also injured two female passengers — one of them naked — in a scandal that triggered his downfall.
Ling, 58, will almost certainly face trial, with a guilty sentence and jail term effectively guaranteed to follow.
Since coming to power, Xi has overseen a high-profile crackdown on graft that has deposed several senior officials, but in the absence of systemic reforms, critics said the drive is open to being used for political faction-fighting.
The campaign also risks reinforcing perceptions of widespread corruption in the ruling organization.
Previous scalps include former Chinese domestic security head Zhou Yongkang (周永康), who was jailed for life earlier this year, and former Chinese Communist Party Central Military Commission vice chairman Xu Caihou (徐才厚), who died of cancer earlier this year while under investigation.
City University of Hong Kong political science professor Joseph Cheng (鄭宇碩) said Ling’s targeting suggested Xi was confident of taking on high-profile cadres associated with his predecessors.
Retired leaders in China are seen as continuing to wield influence behind the scenes, including regarding their allies, and Zhou has links to former Chinese president Jiang Zemin (江澤民).
“By prosecuting figures formerly associated with first Jiang Zemin, and then Hu Jintao, certainly means that Xi Jinping wants to demonstrate his determination to get rid of all resistance to his policy program irrespective of their affiliations and associations,” Cheng told reporters.
“It certainly generates pressure on previous leaders, including Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao,” he said.
Taiwanese and Hong Kong media have speculated that Ling — along with Zhou, Xu, and former party rising star Bo Xilai (薄熙來), who was jailed in 2013 after a murder and graft investigation — had formed a political faction opposed to Xi.
The alleged cabal has been dubbed the “New Gang of Four,” a reference to the infamous quartet including Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) widow who were put on trial in 1980.
“The Communist Party of China has moved a major step forward in its anti-graft campaign,” Xinhua news agency said in a triumphant commentary. “Like water and fire, the CPC doesn’t tolerate corruption.”
The commentary said that Ling had engaged in internal plotting, saying that his case “served as a warning that it’s absolutely forbidden to organize factions within the party.”
Ling had become an embarrassment to the ruling party, University of Sydney Chinese politics professor Kerry Brown said, adding that the Ferrari crash in Beijing came at a sensitive time during the power transition between Hu and Xi.
“Ling was simply unable to rein in people around him cashing in on his political links — the most obvious being his son, who was evidently out of control,” he said. “Ling harmed the party, in this story, just like Zhou did, and the Party has taken its revenge.”
He described the expulsion as “the final dispatching of someone who flew too close to the sun after rising from a very modest background.”
“It just goes to prove that there is no more dangerous or treacherous place in the world to try to exist in than the upper reaches of Chinese politics,” he told reporters.
State-run media made no mention of Ling’s links to Hu, and only passing reference to allegations against his family.
In an editorial, the Global Times, which is affiliated with the CCP mouthpiece People’s Daily, said Ling’s “close relatives indulged in their desires and became involved in criminal behavior and they paid a high price.”
In June last year, the party announced an investigation into his brother, Ling Zhengce (令政策), for “serious discipline violations.”
Ling was a vice president of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a CCP-controlled debating chamber, in the family’s home province of Shanxi.
Xinhua on Monday also implicated Ling’s wife, while reports last year said that his brother-in-law had been held.
The People’s Daily said Ling’s case should serve as a lesson to other officials.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS