The Wall Street Journal writes, "Two days after more than a dozen blasts battered a city in southern China, state media said that the suspected perpetrator was killed in one of the explosions and raised the death toll to 10. Police identified the suspect as 33-year-old Wei Yinyong, who was a resident of Liucheng, where most of the explosions took place, the China's official Xinhua News Agency reported Friday. The police's preliminary investigation said that Mr. Wei had been in a dispute with local villagers and offices near a quarry that he was involved with and he made the bombs to enact revenge, Xinhua said."
The stock market bungle isn't a make-or-break issue for the legitimacy of party rule because only a small percentage of Chinese invest. But if the economic downturn is prolonged, and if the Chinese people hold the government responsible and lose faith in its ability to correct the situation, then the China model is indeed under threat. It's an unlikely scenario anytime soon. The more serious threat to the Chinese political system is that economic growth will lose its status as the main source of legitimacy. Over the past several decades, government officials could be promoted based on economic performance above all else. Today, the country's problems are much more diverse: rampant pollution, growing inequality, precarious social welfare, not to mention massive corruption," Daniel A. Bell writes for The Wall Street Journal.
The New York Times writes, "Shanghai prosecutors say they are charging people connected to a U.S. meat supplier's Chinese subsidiary with producing and selling fake and substandard products. Shanghai Husi Food Co., which is a unit of OSI Group of Aurora, Illinois, has been under investigation since a Shanghai TV station reported last year that it repackaged and sold old meat. The scandal alarmed Chinese diners and disrupted operations for fast food brands. The Shanghai prosecutor's office said in a statement that prosecutors from Shanghai's Jiading district brought the cases against 10 defendants, including some connected to Husi's facilities in Shanghai and Hebei province."