Media on China - CHINA US Focus

September 29 , 2016

Foreign Policy: Tea Leaf Nation：How to Fix China’s Crooked Congress

Foreign Policy: Tea Leaf Nation comments: "Even the most jaded likely could not ignore the revelations disclosed on September 13: meeting in an extremely rare special session, the Standing Committee of China’s National People’s Congress dismissed 45 of the 2,987 members of the full National People’s Congress (NPC)....At first glance, one might think that the purging of 45 corrupt officials could change the way that the NPC does business. Yet the corruption scandal only highlights the NPC’s political irrelevance, despite its constitutional position as the highest organ of state power....The most important reform Beijing could undertake would involve changing the selection process for Chinese legislators....Real reform would also address the institutional autonomy of the NPC....the NPC will remain institutionally weak unless it is released from the tight grasp of Party oversight....A first step in institutional reform could be to significantly reduce the total number of delegates, and to make the body a truly full-time institution....Once those reforms were in place, the NPC could turn to bolstering its bureaucratic staffing to give legislators the support they need. Unfortunately, it seems more likely that this scandal will come and go, and the NPC will remain what it is today: a weak and ineffectual body largely populated by those serving their own ends, one that exercises few of the powers assigned to it under China’s constitution."
The New York Times：32 People Missing in China Landslides Following Typhoon

The Associated Press reports: "At least 32 people were reported missing Thursday after rain-saturated hillsides collapsed onto villages in southeastern China following a typhoon. A rescue operation was underway in Sucun village in China's Zhejiang province, south of the financial hub of Shanghai, after it was hit by a landslide on Wednesday evening, leaving 26 missing, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported. Another six people are missing in Baofeng village, also in Zhejiang, after a landslide destroyed their homes. The landslides were triggered by torrential rain brought by Typhoon Megi, which lashed southeastern China on Wednesday. The storm had already killed at least five people in China and Taiwan, and forced the closure of schools and offices and the cancellation of hundreds of flights."
The Wall Street Journal: China Real Time：Chinese Tabloid Riles Singapore in South China Sea Spat

The Wall Street Journal: China Real Time comments: "Singapore’s ambassador to China has engaged in unusually public sparring with influential Chinese tabloid the Global Times over the city-state’s posture on regional maritime disputes. The spat arose after the newspaper reported that Singaporean delegates at a recent international summit lobbied aggressively to add sterner language about the South China Sea to the meeting’s final communique....The report prompted the Singaporean envoy to criticize the Global Times, a popular Communist Party-controlled newspaper, for publishing an 'irresponsible report replete with fabrications.' His protestations, however, were met with defiance from the newspaper’s editor-in-chief, who stood by the article and accused Singapore of 'damaging China’s interests.'"

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