Internal political schism in China, highlighted by recent rumors of a coup attempt, may have been one of the main factors that has incited China’s political authorities to dabble with the latest gunboat diplomacy with her neighbors. The unfolding controversy over disputed territorial claims at Scarborough Shoal and the Senkaku Islands has most likely been meant to divert or distract the public’s attention from real political issues developing in China.
Yet the tensions being manifested in China’s political system has been exposing on the festering rottenness of the perversion of the legal system, which the great Frédéric Bastiat warned centuries ago, directed at repression and plunder of the resources of the population for personal benefit of politicians and their favored allies. He called this “legal plunder”.
Sovereign Man’s Tim Staersmose gives us a terse but splendid narrative of the political events brewing at China
I’m convinced that history will one day show that corrupt Communist party officials, in cahoots with shady developers and construction moguls, systematically plundered the Chinese economy, getting rich off the hard work and savings of the average person.
It’s been happening on an unimaginable scale… and the fuse for the whole rotten mess to explode may have just been lit with this Bo Xilai scandal. To review, briefly:
- Bo Xilai, the former mayor of China’s largest city of Chongqing, was once one of the rising stars of the Communist party and being groomed for a top spot in the Politburo.
- Wang Lijun was his police chief and right hand man.
- Together, Bo and Wang waged a high profile campaign to stamp out organized crime in the region, jailing and even executing supposed underworld bosses and corrupt businessmen.
(As it appears now, they may have simply been eliminating their competition.)
- The two had an apparent falling out, allegedly over evidence that Bo’s wife was involved in the death of British expat Neil Heywood.
- Heywood had been a longtime confidant of the Bo family. His death late last year was originally ruled as a heart attack, however there is now so much conflicting evidence that many are suggesting Heywood was going to come forward with extensive records of Bo’s shady business dealings.
- After being stripped of his rank by Bo, Wang went to both the US consulate and British High Commission seeking asylum in exchange for information about Bo’s impropriety. He was politely rejected.
- Bo has now been relieved of his powers amid a flurry of evidence and allegations that he and Wang siphoned off hundreds of millions of dollars from Chongqing’s economic boom and secreted the funds out of the country.
- Meanwhile Bo’s wife is under arrest for suspicion of murdering Mr. Heywood. Mr. Wang is also in the custody of Chinese authorities.
- Bo’s son, a lavish partier who attends $90,000/year graduate school and drives around campus in European supercars, is hiding out in the United States.
The top echelons of the communist party are now working overtime to snuff out the scandal lest their own financial dealings and personal dirty linen be aired in public.
But, they’re fighting an uphill battle. The rapid spread in China of micro-blogging services (like Twitter) mean that the party’s censors have a real battle on their hands.
Again the wonders of technological advances in today’s deepening information age has been facilitating the divulgence of the reeking corruption operating behind China’s “communist party system” which in reality is no more than state (crony-fascist) capitalism.
As Frédéric Bastiat wrote in must read classic The Law,
The delusion of the day is to enrich all classes at the expense of each other; it is to generalize plunder under pretense of organizing it. Now, legal plunder may be exercised in an infinite multitude of ways. Hence come an infinite multitude of plans for organization; tariffs, protection, perquisites, gratuities, encouragements, progressive taxation, free public education, right to work, right to profit, right to wages, right to assistance, right to instruments of labor, gratuity of credit, etc., etc. And it is all these plans, taken as a whole, with what they have in common, legal plunder, that takes the name of socialism.
Pretentions to solve social ills via socialist redistributionist policies are simply unsustainable, and the gunboat diplomacy will not excise the truth from unraveling.
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