Editor’s note for Monday, October 4, 2021

My thoughts today:

A National People’s Congress delegate from Henan, Féng Qíyǎ 冯琪雅, is “China’s only politician to be named in a sprawling investigation of millions of confidential financial documents known as the Pandora Papers…[she] is a female entrepreneur who the report says set up an offshore firm to trade U.S. stocks,” per Bloomberg.

Feng has previously been in the news for proposing (in Chinese) that China use artificial intelligence to combat phone scams, and more controversially, for suggesting (in Chinese) in 2019 that China resume mandatory premarital medical inspections “to reduce the incidence of birth defects.”

It was a noisy weekend in the airspace near Taiwan: Beijing has sent 150 aircraft into the airspace near Taiwan since October 1, including a record 56 today.

How are you feeling about the future of Taiwan? I’d love to know what The China Project Access members’ thoughts on this topic are. Please just reply to this email to reach my inbox.

Who will watch the watchdogs? Or “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” as the Roman poet Juvenal put it about 2,000 years ago. That seems to be a problem Xi Jinping’s government is dealing with right now, judging from today’s news:

• Former justice minister Fù Zhènghuá 傅政华, “an iron-handed ex-top police officer who rose to become a member of the ruling Communist Party’s key leadership body, has been put under investigation for corruption,” reports Reuters. CNN puts it this way: “He helped bring down one of China’s most corrupt officials. So why is the country cheering his downfall?”
• Last week, the former vice minister for public security, Sūn Lìjūn 孙力军, was expelled from the Communist Party for “serious violations of discipline” including “building cliques and cabals to take over a key government department,” per RFA.
• Outside China’s legal and justice system, Xi’s cleanup campaign continues in force: A former vice president of oil giant PetroChina, Líng Xiāo 凌霄, “has surrendered himself to anti-graft agencies, according to an official statement published Sunday,” reports Caixin.

Did you know that one of your benefits as a The China Project Access member is the ad-free early-release version of the Sinica Podcast available every Monday by plugging this URL directly into your podcast app of choice: https://rss.art19.com/sinica-members-only.

• All podcast apps have the ability to do this, but it’s a bit different for different apps. Let us know at subscriptions@thechinaproject.com if you need assistance (noting which app you use).
• Today’s early release Sinica is: “Can China meet its ambitious emissions targets?” with Michael Davidson, a leading scholar on China’s environmental policy at UC San Diego.

Our word of the day is the Chinese name of U.S. trade representative Katherine Tai: 戴琪 Dài Qí.

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief