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It's rare to see successive and extensive news coverage of corruption among major Chinese Communist Party leaders, and there's been 3 this year already: Bo Xilai in March, Xi Jinping in June, and now Wen Jiabao.

This year's unusual because 7 major members of the Politburo Standing Committee are stepping down and their replacements will be selected at the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. This is the reason the dueling political factions are aggressively ousting eachother, or else stories about corruption would never have made it to major media outlets.

The Congress was originally scheduled to commence November 4th (or sometime just before the US presidential elections) but was suddenly changed to November 8th. I don't think there's been official commentary on the last minute date change, but it's pretty obvious the Chinese party leaders want to know who's going to be the next US president first so they could "adjust" the makeup of of the Chinese political body accordingly.

I'm impressed by Bloomberg's and NYT's coverage. There's so much stuff that gets suppressed, even when tidbits of stories go viral on Weibo, the entire story almost never makes it over to this side of the Atlantic in one piece.



By Atlantic I meant Pacific, because I'm obviously a geography genius :)




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