– ISIS captive, as told to an interviewer on the Chinese show On the Road.
The entire show has since been censored by Chinese authorities

Zhang (center left, wearing sunglasses) poses with Kurdish forces and members of his film crew

A reality show about a pair of millionaire tourists has been nixed from China’s Internet, after an episode depicting encounters with Kurdish forces fighting ISIS in Syria was broadcast on the mainland.

Married couple Zhang Xinyu, 38, and Liang Hong, 36, made their name crisscrossing the globe for travel show On the Road, getting about as far as possible from the stereotype of the bovine boor abroad: the pair have filmed themselves in unfashionable spots like Somalia and Chernobyl, enjoying their nuptials in Antarctica and recreating an iconic Buddha previously destroyed by the Taliban.

Zhang is a self-made entrepreneur who joined the PLA Air Force when he was 19. After leaving, he invested his savings in a tofu shop in south Beijing. Bean curd was still a relatively rare delicacy in those days and the business flourished. With a line of tofu-making machines and investments in trade, jewelry and construction, Zhang has been able to fund a passion for travel that has established him and his wife as minor celebrities.

Though the affable pair has probably done more for Chinese soft power than any effort by Xinhua, that hasn’t won them credit with the censors. After Syria, all episodes of On the Road were removed from streaming sites such as Youku and Tudou, their Baidu fan forum was shut down, and the show’s official Weibo account – as well as the couple’s personal microblog accounts – was frozen.

Kurdish forces near the Syrian battlefront

Journey to the Middle East

The most recent episode of On the Road depicted the well-tooled couple running with underpowered Kurdish troops in Syria, launching a drone into ISIS-held territory, and interviewing captured Islamic State troops shortly before their (off-camera) execution. It’s surprisingly bold TV – the sort you can’t possibly get away with in China.

While Beijing has condemned the Paris attacks, it’s not interested in having a conversation on terrorism back home. Beijing is as clueless about fighting Islamist terrorism as Western leaders, as bungling attempts to quell the insurgency among ethnical Muslims in Xinjiang well demonstrate. Short of any solution, Beijing is relying on brute censorship to quell all debate in the meantime. (When ISIS executed a Chinese hostage recently, censors played down news of the killing and suppressed any calls for a reprisal.)

Therefore it’s not a surprise that the show got yanked – the Syria incident crosses every red line on what Beijing considers acceptable for public consumption. What’s curious is it even got broadcast in the first place, given China’s much-ballyhooed Internet restrictions, or that some wishful thinker clearly didn’t think it would cause problems in the first place.

Below is an edited translation of crew member “Liu Feng’s” account of what happened during filming of the controversial episode (which was broadcast last week – the episode was still viewable on YouTube until this weekend; it is now only accessible to members*).

“What happened in Paris yesterday has been going in Iraq and Syria every day for the past five years. On the Road’s Season 3 crew drove to Iraq this May, after breaking through Taliban blockades in Afghanistan. A month later, with the help of Iraqi Kurds, the team entered Syria ‘with no permission,’ heading straight to Kobani, the frontline of Kurds against ISIS,” Liu writes.

“The battlefront is very long and not heavily guarded, though everyone was very hospitable to we Chinese, with many saluting us. [The Kurds] lived in very modest sheds and called each other ‘comrade.’ They even prepared tea for us.

“A 14.5mm machine gun was the only ‘heavy weapon’ in the Kurds’ camp, which jammed very frequently. Their weapons were very old and outdated: most of their ammunition was almost 40 years old. Put it this way – the Kurds are fighting a 2015 war with 1960s weapons, whereas their rivals ISIS, after capturing Mosul, took over local Iraqi and Syrian government arsenals, which included many arms left behind by the US army, including chemical weapons.

“The Kurds were fascinated by our crew’s filming drone. They sent the drone above ISIS territory and filmed for a while […].” Three days after the crew left, though, disaster struck the Kurdish team. ISIS “used mustard gas on the Kurds. Seven soldiers who were just drinking tea with Zhang days ago died.”

The team also visited a camp of female Kurdish soldiers, aged 17 to 27, described as “highly limited” in their physical ability to attack ISIS but psychologically effective because “ISIS would most hate to die at their hands… in the world of ISIS, a man killed by a woman will never go to heaven.” When the crew gifted the women their bulletproof vests, “the Kurds had obviously never seen one and had to test them by shooting at it.”

The team decided to help their Kurdish allies seek out some “real action” by sending a drone deep into ISIS-held territory; when the enemy fired on the aerial camera, light tracers betrayed their position (miraculously, the drone escaped completely intact). Soon after, the crew got to meet the enemy face to face.

“[The Kurds] agreed to let us interview a couple of ISIS captives. Yes, real, bona fide ISIS members. We wanted to see what they look like, what they think, how they act, how they face death. Three men were brought into our room, all blindfolded.

Zhang (left) waits to interview one of the seated captives

“We knew they were all going to be executed”

“The first came from Turkmenistan, was extremely handsome and looking not the slightest bit brutal. He had been in ISIS for a long, long time but we couldn’t communicate with him, as he did not speak Russian, Arabic or Turkish.

“The second was from Tunisia, and was strong. He said he had been a house painter before… after the Arab Spring a year ago, he went to Syria and joined the [Free Syrian Army] to fight against Assas. There he was recruited by ISIS and had an ISIS-arranged marriage. During battle in January, he was injured and captured.

“‘Have you killed anyone?’ [On the Road host] Zhang asked. He answered that, because they just randomly opened fire in battle, someone could have been unknowingly hit but he didn’t directly know if he’d killed someone – though perhaps he was trying to play down his own guilt. ‘So do you think ISIS is Muslim?’ He kept shaking his head. ‘Some extremist things that ISIS does is against Islam. This is not Islam.’ He then lowered his head and murmured that ISIS had tricked him: he missed home and he missed his mother.” (Reports from defectors suggest that disillusionment is quite common among overseas recruits)

“The third one pissed us off. He was 24 and a Kurd from Turkey himself. He was studying engineering in Turkey and didn’t even know Koran well. He just watched some ISIS promotional videos at school, contacted some extremists… then just left school and joined ISIS in Syria. On the first day, an ISIS officer asked if he was willing to be a human bomb and go to heaven, and he said no. He was then sent to rookies’ camp for two month. The first time he was sent into battle, he was captured. He considered ISIS simply a rather extremist form of Islam but not wrong. He also thought ‘beheading’ was simply the Islamic form of execution… Zhang asked if he knew what would happen to him. He bit his lip. ‘Do you miss your mother?’ ‘Yes.’ Then he began crying. Because ISIS doesn’t exchange POWs, we knew they were all going to be executed. We heard three gunshots in the camp when we left.”

One of the three ISIS hostages later believed to have been executed by the Kurds

While Weibo searches for the show produce no results, Zhang and Liang’s many fans are using the social media platform to make plain their disappointment at the show’s suspension and express concerns about their personal safety. During the third season of On the Road, Zhang and Liang made global headlines by “recreating” the destroyed Buddas of Bamiyan for their Kurdish friends, and were said to have been captured by ISIS, a rumor they dispelled by attending a book launch in the capital in late October. Instead, they have now vanished from their own country’s cyberspace.

Valentina is a journalist in Beijing. Follow her @valentinaluo

* UPDATE: Reader @Pennyfeathr kindly points out that episodes of the ISIS trip are back on YouTube, albeit at a different account. Watch the two parts here:

The Cheese Stands Alone: Welcome You to the Xi Jinping Phone App

Something for the weekend, sir? With Chinese cadres under official instruction to behave themselves for, perhaps, ever, the kind folks at Ccln.gov.cn, a website operated by the Central Communist Party School, have offered them a replacement entertainment to getting lobster-faced and curling up with a dead-eyed mistress.

The classics-quoting, picture-rich, cutting-edge “Learning China” app was launched yesterday, and is set to blow your mind – or your phone. Just three minutes after I opened the app, my two-year-old HTC had frozen up –  like its owner, it was obviously having a hard time processing all the fun.

I restart the phone. OK, here we go.

The app, according to Chen Jiancai, the Deputy Chief Editor of the tech-savvy Ccln.gov.cn – which supposedly stands for “Chinese Cadres Learning Network” – is based on the “Xi Jinping database” (huh?) and aims to present Xi Jinping’s important speeches since the 18th Party Congress, when he took over Zhongnanhai, through sections entitled “News, Live Map, Mini Courses, Knowledge Map, Xi Dada* Syllabus, Expert Interpretation, Select Commentary, Ebook, Theoretical Articles, Crucial Analysis, Quoted Poems and Xi Dada Anecdotes” (ooh).

“Everyone can find something that interests him or her,” says Chen. It’s a bold claim and therefore one Beijing Cream was keen to test. Let’s have a look, shall we?

In “Mini Courses,” you may watch 5-7-minute videos, each explaining one of the important political credos dreamt up and spat out since Xi’s big takeover, such as “Hong Kong-Shanghai Express,” “Bottom-Line Thinking” (aka, pessimism, fyi), “The Four Comprehensives,” “One Belt, One Road” etc.

The eBook section includes Xi’s latest masterpiece The Governance of China (for FREE), a collection edited by the People’s Daily editorial team of “classics quoted by Xi,” studying notes of Xi’s articles, Xi Zhongxun’s – Xi the Senior, or Xi Daddy – Anthology, which includes Xi Zhongxun in Shaanxi, Gansu and Ningxia, Xi Zhongxun in Changge, Xi Zhongxun in Guangdong, ad infinitum.

If, by any chance, you need to search for any speech made by Xi at any time and any place, you may go to the star feature of the app, “Live Map” – which is neither live, by the way, nor a map – and see the complete. footage. of it. Thus:

Sing it with Xi: We’re on the road… to rejuvenation… Altogether now!

In this cut, entitled “Xi Jinping attends Panda Garden opening ceremony with Belgian King,” you can see a series of bored white men standing in front of stereotypical Chinese buildings, with Xi Jinping and… a panda! A true bargain: Seen one, seen too much. (Actually, that panda one is a bit of a stand-out. Well worth a look.)

Our favorite tab, and sure to be yours, is obviously the “Xi Jinping Anecdotes.” It’s a combination of heart-warming stories about courage and hierarchy in the face of adversity – “Xi Told Underling to Buy Rubber Shoes for Flood Victim” – and Buzzfeed-style listicles (“15 Comments Foreign Leaders Made on Xi Jinping,” “10 Bits of Trivia That Show Xi’s Respect for the Elderly”) that try hard to make you regret clicking on them: the old clickbait-and-switch.

The app, unfortunately, isn’t available in Google Play yet, because Google notably gave CNNIC, who endorsed the app, a big and well-deserved screw-you just days ago for abusing the trust placed in it by the search engine to outsource its security certifications and thus allowing MITM attacks. 

Comments are already beginning to trickle in on the App Store, and it’s clear that someone is having a chuckle. One review claims to be from a thief who promptly returned the stolen phone after reading the app and seeing the error of his ways.

Another simply notes: “Under Boss Xi’s leadership I downloaded this app instantly when I saw it. It’s so impressive I’ve been brought to tears. Boss Xi’s footprints are all over the world and his speeches motivate the whole country. I must use this app everyday. Boss Xi is the guide and the light. Thank the author!”

It’s getting harder to separate wumao from parody these days

But you may download it directly, using an iPhone or just a phone. Personally I wouldn’t keep it for long on my phone, but that’s just me. The thing is definitely not riddled with spy and malware. 

*Quick Xi Jinping 101: Xi Dada is the cute nickname given to Xi by the propaganda department his adoring people. Means Uncle Xi, not Father Xi (that would be creepy).

Follow the author of this piece @valentinaluo

From left to right: Sima Nan, Zhou Xiaoping, and Fang Zhouzi

Until this week, the social critic Sima Nan was best known for getting his head stuck in an escalator at Dulles Airport. That moment was particularly precious because Nan, a devoted neo-Maoist, had just posted another of his anti-America screeds on Sina Weibo before flying to DC.

But China’s most famous wumao is now back in the news for a more impressive reason: as an impassioned defender of free speech.

The wumao, or 50-centers, are patriotic Web commenters who sing the praises of big government, whether for a paycheck or genuine nationalism – the latter have a special name, Ziganwu, “wumao who runs on his own fuel.” (Indeed, this very site has lately been enjoying their considerable insight –Ed.)

The talk of the Chinese Internet has been the overnight elevation of a new leader to the wumao ranks, “online writer” Zhou Xiaoping. Zhou reportedly was invited to attend a Forum on Art and Literature on October 15 held by “Uncle” Xi Jinping, where he posted a rather blurry selfie that featured the chairman in the background. That he wasn’t wrestled to the ground indicated Zhou’s star was in the ascendancy.

The 33-year-old actually began his writing efforts with a Sina blog back in 2005, where his provocatively titled articles have the measured nuance of Rush Limbaugh on a Vicodin binge. “America-Style Democracy Can Kill You,” begins one. Another warns, “If American Soldiers Invade China, I Will Have No Choice But To Join the Taliban.” Many are plain vulgar: “Some Gossip About the Gay Affair Between Gary Locke and Brother Blind” describes an alleged relationship between the former US ambassador and blind activist Chen Guangchen.

Such sophomoric writings have made Zhou a laughingstock even within the wumao community. His nickname, “Belt Fish” Zhou, was earned for his penchant toward fabricating evidence (Zhou had claimed that social critic Charles Xue was “spreading rumors” about Zhejiang beltfish farms suffering water pollution. When people pointed out that the beltfish is not farmed, Zhou revised his article and claimed the original was by an unknown sock puppet out to discredit him).

Has Xi actually read any of Zhou’s bollocks? Hard to say, but that’s irrelevant now anyway. Following the presidential praise, Zhou is a made man, and millions of readers have to pretend to give a shit about what he says. He has interviews with People’s Daily and affiliated tabloid Global Times (neither mention the beltfish), and has published three articles (“Broken Dreams in the USA,” “Fly, Chinese Dream,” and “Their Dreams and Our Flags”) on Reference News, the best-selling newspaper in China.

Not that there aren’t knives out for Zhou. Fang Shimin, better known as Fang Zhouzi for his relentless fights against plagiarism and fraud, published his own point-by-point critique of Zhou’s “Broken Dreams” on October 21.

The pair has history. Fang himself was maligned by Zhou in a 2010 article titled “This World Will Enjoy Harmony When Fang Zhouzi Doesn’t Exist Anymore.” It took four years, but Zhou’s wish was realized merely hours after Fang’s rebuttal came out: Not only was the blog deleted, Fang’s accounts on Sina Weibo and Sina Blog were soon gone altogether. Within a day, almost all reposts of the article were also erased. It’s as if Fang didn’t exist anymore.

But with Fang, has harmony returned to the galaxy? Far from it, says, of all people, Sima Nan. “Fang held his rationality as always and corrected the untrue parts in [Zhou Xiaoping]’s article,” Sima wrote (pictured below). “I tried to repost Fang’s article but was blocked too. Firstly, I hope that was a mistake by law enforcement; second, I hope the blogger [i.e. Zhou] will stand up and speak for himself; and third, hopefully Fang Zhouzi’s account will be spared from death when the sun rises again.”

Alas, it was Sima’s post itself that was deleted. That led to a meditation on rule of law, the theme of the Communist Party’s Fourth Plenum.

“Learning from the plenum documents should combine realities. There’s one thing I just can’t get over thinking about,” admitted the leftist in an emotional plea. “A popular science writer that I know, whose name now cannot even be mentioned, is blocked all over the Internet. None of his works can be read on Weibo or WeChat. Please – exactly what law did this writer break? Stripping him of his right to speech rights, is that legal? Please help me understand!”

That post was also blocked. Unbowed, Sima made a third petition: “Could [administrators] mercifully allow [Fang’s] popular science writings to be published? Even in the days when the Qin Emperor launched his ‘Burning Books and Burying Scholars’ campaign, he didn’t burn all books… Your grace, please think carefully!”

So, why is Sima Nan doing this?

Well, he wasn’t always been known for being a blowhard. Sima was once a keen critic of pseudo-science himself in the 1990s. He met Fang in 1997 as a guest speaker at a forum led by Fang on academic corruption, according to this interview. “Fang Zhouzi is hardworking, insightful and feisty… many elites choose to protect themselves by not pointing fingers at plagiarism and lies, but some choose to stand out. Fang is a respectable, fearless warrior,” he told the journalist in 2010.

Fang returned the favor by publicly acknowledging Sima as a friend, something which won him few friends (here’s Sima having a shoe thrown at him by one of his detractors). “I don’t agree with his basic political ideas, but it doesn’t mean I can’t make friends with him,” Fang said in an interview with Tencent News. “I’m not looking for a political ally.”

But friendship may be only part of the reason. Political observer Zhang Lifang says that Xi Jinping’s Mao-style Forum is an attempt to seize the “market” of mainstream commentary and “replace it with political control.” Many, like Sima, were tempted to sign up, says Zhang: “But as it turned out to simply mean degrading themselves ahead of cheap scum like Zhou, they are reluctant.

“Even if Zhou doesn’t have a market, he doesn’t need one. If one day all public intellectuals are diminished, [wumao] will lose their jobs too. That’s why you now see many wumaos like Sima Nan talking more and more like public intellectuals.”

That, after all, may not be a bad thing.

Follow Valentina @valentinaluo.

Han Han: like his work, a mood piece

Witty but otherwise empty, The Continent manages to show again that its director-scriptwriter, Han Han, is a dab hand at word games, but possibly little more. Dwelling on the dreams and confusion of modern Chinese youth, a theme that features tirelessly in his novels, the writer (and occasional race-car driver) chooses to tell his tale story from behind the wheel — another safe zone. But directionless and self-absorbed, the journey is more drag than race. Its title song, “The Ordinary Road,” says it all.

[SPOILERS ALERT] Wishing to explore the world outside and look for a pen pal he has fallen in love with, Ma Haohan (William Feng, Painted Skin 2) leaves the small island he grew up on, with two friends: Jiang He (Wilson Chen, Buddha Mountain), a nerdy geography teacher, and Hu Sheng, the narrator (who disappears from the screen after day one). Jiang, a hopelessly naive idealist, soon loses his heart to Su Mi, a “call girl” (May Wang, Driverless), while Ma, who turns out to be less well-rounded and sophisticated than he claims, finds that his epistolary ‘dream girl’ Liu Yingying (Yolanda Yuan, Like a Dream) is actually his half-sister, who’s been hiding the ugly truth about their father from him for decades.

Not discouraged by the lies upon lies they are told, the bumbling pair pick up yet another stranger in A Lyu, an astronomy fan and former motorcyclist who claims to have “lost” his bike and wife. Just as the two begin to trust him, he steals their car. And that is pretty much it. [ENDS SPOILERS]

The deliberate juxtaposition of the two travelers in their crisscrossing countryside escapades guarantees conflict – Ma is a supposedly street-smart taxi driver turned security guard, while Jiang is instantly recognizable as a wenyi qingnian (“cultural youth”), bearing ridiculous glasses and poems learned by heart (even his job sounds straight out of a Cultural Revolution memoir). Yet for the best part of the film’s 100 minutes, the two live in all-but-parallel worlds, only occasionally trading snarky comments with each other. “Cheaters can be trusted partially too!” says Jiang, after their car is stolen by Lyu: Han hopes such lines depict the multiplicity of his character’s inner lives, but should realize by now that telling a story on paper is different from on the screen.

Poster for ‘The Continent’

The females appear, by comparison, better developed. Certainly, their struggles are more compelling than those of Han’s listless, dreamy men. Su’s fraudulent ways are the desperate act of a mother dreaming of giving birth in a foreign country while Yingying chooses to calmly spell out the brutal truth over pool, rather than admit her feeling for Ma. The relative success of their characters only destabilises the drama, making the men look even feebler.

And when the actors start uttering carefully crafted dialogue about life and love (“You haven’t even viewed the world, how can you have a worldview?” asks one. Another consoles, “If you like someone, indulge. But if you love someone, refrain”), it sounds like chicken soup for the soul, served up at a rural Henan funeral. The Continent only offers the kaleidoscope of modern society a road film demands when the two leads are off-camera.

Zhou Mo, for example, a friend they visit, works as an extra in an anti-Japanese war film, a genre encouraged by the government since the 1990s. Su Mi, when told by Jiang that he’s a teacher, mimics a student (“Hello, teacher”), echoing the Dongguan nightclub role-play scene in Jia Zhangke’s infinitely superior A Touch of Sin. Su Mi’s life plan is also a true-to-life epitome of the middle class Chinese Dream (‘get rich and get out’). But what entertained the audience in the Beijing cinema I went to was a line from motorcyclist Lyu, who says his first road trip was delayed in Beijing because “the traffic’s so bad, even the motorcycles can’t move.”

If Jia Zhangke’s masterpieceweaves together the fates of four disparate wanderers, all from the underclass of modern China, Han draws instead on a single generation, the balinghou (post-80s) he grew up with. What these people share is not elite exploitation but insecurity about the future. Cynical cabbie Ma may seem to be the fictionalized race driver himself, but the artistic and clearly more thoughtful Jiang seem closer to the younger, idealistic defiant Han. He was loyal to his faith pushing the boundaries of his dreams; he made it. But the sceptical and pessimistic Ma is what’s left after years of fighting the Man— the government, critics, those who like him, those who don’t. He’s tired and in the end, surrenders.

The book The Continent most resemblesis Han’s 2010 road fiction 1988: I Want to Talk with the World, about a young man driving a Jeep,“1988,” to pick up its owner. As in The Continent, there’s a petty romance with a prostitute – Han likes to present this modern Chinese society through their dejected tales –but also darker, political themes. AIDS, corruption, the death of a dissident in a Tibetan jail, the slaughter of ’89, are all alluded to in Han’s dexterous wordplay (a technique initially developed to evade censorship) but he’s clearly incapable – or unable – of translating that visually.

For millions, myself included, he is still the defiant 16 year old who dared to challenge authority with his sarcasm and smirks. He represented the bravery and integrity we longed to have ourselves. Young adults liked him not only because he was cool but it was cool to like him at the time. Whether Han still is (cool) or not, the sight of fans of Guo Jingming, whose much-derided Tiny Times 3 premiered a week before The Continent, can still induce disdainful sneers at these “wannabe materialists.”

That makes us feel good about ourselves. What shouldn’t engender much pride is how lacking in superiority Han’s product is to Guo’s trilogy (and the only thing preventing the pair from box-office domination is Transformers 4). “I wasted too much essaying in the past years…although they carried my thoughts and may perhaps have had its social meaning.” Han told film critic Cheng Qingsong last week. “Artworks last longer by comparison… Essays are like one night stands, but films and novels are like love… I think I should do more of them.” As an actor, maybe.

Follow @valentinaluo on Twitter

The finger is now being pointed at Rui Chenggang

The arrest of another journalist in China is normally cause for concern: as the news is shared across social networks, tweets of sympathy accumulate, human rights groups and lawyers protest, and diplomats may even issue statements of public concern.

But the detention of economics anchor Rui Chenggang (pictured), reportedly “dragged” from his offices by investigators just hours before his show was due to go live, has prompted almost the opposite – the overwhelming response, as the NY Times’s Ed Wong noted, has been one of schadenfreude (xingzai lehuo, “feel happy about someone’s disaster”). In a rare show of alliance, Western journalists and Chinese state media have instead issued a steady drip of allegations and gloating commentaries about Rui’s supposed misdeeds.

“It’s just breathtaking how many people feel disgusted or offended when he’s mentioned,” tweeted anti-censorship commentator Michael Anti while neatly skewering China’s own public-relations problem: “Such a classic example of negative PR, and yet Rui’s hailed as some icon of the nation’s soft power. There you have it, China’s rise.”

If a man is judged by the company he keeps, Rui was always keen to share his circle with the world. On his blogs, acquaintanceships with the likes of Bill Gates and Kevin Rudd were dropped with the frequency of one who has something to prove; his conversation is said to be similarly peppered with, “As Bill [Clinton] once told me…” or “As I said to Henry [Kissinger]…”

“[He’s] the biggest name-dropper I know,” said a former colleague at state mouthpiece CCTV, where he was a frequent presenter of Economics News Broadcast. Speaking on condition of anonymity, the colleague described her former peer in none-too-impressed terms: “Arrogant. Snobby. Climber.” And then there are his close relationships with many who have already fallen victim to the purge that is scything through Chinese society under the banner of a corruption crackdown (Rui is said to have boasted, for example, about his friendship with Bo Guagua, at least before the senior Bo was charged with corruption).

Still, none of this behavior qualifies as criminal – merely distasteful. Under the microscope, though, are apparent financial transgressions formerly considered de rigeur in Chinese media circles.

According to financial records reviewed last week by Tencent Finance, Rui helped set up a PR company called Pegasus and owned 30% of the firm. Pegasus later made the “Top 1o Chinese PR Firms” list compiled by the China International Public Relations Association and, since 2009, numbered among its clients — perhaps unsurprisingly —  Rui’s employer, CCTV Finance Channel for its Davos coverage (cutting Rui loose on LinkedIn, the WEF’s managing director had this to say on the matter).

Alan VanderMolen: issued denial

Edelman’s owners, via DJE vice-chairman Alan VanderMolen (who inked the purchase of Pegasus while running the firm’s Asia-Pacific operations), later confirmed to PR industry publication the Holmes Report that “Pegasus was engaged by corporate sponsors involved in underwriting CCTV’s presence” at Davos in 2009 and 2010. VanderMolen declined to identify the sponsors and added that there was no commercial relationship between CCTV and Pegasus “to my knowledge.”

Also taken away that fateful day was Li Yong, the Deputy Director of the Finance Channel, where Rui had worked since 2003, bringing the total of those at CCTV under investigation to nine – including its director Guo Zhenxi, producer Tian Liwu, and now its youngest presenter, the once-fragrant female anchor Ouyang Zhiwei.

Rui may have named his company Pegasus, the mythological wingéd horse, but a more apt classical analogy might be Icarus, the youthful highflier doomed by arrogance.

The well-connected 37-year-old presenter, who has been a regular at Davos World Economic Forum since he was 22, did not appear to envisage his own downfall, which was so sudden that his chair and microphone were still in place, awaiting him. In the event, the show aired at 20:30 on July 11, with his co-host taking on sole presenting duties.

Equally ignorant, apparently, were his colleagues: “We kept phoning him before the programme aired, but the calls never went through,” a CCTV staffer told Thepaper. “That’s why we didn’t even take down his mic.”

But his boss, Guo, had been detained on June 1 – a sure sign, at least, that trouble was imminent. Ever the showman, Rui batted off the rumors, issuing a denial through his assistant while taking to Weibo to quote a conversation between two ancient Zen masters (thus, of course, alluding to his own wisdom): “Hanshan asks Shide, ‘People libel me, bully me, insult me, trick me and neglect me. What should I do?’ Shide laughs: ‘Bear with them, avoid them, tolerate them, respect them and ignore them. Give it a few years, and let’s see.’”

In fact, Rui was only given a few weeks. Meanwhile, he was, at least, wise enough to hedge: his wife and child left for the US in June, according to elite gossip, and are not expected to return.

Fellow anchor Ouyang Zhiwei, led away by prosecutors in June, also appears to be in the soup

 ~

It should not be surprising that his career has almost certainly peaked at the comparatively early age of 36. Rui Chenggang was always an early developer. Born in 1977, he began learning English when he was 10, and according to his own claims, was reading English-language books, including Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by the time he reached middle school.

The top gaokao (university entrance exam) scorer in Hefei, his hometown, Rui entered the Foreign Affairs University in Beijing in 1995, where he had a chance to see the world through an international debate contest. He was, he says, shocked to find how Western youth were educated to express their opinions freely, and told Southern People Weekly he felt like an idiot

In 1999, Rui graduated and, turning down offers from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Bank of China, chose to work at an emerging arm of the state-owned CCTV: the English Channel.

A former colleague there, according to the same article, recalls a man “extremely good at the language [English] and quite smart. He… often said things like he ‘wanted to become the bridge of communication between the East and the West.’” Rui was also an avid self-promoter, says the colleague. When interviewing, he’d hand out copies of his book, urge them to watch his programmes and collect photographs of himself with foreign luminaries.

Four years after Rui began at CCTV English, he was talent-spotted by Finance Channel producer Wang Lifen to host Global News Bulletin, a new current-affairs show. He quickly made a name for himself, scrutinizing the scripts and frequently digressing from them, a practice all but unheard-of among Chinese anchors. A pattern in his work behavior began to emerge: superiors such as producer Qian Xi, who has worked with Rui since 2003, called him “the symbol of the Finance Channel’s internationalization,” even while colleagues and underlings recalled an aloof, distant figure.

“He gets close to the leaders, but stays very distant from common coworkers, barely even saying ‘hello’ to them,” said one peer, who asked not to be named because he still works for the channel.

With a 200- to 300-million-strong audience, Rui’s domestic admiration mostly stemmed from public associating himself with world elites at Davos in 2008;  he enjoyed almost rock-star status among younger viewers. But Rui’s link to Davos wasn’t limited to a role in front of the cameras. By then, Pegasus – the firm he still held a 36% share of – had become the executive service provider for CCTV, reportedly finding a studio for the station a mere 200 metres from the main venue in Switzerland. Tony Blair (pictured) apparently called it “the most cozy and comfortable studio in all of Davos,” according to Tencent. Rui reportedly only sold his Pegasus shares in 2010.

British ex-PM Tony Blair with former News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks, recently acquitted of phone hacking

Sources in CCTV also told thepaper.cn that Rui’s family set up their own PR firm, with the sole purpose of commercializing Rui’s interview subjects, their schedules and campaign content. Certainly, he is believed to enjoy a close personal friendship with politician Ling Jinhua’s family that has been subject to longstanding rumors.

Such conflicts of interest appear at odds with his role as a journalist, at least in foreign eyes – but then Chinese media is saturated with such misbehavior. Is it against the law? Even the Global Times wondered. “Did [Rui] know that such behavior was illegal?” asked an unsigned editorial on Tuesday. “Perhaps he believed he was in a gray area where some seek personal gains by exploiting their positions. But the anti-corruption campaign not only targets ‘black holes,’ but also gray areas.”

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Advertising and public relations (gonggong guanxi) is one of the murkiest industries in China (and also, to be fair, elsewhere). The word guanxi implies connections, the ability to enjoy a string-pulling reach that bests rivals: How many journalists and celebrities can you guarantee at a product launch? Which newspapers can be bought off to stay quiet about a scandal?

Ding Shumiao, for instance, the Shanxi businesswoman accused of colluding with the disgraced railways chief Liu Zhijun over projects worth 180 billion yuan (HK$226 billion), reportedly collected nearly 4 billion yuan securing contracts for the high-speed network with Liu’s help. Her company, founded in 2008, became practically the exclusive advertisement agency for high-speed rail, reaped 120 million RMB in 2010 alone from state-owned companies attending the seventh World Congress on High Speed Rail in Beijing, all thanks to Liu.

One of the Finance Channel’s trademark shows, the annual Consumer Rights Gala on March 15, had become another income source for Guo and his gang. Notorious for its toothless exposes of “scandals” usually perpetuated by foreign firms – while ignoring the egregious antics of domestic giants – the show has been widely mocked in recent years for its clumsy nationalism and reporting techniques.

According to Caixin, local governments and companies routinely inquire before annual tapings to see if their products were on the CCTV “blacklist,” and then offer to pay a gagging fee. Other programmes, such as the praise-singing Economic Figures of the Year, are essentially paid services available to the highest bidder. One website operator told Caixin that Guo had often used his influence to ask portals to delete critical posts about companies that had approached him, or other presenters familiar with him, for help (a practice known in China as “black” PR).

The downfall of Rui and his mentor, Guo, can be seen as part of the aftermath of Li Dongsheng’s arrest and, behind that, ex-Politburo security czar Zhou Yongkang’s own (still unofficial) downfall. Li had worked at CCTV for 21 years, since 1978, and eventually became the vice chief of the state channel. He took off quickly from there and moved on to state censors, the then-SARFT, and the Ministry of Propaganda.

It was in 2007, says Caixin (in an article already deleted), that Li hoped to join the Central Standing Committee of the Communist Party, but was hindered by his rivals, who tipped off ministers that his daughter was studying in the UK thanks to illicit “sponsorship” and his brother, who was running an advertising agency, was also benefiting from his positions.

Li’s trouble, however, was “handled, thanks to a senior leader’s help,” according to a source of Caixin. This “senior leader” is now believed to be none other than Zhou Yongkang, once henchman-in-chief of China’s sprawling security apparatus, and whose power network has been steadily eroded since retirement via a series of arrests and investigations (Zhou himself has not been seen in public since December).

Zhou Yongkang and Bo Xilai – two ex-Politburo heavyweights, now tainting anyone in their midst

The source, however, could not confirm how close exactly the two were, nor the validity of the rumor that Li introduced Jia Xiaoye, the then-CCTV Finance Channel producer, to Zhou, 28 years her senior; the pair later married.

On June 14, just three days after the capture of Rui Chenggang, Li was announced together with Jiang Jiemin and Wang Yongchun, two former chiefs from the CNPC, as being formally investigated. Both had worked for many years with Zhou.

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While at Yale for a year in 2005 – he is still a World Fellow – Rui was remembered as a self-styled fenqing (“angry youth”), promoting and defending the motherland on a personal mission, whenever he heard “anti-China” voices. He took one law professor to task for calling China “not a democratic country”; Rui argued “Americans always think there’s only one type of democracy, which is the American kind. But democracy has different meanings and different stages.”

On his popular blog, a large part of which is devoted to conversations and photos with his star-studded Rolodex, Rui’s best-known piece is still the one published in 2007, calling for Starbucks to be ejected from the Forbidden City. (That didn’t prevent Rui from having his cake while eating it, boasting of email exchanges with Jim Donald, the coffee chain’s new CEO, as if the pair were close friends.)

Indeed, according to one guest who shared a banqueting table with Rui, the host frequently referred to former US President Bill Clinton as “a very good friend of mine.” Like most of his associates, which once included Kevin Rudd, George W. Bush and Warren Buffet, Clinton seems unlikely to come to the defense of his “friend” in his hour of need.

Former Rui associates include Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Rupert Murdoch and Henry Kissinger

Question marks even surround the true extent of Rui’s wealth. The TV star, who purportedly enjoys an official salary of around 150,000 RMB a year, is known for his cost-cutting ways. At the aforementioned banquet, a well-lubricated Rui is said to have finished two bottles of wine before a Sinopec executive at the table that he could polish off a third. The stake Rui demanded? A Sinopec card, so he could fill up for free in perpetuity.

If that seems grasping for someone who famously drives a foreign-made Jaguar, it may be worth noting that surface is very often illusory, especially in China. One user of Zhihu – a kind of Chinese Quora – claims his client was constantly being hassled to lend his car, a Land Rover, to a wealthy neighbor: one Rui Chenggan.

And perhaps due to his domestic celebrity, Rui sometimes over-estimated his influence abroad. A hotel management student at the University of Nevada recalled that, when Rui stayed at the Las Vegas hotel where she was interning, he made an indecent proposal. When she declined Rui’s offer, the host allegedly became incensed at what he inferred as the suggestion he couldn’t afford the asking price.

According to a PR manager for Emirates Airline, Rui purchased an economy-class ticket to visit Brazil but demanded a free upgrade to first class. Unsurprisingly, he was rejected, but took his grievance to Weibo (writing that “Emirates’s A380 feels really so-so. Although the plane is a bit bigger and looks new, there’s no enhancement to comfort and the space division makes one feel suppressed… Emirates’ trademark fake-mahogany interior feels like only faux luxury”).

Li Yong, the deputy director also arrested, never even made it to Brazil: he was reportedly stopped at customs en route to report on the BRICS summit, though it’s not clear what exactly for. The local rumor mill suggests his arrest may actually be unrelated to Guo’s; the two are said to dislike one another.

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players” was one of several Shakespeare quotations Rui was fond of tossing into speeches. (In his autobiography, Rui professes to be able to recite entire sections of Shakespeare, Francis Bacon and Bertrand Russell). Alas, it seems that Rui has now exited the stage, apparently pursued by a bear even he can’t tame.

Follow Valentina @valentinaluo (H/T RFH)

A possible emblem for the Chinese Scientist Liberal Democratic Party

By Valentina Luo