Bo, once a rising star in China’s leadership circles who had cultivated a following through his populist, quasi-Maoist policies, was jailed for life in September after a dramatic fall from grace that shook the ruling Communist Party.

(Reporting by Ben Blanchard)

BEIJING (Reuters) – The teenage son of a prominent Chinese general goes on trial on Wednesday suspected of involvement in a gang rape in a case that has inflamed public anger at the offspring of the political elite who are widely seen as spoilt and reckless.

Li Tianyi, 17, is among five men accused of sexually assaulting a woman in a Beijing hotel in February, according to state media.

His father is General Li Shuangjiang of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), who is a singer known for performing patriotic songs on television shows and at official events.

Li’s mother, Meng Ge, is a famous singer in the PLA.

It is not the teenager’s first brush with the law. In 2011, he drove a BMW into another car in Beijing, beat up the couple inside the vehicle and then scoffed at bystanders about calling the police.

He was sentenced to a year in a juvenile correctional facility and his father made a public apology.

The latest case has dominated headlines for weeks, focusing attention again on China’s political aristocrats who are widely viewed as corrupt and above the law.

It follows the dramatic trial of ousted former senior politician Bo Xilai, whose family’s lurid excesses were detailed by the court and lapped up on social media.

Li has become the most prominent target of complaints that the sons and daughters of China’s top-ranked Communist Party officials can dodge the law because of family influence.

“The general public is worried that his family, because of their relationships and power, will be able to use their connections,” said Zhang Ming, a politics professor at Renmin University.

“In China, this kind of privilege is very powerful. It’s omnipresent,” Zhang said. “The people’s fears are not groundless.”

In July, hackers attacked the website of one of the law firms representing Li, saying: “We just want to return justice to the client.”

“SUE ME!”

President Xi Jinping has made addressing discontent over abuses by officials a main goal. Rising mistrust of the government presents a potent risk for leaders who fear social instability.

Even the People’s Daily, the party’s mouthpiece, weighed in on Li’s case when it broke, saying the failure of prominent families to educate their children could “lead to antagonism among the people”.

The case has also stoked debate about rape and attitudes towards women.

In July, a law professor at the elite Tsinghua University apologized online after he had said that “raping a chaste woman is more harmful than raping a bar girl, a dancing girl … or a prostitute”, sparking outrage.

Li’s lawyer, Chen Shu, told Reuters Li would not plead guilty but he declined to elaborate except to say the court was not expected to announce a verdict on Wednesday.

Li’s lawyers have asked the court to investigate suspected prostitution and extortion relating to the case, Li’s legal adviser, Lan He, was quoted by the state-run China News Service as saying.

The lawyer for the woman victim could not be reached for comment.

Family connections do not always help unruly offspring.

In 2010, a 22-year-old man was jailed for six years after he ran over a student and shouted “Sue me if you dare. My father is Li Gang!”

Li Gang was a deputy provincial police chief. His son’s warning has become a byword for nepotism and corruption.

(Additional reporting by Beijing Newsroom; Editing by Robert Birsel)

At least 105 people have died and 115 are missing after floods and a typhoon hit parts of China, state media report.

Heavy rain since Wednesday has caused floods in the north-eastern provinces of Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang.

Southern China has been hit by Typhoon Utor, which made landfall in Guangdong province, where 22 people have been killed, reports say.

Neighbouring Hunan province and Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region have also been affected by the typhoon.

The storm passed through Guangdong last week, but the heavy rains which followed it have brought more chaos to the region.

China’s Xinhua news agency described the floods in the north-east as the “worst in decades”.

The floods have caused crop failure across 256,000 hectares of farmland in the region, which is one of China’s major bread baskets, Xinhua reports.

More than 8 million residents of the north-east have been affected by the floods.

Almost 3,000 soldiers are helping with relief efforts, reports say.

• 
• Zao Wou-ki’s rare triptych, 15.1.82

Sanyu’s Goldfish.Fans of Zao Wou-ki will drool at paintings spanning an incredible five decades of the French-Chinese master’s prolific career. A two-by-four metre triptych, 15.1.82, shows the master at his most lyrical and mature. There is a nod towards a traditional Chinese ink landscape, but the vision demonstrates the poetry of Zao’s unique language.

Sylvie Chen, head of 20th-century Chinese art at Sotheby’s, says the work is rare, as Zao’s prodigious oeuvre of more than 3,000 paintings only features about 20 diptychs and triptychs. “The overlaying of colours and the composition make it an exceptional piece of work. This is likely to top Zao’s auction record of just over HK$68 million,” she says.

Even if the painting is sold at the low end of its HK$68 million to HK$90 million valuation, it would still smash the previous record, set in 2011, which includes a roughly 10 per cent commission fee paid for by the buyer that is excluded from pre-sale estimate figures.

The 2011 sale also made headlines because the Chinese bidder initially refused to pay up, but the record still holds because Sotheby’s says it managed to get the full money in the end.

The bold estimate for 15.1.82 acknowledges the quality of the work and an anticipated appreciation in the value of Zao’s works following his death in April, at the age of 92.

After all, HK$68 million is about HK$10 million lower than the auction records for much younger, living contemporary Chinese artists such as Zhang Xiaogang and Zeng Fanzhi.

The 1982 triptych, which, in Zao’s usual style, just has the date stamp for title, is the work of a confident artist comfortable in exploring his ideas about representing a non-visual experience on a two-dimensional surface, says Zao expert Melissa Walt, who teaches contemporary Chinese art at Colby College in the US. “Some of his works I’d describe as transcendental,” Walt says.

According to Sotheby’s Chen, Zao’s large-format paintings from the 1980s represented a breakthrough for the artist, after a tumultuous time in the 1970s. Chan May Kan, his second wife, who he met in Hong Kong, died of a drug overdose in 1972 after a battle with depression, and his brother also died around the same time.

“For a year-and-a-half he couldn’t paint at all,” Chen says. Shortly afterwards, Zao visited China for the first time since he left home for Paris in 1948. This, some critics say, reunited him with the ink brush tradition of Chinese art.

When Zao emerged from his private torment and resumed work, he created some of the most profound images of his career. They catapulted him into the upper echelon of the Parisian art world in the ’80s.

The Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais commissioned a series of large-format works from him for a 1981 solo exhibition, and this marked the zenith of his career at an age when Chinese artists rarely received such recognition, Chen says.

But he didn’t stop there. 22.8.91 is another work being sold by the Yageo Foundation and that, for Walt, is evidence that the artist certainly still “had it” when he was well into his seventies.

“The 1991 painting has so many of the features that I associate with him, especially a mastery of colour. It looks like it’s glowing,” Walt says.

But the October sale is not all about Zao. Highlights from the Yageo sale all hark back to a generation of Chinese artists who drew inspiration from Western culture, long before style and iconography became blurred across national borders in our globalised age.

The catalogue features a lovely Wu Guanzhong – another nonagenarian who died recently – titled Mountain Lu, which shows Lushan in Jiangxi province looking fantastically un-Chinese (estimate: HK$10 million to HK$20 million).

Other gems come from Sanyu, who was part of the Parisian art scene of the late 1920s. He died in poverty, but found fame posthumously as “the Chinese Matisse”, because of the obvious influence of the French master’s particular style of fauvism.

Painting Goldfish (estimated at HK$50 million to HK$70 million) sometime in the 1930s or ’40s, Sanyu could not possibly have imagined a world where ethnic Chinese collectors would dominate international auctions for his kind of paintings. But this particular work is destined to go down well in such a market. The eight (lucky number) goldfish (lucky fish) is perfectly set against a golden orange (lucky colour) background.

As Chen points out, even the pattern of the tablecloth resembles Louis Vuitton monograms, the now familiar icons of China’s nouveau riche. It is a playful work, but the value of the painting is serious. Sanyu’s works only recently started to attract big-ticket collectors outside of Taiwan. But prices are certainly matching the more famous Zao and Wu Guanzhong. Sotheby’s argues the value of his work lies in his unique position in the history of Chinese art.

As one of the first Chinese artists to settle in France, he marked a major transition between the old and the new in Chinese art, Chen says.

The appreciation of Sanyu’s work is nothing short of incredible. His Virgin Mary and the Infant Jesus, an oil painting showing mother and child in front of a thick, black-framed mirror, was valued at HK$3 million to HK$5 million in 2007, but it went unsold when Yageo put it up for a Sotheby’s auction, despite being featured on the outside back cover of the catalogue.

This time, Yageo is asking for HK$15 million to HK$20 million. The owner of the collection, Pierre Chen is, after all, an astute businessman. Chen is the founder of Yageo, a major Taiwanese electronic components maker, with a market capitalisation of almost HK$6 billion.

His extensive collection, which he started in the mid-1990s, is known as much for works by modern Western artists, such as Francis Bacon, as it is for those by Chinese painters. He was ranked the fourth most important art collector in the world by ARTnews this year.

Sotheby’s is confident more highlights will be added to the October 4-8 sales. It has also gathered an impressive list of contemporary Asian and Southeast Asian art that will get plenty of attention.

A number of works by Takashi Murakami and Zhang Xiaogang will make an inevitable appearance, while there is also growing international interest in Southeast Asian art from Hong Kong and Taiwan, says Mok Kim Chuan, Sotheby’s head of Southeast Asian paintings.

One name that crops up a lot is Walter Spies (1895-1942), a German artist who made Bali his home. Described as a “magical realist fable”, his A View from the Heights will be featured in the evening sale.

There will certainly be a feast for the eyes for everyone this autumn, when all the works

The third company penalized was Hong Kong-listed Biostime International Holdings.

All three said they would pay the fines, the first to be publicly announced in the wake of the antitrust review by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), which coincides with separate pricing investigations into the pharmaceutical sector as well as gold trading.

Foreign infant formula is highly coveted in China, where public trust was damaged by a 2008 scandal in which six infants died and thousands of others were sickened after drinking milk tainted with the toxic industrial compound melamine.

Foreign brands account for about half of total sales in China and can sell for more than double the price of local formula.

Mead Johnson, the maker of Enfamil formula, said it would pay a penalty of about $33 million. The company, based in Glenview, Illinois, gave no details on what the NDRC said it had done wrong.

Fonterra, the world’s biggest dairy exporter, said it had been fined NZ$900,000 ($710,700). It also did not say why it had been penalized but added it would give additional training to sales staff and review its distributor contracts.

“We believe the investigation leaves us with a much clearer understanding of expectations around implementing pricing policies,” Kelvin Wickham, president of Fonterra Greater China and India, said in a statement.

Fonterra is embroiled in a separate milk powder contamination scare that has led to product recalls in China, Hong Kong and elsewhere in Asia.

Infant milk producer Biostime, which imports most of its products, said it had been fined 162.9 million yuan ($26.6 million) for price-fixing.

Other companies being investigated include French food group Danone, Nestle and Abbott Laboratories. An Abbott spokeswoman said the firm had cooperated with the NDRC but declined to comment further. Danone and Nestle officials were not immediately available for comment.

In the wake of the NDRC probe, Mead Johnson, Danone, Nestle and others cut prices on their baby formulas by up to 20 percent in China, where the infant milk market is set to grow to $25 billion by 2017.

The report, quoting a statement by an unidentified Chinese official made on Monday, comes during a visit by Japanese Vice Foreign Minister Akitaka Saiki.

Saiki’s visit is the latest in a series of efforts by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to improve relations soured by the bitter row over uninhabited islands claimed by both countries.

The hawkish Abe, who cemented his grip on power in an election last week, has been signaling a desire for dialogue with China – even though Japan has raised its assessment of the risk of China’s military buildup and maritime assertiveness.

The unidentified Chinese official urged the Japanese government to take concrete measures to improve strained ties rather than “empty slogans”, the China Daily report said.

It also said statements by Abe adviser Isao Iijima that a summit between Abe and President Xi Jinping could occur in the “not-too-distant future”, based on conversations with Chinese officials in Beijing in mid-July, were misleading.

A Japanese foreign ministry source in Tokyo said he had not seen the China Daily report and could not comment on it directly, but said it was still possible a summit could be held “at an appropriate time”.

“It is true no concrete date is set for a leaders’ summit or foreign ministers’ summit,” the Japanese source said. “But this does not mean there will never be one in the future.”

China’s foreign ministry also said in a statement on its website on Monday that Iijima had not met any Chinese government officials recently, contrary to reports on Sunday.

The China Daily quoted the unidentified Chinese official as saying: “What Iijima told reporters on Sunday is not true and is fabricated, based on the needs of Japan’s domestic politics.”

Friction between China and Japan over the disputed islands has intensified in recent years. The election of Abe, perceived as reorienting Japan towards a confrontational posture in regard to Beijing, was not welcomed by the Chinese government.

Abe is also perceived in China as being insufficiently or insincerely apologetic for Japan’s past militarism.

Foreign critics have also accused the Chinese Communist Party of manipulating domestic opinion through anti-Japanese propaganda and film to buttress its own legitimacy.

The China Daily is an English language publication put out by the Chinese government for foreign consumption.

While Premier Li Keqiang provides a drip-feed of easy reforms, he will avoid more radical moves for fear of tipping the world’s second-biggest economy over the edge.

Analysts from top government think-tanks say there is no reason to doubt the government’s commitment to rebalancing China’s economy away from an investment- and credit-driven growth model to one that relies more on consumption and innovation.

But the leaders are aware they are walking a fine line and the economy’s weaker-than-expected performance this year has underlined the need to tread carefully. Reform may well secure future growth, but if they push too hard now they could cause an economic shock that forces Beijing to resort to old-school pump-priming, prolonging the very economic model they are trying to dismantle.

“The government has to safeguard its bottom line in growth, while restructuring the economy. It’s very difficult to balance,” said He Qiang, an economist at the Central University of Finance and Economics in Beijing and an adviser to parliament.

“Economic restructuring can not be achieved overnight and it should be a gradual reform, not a revolution.”

Since President Xi Jinping and Li were appointed in March to lead China they have pressed the reform message to wean the country off a diet of breakneck expansion and easy credit that fuelled double-digit growth for three decades and catapulted China to the top table of global economies.

Just last week Xi was quoted by the official Xinhua news agency on the need “to deepen reforms in all aspects” although he also acknowledged the line between “being courageous and walking steadily”.

In a nod to growth concerns, Beijing has unveiled a series of small steps in recent weeks that analysts say are geared to providing quick help to the economy.

Last week, Beijing said it will scrap tax for six million small businesses, speed up railway investment and offer more help to exporters.

That means radical reforms, such as full interest rate liberalisation, are off the table for now although they may be tackled in October, when the Communist Party holds a key meeting that will set its economic agenda for the next decade and which may also include some political reform.

Until then authorities will reach for low-hanging fruit: uncontroversial reforms that move in the right direction and could have some, even if only modest, impact on growth, but which are limited in scope and ambition.

The central bank’s decision earlier this month to remove the floor on bank lending rates is an example. It was welcomed as a largely symbolic prelude to removing caps on deposit rates, a much more difficult task that will take time.

The central bank says a deposit insurance scheme and other preparations are needed before a move on deposits and economists said besides concerns it would squeeze banks’ profits there is also concern about its near-term economic impact.

“They dare not to liberalise deposit rates now as that could push up borrowing costs,” said Liang Youcai, an economist at State Information Centre, a government think-tank. The working assumption is that lending rates would rise to pay for the higher cost of deposits.

BEIJING (Reuters) – The death toll from a 6.6 magnitude earthquake in China’s western Gansu province on Monday more than doubled to 54 people, the municipal government said, with hundreds injured as many homes in affected areas collapsed.

The quake hit Minxian and Zhangxian counties, about 170 km (105 miles) southeast of the provincial capital of Lanzhou, at 7.45 on Monday morning (7.45 p.m. ET Sunday), the official Xinhua news agency said.

It put the number of people seriously injured at 296. Earlier reports by the official Xinhua news agency said 22 people had died.

Eight towns in the remote, mountainous area sustained serious damage in the quake and subsequent flooding and mudslides, state media said.

There were also power outages, while cell phone and Internet coverage was disrupted, residents and state media reported. The Red Cross Society of China said it had sent relief supplies to the affected areas, including jackets and tents.

“Many have been injured by collapsed houses,” said a Minxian county doctor surnamed Du. “Many villagers have gone to local hospitals along the roads.”

Photos posted on Chinese social media showed roads on the sides of riverbanks that had subsided and farmhouses reduced to piles of red bricks.

About 380 buildings had collapsed and 5,600 sustained damaged in Zhangxian county, the Dingxi municipal government said in a microblog post.

A school building in Minxian county was also damaged, a teacher in the area said, although he said he didn’t believe any students were injured because they were away on summer holidays.

Heavy rain is also forecast for the areas hit by the quake, which officials fear would compound the damage by causing more landslides and flooding.

A second 5.6 earthquake struck the same region about 90 minutes after the first, Xinhua said, the most significant of several aftershocks. The United States Geological Survey said the first quake had a magnitude of 5.9.

Gansu abuts Sichuan province, where a 6.6 quake in April killed 164 people and injured more than 6,700, China’s worst quake in three years.

That quake hit close to where a devastating 7.9 temblor killed some 70,000 people in May 2008.

Among those killed in the 2008 quake were thousands of children, raising suspicions that the schools that had collapsed on them had been poorly constructed, in part due to corruption.

(Additional reporting by Michael Martina, Ben Blanchard and the Shanghai Newsroom; Editing by Paul Tait)
Share this

The quake hit near the city of Dingxi in Gansu province, a region of mountains, desert and pastureland with a population of 26 million. That makes it one of China’s more lightly populated provinces, although the New Jersey-sized Dingxi area has a greater concentration of farms and towns with a total population of about 2.7 million.

The deaths and injuries were reported in Min County and other rural southern parts of the municipality, Dingxi Mayor Tang Xiaoming told state broadcaster CCTV. Tang said damage was worst in the counties of Zhang and Min, where scores of homes were damaged and telephone and electricity services knocked out.

Residents described shaking windows and swinging lights but little major damage and little panic. Shaking was felt in the provincial capital of Lanzhou 177 kilometers (110 miles) north, and as far away as Xi’an, 400 kilometers (250 miles) to the east.

“You could see the chandeliers wobble and the windows vibrating and making noise, but there aren’t any cracks in the walls. Shop assistants all poured out onto the streets when the shaking began,” said a front desk clerk at the Wuyang Hotel in the Zhang County seat about 40 kilometers (25 miles) from the epicenter. The clerk surnamed Bao refrained from identifying herself further, as is common among ordinary Chinese.

The government’s earthquake monitoring center said the initial quake at 7:45 a.m. (2345 GMT Sunday) was magnitude-6.6 and subsequent tremors included a magnitude-5.6.

The quake was shallow, which can be more destructive. The center said it struck about 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) beneath the surface, while the Gansu provincial earthquake administration said it was just 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) deep.

The U.S. Geological Survey measured the magnitude of the initial quake as 5.9 and the depth at 10 kilometers (6 miles).

Initial measurements of an earthquake can vary widely, especially if different monitoring equipment is used.

Dingxi is about 1,233 kilometers (766 miles) west of Beijing.

China’s worst earthquake in recent years was a 7.9-magnitude temblor that struck the southwestern province of Sichuan in 2008, leaving 90,000 people dead or missing.

Order was quickly restored and no flights were affected by the explosion, state-run China Central Television said on its microblog.

The official Xinhua News Agency said a wheel-chaired Chinese man set off the device outside the arrivals exit of Terminal 3 at around 6:24 p.m. It said the man was being treated for injuries, but that no one else was injured in the explosion.

CCTV, which also reported that no one else was hurt, identified the man as Ji Zhongxing, born in 1979 and from the eastern province of Shandong.

It was not immediately clear why the man set off the bomb. Police are investigating the incident, Xinhua said.

Photos posted by CCTV on its microblog showed the area outside the arrivals exit empty and filled with smoke. One photo showed medical staff and police officers hovering over a person, with a wheelchair sitting on its side a few steps away.

Reached over the phone, the airport’s news office said it was not aware of the explosion, and airport police declined to answer questions.