President Xi Jinping of Communist China is too afraid to leave the country because the police are trying to do a coup against him!! koodaytarr!

“Xi has a ton of enemies to handle. He can’t just coast into a third term on the basis of his personality cult.” Foreign media sometimes describe him as president for life. But while he removed the two-term limit on the presidency, he still needs party approval to win a third term when the Party Congress meets next October.

Sensationally, Xi has moved decisively against two of the topmost officials responsible for China’s internal security, a serving and a former vice-minister of public security, in less than a week.

One of them, Fu Zhenghua, served as vice-minister until October 2 and also as China’s Justice Minister. He was in charge of China’s police, secret police, prosecution and court system, putting him at the pinnacle of the country’s political-legal apparatus. He was described by Japan’s Nikkei newspaper as “the man who knew too much of Xi’s power plays”.

“Fu is an intriguing case, he was considered close to Xi for many years,” explains the eminent analyst of elite Chinese politics, Willy Wo-Lap Lam. The bland-faced and unwrinkled 66-year-old Fu was considered the ruthless enforcer of Xi’s political purges. “He did Xi a big favour by removing one of his main opponents in 2013.”

Indeed, Fu broke an unwritten rule of top-level party politics to do so. With Xi’s backing, Fu broke the convention protecting former or current members of China’s inner cabinet, the Politburo Standing Committee, against criminal prosecution. He jailed a retired Politburo member for life on a corruption charge in 2015, raising the stakes for political survival in China.

But now the chief purger has been himself purged. “Fu lost favour,” Lam tells me, “because he was seen to be involved in building cliques and factions within the police apparatus. What Xi and all party leaders are paranoid about is senior cadres building cliques and factions because they could be up to all sorts of conspiracy and so forth.”

But perhaps the most dramatic revelation in recent weeks was the publication of two articles last month outlining a foiled police plot against Xi. The exact nature of the plot isn’t clear – the reports didn’t mention whether they planned to swoop and arrest the President or to do something more grievous. McGregor points out that wherever he moves in China, his personal bodyguard unit has “a lot of people” around him.

A “a conspiratorial clique” allegedly was involved in “planning something illegal and improper” against the President during an expected visit to the city of Nanjing, in Jiangsu province.

Several high-level police figures from Jiangsu were named in the plot, supposedly financed by a billionaire who’d been executed for bribery in January, the prominent former head of the Huarong Asset Management company, Lai Xiaomin.

[link to www.smh.com.au (secure)]