accountability & transparency

around the globe?

I mentioned yesterday that my husband and I spoke on China’s problems three times day before last. We had a range of interesting questions, one strong rebuttal (aimed primarily at me), and one other assertion, made with complete confidence but only sketchy evidence, about what China’s leadership is doing. I want to pull something out of my responses to our audiences Monday to mesh, surprisingly, with two other news items this week.

First, knowing for certain whether China’s General Secretary of the Communist Party Xi Jinping had prior knowledge of the balloon transit (and shoot down, as it turned out) is purely speculation. I would go so far as to say we will never know that answer because that same leader has effected a virtual curtain over CCP decision-making that is even harder to see through than it was for prior decades. Stalinist parties aren’t organisations prone to discuss their decision-making outside the group (albeit 90 million plus in this Party but out of 1.3 billion that is still restricted in number). Xi has