Li Changchun

Wikipedia:

Li Changchun (simplified Chinese: 李长春; traditional Chinese: 李長春; pinyin: Lǐ Chángchūn; born February 1944) is the Propaganda chief of the Communist Party of China. He is the 5th ranked member of the Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China, China's de facto top power organ, and has been a member since 2002. He also serves as Chairman of the CPC Central Guidance Commission for Building Spiritual Civilization, de facto Head of propaganda and media relations. Previously he had served in Liaoning, Henan and Guangdong.

Biography

Li Changchun was born in February 1944 at Dairen in the Japanese Kwantung Leased Territory. He joined the Communist Party of China in 1965 and graduated with a degree in electrical engineering from the Harbin Institute of Technology in 1966. In 1983, at age 39, he became the youngest mayor and Party secretary of a major city, of Shenyang, the capital of Liaoning. In 1987, he became governor of the province, a post he kept until 1990. As governor, mainland China's first expressway was built in the province, linking the cities of Shenyang and Dalian. After Zhao Ziyang was purged from the party leadership in 1989 during the fallout from the Tiananmen Square protests that same year, Li was initially also thought to have been removed from the leadership of the Communist Party because Li was a supporter of Zhao. Li's appearance on state television weeks later confirmed that this was not the case. Li served briefly as the Party chief in the agricultural province of Henan in the 1990s. Jiang Zemin sent him to serve as Guangdong Party Secretary, where he cracked down on corruption to 'put the house in order'. Li, again the youngest ever member, was promoted to the Politburo of the Communist Party of China in 1998, and made a member of its Standing Committee after General Secretary Jiang Zemin's retirement in 2002. In October 2007, the Communist Party of China announced that Li would serve another term as Propaganda Chief.

He contributes heavily to China's censorship campaign of propaganda and frequently orders media to downplay or not report on certain events. He currently holds no other official position. In 2006, he told the members of the All-China Journalists Association to "closely encircle the overall work of the party and state". Li approved the construction of the National Museum in 2006 after a series of disputes and delays about the building of the museum. He was the guest of honor at the opening of the National Center for the Performing Arts.

Li has put his support behind a number of creative projects that might otherwise have been censored by the government. He supported Zen Shaolin, a music, dance and martial arts show intended to increase tourism that opened in 2007 in Henan, despite the producers concerns that a celebration of religion and sacred music would be opposed by the government. Li allowed a 2009 movie Nanking! Nanking! by Lu Chuan to continue running in theaters in the face of strong pressure from nationalists who objected to the sympathetic characterization in the film of a Japanese soldier. The film was one of ten chosen to help commemorate 60 years of Communist rule.

Controversy from leaked diplomatic cables by Wikileaks

In December 2010, one of the leaked United States diplomatic cables quoted a contact that claimed Li Changchun and fellow Politburo Standing Committee member Zhou Yongkang oversaw Beijing's cyber attack against Google. However, such claim has been called into question, as according to The New York Times, the person who was cited in the cable describing Li's involvement in the campaign against Google’s Chinese operations denied knowing who had directed the hacking attack. He described a campaign coordinated by the Propaganda Department’s director, Liu Yunshan, and, in several occasions, Li and Zhou issued approvals. But he "had no direct knowledge linking them to the hacking attack aimed at securing commercial secrets or dissidents’ e-mail accounts".

According to another leaked cable, Li was taken aback to discover that he could conduct Chinese-language searches on Google’s main international Web site. When Li typed his name into the search engine at google.com, he found "results critical of him." James Fallows of The Atlantic questioned the accuracy of such claim. He noted "[e]ven the author of the State Department cable is careful to say that the U.S. government cannot confirm the report".