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That was just the tip of an immense iceberg, says Richard McGregor, the former Beijing bureau chief for the Financial Times. "Everything and everybody got a cut, but it got out of control," he adds. "It was becoming more like Suharto's Indonesia, where it was corroding the foundations of the system." "A lot of people far away from the frontline are celebrating," one soldier tells us, who only wants to be known by his call sign "Gadfly". irannews.ru Keep reading In 1989 - as the Soviet Union was breaking up - China's hopes for change were crushed by tanks and automatic gunfire. Asked on the BBC's Politics Live programme why Mordaunt - who has far less public support from Tory MPs than Sunak at present - isn't bowing out now, Wheeler says: "She's not the sort of person to throw in the towel. That certainly seemed to be the case under Xi's predecessor, Hu Jintao - corruption was on the rise and his authority was being openly ignored and even challenged. end of list In 2005 I was handed a DVD smuggled out of a village called Dingzhou in Hebei province. It showed a pitched battle between local farmers and dozens of armed thugs, hired by a state-owned power company, to force them off their land. The farmers had dug deep trenches in their fields. The thugs attacked at dawn opening fire with shotguns and beating the farmers with steel bars. Six were killed. Nothing lends legitimacy to the Communist Party quite like Mao - the iconic revolutionary whose portrait still reigns over Tiananmen Square, where he declared the founding of the People's Republic of China.