Rule of law gets top billing at key meet

Economy | Ed Zhang

Getting the China picture is not easy because many things can happen at the same time in the country, and people may have different interpretations of each event. But this is also why China-watching can be interesting.

The past few days are a case in point. One sensational item of news followed another: from the country's largest antitrust penalty (1.2 billion yuan, or nearly $200 million) levied on 12 Japanese auto parts suppliers to the central leadership's decision to regulate (for the first time in the reform era) executive pay in all large, State-owned enterprises; from corruption probes of four top officials from the customs office in Shanghai, which followed a report that 84,000 officials were disciplined for their performance failures in the first half of the year, to a decline in home prices, due to sluggish sales, in nearly all mainland cities. And there were still more.