As a member of China’s powerful Politburo Standing Committee and the official in charge of the Communist Party’s internal disciplinary body, Wang Qishan is in charge of rooting any potential threats or interlopers. So if Wang is drawing inspiration from the US political drama “House of Cards” and its ruthless protagonist, Sen. Francis Underwood, his enemies should be very, very afraid.
Hong Kong’s Phoenix Weekly (link in Chinese), citing an anonymous source, reports that Wang has “repeatedly brought up” the Netflix series in recent meetings with party officials. He’s especially interested, as Tea Leaf Nation noted, in the extreme lengths that Underwood goes to enforce party unity. Whether or not the report is true, there are more than a few similarities between the inner workings of China’s Zhongnanhai and Netflix’s fictional US Capitol—including inner-party cliques, schemes to conceal death and murder, and even leaks to the media that take down rivals.
We’ve culled a few choice quotes from “House of Cards” to suss out some of the lessons that Wang and other Chinese officials might be learning, and paired them with some recent moments in Chinese politics that Underwood would surely recognize.
Sources for quotes: Mashable, IMDB, The World According to GMonster.