The recent meeting of China’s National People’s Congress (NPC) brought to the surface the internal turmoil at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The eminent Chongqing party chief and city boss, Bo Xilai (薄熙來), was removed from power.
He had become a champion for those unhappy with the rising tide of crime and corruption, and turned his city into a leader in the tough, and often brutal, campaign against alleged mafia and gang leaders. His police chief, Wang Lijun (王立軍) was Bo’s main ally in the anti-corruption campaign until Wang said he found some skeletons in his boss’ closet that allegedly linked him and his wife to the death of Neil Heywood, a British citizen who lived in Chongqing. Wang said that Heywood had been the victim of a business relationship gone sour with Bo’s wife.
Fearing for his life, Wang sought asylum in the US consulate in Chengdu, claiming to have a trove of incriminating formation on his boss. The Americans refused to get involved in this internal party intrigue and the Chinese authorities took him away. He has not been seen since. Bo fronted a press conference in Beijing while there to attend the NPC meeting, and said he was unrepentant about his crusade against crime and defended his wife’s affairs. His only regret was that he had trusted Wang. Now that his wife, Gu Kailai (谷開來), has been detained by the police as they investigate Heywood’s death, the power struggle is becoming more like a murder mystery.
Why was Bo considered important and dangerous enough to warrant his removal in the middle of the NPC session? One reason, as suggested above, was that he seemed to attract people that were unhappy with the state of China’s corruption and crime. His anti-mafia crusade at times appeared like a political witch-hunt. His actions stoked the Maoist nostalgia of persecuting those who usurped the party leadership, which would explain why Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) raised the specter of another Cultural Revolution like the one Mao Zedong (毛澤東) engineered in 1966. The seriousness of the situation created rumors of a coup, and the Chinese authorities, alarmed, clamped down on Internet and social media sites.
The primary Website of the Bo Xilai-aligned far left, Utopia, was ordered offline for publishing articles that “violated the constitution, maliciously attacked state leaders, and speculated wildly” about China’s leadership. Founded in 2003, Utopia had become the vehicle for China’s resurgent left wing, who opposed Western style economic reforms and, at times, criticized the party leadership.
In his espousal of the Maoist past, Bo was reportedly winning support in the upper echelons of the party to make a bid for a spot on the nine-member Standing Committee, the top governing arm of the CCP, at the next party meeting in autumn where China’s new leadership for the next 10 years will be consecrated. But all his carefully laid plans were sabotaged by the betrayal of his police chief in his run to the US consulate.
The CCP can be broadly divided into three factions: First is the party’s hard-left, who gathered around Bo and challenged the party leadership over its market friendly economic policies. This left wing seems to have been badly damaged with the sacking of Bo.
The second faction is the relatively liberal one, which advocates political reform and further liberalization of the economy. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has been expounding these views for some years with limited success. Wen has highlighted the danger of a possible replay of the 1966 Cultural Revolution if nothing is done.
“Without political restructuring, economic restructuring will not succeed ... [Because] if we are to address the people’s grievances we must allow the people to supervise and criticize the government,” he said.
Will Wen succeed? It seems unlikely that he will make significant progress simply because any meaningful change in the balance of power will upset the entrenched interests of numerous actors on every level of government and the party — local, regional and center — who will thus seek to thwart it.
At this point it is important to point out that the factional divisions in the CCP are not very rigid. Even Bo was using his far-left rhetoric strategically to secure power. Like other CCP leaders, he and his family were beneficiaries of the system of patronage that goes with the accumulation of power. His son, for instance, received much of his education in top British and US institutions and was often seen driving around in a flashy Ferrari, and his wife was engaged in a highly lucrative business.
The third CCP faction — which includes most of the party’s functionaries — favors the continued monopolization of power by the CCP. Any relaxing of political control or induction of popular accountability and supervision will make this third group vulnerable. Like the late Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平), the architect of China’s state capitalist economic boom, they would rather keep both economic and political power within the party.
Deng was completely against political liberalization, fearing that it would plunge China into chaos and so reverse China’s economic growth and stunt its rise as a strong, modern nation. He believed that the party’s monopoly on power was not up for discussion and in 1989, acted to prevent what he believed would have been China’s relapse into chaos by ordering the army to crush the student-led pro-democracy movement.
Not only did Deng crush the pro-democracy movement, he also purged the political liberals in the party that were led by his general secretary, Zhao Ziyang (趙紫陽). At the time, Wen was working for Zhao, so not only is he a survivor of the purges, but has also made his way up the party hierarchy and now destroyed the Bo far-left clique, for the time being at least. Another casualty of the CCP power struggles appears to be Zhou Yongkang (周永康), head of China’s internal security apparatus, who was rumored to have been planning a coup.
Within China’s closed political system, rumor mills grind on despite the government’s firewalls, censoring and shutting down of Internet and social media sites, which make it very difficult to be sure of what is really going on. But one thing is for sure: China is entering uncharted territory where political succession might not be managed smoothly in future; though the next crop of presidents, party general secretaries, and premiers, Xi Jinping (習近平) and Li Keqiang (李克強) respectively, will most likely be confirmed at the next party meeting. Even as China continues to develop as a superpower, its internal power struggles will continue to test its future.
Sushil Seth is a commentator based in Australia.
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