The house detention of top Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official Bo Xilai (薄熙來), until recently China’s most popular politician, now stripped of his titles, while his ambitious lawyer wife, Gu Kailai (谷開來), is charged with involvement in the alleged murder of British businessman Neil Heywood, is a story with everything. The British class system meets the dark, internal labyrinths of the CCP to create China’s biggest political scandal for decades. The Chinese state media are now in overdrive to portray Bo and Gu as an out-of-control, power-mad couple brought back within the rule of law by the wise, all-seeing party.
The rest of the world seems ready to play along. Bo was a dangerous populist politician, a throwback to the darker, more turbulent periods in China’s recent history. The whole process by which he has been brought low may have echoes of the court politics of the old Chinese imperial system, but it is effective. The deed has been done and the reformers remain in control, with British Prime Minister David Cameron welcoming the investigation into Neil Heywood’s death and the resulting arrests.
However, this episode is much more important than an over-mighty politician being squashed by the communist machine. What too few people recognize is the CCP’s colossal legitimacy crisis. The battle between Bo and the leadership is about much more than the way he acquired the personal fortune that allowed him to educate his children at top British public schools. It is about finding an answer to the legitimacy question. Unless a convincing strategy can soon be developed, a Chinese spring happening sometime in the next decade seems nearly certain.
CONFUCIUS VS MARX
The party’s right to govern is that it led the communist revolution, the dawn of an egalitarian paradise in which the party as champion of the proletariat was to govern the economy and society harmoniously in the name of all. However, while China’s growth has been remarkable and 400 million have been lifted out of poverty, it has plainly very little to do with socialism or egalitarian paradise. The revolution’s leaders are long dead and they have been replaced by a competent, if rotten, administrative elite that looks more and more like the Confucian mandarinate the revolution overthrew.
A murky corporatist economic model has been created in which insiders, especially so-called princelings — sons and daughters of former revolutionary leaders such as Bo and his wife (both are children of revolutionary generals) — feather their nests with impunity. There is no impartial law; no checks and balances; nothing can be trusted. Party officials can make no claim to being revolutionary heroes as a reason for holding office; they are corrupt administrators just about delivering the quid pro quo of rising living standards — but if they fail, it is clear the whole edifice will implode.
Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) is the politician most keenly aware of the impending crisis. He has publicly apologized to his fellow citizens for not doing more to advance the cause of accountability and rule of law while in office. He is also clear-eyed about the weakness of the Chinese economy, whose growth he has consistently warned is unbalanced, uncoordinated and unsustainable. After Gu’s arrest, he made no reference to the official party line to justify what had happened; rather, he quoted a passage from Confucius’s (孔子)Analects about the need for leaders to behave with integrity. Wen knows that communism as an ideology is dead, hence his appeal to Confucius rather than Marx.
BO’S CHINESE SPRING
Bo’s challenge, supported by key officials in the army and security apparatus, was that while he agreed that the party had to continue to embrace what Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) called the “socialist market economy,” it had to do more to emphasize the socialist component, otherwise the legitimacy crisis would overwhelm it. Hence, while party secretary of Chongqing he launched a fierce anti-corruption drive, publicly arresting hundreds of officials.
He distributed relief to millions of poor and former party cadres while justifying his actions with references to Mao Zedong (毛澤東) rather than Confucius — and with organized singing of songs from the Cultural Revolution. He launched a greening of the megalopolis, planting trees and cleaning up the air, while courting foreign investment to drive forward economic growth. He was the model for a new kind of communist official, rigorous, fiercely nationalist — and hugely popular.
His threat was twofold. First, he represented a new phenomenon — a charismatic politician prepared to act on inequality and corruption with a popular base. Second, for the reformers he was playing with fire. Wen was right to declare publicly that the Cultural Revolution is not a part of recent Chinese history of which anybody can be proud. At least half-a-million people were summarily murdered. Yet Bo was associating a fight against corruption and reduction of inequality with such “true communism” — so directly undermining the party’s current ideological stance and worsening its legitimacy crisis.
So there had to be a response. There was no autopsy on Heywood, thus allowing the party maximum freedom to act not in the name of justice, but whatever faction in control deemed to be the party interest. There will be a show trial delivering the right result, but the reform wing still confronts the challenge of how to earn legitimacy. Too much exposure of Bo’s wrongdoings will confirm how the elite lives; too little and there is no case.
Worse, Wen may wring his hands over his mistakes, worrying that the government can no longer support loss-making infrastructure projects to deliver growth — rapidly falling away to its lowest for years. However, he did nothing to change things largely because as matters stand nothing can be done. China needs to become a “normal” economy with plural centers of decision-making, an indigenous capacity to innovate and less reliant on state-driven flows of credit and infrastructure spending — but that is incompatible with being a one-party state.
The Soviet Union’s leaders confronted similar dilemmas as they entered the early 1980s. After 60 years, revolutions lose their legitimacy and economic problems become intractable. The group around former leader Mikhail Gorbachev decided there was no option but to accelerate reform. China’s new leadership, set to take over for another 10-year cycle in the autumn, will try to muddle through without much change.
However, Bo’s challenge over legitimacy remains. If there is no change from the top, it will come from below. A Chinese spring is now very likely sometime in the next 10 years. That much we now know. We just do not know when.
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