[LINK] "Bo Xilai and neo-Maoism in China"

[rfmcdonald]

Jamie Kenny's analysis at New Left Review of ousted Chinese politician Bo Xilai's career, what it meant in a Chinese context, and why his career was ultimately destroyed, is a must-read. Alexander Harrowell? If Bo really was developing a public persona that would have risked destabilizing the post-Mao system in China, it's no wonder he was crushed.

[W]hat Bo might actually have done is not necessarily central to his removal. What the seriousness of the charges, against Gu Kailai in particular, tells us is that the Communist Party very badly wanted to dispose of him. The question is therefore why.

For some, it’s a matter of policy. In a conversation with journalists shortly after Bo’s March dismissal, China’s Premier Wen Jiabao warned of the prospect of a new Cultural Revolution. This was seen widely as an attack on Bo and his leftist tendencies and a warning that if he had been allowed to stay in power the whole course of China’s political and economic reforms would be rolled back. Some reports even said that Wen had himself orchestrated Bo’s fall, partly as revenge for the purging in the 1980s of his old patron Hu Yaobang in which Bo’s father, Bo Yibo, played a prominent part, and partly to clear the way for greater political and economic freedom – the latter being understood in the classical free market sense.

[. . . W]en’s remarks about the Cultural Revolution are significant. Their implication is not so much that Bo’s leftism threatened reform, but that his pseudo-Maoism and demagoguery threatened to unravel the basic structure the Communist Party had adopted in the post Mao era. In other words, Bo’s departure was necessary not to ensure change but to maintain the status quo.

It’s difficult to over-state the psychological effect the Cultural Revolution had on the CPC. Many members still alive now were targeted for punishment, torture and humiliation during that time. Most of the actual ruling group were Red Guards, later sent down to the countryside to ‘learn from the peasants’. In political science terms, China has shifted from tyranny to oligarchy and it is plausible to explain this shift as an attempt to ensure that nothing like the ‘ten years of chaos’ ever happens again.

[. . .]

All of this requires a constant balancing of various factions and interests within the Party. Jiang Zemin and his Premier Zhu Rongji were both part of the ‘Shanghai gang’ brought in by Deng to stabilise the country after the suppression of the 1989 uprisings. Hu Jintao rose through the Party’s China Youth League or ‘populist’ faction. His accession to the top job came at the price of accepting Wen Jiabao, a protégé of Zhu, as premier. Hu’s anointed successor Xi Jinping is not from his faction, but the next premier, Li Keqiang, is. This process goes on at all levels within the Chinese power structure, a stately waltz intended to ensure that everything is predictable and that no one, as they used to say on the quiz shows, goes away empty handed.

The threat Bo’s antics posed to such arrangements can be shown by the story of the gingko trees, as related by Chongqing native Xujun Eberlein on her blog. Bo had once said that he liked gingko trees, so his underlings decided to make him a present of them while he was away on business. In the space of a couple of days, they scoured southern China for the variety and planted thousands of them all over the city. Bo approved of the gesture when he returned: “Planting trees never makes mistakes” he said. “Using the rhetoric reminiscent of the 1950s and 60s, when "you committed mistakes" were the most terrifying words in frequent political campaigns” added Eberlein.

Even if Bo hadn’t intended to play the boss here, he had triggered a kind of lust for servility among his officials that, if replicated elsewhere, threatened to radically destabilize the post-Mao Party consensus, just as his supporters among the neo-Maoists resembled the personal claque of a tyrant-in-waiting rather than the supporters of the Party as a communal enterprise.