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Politics and power in China: the endgame

By Brian Hennessy - posted Tuesday, 28 February 2012


Until last week, Bo Xilai was the Communist Party Secretary of the municipality of Chongqing. This huge metropolis is the central government's hub for growth in southwest China. The Party Secretary outranks the mayor, Huang Qifan, and is the main instrument of central government control.

Bo has been in the news a lot lately. He is one of China's princelings and used to be the Minister for Commerce in the central government before he fell out with Hu Jintau (wrong faction) and was demoted and banished to Chongqing.

He was responsible for the crackdown on corruption in this city which netted the police chief, Wen Qiang (executed), members of the local mafia (six executed and hundreds jailed), and an unknown number of local government officers (jailed if they had no powerful patron, or quietly transferred if they did: e.g., the previous mayor). Many businessmen were also jailed and their wealth expropriated.

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Bo was assisted in this undertaking by Police Chief Wang Lijun, whom he had worked with before in Liaoning Province. He had asked Wang to come to Chongqing to take charge of the investigations into corruption in this city. Both men belong to ex-president Zhang Zemin's old-guard, left-leaning faction and have been a team for years.

Bo has had his sights set on a comeback to power: namely, promotion to the Standing Committee, the inner sanctum or 'cabinet' of the Politburo when there is a leadership change later this year.

He was responsible for the so-called 'Chongqing model', which promotes a return to old leftist 'red' ideals, and which has received a considerable amount of publicity if not approval. This phony exercise has been a top-down imposition on the population rather than a grass-roots movement.

Cynics have claimed that both the corruption cleanup and the revolutionary rhetoric were Bo Xilai's vehicles for self-promotion. Recent events have proven them right. Critics also accuse him of deliberately targeting many of his predecessor's staff in the clean-up, in an effort to consolidate his power and rid himself of any factional enemies in Chongqing.

Bo's investigation has also revealed how local corruption is linked to Beijing. He now has dirt on members of the leadership group. He is a man to be feared.

Bo's main rival for a seat in the Standing Committee is his predecessor, the Guangdong leader, Wang Yang. This man is a reformer rather than a reactionary, and thinks that hard-line leftist policies are not suited for a maturing Chinese society today. He belongs to Hu Jintau's faction. Bo has many enemies in the leadership group.

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This is the context for the bizarre events involving the Chongqing Police Chief Wang Lijun and his recent attempt to seek political asylum in the US Consulate in Chengdu in neighbouring Sichuan province.

What is going on here?

At face value, it appears that Wang Lijun is simply a victim of a larger power-play which was aimed at damaging Bo Xilai's run for promotion to the Standing Committee by discrediting his police chief colleague. This is how things are done here. You weaken your opponent by attacking his colleagues, staff and supporters.

The story is that Bo's factional enemies in Beijing have evidence of his and Wang Lijun's personal corruption as well as their persecution of Falun Gong members when they worked in together in Liaoning Province.

Bo used to be the mayor of Dalian, the capital of Liaoning province. However, because he carried out Zhang Zemin's orders to persecute Falun Gong so effectively, he was rewarded with promotion to province chief. Wang Lijun's reward was to become head of the police. Both men are implicated in a policy of harvesting organs from unwilling Falon Gong donors. Bo has international law-suits against him on this matter, and Wang Lijun has received a scientific award for his supervision of the 'technical' side of harvesting.

Bo's political enemies are not interested in justice though. They just want to use this information to damage his chances for promotion to the Standing Committee.

But when Bo realised that his enemies wanted to damage his prospects with these revelations, he cut Wang Lijun adrift in order to save his own skin. He demoted him and wrote to the central government apologising for not vetting him and his history carefully enough before inviting him to Chongqing. In response, Wang Lijun threatened to expose Bo's corruption and human rights abuses.

After Wang Lijun learned that his driver and some other staff had been arrested and tortured (one 'suicided'), he feared that Bo intended to assassinate him. This is why he bolted for the US Consulate in Chengdu, taking evidence against Bo with him. He was followed by the mayor and a large posse of police vehicles and armoured cars. The Consulate was surrounded and nearby streets were blocked off.

However, Wang Lijun was unable to get what he wanted; i.e., the safety of political asylum. It appears that the US government did not want this matter to become an international incident just before Xi Jinping's (the putative next president of china) visit to the USA. Neither did it want to be seen to be taking sides in what was regarded as an internal matter.

Instead, the USA contacted the central government and arranged for his arrest by Beijing security personnel rather than the Chongqing police. A safer option for him. Beijing pulled rank, and the Chongqing cordon returned to base. This is how Wang Lijun was able to walk out of the Consulate "of his own volition''.

Bo has since resigned as Party Secretary of Chongqing (his replacement is Zhou Qiang) and is now in Beijing. Wang Lijun's revelations have wounded him, and he appears to be out of the running for a place in the Standing Committee (he has been offered a lower status post).

But he will never be charged with corruption because there is an unspoken rule that corruption investigations should never touch this level of power. The leadership group is above the law, such as it is.

The law is something to be manipulated for your own ends. For example; in 1998, Chen Xitong, the former mayor of Beijing, was jailed, putatively for corruption but actually because Jiang Zemin's faction wanted him out of the way. In 2008, Shanghai's Mayor Chen Liangyu was jailed, ostensibly for corruption, but really because Hu Jintao wanted to weaken the Jiang Zemin's faction.

Nevertheless, Bo's career prospects remain open. One source says that as a result of his Chongqing investigation into corruption, Bo has damaging evidence against at least three members of the current Standing Committee. This gives him a lot of leverage. As everybody here knows, the rot goes all the way up to the top.

If this is true, then Bo is still a major player, regardless of his apparent demotion. We don't know what will happen to Wang Lijun however, because he is lower down the pecking order. Maybe Bo's factional enemies will protect him, or maybe they won't. It is always possible that Wen Qiang's (the corrupt Chongqing police chief) final words to WangLijun before he was executed may come true: "My today is your tomorrow".

There is more to this story however. Internal sources say that if Bo had become a member of the Standing Committee, he would have joined forces with Zhou Yangkong, a relative of Zhang Zemin and a factional colleague who is the head of The Political and Legislative Affairs Committee of the Communist Party. This man had supervised the terrible treatment of Falun Gong prisoners in neighbouring Sichuan Province before being rewarded for his diligence by promotion to Beijing.

Zhou Yongkang now oversees all legal enforcement authorities including intelligence, law and order, security, detention, and judicial agencies. A very powerful man indeed.

These two men, Bo and Zhou, are now accused of conspiring to replace Xi Jinping after he has been installed as President. A palace-coup, if you like (this charge cannot be verified however, because the source is the dissident and perhaps unreliable Chinese-language website, Boxun.

China: crony criminality as well as crony capitalism.

Conclusion

Wang Lijun's flight to safety has opened a big window into the internal machinations of the Chinese Communist Party at its highest level. This is unprecedented. Ideology is dead, and the only thing that holds this leadership group together is a shared lust for power at any price, and the desire of its members to enrich themselves in the process.

What we are witnessing now is how much individuals in this privileged group distrust each other and what lengths they will go to in order to protect themselves from each other. As Arthur Waldron, Lauder professor of International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania observes: "the weapon of choice that CCP officials use against one another is the knowledge they have of one another's crimes".

In my opinion, this is the beginning of a long process which will end in the collapse of totalitarian Communist Party rule in China. Although it may take a generation or two to play out, the process has begun and the result is inevitable.

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Information for this article has been gleaned from local Chongqing people, and overseas Chinese China-watchers. A media ban on this topic remains in place in China.



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About the Author

Brian is an Australian author, educator, and psychologist who lived in China for thirteen years. These days he divides his time between both countries.

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