Bo Xilai, the Communist Party Secretary of Chongqing, seemed to be on track for a promotion to the Politburo’s Standing Committee until the apparent detention of his police chief, Wang Lijun, threw his political future into question. As son of Party elder Bo Yibo, Bo represents the generation of “princelings,” offspring of the Communist Party’s revolutionary leaders, many of whom are now solidifying their own power. Yet as the drama involving Wang Lijun was playing out in Chengdu, Bo’s contemporaries were gathering in Beijing to decry the Party’s current direction. From the Sydney Morning Herald:
Days after Mr Wang’s sacking, but before his escape, 1200 children of high cadres gathered for their biggest spring festival gathering at Beijing’s Heaven and Earth Theatre.
Hu Muying, who is the daughter of the late Hu Qiaomu, a former politburo member and chief speech speechwriter for Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, used her keynote speech to rail against the kind of party putrefaction that Mr Bo had been waging war against.
”Thirty years of opening and reform have achieved remarkable economic achievements but those brilliant achievements were followed by class polarisation, rampant corruption, a public spiritual vacuum, chaotic thinking, moral decline, prostitution, drugs, triads and so on,” said Ms Hu, who convened the gathering, as president of the Children of Yan’an Fellowship.
”These evils that were exterminated at the founding of New China have made a comeback and may even have grown worse,” she said.