We’ve learned a hard lesson in Chongqing at the cost of both lives and blood.

[…] If I was to describe how they acted in Chongqing over these past few years, I’d say they were like a crazy mouse on a rollercoaster going to a slippery slide. The newly-appointed leaders of the city’s public security apparatus are strongly opposed to the way that former party chief Bo Xilai and former head of the Public Security Bureau Wang Lijun handled matters in the past.

Now many just causes are gradually being rehabilitated.

But how many people were actually detained during the crackdown? How many were prosecuted? How many were sentenced to death or re-education through labor … we need to be clear on these numbers. We have a duty to history and to the people.

[…] If we don’t reveal what really went on, if we don’t expose their crimes and terrible deeds, many ordinary people will remain in the dark and we will be on the wrong side of history.

Also at Economic Observer, Li’s own lawyer Chen Youxi outlines how Bo’s ‘Chongqing Model’ almost succeeded, the damage it did, and the lessons that should be learned.

After two years of observation and deep thought, I believe that the underlying social foundations that led to the tragedy that occurred in Chongqing, continue to exist and flourish in China today. If we don’t seriously reflect on what happened in Chongqing, the soil which cultivated the tragedy in Chongqing will continue to exist, and if it doesn’t happen in Chongqing again, it just might take place somewhere else.

[…] If Wang Lijun hadn’t defected to the U.S. embassy and set off a series of other problems, it’s likely the Chongqing Model would have been copied across the country. If that happened, what would China’s rule of law be like? The more we think about it, the more we still feel have fears even after the events in Chongqing.

[…] In fact, the Chongqing’s problems are national problems that were concentrated and exposed in one municipality. It showed us the serious consequences of not continuing to deepen reform and also the great possibility and danger of the extreme-left making a comeback.

Reflecting on Chongqing is meaningful for the whole nation.

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Post tags: abuse of power, Bo Xilai, Chongqing, Chongqing Model, corruption, lawyers, Li Zhuang, murders, organised crime, rule of law, strike black, torture, Wang Lijun
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“I think that there is no such thing as the Chongqing model,” interim party boss Zhang Dejiang told reporters.

But this did not mean the government would abandon the city, he insisted.

“The policy of reform and opening up for Chongqing will not change.”

Still, Chongqing mayor Huang Qifan admitted that the scandal had caused foreign and domestic investors to hesitate about putting their money in the city earlier in the year.

“The party and the central government took timely steps and since Zhang came in March we have taken a series of measures, including for … stable growth and stable investment, which we have carried out in full,” Huang said.

Zhang also said he does not know when Bo’s trial will take place, according to Bloomberg, echoing statements of uncertainty made earlier in the week by the lawyers appointed by Bo’s family. Elsewhere at the congress, a spokesman called Bo’s downfall  a “profound lesson” to other members of the party:

“Problems involving Bo Xilai and Liu Zhijun [the former railways minister also facing charges] are severe corruption cases that took place among senior leading cadres. The lessons have been extremely profound,” Cai Mingzhao, spokesman for the congress, told a news conference.

He added: “China is in the middle of a social transition and some areas are prey to corruption. The punishment and prevention of corruption is an arduous and ongoing task.”

See also previous CDT coverage of Bo Xilai and the 18th Party Congress.

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Post tags: 18th party congress, Bo Xilai, Chongqing, Chongqing Model, leadership transition, zhang dejiang
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The party’s far-leftists have openly accused top leaders of plotting to oust Bo, and even circulated by email and online an extraordinary petition calling for the impeachment of Premier Wen Jiabao. Its reported signatories included two retired senior officials, although this could not be independently confirmed.

“At least for now, I believe there are too many doubtful points about the case,” said Han Deqiang, an academic in Beijing, who has been one of ardent defenders of Bo’s policies in Chongqing, the southwestern city that Bo made into a display case of populist policies and traditional socialist culture.

“I believe that this whole incident was intended to eradicate Bo Xilai’s Chongqing model,” said Han, who teaches at the Beihang University school of business management. “They have destroyed a ray of hope for the Chinese Communist Party.”

…

The uproar over Bo shows that, as the Communist Party weaves between market reforms and state controls, it faces dissent not only from liberals, but also from fervent leftists who see the party as enslaved by capitalist interests.

Bo now awaits his own fate, writes The Australian’s Michael Sainsbury, along with former right-hand man Wang Lijun. From Bo to Wang to Neil Heywood, The Globe and Mail’s Mark MacKinnon details the characters filling out the cast of China’s latest and greatest drama. Even Xi Jinping, China’s president-in-waiting, has a part to play:

Their fathers stood on the opposite side of some of the key political crises of post-Mao China. While Bo Yibo lead the conservative putsch in 1986, and supported the Tiananmen Square crackdown three years later, Mr. Xi’s father, Xi Zhongxun, was a lone dissenting voice among the Communist Party leadership in both instances.

Mr. Xi’s ascension to the Standing Committee of the Politburo in 2002 is seen as having come at the expense of Mr. Bo. The question many China-watchers are asking now is whether Mr. Xi – who is about to become the most powerful man in China – shares his father’s political views, or whether he harbours any sympathy for his fallen fellow princeling.

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Post tags: Bo Xilai, CCP, Chongqing Model, corruption, gu kailai, leftists, liberals, murder, Neil Heywood, party ideology, scandal, Wang Lijun, Wen Jiabao, Xi Jinping
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Heading into 2013, they are likely to face an outcry, said lawyers and prisoners’ families who allege that Bo and his long-time police chief, Wang Lijun, presided over rampant injustice in the name of fighting criminal gangs and corruption in Chongqing, the southwest municipality that was their fiefdom.

“The barrier to dealing with these unjust verdicts now is that there are so many of them,” said Zou Zhiyong, a Chongqing businessman who said his father-in-law Li Xiaofeng is among the once rich or powerful prisoners planning to seek release and redress from convictions made under Bo.

“We’ll certainly appeal, but not yet, because we have to wait and take into account China’s special political environment,” said Zou. “We’ll wait until after the 18th Party Congress. Many cases will come forward then,” he added.

Before the wheels fell off of Bo Xilai’s Red Culture Express, his “Chongqing Model” of governance was often mentioned alongside Guangdong party chief Wang Yang’s comparatively liberal approach, with the two men underscoring the increasingly public ideological cleavage within the Chinese Communist Party and seen as competing to define the next chapter in China’s development. Now, as the one-in-a-decade leadership transition approaches this fall, Foreign Policy’s Geoff Dyer assesses Wang’s chances to claim the Politburo Standing Committee seat that eluded Bo:

The travails of Guangdong’s economy will be one of several factors that will decide whether Wang gets promoted to the Standing Committee in the autumn. As many as seven seats could be up for grabs this year, and the favorites include Wang Qishan, a vice premier who is in charge of the financial sector; Zhang Dejiang, another vice premier who was sent to Chongqing when Bo was sacked; and Li Yuanchao, who runs the Communist Party’s powerful Organization Department. Some of Wang’s liberal supporters grumble that as the decision nears, he has been trying to demonstrate a more ruthless streak, including tighter controls on Guangdong’s media and a less tolerant attitude toward protests. This is not a good time for a Chinese politician to look weak. At the moment, hardheaded political calculation is pushing out reformist zeal.

Given the political rivalry between Guangdong and Chongqing, Bo’s spectacular political fall has focused a lot of attention on Wang, but the scandal could work both ways for him. Bo’s disgrace has certainly boosted the credibility of the Guangdong model. At the same time, a promotion for Wang might be seen as too big a victory for the anti-Bo faction. Chinese leaders generally don’t preview their appointments for nosy Western reporters, who are rarely granted insights into their political calculations. But Wang’s fate will be an important barometer for which way China is headed. Bo’s way may already have been rejected. Will it now be Wang’s?

In its Yearbook 2012, The Australian Centre on China and the World details the two models and the public debate they have inspired:

Chongqing and Guangzhou have loomed large in the national debate about the future of China. At stake in the contest between Chongqing and Guangdong were strategies for urban development as well as approaches to ruling the country as a whole. In 2011, the symbolic politics of the two places inspired what was dubbed the ‘cake debate’. It was the first time Communist Party leaders used the media to air contesting visions of regional development. In Chongqing, Bo Xilai advocated a more equitable distribution of the wealth generated by the county’s economic boom – ‘dividing the cake’ among the deserving and needy, whereas Wang Yang, the Party Secretary of Guangdong province, promoted continued economic growth in the Pearl River Delta region – ‘making an even bigger cake’. Bo’s formulation drew on historic socialist ideals and the way they intersect with contemporary concerns about increasing income inequality, a problem that had become so serious that the government stopped publicizing statistics about the distribution of wealth. Bo proposed the redistribution of wealth through government funding of programs for the public good including the provision of low-cost housing for migrant workers. Referring to Deng Xiaoping’s pragmatic acknowledgement that in a market economy some people will become rich first, in July 2011 Bo said: ‘some people in China have indeed become rich first, so we must seek the realisation of common prosperity.’ A week later Wang Yang responded that: ‘division of the cake is not a priority right now. The priority is to make the cake bigger.’ This in essence was the ‘cake debate’.

The clash of models and the ‘cake debate’ saw an unprecedented media-fueled conjuncture of national politics, urban planning and contending regional visions in the lead up to the 2012-2013 power transition. While Wang Yang in Guangdong called for continued growth while warning about the limits of self-promotion, Bo Xilai spotlighted the extremes of inequality in Chongqing and the need for greater social equity. In July 2011, the Party Committee of Chongqing adopted a resolution to reduce inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient from 0.45 to 0.35 and highlighted the serious 0.65 figure in Guangdong. Bo also invited members of the Politburo Standing Committee which rules China to Chongqing to witness his achievements.

The ‘cake debate’ that featured Bo as a champion of egalitarianism and Wang as the paladin of liberalisation camouflaged the important contribution that national-level city planners and thinkers have made to China’s overall economic and social innovation. The clash of visions and regional plans show how regional Party leaders project their power through real and symbolic projects. Yet whether in Chongqing or Guangdong, part of what makes a fascinating challenge to our understanding of China is the economic processes unfolding in the country’s new cities. By contrast to the economic path followed by advanced industrial economies in which agriculture gave way to manufacturing followed by services industries, the speed of development in China has meant that agriculture, mining, manufacturing and services industries often develop simultaneously and intertwine in ways that have significant implications for social change.

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Post tags: Bo Xilai, CCP 5th generation, Chongqing Model, Guangdong Model, leadership transition, Politburo Standing Committee, Wang Yang
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In Chongqing, the Bo administration improved public security, rebuilt infrastructure, pulled in foreign direct investment and pioneered several policy innovations on urbanization. The smash black campaign, while widely seen as infringing on civil liberties and private property rights, significantly reduced street crime. Local SOEs in Chongqing, according to Ministry of Finance data, contribute 15-20 percent of their profits to the government, the highest in China, which in turn funds infrastructure and social programs intended to improve people’s standard of living. Mayor Huang Qifan (who kept his position) stated in March that his target for SOE profit-sharing is 30 percent in 2015. A $1.5 billion a year tree-planting program, now widely criticized by Chinese media as wasteful, made a huge difference to the ambience of an industrial city. In the past five years, Chongqing’s GDP grew at an average of 15.8 percent annually, compared with 10.5 percent for China as a whole, helping to close the gap between Chongqing and China’s other centrally managed municipalities.

Bo promoted Chongqing as the place to experiment various policies directed at solving China’s age-old urban-rural tensions. By 2011, Chongqing had spent $15 billion in building 13 million square meters of public housing for poor families, with plans for a further 40 million square meters that could house up to 2 million people. The city has also issued over 3 million hukou, or urban residence permits, to rural migrant workers, giving them access to health care, education and social security — a practice unheard of elsewhere in China. It is these substantive measures, not the populist campaigns he also exploited, that have made Bo’s policies popular in Chongqing, even after his downfall. The Chongqing model is a daring experiment in using state policy and state resources to advance the interests of ordinary people, while maintaining the role of the party and state.

In the short term, the Chongqing model will remain tarnished both inside and outside China by the backlash against Bo’s political ambitions and policy missteps, as well as the charges against his wife. But when the dust settles and the fog clears, the Chongqing model may be remembered as a useful social and economic experiment that tackled the tensions between state and people lying at the heart of modern China, providing a credible alternative while China struggles to rebalance its economy and policies. While Bo’s political career is clearly over, he may also be remembered as a maverick risk-taker for tackling these challenges — whatever his personal motives.

Marketplace’s Rob Schmitz reports that Bo Xilai still has fans in Chongqing, even if some of his environmentally damaging mega projects lacked a compelling economic rationale other than GDP growth.

Meanwhile, the current issue of the Hoover Institution’s China Leadership Monitor contemplates the implications of Bo’s demise from several perspectives. Alice Miller draws parallels between Bo and two other notable leadership purges, those of former Shanghai party boss Chen Liangyu (2006) and former Beijing municipal party chief Chen Xitong (1999), in arguing that Bo’s removal likely strengthens party unity heading into the 18th Party Congress this fall. Joseph Fewsmith writes that it may be too soon to see the real implications of Bo’s case on elite party politics:

The impact of the Bo Xilai case—and of ongoing bargaining about which we know nothing—seems likely to result in compromise at the 18th Party Congress. The most likely way to compromise will be to promote eligible (by age) members of the Politburo to the PBSC, though whether to promote five or seven still seems to be in some dispute. Still, the possibility of a “helicopter” promotion directly to the PBSC cannot be ruled out—both Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping were promoted in such fashion. But most of the bargaining is likely to focus on the members of the Politburo rather than its standing committee. Of the 15 remaining members, 7 are expected to retire for reasons of age. If only 5 are promoted to the PBSC, that leaves 12–13 openings for new faces on the Politburo, and more if 7 are promoted. These are the people who will have an impact on Chinese politics in five years, when some of them will be promoted to the PBSC, and in 10 years, when others will be promoted. So the full impact of the Bo Xilai case may not be understood for many years.

Also for the China Leadership Monitor, James Mulvenon explores Bo’s ties to the military and speculates about what his downfall might mean for party-military relations:

After examining the facts, two things seem relatively clear. First, Bo paid close attention throughout his career to cultivating close relationships with local military elites and high-ranking princelings. Second, the breathless reporting of military purges and coups following Bo’s dismissal appears to be the product of the feverish imaginations of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Falungong journalists.

In the end, Bo Xilai’s fall from power will have a mixed impact upon Chinese party military relations. While the fundamental dynamic between the CCP and the PLA will remain unchanged, the discipline inspections of Bo’s activities will likely negatively affect the career prospects of individual PLA officers, especially senior elites like Liu Yuan and Zhang Haiyang, as well as local military leaders in the Chengdu Military Region. It would not be surprising, for instance, if neither Liu nor Zhang is promoted in the fall personnel moves, at the very least because of the bad publicity they have received during the Bo political theater. In this way, the Bo purge bears greater resemblance to that of Yang Baibing in 1992 than the purges of Beijing Mayor Chen Xitong in 1995 and Shanghai Party Secretary Chen Liangyu in 2006, since “neither of the Chens enjoyed anywhere near Bo’s level of support from the army.”62 It is also not clear how Bo’s purge and its PLA fallout will affect the leadership transition from Hu Jintao to Xi Jinping. Some analysts, for example, have speculated that the questions raised during the investigations will compel Hu to stay on as CMC Chairman past the 18th Party Congress. Yet the largely ephemeral nature of many of the supposed PLA factional behaviors after Bo’s removal strongly suggests that their impact upon the handover of CMC authority will be marginal at best.

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Post tags: 18th party congress, Bo Xilai, CCP 5th generation, Chen Liangyu, Chen Xitong, Chongqing, Chongqing Model, corruption, gu kailai, leadership transition, murder, Neil Heywood, party-military relations, People's Liberation Army, scandal
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“That’s just preposterous,” the Bo family contact told the BBC.

He said the relationship between Mr Bo and Mr Wang was “normal” just days before the policeman fled. “He was pledging his allegiance,” said the contact.

He added that members of Mr Bo’s family had worked hard to avoid the appearance that they were benefiting from the politician’s rise.

…

The source said Mr Bo had nothing to do with the death of Neil Heywood, the British businessman who died in Chongqing in November 2011.

The death of mysterious death of Heywood has added to China’s churning rumor mill, according to The Washington Post, and helped to quench the “massive thirst” of the Hong Kong press and mainland netizens for news since the March 15 announcement of Bo’s dismissal. While the Chinese government immediately named Zhang Dejiang as Bo’s successor, The Financial Times’ Kathrin Hille reports that Chongqing is in limbo as it waits to move on from the recent drama:

Since Beijing announced on March 15 that Zhang Dejiang, a vice premier, had replaced Mr Bo, Chinawatchers have been discussing if his purge is merely part of a fight over power or a broader ideological struggle in the party over the country’s future.

Government critics in Chongqing anxiously await the answer to this question. “We all breathed a sigh of relief when he was gone, but key is what comes next,” says a Chinese lawyer who has practised in the city for many years.

“The problem is all the power is in the party’s hands. Once you have a party secretary who abuses that, it turns into a nightmare,” he says. “Bo Xilai was like Hitler.”

With new details continuing to emerge every day, The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos pauses to reflect on Bo’s downfall and China’s political circus:

The dawn of the oligarchs? One striking feature of Bo’s case comes through clearly in a piece by Sharon LaFraniere and Jonathan Ansfield: this is not the familiar story of hapless, voiceless peasants being brutalized by a local thug. The list of victims includes a motorbike mogul, a construction tycoon, and a real-estate baron. “In 10 months, 4,781 people were arrested, including business executives, police officers, judges, legislators and others accused of running or protecting criminal syndicates.” One of the crucial distinctions between the political economy of post-socialist China and Russia has been the fact that oligarchs in China have steered clear of politics. The Communist Party has managed to keep the support of its most market-oriented citizens. That turns out to be harder than it sounds.

It’s always the loose ends. For all the drama that this story has produced, it’s noticeable that we have gained our best views into it only when it veers wildly into other countries’ lanes. It began, we’ll recall, with Wang’s dash to the consulate, which not only brought American diplomats (and other agents) into the mix, but also drew a phalanx of security forces that made it impossible to hush up the story within China. The latest, impossibly alluring detail, courtesy of Jeremy Page and colleagues at the Wall Street Journal concerns the Briton Neil Heywood, a man of pale linen suits and indeterminate employer, said to be perhaps a “low-level fixer” for the Bo family. He was also said to have worked with former MI6 agents, until he died in a Chongqing hotel room while embroiled, apparently, in a business dispute—involving Bo Xilai’s wife, Gu Kailai.

In a Wednesday editorial, The Guardian claims that Bo’s “Chongqing model” was not the right prescription to quell China’s social and political ills:

Now that Bo has lost his position, his critics are freer to point to evidence that the campaign against crime violated the law even by China’s loose standards, used torture and illegal detention, extorted money from companies, and targeted Bo’s political rivals while sparing his allies. On top of that, some of Bo’s apparently commendable activities in city beautification and police reorganisation, as well as his famous “red songs” programme, were sustained by profligate spending that has left the city hugely in debt. Whatever it is that China needs in the way of reform, and the leaders in Beijing are pretty clear that it needs something, that something is not the Chongqing model. It provided an impression of rapid movement and beneficial change which was misleading. It promised social justice and clean government without delivering it. And it suggested a quasi-democratic accountability might be on the horizon when it was not.

Instead, citizens found themselves marshalled into patriotic choirs or sent off for stints in the countryside in a parody of cultural revolution measures that was more silly than sinister but was in any case irrelevant to China’s real problems. The higher leadership, worried about the volatility and unpredictability Bo was introducing into politics, were probably right to close down the Chongqing experiment. That does not mean, unfortunately, that they have anything so far to offer their people other than the continuation of a very imperfect political status quo.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Bo Xilai, Chongqing, Chongqing Model, corruption, murder, Neil Heywood, Wang Lijun, zhang dejiang
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A handful of provincial officials who will be roaming the Great Hall of the People are unannounced contenders for soon-to-be-vacant seats on the Politburo Standing Committee, the nine-member body that essentially runs the country. Vice President Xi Jinping and Vice Prime Minister Li Keqiang, the near-certain replacements for President Hu Jintao and Mr. Wen, are expected to keep their seats on the committee. But the other seven committee members are likely to retire, and top contenders who will be at the session include party chiefs from Guangdong Province, Shanghai, Tianjin, Chongqing and Inner Mongolia.

Neither they nor any delegate is likely to say anything publicly about jockeying over the transition.

“People are not allowed to speak,” Zheng Yongnian, an expert on Chinese politics who directs the East Asian Institute at the National University of Singapore, said in an interview. Before the Communist Party congress this fall, where leadership changes are to be formally ratified, “stability must be the highest priority.”

“They want to guarantee the coming transition,” Mr. Zheng said. But behind the facade, he added, “you can feel a sense of nervousness over the changes at the top.”

Perhaps no candidate for a seat on the Politburo Standing Committee has faced more public scrutiny of late than Bo Xilai, the “princeling” Communist Party chief of Chongqing, whose “Red Culture” drive and campaign against crime and corruption has had a polarizing effect on China’s political climate. Bo’s chances for promotion suffered a serious blow in February when the architect of his anti-mafia crackdown turned up at the U.S. Embassy in Chengdu amid an announcement that he had received “vacation-style treatment” and a break from his duties, setting off a flurry of speculation over possible defection, corruption and turmoil within Chongqing’s political hierarchy.

Rumors even surfaced on Chinese news and social media sites claiming that Bo had offered his resignation, but no official source confirmed this and his appearance at this week’s NPC would suggest otherwise. Still, the Wang Lijun incident shed light on the dark side of Bo’s “Chongqing Model” and threw his elevation to China’s highest governing body into question. A photo from the NPC emerged on Sina Weibo on Monday which summed up decades of political drama in its depiction of Deng Xiaoping’s son, Deng Pufang, being wheeled (he is a paraplegic) past a nervous-looking Bo. The photo elicited several thousand comments as netizens fix their sights on anything that may indicate Bo’s fate.

Also on Monday, The Financial Times published a lengthy account of Bo’s anti-crime crackdown given by a former billionaire property developer named Li Jun, who fled Chongqing and China after his arrest and torture as the target of a police investigation. The story, in which Li describes Bo’s “Chongqing Model” as “nothing but a red terror” and details his treatment following his December 2009 arrest, paints a picture of extortion, brutality and corruption within Bo’s regime:

Over the next three months, Mr Li says he was subjected to long periods of physical and mental torture as his captors tried to extract confessions that he was a mafia boss engaged in bribery, gun-running, pimping, usury and supporting illegal religious organisations. The interrogations were mostly conducted while he was chained hand and foot to a “tiger bench”, a straight-backed steel chair with ridged steel bars instead of a seat, and he was often beaten, kicked and hit with electric batons.

For the first month he was kept in the Chongqing municipal number one detention centre with dozens of other businessmen accused of running criminal gangs, all of whom he says were tortured to extract confessions.

His extremely detailed account, including names, dates, locations and cell numbers, is corroborated by lawyers who defended some of the accused businessmen and say that torture was widely used in the campaign.

“Some of the methods employed in Chongqing were even rare in feudal society,” writes Prof Tong Zhiwei of East China University of Politics and Law, who recently submitted a detailed report to the central government on Chongqing’s crime-fighting campaign. “One method was to secretly detain anyone who might testify on behalf of the accused and another was to detain any family members who spoke out.”

As the FT piece notes, many insiders and analysts view the upcoming leadership transition as a referendum on the competing ideologies of Bo Xilai and Guangdong party chief Wang Yang, whose “Guangdong Model” of reform stands in stark contrast to Bo’s desire to turn back the revolutionary clock. The two have engaged in public brinksmanship over the past year as they maneuver for a seat on the Standing Committee. But while Bo has come under fire in the wake of the Wang Lijun scandal, political analysts and state media applauded Wang’s handling of the late 2011 land grab protests in Wukan.

See also a BBC News interactive feature which profiles the key “faces to watch” as the next generation of Chinese leaders prepares to take over the reigns of party and government.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Bo Xilai, CCP, CCP 5th generation, Chongqing Model, corruption, Deng Xiaoping, Guangdong Model, leadership transition, National People's Congress, princelings, red culture, sina weibo, Wang Lijun, Wang Yang
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