Among the shirt-wearers is a Canadian legal scholar, Daniel Bell of Tsinghua University in Beijing, co-editor of “A Confucian Constitutional Order: How China’s Ancient Past Can Shape Its Political Future”. Mr Bell believes that the party’s emphasis has shifted to “the task of good governance led by able and virtuous political leaders.” The scholar-official, it seems, stands in for the gentleman from Whitehall who thought he knew best. The party recruits the best and the brightest, says Mr Bell, and the vetting process for the promotion of top leaders is impressively objective and rigorous, though he admits scope for improvement, especially through more transparency.

But to believe virtue always floats to the top in a system such as China’s is fantasy. Chinese government and society are shot through with corruption. Even official media report about cadres gaining promotion through connections, not merit, and despite the occasional execution of corrupt officials, the government can do little about it. The Confucian ideal of self-cultivation is admirable, but it neglects the crucial detail known as human nature.

The answer to China’s challenges is not a return to some exclusive cultural wellspring of virtue. It doesn’t exist. The lesson of China’s 19th century was that supposedly meritocratic Confucian government, unchallenged and unchecked, had failed. “Western” systems of government have plenty of flaws too. Families and groups with more money or power perpetuate their influence in society. But the door is always open for talented outsiders to gain power and earn wealth and, more importantly, to lose it. Richard Nixon was undone by a free press and by the institutions of his own government, not, as with the Chinese former Politburo member Bo Xilai, by a lieutenant who turned against him and fled to a foreign consulate. What will create more meritocratic government in China is continued economic development; more education for more people; open competition; moving towards a free press; an independent judicial system; and, in time, a representative political system.

The term “meritocracy” has indeed popped up in a number of recent pieces of analysis on China as it approaches the 18th Party Congress and its once-a-decade leadership transition. In August, author Daniel Bell touted “the advantages of ‘actually-existing’ meritocracy in the Chinese Communist Party”, though he conceded that China’s political system “can and should become more meritocratic in the future”. Journalist and China commentator John Pomfret also mentioned the concept in an interview with CNN’s Kristie Lu Stout, as part of the network’s new “ON CHINA” program which premiered last week:

“It’s not simply a meritocracy. If your parents are Communist Party members and have a certain amount of connections to the center, chances are you are going to be in the party regardless of your… school studies.”

“The party understands now that the people… want to participate, but the party is struggling to give them a voice while at the same time maintaining total control.”

And just as The Economist points out, The Financial Times’ Jamil Anderlini wrote earlier this month that the Bo Xilai scandal exposed to the world that “rot goes right to the top” of China’s political system:

Far from revealing authoritarian China’s meritocracy and ability to self-correct, the Bo Xilai saga underscores how its leaders believe they are above the law and how little accountability there actually is.

The fact is that Mr Bo’s alleged crimes only came to light after his disgruntled chief of police, Wang Lijun, attempted to defect to a US consulate in February carrying a dossier of damaging revelations and proof that Gu had murdered Heywood.

Chinese, British and US officials say privately that without the involvement of foreign governments Heywood’s murder would probably never have been uncovered and Mr Bo would still be a frontrunner for promotion when the party anoints new leaders at a once-a-decade conclave next month.

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Post tags: Bo Xilai, corruption, john pomfret, leadership transition, Mao Zedong, meritocracy, scandal, Sun Yat-sen
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Xinhua reported yesterday that the NPC Standing Committee would meet from October 23 to 26 and members would review “the membership status of certain delegates”.

…

A decision to kick Bo, a former member of the Communist Party Politburo, out of the NPC would be put to a vote at the end of a four-day session, analysts said.

They added that stripping the former Chongqing party secretary of his NPC membership was constitutionally required to pave the way for criminal proceedings against him.

…

“It is the final move to wrap up the administrative procedures that enable criminal charges against him, because under the Chinese constitution NPC deputies are immune from criminal prosecution,” said Gu Su, a constitutional law expert at Nanjing University.

Bo had already been expelled from the Chinese Communist Party last month, when the government announced that he would face charges of corruption, abuse of power, and other organizational and disciplinary violations. A Chengdu court sentenced Bo’s former police chief and right-hand man in Chongqing, Wang Lijun, to 15 years in prison for a similar string of charges and for attempting defection when he turned up at the U.S. consolate in Chengdu in February to divulge details connected to the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood. Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai, was found guilty in August of murdering Heywood, and received a suspended death sentence. Completing Bo’s trial before next month’s National People’s Congress would allow the CCP to put a lid on the country’s biggest political scandal in decades and, at least for now, look ahead to its upcoming leadership transition.

Over the weekend, son Bo Guagua denied reports that he had returned to China to prepare for his father’s trial.

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Post tags: 18th party congress, Bo Guagua, Bo Xilai, CCP, Chongqing, corruption, gu kailai, leadership transition, National People's Congress, Neil Heywood, scandal, Wang Lijun
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A once powerful Chongqing police official at the center of the scandal that felled the senior Communist leader Bo Xilai was charged with defection, abuse of power and corruption, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Wednesday.

[...]Mr. Bo was not mentioned in the Xinhua report, suggesting the possibility that he will not be formally linked to Mr. Wang’s crimes. Instead, the report said that Mr. Wang helped Ms. Gu, although it did not specify how.

The report did say, however, that Mr. Wang abused power by illegally snooping on people as part of a campaign against organized crime in Chongqing. Human rights groups say the crackdown was arbitrary and many innocent people were convicted. If Mr. Wang is charged with this, however, it could be hard to shield Mr. Bo, who took credit for the crime sweep.

Reuters has more on the Xinhua report. After further detailing the charges of illegal surveillance, the article speculates what Wang might be looking at if these charges stick:

[...]the Xinhua announcement said Wang had abused investigation techniques, an accusation that may reflect rumors that he had bugged other officials, including central officials visiting Chongqing.

“Wang illegally used technical surveillance measures, either without the approval of authorities or by forging approval documents,” said Xinhua.

Wang could face a sentence of up to life in jail on the defection charge, and serious bribery charges can attract the death penalty.

An AP article reports that, while Wang is looking at a menacing list of charges, his cooperation with state security officials may have shielded him from the more serious crime of treason, which had been widely speculated as Wang’s fate. The article also asks why Bo Xilai’s name was conspicuously absent from the Xinhua report:

Xinhua’s report also did not mention Bo, though Wang’s indictment would seem to clear the way for an announcement about Bo’s fate, something that had been expected well before the party meeting that is believed to be scheduled for mid-October.

However, University of Miami China expert June Teufel Dreyer said authorities might be holding back in the face of a lack of consensus or uncertainty how to proceed within such a tight time frame.

“The door’s still open to prosecute Bo at a future time, and it is possible that Wang’s trial will attempt to draw Bo into the murder-cover up intrigue,” Dreyer said.

“The more attention can be diverted from so high-level, and reputedly fairly popular, personage, the better,” she said.

Wang has been charged by authorities in Chengdu, and Global Times reports that his trial will begin “at a later date” in the city where he sought US protection earlier this year.

Also see a BBC News profile of the fallen supercop. For more on Wang Lijun, including the once-proposed but presumably forgotten Hong Kong crime film chronicling his career in police work, see prior CDT coverage.

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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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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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State media in recent days have begun running new reports that flesh out the alleged deeds of 59-year-old Liu Zhijun, one of the most senior members of China’s Communist Party to face corruption allegations. That has fueled speculation from analysts that Mr. Liu’s court date is approaching.

In May, Mr. Liu was removed from the Party for what was described as “severe violations of discipline,” watchwords that typically indicate a fallen party official is likely to face prosecution by China’s civilian courts. Now, the state-run Xinhua news agency is detailing the alleged bribe-taking.

[…] Though perhaps less sensational, a trial of Mr. Liu is also significant for China. Accusations that the head of the Ministry of Railways took bribes are no less than an indictment of the management of one of China’s biggest public works projects, including what Xinhua said was 2 trillion yuan of railroad construction during Mr. Liu’s tenure.

An editorial in the Economic Observer on Monday described the enormous extent of the ministry’s “private kingdom”, arguing that this has helped foster corruption and nepotism. As an example, it noted the rapid rise of Liu’s younger brother to become director-general of the Wuhan Bureau of Railways.

Nepotism certainly isn’t rare in Chinese society. Complex “family trees” within political agencies at the town and county level in rural China are commonplace. However, these local fiefdoms don’t come close to the scale of the national railway system, which covers the entire country. The complexity of the railway’s nepotism comes from its ability to function in a self-contained environment where it’s almost separated itself completely from China’s social system and has become a “sub-system” or “sub-society.”

[…] The Ministry of Railways has exerted its influence on public security agencies, procuratorates, and courts. Its reach can also be felt in ideological outlets (television, newspapers, periodicals, book publication, cultural and art troupes), business (machinery, real estate, construction, tourism, logistics, broad-band networks, advertising, catering services, foreign trade), and public services (hospitals and schools).

[…] Nepotism and cronyism breed in the vastness and omnipotence of an independent “sub-society.” Overly-intertwined relationships and other maladies become unavoidable if the larger system stays unchanged. If you want to change the status quo, the first step is to attack the problem at its root.

See a previous post about Liu Zhijun, ‘CCP Casts Out Former Railway Minister’, and more on China’s railways via CDT.

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The wife of disgraced Chinese politician Bo Xilai has agreed to be defended by two government-appointed lawyers in the murder case against her, two different lawyers with knowledge of the case said Saturday. Her decision could be the latest sign that a resolution to her case is near.

A lawyer close to the case said Gu and her family have accepted the court appointment of Anhui lawyer Jiang Min, a director of the provincial lawyers’ association, as her defense lawyer, along with a second lawyer, Zhou Yuhao of Wuhu, another Anhui city.

But Gu may have had no real choice in her legal representation, and the verdict seems to be a foregone conclusion. At Reuters, Michael Martina and Sui-Lee Wee describe the case in the context of China’s faltering progress towards rule of law:

Gu will not have access to her family lawyer, Shen Zhigeng, who has revealed that other legal counsel have been assigned to her case. China’s official Xinhua news agency has already said the evidence against Gu will be “irrefutable and substantial” when the case goes to court, likely next week.

“It makes the case a transparent sham,” said Jerome Cohen, an expert on Chinese law at New York University. “If you forbid people to have the best lawyer they can and you assign lawyers who you control…it renders the whole thing an obvious farce.”

[…] As ever in China, there is a pithy phrase to sum up Chinese justice. “You will have heard the saying ‘the police cooks the food, the prosecutor serves it and the court eats it’,” said Eva Pils, a law expert at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Another legal peculiarity in the case is the choice of venue, which George Washington University law professor Donald Clarke explored at Caixin:

To the best of my knowledge, neither the accused nor the victim – in fact, nothing about the case – is remotely connected with Hefei. But of course, that is very likely the reason the government has decided to try the case there. There is a long tradition of trying cases involving high-level officials outside their power base – one source estimates this happens 90 percent of the time – because of fears they can use their local influence to influence the result. Indeed, that courts are vulnerable to this kind of pressure is readily admitted even in the most orthodox sources.

[…] The decision to have the trial in Hefei simply cannot be accounted for under the current rules of the Chinese legal system. There is no legal institution that could have made that decision. Instead, an extra-legal decision was made (I use the passive voice deliberately here) that this is how the matter would be handled, and that decision was then transmitted to all relevant actors in the legal system.

There is nothing inherently unjust about trying officials away from their home base, and the government could at any time amend the law to provide a way for these decisions to be made within the legal system. What’s interesting is that nobody important has apparently ever thought it necessary or worth while to bring the law into line with the practice.

As details of the case unfold, new questions have arisen about Heywood’s own part in the events that led to his death. From The Telegraph’s David Eimer:

Gu Kailai, the wife of the disgraced politician Bo Xilai, is expected to be tried for poisoning the old Harrovian businessman with cyanide within the next two weeks. But as she prepares to face justice, Mr Heywood’s former colleagues and acquaintances are wondering if her claims that she feared for the “personal security” of herself and her son Bo Guagua, in the face of unspecified threats from Mr Heywood, mean that he is now also in the dock.

[…] “The court will consider if Mr Heywood threatened them. If it is true that the victim has done something wrong, the court might take that into consideration and give a lighter punishment to the accused,” said Mo Shaoping, a prominent Beijing-based lawyer who defended the imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo.

Different sides of “the Chinese Lady Macbeth” have also come to the fore. From Gillian Wong at the Associated Press:

Gu Kailai has been many things to many people: devoted wife, ambitious lawyer, gracious host, menacing businesswoman and, now, China’s most famous murder suspect.

[…] Impressions of Gu varied: Two American guests Gu invited to the Chinese city of Dalian in 1997 described her as a kind and attentive host who put the visitors up at a fancy resort, personally took them around the city and feted them with banquets. But a British businessman who worked for two years with Gu in a venture said she could be vicious when angry, once threatening to throw him in jail if he went to China.

The fall of Bo ahead of the once-a-decade leadership transition is a triumphant moment for his political rivals, particularly Wang Yang, the Guangdong party boss of Guangdong whose more liberal approach was frequently contrasted with Bo’s harder “Chongqing Model”. From Bob Davis at The Wall Street Journal:

Less than a year ago, Bo Xilai and Wang Yang—Guangdong province’s party chief—were both on China’s Politburo and strong contenders to ascend to its Standing Committee. Since then, Mr. Bo has been dismissed from his party posts and accused of “serious discipline violations” and his wife has been indicted for murder.

That clears an obstacle for Mr. Wang, Guangdong province’s party chief, who is seen in the West and among some of China’s elite as a standard-bearer of reform. Should he get a slot on the Standing Committee, it could be a signal that the new leadership will seek to accelerate market-oriented changes.

The scandal also stirs up various discussions among political analysts, some of whom see the incident as a suppression of individualism within the Communist Party. From Jonathan Fenby at The Guardian:

Top-level Chinese politics does not favour individualism. Long gone are the days when Mao wallowed in a personality cult, when Deng Xiaoping took Margaret Thatcher aback with his liberal use of the spittoon or when his successor, Jiang Zemin, sang a karaoke version of Love Me Tender at a Pacific summit. Today’s leaders present a uniform front with their full heads of jet-black hair and business suits (they are all men). They move in lock-step and act against anybody who gets out of line.

[…] Though official reports of the case last week convicted her in advance, Gu may be saved from execution by her mental state and the argument that she acted to protect her son from Heywood. But the key factor for the leadership is to put a distance between what happened in the Chongqing hills and the political movement that has ruled China since 1949. For all its economic progress, the bottom line remains the preservation of political power. The error of Bo and Gu was to imagine themselves bigger than the system. In today’s China, that is the cardinal sin.

Others analysts argue that Bo’s purge opens a dangerous precedent for the ruling CCP. From Minxin Pei at The Diplomat:

While most people understandably cheer the downfall of characters like Bo, arrogant, hypocritical, cruel, and greedy apparatchiks when they are in power, the political implications of their demise and the manner in which they are purged are not those of a morality play. On the contrary, how the powerful lose power and what happens to them afterwards can tell us a great deal about the nature of the political regime in which they thrive and perish. In the case of the current Chinese regime, the ugly purge of Bo reveals many of its dark sides: corruption, lawlessness, hypocrisy, and ruthlessness. Such qualities of a regime make it illegitimate and undermines its durability.  However, rarely do we view political power struggles from the perspective of a regime insider. As a result, we often fail to appreciate how the insecurity of top elites constitutes a fatal threat to the very regime that has made and unmade their political fortune.

Reflecting these sensitivities, China has banned internet users from discussing the Bo family. From AFP:

State news agency Xinhua’s report saying Gu Kailai had been charged with poisoning a British businessman was the third most reposted story on China’s most popular microblog Sina Weibo on Friday morning.

But users trying to comment on the subject on Weibo received a message saying they were barred from doing so by “relevant laws and policies”, while attempts to search for Gu Kailai’s name and her initials were also blocked.

Despite efforts to set the direction of public opinion, the image of Bo as a populist hero has not faded away completely, and a pro-Bo rebound has taken place online. From Reuters’ Ben Blanchard:

China’s ruling Communist Party might insist that the murder charge against Gu Kailai, the wife of ousted Politburo member Bo Xilai, is a simple case of all being equal before the law, but winning over the jury of public opinion is proving tough.

“Who on earth could believe this?” wrote one microblogger, of the Global Times editorial. “Bo has just lost his personal battle; this case has never had anything to do with the rule of law.”

Others thought Xinhua’s wording that “the crimes are clear, and the evidence is irrefutable and substantial” ruled out any pretence at Gu getting a fair trial.

“It looks like the court is just going to be reading out the Xinhua piece … What a shameless society without governance. I hope it collapses.”

Read more about Bo Xilai and Gu Kailai via China Digital Times.

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Post tags: Bo Xilai, corruption, gu kailai, murder, political security, scandal
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Some observers may object by saying that purging senior officials on corruption charges is quite different from sacking them because of ideological disloyalty or factional power struggle, as was the case during the Maoist era.  This difference may be technically true but substantively and politically irrelevant.  In terms of fostering a dreaded sense of insecurity among the top ruling elites, corruption charges and alleged political offenses are no different.

First, like political offenses, corruption charges can be concocted.  The alleged evidence against the two Chens, for example, revealed two far-fetched and weak cases.  It is common knowledge that the two Chens fell not because of corruption, but because of their political ambitions and disloyalty.  The same could be said of the causes of Bo’s collapse.

Second, because China’s top elites, who personally or directly may have little involvement in corrupt activities but who all have family members and relatives who engage in questionable or illegal business deals, no one at the top is absolutely safe.  At the moment, the Party seems to have drawn the line at the Politburo Standing Committee level — Politburo members are not safe, but Politburo Standing Committee members enjoy absolute immunity, because purges at the highest level of the Party would be too destabilizing.  But since this arrangement is not ironclad, who knows when the Party will decide to go after one of the top nine leaders in the future?

Third, once brought down in a power struggle, even China’s top rulers lack minimal legal protection.  They cannot pick lawyers or have the ability to challenge the charges against them in an independent judiciary.  Their verdict and penalty are typically decided, not by professional judges after the conclusion of the proceedings, but by top political leaders behind closed doors.

What this analysis reveals — and what the case against Bo and his wife shows — is that political security for China’s top rulers today has deteriorated so much that, in some crucial ways, they might feel that they are back to the bad old Maoist days.  Elite disunity and vicious infighting is now the rule, not the exception. This cannot be reassuring news for a regime ruled by individuals whose daily nightmare is that they will one day become another Bo Xilai.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
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Given Bo’s enormous popularity among ordinary people, an unconvincing official account backed by threadbare evidence could lead many Chinese to assume the entire affair was a stitch-up and Bo was the victim of political infighting. On the other hand, if the case against him is presented too fully, with gory details of corruption, murder and plots, then the public may question how someone so craven and deranged could rise to the top of the political system, and scrutiny may turn to other senior leaders. For now, the once-in-a-decade leadership transition scheduled for October or November appears to be back on track. Some analysts are even saying that without Bo’s destabilising presence, a more harmonious and effective leadership will emerge.

“Bo and his ambition were seen as the most dangerous force in Chinese politics and people inside the party always compared him to Hitler,” said one senior Chongqing official who worked closely with Bo. “He was a Marxist-Leninist who opposed western liberal democracy, but the irony is that if the Chinese people were allowed to vote, he probably would have been elected president.”

In Beijing, meanwhile, the French Foreign Ministry denied that alleged Bo family acquaintance Patrick Henri Devillers had been detained upon his arrival over the weekend. From The New York Times:

After news media reports on Saturday that the Chinese had taken the architect, Patrick Henri Devillers, 51, into custody, a spokesman for the French Foreign Ministry said that Mr. Devillers was being “housed” in “proper conditions” and that he was not in prison. “He is well; he’s in great health,” said the spokesman, Bernard Valero.

An official at the French Embassy in Beijing said French diplomats would visit Mr. Devillers again this week. But officials did not specify his whereabouts or say whether he was free to leave China.

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A well-placed source in Chongqing, who has spoken to senior government officials with knowledge of the investigation’s progress, said: “Bo is denying everything, [saying] that he knows nothing.”

…

Government sources in Chongqing say Wang Lijun is likely to be tried next month in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province. Mrs Gu and Mr Bo are also expected to be tried before the autumn congress.

But the source in Chongqing said the central government had yet to decide how to deal with Mr Bo, who still enjoys significant support within the Party.

“There is still fierce struggle going on up there [in Beijing],” they said.

“Bo’s political life is over but it [the government] has yet to decide to what extent he will be punished.” “There are still quite a lot of senior people who support him. I feel they have been less harsh on Bo, probably out of the need for party unity.”

Meanwhile, a Financial Times investigation into Bo’s finances shows that the family bought luxury London properties between May 2002 and May 2003, and that French architect Patrick Henri Devillers occupied one of the flats during various stretches between 2003 and 2010. Devillers was arrested earlier this month in Cambodia in cooperation with a request by the Chinese government, which is seeking his extradition in connection with the investigation into Bo’s wife’s role in Heywood’s death. The Telegraph’s Phillips has an update on the situation in a separate Wednesday report:

Speaking in Phnom Penh on Wednesday, Khieu Kanharith, Cambodia’s Information Minister, said: “Up to now, there has not been any charge against Patrick Devillers and, according to research I have conducted, this Patrick Devillers was importantly in charge of keeping money for the wife of Bo Xilai.”

Kanharith said Cambodia would not extradite Mr Devillers to China but suggested Beijing would send investigators to Phnom Penh to interrogate the French architect.

“We cannot extradite him to China because he is a French man and… China has not provided any information yet. But I think China can send their investigating judge to Cambodia for investigation.”

The plot continues to thicken for Gu Kailai, who reportedly confessed to the murder of Heywood last week. But while her story has been “irresistible” to the netizen masses and foreign media, China author Paul French writes that Gu Kailai is just the latest in a long line of Chinese “dragon ladies” that includes Madames Chiang Kai-shek and Mao.

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Post tags: Bo Xilai, cambodia, corruption, gu kailai, Jiang Qing, murder, Neil Heywood, Patrick Henri Devillers, scandal, Soong Mei-ling
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At the start of the Cultural Revolution, the man at the centre of China’s worst political scandal in decades was a student at the Number Four High School in Beijing, an elite cradle for “princelings”, the sons of Communist leaders who had risen to power with Mao.

The school became a crucible for conflicts unleashed with Mao’s call to rebel in the name of his unyielding vision of communism. The era paralyzed the country politically, trigpicturgering social upheaval and economic malaise.

One day in 1967, Bo and two brothers were paraded at the school by an angry group of student “Red Guards”, and accused of resisting the Cultural Revolution just as their father, Vice Premier Bo Yibo, had been toppled along with dozens of Mao’s former comrades and accused of betraying their leader.

Their persecutors twisted their arms behind them and pressed their heads nearly to the ground while pulling back their hair to expose their faces, Duan Ruoshi, a fellow student at the Number Four school, wrote in a memoir published last year.

“Despite the shouts of condemnation from all sides, Bo Yibo’s sons exuded defiance and twisted their bodies in defiance against their oppressors,” Duan wrote in the memoir published by “Remembrance”, an online magazine about the Cultural Revolution.

The ordeal was a lesson for Bo in the capricious currents of Communist Party power, which only a few months before seemed to promise him and other princelings a bright future as inheritors of the Chinese revolution.

The accounts in the report serve as a reminder that Bo has seen his share of turmoil in the past and any jail sentence that might result from the present investigation would not be his first. One retired academic who overheard comments from Bo’s wife’s sister told Buckley that Bo had “been through much worse than this. He’s been through the Cultural Revolution. This is nothing.”

Separately, The Wall Street Journal profiles Chinese Billionaire Xu Ming and details his ties to the Bo family from their time in Dalian, ties which likely led to his detention shortly after Bo’s sacking in March. Xu’s fortunes have risen and fallen along with Bo, a common feature of the grey area between Chinese business and politics:

Many business leaders in China rely on close relationships with party officials, who have sweeping powers to set policy, allocate government contracts, distribute credit from state banks and control the police, media and courts. The business leaders often nurture these relationships with various gifts and favors.

Such relationships rarely are exposed, under a system in which the party forbids public scrutiny of its affairs. Business ties are often hidden through shell companies and offshore vehicles.

The close relationship of a businessman with a political leader “was not anything unique to Bo Xilai,” said Victor Shih, an expert on Chinese politics at Northwestern University. “It happens at every level of government. Find me a Chinese mayor who doesn’t have these special relationships.”

The risk the entrepreneurs run is that when the party does periodically make an example of someone, as it has now with Mr. Bo, the person’s associates and relatives are compromised as well.

See also a report, via CDT, that Bo’s wife has confessed to the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood.

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Post tags: Bo Xilai, Chongqing, corruption, Cultural Revolution, dalian, gu kailai, Neil Heywood, persecution, prison, scandal, state capitalism, xu ming
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The sources, who have read an interim investigation report circulated among senior party officials, said Gu, 53, admitted to killing her former associate after feeling “driven into a corner” by the investigation into her financial dealings and had provided a specific explanation about how she killed Heywood.

The General Office of the Communist Party Central Committee, which serves as a secretariat for the party’s General Secretary Hu Jintao–who is also China’s president–drew up the interim report and the sources said officials have decided to indict Gu following her confession.

The authorities are also investigating whether Bo, 62, was aware of his wife’s deeds, the sources said.

They have detained dozens of people associated with Bo–including his chauffeurs, close aides and secretaries from his time as mayor of Dalian, Liaoning province–and have also questioned hundreds of people who dealt with him, including corporate executives and entertainers.

They believe Gu was receiving undeclared income from the early 1990s and that she transferred $6 billion to accounts in the names of relatives and acquaintances in the United States, Britain and elsewhere to conceal her illegal earnings. Heywood is thought to have helped her open accounts and exchange currencies.

Meanwhile, the Cambodian government announced that it will not extradite French architect Patrick Henri Devillers, who reportedly has ties to the Bo family and was arrested last week at China’s request. A Cambodian Interior Ministry spokesman told Bloomberg Businessweek that Devillers has yet to be charged with a crime:

“Cambodia decided to keep him in Cambodia,” he said by phone today. “Concerned authorities are investigating into the case right now.”

China, Cambodia’s biggest investor, is investigating accusations that Bo committed disciplinary violations in relation to his wife, Gu Kailai, who was arrested in April on suspicion that she was involved in the death of a British businessman. Devillers, an architect, had business ties to Gu, Britain’s Telegraph newspaper reported in April.

Cambodian authorities earlier said they would wait for China to submit evidence on Devillers before making a decision on whether to send him to Beijing. Under the two countries’ extradition treaty, China has 60 days to provide evidence of a crime and Cambodia then has 60 days to respond, according to Khieu Sopheak.

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Bernard Valero, the spokesman for the French foreign ministry, said at the ministry’s daily news conference in Paris on Tuesday that the architect, Patrick Devillers, had been detained in Cambodia.

“We of course will offer our consular protection, and we are in direct contact with the Cambodian authorities regarding the ins and outs of this arrest,” he said. “We are obviously following the ongoing investigation very closely.”

…

Mr. Devillers had remained in Cambodia despite being warned strongly and repeatedly by friends that he was in danger there, in part because of the Cambodian government’s close connections to the Chinese government, which is its largest creditor and aid donor. Mr. Devillers may have stayed because he began living with a Cambodian woman soon after moving to Phnom Penh nearly six years ago and has a kindergarten-aged child with her, said a friend who insisted on anonymity because of the diplomatic tussle over Mr. Devillers.

The South China Morning Post reports that the arrest of Devillers was carried out with the cooperation of Beijing, which is seeking his extradition, though Phnom Penh police have not decided whether to send him to China or France. While French officials probe the cause of the arrest, The Telegraph’s Malcolm Moore connected with Devillers’ father for his reaction to the news:

“I spoke to my son 10 days ago and he appeared perfectly calm,” said the semi-retired property developer at his home in Rainans, Burgundy.

“He had no idea he was in danger of being arrested, as he had intended to come to France for a trip over the summer. My aim is to have him repatriated to France. I will be speaking with a French consular contact in Cambodia tomorrow, and I intend to fly to Cambodia as soon as possible.”

He said he believed his son was attracted to Mrs Gu and had wanted a romantic relationship with her. “My opinion is that he was ensnared in a web of manipulation by this woman,” he said, without providing more details.

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“The past 15 years was a period when Chongqing’s overall strength achieved the fastest growth, its urban and rural areas experienced the biggest changes, and its people received the most benefits in its history,” Zhang said.

“Meanwhile we must note that the Wang Lijun incident, the death of Neil Heywood and the serious disciplinary violations of comrade Bo Xilai have greatly tarnished the image of the Party and the nation and have had a grave impact on Chongqing’s reform and development,” he said.

…

“We must strictly separate Chongqing’s achievements over the past five years and the painstaking efforts of local officials and residents from the three cases. On the other hand, we must sincerely draw lessons from those cases and earnestly improve our work,” Zhang told the delegates.

Zhang’s remarks come as the CCP’s central leadership determines how to finish off Chongqing’s disgraced former leader, who is believed to be under house arrest in Beijing, but The Associated Press notes that he gave no update on the investigation. The Telegraph’s Malcolm Moore reports that while an investigation may be concluded, senior CCP officials may still be at odds over how to rule on the cases of Bo and his wife:

One businessman in Chongqing, a former mid-ranking city official, said he had heard that Mr Zhang was stilled referring to Mr Bo as “Comrade Bo” in recent meetings and that Mr Bo had done much work to develop Chongqing.

“This means that Bo’s case is not yet closed and there is still a fierce struggle in the central government,” he said. “Zhang is being very prudent and extremely cautious about the words he uses. Bo’s power is not yet exhausted.”

“I would say we are still in a vacuum. They have not yet pinned him down entirely, or decided on the nature of the case. Bo has powerful allies and his Leftist route is the one the Party has been walking down for ever and is difficult to divert from.”

A second former Chongqing official also said Mr Bo could face more lenient treatment and that the central government appeared keen to extend the limbo around him for as long as possible and to dissipate the momentum around his case.

“He still has support in Beijing and they want to protect him. They are trying to fade the case out. Bo’s political career is dead, but they will try to protect him otherwise. One way of them doing that is the rumours that have spread that his wife is schizophrenic, or mentally ill,” he said.

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That version goes like this: Mr. Wang actually confronted Mr. Bo on Jan. 18 with evidence linking Mr. Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai, to the murder by poisoning of Neil Heywood, a British businessman and longtime friend of the Bo family. It was the first that Mr. Bo had heard of his wife’s alleged involvement in the death. Mr. Bo agreed at the time to allow Mr. Wang to act against his wife based on the evidence, even if that meant Ms. Gu would be put on trial. At the meeting, Mr. Wang also told Mr. Bo that three police officers had asked to be transferred from the investigation after they discovered the murder was tied to Mr. Bo’s family.

That story was told to friends by Yu Junshi, a shadowy fixer in Mr. Bo’s inner court. Mr. Yu worked in the 1990s as an overseas intelligence agent and owned two dogs that bit a man to death in Chongqing last July. He was also close to Mr. Wang and has been detained in the party’s broad investigation into Mr. Bo, who was dismissed as party chief of Chongqing in March and suspended from the party’s Politburo the next month.

“At the meeting, Bo Xilai said, ‘Leave me alone for a while and let me think about this,’ ” said a person who has met Mr. Yu and spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of being officially questioned over the events. “Then, to show he’s righteous, Bo Xilai said he would be willing to allow his wife to be tried.”

Mr. Wang was pleased because Mr. Bo’s reaction showed that Mr. Bo trusted Mr. Wang, the person said, citing the story told by Mr. Yu.

But on Jan. 21, Chen Cungen, the head of the Chongqing party branch’s organization department, which oversees personnel issues, told Mr. Wang that he would be transferred from the police chief post, according to the story that Mr. Yu told his friends. Then on Jan. 28, both Mr. Chen and Liu Guanglei, the head of the local politics and law committee, gave Mr. Wang formal notice of his removal from the police force. In this account, Mr. Bo did not deliver the message in person to Mr. Wang; the two never met again after their talk on Jan. 18.

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Post tags: Bo Xilai, Chongqing, gu kailai, murder, Neil Heywood, scandal, Wang Lijun
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