On NPR, Louisa Lim interviews Bao Tong, former aide to former CCP General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, about the current state of the Communist Party and the new generation of leadership who is slated to take power early next year:
Bao is damning in his assessment of the current administration: “There’s no ideology, there’s no socialism, there’s no communism. All that’s left is power.”
[…]
“The party is more powerful than an emperor. No emperor could mobilize and organize 80 million people. Every company and every law court has a party branch. They’re all under the party’s control, including lawyers and newspapers. What emperor could do that?” he asks.
[…]
But Bao still has hopes for the new administration that will be headed by a new president, Xi Jinping. He believes that if the administration can act fast in pushing through reforms, it may be able to claw back some legitimacy.
“They need to be pro-active,” he says. “If they admit that many mistakes were made in the past, the people would immediately forgive them.”
Read more about Bao Tong, via CDT, including an interview with Ian Johnson in the New York Review of Books.
