China’s internal power play

By S P SETH

The recent meeting of China’s National People’s Congress (NPC) brought to surface the internal turmoil at the highest levels of the Communist Party of China (CPC). The powerful Chongqing party chief and the mega city’s boss, Bo Xilai, was removed from power. He had become the magnet and motivator for those unhappy with the rising tide of crime and corruption, using his city as a trendsetter in leading a strong, often brutal, campaign against alleged mafia and gang leaders. His chief instrument in this campaign was his police chief, Wang Lijun. In the process, Wang came close to finding some skeletons in his boss’ cupboard linking him/his wife to the death of Neil Heywood, a British citizen living in Chongqing. Heywood reportedly became the victim of a business relationship gone sour with Bo’s wife.

Fearing for his life, Wang made a dash to the US consulate in Chengdu seeking asylum with a treasure trove of information on his boss and more. The Americans apparently refused to buy into this internal Chinese power play and the Chinese security people took him away. He has not been seen since. Earlier, in Beijing to attend the NPC meeting, Bo fronted a press gathering and was quite unrepentant about his crusade against crime and defended his wife’s affairs. His only regret was that he trusted Wang too much. Now that his wife Gu Kailai has been detained by the police to investigate Heywood’s death, the power play is becoming more like a murder mystery.

Why was Bo so important and, by the same token, so dangerous to warrant his removal right in the middle of the NPC session? One reason, as sketched above, was that he seemed to attract people unhappy with the country’s state of affairs in terms of corruption and crime. His anti-mafia crusade at times appeared like a political witch-hunt. He was stoking the Maoist nostalgia of going after those who had usurped the party leadership. Which would explain why premier Wen Jiabao openly raised the specter of another Cultural Revolution like the one Mao Zedong engineered in 1966 lasting a decade. The seriousness of the situation created rumors of a coup, with the authorities clamping down on internet sites.

Indeed, the main website, Utopia, of the Bo Xilai-aligned hard-left, was ordered offline for publishing articles that “violated the constitution, maliciously attacked state leaders, and speculated widely” about the country’s leadership. Founded in 2003, Utopia became the vehicle for China’s resurgent left, opposing Western style economic reforms and, at times, criticized the party leadership against the backdrop of Maoist nostalgia. In his espousal of the Maoist past, Bo was reportedly winning support in the upper echelons of the party, and making a bid for a spot on the 9-member Standing Committee, the top governing arm of the CPC, at the next Party meeting in autumn where China’s new leadership for the next 10 years would be consecrated. But all his best-laid plans were sabotaged by the betrayal of his police chief when he made a dash to the US consulate in Chengdu.

China’s Communist Party broadly has three groups. First is the party’s hard-left that veered around Bo, and challenged the party leadership over its market friendly economic policies. That seems to have been badly damaged with the sacking and, what looks like, Bo’s purge. The second is the relatively liberal group with their advocacy of political reforms and further liberalization of the economy. Premier Wen Jiabao has been urging this for some years but without much success. Wen has highlighted the danger of a possible replay of another Cultural Revolution, against the backdrop of Bo’s purge, if nothing is done. According to him, “Without political restructuring, economic restructuring will not succeed….[Because] If we are to address the people’s grievances we must allow the people to supervise and criticize the government.”

Will he succeed? It seems unlikely in any significant way, simply because any meaningful change will upset the entrenched interests of so many at all levels of government and the party—local, regional and at the centre. And they will seek to thwart it.

At this point it is important to point out that the factional divisions in the CPC are not watertight. Even Bo was using his hard-left rhetoric as a convenient strategy to capture power. Like other CPC leaders, he and his family were beneficiaries of the system of patronage that went with power. His son, for instance, received much of his education in top British and American schools/universities, and was said to move around in his flashy Ferrari. His wife was engaged in profitable business--- one of its unfortunate victims being Neil Heywood, a British citizen.

The third group (which includes most of the party functionaries), even when they are generally supportive of the government, favor continued exercise of monopoly power by the CPC. With entrenched power and vested interests, any dilution of political control to introduce some sort of popular accountability and supervision will make them vulnerable. Like the late-Deng Xiaoping, architect of China’s economic miracle based on state-controlled capitalism, they would rather keep both economic and political power with the party. Deng was completely set against political liberalization fearing that it would plunge China into chaos thus undoing the process of China’s economic growth and its rise as a strong and modern nation. He, therefore, believed that the party’s exclusive control of power was not up for discussion. And in 1989 he ordered the army to crush the student-led democracy movement to prevent China’s relapse, in his view, into chaos.

Not only did Deng crush the students’-led movement, he also purged the political liberals in the party led by his own appointee as general secretary, Zhao Ziyang. Wen Jiabao, now China’s premier, was then working for Zhao. Wen is not only a great survivor but also has made his way up the party hierarchy to become China’s premier. And now he has smashed the Bo Xilai’s clique, for the time being at least. Another casualty appears to be the Zhou Yongkang, head of China’s huge internal security apparatus, who, according to the rumors, might have been planning a coup.

Because of China’s closed political system, rumor mills grind on despite the government’s firewalls, censoring and shutdown of websites and social media. Therefore, it is difficult to be sure of what is really going on. But one thing is for sure that China is entering uncharted waters where political succession might not be managed smoothly in future; though the next crop of president/party general secretary, and premier, Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang respectively, would most likely be confirmed at the next party meeting. And even as China becomes a superpower, its internal power play will continue to test its future.

Note: This article was first published in the Daily Times