MCLC: Chongqing police chief (2)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Chongqing police chief (2)
***********************************************************

Yet more on the politics behind the Wang Lijun case.

Kirk

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Source: The Daily Beast (2/20/12):
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/02/19/china-s-party-power-strugg
le-2012-reds-vs-reformers.html

The Biggest Political Story in China
A celebrated cop¹s mysterious flight exposes a fierce succession struggle
at the top.
By Rosemary Righter

For Beijing, the timing could hardly have been worse. Just days before
Vice President Xi Jinping was to take off for his high-profile U.S. visit,
the biggest political bombshell in decades erupted in central China. Xi¹s
meticulously planned trip was intended not only to mark his international
debut as President Hu Jintao¹s heir presumptive, but also to impress on
the world that this coming October¹s handover of power‹only the fourth
such changing of the guard since the 1949 Communist revolution‹is a
well-oiled done deal. But then the turbulent reality was thrust into the
public spotlight by the precipitate flight of Wang Lijun to temporary
sanctuary at the U.S. Consulate in Sichuan province¹s capital, Chengdu.

Wang was no ordinary target of Chinese persecution. As vice mayor and
police chief of Chongqing, he had become China¹s most celebrated cop, a
folk hero for his no-holds-barred campaign against organized criminals and
their alleged protectors in that sprawling megalopolis. He was the strong
right arm of Chongqing party secretary Bo Xilai, one of China¹s most
powerful men. But on Feb. 2, Bo abruptly fired his ace enforcer‹and Wang
evidently had so little faith in Chinese justice that he took the
desperate step of fleeing to the Americans for protection. Seventy
carloads of armed police pursued him from Chongqing to Chengdu, where they
surrounded the Consulate until Beijing angrily demanded their withdrawal
and dispatched Qiu Jin, the deputy head of China¹s State Security
Ministry, to escort the fugitive, first-class, to Beijing for
interrogation.

China¹s websites have gone wild with speculation over Wang¹s flight. What
did the fugitive police chief tell the Americans? What did they tell
Beijing? What is he now telling the party¹s enforcement arm, the Central
Commission for Discipline Inspection? The commission had already opened an
investigation into party corruption in Chongqing. Above all, will he
implicate‹perhaps destroy‹his former patron? Chongqing¹s municipal
government tried clumsily to discredit Wang by announcing that he was
suffering from ³mental stress² and was ³receiving vacation-style
treatment²‹assertions that were met with derisive hilarity in the Chinese
blogosphere and only reinforced the widespread assumption that Bo was
trying to make Wang his fall guy.

The drama has exposed a ferocious battle over China¹s future at the
commanding heights of the party. Until now the struggle has been kept
under wraps, although most Chinese know how to interpret the party
leaders¹ telltale harping on ³unity of the leadership² and ³harmonious
society.² Now, however, the battle for top party slots is out in the open,
and all assumptions about its outcome have been upended. The infighting is
assuming some of the intensity of the ideological disputes that preceded
the Cultural Revolution. At stake is not only the balance of the party¹s
leadership, but also the country¹s future direction‹whether China will
take a more statist and nationalist path or stay on the road to
liberalization at home and abroad. In sum, this is the party¹s most
crucial moment since Deng Xiaoping set out to transform China after Mao¹s
death.

As the standard-bearer for the Chinese left, Bo is a key figure in this
contest. His admirers include both neo-Maoists and party diehards who look
back with nostalgia on the days of Maoist dictatorship, accusing the party
of having lost its moral bearings along with its revolutionary fervor. In
the opposing camp are the party¹s modernizers, whose most prominent
representative is Wang Yang, the party secretary of southeastern China¹s
industrial powerhouse, Guangdong province. Secretary Wang is a vocal
advocate of ³free thinking and mind liberation² and the relaxation of
bureaucratic and party controls that hinder development. He urges that the
rule of law be strengthened, insisting that the swelling discontent in
Chinese society is better met by addressing the causes than by bashing
heads. Intervening after a violent uprising against land-grabbing public
officials, he promoted the leader of the protests and‹in a practically
unprecedented move‹ordered that the villagers be allowed to choose their
own representatives in genuinely free elections.

Bo has hitherto been viewed as virtually unassailable. As the son of Bo
Yibo‹one of the eight ³immortals² of the 1949 revolution‹the Chongqing
party secretary is what the Chinese call a ³princeling,² an heir to
extraordinary political influence and privilege. More than that, however,
he¹s a ruthlessly effective political operator in his own right, and he
enjoys substantial personal support within the military. His
much-trumpeted ³Chongqing model² champions old-fashioned Marxist
egalitarianism, classic socialist values, and strong party control over
each individual¹s life. His enthusiasm for sending city youth down to the
countryside to ³learn from the peasants² recalls the Cultural Revolution,
as does his call for a revival of ³Red Culture² that echoes the
propagandistic musical spectacles of Mao¹s third wife, Jiang Qing.

But he¹s popular, too, largely because during his tenure Chongqing has not
only posted growth rates as high as any in China, but also has made
massive provision of housing and health care for workers, in a country
where social safety nets barely exist and the gap between rich and poor is
obscenely wide. Despite the distrust aroused in Beijing by his brand of
red populism, Bo was considered certain to secure one of the coveted nine
seats in the all-powerful Standing Committee of the Politburo at this
coming October¹s five-yearly Plenary Congress of the Communist Party. His
many detractors call him a ³mini Mao² and warn that, given that much
power, he could roll China backward to Mao-style dictatorship.

To take that route would be cynical even by the ruling party¹s standards:
Bo¹s father was disgraced and badly tortured in the Cultural Revolution.
His mother was beaten to death. Yet the son has cultivated the ³red² image
and has but courted a powerful clique of party hardliners who call
themselves the Children of Yenan, after the Red Army¹s refuge in the days
of the Long March. A few weeks before Wang Lijun fled to the American
Consulate, some 1,200 of these cognac communists gathered at Beijing¹s
Heaven and Earth theater. The keynote speaker was Hu Muying, the daughter
of an intellectual who was close to Mao. Denouncing the ³class
polarization, rampant corruption,² and ³moral decline² she linked to
China¹s economic opening-up and reform, she asked: ³How come those who
have been overthrown and exterminated have returned today?² The revival of
³evils that were exterminated at the founding of New China² is a crisis
for the entire party, she said, and the incoming leadership must ³correct
the wayward course. Without this there will be no future.²

Vice President Xi has yet to declare his hand. So far he has straddled the
factions, cannily refraining from specifics on policy. A year ago he
publicly lavished praise on Bo for his revival of Red Culture, but that
may not mean much. In China, you take care to praise your enemies in
public; it¹s from behind and in the dark that you stab them. Xi has yet to
prove that he shares the convictions of his father, Xi Zhongxun, who
personified ³reform and opening up² as Deng Xiaoping¹s man in the
groundbreaking economic test lab of Shenzhen. Still, there¹s every reason
to believe that he adheres to Deng¹s strategies of gai, reform of the
Maoist dictatorship, and kai, opening intellectually and to the outside
world.

We are witnessing one of the climacterics of Chinese history, comparable
to the 1971 plane crash that killed Mao¹s fleeing henchman Lin Biao and
drained the Cultural Revolution of its energy. No one knows how this one
will turn out. The party¹s determination to engineer a flawless transition
is rooted in China¹s bitter experience of abrupt and violent change. The
only certainty is that the gloves are coming off.

Rosemary Righter is an associate editor at The Times of London.