MCLC: Wang Hui on Bo Xilai

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Wang Hui on Bo Xilai
***********************************************************

Source: London Review of Books 34, no. 9 (May 10, 2012):
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n09/-wanghui/the-rumour-machine

The Rumour Machine
Wang Hui on the dismissal of Bo Xilai

ŒMarch 14¹ used to be shorthand in China for the 2008 unrest in Tibet; now
it stands for the 2012 ŒChongqing incident¹. It is unusual for municipal
policy to have national impact, and rarer still for the removal of a city
leader to become international news. Some observers have argued that the
dismissal of Bo Xilai, the party secretary of Chongqing, is the most
important political event in China since 1989.

Stories began to circulate on 6 February, when Wang Lijun, Chongqing¹s
police chief, fled to the US consulate in the nearby city of Chengdu.
Neither the Chinese nor the American authorities have revealed anything
about what followed, the US saying only that Wang had an appointment at
the consulate and left the next day of his own accord. Since then he has
been in the custody of the Chinese government. Reports in the foreign
media fuelled online speculation, with the result that all sorts of
rumours began to spread ­ some of them later shown to be true. There were
stories about a power struggle between Bo and Wang; about the corruption
of Bo¹s family (how could they afford to send their son to Harrow, Oxford
and Harvard?); about coup attempts by Bo and Zhou Yongkang, the head of
China¹s security forces; about business deals and spying; about a
connection between Bo and the mysterious death of the British businessman
Neil Heywood in November. Even supporters of what has been called the
Chongqing experiment ­ the reforms implemented under Bo, who became party
secretary there in 2007 ­ were unwilling to say that no corruption or
malfeasance took place. In today¹s China, these offer a convenient pretext
for an attack on a political enemy.

As the stories multiplied, two main interpretations emerged. The first ­
supported by a good deal of leaked information ­ saw the Chongqing case as
merely a matter of a local leader who had broken the law. The second
linked the incident to political differences. With a population of 32
million, Chongqing is one of the PRC¹s four centrally governed
municipalities (the others are Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin). In the
1930s and 1940s, the city was an important arms-manufacturing centre for
the Kuomintang, and today serves as a hub for much of south-west China.
The Chongqing model operated within China¹s existing political
institutions and development structures, which emphasise attracting
business and investment, but involved quite distinctive social reforms.
Large-scale industrial and infrastructural development went hand in hand
with an ideology of greater equality ­ officials were instructed to Œeat
the same, live the same, work the same¹ as the people ­ and an aggressive
campaign against organised crime. Open debate and public participation
were encouraged, and policies adjusted accordingly. No other large-scale
political and economic programme has been carried out so openly since the
reform era began in 1978, soon after Mao¹s death.

Both interpretations, one denying, the other privileging the political
character of the Chongqing events, are partial. The important question is
whether the scandal will encourage the development of a politics of
democratic participation or merely end up reinforcing China¹s practice of
Œbackroom politics¹. A critical moment came when Premier Wen Jiabao gave a
press conference on 14 March at the end of the ŒTwo Meetings¹ ­ the
National People¹s Congress and the Political Consultative Conference ­ in
Beijing. If there were different views about how to handle the Wang Lijun
incident, or problems concerning Bo Xilai¹s behaviour or that of his
family, the Two Meetings would have been the appropriate place to discuss
them. This wasn¹t what happened.

According to media reports, on the morning of 3 March He Guoqiang, one of
the nine members of the Politburo Standing Committee and the secretary of
the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, visited the Chongqing
delegation to the Two Meetings and was warmly welcomed by Bo Xilai and
Huang Qifan, Chongqing¹s mayor. On 8 March, Zhou Yongkang, another member
of the Standing Committee and secretary of the Central Political and
Legislative Committee, spoke at the Chongqing delegation¹s policy
deliberation meeting at the National People¹s Congress. On 9 March, the
Chongqing delegation held a press conference at which Bo Xilai and Huang
Qifan took questions for nearly two hours. Yet at the closing press
conference on 14 March, the final question (from a Reuters reporter)
elicited a prepared response on the situation in Chongqing from Wen.

He began by acknowledging the achievements of Œsuccessive¹ Chongqing
governments, but then changed his tone: ŒThe current Chongqing and
government leadership must reflect on the Wang Lijun incident and learn
lessons from it.¹ He referred to the 1978 Central Committee plenum that
announced the start of the reform policy, and even more pointedly to the
CCP¹s 1981 ŒResolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party¹,
which officially declared the Cultural Revolution to have been a Œdisaster
for the country and the people¹. ŒWe have resolved that we should free our
minds and seek truth from facts, and we have formulated the basic
guidelines for our party,¹ he continued.

<<In particular, we have taken the major decision of reform and opening up
in China, a decision that is crucial for China¹s future and its destiny.
What has happened shows that any practice that we take must be based on
the experience and lessons we have learned from history and must serve the
people¹s interests. The actions that we take must be able to stand the
test of history and the reality. I believe that everyone in China
understands this, and I have confidence in our future.>>

It is nearly forty years since the end of the Cultural Revolution and the
situation in China today is not remotely comparable to that of the 1970s.
So why did Wen want to link Chongqing and the Cultural Revolution? The
Chongqing model certainly has its faults, and they have occasioned
substantial debate, but the criticisms should have led to improvements.
There have been comparable problems in other regions ­ Guangdong and
Wenzhou, for example ­ but Wen¹s rhetorical invocation of the Cultural
Revolution served to single out the Chongqing experiment and seal it up,
like the Cultural Revolution itself, as a forbidden subject, not available
for public debate or historical analysis and fit only for political
condemnation. Those associated with it can now be vilified as
power-seekers, conspirators, propagandists or reactionaries who want Œto
turn back the wheel of history¹.

Around 9 o¹clock the next morning, the People¹s Daily website hinted on
Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, that there was about to be Œan
important news announcement¹ (the Wang Lijun incident had been made public
the same way). At 10.03 a.m., the Xinhua news agency reported on Weibo
that Bo had been removed as Chongqing party secretary. Soon afterwards a
number of leftist websites began to experience server problems, which
lasted for the next five days, and activists were forbidden from
mentioning the matter on Weibo. ŒWhat happened during the two days after
13.45 on 14 March 2012 can be described as a ³palace coup²,¹ a reporter
for theFinancial Times¹s Chinese website declared. Around midnight on 15
March, Li Yuanchao, head of the Central Committee¹s Organisational
Department, and Vice Premier Zhang Dejiang arrived in Chongqing and
announced Bo¹s dismissal.

People who were old enough at the time remembered what the atmosphere was
like after the mysterious death of Mao¹s nominated successor Lin Biao in
1971. Information is selected or fabricated according to political need,
and then released through channels determined by the same considerations.
Rumours have flourished inside and outside China, and there are signs of
conspiracy everywhere. Rumours are a product of backroom politics, and at
the same time provide the means for backroom politics to come out into the
open. On 10 April, another rumour went round: the government was going to
make an important announcement. The statement came not in the main news
bulletin at 7 p.m., but in the 11 o¹clock news, when it was announced that
Bo¹s wife, Gu Kailai, had been arrested on suspicion of murdering Heywood.
Bo¹s suspension from the Politburo and Central Committee was also
announced ­ allegedly to allow serious violations of party discipline to
be investigated. As for Heywood, there are plenty of contradictory
accounts there too: the official statement calls him a businessman, but
some British reporters have suggested he might have been a spy.

Websites critical of the government, such as Utopia (wuyou zhixiang), were
shut down in the days before Gu was arrested to forestall any uncensored
comments about her, though the reason given was to remove improper
discussions of decisions made by the National People¹s Congress. While
leftist websites were being closed down, foreign sites, including Œhostile
websites¹ like the Falun Gong¹s that are usually blocked, were suddenly
selectively unblocked, providing a conduit for more rumours to flow into
China. The means of transmission itself tells us a lot, involving as it
does collaboration between the Chinese and US authorities, as well as
interaction between domestic and foreign media. It became difficult to
distinguish between the coverage in the New York Times, the Financial
Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Falun Gong¹s outlet, theEpoch
Times, or to differentiate them from Chinese newspapers and websites. The
question here is whether there is a single intelligence at work, or a
network of forces collaborating to bring about a particular result.

The government doesn¹t always seem sure which line to take on the affair.
On the one hand, with Wen¹s press conference, Bo¹s sacking and Gu¹s arrest
what was first said to be an Œisolated incident¹ has been turned into a
situation of the utmost political gravity. Wen¹s talk of the Chongqing
reforms presaging a repeat of the Cultural Revolution seems intended to
indicate that open politics ­ social experiment and competition between
different political positions ­ will no longer be allowed in China. (The
chief similarity with the Cultural Revolution, as many online commentators
have pointed out, is the speed with which Bo was removed.)

Having ratcheted up the importance of the incident, the government then
tried to downgrade it, releasing information through various channels
about Bo and his family breaking the law, in an attempt to cast the matter
as a merely criminal case. TheFinancial Times has claimed the affair shows
that Œthe curtain that covers the highest-level secrets of China¹s rulers
is no longer so tight.¹ But the Œcurtain¹ has always opened to let through
snippets of information at opportune moments. The aim of the current
manoeuvres is to clamp down on political freedoms in order to make it
easier to drive through deeply unpopular neoliberal measures. In the late
1980s, after some failed attempts to push through Œprice reforms¹ on many
basic commodities, the death of the former party leader Hu Yaobang ­
deposed several years before partly because of his leniency over student
demonstrations ­ inspired the discontent that manifested itself in
Tiananmen Square and elsewhere. After the students had been repressed the
price reforms were pushed through without further protest. It is a pity
that during the current celebrations of the 20th anniversary of Deng
Xiaoping¹s Œsouthern tour¹ and his call for the speeding up of reforms,
nobody is mentioning that the precondition for the accelerating
marketisation of 1992 was the crackdown of 1989.

The southern tour opened the way for the privatisation of state-owned
enterprises, leading to large-scale lay-offs and systemic corruption.
Agricultural reforms caused crisis in rural areas, while the marketisation
of social security systems, including medical insurance, led to increasing
disparities of provision between rich and poor, country and city. This has
led to unrest: in 2008, the state council announced that there were
128,000 Œcollective protest incidents¹ in that year. The number has
increased since then to 180,000 a year. There has been widespread
discussion of the problems of state-owned enterprises, the agrarian crisis
and the rising cost of education, housing and medical care, the so-called
Œnew three great mountains¹. In response to all this a directive to Œpay
more attention to social equality¹ replaced the Central Committee¹s 1990s
policy of Œgiving priority to efficiency, with due consideration of
equality¹. Yet now that Hu Jintao and Wen ­ representing a new generation
of national leaders ­ have consolidated their power, political reform has
been put on hold and the bureaucratisation of state structures has
continued apace.

The emergence of different local models was in clear opposition to this
trend. In the past few years, observers from all over the world have come
to study the experiments in Chongqing, Guangdong, Chengdu, Sunan and
elsewhere, with Chongqing attracting more interest than most. The models
in these cities were all constantly adjusted, partly as a result of keen
competition between them but also because of the involvement in policy
debate of local people, dissatisfied with the position of labour and the
gap between rich and poor, rural and urban dwellers.

In Chongqing there was more emphasis than in some other places on
redistribution, justice and equality, and because the province was already
highly industrialised, state-owned enterprises were important to its
model. Chongqing¹s experiment with inexpensive rented housing, its
experiment with land trading certificates, its strategy of encouraging
enterprises to go global: all these, under the rubric Œthe state sector
progresses, the private sector progresses,¹ contributed to society¹s
debate. Chongqing may not have offered a perfect blueprint, and it¹s hard
to know whether Bo himself was corrupt, but its architects stressed the
importance of equality and common prosperity, and tried to work towards
them.

The Chongqing experiment, launched in 2007, coincided with the global
financial crisis, which made a new generation feel less confident of the
benefits of free-market ideology. The policies followed in Chongqing
demonstrated a move away from neoliberalism at a time when the national
leadership was finding it harder to continue with its neoliberal reforms.
What the Chongqing incident now offers the authorities is an opportunity
to resume its neoliberal programme. Just after Bo was sacked the State
Council¹s Development and Research Centre held a forum in Beijing at which
the most prominent neoliberals in China, including the economists Wu
Jinglian and Zhang Weiying, announced their programme: privatisation of
state enterprises, privatisation of land and liberalisation of the
financial sector. At almost the same time, on 18 March, the National
Development and Reform Commission issued a report on ŒImportant Points and
Perspectives on the Deepening of Economic Structural Reform Priorities¹.
It contained plans for the privatisation of large sections of the
railways, education, healthcare, communications, energy resources and so
on. The tide of neoliberalism is rising again. But it won¹t go
unchallenged, even when left-wing websites have been closed down. In the
past ten days both the People¹s Daily and the Guangming Daily have devoted
several pages to the achievements of state-owned enterprises and the
argument against privatisation.

27 April