MCLC: Bo Xilai's arc of ruthlessness

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Bo Xilai's arc of ruthlessness
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (5/6/12):
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/07/world/asia/in-rise-and-fall-of-chinas-bo-
xilai-a-ruthless-arc.html

In Rise and Fall of China¹s Bo Xilai, an Arc of Ruthlessness
By MICHAEL WINES

BEIJING ‹ ³News 1+1² is a sort of Chinese ³60 Minutes,² a newsmagazine on
state-run China Central Television that explores ‹ as much as the censors
permit ‹ the more contentious corners of Chinese society. In December
2009, the program took aim at a much-publicized anticorruption campaign in
the metropolis of Chongqing, a crusade that had grabbed national attention
for its sweep, but raised deep concerns about its brutality and disregard
for the law.

What followed was an object lesson in how Bo Xilai, the campaign¹s
architect and the secretary of Chongqing¹s Communist Party at the time,
dealt with those who stood in his way.

Mr. Bo called Jiao Li, a friend and colleague from the past who was
president of China Central Television, or CCTV, at the time. In short
order, the producer of ³News 1+1² was transferred to another program. The
show¹s popular host was briefly banned from the airwaves.

³Poor CCTV,² said Li Zhuang, a lawyer who dared to defend one of Mr. Bo¹s
high-profile targets ‹ and was sentenced to 30 months in prison for
supposedly manufacturing false testimony in the case. ³They can¹t even
protect their own children.²
As recently as January, Mr. Bo was aiming for the pinnacle of Chinese
political power, a seat on the nine-member Politburo¹s Standing Committee,
when the Communist Party¹s leadership begins a generational turnover this
autumn. He was a fixation for the news media and foreign leaders, the
handsome convention-flouter who was breaking the calcified mold of China¹s
leadership caste.

Today, Mr. Bo¹s fall has transfixed the world. He is suspended from the
Politburo, under investigation for ³serious violations² of Communist Party
rules and being held incommunicado at an unknown location. His wife, Gu
Kailai, long known for her own zealous ambition, stands accused by party
investigators of murdering a British family friend, Neil Heywood, in a
dispute over money. Neither Mr. Bo nor Ms. Gu have been given an
opportunity to defend themselves publicly.

For all his success, the seeds of Mr. Bo¹s destruction were evident long
ago to many of those who knew him. He was a man of prodigious charisma and
deep intelligence, someone who not only possessed the family pedigree and
network of allies that are crucial in Chinese politics, but who had also
mastered the image-massaging and strategic use of public cash that fuel
every Western politician¹s rise.

But Mr. Bo¹s undisputed talents were counterbalanced by what friends and
critics alike say was an insatiable ambition and studied indifference to
the wrecked lives that littered his path to power. Little is known about
career maneuvers in China¹s cloistered leadership elite, but those who
study the topic say that Mr. Bo¹s ruthlessness stood out, even in a system
where the absence of formal rules ensures that only the strongest advance.

³Nobody really trusts him: a lot of people are scared of him, including
several princelings who are supposed to be his power base,² said Cheng Li,
a scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington. The so-called
princelings ‹ like Mr. Bo, offspring of China¹s first revolutionary
leaders ‹ remain a powerful, though fragmented, force in China¹s internal
politics.

³That¹s just his character,² the son of one Communist Party elder, who
knows Mr. Bo well, said in February. ³From the county up to the Politburo,
he¹s a person who has to have it his way.²

Mr. Bo was said by employees to be a demanding and unforgiving boss,
summoning underlings to middle-of-the-night meetings, throwing crockery
and even hitting those who failed to deliver what he wanted. One such
underling approached an associate of Mr. Bo shortly after a meeting in
Dalian and begged the associate to give her a job. ³She said to me, ŒHe¹s
angry and abusive, verbally abusive. He¹s a bad man and I want to change
jobs,¹ ² he recalled.

That penchant for power and glory earned him powerful enemies at virtually
every step of his ascendance. His peers from Liaoning Province, where he
was a prominent official for more than a decade, pointedly left him off
the delegation to the 15th Congress of the Communist Party in 1997, even
though he was by then both mayor and deputy party secretary in Dalian, the
province¹s second-largest city.

When Mr. Bo left his post as Liaoning Province governor in 2004 to become
commerce minister in Beijing, the province¹s party secretary, Wen Shizhen,
famously gave a party to celebrate his exit.

Excesses Overlooked

Yet he continued upward anyway, the internal enmities papered over by a
Communist Party obsessed with the appearance of unity, his excesses
overlooked by the family and political allies whose own clout rose with
his.

Mr. Bo got tough at an early age.

He was born with a pedigree ‹ his father, Bo Yibo, was a war hero who was
at Mao Zedong¹s side during the revolution ‹ and studied with other
children of the elite at Beijing No. 4 High School, China¹s best. But when
Mao unleashed the Cultural Revolution in 1966, the elder Bo became one of
the first targets of the purges, relabeled a revisionist traitor and
dragged from stadium to factory to government office for show trials and
beatings.

At age 17, Mr. Bo seemed to embrace the purges, forming with other elites¹
children a radical Red Guard faction later condemned by Chinese
authorities for its brutality. Stories abound that young Bo denounced and
even beat his father, who spent 12 years in prison. Other Red Guards
kidnapped his mother, who was either murdered or died of illness in 1969.

The truth is murkier. Historians say Mr. Bo¹s faction actually opposed
violence and tried to defend its members¹ elite parents against Mao¹s
excesses. Mao¹s forces quickly turned on them, and in early 1967 Bo Xilai
was shipped to a Beijing labor camp for five years. Working barefoot,
often in deep mud, his feet became so rotted that chunks of flesh fell
off, he later told friends.

But after Mao¹s death, father and son emerged stronger than ever. The
rehabilitated Bo Yibo became vice premier in 1979, under his wartime
friend Deng Xiaoping. In the succeeding decade, he was Mr. Deng¹s point
man in the ouster of two successive Communist Party general secretaries,
Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, during China¹s tumultuous and failed
liberalization in the 1980s.

That earned him the gratitude of Mr. Zhao¹s successor as Communist Party
leader, Jiang Zemin. The elder Bo, who died in 2007, continued to help Mr.
Jiang sideline rivals into his dotage. Mr. Jiang, who continues to wield
backstage influence in China¹s politics even now, is widely said to have
given Bo Xilai¹s political career a boost at crucial times.

Barely a decade after taking his first desk job at Communist Party
headquarters in Beijing, Mr. Bo was named mayor of Dalian, a city of about
six million on the north Pacific coast, in 1992. By then he had married
Ms. Gu, whose family pedigree included a father who helped lead Communist
resistance to the Japanese in the 1930s and 1940s. Ms. Gu set about
building a law practice and a public reputation, including an entire book
on her exploits in a lawsuit she helped pursue in the United States.

Mr. Bo, meanwhile, began to hone the political skills and a hunger for
authority that would come to define his career.

The mayor¹s job was a plum ‹ the central government was pouring billions
into reviving its coastal cities ‹ and Mr. Bo oversaw a lavish effort to
remake Dalian, a graceful but rundown seaport, in the image of Hong Kong.
A building boom replaced empty factories with office and apartment towers;
companies from nearby Japan made Dalian a beachhead for investment in
China. Mr. Bo poured billions of renminbi into splashy ventures like
annual international fashion shows and beer festivals, civic sculptures
and a program that draped the city in seas of freshly planted grass.

Mr. Bo attended seven and eight events a day in the style of an American
mayor in full re-election mode. He relentlessly hyped Dalian¹s soccer
team, China¹s best, as an icon of civic pride.

³You could argue that none of these things are basic to the well-being of
the people, but you had the sense it appealed,² said Stephen MacKinnon, an
author and longtime scholar of China who knew Mr. Bo in the 1980s and
early 1990s. ³It was flashy.²

Mr. Bo¹s self-promotion was equally splashy: by the mid-1990s, a celebrity
chronicler had penned a fawning history of his Dalian accomplishments, and
pro-Bo articles were being planted in major newspapers nationwide. Dalian
gained an international buzz, and Mr. Bo vaulted to governor of
surrounding Liaoning Province and a seat on the Central Committee, which
includes about 370 of the party¹s most powerful figures.

³He was accompanied wherever he went by a battalion of fabulous young
women wearing Madonna headsets and sassy little sailor outfits,² The South
China Morning Post gushed in 2004, recounting a dinner with the governor
on a ship docked at Dalian port. ³He circulated easily between tables,
shaking hands with every man, woman and child on board, graciously
accepting the many requests for photos and autographs that his celebrity
status guaranteed. Later, when he spoke on stage, his enraptured audience
seemed powerless to resist him.²

Known for Abrasiveness

Elsewhere, however, a different Mr. Bo was on display.

Jiang Weiping had pulled into the parking space outside his apartment
building one December morning in 2000 when a half-dozen men threw open his
car doors, forced him into the back seat and threw his jacket over his
head.

Mr. Jiang, a journalist, had written repeatedly about government
corruption in Dalian. He was taken, he said, to a military detention
center where the Communist Party secretary of the city¹s public security
bureau, Che Keming, awaited him. Mr. Che had been Mr. Bo¹s cook and driver
before a meteoric rise through the city hierarchy.

³You are too bold,² Mr. Jiang said he recalled Mr. Che telling him. ³Don¹t
you know that Mr. Bo is soon going to be the party chief of Liaoning
Province, and after that he will be in the top leadership?² Mr. Jiang soon
was detained and charged with subversion and stealing state secrets. He
spent six years in prison before being freed and fleeing to Canada, where
he now lives.

Mr. Jiang¹s account is not easily verified, but such tales are not
uncommon. Yang Rong, whose Brilliance China Automotive Holdings once was
China¹s largest automaker, found his stake of nearly $700 million in the
company seized by Mr. Bo in 2002 after he proposed to build a new factory
in Shanghai instead of in Liaoning. Mr. Yang, who now lives in the United
States, later sued Mr. Bo and the government to no avail.

By then Mr. Bo had made several powerful enemies. His appointment in 2007,
as party secretary of Chongqing, was in fact devised to move him out of
Beijing and away from the seat of power. Two previous heads of China¹s
Trade Ministry, the Commerce Ministry¹s predecessor, had gone on to become
vice premier, a post Mr. Bo was said to crave. But one, Wu Yi, had come to
dislike Mr. Bo¹s abrasiveness and self-promotion; she sided with Prime
Minister Wen Jiabao and others in shunting him to a job in the hinterlands.

Two people who know Ms. Wu said she was miffed by his grandstanding at a
2005 Washington session of the Strategic and Economic Dialogue, where she
had led a delegation of senior leaders. She was further put off after he
opened a police investigation into the Commerce Ministry¹s international
affairs office, where she maintained close ties. And in talks with
friends, she cited his enthusiasm for the more radical Red Guards as an
especially sore point. ³Wu Yi got him,² one longtime associate of Mr. Bo
said. ³She was instrumental, saying, ŒI step down in March; the guy is
gone before I step down.¹ ²

Using Fear as a Tool

Yet any expectation that exile and a consolation-prize seat on the
Politburo would bank Mr. Bo¹s ambitions proved misplaced. Instead, he
reprised his Dalian agenda, spending billions to plaster the city with
ginkgo trees, luring foreign investment, publicizing his accomplishments ‹
and spearheading an anticorruption drive that took on aspects of the
Cultural Revolution purges that claimed his father.

Among the targets was Chongqing¹s deputy police chief, Wen Qiang, whose
2010 execution on corruption charges prompted The Chongqing Economic Times
to proclaim on its front page: ³Wen Qiang is dead. The people rejoice.
Chongqing is at peace.²

Though Mr. Wen was indisputably corrupt, many regarded execution as a
draconian penalty, and some outsiders saw a veiled message from the
ever-ambitious Mr. Bo. Mr. Wen had served under Mr. Bo¹s two predecessors
in Chongqing, Wang Yang and He Guoqiang. Mr. Wang was Mr. Bo¹s rival for a
spot on the Politburo¹s elite Standing Committee. Mr. He already sits
there ‹ and he also runs the party machinery that investigates corruption
and other violations of party rules.

Privately, the Wen execution was an implicit attack on their stewardship
of Chongqing ‹ ³beating the dog while the master watches,² one person said.

Publicly, it was an excuse for a publicity campaign. The police chief at
the time, Wang Lijun, summoned writers to produce a four-volume history of
the corruption campaign, to be followed by a movie and television series.

Less than two years later ‹ perhaps with Mr. Wen¹s fate in mind ‹ Mr. Wang
fled to an American diplomatic outpost, begging for protection from Mr. Bo
and setting off the events that produced his downfall. Among some, Mr.
Wang was described at the time as unreasonably fearful, or even mentally
unstable.

Now, his fears do not look so misplaced.

As Dalian¹s mayor, Mr. Bo once became enraged after a Beijing businessman,
Su Xinmin, traveled to Dalian to lobby on behalf of a Dalian businessman
who was under investigation. One son of a Communist Party elder recalled a
phone conversation in which an angry Mr. Bo declared that he would have
Mr. Su arrested ‹ and soon afterward, a corps of Dalian police officers
went to Beijing, arrested Mr. Su and detained him in Dalian for nearly two
months.

It was a trademark Bo gambit, except that Mr. Su was no stranger: He and
Mr. Bo had spent five years together in the same Cultural Revolution labor
camp, two sons of party leaders cruelly singled out for retribution.

³He would act this way toward a fellow son of a high official with whom
he¹d been imprisoned,² the party figure said. ³So what¹s Wang Lijun to
him?²

Reporting was contributed by Sharon LaFraniere, Jonathan Ansfield and Ian
Johnson from Beijing, and Keith Bradsher from Hong Kong. Edy Yin, Li Bibo,
Mia Li and Shi Da contributed research.