MCLC: the east is still red

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Anne Henochowicz <anne at chinadigitaltimes.net>
Subject: the east is still red
***********************************************************

Source: Foreign Policy (8/22/13):
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/08/21/the_east_is_still_red_bo_x
ilai_china_trial

The East Is Still Red
Bo Xilai's downfall doesn't mean China is moving away from Mao.
BY JOHN GARNAUT 

The downfall of Bo Xilai -- the Chongqing Communist Party boss who will
almost certainly be convicted on charges of bribery, graft, and abuse of
power in a trial 
<http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2013-08/18/c_132640905.htm> that
opened Thursday <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-23776348> in
the provincial capital of Jinan -- was supposed to move China away from
its Maoist past. And yet, judging from Chinese President Xi Jinping's
evolving political platform, Bo's Maoist-flavored agenda has its
attractions -- even for princelings (the sons and daughters of top
officials) whose families suffered horrifically during the chairman's
disastrous Cultural Revolution.

Appointed party secretary of Chongqing in 2007, Bo was widely seen as a
rising star and a contender for a seat on the Politburo Standing
Committee, China's top-decision making body. He re-popularized "red
culture" -- songs, poems, and iconography popular in the third quarter of
the 20th century, when Mao Zedong ran China -- across the city and then
the nation, becoming the pin-up boy for the new left, the old left, the
Maoist left, and, to a degree, all those attracted to the allure of rising
power. Together with his police chief Wang Lijun, he tore up the colorless
template of Chinese politics by waging war against the Chongqing
underworld, exposing a hidden mass of corruption, violence, and decadence
beneath the Communist Party's shiny veneer. Bo and Wang waged war against
the party in the name of saving it.

Nationwide resistance to Bo's red-tinged agenda started soon after, when
liberal lawyers, journalists, and intellectuals began speaking out against
the repression that followed his political campaigns. When Bo arrested
<http://www.smh.com.au/world/children-of-the-revolution-20100212-nxjh.html>
 prominent lawyer Li Zhuang in December 2009, civil society leaders
started framing the debate over Bo's political experiment in Chongqing as
a proxy battle for the future of China: Would it move right, toward
economic liberalization and universal values, or left, to the ideals of
Communism? Those on the left believed that only a stronger Communist Party
could solve the country's problems of corruption, inequality, and moral
torpor. Those on the right believed unbridled state power was actually the
problem, as China had learned during the Mao years.

Li's re-arrest, in March 2011, prompted his lawyer Chen Youxi to warn
publicly <http://www.eeo.com.cn/ens/2012/1213/237385.shtml> that Bo's
disregard for law recalled the Cultural Revolution. Chen was joined by
another renowned and courageous lawyer, He Weifang, who had studied law in
Chongqing in the idealistic years following Mao's death in 1976. "So many
things have happened in this city with which we are so intimately
familiar, things that cause one to feel that time has been dialed back,
that the Cultural Revolution is being replayed, and that the ideal of rule
of law is right now being lost," He wrote
<http://cmp.hku.hk/2011/04/12/11481/> in an April 2011 open letter.

The lawyers' warnings struck a chord with Hu Deping, the eldest son of Hu
Yaobang, China's most popular reform-era leader, so he invited them in for
talks. As Party chief in the 1980s, Hu Yaobang had warned his children
that the lessons of the Cultural Revolution had not yet been learned. But
Hu himself was purged in 1987 -- without a trial or legal process --
before he could do much about it. Xi's father, Xi Zhongxun, who worked
alongside Hu, was the most senior elder who stood up for him.

Throughout 2011, Hu Deping rallied his liberal princeling allies --
including two of Xi Jinping's sisters -- with a series of unprecedented
seminars. "There seems to be a 'revival' of something like advocating the
Cultural Revolution," said
<http://www.smh.com.au/world/mystery-surrounds-collapse-of-feared-double-ac
t-20120210-1skgh.html> Hu in August, a short time before Bo's wife
murdered English businessman Neil Heywood. "Some do not believe in the
Cultural Revolution but nevertheless exploit it and play it up," Hu
explained 
<http://www.canberratimes.com.au/federal-politics/titanic-struggle-to-break
-free-of-the-lawless-past-20120330-1w2rt.html>, referring to Bo, whose
mother was murdered or forced to commit suicide
<http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/d67b90f0-d140-11e1-8957-00144feabdc0.html#a
xzz2cdDpE3TV> during the Cultural Revolution. Privately, Hu repeated a
similar message to two of his father's protégés: the then president and
premier, Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, according to a source familiar with
those exchanges.

Bo was seemingly on the ascendant until he fell out with his police chief
Wang, who was under great pressure from investigators in Beijing. Wang
fled to a U.S. consulate in February 2012, fearing for his life. He told
U.S. diplomats his version of the Heywood murder, which included the
allegation that Bo had attempted to prevent him from investigating the
incident. Bo's rivals thus had ammunition to move against him. On March
14, then-premier Wen Jiabao indirectly framed
<http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/03/29/the_revenge_of_wen_jiabao
?page=0,0> the future of Bo's "Chongqing Model" as a choice between urgent
political reforms and a return to "such historical tragedies as the
Cultural Revolution." Bo was sacked the following day; he hasn't been seen
in public since. 

Wen's intervention and Bo's dismissal prompted other princelings to break
their silence, as the elite descended into factional warfare. Wang Boming,
publisher of the pathbreaking investigative magazine Caijing and son of
one of Mao's most important diplomats, told me that Bo's "Chongqing Model"
was funded and enforced by a mafia-style shake-down of the city's
entrepreneurs. "Basically, the twenty richest guys in Chongqing, he sent
them all to jail and confiscated all their assets," he told me
<http://www.amazon.com/Rise-House-Penguin-Specials-ebook/dp/B00A3Q9ER6> in
April, in an interview for a book I was writing, The Rise and Fall of the
House of Bo. 

Fu Yang, whose father Peng Zhen worked alongside and above Bo's father as
a top Party official, was apoplectic that Li, the lawyer Bo
controversially arrested, was an employee of his law firm. Bo Xilai and Fu
were classmates; Bo even asked Fu for legal advice when divorcing his
first wife. And then Bo disregarded a legal system -- however flawed --
that Fu's father had built, as the head of China's National People's
Congress in the 1980s. My father "attached great importance to the fact
that the legal system had been completely destroyed during the Cultural
Revolution and that people's rights, particularly human rights, were
trampled underfoot," said Fu in an interview.

The men and women who make up China's political elite came of age in an
environment of psychological and physical brutality that is unimaginable
for their counterparts in the developed world. Especially cruel ordeals
were reserved for "children of high cadres," as they were then known, when
Mao's courtiers accused their parents of disloyalty to the revolution.
What seemed most troubling, among princelings who knew Bo well and agreed
to speak with me, was that he had glorified the same Mao-era movement that
killed his mother.

The Bo family was not the only one that suffered. Many princelings bear
grim tales of family members who were tortured and murdered during that
period in China's history. President Xi cannot attend a family funeral,
wedding, or Spring Festival event without facing the absence of his oldest
sister, Xi Heping. She committed suicide
<http://www.smh.com.au/world/leader-cast-from-clay-of-yellow-earth-20121019
-27wnk.html> near the end of the Cultural Revolution, in 1975, according
to close family friends. For Yu Zhengsheng, currently the fourth-ranking
member on the Politburo Standing Committee, it is even worse. "My mother
was jailed in 1968 and released in 1975," Yu said in July 2012, according
<http://news.ifeng.com/history/zhongguoxiandaishi/detail_2012_07/10/1590893
5_0.shtml?_from_ralated> to state media. "When she came out I felt that
she was not right; she always felt like she was being persecuted. She
refused to submit to a physical examination right up until her death last
year. At the start of the Cultural Revolution my younger sister was a high
school student, and was ‘struggled against' at school. Afterwards,
afflicted with schizophrenia, she killed herself. There were six or seven
deaths amongst our close relatives during the Cultural Revolution."

At a broader level, Bo offered a powerful legitimizing story at a time
when the Party was in desperate need of one. Earlier than any other leader
besides Wen, Bo affirmed the country's growing crisis of injustice and
inequality, and shifted the blame to faceless apparatchiks who lacked his
inherited revolutionary credibility. ''Corruption is the Party's mortal
wound and degeneration of its working style is its chronic disease,'' Bo
said 
<http://www.smh.com.au/world/mystery-surrounds-collapse-of-feared-double-ac
t-20120210-1skgh.html> on television in December 2009, echoing the words
of Mao. ''Without help the disease will become fatal.'' Bo, like Xi, grew
up in a household steeped in the communist ideals of equality, personal
austerity, and the emancipation of all mankind. Resurrecting Mao
symbolized old ideals while reminding people of the contributions their
own families made to the founding of the People's Republic of China.

And while Bo's methods were not pretty, they certainly worked. His control
over propaganda, ability to mobilize the masses, and disregard for legal
process and institutions kept the Chongqing population in check. "He's
trying to mobilize society like Mao did during the Cultural Revolution,
and to do that you usually have to brainwash people first," said Wang, the
Caijing publisher, in our 2012 interview. Bo's resurrection of Maoist
iconography and methods offered a way of preserving the power of the
ruling families, in a post-communist nation that was growing more cynical
and fractious by the day.

Similar patterns can be seen across the Xi administration as it battles to
preserve uncompromising one-party rule over an increasingly pluralistic
nation. "Western forces hostile to China and dissidents within the country
are still constantly infiltrating the ideological sphere," says
<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/world/asia/chinas-new-leadership-takes-h
ard-line-in-secret-memo.html?_r=0> a document issued by Xi's central
office, which takes aim at a list of seven "perils," beginning with
Western constitutional democracy. Propaganda outlets have attacked the
idea of constitutional law, security forces have arrested
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-23624034> activists calling
for the party to enforce its own laws, and Xi has launched a Mao-like
campaign to impose 
<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323455104579014960827162856.
html> an ideological "mass line
<http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/790686.shtml>" and rectify the party's
work style.

Bo's case has split the princeling elite. In 2012, Wen was winning
converts as he sought to frame Bo's downfall as the last opportunity to
set China on a smooth transition toward accountable governance and rule of
law. But then the Hu-Wen faction hit its own political turbulence
<http://www.smh.com.au/world/chinas-leadership-transition-facing-chaos-2012
1029-28fjt.html> -- compounded by an October 2012 New York Times article
revealing 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/26/business/global/family-of-wen-jiabao-hol
ds-a-hidden-fortune-in-china.html?pagewanted=all> that Wen's family
members have controlled assets worth at least $2.7 billion -- leaving Bo
supporters to ask why he was singled out for treatment. It seems the
families dominating Chinese politics abide by Benjamin Frankin's warrior's
code: they can hang together or hang separately.

Ironically, perhaps, many of those associates say they are opposed to Bo's
imminent conviction not because he did no wrong, but because he will not
receive a fair trial.

"I also do not agree with what he did but I think he should be afforded
proper legal process," says one of Bo's princeling associates, who was
close to Xi in the 1980s. "Wen and his family were so greedy, so why not
examine him?" Even Bo's most ardent opponents agree that the critics have
a point.

In the eyes of liberal lawyers, journalists, and intellectuals, and
descendants and protégés of the deceased reformer Hu Yaobang, this trial
is a unique opportunity for Xi and their Politburo colleagues to move
China away from its lawless and Maoist past, where imagined utopian ends
can be used to justify any means.

But they know that's unlikely. The trial, which will probably take place
over just two days, will be choreographed down to the finest details. The
verdict, likely to be released in late August, has already been
pre-determined; the judgment largely pre-written. And it will be framed in
narrow, criminal terms, which cannot easily serve to push China toward
rule of law. Bo's erstwhile colleagues are set to banish him to at least a
decade in jail, while borrowing much of what he stood for.  For now, at
least, the scars of the Cultural Revolution remain red raw. He Weifang
<http://www.smh.com.au/world/chinas-trial-of-the-century-set-to-begin-20130
818-2s54l.html?skin=text-only>, the lawyer who raised the specter of the
Cultural Revolution in Chongqing, said
<http://www.smh.com.au/world/chinas-trial-of-the-century-set-to-begin-20130
818-2s54l.html?skin=text-only> it best: "It's not a fair trial, but rather
just evil to fix evil and violence to fix violence."

John Garnaut is author of The Rise and Fall of the House of Bo, and
currently on leave from Fairfax. He has returned to Melbourne to work on a
book about China's princelings.