MCLC: party loses in Bo scandal

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: party loses in Bo scandal
***********************************************************

Source: NYT 
(4/12/12):http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/14/world/asia/chinas-party-may-be-
long-term-loser-in-bo-xilai-case.html

NEWS ANALYSIS
Party May Be Long-Term Loser in Chinese Scandal
By MICHAEL WINES

BEIJING ‹ The scandal that climaxed here on Tuesday when Communist Party
leaders suspended the Politburo member Bo Xilai and accused his wife of
murder seems poised to destroy a charismatic party leader who challenged
President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao¹s vision for China.

But for the Chinese leaders who purged Mr. Bo, there are threats as well.

In the view of some analysts and party insiders, that same scandal has
raised the notion of high-level misconduct among China¹s elite to a level
that some say could have far-reaching and unpleasant implications for
stability. It could cast a long shadow over one of the party¹s linchpins:
the notion that a handful of all-powerful officials and retired elders are
better qualified to pick their successors than are ordinary citizens.

³I think that this could have a deep and delegitimizing impact on China,
not now, but in the long run,² Joseph Fewsmith, a Boston University
scholar of elite Chinese politics, said of the Bo family scandals.

³This has got to be shocking to the people of China,² he said. ³I think
the party has lost a lot of credibility.²

How revelations of murder and potential cover-up in the party¹s highest
echelons will resonate is unclear. But it seems plain that Mr. Bo¹s rivals
within the elite are trying to make the most of his travails.

To date, the party¹s vague wording indicates that Mr. Bo is at least
accused of obstructing justice in the investigation of his wife, Gu
Kailai, and that Ms. Gu faces homicide charges. Ms. Gu stands accused of
ordering the murder of a British businessman and onetime family friend,
Neil Heywood, after a business dispute that belies Mr. Bo¹s assurance last
month that she was but a housewife and helpmate.

But an emerging drip of corruption-related disclosures this week, largely
in a Chinese news media that normally exists in a state-dictated
chokehold, points to an orchestrated campaign to paint Mr. Bo and his
relatives as mired in graft and greed.

The effect could be to neuter a politician whose populist policies of
wealth redistribution and corruption-fighting had endeared him to citizens
of Chongqing, where he was the Communist Party secretary until last month,
and were gaining traction elsewhere in the nation.

³It was very brutal, very tough,² said Jing Huang, a scholar of Chinese
politics who heads the Center on Asia and Globalization at the National
University of Singapore. ³This sends a message to anyone who is behind Bo
to back off. They are making Bo the poster child of corruption and crime.²

Beyond Mr. Bo¹s destruction, however, lies a larger question of how
China¹s leaders address a growing perception that this is a society
rotting from the top, an impression that the spectacular Bo scandal can
only reinforce.

The state-controlled capitalism pushed by Chinese leaders has created an
economic colossus, but at the cost of a steadily widening gap in both
wealth and privilege between the rich and poor. Mr. Bo, though generally a
supporter of the Chinese economic model, sought to build a political base
made of ardent socialists by emphasizing the need to ensure more social
welfare for the middle and lower classes.

Citizens are both boiling over about and wearily resigned to corruption
and impunity among their elites, a ubiquitous topic on the microblogs that
increasingly are the national water cooler.

High-level corruption within China is not a rarity. In the last 17 years,
the party bosses of Beijing and Shanghai have been removed and later
imprisoned for graft. Internal cables from the United States Embassy in
Beijing, released last year by the WikiLeaks project, detailed allegations
of favoritism at the government¹s highest levels.

In the Politburo¹s all-powerful Standing Committee, for example, they
suggest that Mr. Bo¹s foremost patron Zhou Yongkang is tied to China¹s oil
industry, that Jia Qinglin, the nation¹s fourth-ranked leader, is linked
to Beijing real estate and the wife of the prime minister, Mr. Wen, is a
major figure in gem trading.

Mr. Bo¹s downfall has far broader resonance, not only because it involves
a leading national figure and murder ‹ and murder of a foreigner, no less
‹ but because such scandals can no longer be confined, even in China¹s
walled-off cyberworld.

The Communist Party is doing all it can to cast the case in the opposite
light: that the party should be congratulated for confronting accusations
of murder against the spouse of a Politburo member and meting out justice
with an even hand.

Chinese officials said this week that they had closed 42 Web sites and
censored 210,000 online comments since mid-March in a campaign to suppress
³Internet-based rumors,² a principal target of an online crackdown related
to the Bo family scandal. But in a wired world, even ordinary Chinese
increasingly know better.

Some experts, like Mr. Fewsmith of Boston University, compare the Bo
scandal to the case of Lin Biao, a hero of the Communist revolution whom
Mao Zedong once tapped as his successor, but who died in a suspicious
plane crash after a falling-out. Mr. Lin¹s death, he said, was a tipping
point for many Chinese who decided that Mao¹s aim was not to better
people¹s lives, but to gain still more power.

The Bo affair presents China¹s leadership with a crucial and similar
choice between burying serious political problems and settling them
openly, said Cheng Li, a scholar of China¹s leadership at the Brookings
Institution.

³It¹s not about ideological disputes. It¹s not about Bo¹s personality or
his ego or his ambition. It¹s about the very legitimacy of the Chinese
Communist Party,² Mr. Li said. ³People will ask, ŒHow can it be possible
that a soon-to-be top leader of the country could be involved in a
murder?¹  How the system could produce this kind of crisis is a wake-up
call.²

Jonathan Ansfield and Didi Kirsten Tatlow contributed reporting, and Li
Bibo contributed research.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: April 14, 2012

An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the span of time
over which the Communist Party bosses of Beijing and Shanghai were removed
from their posts and imprisoned. It was in the last 17 years, not in the
last decade.