MCLC: Bo trial balancing act

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Bo trial balancing act
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (8/20/13):
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/21/world/asia/at-bo-xilai-trial-a-goal-to-bl
ast-acts-not-ideas.html

At Bo Xilai Trial, a Goal to Blast Acts, Not Ideas
By EDWARD WONG and CHRIS BUCKLEY

BEIJING — The paraphernalia of the global left litters the bookstore
called Utopia on the sixth floor of an office tower here: tomes titled
“Mao Zedong’s Road to Success” and “The Marxian Legacy,” and canvas
satchels with Che Guevara’s visage.

But the store’s most important product, a Web site that gives voice to the
Chinese left, is missing. “It’s still shut down,” said a woman working at
the store. Chinese officials forced the site to close in April 2012
because of its fervent backing of Bo Xilai, the former Communist official
who invoked Maoist talk to rally popular support during his four-year
governance of Chongqing in southwest China. A new site
<http://www.wyzxsd.com/index.php>set up by the store is used mainly to
sell books and publish nonpolemical commentaries.

With Mr. Bo set to go on trial on Thursday on charges of corruption,
taking bribes and abusing power, China’s leaders are engaged in a delicate
balancing act. On the one hand, they aim to parade Mr. Bo as a criminal
and silence his most vocal supporters. On the other, they want to avoid
tarring the leftist policies he championed or alienating important
revolutionary families.

The tension lays bare the continuing need to preserve the vaunted place of
the party’s original ideology in China’s political life, nearly 35 years
after the party turned from Maoism to economic reform and opening. As Mr.
Bo showed, the ideology remains the most fundamental wellspring that
Chinese politicians can tap for popular support and legitimacy. Some
political analysts say China’s leader, Xi Jinping, is taking a page from
the Bo playbook when he stresses the importance of learning from Mao and
Marx and pushes an old-school “mass line” rectification campaign among
party officials.

Those analysts, and leftist allies of Mr. Bo, point out that the charges
against him deal mainly with financial transgressions earlier in his
career — taking bribes from Xu Ming, a tycoon and old friend, is said to
be the biggest criminal act— rather than anything substantially related to
the controversial policies he championed during his governance of
Chongqing. There, from 2008 to his dismissal in March 2012, when a murder
scandal involving his wife and a dead British businessman emerged, he
pushed policies in the name of socialist revival. They ranged from
building low-cost housing to promoting mass Communist “red song”
singalongs to battling corruption in a “strike black” campaign that
liberals criticized for its human rights abuses.

“People believed in Bo Xilai because he held up the banner of Mao Zedong,”
said Yang Fan, a professor at the China University of Political Science
and Law, and a founder of the Utopia Web site. “If you don’t use the
banner of Mao, you’re nobody. Who would believe in you?”

“Even more than Bo Xilai,” Mr. Yang added, Mr. Xi “uses a lot of Mao’s
words.”

Yet as the trial approaches, the party is intensifying its clampdown on
Mr. Bo’s leftist supporters. Some have been detained,
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/10246975/Supporters-a
nd-critics-of-Bo-Xilai-rounded-up-ahead-of-trial.html>others ordered to
avoid making public comments. In late June, a former college teacher, Wang
Zheng, who had gone to Chongqing to help local Bo supporters find
exculpatory evidence, was forced to fly back to Beijing, where she was
detained in the suburbs, according to a first-person account posted online.

Fears of Bo-inspired dissent are not unfounded. Ardent leftists have
insisted that the prosecution of Mr. Bo is rooted in personal vendettas.
The “Red Hometown” Web site signified the party’s announcement of his
trial date on Sunday with a headline beginning, “Tragedy!” Leftist
commentators have continued to depict the case as a plot. Last year,
leftists circulated an extraordinary petition online calling for the
impeachment of Wen Jiabao, a political enemy of Mr. Bo who was then the
prime minister; it got more than 1,600 signatures.

Recently, a group of Maoists revived the campaign, and a version of the
updated petition supposedly had 3,000 signatures.

China’s far left is small, but is a vocal part of the political agitation
allowed under party controls. For the party, loyalists who embrace Marx
and Mao as patron saints are useful watchdogs to be unleashed against
liberal voices.

But as the party pursued policies that created huge gaps in wealth and a
vastly moneyed elite, many leftists found in Mr. Bo — with his expensive
suits, foreign business friends and a son educated at elite schools in
Britain and the United States — an unlikely beacon. The son of one of the
revered “Eight Immortals” who helped lead the party in the Mao and Deng
Xiaoping eras, he pursued a place on the elite Politburo Standing
Committee by turning Chongqing into a showcase for policies aimed at
securing both market prosperity and socialist equality.

Many on China’s far left embraced him as a potential ally; he in turn
burnished his new image by luring leftist journalists, writers and
intellectuals to his fief to extol the “Chongqing model” and sing red with
him. (They ignored that staunch defenders of the capitalist way were also
among the pilgrims — Henry Kissinger gave a speech
<http://shanghaiist.com/2011/07/07/video_henry_kissinger_puts_100000_p.php%
20> in praise of Mr. Bo at one gala.)

“Bo Xilai’s Chongqing model showed that the current system can be used to
restore relations between the party and the people,” said Zhang Hongliang,
a teacher in Beijing who is an intellectual leader of the hard-line left.
“The people in Chongqing used to say, ‘The Communist Party has come back.’
 ”

Mr. Zhang said that after Mr. Bo’s fall, some leftists turned against
party leaders. “In particular, many people who originally supported Xi
Jinping began to complain about him,” he said.

“Because of the Bo Xilai incident, the whole left wing is a mess,” he
added, referring to “a massive split” between those condemning the party
and others who, like himself, still seek to influence it from within.

One of those who hardened against party leaders is Han Deqiang, another
founder of Utopia and an associate professor at the Beijing University of
Aeronautics and Astronautics.

“This is an unjust case with charges trumped up out of nothing or
exaggerated accusations grafted on from elsewhere,” he said.

Like others, he said he had noticed Mr. Xi and fellow party leaders
donning Mr. Bo’s neo-Maoist mantle after taking power in November. “China
is walking on the path of Bo Xilai without Bo Xilai himself,” Mr. Han
said. “What it proclaims in public banners is still the same as what Bo
Xilai did in Chongqing. But the problem is, a Bo Xilai road without Bo
Xilai lacks substance. It’s flimsy and fake.”

This week, Mr. Xi gave a speech in which he stressed the continued
importance of Marxism. But he also appeared to try to reinforce conformity.
“It’s up to propaganda and ideological work to consolidate the guiding
status of Marxism in the ideological sphere,” Mr. Xi told a conference of
propaganda officials in Beijing, the Xinhua news agency reported Tuesday.
“We must uphold, consolidate and strengthen mainstream thinking and
opinion.”

Li Weidong, a political analyst and magazine editor, noted that the party
leadership would have a hard time convincing leftist critics like Mr. Han
that the trial was anything other than the climax of a political struggle.
“They need Bo to directly admit guilt and apologize in his own voice on
television,” Mr. Li said. “Otherwise, it’s even easier for the left to say
it’s all just a fraud.”

Edward Wong reported from Beijing, and Chris Buckley from Hong Kong.
Jonathan Ansfield contributed reporting from Beijing, and Patrick Zuo
contributed research from Beijing.