After apparently engineering the
contretemps that have hit Chongqing Party
Secretary Bo Xilai, President Hu Jintao is putting
additional pressure on other members of the Gang
of Princelings - the political faction composed of
senior cadres' offspring.
The political
fortunes of Bo, the high-profile son of Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) elder Bo Yibo, have
nosedived following the recent detention of his
key protege, Wang Lijun, on alleged "economic
crimes". Regardless of the veracity about the
speculation that the 62-year-old princeling
offered to resign from the Politburo, Bo's chances
for making the Politburo Standing Committee (PBSC)
at the 18th Party Congress later this year seem
over.
Last week, Bo reportedly wrote a
"letter of self-criticism" to the PBSC in which he
blamed himself for failing to detect the alleged
corruption and other
misdemeanors of former Chongqing Vice-Mayor Wang,
who reportedly tried to seek political asylum in
the United States Consulate in Chengdu earlier
this month.
Political observers in Beijing
are closely watching two related developments. The
first is which senior cadre will likely acquire
the PBSC seat which Bo seemed to have a high
chance of filling. The second and perhaps more
significant issue is the fate of the so-called
"Chongqing Model" associated with Bo, particularly
the large-scale resuscitation of Maoist values and
culture that is symbolized by the popular "singing
red songs" (changhong) campaign.
Since the Wang Lijun saga, however, the
mainstream media has been replete with
commentaries advocating ideological and political
liberalization. Particularly given that other
pedigreed cadres such as Vice President Xi Jinping
also have taken part in the changhong
movement, are these pro-reformist articles yet
another weapon used by President Hu and his
associates to lay into the Gang of Princelings?
Are there also possibilities that the recent
outburst of reformist sentiments will persist
beyond the 18th CCP Congress?
Bad blood
between the Hu-led Communist Youth League (CYL)
faction and the so-called Gang of Princelings goes
back a long way. At the 17th Party Congress in
2007, Hu's original plan of anointing Vice Premier
Li Keqiang - a former CYL Party Secretary - as his
own successor was foiled by an apparent collusion
between the Gang of Princelings and the Shanghai
faction, many of whom are also high-born
officials.
As a result of these unexpected
developments, the 58-year-old Xi, son of the late
Vice Premier Xi Zhongxun, was confirmed "crown
prince" at the conclave. [1] . It is also
well-known that Hu does not approve of the
changhong shenanigans in Chongqing.
The general secretary has not visited
Chongqing since Bo's appointment as the party
secretary of the western metropolis in late 2007.
That Hu had a hand in bringing down Wang - and in
the process crippling Bo's promotion prospects -
was attested to by reports in Beijing that last
year the party general secretary asked the Central
Commission for Disciplinary Inspection (CCDI) to
investigate corruption-related offences allegedly
committed by Wang and his colleagues when the
latter served as a top police official in Tieling
municipality from 1995 to 2003.
In
January, Gu Fengjie, Wang's successor as Tieling
police chief, was sentenced to 12 years in jail on
graft-related charges. CCDI agents began
questioning Wang himself early this year.
Moreover, Wang's replacement as Chongqing police
chief is 42-year-old Guan Haixiang. While Guan
spent 15 years in the CYL's regional and central
offices, he has no experience in police or
political-legal system (zhengfa xitong)
work whatsoever.
That Bo is now out of the
running for the PBSC has afforded Hu an
opportunity to revise the "tripartite division of
the spoils" formula that the CCP's disparate
factions had been arrived at late last year. Under
this scheme, the CYL faction and the Gang of
Princelings would each get three PBSC seats, with
the remaining three positions to be allotted to
representatives from other cliques. It is
understood that Hu wants the slot for which Bo was
once deemed a shoo-in to go either to a CYL
faction member or a cadre with no obvious
political affiliations. Before the Wang Lijun
scandal, heavyweight CYL faction candidates for
the PBSC included Executive Vice Premier Li
Keqiang, Director of the CCP Organization
Department Li Yuanchao, and Guangdong Party
Secretary Wang Yang, while the three front-running
princelings were Xi Jinping, Vice Premier Wang
Qishan and Bo Xilai.
One possibility is
that Hu may insinuate Inner Mongolia Party
Secretary Hu Chunhua, age 48, into the PBSC. A top
member of the Six-Generation leadership - a
reference to cadres born in the 1960s - Hu, who is
not related to the president, is also a former
party secretary of the CYL. However, it also is
possible that the position may be awarded to
Minister of Public Security Meng Jianzhu. While
Meng lacks Politburo status, he has won the top
leadership's praise for cracking down hard on
dissidents as well as "splittists" in the Tibet
and Xinjiang regions.
Of perhaps larger
significance is the blow that the Wang scandal has
dealt the so-called Chongqing Model, which became
famous due to the city's efficacy in nabbing
hardcore criminals and in revitalizing Maoist
norms. It is instructive that in a mid-February
meeting of the Chongqing municipal party
committee, Bo heaped high praise on the
"contributions that the scientific outlook on
development has made to Chongqing's development".
The "scientific outlook on development" is
considered to be President Hu and Premier Wen's
most important contribution to communist-Chinese
statecraft since they came to power in late 2002.
It was the first time that Bo, who usually
preferred to dwell on his own political and
economic programs, had so lavishly eulogized the
pet slogan of the Hu-Wen leadership.
That
Wang Lijun, the "anti-triad national hero", is
himself under investigation for graft-related
charges has undermined the entire law-enforcement
mechanism in Chongqing. Li Zhuang, a highly
respected lawyer who was briefly imprisoned in
Chongqing for allegedly using illegal means to
defend one of the triad bosses arrested by Wang,
told the Hong Kong media that "the Chongqing model
is problematic because the city's leaders do not
follow the rule of law".
Yang Fan, a
renowned "New Left" scholar who is co-author of
the book The Chongqing Model, indicated in
his blog last week that he might have to
reappraise the "Chongqing way of doing things".
Referring to the Wang case, Yang wrote "since a
big scandal has hit Chongqing, it is imperative
that we take a second look at the Chongqing
Model".
Bo's even more controversial
crypto-Maoist campaign, which is symbolized by the
thousands of changhong concerts that have
been held across China in the past couple of
years, probably is also against the ropes.
The keen advocate for political reform,
Premier Wen, has criticized certain cadres'
nostalgia for the Maoist era, stating, for
example, last year "A major obstacle to reform is
the remnant poison of the Cultural Revolution."
It is therefore probably not accidental
that in the fortnight or so after Wang Lijun
sought refuge in the US Consulate in Chengdu, a
rash of reformist-oriented pieces has appeared in
the official Beijing media. Last Tuesday, the
People's Daily ran a commentary entitled "While
reform carries risk, abandoning reform will bring
jeopardy to the party."
Wu Jinglian, one
of China's most famous liberal economists, wrote
"China is at a new crossroads" and "Above all, we
must be careful not to go back to the old road."
It is significant that a number of these articles
cited "vested interest blocs" as the most daunting
impediment to reform.
For example, Sun
Jian, a researcher at the party journal Seeking
Truth, wrote "we must not allow interest groups to
block reform." Finally, He Chuiyun, a commentator
for the China Business Times, pointed out that
"unless we have the determination and courage to
reform ourselves, it will be difficult for us to
break up the configuration of interest [groups] in
the country".
Given that the Gang of
Princelings is perhaps the best-known "interest
bloc" in China, there is a possibility that Hu and
Wen are using these liberalization-minded articles
to cast indirect aspersions at the sons and
daughters of privilege for political advantage.
At the very least, Vice President Xi, who
enthusiastically endorsed Bo's changhong
movement during a visit to Chongqing in early
2010, may be in the line of fire. Almost as much
as Bo, Xi has the past few years underscored the
imperative of heeding the Great Helmsman's
instructions. For example, at the opening of a
Central Party School (CPS) semester last year, Xi,
who is also CPS president, urged his students to
"pay attention to the Marxist canon", especially
Mao's classic writings.
"Cadres must
seriously study Marxist theory to ensure that they
can maintain political resoluteness," he said. Xi
added that since Marxist classics were voluminous,
"we should focus on the salient points, and
concentrate on studying the quintessence -
particularly the important works of Mao Zedong".
Before the Wang Lijun episode erupted, a
number of illustrious party liberals such as Hu
Deping, the son of the liberal party chief Hu
Yaobang, had tried to resuscitate ideological and
political reform through holding a series of
salons and seminars.
The theoretical
possibility exists that the dominant CYL faction
might seek the help of these remnant liberals in
consolidating its grip on post-18th Congress elite
politics. It is, however, instructive to note that
the powers that be in Zhongnanhai in Beijing have
a long tradition of using radical reformists and
genuine liberals as pawns in political intrigues -
and then abandoning them once the power struggle
is over.
A classic example is what took
place in 1979 and 1980, when Deng Xiaoping
encouraged dissidents such as Wei Jingsheng to
attack the party's unrepentant followers of
Chairman Mao. Once he was ensconced in power,
however, Deng closed down the Democracy Wall and
threw Wei and a number of his close comrades into
jail.
Irrespective of the outcome of the
on-going contention between the CYL faction and
the Gang of Princelings, the chances that the
tattered threads of political liberalization may
be picked up again seem abysmally low.
Dr Willy Wo-Lap Lam
is a Senior Fellow at The Jamestown Foundation. He
has worked in senior editorial positions in
international media including Asiaweek
newsmagazine, South China Morning Post, and the
Asia-Pacific Headquarters of CNN. He is the author
of five books on China, including the recently
published Chinese Politics in the Hu Jintao
Era: New Leaders, New Challenges. Lam is an
Adjunct Professor of China studies at Akita
International University, Japan, and at the
Chinese University of Hong Kong.
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