HONG KONG - When Wang Lijun,
former right-hand man of fallen Chongqing
Communist Party boss Bo Xilai, was sentenced to 15
years in prison on Monday morning in the
southwestern city of Chengdu, you could almost
hear party insiders clucking their approval as
their grand plan to minimize the fallout from one
of China's biggest political scandals took another
step forward.
Last month, China's
thoroughly politicized legal system made quick
work of Bo's wife, Gu Kailai - who, after a
one-day trial, received a suspended death sentence
for murdering British businessman Neil Heywood in
November of 2011.
Wang, 52, then the
Chongqing police chief, was convicted of aiding Gu
in an ultimately failed plot to cover up Heywood's
murder, of taking the equivalent of US$480,000 in
bribes and attempting to defect at the US
consulate in Chengdu. His trial
lasted two days and his
sentence was lighter than the 20 years suggested
in judicial guidelines.
With Gu and Wang
out of the way, that leaves dangling only the
63-year-old Bo himself, the central figure in a
sordid political drama whose true plot and moral
may never be known. Bo's fate is likely to be
decided soon, and with equal expediency, so as not
to cast a dark shadow of corruption over the 18th
Communist Party Congress - expected to be held in
October - that will choose the next generation of
Chinese leaders as the 10-year partnership of
President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao comes
to an end.
Indeed, it is quite possible
that the congress simply cannot proceed until
party leaders decide how to manage the scandal
surrounding Bo, a charismatic politician who had
risen to national prominence and was brazenly
angling for appointment to the all-powerful,
nine-member Politburo Standing Committee before
his abrupt undoing.
Bo had become the
standard-bearer for party leftists, who may need
to be appeased for his removal last March from his
Chongqing post and from his seat on the ruling
Politburo. Thus analysts have been watching
closely the trials of both Gu and Wang for hints
of how Bo's case will be handled and what that
will mean for the upcoming once-a-decade
leadership transition.
Following the
speedy Gu trial, the script looked favorable for
Bo. Gu confessed to poisoning Heywood in a
Chongqing hotel room, apologized for letting down
the party and the country and thanked her jailers
for their humanitarian care. Remarkably, Bo's name
was never mentioned - an omission pundits thought
indicated that his accuser, the party's Central
Commission for Discipline, might treat him
leniently. Bo stands charged with "serious
disciplinary violations" - commission code for
corruption.
An account of Gu's trial
published by the official Xinhua News Agency
painted a sympathetic picture of the 53-year-old
lawyer and author, who testified that she was
suffering from depression and insomnia at the time
of the murder. Gu feared that Heywood would harm
her 24-year-old son, Bo Guagua, after the young Bo
refused Heywood's demands for payment of US$22
million over a failed business venture, the report
stated.
Xinhua made no mention of the
affair that, according to other media accounts, Gu
had with Heywood or the millions of dollars that
Heywood allegedly helped Gu and her husband spirit
out of the country and hide in foreign banks.
Bo wasn't so lucky in the Wang trial. This
time a long Xinhua court report contained
sensational passages involving Bo that hint at the
criminal charges he could face. Once again, Bo is
not named, but it is clear that he is the person
referred to in damning testimony offered by Wang's
deputy police chief, Guo Weiguo.
According
to Xinhua, Guo testified that he was present when
Wang confronted "the principal person in charge"
of party affairs in Chongqing with evidence that
Gu was Heywood's killer. That person could only
have been Bo, who then, as Guo's account
continues, "angrily rebuked" Wang before slapping
him in the face for his temerity.
On
February 2, soon after this reported encounter,
Wang would be demoted to a post overseeing
education, science and environmental affairs and,
on February 6, he would seek asylum at the US
consulate in Chengdu. Apparently unable to strike
a deal with the Americans, Wang left the consulate
after 33 hours and was then seized by security
agents.
The publication of Guo's testimony
by Xinhua provides official confirmation of a
story that had already received wide circulation
on the Internet and appears to show that Bo did
have knowledge of his wife's crime but failed to
act on it. That failure opens him up to criminal
charges that could lead to a jail term.
And there was more bad news for Bo in the
Xinhua story, which also reported that Wang had
provided prosecutors with damaging information
about others in exchange for leniency; again,
although Bo was not named, he is assumed to be one
of those "others".
If Bo - a high-flying
"princeling" whose father, Bo Yibo, is regarded as
one of the "eight immortals" of Communist Party
lore - winds up behind bars along with his wife
and former police chief, it will bring a
humiliating end to a political career that seemed
destined for greatness.
With the help of
his influential father, who died in 2007, Bo began
his political career in China's northeastern
Liaoning province. He rose from being a county
deputy party secretary in 1984 to become vice
mayor of the bustling city of Dalian in 1990.
Within two years, he had risen to mayor of the
city and, in 2001, he was appointed governor of
the province.
In 2004, Bo left local
politics to become minister of commerce - a
high-profile position that required him to travel
the world and allowed him to burnish his
reputation as one of China's most personable and
articulate rising political stars. His good work
earned him a seat on the 25-member Politburo in
2007.
Also in 2007, Bo was appointed party
secretary of Chongqing, a sprawling southwestern
municipality of 29 million people that was
infamous for its powerful triads and corrupt local
administration. It was not a post Bo wanted and
was widely seen as a move by his detractors to
sideline him from the intense jockeying for the
country's top leadership positions.
With
Wang doing most of the dirty work, however, Bo
used his Chongqing appointment to mount the
biggest anti-crime campaign the nation had ever
witnessed, further raising his national and
international profile. Critics complained that Bo
allowed Wang and his underlings to trample on
individual rights and ignore due process during a
two-year purge that began in 2009 and resulted in
the arrest of nearly 6,000 people, including not
only criminals and corrupt local officials but
also defense lawyers and Bo's political
adversaries.
At the same time that Wang's
massive anti-crime sweep was making big news, Bo
launched an ambitious plan to revive the Marxist
thinking of Mao Zedong, the founder of the
People's Republic of China. Through a series of
mass rallies and "red culture" campaigns
punctuated by Maoist quotations and revolutionary
songs reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution
(1966-1976), Bo added to his already considerable
popular appeal.
This combination of
iron-fisted security and mass nostalgia for Mao's
lost communist ideals came to be known as the
Chongqing model - a paradigm no doubt regarded as
a threat by Hu, Wen and many other party leaders
who believed mass revolutionary campaigns to be a
dead chapter in China's dark past, not a model for
a brighter future.
But with Wang now
behind bars and Bo perhaps soon to follow, the
Chongqing model is also dead, as is the naked
hubris of one of the most talented and
controversial politicians in China's recent
history.
Kent Ewing is a Hong
Kong-based teacher and writer. He can be reached
at kewing56@gmail.com Follow him on Twitter:
@KentEwing1
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