SUN
WUKONG Bo's ghost to haunt CCP
congress By Wu Zhong
HONG KONG - It is now certain that the
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will hold its 18th
National Congress in the fall as scheduled,
presumably in October or November. Preparations
have gone smoothly: the new CCP committees of all
31 provinces and municipality have been formed and
the 2,200-odd deputies who will attend the
all-important party congress have been "elected".
Attention now should be directed to an
informal gathering by incumbent and retired senior
party leaders later this month or next month at
the Beidaihe, an imperial summer resort some 250
kilometers north of Beijing. There, leaders will
decide on a shortlist of candidates for the new
party leadership to be "elected" at the 18th party
congress.
Following adopted practice, the
current (17th) Central Committee
of the CCP will hold its
last plenary session shortly before the opening of
the 18th party congress, to formally endorse the
shortlist of candidates worked out at the Beidaihe
gathering and set the congress agenda.
This time around, the last plenary session
will have to deal with an extraordinary affair:
deciding the fate of the disgraced Bo Xilai. Bo
was sacked as Chongqing party chief in mid-March
and put under investigation for his possible
involvement in the murder of British businessman
Neil Heywood by his wife Gu Kailai, and suspected
corruption. His Politburo and Central Committee
memberships have been suspended, but he still
retains his party membership. In China, a CCP
member can't face public prosecution unless his
party membership is revoked.
Bo's case
happened under the current CCP leadership, so the
mess has to be cleaned up before the power
transition. Hence, it is widely expected that the
Bo will be stripped of his party membership and
handed over to public prosecution before the
opening of the 18th party congress.
This
is just a formality. Whatever legal punishment Bo
may be given, his fate is already set: he will
disappear from China's political and public life
for a long time - though it is extremely unlikely
that he will be executed.
However, it is
by no means certain that the influence of Bo and
especially his so-called "Chongqing model" will be
easily wiped out. The Chongqing model aimed at
enhancing government's role in economic
development through investment and better
distribution of social wealth - to narrow the
wealth gap created in the past three decades of
economic reform and opening up.
Under Bo,
the Chongqing government allocated funds to build
low-cost housing for low-income families,
subsidized education for children from poor
families, and increased government investment to
create more jobs.
In Bo's own words, the
Chongqing model aimed at a more even slicing of
the cake of economic development. On July 3, 2011,
Bo told a guest from Hong Kong that Chongqing
under him had taken a different road of
development from other provinces and
municipalities. The municipality had put fairer
and better division of the cake as a higher
priority than making the cake bigger.
Citing Deng Xiaoping's saying that, "some
people must be allowed to prosper first but the
ultimate goal is for common prosperity", Bo said,
"Some people in China have indeed become rich
first, so we must seek the realization of common
prosperity." Later last July, Bo reiterated that
Chongqing would not wait until it became
"developed" to study a reasonable distribution of
wealth and common prosperity. [1]
At a
time when the rich become richer and the poor
poorer, Bo's practice in Chongqing surely has won
considerable popular support. This was evident
given evidence that a number of grass-roots people
in Chongqing still remember him. July 3 marked his
63rd birthday, and at some bus stations and public
places in Chongqing, there appeared hand-written
and spray-painted messages saying "Happy birthday
to you, Secretary Bo!", "We always remember you,
Secretary Bo!"
How serious is China's
wealth disparity is anyone's guess, as the Chinese
government has since 2000 refused to release the
nation's Gini Coefficient - a common measure of
income inequality adopted internationally. "The
main reason, National Bureau of Statistics
Director Ma Jiantang said…, is that data on
high-income groups is incomplete. Some experts
criticized the announcement, saying the government
is looking for reasons to de-emphasize China's
significant wealth gap." [2]
But shortly
before he was pulled down, Bo himself disclosed
the "state secret" on March 9 - at the annual
session of the National People's Congress, saying
that China's Gini Coefficient had exceeded 0.46 in
2011. As such, he warned, China's wealth gap had
exceeded the point that could trigger social
unrest.
He added: "As Chairman Mao said as
he was building the nation, the goal of our
building a socialist society is to make sure
everyone has a job to do and food to eat, that
everybody is wealthy together".
Bo went
on. "If only a few people are rich, then we'll
slide into capitalism. We've failed. If a new
capitalist class is created then we'll really have
turned onto a wrong road." [3]
Though the
figure Bo disclosed was a bit lower than the World
Bank estimated 0.47 in 2009, it was still much
higher than the internationally accepted threshold
of 0.4, which indicates that income inequality may
threaten social stability. The timing Bo chose to
make the disclosure was intriguing. He apparently
wanted to make a last effort to draw public
attention to his Chongqing model, knowing that his
days were numbered.
What is more
interesting was that Chongqing under Bo was able
to attain fast economic development while
concentrating on wealth redistribution. Bo was
appointed to the office as Chongqing party chief
in November 2007. Under his leadership,
Chongqing's gross domestic product (GDP) grew
14.5% in 2008, 14.9% in 2009, 17.1% in 2010 and
16.4% in 2011, leading other provinces and
municipalities.
Even the CCP cannot deny
the achievement, though it has tried hard to play
down Bo's role in it. Vice Premier Zhang Dejiang,
who was elected as the secretary of the
newly-formed Chongqing party committee last month,
said the growth in Chongqing in past years was
achieved "collectively by the municipal party
committee and government".
Whatever
conclusion the CCP may draw on Bo, the new
leadership of the party must address the problem
of the widening wealth gap. In this regard, Bo's
experiment in Chongqing will likely be remembered
and studied.
However, Bo's attempt to
narrow the wealth gap, like his other political
ploys (such as his Maoist "Red Songs" and
crackdown on crime) can be seen as part of his
maneuvering to move up the bureaucratic ladder.
The CCP will likely have to answer some
embarrassing questions when the dust settles. The
public may ask, for example, how "such a person"
have can come so close to becoming a Politburo
member? (Bo might have been promoted to an even
higher position if former Chongqing police chief
Wang Lijun hadn't walked into a US consulate in
February, carrying secrets that could assist in
his downfall). The Chinese may ask how Bo could be
allowed to do whatever he wanted under his
jurisdiction without any checks or supervision?
No doubt, Bo's case has severely damaged
the image of CCP. A bitter lesson the CCP should
draw from Bo's case is how to mend the fence and
prevent similar cases from occurring again. Better
late than never.
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