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2 China's
reformers hope for a
game-changer By Peter Lee
Jaded China watchers observe the fall of
Chongqing's "Red Leader" Bo Xilai and see little
more than the disposal of another corrupt
Communist sociopath who crossed multiple red lines
- not of reckless criminality, but of naked
ambition, of disobedience to the Center, and of
unseemly and embarrassing behavior involving
foreigners - and got slapped down by the party
leadership.
Score one for the Chinese
Communist Party, in other words, for the efficient
use of party disciplinary functions, media
operations, and kangaroo courts to wrap up the
messy package without overt violence and organized
public dissent or embarrassing private leaks from
Bo's allies inside and outside the CCP, thereby
maintaining the public
veneer of leadership unity going into the
transitional 18th party congress.
This
interpretation is not satisfactory to China's
reformers, who see the country lurching into
crisis and hope to shoehorn the Bo Xilai affair
into a narrative of national political, social and
economic renaissance.
Their efforts have
elicited a faint but unmistakable echo in state
media, serving as an indication that the party
leadership accepts the reality of crisis and the
need for reform, if not the radical changes
advocated by the reformers.
Sun Liping -
who acted as Xi Jinping's PhD thesis adviser at
Tsinghua University and therefore symbolizes the
reformers' hopes for access and influence at the
highest levels of the new party leadership -
recently posted his thoughts on the Bo Xilai case,
opining that it would have been better if the
verdict had been delivered after, instead of
before, the party congress:
If the verdict had come down after
the congress, it would have diminished the
political tinge of the case. Instead, it could
have been part of an overall consideration of
the rule of law for the next 10 years ... and
even helped create a "force" for reform ... a
wedge for further major reforms ... It could
have served as the starting point for the
political institutionalization of the reformist
faction.[1]
Central to Sun's thesis is
that Bo was an atypical representative of
anti-reform forces, and his fall before the
congress was not a decisive victory for reform
that would secure the ascendancy of pro-reform
forces in the new leadership.
Sun Liping
believes that the main obstacle for China's
reformers is not nostalgic Maoists trying to push
back reforms; it is the inertia represented by the
massive, entrenched interests that have corruptly
benefited from the current, flawed reforms, and
which oppose further, more thoroughgoing reforms
that would threaten their advantages.
Sun
characterizes this dilemma as the "political
transition trap", the real trap, in his view, as
opposed to the "income transition trap" (the
difficulty of evolution beyond labor-intensive
industries and thereby hoisting per capita income
into the promised land of middle-class pay
packets) that obsesses Chinese and international
developmental economists.
A significant if
unspoken corollary of Sun's persuasive analysis is
that entrenched interests - maybe we should call
them the "cadre-industrial complex" in a hat-tip
to the late US president Dwight Eisenhower's
prescient warnings about the "military-industrial
complex" - hold the upper hand under normal
circumstances.
In other words, an
exceptional set of circumstances, if not a crisis,
is necessary to break the inertia and get the
reformist bandwagon rolling.
For Sun, a
nice, thorough mastication of the Bo Xilai case by
the powers that be after the party congress might
have provided a suitable kick-start to the
reformist movement.
Although the Bo Xilai
ship has sailed (Bo has been expelled from the CPP
by its disciplinary mechanism and now awaits his
final, legal fate in the politically irrelevant
civil courts), reformers are apparently still
trying to make hay from the state of affairs in
Chongqing.
On the serious-progressive end
of the reformist spectrum, the financial news
outlet Caixin editorialized:
Bo taught us all a painful lesson.
Thirty years of reform and opening up has
brought China tremendous success, but also
created many problems in society. Its people are
desperate for solutions. Chinese leaders should
heed the call for change and deepen their reform
efforts.
Their priority now is to
continue fighting corruption and speed up the
reform of the economic and political systems,
particularly the legal system. "All people are
equal before the law" must be more than a
slogan, and the system of checks and balances
strengthened.
Bo showed us that going
backwards or standing still are not options for
China; only by striking out can it thrive.
[2]
An influential reformer, Han
Zhiguo (previously on the staff of the State
Planning Commission and then a big wheel at
various economic and sociology journals; now head
of a private university) tried to exploit the
Chongqing issue from another angle by providing a
jolt of old-fashioned Communist rabble-rousing.
Han posted an item on his weblog calling
for a purge of extreme-left elements in Chongqing.
Literally. As in:
The main harm of the Chongqing
affair is a return of the Cultural Revolution
and the reigniting of an extreme-left line ...
Chongqing must completely purge
[qingsuan] the extreme left line.
[3]
The "Chongqing affair" is the
matter of a hapless youth, Ren Jianying, who
reposted content hostile to the Bo government on
his webpage, was subsequently discovered by the
local cops to possess a T-shirt with the
inflammatory slogan "Live free or die," and
received a sentence of two years' labor reform.
The post is illustrated by a pretty
picture of clouds over a pasture intended to
convey the image of a ferocious gathering storm.
Leaving aside the completely creepy
reference to qingsuan - which literally
means "a thoroughgoing settling of accounts" and,
in particularly rough times for the CPP, referred
to the execution of political enemies - and the
question of whether Han is advocating the
top-down, legalistic, and numerical quota purges
imposed in the 1950s as opposed to the chaotic
"bottom-up" assaults orchestrated by the Red
Guards in the 1960s or something else - it is
somewhat doubtful that Chongqing is groaning under
the tyranny of extreme-left red terror.
Zhou Yongkang, an erstwhile political ally
of Bo Xilai (and, in the overheated imagination of
some bloggers, fomenter of an attempted coup
d'etat to repair the fortunes of his buddy),
recently made a publicized tour of Sichuan
province. Zhou holds the security brief in the
Standing Committee of the Politburo and his
overweening emphasis on "stability maintenance"
was seen as complementing Bo Xilai's public stance
as hard-charging, crime-fighting mayor.
Reading between the lines, Zhou's visit
was intended to reassure local security cadres
that despite the discrediting of Zhou's
law-and-order agenda by the exposure of rampant
criminality in Bo's government, all would be well
as long as Bo's disappointed neo-Maoist acolytes
were not allowed to make trouble on the streets in
the run-up to the 18th congress:
Zhou visited the procuratorial,
judicial and police departments in the
provincial capital of Chengdu.
When
meeting with representatives from these
departments, Zhou urged them to honestly carry
out their legal responsibilities by enhancing
law enforcement, providing better service for
the people, dissolving disputes, and maintaining
justice, social harmony and stability.
He asked for major achievements from
them to mark the CCP's 18th National Congress,
which is scheduled to start on November 8.
[4]
It appears that residents of
Chongqing fearing a reign of terror by Bo Xilai's
red-bandanna diehards can rest easy.
As
Sun Liping has asserted, the main problem in China
is not maniacal neo-Maoists; it is cadres and
businessman happy to suck up bank loans to line
their pockets and prop up local governments even
as the country slides off a cliff.
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