It is ironic that President Xi Jinping has
deployed the Maoist model of ‘rectification’ to revitalise and impose his will
over the world’s largest and most powerful political party. This is the model
of ‘self-purification’ that Mao applied to instil discipline and consolidate
personal power from the early 1940s. It requires tight control of an internal
security apparatus, to forcefully extract confessions, and it works by rooting
out the patronage networks of perceived rivals. More recently Bo used such
stratagems to transform the Communist Party in Chongqing city and build a formidable
power base, in ways that are not widely understood. Now Xi is applying the same
underlying political logic to establish his own authority across the country,
with some important innovations. And he is doing it by purging Bo
It is easy to forget, amid the sordid hypocrisy exposed by
his fall, that Bo Xilai was a leader who identified a problem and wanted to get
things done. Bo was making his run for high office at a time when it was
getting harder to restrain the predatory instincts of the bureaucracy and
harder still to explain why the Chinese Communist Party, of all political
movements, had created one of the least egalitarian societies in Asia. In Bo’s
judgment, desperate times demanded desperate measures. He offered himself as
the surgeon to remove the Communist Party’s cancerous tumours and fetid organs.
‘Without help, the disease will become fatal’, said Bo in December 2009,
borrowing the metaphors of bodily disease that Mao used to commence his own
‘rectification campaign’ in 1942.
Bo mapped the city’s channels of patronage and nodes of
political and financial power, planted key people, and uprooted the existing
networks of propaganda and coercion which he did not personally control. His
key target was the old Chongqing police chief, Wen Qiang, who, like most
established police chiefs in China, enjoyed power well beyond his official
portfolio. Wen’s patrons included one of Bo’s powerful predecessors, who had
been promoted to the Politburo Standing Committee, and his protégés were
stacked throughout the municipal political-legal establishment. Wen controlled
many of the city’s bath houses, for example, where business was often done. In
other words, Chongqing was an ordinary mainland city in which a new leader who
lacked deep local patronage ties had little hope of getting anything done —
unless he found a way to purge the old regime and make it his own.
Bo’s first major political move was to appoint his own man,
Wang Lijun, to act as his scalpel in the rectification operation. He moved Wang
to be Wen ‘s deputy police chief, from where he could collect intelligence and
map Wen’s patronage ties. In March 2009 Bo shifted Wen Qiang sideways, to be the
minister of justice, while promoting Wang Lijun to take his place and arresting
Wen’s key police department deputies and protégés. One of them reportedly died
of a heart attack in custody. Another reportedly died by smashing his head
against a wall. Wen’s sister-in-law was dubbed the ‘Godmother of the
Underworld’ and sentenced to 18 years jail. Wen’s wife was shown pictures of
her husband with an underage prostitute—and she reportedly led police to the
family millions, buried under a gold fish pond.
With potential critics silenced (including the head of
Chongqing TV, who was concerned that viewers were boycotting Bo’s ‘red’
programming), the completion of Bo’s ascendancy was announced with a text
message, the substance of which appeared on the front page of the next day’s
Chongqing Daily: ‘Wen Qiang Is Dead, The People Rejoice, Chongqing is at
Peace’.
Bo and his scalpel, Wang Lijun, sliced through the city’s
commercial precincts. Police were given quotas of ‘black society’ members to
detain in each district, just like the bad class elements in Mao’s day. Alleged
gangsters were asked to testify against wealthy entrepreneurs who, in turn,
were forced to testify against higher political targets. ‘Basically, the 20
richest guys in Chongqing, he sent them all to jail and confiscated all their
assets’, said Wang Boming, publisher of Caijing Magazine, in an
interview.
The system of justice, based mostly on lies extracted by
torture, proved to be a phenomenally powerful tool of political control. Bo
became locally popular for articulating social concerns and cleaning up the
streets. Nationally, he became the hero of China’s growing neo-Maoist and New
Left movements. Ambitious scholars, entrepreneurs, officials, generals and
international statesmen were drawn into his orbit. By the new year of 2012 he
seemed to be on the cusp of breaking into the top leadership sanctum.
It could have been Mao at Yan’an, 65 years before.
Mao’s ‘scalpel’ was the internal intelligence chief, Kang
Sheng. Kang’s torture-based extraction of false confessions and testimony was
instrumental in Mao’s consolidation of power at Yan’an. It also triggered a
substantial internal backlash, which forced Mao sideline Kang Sheng before
bringing him back to prominence in the 1960s, to resume the work of rooting out
the patronage networks of Mao’s perceived and potential rivals. One of Kang’s
victims was Xi’s father, a vice premier, in 1962, which led to 16 years in
purgatory. Another was Bo’s father, also a vice-premier, during the Cultural
Revolution of 1966. Both men were jailed, and tortured, and a member of each
family was ‘persecuted to death’.
Bo applied the Maoist strategies of purge and rectification
beneath the barest of judicial facades. By then, however, China had changed in
ways that meant the old torture-based confession methods didn’t work so well
anymore.
Bo’s methods were so brutal, and so out of kilter with the
values of China’s increasingly sophisticated and pluralistic society, that they
galvanised lawyers, editors, historians and other intellectuals to fight to
protect their interests and restrain him. The only weapon they had was to talk
truth, in and outside the courtroom, and let events take their course — an
approach whose ultimate success relied on China’s information revolution and an
increasingly engaged public. Several of them warned of a return to the methods
of the Cultural Revolution.
Eventually, the pressure forced open cracks in the political
elite. Bo’s court room persecutions of his rivals were so perverse and so
public — despite his prodigious propaganda efforts — that enemies sharpened
their hatchets and allies found it harder to defend him. Indirectly, as I argue
in The Rise and Fall of the House of Bo,
this is what brought Bo crashing down.
Bo is likely to be convicted of misdeeds that are marginal
to the political reasons that brought his downfall. His downfall followed the
interrogation of dozens of associates, with each detainee testifying against
the one above. The national crisis of injustice and inequality that Bo
articulated, however, has only become more pressing.
It must bemuse Bo to see Xi using the Maoist language of
life-and-death struggle and bodily decay. Public revolt at ‘vile’ cases
threatened to ‘doom the party and the state’, said Xi when he took the stage in
November last year, six weeks after the Politburo pre-announced Bo’s guilt.
‘There must first be decay for maggots to set in.’
Immediately before Bo’s trial, the Xi administration
announced the promotion of a new deputy police chief, Fu Zhenghua, whose
crazy-brave assaults on power had previously earned him comparisons with Bo’s
old police chief, Wang Lijun. Fu quickly made news with high profile arrests of
alleged rumour-mongers on the internet.
Straight after Bo’s trial the South China Morning Post and
The New York Times reported previously-suppressed court evidence that linked Bo’s
abuse of power to Zhou Yongkang, China’s bulldog-headed former petro-security
czar. The news was followed by the detention of the recently-removed chief and
remaining top executives at PetroChina, which is arguably the most powerful of
all Chinese state-owned companies. Most tantalizing, the SCMP reported a link
between Bo’s corruption and the former president who refuses to actually
retire, Jiang Zemin.
Xi’s strategy of manipulating the coercive apparatus to
purge enemies and use their confessions to taint and intimidate rivals comes
directly from Bo’s Chongqing and Mao’s Yan’an. Xi’s propaganda apparatus is
brandishing “swords” to enforce discipline across the contested spaces of the
internet. His security apparatus has renewed the previous administration’s
attack on lawyers and constitutionalism. And Xi’s personal willingness to
extend the Bo investigation to the doorstep of some of the most powerful
patrons in the country shows that the winner-takes-all logic remains firmly in
place.
But the fact that Bo was given probably the most transparent
trial in the history of the People’s Republic shows the rules are continuing to evolve.
Bo’s revolutionary prestige, his clan’s ties with other
ruling families, and his cult-like status among neo-Maoist sections of the
party encouraged (or possibly forced) President Xi to afford him the dignity of
contesting the accusations in a relatively open fashion.
The rise of Bo Xilai showed that extreme measures may well
be necessary to get anything done in an ageing one-party system. His demise,
however, shows that Maoist political methods don’t sit easily with a modern
economy, an increasingly fragmented political elite and a society that is
empowered by prosperity and informed by new networks of information. Several of
Xi’s supporters within the elite say it is too early to rule out the
possibility that Xi wants to leave China with something closer to a credible
legal system than the one he has inherited. Many say he is blasting a path
through webs of patronage and a hopelessly self-interested
political-bureaucracy to enable urgent economic reforms. Whatever Xi’s
plans, it is ironic, and potentially dangerous, that he first has to borrow
from Bo’s playbook in order to give himself a chance.
John Garnaut is the former China correspondent for Fairfax
Media. He is the author of ‘The Rise and Fall of the House of Bo’.
This article appeared in the most recent edition of
the East Asia Forum Quarterly, ‘Leading China where?’.
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