China's 'black box' of mutinous secrets
Were disgruntled Chinese Communist Party members plotting
an internal coup to undermine President Xi Jinping?
That question has been swirling among China watchers
and ordinary Chinese even before Xi officially took the reins of power in
2012, ever since the ouster, arrest and later trial of the former Chongqing
Party chief and strongman Bo Xilai, a charismatic onetime rival of Xi's in the
top leadership.
Following Bo's ouster in March 2012, there were
several signs of a fierce ideological struggle inside the party. Several
so-called "new Maoist" websites supporting Bo were shut down, and
there were even Internet rumors, unsubstantiated and largely discredited,
circulating of unrest in the military. A small number of people at the time
were arrested for fabricating or disseminating online rumors of a coup, and
words like "coup" and "tank" were banned from Chinese
Internet search engines.
Recently, rumors of a foiled coup attempt have been
revived by a rather unlikely source: Xi Jinping himself.
In December, the Chinese government's Central
Documents Press published a banal and little noticed book containing 200
extracts of Xi's speeches to the party faithful. In one of the extracts, from
January 2015, Xi mentioned Bo; his supposed mentor, the now-disgraced and
jailed security chief Zhou Yongkang; Ling Jihui, a now-jailed former top aide
to China's last president; and other (since purged) senior officials as being
involved in "serious violations of party discipline and the law."
"Some had inflated political ambitions and for
their personal gain or the gain of their clique carried out political plot
activities behind the party's back, carried out politically shady business to
wreck and split the party!" Xi said in the extract.
Also mentioned as plotters in the scheme were
General Xu Caihou, vice chairman of the powerful Central Military Commission
who was expelled from the party and was being investigated for corruption when
he died of cancer in March 2015; and Su Rong, a longtime regional chief who was
accused of corruption as party chief in Jiangxi province. Su was also blamed
for showing "blatant disregard for party political rules" and having
"poisoned the local political environment."
Was it a coup?
China's secretive, closed-door political system is largely opaque to
outsiders, leaving a few China-watchers struggling to glean meaning from
obscure clues and hints. Those analysts are now parsing Xi's words, trying to
determine if the unspecified "political plot activities" amounted to
a coup attempt against Xi -- and whether the challenge from Bo and Zhou was
more serious than was known at the time.
China's leaders are notoriously loath to speak
publicly of any divisions in the top ranks. So longtime China hands are also
puzzled about the timing of the release of the extract with references to
efforts to "split the party." Does publicizing the plot mean
the threat has been eliminated? Is it meant to serve as a warning to others who
may still be plotting to desist? Or is it meant to spread a sense of terror,
signaling that potential rivals may, also, be swept up in the search for enemies
within?
"I'm sure there was something going on, but we
really don't know enough," said Minxin Pei, a China scholar at
California's Claremont McKenna College. "Were they actually plotting Xi
Jinping's downfall, or were they plotting a diminution of his powers?"
Contrary to some analysts who believe Xi can talk
openly about the plot because he is now firmly in control, Pei takes the
opposite view: Xi's statement reveals there was, and likely still is,
more turmoil behind the scenes than has previously been acknowledged.
"The fact that he chose to make this public shows
the party is not unified," Pei noted. "His predecessor would
not have done this." Xi, he said, "is the first leader since
Tiananmen Square to say there is a conspiracy inside the Communist Party."
Other signs from China also suggest continuing internal
strife -- if only because Xi and his top cohorts are going to such lengths to
stress the importance of "unity" and the need to instill discipline
in the ranks.
Xi, who has embarked on a sweeping anti-corruption
campaign that has ensnared thousands of officials, has also launched an effort
to get all of the sprawling 90 million-member Communist Party to faithfully toe
the line. The party's Central Commission for Discipline Inspection has become
the leading tool for enforcing rigid orthodoxy.
Xi, in another speech newly released by the discipline
commission, warned party members not to "ask the things they should not
ask" and not to "run after the so-called internal information and
spread it in private." And the most recent target of the ongoing purge
appears to be Wei Hong, the governor of Sichuan province, who was demoted to a
lower level position and stripped of his party duties. His case is considered
unusual, since he was punished not for corruption, but for being "disloyal
to the party," according to the discipline commission.
Bo's ideas took hold
The most serious past threat to Xi appeared to come from Bo Xilai. Bo was
already jailed by the time Xi came to power, but his ideas -- on social
welfare, economic redistribution and Mao-inspired mass mobilization campaigns
-- had taken hold among a significant number of so-called "new
leftists" inside the party who had grown disenchanted with China's
widening wealth gap, the breakup of state-run monopolies, and the party's drift
away from socialist egalitarianism.
Bo's wife, Gu Kailai, was tried and convicted for the
poisoning of British businessman, Neil Heywood, who was found dead in a
Chongqing hotel room in November 2011. Bo was convicted of corruption and
"serious discipline violations." Bo's downfall was believed to have
led directly to the purge of his mentor, Zhou Yongkang, once considered the
most powerful, and feared, man in China for his control over the vast security
apparatus.
The Bo saga exposed the most serious known rift in the
party in decades. Now, with new revelations of "plotting," it
appears that period around Bo's ouster was far more fraught than previously
known.
Most analysts agreed there was likely never any chance
of military involvement in the unspecified "plot activities." The
system is too centralized and bureaucratic to allow any mobilization of troops
or material to go undetected. But one military watcher, Dean Cheng of the
Heritage Foundation in Washington said, "Something wasn't right. There was
much more to the Bo business."
Bo was, like Xi, a princeling -- his father, Bo Yibo,
was one of the revolutionary heroes around Mao known as the "Eight
Immortals." And the younger Bo cultivated a huge personal following in
Chongqing, and instituted projects like his "red song" singing
campaign that brought thousands of people into parks on weekends to sing
Mao-era patriotic tunes.
In the limelight
Unlike almost every other Communist leader, Bo was also media-friendly and
sought out publicity. He boasted that his social welfare plans
constituted a new "Chongqing model" of development. During a 2011
trip to Chongqing for an economic conference, I had a brief and impromptu
hallway interview with Bo, who happily stopped and answered my questions
spontaneously, something unheard of in China. Bo occasionally broke into
English, and quoted Franklin Roosevelt saying, "We have nothing to fear
but fear itself." "My theory is not that Bo was literally planning a
coup," said the Heritage Foundation's Cheng who also met Bo in 2012.
"But he was even scarier. Bo was a populist in the Party. Bo was Donald
Trump, before Trump even thought about running for president."
Have the Bo acolytes all now been silenced or
contained?
In January, the discipline commission announced it
would be sending teams to fan out across the country to assess how well the
party agencies were toeing the line from the central leadership, meaning from
Xi. An official leading the tours told Hong Kong's South China Morning Post
that the inspections should be completed in 2017, when the next Communist Party
Congress, the 19th, is scheduled.
China's leadership is due for an unusual leadership
reshuffle at that Party Congress. Of the nine members on the Politburo Standing
Committee, only Xi and his prime minister, Li Keqiang, are expected to remain.
The other five will all be past the party's traditional retirement age for
senior office-holders. The prospect of such a vast shake-up "creates a
whole new area of instability," Cheng said.
What is impossible to know is whether Xi, who has
swiftly consolidated power, will feel free to name his own cohorts to shape a
new standing committee, or whether China is in for another period of
unspecified plots, splits and internal intrigue.
My guess is that the stepped-up repression -- the
arrests of lawyers, dissidents and journalists, the crackdown on
nongovernmental agencies -- is a sign of regime insecurity, not confidence and
strength. And as China enters a new period of slowing economic growth, we may
be in for more uncertainty, much like in 2012 before the last Congress. But
that is only a guess, since we are all on the outside looking in.
"Things are definitely not stable," concluded
Minxin Pei. "But how bad are they? It's a black box."
Keith B. Richburg was foreign editor of The Washington
Post from 2005 to 2007 and served as the paper's bureau chief in Paris, Manila,
Nairobi, Hong Kong and Beijing.
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