Political Hardball Chinese Style

Maoist revival movements in the spring of 2011, leading up to July 1, the 90th anniversary of when the Communist Party was founded in Shanghai in 1921, were launched with “red song” patriotic campaigns with martial music and performances harking back to China circa 1966. Among the musical offerings: “Without the Communist Party, There Would Be No China.”

The red-song campaign originated in Chongqing, led by the city’s Communist Party boss Bo Xilai. He personally presided over a 100,000-strong rally of revolutionary songs, to which even former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was invited. The mass singalong swept across the country.

It also swept Bo to jail and stripped him of his party titles – and exposed the corruption and weakness of China’s political system and the urgent need for reform.

Bo was first dismissed from his post, stripping him of all of his titles, followed by a criminal investigation. The method is a familiar one. A corruption charge is the standard instrument used to deal with political insubordination. Two top officials were brought down the same way, former Beijing party secretary Chen Xitong, and former Shanghai party secretary Chen Liangyu. This time, it was lucky for the leadership that there was the murder of a foreigner to justify such a move.

The Bo affair is not just about massive corruption but also succession. Bo had developed a high profile with his singalongs. It was a populist, and popular, attempt by a charismatic “princeling,” son of a revolutionary hero, to assert his natural right to ascend to the nine-member Politburo Standing Committee at the 18th Chinese Communist Party Congress. Among the rumours circulating in China at the time was, once on the committee, Bo would have tried to replace the party’s incoming general secretary and president agreed to by the outgoing leadership, Xi Junping.

The Bo scandal has raised questions within the Communist Party about whether it should continue to appoint top brass as municipal or provincial leaders. Bo was a Politburo member also tasked with overseeing a municipality. The Bo saga reflects a key deficiency of China’s political institutions, where new leaders have advanced their political careers not only through administrative channels and their credentials, but also through nepotism and patronage.