All seemed to be going to plan until, on 6 February, Wang Lijun, the vice mayor and former security chief of Chongqing, sought asylum in the American Consulate General in Chengdu. Wang remained in the compound for more than 24 hours but was not granted asylum. The central government was embarrassed at all the fuss and publicity, undertaking to investigate Wang’s actions. All the melodrama associated with Wang’s flight and the way it embroiled Chongqing Party boss Bo Xilai was beamed around the world, in a way not unlike some political scandal might unfold in the West. Interestingly the details oozed out from Chinese sources through the Western press, despite the US connection and an indirect British connection via the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood, who was allegedly set to expose malfeasance by Bo or, in particular, his wife. Bo — who became prominent nationally and internationally because of his campaign to try to elevate himself to the Standing Committee of the CCP Politburo after he became Party Secretary of Chongqing in 2007 — immediately turned on the spin machine, declaring that Wang was under considerable stress due to his heavy workload and that he might be mentally unstable. Wang was subsequently granted administrative leave.
Bo and Huang Qifan, the mayor of Chongqing, attempted to fight off any attempt to take Bo out of the lineup for the CCP’s power transfer. These efforts appeared to be working until Wen Jiabao declared that the future of Chongqing’s leadership should depend on why Wang went into the American Consulate General, pledged that the central government would investigate the case, and that its result must be able to stand any legal and historical test.
The next day, as Yawei Liu reports in this week’s lead essay, Xinhua News Agency announced that Bo would no longer be party secretary of Chongqing, and that Zhang Dejiang, a member of the Politburo and vice premier of the State Council, had taken his place. Bo has not been heard since. Mayor Huang, who had fiercely defended Bo and his achievements, was now supporting the central government’s decision. Several ultra-leftist websites, including Utopia, were unexpectedly shut down. And citizens in Chongqing suddenly found they could no longer sing the revolutionary songs which had been re-popularised by Bo in public places.
What does all this mean for what is going on in Chinese politics?
Liu concludes that ‘politics in China is becoming increasingly contested, and no one person or small group can make the final decision on national policies and personnel arrangements. The concessions and compromises of the past, which often took place behind closed doors, can no longer occur (in that way)’.
‘The factionalisation of the top leadership and the fragmentation of decision-making procedures signal that a new kind of politics is emerging. It may not be democratic but it is relatively more open and oriented toward transparency. As a result, the upcoming CCP National Congress may not be as smooth and triumphant as the leadership might hope, and appointments to the Politburo Standing Committee may not be made easily’. These developments, he reckons, could be a harbinger of some kind of popular decision making, at least among central party committee members.
Political system reform, as Premier Wen again made clear as the Bo affair engulfed the Chinese political process, is deeply connected to getting China’s big economic problems sorted out. Wen’s report to the National Congress promised easing back China’s breakneck economic growth and a shift to domestic rather than export-led growth. A more representative political system is likely to make that easier, and is essential to dealing with systemic corruption — an inevitable outcome of the interaction between a one-party state and getting things done in the market.
Whether the ‘accidental transparency’ of Chinese politics over the past several months can be easily transformed into purposeful transparency and political accountability is more difficult to judge.
Peter Drysdale is Editor of the East Asia Forum.