Peter Goodspeed
Apr 12, 2012 – 8:42 AM ET
China's former Chongqing Municipality Communist Party Secretary Bo Xilai looks up as he attends the closing ceremony of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, in this March 13, 2012 file photo.
China’s worst political scandal in decades exploded onto the front pages of Chinese newspapers Wednesday, riveting the attention of the country like nothing since the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
News of the downfall of Bo Xilai, one of the country’s top leaders, and the arrest of his wife, who is being held as a murder suspect by police investigating the death of a British businessman, is rocking China to its core.
Even the People’s Daily newspaper, the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist party, ran a front page editorial Wednesday urging people to close ranks and move beyond the scandal with its hints of corruption and deep political divisions in the highest ranks of China’s leadership.
“Bo Xilai’s actions have seriously violated the party’s discipline, caused damage to the party and to the country and harmed the image of the party and the country,” the editorial said. The newspaper stressed that the government’s decision to investigate Mr. Bo is “completely in accordance with our party’s fundamental requirement of strict party governance” and showed a “firm determination of maintaining its own purity.”
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.Global Times, a popular tabloid newspaper owned by People’s Daily, claimed Mr. Bo’s case demonstrates “the resilience of the rule of law” in China.
“This is no longer the era where China would rather cover issues up to avoid revealing problems,” the paper’s editor Hu Xijin said. “The Chinese Communist Party’s decision against Bo highlights that nobody is above the law and discipline in China. Power abuses are not allowed, no matter how superior one’s authority is.”
For the average person, Mr. Bo’s fall from grace has all the drama of a soap opera.
A powerful political “princeling,” whose father was a communist revolutionary hero, Mr. Bo was, until last month, one of the most powerful men in China. As governor of the southwestern megacity of Chongqing and a member of the Communist party’s 25-member Central Committee, he was widely expected to be boosted into the stratosphere of Chinese politics in October by becoming one of nine members of the ruling Politburo.
A charismatic neo-Maoist, who appealed to the poor and dispossessed while nostalgically promoting Maoist ideology and encouraging large state enterprises, Mr. Bo clashed politically with China’s reformers who advocate gradually expanding the rule of law and making more room for private enterprise.
Mr. Bo’s sudden demotion marks a seismic rupture among China’s leaders. But the hints of corruption and abuse of power that accompany the clash also underline the vulnerability of China’s leadership, just as they are poised to engineer a generational handover of power in October.
The ambitious political pin-up boy of China’s Communist Left, Mr. Bo’s political fortunes took a beating in February, when his protegé, Wang Lijun, the Vice-Mayor of Chongqing and a high-profile anti-corruption campaigner, suddenly disappeared from view amid rumours he tried to defect to the U.S. consulate in nearby Chengdu.
Four days before his alleged defection, Mr. Wang was moved suddenly and without explanation out of his post as head of Chongqing’s public security bureau and put in charge of sanitation, education and parks.
Chinese websites on the Internet buzzed with speculation Mr. Wang, a high-profile crime fighter who waged a two-year battle against triads and organized crime, may have become the subject of a corruption investigation and tried to flee.
Others suggested he had a falling out with Mr. Bo and fearing for his life fled to the U.S. diplomatic mission with evidence of possible wrongdoing by his former mentor.
After spending 30 hours in the U.S. consulate, Mr. Wang eventually left and was escorted back to Beijing by one of China’s top spies.
Within days rumours began to circulate suggesting Mr. Bo and his wife, 53-year-old Gu Kailai, a lawyer and daughter of a former high-ranking Chinese general, were under investigation for involvement in the possible poisoning murder of 41-year-old British businessman Neil Heywood.
Bo Xilai's wife Gu Kailai, left, is accused of murdering British businessman Neil Heywood, right..
A Beijing-based businessman who worked as a consultant for foreign firms in China, Mr. Heywood was friends with Mr. Bo and his wife and apparently helped place their son in Britain’s prestigious private school Harrow.
Mr. Heywood was found dead in his Chongqing hotel room last November.
At first his family didn’t think anything was suspicious and were told he had died of a heart attack. His body was cremated.
But later Chinese officials said the businessman had died from alcohol poisoning, even though his friends said he seldom drank.
Late Tuesday, after announcing Mr. Bo’s expulsion from China’s leadership, the official Xinhua news agency issued a report saying police investigations “prove that Neil Heywood was murdered and BoGu Kailai and Zhang Xiaojun — a servant in the Bo household — are the major criminal suspects.”
Some Chinese observers said it appears officials are trying to tie Mr. Bo tightly to the murder by deliberately attaching his surname to his wife’s in announcing her arrest.
Xinhua said Mr. Bo, his wife and their son, Bo Guagua, now a student at Harvard University, had been on “good terms” with Mr. Heywood, but that they had a conflict over economic issues that had intensified.
Mr. Bo’s wife and his servant are now being held in police custody “on suspicion of the crime of intentional homicide,” Xinhua said.
Word of the charges, which almost invariably result in punishment once they’re made public, flooded the Internet with carefully worded conversations Wednesday, while China’s censors worked overtime scrubbing all mention of the Bo family and other people involved in the scandal from unofficial websites and microblogs.
Still, China’s leaders are trying to demonstrate a united front. David Bandurski of the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong says news of Mr. Bo’s firing, the arrest of his wife and the People’s Daily editorial “should be read as three separate shots fired in a single salvo by the current top leadership under, as the official releases drum home, ‘Comrade Hu Jintao as general secretary.’”
A Chinese policeman blocks photos being taken outside Zhongnanhai which serves as the central headquarters for the Communist Party of China after the sacking of politician Bo Xilai from the countries powerful Politburo, in Beijing on April 11, 2012...
National Post
pgoodspeed@nationalpost.com
Posted in: News, World Tags: Bo Xilai, China .
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Showing 1 comment
jycg
Gee, isn't it accurate to state that corruption and murder has been a matter of routine in the Communist Party of China for decades? However, when foreign businessmen are involved it suddenly becomes international headlines. I'm not in a position to speculate on the situation but one can only hope that proper justice is served regardless of who is involved and found guilty in the apparent homicide of the businessman. No one should be above the law or being subjected to proper justice.
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