Bo Xilai's removal sheds light on power rift in China: experts
Central News Agency
2012/03/28 17:23:53
Washington, March 27 (CNA) The abrupt dismissal of Bo Xilai as communist party chief of the sprawling southwestern city of Chongqing reflects inner-party divisions in China, according to a U.S.-based academic.
Pei Minxin, a Chinese-born political scientist at Claremont McKenna College, told the Council on Foreign Relations recently that Bo's fall from grace in the most gripping political drama to hit China for decades indicated that there is a rift within China's ruling Communist Party.
"And the rift is over power, not necessarily over ideology, even though the guy may be a leftist," Pei said in an interview with the U.S. think tank.
"From the party's point of view, they want unity, they want stability. In their eyes, someone like Bo can undermine unity and stability. That's why they decided to get rid of him. But whether getting rid of him will bring in somebody who can change direction in the party, nobody knows," he added.
According to Pei, the Communist Party of China now faces a strategic dilemma: the regime needs economic reform to maintain the growth that sustains its performance-based legitimacy, but party leaders recognize that changes won't materialize without political reform that could ultimately undermine its monopoly on power.
While China is in the midst of a once-a-decade party leadership transition that has fueled domestic pressure for political reforms, Pei said nobody is clear about the appetite for reform within the Chinese leadership.
"It is a very sensitive period in China, and typically on the eve of transition, leaders would like to keep their cards close to their chest. They don't want people to know what they are really up to, because if they are going to implement some of those reforms, the interest groups who will be hurt by these reforms will be opposed. So leaders are understandably very cagey about their intentions," Pei said.
Dan Blumenthal, an American Enterprise Institute research fellow, also said in a recent article that Bo's ouster was about power, rather than ideology.
Noting that power is what is propelling Chinese politics during this period of transition, Blumenthal said China is now run more like a mafia state with a dozen or so powerful families in charge.
"Bo's was one of them. The rules of the game are as such: 'If you go after us, then we will go after you.' This might be another contributing factor to Bo's demise," Blumenthal wrote.
Though Bo's story is about power, it should not obscure the fact that there is also an ideological struggle going on inside China, Blumenthal wrote.
He described the struggle as a competition of ideas pitting those aligned with Chinese reformers and the "real" Chinese private sector against very powerful state owned enterprises and the party bosses who benefit from them.
While the particulars of the Bo case are uncertain, two things are clear, according to Blumenthal: The leaders are no longer all powerful and reform is badly needed.
"The question is, will China make the kind of changes it objectively needs or will it become a stagnating PLA-led state? " he wondered.
Commenting on Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao's recent call for structural political reforms to eliminate the remaining excesses of the late communist leader Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, Pei said that in terms of rhetoric, Wen did not depart from what he has been saying all along.
What is important is whether the premier was alone in saying it or if his senior colleagues were saying the same thing, Pei contended.
"And this time, he was saying it all by himself. His other colleagues did not follow him. And that shows that, probably, he is not expressing the collective voice of the Communist Party. That means that, probably, you're not going to see real reform in the short term," Pei said.
(By Tony Liao and Sofia Wu)
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