Gordon G. Chang
World Affairs
September 25, 2013
On September 22nd, the Intermediate People’s Court in Jinan found Bo Xilai, once China’s most charismatic politician, guilty of bribery, embezzlement, and abuse of power and sentenced him to life imprisonment.
No sooner was the stiff term handed down than we began seeing assessments that the Communist Party had finally put behind it a troubled chapter in its history. Perhaps a Guardian headline said it best when it announced that “China hopes to move on after Bo Xilai life sentence.”
Yet it’s clear that Bo has not been the party’s main problem. For instance, the Financial Times, two days before the verdict and sentencing, reported that at the Party School of the Central Committee, in Beijing, talk of the failure of the country’s political system has been the hot topic of late.
The school, according to the article, is the only place in China where discussion of the party’s failure can take place “without fear of reprisal.” That may be true, but the institution, “an intellectual free-fire zone” and the training ground for elite officials, is not the only place where the matter is under discussion.
It is, after all, obvious that there is something very wrong in China at the moment, and there is no greater indication of impending troubles than the Maoist rantings of the country’s new leader, Xi Jinping. Many analysts try to explain his words away by telling us he is merely attempting to placate the extremist supporters of Bo or that he is talking “left” before moving “right,” but these assessments look like wishful thinking. “The more pessimistic, and frankly more realistic, interpretation is that Xi has no fresh ideas so he just quotes Mao and tries to hold on tight to power,” said one reformist Chinese to the Financial Times. “If that is the case, then China has no hope and eventually the anger in society will explode into a popular uprising.”
Can China really explode? Xi’s prolonged attack on civil society—crackdowns, one right after the other—is only increasing the pressure in the country, and that is occurring while the tolerance of the population is decreasing. The fundamental problem for China’s Communists is that, from all we can tell, most Chinese do not believe a one-party system is appropriate for their country’s modernizing society. Simply stated, they want much more say in their lives and demand institutional restraints on their rulers.
This does not mean they are ready to take to the streets. It does mean, however, that people are dissatisfied and may not support their government when forced to choose. And the consequence of this state of affairs is that it probably will not take much to topple the system, which will celebrate its 64th anniversary in power on October 1st.
An incident—of which there are many possibilities—can spiral out of control. We have seen, in the past few years, small crowds in China push around local officials, on issues of both local and national import.For instance, it took only a little over a thousand demonstrators this July to scrap the Heshan uranium-processing plant in Guangdong Province.
The Chinese people are losing their fear of the party and are becoming emboldened by getting what they want through street protest. Senior leaders, in these circumstances, can hold on to power only if they adjust. “Xi Jinping and this administration provide the last chance for China to implement a social transformation that comes from within the party and within the system,” says Shen Zhihua of the East China Normal University. “Without these reforms there will certainly be a social explosion.”
What in fact is Xi Jinping’s answer? “Our red nation will never change color,” he said early this summer. His demand for “ideological purification”—made in August—sounds off-key to a population that cares little for theory, especially of the Maoist variety.
Xi’s problem is that citizen dissatisfaction is increasing and that he does little to address it. Chinese leaders, from Xi down, obsess over the breakup of the Soviet Union, and their view is that Mikhail Gorbachev’s lack of ideological rectitude was the driving cause. Having misinterpreted the reasons for the USSR’s disintegration, rulers in Beijing ignore popular concerns at their peril.
In reality, the Chinese want many things, but the most fundamental is far more say in their lives, and that is the one thing Xi Jinping is not prepared to grant them. In a time of turmoil in society, a time when most anything can happen, the detention of Bo does nothing to address the fundamental divide between a restless people and an intransigent government.
