Minxin Pei
The Indian Express
August 22, 2013
His real crime: threatening the security of colleagues in China’s Communist Party.
Show trials are normally not worth following. In such theatrical proceedings, the accused, pathetic and broken, profess their guilt and accept their punishment without any protest. The trials are not staged to ensure justice, but to underscore the supremacy of the winners in a power struggle and deter potential rivals.
The upcoming courtroom appearance of Bo Xilai, formerly the Communist Party of China’s (CPC’s) chief of Chongqing and a member of the elite Politburo, has all the classic features of a show trial. The judicial proceedings, likely to be closed to the public, will be pro forma. The party is apparently leaving nothing to chance and, in an attempt to gain credibility, originally scheduled in-person or videotaped testimony against Bo by his wife, who is serving a suspended death sentence for murder. Bo was reportedly outraged and threatened to divorce her. As a compromise, his wife’s testimony will most likely be read to the court.
Since conviction is all but certain, Bo and his lawyers will be reduced to pleading for leniency, rather than contesting the government’s charges and supporting evidence. When all this is over, Bo will receive a sentence predetermined by his former colleagues in the Politburo. Based on the CPC’s aversion to executing Politburo-level officials, Bo could get either a 20-year term or a suspended death sentence, which will be commuted to life imprisonment later.
Although the dominant motive behind the CPC’s decision to put Bo on trial is to warn members who may be tempted to imitate his tactics of self-aggrandisement, Beijing’s rulers will nevertheless be thorough in destroying what little is left of Bo’s reputation. The formal indictment, which the Chinese government released at the end of July, listed three crimes — pocketing $3.25 million in bribes (the value of a mansion in the French Riviera), embezzling $815,000 and abusing his power, including an attempted cover-up of his wife’s crime of murdering a British businessman. For good measure, the official press highlighted Bo’s debauchery and reported that he had maintained illicit sexual relations with several women. As he heads to the Chinese gulag, the former high-flying princeling (child of a senior party official) will find himself an utterly humiliated and disgraced loser.
While China’s new leaders hope that Bo’s trial will help them close the last chapter of the dirtiest scandal at the top since the end of the Cultural Revolution, it may actually raise more questions about the internal health of the world’s largest one-party regime.
The most obvious question even a casual observer of the Bo Xilai affair would ask is how such an individual could have climbed so high in a system that is ostensibly known for its meritocracy and rigorous selection process. Before Bo was unceremoniously removed from power in March 2012, he was one of the 25 members of the Politburo and the party’s choice for ruling a municipality of nearly 40 million people. His prior appointments included a stint as China’s trade minister and governor of Liaoning province (a major industrial centre). Based on the official charges against Bo, he actually began to take large bribes and engage in multiple adulterous affairs nearly two decades ago, when he was the mayor of Dalian, a prosperous port city in northeastern China. There can only be two explanations. The party’s much-vaunted anti-corruption watchdogs are totally incompetent and could not detect Bo’s wrongdoing. Alternatively — and more likely — Bo’s colleagues (and potential rivals) have known about his corrupt acts all along but had chosen to turn a blind eye to them.
The most Machiavellian and plausible answer is a variation of the second explanation. Of course, Bo’s rivals were well aware of his sins and crimes, but such offences are common at the top of the regime. Building a case against Bo solely on his greed and lust would have produced a political contagion — his equally venal and lascivious colleagues would have been made to feel just as insecure. The smartest thing to do under these circumstances was to use Bo’s wrongdoings against him only when he violated the unwritten cardinal rule set by the post-Mao leadership: the party will never allow another megalomaniac figure to terrorise it.
Unfortunately for Bo, his ambition was all too visible to reassure his colleagues. What he did during his tenure as Chongqing’s party boss — reviving Maoist-era political symbols, launching mass campaigns against alleged organised criminal gangs, sending his political enemies to jail (one was executed) and unabashedly seeking the media limelight — was reminiscent of the worst excesses of the Maoist regime. Needless to say, Bo’s political rivals could not help feeling a bit scared by his ruthless tactics. If he could do this as a mere Politburo member, they feared, he would be capable of anything once elevated to the Politburo standing committee and made politically untouchable.
So, despite the party’s desire to maintain its façade of leadership unity, Bo had to be made to pay for his real crime — threatening the security of his colleagues. In retrospect, the Chinese political establishment probably could have blocked Bo’s promotion to the Politburo standing committee last year without airing his sordid misdeeds. The party might have preferred to handle him that way. But once Bo’s police chief attempted to defect to the Americans, his rivals smelt blood: they could use the incident to finish off Bo, once and for all. Sadly, even for the most powerful members of China’s ruling elites, life could still be “nasty, brutish, and short”, as Thomas Hobbes put it centuries ago.
Of course, the CPC wants to have it both ways. By locking up Bo for years, it is warning its members not to follow his example. By punishing one of its most senior leaders, the party attempts to reassure the Chinese people that it is serious about fighting corruption.
Fortunately, it now takes a lot more to dupe the Chinese public. The only conclusion they can draw from the Bo Xilai affair is that the one-party state is now rotten to the core. Putting the hapless Bo behind bars will not cure the endemic corruption and abuse of power inside the regime. To regain its lost credibility, the party will have to clean house, not stage show trials.
The writer is a professor of government and non-resident senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the US.
