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March 18th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
The closest thing China has to a Western politician, the charismatic Mr Bo
embodies the contrasts of China’s rapid economic reform, espousing Maoist
slogans while sending his son to be privately educated at Harrow, followed
by Oxford and Harvard.
Last Thursday, though, having looked set for the very top of the Politburo, he
was abruptly sacked: his biggest crime – in the eyes of party elders at
least – to have been an individual in a system that still prides conformity
above all else.
His demise has drawn attention from the outside world because it raised
profound questions about the nature of China’s politics.
After Mao and Tiananmen Square, the Chinese elite has preferred its senior
officials to be bland to the point of invisibility, and its politics free of
excitement. But Mr Bo, 62, has been a stubborn exception to the rule, a rare
maverick in a system that does everything to discourage them.
When he was snubbed for the Politburo’s standing committee in 2007 and sent to
Chongqing – then an underdeveloped backwater in Western China – people
expected him to recede from the political scene.
Instead, he has made Chongqing not just an economic success story but also the
flagship of China’s “Red revival”, trading on a nostalgia –
perhaps misplaced – among many Chinese who are angry at how economic reform
has widened the gap between rich and poor, and often benefited party
apparatchiks and spivs more than anyone else.
With a “Robo Cop” police at his side helping him to clean up his
dirty city, the charismatic Mr Bo became China’s answer to New York’s Mike
Bloomberg or London’s Boris Johnson, charting a new course as a
media-friendly populist who made a name for himself by taking on the party’s
elites.
In China everything that matters is measured, and local officials in Chongqing
would proudly reel off the vital statistics of their progress.
The anti-mafia campaign saw thousands arrested; hundreds convicted; and 14
people executed (including local officials and businessmen, and possibly
some political rivals).
The Red campaign, meanwhile, saw 10,000 revolutionary singing events
organized, 8,000 “Red” story telling events, and half a million
Red mottoes sent by text messages. “We are promulgating Red classics to
boost the Red spirit”, said one official.
Yet what made Bo so central to the future of China was not so much the Maoist
rhetoric, but the mix of populist, egalitarian and free-market policies that
he introduced.
On the one hand, he aggressively courted inward investment and high-tech
companies to Chongqing (over half of the world’s laptops in its the Hewlett
Packard plant). At the same time, he massively increased the size of the
state – growing the state-owned enterprises, building 750,000 social housing
units, compensating farmers for their land through a new land-exchange
scheme, and giving more than two million migrant workers access to social
benefits.
In a country where there are over 100,000 violent protests a year about
corruption, social problems and inequality, his vowed to close the gap
between rich and poor won him genuine support.
But his campaign was not just aimed at making life in this long-neglected
corner of China better.
It was also a brazen attempt to be selected as one of seven people on the
standing committee of the politburo when the current leaders give up their
party posts late in 2012 – effectively the seven most powerful jobs in
China.
Last month, though, his role as an anti-mafia strongman backfired when a
scandal worthy of US cop show “The Wire” erupted on his home city.
That was when Wang Lijun, his hand-picked police chief, suddenly turned up
at the US Consulate in neighbouring Chengdu, where he allegedly asked for
political asylum as well as offering to dish the dirt on his former boss.
Chinese police surrounded the building, and after spending the night there, Mr
Wang left with them, since when he has remained in custody.
What exactly he offered to the Americans is not known, but the saga gave Mr
Bo’s enemies within the party all the grounds they needed to sack him. The
day before his sacking last week he was also publicly reprimanded by Premier
Wen Jiabao, who, in his annual press conference, warned against China
returning to the days of the Cultural Revolution, an indirect rebuke of Mr
Bo’s efforts to revive “Red culture” in Chongqing.
Was that the real reason? Or was it because he openly campaigned for the
leadership in a system that abhors open competition? Or because he simply
upset the wrong people with his anti-mafia campaign?
“We put 1000 people in prison and they have relatives, people who
benefited from their illegal activities,” says one of his aides. “We
knew from the start that there would be opposition.”
The answers to these questions are not yet clear, although there seems little
doubt that Chongqing’s era of charismatic leaders is over. Mr Bo’s
replacement in the city is Zhang Dejiang, a North Korean-trained economist
considered a grey party man even by Politburo standards.
Yet as China prepares for its new political leadership in the autumn, there is
a growing consensus that it also stands on the threshold of a new era in its
development.
Should the priority be promoting private enterprise or reducing inequality?
And what kind of political reforms are needed, now that 500 million citizens
have access to the internet and wealth has created a massive middle class?
Mr Bo’s reign in Chongqing was controversial because it proffered answers to
these questions, though not in any straightforward Western or Eastern model.
The mix of social policy, state investment, and subsidies to attract big
multinationals like Apple, Foxconn and Hewlett Packard was no simple return
to Maoist economics. And the populist mass mobilisations and anti-mafia
crackdowns also seemed to promise a new model of high-tech dictatorship
rather than moving closer to democracy.
However, Jiang Wenran, a former class-mate of Mr Bo’s from university, thinks
that it was more political posturing than a return to past.
“The family had much endured much suffering during the Cultural Revolution”,
he said.
“It’s hard to even imagine Bo was about to take Chongqing or China onto a
Cultural Revolution road of some kind”.
Mark Leonard is director of the European Council on Foreign Relations
and author of “What does China Think?” (Fourth Estate)
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