As recently as early March Bo Xilai was arguably the most popular politician in China – destined for a seat on the country’s all-powerful, nine-member Politburo Standing Committee later this year. Today he is under investigation for “serious discipline violations” – having been fired from his high-profile job as Communist Party boss of the thriving metropolis of Chongqing. For all intents and purposes his political career has come to a screeching and ignominious end.
It must have been troubling enough for party elders that, while proselytizing the regressive philosophy of Chairman Mao and fighting gangland corruption in a manner that would make Eliot Ness proud, Bo was living a lavish lifestyle that made a mockery of both his Maoist devotion and his fight against corruption.
But I suspect it was the antic attempt of his chief of police to seek asylum in the U.S. Consulate near Chongqing in early February that torpedoed Bo’s career. Because, despite all of China’s purported progress, this move betrayed that loyalty to the Communist Party remains so absolute that independent-minded officials are just as inclined to defect from China today as they were to defect from the Soviet Union 50 years ago.
(The chief was “persuaded” to surrender to local authorities within hours after entering the Consulate which was immediately surrounded by Chinese police.)
This means that the discipline violations Bo is accused of probably have far more to do with this spectacular failure to instill party loyalty than with the flair for self-promotion that made him so popular.
Of course revelations that his wife Gu Kailai had a “close” relationship with a murdered British businessman named Neil Heywood did not help. Not least because reports are that they had a falling out over his refusal to help her smuggle millions of dollars out of the country shortly before he was found dead in a Chongqing hotel last November. Chinese authorities announced on April 10 that she is the prime suspect.
Then there’s the trail of spoil-brat shenanigans his son Bo Guagua blazed from Britain’s most expensive prep school through Oxford and on to Harvard. He duly chronicled most of them on his Facebook page, providing unprecedented fodder for Internet gossip.
But if the family life of almost any high-ranking Chinese official were placed under similar public scrutiny, chances are very good that the details would be every bit as scandalous as that of Bo Xilai’s. Such is the epidemic of corruption, bribery, internecine squabbles, and all manner of vice that defines China’s political system.
This is why I am convinced that it was the national “loss of face” the attempted defection represented that compelled party elders to begin the process of purging Bo by firing him on March 15. And whatever the mystery surrounding Heywood’s death, Bo’s wife seems little more than collateral damage in this process. After all, the police originally declared the cause of his death was “overconsumption of alcohol.”
Meanwhile, China is doing all it can to prevent ordinary Chinese from accessing this story on the Internet – no doubt fearing that it might galvanize them the way the story of one Tunisian burning himself in protest galvanized ordinary Arabs….