Opinion
China’s new leaders will have to work hard
China’s new leaders will have to work hard
By Isabel Hilton, Beijing
The Chinese Communist party has just been through its most interesting year since 1976, when the Deng Xiaoping faction purged Mao’s widow and her three key supporters in the weeks after Mao’s death. In case anyone had missed the point, photographs of Mao’s memorial ceremony - which in their originals featured the Gang of Four prominently - were republished following their arrest with fuzzy gaps in the places where they had stood. |
Bo Xilai, the disgraced party secretary of the megalopolis of Chongqing, is also being airbrushed out of the city that he dominated for five turbulent years, until his spectacular fall last March. His victims now speak openly of torture, and the Mao-style rallies he promoted are out of favour. Bo himself has yet to be put on trial on the corruption charges now drawn up against him. While the trial of the Gang of Four in the early 80s was a protracted affair that drew a public line under the extremes of the Maoist era, Bo’s trial is likely to be briefer. Its purpose is to drive a stake through the corpse of his political career, rather than to rehearse the details of crimes that the public might judge unremarkable in any Communist party leader.
Bo was corrupt? The public shrugs. His family was inexplicably rich? Some of the richest people in China are the children and grandchildren of party leaders. But the party prefers its would-be leaders to remember that none is allowed to be bigger than the organisation. It is one of several characteristics the Chinese Communist party shares with the mafia. The message that the once charismatic - and highly visible - leader’s trial will convey to the Chinese public is quite simple: he lost.
But his fall comes at an inflection point in China’s development, almost as significant as that of 1976. This year will test China’s ability to execute a number of key transitions: towards a less wasteful and more innovative economy, towards or away from the rule of law, towards a fairer society or back to authoritarianism and the immense privileges of the elite.
The new leaders inherit a number of actual and impending crises, of which the most dramatic is in Tibet, where the number of self-immolations since 2009 has reached 92. A new approach there would be a convincing sign of leadership. On corruption, Xi Jinping, the incoming president, will have to work hard to convince anyone that his promises mean more than the empty talk of his predecessors.
In 2011, then president Wen Jiabao told a London audience: “Without freedom, there is no real democracy. Without guarantee of economic and political rights, there is no real freedom”, sentiments his audience might claim to appreciate rather more than the speaker. But in his 10 years in office, rule of law made little progress, and economic and political rights continue to be honoured more on paper than in practice. - Guardian News & Media