The Communist Party’s Big Problem? It’s Not Bo Xilai

The bringing of specific charges against former Chongqing police chief Wang Lijun, whose dash to a U.S. consulate earlier this year jump-started the scandal surrounding fallen Chinese Communist Party star Bo Xilai, might signal to some that the party is finally starting to emerge into the political daylight.

With the 18th Party Congress and the selection of a new leadership looming, that would be good news for many cadres.


But it’s nothing of the sort.

Indeed, the whole Bo affair—from Wang’s attempted defection to the murder trial of Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai—is starting to look like a sideshow to a far sharper struggle within the Chinese Communist Party—not over what the new leadership is going to look like so much as what sort of party is needed to deal with the society at large.

That brawl within the party over direction became more pronounced last week with the publication of a long, critical commentary on the website of its main theoretical journal Qiushi, or Seeking Truth.

The essay focuses on the risks to governance that the Communist Party faces—ten of them in all, it argues. And far from being another float in the parade of praise that the official media has been bestowing on the Hu Jintao era, the commentary is a clear effort to puncture the achievements of the present leadership, pointing out the major problems it’s produced, or that its left for the next one to deal with.

Nine out of the ten risks are domestic, with the remaining challenge being “outside hostile forces” (primarily Western), whose “intent and consistent strategic goal,” according to the article, is to exploit China’s “current contradictions” and seek to “destroy the Communist Party and the socialist system.” The essay insists that while “the contemporary world is undergoing major development, major changes and major adjustments,” the real risks to the Communist Party, according to the commentary, are from within–in some cases, inside the party itself.

A good deal of space is spent addressing the shortcomings of political will among officials. For example, according to the article, the party line of “reform and opening up” for the sake of “socialist modernization” is being questioned by some cadres. Some of them want to accelerate reform and push social change by racing “a capitalist road,” leaving the core ideologies of the Marxism and Maoism by the wayside. That’s risky driving; and it could end up delivering a disastrous crash, the essay says.

Equally disturbing, it notes, is the decline of Party ideology as “a weapon to solidify popular feeling.”

“Negative, unhealthy, and reactionary ideas” from “different cultures and different values” are colliding with China’s efforts to build up its own national identity, the article suggests, and those forces are starting to sow seeds of doubt in the minds of officials and the public at large.

That sort of lip-service socialism badly weakens the party and is adding to a “moral landslide” within the government, making cadres less courageous, less heroic and less responsive to the masses—which want guidance and need far more service-oriented government than they currently have. The risk then, suggests the essay, is that party members are not taking enough risks.

So, where’s this disquiet about the state of the Communist Party coming from?

Essays such as this one are usually either sponsored by some political patron, or they emerge as provocations, enjoying support from different parts of the party. This commentary has all the signs of the latter.

It talks extensively about “social justice,” arguing at one point that “the history of Chinese Communism is a history of the struggle for the realization of social justice,” which suggests a blast from the Left.

Yet — and this is what makes it truly noteworthy — the essay also represents a cannonade from the Right, because it rails against “the excessive concentration of power” and the underdevelopment of “inner-Party democracy.”

That’s the true question facing the party in the coming months, up to and through the Party Congress: Not whether Bo Xilai and those who stumbled with him get shot or end up in the slammer, but whether the Left and the Right can be kept from finding common cause to act in concert against the hardline Center.

Thus far, the Center has been tough enough to handle challenges from both ends. And the indications are that the likely successors would like to remain hardline and cautious centralizers, with the pace of reform set to full-speed slow.

That approach worked well when the scandal in Chongqing broke. But if we see more essays like this one as the Party Congress approaches, the old way of political damage control is going to look increasingly questionable.

Russell Leigh Moses