Letter From Australia (About China)

Raw Power and Brute Force

John Garnaut has written an insightful piece in the Sydney Morning Herald describing the power struggle taking place within the Communist Party in China.  The whole article is worth a careful reading.  We endeavour to summarise it below:

Seismic shift

March 31, 2012The battle between China's Maoist past and a more democratic future is laid bare in the 30-year-old family feud that has reshaped the nation's political landscape.

If Premier Wen Jiabao is ''China's greatest actor'', as his critics allege, he saved his finest performance for last. After three hours of eloquent and emotional answers in his final press conference at the National People's Congress earlier this month, Wen uttered his public political masterstroke, reopening debate on one of the most tumultuous events in the party's history and hammering the final nail in the coffin of his great rival, the now disgraced Chongqing party boss Bo Xilai. In doing so, Wen wreaked his revenge on a family that had opposed him . . .  countless times.

Responding to a gently phrased question about Chongqing - the municipality until this month headed by the charismatic Bo - Wen foreshadowed Bo's political execution, a seismic leadership rupture announced the following day that continues to convulse China's political landscape to an extent not seen since 1989. . . . When Bo failed to show humility or contrition to his colleagues in Beijing, it seems, his legion enemies took the opportunity to strike him down.

But the addendum that followed might be even more significant. Indirectly, but unmistakably, Wen went on to define Bo as the man who wanted to repudiate China's long effort to reform its economy, open to the world, and allow its citizens to experience modernity. He framed the struggle over Bo's legacy as a choice between urgent political reform and ''such historical tragedies as the Cultural Revolution'', bringing to a head a 30-year battle for two vastly different versions of China, of which Bo Xilai and Wen Jiabao are the ideological heirs.

Bo Xilai has wanted to turn China back to the highly centralised command-and-control past.   Wen Jiabao has tried to move China into a decentralised, less state-controlled direction.  Both have spent their careers deep within the belly of the Communist party, plotting their schemes and building their support base.  Bo has now been politically banished; the Wen faction appears in control.  It may, however, not last. 

The problem is that Communist China has only the apparatus of raw power.  It has no ideology of the rule of law, no constitution which limits the rule of government.  Wen Jiabao has little to work with, apart from the hunger for development and economic progress amidst the people. 

Wen was speaking against a background where China is rising and challenging Western supremacy and yet beset by a crisis of identity, legitimacy and direction. The contest of ideas, politics and patronage is climaxing ahead of a wholesale leadership transition that will start to unfold at the party's five-yearly Congress in October. This transition is as globally consequential as the US elections that will immediately follow. But for the first time it is taking place without the guiding hand of the republic's founding fathers. And, unlike the world's established democracies, China has no constitutional bottom line, no elections and no independent judiciary.

His rival, Bo Xilai has built his power base in the city of  Chongqing.

Bo has deployed his prodigious charisma and political skills to attack the status quo in favour of a more powerful role for the state. He displayed an extraordinary capacity to mobilise political and financial resources during his 4½-year tenure as the head of the Yangtze River megalopolis of Chongqing.

He transfixed the nation by smashing the city's mafia - together with unco-operative officials, lawyers and entrepreneurs - and rebuilding a state-centred city economy while shamelessly draping himself in the symbolism of Mao Zedong. He sent out a wave of revolutionary nostalgia that led to Mao quotes sent as text messages, government workers corralled to sing ''red songs'' and old patriotic programming overwhelming Chongqing TV.

At the same time, China's netizens were amazed to learn that Bo's favourite son, Bo Guagua, drives a red Ferrari, and asked how the family could afford to educate him at Oxford and then Harvard.

It's all about power and control.  Evoking Communist ideology is a means to consolidate a power base.  One's personal wealth has nothing to do with it--or, so Communist elites always tell themselves.   Wen, in the meantime, has started publicly to raise criticism of the bloody and destructive Cultural Revolution:

By raising the spectre of the Cultural Revolution, Wen Jiabao has opened a crack in the vault of Communist Party history: that great black box that conceals the struggles, brutality, partial truths and outright fabrications upon which China has built its economic and social transformation. Beneath his carefully layered comments is a profound challenge to the uncompromising manner in which the Chinese Communist Party has always gone about its business.

It remains to be seen whether Wen Jiabao will succeed.  The fundamental irony he faces is that the purging of his enemies and pushing China to a more free society has to occur in a vacuum of law, ideology, tradition, or a doctrine of a limited state and personal freedom.  His only resource is the use of raw state power.  Mao used to say that (state) power grew out of the barrel of a gun.  It's hard to see how such raw power can destroy itself by withering away under the rule of law.  Modern China has never known any other way of operating apart from brute force.

Wen Jiabao sees Bo's downfall as a pivotal opportunity to pin his reformist colours high while the party is too divided to rein him in. He is reaching out to the Chinese public because the party is losing its monopoly on truth and internal roads to reform have long been blocked. Ironically, he is doing so by leading the public purging of a victim who has no hope of transparent justice, because the party to which he has devoted his life has never known any other way.

John Garnaut is writing a book on the princelings who are shaping China's future. A longer version of this story appears online in Foreign Policy magazine (foreignpolicy.com).