Blood & Treasure

on the premier/princeling smackdown

One of the good things about the way which China’s leadership rivalries have broken into the open since Bo Xilai went is that you’re getting more stuff like this epic account of Wen Jiabao’s revenge:

If Premier Wen Jiabao is "China's best actor," as his critics allege, he saved his finest performance for last. After three hours of eloquent and emotional answers in his final news conference at the National People's Congress annual meeting this month, Wen uttered his public political masterstroke, reopening debate on one of the most tumultuous events in the Chinese Communist Party's history and hammering the final nail in the coffin of his great rival, the now-deposed Chongqing Communist Party boss Bo Xilai. And in striking down Bo, Wen got his revenge on a family that had opposed him and his mentor countless times in the past.

Responding to a gently phrased question about Chongqing, 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. But the addendum that followed might be even more significant. Indirectly, but unmistakably, Wen defined Bo as man who wanted to repudiate China's decades-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 reforms and "such historical tragedies as the Cultural Revolution," culminating a 30-year battle for two radically different versions of China, of which Bo Xilai and Wen Jiabao are the ideological heirs. In Wen's world, bringing down Bo is the first step in a battle between China's Maoist past and a more democratic future as personified by his beloved mentor, 1980s Communist Party chief Hu Yaobang. His words blew open the facade of party unity that had held since the massacres of Tiananmen Square.

However, I don’t think it holds up, largely because to sustain the theory that Bo and Wen are representatives and/or leaders of different ideological tendencies within the Party you have to leave too much of the Party out.

It’s not mentioned, for instance, that Wen owes his comeback to the patronage of Zhu Rongji, and by extension to the Shanghai gang that Deng Xiaoping brought in to restore stability after Tiananmen. In other words, he didn’t come to power as a reformer but as a practitioner of stability management through the pursuit of economic growth. Of course, this doesn’t rule out an additional commitment to political reform, but it indicates that it might not exist in the sustained way that Garnaut argues for. The overall picture of Wen isn’t that of a reformist mole working his way up inside the apparat but of a skilled trimmer who has never put his opinions before his determination to advance. This is only to be expected: a former protégé of both Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang will have a lot to live down.

Moreover, he has been consistently assessed as a weak Premier, unlike Zhu who bossed the job and was often seen as the dominant partner in his pairing with Jiang Zemin. He can go and sympathise with the masses after some disaster or other and issue the occasional plaintive call for something that sounds a bit like political liberalization but it goes against the grain to believe that he can make something like Bo’s ouster happen. He’s never made anything happen so far as I can tell.

It’s also not clear that Bo and Wen have been long term ideological opponents: I’ve never been convinced that the ‘princelings’ are a faction in the same way that the Shanghai Gang were and the CYL-populist group are now: as red aristocracy they don’t have to work their way up through patron-client networks in the same way and are free of the collective ties these impose. Nonetheless, they and the Shanghai gang are arguably part of the same loose meta faction of ‘elitists’ urban, more outward looking, from higher party backgrounds, oriented towards the development of the coastal cities and so on. In other words, Wen and Bo were, in a very broad way, factional allies. At this point it’s worth noting as well that Garnaut is describing a vital ideological struggle that leaves the CYL people out of the loop entirely, even though they are the currently dominant faction in the Party and led by the Party Secretary and President.

There’s also the fact that while Bo senior might have been instrumental in the purge of Hu Yaobang, Bo junior’s ‘redness’ is of very recent vintage. He was Mr Globalization when he was running the trade ministry and Mr Green Mayor when he was running Dalian. His history is one of picking up political identities to aid his career progress and exchanging them for others when he takes up new posts.

This gets us to what I still think is the fundamental reason for his ouster. The CPC higher ups were always reportedly irritated by his flamboyant approach to running his fiefdoms. I think that this rapidly changed to alarm when he started getting everyone singing red songs and running the whole panoply of Kitsch Maoism in Chongqing, something which represented a challenge to the whole principle of collective leadership in the Communist party established by Deng and his successors and designed explicitly to avoid the prospect of a skilled demagogue manipulating public anger against the Party as a whole.

So it isn’t Cult Revolt versus Reform. Bo’s antics alarmed people who have no intention of reforming anything, and indeed people whose job is partly to prevent reform happening. When the head of CDIC told Chongqing that the fun was over it became safe for Wen Jiabao in his persona as chief weathervane, to put the cherry on top. This is probably how Wen’s words are significant. If there was a realistic prospect of Bo steaming back, shitlist in hand and loaded for bear, Wen wouldn’t have said what he did.

mouth stopping time

While the window hasn't exactly opened up on machinations around the CPC leadership, we've had a fascinating few weeks worth of tales of poisoning, coups, mass gun battles outside leadership compounds, red terror and human vivisection. Now the hammer comes down:

Today, attempts at commenting on Sina’s popular Weibo site receive the following message: (From 8:00 March 31 until 8:00 April 3, the Weibo commenting function has been temporarily suspended, we deeply apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you.”)

More ominously, the BBC reports this morning that six people have been arrested for spreading false rumors relating to the ‘coup’ in Beijing.

...Once again, the reaction has become the news.  Just when it seemed like crazy rumors of a possible coup in the capital were mostly a jape, easily traced back to a certain heavy-breathing religious society based in the US, the CCP leadership has taken direct aim at the tops of their imported Italian loafers and pulled the trigger.  The story had already largely played itself out in the foreign press. Even the tantalizing threads of scandal emerging on a near daily basis from Chongqing had started to run their course as journalists who traveled there found it nearly impossible to confirm any of the wild and tawdry tales being told about Bo, his wife, the corpse, and the cop.  This is sure to keep those stories going for (at least) another week.

Moreover, Chinese Weibo users are now having their Brave New Weibo World disrupted: “What do you mean I can’t tell my friend that her funny cat picture is soooo cute?  Why?”  

True of course, and I'd surely like to see a Hello Kitty mass group incident. But my guess is that they realise this and they don't care: they've been held up to mass public ridicule, they're pissed off and they want to see people punished. 

sand flea

Unmanned systems go kawaii. It's an IED detector right now, but there's something about it that says non-lethal weapon.

a few words

So I’m reading this really trashy book about the last meals and final testaments of death row prisoners in Texas, whose name I hurry to forget, taken from a notorious website the State Department of Corrections ran, and now I believe has pulled down. Basically it’s a book about people who are going to die imminently eating cheeseburgers and talking about Jesus. But one fellow’s testament stuck out:

I’ve been hanging round this popsicle stand far too long. Warden, let’s go.

That’s almost worth being executed for. And then there was the fellow whose last meal consisted of 'ice water' and who said nothing.

an unfortunate jogging of elbows (updated)

Meet the Cabinet Office Behavioural Insight team, otherwise known as the Nudge Unit:

We can all cite instances in which we know that we should act differently in our own self interest or in the wider interest, but for one reason or another do not. The traditional tools of Government have proven to be less successful in addressing these behavioural problems. We need to think about ways of supplementing the more traditional tools of government, with policy that helps to encourage behaviour change of this kind.

The Behavioural Insights Team has been established to do just that. Its aim is to help the UK Government develop and apply lessons from behavioural economics and behavioural science to public policy making. In short, it supports Government departments in designing policy that better reflects how people really behave, not how they are assumed to behave.

The nudge unit reports to Francis Maude as Cabinet Office Minister (you can read him justifying its work here). If we take ‘behavioural science’ seriously for a moment, we’re left with the question of whether actual panic was the objective here, rather than this being a standard political diversion trick that got out of hand. After all, if an outcome is predictable, it becomes reasonable to consider that it was intended, especially when performed by a confirmed nudger.

UPDATE: This:

But now that I have heard the Conservatives’ private explanation, which is being handed down to constituency associations by MPs, I begin to feel angry.

The private message is as follows. “This is our Thatcher moment. In order to defeat the coming miners’ strike, she stockpiled coal. When the strike came, she weathered it, and the Labour Party, tarred by the strike, was humiliated. In order to defeat the coming fuel drivers’ strike, we want supplies of petrol stockpiled. Then, if the strike comes, we will weather it, and Labour, in hock to the Unite union, will be blamed.”

 

deep structure of Galloway victory

To New Labour, Galloway is the bogeyman. But to young Asians such as Yasser Hussein, a Bradford student who had been a fan since watchinga YouTube clip of Galloway savaging the US senate in 2005 over the Iraq war, he is simply a "legend" and "the only politician who tells the truth". 

Now, if a Labour Party leader had done that he might be in power now.

degrees of bent

There’s an interesting Q &A here with the author of a book on corruption in China. He’s what you might call cautiously optimistic:

I have more confidence in China’s war on corruption than others, not because it will significantly reduce corruption, but in the much more modest sense that they have managed to prevent the problem getting significantly worse.

If you look at either the number of individuals charged with corruption or the estimates of the severity of corruption in China by outside experts, corruption has been at about the same level for nearly a decade.

He also notes that cases go forward at very high level, which is not what you see in places where there’s been complete state capture. On the other hand it seems unlikely that with growth rates the way they have been over the past decade that this wouldn’t lift more people to the level where they were able to afford bribes or be able to demand them. Maybe all those worries about social mobility in China have something to them after all.

I still think the good graft/bad graft distinction used by Tammany politicians of old is useful, in the sense that paying to get things done may be bad, but paying to preserve the necessary conditions for living is very much worse. However, this tends to operate on a class basis: the businessman pays for favours, but the street hawker pays not to have his stuff trashed by the cops or the chengguan.

At the top of the pile you have the ability of corrupt actors to sequester the resources of the state for private use, which I think may be behind this odd case. This poor fellow was transferred from a jail in Gansu to some kind of private residence in Beijing under police guard, where he stayed for four years until he died, which seems to me to indicate that he pissed off someone powerful enough to ‘take over his case' personally.

Of course, sequestering the resources of the state couldn’t happen here.

a wail of a time

Qingming coming up in China. Too busy to sweep the ancestral tomb? No problem:

An advertisement posted on a wall in Tianjin offers to carry out sacrificial offerings, burn joss sticks and even cry on your behalf at the graveside of your relatives for the rate for 30 to 45 minutes.

This is just one of a number of agencies that have sprung to life in recent years offering to honor the dead on behalf of strangers.

When contacted by a reporter, the advertiser surnamed Li confirmed the normal charge is 3,000 yuan, but added the service is not just for those who are too busy to honor their ancestors.

"Not all people need our service because they are too busy. Some need us to add to face. You see, if a crowd of people cry for the deceased, you'll feel proud," said Li.

This reminds me a bit of the Roman Uncles described at Neapolitan funerals by Norman Lewis, who were basically slightly decayed but dignified old men hired to pretend they came from Rome, where they supposedly men of substance and influence, and to stand around looking pompous while everybody else wailed and rent their garments. Here too the aim was to make the family look like it amounted to something.

I predict a merger with the flourishing rent a white guy trade, by a familiar process of horizontal integration.

intermission

Politics in Britain hit the vodka early yesterday. But to cap a pleasingly surreal British week, the Mail gives us a straight up lefty popcorn interlude, while the PM tries to remember where he consumed his baked goods.

more career advice

"You should become an official. Then I could say to people I do business with that my cousin's an official, and they'd be impressed. Why don't you do that?" - Ms Blood's cousin, the one who sells fake drugs to hospitals.