The End of the Chinese Dream: Why Chinese People Fear the Future
IT HAS BEEN a tumultuous year for China. In March, the Communist Party unexpectedly sacked one of its biggest magnates, Bo Xilai, who was set to be promoted next autumn to the Politburo Standing Committee, the country’s most powerful body. This charismatic autocrat built up an unusually loud gangster personality that, in this rapidly growing country, was too “Red” for his more cautious peers. In 2007, Bo gained a high profile when he took command of the exploding mega-city of Chongqing, an industrial entrepôt of twenty-nine million people in the country’s southwest. He cracked down on organized crime, revived welfare programs, built low-income housing, and embarked on a Maoist nostalgia campaign that earned him the respect of the poor. “I like how Chairman Mao puts it: The world is ours. We will all have to work together,” reads a text message that Bo sent out to city residents in 2009, one of the many quotations that were usually taken from the former premier’s Little Red Book.
Bo, the son of a famous revolutionary, was part of the “New Left,” a movement that seeks to move China away from capitalist development and to sew up its growing inequalities. But this is 2012, not 1964, and Bo’s celebrity unnerved rivals who favored a more nuanced, market-driven approach. In the end, they didn’t need to do much about him: as Bo got increasingly brutish, his own success killed him. His anti-corruption crusades became a front to lock away (and sometimes execute) political opponents. And thanks in part to wealth that his government confiscated from a number of industrialists, the so-called man of the people amassed a fortune. Party elites, who tend to keep quiet about their largesse, were uneasy about the wealth flaunted overseas by his Oxford- and Harvard-educated son. Bo was a liability to the party’s legitimacy, and a threat to their hard-earned spoils. He had to go.
Bo’s political dreams were ended in February, when the Chongqing police chief sought asylum in the American consulate in Chengdu, about 180 miles away. The official reportedly revealed to American diplomats that Bo’s wife was involved last November in the murder of a British entrepreneur because of a business dispute. Every week since then, the allegations have piled up with the mystique of a James Bond novel. The New York Times has revealed that Bo even wiretapped the phone calls of the president, Hu Jintao. His son, who finished his Harvard master’s degree in May, will move on to law school in the U.S., while his wife is being held in detention. Bo, meanwhile, has been stripped of party posts and has not been seen in public since the imbroglio began.