Susan Shirk Quoted on China's Recent Power Struggles
China: The fall of Bo Xilai
03/18/2012
chinaworker.info
Dramatic events are unfolding as China’s once-in-a-decade leadership transition gets underway. A serious schism in the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) top ranks has come into full public view – something unprecedented since the mass anti-government protests of 1989. Bo Xilai, standard-bearer of the neo-Maoist ‘new left’, has been dismissed as provincial party chief of Chongqing.
While dramatic, these developments are not completely unexpected. As we explained last year on chinaworker.info, “Still, the [populist] campaign of Bo is an important development signifying that the relative cohesion of the ruling group – in public at least – since the 1989 Beijing massacre is beginning to unravel.” (China: Repression or ‘reform’?, chinaworker.info 11 July 2011).
Bo’s exit follows a major scandal resulting in the arrest of his former right-hand man, Wang Lijun, who until six weeks ago was vice-mayor and police chief of Chongqing. Wang has been labelled a ‘traitor’ by the regime after what was possibly a defection attempt at the US Consulate in Chengdu on 6 February. He is also widely suspected of corruption. “The Wang Lijun saga has evolved into one of the biggest political scandals over the past 60 years,” argues political commentator Chen Ziming. The fall of both men is part of a wider power struggle within the regime, rather than merely an anti-corruption ‘clean up’.
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Susan Shirk is director of the University of California system-wide Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation and Ho Miu Lam professor of China and Pacific Relations at IR/PS.
In 1993, she founded, and continues to lead, the Northeast Asia Cooperation Dialogue (NEACD), an unofficial “track-two” forum for discussions of security issues among defense and foreign ministry officials and academics from the United States, Japan, China, Russia, and the Koreas.
