Sol W. Sanders   [See Archive]

Chen Guangcheng and Bo Xilai represent the two poles of the Chinese political spectrum. Chen is a blind, self-taught lawyer and provincial activist for human rights, in a life and death struggle to reinterpret the system. Bo is a pampered scion of a famous Communist family, until recently a successful Party apparatchik taking full advantage of systemic corruption but now facing censure.

Still there is verisimilitude. Both now likely face obscurity: Bo as a cashiered bureaucrat caught in the toils of his wife’s “business” deals which apparently included murdering a foreign businessman. Chen, following dozens of other human rights heroes exiled to the West, like they, henceforth will exert little influence on events inside the Middle Kingdom.

Talking heads have made much of Bo’s notoriety impacting inner-Party factional struggles. Yet the Zhongnanhaiologists, those seeking to divine movements inside Chinese Communist Party’s headquarters, might well have over intellectualized. Like Kremlinologists of old — most of whom did not foresee the coming sudden Soviet implosion despite their Talmudic analyses — they speculate on ideological Party interplay.

That obscures a basic truth: corruption in every form has reached such dimensions, junior comrades must make individual “deals” on all sides to survive, much less to scrabble up the Party ladder. When an ambitious rising Party star trips up, as Bo did, the tentacles of their plotting lead in all directions.

That is perhaps what outgoing Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, a wily leader who himself has been on all sides of all issues, meant when he recently publicly warned against a return to the chaos of the Great Cultural Revolution in Mao Tsetung’s declining years. That leadership feud with its rival hit squads recruited among disaffected youth almost brought down the regime. Wen says there must be “reform” — but how to reform a one-party regime built on indispensable repression?

Chen fought that tyranny with a subtle if inevitably self-defeating strategy: he challenged Beijing to honor lofty commitments in its formal declarations and to rein in increasingly oppressive local Party cadre. But like those pre-World War II Stalinoid Western intellectuals who constantly ballyhooed the 1936 Soviet constitution as the most liberal in the world, Chen ultimately was betrayed. The old Russian lament, “if the Tsar only knew”, suggesting Tsarist, then Soviet, and now Chinese Communist tyranny is a function of local misrule rather than central government policy is a fantasy which gives dissidents like Chen hope but in the end little surcease.

What connects the separate but symptomatic dramas of Chen and Bo is an authoritarian regime’s failure to deal with them promptly and adequately as it approaches this fall a difficult transition from one aging leadership generation to another. The largest, most technological advanced and determined effort to suppress political dissidence the world has ever seen — the so-called Great Firewall of China — could not stop Internet bloggers dragging a Communist chieftain through his own mud. In Chen’s case, Beijing initially failed to replicate earlier successful efforts to choke off individual dissidents by bundling them off to relative silence in the West.

The result was an international incident, apparently as much produced by differences inside the Party security apparatus as incompetence on the part of Sec. of State Hillary Clinton’s entourage.

Had that scenario played out, Chen quickly would have fled the country, the human rights “industry” in the U.S. would have crowed, and the Chinese authorities would have removed an irritant all the while claiming cooperation with Washington and claiming movement toward “reform”. That now looks to be what will happen — but belatedly.

Granted the scandal exploded at a most unpropitious moment, during a highly touted meeting with American officials in Beijing kowtowing in another ostensible effort to resolve larger differences of trade, finance and international trouble spots. But, whatever, the system, at least temporarily, failed spectacularly.

That poses the real question of the hour: are we seeing the demise of ad hoc policies which facilitated inordinate economic progress by opening China to international development? Is it proof Western optimists have been correct in arguing China ultimately could not continue economic gains without concessions to liberal politics? Or are we seeing the beginnings of the eventual collapse of The China Model — a template for modernization which held fast to traditional “oriental despotism” while simultaneously embellished, and presumably protected, by the newest world class technology?

Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net), writes the ‘Follow the Money’ column for The Washington Times on the convergence of international politics, business and economics. He is also a contributing editor for WorldTribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com.

  Bo Xilai, Chen Guangcheng, Communism muddles along in the Middle Kingdom, Cultural Revolution, Great Firewall of China, Mao Tsetung, Wen Jiabao