The Bo Xilai Affair and China’s Future DevelopmentThomas Heberer und and Anja Senz

ASIEN – Nr. 125 (2012) pp. 78–93

Current events have thrown a spotlight on the Chinese political elite and the structure of the communist party-state: the escape of Chongqing’s well-known police chief and deputy mayor Wang Lijun to the US consulate in Chengdu on 6 February 2012, where he apparently sought asylum, the dismissal of Chongqing’s powerful party chief Bo Xilai, and the detention of Bo’s wife Gu Kailai on suspicion of murdering a British citizen. Observers are divided between those who take the scandal as a major crisis with regard to factional infighting and ideological conflict in China and those who see the response to it as a step which successfully protected China from an even bigger political crisis. For their part, Chinese authorities have argued that the affair is merely a “legal” issue which demonstrates that no-one is above the law. At a press conference held at the end of the 5th Session of the National People’s Congress in March 2012, however, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao explicitly emphasized that the growing social gap and the problem of corruption cannot be solved without political reforms. Should the government fail, so Wen, a tragedy such as the Cultural Revolution might one day recur; the Party Committee and the government of Chongqing should therefore rethink their political behaviour and draw lessons from the Wang Lijun case. This statement illustrates that the affair is not merely a legal issue, but rather one involving major underlying political issues…