Quote:
Originally Posted by Urzu 7
What is this news coming out of China about a politician committing murder and his wife was involved?
I'm not clear on the details. Does anyone know what I'm talking about? Can anyone explain what is going on to me?
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In China there is the Communist Party (CCP), which is administrated by the Politburo and Central Committee. The high-ranking Party bosses do not always agree with each other, and can very roughly be defined in two groups:
The first one is headed by Hu Jintao (president of China and general secretary of CCP) and Wen Jiabao (premier), and is known as the "reformist", "populist", or simply "Hu-Wen" faction.
The second group has its origins in the leadership of Jiang Zemin and his subordinates. Though Jiang is now old and near death, the people he promoted to high positions are still alive and well and seem to be their own faction at odds with the Hu-Wen group. I call this faction either the "Jiang group" or the "elitist faction".
The guy you are asking about is Bo Xilai, who was an aspiring Party official in league with the Elitist Faction who had held posts as two major cities' local CCP boss. In theory, he promoted a return to socialist ideals and moderation of capitalism, but in practice this just meant threatening and harming rich people and expanding his personal power. In doing so, he had a lot of people arrested, tortured, and murdered to serve his interests. His wife seems to have been complicit in some this, as we see in the news regarding the death of the Briton.
A couple months ago, Bo Xilai's crimes were called into question when one of his henchmen, a police chief Wang Lijun, escaped to the US Consulate to seek asylum.
Evidently Wang Lijun was frightened that he was soon to be done away with (perhaps to erase evidence) for participating in various illegal deeds. Anyhow, after getting to and staying at the consulate for some time (where he is supposed to have unloaded A LOT of critical information on the inner struggles in the CCP to the Americans), the Americans kicked him out and he was immediately arrested and sent to Beijing.
Hu and Wen proclaimed him to be a traitor and began to criticize his boss Bo Xilai as well, and kicked him out of his position as a Party official. Now because Bo Xilai was a very prestigious upcoming official, one who had had a real chance at gaining a seat in the Politburo, his sudden denunciation and subsequent expulsion was a massive slap in the face to the Elitist Faction, which Bo Xilai was a part of.
Now, Wang Lijun is awaiting trial (and probably being interrogated), Bo Xilai's position is gone, and his wife has been arrested. In short, the Hu-Wen faction is doing all they can to milk the incident in way that they can discredit and strike at the Elitist Faction. The whole affair has shown us that the CCP is not as stable or coherent as they would like to have everyone think, and that change in China* is a little more likely.
*= Of note is that on the day that the scandal happened, Zhao Ziyang (a politican who are put under house arrest for supporting the students at Tiananmen in 1989) had his name unblocked from Chinese search engines. Shortly afterwards, many other politically or socially sensitive websites were also unblocked. One theory is that these sites have already been discussing the crimes of the CCP, and since most fingers are pointing at the elitists like Bo Xilai, letting ordinary Chinese people read these sites will make them more supportive of the Hu-Wen faction and blame human rights abuses and other ills on the Elitist Faction, as opposed to the CCP as a whole.