The myth that the consensus-led leadership can carry on business as usual has been temporarily dented, if not permanently shattered
In coming to an abrupt stop the driver is supposed to check the rear-view mirror before slamming on the brakes. The official party newspaper in China dispensed with that courtesy yesterday. When the People's Daily urged people to rally around the top leadership, saying that Bo Xilai had damaged the cause of both party and state, the sound of tinkling glass and smashed fenders resounded all over the blogosphere, which now had, according to China Digital Times, a whole new batch of censored words. The debate over Bo, who was dismissed as party secretary of the megacity of Chongqing some weeks ago, but who had held on to his politburo and central committee seats until this week, was now apparently over.
But what was over? The investigation into the murder of a British businessman, Neil Heywood, in which Bo's wife Gu Kailai was strongly implicated? The rise of an opportunist princeling, who had turned a city with the population the size of Canada's into a massive personal springboard to national fame? Or the biggest upheaval since the general secretary Zhao Ziyang was ousted following the Tiananmen protests in 1989? It took more than a month from the incident which started all this, the dramatic flight of Bo's former ally and police chief Wang Lijun to the nearest US consulate, to the removal of Bo as Chongqing chief. Another few weeks elapsed until Bo was dismissed from the politburo. Obviously Wang's allegations against his former boss had to be investigated. But there must also have been one big bust-up, as rival party barons settled scores over the seat in the standing committee that Bo will now never occupy. China's seamless handover of power from one generation of leaders to the next, scheduled for this autumn, has been all too visibly stitched up.
The fall of Bo tells us three things about the ability of the communist leadership to manage change. The first is that it was enormously public. Brutal factional politics can no longer be concealed behind a screen. It is duplicated in real time all over millions of them. The second is that, whether or not Bo's fall was accidental or triggered by forces outside Chongqing, the myth that the grey, collective, consensus-led leadership can carry on business as usual has been temporarily dented, if not permanently shattered. The next generation of leaders faces such massive challenges – a major environmental crisis, an acute shortage of water in the north, a falling birthrate, the end of double-digit growth, the need to rebalance the economy towards domestic consumption, corruption, riots – that it patently cannot carry on business as usual. Third, Bo's rise and fall came amid a steady crescendo of debate about the need for reform, political as well as economic. Maybe Bo was the wrong answer to the right question.