Comrade Xi’s Purge: China’s New Strongman Returns to the Methods of Chairman Mao.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/comrade-xis-purge-1434063076
China’s internal power struggle continues. That’s the meaning of Thursday’s announcement that former Politburo Standing Committee Member Zhou Yongkang was sentenced to life in prison for corruption.
After taking power in 2012, Party General Secretary Xi Jinping had former rival Bo Xilai sentenced to life the following year. Then Mr. Zhou disappeared from public view, and his associates were arrested one by one. He is the highest-ranking Party official to be purged since the days of Mao Zedong.
That is no coincidence. Mr. Xi has championed a return to Maoist rhetoric and political mobilization. His propaganda organs sometimes claim that the “ongoing anticorruption campaign” is a sign of the rule of law. But they give the real game away with attacks on Mr. Xi’s enemies for building factions within the Party.
Nobody in China will be surprised to learn that Mr. Zhou was corrupt. His conviction for taking $118,000 in bribes is laughable compared to the $14.5 billion in assets investigators seized from his family, according to Reuters. Yet all of China’s recent leaders have enriched themselves and their relatives.
Like Bo Xilai, Mr. Zhou’s true crime was political. As a former head of the security apparatus and the state petroleum monopoly, Mr. Zhou built an empire so powerful that even after his retirement it threatened Mr. Xi and the Party center.
Because he once controlled China’s police, spies and courts, Mr. Zhou knows where all the regime’s skeletons are buried. That explains why the prosecution case against him proceeded slowly. His guilty plea and contrite acceptance of the verdict suggests that a deal was cut to spare his life and protect his family.
The purge continues, with former Politburo member Ling Jihua also now in the cross hairs. At the lower levels of the Party, frightened cadres are keeping their heads down. This rectification campaign has made Mr. Xi arguably the most powerful leader since Mao.
So what direction will China take under its new emperor? Perhaps Mr. Xi will undertake far-reaching economic reforms, or promote an even more nationalist foreign policy to intimidate neighboring countries, or some combination of both. One-man rule is always hard to predict, as the Mao years tragically showed.
The Zhou purge reveals how little rule of law there still is in China, and why this rising military power unconstrained by institutional checks and balances is such a potential threat to world order.
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