Flashing a Red Card

The senior official from Chongqing, China’s largest metropolis, suddenly looked uneasy. It was last summer, and I had just asked him about “red culture,” the drive by Bo Xilai, Chongqing’s now disgraced party boss, to instill revolutionary fervor in citizens by singing patriotic songs and reading communist classics. Given that Bo had, according to the official, “turned red culture into Chongqing’s calling card to the world,” it was surprising that he then proceeded to stumble on what the controversial campaign actually meant. By the time he finished his convoluted explanation, I had learned red culture included not only communist values but also encompassed the wisdom of Confucius, Einstein, Shakespeare and Martin Luther King. Oh, and Michael Jackson too.

Ambitious and possibly a fan of the Gloved One, Bo was a pop star in the Chinese political galaxy. His red-culture campaign invited skepticism for its uncomfortable associations with the chaotic 1966 — 76 Cultural Revolution launched by Mao Zedong. Yet Bo, 62, was the closest China had to a Western-style politician who reveled in pressing the flesh with the masses. He was unabashedly Technicolor — equal parts showman and strongman, keen to show off his pedigree as the son of one of the People’s Republic’s founding fathers. Bo held press conferences and, unlike practically every other Chinese leader, didn’t read out scripted answers. He relished political theater.

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But on March 15 the curtain fell on Bo: he was relieved of his duties as Chongqing’s Communist Party secretary in the biggest political scandal to strike China in years. The purge of a so-called princeling came months before the nation’s once-a-decade leadership transition in which Bo and his rather less colorful rivals were to jockey for seats on the nine-member Standing Committee that runs China. There’s much speculation as to why he was ousted: machinations by party elders who felt Bo was hogging the limelight, national embarrassment that one of his aides had briefly sought refuge with the Americans, the shadow of corruption hanging over his family and hangers-on. What’s clear is that the country’s rule-by-committee leadership, in a rare move, openly ousted one of its own, if only to teach other leaders climbing the political ladder: Don’t stick out and don’t get ahead of yourself.

Chinese politics are still largely a hidden affair. But the rapidity with which details of the Bo scandal reached the Chinese public seemed to signal a new social contract between China’s rulers and their subjects, who, even when dodging online censors, are relishing the ability to follow Chinese politics in virtual real time. Hours after Bo’s sacking, his name was the most searched term on Sina Weibo, China’s version of Twitter. The previous month, the Chinese Internet went into overdrive when Bo’s lieutenant Wang Lijun spent a night in a U.S. consulate in southwestern China, raising suspicions that he was trying to defect and spill secrets about his former patron. Within hours, a map of Wang’s supposed route from Chongqing to the city of Chengdu appeared on the Internet.

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But there is another lesson from the Bo affair that is less heartening. He was the only high-level Chinese politician in recent years to cultivate such a brash public persona — and now he has been kneecapped by colleagues who chafed at his easy popularity. The man chosen to replace Bo is a bland apparatchik whose most interesting biographical detail is that he studied economics at a North Korean university. In a contemporary China that values stability and consensus above all, Bo was too turbocharged to truly fit in. “If he was American, he could have been successful by winning elections,” says Yang Fan, an economist who co-wrote a book called The Chongqing Model and was schooled in Beijing with Bo’s brother. “In China there are basically no elections, and being too high profile doesn’t mesh with our political culture.”

Bo was an extreme embodiment of some of modern China’s biggest contradictions. How does a man preside over a red-culture campaign that echoed the Cultural Revolution when his own mother died during that turbulent period? As China’s Commerce Minister from 2004 to ’07, Bo negotiated trade deals with the West and impressed foreign envoys with his charm and colloquial English. His son, who attended Harrow and Oxford, has been spotted racing around Beijing in a red Ferrari. So how could Bo arrive in Chongqing, one of China’s fastest-growing cities, and suddenly spout iterations of Chairman Mao’s class-busting ideology? “Last May, I said on my blog that Bo Xilai wanted to become Mao Zedong,” economist Yang told me after Bo’s dismissal. “But he failed because in today’s China there is no need for a Mao.” The gray men have triumphed for now.

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