Source: Foreign Policy
Last week, controversial politician Bo Xilai, whose relatively
open campaigning for a seat on China's top ruling council shocked China
watchers (and possibly his elite peers, as well), was removed from his
post as
Chongqing's party secretary. He hasn't been seen since. Rumors of a
coup, possibly coordinated by Bo's apparent ally Zhou Yongkang, are in
the air.
Western media has extensively
covered the political turmoil: Bloomberg reported on how coup rumors helped
spark
a jump in credit-default swaps for Chinese government bonds; the Wall
Street Journal opinion
page called Chinese leadership transitions an "invitation, sooner or
later, for tanks in the streets." The Financial Times saw the removal of Bo,
combined with Premier Wen Jiabao's strident remarks at a press
conference hours before Bo's removal as a sign the party was moving to
liberalize its stance on the Tiananmen square protests of 1989. That Bo
staged a coup is extremely unlikely, but until more information comes to
light, we can only speculate on what happened.
Reading official Chinese media response about Bo makes it easy to forget how much Chinese care about politics. The one sentence mention in Xinhua,
China's official news agency, merely says that Bo is gone and another official,
Zhang Dejiang, is replacing him. But the
Chinese-language Internet is aflame with debate over what happened to Bo and
what it means for Chinese political stability.
Mainland media sites have begun to strongly censor
discussion of Bo Xilai and entirely
unsubstantiated rumors of gunfire in downtown Beijing (an extremely
rare occurance in Beijing). Chinese websites hosted overseas, free from censorship, offer a host of unsupported,
un-provable commentary on what might have happened in the halls of power. Bannedbook.org,
which provides free downloads of "illegal" Chinese books, posted a long explanation
of tremors in the palace of Zhongnanhai, sourced to a "person with access
to high level information in Beijing," of a power struggle between President Hu
Jintao, who controls the military, and Zhou, who controls China's formidable
domestic security apparatus. The Epoch Times, a news site affiliated with the
Falun Gong spiritual movement (which banned in China), has published extensively in English
and Chinese
about the coup.
Speculation is rife: A Canadian Chinese news
portal quoted Deutsche Welle
quoting the Hong Kong newspaper Apple
Daily quoting a netizen that a group of citizens unfurled a banner
in a main
square in Chongqing that said "Party Secretary Bo, We Love and Esteem
You," and
were subsequently taken away by plain-clothes security forces. A
controversial Peking University professor
Kong Qingdong, a 73rd generation descendant of Confucius, said on his
television show that removing Bo Xilai is similar to "a
counter-revolutionary coup;" one
news site reported his show has since been suspended.
The
Wall Street Journal reports that searching for Bo
Xilai's name on Baidu, China's most popular search engine, lacks the
standard censorship boilerplate ("according to relevant rules and regulations, a portion
of the search results cannot be revealed") that accompanies searching for top
leaders like Wen Jiabao and Hu Jintao. A recent search for other Politburo
members like Bo
rival Wang Yang and People's Liberation Army
top general Xu Caihou were similarly uncensored. Conversely, searching
for Bo's name on Sina's popular Weibo micro-blogging service now doesn't
return any relevant results. A censored fatal Ferrari crash
on Sunday night has raised suspicions of elite foul play, possibly
realted to Bo. The bannedbook.org reports that Hu and Zhou "are
currently fighting for control of China Central Television, Xinhua News
(the
official Communist Party wire service), and other ‘mouthpieces,'" which
have
been eerily but unsurprisingly taciturn about Bo Xilai.
What we do know, as one message that bounced around Sina
Weibo said, is that "something big happened in Beijing."
