Behind the Bo Xilai trial - a battle for the future of China

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The polarization of rich and poor is the backward culture of slave owners, feudal lords and capitalists, while common prosperity is the people’s just and advanced culture. The Western culture from the British bourgeois revolution in 1640 has had a history of more than 370 years. They often championed the slogans of “freedom, democracy, equality, and fraternity.” However, they have never mentioned “common prosperity”—a topic that concerns the fundamental interests of the vast majority of humanity. Only the communists, with their down-to-earth materialist courage and selfless spirit, write “common prosperity” on their own flag. As comrade Hu Jintao proclaimed at the CCP’s 90th anniversary conference, we must steadfastly pursue the path of common prosperity! We firmly believe, sooner or later, the whole humanity will take on the road of common prosperity.

These are the words of former Chongqing party boss Bo Xilai before his recent expulsion from the Chinese Communist Party and the announcement that he would face justice for corruption and abuse of power. You will not have read these words anywhere in the western media because our corporate media is not interested in enlightening us about Bo's ideology or political practice. On the contrary, the message we are being fed constantly is that China's road to capitalism is near completion - and irreversible and that Bo was an ambitious opportunist. (Remember everyone - There Is No Alternative.)

While these charges against Bo may have substance, are we to believe that Bo was unique in China in using his office for personal or family benefit? Surely, the example of Chongqing as an alternative to the onward march of capitalism in China - and within the CCP - is the real reason for his downfall. In the upcoming congress starting on 8 November, a new leadership will be annointed. The congress includes representatives of China's new class of billionaires. The net worth of those attending is reported to be an eye-watering $98 billion - contrasted with the paltry $7 billion worth of the US Congress and senior US officials. It seems that China's new leadership are likely to pursue a fully fledged turn to capitalism, with the new bourgeoise likely to produce 'liberal' figures who will support a turn to liberal democracy, the figleaf for full-blown neoliberalism the world over. Any attempt to resist such a process is painted by CCP 'reformers' as a desire to return to Maoism and the Cultural Revolution.

The following extract is from an essential analysis of the Chongqing model in the context of China's reform process and the struggle for the country's future from the Monthly Review.

Previously a municipality of Sichuan province, Chongqing gained provincial jurisdiction status in 1997. With a huge rural population (70 percent of 32 million in 2010) and a rugged geography in China’s southwest interior, Chongqing is a microcosm of China. It not only faces some of the country’s most profound socioeconomic challenges but also manifests all the pitfalls of neoliberal capitalist reintegration, including a criminalized economy. In late 2007, Bo, who had gained local governance experience first in the city of Dalian and then in Liaoning province prior to becoming China’s Minister of Commerce in 2003, was sent to lead Chongqing as its party secretary.
Chongqing still prides itself as China’s wartime capital and a center of global anti-fascist struggles between 1937 and 1946. It was turned “red” by literally soaking in the blood of Communist martyrs in the fierce struggles between the Communists and the Nationalists around the time of the PRC’s founding in 1949. Later, Chongqing was built into one of China’s Cold War–era major inland military-industrial bases. This cultivated a strong working class, who had been on the forefront of anti-privatization struggles until the mid–2000s. As China’s newly established metropolis during the reform era, Chongqing shouldered some of the heaviest social dislocations burdening China’s post-Mao development and modernization, with not only the resettlements of Three Gorges Dam migrants but also the care of the elderly and the children left behind in depressed rural villages by migrant workers moving to the coastal regions. Partly because of this, since 1997 the central authorities have given Chongqing more leeway to experiment with integrating urban and rural development. Bo, an ambitious, charismatic, and strong-willed “red princeling” (he is the son of a revolutionary leader) who had a significant power base among China’s political and military elites, was trying to reclaim China’s revolutionary legacies to win popular support in a bid to return to Beijing for a higher political office. This particular configuration of socio-historical, geopolitical, as well as biographical forces gave rise to the Chongqing Model.4
The model’s cornerstones were an enlarged public sector and a focus on social welfare.5 As an August 8, 2012 Foreign Policy article put it, it was “a daring experiment in using state policy and state resources to advance the interests of ordinary people, while maintaining the role of the party and state.”6 Specifically, the local state significantly enlarged its role in the economy through the creation of eight major investment firms that operated as marketized entities but served the purpose of equitable development. Similarly, a state investment firm, rather than private capital, took control of the massive “poor assets” of more than 1,160 state-owned enterprises from the Mao era, restructured them, and developed them into viable businesses. As a result, Chongqing’s state-owned assets grew exponentially. Chongqing took aggressive steps in bridging the urban-rural gap, enabling as many as 3.22 million rural migrants to settle in the city with urban citizenship entitlements in employment, retirement pensions, public rental housing, children’s education, and health care. Beginning in 2009, under a program known as 10 Points on People’s Livelihood, Chongqing spent more than half of all government expenditures on improving public welfare, particularly the livelihoods of workers and farmers.
In these ways, Chongqing put into practice the CCP’s slogan of pursuing people-centered development. In fact, there was nothing radical in these policies—if they were measured against official rhetoric. The effort to strengthen the public sector, for example, remains consistent with China’s constitutional commitment to build a “socialist” system based on the primacy of public ownership. Rather than oppose capitalist reintegration, Chongqing aggressively courted global capital. For example, in a plan to build Chongqing into Asia’s largest manufacturing center for notebook computers, transnational corporations from HP to Acer were attracted to establish operations there. Bo’s leadership even lured the super-exploitative IT manufacturer Foxconn to relocate 200,000 of its 500,000 Shenzhen jobs to Chongqing.7 However, there was a key difference. In Shenzhen, Foxconn was allowed to disembed itself from society by forcing workers to live in factory-supplied, military-barrack-style dorms. In contrast, Chongqing provided cheap public rental housing to Foxconn workers. This allowed it to break away from the “global labor arbitrage” pattern and re-embed transnational capital in society.8 Meanwhile, in an effort to solve the employment problem, Chongqing implemented a massive microenterprise program to support rural migrants and university graduates to establish businesses in the urban areas. In short, as Philip Huang observed, the Chongqing Model attempted to find a way that allows the complementary growth of state, transnational, and domestic private sectors in a mixed economy.9

Waving the Flag of Common Prosperity

Meanwhile, Bo, in a move that was highly counterintuitive to liberal expectations for political liberalization, reinvigorated the Maoist practice of mass line political communication in an attempt to reign in the CCP bureaucracy and capture the hearts and minds of Chongqing’s residents. The core concept is “common prosperity.” In a 2011 speech, Bo, citing Hu Jintao, argued that “common prosperity” is what defines the “advanced direction” of a communist culture:

The polarization of rich and poor is the backward culture of slave owners, feudal lords and capitalists, while common prosperity is the people’s just and advanced culture. The Western culture from the British bourgeois revolution in 1640 has had a history of more than 370 years. They often championed the slogans of “freedom, democracy, equality, and fraternity.” However, they have never mentioned “common prosperity”—a topic that concerns the fundamental interests of the vast majority of humanity. Only the communists, with their down-to-earth materialist courage and selfless spirit, write “common prosperity” on their own flag. As comrade Hu Jintao proclaimed at the CCP’s 90th anniversary conference, we must steadfastly pursue the path of common prosperity! We firmly believe, sooner or later, the whole humanity will take on the road of common prosperity.10

Furthermore, Bo argued that “common prosperity” is not just an ideal or an end point; rather it is the motivating force that runs through the entire developmental process. Just as neoliberal reformers have selectively cited Deng to justify class polarization, Bo cited the Deng who warned against the danger of the reform taking on the “evil path” of capitalism if it had created social polarization and engendered a new capitalist class. Bo even modified Deng’s developmental doctrine to argue that “the people’s livelihood is the ironclad truth.” Against those who continued to espouse the neoliberal “trickle down” theory by pitting “making the cake” against “dividing the cake,” Bo insisted that these two aims can be mutually reinforcing. Most significantly, he argued that the CCP could not wait for too long before dealing with the problem of social polarization, because then vested interests would be too powerful and it would be no longer possible to make any change. Speaking to the central leadership’s overriding concern with social harmony, Bo maintained that it was not the result of “control”; rather, only common prosperity would serve as the soil that nurtures the fruits of social harmony.11