China's New Red Guards by Jude Blanchette

Author:Jude Blanchette
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

4

Bombard the Headquarters

And beneath the surface of an ever more sophisticated society what dark passions and inflammable credulities do we find, sometimes accidentally released, sometimes deliberately mobilized!

—Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, 1967

Government press conferences in China aren’t usually dramatic affairs. But Premier Wen Jiabao’s final appearance before stepping down from office was different.

During a three-hour Q&A session on March 14, 2012, marking the conclusion of the annual National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, together known as the “two meetings,” a Singaporean journalist asked Wen about political reform in China.

His response, although clearly prepared, was nonetheless remarkable for its directness: without future reforms “such historical tragedy as the Cultural Revolution might happen again.”1

Since Ma Bin’s call for a “second Cultural Revolution” in 2006 and the normalization Mao-era “class struggle” discourse by neo-Maoist organizations such as Utopia and Maoflag, liberal-leaning intellectuals had stepped up their warnings of a populist threat to China’s Reform-era gains and the country’s political and economic stability. While party propaganda organs regularly intervened to contain both sides of the debate, statements from China’s top leaders remained confined to platitudes about the importance of reform to China’s modernization and the need for “harmonious development.” They had rarely, if ever, weighed directly into political controversy or aired the party’s dirty laundry in public.

Until now.

Within minutes of Wen’s remarks, traffic to Utopia’s website exploded.2 The next morning, the website was blocked, as were nearly one dozen other neo-Maoist websites. Those who could circumvent China’s “Great Firewall” to access the sites were greeted with a message of defiance, and a warning for Wen Jiabao and the party’s leadership in Beijing: “Fake Communists Have Seized Power in New China.”3

One month before the National People’s Congress, Wang Lijun, the police chief of the southwest metropolis of Chongqing, reportedly disguised himself as a woman and drove to the US Consulate in nearby Chengdu. He brought with him rumors of intrigue at the highest reaches of the party—including infidelities, corruption, and even murder—and he wanted the Americans to protect him. After thirty-six hours of questioning, US diplomats calculated that sheltering Wang wasn’t worth angering Beijing, and he was unceremoniously turned over to security officials from Beijing. (The State Department claimed he’d “left of his own volition.”) A party investigation was quickly launched, and state media reported that Wang would undergo “vacation-style medical treatment” for mental stress.

For Wang’s boss, Chongqing party secretary Bo Xilai, a precipitous fall from power was imminent, and for a time, it seemed as though he would take the entire neo-Maoist movement down with him.

The son of the legendary party “immortal” Bo Yibo, Bo Xilai was raised as a member of China’s red aristocracy. After the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, however, elite bloodlines could be a curse as well as a blessing. In 1966, Kang Sheng, the head of internal security and intelligence, presented Mao Zedong with an old newspaper clipping that contained an anti-party comment purportedly made by the elder Bo in order to secure his release from a KMT prison in 1936.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.