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发帖数: 56 | 1 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/20/world/asia/bo-xilai-accused-o
BEIJING — Communist Party leaders sacked Bo Xilai, the powerful party chief
of metropolitan Chongqing, after being told that he had schemed to remove
his police chief and impede a corruption investigation involving his family,
according to a preliminary report on Mr. Bo’s actions circulated among
government officials.
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A version of the report, posted on a Chinese Web site and verified
independently, provides a rare glimpse of the government’s internal efforts
to manage one of its biggest political earthquakes in years. Some officials
are worried that the purge of Mr. Bo could upset plans for a transfer of
power to a new generation of party leaders this fall.
The report also states for the first time that the Chongqing police chief
who set off that earthquake — Mr. Bo’s trusted aide, Wang Lijun — had
sought political asylum when he fled to a United States consulate to escape
Mr. Bo’s wrath.
The Communist Party Central Committee circulated the findings to ranking
party and government officials on Friday, one day after the announcement of
Mr. Bo’s dismissal. Its contents were confirmed by a researcher at a
ministry-level institute and by a Chongqing official briefed by colleagues
who were present when the report was read at a government meeting.
Combined with other actions in recent days, the government’s decision to
begin making its case against Mr. Bo suggests a campaign to discredit him.
Mr. Bo, a broadly popular but highly controversial politician whose father
was one of China’s revolutionary-era leaders, was openly seeking a spot in
China’s top leadership when power changes hands late this year.
It also raises the prospect that Mr. Bo could face criminal charges, a
rarity for an official of his rank. The party secretaries of Beijing and
Shanghai, major metropolises like Chongqing, were dismissed in 1995 and 2006
, respectively, and later were imprisoned for corruption. Like Mr. Bo, both
were also members of the Politburo, the 25-member body that oversees
Communist Party affairs.
Both of those firings, like Mr. Bo’s, were principally viewed as the
fallout from power struggles within the leadership. But a number of
political analysts say they regard Mr. Bo’s dismissal as potentially more
serious because it involves more than a struggle for control.
“It’s not about political lines,” said Zheng Yongnian, who directs the
East Asia Institute at the National University of Singapore. “It’s about
whether to reform or not reform.”
The decision to oust Mr. Bo in the midst of a once-in-a-decade change of
rulers underscores the gravity with which leaders view both his political
influence and the controversy around him.
After decades in which leaders were handpicked by predecessors, this year’s
leadership change is the first in China’s Communist history that is
following rules — albeit rules known mostly only by China’s leaders.
Ensuring a stable transition has become a party obsession.
“If he is dislodged and this purge sticks, then the transition can move
forward smoothly,” Andrew J. Nathan, an expert on China’s leadership at
Columbia University, said of Mr. Bo. Yet “they have paid a huge price by
firing him.”
“They have had to do exactly the thing that they hate him for doing,” he
added, “which is to shred the facade of party unity. And they would have
preferred not to.”
Mr. Bo, 62, has built a national reputation on his charisma — a sharp
contrast to the rest of China’s interchangeably bland leadership — and on
his stewardship of Chongqing, a fast-growing municipality with a population
of 28 million, where he marshaled the government to purge officials and
private entrepreneurs accused of organized crime, redistribute wealth and
start a big drive to urbanize and house rural migrants.
His statist policies and promotion of a retro-Maoist culture in which
citizens sang patriotic songs and dressed in red made him a darling of China
’s political left and a serious contender for a seat on the Politburo’s
Standing Committee, whose nine members enjoy uncontested authority over
government policy.
But that same personality and political bent were said to nettle President
Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, who appeared to resent his mixing of state
power over the economy and society with the promotion of his personal and
political interests. Some in the elite also frowned on Mr. Bo’s crowd-
courting, almost Western style of politicking.
Mr. Bo’s rise came to an abrupt end on Feb. 6, after his longtime aide and
Chongqing’s vice mayor, Wang Lijun, fled the city and sought refuge
overnight at the United States Consulate in Chengdu, in Sichuan Province. Mr
. Wang left the consulate after about a day and was taken by Chinese
security officials to Beijing for interrogation.
The version of the party’s four-point report circulated on Friday purports
to explain why Mr. Wang fled to the consulate and how the party contained
the damage. In essence, it states that Mr. Wang left Chongqing because he
feared for his safety after telling Mr. Bo that his family was under
criminal investigation.
The party investigation’s “preliminary findings” state that Mr. Wang,
whose portfolio included Chongqing’s security apparatus, told Mr. Bo on Jan
. 28 about “important cases related to the Bo family.” Mr. Wang told him
that some investigators on the cases had felt pressured and sought to resign.
“Comrade Bo Xilai was very dissatisfied with this,” the leaked transcript
states. Within days, he arranged for Mr. Wang to be removed as police chief
and demoted to a lesser role supervising education and science, without
seeking the approval of the Ministry of Public Security, the document adds,
“as rules dictated.”
The report does not address why Mr. Wang, a subordinate of Mr. Bo’s, would
have sought to pursue his own corruption investigation against his boss.
Corruption inquiries against a leader of the rank of Mr. Bo would normally
be conducted by investigators under the direct authority of the party elite
in Beijing, not by a provincial official.
According to the report, after the Chongqing party authorities announced the
move to the local police on Feb. 2, investigations were initiated of Mr.
Wang’s aides and the investigators of the cases against the Bo family,
under pressure from Mr. Bo’s relatives and people who worked by Mr. Bo’s
side.
“Wang Lijun felt that his own personal safety was under threat. He then
decided to leave.”
The document states that Mr. Wang filed a formal request for political
asylum with American consular officials after discussing “matters related
to cooperation and exchange,” but does not elaborate.
Rumors have been rife — and unverified — that Mr. Wang presented American
officials with evidence of official corruption, and that he dispatched more
evidence outside China for release in the event that someone should seek to
harm him.
Both those rumors and the party’s findings underscore the unusual degree to
which reports of corruption dog the Chinese elite, and color citizens’
views of their leaders. Few complaints about the government are as widely
shared, and few seem as resistant to solution as the issue of graft.
In Mr. Bo’s case, however, accusations of corruption may be part of a
broader effort by Mr. Bo’s rivals in the party leadership to sully his
reputation as a populist Robin Hood who wielded his power to better the lot
of Chongqing’s poor multitudes.
On Friday, Mr. Hu’s ally and heir apparent, Vice President Xi Jinping,
published an essay in a Communist Party journal calling for more discipline
in the party’s ranks and criticizing those who “play to the crowd” or use
their positions to gain fame or wealth.
Like Mr. Wen’s remarks at a news conference last week warning against
radical policies that could trigger another Cultural Revolution, Mr. Xi’s
article was largely interpreted as a swipe at Mr. Bo’s flamboyant rule.
Even so, Mr. Bo’s popularity and clout makes disposing of his case an “
extremely dangerous” matter for party leaders, said Cheng Li, a scholar of
the Chinese leadership at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
“If the charge is too lenient, some senior leaders and all liberal
intellectuals will not agree,” he said. “If they only charge him with
corruption, that will make him a hero among many people because the general
perception is that corruption is a widespread phenomenon — so why are you
singling him out?” | t*******d
发帖数: 1845 | | a*********g
发帖数: 8087 | 3 纽约时报也就这么回事儿
话说回来现在纽约时报越来越颓了
跟华尔街差距越来越大了 |
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