o******l 发帖数: 828 | 1 http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2012/05/04/china-politi
Bo scandal shows politics re-emerging in China's Communist Party
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By Fareed Zakaria, CNN
The rise and fall of Bo Xilai is part of a much larger and potentially
disruptive trend in China — the return of politics to the Chinese Communist
Party.
We don't think of the Chinese Communist Party as a political organization
these days. It is dominated by technocrats obsessed with economic and
engineering challenges.
These men — and they are almost all men — are comfortable talking about
detailed economic and technical data, laying out master plans for
development. But they are not politicians, adept at handling large crowds or
palace intrigue.
When the Chinese Communists took power in 1949, the party was dominated by
charismatic revolutionaries and military leaders. Court politics, intrigue,
ideological posturing, and mass politics were pervasive in the new system,
and the leader, Mao Zedong, was the master politician. Mao presided over a
period of "hyperpolitics" — political purges, the Great Leap Forward, the
Cultural Revolution — all designed to divide and destroy his opponents and
consolidate his power.
It was against this backdrop that the next great leader of China, Deng
Xiaoping, took power in the late 1970s.
Deng was determined to end the high drama of Chinese political life and
focus on economic development. He turned the party into a professional
organization that was run by technocrats.
By 1985, the party's top leadership, the Central Committee, was dominated by
younger, college-educated graduates, and the Politburo's Standing Committee
, the country's ruling elite, were all engineers.
That tradition of technocracy has persisted.
The Communist Party of China, a party whose history is tied up with peasants
, workers and soldiers, is now the most elite party in the world. Its system
of promotion favors engineers, economists and management experts over
anyone with grass-roots political skills. For two decades, China has been
run like a company, not a country.
But China is, in fact, a country — a vast, complex one with a long history
of politics. And eventually, politics had to re-emerge.
China has reached a level of growth and development where the big questions
it faces are not technical and engineering ones, but deep political and
philosophical ones.
Bo Xilai represented this emerging reality in two ways.
In a system of colorless men, he was charismatic, conniving and political.
He was comfortable in front of crowds, eager to push himself forward, and he
rubbed against the grain of consensus decision-making.
But he also represented the "new left," an ideological movement that
emphasized social and cultural solidarity, the power of the state and other
populist issues.
Whether he truly believed in these issues is irrelevant. Like all good
political entrepreneurs, he saw a market for these ideas and filled it.
Bo's ouster is the most significant purge in the higher ranks of the party
since Tiananmen Square. And the party will hope that, as it did after those
events, it can return to its technocratic path.
But China has changed too much.
And politics in China could be xenophobic, nationalist, populist and almost
certainly messy and unpredictable — like politics is everywhere.
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