HK Magazine: They say that truth is stranger than fiction, and this remarkable story is testament to that. Did the Hollywood-like quality of Bo Xilai’s career trajectory help you as a journalist?
John Garnaut: This book is sort of a cheat, because it wrote itself. These characters were writing their own scripts. Bo—this is a guy who used to stare at pictures of himself, wondering what [future he] could see. [Police chief and whistleblower] Wang Lijun saw himself as a character in a blockbuster movie. [Bo’s wife] Gu Kailai was her own bag of unusual characteristics and perhaps mental illnesses. Bo Guagua, the son, lived a larger-than-life existence as well. It’s got to be the easiest political book to write of all time.
HK: Bo Xilai is obviously the center point of the story. Do you find it odd that given his family’s history during the Cultural Revolution of being tortured and exiled under Mao, that he would then become this Mao-like figure in Chinese politics? From an outsider’s perspective, where does that come together for you—that he would be so negatively influenced by that regime, and yet, come to mirror it?
JG: This is the hardest question for people in China to answer. Tough for anybody. There’s no doubt that a large proportion of what Mao was doing was about power, but you cannot extract the idealism that was there at the time, both in Mao and in people like Bo Xilai, who were running around being Red Guards. One way to think about the Communist Party is as a collection of families. The ultimate patriarch was Mao, and you cannot execute the patriarch of the whole extended Communist Party family and completely write him off because, as Bo’s brother says at one point, “where would we be?” They would not exist without Mao. So Mao did extraordinarily horrific things to the Bo family and so many others, but never came to represent evil in their lives.
HK: This corruption scandal has blown up not just Bo and his family’s legacy but also this Chongqing Model – the idea that, in theory, an expansion of state power while simultaneously coddling foreign investment was a way for China to move forward into the future. Now that the inner workings of that plan have been laid bare, is the Chongqing Model dead?
JG: [This scandal] is so important to China’s future direction, because up until the Bo Xilai explosion there was a heavily tilted playing field in the ideological contest that’s playing out today in China about which direction China will go. There is the weight of civil society, which naturally is leaning towards a more liberal, accountable, democratic ideal. And balancing on the other side is the old revolutionary ideals. And what the Chongqing model did, while it was still intact and it got a huge amount of support from the state, was make it much easier for the party state to defend its status quo. Once you take that away – once the leader of the movement, Bo Xilai gets decapitated – the Chongqing Model gets obliterated, and there is nothing holding up that side of the equation anymore.
[The result is that] the liberal agenda becomes much more powerful and more difficult to stop. We haven’t yet got a replacement for the Chongqing Model - we don’t know if we ever will -but it doesn’t mean socialist ideals are dead at all. [Still,] there is absolutely no prescription for what it might look like or how it might work, and that’s very dangerous for the Communist Party.
HK: After Mao’s death, Deng Xiopeng and his party symbolically distanced themselves from the legacy of the Cultural Revolution in order to create reform, and the public trial of Mao’s wife [Jiang Qing] was a big part of that. In terms of China moving forward, do you foresee the Communist Party using this trial as an excuse to separate themselves from the past to move towards reform?
JG: The Madam Jiang Qinq precedent is very important, because even though reform had been happening [in 1981] and was going to have to happen anyway, the trial was an opportunity for them to define the future against the past that they did not want to repeat. There is a huge amount of pressure and hope in civil society and amongst liberal members of the party—particularly liberal princelings—who want exactly that to happen. Bo Xilai is the opportunity to define a past that China is no longer going to go back to.
It’s really about the battle for law. Instead of rule by one strongman, as we saw in Chongqing or as we saw under Mao, China needs to have institutions that are strong enough to bind everybody, even the strongest political leaders. So that’s the battle that’s going on. I don’t think it’s been decided yet. It won’t be decided decisively at the time of Bo’s trial, but we’re already seeing that so much of the rhetoric from Xi Jinping and the propaganda system is about an attack on corruption, an attack against privilege, and sporadic calls for movement towards the rule of law. You see an effort now in trying to define Bo’s trial in those terms. I still think they’ve got a fight to go, and I don’t think it will be a clear-cut victory, but it will be enough for the optimists and the reformers in the system to hang onto and say, “okay, that’s the past, and now we’re moving forwards to something else.“
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