Tag: Chongqing

Jamil Anderlini: Jon Huntsman, a former Republican presidential hopeful and US ambassador to China who met Mr Bo [Xilai, Communist Party chief of Chongqing] a number of times, said his demise revealed serious rifts among the top leadership of the country.

“The splits in the standing committee [over reform] are as pronounced now as they were during the [1989] Tiananmen Square period,” Mr Huntsman said. “Politics in China is a rough and tumble business. This is an open and public evidence of this and what happens behind the velvet curtain that the world never sees.”

via Beijing On Edge Amid Coup Rumors – Asia Business News – CNBC.

Patrick Chovanec: Top Party leaders, regardless of political philosophy, had come to dislike Bo [Xilai], not as a person per se — by all accounts, Bo is an extraordinarily charming man — but as a political persona, at least in his Chongqing incarnation, for three reasons:

First, they were offended by his courting of the media and his vigorous self-promotion, which showed a lack of appropriate deference and humility to established power channels and ways of resolving competition. Second, they felt threatened, because few of them were equipped to compete on this basis, if that’s what it took. Third, they were alarmed by Bo’s tactic of “mobilizing the masses” in ways that explicitly invoked the Cultural Revolution, which called up deep-seated fears that populist fervor could be used as a weapon against rival leaders within the Party — as indeed happened during the Cultural Revolution, to horrific results.

via Bo’s Ides of March « Patrick Chovanec.