The mysterious Orient, hidden behind a façade of inscrutability, an enigma wrapped in a veil of secrecy: that’s how the internal politics of China are “reported” in the West – and that’s just the way the present Chinese leadership likes it. They quite naturally don’t want their dirty linen exposed to public view, and the Western media is surprisingly accommodating about this, as exemplified in Western reporting on the fall of Bo Xilai, a member of the Politburo and up until recently party chieftain of the Chongqing region – the fastest growing metropolis in China.
The West portrays Bo as a “neo-Maoist,” a leading figure in China’s “new left” faction which cavils at the burgeoning inequalities resulting from the country’s rapid economic rise, but this is a simplistic and essentially inaccurate portrayal of what is a decidedly more complicated context.
“To get rich is glorious!” proclaimed China’s maximum leader Deng Xiaoping, the reform-minded successor to Mao, who was himself victimized by the excesses of the radical egalitarian “Cultural Revolution.” Deng led the nation out of the economic sinkhole created by radical Maoist ideology run amok, and onto the “Chinese road to socialism,” which the party’s theoreticians define as “market socialism,” i.e. politically controlled “markets” that function under the watchful (and avaricious) eye of party officials.
This system of highly-regulated “state capitalism” has given rise to a new class of “princelings,” children of high-ranking party cadre who take advantage of their family connections to amass huge fortunes and lord it over the commoners. The result: huge disparities in wealth, and increased popular unrest. You don’t read about it in the Western media, or at least not very often, but China has been hit by a wave of strikes in major manufacturing centers: as the Chinese economy dips, in tandem with the worldwide economic downturn, workers in factory towns are facing pay cuts and mass firings. They are responding with increasingly militant labor actions: while labor unions not controlled by the party are forbidden, they are organizing using the Internet and cell phones, which are ubiquitous in China.
