A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel (37 page)

For political analysts, Wen’s liberal rhetoric resembled Bo’s “Singing Red and Smashing Black” campaign. Both men were, in essence, populists trying to win the hearts of the disgruntled public, and neither believed in what he preached. Premier Wen was said to be a fan of Bo Xilai when the latter was minister of commerce in 2004. They went on several trade missions together and Wen even recommended Bo for the vice premier’s position. However, their relationship grew strained after Bo moved to Chongqing. An official with the Chongqing Municipal Party Committee said Bo started to move closer to other princelings and distanced himself from Wen. On several occasions, he publicly berated Wen. At a local party conference, Bo praised
his partner, the mayor of Chongqing, calling him “more competent” than the premier of China. Bo’s remarks put the mayor and many attendees in an awkward position.

In 2011, when Bo’s Chongqing model grabbed national attention as a seemingly effective way to combat rampant corruption and achieve common prosperity, Wen became an outspoken critic. He refused to offer his endorsement. As other senior Chinese leaders traveled to Chongqing and heaped lavish praise on Bo’s Chongqing model, Wen backed Bo’s political rival, the party chief of Guangdong province, who advocated greater market reform and political liberalization. Wen made it clear in published articles that he was a disciple of reformists such as Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, whereas Bo Xilai unabashedly positioned himself as a descendant of veteran Communist leaders such as Mao and his own father.

So there was a great deal of significance in the fact that in March 2012, it was Wen who became the first senior leader to criticize Bo harshly at a press conference during the National People’s Congress, accusing Bo of trying to restore the practices of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, under which millions of people were persecuted to death. In April, when the Politburo Standing Committee was divided over whether to slap Bo with an internal reprimand or undertake a full-blown legal investigation, Wen, along with former president Jiang Zemin, was reportedly adamant that Bo be tried as a criminal and receive severe punishment.

Wen’s tough stance toward Bo was not all ideologically driven, said a retired official in Beijing. Having heard about Bo’s harsh tactics against his political foes and private businesspeople in Chongqing, “Wen was determined to destroy Bo to protect himself and the interests of his family before his term expires in 2013.” At the same time, Bo felt that Wen attempted to sabotage his chance to join the Politburo Standing Committee and reportedly vowed to imprison Wen’s relatives in the name of corruption after he seized power.

In September 2012, after Bo Xilai was expelled from the party and was facing a criminal trial, many hailed the seventy-two-year-old Premier Wen as the clear winner. However, the
New York Times
report on the Wen family’s wealth all but wiped out Wen’s political gains from
Bo’s downfall. He found himself a target of public anger and ridicule. I wrote in an editorial in
Mingjing News
:

       
If proven to be true, the Wen Jiabao corruption is far more damaging to the Communist Party than the scandal surrounding Bo Xilai, which only involved a regional leader and bribe-taking of 20 million yuan. As the second-highest leader, who has ostensibly positioned himself as a man of the people, the Wen scandal will undermine the credibility of the party and directly challenge the party’s legitimacy.

Feng Shengping, a US-based analyst, saw the Wen scandal from a different angle. To Feng, Bo Xilai represented the far Left and Wen the Right. Both of their policies were seen as a threat to the interests of the party establishment. Bo’s weakness was his police chief, who used the US Consulate to launch his attack, and Wen Jiabao’s was having greedy relatives. Two strategies were at work: Bo’s removal would clear an obstacle to a smooth leadership transition at the Party Congress; Wen’s downfall would appease the conservatives who worried about losing the party’s monopoly.

Chen Xiaoping, the US-based scholar, was more acerbic. “Wen chose to punish Bo for his political ambitions and policies with the crimes of corruption and immoral lifestyle, all of which would please the public, which hated corrupt officials. Wen did not realize that the same weapon that gunned down Bo Xilai was aimed at him. Now, Wen’s opponents intend to attack his legacy with similar excuses of corruption. The Wen story added a new twist to the party’s intense power struggle before the Congress.”

Two hours after the Wen story appeared, a person who identified himself as a friend of the Wen family contacted me from Beijing. He asked if I could interview a wealthy businesswoman, Duan Weihong, who was quoted in the
Times
story. She wanted to tell
Mingjing News
that the majority of the assets listed in the
Times
article were erroneously attributed to Wen family members. I assigned a reporter to conduct the interview.

Then I received another e-mail, from another source close to the Wen family. This second source disclosed that the Wen family had
hired lawyers who would issue a statement soon. I was asked to post it on
Mingjing News
. According to this source, Premier Wen emphasized four key points after reading the
Times
article.

First, his family has never engaged in any illegal commercial activities. Second, the US $2.7 billion mentioned in the
Times
article did not exist. Third, all of his family members would disclose their financial dealings and cooperate with any audit or investigation by the relevant government agencies and judicial organs. Last, all of Wen’s family members, friends, and colleagues would stand accountable for their own businesses and actions.

I soon received a statement from Junhe Law Office and Grandall Law Firm, both of which are based in Beijing. The statement echoed similar arguments I had heard from Wen’s friend, except the lawyers added the threat of legal action against the
Times
. All of this was posted on
Mingjing News
and later widely reported by the international media. In the period of two days, I received pictures and documents from Wen family members and business associates in vigorous defense of Premier Wen. Legal experts I consulted said the documents were too vague and the arguments too weak to serve as evidence of innocence or guilt.

What was unusual, and perhaps more significant than the scandal itself, was the approach taken to defend Wen. I was accustomed as an editor that each time a negative story about a senior leader had been published, government censors would harass reporters and attempt to block the article through intervention on the Internet, and the Chinese Foreign Ministry would issue a terse statement, accusing the media of “harboring ulterior motives and demonizing Chinese leadership.” There was never any response from individuals named in the article. In June 2012, when Bloomberg ran a story about president-elect Xi Jinping’s family, Xi’s friends took an unusual step by sending me meticulously researched facts to dispute the Bloomberg report, which was not broadcast inside China. In Wen’s case, he effectively promised to face the public and defend himself after the Party Congress. The active interaction with the media was entirely unexpected and spoke volumes about the potential for more media freedom to participate on the political stage.

In addition, Premier Wen’s relatives conveyed a message through
Mingjing News
that Wen would respond in writing to the
New York Times
allegations. “No matter what happens, my family and I are ready to take full responsibility, even if it means sacrificing my career and life,” Wen said.

Wen’s decision elicited positive responses online. “If he and his family have violated regulations, he should willingly face the consequences,” posted one resident of Sichuan. “Even if he ends up in jail, he would go down in history as a respected politician, whose honesty and courage would help bring about true political reforms.”

In my editorials on
Mingjing News
, I reminded Wen’s friends and his supporters of the opportunity that the
Times
article had presented for China:

       
For years, Premier Wen has pushed for such financial disclosure regulations. If he is confident that he has nothing to hide, I would recommend that he defend his name by releasing his family financial records to the public, just as politicians do in democratic countries. By divulging such information, he will set a new standard in Chinese politics and an unprecedented example for other senior leaders. Transparency is an effective way to stem corruption and rescue the party from being toppled.

My article also urged senior leaders not to obstruct Wen’s efforts. I predicted that some senior leaders inside the party would prohibit Wen from going public about his defense, thereby setting a dangerous precedent, and some of his own family members might silence him before he damaged their economic interests:

       
A critical issue here is that if Premier Wen bows to the system, ignores public outcry and sticks to his denials until his retirement, he and other leaders will prove to the world that the party is incurably corrupt and rotten to the core. They would all end up tragically like the other corrupt dictators in the world.

           
The Chinese leadership takes pride that their country has emerged as an economic and political superpower. However, being
a superpower also means that China has to subject itself to scrutiny by the Western media because every political and economic decision made by China has global consequences.

The
New York Times
story about Wen’s family has led to broader scrutiny of the records of other senior leaders—Bloomberg released an article about the billionaire offspring of revolutionary veterans in December 2012—and spawned a new round of attacks among political opponents who compete to expose each other’s dirt to the overseas media. In a refreshing way, the foreign media, including the Chinese-language media overseas, now plays the civic role of supervision that should belong to the Chinese domestic media. The party will either improve with increased media scrutiny or be toppled by a better-informed public.

In an interview with Fareed Zakaria on CNN’s Global Public Square television program aired in October 2010, Wen made the following statement: “I will like to tell you the following two sentences to reinforce my view. I will not fall in spite of the strong wind and harsh rain, and I will not yield until the last day of my life.”

At the time of this writing, we have not seen any response from Premier Wen. He has either encountered opposition from the new leaders, as I predicted in my editorial, or he has simply realized that he can never clarify the issues raised by the
New York Times
about his family finances because what has been reported is largely accurate.

D
ESPITE THE PARTY’S repeated claims that the Bo Xilai scandal would be handled as a legal case, not a political one, the public still sees the party chieftains, such as President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, as the de facto judges, rather than those in the courtroom.

The public perception is based on the fact that in China, the party controls police, prosecutors, and judges, and decides the outcomes of politically sensitive trials in advance.

Therefore, President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao became the proxies of Bo’s adversaries within the party who orchestrated the political drama that had unfolded since February 2012. In many overseas media reports, the case was positioned as Bo versus Hu and Wen. In July, an anti-Bo activist even hailed the removal of Bo Xilai as one of the key accomplishments during President Hu’s otherwise uneventful tenure.

As I have described in the previous chapter, among these two proxies, Premier Wen probably deserved the title of Bo’s true public enemy. On the other hand is President Hu, who many analysts say was a reluctant participant. If one examines Hu’s policies during his rule, one can see clearly that Hu felt a deep kinship with Bo—they both strove to be true disciples of Mao.

ON DECEMBER 5, 2002, a heavy snow fell on the vast expanse of northern China, turning the mountainous regions outside the capital of Beijing into an icy wonderland, resembling what Mao Zedong had described in one of his poems the country had to memorize during the Cultural Revolution: “The mountains dance like silver snakes and the highlands charge like wax-hued elephants.” On that cold, snow-flurried day, many people were advised to stay indoors because of treacherous road conditions. However, the inclement weather did not deter sixty-year-old Hu Jintao, the new party general secretary, from traveling. He went to Xibaipo, one of the Communist Party’s “holy sites”—the temporary headquarters for Mao Zedong and his troops in 1948, before they won the civil war in 1949 and took over China.

With a head of jet-black hair—a dye job, as commonplace among senior Chinese leaders as the Mao suit once was—and a face purposefully pious, the new party chief came flanked by several of his cabinet members. It was his first public appearance since he was officially installed as the party’s general secretary. Though he had been a “crown prince” for ten years, Hu was an enigmatic figure. Most people had no idea who he was, or where he stood on issues facing the party and the country. Using China’s former Communist neighbor as a reference,
people wanted to know if he was going to be China’s Gorbachev, or a Putin.

He chose Xibaipo to set the tone for his upcoming rule because, on the eve of the Communist victory in 1948, Mao had formulated many of the ruling strategies for the party in Xibaipo and commanded the three crucial battles against the Nationalist forces. Xibaipo, which fell into obscurity and disrepair for many years, was restored in the early 2000s and has become a popular tourist destination. Being close to the capital, it is frequently visited by group tours organized by local party branches. People who grew up under the rule of Mao Zedong—essentially anyone under sixty years old—feel a nostalgic connection there. Exhibits and pictures in Xibaipo specifically feature the plain living conditions of the hardworking senior Communist Party leaders in the early days of the revolution. Visitors are regaled with legendary tales of how senior leaders like Marshal Zhu De helped locals plow the land and harvest crops, and how he volunteered to be a coffin-bearer at the funeral of his barber. The grindstone that Mao used while working in the mill house, the kerosene lamp that Premier Zhou Enlai carried when he rescued a villager from an accident on a rainy night, and the wooden wheel that senior leader Dong Biwu used to spin yarn are on prominent display. Their simple lifestyles are a stark contrast to those of the current leadership.