薄熙来和毛的幽灵 北京真正害怕的是什么？

（本文为Justin Raimondo于7月9日在AntiWar.com发表的题为“Bo Xilai and Mao’s Ghost（薄熙来与毛的幽灵）”的文章。以下是该篇文章的译文，译文有删节。）

当（乌坎）骚乱震动广东、经济高速增长开始减速之时，薄熙来和其妻子谷开来的事件，与所有其它因素一起将中国带入了危机，这些因素包括：官员腐败、党内权贵和普通人之间的收入差距日趋扩大、党内派系林立，当然，还有毛泽东的幽灵。

薄熙来被解除了一切职务，并从公众视线中消失，现在已经过去了14周，北京当局仍然没有定论。薄熙来丑闻震动中国长达数周，并引发了政变传闻，不过，政变传闻很快被互联网审查机制打压了下去，党的宣传机器纷纷谴责薄熙来，然后，忽然之间，一片死寂。北京到底在发生什么？

薄熙来的命运很可能正成为党内高层激烈博弈的主题。显然，在高层他有一些支持者，那些人希望找到一个可以继承毛泽东传统的人，而薄熙来推动的唱红运动印证了毛思想。中国或许已经走了资本主义，但党内仍然有一些老前辈把年轻时的意识形态口号很当回事。在北京有“改革”思想的官员们，手上掌握着党的大权，但是各派四分五裂，可以想见，象薄熙来这样的政客可能会挑战世界历史上规模最大的腐败寡头统治。

关于薄熙来的金融帝国的故事在流传，该金融帝国由他恣意的妻子所统治。还有对薄熙来妻子试图将60亿美元转移到海外的模糊指控，当海伍德威胁要揭露她时，她毒杀了他。

另一方面，如果我们看看中国每天正在发生的实际腐败情况，中国自己的央行最近报告，腐败官员已经将1230亿美元转移到了海外，薄熙来及家人被指控的罪行与之相比简直是小巫见大巫。在中国真正的腐败丑闻是，如果不贿赂官员就做不成生意，无论是国内生意，还是和外国人的生意都是如此。中共的太子党是中国的特权阶层，他们的钱抬高了从曼哈顿到马里布（译者注：马里布是加州洛杉矶的海滨城市）的高端房地产市场。过去，中共党内的派系是围绕着意识形态展开的，有“左派”和“右派”，而现在派系因为争夺金融资产而产生，当党的官僚变卖“公共”财产给竞价最高的人，这些派系演变成了新的“资本主义”阶级。

当局现在，就在家门口，正面临着巨大的经济问题，其中一个最动荡的因素是数千万的农村流动人口，占全国人口的16%，他们为中国的出口型经济提供了廉价的劳动力。社会和地区紧张局势因为这个巨大的流动人口而加剧，他们生活在社会的最底层，最近广东的骚乱只不过是之前无数个事件的重演。自从1990年代出，大规模骚乱和其他类型的公共骚乱的数量成指数增加。1990年代初，只有8300起，而2012年，数量超过9万起。党的官员强征土地通常是诱因。

薄熙来满足了一些人日益增长的不满，那些人目睹了中共蜕变成了黑手党，并记得或自以为记得（毛时代）曾经更好的日子。他的打黑赢得了广泛支持。他把所有党中央最担心的事情都火上浇油---毛思想、民族主义、日益加剧的经济不平等。

薄熙来和其妻子的命运将显示谁会在这场斗争中获胜，而这件事件的时机，是至关重要的。

如果到18大召开时，薄熙来事件仍然悬而不决（看起来很可能，因为官方到目前仍然沉默），那么中国或许会再次面临有趣的情况。

（到现在）问题仍不能及时尘埃落定，意味着中共党内斗争正酣—而此时正值中国开始感受到世界经济衰退的影响之时，也是正值中共面临国外的新的威胁之时。美国已经重新将他们整个的“防御”策略重点转移到了亚太地区，而南中国海的骚动已达到了沸点。

美国的头号债权国，假设会成为将来超级大国的中国，是一只纸老虎。北京当局花在国内警察上的钱超过了军费，这应该让我们看到他们真的害怕什么。他们有担心的理由。

中国的独裁政权比叙利亚的复兴党政权更加脆弱，更不堪一击：一个震颤就会动摇整个系统，并威胁其非常脆弱的根基。自从文革，中国领导人一直成功地捂住了涌动的民粹主义强大暗流，但以后他们不见得那么容易做得到了。毛泽东的幽灵正在这个国家游荡，其不计后果又贪婪的统治者们过着豪华的生活，带领着没有人相信的“党产”党。如果他们不小心，这些“太子党们”可能会发现他们被罢黜的容易程度超过任何人的想象。薄熙来事件揭示了大厦出现的第一条裂缝，随着（外界）对政权压力的增加，更多的（裂缝）很可能会出现。

（译文有删节，原文）

Bo Xilai and Mao’s Ghost

China's coming crisis
by Justin Raimondo, July 09, 2012
Print This | Share This

As riots shake China’s Guangdong province, and the kudzu-like growth that has catapulted the country into modernity starts to sputter, the case of Bo Xilai, and his wife, Gu Kailai, combines virtually all of the elements that are pushing the country into a crisis: official corruption, the growing income disparity between the party elite and the rest of the country, a faction-ridden Communist party leadership — and, not least of all, Mao’s ghost.

Just to recap the details of the case: Bo, formerly Communist party boss of Chongqing and a rising star in China’s political firmament, is now being held in secret, along with his wife — the latter accused of murdering a British businessman, Neil Heywood, who apparently functioned as a “fixer” for the family’s many overseas investments. Asahi Shimbun recently reported her “confession.”

Bo was summarily ousted from all his posts, and disappeared from public life — and now, fourteen weeks later, there is a dead silence coming from Beijing. For weeks, this scandal rocked China, where rumors of a coup were quickly quashed by internet censors, and a stream of denunciations of Bo issued forth from the party’s propaganda apparatus — and then, suddenly, nearly complete silence. What’s going on in the Inscrutable East?

Bo’s fate is likely the subject of a fierce debate within the top party leadership. Apparently he has some support among senior leaders, who no doubt have a soft spot in their hearts for a modern Chinese leader who would invoke the heroic tradition of Maoism, exemplified by Bo’s push for the singing of “patriotic” “red songs” from the old days of the Revolution. China may have gone capitalist, but there are still some old-timers in the top echelons of the party who take the ideological slogans of their youth seriously. The “reform”-minded officials, centered in Beijing, have the central party organization well in hand, but they are riven by factionalism, and it is not inconceivable that a politician like Bo could arise to challenge what is one of the most corrupt oligarchies in world history in terms of sheer scale.

Stories are now circulating about Bo’s financial empire, lorded over by his willful wife — another Chinese “dragon lady,” a ridiculous Western stereotype the anti-Bo forces in China (and the West) are not above exploiting. Yet the details are unimpressive: a couple of London apartment buildings worth somewhere around $3 million. There are vaguer accusations of Madame Bo managing to somehow take $6 billion out of the country — and when Heywood threatened to expose her, she had him poisoned. That, at any rate, is the official story. That this scenario sounds like the plot of one of those movies that never make it into the theaters and instead go straight to DVD is not a reason to rule it out, but count me as skeptical, to put it mildly.

On the other hand, if we look at the actual corruption that is an everyday fact of life in China — China’s own central bank recently reported that corrupt officials have spirited $123 billion out of the country — the alleged sins of Bo and his family pall in comparison. The real corruption scandal in China is that one cannot do business without paying off officials, and this is true in the internal market as well as for foreigners. China’s “princelings,” the sons of Mao-era party leaders, are China’s One Percent, and their money is driving up prices for high-end real estate from Manhattan to Malibu. Whereas factionalism in the Communist party used to revolve around ideological matters, with “rightists” and “leftists” contending for public opinion, today the factions are centered around competing financial combines, as the party bureaucracy sells off “public” property to the highest bidder and emerges as the new “capitalist” class.

This, of course, was the whole point of Mao’s “cultural revolution,” which was initiated on the premise that a new capitalist class was incubating in China — in the ranks of the ruling Communist party. Prominent party leaders were hauled up before the masses, made to wear dunce caps, and denounced as “capitalist-roaders” — among them Deng Xiaoping, who made a political comeback after Mao’s death and did indeed put China on the capitalist road. His successors, however, are taking a detour down Crony Capitalist Lane, and this is creating the conditions for a potential day of reckoning for China’s elite.

The regime is facing huge economic problems on the home front, one of the most volatile being the millions of migrant workers, some 16 percent of the population, who provide cheap labor for China’s export-driven economy. Social and regional tensions are exacerbated by this vast mobile workforce, who exist at the very bottom of the socio-economic ladder: a recent riot in Guangdong province is but a rerun of numerous previous incidents. The number of large scale riots and other examples of public “disorder” has increased exponentially since the early nineties, when 8,300 such incidents were recorded. In 2012, the number exceeded 90,000. Land seizures by party officials are often the cause.

Bo appealed to some of these sources of rising discontent — to those who witnessed the degeneration of the Communist party into a kind of Mafia, and remembered — or, thought they remembered — a better day. His crackdown on China’s rampant gangster underworld — often linked to party officials — inspired widespread support. He stoked all those fires the central party leadership most fears — Maoism, nationalism, and growing economic inequality.

That is why he had to go: this nonsense about a murder plot is just for the tabloids. What’s telling is that the case shows no signs of going forward: for the first time since the Bad Old Days of Mao’s reign, there is a real ideological struggle going on behind the scenes. The fate of Bo and his wife is going to give us a good idea of who is winning the struggle, and the timing, in this case, is crucial.

The 18th national congress of the Chinese Communist Party is scheduled to begin in the autumn, and there the power will pass from one generation of party leaders — Hu Jintao — to the next: Xi Jinping. If the Bo Xilai matter is still up in the air by the time the congress convenes — which seems likely, given the official silence so far — China may be facing some interesting times once again.

Failure to resolve the issue in a timely manner means there is a real fight going on inside the CCP — at a time when China is beginning to feel the effects of the worldwide economic recession, and is facing new threats from abroad. The Americans are reorienting their entire “defense” strategy to focus on the Pacific region, and the brouhaha over the South China sea is reaching the boiling point.

In the field of foreign affairs, the Chinese have pursued a classic mercantilist policy, abjuring Great Power theatrics for the most part and playing a cautious role at international forums such as the UN. Yet if the Americans are determined to come after them, and intervene in territorial disputes between China and its neighbors, then the Beijing leadership will have no choice but to respond in like manner. Failure to do so means losing credibility at home with an already disgruntled and highly nationalistic populace.

China, America’s number one creditor, and supposedly the rising superpower of the future, is a paper tiger. Efforts by the neocons to make them into a replacement for the vanished Soviet threat seem doomed to failure when the Chinese spend a fraction of what we spend on “defense.” To put it all in perspective: the Chinese government spends more on its internal police than on their military, which should give us a good indication of what they’re really afraid of. And they have reason to fear.

China’s dictatorship is more brittle, and less resilient than the Syrian Ba’athist regime: one good tremor will shake up the whole system and threaten its very fragile foundations. Ever since the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese leadership has been successful at keeping a lid on powerful populist currents churning just below the surface of society, but their luck may be running out. Mao’s ghost haunts a country whose heedless and greedy rulers live in luxury and head up a “Communist” party no one believes in anymore: if they aren’t careful, the “princelings” may find themselves dethroned much more easily than anyone ever imagined. The Bo Xilai affair revealed the first cracks in the edifice: more are likely to appear as the pressures on the regime increase.