The plot thickens | 6 December 2012

At last! At the age of 80, I have read my first digital book. According to Penguin, these brief ‘Specials’ are

written to be read over a long commute or a short journey, in your lunch hour or between dinner and bedtime, a short escape into a fictional world or … as a primer in a particular field, or to provide a new angle on an old subject. You can read on the move or in a spare moment for less than the price of a cup of coffee.

So what do you get from this Special? John Garnaut, an Australian journalist who specialises in Chinese affairs, describes here, in steamy prose foreshadowed by the sub-title, an example of the self-cannibalism that has wracked most communist regimes, and certainly the Chinese Communist Party almost since its founding in 1921.

Bo (pronounced Baw) Xilai, until his very recent ‘smashing’, as these dramas are termed in China, was a ‘princeling’, one of those Chinese leaders, or potential leaders, who are the sons and daughters of previous famous leaders — or ‘immortals’, as eight of them, including Bo’s father, Bo Yibo, are called. They have vast guanxi (connections) with each other and with other leaders, and unless they fall — as Bo just has — they can soar all the way to the top, like Xi Jinping, China’s new party chairman and president-to-be.

It is a mark of the tumultuous nature of Chinese politics that until it was necessary to purge Bo, Xi Jinping (like Henry Kissinger) was an admirer. An egomaniacal provincial leader, with his base in Chongqing, one of China’s biggest cities, Bo had resurrected, according to Garnaut, a kind of ‘neo-Maoist’ iconography, making everything as Red as possible with Maoist songs and slogans. He seemed headed for the Politburo’s standing committee, the locus of ultimate power, perhaps even to challenge Xi.