The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) war on corruption has taken a bizarre turn with the show trial, reminiscent of Stalinist and Maoist era purges, of former political icon Bo Xilai on charges of embezzlement and abuse of power.

Far from upholding equality before law or demonstrating genuine commitment to rooting out the entrenched culture of graft,
Mr Bo’s prosecution is political vendetta marked by selective targeting.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has vowed a crackdown on both “tigers” (powerful CCP leaders) and “flies” (low-ranking bureaucrats) for “unhealthy tendencies and corruption problems.” The unprecedented public coverage permitted at Mr Bo’s trial through the microblogging service Weibo, where citizens could post comments on the court drama, could be interpreted as the CCP bigwigs’ desire to set an example of how ignominious the end could be for highfliers who succumb to vices.
But sarcastic reactions from lay Chinese watchers of the Bo trial prove Abraham Lincoln’s adage that one cannot fool all the people all the time. Average Chinese netizens sense correctly that Mr Bo is not uniquely corrupt, and that the $3.3 million he is alleged to have amassed through bribery while being the mayor of Dalian is minuscule in the overall context of gargantuan corruption within the CCP’s ranks.
An ironic social media comment by a Chinese Web user cited in the New York Times captures the pathos of the worst political scandal since the trials of the Maoist “Gang of Four” in 1980: “Old Bo took just over 20 million yuan. A dinky little village party secretary could get more than him. It’s just a case of winner takes all, the fate that comes from political defeat.”
Why is Mr Bo being pilloried as a greedy politician who misused authority to acquire a villa in France and fund a jet-setting life for his family members when there are bigger “tigers” than him in the CCP who have accumulated unbelievable wealth through foul means?
The former Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao had harnessed the power of his office to enable his family members to be enriched by at least $2.7 billion. But unlike Mr Bo, who has been humiliated and incarcerated for over one year, Mr Wen walked into the sunset as a “popular” politician who had done yeoman service to China.
In China’s closed but juicy political grapevine circuits, graft in billions of dollars is mentioned casually as take-home sums for CCP bosses. A few, like the former railway minister Liu Zhijun, do get caught and punished after being exposed by glaring failures of big ticket infrastructure or industrial projects.
But Chinese people’s cynicism that the “red nobility” of the CCP are stinking rich and get away with vast financial crimes which hurt ordinary citizens is well-founded. The dreaded death sentences that China’s propaganda masters tout for corrupt officials are usually reserved for smaller fish or larger ones that fall out of favour or threaten the overall policy direction decided by the politicians at the pinnacle in Beijing.
Mr Bo was singled out for a public washing of his dirty linen because of a political power struggle in which he led the “New Left” faction of the CCP against the dominant Liberal faction. The shenanigans of Mr Bo and his wife, Gu Kailai — who received a suspended death sentence last year for murdering a British citizen— were not particularly gross or appalling in the criminalised, cloak-and-dagger world of the CCP. The reason they were guillotined was due to Mr Bo’s unorthodox politics which presented an alternative model to that being pursued by the collegial CCP leadership.
The chequered record of China’s anti-corruption agenda shows that political rivalries play a central role in determining who gets axed and who survives.
In 2006, the then CCP establishment under Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao went after Chen Liangyu, who was the party chief for Shanghai and a member of the elite Politburo, on charges of bribery and abuse of office.
Mr Chen’s sins were uncovered as a payback for belonging to a clique loyal to Mr Hu’s predecessor, Jiang Zemin. For posing hurdles to Mr Hu’s policy line in a major metropolitan centre of China, Mr Chen was handed an 18-year-long prison sentence. His fall was part of a political purge rather than impartial justice against corruption.
Mr Bo is even more of a thorn to the current CCP big guns than Chen Liangyu used to be. When the bulk of the CCP senior leaders kept low profiles and hewed to the collective decision-making processes which have guided the party since the demise of Deng Xiaoping in 1997, Mr Bo built up a charismatic halo around his personality cult. When the CCP leadership preferred more state capitalism, Mr Bo fashioned himself as a flamboyant reviver of Maoist campaigns against rampant economic inequalities. When the CCP gospel was to behave in old-fashioned Ostrich style, Mr Bo was a celebrity politician who cultivated the news media and fancied himself as the next Mao Zedong.
Deviation from the overall zeitgeist of the party could be tolerated if the culprit was a harmless “tiger”. But Mr Bo is the son of one of the “Eight Immortals” in the CCP’s history. A “princeling” who was the commerce minister of the country and party chief of Chongqing, he was once tipped to enter the sanctum sanctorum of the CCP’s Standing Committee and eventually become President of the nation. The enemies he made along his rising career trajectory and his brash methods of attacking atrophy in the political and economic systems were the real causes of his toppling. Mr Bo showed a mirror on where China was going wrong and he had to be stopped in his tracks.
Too many “flies” and the occasional off-kilter “tigers” are being netted in China’s renewed war on corruption, but the kingpins raking in the moolah and fuelling discontent in the population are permitted to operate above the law. Little wonder that China’s ranking in the Transparency International Corruption Perception Index keeps hovering around an unenviable 80th position (out of 170-odd countries) for the last several years.
The Bo Xilai affair has revealed fundamental contradictions and self-serving motives behind China’s drive for honesty. The party knows in its heart of hearts that the people know this truth.

The writer is dean of the Jindal School of International Affairs