Bye Bye, Bo

One day Prime Minister Wen Jiabao makes a strong call for political reform. The next day Bo Xilai, the charismatic head of the megalopolis of Chongqing, is axed. A rare public firing by the Chinese Communist Party, Bo’s dismissal on Thursday has commentators wondering what’s in store for China’s leadership transition later this year.

What exactly caused Bo’s downfall? “Very few have any real idea of what is going on behind the closed doors” of the C.C.P. leadership, notes Adrian Hamilton in The Independent.

Maybe it had to do with that high-stakes drama surrounding his former police chief’s apparent attempt to defect to the United States. That episode may have been “ simply too awkward for a leadership which operates in a highly buttoned-up style,” notes Jonathan Fenby in The Telegraph.

Maybe it was because he was popular and a self-promoter, and “distrust and resentment” have brought him “so many enemies,” writes Patrick Chovanec, a professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, on his blog.

Or maybe it was because “Bo had been nurturing the so-called ‘red revival,’ a movement that was cheerleading more equitable wealth distribution,” argues J. Brooks Spector in South Africa’s Daily Maverick.

Many of Bo’s fellow party leaders might have realized that only a powerfully charismatic figure like him would have “any chance of launching something like a Cultural Revolution, which was about utilizing and mobilizing the general public to seize power from the Communist Party,” writes Steve Tsang in the Guardian.

Certainly, Wen clearly criticized Bo for “encouraging nostalgia about the days of Chairman Mao,” notes an editorial in the Irish Times. This is the reason that Bo’s sacking looks to some like a signal to reformers. The leaders could not tolerate what seemed like “an omen of a dangerous trend,” as Alan Philps puts it in The National.

If nothing else, according to David Pilling in the Financial Times, the Bo drama does serve as “a useful reminder that China’s political system is not the well-oiled machine it is sometimes made out to be.”

Or, as the South China Morning Post says in an editorial: now “a struggle between reformists and leftists over China’s future direction, hitherto waged behind closed doors, has burst into the open.”