Murder, Lies, Abuse Of Power And Other Crimes Of The Chinese Century

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Photo-Illustration of Bo Xilai by Miles Donovan for TIME

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The trajectory of China at the dawn of the 21st century was supposed to be simple. An ancient civilization was reclaiming its rightful place on the international stage, reveling in its new status as the second largest economy in the world. This fall the country will begin a once-a-decade leadership transition that will likely see President Hu Jintao replaced by Vice President Xi Jinping, 58, a member of the Communist Party aristocracy whose father was a Red Army guerrilla turned proponent of the economic reforms that have transformed China. The leadership handover to a so-called princeling was to be solemn, momentous and, above all, a display of stability in a nation with a history of bloody transfers of power. The party had reinvented itself as an economic juggernaut that shielded China from the global financial crisis. Surely it could manage an orchestrated handover of power?

But the cases of Chen and Bo have pulled China off script. A leadership that prefers to shroud its decisionmaking in secrecy has been forced to deal with unexpected crises that speak to the manifold issues facing the incoming crop of communist rulers--massive abuse of power and corruption within party ranks, a stunning lack of rule of law in a nation obsessed with bureaucracy, and an increasingly restive, wired populace no longer content to accept the say-so of government propagandists. As the party struggles with damage control, the world has gotten a peek at the vicious infighting that belies the leadership's preferred image of itself as a unified force. Says Dali Yang, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago: "There is a growing number of people frustrated with the government's effort to maintain stability at all costs, and yet their voices have not been heard."

The last time China was so riven was back in 1989. No one's predicting a repeat of the Tiananmen tragedy. But this time around, what happens in China matters for the rest of the world beyond just the moral outrage over students gunned down by government forces. China is now the largest foreign holder of U.S. debt, the second biggest consumer of luxury products and the planet's top buyer of gold and mobile phones. Its middle class will soon be larger than the entire American population. But China's continued upward march depends on the machinations of a clutch of men who know they cannot indefinitely maintain the high growth rates they have used to persuade the country's citizens to remain politically pliant. "Just as many Americans were beginning to wonder whether maybe the Chinese model does have some merit, maybe it's more effective than our clumsy democracy, then these things happen," says Schell. "It shows that China, too, has its dysfunctional side."

The Prince of the Princelings

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