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China's leadership, spurred by all this online chatter, has had to react much faster to the Bo scandal than it is used to doing. It took years before China fully addressed the fact that one of its purged heirs apparent had died in a mysterious 1971 plane crash. But the other lesson from the Bo affair--that the party, by its own admission, is riddled with corruption and that immense abuse of power occurs at the highest levels of government--is less heartening. Says Jean-Pierre Cabestan, a politics professor at Hong Kong Baptist University: "You can't have checks and balances with a one-party system."
Blinding Insight
If Bo Xilai is the epitome of the Communist Party's excesses of power, then Chen Guangcheng is the voice of China's powerless. Born among the fertile orchards of Shandong province, not far from Confucius' hometown, Chen was blinded by a fever as a small child. His farm-boy roots and his disability were supposed to condemn him to a life of quiet servitude, perhaps as a masseur. But he had other plans. Even though he didn't step into a classroom until age 13, he persevered and ended up studying traditional Chinese medicine at a big-city university. While there, he pushed boundaries, auditing law classes even though the blind were not allowed to major in that subject. Few paid attention to the handsome man in sunglasses sitting among them, but Chen believed in the sanctity of the legal system and was determined to understand how the law worked. After returning to his hometown of Linyi, he began representing locals who felt wronged by officialdom.
Chen's leap from obscure legal activist to nationwide icon came in 2005. He had already been written up by local media as a heartwarming example of a disabled man overcoming obstacles. But that year he began representing hundreds of Linyi women who had been forced to undergo sterilizations or abortions by local family-planning officials. One woman, whom I met with Chen's help, described how she had been strapped to a bed by officials who injected poison into her belly two days before her due date. A few hours later, she delivered a lifeless girl. The officials then placed the infant in a bucket filled with water to make sure she was dead.
What Linyi officials were doing was against China's family-planning laws. By then, if Chinese families were willing to pay fines, they were technically allowed to have more children. But the political system in China is still set up so that promotions of local officials are compromised if they oversee places with large numbers of extra births. Chen was hopeful that he could persuade central-government officials to rein in the Linyi cadres. "He wants to use the system as it's legally prescribed," says Jerome Cohen, a co-director of New York University's U.S.-Asia Law Institute who helped Chen train 200 other legal activists from the Linyi region in 2005. "He's not a dissident in that regard."