Things I've learned digging this up. No member of the Politiburo Standing committee since the era of Mao Zedong (50 years ago) has been prosecuted or stripped of party titles. Which makes this kind of a big deal.HE HAS always looked a rather nasty piece of work, and China’s press now tells us just how nasty. Zhou Yongkang is a thief, a bully, a philanderer and a traitor who disclosed state secrets. The spider at the centre of a web of corrupt patronage, he enriched himself, his family, his many mistresses and his cronies at vast cost to the government. Many Chinese reading the reports of his arrest released early on December 6th must have felt delighted that at last his comeuppance had arrived. But many must also have asked themselves how such a thoroughly bad egg came so close to the pinnacle of political power in China. And some may have wondered why, in its 93-year history, the Chinese Communist Party had promoted so many villains to its upper ranks.
Mr Zhou was for five years the party’s most senior official responsible for the pervasive internal-security apparatus. He is the most senior Chinese politician to face criminal charges since the “Gang of Four” of Chairman Mao’s close associates was arrested in 1976. Since then serving or retired members of the party’s highest body, the Politburo’s Standing Committee, have been immune from the most humiliating forms of political retribution. Leaders such as Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, dismissed in the 1980s for flirting with liberalism, were never publicly disgraced. They even remained party members—and, in Mr Hu’s case, on the Politburo. Other party leaders have faced criminal charges: Chen Xitong, a mayor of Beijing, was convicted of corruption in 1998. So, a decade later, was Chen Liangyu, mayor of Shanghai. Both were Politburo members; but neither had reached the party’s innermost sanctum, the Standing Committee.
Nor had Bo Xilai, the former party secretary of the municipality of Chongqing, though some had expected him to be promoted to it at the party’s most recent congress, in 2012. But by then Mr Bo had been toppled in a scandal involving corruption, murder and the abuse of power, whose reverberations ultimately led to the downfall of his most powerful ally in Beijing, Mr Zhou. Until now, Mr Zhou’s status as a former Standing-Committee member would have been expected to protect him.
The big winner in all this is the party’s leader since that congress, China’s president, Xi Jinping. It confirms Mr Xi’s status as the strongest Chinese leader at least since Deng. He has shown where power really lies: with him; and no longer with the sort of collective leadership seen under his predecessor, Hu Jintao. In that arrangement, Mr Zhou, a man now depicted as a power-hungry villain, became nearly as influential as Mr Hu himself, in part because of his grip on the security services and legal system.
Putting Mr Zhou on trial may also help boost Mr Xi’s considerable popularity, by appearing to prove the sincerity of his campaign to cleanse China of corruption, both by high-ranking “tigers” as well as the lowly “flies” buzzing around the dung heap of China’s public ethics. It lends credence to Mr Xi’s recent emphasis on the importance of the law, suggesting that no one is above it.
But the party itself is above the law. The ritual of political humiliation follows a rigid protocol: first, the internal party investigation; second, expulsion from the party. Only then—at the party’s behest—are legal charges framed. In the case of Mr Zhou, the Chinese press has tried to present his fall from grace as purely about the party purging itself of corruption, rather than some internal power struggle. “The party and corruption are like water and fire,” sobbed its mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, surprising those who think they are more like dry tinder and matches.
Some, however, will still recognise the politics behind Mr Zhou’s fate. Power struggles in the Chinese Communist Party have changed in form since they were waged among guerrilla fighters denouncing each other in arcane Marxist-Leninist jargon in the caves of Yan’an; or, during the Cultural Revolution, using student-written “big-character posters”, dunce caps and mass violence. These days the alleged sins of the losers involve money and sex rather than ideology or loyalty to the leader; and the disgraced get their day in court. But it is hard not to see corruption allegations as the latter-day weapon of choice in the winner-takes-all power struggles that the party has always suffered.
That impression is heightened by apparent factional bias. Research by Geremie Barmé, an Australian scholar, suggests that of 48 “tigers”—high-level suspects—investigated for corruption between the party congress in 2012 and this September, not one was a member of the “red second generation”: the “princeling” offspring of party leaders. Mr Xi is a princeling (as is Mr Bo, whose challenge to Mr Xi could not be ignored). Many others occupy important positions. Some even propagate an ideology reminiscent of the “revolutionary blood lineage” theory North Korean dictators use to justify dynastic succession. “Through revolution and the heritage of blood, our parents bequeathed to us the Red Gene,” Mr Barmé quotes one as writing. Mr Xi certainly gives the self-confident impression of a man born to rule, and to safeguard the political order his father and his comrades helped to build.
This, like the party’s near-miss with Mr Zhou, undermines claims that China is a functioning meritocracy, in which ability and experience alone dictate career paths. The party’s apologists like to point out that abuses can happen at the peak of any political system—Richard Nixon and Watergate is a favourite example—but that in China they will be rooted out. This is debatable. Nixon was toppled because of checks and balances within the American polity, such as a free press. Mr Bo and Mr Zhou fell because of a series of accidents—the murder of a British businessman and the decision by Mr Bo’s police chief to tell all in an American consulate. So Mr Zhou’s case carries a danger for Mr Xi. By advertising the party as motivated by its zeal to combat corruption and as led by those promoted solely on merit, he may raise expectations of transparency and honesty that he will find hard to meet.
Additionally, the 38th army group (the military formation garrisoning Beijing) kinda answers directly to the President. This same formation carried out the arrest of Yongkang as well confronting several police groups loyal to the President's rivals.