The city of Chongqing and the Bo Xilai case: how China works
The downfall of party boss Bo Xilai and his wife Gu Kailai is more than a tale of scandalous intrigue. Their fate reveals the prison of suspicion and mistrust that envelops China’s system of power
At night, approached from a certain direction, the city of Chongqing in China’s southwest looks a little like Hong Kong. Its city centre lies on a promontory, with its skyscrapers, blazing with light, rising impressively over the surrounding water. By day, any such illusions tend to be shattered. In the mid-2000s, soon after Chongqing was granted special status as a municipality directly under the central government - and thus separated from the vast Sichuan province, of which it had been part - the city became known as one of China’s most pollutedplaces. One informal estimate said it enjoyed only seventeen days' sunlight a year. The rest of the time it was under an enveloping man-made toxic fog.
At night, approached from a certain direction, the city of Chongqing in China’s southwest looks a little like Hong Kong. Its city centre lies on a promontory, with its skyscrapers, blazing with light, rising impressively over the surrounding water. By day, any such illusions tend to be shattered. In the mid-2000s, soon after Chongqing was granted special status as a municipality directly under the central government - and thus separated from the vast Sichuan province, of which it had been part - the city became known as one of China’s most pollutedplaces. One informal estimate said it enjoyed only seventeen days' sunlight a year. The rest of the time it was under an enveloping man-made toxic fog.
Around the same time, 2004, the city acquired the title of the world’s largest conurbation, with a population in excess of 30 million. The more sceptical observers worked out that this had to be spurious. Chongqing covered an area the size of most British counties, or the smaller of American states. Even to describe it as a city would be a stretch. The urban area of Chongqing that most outsiders encountered was gave a misleading impression: most of the rest of the “city” looked like contemporary rural areas elsewhere in the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
I visited Chongqing in 2007, a few months before Bo Xilai was sent there as party secretary following a surprise decision at the seventeenth congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Beijing. Like many others, I was enthused and intrigued by reports that the city - renowned throughout the world as “Chunking” - was making efforts to rebrand itself and attract international visitors. I met with members of the local-government’s information office, who showed me flashy presentations about how Chongqing would project itself as “a place where everyone can come” (in Chinese, the strapline was ren ren lai Chongqing).
The equivalent of the city’s tourist bureau had created pleasant little lapel-badges showing two figures walking, a symbol of how the world was about to beat a track to Chongqing’s door. Direct flights from Europe and elsewhere in Asia to the newly built airport at the suburb of Jiangbei offered a fresh target-market and entry-point. Chongqing was about to have a second lease of life. It would, one of the officials declared to me, become “the Hong Kong of the mainland”; indeed, one of the slick, professional adverts showed a visitor flying in for a weekend and experiencing a moment of revelation: this city was everything Hong Kong had wanted, and failed, to be!
The grim theatre: Chongqing now, in 2012, presents a more complicated face to the world. The high-profile Bo Xilai did indeed make waves, following the pattern of his term of office in Dalian in China’s northeast: waging noisy campaigns, attracting attention, telling the world this was the place to come - if only for an audience with the great rising star. But Chongqing’s underside was never far away and could not easily be hidden. It was a city riddled with illegal activity, where mafia traded in contraband goods and ran large swathes of the local economy, almost heedless of the writ of the party.... Read the full story:
