Jacques DeLisle认为,薄熙来还在重庆搞了独树一帜的治理模式,这一模式与在中国政坛占主流地位的改革派倡导的政治模式存在冲突。他主政重庆时的执政理念是,要让国家在经济中扮演重要角色,避免进行任何重大的市场化改革;与中国主流派政治精英相比,薄熙来对"法治"更加持轻蔑的态度。薄熙来的民粹主义政治态度使他与中国改革派人士的关系处于紧张状态。
Former Chongqing Party Chief Bo Xilai, photographed here in 2010, likely faces a lengthy prison sentence after being indicted today. (Jason Lee/Reuters)
The disgraced politician now faces trial for bribery, corruption, and abuse of power. What his downfall tells us about the current state of Chinese politics.
The penny has dropped for Bo Xilai. The one-time Chongqing Party Secretary, held in limbo since March 2012, was indicted today for bribery, corruption, and abuse of power stemming from his previous stint as the top official in Dalian. Bo's long-awaited trial will mark the culmination of China's most serious political scandal in a generation, one that began with the poisoning death of British businessman Neil Heywood in Chongqing in November 2011.
To tease out some of the implications of the Bo Xilai issue, I spoke to Jacques DeLisle, a law professor and Director at the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. The following is a transcript of our remarks, edited for length and clarity.
Now that Bo Xilai has been indicted, when will his trial be held?
There's been a lot of speculation about that already, and of course nobody knows for sure. But I suspect the trial won't be too far into the future because the government has sat on this issue for so long. It's hard to imagine what the motivation would be for indicting him and then letting the indictment sit for a long time.
Another reason that the trial will likely happen sooner rather than later is the arrival of two major events on the Chinese political calendar. The first is the traditional summer retreat of the Communist Party elite to Beidaihe, a beach resort near Beijing, where the country's top leaders go to set the agenda for the coming year. The second is the coming third plenum of the National People's Congress early this fall, an event where policies will be set. This time, the third plenum will be particularly important because it comes after the installation of a new president [Xi Jinping], something that happens in China only once every 10 years.
So is there any chance that Bo will be acquitted?
(Laughs) You'd have to get really, really big odds to cover that bet. If he were acquitted it'd be shocking -- totally out of the ordinary. But what's interesting to me is what they're charging him with.
Why is that?
Well, the main focus of the Bo Xilai controversy was what he did in his last post as the Party Secretary of Chongqing, including the unpardonable sin of campaigning publicly for a spot in the Standing Committee of the Politburo [China's highes decision-making body]. China has a fairly secretive and managed successor process, but Bo tried to subvert this by invoking his own personal standing and his ability to cultivate grass-roots support. That was a huge infraction on his part.
If you look more broadly at what the public saw in Bo, you see someone who ran a brutal dictatorship in Chongqing. There was some genuine support for his anti-crime crackdown, of course, but its brutality, and disregard of legal restrictions and procedures, were problematic. Bo tried to shake down local business interests in the city, and angered China's "rule of law" types by going after a defense lawyer named Li Zhuang, who was defending someone caught up in one of Bo's "anti-mafia" cases.
But the indictment, insofar as we know, just has to do with the crimes of embezzlement and abuse of power that focused on his earlier tenure as the Party Secretary of Dalian, in northeastern China, and has nothing to do with what he did in Chongqing.
Why would Beijing handle it this way? Why not go after him for his Chongqing crimes, and, if his Dalian crimes merited arrest, why didn't they arrest him years ago?
Almost every official at Bo's level in China has skeletons in the closet, so if they had gone after him when he was running Dalian -- his crimes there were not uncommon for Chinese leaders -- then you'd give the impression that members of the elite would be vulnerable to criminal prosecution.
So had the Wang Lijun incident [the Police Chief who fled to the U.S. Embassy in February 2012] not occurred in Chongqing, would Bo have even run into trouble?
The Wang Lijun case made it easy to go after Bo; there's something terribly embarrassing when your top aide tries to defect to the United States and then hands over a bunch of information in the process. And there were other revelations that hurt him, such as tapping the phones of [former President] Hu Jintao when he was visiting Chongqing.
But in general, Bo was playing a high-stakes, high-risk game. He was going outside the usual channels in a bid for higher office by cultivating a populist power base, and that's just a big no-no in Chinese politics. He also stood for a particular model of governance that was at odds with the broadly reformist bloc that runs the country. Bo's vision of Chongqing was in having the state play a big role and to avoid any big market reforms, and he was a good deal more contemptuous and dismissive of "rule of law" values than even the mainstream elite -- which is saying something. His populist, almost neo-Maoist approach was in tension with the reformist, market-oriented model favored by the likes of [former Guangdong Party Chief and current Vice Premier] Wang Yang.
Bo Xilai attracted genuine grassroots support as Chongqing's boss. Will they come out to rally during his trial?
A few years ago this would have been totally unthinkable in China, but with the rise in protests recently people do seem to feel more free to take to the streets. That said, most of the protesters seem more concerned with local economic or environmental issues than anything broadly political.
So will we see a lot of people out in the streets for Bo Xilai? I doubt it. It'd be a risky thing to do, I think, going out and expressing support for someone accused of doing some pretty terrible things. But what's interesting in this: the trial is being held not in Chongqing or Dalian but in Jinan, capital of Shandong Province, which is an area with which Bo has no ties. This might suggest some concern to avoid some embarrassing, if not actually threatening, protests.
What will Bo's sentence be?
I'd guess it'll be somewhere been many years and a suspended death sentence, the latter of which in China usually means life in prison. The odds of him being executed is practically nil -- it just doesn't happen to top leaders in China, not to [Mao Zedong's last wife and Gang of Four member] Jiang Qing, nor people nearer to Bo like his wife Gu Kailai, who was convicted in the murder of Neil Heywood. Chen Liangyu, the Shanghai Party Chief convicted for corruption in 2008, is probably the closest comparison, and he didn't even get a suspended death sentence.
What lesson does Bo's case teach existing Chinese officials?
I don't think it teaches them anything they don't already know. That is to say -- if you engage in corrupt or abusive behavior in these high positions (Party secretary, provincial governor, etc.) you might end up with your political enemies wanting to take your down. Lots of people of course get away with a lot of stuff -- but even for people like Bo in the upper tier of elite, there is that risk of getting caught .
2006年5月10日,美国第二大报《今日美国报》(USA TODAY)发表长篇报道,标题就是“国安局收集海量美国人电话数据”(NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls )。报道引用了几位官员的话,说明国安局并不是监听所有人的通话内容,而只是分析电话号码和通话时长,然后从中找出可疑分子,再对这些可疑分子进一步追踪调查(http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa_x.htm)。这和现在奥巴马政府的说明是一样的。有意思的是,这一揭秘在当时并没有引起多大波澜,如今,经由斯诺登爆料棱镜计划,很多人才注意到这个“秘密”,还以为是新发现呢。
华盛顿——本周三,分化严重的美国众议院(House)否决了一项法案,该法案本可以阻止美国国家安全局(National Security Agency,简称NSA)对通话记录的大量搜集。自从爱德华・J・斯诺登(Edward J. Snowden)上月泄露安全信息以来,这是国会就NSA监控活动进行的首次对垒,而这个结果意味着,奥巴马政府赢得了一场来之不易的胜利。
他们的对手中,不仅有众议院议长约翰・A・博纳(John A. Boehner)和奥巴马,还有国防部和情报机构的领导人。
周二,国家安全局局长基斯・亚历山大上将(Gen. Keith Alexander)用数小时时间就该项目向议员们进行了秘密的情况通报,而白宫则罕见地发布了一份声明,敦促议员们不要批准此项举措。周三,退休的美国海军陆战队(Marine Corps)上将、曾在2009年至2010年担任奥巴马国家安全顾问的詹姆斯・L・琼斯(James L. Jones)将他的名字加入一封支持保留NSA项目的公开信中。此前,已有数位布什政府时期的高级安全官员在这封公开信上签名。
一个未能得到充分认识的历史事实之一是,大部分历史中,人类都生活得比较悲催。从250万前的旧石器时代一直到19世纪初期,人类的平均寿命在35岁左右就达到了极限。而且在这期间的大部分时间里,不存在经济增长这样的东西──人类靠着他们能够捕杀的或能够从地里刨挖出来的东西而生存,或者靠最低限度的易货贸易经济获得收益。虽然有些文明胜过其它文明,但这些文明的佼佼者或早或晚都衰落了。这其中的原因以及美国从中应该吸取的教训正是格伦•哈伯德(Glenn Hubbard)和蒂姆•凯恩(Tim Kane)所着的《平衡:从古罗马到现代美国的大国经济》(Balance: The Economics of Great Powers From Ancient Rome to Modern America)一书的主题。
在他们的论述中,大国的概念涵盖了帝国(罗马帝国、大英帝国、西班牙帝国、奥斯曼帝国)、王朝(中国明朝)、国家(1868年后的日本)、地区(欧盟)、甚至美国的一个州(加利福尼亚)。按照哈伯德和凯恩(分别担任哥伦比亚大学商学院(Columbia's business school)院长和赫德森研究所(the Hudson Institute)首席经济学家)的说法,这些政体的衰落往往都落入了一种模式或者说犯了一系列错误:“否认经济停滞的内在本质、加强中央集权、寅吃卯粮。”当财政上的挥霍无度无力得到控制,又适逢政治制度土崩瓦解时,紧接着就会出现致命的不平衡,衰落随之发生。