BO XILAI, the former trade czar, propaganda revivalist and crusading head of Chongqing municipality, who is known to want a seat at the top table of power in China, has missed an important session at the annual parliament, prompting speculation about his future.
Yesterday, the high-flying Mr Bo was the only one of the 25 members of the ruling Communist Party’s Politburo not attending the National People’s Congress (NPC), and there seemed to be no place setting for him at the 10-day event.
His absence is being read as a sign of a power play at the heart of the Chinese leadership,and a sign that Mr Bo’s bid to win a seat on the Standing Committee of the Politburo, the nine-man body that runs China, may have collapsed.
Mr Bo has been dogged by scandal in recent weeks since his protege and police chief, Wang Lijun, who oversaw his crackdown on organised crime in Chongqing, disappeared for a while into the US consulate in Chengdu, after what looked like a purge.
Some believe Mr Wang was ousted for investigating Mr Bo’s affairs and was seeking asylum at the US mission in the Sichuan capital. He is now being investigated by Beijing authorities.
Mr Bo’s profile at this year’s congress has been subdued. In the first couple of days, he sat quietly in the second row among other leading cadres at the front of the Great Hall of the People.
Mr Bo’s credentials are powerful – his father Bo Yibo was a leader on the Long March, a key event in the revolution that brought the Communists to power in 1949, and one of the Eight Immortals of the Party.
As party leader in Chongqing, Bo Xilai oversaw a patriotic campaign of “red ballads” stressing the party’s communist, and Maoist, roots.
However, rumours of a power struggle intensified after the publication of a series of pictures from the congress, which show Deng Pufang, son of the late supreme leader Deng Xiaoping, being wheeled past a decidedly nervous-looking Mr Bo. This is more than the usual tale of rivalry between two princelings.
Deng Pufang was thrown from a third-storey window on Beijing University campus in 1968, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, leaving him a paraplegic and making him one of the most powerful examples of the suffering of the Cultural Revolution.
Mr Bo’s decision to revive the patriotic songs of that era of Maoist extremism are said to have outraged the Deng family.
Deng Xiaoping was the architect of the reform process three decades ago that kick-started economic growth in China, so Deng Pufang’s credentials appear to trump those of Mr Bo.
