MY ARTICLE ON BO XINLAI: A DIFFERENT VIEW

i HAVE BEEN IN RECEIPT OF THE FOLLOWING COMMENTS FROM AN AUSTRALIAN ANALYST ON MY ARTICLE ON THE FALL OF BO XINLAI


"Your portrait of Bo is the one-sided flattering version cultivated by him and which is swallowed by the netizen community. Bo was a charismatic but ruthless politician whose pursuit of "mafia" figures was carried out with considerable excesses. Some would argue that Bo sought, in doing so, to entrench himself as the paramount leader in Chongqing. His assiduous courting of the digital media and his public warfare against the mafia made his Party colleagues uneasy. Bo's family however brazenly wore the trappings of power - his son drove a Ferrari - suggesting that Bo himself was not the uncompromising moral crusader he made himself out to be.


"The Party leadership has never been comfortable with those who aspired to high office through high profile, public campaigns as these risked the collective, consensus-moded and cautious Party approach they favoured. The abortive attempt by the Police Chief to seek asylum at the US consulate was seen by Beijing as symptomatic of Bo's inability to manage the situation - regardless of the circumstances, this was a highly public and humiliating outcome. Whilst Bo was busily mounting his anti-corruption rhetoric, the detained Chief made a series of allegations (unfounded or not) against Bo that provided his Party detractors with the weapon to remove a person whose pathway to the highest Party positions was increasingly perceived as being based on building public opinion rather than on the Party's favoured internal consultative mechanisms."