Bo Xilai and His Red Revolution in Chongqing

Implying "revolution", Red has always been used as political color. In Taiwan, the DPP took green, the Kuomintang played with blue, leaving only red color for Shih Ming-teh to name his followers "Red Shirt Army". The red color matched their "revolution" indeed, it is no wonder that some people doubted whether the "Red shirts" was supported by the Chinese communists. And now the question is: what's the real target of Bo Xilai's "Red Revolution" in Chongqing?

The current meaning of red refers to history and reality: to take advantage of the agitated sentiments of masses in political struggle. It has been widely observed that the mobilization process on the Internet is highly similar to the way of Cultural Revolution. In 1998 Wang Lixiong published an article on Mao Zedong and "economic Cultural Revolution". Wang claimed that China's social crisis will most likely happen in the economic field and is likely to start from financial crisis. At that time, once the crisis hit the majority of members in the society and turn their wealth into waste paper, the people's response will not only be limited to run on banks or buying supplies, they may worship Mao Zedong Thought. His imagination summed up as a "mass spontaneous class struggle" mechanism, but he underestimated the Chinese Communist technocratic control system, why Wang Lixiong did not predict the high-level of Communist party will exploit the resources of Cultural Revolution? Here comes Bo Xilai.

Back to the "Cultural Revolution Context", we may say that Bo engaged in "the struggle between lines within the party" -- his ideas about the governance in China are different from Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao. Bo Xilai also inherited, developed Mao Zedong Thought and carried forward the class struggle in the new situation. From the perspective of modern political science, there will always be someone with his new and more effective strategy (or old tactic) to seek the highest authority within the power group. In the post-Deng period the Communist Party of China gave top priority to "stable" and it is absolutely not allowed to make noise even within the party, therefore, Mao Zedong's favorite "line struggle" apparently disappeared. However, the desire for power is an aphrodisiac, and there's no miraculous cure for people's desire.

This new revolutionary route was supposed to be Hu Jintao's "patent", but unfortunately, he was afraid of "color revolution". The difference indicates the ambiguous of "inner-party origin" theory: the "civilian-type" cadres who were trained step by step from the organization department have strong party spirit and sense of discipline, but lack of creativity; and cadres who were directly selected from "own children" are reliable, competent, but difficult to control -- this dilemma unveils the success of Xi Jinping who understood the importance of balance in this competition.