In July, two stories out of China were big news. One focused on watermelon seller Deng Zhengjia, a poor urban migrant in Hunan province, who became newsworthy only when reports circulated that thuggish chengguan ― members of para-police units ― allegedly beat him to death. A week later, someone very different, Bo Xilai, was back in the news when he was formally charged with “abuses of power” and corruption.

Bo ― the former party boss of one of China’s biggest cities, Chongqing, a Politburo member and once thought to be bound for elevation to the Communist Party’s ruling Standing Committee ― was anything but poor, powerless or unknown before cascading scandals brought him down in 2012. Putting the tales of Deng’s death and Bo’s indictment side by side illuminates a major challenge China’s leaders face: How to keep the people believing the stories they tell to justify their rule.

In China, as elsewhere, such stories often involve a kind of political-product differentiation that presents the current era as totally unlike earlier dark periods. This meant that, during the Mao Tse-tung years (1949-1976), a steady stream of propaganda stressed the allegedly total contrasts between the new China of the Communists and the old one of Nationalist times (1927-1949). Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek was presented as obsessed with vanquishing his rivals and being closely allied with thugs and gangsters who rode roughshod over ordinary people and were rewarded for it. The Nationalist Party was portrayed as corrupt and dominated by cliques, many of whose members were close friends or relatives of one another.

In the post-Mao reform era, versions of this story continue to be told, but leaders also stress a newer one that contrasts the present age to the chaotic Cultural Revolution decade (1966-1976). Since Mao’s death, this tale goes, China has not just boomed economically but has been placed on a more stable, saner political footing, thanks to the end of bitter factional infighting and scattershot purges.

But stories of things like chengguan abuses, of which the killing of the watermelon seller is but the latest, call into question the Communists versus Nationalists product-differentiation narrative. So too did another story last month. This one involved a wheelchair-bound petitioner who, frustrated by his inability to get the state to pay attention to his grievances, injured himself when he detonated an explosive device at the Beijing airport. He, like the watermelon peddler, elicited a great deal of sympathetic online commentary from people who related to his feeling of powerlessness.

Bo’s story also has elements that undermine the notion of a night-and-day difference between pre-1949 and post-1949 China. He is described as having worked closely with thuggish underlings in cracking down on crime in Chongqing, and both he and his opponents belong to intertwined, powerful families. Mostly, though, his downfall raises doubt about Cultural Revolution-style score-settling being a thing of the past.

The government’s quick response to the powerless peddler’s death and slow movement in bringing the disgraced power holder to trial speak to an awareness of these problems. In the case of the peddler, the authorities moved swiftly to defuse the situation. They are punishing and investigating members of the chengguan and offering compensation to the victim’s family. These moves are designed to shore up the idea that, in the People’s Republic, the authorities are on the side of ordinary people.

The caution in moving against Bo may be partly due to debate at the top on how severely to punish one of their own, but it also may be an attempt to signal that this is an era of deliberative action rather than wild revenge. It’s notable as well that since the scandals linked to Bo broke, the state media have worked hard to downplay how integral a part of the overall power structure he once was.

Bo rose higher than had most targets of anti-corruption drives, but now he is cast as just another lower-level power holder who went too far. Local figures and heads of ministries sometimes do outrageous things, the central authorities often acknowledge, and they need to be reined in. Bo’s case, they claim, is just one more example of such a self-correcting mechanism in action, carried out by the true top leaders who are not tainted by corruption.

The authorities in both cases are working to show that old narratives about the present being unlike the past remain relevant, treating thuggish chengguan and the latest official targeted for punishment as scapegoats, outliers, not typical parts of a deeply corrupted system. Unfortunately, that system, official fairy tales to the contrary, actually shares many of the flaws of dark periods in the nation’s past.

By Jeffrey Wasserstrom

Jeffrey Wasserstrom teaches at UC Irvine and is the author of “China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know.” ― Ed.

(Los Angeles Times)

(MCT Information Services)