Former official Bao Tong blasts Bo Xilai, CCP
Staff Reporter 2012-09-12 16:03 (GMT+8)
Bao Tong was formerly a secretary to Zhao Ziyang. (Internet photo)
Bao Tong, a Chinese democracy activist and a former high-ranking official, has launched a scathing attack on the Chinese Communist Party and former Chongqing party secretary Bo Xilai, reports Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao.
Bao was the former policy secretary of the late Zhao Ziyang, the party's general secretary who was purged for expressing sympathy with the student protesters in Tiananmen in 1989.
As a close associate of Zhao, Bao was arrested in Beijing shortly before the military crackdown began and became the highest government official to be charged in relation to the demonstrations, serving a prison sentence of seven years and an additional year of house arrest. Zhao, who died in 2004, was kept under house arrest for the rest of his life.
The 80-year-old Bao remains under around-the-clock surveillance and is followed wherever he goes. He continues to openly write articles critical of the party and has reportedly been warned not to make any public statements in the lead-up to the country's pivotal leadership transition scheduled for later this year.
In his interview with Ming Pao, Bao expressed high expectations for China's next generation of leaders under the president-in-waiting Xi Jinping. He said he was disappointed by the decade in office of President Hu Jintao, who has failed to implement significant changes despite declaring that the Chinese people should be the masters of their country and that the country should be governed by the rule of law.
Bao also touched on the Bo Xilai scandal, which he said has had a tremendous impact on the party. He praised the "public" — albeit tightly controlled — one-day trial of Bo's wife Gu Kailai, who was handed a suspended death sentence last month for the murder of a British businessman. Whether the trial revealed the truth or not, merely holding an open trial required a lot of courage and is already a big step in the right direction, Bao said.
He remained highly critical of Bo, who was a rising political star until his spectacular fall from grace, and who remains under detention for unspecified "serious discipline violations," suspected to involve massive corruption and the use of extrajudicial detention and torture in his campaign to rid Chongqing of organized crime, in which he may have knowingly targeted innocent business owners.
"Some say Bo Xilai has been a bad son to his late father Bo Yibo, but I think he has been a great son because every part of his DNA is from the party's gene pool. His criminal behavior is the embodiment of the party's nature," Bao said.
For the People's Republic of China to be a true republic, the country needs to have free elections, Bao said. Yet he does not have faith in China's ability to run a proper election, claiming that "an election without competition is no election at all."
Bao believes it is a tragedy that Chinese people are essentially paying taxes to fund the government's suppression of their rightful exercise of citizenship. He also added that there is nothing for China to be proud of as the world's second-largest economy behind the US given that China's population exceeds the US by a billion people.
Bao said his ultimate hope is for a society without owners and slaves. "What Chinese people need most is freedom. I need freedom. There is not a single person that doesn't need freedom," he said.
