On the eve of the trial of China's fallen political star Bo Xilai for corruption and abuse of power, the ruling Chinese Communist Party is ramping up its leftist rhetoric in a bid to curb a vocal Maoist camp in its own ranks that is potentially loyal to Bo, analysts said on Wednesday.
After a series of articles in state-run media hitting out at "Western" notions of constitutional rule, the Party's own cadres are now being warned that "hostile foreign forces" are trying to spread harmful ideas about constitutional government and the rule of law in China, media reports said.
"They are fighting the left with leftism, not with right-wing ideology," Li Xiaobing, director of the Western Pacific Institute at the University of Central Oklahoma, said in an interview on Wednesday.
He said the leftist rhetoric now pouring out of Beijing is linked to a political power struggle sparked by the fall of former Chongqing Party secretary Bo, who is set to stand trial in the eastern province of Shandong on Thursday.
"This is because [right-wing ideology] would be open to criticism from those people [who still support Bo Xilai]."
Swerve to the left
Li said Party thinking under the current administration of President Xi Jinping had swerved to the left recently, but that the Party had always secretly regarded Western political ideas as hostile.
"It's just that they weren't very direct about it; it wasn't a view they spoke about openly," he said.
Attacking reform calls
Analysts have pointed to a string of articles in official media lately attacking recent calls on China's leaders to reveal details of their assets, as well as campaigns for human rights protection and a more accountable form of government.
"Constitutionalism is essentially capitalist," one commentary in the overseas edition of Party mouthpiece the People's Daily said recently.
Another article in the same paper called constitutionalism "a weapon for information and psychological warfare used by the magnates of American monopoly capitalism and their proxies in China to subvert China’s socialist system."
Document No. 9
Chinese cadres have been attending political study meetings across the country since May, to study the secret Document No. 9, which warns that importing "Western" ideas could lead to the loss of their authority, the New York Times reported this week.
The document lists "seven perils," which include "Western constitutional democracy" and "universal values" like human rights, press freedom, civic participation, and "nihilist" criticism of the Party's historical record, the paper said.
Maoist holdover
Xie Jiaye, head of the California-based America-China Association for Science & Technology Exchange, said the rhetoric of "Western hostile forces" was a hangover from the Maoist language of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).
"This sort of thinking about 'Western hostile forces'...is very outdated," Xia said, adding that it was unlikely to garner much public credence.
"Ordinary Chinese people are very opposed to the idea of Marxist-Leninist thought as a belief-system for the Chinese people," he said.
Xia said the view that China's social conflicts, which include an ever-widening gap between rich and poor, had their roots in the country's own social structures, and shouldn't be blamed on external ideas.
"You have to look inside Chinese society for [the roots of] Chinese social problems," he said. "The reasons lie in the way that China gone about its development."
Curbing state power
Last week, a former top Party aide blamed rampant official corruption and social injustice on the failure to curb state power, calling for China's constitution to be implemented fully.
"China is currently in the midst of a great variety of uncertainties, whether political or economic, ethnic or geographical, physical or spiritual, the ultimate roots of which can be unambiguously traced back to unchecked state power," wrote Bao Tong, former aide to late, disgraced premier Zhao Ziyang.
"If we want long-term peace and stability, we must put this lawless exercise of public power behind bars," wrote Bao from his Beijing home, where he has been under house arrest since serving a seven-year jail term in the wake of the 1989 military suppression of the student-led pro-democracy movement.
"The Constitution of the People's Republic of China is the only ready-made cage we have to curb the exercise of state power," he said in an essay broadcast on RFA's Mandarin Service.
Political reform
Li, meanwhile, said political reform would likely boost social development.
"We have already developed our economy, and the middle class is taking an interest in social reform and improvement," he said.
"They care about social progress, so we will see a bottom-up movement in favor [of reform]," Li said.
Fallen political star
Bo, 64, was indicted last month at the Jinan Intermediate People's Court in Shandong and accused of receiving more than 20 million yuan (U.S. $3.26 million) in bribes and of embezzling another 5 million yuan (U.S. $815,000).
State media said Bo "took advantage of his position as a civil servant to seek gains for others ... [and] accepted bribes in the form of large amounts of money and property."
He will face trial at the court in Jinan, Shandong's provincial capital, on Thursday at 8:30 a.m., the official Xinhua news agency reported.
The charismatic and once-powerful Bo had once been widely tipped to rise from his post as Chongqing Party secretary to the all-powerful standing committee of the Party's Politburo.
But the flight of his police chief Wang Lijun to the U.S. Consulate in Chengdu on Feb. 6, 2012, signaled that all was not well with Bo's controversial "Chongqing model" of revolutionary Mao-era ballads and large-scale anti-crime campaigns in the city.
Public opinion clampdown
However, Bo still has some outspoken support in Party ranks, and Beijing has tightened its grip on public opinion linked to Thursday's trial.
Earlier this month, Beijing police detained left-wing journalist Song Yangbiao after he called on ordinary Chinese to gatecrash the trial, which observers say is likely to be highly orchestrated and result in a lengthy jail term.
Leftist supporters
Han Deqiang, founder of the leftist website Utopia, which has been targeted by the authorities since Bo's ouster in March 2012, said many leftists in the Party still supported Bo and his program of revolutionary songs and anti-crime campaigns in Chongqing.
"I think that the entire case is a miscarriage of justice," Han said. "The reason they gave for arresting Bo at the time isn't the same as the reasons they are giving at his trial."
"They arrested him first, then they came up with some charges, and tried to dig up some evidence," he said. "This isn't normal procedure."
Han said much of the evidence against Bo had centered around his tenure as Party secretary in the northeastern port city of Dalian, and less around his time in Chongqing.
"They looked for more than a year and they couldn't find any [Chongqing-based evidence]," Han said. "This is a huge question mark."
"I suspect they may be grafting one thing onto another."
Chongqing model
Han said Bo had inspired leftists in the Party with his rule in Chongqing.
"I think that the Chongqing model showed us a genuine path for socialism with Chinese characteristics, unlike the capitalism with Chinese characteristics that they were implementing in other [parts of China]," Han told RFA a day before Bo's trial for corruption and abuse of power.
"There were some miscarriages of justice in the anti-crime campaigns, this I believe," he said. "But this points to the fact that Wang Lijun's work style was inappropriate at times."
Reported by Yang Jiadai for RFA's Mandarin Service and by Hai Nan for the Cantonese Service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.