英文原文：
China: A populist rising
By Geoff Dyer
Published: March 9 2010 20:59 | Last updated: March 9 2010 23:11
At the National People’s Congress during the past few days, one man has dominated the talk among the gathered elite. When he arrived 40 minutes late for a weekend meeting at the Great Hall of the People, onlookers were trampled by the scrum of television crews following in the wake of the tall photogenic figure. Generating all this attention, of the kind usually reserved for film stars, is Bo Xilai, the Communist party boss of Chongqing city in central China.
For the past six months, Mr Bo has been on a crusade that has won him countless headlines and stirred up a political hornets’ nest in Beijing. The Chongqing government has been conducting an all-out campaign against organised crime that has led to more than 3,000 arrests – including that of the leading judicial official – and prompted calls for similar action across the country. Mr Bo has also encouraged a wave of nostalgia for the Mao era, which many perceive as less corrupt. The city’s mobile phone users often receive “red text messages” of the Great Leader’s famous phrases.
Mr Bo’s campaign is lifting the lid on the ties between local party officials and the growing gangster culture. But its impact is being felt well beyond the provinces. For a start, it indicates that the battle for the senior party leadership succession in 2012 – potentially a turbulent period, when as many as seven of the nine members will be replaced – is gearing up. If the governor of an American state launched such an attention-grabbing agenda, it would be assumed he was running for national office – which is exactly what Mr Bo is doing.
“He is trying to perform his way back to Beijing,” says Huang Jing, a professor at the National University of Singapore, of the former commerce minister. “It is a well-calculated but risky gamble to get into the ‘fifth generation’ [post-2012] leadership.”
Mr Bo’s very public battles could also shift the way politics is practised in a system dominated by back-room deals and consensus decisions. President Hu Jintao exemplifies a certain type of politician – competent, dour and skilled at working the party’s inner bureaucracy. By appealing for popular support over the heads of the political elite, the charismatic and media-savvy man from Chongqing is charting new territory – call it populism with Chinese characteristics.
“He is one of a more accessible, populist new style of Chinese politician,” says David Shambaugh, a professor at George Washington University based in Beijing.
Mr Bo’s popularity could pave the way for the next generation of China’s leaders to behave both at home and abroad in a way that is more open and less rigid but also potentially more erratic and, some fear, nationalistic.
Now 60, Mr Bo has long been a rising political star. The son of revolutionary hero Bo Yibo, he grew up in Beijing and has been in party or government jobs all his life. He become well known in the 1990s as mayor of Dalian city, then governor of Liaoning province, both in the north-east, before moving to Beijing as commerce minister in 2004, when he had a number of tense negotiations with Peter Mandelson, then European Union trade commissioner. By aggressively promoting urban modernisation projects in the north-east he has appealed to those who favour economic reform, but his anti-corruption campaigns have also won support among more conservative groups.
However, at a 2007 party congress, he saw two members of his own generation promoted to the nine-man Standing Committee at the top of the party: Xi Jinping, expected to take over from Mr Hu in 2012-13; and Li Keqiang, expected to become premier. Mr Bo was appointed party secretary of the fast-growing municipality Chongqing – technically a promotion but a sideways step in some eyes.
He has made sure the city is anything but a political backwater. Last summer, the first arrests were made in a crackdown called an “anti-Triad tornado”. The public has lapped up details about the city’s gangsters. One of the most high-profile arrests was of Xie Caiping, known as the “godmother of the Chongqing underworld” because of her network of casinos, one of which was based across the road from the supreme court.
The arrests quickly began to expose the extent of organised crime. Wang Li, a law lecturer at Southwestern University in Chongqing who has written a book about gangsters, says it really expanded after 2000 when its economy began to explode. “They started entering legitimate businesses like real estate, threatening other bidders at land auctions not to raise their prices,” he says.
The trials also revealed the extent of alleged ties between gangsters and the local government, especially with the arrest of Wen Qiang, a former police chief and head of the city’s judicial bureau, who happens to be the brother-in-law of Ms Xie. The most senior of the more than 50 government officials arrested, he has been charged with accepting Rmb16m ($2.3m;
