Dependência ocidental da China no tocante a minerais críticos - Lily Ottinger (China Talk)

 Dependência ocidental da China no tocante a minerais críticos:

China's Other Minerals Monopoly: autonomous mining!

LILY OTTINGER

China Talk, JUL 30

Today’s guest post was authored by Nima Khorrami, a Stockholm-based Research Associate at the Arctic Institute, Centre for Circumpolar Security Studies.

After decades of neglect, Washington has adopted a coherent and “forceful” response to China’s dominance over critical minerals. China controls an estimated 91 percent of global rare earth refining, dominates the processing of a wide range of minerals, and has demonstrated repeatedly that it is willing to weaponise that position. The United States has responded through a range of initiatives and policy packages including Executive Order 14241, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and Pax Silica. Add bilateral deals with Australia, Japan, the DRC, and Saudi Arabia, and the result is undeniably a more aggressive and cohesive mineral strategy than the United States has attempted in decades.

The problem is not with any of these agreements and frameworks. Instead, it is with what is systematically absent from them. The entire architecture of American mineral strategy, and indeed the EU’s parallel effort under its Critical Raw Materials Act and RESourceEU, is built around two variables: where minerals are located and who processes them. What it consistently underweights is a third variable that will most likely prove equally consequential over the medium term: who controls the technology that operates the mines themselves. This constitutes the central strategic blind spot in the West’s mineral autonomy agenda because China is not just dominant in mineral processing. Beijing is also rapidly establishing dominance in the operational technology of extraction; the autonomous systems, industrial AI, connectivity infrastructure, and integrated machine intelligence that will define how the world’s future mines will run. Today, we’ll explore China’s dominance in autonomous mining technology and what to do about it.

If that dominance goes unchecked, the US and its allies could succeed in securing access to mineral deposits across friendly jurisdictions and still find those mines dependent on Chinese operational technology to function.

Does Manufacturing Matter? - Chris Miller (China Talk)

 Um importante artigo sobre os mitos e verdades da desindustrialização e as novas estruturas da competividade internacional entre grandes atores (o Brasil não se qualifica nesse cenário). PRA

Does Manufacturing Matter?

Chris Miller with a guest post on goal-setting for industrial policy

JORDAN SCHNEIDER AND CHRIS MILLER SubstACK, CHINA TALK, DEC 29, 2025

READ IN APP

While 2025 was, in USTR Jameison Greer’s phrasing, “the year of the tariff”, industrial policy served as a strong leitmotif. From the US-China rare earths saga to equity stakes, golden shares and prepurchase agreements, Trump 2.0 has wholly embraced the sort of muscular intervention into private markets that would have made the GOP of just a decade ago cry bloody murder.¹ Looking past this administration, JD Vance and Rubio, the two 2028 nominee frontrunners, both have Senate track records filled with bill proposals around industrial banks and domestic manufacturing promotion.

But for all the motion around creative applications of industrial policy in America, it’s been surprising to me how little thought has been applied to the big questions around these swings. Key questions I see unanswered include: 

• What should the long term goals of national industrial policy be?

• What does it mean to be an economically secure nation? Where should marginal dollars be spent to promote economic security? 

• Just how important is manufacturing relative to services? 

• What are the tradeoffs involved in furthering these aims?

To kick us off, Chris Miller, Chip War author and reigning belt holder for most ChinaTalk appearances, published an excellent piece on what the core policy questions are for industrial policy. We’re rerunning this from his exellent new substack below.

Exploring these themes will be a focus of our coverage in 2026. Look out for essay contests coming in the next few weeks on this theme. Leave in the comments your ideas for what our first prompts should be!

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The Economist, in a recent survey of Europe’s economic woes, sparked a minor controversy by urging the continent to adjust to intense Chinese competition in manufacturing by reorienting toward services. “De-industrialization,” it argued, “need not be synonymous with decay.”

The argument goes like this: rich economies are rich because of high value-add services. America is the least industrial (measured by manufacturing as % GDP) of all big economies, but also the richest. One reason that Germany and Japan are relatively more industrial is because they never developed much of a software industry. They’re more industrial partly because their manufacturers are relatively more successful (eg, their auto firms retained more market share the US ones over the past few decades) but also partly because they’ve underperformed in high value services.

Here’s auto manufacturing, where the US has dramatically underperformed the trend (data from Gemini):

And here’s software market cap and market share, also from Gemini. Ask “would you rather have: 1) a world in which GM performed as well as Volkswagen over the past 30 years or 2) Silicon Valley?” the answer is obvious.

Perhaps that’s an unfair phrasing of the question, assuming that the only options were to either double down on an aged-out industrial base or to deindustrialize in favor of software.

Was there an alternative? Peter Thiel has quipped that we were promised flying cars and instead got 140 characters. Could we have redirected talent to produce less social media and more SpaceX? I’m unsure, though I’d note that Elon’s initial fortune came from enabling online shopping (PayPal) and Peter Thiel was an early Facebook investor. Palmer Luckey founded Anduril after he’d already sold a business to Facebook. It’s not easy to separate America’s titans of deep tech from the profits of the internet economy.

I’m a supporter of the “reindustrialize America” impulse. But I also haven’t seen clear thinking around the tradeoffs it implies. We need to prioritize when allocating people, dollars, and other scarce resources. So whether and when does manufacturing matter? Here are some ideas.

1. Jobs

I find completely unconvincing the theory, commonly hawked by politicians of both parties, that manufacturing is a good source of “jobs.” Even supposing that it’s true that manufacturing jobs pay better than service sector jobs on average (I haven’t yet parsed this data carefully), manufacturing is only ~10% of employment in the U.S. and so a 20% increase in manufacturing employment will be negligible at the economy-wide level. Moreover, the only way to manufacture in the U.S. cost effectively is to aggressively automate. So as a theory of policy, “manufacturing is good for jobs” makes no sense.

2. Driving productivity growth

I also don’t think much of the theory that you need a big manufacturing sector to drive productivity improvements in an advanced economy. If that were true, Germany would be richer and America poorer. But America has deindustrialized (manufacturing as % GDP) even as its economy has outperformed. I’m open to the idea that developing economies sometimes need manufacturing to drive productivity growth—a debate that has huge ramifications eg for India, but none for the United States.

The tech sector is a useful case. As Patrick McGee argues in Apple in China, America’s largest consumer tech firm is inextricably intertwined with China-based manufacturing. Perhaps hopelessly so. I worry a lot about the geopolitical implications of this. But I don’t worry much about the economic implications.

A decade or two after “capturing” Apple, Chinese firms still haven’t captured much economic value. Around a quarter of the bill of materials of an iPhone accrues to China-based suppliers, but generally for the lower margin components. A lot of the higher value manufacturing done in China is in factories owned by foreign firms, as Vishnu Venugopalan and I have explored.

Apple still makes ~50% margins across the iPhone business. It makes ~80% of all global profits from selling smartphones, despite selling only a fraction of the world’s phones. Chinese brands—Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi, Honor, etc—dominate the industry by units sold. Most of the world’s phones are assembled in their neighborhood. But these companies haven’t found a way to make much money. Samsung’s done better than the Chinese firms at profitability, but far worse than Apple, despite that Samsung is much “closer” to the manufacturing process, making displays, memory chips, logic chips, and other components itself. In other words, the smartphone company furthest from the manufacturing has made the most money, now for nearly two decades. It’s actually pretty shocking.

If you assume away geopolitics—which of course we can’t, more on this below— smartphones suggest that there’s no generalizable link between manufacturing, productivity improvements, and value extraction. I’m open to this dynamic existing in certain industries, but it doesn’t seem like a strong case for broad-based support for manufacturing.

3. Defense and geopolitical leverage

The best argument against The Economist’s embrace of deindustrialization came from Sander Tordoir, who wrote in a letter to the editor: “Europe will need drones and tanks, not just consultants.” The ability to make stuff has military and geopolitical importance.

The claim that manufacturing matters for geopolitical power is obvious in the abstract. We’ve all studied the “arsenal of democracy.” We’ve lived through economic warfare around manufactured products like chips and magnets.

Yet the policy relevant question is not “is manufacturing geopolitically useful?” but rather “given resource constraints and a preexisting factor allocation, how much should we spend to boost our manufacturing capabilities? Should we target a) pure defense, b) dual use, c) chokepoints, or d) across-the-board civilian production?”

We haven’t put much collective thought into the answers. We agree that chips and magnets matter, while t-shirts don’t. What we disagree about is everything in between.

Here’s President Trump:

I’m not looking to make t-shirts, to be honest. I’m not looking to make socks. We can do that very well in other locations. We are looking to do chips and computers and lots of other things, and tanks and ships.

And CFR President Michael Froman (and former USTR) on ChinaTalk earlier this month:

Can we take T-shirts and sneakers and toys from China without compromising our national security? I would think so.

The problem is, there’s a whole lot of manufacturing that falls in between t-shirts and rare earth magnets. Of America’s ~$2 trillion in imports, only ~7% is textile products like clothes and furniture (using the excellent Atlas of Economic Complexity’s trade categorization.) Agricultural products are something similar. Toys are less than 2%. Games are 0.3%, sporting equipment 0.2%, and Christmas decorations are 0.14%. In other words: take out toys, textiles, t-shirts, and the like, and the U.S. is still importing a ton of manufactured goods.

The key remaining categories by complexity and scale are: cars, computers, phones, a wide variety of industrial and electronic machinery, chemicals and metal products. If you want to say something serious about reindustrialization, you need a view on these good. Should we be producing more of them?

Here’s a visualization: green goods are deemed by Harvard’s Atlas of Economic Complexity to be “complex” goods—roughly, high value. The yellow are simpler things produced by a larger number of trading partners, that are lower value and at lower risk of monopolization. As you’ll see, there’s a lot of green.

The scale of imported manufactures—including relatively complex, relatively higher-value added goods—illustrates the scale of trade offs around reindustrialization efforts. For reckoning with these trade offs as they relate to national security, I see a couple of hard-to-answer empirical questions.

1. What’s the risk a given product can be monopolized and used for leverage, like China’s done with rare earth oxides and magnets this year?

Economists have produced rough estimates of elasticities, but you often need deep supply chain knowledge to fully understand these dynamics. If it were easy, we wouldn’t see so many supply chain disruptions in the auto industry.

2. How shiftable is manufacturing capacity in a crisis?

One of the arguments in favor of building industrial capacity is that it can be repurposed if needed. Ford made tanks and planes during World War II. Yet how generalizable is such repurposing?

3. How tightly linked are today’s manufacturing ecosystems and tomorrow’s?

If losing today’s manufacturing capability also prevents a country from making tomorrow’s key products—and if benefits accrued not to a specific firm, but to a broad ecosystem—it might be reasonable to subsidize it. How strong are these ecosystem effects? Some good historical examples:

4. What’s the opportunity cost?

Even acknowledging the scale of China’s manufacturing dominance and the incapacity of our defense industrial base, we still must ask whether a marginal dollar is best spent on trying to shore up our manufacturing base versus buying defense-specific or other capabilities. Not that I wouldn’t gladly take some more manufacturing capacity, if it were free. But it isn’t. We’re constrained by labor, electricity, capital, etc, as anyone building a factory in the U.S. will immediately report.

Chris Miller's Newsletter Technology, politics, supply chains, chips, AI, economics, history. And whatever else is on my mind.

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See the recent riff I had refelcting on Solyndra with Rahm Emanuel. Rahm: To your point about socialism — Solyndra. We invested in this new solar firm and everyone’s like, “Oh my God, oh my God!”, and here are these guys investing in and putting public money in companies with zero operating capacity.”

A guest post by Chris Miller Chris Miller is author of Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology, a New York Times bestseller, a professor at the Fletcher School and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

A luta contra a corrupção na China: algo como os 12 trabalhos de Hércules? - Lily Ottinger (China Talk)

A história pouco edificante, da qual tomei conhecimento quando ainda vivia na China em 2010, e segui (pela imprensa ocidental) o extraordinário "crescimento financeiro" das elites do PCC, pouco depois abatidas pela nova administração de Xi Jinping. PRA 

CCP Purges as Camp

A Bo Xilai Retrospective!

LILY OTTINGER China Talk, DEC 15, 2025

Anon contributor “Soon Kueh” occasionally writes about China and delights in bureaucracy.

Disclaimer: All the quotes and information are obtained directly from Pin Ho and Wenguang Huang’s A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel: Murder, Money, and an Epic Power Struggle in China unless stated otherwise.

Under Xi’s regime, CCP purges have been exceptional in terms of quantity and quality. Xi has now purged more officials than Mao ever did, and he is not stopping. While purging is now a normalised feature of Xi’s rule, fresh rounds of purges always invite new political divinations, rumours of succession politics, and new speculations on the cabinet’s factional alignments.

While understanding realpolitik is fun, what about the fanfare, the drama, the campiness associated with purges? Unfortunately, because of the party’s opaque politics, we are rarely privy to the internal processes of a successful purge and can only debate about the outcomes once the dust settles. Alas, we can only imagine what it’s like being a fly on the wall in the recent PLA purge, but we can draw from memory to extrapolate. So far, the only crack that allowed us a rare glimpse into the party’s shrouded political intrigue occurred 13 years ago, during the purge of Bo Xilai. For longtime party watchers, it was a strangely serendipitous time to witness how the chips fell out of place — from Wang Lijun’s 王立军 botched defection at the American embassy, to Gu Kailai’s 谷开来 shoddy murder of British businessman Neil Heywood, and the resulting purge of Bo’s faction. Borrowing mainly from Pin Ho 何頻 and Wenguang Huang’s 黃聞光 A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel: Murder, Money, and an Epic Power Struggle in China, this article takes a trip down memory lane to revisit Bo’s fantastical downfall and indulges in a campiness rarely associated with the CCP.

Act 1: The Hero’s Return to Greatness

Bo Xilai in 2007 (Source)

Our tale begins as a wǔxiá 武侠 novel, with Bo Xilai as our main protagonist, attempting a return to greatness. The revenge trope of the fallen prince is a common theme in the wǔxiá genre and Chinese historical dramas. Forced into exile, the disgraced noble prince swears to bide his time in the shadows as he slowly accumulates resources(韬光养晦 and plans for his return to glory.

As the son of former high-ranking revolutionary Bo Yibo 薄一波, Bo Xilai’s life fundamentally embodies this trope (although he is obviously not a conventional hero). Princeling by birth, his playmates included Xi Jinping and Liu Yuan 刘源, son of Liu Shaoqi. However, Bo’s life soon took a downturn when his father was purged during the Cultural Revolution and languished in jail for twelve years. As a result, Bo and his brothers were detained in a youth delinquency center for 5 years from 1967-1972. Bo’s life improved in his thirties, when his father was finally reinstated as vice premier. His father’s return to power signaled that young Bo’s exile was over and that it was finally appropriate for him to enter politics.

Tired of quietly lurking in the shadows, Bo’s political ambitions were obvious from the start. In 1982, he joined the Party Central Committee Secretariat as a research assistant. Following the playbook of elite officials who forged their careers by conducting revitalization efforts in the rural countryside, Bo requested a transfer in 1984 and was ultimately posted to Jin county 金县 in Liaoning. His career progressed steadily afterwards, alongside his vanity and flamboyance. In 1987, Bo became district party chief in Dalian, where he sought to beautify the city through extensive greenification (which was a questionable priority given the region’s severe water shortage) and heavy redevelopment. He was both an ambitious princeling and a debauched ruler. He had an unabashed love for beautiful women. At one point, he used government money to host fashion shows with gorgeous young women to demonstrate Dalian’s immense beauty, and even ordered the police department to create a squad of policewomen who patrolled on horseback. He was also aptly nicknamed “Bo Qilai” 薄起来, which translates to “Get-it-Up Bo” because of his lustfulness.

During his ascent, his burgeoning political ambitions ruffled many feathers. In 1994, he built Xinghai Square 星海广场, the largest city square in the world, to celebrate the handover of Hong Kong.

Xinghai Square, Dalian City (Source)

It wasn’t just the size that caught people’s attention, but the huábiǎo 华表 that was erected there. As a huábiǎo is a ceremonial column traditionally placed in front of tombs or palaces that usually signified imperial authority, many observers thought that this artistic decision revealed Bo’s thirst for influence — especially since the huábiǎo in Dalian was much larger than the one in Beijing. Rumors even alleged that Jiang Zemin was shocked when he first saw the huábiǎo in Dalian during a visit.

The now-demolished huábiǎo in Xinghai Square (Source)

Like a classic wǔxiá novel where the protagonist must undergo many trials and tribulations, Bo’s career was not all smooth sailing. In fact, his final posting, Chongqing, was initially viewed as a demotion. But to be fair, Bo is no hero. In fact, it was his domineering personality that led to his Chongqing reassignment.

Bo was initially promoted to deputy party secretary and interim governor of Liaoning in 2001 after he left Dalian. (He was given a huge sendoff by residents, although some eventually disclosed that they were promised free KFC by local officials if they attended). However, because his strong-headed personality did not gel with the Liaoning leadership, President Hu Jintao brought him to Beijing to succeed ailing Commerce Minister Lu Fuyan 吕福源 in 2002. His stint at the Commerce Ministry earned him the unpleasant nickname “Mao Zedong Jr. 小毛泽东” and he clashed with his superior, Vice Premier Wu Yi 吴仪, who oversaw the ministry. Bo sought to replace Wu Yi when she announced her imminent retirement in 2008, but was thwarted by Wu’s objections. Against his will, Bo was posted to Chongqing as party secretary — although he eventually looked at it as an opportunity to exercise more political autonomy to implement his own policies.

Act 2: Every Hero Needs a Sidekick

Bo’s narrative arc is fascinating because of its capacity for genre-shifting. While his story initially resembles the return arc of The Dark Knight Rises, where Batman painstakingly crawls out of the underground prison to defeat Bane, Bo’s stint in Chongqing embodies the spirit of a classic buddy cop film, with a twist of tragicomedy.

Bo Xilai’s stint in Chongqing was unforgettable. His year-long “Smashing Black, Singing Red” 打黑唱红 anti-corruption campaign was implemented by 10,000 police, divided into 329 investigation teams. Allegedly, nearly 5,000 arrests were made and 3,273 people were prosecuted; 520 of these cases resulted in a conviction, with 65 people executed or sentenced to life imprisonment. In the same time frame, the “police successfully captured 4,172 previously unsolved cases and broke up 128 crime rings.” While later reports claimed that the numbers were heavily exaggerated, the operation’s massive scale was enough for Beijing to become wary of Bo.

In comes Bo’s loyal sidekick and fellow buddy cop Wang Lijun, who was responsible for executing much of the campaign. Wang was the former Chongqing police chief and deputy mayor. Bo and Wang’s initial connection has been the subject of much speculation, which often veers towards the fantastical. Supposedly, Wang was an elite cop who cracked the mysterious attempted mercury poisoning of Bo’s wife Gu Kailai after he was enlisted by family friend and billionaire Xu Ming 徐明. Unfortunately, the most realistic story is also the most boring: Wang was introduced to Bo by former security czar, Zhou Yongkang 周永康, who owed Wang a favour.

Wang Lijun in 2012 (Source)

In many ways, Wang was as narcissistic as Bo, if not more. He always “had an entourage of more than twenty camera-carrying assistants” who followed him everywhere and recorded his every word and action. Quotes and pictures deemed good enough were then either “compiled into a book which included lavish praise from subordinates,” or posted on the news. If the photos taken were too ugly, the photographer needed to Photoshop them until Wang was satisfied. Wang was also a terrible boss. He once jailed his secretary for “talking back to him over a trivial matter.” In just two years in Chongqing, he burned through fifty-one personal secretaries; one was even fired on his first day. And like Bo, Wang had a love for women — his bodyguard posse mainly consisted of women decked in red uniforms.

But Wang was no princeling, a fact which clearly haunted him. He started from scratch as a volunteer in a neighbourhood watch group before becoming a police officer in Tieling 铁岭, Liaoning. Thereafter, he was posted to Jinzhou 锦州, Liaoning, and finally Chongqing. Much of Wang’s career involved a dash of deceit and savviness that easily rivalled Anna Delvy and Elizabeth Holmes. To take advantage of the affirmative action policies that benefit ethnic minorities, Wang switched his ethnicity from Han to Mongolian to contest for a delegate spot at the 14^th Communist Party Congress in 1992. To make up for his lack of college credentials, Wang embarked on a retroactive crusade to collect them all:

“His official résumé indicates that he obtained an [MBA]…at something called “California University” … Wang also obtained an eMBA from the China Northeastern Finance University between 2004 and 2006, when he was deputy mayor of Jinzhou. A professor at Beijing University said Wang’s eMBA degree has no academic value because the program is a revenue-generating engine for the university.”

Despite his suspicious credentials, “more than ten of China’s prestigious universities have made Wang an adjunct professor and doctoral supervisor.” The president of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications even claimed that Wang had a PhD in law. Chinese state media also reported that “Wang was an expert on forensics, criminal psychology, and law; had written five books on law; and had presided over eighteen legal-research projects.” Wang was supposedly also a genius inventor: he has filed more than 119 patents on China’s State Intellectual Property Office website, “from police equipment and alarm systems to police raincoats and policewomen’s boots.”

Wang’s inferiority complex found refuge in Bo’s princeling status. With Bo’s backing, Wang confidently unleashed Chongqing’s anti-corruption campaign that terrorized the city and made excessive surveillance and paranoia the new normal.

However, this camaraderie did not last long.

Act 3: The Slap that Ended it All

The genre shifts again. We are now regressing in time and now reside in the genre of the Chinese historical period drama, where political intrigue, murder, and petty catfights — alongside the occasional gender bender — unfold.

To say that a slap ended it all would be an exaggeration. But it is not entirely false to say that the slap did create the fissure that caused the cataclysmic fallout between Bo and Wang. But first, we must return to the catalyst: Neil Heywood’s murder.

Out of all the career switches an ESL tutor can make, Neil Heywood chose the riskiest option. He started working as an English tutor to affluent families in 1998. However, with the suave confidence of a white man in early reform China, Heywood reached out to Bo Xilai’s wife, Gu Kailai, and introduced himself as an alumnus of Harrow — an elite UK private school where Gu’s son Bo Guagua 薄瓜瓜 was studying. Gu agreed to meet Heywood in London thereafter, and the rest was history. Heywood successfully transitioned out of his teaching gig to become a part-time nanny and part-time money launderer — arguably the most successful ESL career switch in history.

Bo Guagua (right), with his parents (Source)

Heywood and Gu’s relationship had always been intense, but their relationship became severely strained when Heywood ran out of money in 2011 and started harassing Bo Guagua. (Heywood even forcibly detained Bo Guagua in his apartment once.) Consequently, Gu viewed Heywood as a threat that needed to be neutralised. In choosing between framing Heywood for drug trafficking and poisoning him to death, Gu eventually preferred the latter for its simplicity. Throughout this process, Wang was actively assisting Gu and brainstorming ideas to get rid of Heywood. (Wang even suggested killing Heywood in a shootout and planting drugs on him, but this idea was eventually rejected as it would have caused a massive international scandal and risked damaging Chongqing’s reputation.)

However, Wang’s assistance eventually turned into blackmail. Around the same time, Wang feared that his career was coming to an end because his political opponents were zeroing in on him; many of his old friends in Tieling were investigated by the Central Disciplinary Inspection Commission and prosecuted. Wang feared that he would be next. When Wang realised that Bo remained unconcerned, he took things into his own hands. After Gu double-crossed Wang and tried to destroy evidence of Heywood’s murder behind his back, Wang reached out to Bo directly and informed him of Gu’s role in Heywood’s murder. However, this did not end well: when Gu falsely denied her role, Bo slapped Wang for his ungratefulness and betraying him.

This slap was the turning point that “shattered the last shreds of [Wang’s] illusions about dignity,” according to a police officer in Chongqing. Realising that he was “merely Bo Xilai’s hound dog,” Wang reopened the investigation into Heywood’s murder. Unfortunately, Wang was soon fired by Bo thereafter. Although Wang and Gu had a brief reconciliation — during which he “allegedly slapped his own face in repentance” — Bo still sought to “eliminate” him, prompting Wang to find new exit options.

Drawing on his talent for self-reinvention, Wang cosplayed twice — once as an old woman, and the other as an old man — and started embassy shopping. Unfortunately, his undercover trip to the Guangzhou British Embassy as an old woman was unsuccessful; visa officials ignored him when he probed the possibility of political asylum. His second expedition became an international scandal, except this time Wang cosplayed as an old man in the American embassy in Chengdu. Indeed, Wang’s strategy of causing massive political damage at his own expense 杀敌一千自损八百 ensured that Bo could not easily kill him, albeit at the cost of the party’s reputation.

There is a conspiracy theory that Wang’s brazenness in entering the US consulate was a result of working with the anti-Bo faction in Beijing, but this cannot be fully proven. Either way, it was a win-win situation for both parties: Bo got taken down, and Wang saved his skin.

Act 4: Schadenfreude and Old Debts

We are still in a historical period drama. The genre has not shifted, except that most of the drama now unfolds in the imperial court, where backstabbing and political intrigue are the norm. Occasionally, petty disputes arise and old debts are settled.

Initially, many of Bo’s political opponents delighted in the convenient opportunity to get rid of him. After all, his tremendous anti-corruption campaign implicated many in Beijing. It was rumoured that even former Premier Wen Jiabao secretly ordered “the deputy minister of state security to dig up dirt on Bo” in 2009 because he was against the latter’s anti-corruption crusade. Bo’s association with Heywood’s murder, alongside the international ruckus it caused, was thus a perfect opportunity to drag all the skeletons out of the closet. The family’s routine money laundering, close relationship with Heywood (who was a suspected British spy), chummy relationships with billionaires such as Xu Ming, the murder allegations, and other accusations of corruption became prime fodder to eliminate Bo from the party for good.

It was also a time to settle petty debts. Remember the time when Jiang Zemin visited Dalian and was shocked by the huábiǎo that rivalled Beijing’s? During that visit, Bo covered the city with life-size posters of Jiang, only to tear them down immediately after Jiang left. This apparently upset Jiang, who began to view Bo as a “mere sycophant,” “deceptive,” and overly politically ambitious. Unfortunately, for Bo, it was Jiang, his former mentor, who denounced him as morally unscrupulous and deserving of punishment. (We can only guess how many more petty incidents like these played a part in Bo’s fall from grace.)

Nonetheless, the attack against Bo became too much of a good thing as it brought increased scrutiny to other party members. On October 25th, 2012, the very same day Bo lost his position as a delegate to the National People’s Congress, a New York Times article divulged that Wen Jiabao’s 温家宝 family had a startling estimated net worth of $2.7 billion. Correspondent David Barboza reported that the wealth was “hidden behind layers of partnership and investment vehicles involving friends, work colleagues, and business partners.” Bloomberg also published an article on the sprawling elite fortunes of the descendants of former revolutionaries shortly after.

To avoid disrupting the leadership transition by kicking up more dirt, punishment was swiftly meted out. Gu was given a suspended death sentence on August 9th, 2012, while Bo was issued a life sentence the year after. Bo Guagua escaped unscathed and now resides in Canada, where he spends time writing long eulogies about his dead dog. He married a Taiwanese hospital heiress in 2024.

Conclusion: C is for Camp

CCP politics are inherently campy because of their strong affinity for theatrical excess. Campy politics are only a natural outcome when so much weight is placed on slogans, performativity, and backroom gestures. Add in the fact that many party members have feuds that trace back to the Cultural Revolution, and the opportunities for camp and petty drama are endless. While the dust is settled for now, nothing stays buried for long. Maybe in the next few decades, we’ll see a political comeback by Bo’s faction.

But for now, we wait.

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