Power: Opium of the political class

The corrupting influence of absolute power, with apologies to Karl Marx

 

As long ago as in 1843, Karl Marx wrote that “religion is the opium of the masses”. The current behaviour of the political class in many nations, ranging across the whole range of types of governance, from functional democracies to one-party states, to military dictatorships, makes it clear that the time has come to revise Marx’s statement and restate it as “power – the opium of the political class”.

The examination of just one example of the alleged abuse of power, which is currently being laundered very publicly in the People’s Republic of China, is more than sufficient to justify Karl Marx’s statement being updated in the proposed manner 169 years later.

Bo Xilai

The world is mesmerised by the very public dismissal and continuing expose of the alleged misdemeanours of the former Communist Party Chief of Chongqing and member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of China, Bo Xilai and his family.

Bo, described as a self-promoting populist, after being appointed Party Chief of Chongqing, has orchestrated a very public war against corruption and simultaneously fostered a revival of some aspects of Maoism, like the mass singing of nostalgic old revolutionary songs in public; he was also opposed to democratic reforms and supported a big role for the State and the Communist Party in China.

Members of the current leadership of the Communist Party, including his colleagues on the Politburo, were worried about this return to Maoism, as most of them had suffered grievously during the Mao’s Cultural Revolution and were much more comfortable with today’s Red Capitalism, which had successfully pulled so many millions of Chinese out of poverty.

Bo was aiming high; in the current once-in-a-decade leadership change in China, he was tipped to get appointed onto the Politburo’s Standing Committee, one of the nine people at the very pinnacle of power of China’s Communist Party.

Bo was a Red Princeling; his father was of the Seven Immortals who were with Mao, the Great Helmsman, at the helm of China, and a senior General of the People’s Liberation Army. Bo’s wife Gu Kalai is a daughter of a PLA General, lawyer and a business person, she is also highly connected, in a nepotistic way, to the Communist Party hierarchy. They were in every sense China’s power couple of the future, destined for higher things.

She was involved in business transactions with a Mandarin-speaking old Harrowian, Oxford educated, Englishman, Neil Haywood, who was found dead in a Chongqing hotel room. At first his death was attributed to an excess of alcohol and his body was quickly cremated. Later cyanide poisoning was claimed to be the cause of death and Gu Kalai, Mrs. Bo, who some say was present when cyanide was forced down Haywood’s throat, and a family ‘orderly’ were accused of murder.

It is claimed that Heywood had business disputes with Mrs. Gu which had resulted in the two falling out. Bo Guagua, Bo’s son, was also said to be involved in business; had been educated at Harrow, Oxford (admitted with the late Heywood’s help) and is currently attending the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. It is said he drove around Beijing in a red Ferrari, led a Bohemian lifestyle and hardly studied. But in a statement issued to Harvard’s student newspaper ‘The Crimson,’ the younger Bo had denied all these allegations.

‘Smash black’ campaign

When in power, Bo was praised for his heavy-handed crack down on organised crime in Chongqing. Many senior leaders from Beijing visited Chongqing and heaped lavish praise on his ‘smash black’ campaign, against criminals and corruption.

Things began to fall apart for Bo, when his right hand man in the campaign, Chongqing’s Chief of Police Wang Lujin, went to an American Consulate in Chengdu, an adjoining province and claimed asylum, on the grounds that his life was threatened after he found evidence that Mrs. Bo was complicit in Heywood’s murder.

However, after a full day at the US consulate, during which many a message was exchanged between the Consulate and Foggy Bottom, the US State Department in Washington D.C., Wang Lujin walked out into the custody of Chongqing’s Deputy Mayor. He has been in custody since.

Since then the victims of Bo’s arbitrary law enforcement, show trials, illegal arrests and seizures, torture and even, it is claimed, murder, have been claiming redress. A prominent billionaire and 10 other victims who claim they have been unfairly persecuted by Bo have filed retrial applications to the courts in Chongqing.

The wife of billionaire Peng Zhimin filed an application to have her husband’s sentence overturned. Peng was at one time the owner of the Chongqing Hilton, one of the wealthiest real estate tycoons in the city of Chongqing; he was sentenced to life imprisonment when Bo was in power, as a part of the ‘smash black’ campaign on charges of leading a mafia organisation, pimping, loan sharking, bribery and illegal logging.

A lawyer who set up a team of 26 independent lawyers to request retrials and cases to be reopened in Chongqing, said authorities had forced him to suspend the initiative. Li Jun a property developer, was one of Chongqing’s richest men, before Bo turned his guns on him. He is now in hiding outside China.

He says he was arrested by Bo’s Police and held for three months. He says he was charged with crimes he did not commit, such as – organising a mafia, bribery and illegally supporting religious organisations. He says he was finally freed when he agreed to pay a fine of 40 million Yuan.

It is said that Mrs. Bo ordered the killing of Heywood after they fell out, over a scheme to move millions earned through corruption to bank accounts abroad.

Relatives amass a fortune

While Bo Xilai was busy moving up the ranks of the Communist Party, it is reported that his relatives were quietly massing a fortune estimated at more than $ 160 million. They are now being exposed; his elder brother has just stepped down from the board of leading listed company in Hong Kong.

Bo’s sudden downfall also cast a sharper spotlight on the hidden wealth and power accumulated by the Communist Party’s so-called ‘revolutionary’ families. A senior fellow at the National University of Singapore’s East Asia Institute says, “This could open a can of worms. The relatives of other party leaders are also doing lots of business deals and people will begin to ask: ‘What about them? Was the Bo family the only one doing this kind of thing?’”

Relatives of high-ranking leaders in Communist China are in demand as facilitators of business deals. Laurence Brahm, a lawyer and author on China’s economy and political scene, points out that “they are sought after because they are considered conduits of power. By virtue of the fact that they are a son or daughter of someone important, when they visit the provinces they’ll get red carpet treatment from the leaders there. The business people can tag along.”

Political power a source of evil

A few years after 1843, when Karl Marx wrote that “religion is the opium of the masses,” in 1887, in England, Lord Acton, penned the words “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely,” in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton.

As Jim Powell of the Cato Institute has written: “Few recognised the dangers of political power as clearly as Lord Acton. He understood that leaders put their own interest above all and will do just about anything to stay in power. They routinely lie. They smear their competitors. They seize private assets. They destroy property. Sometimes they assassinate people, even mark multitudes for slaughter. In his essays and lectures, Acton defied the collectivist trend of his time to declare that political power was a source of evil, not redemption.” The case of Bo Xilai’s activities in Chongqing exactly fits this mode.

Limitations to power and controls on behaviour are concepts which have been found in societies from time immemorial. In any process or system, checks and balances are essential and the lack of those safeguards will result in anarchy and disaster.

When human beings first evolved, the family group had its basic rules for conduct, as tribes came together for protection from predators and other competing human beings, the recognition of the leadership of an individual and/or his family became customary. Rules evolved as to succession and settlement of leadership disputes. Gradually these evolved into codes of conduct. When the great religious philosophers came on the scene, distinct codes of conduct were enunciated.

Great rulers such as Akbar the Great of the Mughals and Emperor Dharmashoka of the Mauryas, called upon their people to abide by these rules. An example would be the Dasa Raja Dharma. Communities began to meet among themselves to set their rules, rather than wait for a leader to prescribe them, like the free men among Athenians and the Lichchavi people of the Terai in Nepal.

In time when the numbers became unwieldy, representation became a device of choice and people were chosen to express the views on behalf of a particular tribe, community, or those living in a geographical area.

In England the King was compelled to agree to the Magna Carta, to be able to continue to raise taxes. The French Revolution, the American Revolution and the Indian War of Independence (the Mutiny) were all explosions of subjugated people, who disagreed with others with unlimited power ruling them. Rules evolved as to the selection of people’s representatives, their conduct, their accountability and the timeframe during which they could operate.

Law should rule

The axiom that the law, and nothing else, should rule, became entrenched in human thought. Lord Bingham, one time England’s, Master of the Rolls, Lord Chief Justice and Senior Law Lord, in his book, ‘The Rule of Law,’ has included, accessibility of the law, equality before the law, right to a fair trial, legal accountability of servants of the state, a right to education, protection of fundamental human rights, application of law rather than discretion when deciding questions of legal liability, etc. among the fundamental eight principles which underpin the Rule of Law.

The League of Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the United Nations Organisation, were symbolic of the demise of the era of absolute power by both individuals and nation states. Rulers should abide by the rules of good governance and the ruled should only be subject to the law. Checks and balances to curb abuse of power evolved.



The pinnacle of this is probably found in the Constitution of the United States of America, today, in which an intricate set of limiting checks and balances, on Presidential power, on Federal power, on the Supreme Courts’ power, on Congress’s power, on the State’s power, on the power of the media, term limits for the President and legislators, recall provisions for legislators in some States, the sovereignty of the Constitution and the procedural limitations on amending it, etc.

Cynics have described the US Constitution as a recipe for paralysis! The alternative view is that it may be a practical framework to encourage consultation, compromise and consensus building.

Unexpected consequences

Even in Communist China, the Bo case shows, abuse of power, to an extent that threatens the existing system driven by personal greed and corruption, is not tolerated. Checks and balances on the abuse of power are triggered, even in most unexpected quarters.

When the Bo family involved Heywood in their business deals, they would have never dreamt of the consequences which have transpired today. The Law of Unexpected Consequences (which a Senior British Law Lord was heard to say, after 30 years on the Bench, was the only law he really believed in) comes in to play!

The Communist Party’s reformers were worried about Bo reverting to Mao’s strategies. It is alleged that Bo was having the phones of senior leaders tapped when they visited Chongqing. Bo’s Chongqing model of big State spending on welfare projects and the nurturing of State-owned firms is now under attack.

The World Bank and a Chinese Government think-tank recently published a report proposing a future for China by liberalising the economy and scaling back State-owned enterprises. This was anathema to Bo and his left wing conservatives such as Fa Jinggan, who runs a left wing web site, who attacked the World Bank report for “harbouring evil intentions”. He described the report as a conspiracy by America, the World Bank, think-tanks in the west and “traitors” within China.

But the reformists seem to be wining the day; they are using Bo’s removal to press for further reform. The day before Bo was sacked Prime Minister Wen publicly rebuked Bo in a manner not heard between members of the Politburo since the 1980s. Wen suggested that Chongqing’s leaders should ‘reflect’ on the Wang Lijun case. The British Government is pushing for an inquiry into Heywood’s’ death.

Accountability

Clearly, therefore, however autocratic a system may seem, however subjugated, dysfunctional, otiose and corrupted the institutions which should protect the rights of the citizen are, every enterprise such as that of the Bo family carries within it its own seeds of destruction, in the same way that birth brings with it the inevitability of death.

Excess and abuse of power beckons accountability even in a Communist dictatorship. Lord Acton’s words, that absolute power, does nothing else, but corrupts absolutely, is an irrefutable and fundamental truth.

The hierarchy of the Communist Party in China, may be in the furtherance of their own interests, could not condone the Bo family’s excesses, especially when it involved the murder of a British citizen and a reversion to Maoist tactics. With the attempt to seek political asylum in America by Chongqing’s Police Chief, Wang Lijun, a line had been crossed and the Bos had to be sacrificed.

There are similar scenes to the Bo case in Communist China being played out in all countries, both democratic and autocratic, it only re-emphasises the truth of Lord Acton’s assertion that “Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely”.

A political class addicted to power, in the manner a druggie is addicted to opium, destroys themselves. It is only a matter of time before the seeds of destruction, built into a corrupt enterprise, germinate. A cynic has said: “To really understand what the consequences of abuse of power are, write the word ‘power’ in the Sinhala script and get at the real meaning of the word, then and only then, can one understand the consequences of the abuse of power!”



(The writer is a lawyer, who has over 30 years experience as a CEO in both government and private sectors. He retired from the office of Secretary, Ministry of Finance and currently is the Managing Director of the Sri Lanka Business Development Centre.)