Reading the power games in Beijing

In many ways, the cloak and dagger developments in Beijing are a throwback to an older time when communist regimes held the fort in the erstwhile Soviet Union and most of Eastern Europe. With no access to the political brass, journalists and foreign policy wonks had to scan every bit of information available, from official photographs to diplomatic gossip, to understand the twists and turns in the Party and the government. While the USSR has crumbled to make way for Putin’s neo-authoritarian Russia and most of East Europe has embraced democracy, China has gone back to the era of Mao, when the Great Helmsman’s word was the people’s will and the nation’s destiny. In Xi Jinping’s China, Li and Qin are unlikely to be even footnotes, now likely to fade into oblivion, and their records, like the late Milan Kundera wrote in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, “airbrushed” from official records. No communist regime in its pomp has been immune to this tendency, where “renegades” and “revisionists” are dumped in the dustbin of history.