How extraordinary the past 10 days have been in Chinese politics. On March 9, Bo Xilai, then the high-profile controversial Chonqqing party secretary, met the overseas press, directly addressing arguably the country's biggest political scandal, involving the defection of his right-hand man. Sounding confident and even defiant, he gave the distinct impression that he still had the support of the mainland leadership, despite intense rumours to the contrary.
Then, at the end of the NPC on Wednesday, Premier Wen Jiabao, in what was probably his last major news conference broadcast live on national television, issued an unusual public rebuke to Bo and gave a stern warning that without political reforms, China risked returning to the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. That prompted many analysts to conclude Bo's days were numbered. One day later, Xinhua announced the removal of Bo as Chongqing's party chief and his replacement by Vice-Premier Zhang Dejiang. The Xinhua report seemed to suggest that Bo still remained a politburo member. Later in the day, Chongqing TV quoted Li Yuanchao, the head of the Communist Party's powerful organisation department, as telling local officials that Bo was sacked because of the negative political implications from the case involving Wang Lijun, a city vice-mayor and former police chief, who spent more than 10 hours in the US consulate in Chengdu, Sichuan province in February.
What is happening to Bo? More importantly, what are the odds that China will plunge into a new Cultural Revolution if political reforms are not implemented?
The replies to those two questions are somewhat interlinked, underlying the tremendous challenges facing the party over its legitimacy.
Let's start with the possible return of the Cultural Revolution, which was launched by Mao Zedong and unleashed 10 years of terror and horror on the Chinese people, history, culture and government from 1966 to 1976. The period, which saw tens of millions of officials and intellectuals purged, many of whom died, has left indelible scars on the collective conscience of those people who went through it.
But much like the government's bloody crackdown on student demonstrations on June 1989, the mainland leadership has swept the atrocities of that period under the carpet and focused mainlanders' attention on the achievements the party has made over the past 30 years.
While the leadership may be happy to see that most of today's younger generations have little knowledge of that period, just like their scant knowledge of the June 4 incident, this gave Bo and the country's leftists a great opportunity to assert their political agenda.