One of the cardinal rules of Chinese diplomacy is that China doesn’t mix business with politics. The precept fits in nicely with the primacy that China places on sovereignty, respecting the right of a country—or at least the leaders of the moment—to determine how things ought to work. And, of course, it also provides Beijing with the opportunity to rationalize its lack of enthusiasm for tough foreign policy action in places such as Iran, Syria, Sudan, or Zimbabwe as a matter of principle.

Of course, as I have written elsewhere, doing business in any country—particularly when you supply a country with arms as Beijing has done in both Sudan and Zimbabwe—is in fact mixing business with politics. And the ongoing competition between Beijing and Taipei to purchase diplomatic relations with small, often poor, states is nothing if not the blatant mixing of business with politics. So on the face of it, the claim is rather silly. Moreover, there have been more subtle cases in the past—such as when Beijing postponed a purchase of Airbus planes after then-President Sarkozy agreed to meet with the Dalai Lama in 2008 and its rare earth export slowdown to Japan in the wake of the East China Sea dispute in 2010, to name a few—that suggest Beijing has not been unwilling to exert a bit of economic leverage to punish a perceived political transgression.

In fact, it appears that Beijing’s willingness to mix business with politics is increasingly an open secret.  In the midst of China’s dispute with the Philippines over control of a shoal in the South China Sea, Beijing has called on Chinese travel agencies to suspend tours to the Philippines. There have also been some fruit shipments blocked from the Philippines to China, although this problem apparently began before the standoff in the South China Sea.

A similar theme is playing out this month across a couple of oceans. The state-supported Global Times has called for Beijing to suspend some economic cooperation with the United Kingdom in retaliation for Prime Minister David Cameron meeting with the Dalai Lama. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has chimed in by saying that the meeting “Seriously interfered with China’s internal affairs, undermined China’s core interests, and hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.”

And of course, Tokyo felt Beijing’s political sting when it hosted the World Uyghur Congress, an exile group opposed to China’s policies in Xinjiang that is considered by Beijing to be a terrorist organization. Beijing cancelled a meeting between Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi and Hiromasa Yonekura, the Chairman of the Japanese business group Keidanren, to demonstrate its displeasure with Tokyo.

Despite Beijing’s massive economic weight, however, its efforts to throw that weight around are unlikely to succeed. The problem for Beijing, as I see it, is three-fold.

First, on the rare occasion that anyone listens to China’s protestations and does what Beijing wants, it seems that Beijing doesn’t then return the favor. (See, for example, President Obama postponing a meeting with the Dalai Lama before his trip to Beijing in 2009, and China’s ungenerous treatment of the U.S. president in return.) Once countries see that China takes without giving back, no one will want to give any more.

Second, it is very difficult to use economic leverage to get other states to adopt your interests as their own when they really don’t want to. Here Beijing can look to the United States for instruction. At a recent meeting I attended, when a senior Myanmar/Burmese official was asked whether the U.S. sanctions had any impact on the country’s decision to transition to democracy and open the economy, the official said—rather unsurprisingly, I think—that they really hadn’t, because the sanctions had been around for years.

Third, Beijing may simply be in danger of overestimating its economic leverage. In the case of the Philippines, for example, even though China is the Philippines’ third largest trading partner, the Chinese are not among the top three tourist groups visiting the Philippines and Filipino Tourism Secretary Ramon Jimenez Jr. seems unfazed by China’s pullout. He has simply suggested that the Philippines will look to Japan and other “traditionally stronger markets” to make up the difference.

China has long mixed business with politics in a most unattractive fashion; it just hasn’t been willing to admit it. Will it make a difference if Beijing finally fesses up? My guess is that greater honesty won’t make much of a difference outside China, where everyone is pretty well aware of the gap between Chinese rhetoric and Chinese actions on the ground. The opportunity rests within China itself. If China’s leaders can take the first step to acknowledge honestly what it is they are doing, they may be able to take the second step and realize that what they are doing is not, in fact, yielding what they want. That, at least, might put them a step ahead of the United States, where we are still waiting for Cuba to see the error of its ways.

China’s public security apparatus and all its friends in the propaganda and censorship departments must be exhausted—I know that I am exhausted just trying to keep up with them. Within the past month, they have had to figure out what to do about a blind political activist who escaped from illegal house arrest and traveled hundreds of miles to Beijing to take refuge in the American Embassy. They have had to keep an eye on 300 million Chinese micro-bloggers to determine who might have crossed a line here or there as the weibosphere has gone nuts over tales of leadership corruption and Chen Guangcheng’s harrowing journey. And they have had to keep watch over all those pesky foreign journalists who have had the temerity to practice actual journalism. Then, of course, there is the 800 pound gorilla—mapping out a strategy for managing the investigation and subsequent trials of former Politburo member Bo Xilai and his wife, Gu Kailai, who have been charged with “serious disciplinary infractions” and murder respectively.

But with all of this effort, what have they really achieved? No doubt those whose job it is to block and stop have a lot of resources at their disposal—chief among them is an internal security budget that exceeds the country’s defense budget. When they tell China’s Internet providers to shut down a micro-blog or two, the servers do it. One popular micro-blogger, whose account was blocked in recent weeks, said in an interview with the South China Morning Post [paywall], “The closure was not carried out by Sina.com voluntarily…but I am not shocked by the decision, given that anything can happen in the country.” Whatever the intention behind closing down his blog, clearly he has not been deterred from speaking out. The security apparatus also helped take care of one foreign journalist, Melissa Chan, by blocking the renewal of her visa; it’s not clear whether this came as a result of her work or the reporting by some of her Al-Jazeera colleagues.  Whatever the case, China pays a stiff price for this kind of behavior. It’s tough to promote your soft power when you don’t let people into your country to write about you. The toughest nut, however, has yet to be cracked: how to be transparent about the extraordinary situation surrounding Bo Xilai and his family, to contain the situation so there isn’t further fallout within the leadership, and to persuade everyone in and outside China that the transition to the next generation is proceeding as planned. So far, the only whisper of a strategy is proclaiming the Bo case a triumph of the rule of law in China and rumors that the Party Congress is going to be delayed by several months. (These rumors, themselves, however, have been proclaimed by Chinese news outlets to be without merit and the work of “overseas hostile elements” with “ulterior motives” who want “publicity.” )

A job maintaining control in China is not for the faint of heart. And it seems that even with all the time, money, and effort they expend to keep the dam from breaking, they are like the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dyke. The pressure behind the Great Wall just keeps mounting. All those people, all their interests, and all their voices just won’t stop coming.

It is still too early to call the outcome of the Chen Guangcheng case a home run, but for now Chen has at least made it to first base. Last week the Chinese activist—a blind, self-taught lawyer known for defending those under threat of forced abortion or forced eviction in particular—escaped from extrajudicial house arrest in Shandong province and fled to the U.S. embassy in Beijing. After six days, on May 1, he left the embassy and was reunited with his family in a Beijing hospital, where he is now receiving medical treatment. Reportedly, once he leaves the hospital, he will be relocated out of Shandong and able to pursue formal studies at a university. In the meantime, Beijing has indicated that it will investigate potential wrongdoing by local Shandong authorities.

Chen, the United States, and reform-oriented leaders in Beijing could scarcely have scripted a better ending to the political drama that had become Chen’s life. Chen took a big risk in seeking refuge in the U.S. Embassy. He put his family in jeopardy, cast his future into the very uncertain winds of U.S.-China relations, and faced the threat of being branded a traitor. But Chen also played it smart. He offered Beijing a face-saving way out of the predicament by making clear that he was not choosing the United States over China; he repeatedly reiterated his desire to remain in his homeland. Even more importantly, he played into the notion—however ludicrous—that Beijing somehow did not know of his plight and appealed via video directly to Premier Wen Jiabao to look into his case.

It appears as though China’s leaders took Chen’s offer of plausible deniability and ran with it, promising not only safe passage for him and his newly reunified family (he hadn’t seen his son in years) but also a university education and the possibility of seeing his jailors jailed.

Nonetheless, no one is celebrating quite yet. Too much uncertainty remains. First, there needs to be an official statement by Beijing confirming the details of the deal, thus far outlined only by U.S. officials. So far, the official news service Xinhua has done little more than publish a demand for an apology from the United States. Second, many of Chen’s friends and associates remain unconvinced by Beijing’s apparent pledges, seeing little hope that the blind lawyer will remain safe over the long run. Third, there have been unconfirmed rumors that Chen left the U.S. Embassy under duress after receiving a phone call from his wife saying that his family would be beaten if he did not leave the embassy.

Nothing is straight forward or simple in Beijing these days. Rumors of an investigation into Bo Xilai ally and top public security official Zhou Yongkong are coupled with reports that the website of one of China’s leading economic reformers Mao Yushi has been shut down. Within the broader battle for China’s political future, however, the case of Chen Guangcheng has the potential to give life to the new narrative begun with the downfall of Bo Xilai: that China is indeed beginning to practice the rule of law. Only after the Strategic and Economic Dialogue finishes up and the Americans go home this weekend, however, will we have any real clarity as to whether Chen will be home free.

Last week I participated in the Fortune Brainstorm GREEN conference, a two-and-a-half day meeting in California that brought together money people, inventors, CEOs, chief sustainability officers, journalists, and policy analysts to talk about what is going on in the world of clean and green tech. The meeting struck me as unusual for a couple of reasons.

First, there was a lot of positive energy—no pun intended—engendered primarily by the inventor types and CEOs (not surprising, I suppose, since they are the ones actually involved in creating things), as well as the sustainability officers who are always thinking about how to make their companies do more with less. Of course people were concerned about the future of clean energy given the lack of a multi-year commitment to supporting clean tech research and development and deployment from Washington.  However, overwhelmingly, the participants were committed to making economic growth and environmental protection work together, and brought a can-do attitude to the table. This was a pleasant respite from life along the Northeast Corridor, where the dominant refrain is less “yes we can” and more “no you can’t.”

The conference was also notable for its lack of focus on China. Of course China was discussed—my panel was on China, for example—but so were India, Germany, and Indonesia. Despite the ubiquity of media headlines such as “U.S. Retakes the Lead from China in Clean Energy Race,” or “China First in Clean Energy,” there was no hyping of the China threat or over-focus on competition with China. Rather China was discussed in the context of the country’s on-the-ground reality: where are things working (e.g. deployment of clean energy technologies) and where are they not (e.g. ability to attract venture capital). This strikes me as healthy not just in the context of clean energy but also for the broader U.S.-China relationship. Too often China and the United States are viewed through the prism of the other, fostering competition where none need exist.

Tsinghua scholar Yan Xuetong, for example, describes the U.S.-China relationship as a zero sum game and a “race for global supremacy.” He sees China’s weakness—its soft power—through the strength of U.S. soft power and argues that the two countries are engaged in “a battle for people’s hearts and minds” and that is what “will determine who eventually prevails.” Yet the development of China’s soft power is internal to China; it has nothing to do with the United States. Former Singapore Ambassador to the United Nations Kishore Mahbubani frequently underscores the perceived weakness of the United States in competition with China. In a recent piece for CNN, he commented, “Let me give you a very simple example. The most shocking thing I’ve learned recently for someone who lived in New York for 10 and a half years is that the Tappan Zee Bridge, which carries thousands of cars can only survive another 10 years. Isn’t that shocking? In the meantime, while you can’t hold up one bridge across one river, guess what, China is building the world’s fastest trains and the world’s best airports.” While Mahbubani may simply be encouraging the United States to modernize its infrastructure, there is no need to frame the critique in the context of a competition with China.

The U.S.-China relationship has real issues it needs to confront and real cooperation is limited at best. Why add to the depressingly long list of concerns with manufactured challenges? Better to adopt the approach of the innovators, chief sustainability officers, and CEOs by focusing on developing real solutions to the real problems each country faces.

After a month of rumors and speculation, former Chongqing Party Secretary Bo Xilai has been ousted—or more accurately suspended—from all his formal political positions, including as member of the Politburo. Behind the scenes of Bo’s political downfall are apparently numerous issues regarding “violations of Party discipline,” the most dramatic and terrible of which appears to be a link between his wife and the death of British citizen Neil Heywood. The death of Heywood—who had personal and professional ties to Bo’s family—in mid-November 2011, was originally ascribed to natural causes. In the aftermath of Chongqing Vice-Mayor and Police Chief Wang Lijun’s flight to the U.S. consulate in nearby Chengdu, however, it became apparent that there was more to the story, and now Bo’s wife Gu Kailai is being investigated for her potential role in the murder.

While these events are political theater of the highest order, there are a number of larger issues at stake concerning China’s political future:

• The need to reassess Mao Zedong: There has never been a thorough accounting by the Chinese Communist Party of the trauma inflicted on the Chinese people by Mao Zedong, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution. Bo Xilai brought back memories of Mao not only in his campaign-style leadership and red songs but also in his political certitude and defiance of established norms of governance. Bo’s anti-corruption campaign was wildly popular but ignored any procedures for detention and trial. The political death of Bo is a serious political blow for the neo-leftists, who raise the banner of Mao and wreak havoc for any real political reform agenda. However, the Party needs a full accounting of the Maoist period, charismatic leadership, and the cult of personality to truly move forward.

•  The need for transparency, official accountability, and the rule of law: We still don’t know whether any of this political scandal would have come to light had Wang Lijun not spilled his guts to officials in the U.S. consulate or retired senior leaders such as Qiao Shi (reportedly)not played puppet master. Nonetheless, the case of Bo represents a marked improvement from traditional Chinese politics by bringing transparency, accountability, and perhaps even the rule of law into the political process. Of course the Party is already trying to use its handling of the scandal as an example of its respect for the “sanctity and authority of law.” In doing so, however, the Party raises the expectations of the Chinese people that such transparency and accountability will continue, not only for the duration of the Bo Xilai case but also more broadly through the political system. Let’s hope that the remaining Chinese leaders see the advantage of good governance for their own legitimacy.

• The need for a more open Internet: In what may be a political first, as the Bo story exploded, China’s Internet guardians were equal opportunity censors. Their main goal appears to have been to tamp down rumor-mongering and speculation—particularly when those rumors centered on a coup attempt by supporters of Bo Xilai. Sina and Tencent both followed orders by Beijing to block users from commenting on others’ posts and at the same time, Beijing shut down neo-leftist websites such as Utopia. Yet such restrictions are unlikely to work over the long term. Chinese citizens reacted vociferously to the clamp down on their political voice, and their ability to comment was reinstated only four days after being restricted. Beijing should realize that it will never get the Internet genie back in the bottle and let 1.3 billion flowers bloom.

Global Times editor Hu Xijin and others stress that the Party has “full control” of the situation and the “18th People’s Congress will take place calmly and in an orderly fashion.” That may be. However, unless Wen Jiabao and the other reformers within the Chinese leadership push hard and fast for real political advances, the specter of Bo Xilai and everything he represented—the absolute corruption of one of the Party’s beacons of political rectitude, the uncertainty concerning the future political direction of the country, and the questionable legitimacy of the Chinese leadership writ large—will continue to haunt the next generation of Chinese leaders.

Updated with correct sourcing for translation of Hu Xijin’s comments. Thanks to Kenneth Tan of Shanghaiist

The political brouhaha over Bo Xilai’s ouster as Chongqing Party Secretary continues to reverberate throughout China’s political system. Most notable is an effort at the top by Premier Wen Jiabao to capitalize on the moment by trying to once again energize his reform agenda. 

First, at a press conference following the conclusion of the National People’s Congress in mid March, Wen commented, “Now reforms in China have come to a critical stage…without a successful political reform, it’s impossible for China to fully institute economic reform and the gains we have made in these areas may be lost, and new problems that popped up in the Chinese society will not be fundamentally resolved…the reform can only go forward and must not stand still, less go backwards because that offers no way out.” He added that the desire for democracy in the Middle East had to be “respected and truly responded to.”

More recently, he has taken aim at the behemoth state-owned banks, claiming that the time had come to end their monopoly on China’s financial system in order to relieve the suffering of households, which enjoy only non-competitive and extremely low interest rates on their savings, as well as entrepreneurs who are effectively starved of capital because 90 percent of bank lending goes to state-owned enterprises. To back up his words, Wen announced a pilot program in the entrepreneurial center of China, Wenzhou, in which private lenders will be allowed to operate loan companies and households will be able to invest in overseas financial institutions.

Reform efforts are also appearing elsewhere in the country. Guangdong Province recently initiated a policy that supports the establishment of non-governmental organizations. Under the auspices of Politburo Standing Committee-hopeful Wang Yang, non-governmental organizations in Guangdong are allowed to register directly with a civil affairs office, avoiding the cumbersome process of finding a government bureau that would agree to sponsor them. (Currently there are as many as three million NGOs that remain unregistered—thereby operating illegally—in large part because of the cumbersome registration process involved.)

Reform-oriented media, unsurprisingly, are also taking up Wen’s cause. In the wake of Wen Jiabao’s press conference, a Caixin editorial argued, “Our leaders waver because they are afraid political reform will cause instability. But reality has proved them wrong. The unrest that erupted last year in the Guangdong village of Wukan was eventually pacified when the party leadership worked with the villagers to reach a solution stressing people’s autonomy, and fair and open elections were held…Political reform is not frightening. Reform should be gradual but firm.”

Even the Global Times had some interesting things to say, advocating greater political freedoms but within some as yet undefined boundaries. Responding to the recent shuttering of the “ultra-leftist” website Utopia, the Global Times editor Hu Xijin wrote, “I don’t like the website Utopia, but I hope they can continue to make their voice heard.” Appearing as an advocate of free speech, he continued, “I don’t like what Liu [Xiaobo] stands for, but I wish he did not have to sit in prison, and that he would have his place in Chinese society like other ‘dissidents’ do.” But he lands here: “Nevertheless, the tolerance level in Chinese politics is never as high as we wish it to be. Do what you must but be mindful of the measure. Once you break past a certain threshold, the constructiveness of the diversity you’re trying to create will turn into destructiveness, and the backlash will happen. This is the real China”.

Whether you fall into the camp that believes Wen Jiabao is a reform fraud or the one that believes he is the real deal (and I confess to being squarely in the latter camp), there is little doubt that the premier is trying to develop a reform-oriented narrative for his legacy. All he really needs is one big success, but time is running out. If he leaves in 2013 without one notable policy victory, he will be relegated forever in history books as the man who stood next to Zhao Ziyang at Tiananmen, and even when given a second chance to accomplish something significant, fell short.

As details leak out, it appears that corruption will play a central role in the saga of former Chongqing Party Secretary Bo Xilai. Bo, who was summarily ousted from his position on March 15, apparently attempted to derail the investigation of his police chief, Wang Lijun, into corrupt practices by Bo’s family members.

Yet corruption is hardly enough of a reason to scrap one of the country’s most senior and well-known leaders. Scratch the surface of almost any senior official in China and a family member or two will likely have crossed a law or two. Bo’s sins ran much deeper. The dramatic and charismatic Bo was simply too big a personality in a leadership that prides itself on facelessness and colorlessness. And his politics were too disruptive and, in the end, corrosive for a political system that prizes least common denominator consensus.

Between Vice President Xi Jinping and Premier Wen Jiabao, the Chinese leadership signaled Bo’s demise well before his formal ouster. Xi attacked Bo’s political character in a March 1 speech before the Party School, and then in an essay published two weeks later. In his speech, Xi noted that leading officials should “fairly use their power, keep incorrupt [sic] in their work, and resolutely oppose the tendencies of . . . hedonism, and extreme individualism.” The article made things even more explicit, raising the dangers of self-promotion and seeking personal fame through the Party.

Bo’s political proclivities also ran afoul of China’s top leaders. Bo brought Mao Zedong back to life with grand-scale mobilization campaigns to root out corruption and plant trees, as well as singing “red” songs. While popular among some segments of Chongqing’s population, for others—including some within China’s most senior leadership—Bo Xilai’s red reminiscing put a positive spin on one of the darkest chapters in the country’s history. Premier Wen Jiabao took center stage on the last day of last week’s National People’s Congress in rejecting Bo’s revisionist tendencies: “Without successful political structural reform, it is impossible for us to fully institute economic structural reform…China risks another historical tragedy like the Cultural Revolution unless it enacts political reforms.”

Where does this leave politics in China? Certainly Chongqing is getting the short end of the stick. Bo led Chongqing to 16 percent growth in 2011. Little about his replacement, Zhang Dejiang, suggests that such a performance will be repeated. Zhang, one of the most faceless, colorless members of the Politburo, received his university economics training in North Korea. He served an embarrassing stint as Guangdong Party Secretary during the SARS outbreak and, most recently, held oversight responsibility for China’s high speed rail, a story of mixed success at best.

The broader Chinese public is divided on the merits of Bo’s ouster. Despite Weibo’s blocking of Bo Xilai’s name, Chinese voices on the Internet have gone wild. Some decry Bo’s departure: “Bo Xilai leaves, the masses cry. The dream of common prosperity is shattered! Corrupt officials laugh, they can keep squeezing the masses and extorting their money.” Others have taken up Wen Jiabao’s call: “Now it is the 21st century. 1.3 billion Chinese people have entered the modern era . . . yet unexpectedly people are still crying out for a Savior, for a good emperor. What we need is exactly as premier Wen said. We need to wake up! We need a good system not a good man. We need rule of law not rule of man. We need openness and transparency! Do you agree?”

In Beijing, itself, political life is in flux. Bo is in limbo—deprived of his position in Chongqing but not of his seat on the Politburo. It appears to be a real victory for the more reform-oriented officials within China’s senior leadership, but whether they can capitalize on it over the next six months by ensuring that the next Standing Committee looks more like Wen Jiabao and less like Wu Bangguo remains to be seen. In the near term, however, they must be busy struggling to develop a politically viable narrative to explain Bo’s downfall. Based on the voices of the people, the truth would be a good place to start.

From the outside looking in—and maybe from the inside as well—China’s legislative gatherings of the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference are largely tedious affairs, dominated by long-winded prepared speeches and commentary. Yet behind the scenes there is always some high-level politicking, some real ideas floating about, and generally a few moments worth waiting for.

Politicking probably takes the top spot this year given that China is in the homestretch of its leadership transition. The hottest issue has certainly been whether Chongqing Party Secretary Bo Xilai—whose political future may have been torpedoed by the apparent attempted defection of one of his underlings Wang Lijun—would show up for the meetings. And if he did show, what would he do? Well Bo did show, and he tried to put the best face on his unhappy predicament, selling the economic success of the Chongqing model hard in a bid to keep his Politburo Standing Committee hopes alive. One thing missing this year—Bo’s relentless hyping of the Maoist revival he launched back home in Chongqing, which included singing “red” songs and pushing a number of city-wide campaigns, all of which in better times earned him national acclaim.

In better days, Bo Xilai waves a Chinese national flag during the opening ceremony of a revolutionary song singing concert at Chongqing Olympic Sports Centre in Chongqing municipality on June 29, 2011. (Jason Lee / Courtesy of Reuters)

Journalists at this year’s congress did Bo Xilai no favors, reporting that he appeared “tired” and “languished.”

On the ideas front, Guangdong Party Secretary Wang Yang—another contender for a seat on the Standing Committee of the Politburo—has come out swinging. Fresh from his successful management of the Wukan village protests, Wang is claiming the reform mantle.  In a discussion on political reform, he proposed a number of ideas sure to appeal to the vast majority of Chinese citizens including everything from “scrapping lengthy introductions and applause for officials at government meetings,” to more meaningful reforms, such as cutting back on ministries’ powers to veto projects and strengthening intellectual property rights.

Some additional substance from the meetings can be captured quickly by a look at Caixin’s daily roundup of interesting quotations from various delegates. The Global Times also is staying on top of the legislative debates with some thoughtful commentary—not necessarily the highlights report from Premier Wen Jiabao’s work report, which gets down to details such as “The government will enhance school bus safety to ensure children’s safety,” but rather a couple of editorials the paper has published over the course of the meetings. One, which is entitled “Two sessions reflect clamor for reform,” argues “China is in need of ideological liberation and needs a great number of reformers. They should dare to break with convention and to make breakthroughs that were deemed forbidden.” A second, “Path to national revival must stay on target,” published five days later cautions that China needs new bold reforms, but it also needs to firmly uphold some of the fundamentals.” One of the fundamentals, according to the article, is the political system.  (It should be noted that the Global Times is often very interesting, but consistency is not always its strong point.)

And thus far the moment worth waiting for takes us back to Bo Xilai. On Thursday, March 8th, Bo reportedly missed a significant meeting and photo op with the rest of the Politburo. In China, such a picture is easily worth a thousand characters. Usually everyone focuses on who is standing where as a sign of the relative power of each person—if you’re not standing anywhere, nothing more need be said.

In late February, New York-based Global Times writer Rong Xiaoqing published a piece on Jeremy Lin and the “Hunger for Heroes in the U.S.” In her piece, Rong argues that the United States—and democracy more broadly—favors the hero-centered narrative because it needs strong hands “to hold the wheel steady” and “to help avoid endless arguments at times of crisis.” According to Rong, “Americans badly need new superheroes.”

I don’t disagree with Rong that Americans like their heroes, but I don’t think that it has anything to do with being American or having a democratic form of government. All cultures appreciate the extraordinary accomplishments of individuals whether in sports or science or feats of bravery. In fact, China itself is in the midst of promoting its own home-grown hero: Lei Feng.

While many outside China are focused on 2012 as the onset of the transition to the fifth generation of Chinese leaders, within China, the year has a secondary significance. It is the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Lei Feng. A PLA soldier who died at the age of twenty-two when a pole struck him on the head, Lei Feng was immortalized by Mao Zedong in the campaign, “Learn from Comrade Lei Feng.” In the aftermath of his death, Lei became renowned for his selflessness, commitment to others, and devotion to Mao and the Communist Party.

Over the years, however, Lei has lost some of his luster. There is a saying on the Internet in China: “The post-1970’s generation learned from Lei Feng, the post-1980′s generation revolted against Lei Feng, and the post-1990’s generation has forgotten about Lei Feng.” Indeed, Lei Feng skeptics abound. Not everyone is convinced that Lei could have accomplished everything attributed to him, and some even doubt his existence. As one doubter noted, “From 1958—1962, the young man (he would have been eighteen when he started writing) composed 330 diary entries, twelve articles, eighteen speeches, thirty poems, three novels and nine pieces of prose. Which he completed while helping the needy, working in a steel mill, and joining the army, all without attracting any acclaim during his life.”

Beijing has stood firm against such a diminution of Lei’s value. In advance of the anniversary of his death on March 5th, the Ministry of Education is underscoring the value of Lei, calling for a campaign in which students of all ages will embark on a new program “to carry forward the spirit of Lei Feng.” Over the course of that week, schools will organize service activities and students will be encouraged to establish Lei Feng Spirit Research Societies. In a nod to current times, there is already a Lei Feng online video game, in which players can advance by, among other things, mending socks. And of course, there are already Lei Feng students, a Lei Feng village, and cups and T-shirts promoting his image.

Still, there is recognition within broader society that more contemporary role models are also needed. A year ago on the anniversary of Lei’s death, the China Daily published a piece, “Changing Role Models In China,” which advanced an alternative set of role models, including Yu Minhong, who founded the $3.5 billion NASDAQ listed company, New Oriental Education and Technology Group (the company focuses on English instruction), the pianist Lang Lang, the blogger Han Han, the pop star Li Yuchun, Jack Ma, the Chairman of Alibaba group, and Lee Kai-fu, who heads Innovation Works.

The China Daily discussion of Chinese role models as well as Beijing’s promotion of Lei Feng speaks to an understanding of the human desire to witness and appreciate extraordinary accomplishment in the form of heroes. As the China Daily piece intimates, however, with globalization and the Internet, heroes can no longer be constructed by the Communist Party. Choice is ever more a part of life in China, and on the fiftieth anniversary of Lei Feng’s death, it will be interesting to see whom the Chinese people choose as heroes for themselves.

Chinese politics is fun again. The Palace—or Zhongnanhai in this case—hasn’t been rife with this much intrigue since Mao Zedong’s time. The apparent attempted defection and subsequent flight to Beijing of Chongqing deputy mayor Wang Lijun has China historians reminiscing about one-time Mao successor Lin Biao. The analogy isn’t really that precise of course. Lin reportedly died in 1971 in a mysterious plane crash over Mongolia after purportedly leading a failed coup attempt against Mao. At most the mystery surrounding Wang has to do with whether he will be the downfall of his boss Bo Xilai, the powerful Chongqing Party Secretary and Politburo Standing Committee wannabe. But like the Lin Biao drama, the Wang saga is unfolding in a dark and secretive manner that has all the makings of a le Carré novel.

Politics is perhaps not as much fun, but is ever more potent at the grassroots level. There are almost 500 protests every day, and courtesy of the Internet, many of them now are visible to Chinese throughout the rest of the county as well as to the rest of the world. There is no single issue that unites these protests except perhaps poor governance. But everyone—farmers, workers, the middle class, Tibetans, and Uighurs—has something he or she wants changed, and their faces say it all.

While intrigue and unrest claim the headlines, politics is perhaps most interesting where it is least visible. As scholars and thinkers anticipate this year’s leadership transition, they are churning out ideas for the fifth generation in the hopes that real change may be just a leader away. In January, Tsinghua University professor Sun Liping released a report claiming that gradual reform was encouraging institutions to harden and powerful vested interests to take hold. He called for China to take four steps, including “moving in the direction of the mainstream world civilization, which has as its core values: freedom, rationality, individual rights, market economics, democratic politics and rule of law.” A commentary in People’s Daily that followed in late February, appeared to pick up on Sun’s points, arguing, “Reform is risk, but not reforming is risky for the Party… A party that has governed for a long time will be very cautious of anything that might hurt its political base in the short term and so resist change that could affect the development of some special interests.” Quoting Hu Jintao, the article stated: “Don’t miss the opportunity to make reforms in key areas and key links, continue to pursue reforms and innovations in the economic system, the political system, the cultural system, and the social system.” Meanwhile, on the economic front, the State Council’s Development Research Center joined forces with the World Bank to push for reform of the country’s massive system of state-owned enterprises in order to open the economy to real competition and entrepreneurship. Now all Beijing needs is a twenty-first century Zhu Rongji to ram such a reform through.

The fifth generation of Chinese leaders has offered little indication of its policy preferences, and for the first year, the new leaders will likely be consumed simply with consolidating power and ensuring that all the high-speed trains run on time and without mishap. Still, few Chinese appear to believe that their country can thrive or even survive if it remains as Pei Minxin described in 2006, “trapped in transition.” The drumbeat for change is loud and only going to get louder as China’s next generation of leaders take their place behind the walls of Zhongnanhai.