Song Zuying's concert in Chongqing last year is an example of how many key figures benefited from Bo's reign in the city
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It will be hard for the Chinese Communist Party to genuinely punish the disgraced politician Bo Xilai for corruption given his status as a prominent member of China's "Princelings" and the son of PRC founder Bo Yibo, according to Mingjing News, a news outlet based in Hong Kong.
Sources within the Chinese government told Mingjing that Bo tried to see help from the relatives of such political heavyweights as Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, Zeng Qinghong, Li Changchun, Wu Bangguo and Zhou Yongkang after he was removed from his positions of power in Chongqing in March. Among them, one of Bo's biggest supporters was Zeng Qinghuai, the brother of Zeng Qinghong, the former secretary of the party's Central Secretariat.
With Zeng Qinghuai's help, Song Zuying, a famous singer with a PLA background, held a concert at Chongqing last October. Wang Lijun — the city's police chief who would later trigger Bo's dramatic downfall — spent 9 million yuan (US$1.4 million) to promote the concert, which eventually benefited many government officials and local business.
Mingjing's sources said there are many obstacles to an impartial investigation into Bo Xilai because many important figures within the party's leading organizations and their families were personally involved in Bo's "sing the red and strike the black" campaigns in Chongqing to revive the revolutionary culture of Mao Zedong and fight organized crime.
Yet while Bo may be shielded from the full consequences of his wrongdoing on account of his background, this does not mean the man who was once seen as a rising star has any kind of political future. Professor Lin Chong-pin of Tamkang University's Graduate Institute of International Affairs and Strategic Studies in Taiwan told Voice of America in April that the "Princelings" are not able to protect him as Bo does not have the support of all the different factions among them. Xi Jinping, the country's future leader, is himself considered a princeling but has a very different view about the way China should develop — that is, a continuation of the reforms begun under Deng Xiaoping and continued under Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, not a return to Mao-era culture espoused by Bo.
Bo was sacked as Chonqing party chief in March and suspended from his remaining senior party positions a month later for "serious discipline violations," believed to include massive corruption and attempting to cover up his wife's murder of the British businessman Neil Heywood.
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