In China, the Web and Politics Don't Mix

It’s the biggest political scandal to hit China in years, and it destroys any possibility of a smooth transition to the next generation of top leaders. Late on April 10, the official Xinhua News Agency announced that the charismatic politician Bo Xilai had been suspended from both the Central Committee and the even more powerful Politburo. The charge: “suspected of being involved in serious discipline violations,” according to Xinhua, which also announced that Bo’s wife was “highly suspected” in the homicide of a British businessman who died in Chongqing in November.

China’s top brass now have to defuse a world-class scandal. Part of that task involves taming China’s Web, which is turning into both a menace to and a prop for government power. On April 6, censors shut down the nationalist website Utopia, which had aggressively supported Bo and the Chongqing economic model, named after the southwestern city that Bo ran as a showcase of state planning. Utopia was shuttered temporarily at the time of Bo’s dismissal as Chongqing party secretary on March 15. Now it may be out of action for some time. More than a dozen other websites were shut as well.