A revelatory story emerged in China this spring: Bo Xilai, Chongqing’s powerful Communist Party head, was stripped of both his post and party membership and accused of shocking abuses of power, including covering up his wife’s alleged involvement in the death of a shadowy British businessman.

On May 2, the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center held a special seminar to make sense of what this unusual high-level scandal could mean for the future of China’s current political system, erupting just months ahead of a once-in-a-generation leadership transition.

Minxin Pei, director of the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at Claremont McKenna College, said the scandal is a severe test for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which balances on a knife’s edge as it prepares to replace the majority of its Politburo members—the highest CCP echelon. The Bo affair has exposed the existence of serious corruption at a very high level of government, calling into question the party’s image and credibility.

“This is the biggest threat to party unity since 1989,” he said.

More potentially damaging still, however, is the negative light it has cast on China’s overall political system. The scandal has revealed weaknesses and loopholes in the power structure, and the government’s poor crisis management skills.

“The Bo Xilai affair is the beginning of the end of the Tiananmen era,” Pei said. “Twenty years from now, historians will make this point.”

Xueguang Zhou, a professor of sociology and Freeman Spogli Institute senior fellow, agreed with Pei’s analysis that Bo’s fall from power has tarnished the party’s image and deeply disrupted the cohesiveness of its upper leadership.He spoke also of the outpouring of criticism on social media sites for the government’s inability to reign in corruption—so much so that censors have not been able to keep up.

“These voices have been so fierce in criticizing the top leadership that it has huge implications for the emergence of China’s civil society,” Zhou said. 

He expressed his concern for the future of local politics after the smoke from the Bo affair has cleared. Although it is widely acknowledged in China that shady political dealings go hand-in-hand with local-level politics, positive innovations in governance also frequently occur at the city and county level.

“I hope that local governments will still have the power to experiment,” he said.

After all is said and done, China’s top leadership is at a major turning point. Only time will tell the full impact of the fall of Bo Xilai, both during this year’s power transition and the evolution of China’s government structure in the coming decades.

Propelled by the need to develop new and more productive avenues of communication among scholars and policy-makers based in Europe, North America, and the Middle East, in 2010 the Europe Center at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute agreed to launch the multi-year collaborative project titled "Debating History, Democracy, Development, and Education in Conflicted Societies." Our joint initiative aims to promote research and policy projects with partners in Europe, the U.S., and the Middle East.

Viewed in an international context, with a focus on Europe and the Middle East, this collaborative project investigates how societies debate internally and attempt to reconcile differences of historical interpretation and political positions.  The first conference took place at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, and was dedicated to “Democracy in Adversity and Diversity” (May 18-19, 2011). Topics for the conference included democracy in comparative perspective, political reform, the notion and strategies of democracy promotion, regime transition, negotiating religion and democracy, immigration challenges, minorities and East-West relations, emergence or recovery of civil society, the role of non-governmental organizations in democratic societies, and human rights. 

The next conference, at Stanford University May 17-18, 2012 aims to deepen our understanding of the interplay between history and memory. Given the extensive discussion of memory and history across a variety of disciplines in recent decades, we would like to take stock of our current understanding of the concepts of memory and history as they affect society, politics and culture.  At the same time we wish to examine in what ways insights gained in the course of this cross-disciplinary and global discussion may be effective when considering the circumstances of the Middle East, especially the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We are inviting new, innovative approaches to the study of memory and history as they affect different societies. We especially welcome contributions that engage the concepts of memory and history comparatively. Our goal is to advance beyond restating examples of conflicts between versions of history, and to seek new paths of research that may further the work in various cases, and also potentially offer guidance for engaging particular international and civil conflicts.

The questions that we seek to address at the conference include, among others:

• How do we understand the historians’ role and engagement in political and cultural conflicts about the past and present?
• What are the historians’ responsibilities in developing shared narratives about war, civil conflict, occupation, and genocide?
• How do we understand the relation between the work of professional historians and that of civic society organizations?
• How do we understand the roles and interplay of history and memory in efforts towards reconciliation?
• How should one think about the relative importance of historical commissions and truth commissions in “coming to terms with the past.”
• What is the relationship between the historian’s work on international and domestic conflict and that of judicial institutions?
• How do efforts in post-conflict situations to reach accurate assessments (“truth”) of the events meet the needs of healing social, ethnic, and/or religious wounds (“reconciliation”)?
• How do we understand the effectiveness, necessity, and/or legitimacy of remembering and forgetting in models of reconciliation?
• What are the consequences and meaning of actions of forgiveness, including the formal granting of amnesty? Do these actions conflict with the writing of history?

The conference committee consists of Norman Naimark (Core faculty member of The Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor in East European Studies at Stanford), Yfaat Weiss (Director, The Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History at Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Gabriel Motzkin (Director, The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute), and Amir Eshel (Director, The Europe Center and Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies at Stanford).