Another day, another juicy detail. Once, political scandals in China took months, even years, to reveal themselves. We are, for instance, still gleaning particulars of the power struggles that culminated in the brutal 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. (Three years ago, a secret journal by one of Tiananmen’s purged liberal protagonists, Zhao Ziyang, was published in English based on smuggled audio-tapes.) By contrast, the pace at which scandalous details from the Bo Xilai affair have appeared has been tailored for the digital age, even as China is still run by a cloistered, centralized leadership.
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