China security chief down but not out after blind dissident's escape - Chicago Tribune

BEIJING (Reuters) - Strike two against China's once invulnerable domestic security chief, Zhou Yongkang.

An audacious escape by blind dissident Chen Guangcheng is the second uproar this year to hit Zhou, who has expanded China's policing apparatus into a vast, costly and - now for all the world to see - a flawed tool of Communist Party control.

But even one of the biggest domestic security embarrassments in more than a decade is unlikely to knock him out before a party congress late this year that will appoint successors to him and other retiring leaders, said several experts.

The question will be whether his successor gets to rethink his legacy and rein in the domestic security establishment whose $110 billion budget exceeds the People's Liberation Army's.

Chen outfoxed a cordon of guards and security cameras to flee home imprisonment in Shandong province in east China, escaping to what supporters have said is U.S. protection in Beijing. His feat was a rebuff to Zhou's security forces and it threatens to turn into a standoff with Washington.

Zhou was already bruised by a scandal in Chongqing in southwest China, after that city's former police chief, Wang Lijun, fled into a U.S. diplomatic compound in February for more than 24 hours. Wang revealed allegations of murder and corruption that have felled Bo Xilai, the ambitious Chongqing party chief who had courted Zhou as a patron.

The domestic security establishment was humiliated in 1999, when members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement held a surprise protest around the party leaders' compound in Beijing. Although smaller in scale, the two latest incidents are also embarrassing setbacks for the guardians of stability.

"All of the recent astonishing episodes - police brutality in Chongqing and Shandong, Wang Lijun's rise and his attempted defection to the U.S. consulate, and Chen Guangcheng's adventurous escape - have revealed severe flaws of the Chinese security system," said Cheng Li, an expert on Chinese politics at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C.

"Zhou Yongkang, as the leader in charge of this functional area, deserves some blame," Li said in emailed comments.

EXTREME CAUTION

But Li added that China's top leadership was extremely cautious and hesitant to fire more senior leaders, especially someone whose status was even higher than Bo.

Since 2007, Zhou has been the member of the Politburo Standing Committee - the party's core council of power - who steers the police, law and security agencies.

The recent crises have intensified long-standing criticisms in China that Zhou's fiefdom has grown too powerful, unaccountable and yet incapable of meeting the party's expectations of defending social stability.

"You can't separate the case of Chen Guangcheng from Zhou Yongkang and his making stability preservation a national policy that has overridden all boundaries and rules," said Pu Zhiqiang, a lawyer in Beijing who takes on contentious cases about human rights and freedom of speech.

"This all comes down to Zhou Yongkang's policies for social control and domestic security, and this shows that in the end they can't work," added Pu, who said he hoped China's next leaders would rein in what they call the "stability preservation" apparatus after taking power from later this year.

Despite Internet-fed rumors that Zhou could fall because of ties to the disgraced Bo, he remains a hulking presence in politics. His recent regular appearances and speeches appear intended to show he remains out of political danger.

Zhou, 69, must retire at the forthcoming party congress, and ousting him before then could fan panic discord at a vulnerable time, said Xie Yue, a professor of political science at Tongji University in Shanghai. Xie studies domestic security.

"It is rumored that Zhou Yongkang has been under pressure internally, and the Chen Guangcheng incident offers more reasons to criticize him," Xie said in a telephone interview.

"But the priority is a smooth transition for the 18th Party Congress, and if Zhou Yongkang was ousted before then, that could be too much of a shock for the handover of power by the top levels of the Communist Party," said Xie.