A stern-looking Wen Jiabao told hundreds of journalists at a press conference last March that the Communist Party stood by its judgment on the Great Cultural Revolution, passed in late 1978 at the historic Third Plenum of the 11th Party Congress.
“History tells us,” said the then premier, “all practices in line with the people’s interests must also take lessons from history, and stand the test of history themselves.”
Looking back on this moment as we do now, a week after Bo Xilai’s trial, we can be almost certain that those words were Wen’s improvisation on the spot, without the endorsement of the Party leadership. In the eyes of Wen’s detractors who dismiss him as “the greatest actor in China”, he was just putting up another piece of drama, with just one year to go in his tenure as premier. But he did convince many people that, faced with the choice of either returning to the dark days of the Cultural Revolution or continuing with reforms, the Party leadership had made a painful yet resolute decision.