helping to open China to the West — goes beyond the question of whether to forgive an individual's irrational behavior. As the scandal surrounding Bo Xilai's dramatic fall from power shows, it applies equally well to explaining the apparently irrational behavior of regimes. Most reasonable people would

t has at times been a painful process. The decennial communist ritual has been marred this year by a series Q embarrassing scandals [6], including Bo Xilai's fall from grace and the dismissal of a corrupt railways chief. While China's current lame-duck cadres do their best to mop things up before the big

ng the supposed broader confrontational trend in Chinese thinking about the rest of the world. The continuing reverberations within China caused by Bo Xilai's rapid fall from grace earlier this year are a public example of how such differences persist, and are perhaps growing, within the highest levels of