''Corruption is the Party's mortal wound and degeneration of its working style is its chronic disease,'' Mr Bo said on television in December 2009, after Mr Wang reportedly investigated more than 10,000 people. ''Without help the disease will become fatal.'' Mr Bo spoke a language that nostalgic Party elders could understand and Mr Wang provided the action to support it. Mr Bo's surgery metaphor was made famous by Mao Zedong, in Yan'an, when he launched his campaign to ''rectify'' the Party. Mr Bo sent a wave of ''red culture'' across the nation. He became the pin-up boy for the new left, the old left, the Maoist left and it seemed anyone who was attracted to the allure of shiny rising power. Tributes flowed from Vice-President Xi Jinping and even Henry Kissinger. And a roll-call of credentialed scholars explained the genius of Mr Bo's ''Chongqing model''.

That model, and the reputation of Mr Bo himself, has now been battered. ''Mr Bo will not step down but he will be seriously impacted,'' said Han Deqiang, founder of Utopia, the flagship leftist website. ''It will be a big blow to the Chongqing model.'' It's impossible to know for sure what drove Mr Wang to flee and take refuge in the nearest US consulate after falling out with Mr Bo. But his act of near-certain political suicide must have seemed preferable to whatever awaited him in Chongqing. Mr Wang's intimate knowledge of how he and Mr Bo had played -as if the ends could justify any means - would not have been a pleasant thought.

''Twice he tried to kill himself by hitting his head against the wall, and he then tried to bite off his own tongue,'' says lawyer Zhu Mingyong, describing on video the six months of daily torture his gangster client, Fan Qihang, had endured at the hands of Mr Bo and Mr Wang's prison guards before his execution. ''Guards ripped off his partially severed tongue but did not allow him medical treatment for a further two days.'' Mr Bo and Mr Wang seemed prepared to offend almost anybody as they drove a scalpel through the Party in the name of saving it. They sent police to Beijing to arrest a leading lawyer, Li Zhuang, for daring to defend his gangster client, even though he worked for a law firm controlled by an eminent princeling friend. They exposed sordid details of bribery, organised crime and rape by Chongqing's then justice minister, Wen Qiang, and then had him executed - even though he had risen under the patronage of He Guoqiang, the Politburo Standing Committee member in charge of Party discipline.

Mr Bo picked a verbal fight with another of his Chongqing predecessors, Wang Yang, even though Mr Wang was a rising star under the patronage of President Hu Jintao. The Bo Xilai phenomenon grew to its crescendo last year when officials in Beijing followed his lead in singing revolutionary songs, bringing the central bureaucracy to a temporary halt as they practised together. Mr Bo's hard-man methods and Maoist atmospherics triggered an enormous backlash. Hu Deping, son of China's most consistently liberal leader Hu Yaobang, organised private conferences to contest Bo Xilai's Mao-flavoured phenomenon. Mr Hu knew how Mr Bo's mother died at the hands of Mao's Red Guards and that his father was tortured horribly.

''In recent years, for whatever reason, there seems to be a 'revival' of something like advocating the Cultural Revolution,'' said Mr Hu. ''Some people cherish it; some do not believe in the Cultural Revolution but nevertheless exploit it and play it up.'' Yang Fan, a scholar close to Bo Xilai's family and who co-wrote The Chongqing Model, turned 180 degrees to warn that Mr Bo was turning into ''Mini-Mao''. It's not clear whether Mr Wang talked about asylum at the US consulate or if he has dumped incriminating documents against his one-time patron, Bo Xilai. But by Wednesday morning, when Mr Wang walked out the gates into the tentacles of China's enormous security apparatus, it was clear that the nine standing members of China's increasingly fractious Politburo had a big problem on their hands. The Chongqing propaganda office said Mr Wang had been ''overworked'' and would be taking ''vacation-style therapy''. The country's vast and vastly cynical internet community immediately added the term to its growing list of Communist Party doublespeak.

''Let's continue: Consoling-style rape, harmony-style looting, environmental-style murder, scientific-style theft,'' said one of more than 50,000 micro blog comments on the new terms that appeared within a day, according to the China Digital Times. Over the past four days China's censorship machine seems to have blown a fuse as the country's hyperactive and infinitely creative netizens have had a field day. They reached back 40 years to find a precedent for this week's political explosion. In 1971 Mao's right-hand-man in the Cultural Revolution, Marshal Lin Biao, made a frantic escape towards the Soviet Union but his Trident aircraft exploded in the deserts of Mongolia. While Marshal Lin's body was incinerated, for many in China it was Mao's aura and his Cultural Revolution that went up in flames.

''If Lin Biao's escape announced the failure of the Cultural Revolution then Wang Lijun's dismissal proclaims the failure of 'sing red' and 'strike black' in Chongqing,'' wrote one internet commentator, Gong Li. ''Everyone is an insect that can be smashed to pieces at any time, no matter whether an ordinary person or one of great power. This is a system secure for nobody.'' Mao went on to denounce Lin Biao for all manner of conspiracies and Mr Bo is beginning to do the same for Wang Lijun. Whatever evidence Wang Lijun provides to his interrogators, it seems, the ascendancy of both the Chongqing model and the city's ''mini-Mao'' is now in peril.