Bo Xilai, one of China's most influential and fastest-rising political leaders, a man who runs the country-sized district of Chongqing and seemed destined for Beijing, has been sacked over what appear to be remarkable abuses of power. As part of his tough, popular, and not-always-legal crackdown on organized crime (something that bears some similarities to, say, the U.S. war on terror and its excesses), Bo overstepped, imprisoning and torturing suspects who might not have deserved it, sometimes maybe even for personal ends. (This last abuse breaks from any "war on terror" similarities.)

The details of Bo's case are more complicated, and it appears to be about more than just the abuses of his rule -- his preference for state-run enterprises contradicted Beijing's efforts at economic liberalization, his police chief rushed into the local U.S. consulate to (maybe) fess up to his boss's abuses, and his wife is now under investigation for murdering a British businessman. But the cases of American officials and businessmen who are responsible for controversial and potentially abusive policies are complicated, too.

Where the American system seems to err on the side of forgiving high-level individuals, China's seems to be much more ready to topple its own giants. But China's internal purges, though maybe cause for occasional American envy for the state's willingness to take down almost anyone if their abuses are grave enough, are very different from American self-policing in one important way. In China, enforcing the rule of law usually isn't primarily about the rule of law itself, even if it often happens to achieve that end -- it's about preserving the Chinese system, whatever it takes.

Over the course of about a week in May 1989, Zhao Ziyang went from one of the most powerful people in the world -- the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party -- to officially nonexistent. As protests mounted across China, Zhao, a reformer sympathetic to the demonstrators, urged "a track based upon democracy and the rule of law." He opposed declaring martial law in Beijing, but former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping (still pulling the strings from official retirement) and other party hard-liners overruled him, after which he was ousted from rule. The next morning, he waded into the crowd at Tiananmen Square, bullhorn in hand, to give a tearful speech that began, "Students, we came too late. We are sorry. You talk about us, criticize us, it is all necessary." He was placed under house arrest, where he died 16 years later. According to Out of Mao's Shadow, a book by journalist Philip Pan, most state media were barred from even announcing Zhao's death; The Beijing Evening News ran a one-sentence item on page 16.

Zhao Ziyang, like Bo Xilai 23 years later, was ousted from power for many complicated reasons, which on the surface appear contradictory. Zhao's firing was lamented in the West as a sign of Beijing's authoritarian retrenchment; today, Bo's removal looks like good news for China's liberal reformers, who opposed Bo's more neo-Maoist governance. Both of these are true, but Bo and Zhao share that they threatened the established norms of Communist Party rule at that moment. Fears about political stability and the sustainability of Communist Party rule are never far off in Beijing, which came to perceive these two leaders as dangerous to the system. It was that perception danger, much more than any real or imagined crimes, that may have done them in. Call it rule of law with Chinese characteristics.