The real-life murder mystery unfolding at the highest ranks of the Chinese government—featuring, so far, homicide, MI6, poison, Party infighting, and a police chief whose hobby involves organ transplantation—is not only a political opera that makes Berlusconi’s antics look like community theatre. It’s also the largest Communist Party convulsion since the arrival of the Web, and the juxtaposition between Party orthodoxy and today’s information culture has laid bare a fault line in the future of “enlightened authoritarianism.”

Leninist systems are built on secrecy, on a monopoly on information to prevent the wrong ideas from leading the people down the improper path. Secrecy was easier to maintain during the last Party purge of this scale, in 1971, when Lin Biao, a military leader, died in a mysterious plane crash in Mongolia, after the failure of his purported coup against Chairman Mao. It was a year before the Chinese public heard a thing about it, and forty years later China scholars are still trying to figure out what happened in the Lin Biao Incident.

Not this time. After weeks of rumors and dogged foreign reporting, state media had no choice but to announce that Bo Xilai—a rising star and Party Secretary of the megacity Chongqing, who reminds me of Huey Long for his flamboyant, leftist way of wielding authority—has been stripped of his power and detained in an investigation. Even more stunning is the news that his wife, Gu Kailai, and the family’s housekeeper, Zhang Xiaojun, have been transferred to the police on suspicion of “intentional homicide” in the case of Neil Heywood, a British businessman who’d been friendly with the Bo family until—and it’s amazing that the government is acknowledging this—“a conflict over economic interests.” Heywood turned up dead in a Chongqing hotel, and his body was abruptly cremated; the cause was listed as “excessive alcohol consumption,” though friends said he barely drank. In late March, the British government asked China to investigate. Madame Gu, a high-flying lawyer and author, has gone from being compared to Jackie Kennedy to figuring in analogies to Lady Macbeth.

The Party is reeling. Even the Global Times, a nationalist state newspaper that can find a bright side to anything, is straining to argue that “the government did not cover up but initiated an investigation accordingly. This is no longer the era where China would rather cover up issues to avoid revealing problems.” That, of course, is preposterous, but maintaining the illusion of order is especially important right now to the leaders of the country because it’s campaign season. It is at moments like this that the Chinese Communist Party acts from the brain stem, not the cortex, issuing an editorial to tell people that “the Party does not tolerate any special member who is above the law.” (The flipside of that assertion—that everybody receives equal treatment under the law—especially thin this week, as a Chinese court sentences a disabled lawyer, Ni Yulan, who has been applauded for defending people evicted from their homes, to two years and eight months in prison for causing a disturbance and fraud.)

By Wednesday, the state was determined to maintain its monopoly over the Bo case by preventing discussion on social-networking sites. According to a splendid collection by China Digital Times, the following terms were censored:

Commission for Discipline Inspection, filed for investigation, investigate, Neil, British businessman, British housekeeper, Bo, Guagua [the son], Chongqing, King of the Southwest, Gu, Kailai, Wang Lijuan [the police chief], head nurse, Energetic Wang, Wang Li jun, wanglijun, WLJ, defect, U.S. consulate, Central Committee, usurp party leadership, political struggle, inner struggle

There are also more obscure terms being blocked, as censors and commentators battle over the code words people are using to discuss the case. An example: Chongqing hotpot = King of the Southwest = King Who Pacifies the West = Minister of Yu = tomato = Bo Xilai. So don’t go looking to talk about tomatoes today. (People still found a way around it, tweeting with the hashtag “big news” to stand in for the Bo case.)

All of this matters because it was precisely these kinds of “rumors” that the Party has been raging against in recent months, pressuring the country’s two large microblog operators, Sina and Tencent, to temporarily shut down comments earlier this month. The state media has been awash in denunciation of dangerous rumors, and earlier Tuesday, as Josh Chin points out, Chinese Web sites had vowed to “resolutely support and work with relevant government departments” in fighting their spread.

On Wednesday, a generation of young Chinese Web users awoke to discover, once again, that rumors had been more reliable than facts. All of this means it’s especially critical how the Party moves ahead on the Bo case: Will it openly discuss Bo’s alleged crimes? His connections to those still in power? The reasons that his wife appears to have had a foreign passport (a no-no for senior Chinese leaders’ families)? This is important because one of the curious facts is that, for all of Bo’s abuse of power and authority, his rhetoric about the working man had resonated with people. Michael Anti, the Chinese blogger and analyst, was surprised to find his Beijing cabbie denouncing the “shameless government” for “setting a trap for Bo Xilai” and “destroying a man who has helped the people.”

In the years after the financial crisis, commentators like Thomas Friedman had become impressed with Chinese governance: “One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages.” Today, we’re seeing the limitations of that system in spectacular fashion. Boston University’s Joseph Fewsmith, a watcher of Chinese politics, told the Wall Street Journal,

The real question going forward is whether the new leadership that comes out in the fall can adopt up a reform agenda that answers the questions of the leftist supporters of Bo Xilai—the discontented and left behind. Can the new leaders define a reform agenda that is more inclusive?

Or maybe the question is whether they can define that reform agenda—and also solve a case of murder.

Photograph by Reuters/Stringer.