In 1962, he followed in the steps of his elder brother and was enrolled in the elite Beijing No. 4 Middle School—its alumni include many of today’s influential business, political, and military figures from politically privileged families. Unlike his elder brother, who was a popular athlete and student leader, Bo Xilai was a quiet, bookish boy. In May 1966, Chairman Mao, claiming that bourgeois thinking was threatening the well-being of the Communist Party and the socialist society, launched a nationwide political campaign to purify the party of capitalists and remove traditional cultural elements from society. He encouraged young people to take the lead.
Inspired by his vision, a group of older students at Bo Xilai’s school wrote a letter to Chairman Mao in June 1966, urging the party to abolish the national college entrance examination system, which they called “feudalistic shackles.” Mao liked the idea and the State Council immediately reached a decision and suspended the college entrance exams, which were the basis for college recruitment.
In August 1966, children of the senior leaders at Beijing No. 4 Middle School formed an organization—“the Red Guard”—the first in the nation. Students toppled the school administration, kicked out the principal and teachers, and formed a “Revolutionary Committee,” with Bo’s elder brother, a firebrand, as the deputy director. Reuters recently interviewed ten alumni from the school who recalled students parading teachers around the sports ground to humiliate them. Some students looked down on schoolmates who lacked their “red” revolutionary pedigrees, contemptuously calling students of humble origins “bastards” and excluding them from the Red Guard organization. They built a jail, with a slogan written in blood on one of its walls: “Long Live Red Terror.”
Other schools in Beijing, and throughout China, followed suit and Red Guards groups, consisting of twelve- to eighteen-year-olds, sprouted up all over the country. Young people carried Chairman Mao’s portraits and the Little Red Book—a collection of Chairman Mao’s quotations—and sang red songs: “The Revolutionary Rebels’ Song” and “We Are Chairman Mao’s Red Guards.” Their initial targets were the “dark forces of society”—former landlords, capitalists, government, and military personnel under the Nationalist government and anti-party intellectuals. Soon they expanded their list to include lower-level Communist Party officials and teachers, who, the Red Guards felt, had failed to follow Chairman Mao’s teachings. Song Yongyi, a US-based scholar and an expert on the Cultural Revolution, said Red Guards in Beijing killed more than 1,700 people between June and September 1966; more than 11,000 homes were raided and any valuables were destroyed or looted. About 77,000 children of those classified as bad elements of society were kicked out of Beijing.
As the Cultural Revolution escalated, the death toll from violence rose sharply. Many government agencies were paralyzed. Children of the senior leaders, who realized that the revolution could jeopardize the positions of their parents within the party, formed an alliance called the “Capital City Red Guards United Action Committee” in late 1966. United Action, as it was known, gained support from top leaders within the Central Party Committee and attempted to restore law and order by patrolling the streets every day. Members saw themselves as the true descendants of Communism and they were protecting the fruits of their parents’ revolution. A popular slogan for the group read, “Heroes begat heroes and villains begat villains.” Its members freely used violence to target nonmembers who dared to challenge them. In 1966 and 1967, members of United Action attacked several public security bureau stations which had detained their members, and stirred other Red Guard organizations to rally in support of their revolutionary parents. A year later, Chairman Mao recognized that United Action could jeopardize his plan to purge those who threatened his rule, and declared the organization illegal.
While Bo and two of his brothers, all of whom were part of United Action, were running around Beijing trying to rescue the revolution, Mao turned on their father, Bo Yibo. He was detained on charges of betraying the Communist Party in the 1930s. Bo Xilai and other children of disgraced senior leaders were urged to openly denounce their parents. At a public meeting against his father, Bo Xilai was said to have slapped his father’s face and kicked the old man in the stomach.
Bo Xilai’s cooperative attitude failed to shield him and his siblings from persecution. They were paraded around at school as “children of the traitor.” After school, they wandered the streets, engaging in gang fights and stealing. In December 1967, Red Guards raided Bo Yibo’s home. Bo Xilai was said to have collected a package of photos of his father with other senior leaders who had been purged, as well as some private documents. He gave them to a classmate, who later turned over the package to the Red Guards. Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, reportedly saw the photos and personally ordered the arrest of the Bo brothers.
Bo Xilai and his two brothers were incarcerated at a youth delinquency center in December 1967, and subsequently transferred to what was later known as Camp 789, a reeducation camp where more than sixty children of ousted party leaders were imprisoned. Initially, all the detainees studied Chairman Mao’s works and were forced to report on their parents’ crimes. In the next five years, they were allowed to attend regular classes and engaged in labor-intensive farmwork under the supervision of prison officials. Often the limited food ration could not satisfy the pubescent boys, and they would eat whatever bugs they could capture in the field. Gang fights were common.
Bo and his siblings were released in 1972. At the age of twenty-three, he was assigned a job at the Beijing Hardware Repair Factory. A former coworker remembered Bo Xilai as charming and handsome. He was well liked, even though people were aware of his questionable family background. Many older workers tried to fix him up with girls. It was through friends that he met a woman named Li Danyu, a military medical doctor. Their fathers used to be friends—both had joined the revolution in their home province of Shanxi. During the Cultural Revolution, while Bo Yibo had been brought down by Mao, Li’s father had risen in the ranks and served as party secretary of Beijing. By the time the two young people met, Li Danyu’s father had started to lose favor with Mao and was being investigated. Bo Xilai’s former coworker said the plain-looking Li Danyu passionately pursued Bo as her boyfriend. They lived in different cities. Li Danyu told the New York Times in October 2012 that she and Bo used to write each other every three days. In one of the letters, Bo shared his views on romance, which shed light on his controversial lifestyle in later years:
One should not be inflexible or old-fashioned. Besides studies and work, one should take time to soul-search and think about other things. Life is better with a little romance. . . . Many revolutionary leaps and achievements are accompanied by the colors of romance.
Bo and Li were married in 1976 and a son was born two years later.
In 1977, a year after Mao’s death, China revived the national college entrance examination. Many of Bo’s friends at Beijing No. 4 Middle School who had condemned the examination system during the Cultural Revolution jumped at the opportunity. At the age of twenty-nine, Bo Xilai took the exam and was enrolled as a history major at China’s prestigious Beijing University. When his father was reinstated as vice premier a year later, Bo Xilai skipped his undergraduate studies and joined a master’s degree program in international journalism at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Upon graduation in 1982, Bo Xilai joined the Party Central Committee Secretariat as a researcher, but he aspired to higher things. In the 1980s, the Communist Party found itself in a leadership crisis. The revolutionary veterans were in their seventies and eighties and ready to retire. A new generation of leaders was badly needed to fill the power vacuum. The Central Party Committee proposed the concept of building a “third echelon”—placing a large number of well-educated and politically reliable candidates in positions within the Communist Youth League or at grassroots levels, and preparing them for senior positions.
Bo Xilai was energized by the news. In the name of conducting socia
l research, he requested a transfer in 1984 to a poverty-stricken area in China’s northwestern province of Gansu so he could gain firsthand knowledge of people at the bottom rung of society. He ended up in a region closer to Beijing—Jin County in northeastern China—where he was appointed deputy party secretary. Bo Xilai’s marriage to Li Danyu had disintegrated and he filed for divorce in 1982, but his wife rejected his request. The transfer provided a perfect respite, a friend said.
Bo Xilai followed the examples of two of his childhood playmates who had taken similar steps two years before to enhance their political careers. Xi Jinping, who is now the general secretary of the Communist Party, took up a post in a small county outside Beijing. And Liu Yuan, the son of former president Liu Shaoqi and currently deputy director of the Army’s General Logistics Department, settled in the impoverished province of Henan. Driven by idealism and raw political ambition, the trio began accumulating political capital at the ground level.
A contemporary profile in a government newspaper indicates Bo initially had a hard time in Jin County. Local officials treated him with caution and, knowing he was using the experience merely as a launching pad for his political career, nobody took his policy initiatives seriously. Bo Xilai was said to be so frustrated that he thought of quitting, but his father scolded him: “If you can’t even handle such trivial setbacks, how do you expect to be a competent official in the future?” So Bo persisted and by the time he left, the county had won several regional awards for innovative township enterprise development, education, and family planning programs. It is doubtful that Bo personally deserved credit for the accomplishments, but he did achieve his purpose: the grassroots experience gilded his credentials. Coincidentally, the name of Jin County means “gold.”
In Jin County, Bo’s personal life also got a boost. Gu Kailai, a young woman he met when he was a student at Beijing University, came to Jin County in 1984 for an art project. Gu was the daughter of a military general and had majored in law at Beijing University. Bo Xilai hosted Gu and her traveling companion at his small apartment. Gu described their meeting to a Chinese newspaper:
I didn’t expect to meet my Beijing University alumnus. When I saw him, this talented young man was squatting on a deserted beach, engaging in an enthusiastic discussion with local leaders about rural development. He was idealistic like my father. I went with him to his apartment. He lived in a tiny room, which seemed perpetually dusty and dirty, no matter how hard you clean it. He took out a few small local-grown apples from a cardboard box underneath his desk and offered them to me and my professor. Then, he began to talk about his plan for the county. . . . He looked like someone from a novel I have read—well-educated and with a strong sense of responsibility. He was a born workaholic and he was not a family man, but he is a trustworthy and reliable man.
Although both Gu and Bo claimed that they first met in Jin County in 1984, Bo’s ex-wife, Li Danyu, insisted that all three of their families had known one another for years before that—Li Danyu’s brother had married Gu’s sister. In an interview with the New York Times, Li claimed that she and Bo Xilai helped Gu get into Beijing University through their connections. Bo became Gu’s dance partner at school and might have had an affair then.
Following their encounter or re-encounter in Jin County in 1984, Bo began to openly pursue Gu, who was nine years younger and known for her head-turning beauty. Still married, he pressed Li Danyu for a divorce, but to no avail. Instead, the obstinate Li wrote letters to Bo Xilai’s employer and friends, depicting him as a treacherous husband who had used her in his downtrodden years and dumped her for a young woman when his situation took a turn for the better. In the 1980s, Chinese courts seldom granted a divorce involving a third party. In addition, Li Danyu worked for the army and any man or woman who caused the marriage of military personnel to dissolve would be prosecuted. It was a nasty divorce and dragged on for four years, with many court mediations. In the end, Li consented and gained sole custody of their son, changing the child’s last name from Bo to Li.
In 1986, Gu Kailai had the rare opportunity to study in the US, but the now-single Bo Xilai proposed to her. They were married the same year and a son, Bo Guagua, was born in 1987. A year later, the family moved to the city of Dalian, where Bo Xilai was named a district party chief.
THE PRINCELINGS
IN APRIL 1989, thousands of college students in Beijing gathered in Tiananmen Square to mourn the death of former party secretary Hu Yaobang, who had been purged for his liberal views. At first the group was relatively small, compared with the enormity of the square itself, which was designed to comfortably hold a million people when Chairman Mao wanted to address “the revolutionary masses.” Soon, a crowd gathered around the mourning students, some to share the grief over Hu Yaobang’s death, others with broader grievances about the way China was being run, and before long the square became the center of a protest movement. Emboldened student demonstrators called for an end to government corruption and political liberalization. The widespread corruption within the party was a unifying element. The movement quickly spread to cities around the country. In the southern city of Shenzhen, where I was a journalist and protest organizer, angry residents took to the street, in part because of rumors that children of senior leaders had purchased popular consumer goods, such as color TV sets, from manufacturers at below-wholesale prices and made a huge killing in the market.
At the height of the movement, student leaders, whose command of English made them the focal point of Western correspondents, led a hunger strike. Government officials agreed to engage in a dialogue with them. Despite a virtual news blackout in China, the international media freely reported the hunger strike and within a week, the overseas news galvanized sympathy and support from all sectors of Chinese society. Fearing that the Communist Party would lose its power—military units based in Beijing and local police refused to intervene—Deng Xiaoping and other party elders, including Bo Xilai’s father, decided to use force to stop the protests. Military units based on the Mongolian border, who were effectively isolated from news about what was happening in Beijing, were mobilized.
Troops and tanks rolled into Beijing on the night of June 3, and the order was given to open fire on unarmed students and residents, and the so-called prodemocracy movement was crushed. It has been reported that the troops were told by their commanders that the right-wingers within the party were attempting to overthrow the government. Many of the casualties were reportedly trying to flee Tiananmen Square when they were killed on side streets. The official death toll was never publicized, but student organizers now claim more than 1,000 people were killed.
Following the crackdown, officials who opposed the use of force, including party general secretary Zhao Ziyang, were ousted. Party veterans, who gathered to discuss leadership succession in the fall of 1989, expressed disappointment that Zhao, the designated successor to Deng Xiaoping, would betray them by supporting the protestors. General Wang Zhen, who was then vice president of China, was quoted as saying, “Nobody is more reliable than our own children. We need our children to protect the red China that we have established.” His views were widely shared by Bo Xilai’s father and other veterans. At that gathering, the veterans agreed in a secret deal that the government should pick one child from the family of each veteran leader who had fought with Mao during the revolution in the 1940s and gradually elevate him or her to the equivalent of a vice minister’s position or higher in the government and the military.
This special group of senior leaders’ children were the original princelings. Over the next two decades, the princeling definition was expanded to include children of all senior leaders, national and regional, and the princelings have emerged as a formidable political faction. At the recently concluded Party Congress in November 2011, three have made it to the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee, the highest decision-making body.
Rising political clout has also given many princelings access to wealth. According to
a widely-circulated report, supposedly conducted by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, there were 3,200 billionaires (in yuan terms) in China by the end of 2006. Of those, 2,932 were princelings, controlling assets of 2,450 billion yuan (US $395 billion). It is inconceivable that a Chinese official institution would prepare such a report, but based on my knowledge, the figures cited reflect the reality.
In the Bo family, the youngest son, Bo Xicheng, was initially chosen to inherit his father’s political fortune. In the 1980s, Bo Xicheng had bigger name recognition than Bo Xilai, serving first as party secretary of a state-run artifact company, and then as director at the Beijing Municipal Tourism Bureau. However, in the early 1990s, Bo Xicheng suffered a series of setbacks. He failed to garner support for a spot on the standing committee of the Beijing Municipal Party Committee despite his father’s active maneuvering. Official records show that the local government removed him as director of the Beijing Municipal Tourism Bureau in 1992. The youngest son’s apparent political demise prompted the family patriarch to shift his attention to Bo Xilai, who willingly accepted the newly-available role. He moved up steadily from a district party chief in Dalian to become the city’s acting mayor and subsequently mayor in 1993.
Bo’s vision for Dalian might have been shaped by his visit to New York City a decade earlier. Liang Anren is a retired engineer from Long Island, New York. Liang’s father had saved Bo Yibo’s life in the 1930s and the two families were close friends. In 1983, Bo Xilai made a personal trip to New York City and stayed at Liang’s home. Liang remembers Bo Xilai as a smart young man filled with curiosity. He bought a metro pass and toured the city himself on the subway. Liang said Bo Xilai took a keen interest in Harlem and visited the borough twice to study the cultures and living conditions of African Americans. He marveled at the pristine beaches of Long Island and the clean air.
A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel Page 11