Analysts construed Bo’s remarks as a manifesto of defiance. He was sending a belligerent message to those who opposed him in the Politburo, especially Premier Wen Jiabao.
“He acted as if he were general secretary of the party and randomly scolded other leaders,” said an insider. “That didn’t go very well.”
As Bo went about his public campaign, he did not expect Wang Lijun to outsmart him and slip away. On February 6, 2012, Wang walked into the US Consulate in Chengdu, elevating their personal conflicts into an international incident, the consequences of which were beyond Bo’s grasp. Thus, by making a series of reckless decisions against Wang, Bo violated a cardinal rule, which Confucius summarized succinctly for politicians: “Lack of tolerance for small slights will bring destruction to big plans.”
THE DISMISSAL
BO’S GONE! Yes, it’s true, a senior official told me after I rang to confirm a cell phone call from a Beijing-based journalist I had known for twenty years. It was morning in Beijing, March 15. She had revealed, “Bo Xilai has been removed from his party secretary’s post. My contacts have already verified the news. It’s safe to post it on your website.”
In fact, half an hour earlier, Yang Haipeng, a former journalist with Southern Metropolis, whose blog in China attracts 200,000 followers, had already revealed similar information. “I’m willing to shut down my blog as self-punishment if it’s proven otherwise,” he wrote.
The official Chinese government news agency, Xinhua, tried to catch up and issued a fifty-four-word statement ten minutes after my posting that Bo Xilai no longer held the Chongqing party secretary’s position. The Xinhua news quickly appeared prominently on all Chinese news websites. Bo’s downfall elicited strong reactions among the Chinese public. Within an hour, some 62,000 comments appeared on Tencent, one of China’s largest Internet portals. Leftist websites such as Utopia, Red China, and Maoflag were filled with angry rants over Bo’s dismissal. A large number of residents in Dalian and Chongqing expressed their sympathy and support for Bo on Weibo.
Worrying that the news could trigger chaos, the government immediately ordered all government-run news sites to downplay the story. By the afternoon, all the eye-catching headlines had disappeared and the story blended in with other news of the day. Portal sites such as Sina and Netease shut down their feedback section.
Kong Qingdong, a professor at Beijing University, openly opposed the party’s decision to remove Bo Xilai, calling it a “counterrevolutionary coup” during a TV appearance. Kong was detained for five days. Subsequently, he admitted in his blog, under apparent pressure from the government, that he had accepted 1 million yuan from Bo Xilai in exchange for his services to promote Chongqing’s political and economic accomplishments.
Worried that Bo supporters might stage demonstrations against his dismissal, the senior leadership allegedly ordered public security departments to deploy armed police in public areas in Chongqing and key major cities. The Hong Kong–based Oriental Daily featured pictures posted online by residents in Chongqing, showing armored personnel carriers on the streets and a heavy police presence.
When I was growing up in China, there was a popular saying, “The government policies are as changeable as the summer storm weather.” People in Chongqing waited to see which way the storms would blow.
A few hours after Bo Xilai was deposed, a notice went up on a bulletin board near the People’s Square in the center of Chongqing, where a large group used to gather to sing red songs. The notice read:
We have received complaints from residents living nearby that the nightly singing and dancing are too loud and disrupt their normal lives. We will take measures to regulate the activities.
An official with the police department disclosed that they had been notified of Bo Xilai’s departure a few hours before the official announcement. The city government banned “celebrations, open discussions, and gatherings.” Many police were relieved that the “red terror” was over.
On the evening of March 15, Chongqing Star TV broadcast the news about Bo during its prime-time news program. At the end of the newscast, a liquor commercial appeared, followed by an announcement from Chongqing Star TV to recruit sales representatives for its advertising department. Under Bo’s order, the TV station had banned such commercials a year earlier. Ironically, Bo had just reiterated his promise to continue with the commercial-free TV programming at the just-concluded National People’s Congress.
The liquor commercial prompted many bloggers to marvel at how fast politics changed directions. A blogger using the alias “Journalist Yang Wanguo” posted a mini-essay called “Chongqing Is Opening Up Again,” which said:
I saw several people giving out business cards for “massage services.” I got a card and called the number on it. A woman who picked up the phone said she was actually a “sex service provider.” The woman said she and two of her friends had just resumed their business. For a quickie, she charged 300 yuan and an all-night service, 600 yuan.
“Aren’t you worried about getting arrested by our police chief Wang Lijun?” I asked.
“Didn’t he just get sacked?”
“But what if the public security bureau comes to check up on the hotel?”
“Don’t worry. Chongqing is open for business again.”
Several political dissidents told overseas Chinese media that online references to the 1989 Tiananmen Square student protests, the Falun Gong movement, and the deposed Chinese premier, Zhao Ziyang, were accessible after being blocked for several years. On Baidu, another popular Internet search engine, historic photos of the 1989 protesters, including one showing tanks on the streets of Beijing, were available. In addition, the ban was lifted on an article written by a former professor at Beijing University to condemn the Communist Party’s Propaganda Department. The thaw was ephemeral. By the time overseas Chinese media began to report on the phenomenon and decipher whether the change heralded another political spring, the ban had been reinstated. The interpretation with the most traction was that anti-Bo factions within the senior leadership were hoping to convey to the international community that political reforms would be possible if Bo Xilai and his supporters were eliminated.
In the era of the Internet, the usual secret style of the Central Party Committee and its tendency toward cautious investigation did not hold with the public’s craving for fast news. For more than two decades China’s political environment had been relatively stable. The sudden removal of Bo Xilai came as a surprise for most Chinese. The absence of clear and timely government reports on Bo Xilai’s situation generated more speculation and rumors about Bo Xilai’s future. Many wondered if the government would press charges against him or simply force him to retire quietly.
Gu Kailai posted two lines on her Weibo on March 16, in which she thanked everyone for their concern. “I want to clarify some facts—I’m doing very well and none of us is under investigation. We will share the truth with the media soon.” She said Bo’s departure had nothing to do with Wang Lijun’s attempted defection. Bo’s other family members also talked to the media. His sister-in-law Gu Dan told a reporter that “Bo is at peace with himself at home,” adding that for someone who had gone through the turbulence of the Cultural Revolution, “the current setback is nothing.”
The government’s continued silence on Bo Xilai’s fate served only to stoke further interest. A Chinese reporter falsely disclosed in his blog that Bo Xilai and thirty-eight members of his family had been rounded up by the Central Guard Bureau and were imprisoned in a small town outside Beijing. He claimed at least fifty people, including some current and retired senior officials, would be implicated. On the night of March 19, a resident in Beijing posted a message on Weibo saying that a large group of foreign reporters had gathered in front of the Diaoyutai State Guest House and were anticipating some major breaking news related to Bo Xilai. Soon after, someone claimed that the Capital International Airport and the main thoroughfares in Beijing were blocked by fully armed polic
emen and soldiers. An editor with Stock Market Weekly wondered on his blog why there were many military trucks on the streets. He said he had seen plainclothes policemen guarding every crossroad. A well-known poet in China wrote, “Intrigues are in the air tonight. Rumors are flying all over and it looks like a major storm is on its way.” One person reported hearing “incessant gunshots” in Beijing, without mentioning where or when. No shooting that night could be verified.
These postings prompted an overseas Chinese site to post a story saying troops loyal to Bo Xilai had teamed up with armed police in Beijing, staged a coup, and “put President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao under arrest.” A reporter in China told me that several of his friends in the US called him at midnight to ask if there was a coup. The next day, the Weibo postings and the stories proved to be false. It turned out that the foreign reporters who had waited outside the Diaoyutai State Guest House were there to interview the deputy foreign minister of North Korea, who was visiting Beijing with a delegation. There were some armed policemen on Chang-an Boulevard, but they were there to guard the motorcades of several foreign dignitaries.
The government used the excuses of quashing rumors to launch coordinated cyber-attacks against legitimate and reputable news sites both in and outside China. In late March and early April, my Mingjing News site was under constant siege from hackers. Readers accessing Mingjing News would get an automatic fake virus warning message. Following those attacks, we worked with the FBI and determined that the hacker or hackers had struck from a site in Mexico. Boxun, a user-generated Chinese-language news site that featured many inside stories about the political intrigues surrounding the Bo Xilai scandal, had to shut down for weeks and switch servers, such was the severity of the hacker attacks on its site.
In March, the government temporarily shut down sixteen microblog sites in China, especially those run by two of China’s largest portals, Sina and Tencent, for allegedly “spreading harmful information and causing negative social impact.” A dozen websites, some of which supported Bo Xilai’s overall policies in Chongqing, were closed for “viciously attacking the party leadership and engaging in irresponsible speculation on the upcoming Party Congress.” Several bloggers wrote that they had been contacted by police, who invited them out to tea and urged them to impose “self-discipline” and restrain from making trouble for the party and the government.
Interestingly, while the government was trying to block “hostile” websites, party insiders from both sides continued to feed information to domestic bloggers and overseas media.
On March 24, an important piece of news caught public attention. Yang Haipeng, who first disclosed Bo’s dismissal on his blog inside China, revealed that the “British nanny” of Bo’s son had died in Chongqing the previous year. “The body was cremated without any autopsy. Wang Lijun handled the case. It looked like Bo Xilai was connected with the death.”
The “British nanny” Yang erroneously referred to was Neil Heywood. It was as if Heywood’s body had floated to the surface of the river into which it had been thrown at a most inconvenient time for Bo Xilai.
In fact, Yang was not the first to reveal the Neil Heywood connection. Back on February 15, a reporter with Southern Weekend received a text message from Wang Lijun, claiming that Bo Xilai’s wife was connected with the murder of a British businessman named Heywood. The reporter posted the news on Weibo, but the government quickly deleted it.
News that Bo Xilai’s family might be linked with Neil Heywood’s death failed to make any waves in the Chinese media, which continued to focus on the political aspect of the Bo Xilai scandal in March and early April. Without much information about Neil Heywood, many simply believed the link to be too farfetched. It seemed an ultimate oxymoron that the wife of a Communist Party chief, who thrived on his anticorruption and anticrime platform, would kill a foreigner over a business transaction. Several online postings called the news preposterous, something cooked up by members of the anti–Bo Xilai faction.
But the British and US media jumped at the new development. The mysterious death of Neil Heywood, along with Wang Lijun’s flight to the US Consulate, injected new international twists to what had originally been a mere domestic power struggle. In a matter of two weeks, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Daily Telegraph, the BBC, and the Guardian pieced together a profile of Neil Heywood and added to the drama more salacious and intriguing details, some of which proved to be speculative.
Born in 1970 in Kensington, London, Heywood attended the prestigious English public school Harrow, and after graduating from the University of Warwick in 1992, he received a scholarship to study Chinese at the Beijing Language and Culture University. London’s Daily Telegraph worked out that Heywood went back to the UK after graduation and, among other business schemes, launched a venture with his father, “attempting to produce a ‘blind date auction’ television show” but was unsuccessful.
In the late 1990s, Heywood traveled to China again and attempted to try his luck there. The timing couldn’t have been better. At a televised Chinese New Year celebration a few years before, a Canadian, whose given Chinese name was Da Shan, or Big Mountain, wowed the audience with a stand-up skit in impeccable Chinese. Overnight, he became a household name and people started to look at foreigners differently, especially those who spoke broken or fluent Chinese. Young Westerners who majored in the Chinese language suddenly found themselves in great demand. Local TV stations put a Westerner on the show as a fun prop and Caucasian faces became a common feature in Chinese commercials. Western companies generally hired one of their own who knew the culture and language to help them navigate the still-murky business world, and, similarly, Chinese companies employed a Westerner to show off their strength as international companies and to help them set up operations overseas.
Henry David Hwang’s Broadway show, Chinglish, describes a young Mandarin-speaking Australian man named Peter Timms who came to China to teach English and insinuated his way into the family of a senior official by helping the official’s son get into an elite school in Australia. With his political connections and language talents, he gave up his teaching job and became a “consultant.” While trying to school an American businessman in the niceties of building relationships in China, he found himself duped and inadvertently linked in a political power struggle. The character might as well have been based on Neil Heywood, for that is the path he chose in China.
In 1998, Heywood obtained a job in Dalian, teaching English to the children of affluent families, many of whom eyed the West as the destination for their children’s education. A Chinese businessman who met Heywood remembers him as a suave English gentleman who boasted about his aristocratic lineage—his great-grandfather had served in the House of Lords and was the consul general of the British mission in Tianjin in 1929–1935. Heywood claimed to have arranged for the granddaughter of the wartime British prime minister, Winston Churchill, to visit China. When asked how he befriended the Bo family, Heywood would tell his friends that Gu Kailai hired him to be Bo Guagua’s English tutor in the late 1990s, and that he had used his connections to get Bo Guagua admitted into his alma mater, Harrow, an elite preparatory school in the UK.
However, a Bo family friend disputed Heywood’s claim, saying the Briton did not know Gu Kailai until 2003, when he heard that Bo Guagua was attending Harrow. He wrote Gu a letter in which he introduced himself as an alumnus of Harrow living in China, and asked if he could meet her while he was in London. She agreed, and at their meeting, Gu Kailai—who had already spent three years in the UK in order to accompany her son—expressed her intention to return to China soon. Heywood volunteered to be Guagua’s caretaker during her absence. Over the next month, as they became acquainted, Gu Kailai accepted Heywood’s offer, allowing him to be Bo Guagua’s family contact for Harrow. Heywood was supposed to pick up Bo Guagua during weekends and spend time with him at the Bo family apartment in London’s West End. Heywood’s service paid off. Upon his return to
China, Heywood became a frequent guest at the Bo home.
As Bo Xilai’s political career took off—governor of Liaoning and then commerce minister—Heywood jettisoned his low-salaried job and launched a consultancy business to help British manufacturers gain a foothold in China.
An official at the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection disclosed that Gu Kailai, over a period of three years, had asked Heywood to transfer several million dollars of her family assets—presumably bribe money—to the UK, and that Heywood’s death might have been caused by a dispute over such transactions.
The revelation of Bo’s connection with Neil Heywood’s death offered his opponents inside the Politburo an unassailable reason to oust him.
An official who had access to the record of a high-level debate over possible charges against Bo said the leadership had argued over the following allegations, but failed to reach consensus:
•That Bo harbored unbridled political ambitions and turned Chongqing into an independent kingdom. He intended to take over the Central Law and Legal Commission so he could control armed police, and force Xi Jinping, the new party general secretary, to step down.
•That Bo and his wife had accumulated millions of yuan through illegal means and transferred the funds overseas.
For the first charge, the source said it was hard to prosecute Bo on account of his aspiration to join the Politburo Standing Committee. In the Mao era, several senior leaders who were seen as a challenge to Mao’s absolute power were persecuted on charges they harbored political ambitions and tried to split the party. But Mao’s practices had long been discredited and so could not be deployed to go after Bo. Nowadays, ambition and aspiration are considered key motivating factors for politicians. Besides, there was no substantial proof to show that Bo was planning to seize power and be the head of the country. Furthermore, Premier Wen stated during the National People’s Congress that Bo had strayed from the party’s platform of reforms and was attempting to restore the Cultural Revolution. His remarks indicated that the nature of Bo’s case was ideological rather than criminal—even though differences in opinion had been construed as criminal in the past.
A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel Page 15