The corruption allegation against Bo could also be politically risky, said the source. No government official is immune to corruption, or in a popular vernacular, “Nobody’s butt is clean.” Extensive investigation into Bo’s case could implicate more senior leaders and trigger a backlash among the public.
As details about Gu Kailai’s possible involvement in the Heywood murder emerged, senior officials agreed that they had found a powerful weapon that could fatally destroy Bo. The murder allegation weakened the defense of Bo’s supporters and a consensus was quickly forged within the Politburo. In his book, The Mysteries of Bo Xilai Incident, Dong Peidong said President Hu Jintao personally consulted with former president Jiang Zemin, who fully supported the Politburo’s decision to investigate Bo. “Jiang urged the leadership to handle the case according to the law and make it a solid legal case, which can stand the test of history,” wrote the author. Based on Jiang’s idea, Hu should put politics aside and focus on hard criminal evidence. “Bo’s problem has exceeded the bottom line of human civilization,” Jiang added.
On March 19, four days after Bo’s dismissal, Japan’s Sankei Shimbun quoted an inside source as saying that Bo had been detained by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the party’s anticorruption body, for investigation. The article said Bo would be transferred to a small town outside Beijing to undergo interrogation and that he could face criminal charges.
A high school teacher, who claimed to be a Bo family friend, spoke out online, declaring the Japanese report to be a rumor and saying that Bo Xilai was staying in the comfort of his home in Beijing. But everyone knew that Bo’s detention was merely a matter of time.
On April 10, the website of the People’s Daily, the official party newspaper, posted a message on its Weibo site that the Central Party Committee was preparing to make a major announcement. Nothing further was reported that day, nor was there any announcement on the evening television news. People began posting complaints online, castigating the People’s Daily for fueling rumors. At eleven o’clock that night, when most people had already gone to bed, China Central Television interrupted its regular programming and broadcast the following announcement:
As Comrade Bo Xilai is suspected of being involved in serious discipline violations, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China has decided to suspend his membership of the Politburo and the Party Central Committee, in line with the Party Constitution and relevant rules.
The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection will file the case for investigation.
Chinese police have set up a team to reinvestigate the case that British citizen Neil Heywood was found dead in Chongqing on November 15, 2011, which was alleged by former Chongqing police chief Wang Lijun, who entered, without authorization, the US general consulate in Chengdu on February 6 and stayed there, Xinhua learned from authorities.
Police authorities paid close attention to the case, and set up the team to reinvestigate the case according to law with an attitude to seek truth from facts.
According to investigation results, Gu Kailai, wife of Comrade Bo Xilai, and their son were on good terms with Heywood. However, they had conflict over economic interests, which had been intensified.
According to reinvestigation results, the existing evidence indicates that Heywood died of homicide, of which Gu Kailai and Zhang Xiaojun, a personal assistant at Bo’s home, are suspected.
Gu Kailai and Zhang Xiaojun have been transferred to judicial authorities on suspicion of the crime of intentional homicide.
To those who had followed the scandal via Weibo and overseas Chinese media coverage, the short announcement barely confirmed what they had heard and speculated. The next day, a Hong Kong newspaper quoted an official who described in vivid details the final scene before Bo was taken away:
At two o’clock on the afternoon of April 9, two senior officials appeared at Bo’s home in Beijing with four military officers. They notified Bo of a meeting at the Great Hall of the People. “As a veteran politician,” says the report, “Bo knew that his career [had come] to an end.” The sixty-two-year-old Bo asked to make a phone call to inform his relatives, but his request was denied. Bo said calmly, “Even though I’ve long prepared for this moment, I’m still surprised when it comes.”
Before he was led away, he told his household staff, “I need to go. Please take care of yourself. You have to believe in history and believe in the Central Party Committee.”
At the Great Hall of the People, Bo met Li Yuanchao, the head of the party’s organization department, who presented Bo to Chongqing five years before. Li informed him of the party’s decision to remove him from the twenty-five-member Politburo and investigate his wife’s involvement in the Neil Heywood murder case. Before he was led away, Bo was quoted as saying that “he only believed in truth.”
The version offered by a source of mine in Beijing was more dramatic:
At the Great Hall of the People, Bo yelled at the three Politburo Standing Committee members, who were there to get him. They simply ignored him. Bo was then taken away by members of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and confined at a secret location near Beijing.
The source said that at the beginning of the investigation, Bo requested a private meeting with President Hu. After his request was denied, he refused to cooperate with his interrogators, insisting they had no right to question him. One time, he even slapped one official in the face. For a week, he remained silent. To pressure him, officials in charge of his case told him his wife had also been detained. The news further depressed Bo.
Meanwhile, the Chinese official news agency Xinhua published an editorial on April 18 to dispute claims by overseas media, including Mingjing News, that the Bo Xilai case was politically motivated. “From our investigations and reviews, it is in no doubt a criminal case,” said the editorial. “If these types of criminal activities happen in any modern country with developed laws, the government will handle it like a criminal case. For those who look at China with ‘tainted glasses,’ they should wait and see. Truth will prevail.”
LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON
WHEN BO XILAI was designated as heir to the family’s political fortune in 1990, he could never have imagined that his father’s history of misfortunes had also rubbed off on him. Father and son would share an eerily similar fate.
Bo Xilai’s father, Bo Yibo, was imprisoned four times in his life, the first three in the 1930s by the Nationalists for his Communist beliefs and activities, and the fourth in the 1960s by his fellow Communists who accused him of supporting the Nationalists. Bo Xilai, having once been imprisoned by Maoist radicals who had brought down his father during the Cultural Revolution, now faced incarceration at the hands of his fellow Politburo members who felt threatened by his own radical attempts to restore the Maoist Cultural Revolution.
Both father and the son were accused of abandoning the wives who had supported them when they were at the low points of their lives in favor of younger and more attractive women as their careers and lives turned the corner. Both second wives were fatally compromised by their husbands.
Bo Yibo was born in 1908 in an impoverished region of China’s central province of Shanxi at the beginning of the twentieth century. Bo Yibo’s biographer said that when Bo Yibo was a young boy, his family was too poor to feed four children. After one of his younger brothers was born, Bo Yibo’s parents tossed the infant into a local river. Poverty most surely shaped Bo Yibo’s worldview on life. As a high school student, he organized several protests against the local government’s unreasonable land taxes. After he was enrolled in the prestigious Beijing University, which was a hotbed of liberal ideas in China in 1924, he met a group of similar-minded rebels and joined the Chinese Communist Party a year later.
In subsequent years, Bo became an underground Communist Party organizer, first in his hometown of Shanxi and then in the port city of Tianjin. After Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek started to suppress Communists across Chi
na, Bo was in and out of jail. In 1931, he was sentenced to eight years and sent to a prison for military personnel in Beijing.
In 1936, before Japan launched its full-scale invasion of China, the Communist Party leadership was concerned that Bo and his comrades would be executed if the Japanese troops occupied Beijing. The local party branch, with approval of the senior Communist Party leadership, urged Bo and other imprisoned Communist Party members, more than sixty of them, to falsely confess their crimes and sign an anti-Communist declaration, which was later published in a local newspaper. Bo followed party orders and was released.
At the invitation of a close friend, Bo returned to his hometown and worked as a Communist under a sympathetic warlord, who had rallied troops to fight the Japanese. When the warlord later turned against the Communists in his army, Bo Yibo collected his supporters and joined Mao Zedong’s army, conducting fierce guerrilla operations against the Japanese in southern Shanxi. After Japan’s defeat in 1945 by largely American-led Allied forces in the Pacific, China collapsed into civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists. Bo Yibo became an influential military and political figure in the Communist ranks. Mao claimed victory in 1949 and Bo served as China’s first finance minister, deputy chairman of the State Planning Commission, and vice premier. To the public, he was Mao’s close friend and the two were constantly seen swimming together.
Bo Yibo’s political career came to an abrupt end during the Cultural Revolution, which started in 1966. Kang Sheng, head of China’s version of the KGB, dug out a newspaper that featured the “anti-Communist” declaration that Bo Yibo had signed in order to gain release from prison in 1936. Kang brought up the issue to Mao, condemning Bo as a Communist traitor. At a Central Party Committee meeting, Mao, who was well aware of Bo’s false confession back in 1936, did not approve the traitor charges, but a month later, at the urging of other radicals in the party, he switched position.
Mao openly criticized Bo Yibo at a meeting in February 1967, in front of a delegation from China’s Communist ally, Albania:
Some of the Communist Party members had been arrested by the Nationalists, betrayed the cause and published anti-Communist declarations in a newspaper. At that time, we didn’t know they were anti-Communists and did not know the details of their release. Now we have discovered that they actually supported the Nationalists and opposed Communism.
Mao’s remarks sealed Bo Yibo’s fate, just as thirty-five years later, Premier Wen Jiabao’s statement about the Chongqing model at a press conference would lead to the downfall of his son.
In March 1967, Bo Yibo and sixty-one other senior leaders who had languished in a Nationalist prison in the 1930s for their unwavering faith in Communism found themselves prisoners of the Communist state that they had fought to establish. Bo Yibo was dragged before “struggle sessions” at stadiums in Beijing and paraded around with a big iron plaque around his neck, but he remained defiant and demanded to speak in his own defense.
To justify Bo Yibo’s jail sentence, the government launched a nationwide propaganda campaign to “expose his decadent bourgeois lifestyle,” the same tactic that was used thirty-five years later against his son.
Back in the 1960s, as the Cultural Revolution swept the country, it was almost impossible to determine what constituted a crime. Corruption charges against Bo Yibo included watching foreign movies and owning fourteen winter coats for a family of eight.
A party pamphlet titled “The Dirty Mind and Decadent Lifestyle of Bo Yibo” said that Bo Yibo loved “decadent British, American and Hong Kong movies that display women’s thighs” and that he enjoyed banned classical Chinese novels and traditional operas that were vulgar and pornographic:
For many years, Bo Yibo led a decadent bourgeois lifestyle. His eight-member family occupied three courtyard houses. Before an overseas trip, Bo’s wife spent 600 yuan [US $100] on high-end luxury pajamas. Both Bo and his wife frequently drank ginseng soup. When the house was raided, we found a wooden box full of ginseng roots. In the 1960s, when our country was experiencing economic difficulties, Bo and his wife abused power. Each time they took a business trip, they would always purchase bolts of cloth, watches, vegetable oil, candy, fruits, watermelon, peanuts and some stinky tofu. They even bought chopsticks and brooms. Oftentimes they asked the government for subsidies, claiming that they had financial difficulties. At a conference in Guangzhou in 1962, Bo secretly bought a bolt of cloth. Many people saw him carry the cloth from his car to his room. He left a bad impression among the public.
Every one of Bo’s children had their own room, with carpets and sofas. Each child owned a watch, a transistor radio and an imported bicycle. Bo’s second daughter never read Chairman Mao’s books and refused to participate in political campaigns. She used all sorts of excuses to avoid physical labor. She asked her father’s staff members to do her homework and constantly yelled at them if they did not perform to her satisfaction. . . . When she was feeling slightly sick, she would refuse to attend school and stayed home, wandering around in her slippers. She would carry a wooden back massager and patted her back while walking. It was disgusting. She never cooked and did not know how to sew. She even asked her nanny to wash her handkerchief and her menstrual belt. She was a typical stinky bourgeois princess.
When Bo’s eldest son once said contemptuously, “Who cares about serving the people. I want to do a good job at school. I will attend Qinghua University in the future and become an expert on science. It doesn’t matter if I join the Communist Party or not.” When staff members heard about it, they told Bo, who simply laughed and did nothing to correct his son. When Bo’s eldest daughter graduated from college, he used his connections at the Foreign Ministry and had his daughter and son-in-law assigned to the British government office in Beijing. His third daughter was able to transfer to a different college through his connections at the Education Ministry.
In comparison with the corruption allegations against Bo Xilai and his wife—transferring millions of dollars overseas—the charges against Bo Yibo in the 1960s seem trivial, even laughable. But they were enough to keep Bo Yibo in prison for twelve years.
Following Mao’s death in 1976, Hu Yaobang, who was in charge of personnel matters at the Party Central Committee and was to become the general secretary of the Communist Party, received a letter from Bo Yibo requesting a review of his case. Hu Yaobang organized a special team to quietly investigate the charges against Bo Yibo. In those days, even though Mao’s widow and other radicals had been arrested, many supporters of the Cultural Revolution were still in power and resisted any attempts to reverse political decisions made by Mao. Fortunately, Hu Yaobang obtained support from senior leader Deng Xiaoping, who had just emerged as an important figure in Chinese history after years of political persecution.
In 1977, the special team presented a report to the Central Party Committee, which included hundreds of interviews and testimonials to illustrate that Bo Yibo and his fellow Communists were wrongly convicted and that they never betrayed the Communist Party during their incarceration in the 1930s. The Central Party Committee adopted the recommendations and Bo Yibo’s conviction was officially overturned on December 16, 1978. He was reinstated as vice premier of China and joined the Politburo. Despite his imprisonment and harsh treatment, Bo Yibo remained loyal to Mao’s Communist ideology. In the post–Mao era, Bo supported China’s economic reforms but resisted any political liberalization espoused by reformists.
Throughout his life, critics say, Bo Yibo had the habit of biting the hand that fed him. In May 1927, when he was pursued by the Nationalists for his underground Communist activities, Bo Yibo sought shelter at the house of a wealthy friend, who risked his life to save Bo. While in hiding at this friend’s house, the young Bo Yibo fell in love with the friend’s daughter. The two were married and had one daughter, who later became an official at the Chinese Foreign Ministry.
Once his situation turned for the better, Bo Yibo had an affair with his secretary, a Gua
ngdong-born Communist activist, in the early 1940s. He requested a divorce from his wife, but she declined. Bo Yibo continued the affair and three times got his secretary pregnant. For a young woman, premarital pregnancies were considered a disgrace. The secretary had to undergo three abortions. This eventually moved—or appalled—Bo Yibo’s wife so much that she agreed to the divorce, probably saving the young woman’s life. Many years later, his ex-wife was quoted as saying:
His divorce request really hurt my father’s feelings. My father had risked his life to rescue him. . . . But I had to grant the divorce. I had no choice. The secretary already had three abortions. As a woman, I can’t see her going through these abortions again and again. Her life could be endangered.
The secretary’s name was Hu Ming. Known for her beauty and intelligence, the idealistic Hu Ming had joined the Communist revolution at the age of sixteen and specialized in youth, publicity, and woman-related work. She married Bo Yibo in 1945, and after they moved to Beijing in 1949, Hu Ming held various midlevel jobs at government ministries and bureaus. She gave birth to four boys and two girls. Bo Xilai was her second child.
When Bo Yibo was purged in the Cultural Revolution, Hu Ming, who was then in Guangzhou, was escorted back to Beijing on January 5, 1967, to expose her husband’s crimes. On the Beijing–Guangzhou express train, Hu Ming died mysteriously. The Red Guards accompanying her claimed that she committed suicide, but later reports hold that she was beaten to death by her handlers. She would have been forty-eight that year.
In the 1980s, when Bo Yibo’s son Bo Xilai requested a divorce from his wife so he could marry Gu Kailai, some people brought up Bo Yibo’s two marriages, calling Bo Xilai “a replica of his father.” Before his death, Bo Yibo’s reputation was tainted by his treatment of Hu Yaobang, the reform-minded party general secretary who was instrumental in ending his ten-year imprisonment. In November 1986, when university students around the country started to hold small-scale demonstrations—in hindsight this was a warning of the much bigger movement that would come three years later—demanding transparency in government and action against the corruption of officials, Bo Yibo sided with hardliners and blamed Hu Yaobang’s liberal policies for creating the chaos. Hu Yaobang resigned in January 1987, under the pressure of Bo Yibo and other veteran revolutionaries. When Hu Yaobang suffered a heart attack in 1989 and a nationwide student prodemocracy movement broke out, Bo Yibo supported Deng Xiaoping’s decision to suppress the movement with force.
A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel Page 16