A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel

by A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel- Murder, Money

  Following Lin’s death, Mao’s government declared Lin’s fate a state secret and only scant details were released, followed by a nationwide anti-Lin propaganda campaign. Lin’s wife became a key target. She was accused of persecuting many of Lin’s opponents and pressuring Lin to seize power, even though Lin and his wife had repeatedly begged Mao not to name Lin second in line for China’s top position. Throughout the 1970s, high-ranking party leaders spread unsubstantiated stories that Lin’s wife had forced him to escape China by drugging Lin and dragging him onto their plane.

  Jiang Qing, Mao’s widow, suffered a similar fate as those who earned her wrath. An accomplished actress in Shanghai in the 1930s, she was influenced by the rising Communist movement and traveled to the Communist headquarters in northern China, where she aspired to rise above the ranks. Mao fell victim to her charms, divorced his wife, a former guerrilla leader, and married Jiang Qing in 1938, over the objections from his fellow Communists, who, according to historians, saw Jiang Qing as a gold digger. After the Communist takeover in 1949, Jiang took charge of China’s cultural affairs. When the Cultural Revolution started in 1966, Jiang, with Mao’s support, took on a central leadership role in purging their political opponents and intellectuals. She joined the Politburo in 1969 and formed a close political alliance with other radical leftists in the years leading up to Mao’s death.

  Jiang Qing’s political influence dwindled fast after Mao died and as she attempted to invoke Mao’s name to build more political support and take power, Mao’s designated successor, Hua Guofeng, teamed up with other revolutionary elite and staged a coup in October 1976. Jiang and three other similar-minded senior leaders, collectively known as the “Gang of Four,” were arrested. Four years later, she was put on trial on charges of causing the deaths of former president Liu Shaoqi and thousands of other party, government, and military leaders and intellectuals through political persecution during the Cultural Revolution and conspiring to seize power after Mao’s death.

  Over the course of a month, the Chinese public was riveted by the televised trial of Jiang Qing, who was held responsible for all of China’s woes during the Cultural Revolution, as if Mao had simply slept through that period. Even though the trial was politically motivated, one has to give credit to the leadership of the time and the Supreme People’s Court for following proper, if not entirely adequate, due process. The trial, in six separate sessions, was broadcast live on China Central Television and lasted a month. Dozens of victims and witnesses stepped up to testify against the defendant. The prosecution presented a large amount of evidence. The defiant Jiang Qing was given the opportunity to deliver an impassioned speech, which included the famous revealing quote: “I was Chairman Mao’s dog. I bit whomever he asked me to bite.”

  Jiang was given a suspended death sentence, which was later commuted to life imprisonment. Like many of the women before her who had been collectively called “poisonous water,” she committed suicide by hanging herself in the bathroom of her hospital room in 1991.

  Since 2000, each time a senior official was executed on corruption-related charges, the blame has often been assigned to the seductive mistress(es). At a recent anticorruption conference, the deputy director of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection said, “We cannot always target the mistresses in our anticorruption campaign.”

  In 1994, Liu Zhengwei, the former party secretary of Guizhou, and his wife, Yan Jianhong, who headed a government-run foreign trade agency, were the targets of a corruption-related investigation. To protect her husband’s political career, Yan accepted full responsibility for the crimes and was sentenced to death for abusing power and embezzling public funds, especially from the government’s poverty alleviation fund in January 1995. In her will, she famously wrote, “I’m doing this for my husband and I have nothing to regret.” At the execution ground, she stood waiting for the bullets, with her head held high like a martyr’s. Following her death, her husband was able to keep his job (at one time, he was assigned to take charge of an anticorruption agency) and lived up to the ripe age of eighty-two with his reputation intact.

  And as one watched the hastily-conducted murder trial of Gu Kailai, it was impossible not to see the parallels with the fates of those other wives of senior Communist leaders before her.

  In May, Bo’s supporters distributed an exclusive interview featured in a Japanese newspaper, Fuji Evening News, by its reporter, Udagawa, who claimed to have exploited the Ministry of State Security’s request for his assistance in the investigation to gain the opportunity to see Bo. Udagawa mentioned in the article:

  Bo began to say something bad about Gu, the suspect. Bo has been separated from Gu for over a decade, though they have not divorced because of “their child and for fear of affecting Bo’s political career.” Bo did not deny that his wife had killed somebody. He said with regret, “It would have been better if I had divorced her at that time.”

  Meanwhile, in an August 2012 editorial aired on Radio Free Asia, analyst Liang Jing explicitly brought up the “poisonous water” reference:

  Gu Kailai can be considered “poisonous water” for both the princelings and the party elite. She knew exactly what kind of disastrous political consequences she brought for her aspiring husband. With her dramatic action, she ruined her husband’s political career and stained the reputation of the princelings. It is not a bad thing for the country, though.

  Gu Kailai willingly took the scapegoat role. At the end of the trial, she expressed her “gratitude” to the court:

  This case has been like a huge stone weighing on me for more than half a year. What a nightmare. The tragedy which was created by me was not only extended to Neil Heywood, but also to several families.

  The case has produced great losses to the party and the country, for which I ought to shoulder the responsibility, and I will never feel at ease. I am grateful to the humanitarian care shown to me by those who handled the case. I solemnly tell the court that in order to maintain the dignity of the law, I will accept and calmly face any sentence and I also expect a fair and just court decision.

  A veteran political journalist in Beijing, who had followed the trial, said that Gu Kailai was smart to understand that the trial’s real target was her husband, whom senior party leaders in Beijing hoped to render guilty by association and to destroy for good. If she had contested the murder charges, the government would have initiated corruption charges against her, also punishable by death. In China, corruption is so rampant that no government official is immune, and if such charges were made, more of Bo’s relatives and friends could be implicated. Of the two, perhaps the murder charge seemed the better deal. That was probably why Gu Kailai and her family refrained from mounting a vigorous defense: they knew it would amount to nothing. Gu Kailai’s fate had already been decided by party leaders in Beijing, not the judges in the court.

  By striking a deal with the Chinese government and by actively cooperating with the government—she confessed to the crime that she had not committed and at the same time implicated the police chief and his assistants—Gu Kailai aimed to protect her son from any criminal charges and have her husband’s potential death sentence commuted. It is worth emphasizing that Bo Xilai’s name was never mentioned once in Gu’s trial. Insiders familiar with her trial acknowledged the existence of such a deal between Gu and the government. However, the leadership broke its promises after anti-Bo factions gained the upper hand during the pre–Party Congress power struggles in September 2012. It began to call for tougher sentencing for Bo to diminish his unexpectedly-strong political influences.

  As the Chinese saying goes, “As long as the green hills last, there will always be wood to feed the stove.” In Gu Kailai’s case, keeping her life left open the possibility of a comeback when the political winds shifted, just as her own parents and her father-in-law had done during the Cultural Revolution. So she played along and did what the government expected her to do.

  In a sense, Gu Kailai succeed
ed in what she had hoped to achieve. On August 20, the court sentenced her to death, suspended for two years. Under Chinese law, Gu Kailai’s sentence could be commuted in two years. Considering her mental condition, she would be eligible for medical parole.

  Even though all the key suspects in the case have been convicted, debate over who really killed Heywood will linger. The vagueness in the official transcripts of the trials and the prevalence of different “insider” stories swirling around provide fodder for more theories.

  Regardless of whether or not Gu Kailai killed Neil Heywood, she is forever branded as “poisonous water,” along with the likes of Madame Mao and Wang Guangmei. Some bloggers even called her “an evil fox spirit” who attached herself to powerful men and ruined their lives. A political commentator—who claimed that Gu Kailai’s greed for money was the source of Bo’s political woes—issued a warning to the Chinese Communist Party in his article on the China in Perspective website in September 2012:

  Before the Gu Kailai trial, former Chinese president Jiang Zemin urged officials to carefully examine the circumstances for each falling dynasty in Chinese history so they could learn a lesson for today’s China. I am certain the “poisonous water” reference weighed heavily on Jiang’s mind. One should also take note that a regime rife with greed and political corruption was a breeding ground for dynasty-wrecking women. Therefore, a clean government is the best prevention. At the same time, I hope the wives of senior officials have learned a lesson from Gu Kailai—if they don’t act prudently, they will do irreparable damage to their husbands and themselves, not to mention their country.

  PART IV

  The Victor Is King and the Loser a Bandit

  Cheng wang bai kou—in the old imperial court, those who emerged as the winner in a power struggle were crowned and the way they seized power became irreproachable. The losers and their friends were killed or exiled.

  THE RESILIENT LOSER: CHINA’S SECURITY CZAR

  CHINESE CENTRAL TELEVISION, or CCTV, is China’s largest state television broadcaster. Its twenty-two channels of news, entertainment, and educational programming reach more than 1 billion viewers. In recent years CCTV has spread by satellite into North America and Europe and throughout Asia—all part of Beijing’s ambitious propaganda efforts to enhance the country’s soft power, balancing the West’s coverage of China, which is perceived to be mostly hostile.

  CCTV’s prowess has attracted a large number of the country’s most qualified, best-connected, and best-looking journalists, anchors, and hosts. For years, female staff members, especially news anchors and program hosts, have served as a pool of spouses or mistresses for senior Communist leaders. The attraction is mutual. In the movie industry, an actress can obtain a coveted starring role through her “performance” on the casting couch. Inside CCTV, a sprawling state bureaucracy, where political connections are a necessity to get ahead, young women who hope to make it big and have their face seen by a billion people every day are in search of a sugar daddy. There is a popular saying in mainland China now: “Behind every news anchor is a senior Communist leader or a billionaire.” The same phenomenon exists in local state television stations across the country as well. The wives of Cao Jianmin, head of the Chinese People’s Supreme Procuratorate, China’s top prosecution organ, and Zhang Chunxian, governor of Xingjiang and a Politburo member, are both former CCTV news anchors. In December 2011, the director of CCTV was forced to step down after allegations were published on Mingjing News that he had pressured female TV personalities to date or sleep with senior leaders to advance his career.

  Among the alleged “gold diggers” at CCTV, Jia Xiaohua, a former anchor and journalist on the business and finance channel and an editor at CCTV’s Books and Art program, landed the biggest fish. Her husband is Zhou Yongkang, dubbed China’s J. Edgar Hoover. Zhou had great political and quasi-military power. He served on the Standing Committee and controlled China’s law enforcement and judicial authorities including local and armed police, the courts, and the procuratorate, with a budget that is said to be larger than that of China’s military.

  Though largely unconfirmed, common gossip has it that when Zhou met the CCTV journalist, who was twenty-eight years his junior, he was still married. Soon, Jia Xiaohua claimed she was pregnant and demanded a marital commitment, and Zhou obliged. Just as he filed for divorce in 2008, Zhou’s wife suddenly died in a car crash. People suspected that he had personally orchestrated the car accident, though there is no evidence to suggest this was true. At age seventy, Zhou has been the subject of persistent rumors relating to his womanizing activities—his nickname is “King of the Roosters,” implying a man with high sexual libido who would not spare any pretty women in his way. At a two-day conference at a hotel in Sichuan province, he was alleged to have slept with several female hotel staff members.

  Despite his notoriety among his former colleagues in Beijing, Zhou was largely unknown to the general public. As the country’s security czar, he acted mostly behind the scenes, until the Bo Xilai scandal pushed him to center stage. In February 2012, a week after Wang Lijun’s visit to the US Consulate, Zhou’s name began to surface in many of the online news reports and blogs. Some of those posts were about his sexual prowess, but most discussed him as the mastermind and cohort in Bo Xilai’s attempted coup against Xi Jinping, the party’s heir apparent.

  A source at the Central Party Committee’s Secretariat disclosed that the Politburo Standing Committee had held a meeting on February 12 to discuss Wang Lijun’s botched defection and his accusations against Bo Xilai:

  Out of the nine members, eight agreed to detain Bo Xilai for investigation and one cast the dissenting vote. That specific member’s son and relatives had invested heavily in Chongqing. His son had reportedly obtained 4.2 billion yuan worth of government projects under Bo Xilai. The person was worried the investigation of Bo Xilai could implicate him and adversely affect his family’s economic interests. Under the heavy political pressure from his colleagues, he reluctantly agreed to Bo’s investigation.

  The person who cast the lone dissenting vote apparently was Zhou Yongkang. It was known that his son had made major investments in the oil and construction businesses in Sichuan and that he supposedly had designated Bo as his replacement at the Politburo Standing Committee following his retirement in November 2012.

  In February 2012, when Zhou learned that Wang Lijun had entered the US Consulate, he allegedly called Bo Xilai immediately, urging Bo to “get Wang out at any cost.” It was Zhou’s order that prompted Bo to recklessly send several hundred armed police to surround the US Consulate.

  On February 21, Zhou was scheduled to lead a large delegation of Chinese legal experts and entrepreneurs to Argentina, but he canceled the trip at the last minute so he could focus on the Wang Lijun and Bo Xilai case. One of the orders he issued around that time was to censor domestic blogs and attack overseas Chinese-language media sites. Mingjing News, along with Boxun, became a primary target of organized hacker attacks. Insiders from the Public Security Ministry said Zhou was exasperated at reports being published about his womanizing and support for Bo.

  When the National People’s Congress was in session on March 8 and 12, many senior leaders shunned Bo, whose political future was by then at best uncertain. Zhou, however, visited the Chongqing delegation twice and praised Bo for his achievements in the development of Chongqing. Zhou’s praises were viewed as a sign that Bo had procured strong support from senior leaders and he would ride out the storm.

  When Premier Wen Jiabao delivered his rebuke of Bo’s policies in Chongqing the day before Bo was sacked from his position, some analysts predicted that Zhou was also in trouble. In that week, an insider—who identified himself as a scholar who was briefed by a senior leader on Zhou’s situation—posted a story on Boxun saying Zhou had been barred from leaving the country because the senior leadership had found out that Zhou and Bo had conspired to topple Xi Jinping, the party’s heir apparent. According to the scholar:


  Zhou Yongkang and Bo Xilai held five meetings over the past year to strategize on how to get Bo elected to the Politburo Standing Committee to succeed him as the country’s top security chief. They had conspired to topple Xi Jinping in two years. If necessary, Zhou urged Bo to dispatch armed police forces to arrest Xi. Zhou said multiple times to friends that Xi was too weak and unfit to be China’s top leader and that Bo had the capabilities to take over. They would rally national and international media to support Bo and the takeover should be no later than 2014.

  The scholar further alleged that Wang Lijun had procured imported electronic surveillance equipment from Israel and Germany with Zhou’s help to monitor the telephone conversations of senior leaders, while Zhou had instructed Wang to establish secret files on senior leaders. He wanted them investigated for transgressions in their private lives and economic “crimes” so he could release the information to more than two hundred journalists and scholars after the Lunar New Year in 2012, but the Wang Lijun incident disrupted his plan.

  According to the scholar, Zhou enjoyed a steady supply of young, beautiful women, including singers, actresses, and students from Minzu University of China. Bo Xilai made a “gift” to Zhou of a singer with whom he’d slept.

  This scintillating article, clearly aimed at discrediting Zhou, went viral on the Internet, even though the majority of the details were not substantiated. On March 22, the Politics and Law Commission held a series of ideological training sessions in Shanghai, but Zhou, its leader, was absent, leading people to believe that all the previous reports about Zhou’s downfall were true and that he was under investigation.

  As news about Zhou’s absence spread wildly, the state media were ordered to stem the rumors. The next day, CCTV aired a clip about Zhou meeting with the Indonesian foreign minister in Beijing—an unusual choice given that Zhou’s portfolio covers domestic affairs. Two days later, Zhou was seen on TV again, planting trees with other senior leaders and then giving a speech to a group of law enforcement officers, calling them to solidify the ruling position of the Communist Party. But despite the sudden flurry of media appearances designed to suggest business as usual, insiders still claimed that he was being investigated and continued to leak unsubstantiated information to overseas media.