A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel (14 page)

On March 14, the fifth plenary session of the 11th National People’s Congress closed. At the end of the three-hour briefings, which mostly centered on China’s housing, foreign trade, and local government debts, Premier Wen delivered a surprise.

The moderator gave the last question to Chris Buckley, the Reuters correspondent in Beijing. In fluent Mandarin, Buckley wanted to know Wen’s personal view on the Wang Lijun incident and asked whether the incident would affect the central government’s confidence in Chongqing.

Premier Wen did not look surprised. It was apparent that the session, which was broadcast live on China’s state TV, was choreographed and Buckley’s question had been submitted earlier for approval by the senior leadership.

Wen, who had talked freely without a script throughout the conference, took a cautious glance at a piece of paper and commented, “We will give the people an answer to the results of the investigation and the handling of the case, so that it can withstand the test of law and history.”

This was the first time one of the top leaders had directly addressed the issue since February 6, when Wang Lijun entered the US Consulate. But Wen did not stop there. He went on to use the rare public opportunity to take aim at his real target, Bo Xilai. With unusual bluntness, he said,

       
The present Chongqing municipal party committee and the municipal government must reflect seriously and learn from the Wang Lijun incident.

Asiaweek
reported that Wen’s tone and facial expression toughened and his hands rose to emphasize the point. For experienced China watchers, reading between the lines, Wen had hinted, without mentioning Bo’s name, that Bo’s leftist program, which aimed to revive Mao Zedong’s much-discredited Cultural Revolution, went against the party’s reform policies.

Wen’s bombshell at the end of the press conference confirmed suspicion that Bo had been identified as the key culprit in the Wang Lijun scandal. Political analysts believed that the collective leadership had now made up its mind about Bo.

Professor Xueliang Ding, an expert in Chinese politics at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, told the BBC’s Chinese-language service, “Premier Wen warned Bo and other leftists who
attempt to adopt far-left policies to resolve China’s rising social conflicts that the path will meet a dead end and could lead China to disaster. Premier Wen’s remarks mean Bo’s political life is approaching its end.”

Starting in mid-March, the media took a respite from Wang Lijun. With Neil Heywood’s death still in the shadows, the spotlight quickly switched to Bo Xilai. Thus, the prelude ended and the real political drama officially began.

S
EVERAL YEARS AGO, at a press conference in Hong Kong, a reporter asked Bo Xilai, who was then China’s commerce minister, if his father, former vice premier Bo Yibo, had used his influence and connections to advance Bo’s political career. There was total silence. All eyes were on Bo, who was slightly taken aback by the reporter’s frankness. He forced out a smile and responded calmly:

       
I appreciate this straightforward question, which perhaps lingers on the minds of many of you here. I don’t want to deny that I have benefited from my old man. I’m pleased to tell everyone that those benefits will last me a lifetime. When I entered high school and began to understand the world around me, I was locked up in a prison because of my father, who was labeled a traitor. I endured five years of imprisonment. The experience toughened my will and taught me how to think. I learned the importance of justice, democracy and law to a society. I learned the importance of food and shelter, freedom and dignity to a person. I see the five-year imprisonment as a gift. Not everyone can have this gift. Without the misfortunes of my father, I wouldn’t have gotten the gift either. I guess you can say that I have taken advantage of my father’s connections.

As expected, those touching remarks were often cited by Bo’s supporters. Bo’s description of his childhood was factual, if not entirely accurate.

Bo Xilai was born in July 1949, on the eve of the Communist takeover of China. The third of six children, he was known among his friends as “San Ge” or “Third Brother.” He grew up at a time when his father was at the peak of his political career. At the age of seven, he attended the Beijing No. 2 Experiment Primary School, which enrolled a large number of children referred to as “descendants of the revolution.” Because the school was also open to students from ordinary families, the principal insisted the children of senior leaders be treated the same. If any parents picked up or dropped off their children in government cars, they had to park their vehicles in side lanes away from the school. Because Bo’s family lived on the other side of the city, friends remember that his father would drop him off in his car every morning and one of his bodyguards would fetch him after school. By any standards, Bo lived a sheltered and privileged life.

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 social 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.