A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel (2 page)

Fan Chengxiu
—Gu Kailai’s mother and a retired Communist Party official.

Li Danyu
—Bo Xilai’s ex-wife and an army doctor.

Wen Qiang
—Former deputy police chief of Chongqing who was executed on corruption charges in 2010.

Zhou Yongkang
—Close ally of Bo Xilai and former member of the Politburo Standing Committee who was dubbed China’s security czar.

Xu Ming (sh-yu-ming)
—Billionaire businessman in the city of Dalian and close friend of Bo Xilai and Gu Kailai.

Xi Jinping (shee-jeen-ping)
—Princeling and current Communist Party general secretary and president of China.

Xi Zhongxun
—Xi Jinping’s father and a revolutionary veteran who was governor of Guangdong province before his death in 2002.

Hu Jintao
—Former Communist Party general secretary (2002–2012) and president of China (2003–2013).

Ling Jihua
—Hu Jintao’s former chief of staff and Bo Xilai’s “deep throat” who now heads the United Front Work Department.

Wen Jiabao
—Former premier of China (2003–2013).

Jiang Zemin
—Former Communist Party general secretary (1989–2002) and president of China (1993–2003).

Li Keqiang
—Current premier of China.

_______

*
We follow the Chinese tradition by placing family names first.

A
N ENGLISHMAN’S BODY was found in Room 1605 of the Nanshan Lijing Holiday Hotel, or Lucky Holiday Hotel. Nestled atop the densely-wooded South Mountain, the three-star resort is about eight kilometers from downtown Chongqing. The clear mountain air provides a welcome change from the smog-shrouded, fast-growing municipality of more than 30 million. Its secluded location overlooking the sprawling city that straddles the Yangtze River below makes it a popular venue for weddings, holiday parties, government conferences, and leadership retreats. In the spring and summer, the hotel accommodates tourists who visit the nearby botanical garden or worship in the Tushan Temple built around 700
CE
.

During the off-season month of November, the hotel compound looks eerily deserted. Inside the empty lobby of the main building, two thick wooden ceiling beams, painted in bright red, tower over a big glass fish tank. It feels like entering a gaudy Chinese restaurant. Two
young female attendants staffing the registration desk reluctantly stop their computer games to greet guests who either arrive to check in or inquire about the special winter rates.

The hotel registration shows that a
lao wai
, or foreigner, checked into a private villa suite on November 13, 2011. His name was Neil Heywood. He was forty-one, an Englishman with a British passport and a Beijing address. He was last seen with a middle-age Chinese woman who, before she left the suite, flipped on the door’s “Do Not Disturb” sign and told the villa supervisor not to bother the foreign guest because he’d had “too much to drink.”

Two days later, the cleaning staff, noticing that the guest in Room 1605 had not stepped out of his room the whole time and suspecting something had gone awry, notified the villa supervisor. On receiving no answer to his knocks and calls, he opened the door and discovered the foreigner dead on his bed. The hotel’s general manager contacted the police.

Wang Lijun, the police chief of Chongqing, was the first to show up at the scene with the vice chief of his criminal investigation team, whom government papers identified by his last name, Huang. After getting details from the hotel manager, villa supervisor, and cleaning staff and examining the room, Wang Lijun sent Huang away and assigned the case to four of his trusted senior police officers—his deputy police director, the chief of the criminal investigation section, the chief of technical detection, and the chief of the Shapingba District.

The initial police report shows the investigative team interviewed the hotel staff, took a blood sample from the victim’s heart, and conducted a CT scan on the body. The next morning, the team declared that Heywood had experienced “sudden death after drinking alcohol” and reported the results to Wang Lijun, who later testified that he “did not oppose their conclusion.” Police located Heywood’s family in Beijing—he was married to Wang Lulu, a Chinese national, and had two children. Based on a British report several months later, Heywood’s mother in London was grief-stricken after receiving notice of her son’s death. Her husband, Heywood’s father, had just died of a heart attack at the age of sixty-three after drinks over dinner at their London home.

The Chongqing Public Security Bureau persuaded Heywood’s family members to accept its conclusion on the cause of death and, with their approval, cremated Heywood’s body. No autopsy was conducted. Heywood’s friends said he was “not a serious drinker,” but neither the family nor the British Consulate raised any objections to the investigation and its conclusions.

On November 18, three days after Heywood’s body was found, the case was closed. With so many foreigners living in China, Heywood’s death went largely unnoticed by the media and the public. But in Chinese mythology, the spirit of the dead does not dissolve if he or she has unfinished business in this world. The ghost lingers, clinging to its enemies, manipulating their minds, and causing havoc in their lives. So it would prove for those who had come into contact with the dead man from Room 1605, including the most elite members of the Chinese Communist Party. The crisis triggered by Heywood’s death reveals more about the scandalous state of corruption in China than any dissident or journalist could ever manage.

K
uli
, pronounced “cool-lee,” is an ancient term referring to an official or police officer who relied on extreme means of torture and brutality to help his master maintain power.

L
UNAR NEW YEAR PREDICTIONS are taken seriously in China, if only in the hope that the coming year will be better than the one just passed. At midnight on January 23, 2012, Chinese people around the world ushered in the Year of the Dragon. Though the mythical creature symbolizes strength, power, and good fortune, many were wary of its fiery nature, which heralds volatility and change. “China will have some political surprises,” a newspaper in Hong Kong quoted a fortune-teller as saying. “In the second half of the year, a scandalous corruption case will be exposed in China. A number of high-ranking officials will be forced to step down. Some may be thrown behind bars, or even pass away.”

“Political surprises” was a fairly safe bet and was glossed over amid the celebrations in mainland China, where the government-controlled media hyped up the dragon’s auspicious associations,
such as “harmony” and “grand takeoff of the Chinese economy.” In private, many in the leadership would have shared the fortuneteller’s foreboding. The 18th Party Congress was scheduled for the fall, when a new generation of thoroughly vetted leaders who had won fierce power struggles would take over. Leadership transitions historically have been times of political intrigue and conspiracy, and during the past two decades a common and effective way to eliminate a challenger or political opponent was to link a rival with a corruption scandal. President Jiang Zemin employed the trick to consolidate his power, as did his successor, President Hu Jintao. In a one-party state such as China, jockeying for influence is a raw reality of the political system. There is nowhere else to go, so all fighting must be infighting. However, nobody, not even the fortune-teller, expected that the first political surprise of the new year would come even before the fifteen-day celebration was completed. And I was an unwitting messenger.

On February 2, I was in Taiwan. While I waited in the lobby of the Grand Hyatt in Taipei for an early morning meeting, my cell phone rang. “Are you the publisher of
Mingjing News
?” asked a low, nervous voice, referring to one of my US-based Chinese-language news sites specializing in exclusive coverage of Chinese politics. When I said yes, the voice whispered, “Please give me a private number. I have something important to share with you.” Intrigue is everywhere in greater China and I’d encountered similar situations before. I gave the man, who sounded middle-aged, a colleague’s cell phone number. The conversation was brief. The caller identified himself as an official at the Communist Party’s Municipal Committee for Discipline Inspection in Chongqing. The caller disclosed that Wang Lijun, the city’s police chief, had just been sacked and was under internal investigation and charged with corruption. I was skeptical. The caller noticed and raised his voice in agitation: “Trust me. It’s 10,000 percent correct!”

Wang Lijun had made a name for himself in the city’s much-publicized campaign to crack down on corruption and organized crime. He was said to have been seriously wounded more than twenty times
fighting gangs, and the local and national media played him up as the “Iron Blooded Police Spirit.” More important, he was the right-hand man of Bo Xilai, the party chief of Chongqing and a rising political star.

If Wang was under arrest, it was a significant story. I rescheduled my appointment and contacted a source, a senior official with the Chongqing municipal government, to verify the information. Though the source confirmed that Wang would no longer head the public security bureau, he was not aware of any internal investigation against Wang, adding, “Don’t forget, he’s still the deputy mayor.”

But I knew that even if Wang were allowed to keep the title of deputy mayor, he was obviously on his way out, because the public security department had been the real base of his power.

As a journalist and writer, I have covered Chinese politics for more than twenty-five years, first for the government media in mainland China and subsequently for numerous newspapers in Taiwan and Hong Kong. In the 1990s, I started an overseas independent publishing company, aiming to provide a free forum for writers in and out of China, where such opportunities are not available. Even though the books and magazines I have published remain banned in mainland China, tourists smuggle them in from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Moreover, a large number of Chinese Internet users employ proxy servers to access the content on
Mingjing News
. Over the years, I have received a steady stream of news tips and article submissions from senior officials and their friends—well-connected businesspeople, Chinese journalists, and scholars, all of whom represent different political factions and viewpoints. Some attempt to fight the government propaganda machine by revealing the true stories behind certain political decisions, or exposing corruption scandals within the party and the government out of a sense of justice, whereas others have no such noble intent, aiming to smear their political opponents with a mixture of truth and rumor or to advance certain political agendas. These “deep throats” understand that they can effectively influence public opinions. With the explosion of Internet technology, news in the overseas media is available in China in seconds—despite the government’s firewalls.

Based on the anonymous tip and my own research, I dictated the Wang Lijun story to a colleague, who posted it on
Mingjing News
at eleven o’clock in the morning China time. In the story, I mentioned Wang could be under investigation for alleged corruption.

I had no idea that the one hundred-word news item, which soon spread across the Internet, would become the prelude to a political drama that contains all the elements of what the Chinese call
da pian
, or Hollywood tent-pole production—raw ambitions, secret succession plots, historical feuds, shifting alliances, murder, espionage, power marriages, and sexual trysts. The cast would include some of the most influential politicians, business moguls, army generals, and TV celebrities, whose formal photographic portraits often appear on the front pages of Chinese and Western newspapers, and the faceless women who supposedly control their men “behind the bamboo curtains.” The locales for the drama would include tiny, winding streets in the mountain city of Chongqing and an idyllic seaside resort in the UK. The events that have been unfolding in China since February 2, 2012, are not part of what the director or directors of the movie led us to believe: a battle between the good and evil, or a conflict between Maoist radicals and moderate reformists. What we are seeing is political intrigue and power struggle—different cliques competing for the top positions—many driven as much by personal loyalties and generational ties as they are by ideological differences.

TWO HOURS AFTER my website posted the news of Wang’s sacking, press officers at the Chongqing municipal government, which administers some 30 million people, released a short announcement on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter and Facebook:

       
The Chongqing Municipal Party Committee has recently decided that Comrade Wang Lijun will no longer serve as the chief and Party secretary of the Municipal Public Security Bureau. As the deputy mayor, he will be in charge of science research, education and environment.