A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel (20 page)

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 policemen 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.

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.