A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel (23 page)

In Mao’s time, political purges were conducted randomly and largely at the behest of Mao himself. Any member of the party’s hierarchy, regardless of his position, could be labeled a “traitor” or “capitalist” overnight if he was perceived to be a threat. There were no rules or laws to protect the victims. Mao acted like an emperor and his words were law. Often the persecution extended to the families of the disgraced official. Bo Yibo was a typical example.

After Mao died in 1976, party elders such as Deng Xiaoping, who had been victims of Mao’s persecution, tried to avoid the arbitrariness and brutality in the party’s power struggles and protect the basic rights
of the members of the ruling elites by installing certain procedures and introducing an orderly system of leadership transition. However, revolutionary veterans violated their own procedures when they used the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection to purge officials known as “rebels”—they were promoted by Mao supporters during the Cultural Revolution and had participated in the persecution of senior leaders.

In the post-Deng era, when the country was trying to promote the rule of law, if only to placate foreign governments with which China traded, and foreign investors it wished to attract, Deng’s successors employed the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection as a tool to criminalize political opponents in the name of anticorruption. Former president Jiang Zemin successfully brought down Chen Xitong, the former party secretary of Beijing and a Politburo member, because Chen and his supporters in the Beijing area, collectively known as the “Beijing Clique,” were undermining his authority.

In Bo’s case, the party once again resorted to the powerful Central Commission for Discipline Inspection to oust him. A source at the commission said that the initial focus of the investigation was related to Bo Xilai’s role in Neil Heywood’s murder. Soon investigators ran into challenges: Bo Xilai might have attempted to cover up his wife’s act of murder, but there was no concrete evidence to prove that he had participated in the killing. The cover-up charge alone was not a strong enough excuse to destroy Bo Xilai for good. The senior leadership reportedly instructed the commission to turn to areas of corruption and subversion. Starting in May 2012, the party’s propaganda machine launched a massive campaign, depicting Bo as a corrupt official who used illegal means to attain political and economic gains. Meanwhile, insiders in Beijing were feeding what they called preliminary results of Bo’s investigation to media outlets overseas.

For example, in May, “nearly a dozen people with party ties” confirmed to the
New York Times
that Bo Xilai had installed a widespread program of electronic bugging across Chongqing and he had recorded the conversations of senior party officials, including President Hu Jintao. A similar report came out in early March, portraying Wang Lijun as the chief architect of this program.

       
Mr. Bo’s eavesdropping operations began several years ago as part of a state-financed surveillance build-up, ostensibly for the purposes of fighting crime and maintaining local political stability. . . .

           
But party insiders say the wiretapping was seen as a direct challenge to central authorities. It revealed to them just how far Mr. Bo, who is now being investigated for serious disciplinary violations, was prepared to go in his efforts to grasp greater power in China. That compounded suspicions that Mr. Bo could not be trusted with a top slot in the party, which is due to reshuffle its senior leadership positions this fall.

In the same month, a Hong Kong–based newspaper quoted an insider as saying Bo Xilai had used surveillance devices to collect negative information about senior leaders’ families and their mistresses. Bo had planned to unleash the information before the Party Congress as part of his scheme to seize power and, if necessary, arrest Xi Jinping, the heir apparent.

Qi Hong, a Chongqing-based technician who has been hired by local officials to detect and debug surveillance devices in their offices, cars, and bedrooms, told
Chongqing Evening News
that wiretapping became prevalent in Bo’s Chongqing. In 2011, he deactivated more than three hundred audio and video monitoring devices secretly planted by officials’ wives, lovers, supervisors, and competitors.
Chongqing Evening News
revealed that bugging is now being used as a common tool in power struggles at all levels of the government—officials spy on each other and collect needed audio and video evidence to get rid of a competitor. Qi Hong’s story has proven to be true, as Lei Zhengfu, a former district party chief in Chongqing, was recently fired from his position after a video of him having sex with a young woman was posted online by a former journalist. The whistle-blower, who was planning to release similar tapes of more city officials, told
Chongqing Evening News
that 90 percent of the tapes came from party insiders. In addition, according to Feng Qingyang, a blogger, some local officials in China are said to be so paranoid about bugging devices that they will pretend to hug their colleagues “intimately” before conducting a sensitive conversation, to make sure nobody is carrying a mini tape or video
recorder. Some even choose to discuss businesses naked in noisy bathhouses. A former police officer in Chongqing blamed Bo and Wang for the widespread abuse of wiretapping. “The two egomaniacs not only snooped on political opponents, dissidents, and criminals, but also on each other,” said the official. “In the end, others began to follow suit. If you didn’t conspire against others, others would plot to get rid of you. You have to do it. It’s a survival technique.”

In addition, from March to July 2012, I received regular e-mails or phone calls from “insiders” who claimed to have “exclusive information” relating to Bo’s subversion attempts. One e-mail said that Bo had ordered his police chief to purchase 5,000 guns and 500,000 rounds of ammunition from the government’s munitions factory in Chongqing for a possible coup.

The
Wall Street Journal
received similar information. A party official at an influential government think tank told the paper that Bo had cultivated his military contacts and “at least two prominent army generals have been questioned about their connections to Mr. Bo.”

       
At issue now is whether Mr. Bo went too far by cultivating support among senior military figures—especially his fellow princelings—for his controversial policies and for his elevation to the Politburo Standing Committee, which he coveted.

           
Mr. Bo lived in a military area, which he rarely left while in Chongqing, according to a city official who worked under him. In 2011, he poured about $500 million of public funds into developing a helicopter industry in Chongqing to meet the army needs.

           
Last November, he hosted military exercises in Chongqing, attended by Defense Minister Gen. Liang Guanglie, after which Mr. Bo staged one of his “red singing” performances for his guests, according to state media reports.

After the
Wall Street Journal
article was published, several Chinese-language newspapers in the US also reported that one of Bo’s friends in the military had supplied Bo with weapons and secretly helped him establish a private army. But the weapons that Bo had supposedly acquired were nowhere to be found.

I contacted two military experts who castigated the overseas media for trusting those insider stories and exaggerating Bo Xilai’s influence in the military and his military ambitions. Over the past three decades, the two experts said the Chinese Communist Party has gradually tightened its grip over the military through the rotation of senior military leaders, making it impossible for one military commander to cultivate support. And the military’s access to modern weaponry is limited by the tight control exercised over the General Equipment Department. Even if Bo enjoyed close ties with two princeling generals, his ability as the Chongqing party secretary to stage a coup would be very limited.

According to the experts, Chongqing is home to a big army garrison and a military engineering university where weapons are designed. Bo Xilai’s contacts with local and national military figures were nothing unusual. The experts did acknowledge that many in the military were pressured to pledge an oath of loyalty to the party and President Hu Jintao in May to ensure that army leaders fully supported the decision to oust Bo. A vice chairman of the Central Military Commission visited the Chengdu Military Region in April. He urged soldiers “not to listen to, believe, or spread any kind of political rumors, and to strictly guard against political liberalism” in an apparent attempt to prevent military personnel from reading the various corruption scandals relating to Bo and other senior leaders, and boost the army’s confidence in the party.

In addition to the subversion rumors, the state media and party insider leaks depicted Bo Xilai as a hypocrite. In a February speech, Bo was quoted as admonishing other officials with the following words:

       
What is a person’s true wealth? Is it money? Money ruined so many people. The true value is to do good things for the country and for ordinary people; your life will be noble and fulfilling.

Yet, he never practiced what he had preached, said an insider. Bo and his wife were greedy money grabbers. Over the past decade, his wife was involved in more than thirty commercial property development projects and received more than 1 billion yuan in commissions or “legal consultation fees”; in Dalian and Chongqing, Bo Xilai abused
power by granting several government projects to his friends, including billionaire businessman Xu Ming. In addition, Bo encouraged the whole city to study Chairman Mao’s works and love the country by singing patriotic songs, but he sent his son to study political science at elite schools in the UK and US, with the majority of expenses paid for by Xu Ming.

It was interesting to notice that in March 2012, insiders disclosed that the amount of money the Bo family was said to have acquired was 100 million yuan. Barely a month later, it increased to 1 billion yuan. Some online reports even claimed 5 billion yuan (US $806 million).

On April 11, the US-based Bloomberg publicized the results of an investigation into the finances of Bo Xilai’s family members. The report indicated that his son from his first marriage and his elder brother helped manage companies with offshore registrations, from Mauritius in the Indian Ocean to the British Virgin Islands in the Caribbean, amassing a fortune of at least US $136 million. Bo Xilai’s relatives used multiple names, making it more difficult to track their titles and business dealings. Bloomberg said companies in Dalian and Chongqing, where Bo Xilai held office, were among the beneficiaries of their investments.

The Bloomberg article, which was widely quoted in China’s Weibo, gave the anti-Bo camp plenty of ammunition. However, they did not expect the article to spawn a series of reports in the Western media about how the families of other senior leaders, including Premier Wen Jiabao and former Politburo Standing Committee member Zeng Qinghong, are wealthy businesspeople and have profited handsomely from their family status.

These exposés made China’s top leaders, who all have family members and relatives engaging in questionable or illegal business deals, realize that no one would be absolutely safe if the Bo Xilai investigation was allowed to expand. Because Bo had been successfully barred from the Politburo Standing Committee, sources said his foes started to cool off with their attacks. In July and August, the party called for political stability within the party. The true intention was to protect its leaders’ vested interests.

Of all the Bo corruption-related gossip, the item that received the most attention was related to his womanizing. Boxun and a Hong Kong newspaper quoted an inside source as saying that actress Zhang Ziyi, the star of
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
, allegedly had been investigated for a sex scandal linked with Bo. The source said the actress had agreed to sleep with Bo Xilai for 10 million yuan and they had at least ten encounters between 2004 and 2007. The report went on to say that Zhang was barred from leaving the country to participate in the Cannes Film Festival in May 2012, when her movie
Dangerous Liaisons
was competing. In response to such reports, Zhang, who claimed to have never met Bo Xilai, filed a lawsuit at the High Court of Hong Kong against Boxun and two publications in Hong Kong that carried the allegations. At the time of writing, no verdict has been reached and there has been no ban on Zhang’s travel.

As insiders were busy feeding the overseas media with their usual mixture of truth and lies about Bo Xilai, his legacy in Chongqing was being quietly washed away. The big banners bearing Communist slogans in public places were quickly replaced with Gucci and Radar watch ads. Police removed gigantic poster boards that advocated Bo’s signature “Five Chongqing” program—building a livable Chongqing through low-cost public housing, a traffic-friendly Chongqing through more infrastructure investment, a forested green Chongqing through environmental programs, a safe Chongqing by aggressive anticrime initiatives, and a healthy Chongqing through better delivery of health care. The Five Chongqing program, initiated a year after Bo Xilai came to the city, became a model for other cities to emulate. Bo’s replacement, who has ascended to the Politburo Standing Committee, overhauled the government finances and suspended many of Bo’s large-scale public projects.

By mid-May 2012, government officials who were detained, demoted, or resigned during Bo’s reign had submitted applications to the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, seeking review of their cases, and many have gotten their jobs back. Currently, more than a dozen senior municipal officials favored by Bo have been placed under investigation or fired.

But the steady reversal of the Bo Xilai policies upset several Chongqing residents, especially after they heard rumors that the government was planning to pull out the expensive gingko trees that Bo had planted as part of his high-profile environmental programs. “Secretary Bo has done a lot for the city and his program has truly benefited ordinary folks,” said a volunteer staffing a traffic control booth on a busy street downtown in November 2012—he still referred to Bo by his former title of party secretary. “Everyone knows that the streets were safer when Bo Xilai and Wang Lijun were in power and the environment improved. We had more trees and the air was cleaner. We shouldn’t reverse everything he did, simply because he made some mistakes,” the volunteer added. And Bo Xilai’s followers in Dalian and Chongqing have remained persistent. On his birthday in July 2012, many anonymous “Happy Birthday, Secretary Bo” posters popped up in public places in the two cities.