A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel (30 page)

At this is being written, the public has not heard Bo Xilai’s version of the story. With Gu’s conviction, the government will block or ignore any challenges made by Bo’s lawyers to the previous court decision relating to Heywood’s murder.

In September 2012, Wang Lijun was put on trial for defection, criminal cover-up, abuse of power, and bribe taking. Because he produced “important clues that exposed serious offenses committed by others and played a key part in the investigation of the cases which could be considered as major meritorious service,” the government did not make any effort to probe Wang’s murder of Neil Heywood. “All that is left to explain the true cause of Heywood’s death were the samples that had been taken from a long time before and the related artificial testimonies,” said Wang Xuemei, the forensic expert. Thus, the death of Neil Heywood will join a long list of unresolved political mysteries in contemporary Chinese history.

A
S PART OF CHINA’S modernization drive under Deng Xiaoping, the government in 1980 encouraged students to learn English. A friend of mine began to take lessons from the radio. One day he encountered a retired American businessman in front of a large hotel and struck up a conversation in his broken English. At the end of their talk, they exchanged addresses. Two months later, the American wrote his new Chinese friend a postcard, describing his adventures in other parts of China. The postcard was intercepted by the street committee, which sent it to the local public security bureau. Officials there immediately contacted an English teacher at a nearby school to translate it. While the letter was being translated, my friend was detained and interrogated. He ended up handing over to the police an English novel that the American had given him as a gift and wrote a lengthy self-criticism for keeping in touch with a foreigner without approval.

Thirty years later, corresponding with a foreigner or inviting a foreigner home for dinner was no longer considered a violation of Chinese security rules. However, for a member of the Politburo, befriending a foreigner can still be taboo. It did not come as a surprise when I heard from a princeling in May 2012 that Neil Heywood had been on the watch list of China’s State Security Ministry, China’s intelligence agency, for several years.

“The Englishman ran a business consultancy and bragged about his access to Bo and his staff members,” said the source. “When Bo Xilai was the minister of commerce, Heywood said he had brought several foreign business groups to meet with Bo. When Bo Xilai moved to Chongqing in 2007, Gu Kailai introduced Heywood to several businesspeople there. She allegedly told friends that Heywood was her ‘foreign advisor.’ His activities were duly noticed by the Ministry of State Security.”

The source added that Bo Xilai arranged for Heywood to meet the then-Chinese vice president Xi Jinping, saying that Heywood came from an aristocratic family and was well connected in the UK. It was not clear when the introduction took place and whether Bo Xilai wanted Heywood to advise on the education of the vice president’s daughter, who was studying at a foreign-language school near Shanghai and aspired to pursue her college degree abroad, or on political and cultural issues relating to the UK.

The revelations about Heywood’s murky background have added an interesting subplot to the Bo Xilai saga and generated a slew of media reports—journalists cannot resist the lure of being close to an “insider” scandal, particularly one involving members of the secretive Politburo Standing Committee, and the spy angle was just icing on the cake.

According to the
Guardian
, which interviewed Heywood’s friends, the Briton drove a Jaguar flaunting the license plate “007” and liked to give people the impression that he was on a secret mission. His friends believed that he was just posturing, creating a fantasy for himself. However, the
Wall Street Journal
revealed that he once worked with Hakluyt, a business intelligence firm founded by two retired MI6 officers that employs a number of former officers from Britain’s shadowy foreign spy network and is engaged in covert intelligence gathering along the lines of the CIA in the US. In November 2012, the same newspaper confirmed that Heywood was an “unpaid informant” who regularly provided information on the Bo family’s private affairs to an operative of MI6.

Also in November 2012, the
New York Times
confirmed what I had heard in May of that year—China’s Ministry of State Security had long suspected Heywood of being a British spy:

       
A scholar with high-level ties to Mr. Bo and the ministry said Mr. Bo had known of the ministry’s official suspicions before Mr. Heywood’s death, as had other leaders. Separately, a political analyst with high-level party ties said Mr. Heywood was on the ministry’s watch list, possibly for years, as a result of his relationship with the Bo family.

           
“When a minister-level cadre has such relations with a foreigner, they’ll definitely be watched,” the analyst said.

Heywood’s MI6 ties have given rise to conspiratorial rumors among the public—some details might be true and others are trotted out more for their entertainment value. A November 2012 article on a popular Chinese language forum,
creaders.net
, said Premier Wen Jiabao, who strongly opposed Bo Xilai’s “Singing Red and Smashing Black” campaign, had secretly urged the deputy minister of state security to dig up dirt on Bo Xilai in 2009. Secret agents first targeted Bo’s son, Bo Guagua, and tried to identify the funding source for his education abroad.

They soon uncovered the link between Bo Xilai and billionaire businessman Xu Ming, who had channeled money to Bo’s son in exchange for government contracts. At the same time, Neil Heywood, who sometimes acted as a middleman for the Bo family overseas, came to their attention. China’s secret agents suspected that Heywood could be using his connection with the Bo family to gather intelligence for MI6, but they never found any evidence.

When the deputy minister of state security reported his agents’ findings to Premier Wen, he instructed the agents to confirm Heywood’s true identity. If they could prove that the English guardian of Bo Xilai’s son was a spy, Wen knew that the revelation could be lethal for Bo Xilai. Chinese public security agents began to take a keen interest in Heywood’s background. At one point, a member of the National Security Ministry recruited Wang Lulu, Heywood’s China-born wife, assigning her to keep an eye on her husband and report on any of his suspicious activities.

In 2010, a friend of Bo Xilai’s who was a senior official at the ministry informed him of the Neil Heywood investigation. He warned
Bo Xilai that his political opponents could use his close ties with Heywood to sabotage his political career. Bo Xilai immediately shared the information with Gu Kailai, instructing her and Bo Guagua to break off their relations with Heywood. Since 2010, Heywood had not been allowed to contact Bo Xilai and Gu Kailai, but he did maintain frequent e-mail exchanges with Bo Guagua, who was studying in the UK. The news about Heywood’s investigation as a spy aggravated Gu’s paranoia. She believed that some senior leaders in Beijing had made up the espionage story to scheme against Bo Xilai. She suspected that Heywood’s wife might also have fed information relating to Gu’s overseas money transfers to the Ministry of State Security. The
creader.net
story seems to correspond with a British media report that said Gu contacted Heywood in 2010, asking him to divorce his wife, Wang Lulu, and pledge allegiance to the Bo family. “Gu acted very strangely,” Heywood was quoted as saying to his friends.

Also in 2010,
creader.net
said Bo Xilai submitted a written report to the Politburo, stating that there had been no security breaches in his dealings with Neil Heywood. His report successfully preempted Premier Wen’s attacks. In subsequent months, stories started to appear in the overseas Chinese media about how Premier Wen’s son and wife had used political connections to accumulate a large amount of wealth. Bo was said to have provided the information in retaliation.

So far, there is no proof that Premier Wen instructed the Ministry of State Security to uncover Heywood’s MI6 connection. Chen Xiaoping, a US-based China scholar, believed that Zhou Yongkang, the Politburo Standing Committee member who oversaw the State Security Ministry, had instructed Bo Xilai to get rid of Heywood in 2011. “Zhou had chosen Bo as his successor and he was worried that Bo’s connection with a foreigner could give other promising candidates excuses to oppose Bo’s appointment at the 18th Party Congress,” Chen pointed out. “Killing Heywood in Chongqing, rather than Beijing, could remove any future obstacles and minimize negative publicity.” Chen speculated that Bo had used Gu to lure Heywood to Chongqing and assigned the job to Wang Lijun, who choked Heywood to death
after Gu Kailai got the Briton drunk. After the Bo–Wang fallout, Wang shifted all the blame to Gu.

A story on Boxun described a scenario where agents from the Ministry of State Security met with Wang Lijun in Beijing in October 2011, ordering him to find a way to kill Heywood, who, they said, was attempting to infiltrate senior party officials. Wang Lijun then used Gu Kailai to ensnare Heywood in Chonqing. After Heywood passed out in bed, Wang injected him with toxic chemicals. He then teamed up with Bo’s foes in Beijing and concocted the Gu murder case to retaliate against Bo’s refusal to help Wang’s friends in Tieling.

These versions, which still lack substantial evidence, could be good material for a John le Carré wannabe looking for a Chinese spin on a thriller novel for the West’s publishing industry, which is constantly on the lookout for devious plots in foreign countries. But a source in Chongqing said Heywood’s connection with the British intelligence service was an open secret among police. One of the four officers assigned to investigate the Heywood case allegedly said to Bo Xilai, “Gu eliminated a dangerous spy for our country.”

The unusual silence by the British government concerning Heywood’s death—had he been a merely a British national working in China, his death would have at least been the subject of consular investigation and public statement—further fueled the spy theory. At Gu’s trial, the British government sent two diplomats to observe the trial but declined to comment on it after Gu was convicted. The embassy did issue a statement:

       
We welcome the fact that the Chinese authorities have investigated the death of Neil Heywood, and tried those they identified as responsible. We consistently made clear to the Chinese authorities that we wanted to see the trials in this case conform to international human rights standards and for the death penalty not to be applied.

In response to the British government statement, a Chinese blogger commented, “What do you expect the British government to say when one of their intelligence gatherers was killed? There is a Chinese saying
that best sums up the situation: ‘When a mute person accidentally swallows a bitter pill, he feels pain but cannot say it aloud.’”

G
REEK MYTHOLOGY tells the story of Pandora’s Box, of how Zeus sent Pandora away to punish men after Prometheus stole fire from the gods. Pandora carried a jar with her and when she opened it, she released all the evils in the world. In the Bible, Eve purportedly ate the apple of knowledge despite God’s instructions not to do so, and gave some to Adam, and God expelled them from the Garden of Eden.

In China, people are well-versed in the stories of “poisonous water.” For example, in the central city of Xian, not far from the emperor’s terra cotta warriors, there is a mountain called Mount Lishan, made famous by two beautiful women who were blamed for wrecking dynasties and gave rise to the phrase “Beauties kill like poisonous water.”

The first woman, Bao Si, was associated with a beacon tower built 3,000 years ago on top of the mountain. Legend has it that during the Western Zhou Dynasty, the kingdom was under threat from a hostile aggressive neighbor. As a precaution, the emperor built twenty beacon towers and installed gigantic drums on top of every mountain peak nearby, with the one on Mount Lishan the biggest. If the guard saw the neighbor’s troops coming, he would ignite the firewood inside the beacon and beat the drums. The smoke would alert the emperor’s allies and they would gather their forces and rush to help. The system worked well until after the emperor died. His son took over and turned out to be a ruthless ruler. One day, the young emperor met Bao Si, the most beautiful woman in the kingdom. He brought her to the palace and made her empress. The young emperor was so in love that he was willing to do anything to please Bao Si, but there was one problem. She never smiled. Her face was locked into perpetual sadness.

One day, the couple toured the beacon tower in Mount Lishan and the emperor hit upon an idea. He ordered one of his ministers to light
up the signal fire. Entranced by the smoke and fire, Bao Si burst out laughing for the first time. The emperor was thrilled. Meanwhile, allied troops rushed over, thinking there was a war, only to find out that it was a mere joke.

As expected, when a true emergency happened, the emperor lit the beacon, but nobody came to rescue him. The Western Zhou Dynasty was vanquished. Nowadays, climbers who reach the tower can still see the characters “one smile led to the loss of a kingdom” carved on a piece of rock.

At the foot of Mount Lishan was the Huaqing hot spring, which served as the bathhouse for an emperor’s voluptuous concubine in the Tang Dynasty (about 700 CE). As a young man, emperor Xuanzong was a wise and forward-looking ruler, but in later years, he became infatuated with an eighteen-year-old beauty, Yang Guifei, who was originally married to one of his sons. The eunuchs persuaded the prince to give up his wife and the emperor made the former daughter-in-law his concubine. Because of his concubine, the emperor neglected daily duties as the head of his empire and allowed his court to lapse into chaos.

Soon, natural disasters and discontent within the military led to a large-scale rebellion. As rebel forces advanced toward the capital, the emperor and his concubine fled west. On the way, his imperial guards mutinied. Blaming the concubine for the empire’s troubles, his guards refused to carry him unless his concubine was killed. Without any choice, the emperor handed over a white scarf to his guards, who strangled the most beautiful woman in the kingdom.