A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel (31 page)

Stories of “poisonous water” are still told in China. Nowadays the famous American quote “Behind every successful man there is a great woman” has been adapted to describe a unique phenomenon in China: “Behind every disgraced Communist official there is an evil woman.”

Wang Guangmei was China’s first lady. Her husband, Liu Shaoqi, serving as China’s president from 1959 to 1969, was the designated successor to Mao, the Communist Party chairman. Wang grew up in the family of a Chinese diplomat and studied at American missionary universities in the 1930s. A science major, she spoke French, Russian,
and English. In the mid-1940s, the idealistic Wang escaped to the Communist-occupied territories to work as an interpreter when the American government attempted to negotiate a truce between the Nationalist government and the Communist rebels. At the age of twenty-four, she married Liu Shaoqi, who was nearly twice her age, and initially, after their marriage, served as his secretary. When Liu was made president, Wang Guangmei became actively involved in politics and accompanied her husband on several high-profile trips to neighboring countries. In the 1960s, when women in China were encouraged to dress simply, Wang Guangmei dazzled foreign dignitaries with her
cheongsam
-clad figure and her sophistication. Her pictures graced the front pages of the party newspaper and reportedly aroused the jealousy of Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife.

During the Cultural Revolution, Liu Shaoqi and a group of other senior leaders were purged and Liu was denounced as a “traitor and capitalist.” Wang was scapegoated and became the public face of her husband’s crimes. Her elegant taste for
cheongsam
and jewelry was associated with the decadence of a bourgeois lifestyle. In early 1967, the Red Guards forced her to put on a
cheongsam
and the high-heeled shoes she wore during her diplomatic missions. They wrapped a string of ping-pong balls around her neck as a mock pearl necklace and paraded her at a public denunciation meeting attended by more than 10,000 Red Guards.

Four months later, she and her husband were marched in front of 100,000 residents at Tiananmen Square, where they were publicly humiliated and tortured. After her husband was locked away in a secret location in Henan province, Wang stayed in the notorious Qincheng prison for twelve years. As a child, I read a widely circulated handwritten novel, depicting Wang as an American spy, a counter-revolutionary, and the head of a cult group called “Black Plum,” which aimed to blow up many of China’s landmark buildings.

In a recent article published in a reputable magazine in China, the author speculated that Wang’s beauty might have contributed to her husband’s fall, pointing out that Mao had always flirted with Wang in the early 1960s and constantly invited her to swim at his house. Mao’s action angered Wang’s husband, prompting him to openly challenge
Mao’s decisions on several key issues, and the swimming antagonized Mao’s wife, who retaliated during the Cultural Revolution.

The charges against Liu Shaoqi and Wang Guangmei were reversed as fabrications after Mao’s death.

In September 1971, General Lin Biao, who was enshrined in the Chinese Communist Party constitution as Mao’s “closest comrade-in-arms and successor,” died in mysterious circumstances. According to the Chinese government, the general had harbored a strong desire to seize supreme power and allegedly plotted to sabotage Mao’s train and assassinate the Great Leader. When Mao foiled Lin’s coup attempt, Lin, his son, and his wife tried to flee to the Soviet Union, but their plane allegedly ran out of fuel and crashed somewhere in Mongolia. Lin was presumed to have died in the crash.

Following Lin’s death, Mao’s government declared Lin’s fate a state secret and only scant details were released, followed by a nationwide anti-Lin propaganda campaign. Lin’s wife became a key target. She was accused of persecuting many of Lin’s opponents and pressuring Lin to seize power, even though Lin and his wife had repeatedly begged Mao
not
to name Lin second in line for China’s top position. Throughout the 1970s, high-ranking party leaders spread unsubstantiated stories that Lin’s wife had forced him to escape China by drugging Lin and dragging him onto their plane.

Jiang Qing, Mao’s widow, suffered a similar fate as those who earned her wrath. An accomplished actress in Shanghai in the 1930s, she was influenced by the rising Communist movement and traveled to the Communist headquarters in northern China, where she aspired to rise above the ranks. Mao fell victim to her charms, divorced his wife, a former guerrilla leader, and married Jiang Qing in 1938, over the objections from his fellow Communists, who, according to historians, saw Jiang Qing as a gold digger. After the Communist takeover in 1949, Jiang took charge of China’s cultural affairs. When the Cultural Revolution started in 1966, Jiang, with Mao’s support, took on a central leadership role in purging their political opponents and intellectuals. She joined the Politburo in 1969 and formed a close political alliance with other radical leftists in the years leading up to Mao’s death.

Jiang Qing’s political influence dwindled fast after Mao died and as she attempted to invoke Mao’s name to build more political support and take power, Mao’s designated successor, Hua Guofeng, teamed up with other revolutionary elite and staged a coup in October 1976. Jiang and three other similar-minded senior leaders, collectively known as the “Gang of Four,” were arrested. Four years later, she was put on trial on charges of causing the deaths of former president Liu Shaoqi and thousands of other party, government, and military leaders and intellectuals through political persecution during the Cultural Revolution and conspiring to seize power after Mao’s death.

Over the course of a month, the Chinese public was riveted by the televised trial of Jiang Qing, who was held responsible for all of China’s woes during the Cultural Revolution, as if Mao had simply slept through that period. Even though the trial was politically motivated, one has to give credit to the leadership of the time and the Supreme People’s Court for following proper, if not entirely adequate, due process. The trial, in six separate sessions, was broadcast live on China Central Television and lasted a month. Dozens of victims and witnesses stepped up to testify against the defendant. The prosecution presented a large amount of evidence. The defiant Jiang Qing was given the opportunity to deliver an impassioned speech, which included the famous revealing quote: “I was Chairman Mao’s dog. I bit whomever he asked me to bite.”

Jiang was given a suspended death sentence, which was later commuted to life imprisonment. Like many of the women before her who had been collectively called “poisonous water,” she committed suicide by hanging herself in the bathroom of her hospital room in 1991.

Since 2000, each time a senior official was executed on corruption-related charges, the blame has often been assigned to the seductive mistress(es). At a recent anticorruption conference, the deputy director of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection said, “We cannot always target the mistresses in our anticorruption campaign.”

In 1994, Liu Zhengwei, the former party secretary of Guizhou, and his wife, Yan Jianhong, who headed a government-run foreign trade agency, were the targets of a corruption-related investigation. To protect her husband’s political career, Yan accepted full respon
sibility for the crimes and was sentenced to death for abusing power and embezzling public funds, especially from the government’s poverty alleviation fund in January 1995. In her will, she famously wrote, “I’m doing this for my husband and I have nothing to regret.” At the execution ground, she stood waiting for the bullets, with her head held high like a martyr’s. Following her death, her husband was able to keep his job (at one time, he was assigned to take charge of an anticorruption agency) and lived up to the ripe age of eighty-two with his reputation intact.

And as one watched the hastily-conducted murder trial of Gu Kailai, it was impossible not to see the parallels with the fates of those other wives of senior Communist leaders before her.

In May, Bo’s supporters distributed an exclusive interview featured in a Japanese newspaper,
Fuji Evening News
, by its reporter, Udagawa, who claimed to have exploited the Ministry of State Security’s request for his assistance in the investigation to gain the opportunity to see Bo. Udagawa mentioned in the article:

       
Bo began to say something bad about Gu, the suspect. Bo has been separated from Gu for over a decade, though they have not divorced because of “their child and for fear of affecting Bo’s political career.” Bo did not deny that his wife had killed somebody. He said with regret, “It would have been better if I had divorced her at that time.”

Meanwhile, in an August 2012 editorial aired on Radio Free Asia, analyst Liang Jing explicitly brought up the “poisonous water” reference:

       
Gu Kailai can be considered “poisonous water” for both the princelings and the party elite. She knew exactly what kind of disastrous political consequences she brought for her aspiring husband. With her dramatic action, she ruined her husband’s political career and stained the reputation of the princelings. It is not a bad thing for the country, though.

Gu Kailai willingly took the scapegoat role. At the end of the trial, she expressed her “gratitude” to the court:

       
This case has been like a huge stone weighing on me for more than half a year. What a nightmare. The tragedy which was created by me was not only extended to Neil Heywood, but also to several families.

           
The case has produced great losses to the party and the country, for which I ought to shoulder the responsibility, and I will never feel at ease. I am grateful to the humanitarian care shown to me by those who handled the case. I solemnly tell the court that in order to maintain the dignity of the law, I will accept and calmly face any sentence and I also expect a fair and just court decision.

A veteran political journalist in Beijing, who had followed the trial, said that Gu Kailai was smart to understand that the trial’s real target was her husband, whom senior party leaders in Beijing hoped to render guilty by association and to destroy for good. If she had contested the murder charges, the government would have initiated corruption charges against her, also punishable by death. In China, corruption is so rampant that no government official is immune, and if such charges were made, more of Bo’s relatives and friends could be implicated. Of the two, perhaps the murder charge seemed the better deal. That was probably why Gu Kailai and her family refrained from mounting a vigorous defense: they knew it would amount to nothing. Gu Kailai’s fate had already been decided by party leaders in Beijing, not the judges in the court.

By striking a deal with the Chinese government and by actively cooperating with the government—she confessed to the crime that she had not committed and at the same time implicated the police chief and his assistants—Gu Kailai aimed to protect her son from any criminal charges and have her husband’s potential death sentence commuted. It is worth emphasizing that Bo Xilai’s name was never mentioned once in Gu’s trial. Insiders familiar with her trial acknowledged the existence of such a deal between Gu and the government. However, the leadership broke its promises after anti-Bo factions gained the upper hand during the pre–Party Congress power struggles in September 2012. It began to call for tougher sentencing for Bo to diminish his unexpectedly-strong political influences.

As the Chinese saying goes, “As long as the green hills last, there will always be wood to feed the stove.” In Gu Kailai’s case, keeping her life left open the possibility of a comeback when the political winds shifted, just as her own parents and her father-in-law had done during the Cultural Revolution. So she played along and did what the government expected her to do.

In a sense, Gu Kailai succeeded in what she had hoped to achieve. On August 20, the court sentenced her to death, suspended for two years. Under Chinese law, Gu Kailai’s sentence could be commuted in two years. Considering her mental condition, she would be eligible for medical parole.

Even though all the key suspects in the case have been convicted, debate over who really killed Heywood will linger. The vagueness in the official transcripts of the trials and the prevalence of different “insider” stories swirling around provide fodder for more theories.

Regardless of whether or not Gu Kailai killed Neil Heywood, she is forever branded as “poisonous water,” along with the likes of Madame Mao and Wang Guangmei. Some bloggers even called her “an evil fox spirit” who attached herself to powerful men and ruined their lives. A political commentator—who claimed that Gu Kailai’s greed for money was the source of Bo’s political woes—issued a warning to the Chinese Communist Party in his article on the China in Perspective website in September 2012:

       
Before the Gu Kailai trial, former Chinese president Jiang Zemin urged officials to carefully examine the circumstances for each falling dynasty in Chinese history so they could learn a lesson for today’s China. I am certain the “poisonous water” reference weighed heavily on Jiang’s mind. One should also take note that a regime rife with greed and political corruption was a breeding ground for dynasty-wrecking women. Therefore, a clean government is the best prevention. At the same time, I hope the wives of senior officials have learned a lesson from Gu Kailai—if they don’t act prudently, they will do irreparable damage to their husbands and themselves, not to mention their country.