A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel (40 page)

Hu’s perceived incompetence created room for opportunists, Wen Jiabao on the right and Bo Xilai on the left, to emerge and expand their power bases. Politically, Hu is seen, erroneously, as a reformer who sided with Premier Wen and opposed Bo. But after we have examined Hu’s past history, it’s not difficult to see Hu identified more with Bo, whose programs in Chongqing mirrored or carried on to the extreme what Hu had initiated for China. If Bo was a phony Maoist, Hu was a true disciple of Mao.

In the final three years of his rule, Hu expanded the powers of the Communist Party, which monopolizes the country’s resources and controls the government, the military, the legislature and the judiciary, the media, and all government enterprises, and extended its reach into private and foreign enterprises, to the point where many private and foreign companies now have employee party branches. The party used taxpayer money to boost village party organizations, strengthening its control over the rural areas. At an internal meeting, Hu reported to party leaders that China should be tough on dissidents and learn from North Korea and Cuba.

Bo practiced what Hu preached. Insiders say Hu’s chief of staff would arrange for Bo to see the president each time he visited Beijing
to brief Hu on the latest accomplishments in Chongqing. Without Wang Lijun’s dramatic and history-changing visit to the US Consulate, Hu Jintao would have traveled to Chongqing, thrown himself behind Bo, and taken credit for Bo’s “common prosperity” policy. There is also no doubt that Hu would have supported Bo’s bid to join the Politburo Standing Committee. The rise of Bo could have checked the powers of Hu’s successor, Xi Jinping, and the powerful princeling faction supported by Jiang Zemin. Any challenge to Xi would enhance Hu’s authority after he relinquished the presidency.

For that reason Hu expressed ambivalence about punishing Bo in February 2012. It was only in mid-April that Hu allied himself with liberals who opposed Bo’s radical policies, corrupt officials who felt threatened by Bo’s aggressive and ruthless campaign against organized crime, and party elders and princelings who would not allow anyone to disrupt the coronation of Xi Jinping, and businesspeople who were victimized by Bo’s sweeping anticrime initiatives.

The fall of Bo Xilai was initially seen as a fatal blow to the princelings, aggravating the public’s resentment against the group and weakening their political power ahead of the Party Congress. But in fact Hu lost more than the princelings from Bo’s fall, because he was one of the last to abandon Bo. Then Ling Jihua, Hu’s confidante and chief of staff, was caught up in a scandal. The ensuing political crisis washed away any political gains from Bo Xilai’s misfortune that might once have accrued to Hu, and instead strengthened the hands of former president Jiang and other party veterans. Hu was left with hardly any allies in the forthcoming new administration.

The Ling Jihua scandal burst into the open in the early hours of March 18, when a black Ferrari 458 Spider spun out of control and crashed into a concrete bridge support on a highway in Beijing. Due to its high velocity, the car bounced back from the concrete before crushing steel safety fences and landing on the side of the road. Press photographs showed the car had virtually disintegrated in the impact. The engine landed five meters from the main body of the car. There were three occupants. The driver, who was naked when his body was cut from the wreckage, was pronounced dead on the spot. He was identified as twenty-three-year-old Ling Gu, the son of Ling Jihua. Two
women were freed from the wreck and had suffered critical injuries. Both were ethnic Tibetans and both reportedly semi-naked. An anonymous source told
Mingjing News
that the inebriated Ling Gu was apparently engaging in what has become known in China as
che zhen
, or car sex. One semi-naked woman was sitting in Ling’s lap and controlling the steering wheel while the other lay across the front passenger seat engaged in a sexual act with Ling. A passerby took a picture of the accident and called the police. Fifteen minutes later, the Beijing traffic police arrived at the scene and cordoned off the road to conduct investigations.

The two women were sent to the hospital.
Asiaweek
said one woman was Tashi Dolma, a graduate of Mingzu University of China and the daughter of the deputy police chief of China’s northwestern province of Qinghai, and the other, Younge, attended the University of Politics and Law in Beijing and her father was a well-respected lama. Tashi Dolma suffered injuries to her stomach and returned to her hometown after treatment. Younge’s legs were severed in three parts and her arms were broken. Her upper body, including her scalp, was severely burned. She was in a coma for two weeks, but survived her injuries; apart from the loss of her legs she was paralyzed from the waist down.

“Anonymous” sent me the secure e-mail detailing the accident three months later.
Mingjing News
posted the account, with a note at the end, saying we could continue to investigate and provide follow-up coverage. The news attracted waves of interest and criticism from readers. While some asked how a salaried government leader could afford a $200,000 Ferrari and expressed disbelief at the decadent lifestyle of young princelings, others dismissed the news as pure fabrication produced by supporters of Bo Xilai. One person wrote in the comment section, “Many people hate Ling Jihua, who is a close friend of President Hu Jintao, because he has personally signed the order to dismiss and detain Bo Xilai. It is so obvious that Bo Xilai’s supporters are desperate and retaliating by making up this cruel and vicious story about his [chief-of-staff’s] son.” A senior official in Guangzhou called me after reading the story, saying the source was “an imaginative fiction writer.”

Hong Kong media, including the pro-Beijing English-language daily the
South China Morning Post
, gradually confirmed many of the details through their own sources in September and October.

Asiaweek
reported that on the night of the accident, the three victims had left a private party and were on their way to another. The Ferrari 458 could carry only one passenger but the two women squeezed in regardless. When the car was making a sharp turn, the woman sitting in the middle was thrown out on top of the driver, blocking the steering wheel. Allegations of car sex have not been substantiated.

Fifty-five-year-old Ling Jihua was born in Shanxi, Bo Xilai’s ancestral province.
Mingjing News
revealed in December 2012 that the Bo and Ling families had very close ties. When he was alive, Bo Xilai’s father treated Ling Jihua as an adopted son. Like Bo, Ling married a wife with the last name of Gu, who is a legal professional by training and has been rumored to have used her husband’s political connections to engage in lucrative land and property investment and accumulate a large amount of wealth for the family. Ling’s wayward son had attended Beijing University, one of China’s elite schools, through his father’s connections. According to an official at the university, the son’s grades were far from ideal, but the university leadership still hired him as head of the school’s youth league organization after he had graduated a year before. Ling’s son was a notorious playboy and had expensive taste in cars.

Ling started working for the China Youth League in a small county in Shanxi province in the mid-1970s. After Bo Xilai’s father was reinstalled as China’s vice premier in 1980, he brought Ling to Beijing. The twenty-three-year-old was elevated to the propaganda department of China’s Youth League Central Committee, where Ling had stayed for twenty years in different capacities within the organization before becoming chief of Hu Jintao’s office in 1999.

“Ling’s close relation with the Bo family makes us understand President Hu’s initial position that Bo should be isolated from the Wang Lijun incident,” said
Mingjing News
. “Ling was Bo’s ‘deep throat’ in Beijing. His secret support gave Bo the confidence that he would survive the crisis. It explains why Bo was so cocky during the National People’s Congress.”

Known for his uncanny ability to navigate the complex political issues in Beijing, Ling was familiar with every department inside the Central Party Committee and the central government. When Hu became the party general secretary, Ling became his “housekeeper,” taking care of often-overlooked minor details, such as checking venues where Hu was due to speak to ensure everything went as planned. Ling was put on the fast track for promotions and Hu made him chief of the General Office of the Party Central Committee, which took over handling the daily affairs of the senior leadership in 2007. Premier Wen Jiabao served in that function on his rise to seniority. Hu had intended to promote Ling and another youth leaguer, Li Yuanchao, who was in charge of the party’s personnel department, to the Politburo Standing Committee to balance the influence of the princelings.

When the Bo Xilai scandal broke, Ling, in his position as chief of the General Office of the Party Central Committee, coordinated the investigation. His son’s accident on March 18 came three days after he signed the order to sack Bo Xilai. Ling immediately suspected it was a political assassination by pro–Bo Xilai forces and ordered members of the Central Guards Bureau to surround the Beijing Public Security Bureau on the night of March 19, demanding his son’s body be released before any investigation was completed, and ordering that they capture his “murderer.” The confrontation reportedly lasted more than an hour and some residents in Beijing wrote on Weibo that they had heard gunshots. Mobilizing members of the Central Guards Bureau to threaten the Beijing Public Security Bureau without authorization from the president is tantamount to staging a military coup. Zhou Yongkang, the head of the Law and Politics Commission at the Politburo Standing Committee and a close ally of Bo Xilai, was called and he rushed over to the Beijing Public Security Bureau building. He agreed to launch a thorough investigation.

Realizing that the freak accident could ruin his political career if news of it leaked out, Ling was forced to strike a deal with Zhou, who allegedly agreed to have the Beijing traffic police erase the victim’s identity, bury details of the accident, and hide the crash in the usual traffic accident report. Zhou further agreed to support President Hu’s efforts to bring Ling onto the Politburo Standing Committee. In
return, Ling would continue to lobby President Hu and Premier Wen Jiabao to limit the investigation of his friend Bo Xilai to ensure Zhou was not implicated.

Ji Weiren, author of
China Coup
, wrote on
Mingjing News
that Zhou and Ling formed a team to handle the accident. Through Zhou, Ling contacted Jiang Jiemin, who was chairman of PetroChina, the world’s fourth-largest company. Jiang transferred from his company a large sum of money to compensate and silence the two surviving women. In the next twenty-four hours, police in Beijing received instructions from Zhou to destroy the original accident report. The name on the death certificate was changed to Jia, which is both a common family name but also sounded the same as the word for “fake.” In the following days, several Weibo postings by witnesses were deleted. Words such as “Ferrari accidents,” “
che zhen
,” or “car sex,” were blocked on major search engines. Two weeks later,
Asiaweek
carried a news story claiming that Ling Jihua’s son was actually alive and his Weibo account was still active. Because the victim’s name on the death certificate was Jia, some bloggers suggested that the crazy driver was the illegitimate son of Jia Qinglin, a prominent Politburo Standing Committee member.

It looked like the cover-up might work. In exchange for Zhou’s help, Ling persuaded President Hu not to investigate Zhou’s involvement in the Bo Xilai case. He even ordered mental evaluations on Wang Lijun, the former Chongqing police chief, hoping to support the claim that Wang’s allegations against Bo were pure fabrications because Wang was deranged.

At the same time, Zhou helped Ling manipulate the nomination process for the Politburo Standing Committee. Under normal circumstances, President Hu would solicit input through an informal vote from members of the Central Party Committee before the leadership transition. The balloting was originally planned to take place at a scheduled session on June 18. Fearing that his son’s Ferrari crash could leak out anytime, Ling persuaded President Hu to reschedule the voting for May 7, 2012. Prior to the informal vote, Zhou and Ling campaigned vigorously among members of the Party Central Committee. Ling’s chances looked good. The May 5 vote ranked him as the
third–most electable candidate on the list, well positioned to win one of the five seats to be vacated.

However, Ling’s action infuriated many who felt that the schedule change for the informal voting was done without a full explanation to members of the Politburo Standing Committee and without consulting retired leaders, such as former president Jiang Zemin. Some were said to have questioned Ling’s motives in letters to President Hu.

In June, the cover-up of the Ferrari accident was exposed and former president Jiang Zemin reportedly called President Hu to his house, and asked if Hu was aware of it; Hu shook his head, saying he had been completely kept in the dark. Upon hearing that Ling had placed his son’s body in a morgue for months without allowing his wife and relatives to visit for fear that people would find out, Jiang called Ling “a person devoid of human nature” and former premier Zhu Rongji said derisively that “Ling was worse than a beast.”

An
Asiaweek
report later revealed another startling fact about Ling. By August 2012, Younge, one of the Tibetan women, had gradually recovered. As she was going through physical therapy in Beijing, she allegedly became bored and started texting and chatting with her friends about the accident. A month later, Younge suddenly lost consciousness and died. Her doctor attributed her death to complications from her injuries. Her parents, who had decided to bring her back to her hometown in the winter, were devastated, but told reporters, “If she failed to survive, it’s fate.” An insider told
Asiaweek
that officials had warned Younge’s family members who came to look after her at the hospital not to talk with anyone about the accident. “It’s a complex situation and the whole world wants to know the stories behind the accident,” the official was quoted as saying to Younge’s father. One of Younge’s friends saw the young woman’s death as suspicious. “In our country, a senior leader’s wife would even dare kill a foreigner with poison and the police chief would willingly cover up. So, killing an ordinary Chinese is no biggie to those in power.” Younge’s body was cremated immediately. There was no autopsy. A simple funeral was held and Younge’s family members were monitored and well provided for while they were in Beijing. They were told that her ashes had to remain in Beijing.