By Bloomberg News - Apr 11, 2012 2:17 AM GMT+0700
Bo Xilai, the former top official in the Chinese municipality of Chongqing, was suspended from his Communist Party posts after an investigation led to his wife being arrested on suspicion of murdering a U.K. citizen.
Gu Kailai, Bo’s wife, and a domestic helper are “highly suspected” of killing British businessman Neil Heywood, who died in Chongqing in November, the official Xinhua News Agency reported late yesterday. The U.K. was originally told that Heywood died of alcohol poisoning.
Bo Xilai attends the opening ceremony of the National People's Congress (NPC) at the Great Hall of the People on March 5, 2012 in Beijing, China. Photographer: Feng Li/Getty Images
Bo Xilai, Chinese Communist Party secretary of Chongqing, attends a plenary session on the work report of the National People's Congress (NPC) as China's NPC takes place in Beijing on March 9, 2012. Photographer: Nelson Ching/Bloomberg
Bo’s wife and the housekeeper, Zhang Xiaojun, “have been transferred to judicial authorities on suspected crime of intentional homicide,” Xinhua said. Bo has been suspended from his party posts and is “suspected of being involved in serious discipline violations,” Xinhua said in a separate report.
Removal from the Politburo and Central Committee, which would come at a formal party meeting, is often a precursor to prison or detention. Among four other men removed from the Politburo outside regular Communist Party congresses since 1989, two were imprisoned and one, former Communist Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, lived out most of the rest of his life confined to his home.
Bo’s political downfall comes ahead of a party congress scheduled for later this year that will pick a new generation of Chinese leaders. Before his lieutenant Wang Lijun, who Xinhua said made the murder allegations, spent a night in February at the U.S. consulate in Chengdu, Bo, 62, was seen by many analysts of Chinese politics as being a top contender for membership in the elite Politburo Standing Committee. That panel, now with nine men, exercises supreme authority in China.
U.K. Request
“It’s another step toward putting him in jail on a very serious charge,” said Li Cheng, an analyst of Chinese politics at Washington’s Brookings Institution. “It reflects the unity of the party leadership and their plan to resolve this problem in a relatively short period of time, and move on to make sure the party congress will be held in an orderly and institutional way.”
An editorial in today’s People’s Daily (PEODOZ), the party’s mouthpiece, urges cadres to “firmly support the correct decision” to investigate Bo.
“The death of Neil Heywood is a serious criminal case involving the family and close staff of a Party and state leader,” the editorial says. “Bo has seriously violated the Party discipline, causing damage to the cause and the image of the Party and state.”
Rumors, Suspicions
The U.K. embassy in Beijing had asked earlier this year for an investigation into Heywood’s death based on increasing rumors and suspicions, spokesman John Gallagher said on March 26. Gu Kailai and her son were on “good terms with Heywood” and then had “a conflict over economic interests, which had been intensified,” Xinhua reported.
U.K. Foreign Secretary William Hague said today he welcomed the inquiry into Heywood’s death.
“We look forward to seeing those investigations take place and in due course hearing the outcome of those investigations,” Hague told Sky News television. “I don’t really want to say anything more than that because, having asked for the investigations, I don’t want to prejudice their conduct in any way.”
Heywood and the son of Bo and Gu, Bo Guagua, were both graduates of Harrow school in the U.K., with Heywood attending in the 1980s and Bo from 2001 to 2006, Luke Meadows, information officer for the Harrow Association, said in a March 27 e-mail. Heywood, 41, lived in Beijing with his wife and two children. Bo Guagua is a student at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Consulate Affair
Bo’s troubles became public in early February, after his former police chief Wang Lijun spent the night of Feb. 6 at the U.S. Consulate in Chengdu, an event confirmed by both the U.S. and Chinese governments. On Feb. 8, Wang was booked with a first-class seat on an Air China (753) flight from Chengdu to Beijing accompanied by a vice minister for state security, Bloomberg reported on Feb. 10.
Bo won national attention for his success in cracking down on organized crime with Wang as police chief and for his “Chongqing Model” of emphasizing state-led investment to ease wealth gaps between urban and rural residents. Bo also reintroduced songs and slogans from the era of Chairman Mao Zedong to re-instill a socialist spirit.
Evoking Mao
Meeting with reporters on March 9 in Beijing, Bo revealed China’s wealth gap as measured by the Gini coefficient was at a level that social scientists say sparks unrest. He evoked Mao in vowing to reverse it.
“As Chairman Mao said as he was building the nation, the goal of our building a socialist society is to make sure everyone has a job to do and food to eat, that everybody is wealthy together,” Bo said. “If only a few people are rich, then we’ll slide into capitalism. We’ve failed. If a new capitalist class is created then we’ll really have turned onto a wrong road.”
Chongqing led the other three municipalities directly under the central government -- Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin -- in per capita economic output after Bo took the helm in 2007.
Bo is the son of Bo Yibo, one of the founders of the People’s Republic of China and one of the eight “immortals” who helped shape Chinese politics after Mao’s death in 1976.
Cultural Revolution
The younger Bo rose from being the mayor of Dalian to become governor of northeastern Liaoning province before becoming commerce minister, where he oversaw trade ties with the U.S. from 2004 through 2007. In 2007, Bo secured a spot on the Politburo and became the top official in Chongqing, according to his official biography.
On March 14, the day before Bo’s firing was announced, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao told reporters in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People that China in the late 1970s had taken a decisive turn away from the politics of the Cultural Revolution. Wen said China risked a return of the Cultural Revolution -- where millions of people were persecuted by Chairman Mao’s Red Guards -- unless the country continued to pursue political change.
Allegations of murder and treason in Chongqing are reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution. Mao’s top lieutenant Lin Biao was killed when his British-made jet crashed in Mongolia in 1971 as he was apparently trying to flee the country.
“Ironically, given the fact that Bo Xilai is accused of fanning Cultural Revolution-type flames, the case now apparently being made against Bo’s wife is reminiscent of the one made against Chairman Mao’s appointed revolutionary successor Lin Biao and his family after Lin Biao’s political demise and at the height of the same Cultural Revolution,” Nicholas Howson, a law professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and a former managing partner at Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison LLP in Beijing, said in an e-mail. “Complete with tales of moral turpitude, sexual impropriety and murder.”
To contact Bloomberg News staff for this story: Michael Forsythe in Beijing at mforsythe@bloomberg.net; Henry Sanderson in Beijing at hsanderson@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Peter Hirschberg at phirschberg@bloomberg.net
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