The Rise and Fall of the House of Bo

Author:John Garnaut
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781742538808
Publisher: Penguin Books Australia
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

7 Murder on the Yangtze

Investigators sent from the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection appeared at the old stomping grounds of Bo’s police chief, Wang Lijun in the northern spring of 2011, at about the same time as Bo and Wang dropped the charges against Li Zhuang. The Commission is feared for its powers but known more for its own corruption and dysfunction than its achievements. It is headed by He Guoqiang, a Politburo Standing Committee member whose family is notorious for inside business dealings, and whose protégé, Wen Qiang, had just been executed in Chongqing. Important Party leaders each have a loyalist within the commission, minimising the risk that the networks of individual leaders will be undermined by an unexpected investigation. The Commission cannot open a formal high-level investigation without sign-off from the Politburo Standing Committee. However, there are two senior Commission officials – an ageing warrior called He Yong and ‘Iron Lady’ Ma Wen – who are known to be tough and wily adversaries.

The year had begun with Wang Lijun secretly encouraging an entrepreneur to dump a public dossier on the businessman-official-gangland leader, Weng Zhenjie. He Yong, known for his loyalty to President Hu Jintao inside the discipline commission, signed a related investigation but it didn’t get off the ground, according to a participant in that endeavour.

In Tieling city, Liaoning province, where Wang Lijun had been police chief a decade earlier, his successor as police chief was secretly detained in May, 2011.lxviii Later that month Bo made a show of faith by promoting Wang to deputy mayor in Chongqing.

In August, Premier Wen Jiabao’s personal delegate at the discipline commission, a fellow native from Tianjin, Ma Wen, appeared in Chongqing. She made a phone call to President Hu Jintao in Beijing from a state guesthouse that was later ascertained to have been bugged by officials in Chongqing, prompting another avenue of investigation.lxix On 21 September, the former deputy mayor of Tieling was found dead in a river in nearby Shenyang, which police attributed to suicide.lxx Unconfirmed rumours say Wang may have secretly met central discipline inspection officials in Beijing that month, hoping to strike a deal. Bo himself was known to be unbreakable but, with enough pressure, perhaps his circle could be broken at its weakest links.

Just as Bo and Wang did whatever it took to advance their personal ambitions, in a system that had no institutional checks or balances, so too did Bo’s petite, glamorous and formidable wife. They had all grown up in a world where winners took everything and those who were not constantly accumulating power lived in constant fear of having it stripped away. Gu Kailai held no official position but she lived at the court of an emperor and became a central player in his machine. She and Bo appeared to grow emotionally distant as he became consumed by work and liaised with younger women, according to several friends, but he also trusted her, appreciated her as the mother of her son, and used her to bypass the cumbersome Party apparatus and secure the family’s political and personal interests.

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