A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel (15 page)

A contemporary profile in a government newspaper indicates Bo initially had a hard time in Jin County. Local officials treated him with caution and, knowing he was using the experience merely as a launching pad for his political career, nobody took his policy initiatives seriously. Bo Xilai was said to be so frustrated that he thought of quitting, but his father scolded him: “If you can’t even handle such trivial setbacks, how do you expect to be a competent official in the future?” So Bo persisted and by the time he left, the county had won several regional awards for innovative township enterprise development, education, and family planning programs. It is doubtful that Bo personally deserved credit for the accomplishments, but he did achieve his purpose: the grassroots experience gilded his credentials. Coincidentally, the name of Jin County means “gold.”

In Jin County, Bo’s personal life also got a boost. Gu Kailai, a young woman he met when he was a student at Beijing University, came to Jin County in 1984 for an art project. Gu was the daughter of a military general and had majored in law at Beijing University.
Bo Xilai hosted Gu and her traveling companion at his small apartment. Gu described their meeting to a Chinese newspaper:

       
I didn’t expect to meet my Beijing University alumnus. When I saw him, this talented young man was squatting on a deserted beach, engaging in an enthusiastic discussion with local leaders about rural development. He was idealistic like my father. I went with him to his apartment. He lived in a tiny room, which seemed perpetually dusty and dirty, no matter how hard you clean it. He took out a few small local-grown apples from a cardboard box underneath his desk and offered them to me and my professor. Then, he began to talk about his plan for the county. . . . He looked like someone from a novel I have read—well-educated and with a strong sense of responsibility. He was a born workaholic and he was not a family man, but he is a trustworthy and reliable man.

Although both Gu and Bo claimed that they first met in Jin County in 1984, Bo’s ex-wife, Li Danyu, insisted that all three of their families had known one another for years before that—Li Danyu’s brother had married Gu’s sister. In an interview with the
New York Times
, Li claimed that she and Bo Xilai helped Gu get into Beijing University through their connections. Bo became Gu’s dance partner at school and might have had an affair then.

Following their encounter or re-encounter in Jin County in 1984, Bo began to openly pursue Gu, who was nine years younger and known for her head-turning beauty. Still married, he pressed Li Danyu for a divorce, but to no avail. Instead, the obstinate Li wrote letters to Bo Xilai’s employer and friends, depicting him as a treacherous husband who had used her in his downtrodden years and dumped her for a young woman when his situation took a turn for the better. In the 1980s, Chinese courts seldom granted a divorce involving a third party. In addition, Li Danyu worked for the army and any man or woman who caused the marriage of military personnel to dissolve would be prosecuted. It was a nasty divorce and dragged on for four years, with many court mediations. In the end, Li consented and gained sole custody of their son, changing the child’s last name from Bo to Li.

In 1986, Gu Kailai had the rare opportunity to study in the US, but the now-single Bo Xilai proposed to her. They were married the same year and a son, Bo Guagua, was born in 1987. A year later, the family moved to the city of Dalian, where Bo Xilai was named a district party chief.

I
N APRIL 1989, thousands of college students in Beijing gathered in Tiananmen Square to mourn the death of former party secretary Hu Yaobang, who had been purged for his liberal views. At first the group was relatively small, compared with the enormity of the square itself, which was designed to comfortably hold a million people when Chairman Mao wanted to address “the revolutionary masses.” Soon, a crowd gathered around the mourning students, some to share the grief over Hu Yaobang’s death, others with broader grievances about the way China was being run, and before long the square became the center of a protest movement. Emboldened student demonstrators called for an end to government corruption and political liberalization. The widespread corruption within the party was a unifying element. The movement quickly spread to cities around the country. In the southern city of Shenzhen, where I was a journalist and protest organizer, angry residents took to the street, in part because of rumors that children of senior leaders had purchased popular consumer goods, such as color TV sets, from manufacturers at below-wholesale prices and made a huge killing in the market.

At the height of the movement, student leaders, whose command of English made them the focal point of Western correspondents, led a hunger strike. Government officials agreed to engage in a dialogue with them. Despite a virtual news blackout in China, the international media freely reported the hunger strike and within a week, the overseas news galvanized sympathy and support from all sectors of Chinese society. Fearing that the Communist Party would lose its power—military units based in Beijing and local police refused to intervene—Deng Xiaoping and other party elders, including Bo Xilai’s
father, decided to use force to stop the protests. Military units based on the Mongolian border, who were effectively isolated from news about what was happening in Beijing, were mobilized.

Troops and tanks rolled into Beijing on the night of June 3, and the order was given to open fire on unarmed students and residents, and the so-called prodemocracy movement was crushed. It has been reported that the troops were told by their commanders that the right-wingers within the party were attempting to overthrow the government. Many of the casualties were reportedly trying to flee Tiananmen Square when they were killed on side streets. The official death toll was never publicized, but student organizers now claim more than 1,000 people were killed.

Following the crackdown, officials who opposed the use of force, including party general secretary Zhao Ziyang, were ousted. Party veterans, who gathered to discuss leadership succession in the fall of 1989, expressed disappointment that Zhao, the designated successor to Deng Xiaoping, would betray them by supporting the protestors. General Wang Zhen, who was then vice president of China, was quoted as saying, “Nobody is more reliable than our own children. We need our children to protect the red China that we have established.” His views were widely shared by Bo Xilai’s father and other veterans. At that gathering, the veterans agreed in a secret deal that the government should pick one child from the family of each veteran leader who had fought with Mao during the revolution in the 1940s and gradually elevate him or her to the equivalent of a vice minister’s position or higher in the government and the military.

This special group of senior leaders’ children were the original princelings. Over the next two decades, the princeling definition was expanded to include children of all senior leaders, national and regional, and the princelings have emerged as a formidable political faction. At the recently concluded Party Congress in November 2011, three have made it to the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee, the highest decision-making body.

Rising political clout has also given many princelings access to wealth. According to a widely-circulated report, supposedly conducted by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, there were 3,200 billionaires
(in yuan terms) in China by the end of 2006. Of those, 2,932 were princelings, controlling assets of 2,450 billion yuan (US $395 billion). It is inconceivable that a Chinese official institution would prepare such a report, but based on my knowledge, the figures cited reflect the reality.

In the Bo family, the youngest son, Bo Xicheng, was initially chosen to inherit his father’s political fortune. In the 1980s, Bo Xicheng had bigger name recognition than Bo Xilai, serving first as party secretary of a state-run artifact company, and then as director at the Beijing Municipal Tourism Bureau. However, in the early 1990s, Bo Xicheng suffered a series of setbacks. He failed to garner support for a spot on the standing committee of the Beijing Municipal Party Committee despite his father’s active maneuvering. Official records show that the local government removed him as director of the Beijing Municipal Tourism Bureau in 1992. The youngest son’s apparent political demise prompted the family patriarch to shift his attention to Bo Xilai, who willingly accepted the newly-available role. He moved up steadily from a district party chief in Dalian to become the city’s acting mayor and subsequently mayor in 1993.

Bo’s vision for Dalian might have been shaped by his visit to New York City a decade earlier. Liang Anren is a retired engineer from Long Island, New York. Liang’s father had saved Bo Yibo’s life in the 1930s and the two families were close friends. In 1983, Bo Xilai made a personal trip to New York City and stayed at Liang’s home. Liang remembers Bo Xilai as a smart young man filled with curiosity. He bought a metro pass and toured the city himself on the subway. Liang said Bo Xilai took a keen interest in Harlem and visited the borough twice to study the cultures and living conditions of African Americans. He marveled at the pristine beaches of Long Island and the clean air.

Liang says Bo’s personal interests in New York probably inspired many of his public projects in Dalian, a seaport city in northeast China, wedged between the Yellow Sea to the east and the Bohai Sea to the west.

Built and founded by Russians who defeated Chinese imperial troops and occupied what was then Manchuria in 1900, Dalian—or Dalny, as it was known—became the southern tip of the Trans- Siberian
Railway and a gateway to the East. Following the Russian defeat in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–1905, the city was transferred to Japanese control and renamed Dairen.

China regained control of the city after the Second World War. A friend, Dong Ayi, who grew up in Dalian in the 1950s and 1960s, recalled the city as a heavy industrial port of shipbuilding, chemical processing, and industrial equipment manufacturing. When Bo Xilai took over the mayor’s position in 1993, the city was going through a tough financial time. The majority of state-run enterprises had gone bankrupt after losing government subsidies, and thousands of workers had lost their jobs, previously seen as cradle-to-grave iron rice bowls. The city’s unemployment rate was higher than the national average, and its air and water quality was poor due to pollution from heavy industry plants.

Among many of Bo Xilai’s policy initiatives to rejuvenate the city and improve the city’s image, two are worthy of mention: beautification and soccer.

During his first five years in office, Bo Xilai stirred up a “green” storm, aiming to build Dalian into China’s northern Hong Kong. He made ambitious plans to move nearly one hundred pollution-causing factories out of the city proper. The government tore down old factories and barracks to build different styles of public squares, plant trees along streets, and create thousands of square kilometers of lawn in public places. In 1995, the city created 2 million square meters of lawn, with grass covering 37 percent of the city. Bo Xilai’s vision was a challenge for many who still saw idle land as a Western luxury and waste of space. In the Mao era, Chinese were urged to cut trees and burn grass to make space for crops. For a while, some people in Dalian joked that their mayor “paid more attention to grass than crops.”

Bo Xilai was also credited with increasing the number of sewage treatment facilities as part of a campaign to clean up the city’s forty foul rivers and converting old fishing villages into commercial beach resorts and tourist sites.

Dalian soon became a model for the rest of country’s mayors to emulate. It became known as China’s Singapore, a city built around
parks. In 2001, the United Nations Environment Programme recognized the Dalian Municipal Government for its outstanding contributions to the protection of the environment. In 1993, the
Wall Street Journal
named Bo Xilai as one of the top twenty most promising officials in China.

But Bo’s experiments in Dalian were criticized by many as public relations exercises to attract attention from Beijing. For example, Dalian, located in China’s dry north, suffers severe water shortages. Critics say the city wastes its scarce freshwater resources on useless plants and grass, while public squares rob Dalian of precious land that could be put to profitable commercial use.

To counter his critics, Bo claimed that beautifying Dalian had helped attract more foreign and domestic investors. His environmental initiative led to a rise in property values. And of the 2 million residents in Dalian, more than half lived in new housing complexes and 450,000 moved to new buildings with government subsidies. Rising property values provided the city with more taxes, enabling the government to underwrite the relocation of pollution-causing factories to the suburbs.

In addition to his environmental projects, Bo Xilai was also known as the soccer mayor, who saw a competitive soccer team as “an attractive business card” for the city. His pro-soccer stance captured the mood of the city, which is passionate about the sport. In the early 1980s, the Dalian Football Club was a national top-tier team. In 1993, the club was reorganized into a professional team. The city offered Wanda Group, a Dalian-based real estate and entertainment conglomerate, subsidies and tax benefits, making it a model enterprise for sponsoring the club, which won the first fully professional Chinese Jia-A League title in 1994. Subsequently, the team achieved a total of eight league titles, becoming the most successful club in Chinese soccer history.

“Soccer is not just sport and entertainment, but also a spirit,” said Bo Xilai on numerous occasions. In an effort to make soccer the city’s official sport, the government established a soccer development zone, and allocated funds to train new players and popularize the sport among children. Under Bo, Dalian had a well-funded and prolific
soccer academy that produced numerous prominent players. Facilities were constructed to host international matches. In the early 2000s, its overall strength in the sport was unmatched in the country. Children in Dalian idolized their soccer players like movie stars.