A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel (32 page)

C
heng wang bai kou
—in the old imperial court, those who emerged as the winner in a power struggle were crowned and the way they seized power became irreproachable. The losers and their friends were killed or exiled.

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HINESE CENTRAL TELEVISION, or CCTV, is China’s largest state television broadcaster. Its twenty-two channels of news, entertainment, and educational programming reach more than 1 billion viewers. In recent years CCTV has spread by satellite into North America and Europe and throughout Asia—all part of Beijing’s ambitious propaganda efforts to enhance the country’s soft power, balancing the West’s coverage of China, which is perceived to be mostly hostile.

CCTV’s prowess has attracted a large number of the country’s most qualified, best-connected, and best-looking journalists, anchors, and hosts. For years, female staff members, especially news anchors and program hosts, have served as a pool of spouses or mistresses for senior Communist leaders. The attraction is mutual. In the movie
industry, an actress can obtain a coveted starring role through her “performance” on the casting couch. Inside CCTV, a sprawling state bureaucracy, where political connections are a necessity to get ahead, young women who hope to make it big and have their face seen by a billion people every day are in search of a sugar daddy. There is a popular saying in mainland China now: “Behind every news anchor is a senior Communist leader or a billionaire.” The same phenomenon exists in local state television stations across the country as well. The wives of Cao Jianmin, head of the Chinese People’s Supreme Procuratorate, China’s top prosecution organ, and Zhang Chunxian, governor of Xingjiang and a Politburo member, are both former CCTV news anchors. In December 2011, the director of CCTV was forced to step down after allegations were published on
Mingjing News
that he had pressured female TV personalities to date or sleep with senior leaders to advance his career.

Among the alleged “gold diggers” at CCTV, Jia Xiaohua, a former anchor and journalist on the business and finance channel and an editor at CCTV’s
Books and Art
program, landed the biggest fish. Her husband is Zhou Yongkang, dubbed China’s J. Edgar Hoover. Zhou had great political and quasi-military power. He served on the Standing Committee and controlled China’s law enforcement and judicial authorities including local and armed police, the courts, and the procuratorate, with a budget that is said to be larger than that of China’s military.

Though largely unconfirmed, common gossip has it that when Zhou met the CCTV journalist, who was twenty-eight years his junior, he was still married. Soon, Jia Xiaohua claimed she was pregnant and demanded a marital commitment, and Zhou obliged. Just as he filed for divorce in 2008, Zhou’s wife suddenly died in a car crash. People suspected that he had personally orchestrated the car accident, though there is no evidence to suggest this was true. At age seventy, Zhou has been the subject of persistent rumors relating to his womanizing activities—his nickname is “King of the Roosters,” implying a man with high sexual libido who would not spare any pretty women in his way. At a two-day conference at a hotel in Sichuan province, he was alleged to have slept with several female hotel staff members.

Despite his notoriety among his former colleagues in Beijing, Zhou was largely unknown to the general public. As the country’s security czar, he acted mostly behind the scenes, until the Bo Xilai scandal pushed him to center stage. In February 2012, a week after Wang Lijun’s visit to the US Consulate, Zhou’s name began to surface in many of the online news reports and blogs. Some of those posts were about his sexual prowess, but most discussed him as the mastermind and cohort in Bo Xilai’s attempted coup against Xi Jinping, the party’s heir apparent.

A source at the Central Party Committee’s Secretariat disclosed that the Politburo Standing Committee had held a meeting on February 12 to discuss Wang Lijun’s botched defection and his accusations against Bo Xilai:

       
Out of the nine members, eight agreed to detain Bo Xilai for investigation and one cast the dissenting vote. That specific member’s son and relatives had invested heavily in Chongqing. His son had reportedly obtained 4.2 billion yuan worth of government projects under Bo Xilai. The person was worried the investigation of Bo Xilai could implicate him and adversely affect his family’s economic interests. Under the heavy political pressure from his colleagues, he reluctantly agreed to Bo’s investigation.

The person who cast the lone dissenting vote apparently was Zhou Yongkang. It was known that his son had made major investments in the oil and construction businesses in Sichuan and that he supposedly had designated Bo as his replacement at the Politburo Standing Committee following his retirement in November 2012.

In February 2012, when Zhou learned that Wang Lijun had entered the US Consulate, he allegedly called Bo Xilai immediately, urging Bo to “get Wang out at any cost.” It was Zhou’s order that prompted Bo to recklessly send several hundred armed police to surround the US Consulate.

On February 21, Zhou was scheduled to lead a large delegation of Chinese legal experts and entrepreneurs to Argentina, but he canceled the trip at the last minute so he could focus on the Wang Lijun and Bo
Xilai case. One of the orders he issued around that time was to censor domestic blogs and attack overseas Chinese-language media sites.
Mingjing News
, along with Boxun, became a primary target of organized hacker attacks. Insiders from the Public Security Ministry said Zhou was exasperated at reports being published about his womanizing and support for Bo.

When the National People’s Congress was in session on March 8 and 12, many senior leaders shunned Bo, whose political future was by then at best uncertain. Zhou, however, visited the Chongqing delegation twice and praised Bo for his achievements in the development of Chongqing. Zhou’s praises were viewed as a sign that Bo had procured strong support from senior leaders and he would ride out the storm.

When Premier Wen Jiabao delivered his rebuke of Bo’s policies in Chongqing the day before Bo was sacked from his position, some analysts predicted that Zhou was also in trouble. In that week, an insider—who identified himself as a scholar who was briefed by a senior leader on Zhou’s situation—posted a story on Boxun saying Zhou had been barred from leaving the country because the senior leadership had found out that Zhou and Bo had conspired to topple Xi Jinping, the party’s heir apparent. According to the scholar:

       
Zhou Yongkang and Bo Xilai held five meetings over the past year to strategize on how to get Bo elected to the Politburo Standing Committee to succeed him as the country’s top security chief. They had conspired to topple Xi Jinping in two years. If necessary, Zhou urged Bo to dispatch armed police forces to arrest Xi. Zhou said multiple times to friends that Xi was too weak and unfit to be China’s top leader and that Bo had the capabilities to take over. They would rally national and international media to support Bo and the takeover should be no later than 2014.

The scholar further alleged that Wang Lijun had procured imported electronic surveillance equipment from Israel and Germany with Zhou’s help to monitor the telephone conversations of senior leaders, while Zhou had instructed Wang to establish secret files on
senior leaders. He wanted them investigated for transgressions in their private lives and economic “crimes” so he could release the information to more than two hundred journalists and scholars after the Lunar New Year in 2012, but the Wang Lijun incident disrupted his plan.

According to the scholar, Zhou enjoyed a steady supply of young, beautiful women, including singers, actresses, and students from Minzu University of China. Bo Xilai made a “gift” to Zhou of a singer with whom he’d slept.

This scintillating article, clearly aimed at discrediting Zhou, went viral on the Internet, even though the majority of the details were not substantiated. On March 22, the Politics and Law Commission held a series of ideological training sessions in Shanghai, but Zhou, its leader, was absent, leading people to believe that all the previous reports about Zhou’s downfall were true and that he was under investigation.

As news about Zhou’s absence spread wildly, the state media were ordered to stem the rumors. The next day, CCTV aired a clip about Zhou meeting with the Indonesian foreign minister in Beijing—an unusual choice given that Zhou’s portfolio covers domestic affairs. Two days later, Zhou was seen on TV again, planting trees with other senior leaders and then giving a speech to a group of law enforcement officers, calling them to solidify the ruling position of the Communist Party. But despite the sudden flurry of media appearances designed to suggest business as usual, insiders still claimed that he was being investigated and continued to leak unsubstantiated information to overseas media.

On April 17, two days after the government officially detained Bo and his wife, an official who said he was familiar with Zhou’s status e-mailed me, stating that the Politburo had held a secret two-day meeting and reached consensus on two decisions: launching a secret investigation into Zhou in relating to his involvement in Bo’s scandal; and postponing the 18th Party Congress, which was scheduled from mid-October to November 2012, to focus on the Bo–Zhou investigation. Soon, other overseas Chinese-language outlets reported the same information. By April, Zhou had become one of the most searched Chinese officials online, next to Bo and his wife.

ZHOU YONGKANG, born in 1944 in the southeastern province of Jiangsu, got his start in the oil industry. In 1962, he was enrolled in what is now the China University of Petroleum to study geophysical prospecting, an obscure five-year degree program that many urban students chose to skip because a career in geophysical prospecting would require living most of one’s life in the wilderness. Fortunately for Zhou, he was assigned a job at the Daqing Oil Field in northeastern China, a model state enterprise.

In the 1960s, the China University of Petroleum was not considered a prestigious university in Beijing, but many years later, a large number of its graduates have emerged as influential figures, controlling much of China’s energy industry.

Having grown up in China’s warm south, Zhou struggled with the icy weather in the northeast. But he soon became acclimated to both the natural and political environment. He began as a technician and was subsequently promoted to regional director. By 1983, he headed the Liaohe Petroleum Exploration Bureau and was concurrently the mayor of Panjin, an oil city of 1.2 million people.

In 1985, when the group of revolutionary veterans including Bo Yibo, the father of Bo Xilai, were preparing for their retirement, the Party Central Committee scouted for young, educated party officials nationwide and transferred them to Beijing to be trained for senior positions. Zhou, who turned forty-three that year, was chosen to be the deputy manager and subsequently general manager in 1996 of the China National Petroleum Corp., or CNPC, the country’s largest state-run enterprise, which manages oil and natural gas exploration and production projects in China and some thirty other countries.

With China’s growing appetite for oil and other energy resources, Zhou’s career soared. He found himself in great demand. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Zhou headed a large oil field in the far western province of Xinjiang while simultaneously leading a state-run petroleum bureau and serving as municipal party chief of a city in the central eastern province of Shandong, 2,000 miles from Xinjiang.

China’s state monopoly of the oil industry, which included an almost unlimited budget, was a breeding ground for corruption. As
general manager of CNPC, Zhou was involved in his share of scandals. He was known for being a state oil tycoon who was ideologically dogmatic, bullying people around him, and possessing an insatiable need for young women. He obtained his “Rooster King” nickname from this period. During his tenure at CNPC, Zhou often ignored international criticism: he visited Sudan fourteen times to cement ties with its corrupt and genocidal government.

In recent years, Chen Tonghai, who served as president of CNPC and chairman of the state-owned oil refiner Sinopec Corp., received a suspended death penalty for accepting 200 million yuan (US $32 million) in bribes, and Li Rong, who headed an oil field in northeast China, was sentenced to death for embezzling nearly 40 million yuan. Zhou had close ties with both officials, but somehow was untouched by accusations of corruption.

When the State Council was in search of a candidate in 1998 to take charge of China’s newly formed Ministry of Land and Resources, which manages the preservation and development of land, mineral, and ocean resources, Zhou was picked for his background in geophysics and his rich experience in the oil industry. At that time, China’s economic boom had just taken off. Land and energy were two of the most contentious and challenging areas, triggering numerous disputes over resource distribution.

“Zhou felt like he was sitting on a powder keg and he spent most of his time on conflict resolution,” recalled a former official at the Ministry of Land and Resources. “Even so, he was the constant target of personal attacks from people who were involved in the conflicts. Zhou was paving his road to the top with his blood.”

In December 1999, one year and nine months after he assumed the top position at the Ministry of Land and Resources, he was transferred again, ending his thirty-two-year career as a technocrat in the energy industry. Zhou was asked to replace Xie Shijie, the party secretary of Sichuan province, who had just retired.

If Zhou’s previous jobs at CNPC and the Ministry of Land and Resources were based on his highly specialized technical knowledge and experience, his stint in Sichuan was purely political. He was on the fast track to the Politburo. Ruling China’s largest province provided
him an opportunity to showcase his political leadership skills and accumulate political capital.