Murder and mystery among China's
elite By Kent Ewing
HONG KONG - To understand the
significance of the Gu Kailai murder trial -
concluded in a single day last week with the
wife of fallen Chongqing Communist Party boss Bo
Xilai eagerly confessing to killing British
businessman Neil Heywood - it is necessary to put
aside the smokescreen of the courtroom formalities
and the elaborate melodrama surrounding Heywood's
death.
Gu's trial actually had little to
do with Gu except as an actor on the party's
ready-made stage; rather, it turned out to be a
pre-written, one-act drama designed to distance Bo
and the party
from any blame in the case
ahead of a key party congress this autumn that
will determine the next generation of Chinese
leaders.
In the end, Gu's trial was about
politics in China, not justice, and does little to
encourage faith in either.
The sensational
details of the murder revealed in the official
press (not to mention the widespread speculation
and unconfirmed reports in other media that Gu was
having an affair with Heywood) have served to keep
tongues wagging and minds distracted from the
political purge for which the trial is a mere
cover.
In all likelihood, if the ambitious
Bo - who was brazenly angling for a seat on the
all-powerful nine-member Politburo Standing
Committee before being removed from his Chongqing
fiefdom in March - had not alienated President Hu
Jintao and other members of the ruling elite, then
there would have been no trial for Gu, whether or
not she is a murderess.
At this writing,
Gu, 53 - daughter of Gu Jingsheng, a party elder
and military leader - has not yet been sentenced.
Given her cooperation with authorities, however,
she is likely to be treated leniently. A suspended
death sentence is expected.
Who knows what
the facts really are in this case, but the script,
as it played out in a courtroom in the city of
Hefei in the eastern province of Anhui - about
1,300 kilometers from where the crime allegedly
occurred in a Chongqing hotel room last November
13 - has all the elements of the most histrionic
of soap operas.
As reported by the
official Xinhua News Agency, the only media outlet
allowed to cover the trial, Gu feared that
Heywood, 41, would harm her son, Bo Guagua, after
the younger Bo refused to pay him nearly US$22
million over a business deal that had gone sour.
Heywood reportedly sent an e-mail to Bo
Guagua, 24, who graduated this May from Harvard
University's Kennedy School of Government and also
holds a degree from Oxford University, threatening
to "destroy" him if he did not pay up.
As
the Xinhua account continues, Gu told the court
that fearing for her son's safety and suffering
from depression and insomnia, she arranged a
meeting with Heywood in his Chongqing hotel room,
where she coaxed him to drink so much alcohol that
he vomited, and then poured a mixture of rat
poison and cyanide into his mouth.
According to Xinhua, Gu said she and
longtime family servant Zhang Xiaojun, also on
trial in the case, then scattered drugs around the
room to make it appear that Heywood had died of
alcohol abuse and a drug overdose.
At the
time, Chongqing authorities declared that
Heywood's death was caused by a heart attack, and
his body was quickly cremated without an autopsy.
"I suffered a mental breakdown after
learning that my son was in jeopardy," Gu is
reported to have told the court. "The case has
produced great losses to the party and the
country, for which I ought to shoulder the
responsibility, and I will never feel at ease. I
am grateful for the humanitarian care shown to me
by those who handled the case.
"I solemnly
tell the court that in order to maintain the
dignity of the law, I will accept and calmly face
any sentence, and I also expect a fair and just
court decision."
Those, it seems, are the
humble, conscience-stricken words of the erstwhile
most influential woman in Chongqing, a sprawling
southwestern municipality of 29 million people - a
woman who was not just a beautiful flower on her
powerful husband's lapel but one who had also
earned widespread respect and admiration as a
high-flying lawyer and author with her own
impressive stake in Chinese life.
Now, if
we are to believe the script so dutifully acted
out in Hefei last week, this once-proud powerhouse
of a figure accepted court-appointed non-entities
as her defense team and then prostrated herself
before the prosecution, confessing to "intentional
homicide" without a single legal objection while
also thanking her jailers and expressing her
absolute faith in the Chinese legal system.
Maybe this works as soap opera, but it
simply doesn't wash on any other level -
especially when you consider that four senior
Chongqing police officials have admitted to aiding
and abetting Gu in the cover-up Heywood's murder.
It's hard to believe these officers would be
involved in such an extralegal operation without
Bo's knowledge - and yet there was no mention of
Bo during the seven-hour trial.
Also,
according to prosecutors in the case, before
deciding to murder Heywood, Gu had tried to
persuade her husband's right-hand man, Wang Lijun,
then Chongqing's vice-mayor and security chief, to
frame Heywood on a drug-trafficking charge. Wang
reportedly refused to take part in that plan but
was then apprised of the subsequent murder plot.
Again, if his top lieutenant was so
intimately involved in the case, it strains
credulity to ask the public to believe that Bo was
completely out of the loop.
After an
apparent falling out with Bo, Wang was dismissed
on February 2 from his post as head of public
security and reassigned to a far less important
environmental, education and science portfolio.
Four days later, Wang paid a 24-hour visit to the
US Consulate in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan
province, in what many observers saw as an
attempted defection.
Whatever Wang might
have been offering in return for asylum, however,
US authorities didn't bite. Wang was seized by
security agents shortly after leaving the
consulate and has been incommunicado ever since.
Subsequently, in an internal party
briefing, Hu denounced Wang as a "traitor" to the
party and the nation.
Like Gu, Wang now
waits in detention for the verdict on his fate.
Meanwhile, where is Bo and what is his
status? No one knows.
The 63-year-old
populist politician who tried to ride his
anti-crime campaign and Maoist revival in
Chongqing - not to mention his considerable
personal charm and charisma - to a seat at China's
most powerful table has not been seen or heard
from since he lost his post and was removed from
the Politburo five months ago.
His future
is in the hands of the party's Central Commission
for Discipline and Inspection, which has charged
him with "serious disciplinary violations" -
usually code for corruption.
But if the Gu
trial is any indication, Bo too may be treated
lightly by a ruling elite that does want to air
too much dirty laundry before the party congress
this autumn, at which seven of nine Standing
Committee members are due to step down.
It
was Bo's naked ambition that stirred China's
political waters and then his spectacular fall
that thoroughly roiled them. Add to that murder
and intrigue involving his wife and top Chongqing
police officials, and the Chinese leadership has
on its hands the worst political scandal since the
pro-democracy uprisings that led to the bloody
crackdown on student activists in Tiananmen Square
on June 4, 1989.
At this point, the
leadership clearly wants to close the book on the
drawn-out, unseemly Chongqing affair, minimize the
damage done to the reputation of both the party
and the country and move on to the next generation
of leaders.
If you want truth and justice,
look elsewhere.
Kent Ewing is a
Hong Kong-based teacher and writer. He can be
reached at kewing56@gmail.com. Follow him
on Twitter: @KentEwing1.
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