It was the first time a specific motive has been revealed for Neil Heywood’s murder last November, a death which ended Chinese leader Bo Xilai’s hopes of emerging as a top central leader and threw off balance the Communist Party’s looming leadership succession.

Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai, asked Heywood late last year to move a large sum of money abroad, and she became outraged when he demanded a larger cut of the money than she had expected due to the size of the transaction, the sources said.

She accused him of being greedy and hatched a plan to kill him after he said he could expose her dealings, one of the sources said, summarizing the police case. Both sources have spoken to investigators in Chongqing, the southwestern Chinese city where Heywood was killed and where Bo had cast himself as a crime-fighting Communist Party leader.

Reuters also describes the formerly close personal relationship between Heywood and Gu, who is said to have “grown distant” from her husband. More apparently leaked details came from The Telegraph’s Malcolm Moore, who reported that Heywood had been found, before his hasty cremation, to have died of cyanide poisoning.

In recent weeks, to cement support for action against the Bos, the initial findings of the investigators have been circulated within the Communist party.

The report is believed to have been assembled from a “technical police file” that was handed over by Mr Wang [Lijun] to American diplomats.

Mr Heywood, an experienced China hand who advised Chinese and western businesses, was never given an official autopsy. His body was quickly cremated. But Mr Wang is believed to have gathered his own evidence in the 36 hours between the discovery of the body and the announcement of the death to the British authorities.

On Friday, Bloomberg highlighted the extensive global web of business interests built by Gu’s sisters:

Their wealth — and the fact they put some assets offshore where ownership is harder to trace — illustrate how the politically connected thrive in China, a country where Bo himself last month warned of the dangers of a rising wealth gap. While many of the country’s top leaders, including President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, have children who are top executives, the Gu sisters have left a paper trail that details some of their activities ….

While the extent of the wealth of China’s political elite is unknown, “the few figures available suggest the amounts are often staggering,” said Kenneth Lieberthal, director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “It comes from the state being involved pervasively in the economy.”

“The wealth is generally not money they themselves have,” he said of Chinese government leaders. “It is money their families generate. The families of various members of the Politburo have very large assets.”

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Bo Xilai, Chongqing, Chongqing corruption, money laundering, murder
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SAUTMAN: Wang Lijun was the fist of Bo Xilai in dealing with gangsters in Chongching. [sic]

SNOWDOWN: [...] As the police Chief Wang Lijun was tough, high profile and ambitious, and as it later emerged not shy of using possibly questionable arrest and detention methods. But it wasn’t until he went to the US Consulate reportedly to seek political asylum that he fell so heavily from favour. Amidst the intrigue the US has said only he was there for a scheduled meeting. Now it emerges President Hu Jintao has denouced Wang as a traitor to the country and the Party during a briefing to Congress delegates. Barry Sautman says its unusual to hear about Hu Jintao’s criticism of Wang.

SAUTMAN: But I wouldn’t say it would be unusual for Hu Jintao to denounce somebody like Wang Lijun because Bo Xilai who’s the Party Secretary in Chongching and was Wang Lijun’s boss is not somebody who’s favoured by Hu Jintao. That is Hu Jintao has a political system of followers and Bo Xilai is definitely not among them.

Meanwhile, the plot thickens as a well-connected Chongqing businessman was reportedly arrested, by Chongqing police, in Beijing after writing on his blog that he had inside information about the dealings between the Chongqing government and the mafia. From the Sydney Morning Herald:

Yesterday morning, the Chongqing property developer Zhang Mingyu hinted on his microblog he had new information to help outsiders understand ”the jigsaw puzzle around Wang Lijun”.

Earlier he blogged that a Chongqing official committed suicide on Saturday in his luxury compound. The official was a close associate of Weng Zhenjie, a local businessman and official who Mr Zhang and other entrepreneurs have publicly labelled the true godfather of the city mafia, although he was not one of 4500 detained in the anti-mafia campaign.

Mr Weng was a frequent social partner of many senior Chongqing officials including the mayor, Mr Huang.

But yesterday afternoon Chongqing police broke through the front door of Mr Zhang’s Beijing apartment before he could detail further allegations, said Mr Zhang’s lawyer, Pu Zhiqiang.

The South China Morning Post reported on the apparent suicide of Shui Zhengkuan, former deputy chairman of the Chongqing People’s Congress Standing Committee. According to the SCMP article, businessman Zhang Mingyu also served as a Chongqing People’s Congress deputy:

A Chongqing-based source close to the municipal government, who declined to be identified, also told the South China Morning Post that Shui Zhengkuan had killed himself, though the reasons remained unknown.

This was the latest incident to hit the southwestern municipality, which has been embroiled in political uncertainty since its deputy mayor and former police chief was put under investigation early last month amid defection concerns after spending one day in the US consulate in Chengdu .

[...] The anonymous source said Shui had been close friends with Weng Zhengjie , owner of one of the municipality’s largest security firms. Weng once made a massive donation to a foundation set up by Wang, the source added. Local newspapers reported that lawmaker Zhang accused Weng in January last year of embezzling tens of millions of yuan in public funds and of being involved in mafia-like activities, but no official action was taken against Weng.

Read more about Bo Xilai, Wang Lijun, and the crackdown they waged on the mafia in Chongqing. As an indication of the attention focused on Bo Xilai, see this photograph of Bo and Deng Xiaoping’s son, which has generated a tremendous amount of speculation and comment from netizens.

UPDATE (March 8, 2:15 PST): The New York Times provides a more in-depth look at Bo Xilai’s current situation and notes that he did not appear in today’s plenary session:

Mr. Bo’s plight has dominated the annual meeting of the National People’s Congress, China’s handpicked legislature, where his populist attitude and flamboyant personality made him something of a media star a year ago.

On Thursday, he failed to appear at the congress’s plenary session, a highly unusual absence. A spokesman said, however, that Mr. Bo would answer questions at a news conference on Friday.

Mr. Zhang’s charge and curious disappearance add to a growing impression that Mr. Bo’s aggressively cultured image of Chongqing as a model for China’s future — moral and crime-free, rapidly urbanizing, growing like a weed — has been tarnished.

Mr. Bo’s critics regard Chongqing under Mr. Bo as a place where power brokers were given free rein and rivals were framed, extorted and even tortured.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Bo Xilai, Chongqing corruption, corruption, mafia, Wang Lijun
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Chongqing’s ordinary cops can hardly wait. Mr. Wang and Mr. Bo [Xilai, Chongqing's Communist Party secretary] are local heroes for their aggressive action in smashing the gangs that ran the city for years, with 30 billion renminbi, or $4.7 billion, in annual loan-sharking businesses, as well as gambling, prostitution and other activities extending deep into daily life, officials said.

“We all know it’s going to be excellent,” said Huang Shu, a Chongqing police officer, of the planned movie.

[...]More than three decades of rapid economic growth in a deeply networked society within a politically opaque state have produced flourishing mafias, said Kerry Brown, head of the Asia Program at Chatham House, a research organization in London.

[...]The writers were given access to any suspect they wanted, and to any file, many stamped “Top Secret.” The book was to be written with an eye to posterity, and only objectivity and truth could ensure that, Mr. Wang said.

For more on Wang Lijun, see this 2009 photo and explanation of Wang’s work to uncover internal corruption, via CDT.

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Bo Xilai, Chongqing, Chongqing corruption, crime, film, mafia, Wang Lijun
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Li Zhuang, 50, a criminal lawyer from Beijing, went on trial Tuesday in the city of Chongqing, accused of inciting a client to falsify evidence. He had been convicted and jailed on similar charges stemming from his defense in 2009 of a convicted gangster arrested in a highly publicized law-and-order campaign.

On Friday, however, the court dropped the new charges, saying it lacked evidence. The trial had become a focal point for legal activists, who said Mr. Li had been persecuted for defending unpopular clients. The campaign against organized crime had been orchestrated by Bo Xilai, a member of the Communist Party’s Politburo and party secretary in Chongqing. Analysts say that he is a strong candidate to join the powerful nine-member Standing Committee of the Politburo and that he was using the campaign to burnish his credentials.

And from a Caixin editorial on Li Zhuang’s case:

Regardless of Li’s guilt or innocence, few doubted that the original prosecution process lacked integrity. Seven witnesses in police custody were not allowed to appear at his first trial, and defense lawyers were denied access to witnesses whose statements contradicted Li’s. Defense requests for the judge to be recused or the case transferred to another court were rejected.

Neither were Li’s lawyers allowed to exercise their legal right to read case documents, meet their client or investigate the case.

One of the lawyers, Chen Youxi, recently publicized case documents that suggest Chongqing judicial authorities tried to make a number of unfair deals behind close doors with Li. They told Chen to “think and talk politically, behave for the good of the overall situation, and do not haggle over details.”

These revelations shocked the public and prompted strong objections from legal experts. But the Chongqing judiciary has refused to give these and other expert opinions serious consideration.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Chongqing corruption, lawyers, Li Zhuang
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In fact, what Bo Xilai, the 61-year-old party secretary of Chongqing, a sprawling city of 30 million people, is doing is changing the rules of the political game in China. As soon as he went to the city in 2008, he broke the traditional succession truce with his predecessor, Wang Yang, and launched an unprecedented anti-mafia campaign. It was something that Beijing people saw as an insult to Wang, a fellow Politburo member who was moved to head the Guangdong party. Why had Wang tolerated the mafia when Bo would not? Was it really the mafia, or was it something else? Later, Bo brushed up on Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) songs and dances to inspire the common people with renewed idealistic ardor, obscuring the fact that during that period he had been imprisoned just because his father, Bo Yibo, was branded a ”black element”. It was a line he started on its own and that actually perplexed Beijing leaders, uncertain about what to think of this local campaign: whether to approve it and allow it to spread nationwide, or censor it and thus expose the rift in the party’s allegedly unified propaganda policy. In either case, Bo had set the agenda, and Beijing was on the defensive. Thus Beijing astutely decided to simply ignore it. This did not extinguish Bo’s fire.

Meanwhile, the high-profile case of lawyer Li Zhuang, is underway in Chongqing. Li’s case is being carefully watched by the legal community in China; he has been charged with fabricating evidence while defending a gangster in Chongqing convicted during Bo Xilai’s crackdown:

The lawyer, Li Zhuang, a 50-year-old from Beijing, has been accused of inciting a client to fake testimony. Mr. Li was previously convicted on similar charges after one of his clients, a convicted gangster from the western city of Chongqing, testified against him late last year; Mr. Li is currently serving 18 months in prison. Yet few Chinese commentators seem to believe that Mr. Li is guilty in either case. Many think he was framed for fighting what many see as a crude campaign against corruption. “The Li Zhuang case is so important because it is an indicator of how far China has come on its legal reform,” said a Peking University law professor, He Weifang, who has also posted a sharp criticism of the case on his blog. “It sets China’s legal reform back 30 years.”

Read more about Bo Xilai and his crackdown on corruption via CDT, including the recent open letter by He Weifang which discusses Li Zhuang’s case:

In the midst of the hearing on appeal of this case, something extremely strange happened: Li Zhuang, who had firmly denied his guilt in the first trial, suddenly entirely admitted his guilt. We are powerless to get to the bottom of the reasons behind this dramatic shift, but when the court announced that, owing to his confession, Li Zhuang’s sentence would be reduced to 18 months from 30 months, Li Zhuang clearly bore the marks of humiliation and anger of one hoodwinked, and he shouted out: “My confession is fake. I hope the court does not handle me according to this plea bargain, as my confession was induced by the Chongqing Public Security Bureau and prosecutors” (see report from Economic Observer Online, February 9, 2010). Li Zhuang’s words show that he had not admitted guilt.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Bo Xilai, CCP, Chongqing corruption, leadership, local power
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”This is the most brutal battle in Chongqing’s business community since liberation,” says a manager at one of Chongqing’s largest and well-connected private companies, who knows both protagonists well.

This, after all, is the thriving Yangtze River metropolis where China’s only maverick leader, Communist Party boss Bo Xilai, has gained nationwide acclaim by reclaiming the streets from the city’s mafia. Bo has thrown thousands of lesser ”black society” gangsters and their Communist Party protectors in jail and executed several, including the vice-president of the Supreme Court.

As well as ”striking black”, Bo Xilai has been “singing red” by leading his city in rousing cultural revolution songs. He has launched an ambitious ”red GDP” campaign to strengthen state ownership, build public housing and accelerate China’s (already breakneck) urbanisation by coaxing and pushing peasants off their land.

And yet, throughout it all, Weng Zhenjie has managed to grow bigger.

The ascendencies of big brother Weng and comrade Bo reveal the alchemy of power in China today and a signal as to where the country may be heading. Both men have spun astonishingly complex webs of loyalty and patronage through the Communist Party and its red-blood aristocracy. They have exploited every lever at their disposal and chosen their targets carefully.

The article goes on to detail Bo Xilai’s family’s tragic history with the Communist Party, which he appears to have overlooked in order to curry favor for his own political career:

Foreign business and political leaders tend to be struck by Bo Xilai’s charm and political acuity or surprised by his reluctance to read briefing notes, in a country where officials routinely memorise their lines. But even those who closely followed Bo’s mercurial career have been rendered speechless by the audacity of his tack towards the Maoist left.

Bo spent much of the Cultural Revolution in jail with his family. His father was mercilessly beaten. His mother committed ”suicide”, to use the official term, frequently a euphemism for murder.

Suicides, like party verdicts, were tantamount to proof of guilt. If the victims were really innocent they would not have killed themselves, as the logic goes, or the party would not have shot them.

In a strange but potentially important twist of modern Chinese history, Bo Xilai has not only imbued his policies and style with a Maoist red but also forged a personal alliance with Mao family members, including those at the front of the Red Guard movement that caused his mother’s death.

Read more about Bo Xilai and the crackdown on corruption in Chongqing, via CDT.

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Post tags: Bo Xilai, CCP history, Chongqing corruption, princelings
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On this afternoon, the China Youth Daily interviewed Wen Qiang’s wife Zhou Xiaoya at a certain detention center in Chongqing. At the time, Zhou was still unaware that Wen Qiang had been executed.

Q: How do you rate Wen Qiang as a husband?
A (unhesitatingly): He was my good husband. He was good to me and my son. He cared a lot about the family.

Q: How did he show his care for the family?
A (flinching her the corner of her lip upwards): He would tell me everything that happened outside. If I fell ill, he will make all the arrangements to see that I am very well taken care of.

Q: After the first trial, you seemed particularly emotional about the verdict. Is this because you cannot except your verdict?
A: No. I could not accept the death sentence for him. He did not deserve to die for his crimes. He really did not deserve to die. He did wrong. He let the people down. He let the Party down. But he did not deserve to die.

Q: As Wen Qiang’s wife, what is your rating of his “contributions”? Assuming 100 is the maximum and 0 is the minimum.
A: I give him 100.

Q: About his “mistakes,” what is your rating? Assuming 100 is the maximum and 0 is the minimum.
A: I give him 50.

© Paulina Hartono for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Chongqing corruption, corruption, death penalty
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China on Wednesday executed the former top justice official in Chongqing, bringing to an end a year-long crackdown on organised crime in the central Chinese city that has riveted the rest of the country.

Wen Qiang, who was director of the Chongqing judicial bureau and former deputy head of police, was executed after being found guilty of taking bribes, shielding organised crime gangs, hiding financial assets and raping a university student, an announcement on the Chongqing court website said.

His arrest was the most high-profile in a wide-ranging investigation that exposed numerous ties between officials in the local government and police with crime figures in the city.

The widespread public acclaim that the anti-corruption campaign won across China has also served to boost the reputation of Bo Xilai, the Chongqing party secretary, who has been angling for a position among the next generation of senior leaders which will take power in 2012-2013.

Read more about the Chongqing corruption crackdown via CDT.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Bo Xilai, Chongqing corruption, corruption, death penalty
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At first, the public opinion was very one-sided; no one could find any fault with Bo. The controversy and difference of opinions came with the case of Li Zhuang. Proponents of the democratic rule of law questioned and criticized the legality of Chongqing [court] proceedings, but Bo Xilai’s supporters hold that punishing lawyers who defend “bad people” is appropriate.

Bo Xilai’s wife Gu Kailai is a high-level lawyer who has been working for many years. The two have been together for many years and Bo himself was once the head of the Ministry of Commerce, and thus often negotiated international legal issues with foreign opponents. Because of this, Bo Xilai should have a solid conception and knowledge of the law.

But in the end, in the Li Zhuang case, the organs of justice in Chongqing left a bad impression that they might violate legal procedures. Precisely because of this, some people’s opinions on Bo Xilai changed dramatically. I myself once wrote an essay expressing pity that Bo Xilai hadn’t turned out to be the sort of high-quality modern politician [we had hoped].

Putting it all together and thinking about it, as far as Bo Xilai is concerned I think my pity may have been pedantic. The Li Zhuang case is just one piece on his chessboard there, and even though he moved it wrong, it doesn’t really matter. Compared to some of the other setbacks he’s faced, it means nothing.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Bo Xilai, Chongqing corruption
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The case of Wen Qiang has been the biggest in a series of gang prosecutions in the south-western city of Chongqing that have featured lurid testimony about sex, corruption and the city’s violent underworld.

A report posted on the Chongqing News website said the Chongqing No 5 intermediate people’s court had passed sentence on Wen. Phones at the court rang unanswered.

Prosecutors had accused Wen of taking bribes worth more than 16m yuan (£1.5m) from gang members he gave legal protection to while he was director of the Chongqing municipal judicial bureau.

Wen, 55, told the court much of the money he had accepted was for “birthday and new year” greetings.

He was also found guilty of raping a university student in 2007 and 2008, Chongqing News reported.

Read more about the corruption crackdown in Chongqing, via CDT.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Chongqing corruption, organized crime, police corruption
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