Bo Guagua, the younger son of ousted Chongqing Party chief Bo Xilai, has enrolled in the Law School at Columbia University, according to the school’s online records and other sources. From Joanna Chiu and Patrick Boehler at South China Morning Post:
“I learned from a source closed to Bo Guagua that he was going to law school, so I was curious and checked the websites of some law schools,” said Vincent Ni, a Beijing-based journalist who used his Twitter account to release a screenshot of Guagua’s online student listing on Monday. “I think Columbia is a good choice for him,” said Ni.
[…] “Bo Guagua has his family’s financial resources at his back, but that’s not unusual for Columbia students,” said a current Columbia Law School student who asked not to be named. “I think my classmates would resist the temptation to judge him based on his parents’ troubles.”
[…] Professor Joseph Cheng Yu-shek, professor of political science at City University of Hong Kong, said: “This in the eyes of ordinary people is a rather logical choice given the fact that his mother is in prison and his father will likely serve a prison sentence. Staying outside China will probably give him a better environment to pursue his academic studies, and it can also be speculated that with both parents in person the family would need someone to manage the family’s financial assets outside the country.” [Source]
Disgraced Chinese politician Bo Xilai's son Bo Guagua is an incoming JD student at #ColumbiaUniversity in New York. pic.twitter.com/LqDtntM6so
— Vincent Ni (@nivincent) July 29, 2013
The New York Times also reports on the younger Bo’s plans:
It is unclear how Mr. Bo will pay for his three-year education at Columbia, which has one of the most expensive law schools in the United States. The law school’s Web site says tuition is $55,916 for the coming academic year, and total charges are $60,234 once other fees are included. Living costs are listed as an additional $22,561. It is also unclear how Mr. Bo paid for his Oxford and Harvard tuitions, though he said in a letter last year to The Harvard Crimson that the tuition and living expenses at those universities and at Harrow, an exclusive British boarding school that he attended, were paid for through scholarships and money that his mother had earned as a lawyer.
On Monday, a Chinese journalist, Vincent Ni, posted on Twitter a photograph of a Web page from Columbia that showed Mr. Bo’s e-mail address at the law school. Around the same time, the person in Beijing with high-level contacts, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, confirmed Mr. Bo’s enrollment at Columbia in an interview. The person said Mr. Bo had earlier explored getting a doctorate at Oxford. [Source]
Last year, Bloomberg write about Bo’s elder son, Li Wangzhi, who is also a Columbia graduate.
See more about Bo Guagua via CDT.
