MCLC: Gu Kailai charges suggests old tactic

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Gu Kailai charge suggests old tactic
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (7/26/12)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/27/world/asia/wife-of-disgraced-chinese-lead
er-charged-with-murder.html

Charge for Wife of Chinese Ex-Leader Suggests Old Tactic
By ANDREW JACOBS

BEIJING — In a nation that prefers the wives of political leaders to be
bland adornments, Gu Kailai was positively fluorescent. Married to Bo
Xilai, the Politburo member whose downfall earlier this year is still
shaking the Communist Party, she reveled in her brash, ambitious ways.

Admirers bragged that Ms. Gu, a pioneering lawyer who spoke fluent
English, was China’s answer to Jacqueline Onassis.

But in formally charging her on Thursday with the poisoning death late
last year of a British businessman, the Chinese government, almost
certainly intentionally, has placed the larger-than-life Ms. Gu into a
familiar Chinese framework: the conniving, bloodthirsty vixen whose hunger
for money derailed her husband’s promising career.

Although no one has presented any compelling evidence to rebut the
official narrative that Ms. Gu, 53, played a role in the death of the
businessman, many wonder if party leaders are using her case to deflect
public disgust over the kind of corruption and abuse of power that critics
say was embodied by her husband. Mr. Bo, who was suspended last April from
the Politburo and has not been heard from since, has so far remained in a
parallel justice system reserved for the party elite. His fate was not
mentioned in the brief statement announcing his wife’s trial.

“Throughout Chinese history, whenever there’s a political struggle,
whenever someone has to fall, they blame the wife,” said Hung Huang, the
publisher of a fashion magazine whose own mother, Mao Zedong’s former
English tutor, spent two years under house arrest after she was accused of
collaborating with the Gang of Four.

Chinese history is sprinkled with tales of cunning women whose outsize
ambitions led them — and sometimes the men in their lives — to ruination.
Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, took much of the blame for the calamitous decade
of the Cultural Revolution, a point driven home in a televised show trial
that electrified the nation. And Chinese schoolchildren can readily recite
the crimes of Empress Dowager Cixi, who is portrayed as a rapacious,
homicidal leader whose machinations helped topple the Qing dynasty.

It is unclear if Mr. Bo played a role in the death of the Briton, Neil
Heywood, but his former police chief, Wang Lijun, and others have told
authorities that he tried to obstruct the investigation. While word of Mr.
Bo’s fate could come soon, leaving him out of the announcement of the
charges suggests to some observers that he is not likely to be implicated
in the most damning element of the scandal, as prosecutors are viewed as
unlikely to hold separate trials related to the same death.

Susan L. Shirk, an expert on Chinese politics, said party officials might
be reluctant to accuse Mr. Bo of participating in a cover-up of the
murder, given his popularity among some ordinary Chinese and with an
influential faction of the leadership.

“They have to handle this in a way that protects Bo Xilai’s reputation,”
said Ms. Shirk, a former State Department official who teaches at the
University of California, San Diego. “They don’t want all the dirty
laundry of elite politics to be aired because they really don’t know the
potential threat posed by Bo’s followers.”

The official Xinhua news agency disclosed Thursday evening that Ms. Gu
would be tried in regular criminal court, along with an aide employed by
the family, for the murder of Mr. Heywood, 41, whose body was found last
November in a hotel in Chongqing, the sprawling municipality Mr. Bo led
until his downfall.

“The facts of the two defendants’ crime are clear,” Xinhua said, “and the
evidence is irrefutable and substantial.”

No date was set for the trial, however, which will take place in a city
800 miles from Chongqing. If found guilty, Ms. Gu could face the death
penalty, though most party insiders predict she will go to jail instead.
While repeating earlier accusations that tied the murder to “a conflict
over economic interests,” the announcement added two details: it confirmed
that Mr. Heywood had been poisoned and it said that Ms. Gu committed the
crime to protect her son, Bo Guagua, who recently graduated from Harvard’s
John F. Kennedy School of Government. It was unclear what Bo Guagua might
have done to need protection from Mr. Heywood, but the announcement
omitted her son’s full name, suggesting that prosecutors have decided not
to implicate him in the crime.

In fact, the bulk of the guilt seems to be falling on Ms. Gu’s shoulders.
The charges referred to her as “Bogu Kailai,” a name that combines her
name with that of her husband. Some analysts have suggested that referring
to her by a compound name, following an outdated tradition sometimes still
used by Chinese who live outside mainland China, hints that she has or had
foreign residency, violating the rules governing senior leaders and their
families.

She also has other strikes against her. News media reports in China and
elsewhere often referred to her as a gatekeeper to her husband, reaping
substantial financial benefits. She had lived abroad and broke an
unwritten rule by inviting foreigners into the family’s inner circle.

One of those foreigners, Patrick Henri Devillers, a French architect who
had worked for Mr. Bo during his tenure as the mayor of Dalian, arrived in
China last week from Cambodia, where he had been arrested at the behest of
Beijing. Mr. Devillers, who claims he returned here on his own volition,
has told French officials that he is helping in the investigation of Ms.
Gu.

The relationship between Mr. Heywood and one of China’s most fabled
political families remains murky, the subject of considerable gossip and
innuendo. But friends say he met Mr. Bo and Ms. Gu in Dalian in the 1990s
and later helped arrange schooling in Britain for the couple’s son. Those
with knowledge of the party’s investigation say he was also involved in
helping the family transfer illicit funds overseas.

Like her husband, Ms. Gu is the offspring of a revolutionary hero, and
like many “princelings” she experienced her share of hardship during the
Cultural Revolution. Forced to fend for herself after her family was
imprisoned, she worked for a time as a butcher and a bricklayer, according
to accounts in the state news media. In the late 1970s, though, she was
among the first batch of students to be admitted to college after the
death of Mao.

“Courage is more important than wisdom,” she once wrote in a book that
detailed her successful pursuit of a case in an American court that
yielded a $1 million settlement. The book was something of a sensation and
led to the creation of a popular television show whose protagonist — a
comely, quick-witted legal crusader — was based on Ms. Gu.

Her legal practice flourished, thanks in part to the connections of her
husband, who later became commerce minister.

“They were like royalty in Dalian,” said Edward O. Byrne, an American
lawyer who helped Ms. Gu file her 1997 lawsuit in the United States and
later spent time with the couple in China. “The people who worked for them
would refer to them as the Kennedys of China.”

By most accounts, Ms. Gu was fiercely devoted to Bo Guagua, her only
child. In 1998, she accompanied him to Britain, where he attended a
private preparatory school, and later, the elite Harrow School, which was
Mr. Heywood’s alma mater. According to Mr. Heywood’s friends, he was
instrumental in helping the boy gain admission to Harrow, which charges
annual tuition equivalent to $55,000. Ms. Gu spent at least two years in
Britain, where she went by the name Horus, the Egyptian god of war.
Some of those who knew her during her time in the seaside resort town of
Bournemouth recalled her as a mysterious businesswoman enamored with fine
hotels and jewelry. But others described her as unpretentious.

Richard Starley, the landlord of her apartment in Bournemouth, said she
used to practice her English with him over coffee. “She was the most
gracious, nice lady you could meet,” he said. “I don’t think she could
hurt a fly.”

Sandy Macaskill contributed reporting from London.