MCLC: ex-wife tells of Bo family paranoia

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: ex-wife tells of Bo family paranoia
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (10/6/12):
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/world/asia/bo-xilais-former-wife-reveals-
paranoid-side-of-a-once-powerful-chinese-family.html

Former Wife of Fallen Chinese Leader Tells of a Family’s Paranoid Side
By EDWARD WONG and DAVID BARBOZA

BEIJING — Just months before his fall from power, Bo Xilai asked the
brother of his first wife to meet him at a government compound in the
southwest metropolis of Chongqing.

Mr. Bo, the city’s Communist Party chief, pointed to a stack of papers and
said he had forensic reports that proved the existence of a continuing
plot to poison his second wife, Gu Kailai. Then he asked the other man to
step into the yard and turn off his cellphone. The person suspected of
masterminding the scheme, Mr. Bo said, was his son from his first
marriage, Li Wangzhi, also known as Brendan Li, a graduate of Columbia
University who was working in finance in Beijing.

“Could this be true?” Mr. Bo asked. When the brother-in-law insisted the
fears were outlandish, Mr. Bo seemed relieved.

The story, recounted in two recent interviews with Mr. Bo’s estranged
first wife, Li Danyu, 62, deepens the Shakespearean dimension of a scandal
that has gripped this nation and disrupted the party’s once-a-decade
leadership transition.

The Bo saga has already shown that the rise and fall of a politician in
China can hinge as much on family intrigue as on political battles.

In dynastic eras, palace upheavals were often catalyzed by paranoia and
jealousies within the imperial family. From Qin Shihuang, the first
emperor, to the Empress Dowager Cixi to Mao Zedong, China’s rulers have
tended to suspect conspiracies against them and their close kin and have
looked for assassins in the shadows. The same fears can arise within
aristocratic Communist families today, especially among those vying for
leadership positions.

Until his downfall, Mr. Bo was considered a contender for a top post
during the handover of power that is taking place this autumn. But those
hopes were dashed last spring when he was detained.

On Sept. 28, the party announced it was expelling Mr. Bo, 63, and would
prosecute him on a range of criminal charges. Ms. Gu, 53, has been
convicted of murdering a British business associate, Neil Heywood; in a
twist on the earlier suspicions, Ms. Gu confessed to poisoning him last
November because she thought he was a threat to her son, according to
officials.

In the interviews, the first she has given to a news organization, Ms. Li
spoke in detail about her marriage to Mr. Bo, giving a rare glimpse into
the early life and thoughts of the son of a revolutionary leader and
someone whom Ms. Li described as an idealist enamored of communism.

“We believed we needed to save the rest of the world from the hell of
capitalism,” she said.

Ms. Li, also a “princeling” child of a party official, said that although
there has been a long history of enmity between her and Ms. Gu, her son
never conspired to murder Ms. Gu.

Another family member confirmed that Ms. Li’s brother had met with Mr. Bo
and had been told of the alleged plot. He also insisted the son was
innocent. The son and his uncle both declined to comment. Mr. Bo and Ms.
Gu are under detention.

Although she has no proof, Ms. Li said she suspected Ms. Gu was the one
who first blamed her son for the perceived murder plot, and the so-called
forensic evidence might have been provided by Wang Lijun, the former
police chief convicted of helping cover up Mr. Heywood’s murder. Ms. Li
said she feared Ms. Gu wanted to have her first son arrested or harmed.

“She can be that paranoid,” Ms. Li said. As for Mr. Bo, she said, he was
“good in nature and didn’t want to believe this evidence.”

Ms. Li spoke with nostalgia of her romance with Mr. Bo, which began when
the two met in 1975, at the end of the Cultural Revolution. Ms. Li said
she did not stay in contact with Mr. Bo after their bitter breakup in 1981.

The web of entanglements among the families reflects the insular nature of
China’s “red nobility.” Ms. Li’s older brother, Li Xiaoxue, is married to
Ms. Gu’s older sister, the daughter of an army general.

It was this brother who met last October, weeks before Mr. Heywood’s
death, with Mr. Bo in Chongqing.
Li Xiaolin, a lawyer associated with Ms. Gu and no relation to Mr. Bo’s
ex-wife, said in a telephone interview that Ms. Gu and her family members
believed she had been poisoned years earlier with a heavy metal substance.

He said that he did not know whom she blamed for the poisoning. Mr. Li
said that Ms. Gu’s shaking hands, evident at the trial in August, were a
result of the poisoning. Ms. Gu had even taken up knitting on her doctor’s
advice to try to regain control of her hand muscles, he said.

Several people close to Mr. Bo’s family said they had heard Ms. Gu was
poisoned at one time, and that there was extreme paranoia within the
household in recent years. But three family friends who spoke on the
condition of anonymity said they did not believe Ms. Gu was fabricating
evidence about Ms. Li’s son. They said Ms. Li had long resented Ms. Gu and
waged private attacks against Mr. Bo and Ms. Gu to discredit them.

Ms. Li and Mr. Bo, whose elite families had known each other for years,
began their love affair in 1975. Mr. Bo had just endured years of prison
during the Cultural Revolution, when his father was purged, and was
working in a factory.

Ms. Li, whose family had also suffered, was working as a military doctor.
“What he did a lot was he read the selected works of Marx and Lenin,” Ms.
Li said. “He was a simple and progressive young man.”

Living in different cities because of their jobs, they wrote letters to
each other every three days. In a poem, Mr. Bo ends with lines that
reflect both political fervor and romantic feelings:

Raise the army banner,
And laugh still more, gazing at the red cosmos,
Spare no effort to move forward.

Ms. Li’s first name means “red cosmos.” They were married in September
1976 and had a son the next year.
Mr. Bo enrolled in Peking University. He tried to read eight pages of
English each day from library books, she said. He told her, “Eventually
China will open to the world, so we have to learn.”

The two moved into Zhongnanhai, the Beijing leadership compound, after Mr.
Bo’s father became a vice premier. But Mr. Bo did not aspire to join those
ranks, Ms. Li said. Mr. Bo switched from studying history to journalism.

The end of the relationship began on their son’s fourth birthday, June 20,
1981. Mr. Bo surprised Ms. Li by asking for a divorce. “He felt very sad
and cried and hugged us,” she said. That night, he told her, “I have no
feelings for you anymore.”

Ms. Li refused to grant the divorce, though she moved out of Zhongnanhai.
The case went to court. The divorce was completed in 1984. Ms. Gu, in a
book she wrote, said she met Mr. Bo that year in Dalian. But Ms. Li said
Mr. Bo might have been secretly seeing Ms. Gu when the two were at Peking
University, while Mr. Bo was still married.

To try to stop the divorce, Ms. Li told officials that Ms. Gu had
destroyed the marriage. In the interviews, Ms. Li said Ms. Gu, a lawyer,
had threatened legal action if Ms. Li persisted.

Ms. Li said she “finally summoned enough courage to tell my story” after
being contacted by this newspaper. Now, she and her son await the party’s
final verdict on Mr. Bo.

“In those early years it was pure love,” she said. “Even though he didn’t
see me for 30 years, I forget the bad things and remember the good. You
don’t want to live with hate.”

Mia Li, Xu Yan and Amy Qin contributed research.