The flower prince

Bo's campaigns and his fixation on communist “morality” raised eyebrows from some people who pointed out that Bo's own son Guagua was now studying at Oxford University in the UK, where he had a reputation as a spoilt and wealthy “huahua gongzi” or “flower prince”.

While Bo was ordering officials in Chongqing to be more in touch with the masses and to eschew personal wealth and prestige, his son had graduated from Harrow and been admitted to Oxford University’s prestigious Balliol College in 2006. People close to Guagua and Heywood at this time say they were good friends and the Englishman was a mentor figure who would often visit the young man at Oxford.

When Guagua organised a Silk Road-themed ball for the Oxford Union, Heywood drove him to the venue, helped him to organise ticket sales and even to hang up the decorations. Friends of Heywood say they had no reason to believe there was any bad blood between the two and they find it very hard to believe Heywood would threaten Guagua with physical harm.

By this time the privileged heir to the revolutionary Communist Bo bloodline was every bit the product of his expensive upper-class British education.

He was featured in 2008 in the Chinese version of Esquire magazine, which described his passion for equestrian sports, rugby, fencing and dancing the tango. In 2009, he gave a speech at Peking University in which he said China's nouveaux riches needed to learn from British aristocrats to be more “low-key” and not to drive flashy sports cars.

But amongst his contemporaries he quickly garnered a reputation as someone who ignored his studies so he could drink, attend wild parties, drive flashy sports cars and throw his money around.

On one occasion Guagua impressed his friends and classmates by inviting kung fu movie star Jackie Chan to give a speech at Oxford.

When pictures spread over the internet of Guagua at parties wearing women's makeup, kissing western girls and urinating in his undergraduate gown on the gates of an Oxford college, the image of him as a dissolute playboy was cemented.

In a public statement after his parents were detained, Guagua defended his actions, describing his party lifestyle as just the same as any sociable young student at Oxford. People who know him well say he is articulate with a strong sense of entitlement that reveals itself when he describes the paternalistic role his family and other members of the “red aristocracy” play in Chinese politics and society.

Until his father's downfall he believed strongly in his own destiny as a future leader in China and, in a strange habit he shares with some other prominent “princelings”, he sometimes uses the royal “we” when speaking in the first person.

In his second year at Oxford, Guagua was rusticated – suspended – from his degree in politics, philosophy and economics for one year for not working hard enough, according to contemporaries.

This greatly displeased his family back home and the Chinese ambassador to the UK was dispatched with a small delegation in an unsuccessful attempt to lobby the university to reinstate him. Other Bo family friends were enlisted, including Lord Powell, who also lobbied on Guagua's behalf.

Eventually, the young man was allowed to sit his final exams a year late and he passed with respectable marks. Although his tutors at Oxford refused to write him recommendations for his application to the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, he secured a place on a two-year master’s programme there.

As he headed off to Harvard, Guagua established a technology company in Beijing with Rmb2m from his aunt, Wangning, an elder sister of Gu Kailai. According to the New York Times, the supervisor of the company, Guagua Technology Co, was none other than Zhang Xiaojun, who was found guilty of assisting Gu with the murder of Neil Heywood.

In his only public statement since the arrests of his parents, Guagua said he has “never lent my name to nor participated in any for-profit business or venture, in China or abroad. However, I have been involved in developing a not-for-profit social networking website in China...to assist NGOs in raising awareness of their social missions and connecting with volunteers”.

By the time he landed at Harvard, the years of exorbitant school fees and his lavish lifestyle were becoming very hard to reconcile with his father's official salary of just $19,000 a year and the claim that his mother had abandoned her legal career to become an ordinary housewife.

Guagua has publicly claimed that his tuition and living expenses at Harrow, Oxford and Harvard were “funded exclusively by two sources – scholarships earned independently, and my mother's generosity from the savings she earned from her years as a successful lawyer and writer”.

However, classmates and people who knew him at Oxford and Harvard say Guagua would hold large hedonistic parties and spend money in a way that made clear his family had access to a large fortune. “He definitely ran with and was on equal terms with the rich kids and there are some very rich kids who go to Oxford,” said one classmate who spent time with him there.

Other people who partied with him in China and in the UK say he would generously pay for expensive drinks for large groups of people. In China he always showed up at bars and events in expensive sports cars or chaffeur-driven sedans.

According to a former employee at Aspinalls casino in London who dealt with him there, Guagua withdrew £50,000 in cash on at least one occasion from an account held by the Dalian businessman Xu Ming, who regularly lost millions of pounds on the high-roller tables of London.

A spokesperson for Aspinalls said it would neither confirm nor deny whether any person is or was a member or guest of its casino.

Guagua himself turned down repeated requests to make any on-the-record statements to the FT.

In China, well-connected Chinese, and sometimes foreign, businesspeople often provide “scholarships” for the children of powerful officials to study abroad in order to gain advantage in business.

During Gu's trial in August, 2012, the prosecution and defence both agreed that the primary motive for killing Neil Heywood was her belief that Heywood had “threatened the safety” of Guagua.

The court heard that Gu had introduced Heywood to Xu Ming and recommended that Heywood “serve as a proxy” and participates in land deals in France and Chongqing in which Heywood stood to earn about £130m. When the deals fell apart because of “political interference”, Heywood demanded £13m in compensation from Gu and Guagua.

In court, prosecutors presented emails between Heywood and Guagua showing the dispute worsening, culminating in an exchange from early November 2011 in which Heywood threatened to “destroy” the young man if he did not cough up the £13m. The court also heard allegations that Heywood had briefly detained Guagua in his apartment in the UK at one point in an attempt to extract the money he thought he was owed.

When Guagua, referred to by his mother as “little rabbit” in their correspondence, informed Gu, whom he called “big rabbit”, of the threats, she snapped and resolved to deal with Heywood once and for all, according to the narrative presented in court. “To me, that was more than a threat. It was real action that was taking place. I had to fight to the death to stop the madness of Heywood,” Gu said in testimony read out at her trial.

Friends of Heywood and British officials have suggested that any threat Heywood made to “destroy” Guagua almost certainly referred to the young man's reputation and not to his physical well-being.