A long way from home
As the cyanide took effect, Neil Percival Heywood must have looked up at the tacky photos of trees and waterfalls on the mustard-coloured wallpaper and wondered how he ever got involved in the vicious world of Chinese politics.
The dingy room at the Lucky Holiday Hotel – a three-star hilltop resort in the Chinese metropolis of Chongqing where he was found dead on November 15, 2011 – was a long way from his childhood in a middle-class suburb in London or his education at Harrow, the elite private school attended by Winston Churchill and Lord Byron.
Although he had become depressed and worried about his involvement with one of China’s most powerful political families and he had seen enough to know how they dealt with those who crossed them, he thought it was very unlikely they would kill a foreigner.
He could not have imagined that his murder would spark the biggest Chinese political scandal in at least two decades and expose an elite power struggle that has shaken the ruling Communist party to its core.
After spending nearly half his 41 years in China, mostly working as a small-time business consultant and fixer, his death in the secluded run-down guesthouse was blamed on “excessive alcohol consumption” by the Chongqing police.
His remains were quickly cremated without an autopsy on the authorisation of his family.
His Chinese wife, Wang Lulu, was pressed by the Chongqing police to agree to the quick cremation: she was so distraught when she arrived in the city that she sent her brother with a British consular official to identify the body.
Almost every single staff member at the Lucky Holiday Hotel was replaced over the following month and all new employees at the forlorn, mist-shrouded compound have been warned not to discuss the incident with anyone.
Back in the UK, Heywood’s sister, elderly mother and friends were told he died of a heart attack, as his father Peter had in 2004 at the age of 63.
At a memorial on December 19, 2011, in St Mary’s Church on the banks of the Thames in London’s Battersea district, the Heywood family was joined by many of Neil’s old schoolmates from Harrow.
“At least some of us were puzzled and concerned by the circumstances of Neil’s death and the story that he’d died of a heart attack,” says one person who attended. “Those of us that knew who he was connected to in China felt something more sinister had happened.”
The Lucky Holiday Hotel was a favourite spot for Gu Kailai, wife of Bo Xilai, a member of the elite 25-member Politburo of the Chinese Communist party and the man who ruled like a king over Chongqing, a city-province with a population roughly equal to Canada and a land area the size of Austria.
Virtually all Heywood’s success as a business consultant for British companies in China rested on his relationship with the Bo-Gu family and it was Gu who arranged for him to go to Chongqing and stay at the Lucky Holiday that November.
There, with the help of a Bo household orderly and bodyguard named Zhang Xiaojun, she got him drunk on whisky and then murdered him by pouring poison used to kill dogs and rats down his throat.
On April 10, 2012, nearly five months after Heywood's death, the Chinese government announced that Gu and Zhang had been detained on suspicion of “intentional homicide”.
Then, in a carefully staged piece of political theatre in mid-August, 2012, Gu was convicted and handed a suspended death sentence following a trial that lasted less than seven hours. Her accomplice was sentenced to nine years in prison for his role in the murder.
At the same time her detention was announced in April, Gu's husband Bo Xilai was suspended from all his posts because of “serious discipline violations” in a development that sent shockwaves through the Chinese political structure.
The death of an obscure British consultant had brought down one of China’s most powerful men, a Communist party maverick who had been favoured to ascend to the ruling nine-member Politburo standing committee at a once-in-a-decade power transition in late 2012.
Bo's downfall also revealed a deep rift among the top echelons of the Communist party and shattered the illusion that authoritarian China had managed to institutionalise an orderly succession process in the absence of democracy.
But Bo Xilai would almost certainly still be in power and Heywood's suspicious death would have remained a mystery were it not for the actions of one man – Bo’s once-loyal and fanatical chief of police in Chongqing, Wang Lijun.
Wang’s flight from virtual house arrest in Chongqing to a US consulate 300km away on February 6, 2012, made him the most senior asylum seeker in the history of Communist China and will probably go down as an event that changed the course of Chinese history.
While rifle-toting agents sent by Bo Xilai surrounded the consulate on February 7, Wang presented US officials with detailed allegations of Heywood’s murder and Gu’s culpability, as well as lurid tales of corruption and political intrigue involving his former boss.
Insisting that Bo Xilai was trying to have him killed, he requested asylum. When that was refused he negotiated an exit with the central government, left the consulate in the middle of the night and was taken to Beijing by a vice-minister of state security.
He then disappeared into custody where he provided accounts of Bo and Gu’s alleged crimes to Chinese investigators.
In early September, 2012, Wang was indicted on charges of defection, abuse of power and “massive corruption” for his role in helping to cover up Heywood’s murder. At his trial on September 17 and 18, he did not dispute the charges against him and he was expected to be convicted and sentenced by the end of September. Under Chinese law, technically he could face the death penalty. But most Chinese political insiders expected he would not be executed and would receive a relatively light sentence for helping Bo’s many political enemies bring down a man they believed could have tried to seize ultimate power and rule as a modern dictator.
“If Wang Lijun hadn’t run to the US consulate and revealed [the cause of] Heywood’s death, then Bo would almost certainly have been elevated into the standing committee and that would have made him untouchable,” a senior Party member in the Chongqing government told the FT. “That was a very frightening prospect for his rivals, who thought of him as a Hitler-like figure.”
Bo’s critics and even many of his supporters believe he would not have been satisfied working as a junior member of the collective leadership and would have tried to manoeuver himself into a more central role, possibly even by pushing aside Xi Jinping, the man anointed to take over as Chinese president in autumn 2012.
The British government has acknowledged that members of the British community in China expressed their concerns about the nature of Heywood's death in mid-January. But a friend of Heywood's who said he was the first to raise his suspicions with the British government, said he believed the truth would never have been revealed if Wang Lijun had not run to the US consulate and made his allegations.
British diplomats, speaking on condition of anonymity, agreed with this assessment.
If this were a spy novel it would probably be dismissed as unconvincing melodrama but in the murky and cutthroat world of Chinese politics the main thing that distinguishes this case is the involvement of foreigners.
In particular, Wang Lijun's decision to involve the US government internationalised the incident and made it impossible to sweep under the carpet.
China's heavily-censored media has barely mentioned the affair but every twist and turn has played out in real time in the international media and, more importantly, on the country's hyperactive Twitter-like microblogs. The sheer bulk of information available on Bo's downfall and Gu's crime is unprecedented in China but amongst all the sordid details that have come to light, two pressing questions remain largely unanswered.
Why did Wang Lijun, a highly-decorated celebrity police officer and senior Communist party official, betray his master, his Party and his country? And what really drove Gu Kailai to murder Neil Heywood, a man she had known for years and who was the father of her godchildren?