Paul French reflects on the scandal that has rocked the Communist party and expat business communities in China

If there is one thing that all veteran China watchers were agreed on about the prospects for 2012 it was that it would be a year of no surprises and no sudden movements by the Communist party.

This year is one of transition, and not just from the Hu-Wen administration to the next generation of leadership. In addition, thousands of municipal, provincial, urban and rural posts are to change hands. It was deemed essential that this transition be managed smoothly, that a united face be displayed, that no challenge to party legitimacy should surface.

Similarly, as it became clear that the technocrat Xi Jinping would be China’s next leader he was paraded around Washington and key European capitals for introductions. At such times no major policy decisions were to be expected – economic or social – that might rock the boat. This is how, traditionally, things are done in China. Party spats most definitely happen behind closed doors.

Then the script for 2012 got thrown away. Wang Lijun, a senior party member who was also the former chief of police in Chongqing, the massive city at the head of the Yangtze, went awol and resurfaced in the American consulate in Chengdu.

He had a story to tell … a story about the man who could have been China’s next leader – Bo Xilai. Bo’s story is a modern Chinese epic – his father fought with Mao (making him Red Royalty), and he was the tough boss of the tough port city of Dalian.

He went to Chongqing and spurred growth while cleaning out the city’s notoriously deep-rooted mafia. He was a hard man, a tough talker and that rarest of things in the Communist party, a character. In another life he could have been a mayor of Chicago, a Tammany-style politician full of vim and vigour who knows how to work the machine.

All too much for the party – he was ousted in what has been the clearest look inside the Communist apparatus outsiders have had for a generation. An open fight revealing schisms, jealousies and backbiting. Pure theatre, but never meant to be seen by the public.

Then another story surfaced, the Neil Heywood tale that sent the Bo saga into the realm of a Graham Greene novel. George Orwell, even: when I loaded the name Neil Heywood into Google in China I got the ubiquitous exclamation mark and the “connection to the server was reset while the page was loading” message indicating the censor didn’t like that search term.  

Spooky

Heywood was an Englishman, an old Harrovian consulting to the likes of Aston Martin and Eton, who was associated with a company linked to MI6 called Hakluyt. Rumoured to be teetotal, he was found dead in November 2011 in a Chinese hotel room due to “alcohol poisoning”.

There was no autopsy and he was quickly cremated. People now say he had links to the Bo family and fell out with them. The UK government, including the prime minister, David Cameron, is asking questions.

I feel Greene’s ghost walking among us in the British expat community these days – The Third Man, Our Man in Havana, The Comedians, The Quiet American … take your pick.

A dictator and his unstable wife, a foreigner who (maybe) thought he was in the right place at the right time and turned out (maybe) to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. English public schoolboys find themselves (maybe) suddenly out of their depth.

Soviet-controlled Vienna, Batista’s Havana, Papa Doc’s Haiti, Saigon falling apart … are they reflected in 21st century Chongqing? It’s all true … or just a bit of it is … or perhaps none of it.

Because there is no access, there is really, literally, no comment. And so a secretive regime has to accept that there will be conspiracy theories; they will have to shut down websites due to coup rumours flying round Beijing. All the curious are left with is speculation.

The question is, are we seeing real cracks in the system, a serious breakdown in the party’s hegemony, or just a rogue “character” and some rumours around a foreign businessman? If you want to tarnish anyone’s reputation in nationalistic paranoid China just link them to a foreigner – that’s an old game.

And foreign businessmen in China who have traditionally loved to make the front pages of the newspapers back home for their China exploits may now be thinking a little more carefully about who they make friends with.

This was supposed to be the year of no surprises. It’s only spring and that hope is now gone – that alone must say something about how monolithic the Communist party is today and how, just below that seemingly solid surface, everything can very quickly crumble. 

Paul French has been based in China for more than 20 years and is a partner in the research publisher Access Asia-Mintel.