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REUTERS/Jason Lee/Files
China's former Chongqing Municipality Communist Party Secretary Bo Xilai waves as he attends the opening ceremony of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing in this March 3, 2012 file photo.
Updated at 9:45 p.m. ET: The Chinese Communist Party suspended high-flying politician Bo Xilai from its inner circle Tuesday following speculation that he is connected to the murder of a British businessman, China’s news agency Xinhua reported.
In addition, Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai, once a celebrated lawyer, was jailed, as was a Zhang Xiajun, who worked in the family’s home, the Guardian of London reported.
Bo, 62, had been suspended from his position as Communist party boss in Chongqing last month after the city’s former police chief defected to the U.S. Consul and alleged that Bo had ties to the murder.
The British businessman, Neil Heywood, was found dead in a hotel room in Chongqing on Nov. 15. At the time, police said he died of alcohol poisoning, but doubts were raised later and the U.K. embassy asked Chinese authorities to investigate further, the BBC reported.
The news agency said that Chinese law enforcement determined that Heywood had been killed and that Gu and Heywood had been fighting over unspecified “economic interests.”
Days before he was dismissed, Bo said at a news conference that some people were pouring “filth on my family.” He and his wife later disappeared from public view.
Fall from grace: China leadership contender Bo Xilai sacked
British Foreign Secretary William Hague said Tuesday he welcomed China's announcements on its investigation.
"It is a death that needs to be investigated in its own terms, on its own merits without political considerations," Hague told BBC television.
The decision to banish Bo from the Central Committee and its powerful, 25-member Politburo effectively ends the career of China’s most brash and controversial politician.
Bo and his wife had been called the “Jack and Jackie Kennedy of China,” according to the BBC. The son of a prominent Communist leader, Bo had steadily climbed the party ranks; observers of Chinese politics believed he would have been a contender when the party chooses its top leadership later this year, as it does once a decade.
Gu, an accomplished lawyer who also came from an influential Communist family, closed her law practice as her husband became increasingly powerful. In recent years, her health declined, a family friend told the BBC, and she stayed home to read books.
Ed Byrne, an American lawyer from Denver, Colo., told the BBC that when he knew Gu, she was attractive, charismatic and funny.
“They were the modern liberal element there," Byrne said.
Reuters and NBC News contributed to this report.
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Guilty or not...
The Chinese "Justice" System scares the crap out of me.
If Bo were smart he would try and find a way to get out of China. He has become a problem and an embarrassment to the powers that be in China. People like him have a very frequent habit of just disappearing without explanation. It is unlikely that those in power are going to give him the opportunity to start telling stories to get revenge on the party for ousting him. They will find a way to shut him up permanently.
But, that is what China is. Politically a problem and embarrassment to themselves. Any advanced country would have such a man removed from office effective immediately even if his wife were to be found completely innocent, however China... makes up their own rules.
Did we outsource this?
So.......what's so special about some damn Chinaman murdering someone? They not only find it easy to kill their own but they quite often Harvest their Organs for profit too!! NBD...(No Big Deal) That's how ant colonies survive.
and where would he run to? let's not pretend that Bo is some kind of good guy. He's a hardcore Stalinist and a member of the far right security clique that is largely responsible for making China the nasty place that it can be. and yeah, he might be tough on crime,but at best, he's a Rudy Giuliani type sleazeball, and Wang was his Bernie Kerik. at worst, he could've been China's Vladimir Zhirinovsky... A fascist, anti-American and nationalist leader. His purge was good riddance from the free world's point of view... And will hopefully give China's (slightly better cabal of current leaders) the ammunition they need to go after those few other rightists still in their politburo.
China - Where the justice system puts to death more people than the world COMBINED, by 5x...
Drug dealers, CEO's convicted of malfeasance, tax evasion, are just a few crimes that result in death... Ha! Ha!
I think you're being quite lenient with your figures.
Hard to say. China doesn't reveal how many people it kills annually, so every figure I've seen for them merely says "Thousands".
Death penalty is good deterrent against crime. When a country has a huge population, death penalty seems to be the only effective means to deter crimes. A society should rid itself of drug dealers, child molesters, rapists and murderers. Give these criminals jail sentence will only breed copy cats as they have nothing to be scared of.
US and Japan have fortitude to retain a death pealty system. More countries should re-instate death penalty.
As usual the ill informed make up facts and generalizations. I can see everyone here is an expert on chinese law. They read one article and are suddenly experts.
I can't see from this article how the chinese would of acted differently to a murder happening here?
Is there corruption on china? hell yea. Is there human rights problems? Hell yea.
After the Occupy movement started. The Main stream media here do not give it the credit it deserves.
The Executives here and white collar crime in particular runs rampant and flout the law. The criminal mafia in the banks continues there crime spree. The FBI only put people in jail who steal from the rich.
Many hard working good americans have lost there pensions, sold off, had there houses forclosed on. Who benefited? The 1% have increased there wealth by 3 trillion plus. Yet the rest of the economy has gone backwards.
Follow the money. That simple.
An excerpt from the USA.
There own police force beat them for daring to walk in protest past there the citadel of crime ( wall street).
The Commoners of China are some of the very best people this world has...... that being said.... It doesn't help matters that their government is just as corrupt as ours.....
The level of corruption in the U.S. pales in comparison with the level of corruption in Asia.
Oh? Let me guess... it's because of the Socialist Movement that Obama has started? Or was it one of the Bushs'? No... I think it was either Clinton's or at least Reagan's... Meh... Whatever. It was at least one, if not all, of the more recent presidents within the last couple centuries. Nonetheless, our government's corruption is obviously unfathomable. Otherwise how could they pull the hoodwink of democracy over our eyes?
Laughable. America is far less corrupt than China. We have a press that's addicted to scandals of every size and origin, and a political establishment where one party will absolutely tear the other apart at any hint of illegal activity.
In China, the government, the police, and the media are all run by the same people, so there's absolutely no incentive not to be corrupt. Having friends in high places will protect you from being punished for any crime, no matter how blatant or vile, the news will not report any story that might embarrass important people, and they have an entire state apparatus specifically charged with washing the Internet of anything that troubles those in charge.
How on Earth can you claim that America is worse?
I guess the lesser of two evils suits some of you.... Corrupt to any degree doesn't serve our people or our shared world.
No, it doesn't, but corruption is a fact of life, just like disease or bad weather. You can't stop it, you can only minimize it.
Corruption exists everywhere, at every level, in a multitude of forms. It's in business, in government, in law, in civil society, among the rich, among the poor, among the middle class, among the liberals, and among the conservatives. You can either fight it (as democracies generally do) as best you can, or you can ignore/use it (as dictatorships tend to do).
America is not perfect, especially about these cops running around with power in their hands to evict people from their home for banks, pepper-sprayed the people they supposed to protect and serve, generating revenue and tools for politicans, etc.
I always appreciate America and never take it for granted. Vote your heart out.
He's so cool, he doesn't need a name tag messing up his suit.
I wonder who it was that called them the "Jack and Jackie Kennedy of China." How incongruous is that ? Anything to divert attention from the real character, even misusing our good President Kennedy's name and that of his wife.
Good PR foil ! Glossing over all the evil, which got him his position.
I smell a book and a movie.
How about " That's a No No Mrs. Bo'' or '' You're in the Stew Little Miss Gu'' ? '' Harry Potter and the Crouching Dragon " and " Chongqing CSI ( Chinese Slut Investigated) would probably be copy right infringements !
For foreign policy wonks like me, this arrest masks massive changes going on behind the scenes in China now. Bo Xilai is a member of former supremo Jiang Zemin's clique, and an old fashioned right wing autocrat radically opposed to the current ruling administration. Their faction controls the Political and Legislative Affairs Committee, which incudes control of the secret police, a huge armed militia (the PAP), the civilian intelligence services, and the country's political prisons. It was this group that was rumored (probably erroneously) to be plotting a coup, although I they could do without military backing, which they would never be able to get.. Deposing him like this suggests that Wen, Hu and Xi (the premier, president and vice president, respectively) may be making a bid to purge that rival faction once and for all and suppress the security apparatus from which it derives it's power. There are widespread reports that entire PAP units have been relieved of their weapons and secret policemen are being summoned en masse to Beijing for reassignment and "retraining" (possible detention?). They are now saying that the entire security apparatus may be balkanized. Several prominent pro-democracy dissidents who had been disappeared into the faction's secret prison system have mysteriously reemerged over the last few days, contacting their families (such as the lawyer Gao Zisheng, who. after nearly three years of complete silence, called his family out of the blue, from a remote, previously secret prison in Xnjiang last week).
The real question is what the Xi-Wen-Hu administration plans to do with (or more likely to) Bo's friend and confident, security chief Zhou Yangkong. It's no secret that all three top officeholders hate his guts and want him removed from office, and quite possibly killed to boot. Some in the politburo, and quite possible veteran politicos like the powerful Qiao Shi, may go as far as demanding that Zhou and friends be brought to justice for their roles in crimes as far back as the Tiananmen Square massacre.
As the Cinese say, we live in interesting times.
Wow. That was quite intriguing. I actually wasn't aware that China kept a formal militia (figures that it too is run by the bureacracy).
It's got to be difficult to deal with political divisions within a single-party system. Not that I feel sorry for them. Still, less Communism in the Communist party is always a good thing.
Or a movie.....Big Trouble In Mainland China......sequel to Big Trouble In Little China.....Kurt Russel is an undercover cop posing as a BBC reporter. Has Jackie Chan as his side kick (which of course does most of the real fighting (Kurt acts tough though). In the end it all works out as they bring the killers to justice.
I bet he was a spy.
realist11111, if he was a spy, that is no reason to kill him. Incarcerate, yes, but kill outside of a prison ? That smacks of revenge, of a warning to others. It said in the article that they had had an argument about finances. The bribe was not high enough, I assume.
If he had been a spy, he would live to be exchanged for a Chinese spy we might be holding.
You can almost hear it now...
Ready. Aim. Fire.
Trial will follow.
Is it just me or is this piece hard to read? I guess I'm just used to reading news stories on a seventh grade level. :(
China cannot even conduct an authentic murder investigation.
Such a big country with even bigger incompetence. What a waste.
There was a popular tv show called Shanghai Vice, where journos followed cops around in that city. The police procedures they used seemed to remarkably modern and civilized.. That's why their cities are usually pretty safe and decent places (if you ignore the pollution). The problem isn't that they don't do policing well in China, it's that all the usual procedures are suspended for high profile political cases: if you're an anti-government activist or an out of favor official suspected of high crimes or corruption, they'll find a way to get you, police procedure be darned. Believe it or not, Torture's actually completely illegal in China, despite being used on special enemies of the state all the time. Sure, you can sue them for it later and probably get compensation, but, in the meantime, if you're a political threat, it won't stop them from beating you until you talk and then some...
Huh. Didn't know that at all.
It's always strange to see modern liberalism existing side-by-side with 20th century dictatorship.
Thanks for the intriguing info, Cali.
SF, yeah, China's full of contradictions. It combines aspects of a modern, tolerant, civil society with aspects of a secretive, Byzantine and often brutal bureaucracy - America meets Brazil.. As in Brazil, the dystopian Gilliam film.
I lived in Beijing and Shanghai for nearly a decade, as an American expat. I learned the language and made a lot of Chinese friends.
It's not a place where people live with fear and privation, as one might imagine people did in Soviet Russia. It's more like fin-de la siecle Vienna. Artistic innovation and entrepreneurialism flourish.. Everybody around me was setting up galleries and companies based on their own original work. People generally have an optimistic view of the future. Everybody has a rags-to-riches tale. They join clubs, support charities, even join campaign groups for everything from animal rights to child welfare.
But, like in the Austria-Hungary of Franz-Joseph, circa 1895, cross some sort of invisible line, and, wham, the truncheons come out and the authorities bring out the waterboard so to speak. And, as was the case in the Vienna of that era, the secret police is always watching. All of the locals know precisely where that line is, and when they cross it, they know they are making a conscious decision to challenge the authorities and to risk bringing on all manner of horrors for themselves and their families.. And once you antagonize the faceless, un-democratic bureaucrats, they'll never leave you alone.
All the capitalism, none of the democracy.
Neat and horrifying all at the same time. But I guess it can work. Kind of.
I'm not quite sure why Republicans love the Chinese so much to have sold out the American worker. Other than slave labor camps and easy toxic dumping there isn't much for the Republicans in China. For one thing the Chinese government isn't afraid to prosecute it's corrupt politicians… for much less than occurred during the Bush/Cheney Corporate Crime Wave.
Ohhh yeeeaaaa, politicians, corporate leaders and even their wife's are not immune from the long arm of the law. Check it out they're going down like flies Bo Xilai and his wife or maybe Shanghai party secretary Chen Lianyu who was sentenced to 18 years of hard prison labor for bribery and abuse of power.
WOW I wish our Justice Department would stop wasting our time and tax dollars on medical marijuana growers and focused on those bastards who almost sank our economy and committed war profiteering crimes.
The wrath of GOD will come down upon these evil Republicans before our own Justice Department has enough courage to hold politicians and corporate leaders accountable for their criminal activity. Ohh yeeaaa, look at this… The same day George W. Bush came out of hiding to make a speech on the economy, stock markets around the world had their worst day in years. The GOP is like a dark cloud over the USA. Thanks for nothing all you idiot Republican voters for dragging all Americans down with your poor choices.
Frank from ABQ
As posted on consciousmc.blogspot.com
Ok, I'm a Dem, but come on.. Can you honestly say that my party has done more for the American worker than the Repubs have? I don't like the Republicans for other reasons., some of their leaders hold views on freedom of expression and civil liberties that remind me of China's oligarchs, but, face it, both parties routinely sell out American workers.
Reagan opened up China...
Clinton capitalized on the changes...
Where the Democrats had to return Millions of USD in Chinese donations and numerous people were jailed or quickly returned to China...
Later Millions were still showing-up in the Clinton's and relatives accounts...
just Google - Chinagate Clintons or start with - http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/5/26/214938.shtml
"War [with the United States] is inevitable; we cannot avoid it," said Chinese
Defense Minister Gen. Chi Haotian in 2000. "The issue is that the Chinese armed
forces must control the initiative in this war."
For a up-date on China's Military 'THE RISING SEA DRAGON IN ASIA'.. see - http://www.jeffhead.com/redseadragon/
SpoAct, actually, I only see one idiot here..
And history is rewritten in the ministry of truth -
But yankee doodle dandies are oh so wise, aren't they. They read it in the Enquirer as they waited in line at Wallymart.
Not quite. History is written by China Daily, Global Times, Xinhua and People's Daily, as directed by the Ministry of Truth, and Minitry of Truth ensures all other versions are deleted. All others must recite the history as provided by the truth providers.
she probably thinks she can do whatever she pleases since her husband is a high ranking party member.
those people think they are above the law and can do whatever they want, whenever they want, and they run the country that way too...
Bo may have lost his public office and posts in the Central Committee and Poliburo, but he is far from dead. His demise is only temporary, path the way for a smooth leadership change in September. Afterwards Bo will be rehabitated and it won't be surprised he will hold another key post.
Bo has not committed major crimes in the perspective of the Chinese Centre Committe, but violated the party disciplines and will give a slap on the wrist as a result. Bo has done a good job at Chonqing while being the party boss and this cannot be refuted or denied.
And you called that "not above the law" ? Is this what PRC calls "justice"" ?
How dare this editor compare Gu to Jackie Kennedy! Jackie desire and esteem much more praise. Why not compare Gu with Mao's wife, she would have followed Mao's dictatory footsteps along with Bo XiLian. It's no wonder China economy built on corruption and deceit. Printing worthless money work hand in hand in United States centrl bank and China central bank. That's why these corrupted officials are moving their cash oversea because they know there is no gaurantee China growth will sustain too long. Once US economy crashed, so will China. No honest Chinese citizen can earn honest living under constance Communist officials taking bribe.