Banished to the edge of empire

Instead of a top job at the centre of power, Bo was sent back to the provinces – to the steamy southwestern metropolis of Chongqing on the banks of the Yangtze River that briefly served as the capital during World War II as Japanese invaders overran China.

As consolation for again being passed over for a top job, he was also given a position on the 25-member Politburo, the second-highest decision-making body in the Communist party, from which the standing committee is selected.

“There are three main things that stopped him being promoted – his notoriety from being a member of the Liandong [the violent Red Guard group] in the Cultural Revolution, his father’s bad reputation and overly aggressive campaigning on his behalf and thirdly, the fact he treated colleagues and junior officials so badly,” says Cheng Li, an expert in elite Chinese politics at the Brookings Institution.

There was also a fear among Party leaders and elders that Bo’s overwhelming ambition would lead him to try to seize power as, in stark contrast to other senior cadres, he did not try very hard to conceal his desire to one day take the top job of premier or president.

Although he was angry and frustrated at being shoved off to the edge of the empire, Bo would soon find a way to use his new position further to raise his profile on the national stage and to launch what amounted to a public campaign for higher office.

Often compared with Chicago in the US because of its geographic location, its enormous skyscrapers and its role as an agricultural economic hub in China’s south mid-west, Chongqing was also notorious for organised crime and dirty politics.

When Bo arrived to take over as Communist party secretary in November 2007 China’s largest city-province, with a population of 32m, was seething with problems – terrible pollution, unemployment, organised crime, corruption and a nascent real estate bubble.

He quickly began a figurative and literal cleanup of the city with a series of initiatives that would come to be known collectively as the “Chongqing Model” and were seen by some as presenting an alternative to the policies espoused in Beijing.

For the most part, his goal – summed up with a snappy slogan known as the “five Chongqings” (healthy Chongqing, livable Chongqing, green Chongqing, safe Chongqing and convenient Chongqing) – was to address the country’s growing income inequality and other negative side-effects of three decades of booming economic growth.

Just as he had in Dalian, Bo launched a massive planting campaign to “green” and tidy up the city.

His agenda included tearing down and rebuilding large swathes of urban areas, an enormous new subsidised housing programme for low-income families, construction of a giant new highway, bridge and tunnel network and a new airport.

Many of his policies heavily favoured state-owned enterprises but he also courted big foreign investors with the same enthusiasm he had as mayor of Dalian. In the space of four years, Bo increased foreign investment in Chongqing from less than $1bn a year to around $11bn in 2011, according to a senior cadre in the Chongqing government. Over that period the number of global Fortune 500 companies with a presence in the city doubled to around 200.

Foreign investors were enamoured of Bo, with his English banter and all the charm of a western politician that set him apart from the dour Communist officials they usually encountered in China.

In September 2011, before Neil Heywood’s murder and Bo’s downfall, Alan Mulally, president and CEO of Ford Motors and honorary chairman of the Chongqing mayor's “advisory council”, told the FT and a small group of reporters he was “so impressed with [Bo] – the quality of companies and advisers he’s assembled and how much he wants to learn.”

It was not just big business that loved him – politicians and diplomats beat a path to his door and officials from a number of countries, including Mexico and Hungary, decided to open consulates in Chongqing based almost entirely on their favourable impression of Bo, according to diplomats familiar with the matter.

Even Henry Kissinger, the doyen of international relations who had brokered the rapprochement between the US and China in the early 1970s, was a Bo fan and visited him in Chongqing in June, 2011, to attend a giant rally reminiscent of North Korea's “mass games”.

In front of 100,000 people waving the Communist hammer and sickle flag and singing revolutionary “red songs”, Kissinger applauded Bo and later told friends he believed Bo represented a new type of Chinese official.

“Henry thought Bo was a real communicator in the mould of a popular Western politician and he thought those officials and intellectuals who criticised Bo were divorced from the masses,” said one person who accompanied Kissinger for some of his visit. “He didn’t seem worried about the fact Bo was becoming more and more like a dictator, like a little Mao Zedong.”

In meetings Bo invariably charmed foreign diplomats with his charisma and the air of a man who was born to rule. He also came across as refreshingly critical of other Chinese leaders and their policies but occasionally he would reveal his more sinister side.

In a 2011 meeting with a delegation of European diplomats, Bo explained how he believed his extensive tree-planting programme provided him with an advantage in governing because “better air makes for better political decisions”.

This was an obvious dig at his contemporaries in Beijing, which suffers from some of the worst air pollution on earth. As they left the meeting, the Europeans discovered clandestine microphones hidden under their name tags and realised the entire meeting had been secretly bugged on Bo's orders.

Just as in Dalian and at the commerce ministry, Bo’s subordinates soon learned to fear him and went to enormous efforts to anticipate his every whim. Even something as apparently harmless as planting trees could become fraught with danger.

Bo's massive “greening” campaign cost a total of Rmb30bn over three years, according to officials in the Chongqing government who said Bo's fondness for expensive gingko trees was a central reason for the high cost.

Gingko trees are not native to the Chongqing region and some local officials argued they were not a suitable choice because they shed their leaves earlier than indigenous trees, leaving the city without shade from the strong sun. At least one gardener was dismissed by Bo in a shouting rage because he had argued against gingko trees, according to people familiar with the matter. Others were promoted when they came up with costly and creative ways of planting and protecting fully-grown gingkos.

Residents mostly appreciated the greener, more pleasant surroundings but the exorbitant cost led local officials to secretly dub the expensive gingkos “Xilai trees”.

One of Bo’s first big tests came just one year after he had taken over in Chongqing when thousands of taxi drivers went on strike, blocking the city’s winding, hilly streets and bringing traffic to a standstill.

Strikes and protests are usually dealt with harshly in China but Bo gathered praise for his restraint after he held televised discussions with strike leaders and promised to address their concerns. Bo’s handling of the aftermath to this incident told a different story, albeit one that did not appear in any Chinese newspapers.

During the negotiations, Li Qiang, the owner of a taxi company who was representing striking drivers, dared to lecture Bo in public, telling him he didn’t understand Chongqing and that he, Li, would gladly give him a lesson at a later date.

Once most drivers were satisfied and had gone back to work, Bo exacted his revenge by having Li arrested and eventually sentenced to 20 years in prison as a mafia boss.

Although Li did have some involvement with criminal activity, the primary reason for his imprisonment was that he offended Bo so blatantly, according to one person with close ties to the Chongqing police.