The old Harrovian and the red aristocrat

People who regularly met the chain-smoking Heywood say he resembled the American actor Steve Martin. He was often seen wearing a white linen jacket and driving his silver S-type Jaguar with the licence plate “N007W3”.

At the time of his death, he was consulting for the company that owns the Beijing dealership of Aston Martin, the car driven by James Bond, and living in a leafy gated community favoured by expatriates called Le Leman Lake, on the outskirts of Beijing. His annual income was a comfortable Rmb1.2m ($189,000) and his two children, George, 7, and Olivia, 11, attended the nearby private Dulwich College international school.

“He talked about the Bo family and his connection with them a fair bit,” said one person who met Heywood on a few occasions to discuss business opportunities. “I got the impression he was some sort of foreign consigliere, a product of the English public school system who was helping the Bo family to be more like the British aristocracy.”

While he emphasized the fact he attended Harrow to people he met, Heywood was more reticent about having studied politics at Warwick University, a leading institution in the UK but one that lacks the prestige of Oxford or Cambridge. After graduating from Warwick in 1992, he left the UK for Beijing to study Mandarin before moving to the northeastern city of Dalian, where he met his future wife Lulu and the powerful political couple who would eventually destroy him.

Friends of Heywood said they believe that while still in his 20s and teaching English in the remote, seaside industrial enclave, he sent introductory letters to government officials in the hopes of establishing connections he could use to become a business consultant.

Bo Xilai, then the city’s mayor, responded and Heywood soon entered the privileged world of the Chinese political elite.

During her brief trial in August, 2012, Gu Kailai provided a different account, telling the court she met Heywood only in 2005, when he introduced himself by letter after getting to know her son, Bo Guagua, who was studying in the UK at the time. However, family friends and other witnesses insist Heywood was working with Gu at least four years earlier than that.

If any family in post-revolutionary China can be considered aristocratic it is that of Bo Xilai, one of the country's most prominent “red princelings”, as children of top Chinese leaders are called.

His father was the Red Army commander Bo Yibo, who went on to become Communist China’s first finance minister before being purged by Mao in the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution and spending more than a decade in prison for being a “capitalist roader”.

He was politically rehabilitated by Deng Xiaoping to become one of the all-powerful Party elders known as the “eight immortals” who controlled Chinese politics from behind the scenes through the 1980s and early 1990s. While supporting economic liberalisation, he was known as a political hardliner who favoured sending in troops to quell the 1989 student demonstrations centred in Tiananmen Square.

Born on July 3, 1949, the year the Communists won the civil war, Bo Xilai’s early life was one of ultimate privilege in Beijing, where the new, ostensibly egalitarian, rulers had access to all kinds of luxuries, including things like telephones and cars that ordinary people could only dream of.

Surrounded by the children of other top officials, Bo Xilai attended the elite Number 4 High School, along with his older brother, Bo Xiyong and his younger brother Bo Xicheng. “He was much more quiet and civilized than his brothers, who were really very arrogant and aggressive rascals,” one former classmate told the FT. “On the surface he seemed kinder and gentler than them.”

Another former classmate described Bo as the shy one in his family who would blush when he spoke. But when Mao unleashed the madness of the Cultural Revolution and students organised themselves into “Red Guard” groups to brutalise their teachers and elders, Bo Xilai and his brothers all joined a radical faction called Liandong, or “United Action”.

The teenage children of high-ranking cadres that joined this group believed in the “bloodline theory” that their destiny was to rule over China. This theory basically supported hereditary rule by claiming that the children of revolutionary heroes were born to succeed them while the children of capitalists, counter-revolutionaries and other outcasts were genetically tainted and deserved to be persecuted because of their “bad” class backgrounds.

The Liandong physically attacked government officials and other Red Guard groups, even as many of their parents, including Bo’s father, were purged and sent to jail or labour camps.

Two people familiar with the actions of the Liandong at that time say they are almost certain Bo was present when people were killed by his Red Guard faction, although he did not necessarily strike the fatal blows.

At the Number 4 High School, Red Guard groups turned a canteen into a jail where they imprisoned teachers and “counter-revolutionaries” and used their prisoners’ blood to write “Long live red terror!” on the walls.

In a possibly apocryphal story that is today used as shorthand in Chinese political circles to sum up his character, Bo Xilai actively participated in a public “struggle session” against his father, whom he beat until he broke two of his ribs.

“He is someone who ‘liu qin bu ren’ – ‘doesn’t recognize the six relations’ – which means he has no loyalty to anyone, not even his own father,” said one person who knew him well at that time and later at university. He says the story of Bo beating his father is true although he did not personally witness it.

Bo Yibo was sent to prison, where he endured torture at the hands of his fanatical captors, while Bo Xilai’s mother, Hu Ming, killed herself or was murdered while a captive of Red Guards, according to differing accounts.

The chaotic tide soon turned against their children, who were left without food or shelter and forced to stay at the homes of friends or in abandoned classrooms, according to former classmates. As the sons of a disgraced former leader, they were themselves targeted for public persecution and at one mass rally, Bo Xiyong and Bo Xicheng were dragged in front of a frenzied crowd, who kicked and spat on them.

Their arms were twisted high up behind their backs, their torsos forced forward and their heads wrenched back, a favoured method of torture and humiliation known as the “airplane”.

A student of Number 4 at the time who attended this and other struggle sessions told the FT that Bo Xilai was not forced to attend that rally because he was better liked and people felt sorry for him but the crowd showed no mercy toward his arrogant brothers.

According to this person and published accounts from other contemporaries, Bo Xilai was caught stealing while wandering Beijing as a virtual beggar and thrown into prison at the age of 17.

“He was really hungry there; one of his sisters who was too young to go to jail went and gave him a pillow stuffed with dried old noodles and he would munch on them every night when everyone was asleep but when the guards found out they gave him a beating,” said one person to whom Bo confided his experiences. “He knows what it’s like when the country’s in chaos and when there aren’t proper channels for people to confront the authorities.”

Bo spent nearly five years in jail and in Camp 789, a prison for the offspring of disgraced senior officials. On his release in 1972, he went to work in a machine repair factory. People who know Bo well say his experiences left him bitter but his belief that he was special and destined to rule never wavered and was probably only strengthened by his awful experiences.

As the Cultural Revolution drew to a close in 1976 with the death of Mao Zedong, Bo married Li Danyu, a military doctor and daughter of Li Xuefeng, the former Communist party boss of Beijing.

People who knew Bo around that time say they were surprised at the match because notwithstanding his years in prison, he was handsome and charming, while Li was considered plain and unattractive.

One person who knew Bo well said the couple did not get along and it was assumed Bo had chosen his new bride for political reasons, to protect himself and his disgraced family from further persecution by marrying into a household that retained some political influence. Soon after they married, they had a son, Bo Wangzhi, and Bo Xilai was admitted to the elite Peking University in late 1977 to study history.

“Our classmates talked about his time in prison but he didn’t speak about it much,” says someone who studied history with Bo Xilai at Peking University in 1978. “He was charismatic and energetic and was very curious about other countries, cultures and learning English.”

It was at Peking university that friends and acquaintances say an adulterous romance first blossomed between Bo and Gu Kailai, the fifth and youngest daughter of Gu Jinsheng, a prominent revolutionary and later a general in China’s 1979 war with Vietnam.

The beautiful Gu, nine years Bo’s junior, and her family had also suffered in the Cultural Revolution, when her father was imprisoned and she was forced to work in a butcher’s shop and a textile factory.

After two years at Peking University, Bo switched to the China Academy of Social Sciences, where he went on to earn a master’s degree in journalism, a career he hoped to pursue outside of China as a foreign correspondent.

As virtually every other Chinese leader was trained as an engineer, Bo’s choice of subject would later set him apart from his peers. His unique understanding of propaganda and the news media would play an important role in his political rise.

The official version put out by Bo and Gu is that they did not meet until later, in 1984, when Gu was on a “study trip” to the remote county in northeast China where Bo was working as a low-level Communist cadre.

But classmates and people who knew the couple say that is false and the two became lovers much earlier. Some accounts published on the internet in Chinese say Gu’s older sister was married to Li Danyu’s brother, making it all the more likely that Bo had encountered his future second wife much earlier than 1984.

At first, when Bo Xilai requested a divorce, Li Danyu refused and her father was extremely angry at the young man's behaviour. At the time divorce was severely frowned upon in China and divorce from an unwilling military officer was even harder to arrange, but thanks in large part to an intervention from his father, Bo Xilai was eventually able to leave his first wife and marry Gu instead.

By this time Bo Yibo had been rehabilitated and was once again a formidable political figure, while Li's family was important but not in the same league as the powerful Bos.

According to one person who knows both families well, Li's father, Xuefeng, swore in the wake of the divorce that Bo Xilai would never work in Beijing again as long as he was alive.

As it turned out, the younger Bo was to spend the next two decades working his way up through the ranks in the northeastern province of Liaoning and only returned to Beijing in 2004 when he was appointed commerce minister of China. Li Xuefeng had died just one year earlier, in 2003, at the age of 96.

In retaliation for Bo abandoning her, Li Danyu apparently spent much of her time bad-mouthing him to important Beijing power-brokers and lobbying against his political advancement. She also changed their son's surname from Bo to Li.

People who have met him say Li Wangzhi, also known as Brendan Li, is tall and handsome like his father but is, in the words of one acquaintance, “very sensitive”. This person also says he used to be an avid amateur lepidopterist and sometimes gave people gifts of beautifully-framed butterfly specimens he caught himself.

He graduated from Peking University law school in 2000 and was hired by the Chinese offices of a major US law firm but decided to move to the US and continue his studies at Columbia University instead. After working for Citigroup in Hong Kong and mainland China in 2005 and 2006, the young man quit to go into private equity, making investments in his father’s powerbase in northeast China.

Acquaintances say he often drops his father’s name in situations where that could be useful but he has had little to do with his father or the rest of the illustrious Bo family since he was a small child.

The name of a company he is linked to – Chong'er Investment & Consultancy – provides a possible insight into his relationship to his father and to his half brother – Bo Xilai and Gu Kailai's son Bo Guagua. Chong'er was a Chinese prince in the seventh century BC who fled his home in the ancient state of Jin after his father made his half brother the crown prince. The state of Jin was situated in modern-day Shanxi province, which happens to be the ancestral home of the Bo, Li and Gu families. Chong'er eventually fought back and took the crown.

In an interview with Bloomberg News in April, 2012, Mr Li said he had not worked since February 2012, had “no desire to bask in [Bo Xilai’s] glow,” and had not seen his father since the funeral of his grandfather Bo Yibo in early 2007.