BO XILAI’S abrupt sacking marks the most serious setback yet for the country’s most charismatic politician of recent years, but one who seems to have misjudged the prevailing ethos in the party that runs his country.
Tall and dapper, Bo (62) has been a big-city mayor, provincial governor and trade tsar. He has always been considered a bit of a maverick, but unusually for a leading Chinese politician is magnetic and charming.
Bo is Communist Party royalty. His father, Bo Yibo, was the last of the party leaders known as the “Eight Immortals”, who consolidated power in the 1980s and 1990s and oversaw the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Bo burnished his reputation in recent years as the gang-busting Communist Party chief in the southwestern city of Chongqing. He also led a call for a return to old-fashioned communist values, and built low-cost housing.
However, populism may have been his undoing. His police chief protege, Wang Lijun, disappeared for a while into the US consulate in Chengdu after he was apparently purged.
Why Bo is such a champion of ideals associated with the Cultural Revolution when he and his family suffered so much during that period has been a cause of considerable confusion.
When he was 17, at the height of the cultural upheaval, Bo was imprisoned along with members of his family for five years, after which they were placed in a labour camp for another five. His father was imprisoned and tortured for 10 years; his mother was reportedly beaten to death.
He worked at the Hardware Repair Factory for the Beijing Second Light Industry Bureau before being admitted to the Peking University Department of History, majoring in world history. He then completed a masters at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. His CV lists him as a historian and journalist.
Bo’s father was in charge of a Red Army unit called the “Shanxi Suicide Squad for the Liberation of China”, which fought first against the Japanese and then the Kuomintang in the civil war that led to the 1949 revolution.
His son, Bo Guagua, attended Harrow, Oxford and now Harvard.
When it came to trade tensions over European socks and Chinese-made bras, Bo demonstrated his tough side when facing down the then European Union trade commissioner Peter Mandelson.
His whereabouts right now are a mystery. Some say he has been arrested, others that he is keeping a low profile. But it remains to be seen what the next chapter in a remarkable career will be.
