We owe the Party a Vote of Thanks.

Gu Kailai the deranged Red Queen of Chongqing

The Bo Xilai-Wang Ligun mini series is exceeding all expectations. Readers will be well up of developments as they have been comprehensively covered by media including John Garnaut and numerous sites including Peking Duck where I blogged on Bo’s fall from grace just hours before BBC reported his removal as Chongqing’s Maximum Leader.

A delicious mix of serendipity and schadenfreude with the rumour mill going into hyper-drive. Guns on the roof of the Zhongnanhai, tanks on Chang’an Avenue, black Ferraris and a whole lot of other silliness. Whatever, as I written on China Divide and other sites many times in the past, rumour in the PRC is a currency every bit at valuable and exchangeable as a fist full of rmb.

Rather than retrace the whole business and context in forensic detail, I recommend a visit to Seeing Red in China, Sinostand or JRs site or simply undertake a decent google news search.

Clearly, the Bo family is a bit dysfunctional. The son Bo Guagua (is this a take on Ga Ga?) is most definitely a Sino-version of a Hooray Henry right out of a P G Wodehouse novel as evidenced by this article from the Mail Online.

As I’m using a friends pc, unable to reproduce the Mail’s photographic record of this essentially worthless piece of shit, plus his tenuous relationship with the course work reading list while attending one of England’s more illustrious institutions of higher learning. So hit the link and grasp the evidence. Guagua’s excellent foreign activities are hardly newsworthy as they are the norm for the young, rich and brainless spawn of the PRCs current politico-money elite.

However, it is Bo’s wife lawyer Gu Kailai who really concerns me as she appears to be in the throes of some sort of Lady Macbeth psychiatric disorder. Following reports on the suspicious death of non-Sino fixer Neil Heywood as reported by The Telegraph HERE.

On Saturday a startling new report surfaced that Mr Heywood had told friends in China that he feared for his safety after falling out with Gu Kailai, Mr Bo’s wife. Concerned that somebody in the family’s inner circle had betrayed them, she was said to have asked Mr Heywood to divorce his wife and swear an oath of loyalty, which he refused, according to the Wall Street Journal, the newspaper which broke the original story about Heywood’s death last week.

Apparently, Gu’s invitation to Heywood to divorce his present legal significant other and swear an oath of allegiance to her good self was also extended to other individuals with close proximity to the family’s business dealings.

Clearly we are looking at a family with issues. Bo’s naked retro-ambition obviously pissed off a Politburo which places great value on a public face of unity and collegiality, undoubtedly helped along by Guagau’s excellent foreign adventures. But it is wifey’s Macbethean paranoia which raises the dysfunctional ante.

Just imagine if she were able to enforce these oaths of allegiance beyond the inner power elite to the general populace in that massive populace of 23 million. Rather than the Rev Moon’s mass public weddings, Gu could reengineer the whole process and have mass public divorces in Chongqing followed by community oaths of allegiance to herself and the Bo family. The mind boggles.

This reminds me of Lady Macbeth in Kurosawa’s exemplary feudal take on Shakespeare in his Throne of Blood. Heaven help the populace in Chongqing if she totally lost touch with the reality principle and called for mass loyalty suicides a la Jonestown in Guyana.

While we are focussing on the mysterious death of British fixer Neil Heywood, keep in mind the 11 year jail term just handed out to Australian national Matthew Ng by the court in Guangzhou. One treads a very fine line in China when owning a successful business which come to the attention of domestic competitors and pirates.

With luck, this same fate could also descend on that major Though Leader of the Sino-West interface, Shaun Rein.

Apologies for failed links. I shall return to this post when I find a more congenial computer.