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Cutting the tall poppies: What Neil Heywood's death teaches us about China's ruthless rulers

Published: 10:03 EST, 20 April 2012 | Updated: 10:27 EST, 20 April 2012

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Neil Heywood: The murder of the British fixer has caused considerable political upheaval in China

The leaders of China's Communist Party - which has 75 million members - are men in their fifties and sixties, with identical bottle-black hair. They used to be mainly engineers by training, but nowadays they are just as likely to be economists. Their preferred public style is Confucian calm, with no policy undertaken without careful deliberation, so as to commit the whole ruling group (and the Party) to any decision.

The Party is like a shadow, present everywhere in Chinese society. Membership is mandatory for those in senior military posts, university presidents, judges, managers of state enterprises and so on.

Businessmen and entrepreneurs also have to weigh up the moment when they will need to join in order to get really big favours, usually involving giving senior Party leaders their due cut. At a certain level, membership brings a special red telephone, which only connects with other four digit numbers. This is the Party's separate encrypted means of communication. When that rings, people jump.

The Party also has its own secretive Organisation Department, which advances or retards careers and, sometimes, dispatches roving investigators, in the event that enough complaints or rumours of local corruption have filtered upwards, in the first case through an (ancient) petitioning system. They will be at work long before the police. In fact, they will determine whether or not the police and courts ever get involved or whether, as in most cases of corruption, someone just gets demoted or a warning. The idea that the CP shoots (or rather lethally injects) wrongdoers is a myth. Most get a slap on the wrist.

A cardinal consideration in this system is not to draw attention to yourself, by conspicuous consumption, conduct or utterance. Such tall poppies are taking a big risk in the land of grey bureaucrats. In today's interconnected world, the worst thing is for scandal to appear in the media in Hong Kong, Taiwan, let alone further afield. The death of British fixer Neil Heywood on 15 November last year in Chonqing has drawn massive attention to the regional Party boss Bo Xilai and his glamorous wife Gu Kailai.

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Mr Heywood was just another British chancer, trying to insert himself between where streams of money flow. He had done work for the British commercial intelligence outfit Hakluyt, just off London's Park Lane. Founded and operated by MI6 early retirees, this may or may not be an SIS front, affording Vauxhall Cross deniability when it engages in commercial espionage. The firm itself states it has no ties with MI6.

Hakluyt seeks to give businessmen an edge over competitors by picking up good gossip at the right dinners or parties, as well as doing due diligence work on behalf of firms seeking Chinese partnerships or who insure such corporations. This is much more complicated in China than usual since the Communist Party is often the hidden partner. The men on the board who you think are running a company are often just frontmen of much bigger military or political players.

Heywood seems to have been poisoned after he fell out with Gu Kailai over his cut of the US$1 billion he was helping them squirrel away abroad. That he was also sleeping with Gu Kailai, and had helped her son to go to Harrow and Oxford, is an added extra in a very puritanical public culture where studying abroad is an unimaginable ambition. She also seems to have been very autocratic, for example, sacking policemen who were volubly drunk at a neighbouring table in a flashy restaurant she was dining in. Being involved with a foreigner, who may have been a semi detached spy, in stealing China's national assets - the product of the low wage labours of millions - is about as bad as it gets.

In what seems like the worst political crisis in China since 1989, the fate of little Heywood is bound up with a deadly longterm action fight within the Party.

Bo Xilai combined becoming immensely wealthy with a ruthless (selective) crackdown on corruption in the Chonqing area, with his police chief, Wang Lijun, using abduction and torture to extract confessions from suspects. It was Wang, no wilting violet, who was so terrified of Bo's wrath when they duly fell out, that he fled into the US consulate, bearing documents about the forensics on the late Mr Heywood. He was subsequently persuaded to leave, and will not be seen again, except as a witness against Bo and his wife. The Americans will have copied all his documents before he left so the Party cannot just deny anything has happened or that Heywood died of too much drink.

Bo was also a very visible exponent of Mao-nostalgia, or mass incitement of hysteria through rallies and revolutionary songs. He was a close political ally of the former president of China, Jiang Zemin - who still headed the armed forces two years after formally leaving office - and of the State Security Bureau chief Zhou Yongkang. As a hardline nationalist, Bo also had close relations within the armed forces leadership. In other words, Bo was the aggressive public face of a wider group who combine extreme nationalism, making vast sums of money, and rhetorical subscription to Maoist socialism.

Gu Kailai with her husband, former Chongqinq leader Bo Xilai, and their son Bo Guagua

The rival group could be called centrists or reformers, albeit in a one party state. At any rate they believe in the rule of law, rather than kidnapping corrupt businessmen and extorting money from them. They are smart enough to realise that China's growth will be harder to sustain in future, and that if they want to be international players, their associates will need to be persuaded that China is not Russia, a land run by secret police gangsters.

This reforming group includes outgoing President Hu Jintao, and his chosen successor Xi Jinping, outgoing Premier Wen Jiabao, and his anointed successor Li Keqiang. Like Mr Bo and his wife, these designated successors are all children of former senior CP politicians and PLA generals. Hence they are known collectively as 'the princelings'. Animosities between these factions are deep and go back decades since their parents or grandparents may have taken different sides over Tiannamen Square or during the 1960s Cultural Revolution, resulting in the losers being shot or put in labour camps.

Mr Bo's fate seems to be sealed since the main People's Daily newspaper has warned 'Everyone is equal in front of the law. There is no privilege in the system and no exceptions in terms of regulations. Anyone who infringes upon laws shall be convicted and punished'. One minute Bo was tipped to join the nine man Standing Committee of the Politburo; the next he is under arrest.

At present the Party is allowing leaks of select facts, while smearing Bo and Gu. Gu Kailai was first said to be mentally unstable, and now we learn her mind has been affected by treatment for bone cancer. The Party has a delicate management task ahead, in exactly the months building up to the seamless change of leadership coming in November. It has to satisfy public calls for transparency about what on earth has been going on in Chongqing, without releasing so many sordid details that people will think Bo's behaviour was normal among all senior Communist leaders.

Alternatively, if Bo and Gu just go silently into the night, others may suspect that a good Maoist has been persecuted for eradicating corruption. Either way, the scandal surrounding Heywood has lifted a corner of the curtain behind which the Communist Party controls life in China.