It’s known by now that Bo Xilai, the recently ousted Communist Party official, kept a lot of secrets. He is now in the custody of Party officials for “disciplinary violations,” and his second wife, Gu Kailai, is suspected in the sordid murder of British businessman Neil Heywood.
In all the drama, Bo would probably have preferred the story of his eldest son, Li Wangzhi, to have stayed hidden. The tale includes the fact that Li, who was born to Bo’s first wife, is a supporter of democracy in China, and is reportedly under house arrest somewhere in northern China under Bo’s own orders.
Tang Baiqiao, a former student leader of the 1989 Tiananmen movement, attended Columbia University with Li from 2001 to 2003. He recently gave a detailed account to The Epoch Times of his time with Bo Xilai’s eldest son—whose identity Tang only discovered days before Party minders from China, including Bo’s younger sister, paid Li a visit and told him not to associate with Tang any longer.
How does the eldest son of ousted cadre and neo-Maoist hard-liner Bo Xilai become friends with a leader of the Tiananmen student movement and one of the most outspoken critics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)?
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The Dissident and the Princeling
On the first day of school in September 2001 at Columbia’s School for International and Public Affairs (SIPA), Tang introduced himself to his fellow students as a democracy activist and former Tiananmen leader. He'd spent two years in jail and fled to the United States in 1992.
After the meeting, a younger Chinese man approached Tang and introduced himself as Li Wangzhi. He asked simply: “May I be friends with you?”
Li Wangzhi was born Bo Wangzhi, according to accounts online. He changed his name sometime after Bo left his mother, Li Danyu. Li Danyu was known to complain about Bo to friends in Beijing, calling him a “modern Chen Shimei,” a reference to an ignoble character from the Song Dynasty who abandoned his family after marrying the emperor’s daughter.
Tang described Li in the early 2000s as “young, spirited, and proud.” At that time he did not know Li’s Party pedigree, but was impressed with his deep understanding of China’s political and social system.
“How does this person understand Chinese society so well?” Tang said, reminiscing on his conversations with Li. “His manner, his speech, his understanding of the role of privilege in society. It’s as though he grew up around high-level officials since his youth. He was very smooth,” he said.
Though Tang did not know who Li was, Tang’s reputation preceded him. Li politely declined Tang’s invitation to a Thanksgiving gathering in 2001, instead inviting Tang to his place. “He didn’t want others to know we were friends,” Tang said. Only later did he learn why.
Unlike Bo’s younger son Bo Guagua, whose social exploits have been widely reported, Li kept a studiously low profile. “He was extremely low-key,” Tang said. “No different from a regular exchange student.” He shared an apartment with other students at Columbia; he took the subway because he had no car. One time, he pointed out to Tang which places in Chinatown were cheap to shop at, and every week he would stock up on supplies.
An Idealist and Democracy Supporter
One of their first topics of conversation was the Tiananmen student movement and the massacre. Li said he was only a young teenager at the time so too young to understand when the events took place, but later gained a favorable impression of the Tiananmen participants through contact with faculty at Peking University Law School, where he obtained his first degree. This led him to doubt the official propaganda line.
At Thanksgiving, Li showed Tang his personal Yahoo website that focused on democracy and human rights in China, as Tang recalls. He particularly remembers one essay that Li shared on his Yahoo space, written by Peng Guozheng, a human rights activist who spent over 20 years in jail. The essay won an Epoch Times writing award, Tang recalls.
“Putting this article on his personal website shows that he loathed the Party’s human rights abuses, and wanted democracy in China. That was very risky for someone like him,” Tang said in a long interview over Skype.
Tang finally learned Li’s true identity when they stepped into a crowded elevator together one day. Li left first, and another friend from China asked Tang how it was that he became friends with the son of Bo Xilai. Tang had suspected Li had connections in China, but never imagined he was the son of hard-liner Bo.
But their camaraderie was short lived. A few days after Tang discovered his friend’s identity, Li disappeared. It was just before Christmas in 2001, and Tang was slightly alarmed. He heard later from peers that several Party minders, including Bo Xilai’s sister, had called Li to Boston for several days and given him a talking to. He was ordered to cease his friendship with Tang the “counterrevolutionary,” or he would be in trouble.
After that, when the two passed each other, Li would pretend not to see Tang, or secretly he'd acknowledge his erstwhile friend, but they never spoke.
Continued on the next page: Smooth Admission
Smooth Admission
Rumors online say that a large donation to SIPA by Chinese media mogul Yang Lan paved the way for Li’s entrance to the school.
Yang Lan is a 1996 alumnus of SIPA. She is currently listed as a member of the SIPA advisory board. Her combined net worth with her husband was $880 million in 2008, according to the Hurun Report’s Rich List.
The winter 2002 SIPA newsletter shows Yang Lan and her husband Bruno Wu made two donations in 2000–2001: one listed as $100,000–$249,000, and the other as $50,000–$99,000. (Yang Lan made donations on other years too, until 2008, of amounts ranging from $2,000 to $99,999.)
In response to the allegation that Li secured a place because of Yang Lan’s donation, a SIPA spokesperson said, “I have never heard of that instance and I do not believe that is our policy; that is not policy.” The individual later asked not to be named.
After Li Wangzhi graduated from Law School at Peking University, he worked for Yang Lan, according to an April 2001 article on Sina, a major Chinese Web portal. Li is identified as the assistant to the chairperson of the Sun Culture Foundation, which Yang Lan co-founded and presides as chairperson of. It was not possible to contact her.
Detained
After Li graduated from SIPA in 2003, he returned to China where he had a string of jobs. He is understood to have worked for a number of banks in China, including Citibank, according a reference to Li on a government website.
An article by John Garnaut in the Sydney Morning Herald from late 2010, identifies Li as a go-to person for executives from Australia’s Macquarie Bank interested in China’s infrastructure market.
Since early this year, it has been rumored online—and taken as fact among Chinese political observers—that Bo put Li under house arrest for “economic crimes.”
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Wang Lijun, Bo’s former trusted lieutenant, brought Li to Liaoning, the rumors said. “He felt safer to detain his son in his own territory, rather than Beijing,” Tang supposes.
The soft detention was supposed to prevent his former wife and his eldest son from embarrassing him before the 18th Party Congress. (Until February, Bo was supposed to be a shoo-in for promotion to the nine-person Standing Committee of the Politburo, which Bo was recently booted from.)
The claim that Li is under house arrest is difficult to verify.
According to the Haidian District government website in Beijing, in 2010 Li Wangzhi was a lawyer with the Zhong Jing law firm. The record in 2011 identifies him as a partner at the same firm. That is his last known occupation. An individual who answered the phone there at midday on April 17 in Beijing was unreceptive to questions about Li’s current whereabouts.
“In China, the people who know these things aren’t going to come out and speak about it. You could lose your head,” Tang said.
The male answering the phone did not identify himself. He first said Li was “not there” before saying there was no such person at the firm. He then quickly hung up.
When called back, the individual sounded agitated and responded to questions about Li’s whereabouts, including whether he was under house arrest, or when he had last been seen, with a series of increasingly aggressive, “I don’t knows.”
“If you call back I won’t speak nicely, and you'll have deserved it!” the individual shouted, before hanging up.
As a footnote, in an uncanny coincidence, on an events page on SIPA’s website, a photograph that includes Li is part of the page’s banner. Columbia did not respond to a request for permission to reprint the image. Li is on the right, holding a cellphone or other small object to his ear.
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