Buried in China

Despite our government’s best efforts, we’ll probably never know why Neil Heywood died

Dealing with China is never easy, as everybody from Margaret Thatcher (over Hong Kong) to Barack Obama (over everything from currency issues to who is going to be top dog in the Pacific) has discovered. Now David Cameron and William Hague find themselves embroiled in the biggest political earthquake in the People’s Republic since the protests that led to the killings in Beijing in 1989.

At first, the death of a British businessman, Neil Heywood, in a hotel room in the city of Chongqing in western China last November did not seem to be an event of political importance. Heywood had represented British companies in China, done deals, and worked for a consultancy set up by former MI6 people. He had built up a relationship with the family of Bo Xilai, the ambitious Chinese politician who ran Chongqing, a metropolis of 32 million inhabitants. Bo, 62, was aiming for elevation to the Standing Committee of the Politburo of China’s ruling Communist party at its five-year congress later this year. Dapper and media-savvy, he had used Chongqing as his power base, combining statist economic policies with the promotion of nostalgia for the Maoist past through mass rallies singing ‘red songs’.

The exact nature of Heywood’s relationship with the Bos remains uncertain. But he was on what the state news agency Xinhua calls ‘good terms’ with the politician’s wife, Gu Kailai, and her son, Bo Guagua. Gu Kailai was known as a high-powered lawyer; officially she had given up her work to look after her husband but the Xinhua report indicated that she had not devoted herself to household duties. The agency said she and Heywood were in ‘conflict over economic interests which had been intensified’.