“It's dealing with a ghost, really. The guy has been absolutely annihilated,” said Kerry Brown, a former British diplomat in Beijing and China expert at the University of Sydney.
Bo's ouster laid bare how he and other top officials reigned unfettered by the law in Chongqing, a sprawling city of 30 million people where skyscrapers have risen at the confluence of two rivers. The scandal also ruptured the Communist Party's facade of unity, exposing divisions at the highest echelons.
Bo rode to nationwide fame by leading an anti-mafia crusade and mass sing-alongs of communist anthems in Chongqing, and by implementing populist policies that made him beloved with his region's poor. But his publicity-seeking ways angered leaders who were wary of any revival of the personality cult, chaos and bloodshed of the Mao Zedong era.
The rising political star precipitated his downfall in January of 2012 by censuring his top aide, police chief Wang Lijun, and then stripping him of his powerful post.
Spurned by his influential patron and fearing for his life, Wang slipped out of the city by car a week later and fled to the U.S. consulate in neighboring Chengdu to seek asylum. He brought explosive allegations: murder by a city boss's wife, a cover-up and other high-level machinations.
“It felt like something out of a spy thriller,” U.S. Ambassador Gary Locke later said in an interview with Newsweek.
The exact details of what Wang revealed remain unclear but an incomplete narrative rolled out by Chinese authorities in the months since sheds some light.
The Bo family was once—outwardly—a picture of success: a telegenic politician and his devoted wife, Gu Kailai, a corporate lawyer who gave up her job to help her husband's ascent and raise their son. They nurtured a network of strong political, military and business connections aided by their pedigrees as the children of veteran revolutionaries.
