Neil Heywood

Based on Wikipedia: Neil Heywood

The British Fixer Who Knew Too Much

In November 2011, a British businessman named Neil Heywood checked into a three-star hilltop hotel in Chongqing, China. Within hours, he was dead. The official cause? Alcohol poisoning. But Heywood's friends knew something didn't add up. The man they described as barely a drinker—some even called him a teetotaler—had supposedly drunk himself to death.

There was no autopsy. His body was cremated within days.

What followed would become one of the most explosive political scandals in modern Chinese history, toppling one of the Communist Party's rising stars and exposing the murky world where Western dealmakers intersect with China's political elite.

A Privileged Path to China

Neil Heywood came from a world of connections. His great-grandfather, John Barr Affleck, had served as Britain's Consul General in Tianjin from 1935 to 1938—a prestigious diplomatic posting in pre-revolutionary China. Young Neil attended Harrow School, one of England's most elite boarding schools, the same institution that educated Winston Churchill and six other British prime ministers.

After graduating from the University of Warwick with a degree in international relations, Heywood did something unusual for a privileged Englishman in the early 1990s: he moved to China. Not as a tourist or a short-term expat, but as someone who genuinely embedded himself in the country. He learned to speak fluent Mandarin. He married a Chinese woman named Wang Lulu from the northeastern city of Dalian. They had two children, George and Olivia, who attended the Beijing branch of Dulwich College.

The family lived in a gated compound of villas on the outskirts of Beijing. Heywood drove a second-hand Jaguar with a Union Jack bumper sticker—a small, perhaps telling, assertion of British identity in his adopted homeland.

The Business of Being a "White Glove"

To understand what Heywood did for a living, you need to understand a particular feature of Chinese political culture. Senior Communist Party officials and their families cannot openly engage in business dealings. It would look corrupt—which it often is. But the desire for wealth doesn't disappear just because you hold political power. If anything, it intensifies.

Enter the "bai shoutao," which translates literally as "white glove." This is a person who handles financial matters on behalf of powerful families, keeping their hands clean while the money flows. Heywood appears to have served exactly this function for one of China's most prominent political families.

Officially, he ran a company called Heywood Boddington Associates, registered to his mother's house in London. The company described itself as a "multi-discipline consultancy focusing on serving the interests of UK businesses in the People's Republic of China." His clients included dealerships for Aston Martin and Rolls-Royce—appropriate for a man who understood both British prestige and Chinese power.

More intriguingly, he occasionally worked for Hakluyt & Company, a corporate intelligence firm co-founded by a former officer of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, commonly known as MI6. This connection would later fuel intense speculation about whether Heywood was more than just a businessman.

The Bo Family

Heywood's fate became intertwined with Bo Xilai, one of the Chinese Communist Party's most charismatic and controversial figures. Bo was a "princeling"—the term used for children of revolutionary heroes who founded the People's Republic. His father, Bo Yibo, had been one of the "Eight Immortals" of the Communist Party, a designation for the elderly leaders who wielded enormous influence in post-Mao China.

Bo Xilai leveraged his pedigree into a meteoric political career. As mayor of Dalian from 1994 to 2000, he transformed the industrial port city into a showcase of urban development. He later became Minister of Commerce, then Party Secretary of Chongqing, a massive municipality of over 30 million people in southwestern China. He was widely expected to join the Politburo Standing Committee, the seven-member body that effectively rules China.

Bo's wife, Gu Kailai, was equally formidable. A lawyer and businesswoman, she ran a firm called Kailai Law—later renamed Beijing Ang-dao Law. According to complaints from foreign businessmen, any company wanting to operate in Chongqing essentially had to hire Gu's firm. Failing to do so meant permits and licenses would mysteriously fail to materialize. The fees, reportedly, were exorbitant.

Heywood first connected with the Bo family in Dalian, where he was working at an English-language school. He helped their youngest son, Bo Guagua, gain admission to Harrow—his own alma mater. This wasn't just a favor; it was the beginning of a deep entanglement.

A Relationship Curdles

For years, the arrangement seemed to work. Heywood served as a trusted intermediary, helping the Bo family navigate financial matters while connecting Western businesses to one of China's most powerful politicians. According to The Daily Telegraph, Heywood and Gu Kailai "shared a long and close personal relationship, but were not romantically involved."

Then something changed.

In 2007, Gu Kailai became the subject of a corruption investigation. Though she avoided prosecution, the experience appears to have unhinged her. She grew increasingly paranoid. By 2010, she allegedly began asking Heywood and other close associates to divorce their spouses and swear personal allegiance to her. This is the behavior not of a calculating businesswoman but of someone losing her grip on reality.

The business relationship also soured. At the center of the dispute was a villa in the hills overlooking Cannes, on the French Riviera. Gu had purchased the property in 2000 for around two million pounds, but the ownership structure apparently involved Heywood. When he demanded one point four million pounds for his share, negotiations turned ugly.

Gu would later testify that Heywood had begun blackmailing the family, threatening to expose their corrupt ownership of the French property. More ominously, she claimed Heywood had threatened the safety of Bo Guagua, then 25 years old.

Whether these claims are true or self-serving justifications remains impossible to verify. What is certain is that by late 2011, Neil Heywood had transformed from trusted insider to existential threat.

The Lucky Holiday Hotel

On November 14, 2011, Heywood was summoned to Chongqing. The invitation came from Gu Kailai herself. A man named Zhang Xiaojun—described as an "orderly" in the Bo household who had previously served as a bodyguard for Bo Yibo—escorted Heywood from Beijing to a secluded hilltop retreat called the Nanshan Lijing Holiday Hotel. In English, it was marketed as the Lucky Holiday Hotel.

The name would prove grimly ironic.

Gu Kailai had hosted banquets at the hotel before, though according to sources quoted by The Daily Telegraph, she was not physically present at the time of Heywood's death. What happened in that hotel room on that November night would only emerge months later: potassium cyanide, added to his drink.

Heywood's body was found 26 hours after his death. Local authorities ruled it alcohol poisoning. With no autopsy performed, the evidence—and the body—was quickly cremated.

The Police Chief Who Knew Too Much

The man responsible for investigating Heywood's death was Wang Lijun, who served as both police chief and vice mayor of Chongqing. Wang was a colorful character—a police officer with a reputation for ruthlessness who had spearheaded Bo Xilai's controversial crackdown on organized crime, which critics alleged had involved torture and forced confessions.

As Wang dug into the Heywood case, he discovered something that put him in an impossible position: the murder led directly to the wife of his boss, a man he had served for more than a decade.

Wang submitted his findings to Bo Xilai. The response was swift. Wang was stripped of his police duties. Officers who had participated in the investigation were arrested.

For Wang Lijun, the message was clear. He was now a liability.

Flight to the Americans

What happened next stunned the world. In February 2012, Wang Lijun did something almost unprecedented for a senior Chinese official: he fled to the American consulate in Chengdu.

Imagine the scene. A uniformed police chief, running through the streets of a Chinese city, bursting into a U.S. diplomatic compound, demanding asylum and spilling secrets about murder and corruption at the highest levels of the Communist Party. This wasn't a spy novel. This was happening in real time.

Wang spent about 24 hours inside the consulate before Chinese authorities negotiated his departure. But the damage was done. Whatever he told the Americans—and whatever they already knew—the scandal could no longer be contained.

Events cascaded rapidly. On March 14, 2012, Xu Ming, a Dalian-based billionaire closely associated with Bo Xilai, vanished. Reports suggested Heywood's widow had been employed by Xu, adding another thread to the web of connections. The next day, Bo Xilai was removed as Party Secretary of Chongqing.

Less than a month later, the state-run Xinhua News Agency made the extraordinary announcement that Heywood had been murdered, and that Gu Kailai and Zhang Xiaojun were "strongly suspected" of the crime.

The Spy Question

As the scandal unfolded, attention turned to Heywood's connections to British intelligence. Was he a spy?

Foreign Secretary William Hague took the unusual step of publicly denying that Heywood had been an MI6 agent. This was itself remarkable—the British government typically refuses to confirm or deny the identity of intelligence operatives.

But the denial may have been technically true while masking a more complicated reality. The Wall Street Journal later reported, based on interviews with current and former British officials, that Heywood had been "regularly supplying information to MI6" since 2009. The distinction matters: he was apparently an informant rather than a formal employee. Someone who passed along useful intelligence without being on the payroll.

This raises fascinating questions. Did Heywood's intelligence connections contribute to his death? Did Gu Kailai know—or suspect—that her family's business arrangements were being reported to a foreign government? Or was his death purely about money and betrayal, with the spy angle a coincidental detail?

We may never know.

A One-Day Trial

Gu Kailai was formally charged with murder on July 26, 2012. Her trial, held on August 9, lasted exactly one day. She did not contest the charges.

The speed and smoothness of the proceedings raised eyebrows among observers. Chinese political trials are often choreographed affairs, with outcomes determined in advance through negotiations within the Party. The spectacle of a courtroom is just that—a spectacle for public consumption.

On August 20, 2012, the verdict was announced. Gu received a "death sentence with reprieve," a peculiar feature of Chinese law that sounds more dramatic than it is. In practice, this means the death sentence is suspended for two years, and if the convicted person commits no additional offenses during that period, the sentence is automatically commuted. Gu was looking at 14 years to life in prison, not execution.

Zhang Xiaojun, the household aide who had escorted Heywood to his death, received nine years.

The British embassy issued a careful statement welcoming the investigation while noting they had "consistently made clear to the Chinese authorities that we wanted to see the trials in this case conform to international human rights standards and for the death penalty not to be applied."

The BBC was more blunt, observing that "informed observers see the fingerprints of the Communist Party of China all over this outcome." The trial's conclusion was "all too neat and uncannily suited to one particular agenda"—limiting the scandal's damage to the Party itself.

The Widow Under Guard

In April 2012, as the scandal was breaking open, Neil Heywood's widow Wang Lulu visited the British Embassy in Beijing. She asked for visas to travel to the United Kingdom with her two young children, George and Olivia. Her concern, reportedly, was straightforward: the people who killed her husband might come after her family.

The scene outside her home told its own story. The entrance to the family's gated compound was guarded by troops from the People's Liberation Army. Police had ordered her not to speak with international journalists.

Whether she was being protected or contained remains an open question.

Bo Xilai's Fall

The murder of Neil Heywood didn't just end careers. It may have altered the course of Chinese political history.

Bo Xilai was expelled from the Communist Party and put on trial in 2013, charged with bribery, embezzlement, and abuse of power. He was sentenced to life in prison. The charismatic princeling who had seemed destined for the highest levels of power was finished.

Some analysts believe the Heywood scandal provided a convenient pretext for political rivals to destroy Bo, whose populist style and Maoist rhetoric had made enemies within the Party leadership. Others argue Bo's fall was genuinely driven by his corruption and his wife's crime. The truth likely involves elements of both.

What is certain is that Xi Jinping, who rose to General Secretary of the Communist Party in late 2012, benefited from Bo's removal. A potential rival had been eliminated. The anti-corruption campaign that Xi would make the centerpiece of his rule had its most prominent early scalp.

Aftermath

In December 2015, Gu Kailai's death sentence was formally commuted to life imprisonment. Prison authorities cited her repentance and good behavior. Zhang Xiaojun was released early at some point before January 2018.

As for the questions that Neil Heywood's death raised—about corruption in China's political elite, about the dangers faced by Western businessmen who get too close to power, about the relationship between intelligence agencies and the expatriate business community—these remain as relevant as ever.

Heywood was 41 years old when he died, leaving behind two children who would grow up knowing their father was murdered by someone he trusted, in a country he had made his home. His story serves as a cautionary tale about the seductive appeal of proximity to power, and the catastrophic consequences when that power turns against you.

He drove a second-hand Jaguar with a Union Jack on the bumper. He died alone in a hotel room in Chongqing, poisoned by cyanide in his drink, his body cremated before anyone could ask too many questions.