13

ZHOU’S FAILED COUP

THE GUOANBU SAVES XI JINPING

Every morning, as the sun tried to pierce the dusty pollution haze, Comrade Geng Huichang would leave for work in north-west Beijing, going from Zhongnanhai, the village of rulers that backs onto the Forbidden City, towards the Beijing Zoo. His destination was a large, drab building recalling the communist architecture of the 1950s. Over the lintel of the monumental gateway, an eloquent symbol is carved into the stone: the sword and shield of the CCP, overlaid by the hammer and sickle, hanging above the image of an imperial palace. This is the Western Garden district, headquarters of the Ministry of State Security, otherwise known as the Guoanbu.

Geng would head up to the seventh floor, perhaps adjusting his customary blue tie—polka-dot or striped depending on the day—before entering his office, where he would greet the heads of various departments: espionage, counterintelligence, cybersecurity, and so on. Since 2007 and the Olympic Games, when he had been responsible for the event’s security, he had risen to become overall head of the sprawling secret service.

Like its old-school model, the Russian KGB, the Guoanbu is responsible for both internal security and counterintelligence, and for foreign intelligence covering the entire planet, its main enemy naturally being the CIA. As we have seen, the Guoanbu has been responsible for orchestrating the theft of digital technology from other countries, in collaboration with the PLA. Liaising with the police, it has intercepted the emails of dissident internet users, tracked down militant Tibetans, and spied on foreign businesspeople, whose numbers had been steadily increasing since China opened up to international trade under Deng Xiaoping.

Geng’s challenge was to ruthlessly apply the rules of an increasingly hegemonic twenty-first-century CCP, at the same time as continuing to pursue the achievements of Chinese capitalism. This was not merely a motto; it was a real conundrum that seemed to him to be becoming more of a headache than ever. On one cold winter morning in 2009, he received a report that—although he didn’t realize it at the time—was going to change the face of China.

This top-secret file (绝密的 or Jiumide) incriminated Bo Xilai, a major regime figure who was hoping to take the helm at the next party congress, scheduled for autumn 2012. A former trade minister, he was part of the fifth generation of leaders since Mao Zedong had brought the CCP to power in 1949, a Red Prince who wanted to turn China into a superpower, even daring to hope that the country would overtake the US economically by 2030. The affair was even more delicate given that Bo was the brother-in-law of Jia Chunwang, the Guoanbu minister from 1985 to 1997.

Taking his place in the family line, the ambitious and undeniably charismatic Bo Xilai was mayor of Chongqing, a megacity with 30 million inhabitants. He was the son of Bo Yibo, a veteran of Mao’s Long March, who had been a minister under Deng Xiaoping. Bo Junior took after his father. He managed to unite the two Chinese communist traditions, having built up a considerable fortune during his city’s rapid development and having profited from the inevitable cronyism that came with it, while still promoting neo-Maoist ideology, recalling the tormented period of the Cultural Revolution, when Mao dispatched hordes of Red Guards to attack party leaders deemed too reformist. As an adolescent, Bo Xilai had been a member of the most rabid faction of the Red Guards. By the twenty-first century, in the new, all-conquering China, people were beginning to wonder if he was dreaming of repeating the feat—of taking over the leadership of the party and the state, by force.

Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, fearing the irresistible rise of the Chongqing mayor, had ordered a Guoanbu investigation. The very security of the country was at stake, because Bo himself was circulating distasteful rumours about not only Wen, the head of the government, but also Hu Jintao, the outgoing president, and the man who was the favourite to inherit the presidency, the Shanghaian Xi Jinping.

The result was this explosive, hand-written document—to avoid leaving any trace on a hard drive—which Geng Huichang read avidly that morning, gulping down cup after cup of tea to hone his concentration. The dossier was filled with detail and drew attention to Bo Xilai’s weakness. This was his wife, the international lawyer Gu Kailai.

Gu was an alluring, canny businesswoman, who took advantage of her numerous business trips to set up covert networks that she used to invest a good chunk of the couple’s massive fortune on foreign financial markets. She might well have had her eye on the position of Chinese First Lady, but prudence dictated that she discreetly place her money aside abroad, in case of the collapse of Chinese communism. Like many members of the Chinese elite, she made sure that their son, Bo Guagua, received a perfect international education, at Oxford. A British businessman, Neil Heywood, both tutor and financial advisor to the young student, had suggested that the family make some investments in various tax havens, and purchase apartments in the United States and France. The Guoanbu investigation now confirmed that Heywood was rather more than a friend of the Bo family. He was also Gu’s lover.

“We need some more details about this Mr  Heywood,” Geng Huichang demanded. Thanks to the sheer number of agents Chinese services were able to throw at a case, it took less than a month to complete this investigation. In early 2010, Qiu Jin, the deputy minister in charge of counterintelligence—the Guoanbu’s 8th Bureau—stated categorically that, unsurprisingly, it turned out Heywood was an agent for MI6. Geng’s response was, “How can we be sure?”

In principle, a high-profile professional like Geng Huichang did not need to know the source of such information. However, given the importance of the case, Qiu Jin revealed that the Guoanbu’s source was Wang Lulu, Heywood’s Chinese wife, who was only too happy to spy on her unfaithful husband and her rival Gu Kailai.

Once he had been made aware of these findings, Wen Jiabao had a trump card to block Bo Xilai’s rise. Hu and his eventual successor Xi Jinping were rapidly informed.

But Wen was not the only one in on the secret. A Guoanbu official who was not part of Wen’s entourage warned Bo Xilai that he and his wife were in the sights of the secret service, and that Neil Heywood was now believed to be an MI6 agent. This leak was about to set in motion an unexpected tragedy.

The assassination of Neil Heywood

The second act of this highly charged drama took place a year later in Chongqing. Alerted to the fact that the Guoanbu was monitoring their activities, Bo Xilai warned his wife Gu Kailai that she was too close to Neil Heywood. Did he know that she was being unfaithful? For this fairly liberated couple, that would have been considerably less serious than the revelation that her lover was an MI6 spy. In hindsight, it is likely that Bo’s revelation panicked his wife, triggering the drama that drew to its climax exactly one year before the highly anticipated 18th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, when a new leader was expected to emerge.

On 15  November 2011, Wang Lijun, local Gonganbu chief and deputy mayor of Chongqing (thus Bo Xilai’s deputy), was woken in the middle of the night. The body of the British businessman Neil Heywood had just been discovered in a room at the Lucky Holiday Hotel. “Don’t touch anything, I’m on my way!” Wang, originally from Mongolia, hurried to the hotel, about 10 kilometres away. It was palatial, a favourite of wealthy couples on romantic weekends. Above the cloud of pollution that hangs over Chongqing, the air in this mountainous suburb to the south was clean and pure.

Wang knew Heywood, having met him many times in the company of his boss. Wang had been helping Bo Xilai refine his image as a modern politician, despite the “neo-Maoist” veneer of his politics. The media-friendly “super-cop” was leading the fight against the mafia in Chongqing, which was understood to comprise not only criminal gangs but also troublesome political rivals. He had even had a number of them killed. One particular slogan summed up the situation: “In Chongqing, we sing red” (songs from the time of Mao), “and we hit black” (hard against the local mafias).

The “incorruptible” Wang could expect eternal gratitude if he agreed to bring a speedy end to this highly embarrassing episode for Gu Kailai. The dossier was immediately closed: “Mr  Heywood died of a heart attack after consuming too much alcohol,” the express autopsy concluded three days later, on 18  November. Neither Wang Lulu, Heywood’s Chinese widow, nor the British embassy disputed this version of events, preferring to keep a low profile in the case. But Deputy Mayor Wang was suspicious. He decided to take the precaution of having a vial of blood drawn for analysis before the corpse was cremated—this was how he discovered that Gu, in the great tradition of Chinese opera, had poisoned her English “friend” with cyanide.

Who was Heywood? An unscrupulous businessman? An over-demanding lover? A troublesome spy working for MI6? A clumsy blackmailer? Or all of the above?

On 28  January 2012, Wang told Bo Xilai what he had discovered, and how he planned to protect his wife. Questioned by her husband, Gu Kailai yelled at him that it was a setup. The next day, Bo called the police chief. “You bastard! You want to compromise my wife, my family, my career!” He spat at Wang, and then punched him. We know about this because it was witnessed by Wang’s deputy, who testified later. Upset, humiliated and fearing for his life, Wang Lijun decided to spill the beans. But to whom?

To his bosses in Beijing? Impossible. The Gonganbu, to which Wang reported, had been headed between 2002 and 2007 by Zhou Yongkang, the regime number three, now Luo Gan’s successor as head of the political-legal commission that coordinated the security and intelligence services. Zhou was one of Bo Xilai’s principal allies, and he was hoping that Bo would be promoted to first secretary and Chinese president at the party congress coming in eleven months’ time—or, failing that, to his own post of overall head of the secret services after his official retirement. As per tradition in the services, Zhou was then expected to retain significant influence behind the scenes. Wang perhaps considered going to the rival agency, the Guoanbu—but that tack would not be without its risks either.

Troop movements and Comrade Wang’s defection

The Guoanbu boss, Geng Huichang, had earned a reputation for avoiding factional battles in order to maintain professional neutrality for his spies, under the aegis of the State Council, the central government, where prime minister Wen Jiabao held the reins of power. In the Neil Heywood assassination, he was playing Chinese chess—he liked to remain several moves ahead of his opponent. Clearing up the mystery of Neil Heywood would allow him to take Bo Xilai’s “queen”, Gu Kailai—a fatal blow. However, even more disturbing information was flowing into the Western Garden.

At the time of Heywood’s death, unexpected and significant troop movements were taking place that had not been programmed by the general staff; these started in Sichuan province, whose capital, Chengdu, was the headquarters of the military region that dealt with insurgencies in Tibet. These PLA exercises, though unplanned, were understandable. Sichuan had formerly been under the leadership of Zhou Yongkang, and he had positioned representatives there before becoming head of security. Meanwhile, in Chongqing, which had also been under Sichuan’s administration before gaining province status itself, Bo Xilai had organized military exercises for the 14  November. The timing was all the more remarkable as the manoeuvres took place not only at the time of the Heywood affair, but also while the president, Hu Jintao, was out of the country, attending an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Hawaii. Was this a show of force, or a dress rehearsal for a takeover in the near or distant future? Or was it a way to show that Bo Xilai was untouchable?

The question arose because General Xu Caihou, second in command at the Central Military Commission headed by Hu Jintao, was on the move. He seemed to be more than happy to be seen at Bo Xilai’s side. Rather more discreetly, Zhou Yongkang also met with the two men, and other general officers. In the corridors of Zhongnanhai, the government compound in Beijing, there was talk of strange meetings of generals favourable to a joint leadership under Bo Xilai and Zhou Yongkang, primarily heads of the navy and 2nd Artillery—the body responsible for intercontinental strategic missiles capable of striking Taipei, Tokyo or Washington. Zhou, for the first time, was being identified as pulling the strings of all these different interests. This was how a specialist in CCP factional battles explained it to me: “The problem in China is that rumours have such consequences that they end up coming true!”1

Zhou Yongkang was thus a choice target for the Guoanbu, sword and shield of the party. But its boss, Geng Huichang, prefers to rely on facts, not rumours. As the case appeared to be picking up speed, he discreetly summoned Qiu Jin, his head of counterintelligence, to one of the Guoanbu’s many hotel–restaurants, in search of more solid information.2

Meanwhile, in Chongqing, Wang Lijun increasingly feared for his life. As Chinese New Year approached, heralding the arrival of the Year of the Dragon—traditionally a year of great upheaval—he made the decision to defect. This dramatic development, in early 2012, had a global impact. Not since the end of the Cold War had a defection taken place in the open like this. The steps taken behind the scenes to avoid catastrophic consequences were similarly unprecedented.

On 6  February, Wang Lijun visited the US Consulate in Chengdu, having first sent an emissary to warn of an imminent courtesy call. Facing a dumbfounded consul, he asked for political asylum. In Chongqing and in Zhongnanhai, the leadership compound in Beijing, just as in the US embassy, there was universal consternation, not helped by the fact that Ambassador Gary Locke was preparing for the arrival of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, visiting for a diplomatic summit. The embassy’s CIA station, headed by Jean-Paul Ebe, was given the task of convincing Wang to surrender to the Chinese authorities, in order to avoid a serious diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Washington. Ebe trusted the Guoanbu for one simple reason: it was the only counterintelligence service that was not under Zhou Yongkang’s control.

“This was what distinguished this highly professional service from the other, more political intelligence organs of the Central Committee.” This was the view offered me by “Bill”, a Hong Kong-based CIA analyst who followed the case day after day. “Since the 1980s, there has been a liaison mission between our agency and the Guoanbu, and in this case, our station chief was playing a very delicate game. Everyone, on the American side and the Chinese side, was delighted to see him resolve this thorny situation.” Qiu Jin, the counterintelligence chief who had first investigated Bo Xilai and his wife, flew out to Sichuan. With the agreement of the CIA, his mission was to recover the very talkative Wang Lijun, ideally before he revealed too many secrets.

But the situation in Chengdu had degenerated. At the exact moment Wang entered the consulate, a Guoanbu official in Sichuan alerted Beijing, and Zhou Yongkang was informed. Convinced that the defector was about to hand over all his secrets to the CIA, he telephoned Bo Xilai: “We must recover Wang at all costs!”3

Bo easily convinced the mayor of Sichuan—previously run, we should remember, by Zhou Yongkang—to send special troops to surround the US consulate, claiming that there was a terrorist inside who was about to explode a bomb on diplomatic premises. The scene on Linshiguan Street, a stone’s throw from Sichuan University, was quite surreal. Armed to the teeth, Chinese commandos stood facing the US marines responsible for protecting the building, while American and Chinese special agents tried to intervene and calm everybody down.

At last, Qiu Ji, deputy head of the Guoanbu, arrived. Trusting him, Wang surrendered. He was transferred to the Western Garden headquarters in Beijing, where he told all: how Gu Kailai had ordered the assassination of Neil Heywood; how Bo Xilai had covered it up, just as he had covered up innumerable shady deals; and how Bo had plotted with Zhou Yongkang to seize power and destabilize the man on track to become the next Chinese president: Xi Jinping. It was Zhou who had leaked information to the American press about Xi’s hidden fortune. A French family friend of Bo Xilai, the architect Philippe Devillers, was arrested in Cambodia on Beijing’s demand and extradited to the PRC; his testimony largely confirmed Wang’s statement. Devillers was released, and remained silent, fearing reprisals.

The fall of Bo Xilai was now inevitable. In the spring of 2012, he was removed from his position as mayor of Chongqing and expelled from the CCP leadership. He did attempt one last coup in March, declaring a state of siege in his city, while in Beijing special forces were mobilized from the People’s Armed Police (PAP), leading to several attacks on the elite troops of the 38th Army led by General Wu Zhenli, which had crushed the student protests on Tiananmen Square in 1989. This time, the troops had a different goal: to storm the government’s “forbidden city”. And who was the chief political commissioner of these PAP special forces? None other than Zhou Yongkang.

The legal consequences for Gu Kailai and Bo Xilai are well known. Betrayed by Wang, they were sentenced at large show trials. During the first, on 20  August 2012, Gu denounced her husband and even accused Zhou of being an evil genius. She was given a suspended death sentence, meaning life imprisonment. Her husband, tried the following year for “corruption, embezzlement and abuse of power”, also managed to save his head by claiming his innocence and taking care not to reveal the leadership’s secrets—a deal had obviously taken place.

In November 2012, during the CCP’s 18th Congress, the road was opened for Xi Jinping to take over from Hu Jintao as the general secretary, chairman of the Central Military Commission, and ultimately president of the People’s Republic of China. A new era had begun.

Except for one small detail—in the seaside resort of Beidaihe, where the select inner circle of the leadership meets at the end of every summer, the decision was made to target Zhou Yongkang. He was seen in public for the last time in October 2012, during a meeting of the Alumni Association of Beijing’s China University of Petroleum, where he had begun his career half a century earlier.

From this point on, the Guoanbu investigators and those involved in the fight against corruption began looking closely into the case of “Big Tiger” Zhou. He had been the only person in the Politburo that spring to oppose the prosecution of the Bo Xilai faction. He had perhaps even been fomenting a slow-moving coup d’état when his own vertiginous rise had begun; it would have been the first in China since the 1960s.

Zhou Yongkang: from fisherman’s son to king of oil

This is the dark tale of Zhou Yongkang, the son of a modest eel fisherman who became the head of China’s biggest oil consortium, then number three in the CCP, overall head of the secret services and leader of the political police force of the world’s largest autocratic state.

Born in December 1942 in Wuxi, Jiangsu province (north of Shanghai), he was given the name Zhou Yuangen. One day, however, his teacher asked him to change his name, on the grounds that another schoolboy shared not only his surname, Zhou, but also his first name. His father chose Yongkang (永 康), “eternal quietude”—which turned out to be somewhat less than prophetic.

In 1964, young Zhou joined the CCP.  Two years later, he completed an engineering degree at the China University of Petroleum in Beijing, with a special focus on “geological research and exploration”. He was a hard worker. Even during the Cultural Revolution, which saw every institution swept clean, technicians were still needed. At the height of the political storm, when different squadrons of Red Guards were battling it out, the young engineer was already drilling for oil. Mao died in 1976, by which time Zhou Yongkang had three years’ experience of exploration in the largest oil fields belonging to the Chinese National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), in Liaoning province. Over the next decade, his skills and expertise, as well as his legendary severity when it came to managing personnel, led him to take over as head of the CNPC, one of the most powerful Chinese companies at the time. His position saw him prospecting in Asia, Latin America and Africa—wherever he could establish energy development for this new China on the move. In Sudan, for example, people remember seeing Zhou himself working on CNPC oil wells.

During the Deng Xiaoping era in the 1980s, Zhou Yongkang switched to political management, both as minister of planning and natural resources, and as party secretary in Sichuan province. His rise was remarkable, but not unstoppable: at the turn of the century, following an investigation for corruption, the “Godfather of Sichuan” was sacked, at the instigation of National People’s Congress deputies.

Given this career, and especially the unfortunate episode of his dismissal, no one expected that in 2002 he would stage a comeback and take on the unlikely public security portfolio. The Gonganbu’s gigantic domain covered road traffic as well as urban security, the criminal police brigade, the hunting down of dissidents and management of the laogai. Comrade Zhou excelled in the role. His empire also extended in part to counterespionage, sometimes outside the country, thus enabling him to encroach on the Guoanbu’s turf—to the great irritation of that ministry’s head, Geng Huichang.

On top of all this, Zhou also oversaw the terrifying 610 Office, with its 15,000 police officers. We have seen how this office pursued the underground adherents of the Falun Gong movement across the globe. In addition, Zhou served as political commissar of the PAP, which numbered some 800,000 officers actively involved in crushing the separatist rebels of Tibet and Muslim Xinjiang. His political influence was clearly significant, because he joined the Politburo—the first security minister to have done so in a quarter of a century.

Zhou took this opportunity to develop a parallel diplomacy service, meeting with interior ministers from all around the world: Bakirdin Subanbekov from Kyrgyzstan, the Zimbabwean Kembo Mohadi, the Bavarian Günther Beckstein, and the future French president Nicolas Sarkozy. With them, he sought to devise the best way to fight corruption and organized crime. Soon, Zhou Yongkang could be seen as a special envoy at the side of his closest ally, the North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. How had Zhou, a fisherman’s son, managed to reach this apex of global politics?

The answer is that he was a member of the Shanghai clique led by former president Jiang Zemin. Vice-President Zeng Qinghong (2003–8), Jiang’s closest advisor, was general secretary of the famous political-legal commission that oversaw the secret services as well as the judicial administration. He imagined that, when it was time for him to retire, Zhou Yongkang would take over from him. Zhou was so close to this circle that he even married Jiang’s niece. Agnès Andrésy, a Beijing-based French analyst who has studied Chinese power networks, explains this family imbroglio in her book:

Zhou was married from the 1970s to Wang Shuhua, a former oil plant worker, with whom he had two sons. … They divorced in 2000. A few months later, Wang died in an accident: on the outskirts of Beijing, not far from the Ming tombs, she was run over by an army car transporting two policemen. Zhou was strongly suspected of having ordered the assassination of his ex-wife (the policemen confessed a few months later), and his son Zhou Han subsequently cut all ties with him.

In 2001, Zhou Yongkang, then head of the Sichuan branch of the party, invited Zeng Qinghong and Jiang Zemin for a vacation in Chengdu. Zhou told him that he was a widower, and Zeng decided to introduce him to Jia Xiaoye, Jiang Zemin’s wife’s niece, a reporter for the television channel CCTV, who was twenty-eight years younger than Zhou.4

Zhou, newly minister of the Gonganbu, married the young Jia. When Jiang Zemin stepped aside for his successor Hu Jintao, Hu’s compromise with Jiang’s Shanghai clique was to promote Zhou to the highest security rank in 2007. In other words, he was at last able to head the political-legal commission, and thus supervise the entire security community.

We’re already familiar with the hugely important task he was assigned: the security of the Olympic Games, taking place the following year. At the same time, Hu announced the new leader of the Guoanbu, Geng Huichang, an economist specialized in US affairs, and a former director of the China Institute for Contemporary International Relations (CICIR). Geng, who lived more simply than most of his colleagues, was a reformer, in favour of strict respect for the law in the service of the state. He loathed the party bigwigs who grew rich at the expense of the people.

Hu had deliberately sought to strike a balance between the two men, who were far from having a good relationship, but were obliged to work together. To make the 2008 Olympic Games a triumph, it was vital to build a “united front” against the “imperialist enemy” and its spies, who were about to swarm into the country during the games. At the time, Zhou Yongkang said, “The international situation is so acute that antiterrorism is one of our major concerns.” This was his reason for announcing the establishment of special units to protect the stadiums and sports teams.

As we saw in Chapter 12, there was a secret service delegation to al-Qaeda ahead of the games, warning the terrorist organization off trying anything at the Olympics via Uyghur separatists. A small number of the latter had become involved in jihad in Afghanistan, just as hundreds more would join the ranks of ISIS in the 2010s. From the authorities’ point of view, this shift justified the intensification of population control and repression in Xinjiang.5 Experts I spoke to in Asia in winter 2014 believed that Zhou had taken advantage of these initiatives at the time of the Olympics to form special units that might, in due course, play a role in a revolution in Zhongnanhai.

During 2011, the last year during which he was responsible for overseeing the security services, Zhou managed to obtain an increase in their budget, which meant that they now had greater financial resources than the PLA.  He did this by raising the spectre of popular revolt in China, inspired by the Arab Spring. Incidentally, some funds earmarked for the “preservation of the social order” in China were later discovered to have disappeared into his personal kitty.

The Yellow Men’s Band hunts the Tiger

The advantage of being located near the big children’s playgrounds in Beijing is being surrounded by plenty of greenery. But the hundreds of party officials hard at work opposite the park, at 41 Pinganli Xi Dajie (West Peace Avenue), were not having much fun at all. This was the address of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI, Jilu Jiancha Weiyuanhui), which had recently spearheaded the launch of a major campaign of “crushing flies” and “hunting tigers”, focusing on the corruption among cadres endemic all over the country. The Bo Xilai investigation had begun in April 2012. There was also a taskforce led by Liu Jianguo, a former deputy Gonganbu minister with close links to Xi Jinping, which was planning a major offensive against Zhou Yongkang.

As soon as he came to power at the end of 2012, Xi set up a new centre of gravity, in order both to purge the old Zhou Yongkang system and to retake control of the CCP, the PLA and the secret services. This was nothing like Jiang Zemin’s Shanghai clique or the Communist Youth League’s circle of elders around Hu Jintao.

Xi Jinping relied on another regional group to form his praetorian guard, which he deployed in his anti-corruption fight and against all those who had tried to keep him from coming to power. Both Chinese and Taiwanese experts interviewed by this author have mockingly called it “The Hebei Yellow Men’s Band”. This is a play on words, referring to the fact that the eastern province of Hebei, which encircles Beijing, is north of the Yellow River. In fact, the creation of this web of invisible relations (touming guanxi) dates back to 1982, when Xi Jinping was secretary to Defence Minister Geng Biao, formerly head of the CCP’s International Liaison Department, and deeply implicated in political intelligence abroad. Xi later began his rise through the party in Zhengding, Shijiazhuang prefecture, in Hebei province.

The Hebei Band was made up of the following figures:

– Li Zhanshu, head of the CCP Central Committee’s powerful Bureau of General Affairs and of the Office of State Secrets, who was in effect Xi Jinping’s power behind the throne. His father, Li Zhengxiu, had been an intelligence officer under Mao in the 1940s.6

– Wang Jiarui, head of the party’s International Liaison Department—the political intelligence service whose representatives in embassies abroad, including in London, were responsible for coordinating intelligence research.

– Wang Jianping, the new commander of the PAP.

– Madame Sun Chunlan, appointed in early 2015 to run the United Front Work Department (the other political intelligence service still responsible for trying to engage with Chinese and Taiwanese citizens living abroad).

– Liu Jianguo, facilitator of the CCDI anti-corruption taskforce.

– Wang Shaojun, appointed head of the Central Guards in 2015, responsible for protecting ministers and senior party leaders.

But the most notable member of this dream team was another Hebei native already familiar to us: none other than Geng Huichang. The head of the Guoanbu rallied to Xi Jinping, and by early 2013 he had become the figurehead of an invisible club brought together to precipitate the fall of Zhou Yongkang, having already played a central role in Bo Xilai’s demise.

Nonetheless, before launching his final deathblow, Xi Jinping went to Shanghai to pay his respects to Jiang Zemin, by now an old man. He addressed his predecessor roughly along the following lines: “If Zhou Yongkang and his acolytes are prosecuted, there will be no need to go further in the fight against corruption.” The implication of this was that the Shanghai clique would be spared, and neither Jiang nor his vice-president Zeng Qinghong would be implicated—even if they had been in any way involved in the conspiracy hatched against Xi. Jiang Zemin consented.

Some 200 men from the CCDI taskforce organized the rout and arrested Zhou Yongkang, who was put under house arrest—or perhaps was locked in a gilded cage. During my research for this book, I discovered that during 2014 he spent most of his time in Beijing, imprisoned within the red lacquered ramparts of Zhongnanhai. There are luxury houses there that no one leaves, except to be taken to an austere detention centre that is part of the “bamboo gulag”. With a swimming pool, tennis court, Taoist garden, and breathtaking view of the lake, it is a stylish residence for a fallen dignitary. Zhou’s butlers were commandos from the CCP Central Guard, and the former party number three—once overlord of the security services and, according to Forbes magazine, the twenty-ninth richest person in the world—was treated humanely, if somewhat strictly.

The only people to visit him were anti-corruption detectives from the party and members of his family during police interrogations. And, of course CIA agents sometimes filmed him, stooped under the burden of his troubles, as he walked through the meandering Zhongnanhai gardens, not far from the Guards Office and the lavish “Chrysanthemum-Scented Pavilion”.

For eighteen months, the CCDI worked to untangle the multiple networks created by Zhou Yongkang over the past thirty years—not only those established by the security services, but also an equal number of others set up with the oil money he had earned over a long period. Naturally, he had placed members of his family and his inner circle of friends in a variety of state-owned businesses. Similarly, he had played an important role in the provinces: in his childhood home Jiangsu, where his brothers still lived—one, who was suffering from cancer, had died when the Guoanbu agents turned up to arrest him; in Liaoning, where he had worked in the oil business; in Sichuan, where he had led the party; and in Beijing, where he had been first a minister and then the coordinator of the security services.

A team of investigators, headed by Liu Jianguo, had arrested over 300 people who were now waiting to be judged as accomplices of China’s most famous prisoner. The most high-profile were Guo Yongxiang, Zhou’s former aide-de-camp and ex-deputy governor of Sichuan; Li Chuncheng, deputy general secretary of the Sichuan branch of the CCP; Liang Ke, former head of the Beijing Guoanbu bureau (presumably the mole who had alerted Bo Xilai that he was being investigated); and Shen Dingcheng, Zhou Yongkang’s former private secretary, responsible for coordination with the secret services—at the time of his arrest, he was vice-president of PetroChina International. Among the other leading figures were a dozen deputy ministers; Jiang Jiemin, former president of CNPC and its subsidiary PetroChina (listed on the stock market since 2000); and the former vice-governor of Hainan Island, a major Chinese tourist destination.

The most interesting character within these hybrid networks was Li Dongsheng, former deputy Gonganbu minister and one of the 610 Office’s experts at tracking down Falun Gong adherents. After becoming deputy director of the CCTV state television channel, Li had made a name for himself by interviewing his former boss Zhou, the young female journalists forced to become Zhou’s mistresses, and various call girls and chambermaids who worked at the hotels where he stayed during his tours of the provinces. This led to accusations of “abuse of power for sexual favours”, which were among the charges against Zhou in December 2014.

Li Dongsheng was also close to a young CCTV reporter, Jia Xiaoye: Jiang Zemin’s niece who had become Zhou Yongkang’s wife, and who now also found herself in prison for multiple financial malpractices, and possibly even complicity in the murder—disguised as a traffic accident—of Wang Shuhua, Zhou’s first wife. One of their sons, Zhou Bin—who had remained close to his father—was also accused of corruption, along with his wife, Huang Wan.

The anti-corruption taskforce searched the homes of many hundreds of people throughout the country, seizing some 90 billion yuan (around $13 billion) belonging to Zhou, his family, friends and associates. Astronomical sums were made public via the Hong Kong media. Xi Jinping was showing the “little people” that the fight against corruption was having an impact at the highest levels of society. However, according to the scarce information that filtered through during the winter of 2014–15, Zhou Yongkang refused to cooperate with CCDI accountants and officials during his interrogations, declaring, “I am the victim of persecution, of a battle between factions, of a political conspiracy.”

Analysis of the now-frozen Zhou family bank accounts shows that 37 billion yuan remain, on top of 51 billion yuan in shares, the bonds seized in the family’s sumptuous homes in Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Chengdu and elsewhere—not to mention collections of artworks, sixty luxury sports cars, and massive quantities of cash in foreign currencies and gold ingots. Investigators even discovered, during a 2014 house search of someone suspected of being part of Zhou’s gang, a large, solid-gold statue of Chairman Mao.

The army purged, the secret services remodelled

The PLA did not escape scrutiny in Xi’s anti-corruption offensive. Several heads rolled over the course of 2014, starting with General Xu Caihou, former deputy leader of the powerful Central Military Commission. Not only was the campaign now targeting senior members of the Hu regime, but some, like Xu, were suspected of having participated with Bo Xilai and Zhou Yongkang in a conspiracy to destabilize Xi Jinping during his ascent to power. Xu was arrested, but fell ill and died on 15  March 2015.

Still others were convicted of aggravated corruption, for instance of selling ranks, decorations and promotions. Among them was General Guo Boxiong, another leader of the Central Military Commission; the captains of the 2nd Artillery, responsible for intercontinental nuclear missiles; and naval bosses including Admiral Ma Faxiang, the navy political commissar who committed suicide in September 2014 after being interrogated by CCDI investigators, throwing himself from the top of the PLA headquarters building in Beijing.

Others swore allegiance in March 2014 to the new president, after he summoned officers to remind them that “the party commands the gun”, as Mao used to say. In the wake of this, eighteen army chiefs and heads of military regions publicly announced their support of Xi Jinping. Many were preparing for early retirement. Of course, the anti-corruption campaign grew well beyond the Bo Xilai–Zhou Yongkang affair. But the ghost of this conspiracy remained the driving force behind the elimination of corrupt cadres as well as those seen as political nuisances. In 2014, according to official figures, 72,000 cadres from the PLA and the Ministry of Defence—sixty of whom had the rank of minister—and sixteen generals were dismissed and charged with corruption. For perspective, the army had a total of 2 million soldiers in active service.

“By the winter of 2014–15, Xi Jinping had completed the great purge,” Arthur Ding, director of the Institute of International Research of Taipei, told me. “President Xi managed to break up Jiang Zemin’s ‘Shanghai clique’, to which Zhou Yongkang belonged, as well as dismissing several military leaders who were close to [Zhou], including Xu Caihou and Guo Boxiong. He was sending a clear message to all the 50-year-old officers whom he had placed in key positions, and to the leaders of the principal ministries: in our reforms, we are preserving the middle managers, so long as they share our convictions. Basically, the same old tradition: slit the chicken’s throat to terrorize the monkey.”

Professor Ding, who had a broad and mischievous smile on his face for the entire duration of our conversation, is without a doubt one of the connoisseurs of the secret world of Chinese politics. He had first walked into the building of National Chengchi University in the Taipei hills thirty years ago, during my first visit there in 1986, when I was researching the first biography of Kang Sheng.7 He was showing his old-fashioned side that day, with a teapot bigger than his computer sitting in the middle of a pile of documents. I wondered how he could be so certain. He had a thousand sources in his small office, both from mainland China and from nationalist Taiwan. I had to take my hat off to him when, a week after our meeting, an unforeseen development confirmed every detail of the analysis he had shared with me.

Zhou in Madame Mao’s cell

On 5  December 2014, the heads of the CCDI came to inform Zhou Yongkang, still in his gilded cage, of the charges he would be answering in court in 2015: “The investigation is over. You can no longer be called ‘comrade’, now that you have been expelled from the party and charged with the following crimes: embezzlement in collusion with your family, serious infringements of good governance and self-discipline, nepotism, bribery, innumerable adulterous liaisons, the abuse of power to obtain sexual favours—all things which have damaged our reputation. And even more serious charges of disclosing party and state secrets, as in treason.”

That same evening, the Xinhua News Agency broadcast the extraordinary news. This was the first time since the 1970s and the end of the Cultural Revolution that a leader of China’s supreme assembly, the Politburo Standing Committee, had been accused of such crimes.

A few days later, the journalist Eric Meyer, who has long been writing about the developments in Chinese power for his newsletter Le vent de la Chine, wrote, “Now a party taboo has been broken: according to an unspoken rule, which up until now has been universally respected, once a party cadre reached the rank of deputy minister (a much lower rank than that held by Zhou), he became untouchable. But now Zhou faces the death penalty—which may or may not be suspended. More than anything, his downfall shatters the conservatives’ ‘steel square’, which has frozen political reform in China for the last twenty years. Indeed, since the announcement of Zhou’s indictment and expulsion from the party, all his former allies have rushed to rally around Xi Jinping and to show submission in the name of ‘party unity’.”

On the day he was formally charged, Zhou Yongkang was transferred to Qincheng Prison, high on a hill to the north of Beijing, where Pu Yi, the last emperor of China, had been incarcerated in the 1950s, and where Jiang Qing, the widow of Chairman Mao, had been imprisoned in 1976 for an attempted coup. The cell she had occupied, number 1, now housed Zhou. The wolfish grin of the man once known as the “great tiger” was frozen. Geng Huichang, his rival as head of the “other” service (the Guoanbu), must have been rubbing his hands in glee.

But the “shadow battle” against Zhou Yongkang did not leave the Guoanbu entirely unscathed. Internal investigations led to the dismissal of Qiu Jin, the counterintelligence chief, on the grounds that he had been sent to recover Wang Lijun from the US consulate—which had also in itself constituted an inappropriate politicization of the 8th Bureau, responsible for counterespionage. Liang Ke, the head of the local Guoanbu office in Beijing, was also fired, accused of being Bo Xilai’s mole in the service and of having accepted bribes from Zhou Yongkang. The arrest of his collaborators, all cadres in the Beijing office, gives an idea of the extent of the purge carried out within the Guoanbu itself.

During that winter, the boss Geng Huichang was planning a restructuring of the service. He poached hundreds of special agents, originally recruited by Zhou Yongkang, from the Gonganbu’s 1st Department, and had them retrained in counterintelligence in a more professional and less ideological way. In 2014 and 2015, several of Geng’s deputies, including the heads of counterintelligence, were dismissed, including Qiu Jin, who was alleged to have failed to properly control Liang Ke. In autumn 2014, Ma Jian, Qiu Jin’s successor, was removed from office upon his return from Pakistan, where he had been engaged in bilateral exchanges with the ISI, aimed at ending the conflict in Afghanistan and dealing with the fight against ISIS.  The grounds invoked for Ma’s dismissal were blatant corruption.8 The case of the deputy minister Lu Zhongwei was unusual, because while he was also dismissed, the reason given was the claim that his secretary had been recruited by the CIA (see Chapter 14).

Dysfunction within his own ministry did not stop Geng, the figurehead of the “Hebei Yellow Men’s Band”, from being named secretary general of the new National Security Committee, modelled on the US National Security Council. “In two years, Xi Jinping has managed to cumulate all the powers,” Andrew Yang, former Taiwanese deputy minister of defence, told me at the end of 2014. His think-tank, the Chinese Council of Advanced Policy Studies, analyzes the balance of power between security and defence. By the time we spoke, Xi was chairing no fewer than eighteen taskforces, as well as several expert commissions, including on Taiwan. “He even shaped the National Security Committee, which coordinates all the security services. Its function is to identify the central issues to be addressed by intelligence. Its prerogatives are mixed with those of the services, but this time it’s Xi Jinping personally directing all the different domains.” No wonder the American media was already announcing that Xi Jinping might become the “Chinese man of the century”, as Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping had been before him.

There was a stunning epilogue to this rebalancing of power: on 6  December 2014, with the announcement in the media of Zhou Yongkang’s expulsion from the CCP and the appalling crimes of which he was accused, the People’s Daily published an opinion piece by Geng Huichang, which seemed to have nothing to do with the story of the day—though it had finally broken thanks to him. In a highly political article, the Guoanbu chief explained why China had to undergo profound reform—under President Xi Jinping, it was implied—and become a society that respected rule of law, free of ideological constraints, one that guaranteed the independence of the legal system and permitted lawyers to freely defend its citizens. It was an extremely unexpected article to have come from the head of the powerful Guoanbu. But it was no doubt a harbinger of things to come.

This was not necessarily a reform that would benefit Zhou Yongkang, imprisoned in the Beijing hills in Madame Mao’s old cell. In the back alleys where the wildest of rumours run rife, as well as in the palaces he used to frequent, people were saying that Zhou was bound to be condemned to death—quite possibly without any chance of a reprieve.

The new Gang of Four

Given the extraordinary conflict that was simmering in Beijing, it is easy enough to see why Xi Jinping, once his power was strengthened, intended to take control of the newly reorganized intelligence community, with the help of his Hebei comrades.

The new president had suffered a great deal from Kang Sheng’s abuses in the 1960s, and still held deep feelings of bitterness and profound mistrust towards the omnipotent heads of the security and intelligence services. Xi was duly briefed on this issue by Yu Zhensheng, number four in the Politburo and responsible for its reform, who was also the brother of Yu Zhensan, the Guoanbu agent who defected to the CIA and was behind the arrests of Larry Wu Tai Chin and Bernard Boursicot. As we have seen, Xi had been ruthless in his handling of Bo Xilai, who was accused not only of corruption while mayor of Chongqing, but also for having attempted a coup with Zhou Yongkang.

New strategic directions were also emerging from an international perspective. China no longer wanted to be the world’s factory, but its bank. Hence the development of large financial and economic intelligence structures around the creation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, as well as the deepening of economic ties with Europe and, via Central Asia, the development of the “new Silk Road”, both terrestrial and maritime, in the One Belt One Road initiative. All this required a constant regeneration of orientation and MO for the Guoanbu, the PLA2 and the PLA3 in charge of cyber-warfare, which was expanding rapidly. In March 2015, for example, Jason Pan, a specialist in secret service investigations for the Taipei Times, identified no fewer than twelve new offices within the PLA3, specifically working on the online war.9

At the beginning of his tenure as head of state, party leader and chairman of the very important Central Military Commission, Xi Jinping took some major steps in the field of security. He downgraded, for example, the post of head of the political-legal commission, held by Meng Jianzhu, the ex-head of Gonganbu and Zhou Yongkang’s former deputy. For the first time in the history of the CCP, this position no longer came with a seat on the Politburo Standing Committee.

Similarly, at the end of 2013, Xi created a National Security Committee in the image of the US National Security Council, with the difference that he himself was its president. Senior members of the committee—whose relative effectiveness it is too early to judge—were several pivotal figures of this new generation, members of Xi’s Hebei Band. These included the general secretary—none other than the Guoanbu head Geng Huichang—and Li Zhanshu, head of the Office of State Secrets and Xi Jinping’s power behind the throne. These were the faithful, the men who had helped the president develop his anti-corruption campaign and the renewed crackdown on dissidents. In the spring of 2015, new national security laws were put into place, including one major new component: an anti-espionage law (fan jiandie fa), which they masterminded together.

Once again we saw the heads of services on the frontline of the secret war, having crushed the so-called “New Gang of Four” (Xin Xirenbang): Ling Jihua (former director of the CCP General Office, in charge of internal party security), General Xu Caihou, Bo Xilai, and the most formidable of these “tigers”, Zhou Yongkang.

However, despite the services’ key role in bringing Xi to power and consolidating his position, Xi went on to centralize all the power into his hands and those of his inner circle. In October 2017, just after the CCP’s 19th Congress, Xi Jinping was able to replace the head of the Guoanbu, perform an internal purge in the ministry, and simultaneously carry out a reorganization of the PLA and a remodelling of its intelligence services. It was quite some programme.