Ever since Bo Xilai, the Communist Party aristocrat, was given a sentence of life in prison last September on charges of corruption, very little in the way of new details about his downfall have emerged. But this week, a Chinese magazine, Sanlian Life, published a 31-page cover story on Mr. Bo’s youngest son, Bo Guagua, a favorite focus of gossip in China. He is currently a first-year student at Columbia Law School and has been spotted at social gatherings in Manhattan.
The reporter, Li Jing, had spoken to some family friends, but the story was less an exposé than a summary of the reams of reporting last year by a galaxy of news organizations on the Bo family murder scandal.
One detail did jump out. The article said that after Wang Lijun, the former Chongqing police chief, fled to the United States Consulate in the city of Chengdu on Feb. 6, 2012, a prominent Australian reporter based in Beijing for the Sydney Morning Herald, John Garnaut, was called in to act as his interpreter. Mr. Wang then proceeded to tell American officials gathered in the consulate library his suspicions of how Mr. Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai, had murdered a British businessman, Neil Heywood.
The story about Mr. Garnaut was surprising. From the way the article was written, it sounded like he had told this to Ms. Li. In
China circles, Mr. Garnaut is known for his deep reporting on elite party politics. In this case, had he transcended the role of observer and somehow become a
participant, and then kept that secret this entire time?
This was hard to believe. Friends of Mr. Garnaut did not recall him mentioning playing such a role. Western officials who discussed
with this reporter what had transpired in the consulate had not talked about Mr. Garnaut acting as interpreter. Any mention of such an encounter was absent too from Mr. Garnaut’s
recent
book on the Bo family and from a detailed article he wrote in
September 2012 on Mr. Wang’s 30-plus hours in the consulate. Around the same time, Jeremy Page, the Wall Street Journal correspondent who had broken
compelling stories on Mr. Bo’s downfall, had also written a comprehensive account of Mr. Wang’s consulate flight, and Mr. Garnaut
was absent too from that narrative.
Soon after Mr. Wang entered the consulate, Mr. Bo dispatched scores of police vehicles from Chongqing to surround the American building and try to retrieve Mr. Wang. The authorities in Sichuan Province had also surrounded the building with their own forces. All that had built into a tense three-way standoff involving the American guards at the consulate gate. How would Mr. Garnaut have gotten inside?
Still, unlikelier events had taken place during the Bo saga. And Mr. Garnaut’s father, Ross Garnaut, had once been Australia’s ambassador to China. Perhaps, farfetched as it might sound, those diplomatic ties had come into play during the Wang Lijun episode. So Thursday night, the younger Mr. Garnaut, who had moved back to Australia last year, was asked in an email about the Sanlian Life report.
“No, I hadn’t seen it, and very much look forward to seeing what they say on young GG,” he wrote back. “My own cameo, well, that’s fantastic.To be the central player in the biggest China story of the decade and not even remember it.”
He said Michael Anti, the prominent Chinese blogger (real name: Zhao Jing), had made the same claim in an article in January 2013 for Southern Metropolis Weekly. As soon as that article appeared, Mr. Garnaut had contacted Mr. Anti to tell him about the error, and Mr. Anti issued a correction to the story, which was about foreign correspondents, on both Twitter and his Chinese microblog. Editors corrected the official version that appears on Southern Metropolis Weekly’s website. The original version can still be found on the Internet, though.
Mr. Anti said in a phone text message late Friday night that he had first read the “mistaken account” on an overseas Chinese website, but could not remember which one. In his Chinese microblog post on Jan. 30, 2013, he said he would in the future avoid relying on Chinese-language sources for reports on foreigners. “Shame on me,” he wrote in English. And he said he would invite Mr. Garnaut to coffee.
Ms. Li, the reporter for Sanlian Life, declined to comment. Journalists with knowledge of the 31-page article said it had been in the works for a long time. One journalist said the detail about Mr. Garnaut probably came from a Chinese-language source.
Meanwhile, many China watchers have been talking with anticipation about Mr. Garnaut’s next book. It is on “princelings,” those Chinese who, like Bo Xilai and Bo Guagua, are members of the party’s revered revolutionary families. The book will no doubt have many interesting tales of China’s so-called red nobility, and Mr. Garnaut has been working hard to separate fact from fiction.
Mia Li contributed research.