Moving to Chongqing to become its Party Chief was clearly a step up the political ladder for Bo Xilai in 2007, but one figures it must have been bittersweet for him to leave Beijing, where — judging by this video — he was beloved by a large number of supporters.

The above — Bo’s final speech as the Minister of Commerce – was posted to YouTube in December 2013, but just recently tweeted out by Helen Gao. Bo would move down south to begin his stint as a member of the Central Politburo, tabbed for sure elevation into the Standing Committee… until, that is, his career and his life veered off track thanks to his wife, Gu Kailai, his former police chief, Wang Lijun, and Neil Heywood, who just had to get himself murdered.

Jump to the 2:05 mark to see Bo — smiling, happy — make his appearance. He speaks at the three-minute mark. He begins singing at the eight-minute mark. Considering what he looked like at his five-day trial that just ended, what an amazing sight indeed this is.

These screenshots are equally amazing:

Also:

https://twitter.com/Yuxin_Gao/status/372006248545132544/photo/1

Bo Xilai says there was love between his wife, Gu Kailai, and Wang Lijun, his former police chief — the man who would betray him, just as she did, in her own way.

Bo Xilai: Wang Lijun was secretly in love with Gu Kailai. He couldn't help himself. // so the rumors are true.

— Li Yuan (@LiYuan6) August 26, 2013

We waited four days — since the start of the trial on Thursday in Jinan, Shandong province — for a revelation this good, cutting to the inner lining of the human heart, but finally, some clarity, and a motive.

Bo Xilai tells the court that Wang Lijun was infatuated with (暗恋) Bogu Kailai and they were stuck together like white on rice (如胶似漆).

— Xinhua News Agency (@XHNews) August 26, 2013

Of course the poisoning of Neil Heywood was a crime of passion. The exigencies of desire must always be answered for.

Gu had already poisoned her sister’s lover, Neil, in revenge – though she secretly loved him. Luckily, it was all a Chinese dream…

— China Daily Show (@chinadailyshow) August 26, 2013

Does becoming a star politician in an authoritarian state numb one’s soul to the travails, the lashes of love? Does it dull the capricious beast, the jealous heart?

No.

Bo Xilai has a love story to his name, and now one must be written for his wife. A lonely woman who was cheated on, hurt in ways worse than death. A flamboyant man, a police chief, with a knack for trenchcoats and drama – and open arms. A story of passion and betrayal, of blood and backstabbing, set to the backdrop of the inner court in the People’s Republic of China.

Is there love? pic.twitter.com/jKp8emJer6

— XQ (@MissXQ) August 26, 2013

It could be all bullshit. But please don’t tell me if so.

For those who just can’t get enough of the Bo family saga, China Navis has a fairly extensive collection of photos of Bo Guagua — son of Xilai and Gu Kailai — both as a young child in China and growing up overseas.

A lot of these photos you’ve already seen, like the one in which he and his friends pretend to pee on a metal gate, and his graduation photos from Harvard, but others, perhaps not. Take a look at this sampling:

What strikes me about a lot of these — especially the last two — is how typical they seem. That last photo, down to the watermarked timestamp, exists in some variation in thousands of family albums in the homes of Chinese Americans and Chinese Brits, and millions more, probably, across China. (I tell you this from experience.) Look at it: just a young boy doted on by two grandparents, no added significance, nothing artificial about it, no politics.

Bo Guagua led a fortunate life, a privileged one, but from the perch of retrospect, we see these pictures and know, now, that there was an expiration date on his perfect world. (And we also know, judging by his parents’ testimony in the last few days, that his private family life was likely marked by turmoil and tumult; we can imagine how many late-night arguments between his parents he endured.) Especially poignant are the photos of him with mom and dad — showing his mother how to use a Mac, posing with a father in the midst of a meteoric political rise. These are moments in time captured forever, before time went ahead and tore everything apart.

Bo Xilai’s Son Bo Guagua Growth and His Life Overseas Photos (China Navis)

Just when we thought the updates had stopped, the excitement from Bo Xilai’s trial fizzled, here’s Gu Kailai, wife of Bo Xilai and convicted murderer, sending everyone ABUZZ.

The above video was posted to Sina at 11:55 am and already nearly has 1 million views. Everyone is talking about it.

Only things Gu Kailai can remember Bo helping Xu Ming with are buying Dalian football club and putting up the hot air balloon.

— malcolmmoore (@MalcolmMoore) August 23, 2013

For those who, like me, were holding on for mention of the hot-air balloon: 5:25. http://t.co/vQsfCGHlVU

— Brendan O'Kane (@bokane) August 23, 2013

The things princelings ask for…Gu says Xu Ming bought an electric segway-type vehicle for Guagua, and some abalone.

— malcolmmoore (@MalcolmMoore) August 23, 2013

They should have used this double for the trial, she’s much better.

— Samuel Wade (@samuel_wade) August 23, 2013

So Gu implicated Guagua in channeling bribes?

— Eric Fish (@ericfish85) August 23, 2013

Also, we learn that this interrogation room is home to a 1999 dot printer, by the sound of it.

Here’s the Telegraph on the hot air balloon thing.

In a two-paragraph statement to the New York Times, Bo Guagua — the son of Bo Xilai and Gu Kailai, convicted last August of murdering British businessman Neil Heywood — said he has been denied contact with his parents for the past year and a half, and hopes his father gets a chance to defend himself at his trial that is scheduled for Thursday.

Then he dropped a big “however”:

I hope that in my father’s upcoming trial, he is granted the opportunity to answer his critics and defend himself without constraints of any kind. However, if my well-being has been bartered for my father’s acquiescence or my mother’s further cooperation, then the verdict will clearly carry no moral weight.

It’s a sly remark. In Bo Guagua’s view, his father is not being “tried” for bribery, corruption, and abuse of power, but persecuted, like Ned Stark, and only through the noble, self-sacrificing gesture of bargaining for his son’s well-being will he acquiesce to his accusers.

What else is a son to think?

The second of the two paragraphs is interesting, too:

My mother, who is now silenced and defenseless, cannot respond to the opportunistic detractors that attack her reputation with impunity. She has already overcome unimaginable tribulation after the sudden collapse of her physical health in 2006 and subsequent seclusion. Although it is of little comfort to my anxiety about her state of health, I know that she will continue to absorb all that she is accused of with dignity and quiet magnanimity.

Opportunistic detractors? You’d think he doesn’t live in the US, judging by how little he understands the way media works. Look on the bright side though: if Gu Kailai had been tried in the US, Jay Leno would still be cracking jokes. Or is Guagua, perhaps, talking about the Heywood family demanding millions as compensation to the death of Neil? As if that weren’t standard operating procedure.

Anyway. Again, what’s a son to do?

Bo Guagua’s Statement (NY Times)

The Sunday Times, in its now-famous (or infamous) piece on Neil Heywood (still paywalled, but it’s here if you want to purchase), alluded to a certain Channel 4 documentary on the man. Quote: “After a year-long investigation for Channel 4′s Dispatches, based on numerous conversations with friends, business colleagues, diplomatic sources and a Chinese contact who knew both Heywood and the Bo family intimately, we can reveal the real Neil Heywood.”

Whether you believe that or not, Dispatches’s 47-minute documentary on Neil Heywood is now available for viewing, in full, on YouTube. The embedding has been disabled, but we’ve uploaded a preview above. (UPDATE, 12:22 pm: It appears that you can only watch the full show if you’re within the UK, so for those on VPNs, set your portal to an English location; we’ve uploaded the preview to Youku, and it’s embedded after the jump — let’s see how long it stays up. Also: here’s Channel 4′s presser on this episode. UPDATE 2, 12:42 pm: It’s all viewable, anywhere! Big hat tip to Josh Chin, who points us to True Vision, which has the full documentary in three parts.)

You’ll have to excuse the poor audio — it’s much crisper on the full-length movie — but you get the basic gist of this documentary’s great awfulness / awful greatness: November two-thousand and eleven: a British businessman is muhhhduhd in a hotel in China.

Channel 4′s top-secret inside source who knows both Gu Kailai and Neil Heywood seems to be Gu’s friend. She certainly has no ulterior motives, we’re sure. Quote: “There are political enemies out there. It is extremely risky to contradict the existing narrative. I find it impossible to believe she would murder him.”

Shadowy agents. Dramatized bedroom scenes. Existing narratives. Zoom in on newspaper headline word SPY. Did we mention shadows? Lots of those. MUHHHHHHHDUH.

Yes, Channel 4. You win.

(H/T RFH)

In a 3,600-word piece, Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy of Britain’s The Sunday Times lay bare the myth of Neil Heywood. They argue that far from being an intrepid power broker living astutely within the inner circles of China’s elite, the murdered Briton was a “failed businessman,” a “chancer,” an “irritant,” and a liar who lucked into his connection with Bo Xilai, and was killed after a miscalculation on both his part and Gu Kailai’s. The piece, titled “Lost in China,” reads at times like a direct repudiation of the Wall Street Journal’s story last week, “Briton Killed in China Had Spy Links.” (Both are paywalled; we wrote about the WSJ piece here.) Writes The Sunday Times: “[Heywood's] 007 numberplate — even his mobile phone number ended with the same digits — fuelled fanciful stories that he had been an agent of British intelligence.”

After a year-long investigation for Channel 4′s Dispatches, based on numerous conversations with friends, business colleagues, diplomatic sources and a Chinese contact who knew both Heywood and the Bo family intimately, we can reveal the real Neil Heywood.

Far from being a top-level fixer or spy, he was a failed businessman who found himself caught up in a situation he could not control. He then made a fatal miscalculation that led to his murder.

According to The Sunday Times, Heywood arrived in China from England in 1992 and moved to Dalian in 1995, where he taught English. When he traveled to Beijing in 2000 to register a marriage with a Dalian girl by the name of Wang Lulu, he caught the attention of the British embassy, seemingly for no other reason than because he was a Briton in a place where there were few.

Kerry Brown, first secretary, was intrigued.

“At that time there weren’t a huge number of British business people based outside Beijing,” Brown said. “Neil Heywood seemed a pretty positive character, very British.” However, when Brown visited Heywood in Dalian months later and found him wandering about in jeans and a jumper, he wondered about his business acumen: “He seemed to just be drifting by.”

The story continues. Eventually, “after reading in a newspaper that Bo Xilai’s son had gone to England and was studying at Harrow, Heywood spotted an opening.” He got in touch.

The Sunday Times compellingly argues that Heywood did not, as has been reported elsewhere, help Bo Guagua get into Harrow. “Guagua was already at the school by the time Heywood came on the scene. In fact, he met Guagua and his mother in 2002 at a Chinese restaurant: the Royal China, in Baker Street, London.” But Heywood’s connection with the boy was nonetheless significant, because it would lead to his demise.

Nevertheless, Gu agreed to help Heywood out of his financial struggle, in acknowledgment of the years he had looked after Guagua. In late 2007, she introduced Heywood to a property developer who wanted to build a vast estate of Englishstyle houses outside Chongqing. “It was purely a gesture of friendship,” the source said. “She was never a participant in that project, nor a beneficiary.”

Everything Heywood touched seemed doomed. By 2008, he had been shut out of the development for failing to bring the British investment he had promised. That summer, when the bill arrived for his children’s school fees, a distraught Heywood sent an email to Guagua, asking that Gu “compensate him in cash for the failed project and for his years looking after Guagua”, according to the source. He asked for “tens of millions of pounds”.

The family was staggered. “It was absurd to ask for an extraordinary amount for merely having run the most convenient of errands, and even more extraordinary to ask Gu Kailai for compensation for the exclusion from a project,” the source said.

Sensing a growing crisis, Guagua sought to get his mother and Heywood together at a teahouse near Tiananmen Square during the Beijing Olympics of 2008. Heywood backed down. He apologised to everyone.

“Neil suggested that he didn’t really mean all the sum he asked and he was just seeing if they could lend him a hand,” the source says.

In April 2010, Heywood returned to Britain, after his firm had been temporarily struck off the companies register for failing to post its accounts. He was forced to pay for an expensive High Court appeal to get the judgment suspended so he could settle his debts without incurring a credit blacklisting.

We pause here to note that the picture we get is not of a cunning baron who wielded actual influence, but a bumbling, desperate expat who found himself suddenly knocked off his pedestal occupied by China’s many “exalted laowai” — those who, arriving early to the scene, were often overestimated by the many people they encountered simply because of their foreignness.

As it turns out, the Bo family also overestimated Heywood — wrongly — and that cost Heywood his life:

His debts mounting, in early 2011 Heywood emailed Guagua, again demanding money. This message was far more aggressive than the first. It was to prove a fatal mistake. Guagua, according to the source, told his mother about the emails in the presence of the Chongqing police chief, Wang Lijun, who had investigated Gu’s poisoning and become close to her. A few days after the Heywood conversation, Wang asked to see Guagua to talk about security. The source said Wang was determined to persuade the Bo family that Heywood was a dangerous character.

“When Guagua voiced scepticism that Neil could have been a threat, he [Wang] would reply something like, ‘You don’t know their tactics’ or ‘The people who seem the most innocent can be the most dangerous’.”

The Sunday Times built its story on a rolodex of anonymous sources, some sounding downright dopey with quotes such as, “[Gu Kailai] just doesn’t have a trace of violence in her,” but the article is internally consistent. At the very least, the image of Heywood as opportunistic foreigner is more recognizable to many of us than the image of him as suave businessman-cum-informant. RFH, in one of our earliest pieces on this scandal on March 28, alluded to this:

Heywood worked for Hakluyt, a corporate intelligence firm founded by former MI6 officers (so kind of like the Feather Men, then?) supposedly as what the Chinese poetically call a “white glove,” but we – you and me, guv – would call, more prosaically, a bagman. There’s nothing surprising about this. The British economy is run on agents, consultants, go-betweens, middle men and people who generally have nothing to offer except inserting themselves between mutually beneficial parties and making off with a fixer’s fee. The question here is, why are the likes of Bo running with this (apparently) small fry?

It’s a question that has, apparently, bothered The Sunday Times, too. If Heywood was so damn good, as other media would have you believe, how did he keep such a low profile, inspiring neither confidence nor, it seems, memory from most of his acquaintances?

The Sunday Times concludes:

All that is certain is that Neil Heywood, an idle, wellmeaning chancer, fell into a trap, partially of his own making, and that his death triggered the biggest scandal to hit China since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.

You’ll believe it if you’ve known people like him. “Sunday Times piece on Neil Heywood only reporting I have read about him that rings true (laowai in China in 1990s small circle…),” tweeted Danwei founder Jeremy Goldkorn. The responses suggest that the story you choose to believe reveals more about yourself than anything else:

Neil Heywood was likely feeding information to British intelligence officers while in the inner circle of Bo Xilai, according to Jeremy Page of the Wall Street Journal.

From the very beginning of this saga, we’ve known that Heywood — poisoned by Gu Kailai, as the consensus goes — has been connected to MI6, Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, but never have we had proof. Certainly nothing like this:

The Journal investigation, based on interviews with current and former British officials and close friends of the murdered Briton, found that a person Mr. Heywood met in 2009 later acknowledged being an MI6 officer to him. Mr. Heywood subsequently met that person regularly in China and continued to provide information on Mr. Bo’s private affairs.

Continuing:

William Hague, the British foreign secretary who oversees MI6, broke with standard policy of not commenting on intelligence matters and issued a statement in April saying Mr. Heywood, who was 41 when he died, was “not an employee of the British government in any capacity.”

That was technically true, according to people familiar with the matter. They said Mr. Heywood wasn’t an MI6 officer, wasn’t paid and was “never in receipt of tasking”—meaning he never was given a specific mission to carry out or asked to seek a particular piece of information.

But he was a willful and knowing informant, and his MI6 contact once described him as “useful” to a former colleague. “A little goes a long way,” the former colleague recalls the contact saying in relation to intelligence reports based on Mr. Heywood’s information.

If true, the most pressing questions become: 1) How did Heywood clear security checks and gain the trust of one of the dozen or so highest-ranking people in China? Security breach, yes? 2) Was Heywood murdered because he was doing spy work? Could he have possessed unimaginably damning information against the Bo’s?

Britain’s top newspapers have jumped on this story. They don’t add much to WSJ’s report, but here’s the Telegraph, Guardian and BBC. Surely these good folks will be eschewing US presidential election coverage to find out more about the murdered Briton who reportedly drove around in a silver Jaguar with “007″ license plates. We can only hope.

The “open trial” of Wang Lijun, on charges of bribe-taking and “bending the law for selfish ends,” according to Xinhua, began this morning. It is now over, having taken place “under tight security before a carefully selected audience,” according to the Guardian, from which the above picture is taken. “Foreign journalists were not permitted to attend.”

Yesterday, Wang, the former Chengdu vice mayor and police chief, stood a “closed-door trial” on the charges of defection and abuse of power. He did not contest any of the charges.

As the NY Times notes, “The outcome of trials in China, especially those connected to elite politicians, is often predetermined. The flamboyant Mr. Wang, 52, is expected to be found guilty on all four charges.”

And with that, another trial in the Bo Xilai saga begins and ends, swiftly and efficiently. We’re down to one last player, someone we haven’t seen in months: Mr. Bo himself.

But before we move on, let us pay homage, one last time, to the man who kicked off this preposterous, made-for-TV political saga. Words via NYT:

Residents of Chongqing interviewed this year said they could not recall a police chief as flashy as Mr. Wang. He traveled with a group of policemen dressed in dark overcoats, and two officers would always catch his own overcoat when he took it off. In restaurants, he would demand that the entire floor be sealed off. He brought his own food and drink or asked that the restaurant’s be tested. When he drove to his police headquarters from a nearby home, officers cordoned off the route.

Along with the flashy image, Mr. Wang had a canny side. On Feb. 15, after he was taken to Beijing, a Chinese journalist, Chu Chaoxin, received a mysterious text message that said in part: “Briton Heywood was murdered in Chongqing; Wang Lijun investigated the case and found out Mrs. Bo is the suspect.”

Some people now suspect Mr. Wang had previously arranged for an ally to send out the text. Mr. Chu posted the text on his microblog, an action that helped turn Mr. Heywood’s demise from merely a suspicious death into a worldwide murder mystery.

And image, not via NYT:

Be well, Wang Lijun.

In the most non-suspenseful verdict ever, a court in Hefei, Anhui province (read: the Party) has officially sentenced Gu Kailai to “death with a two-year reprieve” for murdering Neil Heywood, as expected. What this means is that Gu will not be put to death, assuming she doesn’t commit another crime in the next two years. And then it’s off to a plush retirement home — sorry, prison – and no one will remember any of this.

With all due respect to Heywood’s family and associates, if you’re related to a high-level Chinese official here and want to kill someone, make sure the would-be victim is insignificant, has few connections with other Chinese bosses, and, oh yeah, it helps if you have friends within the CCP. Gu Kailai obviously does. She’ll be just fine — though we hear cancer is less forgiving than the Party.

Reuters:

“We respect the court’s decision,” said He Zhengsheng, a lawyer for the Heywood family. He and another witness to the hearing – which was barred to all but a few journalists from official Chinese media – revealed the verdict to throngs of reporters waiting outside the court in eastern Hefei city.

They both also said Zhang Xiaojun, an aide to the Bo household, was sentenced to nine years in prison for acting as an accomplice to the poisoning of Heywood.

As for what this means for Bo Xilai, that is the real mystery. Will he face criminal charges? Could he possibly? We’re about to find out whether he has stronger friends or enemies. Stay tuned.

UPDATE, 12:04 pm: Here’s Donald C. Clarke again with an explanation for why Gu could serve as few as 15 years:

Under Art. 78 of the Criminal Law and a 2011 Supreme People’s Court directive, those sentenced to life imprisonment or a term of years (including as a result of a commuted death sentence) may have their sentences reduced for good behavior (that’s my own term; Chinese law speaks of showing repentance or establishing merit) during their imprisonment. And various forms of good behavior are listed, including (in the 2011 SPC directive) paying compensation. Presumably that will not be a problem for Gu.

But there are limits: Art. 78 of the Criminal Law states that a death sentence commuted to life imprisonment may under no circumstances be reduced to less than 25 years of actual time served, and a death sentence commuted to 25 years’ imprisonment may under no circumstances be reduced to less than 20 years of actual time served, in each case counting from the date of the original commutation. And even less is possible: in its 2011 directive, the Supreme People’s Court simply overrode the Criminal Law and stated that a commuted sentence could ultimately be reduced to as little as 15 years of actual time served. [ADDITION: A colleague also points out the intriguing possibilities of medical parole even earlier.]

Donald C. Clarke, professor of law at George Washington University, recently translated an account of the Gu Kailai trial and posted it on his website, Chinese Law Prof Blog. The account was written in Chinese by Zhao Xiangcha, titled, “A Record of my Observation of the Murder Trial of BoGu Kailai and Zhang Xiaojun.” Zhao notes that he wasn’t allowed to bring in any recording equipment — he even had a small pencil confiscated at the door — so all his observations (and there are plenty) are from memory.

The lack of a recording device may have been blessing in disguise, because we end up getting a concise summary of the events preceding Neil Heywood’s murder, including Gu’s fear that he had kidnapped her son, Bo Guagua. He also observes that, “BoGu Kailai was relatively calm all the way through, but was unable to hide her intense anxiety. I could clearly see her hands trembling. She said nothing in her own defense, leaving it all to her attorney(s). Her voice was soft and she spoke standard Mandarin.”

Those behind the Great Firewall can read Clarke’s translation here. Some highlights:

Heywood thereupon sent an email to Bo Guagua demanding 10% of his expected profit, i.e., 14 million pounds. Bo Guagua conceded that his family should bear partial responsibility, but there was a great deal of disagreement over the specific amount. After a number of communications back and forth that produced no result, Heywood turned to threats, and held Bo Guagua in soft detention (软禁) at his [referent unclear] home in England, using this to pressure Gu Kailai.

…

Gu first plotted with Wang Lijun. She wanted to frame him as a drug dealer. At this time Heywood was in Beijing. They would lure him to Chongqing, then use the excuse of his resisting arrest as a drug dealer to shoot him to death on the spot, thus getting rid of him.

Wang Lijun at first took part in the plot, but later on, perhaps fearing the risk, did not want to continue his participation. Gu then decided to do the job herself. On the pretext that she wanted to do an experiment, she got hold of some “Three Steps, Down” [presumably meaning the poison victim falls down dead after taking only three steps following ingestion] dog poison through some Chongqing mafia people. The seven people who supplied poison to Gu were subsequently arrested on suspicion of drug dealing.

…

Gu Kailai entered Heywood’s room by herself while the other three waited outside. She drank together with him – about 350 ml. of 80-proof (40% alcohol) whiskey. Heywood’s alcohol tolerance was low, and he got drunk and vomited (a great deal of vomit was found on the scene). He was woozy and lost the ability to resist. At this point Zhang Xiaojun came onto the scene of the crime and gave the poison to Gu Kailai. He also dragged Heywood from the bathroom to the bed. When Heywood wanted water after vomiting, Gu Kailai took the opportunity to give him the poison. She also dumped at the scene some drugs she had prepared beforehand in order to create the impression that Heywood was a drug dealer. When the two discovered the Heywood had no blood pressure (they could not be sure he was dead), they left the scene. Gu switched on the “Do Not Disturbed” indicator and told the hotel staff that Heywood was drunk and was not to be disturbed. At 11:38 p.m. that evening, the four left the scene.

…

Two days after the murder, on Nov. 15^th, the hotel staff, on finding that Heywood had not left his room for two days, [felt that] something strange was up, and discovered that he was dead. They called the police. Under the direction of Wang Lijun, the Chongqing police undertook an inspection of the crime scene and gathered evidence. They took a blood sample from the victim and did a CT scan of the corpse. Wang Lijun and several other senior police officers, in order to conceal Gu’s crime, personally carried the blood sample and other important evidence with them for a day, in violation of law and in a departure from judicial procedure. (This laid the groundwork for later doubts about the case, as recounted below.) Because of his involvement in the case, in order to escape criminal responsibility (or for some other reason), Wang Lijun later went to the American consulate.

…

She fully admitted her acts in the case without reservation; she offered no objections. She made only three clear points when she spoke: (1) She felt that the prosecution’s account of her motive was not full enough. (2) She sought to reduce Zhang Xiaojun’s culpability, and asked that he be given a lighter sentence. (3) She felt that it was improper for Wang Lijun to appear as a witness in this case and that his testimony was concocted. In her confession and recorded [statement], she repeatedly emphasized Wang Lijun’s insidiousness. As for the reason, everyone should judge for themselves.

Zhang Xiaojun had no objection to the prosecution’s evidence or charges.

In the final statements of the accused, they both admitted guilt and showed relatively sincere repentance.

And finally:

The whole courtroom was quite quiet. During the long stage of introducing evidence, some of the audience slept and was audibly snoring.

Because of course. What a great little detail — you can just picture the scene, right?

Alexander Yuan / AP

If you were counting, the “trial” lasted all of a few hours, ending just now with Gu Kailai not contesting the charge that she murdered British businessman Neil Heywood. So much for transparency of law. Did we learn anything from this process? Gu was never going to win their game, so she didn’t play. A date for a verdict hearing will be announced later, but why should any of us bother caring? She will get a death sentence with a two-year reprieve of execution, and then she’ll get to live out the rest of her days in a glorified retirement home for “jailed” Party officials. Something like this. No one will remember to execute her, or that she committed murder. Next year, she will be a trivia question at some esoteric quiz in a Chelsea bar, and only one or two teams will remember that her husband’s name was Bo Xilai. Bo Guagua, meanwhile, will continue being Bo Guagua, which we imagine can’t be too difficult. The rich will continue feeding off everyone else’s work and sending their riches abroad. The skies will be blue, on some days. A man will wake up and, motivated by a TED talk he heard the previous afternoon, will choose to make someone’s day a little better, and a street beggar, that moment, will die.

Just look at her. That face. In a snap it could transform into a teeth-baring devil or a demurring tigress. Few people in the world could command attention like so — indeed, demand it by simply biting down so that her cheeks — much like her glare — lock into place. She is the type who would whisper into the ear of a gentleman 20 years her junior, through flashing teeth, I would tear you apart. And don’t think she’d blink when inserting a poison-tipped needle into your kidney before disappearing into a crowd before you’ve realized you were dying in your own bile.

Do I think she killed Neil Heywood? I don’t know, but she sure looks like she could have. Xinhua:

Bogu Kailai and Zhang Xiaojun were recently prosecuted by the Hefei Municipal Procuratorate in Anhui province on charges of intentional homicide, Xinhua learned from Authorities Thursday.

Resisting the urge to parse that phrase, which makes it sound like Xinhua employs a team of investigative journalists who need to do more than dial their friends in the Party for the latest scoop, let’s just be glad that we now know for sure. It always seemed inevitable that she would be charged of murder, but then she (and Bo Xilai) fell out of the news for a few months. As NY Times points out:

The brief report is the first official news that the case against Gu is proceeding since the announcement three months ago that she and Zhang were being investigated and that Bo was being suspended from the powerful Politburo for unspecified discipline violations. Unmentioned in the Xinhua report was any reference to Bo or a separate party investigation into him.

But back to the more pressing issue at hand. What should we call this thewy lady? This sly vamp? This perspicacious shrew? The Iron Lady has already been taken, by Margaret Thatcher. Black Widow is taken too, by some Asian American pool player. I shy away from anything involving tigers because Amy Chua has forever ruined that image for me. Maybe Yellow Golem? But people will inevitably take offense. Duchess of Chongqing? GK-47? The Empress?

Your best effort is as good as mine. Leave it in the comments section. The best answer will get a prize.

UPDATE, 7:33 pm: As Brendan O’Kane points out, Gu’s chosen English name is Horus. Wikipedia defines Horus as “one of the oldest and most significant deities in ancient Egyptian religion, who was worshipped from at least the late Predynastic period through to Greco-Roman times.”