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.

Short of that, check out South China Morning Post’s summary of the story. Short of that, here are some excerpts.

Wang paid great attention to his public image. He employed a personal PR team of more than 20 police officers. All dressed in blue uniforms, they were nicknamed the “Smurfs”.

The Smurfs were armed publicists and secretaries, basically. Picture it.

Wang “invited” underground gun-makers to resume production by supplying them with equipment, funding and a place to work – a big cave in a remote town named Xiushan, bordering Guizhou province. The invitation worked and Wang’s entrapment plot proceeded as planned.

In September of 2008, Wang led thousands of special force police officers with submachine guns and bazookas to the cave. He flirted with the idea of shooting a bazooka, but another high-ranking official turned down the suggestion. Instead, they used dynamite to blow up the gun operation and destroy the cave.

A bazooka. The dude just upgraded the actor who’ll eventually portray him from Hung Yan Yan to Andy Lau.

Wang required his policemen to display “good taste” by the way they dress. During his term, he ordered that two sets of casual-style police uniforms, costing 8,000 yuan (HK$9,932) in total, be made for each police officer in Chongqing.

Good taste is important.

Businessmen Gong Gangmo, a convicted mafia boss who was arrested by Wang in 2009, said he was hung by his hands for eight days in a detention centre and beaten by the police. He said the police had covered the camera with a curtain so it could not be recorded.

Play with fire, you’ll get burned.

Wang also claimed to be an expert in arts and architecture. He is the owner of 150 patents and had designed police uniforms, police boots and police raincoats, among other creations.

The man is awesome, and sorely missed. When he’s out of jail in 15 years, we’ll see the Wang Lijun redemption story, I think. In America, he’d make seven digits lending his name out to ghost-written autobiographies and serial thriller novels. In China… to be continued.

(The real Wang Lijun revealed in magazine exposé)

Wang Lijun, who will forevermore be known as “flamboyant” in Western media, was sentenced to 15 years in prison today on four counts, “defection” probably being the gravest. That he did not get a more severe sentence is interesting, and bodes unwell for his one-time comrade Bo Xilai, with whom he will always be linked.

Before we shift the attention to Bo though — a colorful character in his own right — let us linger a bit on Wang’s life and career, as documented in this Reuters article. China will never let a domestic filmmaker touch this subject, which is too bad. The script almost writes itself:

Wang had a rather unique upbringing:

Wang, an ethnic Mongol, boxed as a teen, served in the People’s Liberation Army for three years and worked as a forestry official before becoming a policeman in 1984.

Setting the foundations for early success:

His crime crackdown in the northeast town of Tieling won him national acclaim. Zhou Lijun, a screenwriter, spent 10 days with Wang in Tieling in 1996 while working on a screenplay for a TV series about his exploits called “Iron Blooded Police Spirits”.

According to Zhou’s account in a Chinese newspaper, Wang had a flair for the dramatic. He would drive to crime scenes in a Mitsubishi jeep modified to carry a double rack of lights on its roof so the locals would know “Chief Wang” was on the case.

He absolutely is a screenwriter’s best friend:

On arrival, he would leap atop the car, draw his gun and fire shots in the air. On a night raid of hair salons thought to be fronts for prostitution, Wang rushed into one and threw a young man with dyed yellow hair to the ground.

After a police search for evidence yielded nothing, he told them to take the youth to the police station, saying: “A man with hair like that can’t be any good”.

With success, his ego expanded, and his eccentricities blossomed:

Sources said he sometimes did his own post mortems, boasted of being an FBI agent under an exchange program and of being kidnapped by the Italian mafia.

He had… interesting demands.

He also demanded continuous supplies of fresh flowers and towels, said another source with access to city officials.

But above all else, he was a detective at heart:

Late last year, problems with the Heywood case surfaced. Wang learnt that some of his officers were refusing to sign off on the police report, which said he had died of natural causes.

By January, Wang had set up one of the special case teams that had come to symbolize Chongqing’s successes — and excesses — over the years.

It determined the death was a case of poisoning. It also determined that Bo’s wife was a prime suspect.

And that, unfortunately, would be his undoing:

Initially, sources have said, the politician reacted angrily but agreed to a police probe of Gu’s role in the murder.

However, the next morning Bo rebuked his police chief and slapped him in the face, according to the official version.

Bo also stripped Wang of his police chief post…

Leading to one final, climactic, dead-of-night sprint for law, justice, and freedom…

Wang later made his run to the U.S. consulate in Chengdu where he told U.S. diplomats about the Heywood case, according to the British government which was briefed on this episode.

…before his epiphany, suffered in the darkness of a “free nation’s” embassy, that such values could betray him as easily as he betrayed his friends, colleagues, and countrymen.

The entire article is worth a read if you get a chance. The closing scene?

“That night, all of the restaurants and karaoke parlors in Chongqing were full — and mostly with police officers.”

Cue foreboding soundtrack. Finis.

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.

Over the past month, there’s been a lot of smoke regarding Bo Xilai, some of which we’ve been happy to fan here, but when it comes to Chinese politics and media, you know there’s definitely a fire when that smoke is being blown by none other than Xinhua.

A little more than an hour ago, the official news agency of the People’s Republic of China released a terse 98-word statement that’s more damning than all the hundreds of thousands of words spent on Bo Xilai over the last month combined (H/T: RFH). Here‘s Xinhua’s first statement in full (Chinese only), essentially saying that in accordance with relevant provisions under China’s constitution, Bo Xilai’s membership to the CPC Central Committee Political Bureau and the CPC Central Committee has been suspended, and he’s under investigation. Here’s Xinhua’s second statement, in English, with this part:

According to reinvestigation results, the existing evidence indicated that [Neil] Heywood died of homicide, of which Bogu Kailai and Zhang Xiaojun, an orderly at Bo’s home, are highly suspected.

Bogu Kailai and Zhang Xiaojun have been transferred to judicial authorities on suspected crime of intentional homicide.

“Bogu Kailai” is Gu Kailai, Bo’s wife.

There you have it. In China, where political scandals are nonexistent, that this one has been allowed to exist and now — it seems — allowed to explode is proof that someone important knows something. One gets the sense that some important decision-maker decided it would be best for Xinhua to break this story lest they get scooped by a third party — heavens forbid a party outside China.

Every media outlet is on this story. In no particular order, a small sampling:

Reuters:

“Comrade Bo Xilai is suspected of being involved in serious disciplinary violations,” said the news agency said, citing a decision by the central party leadership, which decided to suspend Bo from its top ranks.

“Police set up a team to reinvestigate the case of the British national Neil Heywood who was found dead in Chongqing,” Xinhau said in a separate report, referring to the sprawling southwestern municipality where Bo was party chief until he was dismissed in March as a scandal surrounding him unfolded.

“According to the reinvestigation results, the existing evidence indicates Heywood died of homicide, of which Gu Kailai and Zhang Xiaojun, an assistant in Bo’s household, are highly suspected,” said the news agency, citing a dispute over unspecified “economic interests” between Gu and Heywood.

Washington Post:

Heywood was initially said to have died last November of an overdose of drinking in his hotel room. But Xinhua said late Monday that a police team’s “reinvestigation” of Heywood’s death found that Bo’s wife, Bo Gu Kailai, and Zhang Xiaojun, a staff member described as an “orderly” at Bo’s home, “are highly suspected.”

“According to investigation results, Bo Gu Kailai, wife of Comrade Bo Xilai, and their son were in good terms with Heywood,” Xinhua said. “However, they had conflict over economic interests, which had been intensified.”

“Bo Gu Kailai and Zhang Xiaojun have been transferred to judicial authorities on suspected crime of intentional homicide,” the Xinhua article said.

New York Times:

According to one person who said he was briefly shown a copy of information for party officials that was circulated on Tuesday, Mr. Bo was faulted for several disciplinary transgressions, including failing to oversee underlings, a reference to Mr. Wang, and mismanaging his family, a reference to the Heywood case. He was also cited for violating organizational principles for not carrying out directives from the leadership in handling the two cases.

“It said that Bo had made decisions arbitrarily, without authorization,” said this person, who also declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter.

He said that the document also referred to “other problems” related to Mr. Bo that were found in the process of investigating his wife in the Mr. Heywood’s death.

Sometimes, we complain — rightfully — about our political scandals involving non-essential issues like tweeted pics or affairs or what have you. This is not that kind of scandal. This one involves one of China’s princelings destined for the country’s highest ruling body making the steepest of falls. You can pull out the Icarus analogies, but are they necessary? Bo Xilai is potentially implicated in the alleged homicide of a foreign national. There. There’s your story. Go run with it.

UPDATE, 2:30 am: British Foreign Secretary William Hague takes to Twitter:

Earlier today, Bo Xilai was ousted from his post as party secretary of Chongqing, a stunning — if not altogether unexpected — end to an unusually public saga that began when Wang Lijun showed up at the US embassy in Chengdu on February 6 with dirt on his former boss.

At 11:43 am, a film producer with the Sina Weibo account “Billionaires” (柒月二十六) created a timeline of Bo’s life and career. As of this moment, it’s been forwarded more than 31,000 times and commented on more than 5,000 times on Weibo (both numbers are rising fast). You’ll see it after the jump, with English translations by Valentina Luo.