China's Ferrari Crash

By?JEREMY PAGE

BEIJING?As a Chinese court prepares to expose the alleged crimes of former Communist Party highflier Bo Xilai, censors and security officials have been trying to bury a separate scandal that has emboldened critics of President Hu Jintao and could complicate efforts to restore the party's tarnished image.

Details are emerging about the fatal crash in Beijing of a Ferrari driven by the son of a Communist Party official. The WSJ's Jeremy Page reports on how the accident could shed light on another scandal the Communist Party is facing today. Photo: Beijing Evening News

Just three days after Mr. Bo was fired as party chief of Chongqing in March, the 23-year-old son of President Hu's closest confidant crashed a black Ferrari at 4 a.m. on a snow-slickened Beijing ring road.

Ling Gu died on the spot, according to party insiders, Chinese reporters and others whose accounts offer new insights into the hushed-up incident. Two ethnic Tibetan women squeezed into the vehicle were badly hurt, and one later died.

All details of the crash, including the name of the driver, were quickly suppressed. Ling Jihua, the father and Chinese official who is close to President Hu, was spared public censure over the lifestyle of his son. Instead, he was quietly transferred months later to a less powerful, but still important, party post.

Color China Photos / Zuma Press

Ling Jihua, right, at a National People's Congress session in 2008, has been a close ally of President Hu Jintao. He was demoted in the wake of his son's death in a fiery predawn crash in a Ferrari on March 18.

The difference in how the party handled the Bo and Ling matters speaks volumes about the challenge it faces as it tries to conclude its most destabilizing political crisis in decades ahead of a sweeping leadership change beginning at the 18th Party Congress, which starts Nov. 8.

The leadership has tried to portray Mr. Bo?now accused of offenses including bribe-taking, sexual impropriety and abuse of power in a murder investigation of his wife?as an anomaly. Broader-than-expected allegations announced last month appeared designed to restore the party's damaged credibility in the eyes of a public grown increasingly angry over the issues of official abuse that Mr. Bo embodies. Mr. Bo has disappeared from public view and is believed to be in detention pending his trial.

Beijing Evening News

Coverage of the crash in the Beijing Evening News showed the destroyed car.

But the Ferrari crash and its aftermath encapsulate some of the same issues, such as children of the elite enjoying expensive luxuries?demonstrating how limited the party's taste is for policing its own upper ranks except when politically expedient.

The contrasting fates of Mr. Bo and Ling Jihua also reflect feuding and deal-making behind the scenes as outgoing leaders and former ones have tried to elevate prot?g?s to conserve their interests and political influence.

Within hours of the early-morning Ferrari crash March 18, Chinese social media buzzed with talk that the driver was a senior leader's son and with questions of how he could afford such a car. Worse, rumors spread that those in the car had been naked or half-naked.

Political Downfall in China

High-ranking Communist Party leaders ousted in recent years.

The crash and the cover-up added to a sense of public disquiet surrounding the downfall of Mr. Bo, who had a base of support within the military and security forces. Over the next two days, Twitter-like sites noted abnormal activities by security forces in Beijing. Some users circulated unsubstantiated rumors of a military coup attempt.

But even as the Bo scandal played out in public, the party suppressed all information surrounding the crashed car's driver, whose father, as head of the party's powerful General Office, supervised top leaders' scheduling, document flow and security.

Emergency workers and reporters were silenced. News of the crash and the driver's identity were scrubbed from the Internet. The badly hurt surviving passenger went into hiding. And at Peking University, classmates of Ling Gu, who was enrolled there under the alias Wang Ziyun, were told he had "gone overseas."

"We didn't believe that," said one classmate. "We knew something serious had happened. He couldn't have just disappeared."

Party insiders and Chinese reporters familiar with the matter said that the father, Ling Jihua, tried to cover up the crash with the help of the Central Guard Bureau, an agency his General Office oversaw.

"He was criticized for that?it should have been a police matter," said a person with connections in the Central Guard Bureau, an office responsible for the security of top leaders.

The only official sign of Ling Jihua's personal and political ordeal came almost six months later when it was announced, without explanation, that he had been shifted to a lesser job heading the United Front Work Department, in which he handles ties with nonparty entities.

Ling Jihua, like Mr. Bo, had previously been considered a front-runner for promotion in this fall's once-a-decade party leadership change.

"This was damaging not just for Ling but for Hu Jintao as well, because they are known to be so close," said a Chinese academic who advises and meets regularly with party leaders. "It complicated the discussions over Bo and the new leadership."

The dead youth, Ling Gu, graduated from Peking University's School of International Studies last year and enrolled at the university's Graduate School of Education, according to fellow students. He kept a relatively low profile at first, telling only a few of his background, though classmates soon realized he came from privilege.

He wore designer clothes, lived in a private residence rather than the dormitory, and often arrived late at classes or left early, students say.

He once boasted he had substantial income from an investment fund run by a friend of his father's, according to a person familiar with the conversation.

Bo Xilai: A WSJ Documentary

The fall of Bo Xilai, once a rising star in Chinese politics, has plunged the country into its biggest crisis since Tiananmen Square. In this documentary, The Wall Street Journal examines how his downfall has altered the debate about China's future.

"He was not a playboy. He was a good guy. But he did seem to have money and a lot of elite friends," one classmate said.

Several of his friends thought it was unlikely Ling Gu or his parents owned the Ferrari he crashed. But he had been seen driving a BMW and was known to have several friends from powerful business and political families who drove fast, expensive cars. Such families' children, known in Chinese as "fuerdai," or "second-generation rich," often lend each other luxury cars or borrow them from dealerships, said people with friends in that circle.

Ling Gu started a club at the university loosely modeled on Skull and Bones, the Yale secret society, say students who recall him discussing it. He invited other well-connected students or ones with top grades to join, but, knowing that Chinese authorities didn't tolerate secret societies, he gave the club an official-sounding name: the Strategic and International Studies Council.

Next in Line

After other trials, Bo is up

Associated Press

Bo Xilai?The former party chief in Chongqing was suspended from Party posts and placed under investigation for unspecified "serious disciplinary violations" on April 10. Eexpelled from the party on Sept. 28 and accused of wrongdoing involving bribes, power abuse and improper sexual relations with multiple women.

CCTV/Reuters

Zhang Xiaojun?The Bo family aide was convicted on Aug. 20 of murdering Briton Neil Heywood and sentenced to nine years in prison.

Associated Press

Wang Lijun?The former Chongqing police chief was convicted and sentenced to 15 years in prison on Sept. 24 for defection, bribery, abuse of power and "bending the law for selfish ends."

Reuters

Gu Kailai?Bo's wife on Aug. 20 was convicted of Heywood's murder and given a death sentence with a two-year reprieve (typically commuted to life imprisonment).

Classmates are unsure who the women in the Ferrari might have been. They said Mr. Ling had dated two women but neither was Tibetan.

A friend of the woman who survived the crash said she is in her 20s and is the daughter of a Tibetan government official. The friend quoted the survivor as saying she had met Mr. Ling before the night of the crash but didn't know him well, and knew him only by his adopted surname of Wang. She recalled him saying he was in the investment business.

The woman who died was described as closer to Mr. Ling. Severely burned, she died in July or August, according to the friend of the survivor.

The survivor needed at least one operation to stop internal bleeding, according to the friend. Initially, "they told us?she might not survive," the friend said.

According to the friend, the injured woman said the cause was simply driving too fast in slick conditions. It had started to snow.

The friend was too embarrassed to ask the survivor about the reports of nudity but doubted their veracity, describing the injured woman as "not a play-around type person."

Police and firefighters who responded at first struggled to identify Mr. Ling because he had a fake name on his license, said party insiders and Chinese reporters familiar with the matter.

Behind closed doors, insiders say, the incident soon played into the intense debate about the coming party leadership change and what to do about Mr. Bo. It was just weeks after Mr. Bo's former police chief had fled to a U.S. consulate with a tale of the murder of a British businessman by Mr. Bo's wife, a crime for which she would later be convicted.

Within the Communist Party, Mr. Bo had been allied with a faction centered on former Chinese president and party chief Jiang Zemin, who insiders say has been trying to secure the promotion of prot?g?s to the new leadership.

The Chongqing Drama

See key dates in the death of Neil Heywood in Chongqing and the drama surrounding Bo Xilai.

Players in China's Leadership Purge

Read more about the players in the case.

Party insiders said a rival faction led by current President Hu and Premier Wen Jiabao, many of whose members rose through the Communist Youth League, pushed hard to strip Mr. Bo of all of his party posts.

But the crash in mid-March meant that a leading figure in Mr. Hu's faction now was embroiled in a scandal that left Ling Jihua open to criticism from other party leaders.

"Former Chinese President Jiang Zemin is probably the most immediate beneficiary," wrote Chris Johnson, a former Central Intelligence Agency China analyst now at the Center for Strategic & International Studies in Washington, in a blog post.

Mr. Jiang's "early support for Bo Xilai risked putting him on his back foot in the succession sweepstakes. But Jiang seems to have seized on the Ling affair to come roaring back," Mr. Johnson wrote.

Although the catalyst for Mr. Bo's downfall was the flight of his former police chief, Mr. Bo had also caused controversy with a Maoist revival movement and apparent tolerance for an expensive lifestyle by his son at Oxford and Harvard universities.

Ling Jihua is a far less controversial figure than Mr. Bo but is important because of his close tie to the president, Mr. Hu. Mr. Ling held positions in the Communist Youth League when Mr. Hu led that body in the 1980s, according to Alice Miller, an expert on Chinese politics at the Hoover Institution.

Mr. Ling moved to the General Office in 1995 and had the job of preparing reading materials for Mr. Hu, according to Bo Zhiyue, a China expert at the National University of Singapore.

Mr. Ling has since been considered the president's closest adviser and has often accompanied him abroad.

In 2007, Mr. Hu secured Mr. Ling's appointment as a full member of the Central Committee, the party's top 370 leaders, and as director of the General Office. Before the Ferrari crash, Mr. Hu was thought to be trying to engineer Mr. Ling's promotion to the Politburo, China's top 25 leaders. And Mr. Ling, 56 this month, was spoken of as one likely to move up to the Politburo's elite Standing Committee in 2017 or 2022.

He may still make it onto the Politburo this fall, but his chances of rising further have been diminished, say party insiders, diplomats and political analysts.

News of the early-morning Ferrari crash was first reported in a brief article later that day in the Beijing Evening News, which didn't name the victims. It showed a photo of the wrecked car, which had been split in two.

A fire-service official who wrote the article and took the photo thought at first it was a routine accident, but was later reprimanded and had his camera and computer confiscated by police, according to a person familiar with the matter.

A person at the Beijing Evening News said the paper had been ordered by the central propaganda department not to disseminate the photograph. The police, the fire service and several local hospitals all declined to comment.

The article was soon deleted from the Beijing Evening News website. As rumors began to spread online, searches for terms including "Ferrari" and "Ferrari crash" were blocked.

The next day, the Global Times newspaper, a nationalistic tabloid connected to the People's Daily, the main party mouthpiece, reported that almost all online information about the crash had been deleted overnight, "triggering suspicions as to the identity of the deceased driver."

That story, too, was soon blocked. The journalist who wrote it declined to comment.

?James T. Areddy contributed to this article.

Source: http://shaigarg.blogspot.com/2012/10/chinas-ferrari-crash.html

time magazine person of the year 2011 new orleans jazz fest new orleans jazz fest louis ck michelle duggar heisman cp3