After Bo’s ouster, a mysterious death adds to China’s churning rumor mill

BEIJING — Until a week ago, few Chinese had ever heard of Neil Heywood, and fewer still raised any questions when the 41-year-old British business consultant was found dead in his hotel room. Today, he is so famous — and such a sensitive topic — that China’s Internet censors have banned searches of Heywood’s Chinese name, Hai Wu De.

Such is the insatiable appetite of tens of millions of Chinese for news — no matter how tangential or speculative — about the country’s biggest political drama in two decades that “Heywood” has joined “tanks,” “military coup” and a host of other search terms now proscribed by the ruling Communist Party as it struggles to calm a national spasm of jitters.

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(Corrects spelling of guest's name in report originally published yesterday.) March 22 (Bloomberg) –- Grant Aldonas, former U.S. Commerce Department undersecretary for international trade, talks about the current trade environment between the U.S. and China. Aldonas also discusses Bo Xilai's ouster last week as head of Chongqing.

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Bo Xilai, during his time as Communist Party head in Chongqing, initiated a campaign in summer 2011 to promote “Red Culture” to remind residents of the past glories of the party.

Through Internet postings, Twitter-like messages and articles in Hong Kong’s Chinese-language media, Heywood’s death in November in the southwest megacity of Chongqing is helping to fill a massive thirst for news created March 15 when, with a single sentence, China’s official news agency announced that one of the country’s rising political stars, Bo Xilai, had lost his job as Chongqing’s Communist Party boss.

Perhaps only nine men — the members of the party’s Politburo Standing Committee — really know what led to Bo’s downfall. But the sudden celebrity of a previously obscure Briton highlights how difficult it has become for the political machinery — rooted in a doctrine of intense secrecy and discipline devised by Vladimir Lenin nearly a century ago — to cope with a flood of fact and fantasy unleashed by 21st-century technology.

Though almost entirely hidden from view inside the Zhongnanhai leadership compound in Beijing, the drama at the summit of the party ahead of a ­once-in-a-decade leadership transition is playing out as an increasingly bizarre spectator sport.

The party is not without defenses. A massive censorship apparatus adds new words daily to a list of taboo topics. Even the word “Ferrari” is blocked, after a mysterious March 18 traffic accident in Beijing that may, or may not, have killed the son of a top party official.

Until his sacking, Bo, the charismatic son of one of the party’s revolutionary-era grandees, was widely thought to be in line for a seat on the Standing Committee in the fall. But Bo’s ambitions crumbled when his former right-hand man, Chongqing’s then recently fired police chief, Wang Lijun, fled to the U.S. Consulate in Chengdu and spent 24 hours holed up inside.

Wang, hauled to Beijing by state security agents, is under formal investigation, but officials have made no comment on Bo’s exact status. Even his whereabouts are unknown.

And, fueled in part by overseas media reports recycled by Chinese Web sites, there has been a storm of speculation that Heywood may have been bumped off by Bo, his family or his entourage.

The British government, citing the swirling conjecture, said this week that it had formally asked Chinese authorities to reopen an investigation into Heywood’s death.

According to foreign businessmen who knew him, Heywood gave the impression of having close ties to Bo and his family. “He was kind of a courtier,” said a fellow British business consultant who crossed paths with him in China. “He was clearly close to the family. What puzzled me was, why are they interested in him?” Business is likely to have played a role, though nobody seems sure what Heywood did for the family on the business side.