A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel: Murder, Money, and an Epic Power Struggle in China

The downfall of Bo Xilai in China was more than a darkly thrilling mystery. It revealed a cataclysmic internal power struggle between Communist Party factions, one that reached all the way to China's new president Xi Jinping.

The scandalous story of the corruption of the Bo Xilai family -- the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood; Bo's secret lovers; the secret maneuverings of Bo's supporters; the hasty trial and sentencing of Gu Kailai, Bo's wife -- was just the first rumble of a seismic power struggle that continues to rock the very foundation of China's all-powerful Communist Party. By the time it is over, the machinations in Beijing and throughout the country that began with Bo's fall could affect China's economic development and disrupt the world's political and economic order.

Pin Ho and Wenguang Huang have pieced together the details of this fascinating political drama from firsthand reporting and an unrivaled array of sources, some very high in the Chinese government. This was the first scandal in China to play out in the international media -- details were leaked, sometimes invented, to non-Chinese news outlets as part of the power plays that rippled through the government. The attempt to manipulate the Western media, especially, was a fundamental dimension to the story, and one that affected some of the early reporting. A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel returns to the scene of the crime and shows not only what happened in Room 1605 but how the threat of the story was every bit as important in the life and death struggle for power that followed. It touched celebrities and billionaires and redrew the cast of the new leadership of the Communist Party. The ghost of Neil Heywood haunts China to this day.

Author: Pin Ho, Wenguang Huang
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 04/02/2013
Pages: 352
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.25lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.00w x 1.40d
ISBN13: 9781610392730
ISBN10: 1610392736
BISAC Categories:
- Political Science | World | Asian
- Political Science | Political Ideologies | Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
- History | Asia | China

About the Author
Pin Ho, a journalist and writer, is the founder of Mirror Media Groups and has covered Chinese politics for twenty-five years. He broke the news on leadership lineups for three consecutive Communist Party Congresses since 2002. His book, China's Princelings, was the first to coin that phrase to describe the children of Chinese revolutionaries, and is the source for much that has appeared in the accounts of various Western journalists.

Wenguang Huang is a writer, journalist, and translator whose articles and translations have been published in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Paris Review, and the Christian Science Monitor. He is most recently the author of the memoir The Little Red Guard and the translator for Liao Yiwu's For a Song and One Hundred Songs, The Corpse Walker, and God Is Red.