Founded in 1928, Canadian Business is the longest-publishing business magazine in Canada.
More than you probably realize, Canada’s future prosperity rests on the outcome of a political thriller unfolding an ocean away.
This much we know. On March 15, one of the contenders to become China’s president for the next decade, Bo Xilai, was sacked as the Communist Party boss for Chongqing, an inland megalopolis with a population roughly equal to Canada’s. Not only that, he was kicked out of the 25-member Politburo and thus out of contention to join the nine-member standing committee—the executive body that really runs China—at the end of this year.
Not long after, Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai, was charged with last November’s suspected murder of a British businessman, Neil Heywood. Bo and Gu had been China’s most potent power couple, offspring of revolutionary heroes and renowned for fighting organized crime. Their revival of Mao-era patriotic songs was a callback to the country’s past—yet they had a son at Harvard known for driving a Ferrari.
The rest of the tale is hearsay: that a heavily indebted Heywood, a former family friend and fixer who had helped get Bo junior into Harrow (Heywood’s prestigious alma mater in England) had demanded a bigger cut of a business deal; that he threatened to expose underhanded dealings by Gu if he didn’t get it; that Bo’s police chief, Wang Lijun, had confronted him over the alleged murder (the death was originally put down to alcohol poisoning), after which Wang sought asylum at an American consulate;