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BEIJING — The tale has taken on mythic proportions in China , tainting one of the country's most ambitious leaders and adding fuel to a scandal that is still unfolding in the halls of power here.
Bo Guagua, the younger son of Bo Xilai, in 2007.
By DAVID BARBOZA and EDWARD WONG
Published: April 30, 2012
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Jon M. Huntsman Jr. with his eldest daughter Mary Anne at his residence in Beijing in 2009.
It goes like this: Bo Guagua, the younger son of the leader, Bo Xilai , arrived one evening last spring at the home of the United States ambassador to pick up one of the ambassador's daughters for a dinner date. He was supposedly wearing a tuxedo and driving a red Ferrari, an emblem of the privileged lives led by the children of "princelings," members of elite Communist Party families.
At the time, the elder Mr. Bo, party chief of the western metropolis of Chongqing, was preaching a return to the socialist values of the Mao era.
The account gained prominence when it appeared on the front page of The Wall Street Journal in November. It has since circulated widely in China and become a political weapon wielded against the elder Mr. Bo, who was purged from his party posts in April and put under investigation as a suspect in "serious disciplinary violations" after the flight of his former police chief to an American Consulate. Gu Kailai, his wife and the mother of Bo Guagua, is a suspect in the murder last fall of a British businessman .
In March, as Mr. Bo felt the pressure from his political rivals building, he gave a news conference at the annual National People's Congress in Beijing, saying "a few people have been pouring filth on Chongqing and me and my family" and called the Ferrari story "sheer rubbish."
Though his son, 24, is known to lead a lavish lifestyle, many of the details in the public account of that evening turned out to be incorrect, according to interviews with the son; Abby Huntsman Livingston, a daughter of the ambassador, Jon M. Huntsman Jr. ; and three others present at the dinner.
The interviews help reveal how what began as gossip made the rounds in expatriate circles in Beijing until it became an accepted truth about the Bo family. One person who told the version of the story that eventually surfaced was Mr. Huntsman. At least two diplomats in Beijing said they heard it from him before he left Beijing in late April 2011. (The New York Times reported this April that American officials had said Bo Guagua came to the ambassador's residence in a Ferrari. )
Ms. Livingston, one of two Huntsman daughters at the dinner, said in her role as family spokeswoman, "My dad's version of the story has always been a reflection of what we told him."
The way the story caught fire so quickly shows the kind of fascination that the lifestyles of China's elite can evoke in a nation where the upper echelons of the party exist in a world apart from those they govern.
"I did not drive at all that evening, and certainly did not sit in a red sports car," Bo Guagua said by telephone on Friday, in his first interview since his father was deposed and both parents were put under investigation. "I'm not sure where this story comes from."
Even Mr. Bo's appearance was wrong in the account: he did not wear a tuxedo, people at the dinner said.
The scrutiny of Mr. Bo's lifestyle has intensified during the scandal. A graduate of the elite Harrow School and Oxford, Mr. Bo is now a student at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and an aspiring Internet entrepreneur. He has driven a Porsche in Cambridge, Mass., has lived in an expensive apartment and has a penchant for polo.
In two telephone conversations, he declined to discuss the scandal surrounding his family, but did discuss the one evening in Beijing, in early April 2011, that he spent with Ms. Livingston and Mary Anne Huntsman, 27, Mr. Huntsman's eldest daughter.
In e-mail exchanges over the past week, Ms. Livingston also gave statements that refute the public account of the event. She said the woman who had organized the dinner picked up her and her sister at the ambassador's residence and drove them to Nobu, an upscale Japanese restaurant. There, they met Mr. Bo for the first time, along with several other strangers. The organizer, a member of the expatriate community in Beijing who spoke only on the condition of anonymity, gave her account of the dinner in an interview, and it matched Ms. Livingston's.
Mr. Huntsman had met the younger Mr. Bo and his father before in Chongqing and had been so impressed that he wanted the children to get together, said one person who had been at the dinner. Mr. Bo said he had arrived at the dinner in a black Audi sedan driven by a chauffeur, a common car among families of senior officials.
The dinner lasted more than an hour. Then Mr. Bo, Mary Anne Huntsman and a European friend of Mr. Bo's left for a bar. Ms. Huntsman stayed there for an hour or two before taking a taxi home, Ms. Livingston said.
It is unclear why Mr. Huntsman passed on a different account or why his daughters did not seek earlier to correct it. Ms. Livingston declined to address those questions.
The article in The Journal said the reporter had heard the story from "several people familiar with it." Ashley Huston, a spokeswoman for Dow Jones & Company, The Journal's publisher, said in an e-mail: "The Wall Street Journal stands behind its story. We never discuss sourcing."
Though everyone agrees on how the daughters were picked up for dinner, there are competing accounts among Mr. Bo and the daughters of some details later that night.
Ms. Livingston said Ms. Huntsman had told her that she left Nobu with Mr. Bo and his European friend and got into a red sports car, which Mr. Bo drove to a bar "at a very fast speed."
"Mary Anne described it as a Ferrari, but she is not completely knowledgeable about cars and doesn't want to mistake the actual car type," Ms. Livingston wrote in an e-mail on Saturday. In an e-mail four days earlier, she said her sister had ridden in a car with Mr. Bo after dinner but "didn't take notice of the car type." Ms. Livingston declined to explain the contradictions in her statements.
In an interview, Mr. Bo's European friend said Mr. Bo and his driver had picked him up for dinner in the black Audi, and then they had gone in that same car with Ms. Huntsman to the bar. He said, "In no way was there a red car."
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