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No man exemplifies modern China's contradictions--and curious turns of fate--more than Bo Xilai, 62. The son of one of the Communist Party's Eight Immortals, Bo enjoyed a childhood of privilege. But his life was upended in 1966 when Chairman Mao Zedong unleashed the Cultural Revolution. Bo's father was purged (although later rehabilitated), and his mother died under mysterious circumstances. Tossed out of school, Bo adapted to a new life as a fervent Red Guard; one version of events has him denouncing his father. Whatever really happened, Bo emerged from that chaotic period a fiercely ambitious man. After divorcing his first wife, he married Gu, the daughter of a revolutionary general. That seemed to cement his political pedigree, and he was dispatched to the coastal city of Dalian to test his leadership skills.
While there--and later as party boss of Liaoning province where Dalian is located--Bo came into his own. Unlike other, wooden Chinese leaders who mostly studied engineering in college, the former journalism student perfected the art of the sound bite. He positioned Dalian as a green, inviting city open for foreign business. Evidently enjoying the trappings of power, he liked to show off how he could start up a fountain in the main square below his office via remote control. But even as investment flowed in, Dalian residents whispered about the Bo family's excesses. Dozens of his foes, from political rivals to nosy journalists, ended up in jail. His wife, meanwhile, was involved in business ventures that seemed to profit from her proximity to power.
Bo Guagua, their son, enjoyed an upbringing completely at odds with the ascetic virtues of communism. He was the first mainland Chinese citizen to attend the prestigious British boarding school Harrow, and he later completed an undistinguished turn at Oxford University (from which he was suspended for one year for "the academic reason of not working hard enough," according to the university's press office) before arriving at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government in 2010. While at Oxford, Bo showed that he shared his father's taste for political theater, coaxing martial-arts star Jackie Chan to appear with him onstage and cajoling other Chinese students to vote for him in an election for a leadership position at a university debating society. (He lost, even though, contemporaries say, he bought umbrellas for fellow students during a rainstorm and threw champagne-fueled parties.)