Photos allegedly showing the luxury apartment of Bo Xilai’s son Bo Guagua have appeared on Chinese microblogs, suggesting that a Hong Kong reporter may have climbed onto a balcony to invade the young man’s privacy.
One of the photos shows a very messy living room scattered with a large Lego model of the Millennium Falcon from the Star Wars movie, some pantyhose, various Sony Playstation video games and a bottle of Macallan whisky.
They were taken by a Hong Kong reporter who had staked out the apartment building for three days after Guagua was seen being escorted away by men believed to be US officials on the night of April 12, according to a microblogger named masteranpuruo, a Boston-based investor and Chinese writer. It was posted on April 19.
The photo is said to have been taken through a living room window of the first-story apartment known to have been rented by Guagua at a cost of $2,950 a month. The apartment is located in a luxury building near the Harvard campus that contains a doorman, a roof sundeck and a gym.
Various published reports had suggested that Guagua had left his finals preparation at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government to hide out in New York City after his father and mother were detained by central government authorities on charges, respectively, of “severe breaches of party discipline” and the suspected murder of British businessman Neil Heywood. But on April 18 the US State Department confirmed that the 23-year-old is still enrolled at Harvard.
Bo Guagua has been a favorite target of overseas Chinese media since his days as a student at the Harrow School and Oxford in Britain. Since 2010 he has been enrolled as a masters student at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. The young man’s image as a free-spending partier and playboy combined with his father’s fame as the populist Communist Party boss of Chongqing, made him an irresistible subject of gossip columnist. Their interest only intensified on March 15 when the central government began stripping his father of his various posts. Until then Bo Xilai was regarded a top prospect to be elevated to the 9-person Politburo Standing Committee which effectively rules China.
