Locustland | A Chongqing tragedy in three acts
It's not quite literature, but some suspension of disbelief is still needed
Think of what follows as a manifestation of remaining support for Bo Xilai, material evidence that some does exist.
Each day last week, US-based Chinese political gossip site Boxun published a series of increasingly sensational rumours regarding the case now being built against Bo Xilai, ending with a list of 89 people who were meant to form post-coup China's core leadership under Bo.
Not to be outdone, Boxun competitor Duowei then published three letters addressed to Chongqing and the nation, supposedly drafted by Bo in March weeks before being suspended from his positions on the Communist Party's Central Committee and its Politburo, with the third instalment arriving October 8.
And pieces they are: list-like re-interpretations of every major detail that has been reported throughout the saga, clearly intended to convince the reader that Bo was a victim of his circumstances, but also, according to the narrator, who describes smuggling the letters to the United States via USB - we're spared the exact details - in that this trilogy had to be painfully reconstructed from the scrambled remains of nearly a hundred plain text files Bo was somehow able to compose, one at a time, on a laptop computer between March 9-11.
Act One: Bo reveals he always knew Wang was mentally ill and out of control but could not be stopped
