Hong Kong, London, New York: The Financial Times has today launched its latest ebook The Bo Xilai Scandal: Power, Death and Politics in China by Jamil Anderlini, the FT’s Beijing bureau chief.

Published in partnership with Penguin, the book greatly expands and brings up to date an extraordinary tale around the rise and fall of Bo Xilai, the disgraced former politician and contender for the top leadership of the Communist Party, which became an instant hit with FT readers when it was first published in the FT Weekend Magazine this summer.

“An outstanding journalist who has gained international recognition for his unrivalled insight and understanding of China’s complex leadership structure, Jamil Anderlini produced some of the first global revelations around the country’s powerful ‘princelings’. With this ebook we are delighted to bring even more colour and depth to this important story ahead of China’s once-in-a decade leadership transition,” said Lionel Barber, editor of the Financial Times.

Weaving together lurid detail and political context, Anderlini provides a compelling account of the popular politician’s fall, brought about by his wife’s murder of a British businessman, and involving the most serious defection attempt in recent Communist Party history. In clear, elegant prose, Anderlini explains why the high political drama matters for Asia’s biggest economy, and the rest of the world.

The ebook is available to download from the Apple iBookstoreAmazon and Kobo for £0.99 or its local equivalent. This is the third offering in a new publishing line for the FT, listed at www.ft.com/ebook, which includes If Greece goes… and The Olympians 1928-2012.

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For further information, please contact:

Asia:
Azmar Sukandar
Head of Communications, Asia Pacific
T: +852 2905 5519
E: azmar.sukandar@ft.com

UK/EMEA:
Kristina Eriksson
Head of Communications, EMEA
T: +44 (0)20 7873 4961
E: kristina.eriksson@ft.com

US:
Andrew Green
Communications Manager
Financial Times
T: +1 917-551-5093
E: andrew.green@ft.com

About the Financial Times:

The Financial Times, one of the world’s leading business news organisations, is recognised internationally for its authority, integrity and accuracy. Providing essential news, comment, data and analysis for the global business community, the FT has a combined paid print and digital circulation of almost 600,000 (Deloitte assured, 2 April 2012 – 1 July 2012) and a combined print and online average daily readership of 2.1 million people worldwide (PwC assured, May 2012). FT.com has more than 4.8 million registered users and over 300,000 paying digital subscribers. The newspaper has a global print circulation of 280,124 (ABC, August 2012).

About Jamil Anderlini:

A fluent Mandarin Chinese speaker, Jamil Anderlini was appointed Financial Times’ Beijing bureau chief in February 2011, having spent four years as Beijing correspondent. He was named Journalist of the Year for his China reporting at the 2010 Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA) Editorial Excellence Awards, and won the Best Digital Award at the 2010 Amnesty International Media Awards for his video coverage of Chinese petitioners seeking justice in Beijing. He was the inaugural winner of the FT’s Jones-Mauthner Memorial Prize in 2012 for his ‘courageous reporting and high-quality writing at a time of great political upheaval in China’. A native of New Zealand, Anderlini has mostly lived in Shanghai and Beijing since 2000.

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