On April 10, 2012, Chinese authorities announced that Politburo member Bo Xilai had been removed from both the Politburo and the Central Committee and that his wife Gu Kailai was implicated in the murder of a British national in Chongqing last fall. Three days later Dr. Cheng Li, America's leading scholar of elite politics in China and director of research and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution's John L. Thornton China Center, discussed Bo Xilai's fall and its implications for China's political transitions taking place this autumn in a conference call moderated by Steve Orlins, president of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations.