prison, where he was charged and convicted of many crimes, including being "a backbone general of the Liu-Deng Black Headquarters", "a core element of the Liu Shaoqi renegade clique", "a big traitor", "a counter-revolutionary revisionist element", and "a Three Anti element". His captors claimed that many of these crimes should be punished by death. Because of Bo's stubborn refusal to break down and "confess" to these charges, he was subjected to various means of torture throughout 1966 and 1967, during which he was routinely beaten and systematically deprived of food, water and sleep. While imprisoned, Bo attempted to keep notes on the circumstances of his beatings by writing on scraps of newspaper, but his jailers confiscated these and used them as evidence of Bo's recalcitrance. Eventually, his hands trembled so much that he could not hold chopsticks, and he had to scrape his rice off the floor of his cell. When he complained to his jailers that this was "not the communist way", his jailers only beat him more severely. Bo's children were jailed or sent to the countryside, and his wife died in captivity (she was reportedly beaten to death by Red Guards, but they claimed that she committed suicide). Bo Xiyong, Bo Xilai, and Bo Xicheng were imprisoned at the ages of sixteen, seventeen and seventeen (respectively), and Bo Xining was sent to the countryside at the age of fourteen. Bo remained in prison for over a decade. Career under Deng Xiaoping Three years after Mao died, in 1979, Deng Xiaoping led an effort to rehabilitate members of the Communist Party who had been persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, and Bo was released from prison and reinstated as a member of the Politburo, and to his former position of vice premier. He joined the ranks of a small group of other senior officials of Deng's generation who Deng had returned to government known as the "Eight Immortals". In 1982 he was promoted to the Central Advisory Commission, a formal group of Party elders with over forty years of political experience. During the 1980s the group clashed with a group of younger reformers within the Party led by Hu Yaobang. Bo came to support economic reform after one of his trips in the 1980s to Boeing's facilities in the United States. During his visit, Bo discovered that there were only two airplanes parked at the facility. He asked the