Pleading with mafiosos who had cornered him while he was on a study tour of Italy, Wang Lijun, the former police chief of the Chinese city of Chongqing whose dramatic bolt to a U.S. consulate in February set off China’s biggest political crisis in two decades, explained his mission.
2 comments:
After Scandal, China Takes a Moral Inventory
By DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW
19 April 2012
Pleading with mafiosos who had cornered him while he was on a study tour of Italy, Wang Lijun, the former police chief of the Chinese city of Chongqing whose dramatic bolt to a U.S. consulate in February set off China’s biggest political crisis in two decades, explained his mission.
“I’m Chinese, and I’m a Communist Party member,” he said to the men, who suspected he was an F.B.I. plant. “I came here because I’m trying to understand, how is it that a Communist Party can turn into a mafia?”
The story cannot be verified independently, but Huang Jiren, chairman of the Chongqing Writers Association, who was part of a team writing an authorized book about the anti-crime campaign of the city’s disgraced Communist Party secretary, Bo Xilai, insisted in an interview last year that it really happened.
Apocryphal or not, it touches on a deep fear among millions of Chinese today — that their government may be dissolving into a criminal state. It also explains the profound impact of the “midnight fright,” as it was quickly called here, the 11 p.m. announcement on April 10 by Xinhua, the state-run news agency, that Mr. Bo had been suspended from the Communist Party Central Committee and its Politburo for “serious disciplinary violations” and his wife, Gu Kailai, arrested on suspicion of arranging the murder of a British businessman and onetime friend of the Bo family.
With Mr. Bo’s fall amid lurid accusations of corruption and murder, a sizable chunk of the party’s legitimacy has vanished among those who still believed the Communists were on the side of the ordinary person, as Mr. Bo seemed to be with his policies supporting the poor in Chongqing.
Many are wondering: After six decades of one-party rule and three decades of rapid economic growth, is there no bottom to the moral decline of their nation? And, frighteningly: Is the government so steeped in criminality, as the police official who should know more about it than nearly any other person in China seemed to be saying?
“My father, an old Communist, feels very sad about Bo’s downfall, because he can’t understand how the party could contain so many bad people for such a long time without anything being done,” a former government ministry employee said in an e-mail, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case. “He isn’t the only one who thinks so. There must be millions of people today wondering the same thing.”
According to Mr. Huang, the Italian story ended like this: Impressed by Mr. Wang’s speech, the Italians sat him down and said, “Tell us about China.” Mr. Wang did, though Mr. Huang said he did not know the details of that conversation. Deeply interested, the Italians, familiar with both leftist terror and a mafia state, listened. Later they set Mr. Wang free.
Secret societies, or triads, have long flourished in China, occupying a vague ground that included anti-dynastic activities, mutual help societies and outright criminality. Sun Yat-sen, the Republican revolutionary, and Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist leader, both participated in differing ways in different times. In the years before Hong Kong’s return to Chinese rule in 1997, top leaders like Deng Xiaoping and Tao Siju, the public security minister, declared that some of Hong Kong’s triad members were “patriotic,” according to news reports at the time. The statements were read as a nod of acceptance by Beijing.
Some Chinese believe Mr. Bo and Mr. Wang’s high-profile campaign against organized crime in Chongqing may have been merely a classic maneuver whereby one gang replaces another. And despite his reported concern about the reach of organized crime into government, no one believes Mr. Wang’s hands are clean.
“The central government is furious with him for going to the Americans,” said the former government ministry employee in a separate telephone interview. “They said, ‘Why didn’t you come to us?’ But Wang knew he was too implicated to go to the center. He didn’t believe the center would protect him.”
The book Mr. Huang and three other authors were compiling focused on Mr. Bo’s and Mr. Wang’s “Peaceful Chongqing” campaign, which began in 2009.
For a year and a half starting in the summer of 2010, Mr. Huang worked closely with Mr. Wang on the account. Mr. Wang behaved like an editor, closely scrutinizing the text, Mr. Huang said.
The authors were given their own room in Chongqing’s police headquarters and access to all case files, including those marked “top secret.” “We got everything we asked for,” Mr. Huang said.
He said he had read hundreds of documents, then spent about a year interviewing scores of people in many secret jails around Chongqing municipality, set up to house thousands arrested during the anti-crime campaign.
The jails were in the city of Chongqing itself, its suburbs and outlying towns like Fuling, downriver on the Yangtze, he said.
“They’re all around, in the city, the suburbs, the countryside. Some have hundreds of people in them,” Mr. Huang said. “We went to many jails, to task forces,” set up by officials to handle the campaign. “There were a lot of task forces. We asked a lot of questions,” he said.
It isn’t clear how many people are still in custody, nearly half a year later, nor how the government, having toppled Mr. Bo, will deal with them.
One of the prisoners Mr. Huang interviewed was Peng Changjian, a former deputy police chief of Chongqing, sentenced to life in prison for corruption and shielding criminal gangs.
Mr. Peng told Mr. Huang how, on his way to a meeting one day, he glanced at his expensive wristwatch and realized it would reveal his own corruption.
“He took off his watch, which was worth tens of thousands of renminbi, and smashed it on the ground,” Mr. Huang said.
Unfortunately for the many people in China and around the world keen to learn more, it is unclear whether the book will ever be published, with its sponsors now in disgrace.
Post a Comment