A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel (6 page)

A businessperson well connected with the Ministry of Public Security argued that Zhou Yongkang, chairman of the party’s Central Politics and Law Commission, was the one who made the official connection between Wang and Bo. Zhou Yongkang, who is featured later in the book, owed Wang a favor—the anti-crime hero released several of Zhou’s friends who had been arrested during the 2002 crackdown on “oil rats” in Panjin. The two became close friends after Zhou was made minister of public security. “All the key personnel changes had to be approved by Zhou,” said the businessman. “Otherwise, it would have been administratively impossible for Wang to make that big career leap.”

Regardless of how the two met, officials in Chongqing say Bo and Wang hit it off. Bo, on multiple private and public occasions, played up Wang’s credentials and his fearlessness. For Wang, the son of a railway worker, one would assume he cherished the honor of working with a prominent princeling and a rising political star capable of opening up a new world for him.

The honeymoon was sweet. Wang started out as deputy chief of the city’s public security bureau. Nine months later, Bo made good on his initial promise and appointed Wang bureau chief.

Wang did not disappoint either. In the first year, he embarked on what he called a “thorough social investigation.” He disguised himself as a cabdriver, visiting different neighborhoods and talking to residents. As in other parts of China, Chongqing was plagued with rising crime rates. In some areas, prostitution and illegal gambling dens were operating just a short distance from police stations.

On the early morning of June 3, 2009, a forty-four-year-old man named Li Minghang—neighbors described him to police as a polite and mysterious renter in a dilapidated housing development with a fancy Scottish name, Edinburg—was gunned down outside his apartment. Subsequent police investigations revealed the tenant, who drove a BMW, was a drug trafficker. He had been killed by a mobster in a dispute over illicit profit. The incident grabbed national headlines and posed a challenge for the Bo administration.

Wang’s special investigative team soon captured three suspects who had allegedly plotted the shooting in Edinburg. Based on the suspects’ confessions and tips provided by residents, Wang arrested more than fifty suspected of gunrunning, drug trafficking, and gambling. The two chief suspects were found guilty and executed in six months. The swift resolution proved to be politically popular. Riding on the success of the case, Wang also mobilized hundreds of armed policemen to wipe out several illegal ammunition and gun manufacturing facilities hidden inside the mountains outside Chongqing. In response to the overwhelming public support for such initiatives, Bo instructed Wang to launch a citywide
da hei
, or “Smashing Black” campaign against the mobsters terrorizing the city. At a conference for police, Wang declared in his usual dramatic style, “We’ll stir up a storm and generate an avalanche.”

Wang’s yearlong campaign targeting mafia organizations involved 10,000 police broken up into 329 investigative teams. State media reported that nearly 5,000 people were taken into police custody and among them, 3,273 of them were prosecuted. The court convicted 520 people, with 65 executed or given life imprisonment. In the same time period, police successfully cracked 4,172 previously unsolved cases and broke up 128 crime rings. However, a recently released Chongqing government white paper showed a much smaller number of arrests. The media’s exaggerated figures probably spooked many senior leaders in Beijing, who feared that Bo could expand his program nation-wide—and threaten their political and financial interests—if he joined the Politburo Standing Committee.

Over the course of the campaign, Wang also targeted police officers who, he said, were working with criminals. “We are supposed to
attack the underworld, but some in the police force are more corrupt and dangerous than the mobsters,” Wang told the Chinese state media. In addition, a policeman in Chongqing remembered receiving a short notice about a meeting one morning:

       
We walked into the auditorium and saw the entrance guarded by fully armed policemen. People could smell blood. Wang stood on the stage and read off the names from a list. Most of the people on the list were in leadership positions and have been found taking bribes or collaborating with criminals. Each time a name was called, Wang would announce the charges and follow them with an order, “You are under arrest.” At the end of the meeting, seven officers were handcuffed and taken away on the spot.

By the end of 2010, more than 1,000 police officers and government officials had been charged with corruption and abuse of power, including many high-ranking officials, such as Zhang Tao, vice president of the Chongqing People’s High Court, who received the death penalty, later commuted, and Wu Xiaoqing, a senior court official; prison officials claimed he committed suicide while in jail awaiting trial.

The arrest and trial of Wen Qiang, the head of Chongqing’s justice bureau, galvanized the nation. Wen, a veteran police officer of thirty-eight years, was deputy chief of the Chongqing public security bureau before Wang. Ironically, Wang and Wen, who are three years apart in age, shared oddly parallel lives. Born in 1956, Wen grew up in Sichuan’s Bai county—a poverty-stricken region—and farmed rice paddies as a teenager. He was recruited by the Luzhou Police Academy in 1977 and became a junior police officer in his hometown. As with Wang, Wen was said to be dedicated and fearless, and was promoted to deputy chief of the Chongqing public security bureau at the age of thirty-eight. He had received numerous medals and awards for cracking difficult criminal cases. In 2000, while Wang was hailed in the north as an anticrime hero, Wen earned a similar title in the southwest after capturing Zhang Jun, who was dubbed as China’s number-one “bandit” and “monstrous murderer.” Zhang had traversed the country
for eight years with three partners, stealing 6 million yuan in jewelry and cash and killing twenty-eight people. Despite the nationwide manhunt, Zhang and his partners, who were well-trained in special military skills, evaded police.

Wen was under tremendous pressure to capture Zhang after the bandit and his two partners seized an armored truck in front of a bank in Changde city in the nearby Hunan province on September 1, 2000, killing two guards and two cashiers while snatching two micro-submachine guns. A witness inside the bank pushed the alarm, forcing them to flee, so Zhang stopped a taxi, shot the driver, and fled empty-handed. Despite his indiscriminate killing sprees, the seemingly invincible Zhang was deemed a hero by many, who applauded him for killing mostly corrupt officials. Some female college students even wrote him love letters.

Wen had studied and tracked Zhang for six years. Two weeks after the failed armored car heist, Wen zeroed in and captured him with a girlfriend at his hideout in a small town not far from Chongqing. After Zhang was wrestled to the ground, Wen had a picture taken, with one foot ostensibly trampling Zhang’s face. On April 21, 2001, Zhang was executed. A novelist wrote a book about Wen’s legendary career, much as Wang’s story had been told to the wider populace of China through a TV drama.

WANG AND WEN, two legendary anticrime heroes, met on June 26, 2008. As the Chinese saying goes, “Two tigers cannot coexist on one mountain.” Wang took over the deputy police chief’s position that Wen had held for sixteen years, and Wen was transferred to what was regarded as a less important post: chief of the justice bureau. At the handover ceremony, an official recalled, Wen shook hands with Wang and went on to express support for the party’s decision in his farewell speech. Over the next year, the two remained amicable. But Wang was secretly plotting—he had heard stories about Wen’s cozy relations with leaders of the mafia and his multiple young mistresses. Besides, the impetuous Wen, favored by the city’s previous party chief, was said to have defied orders from Bo.

Wang made his move on August 7, 2009, sending police to arrest Wen at a conference in Beijing. He was flown back to Chongqing, where Wang was waiting at the airport with one hundred fully armed police officers. Police raided Wen’s home and discovered a plastic bag containing 20 million yuan hidden under a pond in his courtyard. Over the next few days, local and national newspapers carried a series of salacious stories based on information provided by the public security bureau. Wen was portrayed as a godfather figure who had shielded mobsters from the authorities. One article said Wen had attended the birthday party of a mafia leader’s daughter and accepted a huge amount of money. Another article alleged that Wen had asked his subordinates to get him a young girl who was virgin, at the cost of 100,000 yuan. Wen’s sister-in-law had been arrested and detained two weeks before he was, allegedly for running a gambling and drug ring. She was depicted as a nymphomaniac who kept sixteen young men as sex slaves.

The public outcry against Wen Qiang generated by the lurid media reports effectively blocked any attempts by his supporters in Beijing to intervene. In the end, Wen was charged with accepting bribes up to 12 million yuan and raping a college student. In April 2010, eight months after his arrest, the court sentenced Wen to death. His wife and his sister-in-law got eighteen years respectively for taking bribes, operating illegal gambling dens, and harboring drug users.

Wen was awakened in his jail cell early on the morning of July 7, 2011, and told he would be executed. Two hours later, he met with his sister and his teenage son for ten minutes. Reportedly his last words to his son, words many believe were concocted by Wang, were, “Daddy ends up like this today because I have committed crimes. Don’t hate society. Be an honest person. If others give you money, don’t accept it.”

Wen was executed by lethal injection early that morning. In the afternoon, his relatives were called to the crematorium and were handed a plastic bag containing his ashes.

Wang bragged about Wen’s swift conviction, calling it “Chongqing speed,” though critics claimed that Wen’s conviction was politically motivated and that some of the charges, such as raping a young woman who later became his mistress, were fabricated to justify the
death penalty. When Wen Qiang initially refused to admit guilt, Wang detained his son for ten months. During interrogations, Wen was tortured and denied due process. In December 2012, a Hong Kong newspaper disclosed that Wang had allegedly planted the bag of cash under a pond in Wen Qiang’s outdoor courtyard.

Following Wen’s death, Wang restructured the police force. He set up a “talent retraining center”—where police officers he considered incompetent or disobedient were sent to reflect on their “mistakes” and get brainwashed. In the next two years, Wang fired, detained, and imprisoned nearly 1,800 police officers. All the leaders within the police force, more than 3,000 of them, lost their jobs but were free to reapply for their positions, as could anyone else. Wang took the opportunity to install nearly seventy of his former colleagues from northeast China in leadership positions to boost his power base.

Another of Wang’s populist restructuring programs was to merge the traffic and foot-patrol police units, putting 800 to 1,000 police on the city streets every day, with a policeman no more than three minutes away from a crime taking place. The move made Chongqing one of the best-patrolled cities in the world.

In November 2012, a police officer in Chongqing posted the following observation online about Wang:

       
[He] was stubborn and strove to do everything in a speedy manner. He was tough on those who failed to follow his instructions. For example, Wang required those in managerial positions to work fourteen-hour days and would constantly make midnight phone calls to local branches. If the officer on duty did not answer, the branch chief could be in trouble for dereliction of duty. People worked under constant fear. Some could no longer handle the pressure and invented excuses [or simply] left the police force.

In 2011, Wang’s popularity was high. In January, he was elected as a delegate to the National People’s Congress. In May, he was appointed deputy mayor and many residents called for making Wang China’s minister of public security.

Wang had not attended college after graduating from high school. In a country where academic degrees are valued, his lack of education was a defect, which he set about correcting. His official résumé indicates that he obtained a master’s degree in business administration through a one-year correspondence education program at something called “California University,” though an Internet search for the institution produces no results. Wang also obtained an eMBA from the China Northeastern Finance University between 2004 and 2006, when he was deputy mayor of Jinzhou. A professor at Beijing University said Wang’s eMBA degree has no academic value because the program is a revenue-generating engine for the university. According to the professor, decorative titles are sold to officials and businesspeople who need an academic degree but have no desire to study.

Despite his lack of higher education, more than ten of China’s prestigious universities have made Wang an adjunct professor and doctoral supervisor. In December 2011, the president of Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications invited Wang to be a part-time professor. In a grand ceremony attended by several hundred students, the university president addressed Wang as Dr. Wang, saying that Wang had a PhD in law. In a newsletter called
Police Salon
, published by the Chongqing Municipal Police Bureau, Wang was frequently addressed as Professor Wang Lijun and his photos were prominently displayed in every issue. The Chinese state media reported that Wang was an expert on forensics, criminal psychology, and law; had written five books on law; and had presided over eighteen legal-research projects. Wang was also listed as an inventor and fashion designer. On China’s State Intellectual Property Office website, one can find more than 119 patents filed by Wang, from police equipment and alarm systems to police raincoats and policewomen’s boots.

Over the years Wang had meticulously cultivated an image of a scholarly policeman. During an interview with the
Sichuan Legal Daily
, he said, “I have a special respect for intellectuals. I worship culture.” Inside the public security bureau building in Chongqing, he set aside a room called the “Reading Salon” and encouraged his officers to read during lunch breaks.