A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel (7 page)

To further heighten his cultural status, Wang promoted his calligraphy and painting skills. In China, calligraphy is a hobby for many senior Chinese officials, who practice it and secretly compete with one another. Many collect works from famous calligraphers and mount them on silk scrolls they hang on their office walls to create a refined and distinguished atmosphere. According to the state media, Wang won fifth place during a province-wide calligraphy contest in Liaoning and one of his watercolor paintings was once on display at a museum in Mongolia. On his office desk, he insisted on using old-fashioned ink brushes to write and used a regular pen only to sign documents. Soon, other officials started to follow suit. Wang’s flowery handwriting was used to decorate several public security bureau buildings and office walls in Chongqing.

He was said to have many idiosyncrasies, which the official propaganda machine used to humanize him. One story has it that Wang never used a key to open his door at home because he believed that keys should be for hotel rooms only. “When you get home, you press the doorbell and your family members embrace you at the door. That’s called family,” he was quoted as saying. “The feelings and the atmosphere are sublime.” He was also depicted as a doting father who missed a tour of the Eiffel Tower, which he had particularly wanted to see during a business trip to Paris, because he was running around the city trying to buy his daughter toys.

There was a widely publicized story that Wang found a little boy who was lost on the streets of Chongqing. He could have left the boy at a shelter. Instead, he took the boy home and cared for him. When the boy’s parents were located three months later, the boy didn’t want to leave his new “daddy.”

These tear-jerking tales could be true, but they failed to soften Wang’s image inside the police department, where officers categorized him as tyrannical.

In July 2009, a police officer in a Chongqing suburb—carrying a hunting rifle—accidentally killed a civilian. On seeing media reports, Wang held the entire local leadership accountable and summarily stripped them of their positions.

In July 2010, a police officer who was out on his lunch break got into an argument with a security guard who refused to let him back in without an ID. The officer was subsequently exiled to a smaller branch in a remote region for allegedly calling the security guard “Wang Lijun’s lackey.”

On August 30, 2010, six police officers complained and made some unfavorable comments about Wang during lunch. A colleague sitting nearby recorded their conversation and reported it to Wang. A week later, the six officers were interrogated and later demoted.

Such incidents created fear in the police force—each time the topic of Wang Lijun came up during casual conversations, officers would ask each other to take the batteries out of their cellphones to prevent taping. And they avoided mentioning Wang by name, referring to him as “the professor” or “W.”

At the office, if Wang happened to encounter an officer who dressed sloppily, or talked too loudly in the mess hall, or chatted on the phone in the hallway, or slung his bag casually over his shoulder, or failed to greet him properly, he would scold the officer or demote him on the spot.

Shortly after his arrival in Chongqing, Wang organized a five hundred–strong team to solve more than 28,000 open cases that had built up over the previous ten years. He made it a priority to improve the crime resolution rate for each branch by setting annual quotas. Fearing they could be punished if the quota was not met, many police officers would report only the cases they had solved and left many unreported. There were also stories about policemen deliberately sending gang members to commit petty crimes in the market so they could easily catch them and fulfill their quotas for “solved crimes.”

After Wang’s fall, his former assistant Xin Jianwei disclosed that Wang had gone through fifty-one assistants during his two-year tenure in Chongqing—one man was sacked on his first day. Xin himself served as Wang’s secretary and personal assistant for four months before he was locked up in jail for talking back to Wang over a trivial matter. Based on Xin’s account, Wang had ordered Xin to book him a hotel room during a police conference in the spring of 2010. Because
Wang did not check out on time, his room key had automatically expired. “Wang Lijun was furious because he couldn’t get into his room. He got hold of me and began swearing at me, calling me all kinds of names,” Xin was quoted in an online article in December 2012. “When I vigorously explained that it was not my fault, Wang yelled, ‘Get the hell out of here’ and fired me the next day.”

A month later, Xin, arrested on charges that he had provided “protection for mafia leaders,” was held in a tiny cell with two guards watching him twenty-four hours a day for three hundred days. During his incarceration, Xin was forced to confess that he had been hired by several municipal leaders to spy on Wang and block his promotion. When Xin refused, he was tied down to a wooden bench and beaten up numerous times. He suffered severe head injuries. At one time, Xin said he collected the mosquitoes he had killed in the cell and stuck them on the wall to form a character, “injustices.”

An officer who worked in the publicity department of the Chongqing Public Security Bureau also described Wang Lijun as a narcissist who had an entourage of more than twenty camera-carrying assistants. Known as “blue spirits” for the blue jackets they wore, Wang’s assistants followed him everywhere—their job was to record every word Wang uttered and take pictures and videos of him, capturing what he called “his most moving and breathtaking moments.” If any pictures were not up to Wang’s standards, the photographer had to Photoshop them until Wang was happy. Each time Wang delivered a speech, he pressured other police officers to write down their comments. Then, all of Wang’s speeches would be compiled into a book which included lavish praise from his subordinates—items such as “Professor Wang Lijun is a saint, a police hero, and a model teacher. Each time I savor Professor Wang’s words, my heart surges with passion and my blood is boiling.”

The state media, which had helped create a legend out of Wang, also fell victim to his tyranny. In recent years, driven particularly by commercial interests and journalistic sensibility, many media outlets would occasionally push the envelope and run stories critical of the government or the police. Wang had no tolerance for any criticism. At a conference for Chongqing police officers in October 2010, Wang said:

       
In the future, if the newspapers distort the truth and attack our municipal public security bureau and individual police, we will sue both the media organization and the writer. If the news article mentions a certain individual policeman and caused negative consequences, the policeman will gather evidence and take the journalist to court. The bureau where the policeman works and other related organizations should coordinate and support the lawsuit. I call this practice “double lawsuits”—the public security organizations sue the newspaper and the policeman sues the reporter. Once we turn this into a lawsuit, the reporter will be a helpless spectator.

During Wang’s reign, the police department recruited 12,000 new officers and expanded the police force to 70,000, the largest in Asia. Wang also attempted to gain influence over the judicial process. In January 2011, he read a news report about the trial of an official with mafia ties. He wrote a comment on the margins of the article and sent it to the court, recommending capital punishment. Four months later, the official received the death penalty during the first trial.

Wang raised an uproar among legal scholars across China after he imprisoned a defense lawyer, charging him with fabricating testimony in favor of a mobster during the crackdown on organized crimes.

This is how it happened. In June 2009, an alleged crime boss was arrested by Chongqing police for murder, illegal weapons trade, drug dealing, and leading a criminal organization. On November 22, 2009, the defendant’s wife retained Li Zhuang, a well-known lawyer who worked for a prestigious law firm headed by a powerful princeling and who had defended many similar cases. During his research, Li found that Wang Lijun had established an interrogation center with a deceptive name, “The Militia Training Camp,” inside a mountain. Police used extensive torture while investigating defendants, including his client. Li raised the issue with the police.

Li’s legal work made him a target of persecution by Wang Lijun. On December 10, 2009, Chongqing police sent a telegram to the Beijing judiciary bureau, claiming that the Chongqing Detention Center’s audio and video records showed that Li had tried to entice his client to give false testimony by conveying his enticement through “winks.”
Meanwhile, Li’s client also confessed to prosecutors that his lawyer had advised him to falsely testify that he had been beaten for eight days and nights and that he had become incontinent.

On the night of December 12, Li was secretly arrested in Beijing, and police escorted him back to Chongqing.

       
At the airport, Wang Lijun, flanked by more than one hundred police and journalists, waited for me on the tarmac. The plane was surrounded by ten light-flashing police cars. The policemen, armed with anti-riot gear, were dressed in camouflage uniforms, wearing helmets and black boots and carrying micro machine guns. Then, Wang pointed at me and shouted at his assistants. “You can do your job now.” The assistant came up and handcuffed me. Then, I heard him whisper to another policeman. “Be aware, he is someone who is a legal expert.” The policeman nodded, “Understood.”

He was thrown in a police car and the whole entourage followed them to the detention center, which was about four miles from the airport. The road was completely blocked by police. Li said Wang was, by nature, “melodramatic and a showoff,” but admitted that he was intimidated by the “welcome ceremony.” During the investigative process, Wang hired legal experts to advise the police department, teaching them how to skirt laws and regulations.

Li was tried, and in January 2010, the Chongqing People’s Intermediate Court sentenced him to two and a half years in prison and barred him from practicing law for life. Li filed an appeal and in its second review, the court reduced the sentence to eighteen months, citing that Li had cooperated with the court. However, at the sentencing, Li claimed he had been deceived by leaders within the Chongqing government, who promised to release him if he admitted guilt.

Li’s assertion about confessions made under duress and other abuses was later corroborated by another lawyer, who released videotapes of his client, a wealthy thirty-nine-year-old construction contractor charged with running a crime syndicate and murdering one of his rivals. In the video, the contractor claimed police had coerced him to confess and implicate others—he had been subjected to severe beatings
and sleep deprivation for six months. During his incarceration, he tried to kill himself twice and bit off his own tongue in protest. Medical reports back up these claims. Despite mounting evidence, the court rejected the contractor’s appeal and he was executed in July 2010.

Even with Li’s imprisonment, Wang was still unhappy. He sent investigators to other cities to collect more evidence against Li. Three months later, Li was prosecuted again on a charge of obstruction during a case that Li had handled in Shanghai two years before. When Li entered the courthouse, a crowd, allegedly brought in by the Chongqing government, chanted, “Clear out all the bad lawyers.” Despite Wang’s pressure, the prosecution eventually withdrew the charge for lack of evidence.

Fang Hong, an employee in Chongqing’s Fuling district, posted a satirical Weibo comment, calling the lawsuit against Li a “pile of shit.” Police detained Fang and sent him to a Reeducation through Labor Camp for one year. According to Fang’s lawyer, more than 10,000 Chongqing residents had been sent to labor camps by Wang Lijun.

Between 2009 and 2011, court papers say Wang used the anticrime campaign to terrorize the business community by branding legitimate private businesspeople as mobsters. “The party needs to tie a timed bomb around your waist to make sure you obey orders,” Wang said to a private entrepreneur who was a delegate to the Municipal People’s Congress and vowed to collect petitions calling for Wang to resign. Wang had him arrested on charges that he colluded with organized crime, and his assets were confiscated. “I could have him executed if I want,” Wang remarked. In May 2011, one of Wang’s friends held a fundraiser for a scholarship that sponsored policemen’s studies abroad. Wang advised his subordinates to gather some local entrepreneurs at police headquarters for a “meeting” and blatently solicited money from them. At the end of the meeting, the officer collected 30 million yuan. Wang called this practice “robbing the rich to help the poor.” Using Russian president Vladimir Putin as an example, Wang was quoted as saying, “If there are ten people, four are wealthy and six poor. We only need to get rid of two wealthy ones. The other two would be intimidated and voluntarily give their money away. The six poor folks would applaud our actions.”

The
Washington Post
reported that the public security bureau confiscated the assets—estimated at US $700 million—of Li Jun, once one of the richest men in Chongqing. Li now lives as an exile in Canada. Eight of his relatives are languishing in a Chinese jail and his business empire is under police control.

The businessman, originally from Hubei province, moved to Chongqing in 1984 as a soldier in the army and after five years of service, set up a small trading business and then a petrol station. Other ventures followed, including a restaurant, a karaoke parlor, and a sauna, all of which, police said, were connected with organized crime.

Li stated that his arrest was related to a real estate transaction. In 2008, he had purchased a plot of undeveloped military land in Chongqing. The deal had supposedly offended a senior military officer who was a friend of Bo Xilai and had intended to sell the property to a relative. In December 2009, Li was picked up by police, who beat him repeatedly during questioning. Li said he was kept chained for days to a “tiger bench”—a metal chair specially designed to maximize pain—and his arms and legs were shackled while security agents pummeled him and demanded he confess. Held for three months at the secret “Militia Training Camp,” Li was released after agreeing to pay US $6.3 million in penalties. In October 2010, while on a business trip to Chengdu, Li was tipped off that he was about to be arrested again. He fled the next morning to Hong Kong, then later to Canada.