SINOGRAPH Confessions of a former police
chief By Francesco Sisci
BEIJING - Ladies and gentlemen, I know
that you will not believe it, and that you are
prejudiced against me. To you, I am only a crook
who first imposed the rule of power by arresting
and killing people my boss and I arbitrarily
decided were mafia bullies - and someone who later
tried to run for his life abroad.
You are
right. In any way you look at this picture, it is
odd and strange.
It is the tale of a
seditious, mad baron, blinded by ambition and
hubris, who challenged the established order for
his personal gain. Or it is the story of a very
elaborate conspiracy to take down the troublesome
and honest prince who was set to change the
country and bring back
the old golden era.
This is the trouble
with all of this, and it is the essence of my past
troubles. The plot is so complicated and the
details so many and so confusing that it can be
better recalled as a mystery novel or a tragic
play. In all of this, I have but a secondary role,
and I did what I did - tried to run to the US
consulate - because it was the only way to expose
it, to be believed, and to try to put an end to
all the filth that has been rotting our country.
You could say that it all began many years
ago, and certainly it did: with the meteoric rise
of my boss, Bo Xilai, from mayor of Dalian to city
party chief to governor and party chief of
Liaoning. He moved from there to the post of
minister of commerce and was then promoted to
Communist Party chief of Chongqing.
From
that, he was planning to get the plum position of
head of security, something that could lock his
real, ultimate power over all of China. At each
step, he raised many objections and was very
controversial - it seemed that his career would
not go any further and would stop.
Yet, at
each step, he moved further up, protected by a
lucky star and supported by a small crowd of loyal
and faithful followers like his wife, Gu Kailai;
myself, Wang Lijun; and yes, also a foreigner,
Neil Heywood, whose death brought down the whole
house of cards we were trying to build.
You could say that it all fell apart when
Heywood's heart stopped beating in Chongqing. I
believe it happened before - almost a year before
- when Bo's ambitions seemed to take shape, and it
became clear that it was within the realm of
possibility for him to become a member of the
party's almost almighty Standing Committee of the
Politburo as head of security. Sitting there, Bo,
with his charisma, determination, and drive, would
have become the real number one in China.
He would have done it not by pulling and
pushing through the complex web of ties and favors
of the state apparatus, but by campaigning for
himself, maneuvering in the foreign and domestic
press, and coaxing and bribing intellectuals. Bo,
in other words, would have done it by playing with
Western political rules in a Chinese environment,
forming a party within a party and thus creating
de facto a multi-party system in China.
Was the Communist Party ready for it and
willing to accept this change? In theory, Bo could
pull it through by challenging party unity and
introducing new ways while donning left-wing
clothes. It was the old Deng Xiaoping trick: move
to the right and say it is left.
He
understood China clearly, but while he was acting,
he lost track of himself. Could his fellow
Politburo members tolerate him moving up only
thanks to his political abilities and without
owing favors left and right or being saddled with
the usual very heavy burden of political debts?
Moreover, he has done all of this not to
achieve the top spot, president of the state and
party secretary, but the most crucial seat in a
time when power is equally divided among the top
echelons, head of security. From there, he could
threaten and blackmail anybody - and thus be in
the best position to push his own agenda - and
then he could become the rock of authority in the
fragmented Chinese political structure.
But to do this, he should not have too
many skeletons in the closet. Does he? Yes, he
greased the wheels of power like anybody - or
better than anybody: he seized assets from the
mafia bosses I found for him and then sold them at
a bargain to his friends, mostly left-wingers,
conservatives who could then make money while
waving Mao's red flag. Was he wrong? In China,
there are no procedures in place for the sale of
mafia assets, and the mafia should be fought
speedily, no?
He provoked people's
dissatisfaction with the present complex market
society by branding everything new as "corrupt" -
the way most citizens, born and raised in the
times of the Cultural Revolution, would feel. At
the same time, he played up the sense of the
endowment of the "red" aristocracy, the kin of
revolutionaries, who believe that, like the old
imperial aristocracies, the country belongs to
them just because their relatives wrestled it from
the previous owners.
But by playing with
these elements, he was messing with fire. In fact,
despite the sense of displacement felt by most
common people in the current society and despite
the deep-seated nostalgia for the simple times
when they were young, things were simple (red),
and diseases were cured by barefoot doctors'
traditional medicine, there is no way out of
modern society-and everybody knows that in his and
her bones. And despite the fact that the fathers
took the country like the nobility of the Han or
Ming emperors, present China very different from
in its imperial past, and to grant further power
to the red aristocracy would doom the place-and
this is also something everybody feels deep in his
or her bones.
So Bo was creating his
constituency through populist sentiments and
conservative communist nostalgia, but in this, he
was also digging his own grave. The people who
wanted to push the country forward, the people who
resented Bo's overbearing and unlimited ambitions,
coalesced against him.
Over the past
couple of years, pressure was mounting in
Chongqing and in China surrounding whatever Bo
did, and unfortunately, he was not beyond
reproach. Was he corrupt? So was everybody, more
or less, so who can tell exactly? Bo was ready for
this. Perhaps he was not ready for somebody
digging into his past and his even murkier ties
with Heywood. Heywood was an English businessman
with some security background.
I could
never quite put my finger on what it was, but as a
young man, he managed to move a lot of foreign
business to Dalian and get a few British bigwigs
there, the ones who would look down on their
former colonial subjects in Hong Kong. How did he
do that? We wanted to believe what he said: it was
because of the old English public-school tradition
that Harrow people help each other. It was the old
boys' club: you are in or out. The story seemed
fantastically similar to that of the old communist
circle: you are a princeling, or you are not -
nothing in between. But was it really that?
These doubts were hanging over my head
when people said Gu Kailai killed Heywood. Was it
for money or for something else? Had he really
threatened to expose her or Bo, as she claimed?
The idea of that threat seemed fantastic. Either
you use a middleman or you don't, and then either
you pay him what he asks or go to somebody else.
You don't just argue about price. She had done
this for years, so she must have known very well.
Could there be anything else? Jealousy? A deal cut
with the British government through him, which Bo
now wanted to bury?
All these questions
were swirling around my head when, after November
15, 2011, I was called to cover up the murder.
First his wife and then the consulate called on
him for three days, and we didn't know what to say
or do. Beijing learned about it and started
wondering what happened. We had to incinerate the
body to get rid of all the evidence. I knew this
was a dangerous move. I don't know how Gu did it,
but Heywood's wife agreed to the cremation,
although we bungled the situation by giving two
different reasons for his death, a heart attack or
alcohol poisoning.
The cremation set off
alarm bells in Beijing. Everybody here knows that
if the authorities kill somebody and want to get
rid of the evidence, they burn the body, so with
our record for too-swift justice, we immediately
came under scrutiny. The Beijing people came down
like vultures and were breathing down my neck,
watching every step I took. I was the main
suspect: they knew this thing in small or large
part had gone through me. They started
interrogating people and making arrests. It was
just a matter of time until they got to me, and
what should I do? End my life in indignity for the
murder of a foreigner?
I went to see Bo,
but he treated me like a coward. He shouted at me
that I should go down when I had to. You cannot do
that. He should not have shouted at me because I
am no weakling and trying to boss me around only
makes me furious. Most importantly, the fact that
he lost his usual cold demeanor in this moment
confirmed my impression he was loosing his grip on
his nerves and on reality - things were slipping
away.
But what could I do? How could I go
against him? I could not turn on him. He had
friends everywhere, in Beijing and all over the
country. No way I could reach to the top and
denounce him. His network of contacts, which I
helped him to build, would block me and slander
me, arguing I was trying to save my neck by
dragging him into this.
I didn't want to
betray my country and seek asylum abroad, but our
system has no mechanism for real internal
safeguards-there is no check and balance of power
that can prevent abuses and solve cases like these
when they happen. The only check and balance they
have and recognize is the American power. So, if I
wanted to be really heard by my president, I had
to speak to the Americans first, to scare my
people and get them to listen to me.
My
move had no precedent in the history of the
People's Republic and created a systemic challenge
to the country: because of the lack of division of
power and lack of transparent systems of controls,
from now on anybody can stop or threaten to stop
the state machinery by fleeing to a foreign
consulate. That is, if there is no systemic
political reform, the Chinese state machinery will
stall and grind to a halt. Therefore, to recover
its elasticity and independence from de facto
foreign intervention, the system has to become
more transparent, adopt some division of power,
and become more democratic and open in a manner
fitting the Chinese historical conditions.
Otherwise the system will simply collapse.
When I ran, it was not all too clear to
me. Now it is much better defined in my mind. So,
in a way, my running away and Bo and Gu killing
Heywood sped up the process of political reform in
China. I understand that this is not how the top
leadership wanted to do it and that this is not
what many people in the party wanted at all, but I
hope that by taking such a huge risk, I also
pushed the fate of China along. As you now rightly
brand me traitor, I hope you can also recognize
that, by that act of treason in a very dangerous
moment for China, I was more loyal to my country
than the many people who stood sheepishly obedient
when they were supposed to act. Here history
becomes a story, or vice versa. Please understand
me, and save, if not my life, at least my memory.
(This is a fictional account of Wang
Lijun's thoughts based on a very partial
collection of stories circulating in China at the
moment.)
Francesco Sisci is
a columnist for the Italian daily Il Sole 24 Ore
and can be reached at fsisci@gmail.com
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