In a final twist of the overlapping lives of Bo father and son, twenty-two years later, President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, both considered Hu Yaobang’s protégés, ended the political career of the son.
SECRET INVESTIGATION
BEFORE THEIR TAKEOVER of China in 1949, the Communists spent years fighting a guerrilla war against the better armed ruling Nationalists and operating an extensive network of underground Communist agents in China’s key cities. Spies were a popular theme in propaganda movies, depicting heroic underground Communist agents who eavesdropped on enemy conversations, left important notes for other Communists in secret locations, sent secret telegraphic messages to the party from their bedrooms at midnight, and assassinated traitors and enemies with silent handguns. I and millions of others grew up watching such films, long before James Bond movies were allowed into China. For years, being a Communist was almost synonymous with being a secret agent. When my father joined the Communist Party, I was disappointed that he was nothing like the mysterious Communist spies I saw in movies.
In hindsight, our childhood impressions of the Communist Party are probably fairly close to truth. Sixty years after the Chinese Communist Party took power, it still conducts business like an underground organization in enemy-occupied territories. All the key Communist Party organs, such as the Central Organization Department, the Central Propaganda Department, and the Central International Liaison Department, operate in office buildings without signs, without street numbers or listed phone numbers. Major decisions are made in closed-door meetings. Senior leaders act like members of the mafia, mysterious and secretive. Any personal information about them is considered a state secret. In September 2012, the then vice president Xi Jinping reportedly hurt his back and disappeared from public view for two weeks without explanation. The Party Central Committee refused to divulge any details, triggering wild speculations that there might have been a coup.
In the case of Bo Xilai, any information relating to his investigation is considered top secret. The public has no idea where he is being detained or how he is being interrogated. In April 2012, the government announced only that he is being investigated by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, which is headquartered inside a nameless office complex at 41 Pinganli Avenue in Beijing. What kind of organization is the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection? Many Chinese have heard it mentioned frequently in the state media, but few understand how it works.
The Chinese leadership, in its desperate effort to maintain the monopoly of the Communist Party, relies on an internal anticorruption organization—specifically the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, with a network of branches extending to the township level—to monitor the conduct of some 80 million party members, or 16 percent of China’s 1.3 billion people. The commission has eight divisions, the first four of which handle corruption offenses among party members above the vice-ministerial level within the central government or party organizations; the rest handle graft among those of vice-governor level or higher in different regions.
Without a regular open channel for the media and the public to supervise the party, the commission depends heavily on tips and clues provided by petitioners and anonymous whistle-blowers. A recent state media report said nearly half of the cases under investigation were based on tips or anonymous reports. Other important sources come from instructions by the top leaders or petitions or complaints sent to high-level party organizations, and legislative and judicial bodies.
Since the late 1980s, as corruption within the party has become more rampant, the party has actively promoted the role of the commission, giving it more power to discipline corrupt leaders and rank-and-file members. Thus, the commission has established an unassailable position. The judiciary and law enforcement agencies have given up some of their legal responsibilities to the commission. Criminal investigation used to be a key job for the prosecution organ, but the commission has taken over the initial investigation and prosecutors simply coordinate cleaning up the postmortem work.
During an investigation, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection employs a practice known as shuanggui, or “double regulations.” The accused will be taken to a secret place for a specific period of time for harsh interrogation. This practice allows the commission to intervene before a judicial investigation begins. Sometimes investigators detain a suspect at a place away from his or her home or workplace to avoid the suspect’s access to his or her own network of power, influence, and connections in a particular area. Analysts say the secrecy is intended to shield the public from details that might harm the party’s image and to limit collateral damage to those higher up the chain of command. Investigations of officials above vice-ministerial levels are approved by the Politburo, which deliberates on the allegations first. This means that by the time the official is pulled into the system, he or she is already considered guilty by the Politburo. Therefore, few emerge unscathed, if they emerge at all. The state media said that between 1999 and 2009, the court convicted more than 100 senior officials due to the commission’s investigations. Among them, eight were executed and twenty received a suspended death penalty or life imprisonment. There is a popular phrase among senior officials, “I am not afraid of God, neither am I afraid of ghosts, but I am afraid of being summoned to talk to the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection.” Some, including the former deputy mayor of Beijing, had committed suicide or died under mysterious circumstances before they were detained.
During detention, the accused are subject to harsh interrogations. Once investigators obtain a satisfactory confession, detainees are often stripped of their leadership positions and party membership, and their cases are handed over to government prosecutors for summary trials, which are closed to the public. Since 1992, the commission’s investigations have led to the fall of several senior leaders, including the deputy party chief of Sichuan province, the vice president of the Supreme People’s Court, the railway minister, the deputy party secretary of Shandong province, and the assistant director at the Ministry of Public Security.
But in the eyes of ordinary Chinese who have been victimized by rampant government corruption, the commission stands as their only hope for justice.
Even though the party produces impressive statistics on the commission’s work, few observers believe corruption is being systemically addressed. Corruption occurs because of the lack of transparency in the system. Ironically, anticorruption works the same way. In the past few years, the commission has emerged as a monster that is growing in size, placing itself above the judiciary and obstructing China’s efforts to build the rule of law. Mo Shaoping, a well-known human rights lawyer in Beijing, said the commission’s double regulation practice violates the Chinese constitution:
The law stipulates that no organization has the right to restrict a citizen’s freedom without the approval of the court, but the Commission places itself above the law. Communist Party members or government officials are citizens and the law should apply here.
When a major case involving a senior leader is assigned, the commission, with permission from the Politburo, organizes a special team of several hundred people to conduct investigations, turning itself into the most authoritative law enforcement and judicial organ. In Bo’s case, the commission reportedly dispatched two big teams, one to Dalian and the other to Chongqing. In addition, smaller groups traveled to Hong Kong and Guangzhou to collect evidence relating to Bo’s family finances. The commission’s investigation is not part of the judicial process, but takes precedence over any other legal proceedings. During the double regulations process, members of the commission can enlist the help of public security agents and armed or traffic police. Nobody dares disobey. The commission has access to stacks of court subpoenas, detention permits from the Public Security Ministry, arrest warrants from the prosecutor’s office, and auditing permits from the taxation department. It has the authority to detain, collect evidence, and dictate how a target will be
punished. The judicial system is a mere prop in its activities. Upon the completion of the investigation, the commission denies the court any independence by imposing its own sentencing recommendation.
On May 29, 2007, Zheng Xiaoyu, director of the National Food and Drug Administration, was tried for dereliction of duty after he allowed counterfeit drugs to enter the market. Dereliction of duty carries a maximum sentence of seven years, but the committee, which investigated Zheng first, recommended the death penalty to appease public anger. The court acquiesced and found him guilty of corruption—because he accepted bribes—and dereliction of duty, and duly sentenced him to death.
Often, it appears the commission has more power than the Supreme People’s Court, which reviews all death sentences imposed by the lower courts to ensure that the punishment fits the crime. In the name of anti-corruption and in the rigorous pursuit of “truth,” Chinese legal experts say, the commission detains the accused for long periods of time and denies the person access to a lawyer or due process. Even though Chinese law explicitly prohibits the use of torture during interrogation, it does not recognize the right to remain silent. Forced confessions and torture are common.
Li Heping, another Beijing-based lawyer, said the commission resorts to torture more than other judicial organizations do. Moreover, it ignores the presumption of innocence, the most important symbol of human rights protection in modern criminal law. Thus, a person under investigation has no right to hire a lawyer and yet the confessions obtained by any means during the investigation can be used as evidence in court.
The regional version of the commission has now become a very important tool used by local leaders to eliminate their opponents. There are incidents where a new provincial leader has taken over a new assignment, but had problems controlling subordinates who resist his leadership. Under such circumstances, the new leader can fabricate petitions to the commission’s local branch, requiring investigation. Sometimes, when multiple people are competing for a spot in a midlevel government agency, the candidates backstab each other by writing petition letters, thereby eliminating their competition.
At the central level, the commission enforces the law selectively. An anticorruption investigation is a tool to protect the interests of a handful of senior leaders. One of the commission’s most important tasks is to filter out and if necessary remove any suggestion of impropriety that might be harmful to the senior leadership, or attack opponents, or protect certain privileged persons by warning and offering a way out of a potential political scandal. Those who are punished lack connections or are deemed to be of no political significance. Experts say this two-tiered approach, where some are favored over others, explains why corruption is endemic in China. It has been embedded in the political system. As mentioned before, under normal circumstances, any investigation relating to officials at the vice minister levels and above must be signed off by the Politburo. Members of the Politburo Standing Committee enjoy absolute immunity, because the threat of purges at the highest level would be too destabilizing.
In Mao’s time, political purges were conducted randomly and largely at the behest of Mao himself. Any member of the party’s hierarchy, regardless of his position, could be labeled a “traitor” or “capitalist” overnight if he was perceived to be a threat. There were no rules or laws to protect the victims. Mao acted like an emperor and his words were law. Often the persecution extended to the families of the disgraced official. Bo Yibo was a typical example.
After Mao died in 1976, party elders such as Deng Xiaoping, who had been victims of Mao’s persecution, tried to avoid the arbitrariness and brutality in the party’s power struggles and protect the basic rights of the members of the ruling elites by installing certain procedures and introducing an orderly system of leadership transition. However, revolutionary veterans violated their own procedures when they used the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection to purge officials known as “rebels”—they were promoted by Mao supporters during the Cultural Revolution and had participated in the persecution of senior leaders.
In the post-Deng era, when the country was trying to promote the rule of law, if only to placate foreign governments with which China traded, and foreign investors it wished to attract, Deng’s successors employed the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection as a tool to criminalize political opponents in the name of anticorruption. Former president Jiang Zemin successfully brought down Chen Xitong, the former party secretary of Beijing and a Politburo member, because Chen and his supporters in the Beijing area, collectively known as the “Beijing Clique,” were undermining his authority.
In Bo’s case, the party once again resorted to the powerful Central Commission for Discipline Inspection to oust him. A source at the commission said that the initial focus of the investigation was related to Bo Xilai’s role in Neil Heywood’s murder. Soon investigators ran into challenges: Bo Xilai might have attempted to cover up his wife’s act of murder, but there was no concrete evidence to prove that he had participated in the killing. The cover-up charge alone was not a strong enough excuse to destroy Bo Xilai for good. The senior leadership reportedly instructed the commission to turn to areas of corruption and subversion. Starting in May 2012, the party’s propaganda machine launched a massive campaign, depicting Bo as a corrupt official who used illegal means to attain political and economic gains. Meanwhile, insiders in Beijing were feeding what they called preliminary results of Bo’s investigation to media outlets overseas.
For example, in May, “nearly a dozen people with party ties” confirmed to the New York Times that Bo Xilai had installed a widespread program of electronic bugging across Chongqing and he had recorded the conversations of senior party officials, including President Hu Jintao. A similar report came out in early March, portraying Wang Lijun as the chief architect of this program.
Mr. Bo’s eavesdropping operations began several years ago as part of a state-financed surveillance build-up, ostensibly for the purposes of fighting crime and maintaining local political stability. . . .
But party insiders say the wiretapping was seen as a direct challenge to central authorities. It revealed to them just how far Mr. Bo, who is now being investigated for serious disciplinary violations, was prepared to go in his efforts to grasp greater power in China. That compounded suspicions that Mr. Bo could not be trusted with a top slot in the party, which is due to reshuffle its senior leadership positions this fall.
In the same month, a Hong Kong–based newspaper quoted an insider as saying Bo Xilai had used surveillance devices to collect negative information about senior leaders’ families and their mistresses. Bo had planned to unleash the information before the Party Congress as part of his scheme to seize power and, if necessary, arrest Xi Jinping, the heir apparent.
Qi Hong, a Chongqing-based technician who has been hired by local officials to detect and debug surveillance devices in their offices, cars, and bedrooms, told Chongqing Evening News that wiretapping became prevalent in Bo’s Chongqing. In 2011, he deactivated more than three hundred audio and video monitoring devices secretly planted by officials’ wives, lovers, supervisors, and competitors. Chongqing Evening News revealed that bugging is now being used as a common tool in power struggles at all levels of the government—officials spy on each other and collect needed audio and video evidence to get rid of a competitor. Qi Hong’s story has proven to be true, as Lei Zhengfu, a former district party chief in Chongqing, was recently fired from his position after a video of him having sex with a young woman was posted online by a former journalist. The whistle-blower, who was planning to release similar tapes of more city officials, told Chongqing Evening News that 90 percent of the tapes came from party insiders. In addition, according to Feng Qingyang, a blogger, some local officials in China are said to be so paranoid about bugging devices that they will pretend to hug their colleagues “intimately” before conducting a sensitive conversation, to make sure nobody is carrying a mini tape or video recorder. Some even choose
to discuss businesses naked in noisy bathhouses. A former police officer in Chongqing blamed Bo and Wang for the widespread abuse of wiretapping. “The two egomaniacs not only snooped on political opponents, dissidents, and criminals, but also on each other,” said the official. “In the end, others began to follow suit. If you didn’t conspire against others, others would plot to get rid of you. You have to do it. It’s a survival technique.”
In addition, from March to July 2012, I received regular e-mails or phone calls from “insiders” who claimed to have “exclusive information” relating to Bo’s subversion attempts. One e-mail said that Bo had ordered his police chief to purchase 5,000 guns and 500,000 rounds of ammunition from the government’s munitions factory in Chongqing for a possible coup.
The Wall Street Journal received similar information. A party official at an influential government think tank told the paper that Bo had cultivated his military contacts and “at least two prominent army generals have been questioned about their connections to Mr. Bo.”
A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel Page 17