A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel Read online

  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.

  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 door
bell 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.