China's whistleblower police chief charged

Video will begin in 5 seconds.

China to try former police chief at centre of scandal

China's CCTV state television announces plans to try former police chief, Wang Lijun, at the heart of the country's biggest political scandal in decades. Sarah Sheffer reports.

THE coming trial of China's most famous police chief, Wang Lijun, is set to expose a world of Byzantine conspiracies and political bastardry that even fiction writers say they would struggle to match.

An indictment levelled against Wang on Wednesday night alleges a smorgasbord of crimes including covering up a murder, illegally eavesdropping on communications, accepting bribes on behalf of others and defecting to the United States.

Those allegations came to light after Wang fled from his patron in Chongqing city, the maverick politician Bo Xilai, and took refuge in the American consulate in Chengdu in February.

Wang's testimony led to Bo being stripped of his posts, Bo's wife Gu Kailai being convicted of murdering Englishman Neil Heywood and Chinese politics being thrown into a degree of uncertainty not seen in 20 years.

Advertisement

But it is the falling out between Wang and Bo that has invited parallels between how politics was played in the dynastic era, with its ruthless imperial court intrigue and absence of ground rules, and the Communist Party today.

Wang's trial takes place against a background of Bo challenging China's consensus-based leaders by concentrating vast powers in his own hands and draping himself in Maoist iconography.

''It is now very clear that [President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao] used Wang to bring down Bo,'' said a commentary on the Red China website, a platform for Maoists who saw Bo as the great hope for Chinese socialism.

Sources who know Wang say he came under great pressure in the northern spring of last year when investigators from the Central Discipline & Inspection Commission arrived at his former political base, Tieling City in Liaoning Province.

Wang's successor as police chief was detained on May 12, 2011, although it was not reported until the following February.

On September 21 Wang's former colleague, the former deputy mayor of Tieling, was found dead in a river, which police attributed to suicide.

Two months later, according to testimony at the murder trial of Gu Kailai, Wang told Gu he would frame Neil Heywood as a drug dealer and then shoot him on her behalf.

But then he withdrew from the plan, allowed her to proceed without him, and then recorded the conversation when she debriefed him afterwards.

If China's top leaders were, in fact, investigating Wang as a means of destabilising Bo Xilai, then the conspiracy seems to have worked better than they could have imagined.

''When Wang heard the news [of the central investigation against him], to protect his own position he ? incited Gu to kill Heywood, so that he could threaten Bo with Gu's murder evidence,'' says the commentary on the Red China website.

Three months later, as central investigators continued to close in, Wang confronted Bo with information about his wife's involvement in murder.

And then Wang fled in his failed defection attempt.

Many expect that the trials of Gu Kailai and Wang Lijun will provide a platform for criminal charges against Bo Xilai following the 18th Party Congress, expected to take place next month.

Source: http://www.theage.com.au/world/chinas-whistleblower-police-chief-charged-20120906-25h6o.html

cagayan de oro bowl schedule 2011 bowl schedule barry bonds hazing colton harris moore hurd