CHENGDU, China — The trial of the former police chief who was a key player in the fall of the politician Bo Xilai began in secret on Monday in this southwestern provincial capital, where he attempted to seek refuge in a United States Consulate in February.
The attempt, the first of its kind in many years, ignited China's biggest political scandal in a generation.
The session was secret because the two charges against the officer, Wang Lijun, presented in court on Monday — defection and abuse of power, which in this case centers on illegal surveillance — involve state secrets, said one of his lawyers, Wang Yuncai. Ms. Wang, who attended the opening session (and is no relation to Mr. Wang), said the two remaining charges, accepting bribes and bending the law for one's personal gain, would be reviewed in a public hearing on Tuesday.
A person with police contacts in Chongqing, where Mr. Wang was police chief, confirmed that the trial was expected to last two days.
People briefed on Mr. Wang's case said the trial would allow the state to lay out his crucial role in the ostentatious governance of Chongqing by Mr. Bo, a Communist Party aristocrat who was suspended from the Politburo this spring and has been under investigation. Mr. Bo has not been seen in public since March.
The outcome of trials in China, especially those connected to elite politicians, is often predetermined. The flamboyant Mr. Wang, 52, is expected to be found guilty on all four charges. "Wang Lijun will be facing a long prison term for the fact that what he did in February has tarnished the image of the party," said another person in Chongqing with ties to police officials. Like several others closely involved in the case, he predicted Mr. Wang would receive a sentence of life in prison, perhaps in the form of a suspended death penalty.
American and British officials are expected to closely monitor the trial's outcome.
Mr. Wang set off an eruption in Chinese politics by secretly driving to the American Consulate here for a stay that lasted more than 30 hours. During that time, he told diplomats that Mr. Bo's wife had poisoned a British businessman, Neil Heywood, who had close ties to the Bo family. Last month, Mr. Bo's wife, Gu Kailai, and a family aide, Zhang Xiaojun, were convicted in the murder. Ms. Gu was given a suspended death sentence, tantamount to a sentence of life in prison.
The charge against Mr. Wang of bending the law is based on suspicions that he knew that Ms. Gu had killed Mr. Heywood in November but sought to protect her, according to Xinhua, the state news agency. People attending Ms. Gu's trial said court officials had argued that she even approached Mr. Wang to help her kill Mr. Heywood in a fake drug arrest, but that Mr. Wang refused to take part. Mr. Wang and Mr. Bo had a falling-out in January.
Mr. Wang has not been heard from or seen since he left the Chengdu consulate and flew to Beijing with state security officers.
Some Republicans criticized the Obama administration in February for not giving Mr. Wang asylum. But American officials have said Mr. Wang did not apply for asylum. They said that he had feared being taken into custody by officials under Mr. Bo, but that after making calls to Beijing he appeared confident that would not happen and left the consulate of his own volition.
The accusation of illegal surveillance apparently related to Mr. Wang's tenure as Chongqing police chief, a post he was promoted to in March 2009 by Mr. Bo.
The two knew each other from Liaoning Province, in northeast China, where both had risen through the ranks of their professions. Mr. Wang was brought to Chongqing in June 2008 as a deputy policy chief.
Mr. Wang brought into the Chongqing police force a wiretapping expert, Wang Pengfei. (That Mr. Wang, no relation to the police chief, was one of four police officers found guilty last month of helping harbor Ms. Gu after the Heywood murder.)
Wang Lijun, under the oversight of Mr. Bo, started an extensive wiretapping campaign throughout Chongqing; the campaign even resulted in the surveillance of senior officials visiting from Beijing, according to people with party ties.
The aggressive police tactics were part of a "strike black" campaign that became one of the signature policies under Mr. Bo. It was billed as a crackdown on organized crime and police corruption, but also resulted in the torture and imprisonment of business leaders, lawyers and other civilians now believed to have little or no ties to criminal activity. Over 10 months starting in June 2009, nearly 4,800 people were detained, and 13 were executed.
Before the dark side of the campaign became public, a team of writers had been hired to write a four-volume history of the crackdown, and a "Godfather"-style movie and television series were to follow.
In April, after Mr. Bo had been ousted as party chief of Chongqing, a top party official in the city, Liu Guanglei, told senior and midlevel police officers that they should acknowledge any instances of torture that might have occurred in Chongqing. The meeting signaled the start of a wider inquiry into the campaign's abuses.
It is unclear whether those abuses will be addressed in Mr. Wang's trial because of the challenges they pose to the Communist Party's image. Several of China's top leaders, including Xi Jinping, who is expected to take over this fall as the top party leader, visited a museum exhibition for the campaign in Chongqing and praised the crackdown.
Residents of Chongqing interviewed this year said they could not recall a police chief as flashy as Mr. Wang. He traveled with a group of policemen dressed in dark overcoats, and two officers would always catch his own overcoat when he took it off. In restaurants, he would demand that the entire floor be sealed off. He brought his own food and drink or asked that the restaurant's be tested. When he drove to his police headquarters from a nearby home, officers cordoned off the route.
Along with the flashy image, Mr. Wang had a canny side. On Feb. 15, after he was taken to Beijing, a Chinese journalist, Chu Chaoxin, received a mysterious text message that said in part: "Briton Heywood was murdered in Chongqing; Wang Lijun investigated the case and found out Mrs. Bo is the suspect."
Some people now suspect Mr. Wang had previously arranged for an ally to send out the text. Mr. Chu posted the text on his microblog, an action that helped turn Mr. Heywood's demise from merely a suspicious death into a worldwide murder mystery.
By EDWARD WONG 18 Sep, 2012
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Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/18/world/asia/trial-begins-of-wang-lijun-police-chief-in-bo-xilai-scandal.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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