When Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) picked up the telephone in August last year to talk to a senior anti-corruption official visiting Chongqing, special devices detected that he was being wiretapped — by local officials in the southwestern metropolis.
The discovery of that and other wiretapping led to an official investigation that helped topple Chongqing’s charismatic leader, Bo Xilai (薄熙來), in a political cataclysm that has yet to reach a conclusion.
Until now, the downfall of Bo has been cast largely as a tale of a populist who pursued his own agenda too aggressively for some top leaders in Beijing and was brought down by accusations that his wife had arranged the murder of Neil Heywood, a British consultant, after a business dispute. However, the hidden wiretapping, previously alluded to only in internal Communist Party accounts of the scandal, appears to have provided another compelling reason for party leaders to turn on Bo.
The story of how Hu was monitored also shows the level of mistrust among leaders in the one-party state. To maintain control over society, leaders have embraced enhanced surveillance technology, but some have turned it on one another — repeating patterns of intrigue that go back to the beginnings of Communist Party rule.
“This society has bred mistrust and violence,” said Roderick MacFarquhar, a historian of China’s elite-level machinations over the past half century. “Leaders know you have to watch your back because you never know who will put a knife in it.”
Nearly a dozen sources with party ties, speaking anonymously for fear of retribution, confirmed the wiretapping, as well as a widespread program of bugging across Chongqing, but the party’s public version of Bo’s fall omits it.
The official narrative and much foreign attention has focused on the more easily grasped death of Heywood in November last year. When Bo’s police chief, Wang Lijun (王立軍), was stripped of his job and feared being implicated in Bo’s family affairs, he fled to the US consulate in Chengdu, where he spoke largely about Heywood’s death.
The murder account is pivotal to the scandal, providing Bo’s opponents with an unassailable reason to have him removed, but party insiders say the wiretapping was seen as a direct challenge to central authorities. It revealed to them just how far Bo was prepared to go in his efforts to grasp greater power in China. That compounded suspicions that Bo could not be trusted with a top slot in the party, which is due to reshuffle its senior leadership positions this fall.
“Everyone across China is improving their systems for the purposes of maintaining stability, but not everyone dares to monitor party central leaders,” one official with a central government media outlet said, referring to surveillance tactics.
According to senior party members, including editors, academics and people with ties to the military, Bo’s eavesdropping operations began several years ago as part of a state-financed surveillance buildup, ostensibly for the purposes of fighting crime and maintaining local political stability.
The architect was Wang, a nationally decorated crime-fighter who had worked under Bo in the northeast province of Liaoning. Together, they installed “a comprehensive package bugging system covering telecommunications to the Internet,” the media official said.
One of several noted cybersecurity experts they enlisted was Fang Binxing (方濱興), president of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, who is often called the father of China’s “Great Firewall,” the nation’s vast Internet censorship system. Most recently, Fang advised the city on a new police information center using cloud-based computing, according to state media reports. Late last year, Wang was named a visiting professor at Fang’s university.
Together, Bo and Wang unleashed a drive to smash crime rings that controlled large portions of Chongqing’s economic life. In interviews, targets of the crackdown marveled at the scale and determination with which local police intercepted their communications.
“On the phone, we dared not mention Bo Xilai or Wang Lijun,” said Li Jun, a fugitive property developer who now lives in hiding abroad. Instead he and fellow businessmen took to scribbling notes, removing their cellphone batteries and stocking up on unregistered SIM cards to thwart surveillance as the crackdown mounted, he said.
Li Zhuang, a lawyer from a powerfully connected Beijing law firm, recalled how some cousins of one client had presented him with a full stack of unregistered mobile phone SIM cards, and warned him of local wiretapping. Despite these precautions, Chongqing police ended up arresting Li on the outskirts of Beijing, about 1,500km away, after he called his client’s wife and arranged to visit her later that day at a hospital.
“They already were there lying in ambush,” Li said.
He added that Wang, by reputation, was a “tapping freak.”
Not only those suspected of being mobsters, but also political figures were targeted.
One political analyst with senior-level ties, citing information obtained from a senior military colonel he recently dined with, said Bo had tried to tap the phones of virtually all high-ranking leaders who visited Chongqing in recent years, “including Zhou Yongkang (周永康),” the law-and-order czar who was said to have backed Bo as his potential successor.
“Bo wanted to be extremely clear about what leaders’ attitudes toward him were,” the analyst said.
In one other instance last year, two journalists said, operatives were caught intercepting a conversation between the office of Hu and Liu Guanglei (劉光磊), a top party law-and-order official whom Wang had replaced as police chief. Liu once served under Hu in the 1980s in Guizhou Province.
However, perhaps more worrisome to Bo and Wang was the increased scrutiny from the party’s Central Commission of Discipline Inspection, which by the beginning of this year, had stationed up to four separate teams in Chongqing, two undercover, according to the political analyst, who cited Discipline Inspection sources.
Beyond making a routine inspection, it is not clear why the disciplinary official who telephoned Hu — Minister of Supervision Ma Wen — was in Chongqing. Her high-security land link to Hu from the state guesthouse in Chongqing was monitored on Bo’s orders. The topic of the call is unknown, but was probably not vital. Most phones are so unsafe that important information is often conveyed only in person or in writing.
However, Beijing was galled that Bo would wiretap Hu, whether intentionally or not, and turned central security and disciplinary investigators loose on his police chief, who bore the brunt of the scrutiny over the next couple of months.
“Bo wanted to push the responsibility onto Wang,” one senior party official said. “Wang couldn’t dare say it was Bo’s doing.”
Yet at some point well before fleeing Chongqing, Wang filed a pair of complaints to the inspection commission, the first anonymously and the second under his own name, according to a party academic with ties to Bo.
Both complaints alleged Bo had “opposed party central” authorities, including ordering the wiretapping of central leaders. The requests to investigate Bo were turned down at the time. Bo, who learned of the charges at a later point, told the academic shortly before his dismissal that he thought he could withstand Wang’s charges.
Wang is not believed to have discussed wiretapping at the US consulate. Instead, he focused on the less self-incriminating allegations of Bo’s wife’s arranging the killing of Heywood.
However, tensions between the two men crested, sources said, when Bo found that Wang had also wiretapped him and his wife. After Wang was arrested in February, Bo detained Wang’s wiretapping specialist from Liaoning, a district police chief named Wang Pengfei.
Internal party accounts suggest that the party views the wiretapping as one of Bo’s most serious crimes. One preliminary indictment in the middle of last month accused Bo of damaging party unity by collecting evidence on other leaders.
Party officials, however, say it would be far too damaging to make the wiretapping public. When Bo is finally charged, wiretapping is not expected to be mentioned.
“The things that can be publicized are the economic problems and the killing,” the senior official at the government media outlet said. “That’s enough to decide the matter in public.”
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