As Scandal Shook China, Quiet Spy Game Unraveled

BEIJING—In spy-speak it is known as a "walk-in"—an unsolicited approach to a diplomatic mission by a foreigner claiming to have sensitive information. And when an agitated former police chief, Wang Lijun, entered a U.S. consulate in early February with an eye-popping tale about the death of a British citizen, the stakes could hardly have been higher.

As Chinese police cars surrounded the building, Mr. Wang slipped U.S. diplomats the cellphone number of an accomplice, according to several people familiar with what happened. It would lead to evidence, he said, implicating the wife of Bo Xilai, one of the most senior leaders in the Chinese Communist Party, in the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood.

During a 30-hour standoff, U.S. officials weighed the information he claimed to have against the damage that granting him asylum could do to U.S.-Chinese relations. In the end, diplomats said Mr. Wang didn't formally seek asylum, and he left the consulate and was taken into Chinese custody.

But the drama didn't end there. In a previously undisclosed development, the U.S. handed the cellphone number over to British diplomats and gave them instructions on how to track down the information from Mr. Wang's mysterious accomplice. The instructions included setting up an email account under a designated name with a popular Chinese email and messaging service. The British set up the account and texted the cellphone number. People involved gave conflicting accounts of the timing and whether the accomplice responded. For reasons that are unclear, the British never received the promised documents.

On Tuesday, Mr. Wang will stand trial in the city of Chengdu on charges of defection, abuse of power, bribery and "bending the law for selfish ends," according to an official at the trial court. An indictment accuses Mr. Wang, the former police chief of Chongqing, of shielding Mr. Bo's wife from a criminal investigation, taking "massive" bribes and illegally using surveillance technology, according to state media.

The revelation that he claimed to have an accomplice who may still be prepared to spill secrets could complicate China's efforts to dictate the narrative about Messrs. Wang and Bo. The new details about Mr. Wang's stay in the consulate and its aftermath also shed light on how U.S. and British authorities responded to the unusual episode that triggered China's worst political crisis in more than two decades. Mr. Wang was a potentially valuable intelligence source with inside knowledge about senior Chinese leaders, but also was someone accused by human-rights activists and legal experts of widespread abuse of police powers.

The accounts of Britain's actions raise questions about whether it could have acted faster to procure the documents from Mr. Wang's associate. In the U.S., some politicians initially questioned the Obama administration's decision not to treat Mr. Wang as a valuable intelligence source and candidate for asylum.

Lawyers and Communist Party insiders say Mr. Wang almost certainly will be found guilty and given a stiff sentence, potentially the death penalty. Mr. Bo's wife, Gu Kailai, was given a suspended death sentence after her Aug. 20 conviction for Mr. Heywood's murder, which means she could spend life in prison.

Mr. Wang's trial is expected to produce the first official account of his flight to the consulate, which triggered a series of events that have thrown Chinese politics into disarray in advance of a once-a-decade leadership change expected this fall. Communist Party leaders see the trial as a next step in their efforts to limit the scandal. Soon after it ends, China likely will announce whether Mr. Bo—a former political highflier who was sacked from his party posts and placed under investigation in April—will face criminal charges, according to party insiders, political analysts and diplomats.

But the story prosecutors present is unlikely to address many of the unanswered questions about the episode, such as what other secrets Mr. Wang knew about Mr. Bo and what prompted his flight to the consulate.

That means it is unlikely to convince domestic skeptics, especially China's microbloggers, many of whom were deeply suspicious of the official story presented at Ms. Gu's trial. Many appear unsure about whether to view Mr. Wang as a hero or a villain.

"Wang Lijun did a lot of bad things, but he also saved China inadvertently," said Hu Xingdou, a popular microblogger and political economist at the Beijing Institute of Technology. "I don't think the authorities will fully explain what he did. But if they don't, that will only increase people's suspicions and lack of trust in the government."

The first sign of the brewing crisis in Chongqing came on Feb. 2 when a notice on the local government website announced that Mr. Wang had been replaced as police chief the previous day and given new responsibilities as vice mayor.

Soon afterward, he requested a meeting with the British consulate in Chongqing, but he failed to appear, according to people familiar with the episode.

Around the same time, he arranged a meeting at the U.S. consulate in Chengdu on the pretext that he wanted to discuss issues relating to his new post, people with knowledge of the meeting said. He drove the 200 miles from Chongqing to Chengdu and, on Feb. 6, approached the consulate, located in a leafy area of the city center surrounded by high walls.

U.S. diplomats, not realizing the political storm about to erupt, took him to the consulate's library rather than a safe room designed to block Chinese surveillance, according to people familiar with the events. Mr. Wang appeared agitated and fearful for his safety, but he didn't seem to have a preconceived plan, these people said. He told U.S. diplomats that he had fallen out with Mr. Bo, his boss in Chongqing, and gave them an account of the evidence against Ms. Gu, they said.

Among other evidence, Mr. Wang said he could provide a toxicology report proving that Mr. Heywood had ingested cyanide, although he said there were also traces of another poison that local authorities had been unable to identify. He also said that Ms. Gu had confessed to him that she murdered Mr. Heywood.

Early accounts from people briefed on the incident had suggested that Mr. Wang brought the evidence with him. But two people with more direct knowledge of the episode said more recently that he didn't have the documents with him.

At one point, Mr. Wang offered to bring in an associate who had documentary evidence, according to someone with direct knowledge of the incident, but that wasn't possible because the consulate was surrounded by Chinese police.

There are various theories about what motivated Mr. Wang to approach U.S. authorities.

One explanation from several people with close links to the party leadership is that well before Mr. Heywood's death, Mr. Wang was under investigation for alleged abuses of power in China's northeast and in Chongqing.

Some party insiders have said Mr. Wang was implicated in a corruption investigation into his successor as police chief of Tieling city in China's northeast, which was reported by state media in February. These people said Mr. Wang had been relying on political protection from Mr. Bo but became convinced his boss no longer was willing to shield him.

On or around Jan. 28, in an attempt to put pressure on Mr. Bo, Mr. Wang had confronted him over his wife's involvement in Mr. Heywood's murder, according to several people familiar with that incident. But Mr. Bo refused to give Mr. Wang what he wanted and replaced him as Chongqing's police chief three days later, they said.

Inside the U.S. consulate, Mr. Wang asked for shelter from Mr. Bo. Peter Haymond, the U.S. consul general in Chengdu, was out of town but hurried back. Stunned diplomats also informed the embassy in Beijing, which contacted the State Department in Washington. Members of the National Security Staff were informed, but President Barack Obama wasn't briefed while Mr. Wang was at the consulate, according to administration officials.

It was a tricky situation for U.S. diplomats. Although Mr. Wang was a potential fount of confidential information, he didn't necessarily qualify for asylum given the allegations of power and rights abuses that surrounded him. Moreover, offering him protection would have outraged the Chinese on the eve of a planned U.S. visit by Xi Jinping, the man expected to take over as China's top leader in the fall. U.S. government officials appear to have decided early on that he wasn't a sufficiently valuable intelligence asset to risk the political fallout, according to people familiar with the matter.

The U.S. officials explained to Mr. Wang that it wasn't possible to apply formally for asylum in the consulate, and that it would be extremely difficult to arrange his departure from China, according to people with knowledge of the events. After some discussion, Mr. Wang agreed that his best option was to hand himself to central-government authorities, who could protect him from Mr. Bo's security forces. Using three or more mobile phones he brought with him, Mr. Wang spent several hours negotiating with central authorities.

Mr. Wang agreed to be taken away by officials from the Ministry of State Security, who flew with him back to Beijing, where he has been kept at an undisclosed location for the past few months.

Before Mr. Wang left the consulate on Feb. 7, some 30 hours after he entered, U.S. officials briefed British diplomats on his allegations, according to people familiar with those discussions. The next day, the Americans gave the British the cellphone number and told them of the plan for obtaining documents from his associate via the email account.

British diplomats set up the email account and texted the mobile phone number with confirmation that the account was ready, according to two people familiar with the efforts, who gave differing accounts of the timing and whether there was a response.

One of the people said British diplomats texted and called several times starting Feb. 9, but never got an answer. Another said the British didn't set up the email account until later and did receive two text messages from the accomplice, which outlined Mr. Wang's allegations but contained no evidence.

A spokesman for the British Embassy said: "We made every effort to establish whether additional information existed."

William Hague, Britain's foreign secretary, has said he was informed about the matter on Feb. 7 and the British embassy first asked the Chinese government to investigate Mr. Heywood's death on Feb. 15.

Also on Feb. 15, a text message outlining Mr. Wang's allegations and using a Chinese approximation of Mr. Heywood's name was sent to Chinese journalist Chu Chaoxin, according to a message Mr. Chu posted on his microblog in March. Mr. Chu, who works for the Southern Weekend newspaper, said in his microblog posting that the message came from one of Wang Lijun's "one way communication" cellphone numbers. He didn't explain what that meant, and the posting was quickly deleted. He recently declined to comment.

Some party insiders, diplomats and political analysts believe Mr. Wang had laid plans for what would happen if Chinese authorities took him into custody. "I think it's clear that Wang was not working alone," said one Western official following the case.

On March 26, The Wall Street Journal was the first to report that the British government had asked Chinese authorities to investigate Mr. Heywood's death, and to describe his links to the Bo family as well as Mr. Wang's allegations.

During Ms. Gu's murder trial on Aug. 9, prosecutors alleged that she told Mr. Wang about her plan to kill Mr. Heywood, and she originally had schemed with Mr. Wang to have the Briton framed as a drug smuggler and shot dead resisting arrest, according to observers of the trial. Prosecutors said Mr. Wang backed out of that plan and Ms. Gu went ahead with her own scheme to poison Mr. Heywood, the observers said. Mr. Wang met Ms. Gu the day after the murder and secretly recorded her confessing, the observers quoted prosecutors as saying.

Ms. Gu didn't contest the charges against her, but her defense team sought to discredit Mr. Wang's testimony, according to the observers. "They really seemed to be trying very hard to undermine Wang Lijun," noted one.

Lawyers and political analysts say that doesn't bode well for Mr. Wang. But they say he should escape execution if he has provided evidence against others, possibly in relation to the crackdown on organized crime he oversaw, which critics say was used to seize assets from local entrepreneurs.

Wang Yuncai, a lawyer and old friend of Mr. Wang, said she was allowed to meet him in Chengdu last month but had no sense of what penalty he might face.

"It's hard to say if the situation is optimistic or not. There is simply no way to judge it," she said. As for his physical and emotional condition, she said, "it's very difficult to say whether it's good or not."

WSJ

The Communist Party’s Big Problem? It’s Not Bo Xilai

The bringing of specific charges against former Chongqing police chief Wang Lijun, whose dash to a U.S. consulate earlier this year jump-started the scandal surrounding fallen Chinese Communist Party star Bo Xilai, might signal to some that the party is finally starting to emerge into the political daylight.

With the 18th Party Congress and the selection of a new leadership looming, that would be good news for many cadres.


But it’s nothing of the sort.

Indeed, the whole Bo affair—from Wang’s attempted defection to the murder trial of Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai—is starting to look like a sideshow to a far sharper struggle within the Chinese Communist Party—not over what the new leadership is going to look like so much as what sort of party is needed to deal with the society at large.

That brawl within the party over direction became more pronounced last week with the publication of a long, critical commentary on the website of its main theoretical journal Qiushi, or Seeking Truth.

The essay focuses on the risks to governance that the Communist Party faces—ten of them in all, it argues. And far from being another float in the parade of praise that the official media has been bestowing on the Hu Jintao era, the commentary is a clear effort to puncture the achievements of the present leadership, pointing out the major problems it’s produced, or that its left for the next one to deal with.

Nine out of the ten risks are domestic, with the remaining challenge being “outside hostile forces” (primarily Western), whose “intent and consistent strategic goal,” according to the article, is to exploit China’s “current contradictions” and seek to “destroy the Communist Party and the socialist system.” The essay insists that while “the contemporary world is undergoing major development, major changes and major adjustments,” the real risks to the Communist Party, according to the commentary, are from within–in some cases, inside the party itself.

A good deal of space is spent addressing the shortcomings of political will among officials. For example, according to the article, the party line of “reform and opening up” for the sake of “socialist modernization” is being questioned by some cadres. Some of them want to accelerate reform and push social change by racing “a capitalist road,” leaving the core ideologies of the Marxism and Maoism by the wayside. That’s risky driving; and it could end up delivering a disastrous crash, the essay says.

Equally disturbing, it notes, is the decline of Party ideology as “a weapon to solidify popular feeling.”

“Negative, unhealthy, and reactionary ideas” from “different cultures and different values” are colliding with China’s efforts to build up its own national identity, the article suggests, and those forces are starting to sow seeds of doubt in the minds of officials and the public at large.

That sort of lip-service socialism badly weakens the party and is adding to a “moral landslide” within the government, making cadres less courageous, less heroic and less responsive to the masses—which want guidance and need far more service-oriented government than they currently have. The risk then, suggests the essay, is that party members are not taking enough risks.

So, where’s this disquiet about the state of the Communist Party coming from?

Essays such as this one are usually either sponsored by some political patron, or they emerge as provocations, enjoying support from different parts of the party. This commentary has all the signs of the latter.

It talks extensively about “social justice,” arguing at one point that “the history of Chinese Communism is a history of the struggle for the realization of social justice,” which suggests a blast from the Left.

Yet — and this is what makes it truly noteworthy — the essay also represents a cannonade from the Right, because it rails against “the excessive concentration of power” and the underdevelopment of “inner-Party democracy.”

That’s the true question facing the party in the coming months, up to and through the Party Congress: Not whether Bo Xilai and those who stumbled with him get shot or end up in the slammer, but whether the Left and the Right can be kept from finding common cause to act in concert against the hardline Center.

Thus far, the Center has been tough enough to handle challenges from both ends. And the indications are that the likely successors would like to remain hardline and cautious centralizers, with the pace of reform set to full-speed slow.

That approach worked well when the scandal in Chongqing broke. But if we see more essays like this one as the Party Congress approaches, the old way of political damage control is going to look increasingly questionable.

Russell Leigh Moses

No Movement on Major Disputes as Clinton Meets With Chinese Leaders

BEIJING — The United States and China clashed openly on Wednesday over two of the most contentious issues riling their relationship, the violence in Syria and growing tensions over territorial disputes in the South China Sea.

After hours of meetings with other top leaders that began Tuesday night and continued Wednesday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton failed to narrow the gaps over international crises involving Iran and North Korea and the competition for dominance in the Asia-Pacific region. China also rebuffed Mrs. Clinton’s appeals to soften its support for the government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. Adding to the bumps on what is likely to be Mrs. Clinton’s last visit to China as secretary of state, one of her most important appointments, a session with Vice President Xi Jinping, the likely next leader of China, was canceled.

Most important, the Chinese leadership showed no signs of buckling after months of efforts by Mrs. Clinton and her senior aides to persuade the country to be more flexible on maritime disputes in the South China Sea.

“China has sovereignty over the islands of the South China Sea and the adjacent waters,” the foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, declared flatly during a lengthy appearance with Mrs. Clinton in the Great Hall of the People on Tiananmen Square. “There is plentiful historical and jurisprudential evidence for that.”

When asked about the deepening of American military engagement in Australia and the Philippines, Mr. Yang pointedly added that the United States should reconsider its own strategy in Asia in light of “the trends of our current era and the general wish of countries in the region.”

Mrs. Clinton and her senior aides did not come to Beijing with high expectations of resolving major differences, given China’s once-in-a-decade leadership transition beginning this fall. The highly scripted transition has been jolted by a political scandal that led to the downfall of a major party official, Bo Xilai, that revealed some of the maneuvering among the political elite. As Mrs. Clinton was wrapping up her trip, a central figure in the scandal, Wang Lijun, wascharged with “bending the law for selfish ends, defection, abuse of power and bribetaking,” according to the official Xinhua news agency.

American officials said that Mrs. Clinton was not told of the looming charges against Mr. Wang during her talks on Tuesday and Wednesday, but, they said, the United States had expected that Mr. Wang would be charged at some point amid the churning internal maneuvering ahead of the transition.

At the news conference with Mr. Yang, there was little effort to paper over the two countries’ differences on Syria and the territorial disputes in the South China Sea. In July, China established a military garrison and a legislative assembly on the tiny Paracel Islands, which Vietnam also claims, exacerbating the tensions there.

Mrs. Clinton, who is in the middle of a 10-day trip through Asia, has repeatedly called on China to discuss with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations a code of conduct to address disputes in the region. The Chinese have firmly resisted that idea, with Mr. Yang insisting on direct negotiations with individual countries.

The State Department has said that China would be more likely to get its way by bargaining with individual nations than with the entire regional bloc.

In the last few months, for example, China has effectively blocked the Philippines, an ally of the United States, from gaining access to the Scarborough Shoal, known as Huangyan Island by China. The Chinese placed a rope across the entrance to the island lagoon and have kept patrol boats in the adjacent waters.

After days of hostile articles in the official Chinese news media about American interference in the region, Mr. Yang said any settlement over the South China Sea disputes should only involve those “directly concerned,” in other words, not the United States.

The foreign minister repeated China’s oft-stated policy that China would assure “the freedom and safety of navigation in the South China Sea.”

On the conflict in Syria, Mrs. Clinton reiterated American criticism of China’s veto, with Russia, of three United Nations Security Council resolutions intended to press Mr. Assad to end the violent crackdown in his country, which has claimed an estimated 20,000 lives and created a rising flood of more than 240,000 refugees, 100,000 in the last month.

“We believe that the situation in Syria is a threat to peace and stability in the entire region,” Mrs. Clinton said. “And the longer the conflict goes on, the greater the risk that it spills over borders and destabilizes neighboring countries.”

The foreign minister, Mr. Yang, countered that China opposed international interference in any other country’s internal affairs, though he expressed support for the peace proposal of the former United Nations envoy, Kofi Annan, which American and most other diplomats consider to be moot at this point. He suggested that China’s policy, not the United States’, would ultimately prove successful. “I think history will judge that China’s position on the Syrian question is a promotion of the appropriate handling and resolution” of the violence there, he said.

The Foreign Ministry said at its regular briefing that the cancellation of Mrs. Clinton’s meeting with Mr. Xi was a “normal adjustment of the itinerary.” Mr. Xi also canceled his scheduled meeting Wednesday with Singapore’s prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong. “We have reached consensus with the United States and Singapore” on the cancellations, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hong Lei, said.

Diplomats in Beijing said they were told that Mr. Xi had hurt his back and said there was no reason not to believe that explanation, even though there was speculation about whether the cancellation of the meeting with Mrs. Clinton was connected to the once-in-a-decade transition, or whether it was intended as a snub.

Instead of Mr. Xi, Mrs. Clinton met with the vice premier, Li Keqiang, who is expected to become the premier early next year. Earlier Wednesday, she met with President Hu Jintao, whose term ends next year, at the Great Hall of the People. Despite the differences, Mrs. Clinton and her aides appeared satisfied with the Obama administration’s efforts to build greater openness between the two countries by creating regular consultations that allow them to endure disagreements like those on display here. She noted that President Obama and Mr. Hu have met 12 times, while she has visited Beijing five times, joking at one point that she had lost count.

N.Y. Times