Targets Of Disgraced Bo Xilai Still Languish In Jail
It was 5 p.m. on an ordinary Tuesday, and Li Ping was finishing up the company accounts before going to have a facial. She was working for her brother, Li Qiang, who owned one of the biggest private transport companies in Chongqing, a major city in southwestern China.
Suddenly, five plainclothes policemen barged into the room. They asked her name, then put a black hood over her head and drove her to a secret interrogation site. Her ordeal had begun.
"I sat on a chair 24 hours a day," Li Ping remembers. "My hands were cuffed and my feet fettered. I sat there for seven days. I wouldn't let them take the hood off because when I was wearing it, I could doze off and they couldn't see."
Unbeknownst to her, her brother was undergoing the same treatment. Even though he was a millionaire and a politician — a Chongqing city People's Congress member — he spent 81 days handcuffed in a metal chair.
This was July 2009, and Li Qiang's arrest was one of the first in Chongqing party secretary Bo Xilai's highly publicized campaign against the mafia. Now, 14 months after Bo was detained on suspicion of abuse of power and corruption, some victims of his campaign are going public for the first time with accounts of a process that flouted the law at almost every stage. Many others still languish in jail, despite the fall of those who put them there.
'Fight The Black, Sing The Red'
Two arrests precipitated Bo's scandalous downfall from the highest realms of China's leadership: that of his wife, who has since been found guilty of murdering a British businessman; and of his former police chief, Wang Lijun, who is now serving 15 years in jail after a dramatic attempt to seek shelter in the U.S. Consulate in Chengdu. Four senior policemen have received jail terms for helping cover up the businessman's murder, including some who were instrumental in the anti-mafia campaign.
Bo branded his campaign against gangsters as "fight the black, sing the red," tying it into his predilection for mass mobilization in the form of public rallies singing communist or "red" songs reminiscent of the era of Chairman Mao. For the victims, there were other similarities to the lawless days of Mao: Punishment wasn't limited to the individual; whole clans went down. In Li Qiang's case, six other family members and dozens in his inner circle were put on trial.