A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel by Wenguang Huang Pin Ho Read Free Book Online

and was elected deputy mayor the next year. Ironically, both in Tieling and Jinzhou, police officers who had been fired or jailed gained back their jobs soon after Wang Lijun left. His reform programs, such as combining patrol and traffic police into one unit to improve police efficiency, were rolled back. His successors saw his sweeping measures as too radical.
    In June 2008, Wang was transferred from the city of Jinzhou to Chongqing, one of the four mega cities that fall under the direct control of the central government. He took up the deputy police chief’s position. For Wang, it was a career milestone.
“PROFESSOR WANG LIJUN”
    I N CHONGQING, known in the West as Chungking, Wang’s political career took a meteoric rise. He moved from a city of 3 million people to one with 32 million, and within three years he jumped three bureaucratic levels: from deputy police chief to police chief and deputy mayor.
    How did Wang end up in the politically important Chongqing in the first place? Who made the connection between Wang and Bo? There are several competing narratives, I found; this detail is critical to understanding the Bo–Wang partnership in Chongqing and their eventual break.
    A popular version indicates that Wang came to Bo Xilai’s attention in 2007, when his wife, Gu Kailai, suspected that someone had slipped a mix of lead and mercury into the capsule of her daily herbal medicine and attempted to poison her. Xu Ming, a billionaire businessman in Dalian and a friend of the Bos, contacted Wang Lijun,who had by then become a celebrity in China’s northeast due to the popular TV drama based on his life. Xu invited Wang to handle the investigation. Wang solved the case in a matter of days and had Bo’s family driver and a helper arrested. In 2008, one year after Bo’s appointment as the party secretary of Chongqing, he was concerned that organized crime was rampant and considered the then-police chief, a protégé of President Hu Jintao, untrustworthy and incompetent. As an outsider without many local connections, he needed to boost his team with his own people. Bo’s wife strongly recommended Wang Lijun.
    A businessperson well connected with the Ministry of Public Security argued that Zhou Yongkang, chairman of the party’s Central Politics and Law Commission, was the one who made the official connection between Wang and Bo. Zhou Yongkang, who is featured later in the book, owed Wang a favor—the anti-crime hero released several of Zhou’s friends who had been arrested during the 2002 crackdown on “oil rats” in Panjin. The two became close friends after Zhou was made minister of public security. “All the key personnel changes had to be approved by Zhou,” said the businessman. “Otherwise, it would have been administratively impossible for Wang to make that big career leap.”
    Regardless of how the two met, officials in Chongqing say Bo and Wang hit it off. Bo, on multiple private and public occasions, played up Wang’s credentials and his fearlessness. For Wang, the son of a railway worker, one would assume he cherished the honor of working with a prominent princeling and a rising political star capable of opening up a new world for him.
    The honeymoon was sweet. Wang started out as deputy chief of the city’s public security bureau. Nine months later, Bo made good on his initial promise and appointed Wang bureau chief.
    Wang did not disappoint either. In the first year, he embarked on what he called a “thorough social investigation.” He disguised himself as a cabdriver, visiting different neighborhoods and talking to residents. As in other parts of China, Chongqing was plagued with rising crime rates. In some areas, prostitution and illegal gambling dens were operating just a short distance from police stations.
    On the early morning of June 3, 2009, a forty-four-year-old man named Li Minghang—neighbors described him to police as a polite and mysterious renter in a dilapidated housing