Former senior politician Bo Xilai was implicated for the first time on Wednesday in a criminal act, in a published account by state media of the trial of the ex-police chief.
Hours after she poisoned a British businessman, Gu Kailai reached out to a trusted ally: Wang Lijun. Gu was the wife of Bo Xilai, the Communist Party boss in the inland Chinese megalopolis of Chongqing; Wang was Bo’s chief of police and longtime collaborator.
According to an account released by the government’s Xinhua News Agency, when a panicked Gu turned to Wang for assistance following the murder, Wang helped her cover up the crime.
Within weeks, his relations with Gu became strained. He approached “the Chongqing party committee’s main responsible person at the time” — an apparent reference to Bo himself — to tell him about the murder. For that, Wang “received an angry rebuke and was boxed in the ears,” Xinhua said.
Only then, according to the account, did Wang flee to the U.S. Consulate in nearby Chengdu and request asylum from American diplomats.
Wang’s flight in February set off the seamiest political scandal China has seen in decades. The fallout included an end to Bo’s career as a rising star in party politics, his wife’s conviction for murder, and serious complications for an insular Chinese leadership attempting to transfer power to a new generation this fall.