Singing red

As part of Bo's “sing red” campaign, government departments, companies and community groups were encouraged to spend large sums of money organizing singalongs of revolutionary and Cultural Revolution-era “red” songs.

Bo exhorted officials and the masses to glorify the country's “red” Communist heritage and revive Mao-era concepts of egalitarian morality. Officials were ordered to go down to the countryside to spend time with the masses, the government sent Mao Zedong quotations out to all citizens via text message, patriotic historical dramas replaced game shows on television and advertising was banned from primetime airwaves.

The local government even commissioned a new 37-meter statue of Mao and erected it on the grounds of Chongqing Medical University.

While some in the Party dismissed this as harmless nostalgia, others felt Bo was up to something more dangerous – by emphasising Party tradition and history he was glorifying his own pedigree and encouraging the notion that he was born to rule.

Together with his focus on improving the lives of ordinary citizens and redistributing more wealth to the poor, this wave of red nostalgia fed the impression that Bo was a “neo-leftist” who believed in rolling back market reforms. Still others believed his sing red campaign, like the “smash black” initiative, was nothing more than a cynical ploy to tap into populist angst and “appeal to the base” of ordinary Chinese who have been left behind by three decades of rapid growth.

Given his own terrible experiences during the Cultural Revolution, it seemed preposterous to his detractors that he was now promoting nostalgia for that period.

Some of China's top leaders, including Premier Wen Jiabao and President Hu Jintao, both of them set to retire from office early in 2013, were also becoming concerned about Bo's ever-expanding campaigns, his disregard for the rule of law and his tendency to flout internal Party procedures.

They were also increasingly worried by his closeness to the military and his courting of senior figures in the People's Liberation Army.

“Some of the actions taken in Chongqing were even rare in feudal society,” wrote Tong Zhiwei, a leading Chinese legal scholar at East China University of Political Science and Law, in a highly critical report on the “Chongqing Model” he prepared for Chinese leaders in mid-2011. “Even for billionaires their lives and freedom could be taken away with a single word from two very powerful individuals [Bo and Wang].”

The high-profile arrests and trials of dozens of wealthy entrepreneurs on charges of running “mafia” organizations made for exciting television and were mostly applauded in a country where fabulous riches are generally assumed to be ill-gotten.

But entrepreneurs in Chongqing and further afield began to point out that only businesspeople with no connection to Bo, Wang and the new city administration were being rounded up and charged as gangsters. Others with close ties to Bo who faced similar public accusations were left unscathed by the “smash black” campaign.

Li Jun, a former billionaire property developer from Chongqing who escaped China and is currently a fugitive outside the country, told the FT he was shackled for days to a “tiger bench” - a straight-backed steel chair with threaded metal bars for a seat – deprived of sleep and beaten by interrogators who demanded he confess to being a mafia kingpin.

He says his captors tried to force him to admit to corrupt dealings with military officers who were considered political adversaries of Bo Xilai. They also told him he was there on the orders of Wang Lijun and the real reason for his incarceration was that he had refused to hand over a block of land to local government officials and their relatives.

After nearly three months of imprisonment and torture he was eventually released in early 2010 and given various documents that exonerated him of any wrongdoing after he agreed to pay a “fine” of around Rmb40m to the military.

However, he soon found himself the target of another crime-busting campaign and in a panic he fled the country in late 2010, leaving more than 30 of his former employees and family members, including his wife, to be arrested and imprisoned on charges of running a criminal gang. More than Rmb4bn of his assets were seized to be transferred to state-owned enterprises.

Another prominent casualty of the “smash black” campaign was Peng Zhimin, a billionaire property developer and part owner of the Chongqing Hilton hotel. Peng was convicted of bribery, prostitution, assault and running a “mafia-style gang” and sentenced to life in prison in May 2011 by a Chongqing court.

But according to someone with close ties to Wang Lijun and another person familiar with the case, the real reason for Peng's downfall was that he had personally offended the police chief.

These people said that a group of Wang Lijun's old friends and colleagues who were visiting from northeast China tried to check into eight rooms in the Hilton using the official government-issued identity cards of just two people. Under China's strict residency laws, every hotel guest must register their ID cards individually for each room so the hotel refused to rent them all of the rooms, even after the friends invoked Wang Lijun's name and called him to complain.

Wang was livid at how his friends had been treated and soon after Peng was taken away and charged. The harsh treatment extended from the accused “gangsters” to the lawyers and witnesses who tried to defend them. Witnesses or experts called by defence attorneys were regularly made to “disappear” temporarily by the police before they could give testimony; lawyers were intimidated and threatened or worse.

A turning point in the public perception of Bo's “smash black” campaign” came with the arrest and conviction of a prominent Beijing lawyer, Li Zhuang. Li was sentenced to two and a half years in prison in 2010 allegedly for coaching his client, an accused gangster Gong Gangmo, to say he was tortured by police to extract a confession.

“Under Wang Lijun the Chongqing public security bureau arbitrarily and violently executed the law; nobody supervised them, no one could control them and no one could criticise them,” Li Zhuang said in an interview with the FT. “I went there to expose their barbarity so they arrested and sentenced me; that was Chongqing.”

He insists the charges against him were trumped up to send a warning to other lawyers not to interfere in Bo and Wang's campaign. He is now working on defending other people he believes were wrongly accused in the Chongqing trials, including Li Jun and his family.

“In Gong Gangmo's case there were 34 people involved and every one of them was badly beaten, it was very shocking,” Li Zhuang said. “Many other cases involved torture, beatings and forced confessions but after I was imprisoned no other lawyers dared to bring this up in court.”