While everyone was getting their Diaoyus on, Wang Lijun's trial went ahead in Chengdu. Xinhua's done its best to slather the whole thing in officialese, but even that can't erase the noir elements. The droning bureaucrat gives way to the guy in the trenchcoat and snap brim fedora on page three.
On Nov. 18, Heywood was cremated. That evening, Wang told Bogu Kailai about the cremation during a phone call.
"On the evening of Nov. 18, 2011, Wang Lijun called me and asked Bogu Kailai to listen. After the call, Bogu Kailai said Wang used the phrase 'becoming smoke and ashes, gone to the west'," (a euphemism indicating that Heywood had been cremated,) Zhang Xiaojun said in his testimony.
I read elsewhere that the actual phrase involved 'blue smoke' and 'flying to the West with the cranes', which as post mortem euphemisms go would snuggle in nicely between 'sleeps with the fishes' and plain old 'gone west'.
Wang and Madam Gu fell out, on this account, because she couldn't shut up about killing Neil Heywood. That was the point at which he began building his own evidence file. He later became convinced that he himself had been made a target, and so off he went to tell tales to the yanks. It's not stated who Wang thought was targeting him. That may form the basis of any criminal charges brought against Bo Xilai.
UPDATE: What Xinhua English didn't tell us is that Wang went to Bo with his concerns and had his ears boxed. So that's where Bo slots in on the threats to Wang.
See:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgX6JFoV0TM
"I thought we agreed at the meeting that these terms are needlessly ambiguous."
Posted by: Chris Williams | September 19, 2012 at 05:55 PM