关键的三段翻译如下:
官方的叙述和许多外国的关注点,均一直聚焦在较易抓住人心的海伍德先生于11月的死亡案上。当薄先生的警察局长王立军,被剥夺其工作并担心被牵连进薄的家庭事务,于是逃到美国驻成都领事馆时,他谈得最多的就是海沃德先生的死。
这个谋杀解释对于这桩(出逃)丑闻而言是非常关键的,因为它为薄先生的对手提供了一个为何要将其解职的令人信服的理由。然而,党的内幕人士却说,是窃听才被
视为对中央权威的直接挑战:它显示出目前正在受着严重违纪调查、并一直在准备着为在中国抓到更大权力的薄先生,早已在他与中央的关系上,走出了多远。此事
加剧了对薄先生将在今秋党领导层的重新洗牌中获得一个党的顶层职位的疑虑。
“在中国尽管每一个人都在为着维稳而改善他们的系统,”一个掌握着输出官方信息的中央媒体官员在谈及监听手段时说道,“但却并非每一个人都胆敢去监听党中央领导人。”
The
official narrative and much foreign attention has focused on the more
easily grasped death of Mr. Heywood in November. When Mr. Bo’s police
chief, Wang Lijun, was stripped of his job and feared being implicated
in Bo family affairs, he fled to the United States Consulate in Chengdu,
where he spoke mostly about Mr. Heywood’s death.
The murder
account is pivotal to the scandal, providing Mr. Bo’s opponents with an
unassailable reason to have him removed. But party insiders say the
wiretapping was seen as a direct challenge to central authorities. It
revealed to them just how far Mr. Bo, who is now being investigated for
serious disciplinary violations, was prepared to go in his efforts to
grasp greater power in China. That compounded suspicions that Mr. Bo
could not be trusted with a top slot in the party, which is due to
reshuffle its senior leadership positions this fall.
“Everyone
across China is improving their systems for the purposes of maintaining
stability,” said one official with a central government media outlet,
referring to surveillance tactics. “But not everyone dares to monitor
party central leaders.”
Ousted Chinese Leader Is Said to Have Spied on Other Top Officials Reuters Bo
Xilai, center, Chonquing’s former party chief, fell from power amid
allegations his wife arranged a British consultant’s killing, but other
charges have emerged. By JONATHAN ANSFIELD and IAN JOHNSONPublished: April 25, 2012 BEIJING — When Hu Jintao, China’s
top leader, picked up the telephone last August to talk to a senior
anticorruption official visiting Chongqing, special devices detected
that he was being wiretapped — by local officials in that southwestern
metropolis. Feng Li/Getty ImagesHu
Jintao, China’s president, was among those Bo Xilai is thought to have
spied on, a hint of the distrust among officials.
The discovery of that and other wiretapping led to an official investigation that helped topple Chongqing’s charismatic leader, Bo Xilai, in a political cataclysm that has yet to reach a conclusion. Until
now, the downfall of Mr. Bo has been cast largely as a tale of a
populist who pursued his own agenda too aggressively for some top
leaders in Beijing and was brought down by accusations
that his wife had arranged the murder of Neil Heywood, a British
consultant, after a business dispute. But the hidden wiretapping,
previously alluded to only in internal Communist Party accounts of the
scandal, appears to have provided another compelling reason for party
leaders to turn on Mr. Bo. The
story of how China’s president was monitored also shows the level of
mistrust among leaders in the one-party state. To maintain control over
society, leaders have embraced enhanced surveillance technology. But
some have turned it on one another — repeating patterns of intrigue that
go back to the beginnings of Communist rule. “This
society has bred mistrust and violence,” said Roderick MacFarquhar, a
historian of Communist China’s elite-level machinations over the past
half century. “Leaders know you have to watch your back because you
never know who will put a knife in it.” Nearly
a dozen people with party ties, speaking anonymously for fear of
retribution, confirmed the wiretapping, as well as a widespread program
of bugging across Chongqing. But the party’s public version of Mr. Bo’s
fall omits it. The official
narrative and much foreign attention has focused on the more easily
grasped death of Mr. Heywood in November. When Mr. Bo’s police chief,
Wang Lijun, was stripped of his job and feared being implicated in Bo
family affairs, he fled to the United States Consulate in Chengdu, where
he spoke mostly about Mr. Heywood’s death. The
murder account is pivotal to the scandal, providing Mr. Bo’s opponents
with an unassailable reason to have him removed. But party insiders say
the wiretapping was seen as a direct challenge to central authorities.
It revealed to them just how far Mr. Bo, who is now being investigated
for serious disciplinary violations, was prepared to go in his efforts
to grasp greater power in China. That compounded suspicions that Mr. Bo
could not be trusted with a top slot in the party, which is due to
reshuffle its senior leadership positions this fall. “Everyone
across China is improving their systems for the purposes of maintaining
stability,” said one official with a central government media outlet,
referring to surveillance tactics. “But not everyone dares to monitor
party central leaders.” According
to senior party members, including editors, academics and people with
ties to the military, Mr. Bo’s eavesdropping operations began several
years ago as part of a state-financed surveillance buildup, ostensibly
for the purposes of fighting crime and maintaining local political
stability. The architect was Mr.
Wang, a nationally decorated crime fighter who had worked under Mr. Bo
in the northeast province of Liaoning. Together they installed “a
comprehensive package bugging system covering telecommunications to the
Internet,” according to the government media official. One
of several noted cybersecurity experts they enlisted was Fang Binxing,
president of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, who is
often called the father of China’s “Great Firewall,” the nation’s vast
Internet censorship system. Most recently, Mr. Fang advised the city on a
new police information center using cloud-based computing, according to
state news media reports. Late last year, Mr. Wang was named a visiting professor at Mr. Fang’s university. Together,
Mr. Bo and Mr. Wang unleashed a drive to smash what they said were
crime rings that controlled large portions of Chongqing’s economic life.
In interviews, targets of the crackdown marveled at the scale and
determination with which local police intercepted their communications.
“On the phone, we dared not mention
Bo Xilai or Wang Lijun,” said Li Jun, a fugitive property developer who
now lives in hiding abroad. Instead, he and fellow businessmen took to
scribbling notes, removing their cellphone batteries and stocking up on
unregistered SIM cards to thwart surveillance as the crackdown mounted,
he said. (Page 2 of 2) Li
Zhuang, a lawyer from a powerfully connected Beijing law firm, recalled
how some cousins of one client had presented him with a full stack of
unregistered mobile phone SIM cards, warning him of local wiretapping.
Despite these precautions, the Chongqing police ended up arresting Mr.
Li on the outskirts of Beijing, about 900 miles away, after he called
his client’s wife and arranged to visit her later that day at a
hospital. “They already were there lying in ambush,” Mr. Li said. He added that Wang Lijun, by reputation, was a “tapping freak.” Political figures were targeted in addition to those suspected of being mobsters. One
political analyst with senior-level ties, citing information obtained
from a colonel he recently dined with, said Mr. Bo had tried to tap the
phones of virtually all high-ranking leaders who visited Chongqing in
recent years, including Zhou Yongkang, the law-and-order czar who was
said to have backed Mr. Bo as his potential successor. “Bo wanted to be extremely clear about what leaders’ attitudes toward him were,” the analyst said. In
one other instance last year, two journalists said, operatives were
caught intercepting a conversation between the office of Mr. Hu and Liu
Guanglei, a top party law-and-order official whom Mr. Wang had replaced
as police chief. Mr. Liu once served under Mr. Hu in the 1980s in
Guizhou Province. Perhaps more
worrisome to Mr. Bo and Mr. Wang, however, was the increased scrutiny
from the party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, which by
the beginning of 2012 had stationed up to four separate teams in
Chongqing, two undercover, according to the political analyst, who cited
Discipline Inspection sources. One line of inquiry, according to
several party academics, involved Mr. Wang’s possible role in a police
bribery case that unfolded last year in a Liaoning city where he once
was police chief. Beyond making a
routine inspection, it is not clear why the disciplinary official who
telephoned Mr. Hu — Ma Wen, the minister of supervision — was in
Chongqing. Her high-security land link to Mr. Hu from the state
guesthouse in Chongqing was monitored on Mr. Bo’s orders. The topic of
the call is unknown but was probably not vital. Most phones are so
unsafe that important information is often conveyed only in person or in
writing. But Beijing was galled
that Mr. Bo would wiretap Mr. Hu, whether intentionally or not, and
turned central security and disciplinary investigators loose on his
police chief, who bore the brunt of the scrutiny over the next couple of
months. “Bo wanted to push the
responsibility onto Wang,” one senior party editor said. “Wang couldn’t
dare say it was Bo’s doing.” Yet at
some point well before fleeing Chongqing, Mr. Wang filed a pair of
complaints to the inspection commission, the first anonymously and the
second under his own name, according to a party academic with ties to
Mr. Bo. Both complaints said Mr. Bo
had “opposed party central” authorities, including ordering the
wiretapping of central leaders. The requests to investigate Mr. Bo were
turned down at the time. Mr. Bo, who learned of the charges at a later
point, told the academic shortly before his dismissal that he thought he
could withstand Mr. Wang’s charges. Mr.
Wang is not believed to have discussed wiretapping at the United States
Consulate. Instead, he focused on the less self-incriminating
allegations of Mr. Bo’s wife’s arranging the killing of Mr. Heywood.
But tensions between the two men
crested, sources said, when Mr. Bo found that Mr. Wang had also
wiretapped him and his wife. After Mr. Wang was arrested in February,
Mr. Bo detained Mr. Wang’s wiretapping specialist from Liaoning, a
district police chief named Wang Pengfei. Internal
party accounts suggest that the party views the wiretapping as one of
Mr. Bo’s most serious crimes. One preliminary indictment in mid-March
accused Bo of damaging party unity by collecting evidence on other
leaders. Party officials, however,
say it would be far too damaging to make the wiretapping public. When
Mr. Bo is finally charged, wiretapping is not expected to be mentioned.
“The things that can be publicized are the economic problems and the
killing,” according to the senior official at the government media
outlet. “That’s enough to decide the matter in public.” Edward Wong contributed reporting. |