Quotes of the Day

There may be good places to die in China, but Edinburgh isn't one of them. This housing development on the outskirts of the city of Chongqing bears only passing resemblance to its Scottish namesake. Just over a decade old, the brick and gray stone façades already bear the dilapidated look of abandoned manors. Outside the gates is a broad expanse of demolished homes, populated by the homeless sleeping under tarps. A group of "stick-stick" men, who grind out meager livings hauling goods on bamboo poles balanced on their shoulders, sit playing cards. Smoke from a bonfire of garbage mixes with the miasma of smog in the sky.

At around 2 a.m. on June 3, 2009, Li Minghang — a 44-year-old man whom authorities say had a history of drug-dealing and loan-sharking — left his white BMW at the Edinburgh car park and headed for the front gate with his wife. An assassin lurked nearby. "He walked toward them and shot the husband as he passed by," says a 23-year-old security guard surnamed Huang who was on duty that night. "I heard two gunshots," he says. "The shooter was picked up by a car immediately afterward." Huang helped Li into a taxi; the injured man later died at a local hospital. "This place," admits Huang, "is not very safe."

Certainly not if you're a mobster. The brazen killing of Li, apparently a victim of gang warfare, spurred Chongqing's officials to speed up the launch of a citywide crackdown on organized crime. Since the middle of last year, police have arrested more than 1,000 people and to date have prosecuted 782, including 87 government officials allegedly in cahoots with the criminals. So far, four of those convicted have been executed. The campaign, which officially ended Feb. 28, has earned praise for Chongqing Communist Party Secretary Bo Xilai, onetime Commerce Minister and son of a former Politburo member. When the mafia trials were being held, crowds would gather outside the courthouses demanding that justice be served. One man whose son was killed by thugs in a clash over a fish farm in the city's exurbs even placed an ad in a local paper thanking the local government for its efforts. "In a lot of places, the government is still too corrupt, but [here], speaking overall, they are good," says the farmer, 56-year-old Yi Dade. "Without Bo Xilai or [police chief] Wang Lijun, there would be no hope for our family. The protective network of gangsters is very big."

Law and Disorder
Chongqing hasn't had this much attention since it was the temporary capital of China during World War II. Looming on the broad banks of the Yangtze River, it is sometimes called the biggest city in the world; half its population of 28 million lives in a huge swath of countryside that was carved out of neighboring Sichuan when the city was given provincial-level status in 1997. Like much of the rest of China, Chongqing is booming, but, along with the economy, crime has risen, especially extortion and racketeering. Locals say gangs take a big cut of everything from transport to construction. The recent crackdown has made Chongqing's criminal woes a national subject, but the reality is that its problems are commonplace. Take a stroll through practically any city in China and you can see examples of the protective network between organized crime and law enforcement. Prostitution and illegal gambling dens are ubiquitous, sometimes just a short distance away from police stations. "Everywhere you go it is pretty much the same," says Ko-lin Chin, a professor at Rutgers University, Newark, who is an expert on Chinese gangs.

But in its crackdown on crime — the biggest anyone can remember — Chongqing is unique. Driven by Bo, an ambitious outsider whose lack of local ties has given him a free hand to pursue his cleanup campaign, Chongqing's trials have riveted the country. Lurid details about once powerful mobsters and officials have spilled out in open court and across the pages of daily newspapers. In November, Xie Caiping, a mafia "godmother" who ran underground gambling houses and kept a harem of young men for her own pleasure, was sentenced to 18 years in prison. Her brother-in-law Wen Qiang, the former head of Chongqing's judicial bureau and deputy police chief, went on trial Feb. 2 — the highest official implicated. He faces charges of rape, selling promotions to police officers and accepting $2.3 million to protect members of the criminal underworld. (Wen has denied the charges.)

Bo's efforts have earned praise for exposing the links between criminals and officials, and temporarily shaking the gangs' grip on the city. But as the campaign moves into its second year, there is a fear that, in their zeal to stamp out organized crime, the authorities are themselves trampling on the law. Many legal protections, such as the right to legal representation or to not be abused while in custody, are still fairly recent concepts in China. So Chongqing has become a test case not just of the ability of the government to dismantle criminal gangs, but of its ability to uphold citizens' rights while doing so.

A Case in Point
"Cracking down on the underworld is not easy, but building rule of law is even harder," Guo Guangdong, a columnist for the Chinese newspaper Southern Weekend wrote in November. "Cracking down on gangs will give you a moment of peace, but rule of law will safeguard a generation of righteousness." Legal experts say that, in the rush to chalk up a decisive victory, Chongqing officials are undermining already fragile legal rights, especially the right to a fair trial.

The prime example is the case of defense lawyer Li Zhuang. Li represented Gong Gangmo, who was convicted and sentenced to life for, among other charges, ordering the Edinburgh hit. Prosecutors say Gong is one of four organized-crime bosses who funneled thousands of dollars to Wen, the deputy police chief. Gong's trial was at first put on hold while a case proceeded against Li for fabricating evidence and obstructing justice by instructing his client to lie. Li was arrested in December; on Jan. 8 he was convicted and later sentenced to 18 months in prison. Chongqing's Jiangbei district court ruled that in three brief meetings with Gong, Li managed, while being monitored by police, to covertly tell his client that he should recant and say he was tortured to confess his crimes. (Blinking was one of the means by which Li is supposed to have conveyed this.) According to the ruling, Li also sought to pay police officers to give false testimony and coached his client's associates to say that Gong wasn't head of the mafia group but had been forced to act by other gangsters.

Li's lawyers say his trial was hasty and that, although their statements were read into evidence, witnesses testifying against him did not appear in court to face cross-examination. A wider community of lawyers outside Chongqing asserts that the prosecution of Li is a political vendetta because he, unlike most of the other defense lawyers, fought hard for his client. "To the people who are accusing Li Zhuang — the police, the procuratorate, the court and the local government — his flaw is that he opposes them," says Tang Jitian, a Beijing lawyer and co-author of an open letter in support of Li. "They see him as someone who undermines their work and affects their performance. People like Li Zhuang basically ruined their victory banquet."

China's 30 years of reforms have helped to build up a healthy body of legislation. But Tang points out that the judicial process is still subject to the interests of the Communist Party. Indeed, in November, Chongqing's judicial bureau advised that defense lawyers in gang trials should be of "high political quality" and should "stress politics, consider the big picture and observe discipline." The apparent message: Don't get caught up in details that will muddle the overall goal of a successful antimafia campaign. That, says Tang, smacks of the Cultural Revolution, when the law, to the extent that it existed at all, was used to enforce the will of leaders.

The Antihero
Li is an unlikely icon for a civil rights campaign. A 48-year-old ex-soldier with a blunt manner, he wasn't well known among activist lawyers or even other people at his own Beijing firm. The state-run China Youth Daily, which published a long, harshly critical story about Li shortly after his arrest, painted him as brash and money-hungry, and implied that he used political connections to help his clients. Li's defenders say such criticism has nothing to do with the merits of the charges against him but is meant to sway public opinion.

The case against Li hinges on a clause in China's criminal law. Lawyers and human-rights groups say that Article 306 of the P.R.C. criminal code, which makes it an offense for a person to assist or encourage another to give false testimony, goes beyond standard perjury laws and has been used to hobble defense lawyers. If, as in the vast majority of criminal trials in China, the accused is found guilty, then the defense lawyer could be liable for evidence submitted on the client's behalf. "We are interested in this case not because of Mr. Li," says Albert Ho, a Hong Kong legislator and chairman of the China Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group. "He is not known as a human-rights lawyer and he is not active in human rights. We are interested in this case because he is apparently being victimized by Article 306 of the criminal code."

Chinese media have covered Li's case extensively, and while initial reports portrayed him as unethical, later stories examined how his case shone an unflattering light on the Chongqing trials. "Fiery Lawyer Puts China's Judiciary on Trial," wrote the liberal magazine Caixin. Prominent weeklies including Caijing and Sanlian Life Week put Li on the cover. With each story the heroic image of Chongqing party secretary Bo has taken a hit. The aggressive manner with which the trials have been pushed through has dampened enthusiasm for the campaign, says Cheng Li, an expert on Chinese leadership and research director at the Brookings Institution's John L. Thornton China Center. "It's not about the rule of law, it's not about the legal process," he says. "It's a political campaign, and it's purely Cultural Revolution – style. In a way Bo is gaining something, but he has made a lot of people uncomfortable."

The Legal Is Political
Bo is one of China's coming men. His experience as the mayor of the coastal city of Dalian, governor of Liaoning province and Minister of Commerce in Beijing all helped him build a national profile. Now he is widely thought to be in line for a possible promotion to the Politburo's standing committee, China's top ruling body, when it is reconfigured in 2012. Bo insists his goal is to clean up Chongqing; he has denied that the gang crackdown has any political motive, denouncing such interpretations as "twisted reasoning" in a Jan. 17 speech to Chongqing students, according to the state-run China Daily. But by taking the fight to Chongqing's gangs, Bo appears to have undermined his predecessor, Wang Yang, who is now party secretary in Guangdong. The two men represent two major Communist Party factions. Bo, as son of a party elder, is considered a member of the "princelings," while Wang worked his way up through the party's Youth League, the power base of President Hu Jintao. While the two groups have largely similar policy views, they are rivals for leadership within the party. By shining a light on Chongqing's corrupt underbelly, Bo has in effect raised doubts about Wang's earlier leadership, conveying the image that he let gangs grow unchecked.

How effective will the campaign against organized crime turn out to be? The crackdown has had an immediate impact on public safety in Chongqing — calls to police are down 40%, for instance — but its temporary nature means that the results are unlikely to be permanent. "It's not going to change the situation that much," says Chin, the organized-crime expert. "If they arrest 40 or 50 top gangsters, another group of people will simply replace them."

The sentiment is much the same in Edinburgh, where, despite increased attention from law enforcement, an air of fear remains. "I don't think the crackdown on the gangsters really made a big difference," says Huang, the security guard. "There is a police car that parks right down the road now every night until 10 p.m., but everybody knows that criminals only came out after midnight, so there is not much use in that." For now, Chongqing's next crop of gang lords are waiting for the moment that Bo Xilai, like the cop on the corner, decides to call it a day.

—with reporting by Chengcheng Jiang / Chongqing

• Austin Ramzy / Chongqing
• The law-and-order crackdown in the Chinese megalopolis of Chongqing is not just about crime. It is a parable of corruption, politics and the state of justice in China