BEIJING — A trial next week for a flamboyant former police chief marks the latest step by China's leadership to contain the fallout from a messy political scandal that disgraced a senior politician and complicated an unexpectedly bumpy handover of power to new leaders. The Intermediate Court in the Chengdu announced Friday that Wang Lijun would stand trial Tuesday for defection, bribery and other charges. A police chief who was unusually fond of publicity, Wang was a longtime aide to prominent up-and-coming leader Bo Xilai. Wang's unexpected flight to the US Consulate in Chengdu in February set off the scandal that led to Bo being suspended from the Communist Party Politburo and his wife being convicted last month of murdering a British businessman. Dealing with the fates of Wang, Bo and his wife has consumed the leadership's attention when it had hoped to concentrate on preparing for a handover of power to a younger generation of leaders at the party congress this fall — an event that always occasions tricky backroom politicking. Though no dates have been announced, the congress is widely expected to be in the latter half of October. But the scheduling seemed to suffer another complication when the next top leader, Vice President Xi Jinping, suddenly dropped from public view this month and remained unaccounted for Friday for the 13th day. The government has refused to comment. Xi's absence has reportedly prevented senior leaders from holding a Politburo meeting that will set the dates for the congress and confirm the agenda for a larger meeting that will announce the party's verdict on Bo, once the popular head of the inland city of Chongqing and a contender for a leadership spot. With so much unsettled, the leadership appears determined to characterize Wang's case as one of individual wrongdoing rather than symptomatic of divisive infighting within the party. “They would certainly keep this as an individual case with no implications for Bo Xilai and therefore no implications for party factional struggles and so on,” said Joseph Cheng, a political science professor at the City University of Hong Kong. Wang worked with Bo, first in a northeastern province and in Chongqing where Bo made Wang police chief. The two staged a crackdown on organized crime that grabbed headlines and made them both national figures but that later was criticized for trampling on civil liberties. For still unexplained reasons, the two men had a falling out early this this year, and after Bo removed him as police chief, Wang fled to the US Consulate in nearby Chengdu.— AP
