One cellphone rings and one cellphone is silent, and the difference is life and death.Chen Xintao didn’t want any interruptions while he was playing poker with his buddies, so the entrepreneur did something rare in this connection-obsessed country: He turned off his phone.

Across town, Bian Lizhong was out celebrating the birth of his daughter. All through dinner, his phone rang. After the fourth call from a business associate insisting that he had to see him right away, Bian finally agreed to meet him. By morning, the new father was dead, his body riddled with 47 bullets.

The entrepreneur was lucky — the killers weren’t able to reach him, so he survived. But they weren’t done with Chen: They framed him for the slaying. For Chen, that night in the winter of 2001 turned out to be the beginning of a six-year struggle to untangle a web of corruption, a world where businessmen use police officers as hired guns and crooked authorities have the power to send innocent men to prison. “I just have to pierce through these lies,” Chen said. “If I don’t, it would be a disappointment for me as a person and a tragedy for China as a country.”

© Kate Zhao for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: anti-corruption, Bian Lizhong, Chen Xintao
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