Chinese Characters

If you want to understand what kind of dramatis personae we’re confronting in China’s biggest political story in two decades—the fall of Bo Xilai, Party Secretary of the mega-city Chongqing and, as I wrote last week, the closest China has to Huey Long—begin with a detail that has been buried in the backstory. Wang Lijun, a one-time Chongqing police chief, was a man with hobbies. He liked to perform autopsies in his spare time…