The US State Department is stonewalling an official request for information on the "attempted defection" of the Chinese police chief at the centre of the mysterious death of the British businessman Neil Heywood in southern China last year, it has emerged.
Chongqing city police chief Wang Lijun
The US Congress's House Committee on Foreign Affairs requested information in February about why the police chief, Wang Lijun, was not granted asylum after he walked into the US consulate in Chengdu, Southern China last February.
Mr Wang was later alleged to be carrying documents relating to the murder of Mr Heywood which China has linked to the wife of disgraced Politburo member Bo Xilai who was purged weeks after the incident in the most significant political ruction in China for more than a decade.
In a letter to Hillary Clinton, Committee chair Ileana Ros-Lehtinen raised questions over whether US diplomats had failed to ensure the safety of Mr Wang and "secure US national interests" by refusing him asylum.
A Committee spokesman said yesterday that the Committee was still awaiting an "official response" to its letter and that the staff and chair were also still awaiting the fulfillment of its request for an official briefing from the State Department.
Both the White House and the State Department declined to comment yesterday, in keeping with a decision to say as little as possible about the episode which threatened to upset US-China relations in the critical months before a new generation of Chinese leaders takes office later this year.
Administration officials have defended the decision not to grant Mr Wang asylum on the grounds that a former police chief in the midst of a political feud with his boss, Bo Xilai, did not fit the legal requirements.
Exact details of what Mr Wang told US officials have not been made clear, however the New York Times reported that he was carrying "technical descriptions of police investigations" in Chongqing, the megacity in Southern China that was then ruled by Mr Bo.
During a frantic 36 hours of diplomacy, Mr Wang was allowed to make phone calls to Beijing at arrange his safe-passage while he regaled diplomats with a "rambling but ultimately revealing discourse on the murky intersection of power, politics and corruption in China," the paper reported.
Kenneth Lieberthal, a former China adviser in the Clinton administration, said the administration had been forced to finesse the issue, allowing Mr Wang to escape the clutches of Mr Bo's "thugs" who had gathered outside the consulate without poisoning US-China relations.
"I think there was a decision made at the White House and State, that having decided to deny asylum, they also clearly decided not to embarrass Beijing by highlighting what had occurred or what we had learned," he explained to The Telegraph.
"I think the administration sees no upside in getting the US directly involved in this case. This is a very big deal in China, the implications of it within the Chinese system are still not clear. How far will this investigation go? Who else will it manage to tarnish? What will the punishments be?
"All this is unresolved and involves interests and internal dynamics we do not understand even as we want - as does Britain - to get off to a good start with the New Chinese leadership when they come in.
"Getting involved in this case would hardly be the best way to accomplish that."
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