王立军、薄熙来事件爆发后，中共高官互相监听的丑闻在全世界曝光。《华盛顿邮报》2月19日发布一则评论称，中国官员之间监听成风，互不信任。薄熙来就曾窃听过中共高层。　评论引述美国《纽约时报》的报导称，薄熙来落马前曾安装了窃听装置，目标为国家领导人。而出于控制社会的目的，中国官员已普遍采用了高端的监听设备。

　　该评论还列举一位名为齐红的男子的故事说，他擅长于拆除专业的高端窃听装置，每周都要为政府官员工作，有人曾发现被窃听，有人则没有发现。

　　之前，窃听器检测专家齐红曾对大陆媒体透露，2011年，他曾为一百多名官员拆除了三百多个窃听器。最忙碌的一个星期他拆除了40个窃听器。

　　齐红说，中共官员之间广泛使用间谍设备。有的是下级想抓上级的把柄取而代之，有的是竞争对手相互暗算，有的是上级对下级摸底以便控制，窃听器常常安装在官员的汽车、办公室或者卧室中。

　　《华盛顿邮报》表示，这种不受控制的监听已经弥漫在整个中国的官僚体系中，甚至外国人也受到了监听。因此，与中国做生意的外国商人常需要特别的安全程序，例如设定指纹密码等。

　　去年王立军、薄熙来案发后，纽约时报爆出两人在重庆建立了一整套监听、监视系统，包括胡锦涛在内的几乎所有中共高层的电话均被窃听。

　　香港明报曾报导，王立军在当公安局长时因为涉嫌私自监听胡锦涛办公室的热线电话以及腐败问题而受到调查。

　　来自北京的消息说，胡锦涛领导贵州时的部下刘光磊，后来调任重庆政法委书记，与胡锦涛办公室有热线联系，被王立军发现并长期监听，但王的监听又被中共中央办公厅发现。2011年中纪委曾秘密派人到重庆调查王立军。

　　香港亚洲周刊也报导说，使中南海高层最震怒的是重庆当局窃听中央领导人的行踪和私下谈话，习近平、贺国强、李源潮、吴邦国等在重庆考察期间，王立军都部署监听。他多次将获得的重要内容告诉薄熙来。王立军还与中央警卫局攀上关系，了解到主要领导人的行踪和私密。

附：《华盛顿邮报》英文原文

　　Chinese government officials are constantly wiretapping and spying on one another

　　

　　(Jerome Favre/Bloomberg)

　　A few months after a rising star in the Chinese Communist Party named Bo Xilai fell spectacularly from the nation’s top political ranks to disgrace and imprisonment, the New York Times reported that one of his crimes — perhaps his greatest — was wiretapping the president. But just as shocking as the revelation that Bo had planted electronic devices to spy on President Hu Jintao was the suggestion, of which there have since been several, that such behavior may be widespread among China’s top leaders.

　　“To maintain control over society, leaders have embraced enhanced surveillance technology,” the Times explained. “But some have turned it on one another — repeating patterns of intrigue that go back to the beginnings of Communist rule.”

　　A sweeping story by the Chinese outlet Southern People Weekly chronicles the life and work of Qi Hong, a specialist in removing surveillance equipment who might do dozens of freelance jobs for government officials every week. That story, now translated into English by the invaluable China Digital Times (the original article has been removed), portrays Chinese officials as living in a world so rife with competition and suspicion that many have turned themselves into mini spy chiefs, running extensive espionage campaigns against fellow officials.

　　Chinese officials have taken to hugging one another at every meeting — not a traditional Chinese practice — to pat down one another for bugs, Qi says that a government official from Shanxi province told him. Qi tells story after story of removing tiny, high-tech, professional spying devices from the offices and cars of officials. Some of them expected it, others didn’t. One speculated that the spying had been ordered by his mistress, wondering if she herself had been “planted” by a rival official. The ones who did not find spying equipment seemed to assumed it was only because the cameras or microphones were too sophisticated to be detected.

　　In a way, it makes sense. Chinese politics have long been viciously cut-throat, with officials stopping at little to outmaneuver one another — and with the stakes often much higher than just winning or losing a coveted promotion. Corruption is thought to be widespread in the party, but it can also be harshly punished, exposing many officials to jail time or worse. In that culture, the best defense against conniving officials might be a good offense.

　　Qi tells the story of a “director at a state-owned capital management office” he had worked with. The director, unlike his colleagues, had refused to accept bribes. But he felt pressured to “go along” — in part because Qi had discovered his office was bugged, underscoring the director’s fears that his peers didn’t trust him. When he finally did take a bribe, he was quickly thrown in jail — convinced he’d been set up by his own co-workers.

　　Whether the state official’s suspicions were truth or fantasy, his paranoia is telling in itself, part of a larger and self-reinforcing culture where Chinese officials seem to assume that they are constantly at war with one another.

　　“They generally aim at people’s beds and where they shower,” Qi told NPR, which recently published a similar story on officials monitoring one another. “They want to know your secrets, your private life.”

　　The culture of no-holds-barred spying that seems to have pervaded Chinese officialdom might also inform why some of those same officials have seemed so aggressive about spying on others — including foreigners. The Chinese government famously spies on its citizens in vast numbers. And it is suspected of widespread spying on foreign news organizations that cover the country, a possible campaign that may have included the recent hacking attacks on several major U.S. news organizations.

　　Foreign businessmen who deal with China sometimes take extraordinary security procedures, such as keeping their passwords on thumb drives so that they never have to type them out and expose them to clandestine keystroke-recording software, with the apparent belief that they are frequent espionage targets.

　　The China-based hacking campaign against U.S. targets, government and civilian alike, is the most extensive in the word, according to a recent national intelligence estimate. That campaign, in its sophistication, is a sign of China’s growing strength, but so too is its brazenness a reminder that the country may still think of itself as something of an outsider. There are no doubt many factors that contribute to China’s hacking and spying on foreigners. But it seems possible that one of those factors might be the unusual culture of espionage that appears to pervade the lives of government officials.

　　Frank Langfitt, the NPR reporter who talked to Qi Hong, bought his own basic, $35 bug detector (more elaborate models, he says, can go for $1,600) to try at a friend’s office. “In just five minutes,” he writes, “I detected bugs in a lamp, several phones and two fax machines.”