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Prosecutors Say Chinese Official Bypassed Protocol Political Stagecraft in Trial of Fallen China Boss
(about 9 hours later)
JINAN, China — Prosecutors in the trial of Bo Xilai, the fallen Communist Party star, said Sunday that Mr. Bo had bypassed important procedures in demoting his former police chief in the southwest metropolis of Chongqing after the chief confronted him with suspicions that Mr. Bo’s wife had killed a British businessman. JINAN, China — In the weeks before Bo Xilai, the fallen Communist Party star, went on trial here on corruption-related charges, senior officials from the powerful party investigation agency told him about two officials who had been tried earlier on somewhat similar charges, Mr. Bo said in court.
The manner in which Mr. Bo replaced the police chief, Wang Lijun, is the basis of the abuse-of-power charge, one of three that Mr. Bo faces in the most closely watched trial in China in three decades. The prosecution cited testimony by a former head of the party organization department in Chongqing, Chen Cungen, saying that Mr. Bo had ordered Mr. Wang’s removal despite the need for approval from the municipal party committee and the Ministry of Public Security. One, a former vice governor of Anhui Province, was sentenced to death and executed in 2004 for taking bribes and stealing $1.6 million. The other, a former railway minister, received a suspended death sentence — essentially life in prison — in July, mainly for taking $10.6 million in bribes, a much larger amount.
Mr. Bo’s defense lawyer said that Mr. Wang, who had helped Mr. Bo carry out a prominent and controversial anti-corruption campaign, was moved to another job in early 2012 because he was in poor health and suffering from mental strain. The lawyer called Mr. Wang an unreliable witness because Mr. Bo had slapped and fired Mr. Wang after he made the comments about Mr. Bo’s wife. The lawyer also said that Mr. Wang had confronted Mr. Bo with the murder accusation simply to blackmail Mr. Bo. The senior officials’ point, Mr. Bo told the court here in a 10-minute speech on Friday, according to two people briefed on the proceedings, was that the party could mete out any punishment it chose, and that Mr. Bo’s fate rested on whether he chose to cooperate during his own trial on charges of bribe taking, embezzlement and abuse of power.
The back-and-forth painted an ugly portrait of the internal workings of senior Communist Party officials, and it came one day after the dramatic high point of the trial, when Mr. Bo faced off with Mr. Wang, who brought down the charismatic party official when he fled to a nearby American consulate in February 2012. Mr. Bo’s speech and some other instances in which he railed against threats and hardships during his 17 months in captivity have not appeared in the torrent of court transcripts released publicly since the trial — China’s most closely watched legal theatrics three decades — began on Thursday. Instead, those transcripts show Mr. Bo cross-examining witnesses, ridiculing the testimony of his wife and former colleagues, and seemingly free to play his part as defendant however he chooses.
It was the first time the two were known to have seen each other since Mr. Wang fled Chongqing, which Mr. Bo had governed for four years. In the consulate visit, which lasted more than 30 hours, Mr. Wang told American officials that Mr. Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai, had poisoned the Briton, Neil Heywood, and that Mr. Bo was persecuting Mr. Wang because he knew about the killing. But, analysts say, despite the fact that the party, in an unexpected show of relative transparency, has allowed millions of Chinese citizens to witness much of Mr. Bo’s performance through a running court microblog, the trial remains political stagecraft, fashioned around Mr. Bo’s combative character.
In his testimony on Saturday, Mr. Bo took blame, to a degree, for the episode leading to Mr. Wang’s flight. The spectacle, they say, is an effort by the party to convince his elite party allies and ordinary supporters that Mr. Bo, a populist politician and the son of a revolutionary leader, had his say in court, and that the long prison sentence he is expected to get is based on evidence of crimes committed, not political payback. State news media highlight daily the evidence presented against Mr. Bo.
“I made mistakes; I am very ashamed, and I am willing to take appropriate responsibility, but whether it’s a crime or not a crime is another matter,” Mr. Bo testified. He added that he had not bent the law to protect his wife because he did not believe that she had killed Mr. Heywood, and that he had demoted Mr. Wang right before he fled for the consulate because he believed that Mr. Wang was unstable. “The authorities hope to separate the Bo Xilai case from politics,” said Chen Jieren, a legal commentator. “They want people to think this was only an anticorruption struggle, not a political and ideological struggle.”
Mr. Wang, who is serving 15 years for defection and other crimes, took the witness stand for the prosecution on Saturday. In glasses, a white shirt and neatly parted hair, he looked much as he did when he served as Mr. Bo’s enforcer. Mr. Wang testified that Mr. Bo’s wife secretly confessed to him on Nov. 14, 2011, that she had just poisoned Mr. Heywood. Mr. Wang was close to Ms. Gu and kept this a secret, but in late January 2012, he said, he told Mr. Bo that his wife had poisoned Mr. Heywood. While the multimedia gambit may have won Mr. Bo some additional sympathy and exposed cracks in the prosecution, the legal parrying between the defendant and his accusers have also lent considerable credibility to the political theater.
At a meeting the next day, he said, Mr. Bo chastised him in front of other officials and punched him in the face. “My body was shaking a bit,” Mr. Wang said. “I discovered that the corner of my mouth was bleeding. Fluid was coming from my ears.” Perhaps most important for the party, what has most captivated ordinary Chinese — thanks to headlines in major state media outlets — is a mountain of testimony that depicts Mr. Bo as the archetypal corrupt official, complete with a spoiled son and a wife who murdered a British businessman. (She was convicted in August 2012).
In his testimony, Mr. Bo said he had slapped Mr. Wang for what he thought were fabricated accusations about his wife. “I couldn’t accept this. I was furious; I smashed a mug to the ground,” Mr. Bo said. Evidence at Mr. Bo’s trial has shown his wife, Gu Kailai, and son, Bo Guagua, regularly taking favors from a tycoon friend, Xu Ming, including a $3.2 million villa on the French Riviera; a $131,000 six-person vacation to Africa in 2011 that included use of a private jet; a $12,000 Segway for the son, who also traveled to Paris, Venice, Argentina, Cuba and, for the 2006 World Cup, Germany.
On Sunday, Mr. Bo insisted again that he had slapped and not punched Mr. Wang. “I’ve never trained in boxing, and I don’t have that kind of force,” Mr. Bo said. “It was convenient to call Xu Ming,” Ms. Gu testified. “He used to pay for things.”
Besides the charge of abuse of power, Mr. Bo is also accused of taking bribes and embezzling amounts totaling 26.89 million renminbi, or $4.4 million. The abuse-of-power charge is the last one to be addressed in the trial, which began on Thursday and is expected to run at least through Monday. Mr. Bo has pleaded not guilty to all charges. Mr. Bo has not denied that cozy relationship and those favors in court — he only disavowed knowledge of their specific costs — and the portrait the testimony paints of his family is likely to condemn him in the eyes of many Chinese citizens who abhor the official corruption so rampant in China. It may also be enough to convince ordinary people and leftist intellectuals, who praised Mr. Bo for pushing neo-socialist economic policies and an anticorruption campaign when he was party chief of Chongqing, that he is a hypocrite. The trial also benefits party leaders by playing to another audience: corrupt party officials. The new party leader, Xi Jinping, is directing a campaign to rein in their lavish living arrangements and bring “tigers and flies” to heel for corruption. State media has trumpeted Mr. Bo as the biggest tiger caged so far.
A populist politician and the son of a Communist revolutionary leader, Mr. Bo was dismissed from his post in March 2012. Soon afterward, the murder accusations became public. Ms. Gu was convicted of murder a year ago and given a suspended death sentence, essentially life in prison. More salacious details of decadence and conflict in the Bo family emerged over the weekend. Mr. Bo testified Saturday that he had an affair that drove his wife and son to Britain. On Sunday, he quibbled over testimony from a former Chongqing police chief, Wang Lijun, who had said that Mr. Bo punched him, bloodying his face, after he confronted him with suspicions that Ms. Gu had murdered the Briton, Neil Heywood. Mr. Bo insisted he had only slapped Mr. Wang: “I’ve never trained in boxing,” he said, “and I don’t have that kind of force.”
On Saturday, lurid Bo family secrets were laid bare to millions of fascinated Chinese who have been following the trial on a running court microblog that party officials set up in an effort to give the trial an air of legitimacy. In another awkward moment, Mr. Bo insisted Saturday that he had not intended to embezzle $820,000 from a state construction project in the city of Dalian, where he had been mayor, and disputed testimony from a planning official that he had told his wife over a cellphone to take the money. “All those who know me well know that I always tell them to turn off their cellphone first when talking with me,” he said. “I’m quite a cautious person.”
Earlier in the day, the defendant rejected accusations of embezzlement after a former colleague testified that Mr. Bo had arranged for Ms. Gu to accept 5 million renminbi of government money earmarked for a secret construction project in the early 2000s. Mr. Bo said that after his wife found out about an extramarital affair, she left for Britain with their son, Bo Guagua, and mostly lived there from 2000 to 2007, while their son was in school. Mr. Bo said Ms. Gu, a lawyer, had saved a lot of money — 20 million to 30 million renminbi — and his son had scholarships for his schooling, so he had no need to steal government money. Discussing such matters over cellphones, he added, “doesn’t fit in with the behavior of even the most incompetent corrupt criminal. Even a corrupt criminal with the lowest IQ would ask who else in Dalian knows about the money.”
Mr. Bo’s admission of adultery was immediately seized on by Chinese Web portals, one of which posted the headline “Bo Xilai Admits in Court Having Had an Affair, Wife Took Son Off to England in a Rage.” That kind of testimony has contributed to a less than flattering portrayal of Mr. Bo on the court microblog, which had 540,000 followers by Sunday. Online transcripts show him speaking up against his accusers, but only within limits dictated by the party. “He’s avoided incriminating other leaders or accusing them of the same crimes, and we know he could do that,” said one former corruption investigator. “But he knows not to cross that line.”
It was an example of how China’s major state-approved news portals were presenting a unified voice to highlight the prosecution’s evidence against Mr. Bo or, as in the case of the affair, to taint him with scandal. One clear indication the party’s strategy seems to be succeeding is that according to a family associate, Mr. Bo’s most loyal supporters — relatives who are watching the trial firsthand — seem appeased simply because he has been allowed to defend himself in court.
In September, when the Communist Party announced its findings against Mr. Bo, it decided to include the accusation of adultery, saying he “had or maintained improper sexual relationships with a number of women.” A Bo family associate said on Saturday that Mr. Bo and Ms. Gu both had affairs going back before 2000. “The family is relatively satisfied,” the associate said, “because he has been given ample opportunity to speak.”
The associate and another person close to the Bo family who has been briefed on the trial proceedings said some of Mr. Bo’s strongest assertions in court had been kept from the transcripts released on the court microblog. On Thursday, they said, Mr. Bo told the court that he had made one bribery confession last year to investigators only after being warned that his wife could be given the death sentence and his son, who had just graduated from Harvard, brought back to China to face charges. Chen Ping, a Hong Kong publisher who knows party leaders, noted that officials were exposing only narrow crimes by Mr. Bo, not the wider abuses liberals accuse him of encouraging during the “strike black” anticorruption campaign in Chongqing. “The party wasn’t willing to try Bo Xilai on the charges that he should have faced — trampling on human rights, trampling on rule of law.” he said. “That’s because those mistakes are also the party’s mistakes.”
“I felt like there were two other lives tethered to mine,” Mr. Bo told the court, using a Chinese proverb. Still, some liberal voices have expressed approval of the trial’s transparency and judicial procedure. Caixin, among China’s more independent media outlets, published a commentary on Sunday by Xiao Han, a legal scholar, who said officials deserved credit for steps toward openness, including allowing the transcripts to show Mr. Bo’s insistence on retracting confessions he said were made under mental strain. “This shows that the court record that was uploaded is accurate and credible,” Mr. Xiao wrote.
Another detail left out of the transcripts on Friday also involved the pressure Mr. Bo said investigators had put on him, the two family associates said. They said he had testified that he had been interrogated hundreds of times and fainted 27 times.

Chris Buckley contributed reporting from Hong Kong, and Patrick Zuo contributed research.

Chinese news media coverage of the courtroom case on Saturday left no question that party authorities remained determined to dispense with Mr. Bo, who is expected to be sentenced to a long prison term. For three days now, no audio or video clips have been released in which Mr. Bo can be heard speaking. His statements are presented only via the transcripts.
An article on Saturday in The Legal Daily, an official newspaper under the guidance of the party’s political and legal affairs committee, concluded that the testimony on the embezzlement charges “proves deliberate corruption on his part.”

Patrick Zuo contributed research.