To commemorate its founding 25 years ago, PS is republishing a selection of commentaries written since 1994. In the following commentary, Ma Jian reflected on the trial of Gu Kailai, the wife of the purged Chinese leader Bo Xilai, and what it revealed about China’s legal system under the Communist Party of China.
LONDON – The trial, conviction, and suspended death sentence of Gu Kailai, the wife of purged Chinese leader Bo Xilai, has called into question not only China’s legal system, but the very unity of the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) leadership.
Let us begin with the many questions raised at the trial. For starters, Gu claimed that she killed the British businessman Neil Heywood only to protect her son. But, given Gu’s power as Bo’s wife, she could have had someone like Heywood jailed or expelled from China at the snap of her fingers. No need for cyanide.
Still, she not only admitted her guilt, but seemed to embrace it as a sort of historical necessity. “In order to uphold the sanctity of the law,” she told the court, “I am willing to accept and calmly face whatever judgment I am given, and I also expect a fair and just judgment.” Not since Stalin’s show trials of the 1930s has a defendant so effusively praised a judge who seemed bound to condemn her at a trial where no witnesses or evidence against her were presented).
The bitter irony of Gu’s high-speed trial is that she was a true believer in China’s legal system. Indeed, following a victory in an American court, Gu, a lawyer, wrote a book in which she claimed that China provides “the fairest method of trial.” She continued, “Chinese lawyers would not quibble over the meaning of each little word. Once they are sure that you murdered someone, you will be arrested, judged, and executed by firing squad.”
Indeed, Gu was an avatar of the Maoist form of legality that China has maintained long after Mao’s death. Having failed the entrance examination to Peking University, Gu was nonetheless granted an exception and admitted to read law soon after the CPC restored the law departments. Prior to that, she sold pork in a Beijing market, where she earned the nickname “Yi dao zhun,” meaning that she could hack off a desired slice of meat with one blow.
Gu was one of the first lawyers to receive her license under this system. But, with the Tiananmen Square incident of 1989, the authorities clamped down on the profession’s autonomy. The CPC reasserted control over every aspect of justice through a core department: the Communist Party Central Committee’s Political and Legal Affairs Committee (PLAC).
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This totalitarian organ has no known address, yet it manages China’s police, prosecutors, courts, and justice ministry, and appoints their leadership. All lawyers fall under its remit. Most important, all local PLAC secretaries simultaneously lead the local public-security bureau. Small wonder, then, that the artist Ai Weiwei could be detained in secret, Liu Xiaobo could be sentenced to 11 years in prison for starting a petition, and Li Wangya could “commit suicide” while in custody.
But even this monolithic system of control is porous. Had Wang Lijun, the former Chongqing police commissioner and close ally of Bo, not feared for his life and fled to the United States’ consulate in Chengdu, Gu would still be helping Bo rule the city.
Wang is no saint. Before he became Bo’s police commissioner, he was the director of the Field Psychology Research Center, where the condemned were executed and their live organs removed. Wang’s paper, “A Study of Organ and Receptor Transplantation after Execution by Injection,” earned him the Guanghua Innovation Contribution Award. In the paper, he credits “our achievements” to the “thousands of transplantations.”
Given his familiarity with the brutality of the Chinese system, Wang no doubt understood that, after falling out with Gu and Bo, the US consulate might be the only place he could find safety. After all, when it came to the public-security organs, the courts, and the prison system, Gu always had the final say. She acted as her husband’s adviser for cracking down on crime and corruption, and was responsible for sending two people – including the PLAC secretary in Wushan County – to prison.
In fact, a few days after killing Heywood, Gu donned a major general’s uniform (which could have belonged to her father, General Gu Jingsheng), convened police officers in Chongqing, and falsely claimed that she had received a secret order from the Ministry of Public Security to protect Wang’s personal safety. The uniform, perhaps, was intended to intimidate the Chongqing police.
But, in a strange and unexplained twist, Wang was whisked from the consulate to Beijing, where he presented the CPC leadership with the evidence that brought about Bo’s downfall and Gu’s arrest. But revealing the skeletons in Bo’s closet also meant revealing the secret world of the “red aristocracy.” So Wang can expect no leniency at his trial, which will most likely end with a commuted death sentence and forced labor.
In order to protect the red aristocracy, the PLAC made no mention during Gu’s trial of her myriad economic crimes. So, in the PLAC’s rewrite of history, Heywood was murdered so that Gu could protect her son, Bo Guagua. And Wang did not defend China’s honor by revealing Bo and Gu’s criminality, but aired his stories to hostile foreign forces. Only through his punishment can popular indignation be contained.
But the Bo and Gu affair may be merely a prologue, because the only clear truth to emerge from it is that the CPC leadership is fractured. The wolves are now turning on each other.
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The escalating war in the Middle East must be understood in a broader context. The fact that the Iranian regime felt emboldened to risk a direct strike on Israel attests to a changing world order in which Western power is increasingly open to challenge.
considers the implications of Iran’s unprecedented decision to launch a direct strike on Israeli territory.
LONDON – The trial, conviction, and suspended death sentence of Gu Kailai, the wife of purged Chinese leader Bo Xilai, has called into question not only China’s legal system, but the very unity of the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) leadership.
Let us begin with the many questions raised at the trial. For starters, Gu claimed that she killed the British businessman Neil Heywood only to protect her son. But, given Gu’s power as Bo’s wife, she could have had someone like Heywood jailed or expelled from China at the snap of her fingers. No need for cyanide.
Still, she not only admitted her guilt, but seemed to embrace it as a sort of historical necessity. “In order to uphold the sanctity of the law,” she told the court, “I am willing to accept and calmly face whatever judgment I am given, and I also expect a fair and just judgment.” Not since Stalin’s show trials of the 1930s has a defendant so effusively praised a judge who seemed bound to condemn her at a trial where no witnesses or evidence against her were presented).
The bitter irony of Gu’s high-speed trial is that she was a true believer in China’s legal system. Indeed, following a victory in an American court, Gu, a lawyer, wrote a book in which she claimed that China provides “the fairest method of trial.” She continued, “Chinese lawyers would not quibble over the meaning of each little word. Once they are sure that you murdered someone, you will be arrested, judged, and executed by firing squad.”
Indeed, Gu was an avatar of the Maoist form of legality that China has maintained long after Mao’s death. Having failed the entrance examination to Peking University, Gu was nonetheless granted an exception and admitted to read law soon after the CPC restored the law departments. Prior to that, she sold pork in a Beijing market, where she earned the nickname “Yi dao zhun,” meaning that she could hack off a desired slice of meat with one blow.
Gu was one of the first lawyers to receive her license under this system. But, with the Tiananmen Square incident of 1989, the authorities clamped down on the profession’s autonomy. The CPC reasserted control over every aspect of justice through a core department: the Communist Party Central Committee’s Political and Legal Affairs Committee (PLAC).
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Access every new PS commentary, our entire On Point suite of subscriber-exclusive content – including Longer Reads, Insider Interviews, Big Picture/Big Question, and Say More – and the full PS archive.
Subscribe Now
This totalitarian organ has no known address, yet it manages China’s police, prosecutors, courts, and justice ministry, and appoints their leadership. All lawyers fall under its remit. Most important, all local PLAC secretaries simultaneously lead the local public-security bureau. Small wonder, then, that the artist Ai Weiwei could be detained in secret, Liu Xiaobo could be sentenced to 11 years in prison for starting a petition, and Li Wangya could “commit suicide” while in custody.
But even this monolithic system of control is porous. Had Wang Lijun, the former Chongqing police commissioner and close ally of Bo, not feared for his life and fled to the United States’ consulate in Chengdu, Gu would still be helping Bo rule the city.
Wang is no saint. Before he became Bo’s police commissioner, he was the director of the Field Psychology Research Center, where the condemned were executed and their live organs removed. Wang’s paper, “A Study of Organ and Receptor Transplantation after Execution by Injection,” earned him the Guanghua Innovation Contribution Award. In the paper, he credits “our achievements” to the “thousands of transplantations.”
Given his familiarity with the brutality of the Chinese system, Wang no doubt understood that, after falling out with Gu and Bo, the US consulate might be the only place he could find safety. After all, when it came to the public-security organs, the courts, and the prison system, Gu always had the final say. She acted as her husband’s adviser for cracking down on crime and corruption, and was responsible for sending two people – including the PLAC secretary in Wushan County – to prison.
In fact, a few days after killing Heywood, Gu donned a major general’s uniform (which could have belonged to her father, General Gu Jingsheng), convened police officers in Chongqing, and falsely claimed that she had received a secret order from the Ministry of Public Security to protect Wang’s personal safety. The uniform, perhaps, was intended to intimidate the Chongqing police.
But, in a strange and unexplained twist, Wang was whisked from the consulate to Beijing, where he presented the CPC leadership with the evidence that brought about Bo’s downfall and Gu’s arrest. But revealing the skeletons in Bo’s closet also meant revealing the secret world of the “red aristocracy.” So Wang can expect no leniency at his trial, which will most likely end with a commuted death sentence and forced labor.
In order to protect the red aristocracy, the PLAC made no mention during Gu’s trial of her myriad economic crimes. So, in the PLAC’s rewrite of history, Heywood was murdered so that Gu could protect her son, Bo Guagua. And Wang did not defend China’s honor by revealing Bo and Gu’s criminality, but aired his stories to hostile foreign forces. Only through his punishment can popular indignation be contained.
But the Bo and Gu affair may be merely a prologue, because the only clear truth to emerge from it is that the CPC leadership is fractured. The wolves are now turning on each other.
Read more from our “China’s Scandalous Politics”