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The courthouse in the city of Jinan where the ousted Communist Party official Bo Xilai is standing trial on corruption and abuse of power charges.
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.
One, a former vice governor of Anhui Province, fought back and was executed in 2004 for taking bribes and stealing $ 1.6 million. The other, a former railway minister, was more compliant; he received a suspended death sentence — essentially life in prison — in July, mainly for taking $ 10.6 million in bribes.
The senior officials’ point, Mr. Bo told the court here in a 10-minute speech on Friday, 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, according to two people briefed on the proceedings.
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 during the trial, China’s most closely watched in three decades, which ended on Monday. Instead, those transcripts have shown 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.
On Monday, Mr. Bo used the platform of his closing argument to lay bare the secret love triangle involving the prosecution’s two star witnesses — his wife and a former police chief — that he asserted had ultimately ended his vaunted career.
The trial remains political stagecraft, fashioned around Mr. Bo’s combative character, 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 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 have highlighted daily the evidence presented against Mr. Bo, while officials have limited his airtime in court and in the transcripts to help maintain control.
“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.”
While the microblog gambit may have won Mr. Bo additional sympathy and exposed cracks in the prosecution, its show of legal parrying between the defendant and his accusers also lent considerable credibility to the political theater. 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, with a spoiled son and a wife who murdered a British businessman. (She was convicted in August 2012.)
In his closing argument on Monday, Mr. Bo unveiled more explosive elements surrounding his family, and essentially argued that the saga came down to crimes of passion. He said Wang Lijun, the former police chief of Chongqing, which Mr. Bo governed until his downfall in March 2012, had a final falling out with Mr. Bo and fled to a nearby American consulate in large part due to tensions that boiled over from his secret affair with Mr. Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai. Mr. Wang had told Ms. Gu that he was in love with her, and that outraged Mr. Bo, he said. His wife and the police chief had been close for years, he said, ever since Mr. Wang came to Chongqing to investigate Ms. Gu’s suspicions that she had been poisoned.
“Because he and Gu Kailai were stuck together as if by glue, Gu Kailai took him at his word, and Wang Lijun infiltrated my household because of his association with Gu Kailai,” Mr. Bo said Monday. “So now such a serious thing has occurred.”
He added: “The two had an extremely special relationship, and I was so sick of it.”
Mr. Bo said Mr. Wang harbored an enduring “secret love” for Ms. Gu, and that “his emotions were twisted; he could not free himself.” Mr. Wang expressed his feelings in one or more letters to Ms. Gu, Mr. Bo said. One day, Mr. Wang told her of his love and slapped himself eight times in front of her.
According to Mr. Bo, Ms. Gu said: “You’re abnormal.”
“I used to be abnormal, but now I’m normal,” Mr. Wang said, according to Mr. Bo.
Political Staging in Trial of Fallen China Official
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