China jails ex-security chief for life

Zhou Yongkang sentenced for corruption in secret trial

BEIJING— China sentenced its former domestic security chief to life in prison Thursday after a secretive trial, marking the highest-level official to fall in an anti-corruption campaign and the most senior figure to face judgment in more than three decades. The downfall of the disgraced spymaster, Zhou Yongkang, has been presented in China as evidence that no official was safe from President Xi Jinping’s efforts to address chronic corruption in the one-party state.

But some experts said his downfall was also partly driven by a sense that Zhou had grown too influential and had shown disloyalty toward Xi.

Running the powerful state security apparatus, he was feared and hated by many.

“It was basically the case of someone who had grown so comfortable with free-flowing wealth and illicit money for his own networks that he had forgotten how to be loyal to the source of this — the (Communist) Party,” said Kerry Brown, director of the China Studies Center at the University of Sydney. “The combination of venality and disloyalty did for him.” The state-run Xinhua News Agency said Zhou was sentenced after a closed-door trial in Tianjin, about 128 kilometres southeast of Beijing, that began May 22. It said the 72-year-old Zhou had pleaded guilty to charges of bribery, leaking state secrets and abuse of power and did not plan to appeal. Cheng Li of the Brookings Institution said it appeared the authorities cut a deal with Zhou to avoid a potentially embarrassing trial.

“I submit myself to the verdict of the court and I do not appeal,” Zhou said. “I recognize that I broke the law and that this caused great damage to the party’s cause. I again admit my guilt and am penitent.”