Bo says he was hoodwinked into taking ‘bribes’
FORMER senior Chinese official Bo Xilai yesterday denied allegations of corruption levelled against him on the opening day of his trial — the most anticipated political trial in China in decades.
Faced with charges of bribetaking, embezzlement and abuse of power, Mr Bo argued strongly against the individual accusations of corruption in witness testimony presented to the court, according to transcripts published by the court in the eastern Chinese city of Jinan.
At one point in the trial, Mr Bo was warned by the judge not to make personal remarks about witnesses after an apparent outburst in which he described video testimony from a former comrade as “the ugliness of a man who has sold his soul”.
In testimony to the court released just before lunchtime, Mr Bo denied one specific charge of taking more than 1-million yuan (R1.7m) in bribes from Tang Xiaolin, a former workmate in a factory during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, who later became a successful businessman in Dalian while Mr Bo was in charge of the city.
He told the court that while being interrogated he confessed “against his will” to taking the money from Mr Tang and in fact the bribery had never happened, according to a transcript released by the court.
Mr Bo called Mr Tang “a mad dog who wanted to frame me” out of consideration for his own interests.
“This evidence has little to do with my criminality,” Mr Bo said. “I was just hoodwinked. I thought it was all official business.”
According to the Weibo account of the official Xinhua news agency, Mr Bo said: “I hope that the judges can hear the trial in a reasonable and fair manner and follow (the) legal procedures of our country.”
Although the government declared this would be an “open” trial, no independent or international media have been allowed any- where near the proceedings and reporters in the city have been closely monitored and followed by police and state security agents.
This is the most significant political show trial in China since 1980, when Mao Zedong’s wife, Jiang Qing, and the “Gang of Four” were tried for their role in the disastrous and bloody Cultural Revolution.
Perhaps coincidentally, Ms Jiang grew up not far from the city of Jinan and trained to be an actress there in the late 1920s.
Mr Bo was a member of the ruling Communist Party’s 25-person politburo and the top leader of the cityprovince of Chongqing when he was detained in March last year at the end of the annual two-week meeting of China’s faux parliament.
His downfall came after the former police chief of Chongqing, Wang Lijun, fled to a US consulate in western China last February claiming Mr Bo was trying to kill him and alleging that Mr Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai, had murdered a British citizen.
Ms Gu was convicted a year ago and handed a suspended death sentence for the murder of Neil Heywood, a British businessman who had been close to the Bo family and assisted them in some of their overseas business activities. She was found guilty of poisoning Mr Heywood with cyanide in a hotel room in Chongqing in November 2011.
Wang Lijun was sentenced to 15 years in prison in September last year for planning to defect to the US, abuse of power and bribe-taking.
Yesterday, the court said Mr Bo was accused of taking more than 21million yuan in bribes from two companies between 2000 and last year either directly or through his wife or their son, Bo Guagua, who is living in the US and has enrolled at Columbia University Law School.
The court also said he was accused of misappropriating 5million yuan of government funds for his family’s personal use while he was Communist Party secretary of the northeastern Chinese port city of Dalian in the early 2000s.
In addition, Mr Bo is accused of abuse of power in relation to the cover-up of his wife’s murder of Mr Heywood and Mr Wang’s flight to the US consulate.
Outside the Jinan court, small groups of protesters gathered to show support for Mr Bo, who remains popular among some segments of Chinese society.
Scores were drawn by the large crowds of international reporters to express various unrelated grievances and to try to draw attention to their claims of official corruption, police brutality, miscarriages of justice or commercial disputes. Most were promptly bundled away by police.
Many of the people who gathered in crowds a block or two from the court seemed eager to express their more general dissatisfaction, with some calling for the investigation of former premier Wen Jiabao and others loudly calling for the destruc- tion of “American imperialism”.
Some in the crowd carried posters of Mao Zedong and shouted “long live Chairman Mao”.
The former dictator died in 1976, but during Mr Bo’s time in office he led a “red revival” movement in Chongqing that encouraged nostalgia for the Maoist era.
President Xi Jinping is seeking unstinted support from the Communist Party as he seeks to push reforms that will rebalance the economy, and will want Mr Bo’s trial to be finished quickly and with a minimum of fuss.
“He (Mr Bo) is clearly going along with this trial,” said Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher for New Yorkbased Human Rights Watch. “The outcome has been already decided. There’s probably an agreement already between Mr Bo and the party as to what the outcome will be.”
Away from the court, some Chinese political analysts were sceptical that Mr Bo’s downfall would have any lasting significance.
“Mr Bo’s trial will have no real effect on Chinese politics at all,” said Mo Zhixu, a political commentator known for his liberal views.
“On the one hand (the Communist Party) introduces market economics and globalisation in order to avoid total collapse like the Soviet Union while at the same time it uses all kinds of authoritarian methods to suppress any kind of social activism from different classes.”