WRITING IN her improbable bestseller about her courtroom exploits, “Winning a Lawsuit in the US”, Gu Kailai complained that in the US “they can level charges against dogs and a court can even convict a husband of raping his wife.” In China, she said, the system was straightforward and judicious. “We dont play with words and we adhere to the principle of ‘based on facts’,” she wrote. “You will be arrested, sentenced and executed as long as we determine that you killed someone.”
It is unlikely, however, that Gu Kailai retains that touching faith in the rule of law in China. Her arrest on suspicion of murdering British businessman Neil Heywood last November, and the fall from grace of her ambitious husband, Chongqings disgraced Communist Party boss Bo Xilai, have all the hallmarks not so much of the working out of the due process of law, as of a medieval court intrigue.
But then, need we remind you, gentle reader, China is not a democracy, and political succession, lacking the oiled mechanisms of an accountable process, will find a way – any way. Accusations of fraud, self-enrichment, working with foreigners, or murder are standard in the Stalinist system, often refined by abject self-denunciation. The courts, to paraphrase Clausewitz, have always been “politics carried on by other means”.
Was Ms Gu involved in murder? Indeed, was Mr Heywood murdered? His family doesn’t think so, or so they say. But neither question matters at the end of the day. Ms Gu, a hard-driven lawyer and daughter of a revolutionary hero who has allegedly spent two decades turning her husband’s government posts into lucrative business opportunities, will anyway not get a fair trial. Her fate depends entirely on that of her husband.
As for Bo, his is two stories: one of a man of driven, vaulting ambition, and some success, but a shooting star that burnt itself out because his lone-wolf style left him exposed and largely friendless. The other, of Bo, who made his name with a populist form of neoMaoist, as an expression of what we can only surmise is an intense, internal ideological political struggle within the party.
What is hinted at, in the glimpses we get of its debate, is of a conflict broadly between those who want to move further down the capitalist, and maybe even democratic, road and those who cling to the centrality of state control of the economy. Bo, it is said, represents the latter, now on the wrong side of history as China prepares for its 18th party congress this autumn, and a new leadership.