EDITORIAL: One for Xi, zero for rule of law

Score another big one for Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and a big zero for China after Thursday’s conviction of former Chinese domestic security head Zhou Yongkang (周永康) on corruption charges.

Zhou, the most senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP) member — not to mention ex-Politburo Standing Committee member — ever to be tried on corruption charges, was sentenced to life in prison, but the exact details of his crimes remain secret following a closed-door trial in Tianjin.

Xi’s anticorruption drive may have claimed its biggest scalp, but his “rule of law” campaign has fallen short once again of what most people outside of China think of when they hear that phrase.

After Zhou was charged on April 3 — following his arrest in early December last year, five months after he had been placed under investigation and months after he disappeared from public view — international news agencies and many think tank pundits were quick to say that his trial would “expose the inner workings” of the CCP. They should have known better. Trials in China remain little more than public- relations exercises by the CCP, with about as much “legal” validity as there is truth in the myth of the “great China market.”

Despite the head of the Chinese Supreme Court saying in March that the trials of top officials would be open, Zhou’s was not, perhaps a reflection that he had not been as cooperative, although in the end, he was shown on television pleading guilty and promising not to appeal.

Or perhaps Xi has learned his lesson from the August 2013 trial of former Chongqing party boss and politburo member Bo Xilai (薄熙來), who retracted his confession, saying that he had been forced into confessing to taking bribes, and challenged the testimony of the witnesses against him. That was pretty embarrassing, especially since the government had taken the unprecedented step of releasing edited transcripts of the Bo trial proceedings online.

Zhou was found guilty of accepting about US$118,000 in bribes and leaking six secret documents to a man who has been described either as a fortune-teller or a qigong master.

Xinhua news agency said Zhou’s wife and son had also taken bribes totaling more than US$20 million.

Those are paltry sums compared with the more than US$161 million the New York Times last year reported had been traced to Zhou family members.

It is also a pittance compared with the US$376 million in assets that Bloomberg says is owned by Xi’s family members, or the “at least US$2.7 billion” that the New York Times has tied to former Chinese premier Wen Jiabao’s (溫家寶) family.

Venality, despite all of Xi’s “tiger” bluster, is not what doomed Zhou. His real crime apparently was to have warned Bo in early 2012 that he was about to be ousted from his Chongqing post and the politburo, according to sources that Reuters cited in mid-April.

Xi clearly saw Bo as a potential threat to his own ambitions, despite the messy murder mystery that Bo’s wife was involved in. The ink was hardly dry on Xi’s appointment as CCP secretary-general in November 2012 when he began his anticorruption drive, vowing to fight the “tigers and flies,” and embarrassing the party.

Bo and Zhou have been disposed of and more show trials of prominent party members, senior People’s Liberation Army officers and leading businesspeople are on the way, but no one should be fooled into thinking that the CCP or the PLA are really going to be scrubbed of graft and corruption.

Xi’s crackdown is nothing more than the same kind of doctrinal purge/power play seen under Mao Zedong (毛澤東), the Gang of Four, Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) and their successors.

The only rule of law in China remains the law of CCP primacy — and that is determined by whomever is on top at any given time.