MCLC: reactions to Gu trial

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: reactions to Gu trial
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (8/20/12):
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/21/world/asia/in-china-gu-kailais-reprieve-r
einforces-cynicism.html

MEMO FROM BEIJING
In China, Gu Kailai’s Reprieve Reinforces Cynicism
By ANDREW JACOBS 

BEIJING — When it comes to patriotic blockbusters, synchronized military
parades and choreographed political cavalcades that fill the Great Hall of
the People, the Chinese Communist Party knows how to put on a show.

But in publicly prosecuting Gu Kailai, the wife of the purged political
leader Bo Xilai, for murdering a British business associate, it seems to
have committed some fumbles.

The party’s carefully scripted trial of Ms. Gu — which led to her
conviction on Monday for poisoning the Briton, Neil Heywood, and a
suspended death sentence — appears to have prompted anger and cynicism
from almost everyone here who paid attention.

Die-hard leftists who still back Mr. Bo and his populist policies detected
strands of a grand political conspiracy. Legal scholars identified glaring
inconsistencies in what the government had trumpeted as a model of
judicial exactitude. And liberals, noting that Ms. Gu’s crime would have
remained secret had not a player in the scandal divulged incriminating
details to American diplomats, found further evidence that their leaders
believe they can literally get away with murder.

“For many people, the party was just trying to use the justice system for
their own purposes, but they did it in such a way that made everyone
laugh,” said Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist provocateur who spent 81 days
in extralegal detention last year for what he says was his unyielding
government criticism. “It’s obvious to everyone that they came up with the
sentence before the facts were known.”

Even ordinary Chinese ridiculed the decision to spare Ms. Gu’s life,
saying a commoner would have been summarily executed for the murder of a
foreigner. “Steal a whole country and they make you prince. Steal a
fishing hook and they hang you,” read one oft-forwarded proverb.

In sparing her, court officials cited Ms. Gu’s mental instability; her
fear that Mr. Heywood might harm her son; and her testimony, which also
led to the conviction on Monday of four police officials she had enlisted
in a cover-up.

Her principal accomplice, Zhang Xiaojun, a family employee convicted of a
limited role, was sentenced to nine years in prison.

Suspended death sentences in China are often tantamount to life in prison,
but good behavior can bring jail time down to 25 years. And the Dui Hua
Foundation <http://duihua.org/wp/>, a San Francisco group that advocates
reform of China’s criminal justice system, noted that the psychological
ailments cited by the court could make medical parole possible in less
than a decade.

There was no such discussion in the statement published by the official
Xinhua news agency, which brimmed with congratulatory prose and quoted
spectators at the trial extolling the government’s devotion to the rule of
law. “Listening to both the trial and the verdict announcement gave me
firsthand experience of justice delivered by the law,” said one Wang
Xiuqin, a local party member in Anhui Province, where the trial was held.
“A healthy socialist legal system does not leave crimes unpunished.”

Many legal observers, however, were less inspired, noting that Ms. Gu, 53,
a trained lawyer, would have known precisely what she was doing when,
according to the prosecution’s account, she got Mr. Heywood drunk and then
fed him cyanide mixed with water. “She planned the crime herself, put the
poison in his mouth herself, destroyed the evidence herself but didn’t
turn herself in,” Wang Lianqi, a lawyer and commentator, wrote in a blog
post. “Why did she receive a suspended death sentence? Could it be that
our Constitution has been amended to say that people are not treated
equally before the law?”

On Sina Weibo, the country’s most popular microblog service, Ms. Gu was
avidly compared to Xia Junfeng, a food peddler on death row who fatally
stabbed two urban management officials after they beat him. “A lawyer who
commits premeditated murder gets a suspended death penalty, and a peddler
who defends himself gets death,” one posting said. “This is the Chinese
justice system.”

From the outset, the murder of Mr. Heywood was an especially daunting
public relations challenge for the party. And the Internet made the task
even more daunting — despite a veritable army of censors. Judicial
officials, who normally conduct criminal trials behind closed doors, were
forced to accept greater transparency because of the victim’s nationality.
The authorities barred foreign journalists but could not deny access to
British consular officials.

But party strategists seem to have made several miscalculations, releasing
details of a confession by Ms. Gu that defied conventional wisdom and
allowing leaks from several attendees of the trial. Portions of those
accounts, including prosecution claims that Mr. Bo’s most trusted aide had
a hand in the cover-up, were omitted from an official narrative released
by the state media, fueling accusations that the authorities were trying
to shield Mr. Bo from any criminal charges.

In fact, Mr. Bo was the biggest elephant in the room. There was one
prosaic mention of his name, but no exploration of whether he had played
any role in the crime.

Also absent was his former aide, Wang Lijun, that pivotal player who
started the case’s unraveling in an American Consulate in February. He and
Mr. Bo, who lost his job as party chief of the municipality of Chongqing,
still await their fates.

The trial raised a long list of unanswered questions. Why would a powerful
woman like Ms. Gu kill a man she could have easily had arrested or
deported? Why did none of the witnesses testify in court? And if Mr.
Heywood had threatened the life of her son as prosecutors claim, why would
Mr. Heywood have traveled to Chongqing to spend a night drinking at her
side? Many also found implausible Ms. Gu’s purported main contention: that
Mr. Heywood had briefly detained her son, Bo Guagua, during a visit to
Britain, and then sent an e-mail threatening to “destroy” him.

Then there were the small inconsistencies: The court said Ms. Gu and Mr.
Heywood had first met in 2005; most published accounts say their
association dates back to at least the late 1990s, when Mr. Heywood helped
her son gain admission to an elite British school.

“This was a satire of justice,” said He Weifang, a law professor at Peking
University. “The trial was more about covering up facts than revealing
what really has happened.”

Perhaps the most glaring omission was the trial’s failure to discuss the
so-called economic dispute underlying the crime. Prosecutors said Mr.
Heywood had been demanding $22 million from the family for a failed real
estate venture. Many wondered how Mr. Bo, a civil servant, and Ms. Gu, who
had not worked in years, might have been expected to come up with such a
sum. The implication, many analysts say, is that the Communist Party was
eager to avoid highlighting the sort of unbridled official corruption that
many Chinese believe is endemic.

Even Ms. Gu’s emotionally leaden statement at her sentencing inspired
disbelief and ridicule. In her brief monologue, broadcast on Monday
afternoon on national television, she thanked the court for its
magnanimity.
Ma Jian, an exiled Chinese novelist who lives in London, found her
performance patently scripted. “Not since Stalin’s show trials of the
1930s,” he wrote in a blog post
<http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/china-s-show-trial-of-the-cent
ury-by-ma-jian>, “has a defendant so effusively praised a judge who seemed
bound to condemn her at a trial where no witness or evidence against her
was presented.”

Mia Li and Adam Century contributed research.