by Gwynn Guilford
Gu Kailai's trial began and ended today, concluding with her confession that she poisoned a British businessman. Evan Osnos finds the story of her guilt hard to swallow:
There is much about that scenario that is hard to picture. It’s difficult to imagine a privileged, cosmopolitan lawyer—even one driven to rage as the court suggests—not finding a solution better than getting her hands dirty. It’s not impossible, of course, but there’s no way to know for sure because what the court describes as “solid evidence” is unavailable to the public.
Earlier in the week, Osnos mused on why Gu has become the scapegoat for her husband, former political hotshot Bo Xilai:
Though Gu’s fall was entwined with that of her husband, Bo Xilai, they are not accused of the same thing. Bo Xilai, a former political star, has not been linked to the murder—only to vaguely defined “discipline violations,” so far. His fate is being swaddled in more secrecy, in part because a purge at his altitude carries the explosive potential of upsetting the balance of power between factions. Gu’s fate, by contrast, gives the Party less pause.
Gordon Chang argues that the government needs to tread lightly:
The propaganda indicates that party leaders are concerned. … China’s people, rocked by the revelations this spring, are not likely to accept the result as fair, given the failure to prosecute Gu’s husband, Comrade Bo, in connection with this murder. The Communist Party may be powerful enough to get by this crisis, but it cannot continue to lose credibility and retain power indefinitely.
Minxin Pei reads the Bo-Gu scandal as a sign of the Party's weakening:
[P]olitical security for China's top rulers today has deteriorated so much that, in some crucial ways, they might feel that they are back to the bad old Maoist days. Elite disunity and vicious infighting is now the rule, not the exception. This cannot be reassuring news for a regime ruled by individuals whose daily nightmare is that they will one day become another Bo Xilai.
Alice Miller disputes (PDF) this reasoning:
Bo’s removal likely strengthens rather than disrupts preparations for convocation of the 18th Party Congress this fall…. His grandstanding propensity to play to the media, and especially to the foreign press, suggested a political personality unlikely to accommodate the leadership style of collective consensus-building in an oligarchy that has flourished in the Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao eras.
In a post we linked to last week, Perry Link sums up the trial's implications:
In a larger sense … [Gu] Kailai is still a scapegoat—not for her husband but for the whole Communist Party. By focusing all the blame on her, and “bringing her to justice,” the Party, in its tradition of maintaining decorous exteriors, can extend the fiction that everything is basically fine. We, the Party, the center of China, are fine.
The Dish 