New | Secrecy in trial of China's disgraced security tsar Zhou Yongkang raises question: was deal made?
The lighter-than-expected sentence handed to former security tsar Zhou Yongkang after a closed-door trial was a well-calculated political decision by Beijing that likely followed "Chinese-style plea bargains" under the table, observers say.
Two years into his graft probe, Zhou's fate was finally decided on Thursday when a court in Tianjin jailed him for life on charges of taking 731,000 yuan (HK$920,000) in bribes, leaking six classified documents to a mainland "qigong master", and abusing his power.
Professor Huang Jing, from the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, said Beijing wanted to keep Zhou alive as their "tainted witness" to deter corrupt officials and "political opponents" from subverting Xi Jinping's sweeping anti-graft campaign.
Zhou is a walking encyclopedia [of other top officials]. If he was executed, what he knows would be taken to the grave.
"Zhou is a walking encyclopedia [of other top officials]," Huang said. "If he was executed, what he knows would be taken to the grave."
Nor did Beijing want Zhou to walk away from his widely-known crimes, said Steve Tsang, dean of the University of Nottingham School of Contemporary Chinese Studies.
"A life sentence is therefore exactly what one should expect," Tsang said.
"The real issue is not what he was guilty of, but what the Communist Party leadership thought he should be charged with and convicted of in order to fit the pre-determined sentence."
Xiaoyu Pu, a Chinese politics expert at the University of Nevada, said plea bargains might have occurred, out of sight, along the lines of "Zhou agrees to plead guilty and confess publicly in return for more severe charges being dropped," he said.
It was even speculated that Zhou might stand trial for subversion - which could lead to the death sentence - after the annual work report released by the Supreme People's Court in late March said explicitly that Zhou had "undermined the party's solidarity and engaged in political activities [not approved by the authorities]".
The report made the same claim against Bo Xilai , the former Chongqing party chief and close associate of Zhou, who was tried in 2013. Bo was sentenced to life in jail in 2013.
But neither Zhou's indictment nor the verdict made any mention of Bo, or their unapproved "political activities".
It also surprised many that Beijing chose a closed-door trial for Zhou instead of the live-blogged showcase prosecution of Bo two years ago. Xi had repeatedly vowed to promote greater transparency of China's legal system following the party's fourth plenum last year.
Zhang Qingsong, a prominent criminal lawyer who defended executed business tycoon Liu Han , said he was caught off-guard by the abrupt announcement about Zhou.
"From the perspective of warning against corruption and displaying the significance of rule of law, if the trial of the other two charges were open to the public, it would have had a greater social and political impact," the criminal lawyer said.
Zhou's trial was held on May 22, but was kept secret for another 20 days before state media abruptly announced the verdict.
"Xi's 'plan A' was most likely a public trial to showcase his commitment to hunting down 'tigers' [corrupt officials] and his notion of rule by law," Tsang said.
But Xi probably did not want to risk holding a public trial if he was not sufficiently in control and confident Zhou would stick to the script, he said. "Lessons were learned from the Bo trial."
Pu agreed that the political stakes of holding an open trial for Zhou were much higher than Bo's case, as it involved more "national secrets" and information about higher-ranking political elites.
"The court tricked the public," said a lawyer with knowledge of the cases involving Zhou and his family, but who spoke on condition of anonymity.
"They did not tell the public in advance in any form, as far as I know, but they could argue that they did not deny anyone access to the court."
