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At Surprisingly Open Trial in China, Fallen Politician Shows Defiance Testimony at Chinese Ex-Official’s Trial Ties Briton’s Killing to Demand for Money
(about 9 hours later)
JINAN, China — Bo Xilai, the politician who fell from the heights of China’s elite, took a pugnacious stand on Thursday in the opening session of the nation’s most closely watched trial in decades, denying that he took millions of dollars in bribes and ridiculing his wife’s testimony against him. JINAN, China — Prosecutors in the trial of Bo Xilai, the former senior Communist Party official, presented testimony on Friday that tied the murder of a British businessman in 2011 to compensation he was said to be demanding from the Bo family for his management of a villa on the French Riviera.
According to lengthy transcripts the court released in an extraordinary show of transparency, Mr. Bo, 64, called his wife’s assertions that she had noticed anonymous deposits in their safe “laughable.” He accused a businessman who had recorded video testimony against him of having “sold his soul.” And he discounted his earlier confession to taking bribes, saying he had made the statements to Communist Party investigators against his will, out of “opportunism and weakness” and under “mental strain.” Mr. Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai, was convicted of the murder of the businessman, Neil Heywood, a year ago and sentenced to life in prison. After the death of Mr. Heywood was made public in March 2012, the ensuing scandal led to the downfall of Mr. Bo, who was a Politburo member and party chief of the municipality of Chongqing and was said to be a candidate for one of the top party posts. Mr. Bo, whose trial began Thursday, is charged with taking bribes, embezzlement and abuse of power; the last charge is an accusation that he tried to obstruct an investigation into Mr. Heywood’s murder, presumably to protect Ms. Gu.
The authorities’ unexpected openness about the trial — by allowing a running court microblog that was followed by millions of Chinese directly or through news reports drawing on the microblog — turned what many had expected to be banal ritual into an unpredictable display of Mr. Bo’s defiance. As they did on Thursday, the trial’s opening day, officials released information about the hearing on Friday through updates on a court microblog account. Transcripts released via the microblog on Thursday showed Mr. Bo taking a defiant stand in the court and lashing out at the witnesses, in a display of the showmanship that helped propel him to the top ranks of the party.
But as the trial moved into its second and possibly final day on Friday, government and party media outlets unfurled several commentaries that feted the legal proceedings while ridiculing Mr. Bo over his denials — an unmistakable signal that the Communist Party leadership would not let the skilled politician wriggle free of punishment. One signed commentary in the online edition of The People’s Daily stated: “What is regrettable is that, with regard to the facts, Bo Xilai made a supreme effort to quibble, to avoid the major charges while admitting the minor ones, and almost completely denied the facts of his crimes.” But a person briefed on the proceedings said Friday afternoon that that day’s transcripts had been less comprehensive. Those transcripts, for example, revealed less testimony from Mr. Bo.
Before noon on Friday, the court released an 11-minute video of Mr. Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai, speaking to an interrogator about expensive items that one young tycoon, Xu Ming, had bought for the Bo family, including abalone and airplane tickets. Asked whether Mr. Bo knew about the purchases, Ms. Gu appeared equivocal and said, “He should know. Our relationship is very close.” Pressed harder, she said, “Anyway, we all know.” She also said Mr. Bo helped Mr. Xu acquire a local soccer team and get land for a hot-air-balloon venture, but did not mention any bribes paid specifically for those actions. In the video, Ms. Gu, who is serving a prison sentence, sat at a desk in a short-sleeved shirt looking pale and much slimmer than she did at a court appearance a year ago. And party authorities seemed to be making their case against Mr. Bo in the state media, not just in the court. After Mr. Bo’s bold defense on the first day of the trial, state news organizations issued a chorus of commentaries that said the evidence against him on the corruption and embezzlement charges was overwhelming. The commentaries lauded the trial as fair and open while ridiculing Mr. Bo’s efforts to refute the evidence and effectively prejudging him.
The dramatic courtroom exchanges on Thursday raised questions about how party officials would continue to steer a delicate political process that has captivated Chinese scrutinizing it on the Internet. Officials set up a media center in a hotel across the street in this eastern provincial capital. Dozens of foreign journalists and a handful of reporters for Chinese state media gazed at large-screen televisions streaming the court feed. When the first photograph from the trial was posted before 11:30 a.m., showing the 6-foot-1 Mr. Bo standing with a bemused look between two towering police officers, journalists charged the televisions and snapped photos. “Confronted with the facts, Bo’s attitude was to flaunt his cunning and use a hundred kinds of denial,” said a commentary on the Web site of The Guangming Daily, a party newspaper. “The documents are there in black and white and the evidence is overwhelming. Bo Xilai’s self-defense collapsed instantly before the evidence, so that his sophistry was futile and laughable.”
Dressed in a white shirt and black pants with his hair neatly trimmed, Mr. Bo displayed some of the showmanship he deployed in climbing to the party chief post in Chongqing municipality and the elite Politburo, before he was felled last year by a scandal involving the death of a British businessman, a case in which Ms. Gu was convicted of murder. Mr. Bo is also charged with abuse of power over allegations he obstructed an investigation into the death and with embezzlement. The trial is likely to end on Saturday, and a verdict is expected within a couple of weeks.
There were limits to the transparency. One person briefed on the proceedings said that some court testimony did not appear in the released transcripts. And by evening, censors had sanitized the comments section of the court microblog, removing many remarks skeptical of the justice process. Though less voluminous over all than on the trial’s opening day, the transcripts released on Friday did include some instances in which Mr. Bo criticized the prosecution’s main witnesses, including his wife, Ms. Gu, who appeared in a video recording talking about the family’s finances.
Analysts said that publicizing the hearing was the party’s attempt to lend legitimacy to a trial in which a guilty verdict and long prison sentence were almost certainly preordained. The hearing was not as public as the televised trial in 1980 of the Gang of Four blamed for the havoc of the Cultural Revolution. But officials issued about 60 real-time updates over the court microblog. “How much of it is believable?” Mr. Bo said of Ms. Gu’s testimony. “She has become crazy, and she often tells lies. She was mentally unstable and under enormous pressure from the investigators to inform on me.”
“This is the most open trial of its kind, certainly the most open among the ones we have seen recently,” He Weifang, a law professor at Peking University, said in a telephone interview. “He seems to be speaking his mind, judging from his speech and the words he used.” Witnesses for the prosecution painted a vivid portrait of family life within the Bo clan, which appeared to be awash in favors from Xu Ming, a young tycoon. According to testimony, Mr. Bo’s youngest son, Bo Guagua, went to Africa in 2011 at Mr. Xu’s expense, and he brought back a chunk of meat for his father that he insisted should be eaten raw. The father had it cooked, though, to the young Mr. Bo’s disappointment, and the family feasted on it for a month.
But over all, he added, “the whole court is controlled by Beijing.” Mr. Xu also paid for a trip to China in 2011 by Mr. Bo, a graduate student at Harvard then, and 40 fellow students. As for the villa, Mr. Bo helped his wife plan the aesthetics — “he’s an expert in home renovation and decoration,” Ms. Gu said in her testimony.
The party’s efforts at forging an aura of legitimacy could backfire. If evidence released during the trial proves flimsy, the public could side with Mr. Bo, whose Maoist slogans and new brand of socialism bolstered his popularity in Chongqing. Testimony for much of Friday centered on the villa, in Cannes, which documents in France show was owned by a Frenchman, Patrick Devillers, a friend of the Bo family. According to testimony from Mr. Devillers and others read aloud in court on Friday, Mr. Devillers was a frontman in the purchase of the villa by Ms. Gu, who bought the villa more than a decade ago with $3.2 million from Mr. Xu. Prosecutors said Ms. Gu used different people in the French company that managed the property as fronts to hide her ownership of the villa.
Mr. Bo insisted that he knew nothing of a villa on the French Riviera that prosecutors said Ms. Gu bought in 2000 with $3.2 million from Mr. Xu or about a hot-air-balloon venture between the two. He denied knowledge of a $16,000 trip to Africa made by his youngest son, Bo Guagua, and his friends; an $18,000 Segway-like vehicle that Mr. Xu bought for the son; and $50,000 of debt on the son’s credit card that Mr. Xu paid. Mr. Heywood, a business associate of the Bo family, was brought in to hold Ms. Gu’s shares in the villa in 2007, and then removed in 2012. Prosecutors said he then demanded $2.2 million from Ms. Gu and threatened her son, Bo Guagua. She poisoned Mr. Heywood in November 2011 because of the threats.
He said he did not know much about his wife and son’s expenses, because Ms. Gu was “a person of culture and taste, a modern intellectual woman,” so they did not discuss money. The story spun by prosecutors on Friday was somewhat different from the one that officials presented in the August 2012 trial of Ms. Gu. Then, officials said Mr. Heywood had demanded about $22 million, a much larger sum, mostly as compensation for a failed property project in Chongqing, and partly for a French project. He made threats to the son to get that money, those prosecutors said, and that made Ms. Gu fearful. At the time, accounts of Ms. Gu’s trial, which was closed to the public, were posted online and relayed to journalists by people who had been allowed into the courtroom.
Mr. He, a critic of Mr. Bo’s past policies, said the prosecutor “appeared to be ill-prepared,” echoing a sentiment widely seen online. “In comparison,” he said, “Bo appears to be more authentic.” Bo Guagua, who has just started classes at Columbia Law School, did not respond to an e-mail request for comment on Friday. Family members of Mr. Heywood could not immediately be reached for comment.
Since Mr. Bo was dismissed from his party chief post in March 2012 and placed under house arrest, party leaders have been concerned about his popular support. Some of the ardor among ordinary Chinese was in evidence on Thursday morning, as Bo supporters, some carrying Mao Zedong posters, showed up in Jinan at courthouse barricades guarded by the police. The police expanded their security cordon around the courthouse by an additional block on Friday and, by some eyewitness accounts, appeared to dispatch plainclothes officers to intimidate leftist supporters of Mr. Bo and assorted petitioners who had flocked to the courthouse and drawn the attention of international news media. The crowds of onlookers that hovered near the courthouse on Thursday had thinned out considerably by Friday.
“I’m willing to do anything for him,” said a farmer, He Demin, 51, who had flown from Chongqing. “With him gone from Chongqing, security and morale have plummeted. We so need a person like him.” Although the official transcripts posted online on Thursday faithfully reflected the bulk of the hearings, some colorful highlights were omitted, according to the person briefed by witnesses in the courtroom, who also has ties to justice officials.
Mr. Bo started becoming combative midway through the morning session. Prosecutors charged that he had taken about $180,000 in cash bribes from a state company manager and longtime associate, Tang Xiaolin, in exchange for land and auto transactions that Mr. Bo granted as a top official in the northeast province of Liaoning. After watching video testimony from Mr. Tang, Mr. Bo said: “I really saw the ugliness of a person who sold his soul,” and, “He’s biting wildly like a mad dog.” In one exchange, after testimony from Ms. Gu was read in which she described taking cash from a safe that she shared with Mr. Bo, Mr. Bo’s court-appointed defense lawyer, Li Guifang, countered that Ms. Gu’s account was questionable because she faced a possible death sentence at the time. “So she could say anything to reduce her sentence,” said the person briefed by witnesses. “He raised these doubts.”
Prosecutors also read related testimony from Ms. Gu about the anonymous deposits in a shared safe. “I think Gu Kailai’s testimony is very amusing and very laughable,” Mr. Bo said. At another point, Mr. Bo vented anger against Tang Xiaolin, a state company manager who testified via video to having given Mr. Bo 1.1 million renminbi, or $180,000, in bribes in appreciation for help with business deals. According to the person briefed on the proceedings, Mr. Bo stated that if Mr. Tang appeared in court, he would slap him across the face harder than he had hit Wang Lijun — a reference to a run-in Mr. Bo had with Mr. Wang, his former police chief in Chongqing, before Mr. Wang fled in February 2012 to the American Consulate in Chengdu, where he exposed evidence that Ms. Gu had murdered Mr. Heywood.
In the late afternoon, Mr. Bo and his lawyer parried the testimony of Mr. Xu, the young tycoon, who appeared in court and is accused of giving Mr. Bo’s family $3.4 million in bribes, mostly for the French villa. Officials from the court, the police and state security met late Thursday in Jinan, according to a person familiar with the situation, but determined that the situation was basically normal despite the uproar caused by Mr. Bo’s spirited defense. “Yesterday people around the country and even inside the courtroom were surprised by the degree of openness and Bo’s refutals of the charges, but the authorities did not seem to think that was so unexpected and considered the situation to be under control,” the person said. “The main thing was to modify the propaganda, mainly out of Beijing.”
Some analysts say Mr. Bo might have agreed to accept the inevitable prison sentence in exchange for a chance to speak his mind, to a degree. All the information, including the official microblog posts, were still controlled by officials who generally knew what to expect, the analysts noted. It was clear that Friday’s testimony was vetted longer before being posted than Thursday’s testimony, and that Mr. Bo and his lawyers were given fewer opportunities to rebut evidence, at least as shown to the public.
On Thursday night, Li Wangzhi, the son of Mr. Bo from his first marriage, who was in the courtroom, released a statement that said, “I thank the party central authorities and the court for giving the defendant greater rights to a defense and freedom than he had expected, allowing my father to speak his true mind.” The court showed more than an hour of Ms. Gu’s testimony on all three charges against Mr. Bo, though the court posted only an 11-minute clip online, according to the person briefed on Friday’s proceedings.
Mr. Li added that his father had “stood by his own ideas” through an investigation that lasted 500 days and involved more than 300 people. In the video that was made public, Ms. Gu spoke to an interrogator about expensive items that Mr. Xu had bought for the Bo family, including abalone, airplane tickets and a Segway-like vehicle that the son wanted. Asked whether Mr. Bo knew about the purchases, Ms. Gu appeared equivocal and said, “He should know; our relationship is very close.” Pressed harder, she said, “Anyway, we all know.”

Chris Buckley contributed reporting from Hong Kong. Patrick Zuo contributed research from Jinan, and Mia Li and Shi Da from Beijing.

She also said Mr. Bo helped Mr. Xu acquire a local soccer team and get land for a hot-air balloon venture, but did not mention any bribes paid specifically for those actions. In the video, Ms. Gu, who is now serving a prison sentence, sat at a desk in a short-sleeved shirt, looking pale and much slimmer than she did at a court appearance a year ago.
Mr. Bo denied any knowledge of payments by Mr. Xu, which some legal scholars said was a good strategy. “Bo’s defense today is that he was unaware of the bribes Gu took, which stands legally,” said Jiang Tianyong, a liberal lawyer and rights defender. “If he was unaware and took no part in the bribe-taking, he has no responsibility, even if he is married to Gu.”
“Bo’s self-defense is very effective, even more effective than that by his lawyers,” he added.
Outside the courthouse on Friday, there was a clampdown in some corners of Jinan, in a shift from a more open atmosphere on Thursday. The local police tried to shoo away Chinese journalists from progressive state media outlets who were not specifically accredited to cover the trial, though foreign and some official media reporters appeared to work unimpeded.

Chris Buckley contributed reporting from Hong Kong. Patrick Zuo contributed research from Jinan, and Mia Li from Beijing.