Zhou Yongkang trial exposes Chinese officials' links with mystic
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Version 0 of 1. The secret trial of China’s former security tsar exposed not only rampant corruption at the very top of the Communist party but also links between senior government officials and a mysterious fortune teller known as the “Xinjiang sage”. Zhou Yongkang, 72, was jailed for life after being found guilty of corruption, abuse of power and leaking state secrets, it was reported on Thursday. Related: China’s former security chief given life sentence for corruption The latter crime related to claims that Zhou had passed sensitive papers to a man named as Cao Yongzheng, a court in the city of Tianjin heard. “Zhou leaked five ‘extremely confidential’ documents and one ‘confidential’ document to Cao Yongzheng, an unauthorized person, directly contravening the State Secret Law,” Xinhua, China’s official news agency reported, citing the court’s ruling. The “deliberate disclosure of state secrets” to Cao were “in particularly grave circumstances [but] did not have very serious consequences,” the court added without giving further details of the leak. Cao was born in Shadong province in east China in 1959 but was later named the “Xinjiang sage” after the northwestern region where he was raised. During the 1990s he “gained fame for purportedly having unusual abilities”, Caixin, a respected Chinese magazine, reported last year. Those skills were said to include the power to predict people’s futures and to cure incurable ailments. In 1993, Cao, a practitioner of qigong, a spiritual martial art, was said to have successfully predicted that Beijing would host the 2008 Olympics. The spiritual healer “carved out a life of wealth and riches amongst the extensive network of relations he quietly built over the decades, especially in the nation’s capital,” the Taipei-based website Want China Times claimed in a 2013 story. That network included Zhou Yongkang, the now disgraced security tsar, as well as other senior Communist party figures, it emerged on Thursday. Zhou’s son, Zhou Bin, had been close to the mystic as had Li Chuncheng, the former deputy party boss of Sichuan province, according to reports. Li, who had links to Zhou Yongkang, went on trial for corruption in April this year where he was accused of engaging in “feudalistic and superstitious acts”. The fortune teller’s coziness with power brought financial rewards. In 2005, Cao formed a partnership with one former official from state energy firm CNPC and began to develop oil projects in Xinjiang and Jilin province, Caixin claimed. However, the mystic failed to foresee his own downfall even as investigators closed in on his most powerful follower. Cao was detained last year after attempting to flee to Taiwan, some reports suggested. |