After Bo, China's political dysfunction just as opaque

Bo Xilai has been tried, found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. That, in the normal order of things, should be the end of the matter. Barring profound change in the political habits of the Communist Party in dealing with those once in power who are felled, Bo will spend the rest of his life silenced. Maybe in the future, the world will be rewarded with his own words smuggled out as they were for Zhao Ziyang , giving his full, final account of what happened. But his ability to directly influence Chinese politics is over.

What do we know now more than we did when the Bo saga started, over 18 months ago? We already knew that elite Chinese politics was a highly tribal, often brutal and extremely competitive world, in which the stakes were high. We knew that the outcome of trials that involved highly prominent figures like Bo were handled almost wholly according to political considerations, and that whatever judicial process pursued would be tightly managed and the outcome dubious. We knew Bo was regarded with some trepidation by his colleagues and that he had limited support in the upper echelons of party leadership.

The events of these past few months do nothing to change any of these issues. Despite the excitement of the trial last month and the drama around Bo's affair, in the end it merely reinforces issues which were already known. The Chinese elite act according to rules they have themselves devised, and the only red line seems to be not to alienate too many of those in the same privileged club. Bo's real problem was probably this lack of true support among those around him.

One of the new great "what ifs" of Chinese politics now is what would have happened had Gu Kailai never been involved in the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood in November 2011. Would Bo then have enjoyed unhindered passage into the Politburo Standing Committee and perhaps even been made one of the key figures? The consensus before his fall was that Bo was too important a player to be left outside. Would other incidents have been manufactured to ensure that he did not finally make it? Would his inclusion have caused a true split in the leadership? Would it have pitted the elite deciders against each other at a sensitive and crucial moment in the Communist Party's leadership transition?

We will never know the answer to these questions now. All we can deduce from the trial and sentencing is that the gravest crimes in modern China are political. Bo shamed the party, the main accusation seemed to go, and fatally did not control the key people around him. Wang Lijun and Gu, for separate reasons, did not come off well in the trial process. Wang had to suffer Bo's scathing attack, and was up against his own unsavoury and bullying prior record. Gu was not even present in the court, and was easily dismissed as malleable and unstable. All the key narratives of a dysfunctional dynastic family were well in place, and harked back to the sort of shenanigans under Mao Zedong four decades before.

What was less explored during Bo's extended hearing was precisely how he was connected to the Heywood affair, beyond his link to Gu and Wang. No evidence was presented of his collusion, at least from the tightly edited transcripts issued from Jinan during the hearing. Nor was it clear precisely how he had "abused power" beyond proving himself unable to keep tabs on the business and personal affairs of people close to him.