Gu Kailai trial exposes leadership splits

The trial, conviction and suspended death sentence of Gu Kailai , the wife of purged leader Bo Xilai , has called into question not only China's legal system, but the very unity of the Communist Party leadership.

Let us begin with the many questions raised at the trial. For starters, Gu claimed that she killed the British businessman Neil Heywood only to protect her son. But, given Gu's power as Bo's wife, she could have had someone like Heywood jailed or expelled from China at the snap of her fingers. No need for cyanide.

Still, she not only admitted her guilt, but seemed to embrace it as a sort of historical necessity. "In order to uphold the sanctity of the law," she told the court, "I am willing to accept and calmly face whatever judgment I am given, and I also expect a fair and just judgment." Not since Stalin's show trials of the 1930s has a defendant so effusively praised a judge who seemed bound to condemn her at a trial where no witness or evidence against her was presented.

The bitter irony of Gu's high-speed trial is that she was a true believer in China's legal system. Indeed, following a victory in an American court, Gu, a lawyer, wrote a book in which she claimed that China provides "the fairest method of trial". She continued: "Chinese lawyers would not quibble over the meaning of each little word. Once they are sure that you murdered someone, you will be arrested, judged and executed by firing squad."

Indeed, Gu was an avatar of the Maoist form of legality that China has maintained long after Mao's death. Having failed the entrance exam to Peking University, Gu was nonetheless granted an exception and admitted to read law soon after the Communist Party restored the law departments. Prior to that, she sold pork in a Beijing market, where she earned the nickname Yi dao zhun, meaning that she could hack off a desired slice of meat with one blow.

Gu was one of the first lawyers to receive her licence. But, with the Tiananmen Square incident of 1989, the authorities clamped down on the profession's autonomy. The party reasserted control over every aspect of justice through a core department: the party's Central Committee's Political and Legal Affairs Committee.

This totalitarian organ has no known address, yet it manages China's police, prosecutors, courts and justice ministry, and appoints their leadership. All lawyers fall under its remit. Most important, all local secretaries of the political-legal committee simultaneously lead the local public security bureau. Small wonder, then, that the artist Ai Weiwei could be detained in secret, Liu Xiaobo could be sentenced to 11 years in prison for starting a petition, and Li Wangyang could "commit suicide" while in custody.