The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) expelled former domestic security czar Zhou Yongkang (周永康), accusing him of leaking official secrets in addition to expected graft allegations.
An investigation found Zhou “seriously violated the party’s political, organizational and confidentiality discipline,” Xinhua news agency reported shortly after midnight yesterday, citing a Chinese government statement.
Zhou abused his powers to help his friends make profits and accepted “huge bribes” personally and through his family, it said.
Photo: AFP
Any trial of Zhou — a former member of the party’s top decisionmaking body, the Central Politburo Standing Committee — would be a showcase event in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) efforts to bolster his power base and curb the corruption that he has said could erode the party’s power.
“The Chinese regime really is taking a turn toward something probably less corrupt, but more importantly, a vision of a different kind of political system,” University of California professor of Chinese economy Barry Naughton said.
The system would be neither the one former leader Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) created nor the one Westerners assumed would evolve, Naughton said yesterday in a telephone interview.
Zhou, 71, is the highest-level official to fall in China’s bid to sweep away both “tigers and flies” in the anticorruption campaign.
Zhou’s expulsion was decided during a meeting of the CCP Central Committee’s Political Bureau yesterday, Xinhua said.
Zhou has been formally arrested and China’s Supreme People’s Procuratorate started investigating his suspected crimes, Xinhua added.
“We need to advance the anticorruption drive through the investigation of Zhou’s serious violations of party discipline,” the People’s Daily newspaper wrote in an unsigned commentary dated yesterday. “We must stick to the attitude of no tolerance, the resolve of strong treatment, the courage to scrape poison from the bones and the measure of severe punishment.”
Zhou allegedly leaked CCP and Chinese government secrets, Xinhua said, without giving details. He also allegedly abused his power to help relatives, mistresses and friends do business, obtaining “huge” profits and causing the loss of state-owned assets, Xinhua reported.
Zhou is also accused of committing adultery with a number of women, and there is reportedly evidence of his having committed additional crimes, Xinhua said, without elaborating.
“It’s part of Xi Jinping’s governing style that he wants to show that the level of control that he exerts is bigger and more comprehensive than anybody before him,” Naughton said. “And so he’s destroying Zhou Yongkang on every level — legally, politically, morally. In a way, it’s kind of a scorched-earth policy.”
China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC, 中國石油天然氣) will “resolutely support” the party leadership’s decision on Zhou, the state-owned company said in a statement on its Web site. Zhou was previously CNPC’s chairman.
A member of the standing committee until November 2012, Zhou has not been seen in public since October last year.
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