Jintao has had to assume since 2013 the sentences for economic crimes of his closest collaborators
His humiliating forced departure from the Communist Party Congress is the latest grievance Hu Jintao, China’s former president, has suffered at the hands of his successor, Xi Jinping. Since he took over, first as party secretary general in 2012 and then as president of the People’s Republic in 2013, Xi has targeted Hu’s closest aides and senior officials in his fierce anti-corruption campaign.
The last was his right-hand man, Ling Jihua, sentenced to life in prison in July 2016. Judged behind closed doors, he was convicted of having accepted more than ten million euros in bribes and having appropriated state secrets, according to the Xinhua agency. .
Ling Jihua celebrated his 66th birthday just yesterday in prison, where he will spend the rest of his life. Her fall from grace began in March 2012, when her only child, Ling Gu, was killed in a crash of his sports car, a Ferrari 458, in Beijing while driving late at night with two girls who were driving. half naked. An episode that, despite censorship, once again revealed the luxurious and unruly lifestyle of the “red aristocracy” that has flourished in the Communist Party under the protection of economic growth in recent decades.
The scandal targeted Ling Jihua, who was then Hu Jintao’s chief of staff. After being demoted, he began to be investigated at the end of 2014 and in July 2015 he was expelled from the Communist Party. Along with him, one of his brothers, Ling Zhengce, a high-ranking official in Shanxi province, was purged, while the other, Ling Wangcheng, fled to the United States, where he apparently has a two-million-euro mansion in California. .
Ling Wangcheng reportedly took with him 2,700 secret documents provided by his brother, including China’s nuclear codes. Currently, he is missing and it is not known if he lives protected by the US authorities or if Chinese secret agents managed to repatriate him to account.
In addition to Ling Jihua, in 2015 Zhou Yongkang, head of State Security during Hu Jintao’s mandate, was sentenced to life imprisonment for corruption. His purge involved the prosecution of China’s highest political leader since the trial of Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, and the ‘Gang of Four’ for the outrages of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). Both Zhou Yongkang and his family received bribes worth 19 million euros. His allies within the regime were also punished.
Among them stood out his protégé Bo Xilai, sentenced in 2013 to life imprisonment for corruption and whose wife was sentenced to death a year earlier – but with the sentence suspended – for murdering the British partner who helped them get the fortune they had amassed out of the country. with politics. Bo Xilai was one of the most prominent figures in the regime. His arrest sparked a bitter transitional power struggle between Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping. Behind him, the heads of his political godfather, Zhou Yongkang, and his ally Xu Caihou, former ‘number two’ of the Chinese Army, rolled. A year later, another vice president of the Central Military Commission was also sentenced to life in prison for corruption.
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