In addition to the offense of being expelled from the conclave, former president Hu Jintao has had to swallow the corruption convictions of his closest collaborators
His humiliating forced exit from the Communist Party Congress, before 2,300 delegates and the Chinese and international press that had just entered, is the latest offense that Hu Jintao, former president of China, 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 one was his right-hand man, Ling Jihua, sentenced to life in prison for corruption in July 2016. Tried behind closed doors, he was convicted of having accepted more than ten million euros in bribes, used his power to benefit his relatives and having appropriation of state secrets, according to the state news agency Xinhua.
While his former superior, Hu Jintao, was being dragged out of the Great Hall of the People, Ling Jihua was celebrating his 66th birthday precisely this Friday in prison, where he will spend the rest of his life. His fall from grace began in March 2012, when his only son, Ling Gu, was killed when his sports car, a Ferrari 458, crashed into the fourth ring in Beijing while driving late at night with two half-naked girls. . 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.
Missing in California
The scandal targeted Ling Jihua, who was then President 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. .
As reported by some media in that country at the time, Ling Wangcheng would have taken with him 2,700 secret documents provided by his brother, including China’s nuclear codes and abundant information about the leaders of the Communist Party and their power struggle. 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.
Hu Jintao tries to get an explanation from Xi Jinping after being exhorted to leave the Communist Party congress /
In addition to Ling Jihua, in 2015 Zhou Yongkang, former head of State Security under Hu Jintao, 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). According to the sentence, both Zhou Yongkang and his family received bribes worth 19 million euros and used his influence to benefit his allies within the regime, who were also punished.
Among them stood out his protégé Bo Xilai, sentenced in September 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 out of the country. they had kneaded with politics. A former Commerce Minister and Party Secretary in Chongqing, a megacity in southwestern China on the banks of the Yangtze, Bo Xilai was one of the most prominent figures in the regime. But his arrest sparked a bitter transitional power struggle between Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping in 2012.
“Greedy and Corrupt”
Behind him, the heads of his political godfather, Zhou Yongkang, and his ally Xu Caihou, former number two in the Chinese Army, rolled. Suffering from prostate cancer, the latter died in 2015 while waiting to be tried for corruption. A year later, another deputy chairman of the Central Military Commission, Guo Boxiong, was also sentenced to life in prison for corruption.
At the previous Communist Party Congress, held in 2017, the head of the Securities Market Commission, Liu Shiyu, revealed that all these Hu Jintao collaborators “were immensely greedy and corrupt and had conspired to carry out a coup d’état” against Xi Jinping. Years after finishing them off, and perhaps for failing to purge his boss, Xi has taken revenge on Hu Jintao with a public scorn that further strengthens his power.
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