The sentencing of China's fallen political star Bo Xilai to life imprisonment for corruption and abuse of power by a Shandong court over the weekend had scant connection to the case as it was presented in court, Chinese legal experts said on Monday.
Bo's harsher-than-expected sentence handed down by the Intermediate People's Court in Shandong's provincial capital of Jinan on Sunday was the culmination of the biggest political scandal to rock the ruling Chinese Communist Party in decades.
But legal scholar Cheng Ganyuan, who correctly predicted Bo's life sentence, said many analysts had neglected to look at precedents in the annals of Party history.
"Looking at the history of the Chinese Communist Party, political trials never result in light sentences," Cheng told RFA's Mandarin Service after the sentence was passed.
"Some people said Bo would get a light sentence, or even be found not guilty and released, but that shows a lack of understanding of the Chinese Communist Party."
Judge 'just an instrument'
Cheng, a retired former law professor at the Nanjing Normal University now living in the U.S., said Bo's life sentence was likely to have been approved at the highest level of leadership.
"We all know that the verdict wasn't decided in the Bo Xilai case by the judge, who was just an instrument," he said.
"Of course, there was a sense of progress in that the judge heard the arguments in court from the lawyers, and even from the defendant himself, but there is no question that the judge made no independent decision based on the evidence."
Many had expected Bo, the former Party boss of the southwestern megacity of Chongqing, to get 15 to 20 years in jail, slightly more than his former police chief and right-hand man Wang Lijun had received in September 2012.
But the feisty Bo refused to admit his guilt, retracting a confession that he said was signed under duress, and ridiculing witnesses for the prosecution, which called in its summing up statement for a "severe" punishment for the "princeling" son of a revolutionary Party elder and former Politburo member.
The 64-year-old Bo was sentenced to life in prison on the bribery charges, 15 years for embezzlement, and seven years for abuse of power, the Jinan court said on its verified account on the Twitter-like service Sina Weibo.
All Bo's personal assets were ordered to be seized after he was found guilty of taking 20.4 million yuan (U.S. $3.3 million) in bribes, a sum which many familiar with his career was greatly reduced from the actual amount.
Deciding factors 'lay outside the courtroom'
Beijing-based rights lawyer Mo Shaoping said the entire trial was invalid from a legal point of view, regardless of Bo's actual actions.
"It's immaterial whether this case should have resulted in a guilty verdict, or in a sentence of how many years, because the deciding factors all lay outside the courtroom," he said.
"They weren't purely judicial factors, because there is no judicial independence in China."
A second Beijing rights lawyer, Liu Xiaoyuan, said the authorities had used Bo's lack of cooperation and refusal to admit his guilt as an excuse to hand down the sentence.
"Personally, I don't think that a life sentence [in this case] is necessarily a very heavy one," he added.
Not about economic crimes
Meanwhile, Party agricultural policy researcher-turned-political commentator Yao Jianfu said Bo was actually being tried for his attempts to grow his power base in Beijing, as well as his role in the diplomatic embarrassment caused by the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood and Wang Lijun's Feb. 2012 flight to the U.S. consulate in Chengdu, which first brought the scandal to public attention.
"It's just that they couldn't bring up evidence for these political charges in court, because that would be tantamount to putting the Chinese Communist Party on trial," he said.
Cheng agreed. "The heavy sentence handed down to Bo Xilai was because this was a political case, and not an economic one," he said.
"From the start of the trial, right through to sentencing, we can see exactly what people mean when they say that there is no judicial independence in China, and that there is no due legal process, and that judges are unable to pass judgement according to their own appraisal of the evidence."
During the highly choreographed trial, which was updated by tweet at regular intervals but which showed signs of editing, Bo admitted that he had made mistakes in the handling of an investigation into the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood in 2011 for which his wife Gu Kailai has been convicted, but denied charges of abuse of power.
Bo also admitted that he bore "some responsibility" for public funds he was accused of embezzling.
A taste of his own medicine
But Cheng said the case had had little to do with the sums of money Bo was accused of acquiring through corrupt means.
He said the spirited defense by Bo, known for launching strict anti-crime and Maiost revival "red culture" campaigns during his tenure in Chongqing, was likely sparked by finding himself on the receiving end of the same type of highly politicized judicial anger he had once had dispensed to others.
"When Bo Xilai was running his revolutionary song and anti-crime campaigns in Chongqing, there was no judicial independence there, either, and no due legal process," he said. "Then, when he became a prisoner himself, and was calling for judicial independence and a fair trial, he got a taste of that medicine himself."
"A lot of officials find out about the dark side of China's judicial system only after they have suffered the disaster of going to jail."
Maoist supporters
Bo's political supporters among the Maoist left of the Party rejected the charges against him, however.
"There is no way they should have found him guilty, because there wasn't enough evidence to show that he knew about [the corruption]," said Han Deqiang, a Beijing-based professor and founder of the Maoist website Utopia.
"All they could do was suspect that he was guilty," Han said. "That's what innocent until proven guilty means."
"He should have been found not guilty and released ... according to the court's own published principles."
Reported by CK, Xin Yu, and Yang Jiadai for RFA's Mandarin Service and by Hai Nan for the Cantonese Service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.