Once one of the most powerful of China's elite, Zhou Yongkang was sentence to life in prison Thursday, after a secret trial that saw the one-time security czar acknowledge he acted corruptly.
Mr. Zhou, a former member of the Politburo Standing Committee, was sentenced for accepting bribes, abusing power and deliberately disclosing state secrets, Chinese state media said Thursday afternoon. His personal property would be seized, and he would forego political rights, said state media, which reported that he would not appeal.
Mr. Zhou is the most senior Chinese official to be tried and convicted in decades, amid a sweeping campaign that has sought to root out graft and punish political rivals of president Xi Jinping. He was charged with accepting a bribe of $26-million, and arranging for others to also receive money and property – including $26-million that went to his daughter and son.
The amounts pale in comparison to the allegations that he and his network had pocketed illicit gains of nearly $16-billion. Graft investigators working on his case seized stashes of antiques, paintings, liquor, gold, silver and cash.
Mr. Zhou once sat atop China's all-encompassing state security apparatus while also wielding influence inside its state-owned oil and gas Goliath. His power has been compared to J. Edgar Hoover and Dick Cheney combined in one man.
China's Xinhua news agency cited Mr. Zhou as saying he accepted the charges against him, confessed his guilt and acknowledged that those who bribed him were seeking to benefit from his power.
He was convicted after a one-day trial on May 22, which was kept closed, state media said, because one of his charges included the leaking of state secrets. That contrasted with the high-profile trial in 2013 of Bo Xilai, another political heavyweight whose day in court was given a partial public airing through official social media updates from inside the courtroom.
But Mr. Zhou's case, with its revelations of rot at the very highest echelons of the Chinese Communist Party, was extraordinarily delicate for the country's leadership. It not only revealed the scale of top-level misdeeds to everyday Chinese, it also exposed Mr. Xi to backlash from other powerful leaders either associated with Mr. Zhou, or worried their own corruption could be exposed.
"Apparently, it is in everyone's interest to bring this very painful chapter to a close as quickly and expediently as possible," said Victor Gao, a director at the China National Association of International Studies.
A closed trial allowed the party leadership to "deal with this particular situation, with this particular officer, without creating too much collateral damage," he said.
In previous reports, China's state media have said Mr. Zhou caused "serious losses" to state-owned entities, traded power for sex, committed affairs "with a number of women" and used his clout to deliver "huge profits" to relatives, mistresses and friends.
The investigation into Mr. Zhou has formed a central element of Mr. Xi's campaign against "tigers and flies," his bid to root out graft among both the most and the least powerful. Of tens of thousands of people who have publicly come under questioning in the past two years, Mr. Zhou has been the biggest tiger of all.
It is a rare spectacle to see one of China's most powerful men coming under investigation, being tossed from the Communist Party and then tried in court. Mr. Zhou has, as a consequence, served as a confidence-shattering example to China's sweeping, graft-infested bureaucracy.
The stakes of his case were made clear last year, when former presidents Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin both reportedly warned Mr. Xi not to take his anti-corruption campaign too far, for fear of destabilizing the party.
Nathan VanderKlippe