If China's leaders expected that the speedy trial of Gu Kailai, the wife of the disgraced Chongqing party chief Bo Xilai, would put a stop to the speculation, they were gravely mistaken. Instead of dispelling the mysteries surrounding the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood and the purge of Mr Bo, the one-day trial of Ms Gu last week only deepened suspicions.
Beijing might have hoped that a carefully staged trial would help to polish its public image. But the public reaction indicates that the Communist Party's prestige sustained another blow.
Mr Bo's fall from grace in March came after the Chongqing police chief, Wang Lijun, sought asylum at a US consulate. In April, Chinese authorities implicated Ms Gu in the murder of Heywood. But more than these embarrassing incidents, the Bo scandal has highlighted weaknesses in the ruling Communist Party and poorly hidden fractures at the top.
Apparently, this show trial had multiple objectives. Politically, it was meant to punctuate the Bo scandal and pave the way for the regime's handling of the thornier task of deciding Mr Bo's fate. In addition, Ms Gu's case was supposed to fit nicely into a narrative that China's ruling elites are desperate to tell: the Bo scandal notwithstanding, political life in Beijing is now back to normal. Such a reassuring story is critically important because of the loss of confidence in the leadership after the Bo affair.
By trying Ms Gu ahead of the party's 18th Congress, expected to be held in late October, Beijing apparently is attempting to dispense with any distractions now.
China is clearly a country ruled by man, not the rule of law, but the party is nevertheless eager to project a progressive image by going ahead with a trial that was partially open to the public and even permitted observers from the UK embassy. Yet, for all the pains that Chinese authorities took, the one-day court proceedings felt, smelled and sounded like a classic show trial.
Ms Gu was given government-appointed counsel, confessed her crime and apologised to the party (but not to the victim's family). The prosecutors' case was not challenged in the slightest. No foreign journalists were allowed in the courtroom.
So instead of closure, the trial opened a new can of worms. The details revealed during the proceedings raised new doubts about the official version of the story - and also showed that corruption and lawlessness inside the regime have reached unimaginable levels.
For example, Ms Gu's purported motive for murdering Heywood was a business dispute. The British businessman was supposedly guaranteed a profit of $220 million (Dh810 million) from unspecific property deals, but according to testimony he demanded a further payment of $22 million from Ms Gu's son and threatened to "destroy" him if the payment was not made. If the allegations are true, the projects involved would have been huge.
Perhaps more shocking than the sums of money was the revelation of lawless behaviour routinely engaged in by Chinese officials. One plot allegedly hatched by Ms Gu and Mr Wang, although later abandoned, was to frame Heywood as a drugs trafficker by planting narcotics in his belongings.
Apparently murder was a cleaner method of settling the dispute. The real revelation disclosed at the trial was about the arrest of four senior police officers in Chongqing, including the city's deputy police chief, who are accused of covering up the crime.
For all the orchestration of the trial, Beijing achieved none of its objectives. Instead of improving the party's image, the trial showed that corruption within the regime had reached unprecedented heights. Worse still, the party failed to convince the Chinese public that it had put the Bo affair behind it and had moved on to the leadership transition.
The elephant in the courtroom was, of course, Mr Bo himself. His name was barely mentioned during the proceedings. The only crime Ms Gu was accused of was murder. The party had publicly dismissed Mr Bo on the grounds of a "serious violation of discipline" - a code phrase for corruption - yet no corruption charges were filed.
Given the alleged multi-billion-dollar property deal involving Heywood and the Bo family, one suspicion is that the Chinese government is trying to hide a larger scandal that might involve Mr Bo himself and possibly many others.
On the other hand, perhaps the party leadership is holding the corruption charges in reserve, and Mr Bo will be charged in a separate trial at a time of the party's choosing. The pattern in previous purges of top Politburo members was to allow a two-year interval between an official's dismissal and his trial. Beijing might wait another year or more to put Mr Bo on trial.
The party has already pronounced him guilty of corruption. All it needs now is another show trial to get the job done properly.
Minxin Pei is a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and a non-resident senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States
