The New york Times, Hong Kong :
Zhou Yongkang, the once-feared head of China’s domestic security, has been expelled from the Communist Party
announced early Saturday, disclosing a barrage of charges that included taking bribes, helping family members and cronies plunder government assets and leaking official secrets. The move indicated that Mr. Zhou, once widely seen as invulnerable, was being held up by the party to show that top officials were not immune from punishment under President Xi Jinping.
The announcement signaled the biggest move yet in Mr. Xi’s two-year campaign to curb graft and malfeasance in the party hierarchy.
Mr. Zhou, 72, became the first member of the elite Politburo Standing Committee, retired or active, to face criminal investigation in a corruption case. The state news media celebrated the decision as a confirmation that Mr. Xi was serious about cleaning up officialdom.
“Corruption is a cancer that has invaded the party’s healthy tissue,” an editorial in People’s Daily, the party’s main newspaper, said Saturday. “We must use investigating and dealing with Zhou Yongkang’s grave violations to thoroughly advance the struggle against corruption.”
The decision by the Communist Party Politburo, a council of 25 senior officials, to expel Mr. Zhou and place him under a legal investigation made it all but certain that he would face trial, conviction and a heavy sentence from one of the party-run courts that were once part of his political fief.
The official Xinhua news agency, which issued the announcement, said the Politburo made the decision on Friday. “Zhou Yongkang’s actions were totally in contravention of the party’s essence and mission,” said the report, citing the Politburo decision. “This has severely damaged the party’s image, and brought major damage to the affairs of the party and the people.”
Separately, China’s top prosecution office, or procuratorate, which handles corruption inquiries, said that Mr. Zhou had been arrested. The office did not provide details of the charges.
Until now under Mr. Xi, the Communist Party anticorruption agency has investigated dozens of powerful officials, including Xu Caihou, a former People’s Liberation Army commander who confessed to taking enormous bribes, according to the official news media. But none of these fallen officials were as formidable as Mr. Zhou.
Mr. Zhou stepped down from power in November 2012, at the same congress that appointed Mr. Xi the party’s leader. For five years starting in 2007, Mr. Zhou held a seat on the Politburo Standing Committee, the party’s top decision-making body, and at the same time ran a committee overseeing the police and domestic security forces, as well as courts, prosecutors and prisons.
Soon after Mr. Zhou’s retirement, Mr. Xi and his allies started corruption investigations that targeted Mr. Zhou’s bases of power, especially Sichuan Province, in the southwest, and the country’s biggest oil and gas conglomerate, the China National Petroleum Corporation, where Mr. Zhou had risen to become a general manager.
