JINAN, China — In the weeks before Bo Xilai, the fallen Communist Party star, went on trial here on corruption-related charges, senior officials from the powerful party investigation agency told him about two officials who had been tried earlier on somewhat similar charges, Mr. Bo said in court.
One, a former vice governor of Anhui Province, fought back and was executed in 2004 for taking bribes and stealing $1.6 million. The other, a former railway minister, was more compliant; he received a suspended death sentence — essentially life in prison — in July, mainly for taking $10.6 million in bribes.
The senior officials' point, Mr. Bo told the court here in a 10-minute speech on Friday, was that the party could mete out any punishment it chose, and that Mr. Bo's fate rested on whether he chose to cooperate during his own trial on charges of bribe taking, embezzlement and abuse of power, according to two people briefed on the proceedings.
Mr. Bo's speech and some other instances in which he railed against threats and hardships during his 17 months in captivity have not appeared in the torrent of court transcripts released publicly since the trial — China's most closely watched in three decades — began on Thursday. Instead, those transcripts show Mr. Bo cross-examining witnesses, ridiculing the testimony of his wife and former colleagues, and seemingly free to play his part as defendant however he chooses.
The trial remains political stagecraft, fashioned around Mr. Bo's combative character, analysts say, despite the fact that the party, in an unexpected show of relative transparency, has allowed millions of Chinese citizens to witness much of Mr. Bo's performance through a running court microblog.
The spectacle, they say, is an effort by the party to convince his elite party allies and ordinary supporters that Mr. Bo, a populist politician and the son of a revolutionary leader, had his say in court, and that the long prison sentence he is expected to get is based on evidence of crimes committed, not political payback. State news media highlight daily the evidence presented against Mr. Bo, while officials have limited his airtime in court and in the transcripts to help maintain control.
"The authorities hope to separate the Bo Xilai case from politics," said Chen Jieren, a legal commentator. "They want people to think this was only an anticorruption struggle, not a political and ideological struggle."
While the microblog gambit may have won Mr. Bo additional sympathy and exposed cracks in the prosecution, its show of legal parrying between the defendant and his accusers also lent considerable credibility to the political theater. Perhaps most important for the party, what has most captivated ordinary Chinese — thanks to headlines in major state media outlets — is a mountain of testimony that depicts Mr. Bo as the archetypal corrupt official, with a spoiled son and a wife who murdered a British businessman. (She was convicted in August 2012).
Evidence at Mr. Bo's trial has shown his wife, Gu Kailai, and son, Bo Guagua, regularly taking favors from a tycoon friend, Xu Ming, including a $3.2 million villa on the French Riviera; a $131,000 six-person vacation to Africa in 2011 that included use of a private jet; and a $12,000 Segway for the son, who also traveled to Paris, Venice, Argentina, Cuba and, for the 2006 World Cup, Germany. "It was convenient to call Xu Ming," Ms. Gu testified. "He used to pay for things."
Mr. Bo has not denied that those two had a cozy relationship — he only disavowed knowledge of gifts given — and the portrait the testimony paints of his family is likely to condemn him in the eyes of many Chinese citizens who abhor the official corruption so rampant in China. It could also be enough to convince ordinary people and leftist intellectuals, who praised Mr. Bo for pushing neo-socialist economic policies and an anticorruption campaign when he was party chief of Chongqing, that he is a hypocrite. The trial also benefits party leaders by playing to another audience: corrupt party officials. The new party leader, Xi Jinping, is directing a campaign to rein in their lavish living arrangements and bring "tigers and flies" to heel for corruption. State media has trumpeted Mr. Bo as the biggest tiger caged so far.
More salacious details of decadence and conflict in the Bo family emerged over the weekend. Mr. Bo testified Saturday that he had an affair that drove his wife and son to Britain. On Sunday, he quibbled over testimony from a former Chongqing police chief, Wang Lijun, who had said that Mr. Bo punched him, bloodying his face, after he confronted him with suspicions that Ms. Gu had murdered the Briton, Neil Heywood. Mr. Bo insisted he had only slapped Mr. Wang: "I've never trained in boxing," he said, "and I don't have that kind of force."
In another awkward moment, Mr. Bo insisted Saturday that he had not intended to embezzle $820,000 from a state construction project in the city of Dalian, where he had been mayor, and disputed testimony from a planning official that he had told his wife over a cellphone to take the money. "All those who know me well know that I always tell them to turn off their cellphone first when talking with me," he said. "I'm quite a cautious person."
Discussing such matters over cellphones, he added, "doesn't fit in with the behavior of even the most incompetent corrupt criminal."
That kind of testimony has contributed to a less than flattering portrayal of Mr. Bo on the censored court microblog, which had 540,000 followers by Sunday.
Online transcripts show him speaking up against his accusers, but only within limits dictated by the party. "He's avoided incriminating other leaders or accusing them of the same crimes, and we know he could do that," said one former corruption investigator. "But he knows not to cross that line."
One clear indication the party's strategy seems to be succeeding is that according to a family associate, Mr. Bo's most loyal supporters — relatives who are watching the trial firsthand — seem appeased simply because he has been allowed to defend himself in court.
"The family is relatively satisfied," the associate said, "because he has been given ample opportunity to speak."
Chen Ping, a Hong Kong publisher who knows party leaders, noted that officials were exposing only narrow crimes by Mr. Bo, not the wider abuses liberals accuse him of encouraging during the "strike black" anticorruption campaign in Chongqing. "The party wasn't willing to try Bo Xilai on the charges that he should have faced — trampling on human rights, trampling on rule of law." he said. "That's because those mistakes are also the party's mistakes."
Still, some liberal voices have approved of the trial's transparency and procedure. Caixin, among China's more independent media outlets, published a commentary on Sunday by Xiao Han, a legal scholar, saying that officials deserved credit for steps toward openness, including allowing the transcripts to show Mr. Bo's insistence on retracting confessions he said were made under mental strain.
He Bing, a law professor, said in an interview that it appeared "the defendant enjoys full rights to defend himself, but whether the trial is fair or not ultimately depends on the verdict."
Chris Buckley contributed reporting from Hong Kong, and Patrick Zuo contributed research.
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