Former Chinese politician Bo Xilai speaks in a court room at Jinan Intermediate People's Court in Jinan.

It would be a suitably jaw-dropping postscript to one of the most remarkable political shows on earth if Bo Xilai turns out to be the man who saves the Chinese legal system.
As celebrity drama it doesn't get much more riveting than a fallen neo-Maoist hero, whose father was one of the "Eight Immortals" of the communist revolution, brawling with his former right hand man and his current wife over infidelity, insanity, defection, a $3.2 million mansion in France, the murder of an Englishman and a "princeling" child marooned in the United States.
Power is becoming too fragmented and truth too hard to control 
Bo's police chief and enforcer, Wang Lijun, was a "vile" compulsive liar, said Bo, before arguing in court over whether Bo had merely slapped Wang or punched him so hard that fluid was leaking from his ear and blood from his mouth.
Hotel staff chat near a screen displaying a photo of former Chongqing city police chief Wang Lijun seated at right when he testifies at a trial of former Politburo member and party leader Bo Xilai.

Bo's own wife, Gu Kailai, had "gone mad and always lies," he said, explaining why her testimony against him was unreliable. He said their relationship had been strained for more than a decade because "she was angry with me over an affair."


Relative court room transparency and the cross-examination of witnesses may seem mundane in the West, where the rule of law evolved over several centuries to mediate conflict between an increasingly fragmented elite.
But never before has this happened in the People's Republic of China.
In the old days China's leaders didn't need a court of law to resolve their differences, let alone a transparent one. Chairman Mao destroyed his imagined rivals physically or mentally, together with members of their families, and then deployed wall posters, megaphones and cult-like criticism sessions to drum his version of the facts into the people until their brains were too numb to think. Gradually, the political purges migrated to closed-door courts where prosecutors relied on dubious confessions - and the public had no platform upon which they could query or protest.
But Bo's own methods in Chongqing showed those tricks doesn't work anymore. Power is becoming too fragmented, truth too hard to control and universal understandings of justice too entrenched.
Bo's brutal excesses in Chongqing — deemed by many to be a reign of terror -  established his political dominance for a while but also served to galvanise a new breed of courageous and strategically-focused Chinese entrepreneurs, lawyers, journalists and intellectuals to fight to protect their interests and restrain him. The only weapon they had was to talk truth, in and outside the courtroom, while letting China's information revolution and an increasingly engaged public take their course.
China's nascent civil society network, now woven together by microblog, did not build a credible legal system but they did raise the political cost of committing grotesque judicial abuses. Eventually, the pressure they created by exposing Bo's methods in Chongqing forced open cracks in the political elite. Bo's court room persecutions of his rivals were so perverse and so public — despite his prodigious propaganda efforts - that enemies sharpened their hatchets and allies found it harder to defend him. Indirectly, I argue in The Rise and Fall of the House of Bo, this is what brought Bo crashing down.
Since then, the trials of Bo's police chief Wang Lijun and wife Gu Kailai were judged to be so unprofessional and opaque — by the new and higher standards of Chinese civil society — that basic things that probably were true became make-believe. Even the most fundamental facts were seriously questioned, including whether the lady in court was actually a body double for Gu Kailai.  
And this may well be why President Xi Jinping has taken the unprecedented step of posting regular (if incomplete) transcripts of proceedings on social media and giving his charismatic and capable rival the right to cross-examine prosecution witnesses. In China's increasingly fragmented elite, Xi could not afford the prosecution of his rival to be seen as farce.
I initially thought the transparency had back-fired, as Bo dented the credibility of key prosecution witnesses. Now, in the fifth day, it seems that the core elements of the most of the prosecution's allegations against him remain intact.
Bo's conviction has no doubt been predetermined but it will be more stable than it otherwise would have been, for all the reasons that we have rule-of-law.
China's ruling families (including the Bo family, which remains powerful and connected) will walk away satisfied that their man has had his say in court and that his reputation, or at least his dignity, has not been gratuitously shredded.
There are a dozen reasons of Bo's trial doesn't meet true justice, as measured in the West. The decision to prosecute was entirely political. Bo couldn't appoint his own lawyer. The published transcripts are incomplete, as the New York Times reports today. But the outcome that has been pressured by civil society and negotiated within the elite has lifted the bar for what is possible and further raised the legitimacy-costs of the litany of judicial abuses that will continue to take place each day in China.
Li Zhuang, a lawyer whose own courage and suffering helped bring Bo undone, believes an historic precedent has been set. "This trial is extraordinary," Li told my colleague, Phil Wen, who is reporting in Jinan. "This is a first in China. This has almost reached a genuine level of ... transparency."
In the West it took hundreds of years to create the rule of law, where rulers could no longer operate above the rules they set for other people. The rise and fall of Bo Xilai suggests that China does not have that long.