Bo Xilai trial to begin Thursday BEIJING - The long-awaited trial of deposed Chinese politician Bo Xilai will begin Thursday, a court announced Sunday, setting into motion the final chapter to one of modern China's most dramatic and politically fraught cases and carrying deep potential implications for the ruling Communist Party. For more than a year, the once-powerful regional party chief Bo has been at the center of scandal, political maneuvering and negotiations within the party. His fall from grace - sparked in part by the suspicious death of a British businessman - led to the party's biggest scandal and crisis in the past two decades and exposed divisions among its leaders. Because of the danger that those rifts pose to the party, the outcome of Thursday's trial has probably already been decided, say political analysts and officials within the party. "The verdict won't be made by the court, but by the seven members of the party's standing committee," said Zhang Sizhi, a lawyer who defended the widow of party founder Mao Zedong in 1980 in a similarly sensational and politically charged trial. Everything in court is already arranged. The court will be nothing but a rehearsed performance. For the past year, party leaders have been working out exactly how to deal with Bo in a way that satisfies party factions supporting him and opposing him, say many party officials speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the case. For years, Bo campaigned for promotion to China's highest circle of power - a seat on the seven-member standing committee. In pursuit of that goal, he cultivated powerful party and military allies but also became a polarizing figure. Bo represented a brash, left-wing, Maoist ideology that was in some ways the antithesis of the party's market-driven factions. But the scandal and inner party battle that led to his fall from grace was largely a struggle between power factions and not over ideological differences, party officials say. Many believe that the negotiations over his fate have largely played out along the same lines. One key factor is Bo's complicated relationship with China's new president, Xi Jinping. Both belong to the party's new generation of "princelings," children of the party's founding fathers. But the two did not always get along. Bo was very ambitious. He looked down upon Xi Jinping when he was young," said one person with close ties with other princelings and schoolmates of both men. "When mentioning Xi Jinping in any occasion in those days, Bo Xilai often called him "idiot" and Xi knew it." Now, as adults, Xi and Bo are on opposite ends of the trial process. Xi - still in his first year as China's top leader and trying to consolidate his hold on power - faces the thorny question of how severely to deal with Bo. In an apparent reflection of Xi's delicate position heading into the trial, former president Jiang Zemin recently issued an unusual comment praising Xi and urging party members to support him. On Bo's side, some believe that his main tools of leverage are the threat of division posed by his supporters as well as his knowledge, as a former high-ranking party cadre, of potentially embarrassing secrets about others.