If he believe he is not guilty, go back to China. Easy. Proof your innocence.
Unfortunately under the current Chinese legal system and political situation (pretty every official has some wrong-doings in the past, big or small), it is nearly impossible to proof your own innocence. If you are an official in China, your always have something others could use to get you prosecuted. I have a distant friend in Guangzhou who's father is in the local government. He told me that before Xi came to power, you HAVE to be either corrupt or slept with other women (and make such dirty secrets known to your boss) if you have to get promoted. Since other officials are corrupt, you have to be corrupt as well in order to earn their trust. Corruption is/was the institutionalized checks-and-balance within the CCP. They are also weapons during political struggles. As a result, every official has some dirty secrets. Once he or she gets arrested, there would be not such thing as "innocence." If you are really well-connected, while the government still needs you, you might be given a light sentence or simply being fired. Then you will be put under house arrest, while still technically (if not forcefully) employed by the state.
I still don't know where Xi is going. However, given the amount of troubles he has run into simply trying to deal with Ling Jihua, you can tell that it is not very easy to fix a system in which nearly everyone has vested interests in some degrees of checks and balance by means of corruption. Nothing really happened to Zhou Yongkang other than "life sentence," despite rumors of Zhou running over his wife with a military trust (a PLA Captain in a pub told me this), along with keeping hundreds of firearms to stage a coup, possibly planning to assassinate Xi. On the other hand, if you know how to use and maintain your connections and political influence, then corruption is not just a tool of checks and balance, but also a tool for you to satisfy your lust for even more power, wealth, and sex. Think about Bo Xilai sleeping with 10 women at once. That was some true feudalistic manchu official right there. Unless you are super smart and careless about people's lives/morality (willing to kill, steal, and lie to your own compatriots and fellow Party comrades), China is not a place for you to be civil servants. Despite the Communist Revolution, the domestic political culture and climate in China remain very feudalistic and zero-sum. One the other hand, the morality in China lies in loyalty toward one's family and clique. You can betray your nation (like Ling), but you never betray your father or head of your clique/Guanxi network (exception: Zhou killed his wife because she was a woman, which tells you something about the fact that sexism is still big in China, especially how people with power and wealth see having more than one women as sex toys is a sign of prestige). There is a TV show called Nirvana on Fire 琅琊榜. Although the background was set in ancient times, the TV show is a still a relatively good example of Chinese political culture. Ultimately, it is not realistic to demand China to follow the path of liberal democracy at this moment, but what I have written above are just the problems the Middle Kingdom still struggles with, while trying to become a modern nation. Hopefully that explains something about Ling Jihua.
