China’s legislature has expelled 45 of its members in a vote-buying scandal that has snared a prominent businessman who is active in donating to US universities, foundations and political campaigns.
Some of the lawmakers whose dismissals were announced on Tuesday, all from the economically struggling Liaoning Province, had bribed their way into the National People’s Congress (NPC) by buying votes, Xinhua news agency reported.
The nearly 3,000 members of the congress, which meets as a full body for less than two weeks each year in March, ratify laws and government programs, usually with little drama. Members are mostly voted in by lower-ranking organizations, including provincial congresses.
The businessman, Wang Wenliang (王文良), is a billionaire who made his fortune in the construction business and from operating the strategic port of Dandong on the North Korean border. Wang has also been linked with entities holding hidden stakes in three condominiums in the Time Warner Center in New York.
Through his companies, Wang has donated to US universities, charities, research institutes and political campaigns, including New York University, the Clinton Foundation and the successful 2013 campaign for Virginia governor of Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat. Though Wang is a Chinese citizen, he is also a legal permanent resident of the US, which entitles him to make campaign contributions.
A woman answering the telephone at China Rilin Construction Group, a company in Liaoning where Wang serves as chairman, said that he was on a business trip and unavailable to comment.
Sig Rogich, an adviser to Wang who is based in Las Vegas, said his client was a philanthropist, an environmentalist and “a man of great integrity.”
National People’s Congress Chairman Zhang Dejiang (張德江) on Tuesday told lawmakers that the bribery scandal, which resulted in the expulsion of almost half of the province’s delegation, was unprecedented in the history of the People’s Republic of China, Xinhua reported.
He vowed to show “no mercy.”
Often derided as a rubber-stamp legislature, the congress and its companion advisory body have in recent years become a club for some of China’s wealthiest executives, keen to rub elbows with government officials.
Holding such high office also brings prestige and is seen as a marker of status in the Chinese Communist Party-dominated establishment. It is sometimes known as “wearing the red hat.”
“People within the system can trade interests,” Zhang Ming (張鳴), a political scientist at Renmin University in Beijing, said by telephone. “Whoever gets elected will have a pass to do so.”
Serving as a lawmaker has become so attractive to the wealthy that last year, of the 1,271 richest Chinese people tracked by the Shanghai-based Hurun Report, a record 203, or more than one in seven, were delegates to the NPC or its advisory body.
“For reasons that don’t make sense to outsiders given the ‘rubber-stamp’ nature of the NPC, membership in any honorary body is coveted by people who see it as a mark of social status, something to add to their resumes,” said Suzanne Pepper, an academic based in Hong Kong who studies Chinese elections.
Many of the expelled delegates are executives of private businesses or leaders of state-owned companies, rather than career politicians and military officers — who are also well represented on the body.
The Liaoning vote-buying scandal has been brewing for at least five years, with hundreds of officials and lawmakers in its provincial bodies accused of engaging in the bribery, according to a report in Caixin news magazine.
The report, posted online Tuesday, has since been taken off the Internet.
NPC delegates are elected for five-year terms. The current term began in 2013.
News that China faced new accusations of election fraud has drawn some tart comments on social media from people who are not accustomed to what for some in other countries can be an all-consuming obsession with following electoral politics.
Usually, Chinese audiences read about elections in other countries.
“When I saw the news about the vote-buying scandal in Liaoning, I was shocked,” wrote one user on a Chinese microblogging site. “I didn’t know there were elections in the motherland!”
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