Tue, Jan 20, 2015 page8

• Xi’s anti-graft effort creates doubts

  • By Andrew Jacobs
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  The daily cavalcade of government miscreants featured in the Chinese news media makes for lurid reading: the housing official caught on camera aggressively fondling women at a karaoke parlor; the 41 members of the Chinese Communist Party expelled for using heroin and crystal meth in Yunnan Province; the general manager of a state agricultural firm sentenced to death for pocketing US$55 million in bribes.

  “We ordinary Chinese feel such joy seeing these corrupt officials get their comeuppance,” said Yang Tianrong (楊田榮), 75, a retired soldier who lives in Beidaihe, a seaside resort east of Beijing that is home to a municipal water official who made national headlines after the authorities said they found a 0.9 tonne mound of moldy cash worth US$20 million in his basement.

  However, two years into a breathtaking government campaign against official malfeasance, one that has reached the highest echelons of the party apparatus and put much of Chinese officialdom on edge, many people here remain deeply cynical about whether Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) can truly alter the sort of self-serving behavior that has long suffused China’s vast bureaucracy.

  In nearly two dozen interviews, many Chinese said that they thought Xi was serious about taming official graft and that party officials big and small had scaled back their most egregious abuses. However, they also said they were convinced the problem would return once the anti-graft juggernaut ran out of steam.

  “Corruption is something you can never completely root out. After you get rid of one group of officials, another group will take their place,” said Gong Qiang (龔強), a Beijing taxi driver in his 50s, who has seen his share of anti-graft campaigns.

  “It’s like cutting a bunch of leeks; you cut them, and another batch will eventually surface,” he said.

  In recent days, party leaders have reaffirmed their commitment to the war on corruption and signaled concern about resistance among the party’s 86 million members. In a commentary published on Jan. 11, the official People’s Daily railed against officials who complain that by exposing so much corruption, the campaign is hurting the party’s image. It also admonished those who say the crackdown has prompted government employees to sit on their hands rather than do work that might get them into trouble.

  “For those officials still whining about too much scrutiny and too many probes, you’d better hurry up and get used to the new normal,” it said.

  Still, critics of the government say they have been impressed by the tally and stature of those taken down by the campaign. Nearly 72,000 officials were punished last year, including 68 “tigers” — leaders who serve as Cabinet ministers, provincial bosses or in other senior posts — and 1,575 employees of the very agency charged with bringing wayward officials to heel, Xinhua news agency said this month.

  However, many Chinese intellectuals said they believed Xi was using the anti-graft campaign to sideline would-be enemies and consolidate power. Without systemic change, including greater transparency and a free press, unscrupulous behavior will re-emerge, they said.

  “There have indeed been some positive effects, that I cannot deny, but this is more a political campaign than a true anti-corruption campaign,” said Murong Xuecun (慕容雪村), a social critic who often writes about abuse of power. “The only thing that can solve the problem of corruption is a check on the party’s power, and that’s something we’re unlikely to see.”

  Zhu Ruifeng (朱瑞峰), a freelance muckraker who has used the Internet to expose a number of misbehaving officials over the years, said anti-corruption investigators were not interested in tips from ordinary Chinese, many of whom have become frustrated by their inability to bring down local officials.

  “Everyone is excited by the prospect of cleaning up the rot, but as soon as they try to report corrupt officials in their hometowns, they run into reality,” he said.

  Zhu’s Web site, People’s Supervision, is often blocked, he added, and the cases of official wrongdoing he has exposed in recent months have gone unpunished.

  “The government has its own plan and makes its own choices about who to pursue, which is why people are bound to be disappointed by this campaign,” he said.

  Analysts who have taken a closer look at the roster of the most senior figures implicated over the past two years say there is a pattern to the offensive; many disgraced officials have had ties to Zhou Yongkang (周永康), the powerful former chief of domestic security who has been accused of being part of a “traitor” class for his involvement in forming “dangerous political factions.”

  In a recent study, Geremie Barme, a China expert at Australian National University, also found that the offspring of modern China’s revolutionary founders — the country’s so-called red second generation, whose ranks include Xi — had largely escaped serious punishment.

  In a survey of four dozen high-level officials who had been publicly purged as of September last year, Barme found that all had roots in China’s “commoner” class. By contrast, wayward members of the red second generation appeared to have been spared severe punishment or public disgrace.

  “In the murky corridors of communist power, an impressive number of party gentry progeny, or the offspring of the Mao-era nomenclatura, have been implicated in corrupt practices,” he wrote in an article in October last year. “But word has it that, like the well-connected elites of other climes, they’ve enjoyed a ‘soft landing’: being discreetly relocated, shunted into delicate retirement or quietly ‘redeployed.’”

  Ambivalence is rife in Beidaihe, a beach town where party elders and their families have traditionally decamped during summer. In recent months, the city has been transfixed by the alleged misdeeds of Ma Chaoqun (馬超群), the former general manager of the municipal water company who was detained last year on charges that included demanding kickbacks for a connection to the water supply.

  Ma is accused of amassing 37kg of gold, 40 boxes of cash and the deeds to 68 properties, seven of them in the nation’s capital. Water customers who refused to pay him, including an entire village and a local bus terminal, were cut off, according to accounts in the Chinese news media.

  Ma, 48, a former boiler repairman with a reputation for vindictive tantrums, was said to have ordered employees to clean the windows of the water company’s headquarters in the rain and snow. One resident recalled how Ma publicly humiliated a friend who worked as a meter reader.

  “He told her that with the lure of two steamed buns, he could get a dog to do her job,” the woman said in an interview last month.

  However, even as they cheer Ma’s downfall, many residents expressed frustration that other abusive officials had remained in their jobs. In fact, the details of Ma’s gluttony appear to have stoked public anger.

  “If such a small sesame seed of an official is capable of such greed and venality, can you imagine what high-ranking officials are stealing?” said Qiu Ying (邱英), 55, the owner of a restaurant that is a stone’s throw from the house that Ma built on land he is accused of expropriating in exchange for connecting a village to the city’s water system.

  On a recent visit, Ma’s three-story villa appeared abandoned, its front yard overgrown with weeds. A half-dozen villagers gathered in a nearby shop to complain about the government’s efforts to evict them from their homes as part of what they described as a corrupt real estate development project. Last year, several residents took their case to Beijing, only to end up in unofficial jails and then forcibly sent home.

  After Ma was detained, Chinese reporters flocked to Beidaihe seeking reaction to his downfall, but the reporters later said they were forbidden to write about the officials who have been seeking to expel the villagers from their ancestral land.

  “We originally hoped the case of Ma Chaoqun might bring about the demise of these other corrupt officials, but we have been sorely disappointed,” Yang said.

  Andrew Jacobs is a reporter for the New York Times stationed in Beijing, China.
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