A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel
Page 25
On April 17, two days after the government officially detained Bo and his wife, an official who said he was familiar with Zhou’s status e-mailed me, stating that the Politburo had held a secret two-day meeting and reached consensus on two decisions: launching a secret investigation into Zhou in relating to his involvement in Bo’s scandal; and postponing the 18th Party Congress, which was scheduled from mid-October to November 2012, to focus on the Bo–Zhou investigation. Soon, other overseas Chinese-language outlets reported the same information. By April, Zhou had become one of the most searched Chinese officials online, next to Bo and his wife.
ZHOU YONGKANG, born in 1944 in the southeastern province of Jiangsu, got his start in the oil industry. In 1962, he was enrolled in what is now the China University of Petroleum to study geophysical prospecting, an obscure five-year degree program that many urban students chose to skip because a career in geophysical prospecting would require living most of one’s life in the wilderness. Fortunately for Zhou, he was assigned a job at the Daqing Oil Field in northeastern China, a model state enterprise.
In the 1960s, the China University of Petroleum was not considered a prestigious university in Beijing, but many years later, a large number of its graduates have emerged as influential figures, controlling much of China’s energy industry.
Having grown up in China’s warm south, Zhou struggled with the icy weather in the northeast. But he soon became acclimated to both the natural and political environment. He began as a technician and was subsequently promoted to regional director. By 1983, he headed the Liaohe Petroleum Exploration Bureau and was concurrently the mayor of Panjin, an oil city of 1.2 million people.
In 1985, when the group of revolutionary veterans including Bo Yibo, the father of Bo Xilai, were preparing for their retirement, the Party Central Committee scouted for young, educated party officials nationwide and transferred them to Beijing to be trained for senior positions. Zhou, who turned forty-three that year, was chosen to be the deputy manager and subsequently general manager in 1996 of the China National Petroleum Corp., or CNPC, the country’s largest state-run enterprise, which manages oil and natural gas exploration and production projects in China and some thirty other countries.
With China’s growing appetite for oil and other energy resources, Zhou’s career soared. He found himself in great demand. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Zhou headed a large oil field in the far western province of Xinjiang while simultaneously leading a state-run petroleum bureau and serving as municipal party chief of a city in the central eastern province of Shandong, 2,000 miles from Xinjiang.
China’s state monopoly of the oil industry, which included an almost unlimited budget, was a breeding ground for corruption. As general manager of CNPC, Zhou was involved in his share of scandals. He was known for being a state oil tycoon who was ideologically dogmatic, bullying people around him, and possessing an insatiable need for young women. He obtained his “Rooster King” nickname from this period. During his tenure at CNPC, Zhou often ignored international criticism: he visited Sudan fourteen times to cement ties with its corrupt and genocidal government.
In recent years, Chen Tonghai, who served as president of CNPC and chairman of the state-owned oil refiner Sinopec Corp., received a suspended death penalty for accepting 200 million yuan (US $32 million) in bribes, and Li Rong, who headed an oil field in northeast China, was sentenced to death for embezzling nearly 40 million yuan. Zhou had close ties with both officials, but somehow was untouched by accusations of corruption.
When the State Council was in search of a candidate in 1998 to take charge of China’s newly formed Ministry of Land and Resources, which manages the preservation and development of land, mineral, and ocean resources, Zhou was picked for his background in geophysics and his rich experience in the oil industry. At that time, China’s economic boom had just taken off. Land and energy were two of the most contentious and challenging areas, triggering numerous disputes over resource distribution.
“Zhou felt like he was sitting on a powder keg and he spent most of his time on conflict resolution,” recalled a former official at the Ministry of Land and Resources. “Even so, he was the constant target of personal attacks from people who were involved in the conflicts. Zhou was paving his road to the top with his blood.”
In December 1999, one year and nine months after he assumed the top position at the Ministry of Land and Resources, he was transferred again, ending his thirty-two-year career as a technocrat in the energy industry. Zhou was asked to replace Xie Shijie, the party secretary of Sichuan province, who had just retired.
If Zhou’s previous jobs at CNPC and the Ministry of Land and Resources were based on his highly specialized technical knowledge and experience, his stint in Sichuan was purely political. He was on the fast track to the Politburo. Ruling China’s largest province provided him an opportunity to showcase his political leadership skills and accumulate political capital.
In the past, Sichuan, with more than 80 million people, had served as the launching pad for many aspiring leaders. Former premier Zhao Ziyang rose to prominence for his reform initiatives that greatly improved Sichuan’s industrial and agricultural output in the late 1970s. Zhou followed a similar path. In his official biography, he is credited for introducing a series of innovative initiatives to rejuvenate Sichuan’s economy even though no official records indicate what those innovations were. To many human rights activists, Zhou gained a reputation for his brutal crackdown on Falung Gong practitioners—a meditation group declared a cult by the government after it staged a flash protest in Beijing in 1999, marshaling 10,000 practitioners within hours by using cell phones and catching the police entirely by surprise. Zhou Haiying, a medical researcher at Harvard University, filed a lawsuit in the US against Zhou in 2001, accusing him of ordering police to persecute and torture his family members for practicing Falun Gong.
In addition, Zhou was also criticized for his mistreatment of Tibetans in western Sichuan, which is home to a large population of Tibetans. According to overseas reports, Zhou never hid his disdain for Tibetan culture during his reign. In March 2000, he reportedly criticized the Tibetan religions for encouraging people to pay too much attention to the afterlife, rather than the current life, and opposed the Tibetan practice of donating money to temples. In the summer of 2001, the Sichuan provincial government put pressure on the abbot at Serda Lharong monastery to remove the Dalai Lama’s pictures and reduce the number of monks enrolled at the monastery. When the abbot refused, the government expelled more than 1,000 monks and nuns who had come from other parts of mainland China, Hong Kong, and Singapore to worship and study there, forcing them to sign a document denouncing the Dalai Lama and then demolishing their apartments.
At the same time, Zhou implemented policies to force Tibetans to give up their religion and accept Communism. He said:
The Dalai Lama attempts to split China. Most of his anti-China activities are underwritten with donations from Tibetan people. We need to stop there. We need to propagate atheism and advocate science so they can give up their religions.
In 2002, the year he turned sixty, Zhou joined the Politburo and in December he was appointed minister of public security. Many people wondered about the rationale for Zhou’s new post. But the oil industry has always been run like a military unit and leaders have always adopted a quasi-military management style, with employees obeying orders without question, like soldiers. Zhou’s ascension to the post of the country’s top policeman was a logical progression.
As minister for public security, he sought to root out sloppy practices and enhance the reputation of the police force. He sacked hundreds of public security officers who were involved in excessive drinking. Zhou also ordered the arrest and kidnapping of many political dissidents in Sichuan, vowing to crack down on any protest movements instigated by “Western hostile forces.”
At the 17th Party Congress, he emerged as a dark horse and was elected to the Politburo Standing Committee.
In Xi Jinping PK Li Keqiang, a book about China’s new leadership, author Xia Fei believed Zhou’s rise was part of the push by then president Jiang Zemin. “Before his retirement, Jiang Zemin installed three of his loyal supporters to take over the military, the Central Guards Bureau and the public security apparatus, which has access to armed police. The arrangement boosted his [Jiang’s] influence after retirement.”
There are reports that Zhou is related to former president Jiang Zemin’s wife. Although many say this is no more than a rumor, one thing is sure: Jiang Zemin and Zhou were close political allies. An official at CNPC said Zhou had befriended Jiang Zemin back in the days when Zhou dominated the oil industry. Zhou might have preferred to be China’s vice premier, which could fit with his technical expertise, but Jiang secured him a more powerful position.
Like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who posed bare-chested with a horse to show his good health and stamina before an election, Zhou, at the age of sixty-four, pulled a similar stunt on the eve of his ascension before the 17th Party Congress. On August 31, 2007, he visited a local police station and walked into a gym, where officers had their regular training and workouts. In front of the cameras, he performed ten sit-ups in one breath.
Zhou’s appointment was said to have triggered widespread opposition from other Politburo members, who cited his lack of experience in internal and external security matters and his scandal-tainted past. Still, Jiang’s opinion eventually prevailed.
In a speech at his inaugural ceremony to assume the head of the Politics and Law Commission, Zhou stated his three priorities: solidifying the ruling status of the Communist Party, maintaining stability of the country, and protecting people’s safety. Overseas analysts criticized him for putting the people’s interests last.
The Politics and Law Commission was formed in 1949 to enhance the party’s control over the country’s legislative, law enforcement, and judicial functions as the Communists tried to bring the diverse elements of a war-torn country in line with the directions of the new Communist government. But the head of the commission was a symbolic title without much substantial power.
During the Cultural Revolution, when the Red Guards, instigated by Mao, destroyed China’s legal system, the commission was abolished. China was plunged into lawlessness. Under Mao’s social legality theory, any local party organizations or the police could arbitrarily arrest citizens and conduct impromptu trials on the spot. Death sentences were handed down frequently by the so-called revolutionary committees for petty crimes such as “creating mass panic” and looting, as well as more serious ones, such as burglary and rape. In Beijing, Mao could throw any of his senior leaders into jail without any legal justification.
In the post-Mao era, Deng Xiaoping and a group of revolutionary veterans who had suffered tremendously during the Cultural Revolution called for the restoration of legal reforms. The Politics and Law Commission was reinstated and its status was elevated within the party. Even so, in the early 1980s, holders of the commission chair were typically revolutionary veterans at the end of their careers. The position was more a consolation prize for past services, suggesting it carried little innate power. When reform-minded leaders under party secretaries Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang attempted to enhance the functions of the legislature and enhance judicial independence in 1988, the commission was downgraded again and renamed: the Central Politics and Law Group. With its limited power, the work group reinvented itself by shifting its focus to antismuggling operations.
The political winds soon changed once more. After the government cracked down on the student protest movement of 1989, the conservatives pushed Jiang Zemin, the new party secretary, to elevate the organization to “strengthen the party’s leadership role in the legal arena.” It again became a commission and its responsibilities were considerably expanded.
When, in June 1999, the Chinese government moved against the Falun Gong as a political cult, the authorities responded by creating what was known as the “601 Office” under the commission to specifically target Falun Gong. As social unrest escalated due to government corruption, illegal seizure of land, unpaid wages to migrant workers, and employment and pension issues for laid-off workers, the party added “maintaining stability” to the commission’s remit.
Starting in 2002, the head of the commission was elevated to the Politburo Standing Committee and Zhou became the third–most important person in China, after the president and the premier. His direct control over police and armed police made him nearly invincible.
It is estimated that Zhou supervised a staff of 10 million—far exceeding China’s standing army of 2.5 million troops—and his annual budget to maintain China’s stability has allegedly reached as high as 700 billion yuan (US $112 billion). Zhou’s expanding empire, known as China’s fourth power—besides the party, the government, and the military—encompassed the nation’s public security departments, that is, the police, the procuratorate, the state agency for prosecution and criminal investigation, the courts, justice departments, civil affairs agencies that register nongovernmental organizations, and national security departments, which are responsible for intelligence gathering. More important, Zhou controlled the country’s large contingent of armed police, a paramilitary force of former soldiers, specifically charged with handling social unrest.
During the past decade, in the name of maintaining stability, the Politics and Law Commission under Zhou has turned China into a de facto police state, similar to those that operated in the former Soviet Union and former East Germany. Armed police have been used to suppress pro-independence protests in Tibet and to persecute Christian underground church members and political dissidents, and arbitrarily arrest and torture petitioners and human rights lawyers. In the 1980s, the commission resorted to the use of this paramilitary force only once in ten years. Under Zhou, it was deployed on average fifteen times a year to crack down on group protests or riots. In recent years, the commission, in violation of Chinese law, has ruled that police involved in “maintaining stability,” or controlling group protests, do not have to document their actions. This unwritten rule was widely adopted by local law enforcement organizations throughout China, prompting them to take extreme measures, such as kidnapping, torture, and illegal confiscation of personal property without having to justify their actions. The judiciary passively condones the practice. There is now a saying among the public that the party operates like a triad: the police are worse than the bandits.
With such expansive power, Zhou thought he could wrap up his tenure smoothly and pass the baton to his friend, Bo Xilai, whose experience in running a police state was second to none in the country. However, Wang Lijun’s defection disrupted Zhou’s plan, plunging him into a deep crisis.
In April 2012, the state news agency, Xinhua, engaged in a furious campaign to counter negative coverage of Zhou by the overseas media. Within one month. Xinhua ran ten long articles about Zhou, making him the most featured Politburo Standing Committee member—on April 6, Zhou received a delegation from Austria and on the same day, in a separate article, he was attending a conference on “Cleaning up the Internet.” On April 17, he participated in a seminar organized by the Ministry of Public Security, and on the same day met with a visiting leader from Cuba.
At the same time, Zhou’s name appeared with equal frequency in the overseas media, which continued their follow-up with previous reports that President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao were keen to purge Zhou and his allies. One article revealed that several retired officials—including Zhou’s mentor, former president Jiang Zemin, and former premier Zhu Rongji—were said to be unhappy with Zhou’s high-profile alliance with Bo.
An overseas Chinese website carried an exposé of how Zhou’s son used his father’s influence in the legal arena to extort “protection” fees. One source told Boxun that Zhou’s son received 20 million yuan (US $3 million) in bribes because he managed to get a key triad leader released from jail, even though he had been charged with brutal mur
ders in Gansu. In another case, Zhou’s son bailed out a police officer who killed a criminal suspect by pouring buckets of scorching hot water over his body. He pocketed more than 100 million yuan (US $16 million), paid for by the suspect’s relatives.
Ji Weiren, author of The Enigma of the Bo Xilai Incident, said in June that Zhou had made a tearful apology at a Politburo Standing Committee meeting for backing Bo, but vehemently denied the allegations that he was plotting against future party leaders. Zhou was eventually barred from a three-person work group handling the Bo Xilai investigation. “Based on the Central Party Committee regulations, if a senior official is implicated in a certain case, he has to be excluded to avoid conflicts of interests,” said author Ji Weiren.
Because many of the overseas stories about pending investigation into Zhou’s connection with the Bo Xilai scandal were based on leaks from inside the decision-making bodies in Beijing, Shi Zangshan, a China expert, wondered if Beijing was flying a test balloon to determine public reaction to decide whether to take action against Zhou.
After Wang Lijun went to the US Consulate, it took thirty-five days for his boss, Bo Xilai, to lose his job and freedom. Many wondered how long it would take for the party to unseat Zhou, Bo’s boss in Beijing. But as the 18th Party Congress approached, it was apparent that the resilient Zhou Yongkang had survived.