The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers

by Richard Mcgregor

  To tilt the odds back in the commission’s favour, the Party allows the body to play tough, handing it untrammelled powers to deal with the approved targets of its investigations. The commission’s powers of detention are the most fearsome weapon in its armoury. There are no legal niceties when the commission comes calling. Under a procedure known as shuanggui, or ‘double regulation’, so called because suspects are held at a time and place regulated by the Party, the commission, in effect, kidnaps officials, and holds them for interrogation until a decision is made on whether to proceed with a formal case against them. Officials under investigation have no rights to call their families or hire a lawyer, and can be detained without trial for up to six months, without the law ever entering the equation.

  The suspects’ welfare is taken into consideration in one respect. They can be held almost anywhere, in company offices, dormitories and hospitals, with a single proviso. They must be kept in single-storey buildings, or on the first floor of multi-storey buildings, to prevent a repeat of the fatal escape attempts of a number of senior officials under interrogation in the late nineties, who committed suicide by jumping out of their high-rise holding pens. Commission officials guard and watch detainees even when they visit the toilet, according to Ms Sapio. ‘Sleep deprivation, round-the-clock interrogations and a skilful alternation of abusive treatment with displays of gentleness’–all the techniques that entered everyday political parlance through the Bush administration’s merciless pursuit of terrorists have long been legitimate tactics to secure the co-operation of suspects in the Party’s custody in China. On rare occasions, officials considered to have co-operated with investigators, usually by providing evidence against someone else, are permitted to return to their former posts. But few careers prosper after a period under shuanggui. It is a life-threatening experience that inevitably scars the detainee thereafter. Paradoxically, it also represents the final chance for suspect officials to save their skins.

  With neither judge nor jury to speak of, the commission’s verdicts are delivered in public through an unusual mechanism, the announcement of the suspect’s expulsion from the Party. Only then are their cases formally referred to the prosecutors. Being expelled from the Party for serious corruption is tantamount to a finding of guilt in a court of law, even though the trial itself and a formal verdict and sentencing may be months or longer away. Once officials have been passed over to the legal system, their fate has already been decided. ‘During shuanggui, the person is still struggling to obtain their personal freedom or be let off with a demotion in rank,’ said Qian Lieyang, a Beijing lawyer, who works as a government-assigned defence counsel for officials charged with corruption. By the time they reach the court, he admits, the argument is solely about the length of their sentence, not their guilt or innocence. ‘When they are transferred into the legal system, they lose all hope. It means the end of their political career. Normally, when I take their case, it is the lowest point in their mental state.’

  The Party, or at least the sections of it which have control of the anti-graft body at any given time, savours the fear generated by the commission’s dark powers. The commission calls its undeclared spies ‘grains of sands’, scattered through any institution it might decide to target or about which it is suspicious. The editor of a Shanghai newspaper confided during the property scandals that he had been told that an individual on his staff was working for the anti-graft commission, but he had no idea who it was. ‘It could be the cleaner. It could be the deputy-editor,’ he said.

  The commission works, by definition, in secret, and relies on the subterranean eddies of China’s tittle-tattle culture for most of its tip-offs, in the form of the reams of anonymous letters and petitions which arrive at its offices every day. Some corruption is uncovered through lawsuits filed against Chinese entities overseas. Some comes to light through material discovered in other investigations. But the commission’s greatest ally in uncovering corruption is not open and above-ground investigations. Wang Minggao estimates about 60 to 70 per cent of investigations are triggered by informants. The People’s Daily has reported that the figure is as high as 90 per cent in some provinces. ‘Ordinary people’s eyes are the sharpest,’ Wang says. ‘Many cases arise because of reporting by ordinary people.’

  Many informants, of course, are only posing as ‘ordinary people’. In reality, they are often part of rival cliques attempting to undermine personal and political rivals. In top-level political struggles, such as the Shanghai case, the anonymous dirt-files inevitably leak into the Chinese-language press in Hong Kong, the foreign media, or, in more recent years, Chinese-language websites hosted outside of the country, in the hope that the information blows back into official circles in China itself. Anonymous letters provide the only safe way for anyone, be they a member of the public or a junior official, to report corruption allegations about superiors without being harassed or even arrested themselves.

  Political rivals have another technique to spread dirt about their enemies, through books masquerading as popular crime novels. The existing fiction genre in China preys on public cynicism about degenerate cadres and their carpet-bagging families and mistresses. But these novels can also double as sophisticated acts of subversion, exposing tales of real-life corruption in thinly disguised plots. Wrath of Heaven, the most famous roman-à-clef chronicled the removal from office of the then Beijing mayor, Chen Xitong, in 1995, providing the kind of lurid detail absent from the dry accounts of his downfall in the state media. In the book, the princeling son of the Beijing party secretary runs wild, siphoning off government funds for a luxury house, and sharing mistresses with his father in sessions videotaped in their five-star hotel love nest. Jiang Zemin, who instigated the investigation into Chen Xitong, an avowed political enemy, praised the book initially, before the authorities decided enough dirty linen had been aired and banned it from sale.

  The threat of being fingered anonymously explains why officials will go to enormous lengths to conceal any behaviour that might give rise to suspicion about potential wrongdoing. When Zhang Enzhao, then president and chairman of the China Construction Bank, one of the country’s top three lenders, was invited by a US financial services company in 2002 to play golf at Pebble Beach, the iconic California course, he asked his hosts to buy clubs for him. Golf has become immensely popular as the business networking sport of choice in China, as it is throughout Asia, but is officially frowned on because it uses scarce land and water the government thinks should be retained for farming. In one of the regular campaigns against the game, golf was branded as ‘green opium’ for the damage it did to the body politic. As a senior official, Mr Zhang confided to his hosts that he did not want to attract ‘unnecessary attention’ by carrying clubs on to the plane in Beijing himself. He demanded they be given to him on the course itself.

  Zhang’s tradecraft did him no good in the end. The banker was detained by the anti-corruption commission in March 2005 over allegations made in a US lawsuit that he had taken bribes of about US$1 million from the company that hosted him at Pebble Beach. Zhang received a phone call out of the blue at his home in Beijing from the commission one early evening on a working day in mid-March and was told to wait there. He then made a single phone call to a colleague and asked him to take his place two days later at a speaking engagement to which he was committed. ‘I won’t be able to make it,’ Zhang said, according to bank officials, and then hung up the phone. A car picked Zhang up at about 8 p.m. at his home and took him to the commission’s headquarters for questioning. Zhang never appeared in public again. About eighteen months later, he was finally tried in court on charges of bribery and sentenced to fifteen years in jail.

  ‘Wen Jiabao went ballistic’ on hearing the allegations against Zhang, said an adviser to the Chinese bank’s foreign share offering, scheduled for a few months later. The leadership was enraged because the scandal threatened to undo years of reform of the financial system. Once Wen had calmed down, however, he might h
ave reflected how lucky the leadership had been to catch Zhang at all. Zhang’s case, even though he was caught, highlighted the anti-corruption system’s other great failing, the fact that senior officials are largely responsible for supervising and investigating themselves.

  Like all large state bodies, China Construction Bank has an executive on its supervisory board who acts as the delegate of the anti-graft commission within the institution. This executive performs the usual perfunctory political duties required of cadres, disseminating details of the Party’s latest anti-graft edicts through the organization. He is also responsible for handling internal complaints about corruption within the bank. All allegations about corruption flow through his door. In the case of Zhang, the inherent weakness of such a system is not hard to spot. The anti-graft delegate inside the bank was answerable to Zhang, who outranked him as the bank’s party secretary. In other words, besides keeping an eye on the rest of the company, the delegate was also theoretically supervising Zhang, his boss, who had appointed him in the first place. It was just Zhang’s bad luck that the complaint came from overseas and went to the commission’s head office in Beijing. If the allegations had been made internally in the bank rather than in the US, Zhang would have been in charge of approving an investigation into himself, something he was clearly unlikely to do.

  The system frets constantly about how to devise an effective way to supervise the ‘number one hands’, like Zhang at China Construction Bank and Chen Liangyu in Shanghai. Niu Yuqing, a scholar at the Central Party School in Beijing, said the individuals who headed party committees, be they in provincial or city governments or state companies, seldom seemed to be held accountable for wrongdoing. ‘These people fly above or exist outside the system,’ he said. The commission’s delegates inside ministries and companies rarely refer corruption cases they uncover in their bailiwicks to higher authorities, for fear they will be exposed as whistleblowers without support from on high. They ‘either do not dare [to refer cases], or are not willing to,’ says Li Yongzhong, another party school scholar. Li’s recommended remedy for this weakness, the creation of a separate bureaucratic stream for the commission, foundered because the Party will not allow any body to act independently of it. Other proposals have failed for the same reason. ‘A couple of dozen documents cannot control one mouth,’ said Niu. ‘And over a dozen departments cannot control one pig.’

  Chinese scholars, like Niu and Li, have produced many acutely critical reports about how the structure of the anti-graft system compromises its independence and effectiveness. But their status in the party school means they have to pull back in the face of the obvious conclusion, that as long as the Party and individuals within it supervise themselves, systemic corruption will continue to flourish. It took a scholar from Taiwan to nail the logic of the positions taken by the mainland scholars. If the Party had followed the pair’s recommendations for an independent anti-corruption body, the Taiwanese academic noted, then it ‘would have achieved the “separation of powers” proposed by Montesquieu that has long been rejected by the CCP as an idea belonging to the decadent bourgeoisie’.

  The biggest beneficiaries of the requirement for the commission to get political clearance from above to proceed with investigations are the country’s most senior leaders. Short of civil war, there is no mechanism by which the commission can get approval to investigate any of the nine members of the Politburo’s inner circle, unless they effectively hand themselves in. As the son of a former senior leader told me: ‘It is sort of a given that they are beyond the law.’ By extension, their seniority protects their immediate family members as well, and reinforces strict taboos prohibiting public discussion of the private and business lives of top leaders and their kin.

  The furore that erupted when a Taiwanese jeweller encountered the wife of Wen Jiabao, Zhang Peili, at the Beijing diamond fair in 2007, underlined the force of the taboo surrounding leaders’ families. Ms Zhang was for many years the vice-president of the China Jewellery Association and reportedly retains interests in companies trading diamonds in the country. The jeweller, flattered by Ms Zhang’s compliments about his stand, spoke admiringly to a Taiwanese cable station about the expensive pieces she was wearing, worth, he estimated, about $300,000. The naïve dealer, who had just been trying to promote his wares, quickly realized, once his comments were relayed in a flurry of headlines in Hong Kong and Taiwan, that he had stumbled into an area totally off-limits in China. Within days, Taiwanese jewellers had collectively taken out full-page advertisements in the Chinese-language media in the two markets apologizing to Ms Zhang and accusing the media of distortion.

  Wen’s wife attracts attention because her role in the flashy diamonds business is so at odds with her husband’s carefully cultivated image as the clean-living humble people’s Premier. In an open political culture, the obvious conflicts of interest between his position and the wealth she has generated in a tightly regulated business would be legitimate grist for the mill of public debate. Under the watchful eye of the propaganda department, however, Ms Zhang’s business dealings disappear into a black hole. Wen himself takes care never to appear in public with her and the media in China are not allowed to report on her dealings. ‘This conflicts with the kind of open atmosphere and image that the Chinese government is advocating, and something that is very much accepted in the west, to involve one’s spouse in public occasions,’ said Jin Zhong, the editor of Kaifang (Open), a Hong Kong political magazine. ‘Even though Jiang Zemin’s wife is elderly, he still takes her with him everywhere, as did Zhu Rongji, Li Peng and now Hu Jintao. Why not Wen? What reason is there for his wife not to show up? No Chinese would dare to touch upon this.’

  The blackout imposed on information about Ms Zhang was replicated to suppress stories about corruption charges against a company once headed by Hu Haifeng, Hu Jintao’s son. The case was especially embarrassing for Hu, as he had until then won praise for keeping his family under control, unlike his predecessor, Jiang Zemin. The Chinese internet police gave suppression of the Hu Haifeng case the highest priority after it was first reported in Namibia, southern Africa, in July 2009. In a virtuosic display of their censorship capacities, the authorities were able to block stories about the case from within internet sites. So while the websites of the New York Times and the Financial Times were not blocked in China, the specific stories within them about Mr Hu’s case were. Equally, the subscription-only, password-protected Factiva news service operated normally inside China, but was disabled the moment users tried to call up stories about the Namibia case.

  If they are careful not to flaunt their power and wealth at home, and in the cases of Ms Zhang and Mr Hu, keep their business activities out of the media, top leaders and their families are just about untouchable. ‘If the emperor does not want investigators to pursue corruption cases, then that’s it,’ said Wang Minggao. ‘If they run into the relatives of the emperor, they will be running into his core interests. Basically, they would be trying to exercise individual power against a whole class of people.’ The only thing that can tip the balance is top-level politics.

  In the mid-nineties, Jiang Zemin’s removal of the Beijing mayor, Chen Xitong, on corruption charges symbolized his ascent to genuine power in the capital. Initially a weak leader in thrall to the elders who appointed him, Jiang gradually and deftly built his own power base, establishing loyalists from Shanghai at the top of the central government. The ‘Shanghai gang’ ruled the roost in Beijing for the best part of a decade, showering their home town with policy privileges and incurring deep resentment elsewhere in China. By 2002 and 2003, however, the faction’s power had peaked and had begun its decline, leaving the city and its leaders vulnerable as never before.

  Shanghai had been fêted in colonial times as the Pearl of the Orient, a mercantilist and mercenary trading hub where it was ‘hard to know where the government ended and gangsterism began’. When Mao’s sandal-clad army marched into the city in 1949, they cast a cold eye on the freewhe
eling entrepot. Branding Shanghai the ‘whore of imperialism’, the communists submitted the city to a lengthy punishment, closing private businesses and locking up, or banishing, entrepreneurs, gangsters and foreigners alike. By the mid-sixties, history had turned full circle. Shanghai, once a gangsters’ paradise, had become the stronghold of the Party’s ultra-radicals. The spell that these two contradictory political currents cast over the city was not broken until 1989. The Shanghai that these days dazzles foreigners and local out-of-town visitors alike ironically owes its resurgence to the military suppression of the demonstrations in Beijing and other cities across the country that year.

  Mao and his third wife, Jiang Qing, had used a clutch of radicals from Shanghai to launch the Cultural Revolution in 1966, their putsch against their chairman’s party rivals in Beijing. The ‘Gang of Four’, as Jiang Qing and her three cronies from the city came to be known, radicalized the economy and the arts. When Mao died, they tried to extend their power over the entire central government. Even after the Gang of Four were outmanoeuvred and arrested in Beijing in October 1976, the Shanghai party committee tried to fight on, mobilizing local militia groups to stage an armed insurrection against the incoming regime in Beijing. The city’s bosses backed down only when Beijing prepared a military counter-action, and Shanghai’s own residents, tired of their ultra-leftist leaders, took to the streets to support the new central government.