Chinese more concerned about corrupt officials than democracy

BEIJING LETTER:More than 240,000 cases of embezzlement, bribery, dereliction of duty, and rights abuses were investigated from 2003 to 2009

WHILE CALLS for more democracy in China make headlines in the West, the vast majority of Chinese people are, day to day, more concerned with corrupt Communist Party officials on the take than they are the fate of jailed Nobel winner Liu Xiaobo.

The Communist Party, perennially adaptable, recognises this, and is stepping up its ongoing campaign aimed at stamping out corruption. As people get wealthier in China, they demand more of a say in how their money is spent. The sight of corrupt cadres causes tremendous social friction in China.

“Combating corruption and building a clean government is related to China’s national development, the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the Chinese people, social fairness, justice, harmony and stability,” a recently published, 39-page White Paper on corruption said.

“The Communist Party is the ruling party in China, and thus efforts to combat corruption and build a clean government are under the leadership of the party,” it said. From 2003 to 2009, prosecutors at all levels investigated more than 240,000 cases of embezzlement, bribery, dereliction of duty, and rights infringement, according to the report.

There are regular tales of official excess and they do much to undermine the popularity of local officials. The state broadcaster CCTV highlighted official trips to Las Vegas and other places, many of which have no apparent economic relevance to China, which cost taxpayers about 400 billion yuan (€46 billion) every year, according to state broadcaster CCTV.

On one such trip two years ago, officials paid the €532-a-night bill at a Las Vegas hotel using taxpayers’ money, and the cadres also visited a sex show in San Francisco. There have been cases of police officers blowing hundreds of thousands of yuan on a family wedding, even though they earn a fraction of that every year; or of a young man who killed a young student while drunk and taunted the onlookers to do something about it, saying his powerful father would protect him.

Some of the corruption cases are spectacular. Four years ago, following a major corruption investigation in the financial capital Shanghai, which was largely a power play within the party, the city’s top communist, Chen Liangyu, was arrested on corruption charges and given 18 years in prison. During his period in office he had scores of mistresses, and he and his wife would charge huge sums for “consultations” with people who had issues they wanted resolved.

In July 2010, the top justice official in the city of Chongqing, Wen Qiang, was executed after being convicted of accepting bribes, rape and shielding criminal gangs. The head of the country’s food and drug agency was executed for approving fake medicine in exchange for cash.

Officials have died on the toilet after drinking too much at banquets. Such issues make the blood boil in China.

The policy document, crucially, underlined how China wants to keep the fight against corruption an internal matter. Some critics in China say that if there was an independent judiciary, the courts could deal with corruption issues. However, for the party it is an internal matter.

The usual channels of dealing with graft, such as an independent media or a more transparent system of government, do not exist.

Transparency International, a Berlin-based anti-corruption group, ranked China 79 out of 180 countries in its corruption perceptions index last year, a far worse ranking than the United States and Britain, but better than India and Russia. Corruption is less evident on the streets day-to-day than in some countries, but is said to be endemic when it comes to awarding big state contracts and in greasing the wheels in infrastructure projects.

In April this year, President Hu Jintao gave a surprisingly frank speech in which he warned cadres of the temptations of beautiful women, money and power.

From January to November, the party’s discipline watchdogs investigated 119,000 corruption cases, resulting in 113,000 people being punished, of whom 4,332 were prosecuted, according to Wu Yuliang, secretary general of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of the Communist Party.

There was a major outcry recently when police in Suzhou’s traffic and patrol department bid for 21 expensive iPhone 4s, and they were forced to respond by saying the smartphone model is the only mobile device that meets its video monitoring system’s requirements. The department’s deputy political commissar, Tao Ren, said the 32GB iPhone 4s will be used to create a digitised transportation monitoring system, enabling police to remotely observe scenes before they arrive.

Then a purchase plan by Heilongjiang provincial public security department was discovered and posted online. It outlined what looked to me like a fairly innocuous plan to buy computers and printers, but the net vigilantes did their sums and claimed the officials were spending too much, and again forced an official to defend their actions.

The key thing as far as the Communist Party is concerned is that all of this is working. The White Paper says that between 2003 and 2010, Chinese citizens’ rate of satisfaction with the work of combating corruption and building a clean government, rose steadily from 51.9 per cent to 70.6 per cent.