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China news tagged with: corruption (337)

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Chongqing Example for Real Harmony
An opinion piece in China Daily praises Bo Xilai’s anti-corruption campaign in Chongqing as an example of how to bring real harmony to Chinese society:
A third-year student from the Southwestern University of Political Science and Law appealed to Chongqing leaders to intensify their efforts to eliminate the “dark and evil forces” and help society regain its sense of security. Many others echoed his demand. Bo was quick to reply that no development could be possible in a place where the basic moral boundary had become blurred.
The anti-gangster campaign is essentially an effort to restore decency and the good life of the people, he said. In a place run by triads, which used to monopolize many sectors – from mining, roads and transportation to grocery supplies – the already difficult life of wage earners would become unbearable. “And to help them out is what a government is there for,” Bo said.
But he also had his own complaints. The applause he earned from the college students did not prevent him from saying that at times he has heard “sour remarks”, criticizing him for not being nice and perhaps not handling things properly. Incidentally, some overseas reports have suggested that the Chongqing campaign is politically motivated. But Bo said: “We won’t listen to this kind of twisted reasoning.” That the local government has been able to assure people of their safety and security can be gauged from the number of support messages it got on the Internet on Monday morning. There were hundreds, with the most frequent remark being “When will Chongqing’s campaign spread nationwide?”
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- February 7, 2010 9:59 PM
China Teen Seen as Hero for Killing Local Official
A teenager who has been sentenced to death for killing a corrupt and violent local Party official has gained the support of villagers, with 20,000 people petitioning the court for a lighter sentence. AP reports:
The murder trial has again cast a harsh light on abuses of power by communist cadres and the frustration many ordinary Chinese feel with a one-party system that sometimes allows officials to run their districts like personal fiefdoms.
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China’s leaders have identified corruption as a threat to the country’s progress, but an opaque political system dominated by the ruling Communist Party – which brooks no dissent – and the lack of an independent judiciary contribute to the problem.
In the case of party secretary Li, the young man who confessed to the stabbing – 19-year-old Zhang Xuping – has been sentenced to death for the September 2008 killing, his mother and lawyer said Wednesday. The sentence was quietly handed down last week and an appeal was filed this week, they said.
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- January 20, 2010 2:42 PM
China Jails Former Top Judge for Corruption
A former Supreme Court judge has been sentenced to life in prison for embezzlement and accepting bribes. AP reports:
Huang Songyou, the court’s former vice-president, is the first judicial official of his stature to be tried and convicted on such charges, part of a continuing Communist party campaign against deep-seated and high-level corruption.
Formally known as the supreme people’s court, the body is the highest judicial panel in China with wide-ranging powers including overseeing lower courts and reviewing death sentences. The court has 13 members, with its grand justice also sitting on the party’s decision-making central committee.
Huang’s entire property also was confiscated under the ruling, according to the official China News Service.
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- January 19, 2010 6:25 PM
Exactly How Much Have Officials Swindled out of China?
For China Media Project, Qian Gang analyzes recent news reports about vast amounts of money allegedly taken out of the country by corrupt officials:

A report run on various major Websites on January 10 and 11 bore the headline: “4,000 corrupt officials have fled our nation with an estimated 100 million yuan each in the last 30 years.” [Another link HERE].

According to some reports, these figures were given by CCDI deputy secretary Li Yufu (李玉赋) at a recent press briefing.
When I saw these figures being tossed around, I was quite surprised. It wasn’t the enormous figure given for embezzled assets that took me aback, but rather the frankness with which the figure had apparently been shared by a senior CCDI official.
When I followed up on Li’s statement in news coverage about the press briefing, however, I could not find any mention of the figure, and it quickly became clear that basic blunders had multiplied through the news media.
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- January 18, 2010 10:21 PM
Here the Wheels of China’s Corruption Grind Exceedingly Fine
For the Sydney Morning Herald, John Garnaut looks at the flow of money in a county in Anhui, which he gives the fictitious name Benghai:
A year ago I toured Benghai with Graeme Smith, a scholar at the University of Technology, Sydney. Since then, Beijing’s regular corruption crackdowns have appeared to me to be little more than pantomime, designed to reassure the public and defeat the odd political adversary.
Smith has spent four years getting to know everyone he can in Benghai and working out exactly how the money flows. He has now mapped the internal logic of Chinese corruption in Political Machinations in a Rural County, in The China Journal.
The perpetrators of corruption are rarely morally good or bad. Rather, they are playing by the unwritten rules of a system that makes them utterly dependent on the patronage of those higher up the tree – and oblivious to the needs of those below.
One reason Benghai County is doing well is that it has opened embassies in seven cities for the purpose of cultivating higher officials. ”What do you think these offices do? Hand out brochures? The money goes up, and then the money comes down,” a Benghai business source told Smith. Despite its relative wealth, or perhaps because of it, Benghai convinced Beijing to reinstate it on China’s ”impoverished county” list, which led to two major international aid projects and additional national infrastructure projects. Once the money comes down, a huge and rapidly growing bureaucracy divides it up in places like Sauna City.
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- January 5, 2010 9:55 PM
China To Try Top Judge For Graft
From AFP:
One of China’s former top judges will be tried for taking up to four million yuan ($A652,000) in bribes, in one of the nation’s most high-profile graft cases, the state press says.
Huang Songyou, former deputy head of the Supreme People’s Court, will go on trial by the first week of March, making him the most senior judicial official to be tried since the establishment of new China in 1949, the Chongqing Evening News said on Sunday.
Huang, 52, is being accused of abusing power, enabling profit for others, taking bribes and living a “corrupt and lavish” life, the report said.
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- January 3, 2010 3:38 AM
China Says Billions Missing From Public Funds
From AFP:
Over 34.4 billion dollars went missing from public funds in China in the first 11 months of 2009, state media said Tuesday, with national auditors highlighting embezzlement, waste and fraud.
Over 230 people, including 67 government officials, have been handed over to disciplinary or judicial authorities for their roles in the missing funds, the China Daily said, citing the National Audit Office.
The audit covered 99,000 companies, government agencies and public institutions across the nation, Liu Jiayi, China’s top auditor, told a national auditing conference.
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- December 29, 2009 4:18 AM
China Corruption Trial Exposes Capital of Graft
The Telegraph has a report on the ongoing crackdown on corruption in Chongqing which, after five months, has become China’s largest-ever criminal investigation:
The sweep began in June, when officers began to raid the city’s illegal gun factories, seizing over 1,700 firearms. As their leads multiplied, however, the police widened their search. An operation that began with 3,000 policemen is now being conducted by 25,000 officers, as the city tries to rid itself of an insidious mafia network that stretches to the very highest levels of the Communist party.
So far, 4,893 suspected gangsters have been taken into custody, many of them city officials, including a former deputy police commissioner and the head of the city’s Justice bureau, Wen Qiang. Mr Wen, who is suspected of having accumulated a fortune of over 100 million yuan (£10 million) in bribes, is said to have been the overall godfather of the city, a protective umbrella who shielded the gangs from the authorities.
The operation revealed the depths of corruption inside Chongqing’s monumental police headquarters, with some Chinese reports suggesting that one-fifth of the city’s police has been removed. Officers have revealed sudden morning meetings at which their colleagues were dramatically purged and led away in handcuffs.
Meanwhile, a small core of investigators have been taken “to a secret location” and “have all signed confidentiality agreements” so that no one knows where they will strike next, according to Chen Xiaohua, a Chongqing lawyer. Every policeman in the city has been reassigned a new beat to break up any patronage they may have enjoyed in their old patches.

Read more about the investigation and corruption in Chongqing via CDT.
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- October 18, 2009 8:35 PM
Chinese Trial Offers Peek Into Police Corruption
From Wall Street Journal:
The first in a series of trials got under way in China’s western municipality of Chongqing that may reveal how senior police officials conspired with local gangsters to run rackets in one of the country’s biggest cities. It is also the latest reminder of the government’s challenge in rooting out corruption.
In a sensational sweep that started in June, authorities have formally arrested hundreds of government officials, police officers and alleged gang members in a crackdown on organized crime in Chongqing. Authorities have said they are investigating crimes including bribery and extortion, and have grabbed headlines by putting forward evidence of drug dealing and gun possession.
The first trials in the probe began Monday at Chongqing’s No. 1 Intermediate People’s Court and No. 3 Intermediate People’s Court, judiciary officials said. They declined to discuss case specifics, but confirmed state-run media reports that the courts plan to launch other cases over coming days.
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- October 12, 2009 10:27 PM
The PRC Legal System At Sixty
Jerome Cohen, a professor of law at New York University, takes a look at the PRC’s legal system at the East Asia Forum. Cohen comments that while the PRC has made impressive strides in the area of legal reform, problems like corruption and local protectionism are still endemic, leaving room for but dim “prospects for immediate significant reforms.”
In early 1978 there was almost no contemporary legislation, nor was the PRC a party to the many multilateral and bilateral agreements necessary for successful international relations. The courts and the procuracy were a shambles, the legal profession long since abolished, as was the Ministry of Justice. Legal education and scholarship had barely begun to revive. Today, thirty years later, the situation has dramatically improved. A multitude of new laws and regulations are now on the books, with more to come. These norms help to guide the country’s prodigious economic achievements and foreign investment and technology transfer. The PRC has also adhered to most of the multilateral treaties that grease the wheels of international relations and commerce and has a dense network of bilateral agreements with all major countries.
[...]
Yet, the ‘socialist rule of law’ invoked by Party and government leaders is a far cry from any of the rule of law’s commonly understood meanings. Despite the importation of Western norms and forms, including constitutional endorsement of the rule of law, human rights and property rights, the Party makes no bones about its airtight control of the judiciary and the legal system generally. Its central political-legal committee and local Party counterparts ‘coordinate’ the work of the courts, the procuracy, the Ministry of Justice, the legal profession, and the regular and secret police.
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- October 1, 2009 8:59 PM
Politics Permeates Anti-Corruption Drive in China
The New York Times writes about several recent high-profile corruption cases in China:
Chinese authorities say the arrests are part of the Communist Party’s latest anticorruption campaign — and they include the arrest last month of four employees of the British-Australian mining giant, Rio Tinto, on bribery charges.
But analysts say that prominent corruption cases in China are often the outgrowth of power struggles within the Communist Party, with competing factions using the “war on corruption” as a tool to eliminate or weaken rivals and their corporate supporters.
In the case of Mr. Huang, the electronics billionaire, for example, state-run media say a number of other high-ranking officials with longstanding ties to him have also been dismissed and arrested in what looks to be a Communist Party power shuffle.
China does not have an independent police or judicial system; party leaders order investigations. “It’s a very politicized process,” says Minxin Pei, a professor at Claremont McKenna College in California and author of numerous studies on corruption in China. “If your patrons do not protect you, you’re toast.” This may help explain one of the enduring contradictions of China’s political and economic system: the government regularly publicizes an astounding number of corruption cases, yet little progress seems to be made in uprooting corruption.
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- September 3, 2009 9:45 PM
Ex-China Supreme Court Vice Head ‘On Graft Charges’
From AFP:
The disgraced former vice head of China’s Supreme People’s Court has been kicked out of the ruling Communist Party and will face criminal charges for corruption, state press said on Saturday.
“Huang Songyou used his position for personal gain to seek profits for others and to receive large sums of money,” Xinhua news agency said.
“He violated regulations, received gifts and cash and lived a corrupt life.”
The case of the 51-year-old Huang has been handed over to judicial authorities for criminal prosecution, it said.
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- August 22, 2009 4:05 AM
The Case of the Chinese Mayor Who Wasn’t There
The Financial Times writes about Xu Zongheng, the maor of Shenzhen who was recently toppled in a corruption probe, and other officials who disappear from office with barely a trace:
In China, senior government and Communist party officials vanish all the time without causing so much as a ripple in the domestic media.
Like so many cadres before him, Mr Xu disappeared into the jaws of the Chinese Communist party’s disciplinary inspection commission. The powerful commission’s so-called shuang-gui (or “twin regulation”) powers allow it to detain party officials indefinitely. In theory, officials caught up in this extra-judicial twilight zone are merely making themselves available to party investigators and can be released later without stain. In reality, the commission’s targets are routinely handed over to government prosecutors months or even years later, all but gift-wrapped for summary show trials and sentencing.
In a more famous example of shuang-gui in action, in 2003 the head of Bank of China’s Hong Kong subsidiary disappeared for two years before resurfacing in a courtroom in Changchun, a city in the country’s far north-east. There he was convicted for a corruption spree that had allegedly begun nine years earlier in Shanghai. When it comes to “renditioning” suspects from one jurisdiction to another, the disciplinary inspection commission appears to be as accomplished as the CIA.
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- August 15, 2009 9:17 PM
China Fires Nuclear Power Head after Investigation
The AP gives an update on the case against Kang Rixin, the head of the government’s nuclear power project, who has been investigated for corruption:
No reason was given for the dismissal of Kang Rixin, the general manager of China National Nuclear Corporation — the biggest owner of nuclear power plants in China. He was under investigation for “grave violations of discipline,” a standard Communist Party term referring to graft and abuse of power, the official Xinhua News Agency said late Friday.
The Organization Department of the Communist Party appointed Sun Qin, 56, deputy director of the National Energy Administration, in Kang’s place, the report said.
The Communist Party’s Central Committee announced earlier this month that Kang was being investigated. He had been head of the company since September 2003.
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- August 15, 2009 8:56 PM
Former Beijing Airport Boss Executed in China
AP has details of recent high-profile corruption cases:
On Friday, the former head of the company that runs airports in Beijing and more than 30 other Chinese cities was put to death after the People’s Supreme Court upheld his sentence in a $16 million bribery and embezzlement case.
Li Peiying’s execution came two days after word emerged that the head of China’s nuclear power program was under investigation for alleged corruption. Just last month, the former chairman of China’s second-biggest oil company, Sinopec, was also convicted of taking $29 million in bribes and given a suspended death sentence.
The heads of state-owned enterprises “possess power and money, making it easy to give rise to corruption,” Wang Yukai of the China National School of Administration was quoted Friday in the Communist Party newspaper Global Times as saying.
China has long struggled against corruption among high-level Communist Party officials, hoping high-profile takedowns will help scare the rank and file straight.
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- August 7, 2009 10:30 AM