With his five cellphones constantly ringing, it is not easy these days to get the undivided attention of Zhu Ruifeng, a self-styled citizen journalist whose freelance campaign against graft has earned him pop-star acclaim and sent a chill through Chinese officialdom.

[…] A former migrant worker with a high school education, Mr. Zhu has become an overnight celebrity in China in the two months since he posted online secretly recorded video of an 18-year-old woman having sex with a memorably unattractive 57-year-old official from the southwestern municipality of Chongqing. The official lost his job. Mr. Zhu gained a million or so new microblog followers.

The takedown was just the opening act, Mr. Zhu says. He promises to release six more sex videos that he predicts will make a number of other men run for cover. “I’m fighting a war,” he said with characteristic bombast, his voice a near-shriek. “Even if they beat me to death, I won’t give up my sources or the videos.”

[…] Mr. Zhu, who began his Web site in 2006, largely relies on whistle-blowers to funnel damning evidence to him. Through the years, he said, he has exposed 100 officials, bringing down more than a third of them. He has been threatened and beaten; more than once, he says, he has been offered huge sums of money to delete an incriminating post from his site, which is called People’s Supervision.

Zhu’s “characteristic bombast” may seem excessive, but is at least in part a matter of self-defense: by courting attention from traditional and social media, he hopes to deter attempts to silence him. That he credits Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption speeches, the Chinese Constitution and his own love of country with inspiring his activities may confer some measure of additional protection.

Nevertheless, his crusade has cost him. He has chosen to end his marriage, he says, rather than see his wife, a P.L.A. officer, suffer retaliation from his adversaries. “To be honest,” he told The Times’ Jonah Kessel, “I would like to tend to the big family in sacrifice of the small family.”

Kessel has also posted outtakes from their conversation on Vimeo, including an extended account of a recent police visit to Zhu’s Beijing home. Chongqing authorities appear determined to contain the sex tape scandal by acquiring Zhu’s remaining videos, but as in the recent New York Times hacking attacks, identifying sources seems to be their primary goal. From Tom Lasseter at McClatchy:

Powerful interests were searching for his sources, he explained over lunch last Friday [January 25th]. Police detained one contact in the southwestern city of Chongqing, where the scandal had erupted, Zhu said. They traced a second source to Henan province, hundreds of miles away, and had questioned that person at least twice.

Two days after that conversation, the police showed up at Zhu’s home in Beijing. They banged on his door Sunday night and demanded that he come with them. He refused but reported to a police station Monday morning, where he was held for more than seven hours. Police officers from Chongqing pressed him to hand over five sex recordings he hasn’t made public and to tell them the identities of his informants. They threatened that “if you don’t present evidence, you will be in violation of national law,” according to Zhu’s account.

The pressure on Zhu suggests that despite Communist Party rhetoric about an all out campaign against corruption, limits remain. The party’s leader, Xi Jinping, said shortly after being installed in November that failing to crack down on corruption would risk the downfall of the state. But while Beijing has dismissed some wayward officials and canceled extravagant banquets that stoked resentment among average Chinese, it so far seems set on keeping a tight grip to keep the process from spinning out of control.

Undaunted, Zhu has offered a cash reward to anyone who can verify the identity of a state-owned enterprise president allegedly caught on one of the videos. Meanwhile, the woman in the videos was formally charged with extortion last week, though she too has been hailed—perhaps less plausibly than in Zhu’s case—as an anti-corruption crusader. From Keith Zhai at the South China Morning Post:

“Zhao was officially arrested on December 31 for extortion,” Zhang said yesterday, adding that she had been “brainwashed” by a company she left in 2009 to secretly record herself having sex with officials to give the firm leverage. “After all, she was young and a victim herself.”

[…] Zhao has drawn support on social media, with internet users hailing her as a heroine for exposing corrupt officials.

Many have compared Zhao’s case with that of Deng Yujiao , a hotel waitress who in 2009 stabbed to death a local party official in Hubei and wounded another after they tried to force themselves on her.

Deng was charged with assault, rather than murder, but walked free on grounds of diminished responsibility after having received widespread support from the online community.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: anti-corruption, Beijing, bloggers, Chongqing, citizen journalism, citizen journalist, constitution, corrupt officials, Deng Yujiao, extortion, journalistic ethics, lei zhengfu, migrant workers, muckraking, PLA, sex scandals, Xi Jinping, Zhu Ruifeng
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(Da Su Lao Zhang @大俗老张)
There isn’t much love this week for Shen Jilan, the National People’s Congress’s longest-serving delegate. Shen, who claims the key to her success is voting “yes” on every measure, was sharply criticized this week on the official Weibo account of the Shanxi Committee of the Communist Youth League of China. The post was deleted and an apology reiterated six times, but netizens hadn’t lost the scent. In Da Su Lao Zhang’s cartoon, Shen is as unpleasant as she is predictable. “Loyalty: If she visits once a month, she’s Auntie Flow; if she visits once a year, she’s Auntie Shen!”

(Lao Xiao @老肖漫画_rmd)“From Nanjing to Beijing, buying can’t beat selling. It’s like this in the political market, too.” An official’s cap, marked with a UPC code, is available for purchase. The market for government positions, literally the “buying and selling” of posts (买官卖官), is an ongoing problem.

(Sinking Stone @漫画沉石)Last week, Xi Jinping vowed that the Party “must uphold the fighting of tigers and flies at the same time,” that corruption should be investigated among officials both high and low. This tiger, who has the mark of the “king” (王) on his forehead, thinks he can make off with a fortune. Distracted by the fly swatter, he doesn’t see what’s about to hit him. In a corruption crackdown, lower-level officials may find themselves out of work; but the big players, like Bo Xilai, have far more to lose.

“Striking the Tigers with the Flies” (Artist: Thomas Y.C. Wong @thomasycwong)Another take on Xi’s anti-corruption campaign: he may catch the fly, but is it worth it to face the tiger’s wrath? Top-level officials certainly don’t like when the foreign press exposes their graft. Will the Party really scrutinize its core?

(Dashix @大尸凶的漫画) If Xi is serious about fighting corruption, he has a long way to go. Zhao Hongxia, the woman who taped her sex session with Lei Zhengfu to blackmail him, slept with five other Chongqing officials, identifying herself with her real name and two other fake identities. (The stopwatch indicates Lei’s “stamina” in the video.) Read more about how she hit her target from the International Business Times [zh].

© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Chongqing, Drawing the News, lei zhengfu, official corruption, political cartoons, political humor, sex scandals, Shen Jilan, Xi Jinping, Zhao Hongxia
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“I also turned down their demand for the original version of those already exposed clips, for the safety of the person from Chongqing’s police bureau who fed me the information,” said Zhu, adding that he is not ready to publish the remaining evidence, as time is needed to authenticate them.

The negotiations came after Zhu claimed some local officials involved in the scandal haven’t yet been netted and accused local police of a coverup and destroying evidence.

[…] Si Weijiang, a Shanghai-based lawyer, told the Global Times there is no crime of withholding evidence, and that the process to compel Zhu to be a witness is not clear. The police have no right to forcibly request the evidence, he said.

The videos were recorded as part of an extortion racket targeting a number of Chongqing officials, 11 of whom have now been dismissed as a result. Former Chongqing Party chief Bo Xilai and his police chief Wang Lijun reportedly covered up an earlier investigation into the case. While Zhu says that his source is associated with the Chongqing police, the police now claim that he may have obtained the videos from a member of the gang itself.

The Washington Post’s Wang Juan highlighted Zhu’s use of social media for protection:

Zhu’s lawyer, Li, said he believed the policemen originally intended to detain Zhu when they tried to get into his house Sunday night but were forced to change their plan once Zhu’s online posts for help and calls to Chinese and foreign media drew widespread attention.

[…] Before leaving his home for the police station on Monday, Zhu posted a picture online of a signed legal document. The document named several people he was officially authorizing as his lawyers and representatives and said that any confession or change of lawyers after he is imprisoned would likely be made under duress. Mindful of several recent high-profile cases in which detainees have been cut off entirely from the outside world and with their lawyers switched out for government-friendly ones, Zhu said in the document that the lawyers he named are the only ones he wants, “even if I later write a letter in blood asking for a change of lawyers.”

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Beijing, Bo Xilai, Chongqing, Chongqing corruption, drinking tea, extortion, Global Times, journalistic ethics, lawyers, lei zhengfu, police, Si Weijiang, sina weibo, social media, Wang Lijun, Zhu Ruifeng
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Artist: BrickWeave

New Internet regulations, announced by state media in the final days of 2012, threaten to stifle the vibrant world of the Chinese netizenry. The regulations, which include required real-name registration for all Internet users, were announced in a December 18 People’s Daily editorial, which was in turn covered by CCTV’s primetime news show, News Simulcast (新闻联播 Xīnwén Liánbō). Twisting the CCTV report, BrickWeave casts disgraced politician Lei Zhengfu as the News Simulcast anchor in the mock segment “Netizens Call for Legislation to Protect Online Information.” Ordinary people have exposed corrupt officials like Lei through Weibo, forcing the authorities to do more firing and apologizing than they could have imagined before microblogging began.

Artist: Simon

“Don’t… don’t! I just want to write a weibo…” What exactly does real-name registration mean for Chinese Internet users? Officials say people will still be able to use nicknames online, but that offers little protection from identity theft. South Korea provides a sobering example of who mosts benefits from an online real-name registration system. The ninja inspectors going through this man’s pockets could be government regulators–or cyber-criminals.

Artist: Tango

Be careful what you wish for. A netizen-turned-puppet asks for a little freedom, but the very tool which could liberate him is used to control him instead.

Artist: Yuanzi

In “Getting Rich Through Hard Work” (劳动致富), ordinary men fish for their fair share–but the official, sitting on his throne at the tip of the iceberg, has cast his lines with something else in mind. The online public boiled with rage last year at the luxury watches, designer suits, and Italian cars sported by officials at all levels of the government food chain. Bo Xilai’s humble US$1600 monthly salary was apparently more than enough to send his son to Harrow and Oxford. “Watch Brother” was identified wearing at least 11 different watches in various photos. Guangzhou official Cai Bin was caught owning 21 houses, 20 more than the legal limit. The list goes on.

Artist: Fenzi

This menacing Pinocchio is not ashamed of the florid lie sprouting from his nose. Like a propaganda poster from the Great Leap Forward, it glorifies a bounty that never existed. Retired journalist Yang Jisheng has just published Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, the fruit of 20 years of research about the horrors of the Great Famine of 1960-1962. In Foreign Policy, Murong Xuecun writes that the crucial debate in China today is not how the famine happened, but whether it happened at all. He references Frank Dikötter’s landmark book Mao’s Great Famine, which estimates “‘at least’ 45 million premature deaths.” But, says Murong, “the people who spoke the truth are all dead.” Dikötter also examines the country’s collective amnesia in Foreign Policy.

Artist: Padme

What does the New Year have in store for China? Will the Party hold the country together, or will an explosive situation of its own making finally burst forth? The first controversy of 2013 has already charged ahead, as Southern Weekly’s editorial calling on China to uphold its constitution was torn to shreds by the censors. Some people like Eric X. Li may argue that the “China model” offers an alternative success story to democratization, but as China’s economy slows and middle-class discontent grows, it’s clear the whole story has yet to be told.

Browse CDT Chinese’s cartoon collection on Google+.

© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Drawing the News, famine, Frank Dikötter, great leap forward, history, Internet censorship, Internet regulation, lei zhengfu, Murong Xuecun, News Simulcast, official corruption, political cartoons, political humor, real name registration, Yang Jisheng
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“The anticorruption storm has begun,” People’s Daily, the party mouthpiece, wrote on its Web site this month.

The flurry of revelations suggests that members of China’s new leadership may be more serious than their predecessors about trying to tame the cronyism, bribery and debauchery that afflict state-run companies and local governments, right down to the outwardly dowdy neighborhood committees that oversee sanitation. Efforts began just days after Xi Jinping, the newly appointed Communist Party chief and China’s incoming president, warned that failing to curb corruption could put the party’s grip on power at risk.

“Something has shifted,” said Zhu Ruifeng, a Beijing journalist who has exposed more than a hundred cases of alleged corruption on his Web site, including the lurid exertions of Mr. Lei [Zhengfu]. “In the past, it might take 10 days for an official involved in a sex scandal to lose his job. This time he was gone in 66 hours.”

The “astonishingly ranine” Lei took a starring role in Evan Osnos’ survey of the recent string of sex scandals at The New Yorker (via CDT).

© Mengyu Dong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: anti-corruption, corruption, high-level corruption, lei zhengfu, local corruption, sex scandals, Xi Jinping
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I wrote, not long ago, about the odd political significance of an orgy involving some obscure, photo-loving Communist Party officials. At the risk of tarting up an event that speaks for itself, I argued that it was a problem for Chinese leaders because it made clear the gap between the Party’s artificial solemnity and the unadorned reality beneath. Since then, more has happened, and here is a brief inventory: in addition to the police chief and his secrets of the Usu sisterhood, there was the recent case of Lei Zhengfu, an official in Chongqing who was abruptly dismissed after a sex video showed him with a woman a third of his age who had been hired by a local real-estate developer to blackmail public officials into giving out hugely valuable tracts of land. (As outlandish as those details were, they were surpassed by the sheer physicality of the gentleman in question, a man whose astonishing ranine qualities inspired a wave of Chinese parodies online.)

But let’s not get sidetracked. Onward with the inventory: There was Wu Hong, who turned up in pictures the other day wearing his uniform from the Urban Administrative and Law Enforcement Bureau, alongside a young woman in a hotel room who was not wearing much of any uniform at all. There was the local Shanxi official, Li Junwen, caught juggling four wives and ten kids in the land of the one-child policy. (Perhaps the one-wife policy should have been made more explicit?) Admittedly, they start to blur: Can I interest you in the executive of the state-owned oil company in pictures with a female subordinate? Or, perhaps, the vice head of the Shandong Agricultural Department found to have signed a hand-written contract with his mistress, promising to divorce his wife by December 20th?

…

The most interesting thing about the list above? Everything on there comes from the past three weeks. Not one day more. Some have argued that the surge of sex-scandal news is a sign that the new Politburo is determined to expose and crack down on the phenomenon. (Indeed, the police chief and the hapless Lei, among others, are already on their way to punishment.) Others see it as the accretion of the power of the Web. I see it as a bit of both. But exposing the epic ineptitude of public servants is not the same as rooting it out as its spiritual source: a deep-rooted culture of impunity and entitlement that has grown without boundaries for three decades. That will be a far more difficult task.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: corruption, lei zhengfu, Li Junwen, Politburo, sex scandals, Wu Hong
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The trend even came to the attention of the U.S. Naval Air Forces, who seized the chance to take a jab at China’s novice status in the aircraft carrier club:

Interesting trend taking hold of “Shootering” ow.ly/fGwUx, Funny we’ve had people striking that pose for ~100 yrs@b_fung

— flynavy (@flynavy) November 29, 2012

Chinese political cartoonists have caught on, too, tackling more serious issues with this lighthearted meme:

Artist: Dashix

“Soar!” a corrupt official exhorts a hungry student, clinging to his “nutritious lunch” as he pads down the runway. The Yangcheng Evening News reported on Monday that the school system in Fenghuang County, Hunan saves about six million yuan per year by spending only two yuan per student on lunches of the allocated three. Children get only a box of milk and a palm-sized piece of bread [zh]. The school system claims it is following government regulation on expenditures. In Dashix’s illustration, the tear in a boy’s eye gets an official drooling.

Artist: Gouben

A victorious mistress lets a government seal fly as she stands on top of Chongqing official Lei Zhengfu while training a tape recorder on him. Screenshots of sex tapes surfaced this week, costing Lei his job and possibly implicating former city police chief Wang Lijun. Peering over his mistress’ bra, Lei is horrified to find his own government seal is now impotent.

Artist: so7os

China’s conscience was rattled this month by the death of five boys in Guizhou. Missing for weeks, their bodies were found in a dumpster, where they had died of carbon monoxide poisoning from the fire they lit inside. “Brothers, it’s nice and warm in here!” says a younger boy, in a tragic flight of fancy. “Let’s sleep–I’m closing the cabin door. This is our spaceship!” The “Guizhou Five” remind many Chinese of the Hans Christian Andersen story “The Little Match Girl,” once taught to schoolchildren as an example of the evils of capitalist society. The dumpster displays the slogan, “Everyone pitch in and fight to be civilized” (人人动手参 个个争当文明).

Artist: Pearl Forest

Politicians “speak south and head north.”

Artist: Lao Jue

In his opening remarks at the 18th Party Congress, Hu Jintao stressed that China should “not walk the old path of the closed and rigid, nor the evil path of changing flags and allegiances” (既不走封闭僵化的老路、也不走改旗易帜的邪路) “We Are Walking on the Correct Path” (我们走在正路上) shows seven naked men march proudly across a narrow bridge. They are the new seven-member Politburo Standing Committee, which debuted at the end of the Congress. Chinese cartoonists typically cannot depict political leaders in print, but Lao Jue is afforded a wider latitude by the Internet.

Artist: Kuang Biao

Lao Jue makes China’s journey across the river seem like a lark, but in Kuang Biao’s depiction, Xi Jinping is struggling with the hammer and sickle over one shoulder and the burden of the economy over the other while “groping for stones to cross the river” (摸着石头过河).

Artist: Jiu’an

Xi Jinping prays before jailed tweeter Zhai Xiaobing (aka @stariver), his Standing Committee zombies in tow. Zhai was detained on November 7 for a tweet comparing Final Destination 6 to the 18th Party Congress. “Dear Lord, we beg you to free Star River… Boo hoo… Black humor, this cartoon is just kidding!”

© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 18th party congress, aircraft carrier, aircraft carrier style, Chongqing, Drawing the News, Gangnam style, Guizhou, Hu Jintao, Hunan, lei zhengfu, official corruption, Politburo Standing Committee, political cartoons, political humor, Wang Lijun, Xi Jinping, Zhai Xiaobing
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Screenshots purporting to be from video of Lei Zhengfu having sex with his mistress, were published on Tuesday.

Mr Lei, a party chief in the city of Chongqing, is reported to have said that the video is a fake.

The case highlights the growing influence of China’s microbloggers in pursuing local officials.

Correspondents say that the Communist Party has stepped up its drive against corruption and official impropriety amid rising public anger at abuses of power.

After an investigation determined that the tape was authentic, Lei was relieved of his post, according to Xinhua:

Investigations by the Chongqing Municipal Committee for Discipline Inspection verified that Lei Zhengfu, secretary of the Beibei District Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), featured in the video, which was filmed in 2007.

On Friday, Chongqing Municipal Committee of the CPC decided to remove Lei from his post and begin an investigation into the case.

Lei, 54, used to serve as vice mayor of the county-level Jiangjin City, Party chief and head of Dianjiang County, deputy Party chief of Jiulongpo District, Party chief and head of Beibei District, which are all under Chongqing, according to government information.

Ji Xuguang, a journalist, released an article on the sex video along with some screengrabs earlier this week.

“At the Spring Festival and two days after the festival in 2007, the man, who was deputy Party chief and head of Beibei District at that time, was fooling around with his 18-year-old mistress at a hotel of Chongqing,” he said in the article.

Now, additional details of the case reveal it to be more than a simple affair and may implicate former Chongqing police chief Wang Lijun, who has been sentenced to 15 years in prison on unrelated charges including abuse of power and bribe-taking. The South China Morning Post reports on the account by Chinese “citizen journalist” Zhu Ruifeng:

Quoting an unidentified informant within the Chongqing police bureau, Zhu said that the young woman in the video, surnamed Zhao, was one of many who were trained by the head of a construction company to be “given” to officials as bribes.

Zhu claimed that “the construction builder ‘gave’ Zhao to Lei” in early 2007. The builder had Zhao secretly recorded the sex tape and used it to blackmail Lei, prompting Lei to report it to a Chongqing “senior official”. This was followed by Wang Lijun’s order to detain Zhao for thirty days and jail the builder for a year.

Zhu said he could back his claims with police records given to him by the anonymous source. He said he has a record of the police’s interrogation of the builder.

Zhu also claimed he had sex tapes of six officials, “four of them are incumbent officials”.

A post on Ministry of Tofu, also based on Chinese media accounts, says disgraced Chongqing Party chief Bo Xilai may also be implicated in the case:

From 2002 to 2006, Lei Zhengfu, while serving as the party secretary of Dianjiang county under the city of Chongqing, he used his position to give contracts of the county’s public works projects to a construction company owned by his younger brother to benefit himself and his family. Other contractors could only get leftover nominal projects.

In 2007, in order to win lucrative contracts from him, who had by then been promoted to the vice party secretary of Chongqing’s Jiulongpo District, one construction company offered huge bribes to Lei. However, having netted millions of yuan, Lei was not impressed and rejected their offer.

The company soon found out about Lei’s particular interest in women. So they hired several young women, all under 20, and put them through strict training before sending them to sexually please Lei. At the same time, these young women, who approached Lei with fake identities and proffered to be his mistresses, secretly videotaped the intercourse for the company to have more leverage over Lei.

In 2009, the head of the construction company fell out with Lei over business interests and threatened Lei with the sex tape. Lei came cleaned on his ‘one-time mistake’ to Bo Xilai, then the party boss of Chongqing and a contender for one of China’s most powerful political posts. Soon, Wang Lijun, then Chongqing’s police chief, headed a special team to investigate the matter. As the result, Zhao Hongxia was detained for 30 days, and the boss of the company was incarcerated for a year for ‘carving an official seal without authorization from the government.’

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Bo Xilai, Chongqing, corruption, lei zhengfu, local power, mistresses, sex scandals, Wang Lijun
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