China News: Official Corruption | China Digital Times (CDT)

China news tagged with: official corruption (9)

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The Price Of Corruption
From Forbes Beijing bureau chief Gady Epstein, a look at corruption among coal mine bosses in Shanxi, and the rest of the country at different levels of government:
In any of these cases, the question is not whether investigators will find corrupt officials, it is how far up or down or sideways in the bureaucracy will they go in making arrests. The party knows from the top on down that corruption is a chronic and thorough affliction of the one-party state, and has long assigned many authorities to the task of curing it.
But many of the highest-profile crackdowns, including former General Secretary Jiang Zemin’s against the Beijing party secretary in 1995, Chen Xitong, and current General Secretary Hu Jintao’s against Chen in Jiang’s power base of Shanghai, are viewed less as cleanup efforts than as factional maneuvers to undermine enemies and consolidate power.
The Chongqing crackdown was one of the most publicized in years. Many were shocked the local party chief was able to take on such entrenched corruption. People assumed, perhaps correctly, that Bo had some ulterior motive for moving on the Chongqing mafia: Maybe he was trying to impress Beijing so that he could move up in the party hierarchy; maybe he was uprooting a faction that rivaled or threatened his own. The notion that a leader in government simply would see wrong and try to right it, Robert F. Kennedy-style, exists in Camelot, not China.
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- October 30, 2009 7:26 PM
In Guiyang, a Golden Rule Built on Graft
Wang Heyan reports on Fan Zhongqian, a former Guizhou official convicted for graft. From Caijing:
Cash, real estate and a golden book of traditional Chinese morals –literally made of gold – were just a few of the perks Fan Zhongqian received during 20 years as a government official in Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou Province.
Fan apparently enjoyed the cash and property, but ignored the book. Authorities say he bypassed moral ways to wealth for a fast track by accepting bribes in exchange for government favors.
Fan, 52, has been awaiting a court verdict since March after standing trial in Guiyang Intermediate Court for accepting more than 10 million yuan bribes. The former mayoral assistant and chief of the city’s land resources and urban construction department has been in custody since spring 2008.
His wife, Tan Jin, a former official at Guizhou Normal University, has already been sentenced to a five-year prison term for taking bribes. She was convicted shortly before Fan went to court.
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- October 16, 2009 4:33 PM
Official Outed by Netizens Gets 11 Years
Zhou Jiugeng of Jiangsu province has just been sentenced to 11 years in prison for corruption. He was outed from his post in late December, largely due to the netizen uproar over his excessively luxurious lifestyle. From Xinhua:
Zhou Jiugeng, former director of the real estate management bureau in Jiangning District, the provincial capital of Nanjing, was convicted of accepting 1.07 million yuan and 110,000 Hong Kong dollars in bribes from contractors, subordinate businesses and officials.
The Nanjing Intermediate People’s Court also confiscated 1.2 million yuan (175,784 U.S. dollars) of Zhou’s personal property.
The court said the 49-year-old was given lenient punishment for confessing to the prosecutors and handing over the bribes on his own.
A number of officials have shared their thoughts on the role of netizens in official supervision. Excerpted from China Daily:
Liu Binjie, head of the General Administration of Press and Publication, agreed, saying many problems were first exposed on the Internet and then received the government’s attention.
“Internet supervision is playing a very important role in promoting democracy and ensuring the people’s right to know, which should be fully encouraged and supported,” Liu said.
Some scholars, however, expressed worries over whether Internet supervision could work as well as people expected.
Gao Xinmin, a professor with the Party School of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, said: “The Internet provides a new way for people to supervise officials, but what really matters is that the government listens to their voices and takes action.”
While online manhunts can help fight corruption, they must be properly used or they can infringe on people’s basic human rights, he said.
Read also a report by Jane Macartney at Times Online.
For more background on this story, see this Global Voices post by Bob Chen, “Commissioner Scrutinized by Netizen Detectives.”
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- October 11, 2009 8:27 PM
Chinese Mayor in Graft Probe
The Straits Times reports that the mayor of Shenzhen is being investigated for his ties to disgraced businessman Huang Guangyu:
Xu Zongheng had been put under shuanggui – a form of detention imposed on party officials, given his alleged links to Huang Guangyu, the founder of GOME and once ranked China’s richest man, the South China Morning Post reported citing several unnamed sources.
‘It must have something to do with economic irregularities… but it could also have something to do with a power struggle,’ a government source was quoted as saying by the Post.
Corruption investigations in China can be proxies for political struggles.
Xu would be the latest in a number of senior officials to be implicated in Huang’s graft investigation, triggered last year by alleged financial misconduct.
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- June 6, 2009 7:41 AM
Dark Days for China’s Whistleblowers
At a clean governance conference yesterday, Wen Jiabao emphasized the government’s stance against corruption. From Xinhua:
Wen said any construction of new government buildings, training centers and government hotels were banned between now and the end of 2010.
[...]Reception expenditures this year should be reduced by 10 percent over 2008, car purchase and maintenance fees should be cut by 15 percent on the basis of the average amount in the recent three years, and expenditure for business trips abroad reduced by 20 percent based on the average amount over the recent three years.
Wen said, this year efforts will be focused on investigation and handling of corruption cases involving government organs and officials, and hard strike will be given to “collusion between officials and businesses, power-for-money deals and commercial bribery cases.”
He urged officials to discipline themselves and “resolutely oppose bureaucratism and formalism.”
While Wen and others have expressed concern for the extent of official graft, the treatment of whistleblowers remains harsh. Wu Zhong of Asia Times reports:
Fear of retribution is a major concern for whistleblowers. “Nine of the top 10 anti-graft fighters in the past three decades have faced retaliation,” He Zengke, director of the Institute of Contemporary Marxism under the CCP’s Central Compilation and Translation Bureau, told China Youth Daily. He did not give details on who the top 10 anti-graft fighters were, or what retribution had been meted out to them, but there are plenty of cases of informants being killed, jailed or attacked after tipping off the authorities.
In May 2002, Li Wenjuan, a civil servant with Anshan Office of State Revenue in Liaoning province, reported suspected irregularities in tax collection and accounting to the party’s Central Commission for Disciplinary Inspection (CCDI) – the party’s top anti-graft watchdog – and the General Administration of Taxation. After the taxation office sent an investigation team to Anshan, Li was first removed to a local branch and then one year later fired, though after the CCDI’s intervention she was re-instated.
However, in September 2004, Li was sacked again after she was arrested by Anshan police and sent to a “education through labor” camp on charges of “slandering” an official on the Internet. She was released after two years and has said she “would not dare” to report corruption again.
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- March 25, 2009 5:28 PM
Chinese Audit Cites Widespread Misuse of Government Funds
The International Herald Tribune reports on official embezzlement figures:
Ten central government departments, including the powerful Ministry of Finance, “misused or embezzled” more than 4.52 billion yuan, or $660 million, last year, according to a report from China’s top auditor.
The report also said that 14 officials were referred for prosecution, 88 people in all were arrested and an additional 104 government employees were punished for their roles in mismanaging or embezzling what amounted to billions of dollars of additional government funds, state media reported Thursday.
Even the State Administration of Taxation was accused of fraud.
Read the Xinhua report on this topic.
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- August 28, 2008 7:08 PM
Promotion-gate of Officials’ Children
Another score for Internet users and the online press for prompting an apology, sort of, from a local government for cronyism in the promotion of four positions. Translated by CDT from the Beijing News and others.
It all started with a bulletin announcing promotions of four “cadres” at Benxi City in Liaoning Province for the city Communist Youth League’s secretary and deputy secretaries. Candidates and their short bios are as follows, briefly:
Sun Mingdi, born in May 1979. Started work in March 2005 and joined CCP in June 2006. MBA from an Australian university. Now deputy governor of Nanfen District government, to be promoted as secretary of city Communist Youth League branch. (The reporter noted that the university was founded in 1994 and is virtually unknown in academia.)
Li Haoran, a graduate of an on-the-job college program, now is deputy secretary of Jinshan neighborhood committee of Minshan District.
Gao Ting, born in August 1981, joined CCP in December 2006. Now director of foreign trade and economic cooperation of Minshan District, and deputy chief of investment attraction.
Judging by their ages and lack of experience, it’s an amazing achievement that they are going to assume important positions with some potential power and self-enriching opportunities.
A deeper look reveals that Sun Mingdi, for example, is the son of Benxi city’s trade union president. Gao Ting’s father is secretary of the city’s Party Discipline Inspection Committee. Li Haoran’s father is head of the city’s Department of United Front. Two of these parents are in the city’s politburo. No wonder that the announcement, posted on the city government’s official site on April 11, quickly triggered explosive anger over the Internet.
“Why can’t officials’ children become successful?” Sun Mingdi answered with frustration in an interview.
Someone who posted this announcement in a forum labeled these kids as “Benxi’s well-known princelings” and said they “will become department level officials (ju ji or fu ju ji) in a couple of years, standing on the shoulders of their powerful parents.” Although most of these posts have been deleted, the damage has been done and a wave of criticism poured the government’s way.
A couple of weeks later an official site of the city flashed with a bulletin saying that the promotions of the four people were invalid. The city party branch studied and decided that some were not qualified for the positions and that the deliberation process had violated certain rules of officials’ promotions, namely avoiding relatives of current officials or such things.
The story isn’t over yet. A Beijing News commentary called for a systematic reflection. It was indeed another victory for media supervision that Benxi officials admitted their wrongdoing in this scandal. But the pity was that the authorities didn’t apologize “sincerely.” Since Benxi was at fault in these promotions, and it had very bad social implications, shall we hold relevant officials accountable for this? The local government didn’t say a word about this.
Speaking of all the controversies surrounding official selections, including the recent “post-80 kids assuming high positions,” etc., we cannot just look at the Benxi scandal as an individual case, but have to look at it from the systematic perspective. Otherwise, cronyism in official promotions and black-box operations in personnel arrangements will be unchallenged and the system will remain unable to correct its flaws.
Another commentary, from RedNet, cautioned that the Benxi scandal is commonplace in many places, as the saying goes, “Being good at math, physics and chemistry is not as good as having a good dad.” A disguised form of hereditary officialdom, if becoming a social norm, will be the most horrible political cancer.
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- May 3, 2008 6:37 PM
China Punishes Thousands of People for Illegal Land Grabs
A brief bulletin from Xinhua via people.com.cn:
China has meted out disciplinary punishments to 2,864 people and criminal penalties to 535 during the largest-scale crackdown on illegal land grabs in recent years.
Chinese authorities uncovered 31,700 cases of unlawful land seizure from Sept. 15 last year to Jan. 15, involving a total land area of 3.364 million mu (about 224,267 hectares), said Zhang Pu, deputy director of the law enforcement and supervision bureau of the Ministry of Land and Resources, on Monday.
Nearly 60 percent of the land was used before obtaining government approval. The rest was illegally rented or misappropriated, Zhang said at a press conference.
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- April 14, 2008 4:21 PM
Anxi, Fujian: Levying “Xiaojie Tax” With No Fault – Legal Daily
A story about a hidden rules of the game in China. Translated by CDT from Legal Daily:
A 5,000-word article, “serving the people, Anxi (安溪)’s tax bureau breaks down Singaporean firm,” popped up on Internet forums after the October week-long holiday last year. Wang Quancheng (王泉成), the Singaporean Chinese and leading character in the article, offended his local tax authorities due to his lack of understanding of the rules of the game, or the “under-the-table rules.” Opening up Anxi County’s first four-star hotel Mingyuan (明园大酒店), Wang returned to his hometown to establish his business. But he is not a fan of “taking care of” tax officials and often refused to treat the cadres with free, fancy meals (霸王餐).
The hotel alleges the county tax bureau owed 18,000 yuan in meals and hotel stays but couldn’t collect the receivables after numerous attempts. When one day a hotel employee went up to the tax bureau for the payment, he was slammed for “not understanding who’s the boss (不识相).” Soon, the tax bureau and the city tax inspection bureau made an allegedly retaliatory raid on the hotel and left a few tickets, totaling 1.87 million yuan fines in “urban property taxes” and “xiaojie taxes (小姐税).” (Xiaojie, literally “miss,” also is a euphemism for “prostitutes” and such.)
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- January 8, 2008 8:14 PM