by Guy Sorman
Corruption: crucial to the Party’s survival
The matter is serious. The leaders of the Central Commission for Discipline in Beijing have gathered around the conference table. There are only men, as women are excluded from decision-making bodies (their role is only to serve tea). The vice president, Liu Fengyan, is easy to spot, sitting as he is in a central position with his hair dyed jet-black. (Black hair is the fashion among Party leaders.) A large clock hangs on the wall to mark the two hours allotted for our meeting. I have been accorded a great honor. I was aware of the importance attached to the fight against corruption in the Year of the Rooster, so I had asked to meet the highest body in that fight, the Commission for Discipline. Amazingly, I managed to get an appointment, surprising everyone at the French Embassy, where one is usually obliged to stay to meet Chinese officialdom. No journalist would have been granted such an audience. Luckily for me, I am not one, which made investigation easier. In reality, the Party, desirous of “communicating” on the subject, imagined that I would be a receptive listener. I did listen, but my interpretation of the facts did not coincide with the Party’s.
For two hours, the vice president read the new policy against corruption. There was no time for debate or questions. The Party believes in ramming points home, not in discussion. No one asked me what I thought of the proceedings, though I was treated courteously enough, since I was a foreign guest and not a Chinese subject. The exposé could have been briefer. There was a great deal of repetition, as we had two hours to fill. The time granted and the high rank of the members present were all meant to demonstrate to the French visitor, after the customary speech on Sino-French friendship, that the fight against corruption was a “matter of life and death” for the Party. Many Chinese would agree: corruption is one of the main reasons for the people’s hatred of Party cadres.
The Central Commission for Discipline is not what we would imagine it to be in the West. We would expect it to act as an independent watchdog to check abuses of power. But in a Party-State, its role is different. It is, in the words of its vice president, a “self-regulatory mechanism against the misuse of power for personal aggrandizement.” The temptation is great: local leaders, mayors, district chiefs, and governors wear many hats. They administer, legislate, run public enterprises, and provide employment at the same time. With so much power, you would have to be a saint to act disinterestedly. But the vice president refuses to acknowledge the connection between overlapping powers and the possibility of abuse. Instead he reels off statistics: in 2004, there were 162,032 cases of corruption in which 5,916 cadres were punished, 4,775 Party members tried, and 900 sentenced. This goes to show how serious the commission is about rooting out corruption. Moreover, he continues, just 900 serious cases for 60 million members is proof of the Party’s probity. By 2020, he declares, “bad habits” and “bad behavior” will have been completely eradicated, thanks to the new anticorruption plan adopted this year—some 300 laws and several thousand regulations. In 2020, the very memory of corruption, an old Chinese scourge, will have disappeared because “a sense of probity will have been instilled in the entire population.”
The ladies come in to serve tea. I use the occasion to interrupt his perfect speech and to ask him about the role of the press. His answer is along the expected lines: “It is useful when it condemns specific incidents but harmful when it blows things out of proportion.” Even some “foreign media are prone to use the issue of corruption to destabilize the Chinese government.” So far, however, no “French newspaper has taken part in this anti-Chinese conspiracy.” I don’t rise to the bait.
As he makes his marathon speech, replete with quotations from Marx, Mao Zedong, and Deng Xiaoping, my mind begins to wander. I look out the window at the park in which Madam Mao Zedong rode her horses when she behaved like an empress. The premises of the Commission for Discipline served as her pleasure grounds. The Party has become a little more circumspect since then, but it has not given up its doublespeak.
While Liu Fengyan extols the Party for its resolute struggle against China’s old evils, we learn from the Chinese press that most of the private coal mines, very profitable because of the energy shortage, belong to the spouses or cousins of Party cadres responsible for their management and safety. Not a week goes by without the media’s reporting some terrible accident caused by a total disregard for safety, with productivity taking precedence over everything. What is the Commission for Discipline doing about this? Since the beginning of the Year of the Rooster, 30,000 miners have lost their lives. Yet no inquiry has been made, nor has any cadre been dismissed.
The history of Chinese communism demonstrates that the Party’s fight against corruption is as old as corruption itself. Naturally, communists deny the relationship between corruption and the Party. Westerners who do business with Chinese cadres jump to the Party’s defense. Western entrepreneurs and politicians who know exactly what it takes to grease the palms of Communist leaders try to excuse the Party on cultural grounds. Corruption, they tell us, is inherent in Chinese civilization. Liu Fengyan said the same thing. Traditionally, the mandarins bought their offices and sold their services. Badly paid, they sponged off the people. The Party and its cadres are only perpetuating an age-old tradition. So a tax inspector who adjusts taxes in accordance with the bribes he gets, a cadre who buys a university degree for his son, a minister who employs his entire family in the government, an officer who gambles away his departmental budget in a Macao casino—these are publicly recorded cases that at times have been punished—are in reality the inheritors of a specifically Chinese convention. How can we be so churlish as to take offense at old customs—which, in any case, we are told, will be eradicated by 2020?
The cultural determinism argument does not stand up to scrutiny. It was precisely to fight against corruption that the Party seized power. Now corruption has become more pervasive than ever before, especially since the ethics of Confucianism no longer act as a check. When the same Chinese work as bureaucrats in Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong, they are far less corrupt than their Communist counterparts. And the Chinese in China abhor the corruption of the Party cadres and do not view them as custodians of a laudable tradition.
“Corruption is efficient” is another specious argument that finds favor with Western corporations and chanceries. China is a complex society where the rule of law has yet to take root, they say. Back-door entries are quicker and save the trouble of getting lost in labyrinthine bureaucracy. What a foreign businessman can get done in a day through the back door would take an eternity through normal channels. The Chinese experience confirms the fact that corruption tempers totalitarianism. This is what people used to say about the Soviet Union, too. But the back-door route is only for the rich and powerful. The rest—those who have children to be admitted to school, are looking for a place to stay, or need an identity paper or permit—pay exorbitantly.
The third argument proffered by Western sinophiles and Chinese leaders is that corruption is a transitory phenomenon. As an economy moves from state controls to a free market, some excesses are inevitable. When public ownership moves to private hands, managers do tend to dip into bank loans and company funds to buy shares of the erstwhile public enterprises, thus becoming their owners. Once the process of privatization has been completed, these practices will cease automatically. The advocates of the transition theory say that the Chinese state, weakened by the market, needs to strengthen its power. “More state for more market” is the government’s thinking.
But the transition phase has gone on for twenty-five years, and corruption shows no signs of abating. In fact, it is becoming worse, as indicated by the exemplary punishment that the Party gives its cadres from time to time. No one can get anything done in China without obtaining a host of authorizations. The State is omnipresent; how can it get any stronger? Contrary to the transition theory, the Party’s privatization program makes sure that corruption persists because it is embedded in the system. Privati
zation in China is merely the right to grow rich granted to a private individual under the permanent tutelage of a public custodian. With the government keeping a close watch on the market and with ownership more in the nature of a grant, the Party ensures that its concessionaires remain beholden to it. This brings us back to our initial hypothesis: corruption is crucial to the Party and has been so since the beginning.
From the outset, the Communist Party intended to acquire political and economic power in China so that it could maintain its hold over society and ensure the prosperity of its members. From its first “base,” set up from 1934 to 1949 at Yanan in Shaanxi Province, the Party has been self-sufficient, relying on its own enterprises to meet its members’ needs. Mao Zedong rejected any distinction between economics and politics, never wanting civil society to generate wealth. He encouraged Party cadres to get rich by all means, including contraband. The Party’s greed for lucre is as old as its condemnation of it. In 1946, Huang Kecheng, a general of great integrity, said, “All the cadres want is the decadence and luxury of the city.” They got both when they reached Beijing in 1949. Mao Zedong led the way, building huge palaces and collecting a bevy of courtesans. His wife, Jiang Qing, did not lag far behind. Yet in 1963, the very same Mao Zedong, using the kind of metaphor that the Party favors, ordered that the “tigers and lice”—in other words, the big and small alike—be exterminated to stem the rot. The Party was thus to have a split personality: indulging in every kind of corrupt practice itself, it was to mount a crusade against corruption at the same time.
Indeed, why does one become a Party member, if not to live off it? From the peasant soldier of the early days to the modern ambitious student, economic security is what prompts people to join the Party. How many of its 60 million are members because of their ideals? And what ideals can they have when the Party is geared for only one thing: individual prosperity?
This obsession for amassing wealth has put the Party in a dilemma. How can it motivate people to “throw themselves into the ocean of business” without the cadres, who are in charge of applying this policy, getting rich themselves? The Singapore solution is to pay officials the same salaries as those of company executives, while punishing any form of corruption. But Singapore is a small country with few bureaucrats, and monitoring is easy. Besides, the British inculcated a sense of law in them. In Communist China, implicit corruption is the implicit answer: the Party cadres rallied around the “free-market revolution” because they saw that it was to their advantage. Did Deng Xiaoping have any other choice? None of the ex-Maoist cadres resisted privatization, because they all stood to gain from it. The Party has been supporting liberalization for the past twenty-six years without any protest, for the main beneficiaries are the cadres and their families, who have either become entrepreneurs or are on their payrolls.
At the same time, the Party must condemn corruption, a ritual as essential as corruption itself. Since 1949, it has launched an anticorruption campaign every two years. The propaganda managers have shown great inventiveness in naming this campaign: in 1980, it was a campaign against official privileges and unhealthy trends in the Party; in 1982, it was a fight against economic crimes, and in 1983, against “spiritual pollution”; 1988 saw a campaign to build a “clean government”; in 2005, the motto was “little eyes against big eyes”—in other words, children should tell on their parents. The government keeps publishing manuals, rules, case studies, and posters on how to fight corruption. There are 300 laws, Liu Fengyan tells us.
All these campaigns, manuals, orders, and posters are part of an expiatory ritual to convince the people that the Party does not treat corruption lightly. The sensational trials of a few Party leaders, with the death sentence thrown in at times, make appearances all the more credible. Like the propaganda campaigns, the trials are not meant to eliminate corruption but to contain it within limits tolerable for the people and acceptable to the cadres. Going too far would be suicidal; it could disband the cadres and incite them to revolt against the liberal reforms.
Do reforms and corruption go hand in hand? Is it possible to move from socialism to a market economy without the subornment that supposedly eases the transition? In all the countries of the former Soviet Bloc, privatization has helped Communist apparatchiks turn themselves into entrepreneurs. But the privatization was real, and when it had been accomplished, the Communist Party generally made way for an administrative bureaucracy on the one hand and a new class of entrepreneurs on the other. This is not the case in China. The Party has not become an administration, and the rule of law has not replaced clientelism. In the absence of any democratic changeover, the Party continues to prevaricate with no other check than its own goodwill.
The manner in which the Nanjing municipality proceeded is a good case in point. In May of the Year of the Rooster, it ordered Party cadres to report their extramarital relationships to an office set up for the purpose. The ostensible reason given was that 95 percent of the cadres accused of corruption also had a mistress (the Party has a fetish for precise figures). The local government therefore decided to take this step in the hope of eliminating corruption, or at least of detecting it. The People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Party, made it a front-page story: “When fighting corruption, the Party scales new heights of creativity.” In order to strike fear into the cadres and please the public, the newspaper recalled that, in 2000, the Party had not hesitated to execute the former vice president of the National People’s Congress. He was the highest leader ever to get the death sentence for corruption—and he had had several “second wives.”
Chinese individuals decide marriage and divorce freely, so a few Beijing jurists questioned the legality of the order. The reply of the Nankin municipality was that legal niceties were extraneous in the fight against the scourge of corruption.
During the Year of the Rooster, not a single confession had been recorded so far at the Nanjing office for extramarital affairs. Had cadres turned chaste—and honest—overnight? Did the leadership in Nankin really believe that such a measure would yield results? There must have been some who did, or else the constant rehash of the sixty-year-old anticorruption campaign would be meaningless. The democracy advocates aver, tongue in cheek, that the Communist Party will vanish under the weight of its own contradictions. This is wishful thinking; the Party has both political and economic clout and has no intention of giving up either.
The Voice of Big Brother
“Obesity, the new threat to China”: this was the editorial in the China Daily on August 10 of the Year of the Rooster. The China Daily is one of several newspapers that are mouthpieces of the Communist Party’s Propaganda Department. Reading it tells us nothing about the real China but provides an insight into the nature of the state.
On August 10, the Propaganda Department discovered—or, to be more precise, decreed—that 12 percent of the Chinese were obese and had to watch what they ate. The nameless editorialist—articles are usually churned out at Party headquarters—called for yet another campaign, this time against dietary excesses, one of the few pleasures the Chinese can indulge in. Frugality and chastity are the buzzwords of Communist discourse, a way of reining in people suspected of being individualistically hedonistic. That the Party cadres are hardly frugal or chaste in their private lives is of little consequence. Plainly, the obesity threat was a piece of pure fabrication to make us believe that China was now suffering from a problem of surfeit. There are 100 million undernourished people living in nearly faminelike conditions (the figure has been given in various scientific journals), and yet the Party denies their existence, just as it downplays the devastation caused by AIDS and other pandemics. A good Chinese communist must always live in a state of euphoria.
That week, another China Daily editorial recalled “the tradition of Chinese leaders of placing the people’s interest above their own.” Three centuries before Christ, Mencius wrote: “The people come first, land and grain second, and the sovereign last.” This trad
ition of selflessness, continued the nameless editor employed by the same office that invented the obesity epidemic, was brought up to date by Sun Yat-sen, who decided that the focus of the 1911 revolution would be on “the three principles of the people”: minsheng, the welfare of the people; minzu, the people as a nation; and minquan, the power of the people. Finally, Mao, with his principle that the “service of the people is the sole reward of the leader,” transformed once and for all the relationship between the state and the nation.
This nonsense, reproduced here faithfully, is so far removed from the reality of China that the expression “service of the people” has become a common joke. The moment you say it, your audience bursts into laughter. How can the press continue to churn out such gobbledygook day after day when nearly everyone in China laughs at it? Does the Propaganda Department think that by repeating something ad nauseam, it will succeed in brainwashing its readers? The effect seems to be just the opposite: fed up with official falsehoods, the Chinese have become inured to ideology. “Journalists,” especially editorialists who toe the official line, behave like members of a secret sect: they believe in what they write, though their articles are divorced from reality.
Espionage, too, hit the headlines that week. We learned that the China correspondent of the Singapore daily Straits Times, who held a British passport issued in Hong Kong, had finally confessed after being arrested by the police and kept in solitary confinement for four months. There wasn’t the shadow of a doubt: Ching Cheong was a spy in the pay of foreign agencies—in other words, Taiwan. He admitted receiving “large sums of money for his spying activities.” In prison and without a lawyer to defend him, Ching Cheong never got an opportunity to tell his side of the story. From the Hong Kong press, one gathers that he had managed to get hold of documents revealing divergences between the Party’s hardliners and its more liberal elements. The China Daily wrote: “Long oppressed by British colonialism, it was only with the transfer of Hong Kong to China that journalists became free and thus tend at times to abuse their newfound independence.”
