[But two years into a breathtaking government campaign against
official malfeasance, one that has reached the highest echelons of the party
apparatus and put much of Chinese officialdom on edge, many people here remain
deeply cynical about whether President Xi Jinping can
truly alter the sort of self-serving behavior that has long suffused China’s
vast bureaucracy.]
 |
|
Many
citizens remain cynical about whether President Xi Jinping can combat the
corruption that
has long been a part of China. Credit Aly Song/Reuters
|
BEIDAIHE, China — The daily cavalcade of
government miscreants featured in the Chinese news media makes for lurid
reading: the housing official caught on camera aggressively fondling women at a
karaoke parlor; the 41 members of the Communist Party expelled for using heroin
and crystal meth in Yunnan Province; the general manager of a state
agricultural firm sentenced to death for pocketing $55 million in bribes.
“We ordinary Chinese feel such joy seeing these corrupt
officials get their comeuppance,” said Yang Tianrong, 75, a retired soldier who
lives in this seaside resort east of Beijing, home to a municipal water
official who made national headlines after the authorities said they found a
one-ton mound of moldy cash worth $20 million in his basement.
But two years into a breathtaking government campaign against
official malfeasance, one that has reached the highest echelons of the party
apparatus and put much of Chinese officialdom on edge, many people here remain
deeply cynical about whether President Xi Jinping can
truly alter the sort of self-serving behavior that has long suffused China’s
vast bureaucracy.
In nearly two dozen interviews, many Chinese said that they
thought Mr. Xi was serious about taming official graft and that party officials
big and small had scaled back their most egregious abuses. But they also said
they were convinced the problem would return once the antigraft juggernaut ran
out of steam.
“Corruption is something you can never completely root out.
After you get rid of one group of officials, another group will take their
place,” said Gong Qiang, a Beijing taxi driver in his 50s, who has seen his
share of antigraft campaigns. “It’s like cutting a bunch of leeks; you cut
them, and another batch will eventually surface.”
In recent days, party leaders have reaffirmed
their commitment to the war on corruption and signaled concern
about resistance among the party’s 86 million members. In a commentary published on Sunday, the
official People’s Daily railed against officials who complain that by exposing
so much corruption, the campaign is hurting the party’s image. It also
admonished those who say the crackdown has prompted government employees to sit
on their hands rather than do work that might get them into trouble. “For those
officials still whining about too much scrutiny and too many probes, you’d
better hurry up and get used to the new normal,” it said.
Still, critics of the government say they have been impressed by
the tally and stature of those taken down by the campaign. Nearly 72,000
officials were punished last year, including 68 “tigers” — leaders who serve as
cabinet ministers, provincial bosses or in other senior posts — and 1,575
employees of the very agency charged with bringing wayward officials to heel,
Xinhuasaid this month.
But many Chinese intellectuals said they believed Mr. Xi was
using the antigraft campaign to sideline would-be enemies and consolidate
power. Without systemic change, including greater transparency and a free
press, unscrupulous behavior will re-emerge, they argued.
“There have indeed been some positive effects, that I cannot
deny, but this is more a political campaign than a true anticorruption
campaign,” said Murong Xuecun, a social critic and a contributing opinion
writer for The International New York Times. “The only thing that can solve the
problem of corruption is a check on the party’s power, and that’s something
we’re unlikely to see.”
Zhu Ruifeng, a freelance muckraker who has used the
Internet to expose a number of misbehaving officials over the years, said
anticorruption investigators were not interested in tips from ordinary Chinese,
many of whom have become frustrated by their inability to bring down local
officials. “Everyone is excited by the prospect of cleaning up the rot, but as
soon as they try to report corrupt officials in their hometowns, they run into
reality,” he said.
His
website, People’s Supervision, is often blocked, he added, and the
cases of official wrongdoing he has exposed in recent months have gone
unpunished. “The government has its own plan and makes its own choices about
who to pursue, which is why people are bound to be disappointed by this
campaign,” he said.
Analysts who have taken a closer look at the roster of the most
senior figures implicated over the past two years say there is a pattern to the
offensive; many disgraced officials have had ties to Zhou Yongkang, the
powerful former chief of domestic security who has been accused of being part of a
“traitor” class for his involvement in forming “dangerous political factions.”
In a recent study, Geremie R. Barmé, a China expert
at Australian National University, also found that the offspring of modern
China’s revolutionary founders — the country’s so-called red second generation,
whose ranks include Mr. Xi — had largely escaped serious punishment. In a
survey of four dozen high-level officials who had been publicly purged as of
last September, Professor Barmé found that all had roots in China’s “commoner”
class, rising from humble origins. By contrast, wayward members of the red
second generation appeared to have been spared severe punishment or public
disgrace.
“In the murky corridors of Communist power, an impressive number
of party gentry progeny, or the offspring of the Mao-era nomenklatura, have
been implicated in corrupt practices,” he wrote in an article last October. “But word has it
that, like the well-connected elites of other climes, they’ve enjoyed a ‘soft
landing’: being discreetly relocated, shunted into delicate retirement or
quietly ‘redeployed.’ ”
Ambivalence is rife here in Beidaihe, a beach town where party
elders and their families have traditionally decamped during summer. In recent
months, the city has been transfixed by the alleged misdeeds of Ma Chaoqun, the
former general manager of the municipal water company who was detained last
year on charges that included demanding kickbacks for a connection to the water
supply.
Mr. Ma is accused of amassing 82 pounds of gold, 40 boxes of
cash and the deeds to 68 properties, seven of them in the nation’s capital.
Water customers who refused to pay him, including an entire village and a local
bus terminal, were cut off, according to accounts in the Chinese news media.
Mr. Ma, 48, a former boiler repairman with a reputation for
vindictive tantrums, was said to have ordered employees to clean the windows of
the water company’s headquarters in the rain and snow. One local resident
recalled how Mr. Ma publicly humiliated a friend who worked as a meter reader.
“He told her that with the lure of two steamed buns, he could get a dog to do
her job,” the woman said in an interview last month.
But even as they cheer Mr. Ma’s downfall, many residents
expressed frustration that other abusive officials had remained in their jobs.
In fact, the details of Mr. Ma’s gluttony appear to have stoked public anger.
“If such a small sesame seed of an official is capable of such greed and venality,
can you imagine what high-ranking officials are stealing?” said Qiu Ying, 55,
the owner of a restaurant that is a stone’s throw from the house that Mr. Ma
built on land he is accused of expropriating in exchange for connecting a
village to the city’s water system.
On a recent visit, Mr. Ma’s three-story villa appeared
abandoned, its front yard overgrown with weeds. A half-dozen villagers gathered
in a nearby shop to complain about the government’s efforts to evict them from
their homes as part of what they described as a corrupt real estate development
project. Last year, several residents took their case to Beijing, only to end
up in unofficial jails and then forcibly sent home. After Mr. Ma was detained,
Chinese reporters flocked here seeking reaction to his downfall, but the
reporters later said they were forbidden to write about the officials who have
been seeking to expel the villagers from their ancestral land.
“We originally hoped the case of Ma Chaoqun might bring about
the demise of these other corrupt officials,” said Mr. Yang, the retired
soldier, “but we have been sorely disappointed.”
Patrick Zuo and Jess Macy Yu contributed research from Beijing.
