Jiangsu anti-graft official’s new work draws from real cases
When he was just another young man from the countryside, his girlfriend, an urban woman, betrayed him after he failed the college entrance examination.
The unhappy ending left him traumatized. So, decades later when he became an official and went back to the place where his ex-girlfriend worked, he felt extremely satisfied to see her picture on the wall — a middle-aged stocky woman — especially when he compared her with his two young and pretty mistresses.
He was married and had a daughter, who was the only person that visited him in jail where he was sent for corruption.
This story, narrated in first person, is one of the eight stories based on real-life cases in Ding Jie’s Zhui Wen (Investigation), a new book on the anticorruption campaign.
Ding, 49, a civil servant in Jiangsu province, spent two yearsworkingonthisbook.He wrote other books earlier.
He was appointed as the secretary of the committee for discipline inspection in a State-run TV station in Jiangsu a few years ago. At first, Ding was not sure if he could do the job, but later he realized the similarities between the two jobs.
“Both writing and discipline inspection deal with people,” he says.
The sensitivity of a writer and his or her understanding of human nature is helpful in dealing with corrupt officials, he says.
Ding had often been shocked by the cases he handled.
“I thought of writing a book about my feelings and the clashes in my mind during work from the perspective of a secretary of the committee for discipline inspection,” he says.
However, he realized that compared with the story of a secretary for discipline inspection, the stories that are told from the perspective of corrupt officials might be more useful as a warning to society, Ding says.
So, with the help of Jiangsu’s provincial committee for discipline inspection, he got the material of 633 corruption cases from all over the country and started his twoyear work. In the end, he chose 28 typical cases and talked to 13 senior officials in person to get firsthand material.
“I almost broke down during the process. It was hard to do the investigation and interviews, but the most difficult part was when I tried to find the logic of the corruption cases.
“I needed to dive into the hearts of those officials, follow their logic and identify their emotions,” he says, “and often their twisted minds angered me.”
“So for a while, I felt I couldn’t continue,” he adds.
Based on the material and interviews, Ding summarized similar cases and rewrote the stories, so that some stories in the book are a combination of several cases.
Gu Yicheng, who has been doing discipline inspection for more than 20 years, dismisses many fictional works about corruption.
“Many are made-up stories, telling how corruption of an official was disclosed by his mistress, or by a thief who broke into his house, without showing the determination of our Party and government to fight corruption and the efforts of discipline inspection departments,” he says.
“But Zhui Wen depicts the real things about corrupt officials, the dark side of human nature like cowardice, greed and shamelessness. Ding shows how these originally kind, smart and hard-working people gradually took the wrong road. He gave the stories a human face, which is real and strong,” he says.
Li Chaoquan, a deputy director with China Writers Association, says Ding’s writing reveals the essence of the cases — bad and ugly — to give people a warning.