China’s rulers: a kleptocracy or terminally corrupt?
The scandal of China’s disgraced political high- flyer Bo Xilai is giving sharp focus to questions about whether the ruling Communist party is now corrupted beyond redemption.
There is, for example, an increasingly active discussion among China watchers both inside and outside the country over whether the regime can legitimately be called a kleptocracy; a government whose overriding purpose is to steal and pillage the country’s resources.
A new book by an acknowledged expert on corruption in China, Andrew Wedeman, chair of Asian Studies at the University of Nebraska, argues that despite engaging in “predatory corruption”, China’s Communist Party leaders have pursued enough anti- graft campaigns to stop short of becoming a pure kleptocracy.
“The regime as a whole, as an institution, has not thus far degenerated into an instrument of plunder,” he writes in Double Paradox: Rapid Growth and Rising Corruption in China.
Others disagree, and disagree vehemently.
One of the most colourful portrayals of the Beijing regime as a gang of thieves beyond redemption comes from former senior Communist party official, Bao Tong.
Bao was director of the party’s Office of Political Reform in the mid- 1980s and was policy secretary to Zhao Ziyang, the party’s general secretary who was held in detention for 15 years until his death in 2005 for sympathizing in 1989 with the Tiananmen Square student demonstrators demanding political reform and an end to corruption.
Bao himself was convicted of making counter- revolutionary propaganda and served several years in prison in solitary confinement. Since his release in 1996, he has been under constant surveillance.
But last week the New York Times Review of Books published the transcript of a delightful interview with Bao by Ian Johnson, apparently conducted in a McDonald’s restaurant in Beijing with secret policemen looking on and photographing the exchange.
At one point, Johnson asks whether China is suffering from not having a single strong leader, such as Mao Zedong or Deng Xiaoping in the past.
Bao retorts: “It’s terrible when just one person decides,” and he cited the evil of Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Deng’s decision to send in troops against the Tiananmen Square students.
But, he says, endemic corruption among China’s current collective leadership has made them dysfunctional and created its own stalemate.
“In America, if you are corrupt, you have to resign. Look at [ former president Richard] Nixon. He had Watergate and had to resign.
“In China, does that happen? No. Why? Because everyone [ in the leadership] is in one boat.
“If that boat turns over, everyone ends up in the water. So in China, everyone [ in power] helps each other out.
“Right now it’s nine guys [ at the centre of power on the standing committee of the party’s Central Committee, the politburo] helping each other out. That’s the political system. No one wants to rock the boat.”
Indeed, Bao said, the system demands that all the leaders be equally corrupt to validate each other’s corruption.
“If I were in the current system, I’d be corrupt too,” he said.
Corruption at the top is unavoidable unless the system is fundamentally changed, Bao said, and how the party deals with Bo Xilai will be a litmus test of its future.
The question, said Bao,
is whether the party uses the Bo Xilai case as an opportunity to pursue basic political reform, or if it decides to dismiss him as an isolated case; just one bad egg.
If the latter course is taken, it will be a difficult tack to stage convincingly.
The corruption of the Beijing regime is not a matter of speculation. Even internal government studies, made public by mistake, have found officials siphoning tens of billions of dollars abroad.
One recent study for the party’s Central Committee found that 91 per cent of its 204 members have families living overseas, or who had acquired foreign citizenship. Even 88 per cent of the 127 members of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection have relatives who have emigrated.
Combined, those numbers paint a picture of a ruling clique very unsure about how long its predations will be allowed to continue.
Bo Xilai, who was party boss of the city of Chongqing — with its 32 million people and provincial status — was dismissed from this post and suspended from his position on the 204- member national party Central Committee in March.
The ambitious and charismatic Bo had campaigned almost openly for a position on the politburo’s nine- member standing committee inner hub of power for the changes coming up later this year to the fifth generation of leaders since the 1949 Communist party seizure of power.
Bo’s career collapsed, however, when his longtime deputy fled to the United States consulate in Chengdu, with tales of Bo’s abuse of power and corruption.
It also transpired that Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai, who is now under arrest, may have ordered the killing of her British business partner.
Reports from Beijing say party leaders are still undecided about what to charge Bo with and how to deal with the case.
Such high- profile cases are highly choreographed affairs, and it is likely officials will try to confine the charges against Bo to such things as illegal wiretapping and perhaps illicit sexual liaisons.
They will probably try to stay clear of Bo’s evident prospering from corruption and his flouting of even China’s feeble basic laws. Those are charges that could be levelled at all the leaders of the Chinese government, and everyone knows it.