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had become a patron of a Buddhist temple, to which he gave a large portion of the bribe money he had received. The head of the industrial and commercial administration in a county in Hainan set up a Buddhist altar in his own residence. He allegedly never convened a party group meeting to discuss personnel issues. Instead, he would ask prospective appointees to perform religious rituals in front of the house altar before he publicly announced their appointments. Jia Yongxiang, the president of the Shenyang Intermediate Court who was sentenced for corruption, spent 30,000 yuan on a fengshui master for picking the right date for the court to move into its new building.

The chief of the public security bureau of Qingyuan county in Guangdong, who had accepted more than 400,000 yuan in bribes, fretted that the front entrance of the bureau was not built in accordance with good fengshui.He suspected that bad fengshui was responsible for the downfall of his predecessor, who was in jail for corruption. So he consulted a fengshui master and ordered a new front entrance be built according to the master’s specifications (although this intervention apparently failed to protect the police chief from the graft busters).78

The practice of retaining fortune-tellers was widespread among ranking provincial leaders in Hunan. A deputy chief of the provincial government’s secretariat who was in charge of approving key infrastructure projects used his power to allocate 2 million yuan to a local Buddhist temple because one of its monks was able to forecast his promotions correctly on several occasions. A deputy mayor of Changde city paid 350,000 yuan to a fortune-teller to predict his political future. Many local leaders even developed a habit of consulting fortune-tellers before they made major personal decisions, such as assuming new appointments, building houses, and purchasing vehicles.79

Collusion and the Emergence of Local Mafia States

The breakdown of the institutional mechanisms that police state agents and enforce political accountability has also facilitated collusion among government officials in corrupt activities. In its most extreme form, a decentralized predatory state can spawn numerous local mafia states.80 The glue holding such local mafia states is collusion among state agents. The spreading of official collusion within Chinese officialdom, thus, directly contributes to the growth of local mafia states.

By most accounts, official collusion was uncommon in the 1980s. An examination of published reports of major corruption cases uncovered in the decade shows that almost all corruption cases were committed by individuals acting alone.81 In the 1990s, however, official collusion in corruption and other types of criminal activities became increasingly common. According to Liu Liying, a deputy secretary of the CDIC who oversaw many high-profile corruption cases in the 1990s, the most worrisome aspect of corruption in the 1990s was collusion among officials. In Liu’s view, officials colluded in corrupt or even criminal activities because they had formed “alliances of interests.” As a result, the number of wo an and chuan an (corruption cases involving multiple individuals) has increased dramatically. In an interview, Liu disclosed that 104 senior municipal officials in Shenyang were prosecuted in a major corruption case that led to the downfall of its mayor and the execution of its executive vice mayor in 2001.82 In another notorious case, five senior provincial officials in Heilongjiang (a deputy governor, a vice chairman of the provincial people’s congress, the president of the provincial high court, the chief of the provincial procuratorate, and the head of the provincial CCP committee’s secretariat) were removed from office on the same day in October 2004 after they were implicated in corruption. Prior to their downfall, a former governor of Heilongjiang, Tian Fengshan, and the head of the provincial CCP’s organization department, Han Guizhi, had been arrested for selling party and government appointments for personal