China's Trapped Transition_ The Limits of Developmental Autocracy - Minxin Pei [95]
In Hebei province, the investigation of Li Zhen, the chief of the state tax bureau in Hebei province, uncovered 160 other senior officials who were involved in the same corruption case. In the corruption case of a vice president of the provincial branch of the Agricultural Bank in Heilongjiang, more than seventy were implicated; the case of Ma De, the party secretary of Suihua City in Heilongjiang who had collected 5.2 million yuan in bribes for selling government positions, involved 260 officials, including 50 yibashous in the ten counties and various county-level departments in Suihua.84 Anhui’s disgraced vice governor, Wang Huaizhong, admitted to investigators that more than 160 officials were complicit in his corrupt activities.85 In the case of Li Tiecheng, who served as party secretary for almost seven years in a poverty-stricken county in Jilin, prosecutors found that 162 county officials gave bribes to Li to secure promotions. They included the head of the county’s People’s Congress, a deputy party secretary in charge of law enforcement, the executive deputy county magistrate, two deputy party secretaries, five deputy county magistrates, and the chiefs of the county finance bureau, labor bureau, personnel bureau, and law enforcement agencies. The Li case, though extreme, is a vivid illustration of how the machinery of the party-state can be captured by a network of collusive officials.86
Although China’s anticorruption authorities do not disclose data on the share of wo an or chuan an in all corruption cases, the information released by Guangzhou, Hubei, Fujian, Shandong, and Jiangsu suggests that collusive corruption is widespread. In Guangzhou, 65 percent of embezzlement and bribe-taking cases prosecuted in 2001 were found to have involved collusive officials.87 Forty percent of cases classified as “using public office to commit crimes” in Hubei, in 2001, were those involving multiple individuals.88 In Fujian, 30 percent of corruption cases investigated in 2002 were classified as “group corruption.”89 The prosecutor’s office in Xintai City in Shandong disclosed that wo an accounted for 30 percent of the corruption cases it prosecuted between 7998 and 2000.90 Data collected by the prosecutor’s office in Nantong City, in Jiangsu, showed that the number of wo an cases steadily increased in the late 1990s. The number of wo an cases the office prosecuted was nine in 1999, fifteen in 2000, and twenty-five in 2001. On average, each wo an involved four individuals employed in the same “unit.” Two-thirds of the perpetrators were cadres. Cadres participated in every wo an.91
In the worst cases, official collusion creates local mafia states—jurisdictions in which criminal elements have formed a close alliance with officials in key government positions. The extent to which the Chinese state has been penetrated by organized crime is unknown. The head of the office in charge of fighting organized crime (daheiban) at the MPS admitted in July 2003 that this scourge was widespread:
In some areas, local government organizations were weak and in disarray, and society was out of control. This provided opportunities for evil forces to breed and spread in rural townships. The local governments in these townships were in a state of collapse. Some of them degenerated to such an extent that they had allowed evil forces to run amok within their jurisdictions, control the governments, illegally interfere in local administrative affairs, and take over law and order. These jurisdictions became lawless fortresses and uncontrollable villages that openly defied the government and law enforcement agencies.92
Apparently, the collusion between organized crime and corrupt officials has extended beyond rural areas. The Supreme People’s Procuratorate reported that, from 2001 to 2002, it prosecuted 557 government officials for protecting organized crime.93 One representative example of a local mafia state is Shenyang, where in the late 1990s practically all the key local officials, including the heads of seventeen agencies (ranging