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By Root 408 0

from the city’s intermediate court, the procuratorate, the tax bureau, and the state asset bureau) took bribes from the city’s mafia boss, Liu Yong, in return for protecting his criminal activities, which included extortion, murder, assault, and fraud. The provincial government of Heilongjiang also appeared to have degenerated into a mafia state. As described above, nine senior provincial leaders were found to have engaged in collective corruption. A third example of a local mafia state was Fuzhou, where a criminal group headed by Chen Kai colluded with ninety-one key local officials, including the city’s deputy party secretary and police chief, in drug trafficking, gambling, prostitution, and other illegal activities.

Although violence and outright criminal activities arc among the defining features of the hard local mafia states in China, many of the local mafia states may be considered soft because of the absence of violence and involvement of hardened criminal elements. The Yuanhua smuggling case, which implicated more than two hundred officials in Xiamen, belongs to this category.94 Jilin’s Jingyu county and Heilongjiang’s Suihua prefecture, where the local party chiefs effectively sold hundreds of government posts for personal gains, are two additional examples. In such cases, shady businessmen and local officials were primarily interested in maximizing their private gains, not terrorizing the local population.

To better understand the workings of the local mafia states, the Appendix (page 219) offers a sample of fifty high-profile corruption cases in seventeen provinces that were published in the official media. 95 All of them fit the two core characteristics of local mafia states: the involvement of organized criminal elements and the collusion of key local officials. Roughly half of the cases belong in the hard category—local officials were found to have provided protection for organized criminal groups in twenty-four cases. Hunan was the province reporting the largest number of local mafia states (seven), followed by Guangdong (six) and Fujian (six). Like their Western counterparts, China’s organized criminal groups controlled businesses, such as real estate, construction firms, mines, transportation companies, the local produce market, and department stores. They used their political protection to extract monopoly profits, terrorize competitors and consumers, and fight off rival criminal groups. From 2001 to 2002, according to data provided by the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, the government prosecuted ninety-nine officials for protecting organized crime in engaging in illegal economic activities. Of the 265 major criminal cases involving “violation of the economic order of the market,” criminals received official protection in about a quarter of them.96 In eighteen of the twenty-four cases of hard local mafia states, party secretaries, county magistrates or mayors, police chiefs, or the party secretaries of the politics and law committees were involved.

There are two subtypes of soft local mafia states. The first includes jurisdictions staffed by venal officials who collude in committing economic crimes, such as smuggling and collective bribe-taking. In the sample of fifty tainted jurisdictions, there were six cases of organized large-scale smuggling sanctioned by local leaders and ten cases of collective bribe-taking. Because of the scope of collusion in such illegal activities (which usually encompasses most of the key government agencies), these local governments have been practically subverted into collective illegal economic enterprises. The Xiamen smuggling scandal is the most extreme case. It is worth noting that, based on this limitcd sample, this subtype of soft local mafia states appeared to be more prevalent in the more prosperous areas. A possible explanation is that the profits to be made from these illegal economic activities were much greater than those from a more risky alliance with organized crime.97

The second subtype consists of mafia states formed through the sale and purchase of government