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’s Congress. Sang Yuechun, another crime boss in Changchun, Jilin, owned a private conglomerate with a net worth of 120 million yuan. Relying on his wealth to bribe local party leaders, Sang managed to be elected a deputy to the NPC in 1998.103 He was expelled in 2002 after he was arrested for a criminal offense in October 2002. Zhang Wei, a mafia boss in Wenling, Zhejiang, controlled a large conglomerate in the province; before he was executed, he had held four official titles, including vice chairman of the political consultative conference of Yidu city in Hubei province. A member of the crime family that controlled both the local coal mines and government in Qianshan county in Jiangxi was the party secretary and mayor of a township.

Writing in the official publication of the Ministry of Supervision, a government prosecutor observed:

Organized criminal groups in several provinces and cities have penetrated into the governments of counties and municipalities. They selected their representatives inside the government and worked together to arrange the appointments of local government leaders and heads of the local people’s congress and political consultative conferences.104

The extent of the entrenchment of this interwoven network of criminals and party officials is shown by how long it operated in these jurisdictions. In the fifty cases listed in the Appendix, a hard local mafia state lasted from four to twelve years before it was uprooted.105

To the extent that the central authorities retain the ability to destroy these local mafia states during periodic anticorruption and antimafia campaigns, the risks posed to the survival of the Communist Party by this collusive network of corrupt officials and criminals are controllable. The top-down approach to the eradication of China’s local mafia states provides, at best, a temporary solution because it does not address the underlying conditions that foster the emergence of such local mafia states. Without empowering the public or giving the media more leeway in monitoring and enforcing accountability on local officials on an everyday basis, the central authorities will unlikely never acquire effective capacities to police their local agents. If anything, the emergence of local mafia states, a clear and dramatic indication of regime decay, reveals not only the deterioration of governance in certain parts of China, but also demonstrates that the regime’s institutional mechanisms of monitoring and policing its agents are breaking down. In particular, the breakdown of these mechanisms, coupled with the absence of constraints imposed by public opinion and political participation, has allowed local Communist Party bosses to turn their jurisdictions into personal fiefdoms. In the sample of 50 cases of local mafia states, party secretaries and/or mayors were implicated in half of them.

The emergence of a decentralized predatory state in China raises several disturbing questions. In predatory states, economic development and market-oriented reform may create a unique situation where the authoritarian ruling elites can enjoy, for a considerable length of time, both the fruits of economic growth and the privileges of autocracy. This combination, instead of weakening the old regime’s resolve to hold on to power, may only create conditions more conducive to prcdation as well as strengthen such a resolve. In practice, this could lead the regime to devote considerable resources and efforts to the repression of opponents and potential challengers deemed most threatening to its power, while allowing various forms of decentralized predation to sap its energy and erode its political foundations. This explains why, as detailed in Chapter 2, the CCP has been relatively successful in responding to societal challenges and co-opting new social elites but seems to be impotent in addressing its internal decay.

The degeneration of the Chinese state during the reform era also calls into question the main thesis of developmental neoauthoritarianism: an autocratic regime pursuing market-friendly policies