One Billion Customers - James McGregor [63]
As one senior Chinese official with twenty years of working at top levels in Beijing told me: “Being corrupt is not a big deal. Everybody is corrupt. But you can’t be corrupt and be politically incorrect at the same time. You don’t have to be clean as long as you are loyal to your political protectors above you. Honesty in China will always lose out to piety and loyalty.”
In August 2001, under the orders of Premier Zhu Rongji, Lai’s now-infamous Red Mansion was opened as an anticorruption exhibit. It would, officials said, serve as “an alarm bell that has to keep ringing and ringing.” It was a huge hit. People flocked to Xiamen to see the double-size bathtubs in which generals had cavorted with prostitutes, the dance hall and movie theater, and Lai’s own bullet-proof car. A month later, even as travel agents were being flooded with tour requests, the exhibit closed. The public’s reaction, recorded in the visitors’ book, had shocked the leadership.
“Such a big case, so many corrupt officials, how come it has dragged on for so many years before being discovered?” asked one visitor. “This is a problem with the system.”
Ruminations from “the Boss”
I met Lai Changxing in Vancouver in the summer of 2003. I expected to encounter a sleazy, somewhat scary guy. Instead I found the nicest international fugitive you would ever want to meet. Sitting on the balcony of a modest Hilton Hotel near his home in the blue-collar suburb of Burnaby, Lai looks like a Chinese worker on a North American holiday. Dressed in a T-shirt and khaki slacks, he sports a flat-top crew and the ruddy face of a peasant. He doesn’t look at all distressed but he chain-smokes Chinese Double-Happiness cigarettes and fiddles with two mobile phones. As they did in Yuanhua’s heyday, the phones ring every few minutes. But it’s no longer Chinese generals and top party officials on the other end. It’s his demanding and distraught wife, who wants him to cook dinner and warns him that he must be home before the 6:30 P.M. curfew that Canadian officials have imposed as part of his house arrest.
There’s little for Lai to do these days except ruminate over his ordeal. He doesn’t understand why his methods have failed so miserably. He built visible friendships with senior officials, but he seldom asked them for anything in return. He counted on those highly visible friendships with senior officials to reassure lower-level officials that they could safely become Lai’s friend and help him out just as he helped them. Lai says that he followed this tradition, merely exploiting the natural inclinations among the lower-level officials he befriended. He explained it to me with this convoluted reasoning:
“I didn’t give government officials money in exchange for their help with my business. I wouldn’t do this. If I regard you as a friend, when you have difficulties, I will help you. If you have requests, and I am capable of meeting those requests, I will help you. But I won’t ask you to repay me. It is a mutual exchange. With these friends you can know which business you can do, and what you can’t do, which areas you can make money in and which areas you can’t. There is no harm in having these friends, right?”
Lai hates that he is known across China as a gangster. He sees himself as an average businessman who did everything right. He treated people fairly. His employees were paid higher-than-market wages. Many had free lodging and free food. He fired only one employee in all his years in business. The man was a drunk, so Lai continued to send a monthly stipend to the man’s wife and child. There were other smugglers besides him, Lai told me, but they were from prominent families. They were quietly put out of business and given protected government or military positions, not a bullet in the back of the head.
“I had no grand plan. I pursued the businesses where I thought I could make the most money. Everything that has happened was just a coincidence,” Lai said as he gathered