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Shanghai Gang losing power
struggle By Poon Siu Tao
HONG KONG - Beijing is waging a whirlwind
anti-corruption campaign in Shanghai to shake up
the so-called Shanghai Club or Shanghai Gang,
headed by former president Jiang Zemin. The group
dominated China's political power scene for more
than a decade until Jiang began to fade from
active political life in late 2002.
The
anti-graft campaign has been launched one year
ahead of the all-important 17th Congress of the
Chinese Communist Party
(CCP) and thus is seen as
President Hu Jintao's maneuver to gain full
control by eliminating all Jiang's influence.
The latest target was Qin Yu, chief of
Shanghai's Baoshan district, who has been linked
to a severe breach of party discipline and laws
and is now under investigation by the CCP's
central commission for disciplinary inspection.
What is striking about Qin's arrest is
that before taking up his present position, he had
worked for years as the personal secretary of
Shanghai Communist Party chief Chen Liangyu. Chen
is a local-level affiliate of the Shanghai Gang
and also a member of the all-powerful politburo in
Beijing.
Qin's arrest clearly serves as a
warning that Chen himself might be next on the
hit-list. This would take the power rivalry
between Jiang and Hu into its final stages, marked
by the crackdown on corruption in Shanghai.
Over the past two decades, Shanghai has
appeared immune to Beijing's anti-graft campaigns,
which have netted senior officials in all other
provinces, as if Shanghai were the only "clean
soil" in China.
And not only did Shanghai
officials escape censure, many of them were
promoted to key departments in the central
government in Beijing. That situation began to
change after the CCP's 16th Congress in late 2002,
when Jiang finally resigned as the party's general
secretary.
The Shanghai phenomenon So what was it that allowed all those
Shanghai officials to remain so clean in the face of
so much temptation in the booming city? Was
it because they were all saints, or that the
municipality had created a perfect environment to
immunize officials against graft-prone
temptations? Neither, is the answer.
As
with other parts of mainland China, Shanghai is
ruled in the so-called socialistic system with
Chinese characteristics under which bureaucrats
wield vast power. The evidence points to their
using this influence to line their pockets, and
the pockets of business associates.
Two
former Shanghai party chiefs were said to have
been hand-in-glove with disgraced Shanghai
property tycoon Zhou Zhengyi. That Zhou was able
to obtain multibillion-yuan bank loans and
valuable downtown land can only be attributed to
close ties with municipal authorities.
Zhou, who was suspected of a huge loan
swindle, was finally brought to justice in 2003,
but he was only found guilty of "manipulating
stock prices and misreporting registered capital",
for which he received a three-year jail sentence.
By contrast, the former president of the Bank of
China (Hong Kong), Liu Jinbao, implicated in the
same case, was eventually given a suspended death
sentence by a court in Changchun, the provincial
capital of Jilin province in northeastern China.
Quite simply, for many years Shanghai
officials had been able to escape scot-free
because of the protection given to them by the
most powerful man in China - Jiang Zemin. This was
especially true after 1989, when Jiang was
promoted to CCP general secretary from his post as
Shanghai's party chief.
Under the umbrella
of Jiang's administration, corruption scandals
involving the Shanghai Gang were swept under the
carpet.
All that has changed. In recent
months, the central government has mobilized more
than 100 commissioners in Shanghai to rake out the
filth.
Already they have found some. Zhu
Junyi, chief of Shanghai's Labor and Social
Security Bureau, was found to have been bribed
into illegally lending 3.2 billion yuan (US$405
million) from the city's social-security funds to
a private enterprise, China Fuxi Group. The Fuxi
group had participated in the restructuring of
Shanghai Electric Corp. As the snowball kept
rolling, senior officials of many companies and
government departments associated with the
business of these companies were detained for
investigation.
Most important, Baoshan
district chief Qin has been implicated in the same
case. As mentioned, Qin was Chen Liangyu's
secretary and assistant. In February 2002, Chen
was made Shanghai mayor. In October of that year,
Chen took over the position as Shanghai's party
chief, and Qin was promoted to deputy director of
both the general offices of the Shanghai Communist
Party Committee and the Shanghai municipal
government.
The Qin case shows that Chen,
a local shepherd of the Shanghai Gang, is no
longer powerful enough to protect his cronies, nor
can he depend on his chief mentor, Jiang Zemin.
Hu is very close to shooting down the top
echelon of the Shanghai Gang. But very likely he
will stop there and give it a chance to bow out
gracefully.
Poon Siu-tao is a
Hong Kong-based contributor to the Chinese edition
of Asia Times Online.
(Copyright 2006
Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us about sales, syndication and republishing
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