Corruption taints China's police heroes

but few suspected that previously revered police officials would be implicated. No sooner had Huang Guangyu, the former chairman of China's largest consumer electronics chain retailer Gome Group, been detained by Beijing police in mid-November 2008 for alleged "stock market manipulation", than speculation grew over how many officials would be implicated in his case and how senior they would be. Huang's Gome Group is listed in Hong Kong, and he was named as the richest mainland Chinese entrepreneur worth an estimated US$6.3 billion in the Hurun Institute's 2008 China Rich List. As Huang, known as Wong Kwong Yu in Hong Kong, was so rich, it was expected that the officials he had colluded with to make his fortune would also be senior. Sure enough, authorities have confirmed that at least four senior law-enforcement officials - one at minister-level, two at the vice minister level and a slightly lower rank - are being investigated in the Huang case. A handful of officials with the Ministry of Commerce have also been netted in relation to Huang's case, but they are not as senior as the law-enforcement officials. On January 19, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported that Zheng Shaodong, director of the Ministry of Public Security's Economic Criminal Investigation Bureau, and his deputy Xiagn Huaizhu, were two of the police officials under investigation. Zheng was then also an assistant to the Minister of Public Security and thus a vice minister level police officer. On April 16, Xinhua reported that Chen Shaoji, chairman of the Guangdong Provincial Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), and Wang Huayuan, secretary of the Communist Party's Provincial Commission for Disciplinary Inspection in the booming eastern province of Zhejiang, were being investigated for "severe violations of discipline". Chen served at minister level and Wang at vice minister level. Xinhua stopped short of revealing the causes for the detention of these four officials, but other Chinese media have said they were implicated in the Huang case. The media reports claimed that the four had helped Huang launder money and took bribes from him for covering up his economic crimes. Initial investigations have accused Chen of taking bribes worth hundreds of millions of yuan. Three of the four officials netted, Chen, Zheng and Wang, had worked in Guangdong province's law-enforcement office. Chen, 63, a career police officer, had been Guangdong's police chief and deputy party chief overseeing law enforcement before being appointed to his CPPCC post in 2004 due to his age. Zheng, 50, also a career policeman, had been in charge of criminal investigation in Guangdong police before he was promoted to Beijing. Wang, 61, retired from the People's Liberation Army Air Force to work in Guangdong in 1995 and was Guangdong's deputy party chief and secretary of the party's Guangdong Provincial Commission for Disciplinary Inspection before he was removed to the Zhejiang post two years ago. The Guangdong links make this the highest-ranking official corruption ring that has ever been uncovered in the province. It is China's richest and considered to be one of the country's three economic "engines" alongside the Bohai Rim with Beijing at the center and the Yangtze River Delta with Shanghai at the center. In Beijing, then party chief Chen Xitong, a Politburo member, was sacked in 1995 and later convicted of corruption and jailed for 16 years. In Shanghai, Chen Liangyu, then Shanghai party chief and also a Politburo member, was last year sentenced to 18 years imprisonment for corruption. So some analysts feel that the time is right for the government to tackle official corruption in Guangdong. Other analysts say this is a breakthrough by current Minister of Public Security Meng Jianzhu in his efforts to clean up the Chinese police force. Meng, famed for being upright and clean, was party chief of Jiangxi province in 2007 when he was removed to head the police force. Meng had reportedly been tasked with curbing rampant abuse of power and corruption among police officers across the country, but after two years without results, the public was questioning his abilities. But with the cracking of the Huang case, Meng has exposed the largest police corruption scandal since 1998, when Li Jizhou, then a vice minister of public security, was found to have been covering up rampant smuggling in Xiamen of Fujian province masterminded by "smuggling kingpin" Lai Changxing (Li was later given a suspended death sentence and is now living in exile in Canada). Meng is expected to continue his pursuit and the Huang scandal could snowball. The history of the Huang case sounds more like crime fiction than reality. Huang and Zheng are natives of neighboring villages in Chaoyang district of Shantou city in Guangdong province, and became friends early on in their careers. It is now clear that both "helped" each other's career development for years, but friction grew between as each grew more arrogant and self-assured. One day last October, Huang invited Zheng to have dinner in his luxurious home in Beijing. While dining, Huang asked Zheng whether he had done something Huang told him to do. Zheng said not yet. Perhaps drunk, Huang became very upset and began to swear at Zheng, blaming him for doing nothing for his pay. Zheng, then a rising star in China's police circle, was outraged and swore back at Huang, threatening to put him under investigation, according to Chinese-language news website Boxun.com. Given their long friendship, Huang did not think Zheng would dare to do this, so he challenged the police officer, saying, "You are a coward if you don't put me under investigation." The next day, a still angry Zheng ordered some of his men to question Huang at Gome's headquarters. His real intention was just to rein in Huang's arrogance, but Huang took it seriously and thought Zheng was betraying him. He told investigators that Zheng had taken bribes from him. At that point, Zheng knew things had become serious. So he struggled to formulate a cover-up. In mid-December, he even called a nationwide teleconference on investigations of economic crimes, announcing "new rules" that under the financial crisis police should avoid detaining top executives of enterprises for investigation to not interrupt their "normal business operations". But it was already too late. The party's Central Commission for Disciplinary Inspection (CCDI) was already alert to the case and had taken it over in late November. Zheng himself was then already on the list of suspects. It might not be coincidental that Guangdong had moved promptly to follow Zheng's "new rules". On January 6, the Guangdong provincial high procuratorate issued guidelines which stipulated that detention and arrest of legal persons, senior executives or key technicians of enterprises suspected to have conducted criminal offences should be avoided if prosecution would not be affected, so as to ensure the enterprises' normal operation. (No rhyme or reason to China's rule of law , Asia Times Online, Jan 14, 2009). In Hong Kong, many people feel pity at the downfall of Chen Shaoji and Zheng Shaodong, as they had become popular in the city after successfully solving several shocking cross-border criminal cases in the 1990s. The best-known case was the successive kidnaps in 1996-97 of Victor Li, the eldest son of Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing - tipped to be the richest ethnic Chinese in the world - and Walter Kwok, then board chairman of Sun Hung Kai Properties. The Kwok brothers' wealth is second only to Li Ka-shing. Both men were released after their families paid ransoms of HK$1 billion (then about US$129 million) and HK$600 million respectively. Hong Kong gangster Cheung Tze-keung (known as Zhang Ziqiang in pinyin, the Romanized version of Chinese), also known as "Big Boss" or "Big Spender", masterminded and led the kidnaps. It was said Cheung was so bold that after kidnapping Victor Li he tied explosives to his waist and visited his father's house personally to negotiate the ransom face-to-face with the tycoon. Cheung also had plans to kidnap the top 10 richest tycoons in Hong Kong one by one for huge ransoms. Neither Li nor the Kwok family reported the kidnaps to Hong Kong police, so the local police could do nothing. But the Chinese authorities were informed. So when Guangdong police were tipped off that Cheung had crossed the border with forged documentation, they began a man hunt. The hunt was led by Zheng and overseen by Chen. In early 1998, Cheung was arrested and later that year he was convicted and executed in Guangzhou. Although all of Cheung's crimes were conducted in Hong Kong, the Guangzhou court managed to convict him of "plotting" all the crimes on the mainland. His death may have satisfied the Li and Kwok families, and other Hong Kong tycoons probably slept better at night. Had the Li and Kwok families reported the cases and Cheung been caught in Hong Kong, his life would have been spared as capital punishment was formally abolished in the city in 1993. Some people may say the fall of such outstanding police officers as Chen and Zheng highlights how wild corruption is now running in Chinese officialdom. Others say this demonstrates how determined Beijing is to crack down on official corruption - that no corrupt official will be spared, regardless of his past achievements or contribution. Putting the two views together perhaps makes the picture complete.

Asia Time